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  breath hard, regaining her balance, waiting, settling her left foot beside

  the right.

  Natalia took another step, then another and another.

  She remembered how foolish Vladimir had looked, sitting on his desk,

  swinging his feet around to avoid the plates flanking his desk on both

  sides.

  Now, she shifted her weight forward, onto her finger­tips, then (hrew her

  pack onto the desk top. The Kel-Lite was in the black belt around her

  waist on which she carried a borrowed pistol. Had she lost one of her own

  guns, the ones given her by President Chambers, it would have meant

  instant recognition and arrest.

  With the flashlight beam zigzagging at a bizarre angle with the rising and

  falling of her chest, she leaned toward the desk, throwing her weight

  forward and pushing herself up, jumping, tucking her knees up.

  Natalia was on the desk top.

  The safe was behind the desk and a little to the right of it. As she

  turned, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror—all made up for the

  American Halloween,

  she thought.

  She had to move like a spider now, her pack once more on her back, jumping

  to avoid the pressure-sensitive plates.

  She stood on the desk, judging the distance, inhaled deeply, then jumped.

  Her feet landed on the top of the small safe, and for a moment, her

  balance faltered and she started to fall back. But she caught herself,

  lurching her body forward, then rising to her full height.

  Natalia breathed again.

  Dropping to her knees, the flashlight in her right hand, she bent over the

  safe door, upside down, shining the light on the combination lock.

  Shifting the light into her left hand, she tried the combination.

  The combination, as she had suspected, had been changed,

  "Damn it," she muttered in English.

  She reached into her pack, extracting the specially sen­sitive stethoscope

  there.

  Untwisting the tubing, she touched the flat diaphragm chest piece to the

  safe's escutcheon plate, beside the dial.

  The door was slightly recessed into the body wall of the safe. She leaned

  over slightly more, working the combination to the dial's right, then

  left, then right again, listening. She heard a minuscule clicking in the

  locking bolt linkage, then stopped. Her gloved fingers worked the dial

  left, stopping when through the stetho­scope's binaural ear tips she could

  hear another click.

  Now right—listening for the click might be more faint. She heard it, but

  had passed it.

  "Damn," she muttered again. She cleared the dial, then reworked the

  combination she had already memor-

  ized, this time without the earpieces to aid her; she had the numbers now.

  She worked the handle, heard the bolt-activating gear rings click; the

  safe opened under her hand.

  Natalia reached inside the safe, to the lower shelf.

  The six crates of documents were in the cryptoanalysis room, but

  Rozhdestvenskiy would have the abstract or a copy of it.

  Natalia found more than she had anticipated.

  Squatting like an Indian on the top of the opened safe, she fished info

  her pack for the camera. Shining the Kel-Lite on the documents' faces,

  working the shutter, she caught bits and pieces of words.

  "Eden Project ... in the event of massive nuclear exchanges between our

  country and the Soviet Union . . . the ultimate statement of the Western

  democracies . . . this utilization of the Space Shuttle Fleet . . .

  manufac­turing processes . . ." She flipped the page for the next shot.

  tfIn the face of the near total destruction of life on the planet . . ."

  She felt her heart skip a beat, then realized that it hadn't; she was

  being emotional. ". . . Bevington, Kentucky, and an as yet undesignated

  site . . . precursed by bizarre atmospheric changes . . ." The third page

  of the abstract was merely a list of names—she assumed those who had

  compiled (he reports.

  She photographed the next document, a simple-road map, (he kind once sold

  in American gasoline stations, of the state of Kentucky, with a small town

  in the moun­tains, Bevington, circled in red with an arrow pointed toward

  it coming from the southeast.

  Natalia began photographing the last set of docu­ments; it was

  Rozhdestvenskiy's report. ". . . findings of

  Soviet scientists have been verified and coincided with those of Western

  scientists . . . raid on Bevington, Ken­tucky, in the south-central United

  States . . ." Natalia would have called it more southeastern.

  She glanced at her Rolex; she had to hurry. Rozhdest-venskiy might be back

  at any moment. She photographed the second page without taking note of

  anything written there, then the third and last page. He was admirably

  con­cise in his writing she noted subconsciously. ". . . the construction

  at the site called the Womb, and the bringing together of strategic

  materials (here, is ihe only hope for the survival of the Soviet."

  She shuddered. Survival of the Soviet?

  Was survival of the Soviet equivalent with the survival of mankind? she

  asked herself, closing her eyes from the glare of the flashlight. A

  doomsday device?

  She prayed not; then felt the corners of her mouth raise in a smile—to

  whom did a good Communist pray?

  Carefully, Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna replaced the documents exactly as

  they had been in the safe, then she closed the combination, resetting the

  dial to the number it had been set to before she had touched it.

  Natalia stood up, on the top of the safe, shouldering the pack, her gear

  secured inside it.

  In the darkness, her eyes accustomed enough toil with the flashlight

  packed away, she jumped to the floor, intentionally landing on one of the

  pressure-sensitive plates. She ran toward the inner office door, knowing

  the silent alarm was sounding.

  She threw open the door, then ran across the outer office, throwing open

  the door, turning into the corridor and running toward the panic-locked

  emergency door.

  "Halt!" The guard's voice came in clumsy English.

  Gunfire ripped into the wall bebide her as she hit the panic lock, the

  door opening outward into a corridor

  She slammed the steel fire door, hearing slugs impact­ing against it from

  the inside.

  She reached up, clipping the wires for the alarm there into a bypass with

  alligator-clipped strands of wire of thinner proportion to suck off the

  electrical charge Then, with a wire cutter from the left hip pocket of her

  jump suit, she clipped the alarm wire

  She replaced the wire cutter after scratching the outside locking panel

  with it—to make it appear she had used a pick after neutralizing the alarm

  in order to originally gain access

  More gunfire—the door bulged in the center She released her weight against

  the door and ran up a small flight of stairs, hearing the door thrown open

  behind her, more gunfire, louder now, another command in English "Half"

  She turned out of the stairwell into a darkened hall— the Egyptian exhibit

  She remembered strolling through it with
her uncle. Now she ran its

  length—more running feet and shouts behind her, the gunfire ceased

  There was a row of sarcophagi and past it an exhibit depicting the

  dressing of a pyramid block "Appropriate," she thought, making an English

  pun on the word "dress­ing" in her mind She slipped behind the exhibit

  case, into a service closet, closing the door behind her.

  In total darkness, she slipped the pack from her back, then began to unzip

  the jump suit with her right hand, her left hand working free the pistol

  belt She tugged the zipper down the rest of the way, then with both hands

  ripped away the scarves that had covered her face and

  hair. She kicked off the crepe-soled shoes she had worn, reaching down for

  them in the dark—she thought she heard the skittering of a mouse or rat

  across the floor. She pulled the Bali-Song knife from the pocket of her

  jump suit, holding it closed in her teeth while she smoothed the white

  slip she had worn under the jump­suit trousers, smoothed it down from

  where it had bunched around her hips.

  She reached into the pack, pulling out her skirt.

  She put it around her waist, buttoning it once, then again at the

  waistline in the front. From the pack, she extracted a pair of black high

  heels, stepped into them, and stuffed everything into the pack, closing

  it. She released the straps on the pack, hooking them together to form a

  single strap. She ran her left hand through her hair, then listened at the

  door—no sound. She opened it a crack, saw no one in the hali and stepped

  out of the closet. She realized she had forgotten the gloves, then quickly

  pulled them off, stuffing them into the backpack converted now into a

  large black shoulder bag.

  She could hear running feet in the hall as she looked down at herself,

  smoothing the skirt, then reaching up to retie the bow on the collar of

  the white blouse she'd worn under the jump suit.

  She turned, she hoped at the dramatically correct moment, and confronted

  the guard before he could confront her.

  "What is going on, Corporal?"

  "Comrade Major Tiemerovna, a man—someone from ihe Resistance apparently.

  There was an attempt to break into Comrade Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy's

  office."

  "An attempt?"

  "Yes, Comrade Major. The alarm system sounded

  before anything could be disturbed—Comrade Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy has

  himself said this. He was just returning when the intruder was

  discovered."

  "Thank goodness." She smiled. Then she let her smile fade, saying to the

  guard corporal, "You have your rifle but I am unarmed. Give me your pistol

  and I will search with you, Comrade."

  "Thank you, Comrade Major!" The young man's face beamed.

  "Sleeping," Rourke murmured. That he could think, that he had awakened

  told him it was nearly time for another dose. He knew now just what that

  was—a muscle relaxant to keep him immobile and morphine to keep him high,

  drunk. The combination could kill him. If he could convince her of that .

  . . His mind worked again, but he felt himself moving like a drunkard as

  he tried to edge over on the cot. If she stopped administering one or the

  other, he would have a chance to fight the freshly admin­istered drug and

  the drugs in his system. She would have an antidote, a muscle-relaxer

  block of some kind, and probably Narcan or something like it to counteract

  the morphine build-up.

  "Respiratory distress,' he murmured.

  He felt a smile cross his lips, laughed with it. Alcohol had never made

  him feel so drunk. Rubenstein hadn't been this drunk that time . . . Where

  was it? he asked himself mentally.

  Natalia had been pretty drunk ... or had she been? Sarah had never drunk

  to excess in her life; when she drank even a little, it simply made her

  sleepy.

  'Sarah." He smiled, then remembered. They had

  gone—and here." He watched as she raised a hypodermic and squirted out a

  good third of the contents. "A milder dose this time and you'll just

  rest."

  Rourke closed his eyes—not able to help it. He knew he was drunk. He felt

  like singing because he was so happy she had bought his act. He twitched

  once in his sleep, feeling the needle go into his arm again. . . .

  Lamazed for both children, Sarah having used the natural childbirth

  technique, which was really only erroneously called that. It was

  controlled childbirth— you controlled it with breathing. But you had to

  learn the breathing techniques well. His mind was wandering and he

  couldn't organize his thoughts. "Breathing," he mur­

  mured, squinting against the overhead basement light. He could make

  himself appear to be in respiratory distress by hyperventilating.

  He started breathing, panting, blowing, panting— building up the oxygen

  level in his bloodstream. The oxygen would also serve to fight off the

  drugs by burning them off, out of his system as he respirated.

  Floaters appeared in front of his eyes, a cold wash of nausea swept

  through him, and again he leaned over the side of the cot and vomited, his

  head barely able to move. "John! Are you ill?"

  "Breathe," he gasped, panting now more than before despite the fact it was

  actually starting to make him

  hyperventilate.

  "John—my God. I was afraid of this. You aren't supposed to— Here." She

  began massaging his chest, then started to give him mouth-to-mouth

  resuscitation. He felt her lips against his, felt the rush of air making

  him choke. He coughed and felt her rolling his head to the side. He

  vomited again, but nothing came out.

  "I'm going to give you this." She reached into a small black leather case

  and extracted a hypodermic. "This will block the effect of the muscle

  relaxant I gave you. It'll take effect almost immediately."

  He felt the needle, closing his eyes against it and the pain in his

  already sore arm. "I'll wait with you beforel give you more morphine—once

  the muscle relaxant is

  Sarah Rourke shivered, despite the warmth from the truck's heater, despite

  the fact the children, wrapped in their blankets, were warm now.

  She had found an M- under the seat; it said M-on the side. It looked

  identical to the rifle she had lost so she now adopted it as her own.

  She shivered because of what she was doing. She drove the main roads,

  passing into Tennessee now, and the main roads could mean Soviet troops or

  Brigands. She knew.that Chattanooga had been neutron-bombed; by now it

  would be safe to drive near or through.

  The ground dropped sharply as she saw Chattanooga for the first time—no

  smoke from its chimneys, no cars. The road angled sharply left and she cut

  her speed slightly as she made the curve; the pickup's steering was not

  the world's best, she had decided.

  As she started out of the curve, she glanced across at Michael and Annie.

  They slept in each other's arms.

  She looked back at the road. She sucked in her breaib, almost screaming.

  A hundred yards ahead, perhaps—judging distance accurately had never been

  her strong point, she knew—

  and the road
was flanked on the right by the end of a long-reaching column

  of trucks and other vehicles, motor­cycles parked near them. The men

  standing near the trucks and motorcycles were Soviet troops.

  She glanced at the children. They were asleep and she'd let them stay that

  way.

  She slipped the M- under the seat, then pulled her . and cocked the

  hammer, locking up the thumb safety catch, then sliding it under her right

  thigh. She kept driving, not speeding her pace, not slowing. She noticed

  the quizzical expressions on the faces of some of the Soviet soldiers who

  turned toward her as she passed.

  One young man waved and she waved back, suddenly glancing in the mirror at

  her hair. It was greasy-looking from being wet so long. She ran her right

  hand through it. She kept driving.

  She made a mental count of the vehicles—in case she reached the Mulliner

  farm. She could tell Mary's son and he could pass the information Jo U.S.

  Intelligence through the Resistance group he worked with.

  "Eighty-one, eight-two, eight-three—" She stomped on the brake pedal,

  almost forgetting the clutch, not knowing what else to do when six

  soldiers with rifles stepped in front of her truck. The one who seemed the

  oldest raised his right hand in a gesture for her to stop.

  Her blood froze.

  Glancing into the rear-view, she saw, through the bullet-holed window, men

  closing ranks behind her.

  The older man approached her truck on the driver's side.

  She rolled down the window.

  His English was heavily accented but perfectly under­standable to her.

  Your papers—travel permits."

  "They are lovely children there. I must see your papers, madam."

  She glanced at Michael and Annie, still sleeping. "Thank you—rny son and

  daughter."

  "Your papers, madam." He smiled, his right hand out­stretched.

  She could shoot him, she thought—but then, Michael and Annie would be

  killed when all the others with their rifles and handguns would shoot

  back.

  "I—I don't—"

  "What is the problem, Sergeant?"

  She looked away from the sergeant's face, in the same direction the