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  "But you love him differently—I know that, too. The kid isn't always

  asleep when you think he is." Ruben­stein smiled, then winced, his face

  evidently hurting when he moved.

  "Rest," she told Paul.

  "He's a funny guy, isn't he? John, I mean," Paul Rubenstein said, as if to

  himself, she thought.

  "Yes—he is," she answered, wishing for a cigarette but still needing to

  rub his face to restore the circula­tion. "How are your feet and hands?''

  "Left foot's a little stiff—but I don't think it's—"

  "Rourke isn't the only one who knows about the damage cold can do to the

  body," she said reprovingly. "Lean back."

  "Hey, no—I can—"

  "Do as I say," Natalia told him. She started undoing the laces of his left

  boot, getting the boot free; it felt damp to her. Then she removed the two

  socks that covered his foot. The sole of his foot was yellow. "This could

  turn to frostbite—very quickly," she snapped. She opened the front of her

  coat, throwing back as well the sleeping bag that covered her. Reaching

  under her coat, under the shirt Rourke had given her, to the front of her

  black jump suit, she zipped it down, then took Rubenstein's foot and

  placed it against the bare flesh of her abdomen. Hey—you—

  "Let me! Tell me when the feeling starts back. How is the other foot?"

  "It's well, it's okay."

  "Keep your foot here and don't move it," she ordered, reaching down to his

  other foot and starting to work on the boot laces—her own fingers were

  numb, and her ears still felt the cold from the slipstream of the bike as

  they'd ridden.

  "That bandanna you put over my face against the wind—it smelled like you.

  I guess from your hair," Rubenstein concluded, sounding lame.

  "Thank you, Paul," Natalia whispered, getting the two socks off his right

  foot. The sole of his foot was yellow, but not as bad as the left one had

  been. Again, she felt the almost icy flesh against her abdomen and she

  shivered,

  "You love John—I mean really love him, don't you?" Rubenstein blurted out.

  She closed her eyes a moment, felt pressure there

  against her eyelids, tt
  "I'm sorry—I mean for both of you. John and Sarah— I mean it's none of my

  business—"

  "No—talk if you want," she told him.

  "He—well, it's because he doesn't know if she's safe, if she's alive

  minute by minute—that's—"

  "I heard the lines in an American movie once—fI can't fight a ghost'?

  No—even a living ghost. And I don't want to fight it. I respect John for

  searching for Sarah. For—" She almost said never touching her. But she

  couldn't say that because she didn't like to think about it. !

  "I mean . . . he's the last of a breed, isn't he? Silent, strong—a man of

  honor."

  "Yes—he's a man of honor," she repeated. The chills in her body from the

  coldness of Rubenstein's feet were starting to subside. . . .

  They had built a fire; there had been no other choice. And behind the

  windbreak in the glow of the fire, her feet wrapped in the sleeping bag

  and blankets around her, even covering her head, her ears were finally

  starting to become warmer.

  Paul sat a foot or so away from her, the whiskey bottle beside them,

  between them. He had taken a long drink from it an hour earlier and then

  simply sat, watching the fire, silent, his feet wrapped in blankets

  against the cold.

  "She used to do that. I always had problems with my feet freezing up,"

  Paul said suddenly.

  "Your—"

  "My girl—I was afraid you were gonna say my mother. But it was my girl."

  "Was she—was she pretty?" Natalia asked, not looking at him, but staring

  into the fire.

  "Yeah—she was pretty. She was," he said with an air of finality.

  Natalia felt suddenly awkward, reaching her hand out of the blankets which

  swathed her, the cold air some­thing she could feel suddenly against her

  skin. She picked up the bottle—the glass of it was cold to her touch and

  cold against her lips as she drank from it, then set it down again. She

  reached her hand out still farther, found Rubenstein's arm and held it.

  "Would you tell me about her?"

  "Catharsis?"

  "Maybe—and my curiosity. You know that. Women are always curious."

  "Ruth was that way," he said quietly.

  "Had you—?"

  "Known each other a long time? Yeah—went to temple together whenever my

  dad was on leave when we were kids. Her folks and my folks knew each

  other."

  "You were a military brat weren't you?" Natalia smiled, looking at him in

  the firelight.

  "Yeah—brat period, maybe. But that isn't true. I was always a good

  kid—relatives, the other officers, always said, 'Paul is such a

  well-behaved little boy.' Wish I hadn't been. Ruth always said we should

  wait until we—" He stopped and fell silent.

  Natalia didn't know if she should press it, but then decided. "Until you

  were married?"

  He just looked at her, his glasses, long since back in place, slipping

  down the bridge of his nose. "You believe that ... I mean, well you know .

  . . but this isn't any kind of thing on my part to try to—"

  "To make a pass?" Natalia smiled.

  "Yeah—that'd be pretty funny—me making a pass for

  you, wouldn't it?" He laughed.

  "No—and it wouldn't even be sweet. But it'd be flat­tering to me." She

  smiled.

  Again he fell silent, taking a pull on the bottle, then settling his

  forearm under her left hand again. "Here I am—middle of nowhere and I'm a

  virgin. Just what you want with death around every corner, isn't it?" He

  laughed.

  "You would make any woman a fine lover," Natalia said, feeling awkward

  saying it.

  "Hell! I knew Ruth for six years before I worked up/the nerve to kiss

  her." Rubenstein Jaughed. {

  But the laughter sounded hollow to her, and Natalia said, "How old were

  you then?"

  "Nine." He laughed again, this time the laughter sounded genuine she

  thought.

  (fI me! Vladmir when I was twenty. He was so strong and brave and—I didn't

  know any better. He made love to me—a lot in those days. I thought it was

  love anyway."

  She moved her hand away, finding the black shoulder bag and starting to

  search it for her cigarettes. She set her knife down on the ground beside

  the bag.

  "What'd you call that knife again?" Rubenstein asked, obviously changing

  the subject. "What was it?"

  "A Bali-Song knife—it's a Philippine design, though it may have originated

  with an American sailor who brought it there. Some of the really big ones

  were used as cane knives and as weapons, too. It's a martial-arts

  fight­ing knife. I got into martial-arts weapons when I was just—"

  She put the knife down, looking at Paul. "Why don't you ask—did I ever

  really love Vladmir?"

  She lit a cigarette, waiting for him to ask her.

  "Did you?' he finally said, his voice sounding sud­denly older to her.

  "Yes—until I found out what he was. And
I was trying to deal with that and

  I saw John again there and—" She swallowed hard, forgetting about the

  cigarette a moment, then choking on the smoke and coughing.

  "John was everything you'd thought Vladimir was— but really wasn't. I

  mean, the grammar or syntax or what­ever—well it really sucks, but isn't

  that what you want to

  Of >

  say:

  Natalia swallowed again, this time without the smoke—instead the bottle in

  her left hand, the whiskey burning at her throat suddenly. "Yes—I wanted

  to say that. Men always jokingly say women are like children, call them

  girls—but we are. We all look for our own personal knight—you know, the

  kind with a rK-N-I—' We look for someone we hook our dreams on. That's

  what Ruth saw in you—and she wasn't wrong."

  "Me—a knight?" Rubenstein laughed.

  "A knight doesn't have to be tall and brave—but you are brave, you just

  maybe didn't know it then. It's inside. That's what it is." She reached

  her hand out and felt Rubenstein's hand touching hers. "That's what it

  is," she repeated.

  Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy thought the idea was, in a way, amusing. He

  looked at his gun—a nickel-plated Colt single-action Army . with a

  four-and-three-quarter-inch barrel. He was the conqueror, the invader,

  and/his sidearm was "The Gun That Won the West'—as Ameri­can as—he

  verbalized it, "Apple pie—ha!"

  He cocked the hammer back to the loading notch, opened the loading gate,

  and spun the cylinder—five rounds, originally round-nosed lead solids, but

  the bullets drilled out three sixty-fourths of an inch with a

  one-sixteenth-inch drill bit, then tipped into candle wax after first

  having had an infinitesimal amount of powdered glass shavings inserted

  into their cavities. His own special load.

  After rotating the cylinder, closing the gate, and lowering the hammer

  over the empty chamber, he holstered the gun inside his waistband, in a

  small holster he'd had custom-made of alligator skin, the gun with -ivory

  butt forward and slightly behind his left hip bone. He reached to the

  dresser top, picking up the set of military brushes and working his hair

  with them. Thirty-four years old and not a speck of gray, he thought.

  He set down the brushes and walked across the room to his closet; the

  clothes were neatly arranged there by his valet. He took down a tweed

  sportcoat—woolen and finely tailored to his exact measurements. He held it

  for a moment against the charcoal gra> slacks he wore. The herringbone

  pattern had a definite charcoal gray shading and it made for a perfect

  combination.

  He slipped the coat on. It would be cold, dangerous because of the

  storm—but it was vital and no choice was left other than to go.

  He tried to think if there was some American song about West Virginia—his

  destination. He thought for a moment, then decided there doubtless was but

  he didn't know it. Instead he whistled "Dixie"—it was close enough for his

  purposes.

  He stopped whistling as he reached the door of his quarters, laughing.

  "Whistling 'Dixie' in a snowstorm—ha!"

  He started through the doorway, into the hall. . . .

  The wind at the restored Lake Front airport was bit-ingly cold, and he

  pulled up on the collar of his coat— wolfs fur—as he started toward the

  helicopter for the first leg of his journey toward West Virginia and the

  presidential retreat—and the duplicate set of files on the American Eden

  Project.

  As he crossed under the rotor blades, he could feel it— his hair was

  ruined.

  Darkness had fallen deeply—he glanced at the black luminous face of the

  Rolex Submariner he wore—more than an hour ago. Rourke exhaled, watching

  the steam $n his breath. The Harley's engine rumbled between his legs,

  running a little roughly with the cold.

  A smile crossed his lips; he had been right. He was heading into the heart

  of the storm, Natalia and Paul away from it. He looked behind him once,

  into the white swirling darkness, then gunned the Hariey, slowly starting

  ahead, the snow making the road almost impas­sable. . . .

  Rourke had stopped a little while earlier to pull up the neck of his

  crew-neck sweater so that it covered most of his face, and his ears and

  head. There had been a sudden coldness near the small of his back where

  his sweater no longer protected him, and his ears had been stiffening with

  the cold. Now as he pressed the bike along a moun­tain curve, the

  visibility was bad, worse than it had been before. The storm only seemed

  to intensify as he moved along, and the cold increased. He wore his

  dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses, to protect his eyes from the driving

  ice spicules; the backs of his gloved hands were

  i

  encrusted with the ice where his fists locked over the handlebars.

  Brushing the ice away from the cuff of his sweater where it extended past

  his brown leather jacket's cuff, he moved his right hand to roll back the

  sweater and read the face of his watch. It was early in the evening, and

  the temperature would still drop for another nine or ten hours or so until

  just before dawn. As he shifted his right hand back to the handlebars, his

  weight shifted— stiffness from the cold—and the bike started into a skid.

  He was doing barely twenty by the speedometer, the headlight of the Harley

  dancing wildly across the snow and ice as he took the curve, the Harley

  almost out of control. His hands wrestled the controls, trying to steer

  'the bike out of the skid. His feet dragged to stop it, to balance it.

  He let the bike skid out, jumping clear of it, the machine sliding across

  the road surface as he rolled. The Harley stopped in a snowbank to the far

  right of the road; Rourke landed flat on his stomach on the ice and snow.

  He looked up, shaking his head to clear it.

  He pushed himself up with his hands, slowly rising to his feet, pulling

  off his right glove, clutching the wrist hole tight in his left fist to

  retain the warmth inside. Then, with his right hand, he took off the

  glasses that had protected his eyes. He realized also that he was tired,

  fast approaching exhaustion; and with the cold, that could be fatal. He

  moved slowly, carefully toward his bike. It was in a snowbank, the snow

  having cushioned its impact. It appeared totally undamaged.

  "Lucky," he murmured. He reached down and shut off the key, putting the

  glasses into an inside pocket of the jacket first. Squinting against the

  ice, he looked around him; he needed shelter. To his left—to the east—the

  clouds had a strange glow. Radiation? He shook his head, dismissing the

  thought. He could be dying at this very instant, he realized, if the snow

  that fell on him was irradiated. He would worry about that later.

  But there was a subtle glow and trails of fire were visible; and as the

  cloud patterns shifted in the wind, the glow remained, as if it emanated

  from the ground.

  If things had been normal, he would have labeled the glow as the lights

  from—he verbalized it—"A town—a town. A town." It looked to be about two
>
  or three miles away, but he realized that with the darkness and the snow

  and the cloud layers the distance judgment he made could have been

  self-deceptive. ,

  He gloved his right hand again, working his fingerfs which were already

  stiffening.

  There were two possibilities: to fabricate a shelter which would give

  marginal protection from the wind and no protection from the cold, or to

  go to the source of the lights. He had passed a side road turnoff a

  half-mile back; it likely led toward the source of the lights. The general

  direction seemed the same, although mountain roads, winding like Christmas

  ribbons across the landscape and really leading nowhere, could be

  deceptive as to direc­tion. But along such a road there would be farms,

  homes—he decided.

  His best chance for shelter was along the side road, though the snow would

  be heavier there.

  He wrest/ed the Harley up, straddling it, starting it, the engine

  rumbling; his gas gauge was low, very low. Rourke fought the machine back

  out of the snowdrift and arced it around. If he kept the speed low enough

  . . .

  When more Brigands had started arriving—some sort of conclave she

  wondered?—she had awakened the chil­dren; then as silently as possible,

  she led them and the horses down on the far side of the rise—away from the

  Brigand camp, into the mounting storm. As Sarah rode Tildie now, the

  horse's body white-coated with the snow and ice, she wondered if it had

  been a wise decision—the right one? What would John have done? Would he

  have—?

  "Mommie?"

  She shook her head, smiling as she turned around. "What is it, Annie? Are

  you cold?"

  "No—I'm letting her hug me—she isn't—"

  "I am cold," Annie interrupted Michael. "I'm cold. I'm cold."

  "Slow up, Michael," Sarah told her son, wanting him to rein in Sam.

  Michael didn't argue; she guessed he was cold, too. "Here." She reined

  Tildie around, then came up beside her children. She took the blanket

  which she had wrapped around her and put it around Annie's shoulders,