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.”