recoiled from it dramatically. Karl-Heinrich watched her stagger and lurch and crumple and go tumbling to the floor, landing with a hard thump in the middle of the room. There she pulled herself instantly into a little ball, facedown in a huddled sobbing heap, her forehead grinding into the ancient Persian carpet from the museum. This was the first time Karl-Heinrich had seen anyone encounter the field. Its effect was even more powerful than he had expected. To his dismay she seemed now to be going into hysterics, her whole body jerking convulsively, her breath coming in wild gulping gasps. That was annoying; annoying and yet somehow sad, too. That she should suffer so.
He wondered what to do. He stood over her, staring down at her twitching naked form, seeing her now as he had seen her in that illicit spy-eye view of all those years ago, the fleshy white buttocks, the slim pale back, the delicate tracery of her spine.
For all his earlier indifference, a surprising touch of desire arose in him now, even in the midst of her agony. Because of it, perhaps. Her vulnerability, her misery, her utter pitifulness; but also that smooth taut rump heaving there, the lovely slender legs coiling beneath her. He knelt beside her and let his hand rest lightly on her shoulder. Her skin was hot, as though she was feverish.
“Look, there’s really no problem,” he said gently. “I’ll get you your son back, Barbro. Don’t carry on like that. Don’t.”
Moans came from her. This was almost like a seizure. He knew that he should send for help.
She was trying to say something. He could not make out the words, and leaned closer still. Her long arms were splayed out wide, the left hand drumming in torment on the floor, the other one clutching at the air with quivering fingers. Then, suddenly, she was turning, rolling over to face him, jerking and twitching no longer, and there was a ceramic knife in that outstretched hand, arriving there as though by magic—pulled out of thin air? Out of her pile of discarded garments?—and, utterly calm and poised, she rose toward him in a single smooth movement and thrust the blade with extreme force, with astonishing strength, deep into his lower abdomen.
Pulled it upward. Brought it ripping like an irresistible force through his internal organs until it came clinking up against the cage of his ribs.
He grunted and clasped his hands to the gaping wound. He could barely cover it with his ten outspread fingers. Surprisingly, there was no pain yet, only a dull sense of shock. She rolled backward from him and sprang to her feet, looming over him like a naked avenging demon.
“I have no son,” she said vindictively, biting off the edges of the words, as his eyes began to dim.
Karl-Heinrich nodded. Blood was spouting from him, covering the Persian carpet with a pool of blood. He attempted to tell the servo to send help, but he found himself unable to make a sound. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, in soft furry silence. In any case what good would calling for help do? He could feel himself already dying. His strength was leaving with him with every spurt. Eyesight growing blurry, inner systems shutting down. He was finished, a dead man at twenty-nine. He was surprised how little he cared. Perhaps that was what dying was like. So they had caught up with him at last. How odd that she would be the one. How appropriate. “I’ve dreamed of this for twelve years,” the lovely assassin said. “We all have. What joy it is to see you like this now, Borgmann.” And said again, this time making the name sound like the curse it had become: “Borgmann.”
Yes. Of course. That was borgmann, no capital letter. She had killed him, all right.
But there was consolation all the same, he told himself. He would die famous. His very name was part of the language now; that he knew; that knowledge he hugged lovingly close to himself as his life dwindled away. He would be dead in a few moments more, but his name—ah, his name—that would be immortal, that would march on through human history forever. Borgmann… borgmann… borgmann.
The baby was a girl. Steve and Lisa named her Sabrina Amanda Gannett. Everyone at the ranch came around to go ooh and ahh and kitchy-koo, as the cultural norms demanded.
But there was an enormous amount of muddle and turmoil before things got to that point, of course.
First there was the awkward business of Lisa’s family’s quisling affiliations for Steve to deal with. So far as his uncle Ron was concerned, that was a simple matter. “You have to dump her, boy, that’s all there is to it. Carmichaels just can’t hang out with quislings. They just can’t.—Don’t give me that stricken expression, my friend. Out of all the pussy there is for you to find in California, why did you have to wind up with one of them?”
That, though, was Ron, who was cool and smooth and handsome and who over the years had had any number of girlfriends, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, and at least a couple of wives too, before meeting up with Peggy and deciding to mend his wandering ways. Easy enough for him to say: dump her. What would someone as magnetic and charming as Ron understand, really, about poor pasty-faced Steve Gannett, who didn’t know how to keep his own shirt-tails tucked in and whose entire sex life up till the time he had met Lisa had consisted of serving as an animated dildo for his heartless cousin Jill? Did Ron think that it would really be so easy for him to toss Lisa back into the pool and find himself another girlfriend just like that, half an hour later?
Besides, he loved Lisa. She was important to him in a way that nobody ever had been before. He lived for their meetings, their trips to Point Mugu Park, their delicious sweaty grapplings on that carpet of fallen leaves beneath the oak trees. He couldn’t imagine life without her. Nor did he see how he could bring himself to discard her, the way Jill had discarded him.
How, though, was he going to work all this out?
“I’ve got to see you,” he told her, a couple of days after their visit to the Topanga Canyon Boulevard construction site. “Right away. It’s essential.” But he didn’t have the ghost of an idea of what he was going to say to her.
He drove blindly southward at top velocity over the battered coastal highway, giving no heed to potholes, cracks, dips and curves, and other such trifling obstacles. When he got to Mission San Buenaventura, Lisa was waiting out in front, sitting in her car. She smiled pleasantly as he approached, just as though this were one of their ordinary dates, though it was so soon after their last meeting that she should have suspected something. That cheery, expectant smile of hers made everything just that much worse. She opened the door on the passenger side for him and he slipped in beside her, but when she began to start the engine he caught her by the wrist and stopped her.
“No, let’s not go down to the park. Let’s just stay here and talk, okay?”
She looked startled. “Is something wrong?”
“Plenty’s wrong, yes,” he said, allowing the words to come out without pausing to form them in his mind. “I’ve been thinking, Lisa. About how we got through the checkpoint, and all. How you happened to have the password, when practically all the LACON entry permits for Los Angeles have been revoked.” He could hardly bear to look straight at her. He had to force himself; and, even so, his gaze kept sliding away from her eyes toward her cheek or her chin. Surprisingly, she seemed very calm, staring steadily back at him, even when he let the next string of words come blurting forth: “Lisa, the only way you could have had that passport would be if you’re a quisling, isn’t that so? Or know someone who is?”
“That’s an ugly word, quisling.”
“Well, collaborator, then. Is that any better?”
She shrugged. She was still strangely calm, though now her face seemed a little flushed. “My father works for the telephone company, and so do my brothers, and so do I. You know that.”
“Doing what?”
“You know that too. Programming.”
“And the phone company: what’s its relationship to LACON?”
“LACON controls all communications networks in and around the Los Angeles Basin, from Long Beach to Ventura. Certainly you would know that.”
“So someone who works for the telephone company in this county actually works for LACON, isn’t that so?”
“You might say so, yes.”
“And therefore,” said Steve, with a sense that he was pitching himself off the edge of a high cliff, “you and your family work for LACON, and, since LACON is the human administrative arm of the alien occupying powers, therefore you all can be regarded as quis—as collaborators. Yes?”
“Why are you grilling me like this, Steve?” Not at all indignant. Merely prompting him to speak the next line. As though she had expected this conversation to come, sooner or later.
“I have to know these things.”
“Well, you do know them, now. Like thousands and thousands of other people, my family earns its living by
