"I shall blame myself if I do nothing."
"You did something--you wrote to Theo's daughter."
"No, no, that was different." His head moved back and forth, restlessly. "It was only a vague fear then, a speculation. It hadn't occurred to me that the project would be used deliberately as a global threat. But that's exactly what it is and what they intended it to be all along-- global blackmail."
"Malankov didn't say that."
"Of course not." "Then how do you know? How can you be sure? Just because he happened to mention something about 'national security'? Boris, he could have meant any one of a dozen things--you know how their minds work."
"It's because I know how their minds work that 1 know what he meant," Boris said. "It isn't that he used those words, it was how he reacted. He knew at once he'd gone too far, let something slip."
Nina was silent for a while, thinking, yet hardly daring to think. Then she said, "It will--would be very dangerous sending this information to the West. Especially with Malankov watching you."
"Too dangerous," Boris agreed. "For both of us."
She was instantly relieved, thinking he'd changed his mind, and an instant later knew she was a fool. There was something in his voice that made her body tense itself. Her hand gripped his tightly.
"What are you going to do?" Heart in her mouth.
"Get out."
"Defect?" The word was like the taste of iron on her tongue.
"Yes."
"It can't be done," she whispered.
"Yes, it can," Boris said very calmly. "I've already begun to make the arrangements. Within a few days I'll know the date and what I have to do."
Fear lapped in, shrinking her mind to nothing. She became numb. Tears leaked out of her eyes and ran down the sides of her head onto the pillow.
"Boris, I don't want to lose you," she sobbed. "Oh, please no, God no!"
He gathered her body in his arms and held her close, feeling her mad heart shuddering in her chest. "Woman. Woman! You're not losing me. Did you think after all these years I'd leave you behind? We stay together, whatever happens. I'd rather lose my life than lose you, stupid woman."
The silver helicopter clattered in low over the trees and shimmied down onto the yellow criss-crossed landing pad. Sunlight flared off the clear plastic canopy and glinted goldenly on the conch-shell motif aft of the starboard door. The door swung open, a pair of white shoes emerged, a pair of white-clad legs, and even before the helicopter had properly settled the man in the white linen suit was striding across the pad. He went down the steps to where the lawns swept like a rolling green billow up to the house, passing through the ring of plainclothes guards standing idly with curled hands and hard immobile faces.
Two more guards stood aside as he entered the glass-walled elevator, which took him smoothly to the rooftop. A covered area extended to a sun deck, supported on concrete stilts, which overlooked the orderly ranks of firs descending to the blue haze of the Pacific. To the south, just visible beyond the ridge, the white ramparts and Gothic follies of San Simeon gleamed like bleached bone.
This stretch of Californian coastline still ranked--despite the motorcycle gangs, the religious fanatics, the cult anarchists--among the high-est-priced real estate in the world.
A white-coated Javanese manservant stood near the mirror-tiled recess that reflected row upon row of bottles, glasses, silver shakers, ice buckets, and numberless, identical Javanese manservants, left arms bent at the elbows forming rails for spotless white napkins. The myriad sallow-reflected faces remained blank though attentive as the man in white passed quickly through and out into the raw sunlight.
Cars hummed distantly on U.S. 1 below, and a light aircraft droned somewhere over the placid ocean.
The man in white stood looking down, wraparound sunglasses masking his eyes, arms hanging by his sides, hands loosely flexed. "The Lebasse situation checks out, Mr. Gelstrom. It's as we thought. The condition is terminal."
"How terminal?"
"One year. Maybe longer."
"You've seen the medical records?"
The man in white nodded.
"The doctor?"
"Receptionist."
"How much?"
"Ten thousand."
Joseph Earl Gelstrom opened his vivid blue eyes for the first time and squinted up. The man in white watched him. The same thought hovered in the hot motionless air between them; they understood each other so well that words were superfluous.
Gelstrom nodded once and looked along the length of his lean bronzed body and suddenly tautened his abdominal muscles into a set of symmetrical hard brown pebbles. Head thrust forward with the effort, his long sun-streaked hair hung back, gathered thickly at the nape of his neck. He was forty-four years old and possessed the looks and physique a man twenty years younger would have envied. He didn't drink or smoke, and exercised obsessively. Nothing could touch him.
