“No,” Forrester said. “We’re going to lick them this time. I’m not a bad in-fighter, Professor. And we’re gathering support every day.”

“But we’ve got this damned technological clock ticking away—maybe it’s too late to stop it. Each side keeps goading the other into a first-strike psychosis; there’s always the temptation to turn a so-called retaliatory weapon into a first-strike weapon. Remove the other side’s deterrent by knocking out their missiles before they can be fired. Leave them helpless to hit back. It’s the old Why-Not-Victory idea—feebleminded cretins. This Phaeton system—what’Il they do with all the lethal radioactive wastes from the spent elements? It’ll multiply the permanent storage problem out of sight. And the risk of accident? A radioactive leak, a chemical reaction, some stupid little component that got passed through quality control when the inspector was yawning? We’ve always had those risks but when you multiply them a thousandfold you go right off the crap table. Speaking purely as a mathematician I’d say the odds stink.”

“Make a stab at a figure.”

“I’d have to sit down and work it out.”

“Will you do that?”

“Sure, why not?”

Chandler and Spode returned from their separate errands at almost the same moment and Top Spode’s face was closed up tight. “Let’s get out of here—something’s come up.”

Forrester asked the question with his eyebrows but Spode only shook his head, mute.

The Professor got into the back seat and on the sun-blasted concrete in front of the admin block Forrester saw Major Chandler, who had just bade them good-bye with cool civility, stop to remove his big sunglasses and polish them. Forrester was amazed to see that behind the great mirrored shields the eyes were little buttons, too small for the rest of Chandler’s face.

Spode put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking slot. Forrester said, “All right, what’s up?”

“Later.”

They were in Spode’s car because Forrester’s two-seater wouldn’t have accommodated them. Spode drove through the gate and accelerated past the ugly parasitical traps that had sprung up to milk the airmen: SALES & SERVICE, DISCOUNT, AIR-CONDITIONED, LOW DOWN PAYMENT TO SERVICEMEN, TOP VALUE, ALL CARDS HONORED. Past a hamburger stand and a beer joint and a retread tire shop, dust hanging in the un-paved parking lots. The sun was molten brass. Forrester said, “All right, Top, what’d you spot?”

“Hard to say right off. But I tried to case it as if those pushbuttons were the crown jewels. I think it could be done.”

Moskowitz snorted. “Of course it could be done. Any group of crackpots with a little scientific training could think of a dozen ways to beat the fail-safe systems. All it takes is the instincts of a safecracker.”

“And the organization of a Gestapo,” Forrester said. “I still don’t put too much credence in it—it’s a far-fetched notion but it’s worth exposing if there’s any risk at all.”

Spode said, “It would take more than a handful of crazies. You’d need fifty or a hundred people and they’d have to be in the right places with the right training and a hell of a lot of preparation. But there’s no single security point I could see that’s so foolproof it couldn’t be breached. Take those KMS identification systems—those visitors’ cards for the three of us got prepared fast enough, and that means they could be fixed up for anybody. All it takes is one insider. Maybe you could do it without an insider for that matter—pick an airman’s pocket and make copies of his card, slip the original back into his wallet and nobody’s the wiser. Just leave blanks for your own people’s thumbprints to be filled in, and get uniforms for your people. I don’t see how any of it’s beyond the reach of some of these fascist outfits that have passwords and code names and keep bazookas in their basements. Half of them are Air Force people or retired Air Force people.”

Spode crowded the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit down Twenty-second Street. “You’d have to get your hands on copies of the codes they use and that might be tricky; they keep changing the codes. But it could still be done. Each one of those blockhouses down there has a phone and a microwave radio—I had a look. That’s the key point, communications. Every system has to have a bottleneck here and there and if you can take Over those bottlenecks you can control all the incoming and outgoing messages. Once you do that the rest’s no problem. We’ll need to tap a few sources and work up a complete chart of the communications they’d use in case of a nuclear attack.”

Moskowitz said, “You sound like you’re plotting to do it yourself.”

“Only way to figure it out, Professor. Put yourself in the other guy’s shoes and decide how you’d do it if you were him.”

Forrester said, “The point is, it can be done. That’s what terrifies me. Fifty or a hundred fanatics with Nazi minds—if that’s all it would take, it’s fantastic.”

Spode turned up Cherry Avenue past Bear Down football stadium and north into the campus—stolid brick buildings on incongruous palm-tree-studded lawns. Spode pulled up by the administration building. Kids walked by in bunches and Moskowitz’ glance swiveled to follow girls’ legs. “When will you want me in Washington to testify?”

“Guest set the hearings for three weeks from Monday—the twenty-fourth,” Forrester said.

“I’ll be there.” Moskowitz extended his knobby hand across the back of the seat to grip Forrester’s. “The odds still stink, but I’ve got a little hope—for the first time. Don’t bail out on me, Senator. Pleasure to’ve met you, Mr. Spode.” Moskowitz got out of the car and trailed after a trio of long-haired girls as if attached to them by a leash. Spode’s eyes didn’t dally on the girls at all; Forrester couldn’t remember having seen Spode this tense.

“All right, Top, what’s the matter?”

“Not sure. Wait till I get to a phone. That call I had, it was important but we couldn’t talk on that line.”

Spode drove onto a gas-station apron and Forrester watched him put through his call in the glass booth. When Spode came back he said, “Okay, we’ve got to talk.”

Spode handed him five photographs and talked while he drove. “His name’s Leon Belsky. He’s Russian KGB, one of their good ones. I took the pictures last night because I bumped into him at Trumble’s—he was doing the same thing I was but he was looking for bigger game. I took the pictures and his gun to somebody last night to find out who he was.”

“The Agency?”

“Aeah. Look, follow this because it all gets to a point. I left the gun and the negatives with Art Miller—he’s the guy who developed them for me. I gave you the Phaeton specs this morning but I held out on the rest because at that point you didn’t need to be involved in it. But now there’s two dead guys and a third guy missing and they’re all tied into it, and you need to know about it because I think they’re after you and me now.”

Forrester’s scalp contracted. “Then you’d better spell it out. Who’s dead and who’s missing?”

“Ross Trumble’s dead, for one.”

Forrester stared at him.

Spode turned the wheel to take a corner. His jaw had crept forward to lie in a hard line. “In his bathroom on a pile of broken glass with his wrists cut open. They made it look like suicide, but it wasn’t. I was the one who broke that glass and Trumble wasn’t there at the time. So now we know what Belsky was looking for—he was looking for Trumble, to kill him. But we still don’t know why. The letter Trumble wrote you from Phoenix—maybe that will have some answers.”

It was a quiet street, cottonwoods and elms throwing pools of shade. Spode pulled to the curb and switched the engine off. “The other dead one’s Art Miller. The guy who had your negatives and Belsky’s gun. Remember I left the stuff with Miller last night. It was a stupid mistake and you see what it cost Miller. If you want to plant a bug on somebody a gun’s a good place to put it—bug your gun and then let somebody take it away from you. There must have been a beeper in Belsky’s Smith and Wesson, and Belsky must have followed the signal right to Miller’s house. They found Miller dead a few hours ago. The gun and the negatives are gone so Belsky must have taken them with him.