“Aagh,” he said, disbelieving it, dismissing it.
“We are. You can deny it to me but you can’t deny it to yourself, can you? We’ve been living lies for twenty years, and they’ve eaten us away like acid. How can we be expected to tell the difference between lies and truth after all that? We’re examples of the legal definition of insanity: we simply do not know right from wrong.”
“Get a grip on yourself. You can’t afford to fall apart now. Do you know what Dangerfield would do if he heard you talking like this?”
“I’m not sure I really care. We’ve been falling apart for twenty years. But up to now we could hold ourselves together with the hope that they’d never decide to activate us. Now they’ve removed that and we haven’t got a damn thing left.”
“You’re talking treason,” he said, not as if it mattered.
“Of course. Whatever we do it’s treason—treason to one side or the other.”
“Don’t worry about sides for Christ’s sake. Worry about your own skin.”
“That’s all you’ve ever worried about, isn’t it?”
He said, “Don’t tell me you’re any different.”
“I suppose I’m not. I won’t martyr myself to save the world. But I don’t want to die.”
“Then just do what they tell us to do.” He got out of the car and slammed the door.
She caught up with him halfway to the courthouse. “We are, you know,” she said. “We’re both quite mad.”
Chapter Thirteen
She was sitting at the desk absently sorting the letters that had come in the morning’s delivery. A few of them required the Senator’s personal attention and those she put in his In box. The rest were letters from citizens, many of them from states other than Arizona, most of them concerning Phaeton Three. She stacked them in pro and con piles; someone in the Washington office would be doing the same thing with the mail there.
It didn’t require her concentrated attention; her thoughts were adrift, stirring with drowsy eroticism. Even when she was not with him now she was thinking of him. He had become all too important to her and it was no good; she didn’t belong to herself. For his sake she had to break it off. For the past hour she had tried to put up reasons she could give him for ending it but her mind kept twisting them and she kept finding reasons why she should not break it off.
When other men had approached her she had sized them up coolly and only dated them when she felt sure they had nothing permanent in mind; the others she had chilled quickly and effectively. But now she didn’t know what to do.
She didn’t want to work, to speak with anyone else. She didn’t want to do anything except be with him, to watch him wash and shave and dress and eat—and to sleep with him. She had caught herself thinking: He is my world and I want to be his. Her breasts ached; she felt light-headed; she looked at the clock and then she closed her eyes and said very softly and without great conviction, “No.”
When Douglass and Nicole came into the office she was startled but she knew immediately why they had come before either of them spoke a word.
Douglass said, “Are you alone here?”
“Yes.”
“Where is everybody?”
“I don’t know where Les Suffield is. The Senator and Jaime Spode went out to the base a little while ago.”
“We want to talk to you about that,” Nicole said.
“Yes. About Senator Forrester,” Ronnie said.
“About his inspection tour of Davis Monthan,” Ramsey Douglass said, and that did surprise her. She looked at him more closely. His silken glance was intended to inspire fear; his eyes saw everything, knew everything. Douglass closed the outer door softly, like an alderman. Nicole said in her abrasive matter-of-fact voice, “Is this place bugged?”
“I have no idea,” Ronnie said. “I wouldn’t know where to look.”
“I would,” Douglass said, and went around the room looking behind things and under things.
Nicole pulled a chair out and sat down near the desk. “You really light up for the good Senator, don’t you?”
Ronnie didn’t answer but kept her eyes on Douglass. He put the floorlamp down and came to the desk and unscrewed the mouthpiece and earpiece of the telephone receiver to look at its insides. Ronnie felt tiny drops of sweat burst out, beading her hairline and prickling the roots.
Nicole spoke as if Ronnie weren’t in the room. “She’s always been independent and proud, stuffed full of romantic sentimentality. When that type falls in love with a man she really falls.”
Douglass said abstractedly, “You don’t often find a woman with more sense than temperament.” He pried back an edge of the felt bottom-cover of the desk lamp and peered inside.
Of course they were trying to unnerve her; it was a ritual with them. But even knowing what they were doing wasn’t enough to immunize her. The words they spoke were banal and trite and she had said them all to herself anyway; she was angry now because it was enough to have to suffer this self-inflicted agony, it was too much to have to discuss it.
Douglass said, “Shove back a minute.”
She pushed her chair back on its casters and Douglass crouched to take the drawers out of the desk and investigate its insides and undersurfaces.
Nicole said, “You can’t offer him anything, love, and you can’t ask him to wait. The only thing you can do is walk nobly out of his life. Why make it hard for yourself?”
“I know all this,” Ronnie said. “I’d already decided to break it off.”
“Isn’t that ducky.” Douglass’ voice was muffled because his head was under the kneehole of the desk.
Ronnie said, “Look, you don’t need rubber hoses. I’ll behave.” She felt washed out but there was a kind of relief: she had needed this confrontation, she hadn’t had the strength to make the decision alone. “I’ll end it today.”
Nicole said, “No you won’t.”
“Come again?”
“You’ll string him along a while.”
“But it will be easier to cut it off clean—I’ll just clear out my desk and go. I’ll telephone him and tell him it was no good, I’m leaving Tucson and going somewhere else to get a job.”
“That’s just what you won’t do,” Douglass said, straightening up and dusting his hands. “I think it’s clean.”
Nicole said, “How about the walls? Through-the-wall listening devices?”
“It’s an old building. These walls are thick. Anyhow you’ve got the County Supervisor’s anteroom on one side and the license-issuing office on the other—too much traffic in and out, nobody’d fix anything to those walls. It could be spotted too easily.”
“If you’re satisfied, then.”
Ronnie said, “I wish you’d explain yourselves. You sound as if you don’t want me to break it off at all. I don’t understand.”
“You’ll break it off,” Ramsey Douglass said, “when we tell you to break it off. I’d have thought by now you’d have learned to obey orders.”
She didn’t need reminding and of course they knew that. She had fallen in love with an outsider and she had married him against orders; she had been young and her defiance had been strengthened by passion. Phil had been a native-born American; he’d known nothing of Amergrad. She had told him nothing, given him no clues, he’d never suspected a thing. But possibly they had been right; there was always the possibility of a slip of the tongue. Still, didn’t all of them run that risk? But they had forced her to watch while they slowly beat him to death with bludgeons behind the bowling alley.
Douglass said, “The cells have been activated. The man has come from Moscow.”
She sat erect. “What?”
“We’ve been ordered up. To do the job we’re here for.” Douglass’ lips had been upturned in his sour smile but now they went flat and lifeless. “So you see in any case you’ll be leaving soon enough. They’ll have to evacuate us when the job’s been done.”
It was beyond her capacity to absorb; she drooped
in the chair like a loose sack of laundry and sweat trickled down between her breasts. Her face crumpled and collapsed slowly into defeat and she covered it with her hands. She was beyond tears but when Nicole spoke her rigid body jerked galvanically.
“Pull yourself together. We haven’t got time for you to have another breakdown.” Nicole’s voice was gentler than usual. The wizened face turned toward Douglass and when Ronnie looked up she saw on Nicole’s features an expression of black fury. It did not seem personally directed against Douglass: it was simply an unreasoning rage and Ronnie realized in that moment that they were all caught by the knowledge that everything had been ended for them by the whim of a faceless man twenty thousand miles away.
The fact that they were all in the same trap somehow made it possible to bear. She said, “All right. You have instructions for me.”
Douglass and Nicole exchanged glances. Nicole nodded as if thoroughly fatigued.
Douglass said, “We haven’t been told when it’s to take place. I suppose they think it’s none of our business, our job’s just to swing the hammers, we don’t have to know what the building’s going to be. But we’re supposed to isolate the base. It’ll be a very tricky caper and we’re going to have our hands full enough without your Senator crawling all over the base tripping over us. He’s got clearance to go everywhere in the complexes with his hand-picked scientist and his Navajo detective and if any of them spots our preliminary maneuvers it could blow the whole thing open. So that’s your job: distract him, discourage him, pressure him to lay off. He’s got to be kept away until it’s over and done with. I can’t tell you how long that’ll be but they wouldn’t set this up too far in advance; there’d be too much risk of leakage. A week, maybe only a few days.”
“I don’t see how I can do that. He makes his own decisions—I can’t tell him what to do.”
Nicole turned. Her simian face picked up the light from the window and seemed at once bitter and amazed. “Don’t be a fool. Seduce him—drag him away on a white-hot orgy. A woman like you could put everything else out of his mind.”
Color suffused-Ronnie’s cheeks. “I’m not the type. I wouldn’t know how.”
It elicited Nicole’s harsh bark of laughter. “With your looks? Christ if I had your looks I could make the President of the United States forget he ever saw the White House.”
“He knows me too well. I can’t just change overnight into a sex maniac. He’d know something was wrong—he’s not a fool.”
“Every man’s a fool where women are concerned.”
Douglass said, “No, she’s right. If you’d air out your mind once in a while you’d see there are problems sex doesn’t solve.”
“You ought to know about that,” Nicole snapped.
Douglass disregarded her. “Look, Ronnie, you’re his center of communications, you make his appointments and screen his incoming calls and whatnot. You can rearrange his schedule and he’ll never be the wiser.”
“How?”
“He’s at Davis Monthan this morning with his two hired snoops but it’s only a preliminary survey, he’s planning to go back four or five times more, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“We can’t have that. When he comes back to the office today I want you to tell him Colonel Sims called and asked if he’d postpone his next visit till Tuesday or Wednesday because the base has been alerted for a no-notice Operational Readiness Inspection and they’ll be closing the base until the alert’s ended; they’ll be too busy to conduct his party around. Got that?”
“Yes, but what if he calls them to confirm it?”
“He won’t if you’re convincing enough. Now tomorrow you can call Colonel Ryan and tell him the Senator’s been called into an emergency conference—something political—and won’t be able to resume his inspection tour until Tuesday or Wednesday. And if Tuesday comes and we still need to keep him out we’ll think of some other herring. Now you can take care of that, can’t you?”
“I suppose so. But he’s a friend of Colonel Ryan’s—suppose he happens to call him and finds out I lied?”
“Then you’ll just have to bluff your way out of it, won’t you?”
Nicole said, “Just bat your eyelashes and wiggle at him.”
Ronnie said uncertainly, “I don’t—” But the telephone interrupted her and she picked up. “Senator Forrester’s office.”
“Hello, is Mr. Spode there, please?”
“Not at the moment. May I take a message?”
“It’s rather urgent that I reach him.” The man’s voice was calm, filled with authority; she didn’t recognize it.
“Who’s calling, please?”
“My name is John Warren Block. It’s important that I get in touch with Mr. Spode as quickly as possible. Do you have any idea where I might reach him?” There was enough interference on the line to suggest it was a long-distance call.
She said, “Right now he’s out at Davis Monthan Air Force Base with Senator Forrester. You might try there, but I’m not sure they’ll be able to find him right away. Would you care to leave your phone number?”
“He knows the number. John Warren Block. Thank you, I’ll try the base.” Click.
Douglass said, “Who was that?”
“Someone trying to reach Jaime Spode.”
“What was his name?”
“John Warren Block.”
“Ever heard of him?”
“No.”
“Well it’s probably nothing. But did Spode say anything to you about anything that happened last night?”
“No. I only saw him for a few minutes this morning. He and Alan—Senator Forrester—went out together to collect Professor Moskowitz and drive out to the base.”
Douglass nodded. “All right, when you talk to Forrester you’ve got to find out what Spode told him about last night. Particularly about a man he met last night.”
“I don’t understand—what am I supposed to be looking for?”
“Find out if Spode recognized the man and whether he notified any officials about him.”
Nicole said, “What’s this all about?”
“Our man from Moscow had a run-in with Spode last night. We’ve got to find out whether Spode carried it any farther. If Dangerfield’s under suspicion we’ve got to know about it.”
The implications ran rapidly through Ronnie’s mind and Nicole said to Douglass, “She’s very quick—you can see she understands what it could mean.” Nicole came forward to the desk and put her palms flat on its surface, her face close before Ronnie’s eyes. “You’re right, of course. If Spode saw too much and communicated it to the Senator it may be necessary for us to take steps to make sure the information goes no farther. We can’t afford to have the place crawling with FBI. On the other hand we’d be idiots to take any unnecessary action against a United States Senator—think of the furor that would cause. We don’t want to touch him if we can help it, but if he knows too much we’ll have to do something.”
Douglass said, “He might have to suffer a sudden illness and retire to his ranch for a few days accompanied by a doctor and one or two nurses and of course his confidential secretary. You’d have to go with him and handle the phone calls and inquiries from reporters.”
Ronnie said, “He wouldn’t be—”
“Hurt? No. We couldn’t afford that, could we? Besides, once we’re finished here it won’t matter what he tells the authorities. The job will be done and we’ll be gone. In the meantime if he doesn’t know anything we’ll leave him alone. But if he does know something we’ll just have to keep him incommunicado—perhaps under sedation—until we’re ready to leave.”
“As long as he won’t be harmed.”
Nicole said, “We wouldn’t touch a hair on his handsome head. On the other hand nobody’s going to pay much attention if a few Russian professors and nurses and ballerinas happen to be arrested and sent to a torture camp.”
The reference was to members of Ronnie’s family and she said,
“I know—I know.”
“And your beloved brother,” Douglass said, and that took her aback.
She said, “But my brother’s right here—you wouldn’t harm one of our own group!”
“Under the circumstances we need your services more than his,” Douglass said. “He’s expendable. He’s got nothing to do with the military base. So you see his life is in your hands.”
“Just in case you think about changing sides,” Nicole drawled.
Ronnie said, “Nobody in this country even knows I’m his sister.”
“You know it and he knows it. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it?” Douglass turned to go. “You know what you’re to do. Come on, Nicole.”
When they were gone she sat with no more expression than a plastic mannequin’s but her right hand slowly closed into a small fist and the knuckles turned white.
Chapter Fourteen
Forrester stood with one hand on the iron balustrade looking out across the heaped-up distance toward the approaching airplane. On the tower above him the radar dishes turned steadily, without sound, and out toward the hangars crewmen with big sound suppressors clamped over their ears stood clear of intakes and exhausts while airplane engines, tuning up, sucked the thin dry air by the ton. Wind ruffled Forrester’s hair and whipped away whatever Bill Ryan was saying. The others—Spode, Colonel Sims, Professor Moskowitz, Major Pete Chandler—stood in a knot a few feet away, watching the distant F-111 extend its wings and turn final on the range with a tearing sigh of sound.
The plane sank toward the desert and lined itself up on the runway. It grew big as it rocketed forward, sun racing along its wings in fragmented reflections, and Ryan yelled something about its performance supremacy-while the F-111 hit the pavement a mile away and rumbled forward at high speed past crash crews. When it stopped at the maintenance hangar its crewmen climbed out in their hooded moon suits and the three uniformed men on the platform with Forrester all gave him a gung-ho show of teeth as if they were very proud of the fact that the six-million-dollar airplane had managed to land without breaking up.
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