"What for?" he said.

"So you could leave me with someone. That way you wouldn't have to just slip out some morning with me in some motel room, sound asleep, leaving me there. You want to leave me with him."

He took off his shirt.

"If I had maneuvers in mind, I'd have left you at your sister's. I showed up, didn't I, after your sister's."

"That was different."

"How?"

"This is the end of the line," she said.

He smiled, stepping out of his pants. Nadine smiled too, moving toward him and delivering a mock blow to his arm. They tried to make love quietly. It was an old cot, and squeaked, and Jack was somewhere nearby, moving about. She kept on smiling, her eyes closed. When they were in bed together, everything about her suggested appealing healthiness. It bothered him. She seemed to think sex was wholesome and sweet.

Selvy would never understand her. All the more reason to think of her as the girl. But he was beginning to understand something else. Black limousine. Certain things were becoming clear.

After Nadine left to go to her room, he heard Jack come downstairs and knock at his door. He showed Selvy a photograph of three men he used to go fishing with. They stood in front of a pickup, wearing trail vests and wading boots.

"This one's Jack Brady. Same as me. Jack. This is Vernon Floyd. That one's Buck Floyd."

Selvy nodded.

"Now that pickup. I goddamn swerved to avoid a hole about so wide and my rear tires went for a walk on me. Truck swapped ends for sure. Now Vernon. He called me every name. Brother Buck couldn't talk for laughing."

He looked at Selvy, who nodded again. Then he took the picture back upstairs. Selvy listened to the sheeting as it snapped in the wind.

It was becoming clear. He was starting to understand what it meant. All that testing. The polygraphs. The rigorous physicals. The semisecrecy. All those weeks at the Mines. Electronics. Code-breaking. Currencies. Weapons. Survival.

All the paramilitary sessions. The small doses of geopolitics. The psychology of terrorism. The essentials of counterinsurgency.

What it meant. The full-fledged secrecy. The reading. The routine. The double life. His private disciplines. His handguns. His regard for precautions. How your mind works. The narrowing of choices. What you are. It was clear, finally. The whole point. Everything.

All this time he'd been preparing to die.

It was a course in dying. In how to die violently. In how to be killed by your own side, in secret, no hard feelings. They'd been grooming him. They'd spotted his potential, his capacity for favorable development. All this time. It was a ritual preparation.

We are teaching you how to die violently. This is the only death that matters, steel or lead or tungsten alloy, death by hard metal, taking place in secret. To ensure the success of the course, we ourselves will kill you.

He lay in the dark, smoking.

Sure. The rougher the testing, the more certain you can be they're preparing you to die. They want perfect specimens, physically and otherwise. It's less resonant if you're flawed.

So. He'd be able to sleep now. Good.

All conspiracies begin with individual self-repression. They'd seen his potential. He'd checked off the right numbers in the elaborate profiles. They liked his style in the interviews. The computers approved.

Black limousine.

Of course. It was only fitting. All this time they'd been conveying him to the cemetery. In short hops. In stages. Now he knew. He'd sleep finally. Good.

He listened. The wind sound was haunting, a series of timed cries, level and clear. There was a change in direction and the wind's speed increased. The sound grew very different. The wind met creaking obstacles, banging through the hulks nearby, the ghost structures with windows blown out and doors leaning, weeds coming up through the floorboards.

The girl came to him in the dawn, moon-striped and pale, with dream-brown eyes, knocking over a chair as she crossed the room. She scrambled under the blanket. It was freezing and they couldn't stop trembling with cold-induced laughter as they pressed tight in the dark.

It hit seventy-five next day. They walked down the winding dirt road to the car, still parked near the river. Nadine sat on the fender. Selvy sat on the front end of the roof, his feet on the hood. The sky was glassy blue, marked by a single vapor trail formed in the wake of a passing plane.

"Are you as sluggish as I am?"

"No," he said.

"It's my biorhythms. They're way out of whack today."

"I'm great, I'm tuned."

"Biorhythmically I feel awful."

"You need a swim," he said.

The river wasn't wide here. On the Mexican side the rock wall was variously gray and copper, depending on the shadow line. Down here, with no buildings in view, no people around, it was all rocks and sky. A hawk sailed parallel to the cliff line where it ran straight for a fifty-yard stretch. He watched Nadine climb down to the lower bank, cautiously, skidding down the last dusty incline on her bottom, using her feet to brake.

Her voice was small, though remarkably clear.

"Got hit spang in the mouth with a pebble."

She stripped to her briefs and stepped into the water. The river twisted here. From his perch he could see material suspended in the areas of water that were touched by the sun. Mineral particles, brownish sediment. She slipped full-body into the river, dog-paddling in small circles.

"Not too cold. I thought it might be colder. Haven't done this in five years."

Her voice kept changing as she turned toward the opposite bank, then circled back this way. He saw her touch bottom at the near bank and stand erect, running her hands through her hair. When she spoke again he could tell by the pure tone of her voice that she was looking up at him.

"Hey, bo, come on down, get a little wet."

Selvy was looking across the river to the top of the rock wall. Two figures had appeared on the cliff line. First one, then the other ARVN ranger. He felt the briefest of regrets, thinking of his handguns. There was no mistaking the one he'd roughed up. Mustache. Wouldn't take his eyes off Selvy. The other one, the knife squatter, the one who'd waited motionless in the microbus, didn't mind tossing a look at Nadine.

She looked up that way, following Selvy's gaze. Then she turned toward the car again. Her voice was very small.

"I don't know more'n a monkey who they are."

Selvy remained on the car roof, watching them.

"They're not local people exactly," he said. "Why don't you stay right where you are for the time being? Put on your shirt if you want."

The two men remained for a long moment on the cliff line. Stetsons, sunglasses, tight denim pants. Nothing behind them but clear sky. Finally they moved back. Because of their higher elevation, from Selvy's vantage point, it took just two steps. They were out of sight.

The girl put on her jeans and climbed up to the lookout.

"This is turning into a Western," she said.

"What was it before?"

"I don't know what it was before. But it resembles a Western right now."

"Nothing like a swim," he told her. "You ought to be feeling better."

Selvy got in the car and started it up. Nadine kept looking over to the Mexican side. When the car started moving, she walked after it, opened the door and got in. He drove up to the post office. Less than a hundred yards away, tourists were emerging from a bus.

Selvy got out of the car and went over to talk to the bus driver. Above the curved windshield, in the slot where destinations are lettered, appeared the words: WILD WEST AND MEXICO. Nadine watched the imprint of her wet underwear gradually appear on her jeans.

He came back to the car and leaned against the door on her side. A few of the tourists drifted down this way, going into the general store, taking pictures of each other.