Soft Targets

let me continue my work through a mail drop.'

He sipped the coffee through a longer pause, one corner of his mind occupied with the liquid slither of a nude blonde soaping herself a few paces away. A nude blonde butch, he reminded his libido; forget it.

Then he heard Will Fulton's last suggestion, which made it easy to forget women. 'Oh no, fella; that's out.' Brief pause. 'I can't tell you why, exactly, but the idea lacks appeal. I've been Maury Everett too long. And who'd foot the bills?'

He barely noticed Gina's return, immersed in a debate he felt that he was losing. 'Okay,' he said at last. 'I'll think about it, and you set up a scenario. I'll be around here somewhere until you can convince me this'll work. Remember, Fulton, in some ways I'm like any other working stiff.' He watched Gina as she sat on the bed to slip from culottes to slacks, then forced himself to look away. 'Sure; and I appreciate it, Will. 'Bye.'

Everett would not discuss his problem with Gina until he had thought it out in a more pleasant setting. Over her objections, they canvassed Empire, then Golden, for an extra set of snow-shoes. She objected again at the price, observing that they made the ugliest, most expensive pair of hand-chewed tennis racquets in her experi­ence. It was past noon on Saturday before they were properly shod for the trek, Gina quickly learning the widestance shuffle, carrying her shoulder bag easily for the first hundred meters.

Maury Everett stopped frequently to let her rest, and laughed as she stumbled down a slope. 'Lean back until you have the hang of it,' he advised. 'You're not on skis.'

Grumbling pleasantly, wiping snow from her goggles, she moved with him across the mounded blue-white wilderness, pausing now and then to inspect animal tracks. They had cov­ered more than a kilometer before Everett found a sunny overhang sheltered from the wind and, with his clasp knife, cut boughs for insulation. They took off the snowshoes and sat on them, leaning against the green boughs, silently shar­ing cheddar and crackers.

The sunlight was warm on her face, distant peaks sharply visible in the thin clear air. It was no longer so difficult to see how a man of solitary habits might prefer winter in the Rockies, alone, to any other time, any other place. She said as much.

'Only we're not alone; and neither is Nijinsky,' he replied, and indicated a copse of trees in a ravine far below. Gradually she traced the patterns that revealed several deer among the mass of conifers, as Everett launched into a dis­course on the fleet animals.

'My fanny's like a waffle from sitting on these snowshoes,' she said, shifting, and provoked a lecture on the differences between her bobtailed `bearclaw' snowshoes and the long-tailed types used for less rugged country. Gina suddenly realized that the big man was temporizing, focusing on familiar topics, using her as a stimulus to deflect his thoughts. From what? 'My face is frozen in a permanent squint,' she said then, to change the subject. 'Could we get moving again?^'

Single file, they followed the mountain's contours, Everett taking the lead. Eventually Gina admitted that her stamina was waning again in the high altitude and, after another quiet breath­er, they retraced their path. In another hour they stood in a grove of trees above the cabin.

'Let me go first,' she insisted. 'I'll wave you in if it's okay.'

He hesitated, then shrugged. 'I'll never get used to this,' he said, motioning for her to go ahead.

He watched her circle the cabin, aware that there were ways to locate and deactivate the Oracle sensors, ways to counter the most sophis­ticated passive system. Gina Vercours herself was the active system that must probe the site. She disappeared into the cabin then, finally emerging to scan the heights where he stood.

At Gina's wave, Everett lurched forward in a shambling lope, traversing the steep declivity in a series of shallow zigzags. Exhalations con­densed in his wake, wafting upward in the still air, and as he trotted in, she was grinning. 'You leave a contrail like a 747,' she marveled.

'Just out of condition,' he puffed, hypervent­ilating. 'Can't afford to inhale fast, it'd shrivel all those poor little alveoli.'

'I'll take your word for it,' she said quickly. 'No more lectures, please; whatever's bothering you, suffer in silence!'

He unstrapped the snowshoes, amused, then followed her into the cabin. 'Am I all that transparent? Well, humor me, babe; I just need time to get used to new ideas.'

She was heating water for instant coffee. 'Such as?'

'Such as undergoing cosmetic surgery,' he said, and was grimly pleased to see that the no­tion disturbed her. By tacit agreement they eased onto separate sides of the bed, sitting side-by-­side, sipping coffee as they argued the problem out.

At one point, Gina reached over to take the roll of fat at his waist between her thumb and forefinger. If he lost thirty pounds of suet, she joked, nobody would recognize him.

'That's the crux of it,' he objected. 'I hate being forced to extremes because a half-dozen gangs of charlies want my hide on their walls.'

'Then repudiate your stand. You'd have all the media coverage you could want.'

He was damned if he would. The very fact of his being hunted, he said, implied that young Rhone Althouse had found an Achilles tendon in terrorism. But between repudiation and a new identity there was an alternative. He could con­tinue as always, but with tight security around him.

That, Gina said flatly, was suicide. 'And I won't be a party to it,' she warned. 'Get yourself another boy, fifteen of 'em. It might delay the inevitable but sooner or later—' she broke off, laid a hand on his arm, not looking at him. 'You're not seriously considering that, are you?'

Everett laid his big paw over her hand, turned to face her. 'I considered it, yes. But General Patton was right: don't die for your country; make some other sonofabitch die for his. I'm no martyr, Gina.' He withdrew his hand, powerfully conscious that she had made no move to retreat from this small evidence of a growing rapport.

Gina levered herself up to sit cross-legged, facing him. The act somehow lent her a gamin charm; in other circumstances he would have worn a wide grin. 'So you're damned if you'll repudiate, and you won't paint a bull's eye on your butt,' she urged. 'That leaves us with a new you. Any other alternatives?^'

'Only the choice between stories that I'm comatose, and stories that I'm dead. I like the coma; that, you can come back from. Only I'd have to come back with a different face.'

'Just thinking about it must be a downer, huh?'

It was not so much a fear of surgery, he said; Fulton had hinted at temporary cosmetic techniques. The weight loss was a good idea in any event. He sighed, 'I guess I'm just worried about the effects on the few people I care about.'

'Ah,' she breathed; 'relationships.' They were silent for a time before she added, 'You have a solid self-image, Maury. No matter who you see in the mirror, you'll still be you.'

He stared hard at her. 'Tell me that when I have a new face.'

'I will—assuming you'll still need me.' It was a clear request for clarification; even a bit wist­ful, he thought, his gaze softening as he sought the frank hazel eyes.

To avoid making a fool of himself he swung from the bed. 'That's your safest assumption of the day,' he said. 'I have a phone call to make.'

Will Fulton did not have every detail worked out, but Everett accepted the story they had con­cocted for the press. Severe head injury during a kidnap attempt, condition improved but still critical, under heavy guard at an undisclosed location. 'We can take you to Beverly Hills, Tuc­son, or San Antonio for the plas—uh, cosmetic surgery,' Fulton said.

Everett glanced across the bed. 'Tucson it is,' he said, and exchanged slow smiles with Gina. 'But why don't I just drive your Firebird down to Las Cruces and across?'

He frowned at the answer. 'Okay, then the lady can do the driving and I'll hide my wallet. That's the way I want to do it, Fulton . . . I'm not asking you to take the responsibility.'

There was more along this vein, the FBI loath to take chances on some accidental unmasking of Everett, and Everett determined to have his way. Everett finally terminated the call, met Gi­na's glance.

'What now?' she asked. There was something in her query that was calculated, yet far from cold.

'We head for Tucson tomorrow; and I start losing weight today. Get into your snowshoes,' he smiled; 'I'll tell you about it on the moun­tain.'

She lay back on the bed, flexing the long bare legs in languid sensuality. 'Tell me here,' she purred. 'I can think of better ways to lose weight.' Her invitation left no room for misunderstanding.