The man she brought into the office was in his mid-forties, balding, with alert blue eyes and nicotine-stained fingers. He sized up Jeff with a quick, penetrating glance, did the same to Pamela, then looked at Mitchell Wade.
'I’d prefer we had this talk in private,' the man said.
Wade stood, introduced himself. 'I’m Mr. Winston’s attorney,' he said. 'I also represent Miss Phillips.'
The man pulled a thin billfold from his jacket pocket, handed Wade and Jeff his card. 'Russell Hedges, U.S. Department of State. I’m afraid the nature of what I have to discuss here is confidential. Would you mind, Mr. Wade?'
'Yes, I would mind. My clients have a right to—'
'No legal advice is required in this situation,' Hedges said. 'This concerns a matter of national security.'
The attorney started to protest once more, but Jeff stopped him. 'It’s all right, Mitchell. I’d like to hear him out. Think over what we were talking about before, and let me know if you come up with any workable alternatives; I’ll give you a call tomorrow.'
'Call me today if you need to,' Wade said, casting a scowl at the government representative. 'I’ll be in my office late, probably till six or six-thirty.'
'Thanks. We’ll get in touch if necessary.'
'Mind if I smoke?' Hedges asked, pulling out a pack of Camels as the lawyer left the room.
'Go right ahead.' Jeff motioned him to one of the seats facing the desk and slid an ashtray within his reach. Hedges produced a box of wooden matches, lit his cigarette with one. He let the match burn slowly to a blackened stub, which he dropped, still smoldering, into the large glass ashtray.
'We’ve been aware of you, of course,' Hedges said at length. 'Difficult not to be, what with the media spotlight you’ve been in for the past four months. Though I must admit, most of my colleagues have tended to dismiss your pronouncements as parlor tricks … until this week.'
'Libya?' Jeff asked, knowing the answer.
Hedges nodded, took a long drag from the cigarette. 'Everyone at the Middle East desk is still thunderstruck; our most reliable intelligence assessments indicated King Idris had a thoroughly stable regime. You not only named the date of the coup; you specified that the junta would come from the middle echelons of the Libyan army. I want you to tell me how you knew all that.'
'I’ve already explained it as clearly as I’m able.'
'This business about reliving your life—' His cool gaze took in Pamela. 'Your lives. You can’t expect us to believe that, can you?'
'You don’t have any choice,' Jeff said matter-of-factly. 'Neither do we. It’s happening; that’s all we know. The only reason we’ve made such a spectacle of ourselves this time is because we want to find out more about it. I’ve made all this very plain before.'
'I expected you’d say that.'
Pamela leaned forward intently. 'Surely there are government researchers who could investigate this phenomenon, help us find the answers we’re looking for.'
'That’s not my department.'
'But you could direct us to them, let them know you’re taking us seriously. There are physicists who might—'
'In exchange for what?' Hedges asked, flicking a long ash from his cigarette.
'I beg your pardon?'
'You’re talking about a commitment of funds, manpower, laboratory facilities … What would we get in return?'
Pamela pursed her lips, looked at Jeff. 'Information,' she said after a moment’s pause. 'Advance knowledge of events that will upset the world’s economy and lead to the deaths of thousands of innocent people.'
Hedges crushed out the cigarette, his keen blue eyes riveted on hers. 'Such as?'
She glanced at Jeff again; his face held no expression, neither approval nor admonishment. 'This thing in Libya,' Pamela told Hedges, 'will have disastrous, far-reaching consequences. The man in charge of the junta, Colonel Qaddafi, will appoint himself premier early next year; he’s a madman, the most truly evil figure of the next twenty years. He’ll turn Libya into a breeding ground, and a haven, for terrorists. Dreadful, unimaginable things will happen because of him.'
Hedges shrugged. 'That’s awfully vague,' he said. 'It could be years before those kinds of assertions are proven or disproven. Besides, we’re more interested in events in Southeast Asia, not the ups and downs of these little Arab states.'
Pamela shook her head decisively. 'You’re wrong there. Vietnam is a lost cause; it’s the Middle East that’ll be the pivotal region during the next two decades.'
The man looked at her thoughtfully, fished another cigarette from his crumpled pack. 'There’s a minority faction at State that’s expressed just that opinion,' he said. 'But when you claim our stance in Vietnam is hopeless … What about the death of Ho Chi Minh day before yesterday? Won’t that weaken the resolve of the NLF? Our analysts say—'
Jeff spoke up. 'If anything, it’ll strengthen their determination. Ho will be all but canonized, made into a martyr. They’ll rename Saigon after him, in—once they’ve taken the city.'
'You were about to name a date,' Hedges said, squinting at him through a haze of smoke.
'I think we should be somewhat selective about what we tell you,' Jeff said carefully, giving Pamela a cautioning look. 'We don’t want to add to the world’s troubles, just help it avert some of the clear-cut misfortunes.'
'I don’t know … There are still a number of doubting Thomases in the department, and if all you can offer are evasive generalities—'
'Kosygin and Chou En-lai,' Jeff declared forcefully. 'They’ll meet in Peking next week, and early next month the Soviet Union and China will agree to hold formal talks on their border disputes.'
Hedges frowned in disbelief. 'Kosygin would never visit China.'
'He will,' Jeff asserted with a tight smile. 'And before too long, so will Richard Nixon.'
The March wind off Chesapeake Bay stirred the light rain into a fine, chill mist, stopped the scattered droplets in their fall, and whipped them this way and that, into an atmospheric microcosm of the whitecaps that slapped across the choppy bay. Jeff’s hooded slicker glistened blackly in the omnipresent moisture as the cold, clear drizzle lashed and trickled invigoratingly across his face.
'What about Allende?' Hedges asked, trying without success to light a sodden Camel. 'Does he stand a chance?'
'You mean despite your people’s mucking about in Chilean politics?' It had long since become obvious to Jeff and Pamela that Russell Hedges had only the most tenuous connection to the State Department. Whether he was CIA or NSA or something ; else entirely, they didn’t know. It didn’t really matter; the end results were the same.
Hedges gave one of his ambiguous half-smiles, managed to get j the cigarette going. 'You don’t have to tell me whether he’s actually going to be elected or not, just whether he stands a reasonable chance.'
'And if I say he does, then what? He goes the way of Qaddafi?'
'This country had nothing to do with the Qaddafi assassination; I’ve told you that time and again. It was purely an internal Libyan affair. You know how those third-world power struggles go.'
There was no point arguing about it with the man again; Jeff knew damned well that Qaddafi had been killed, before ever taking office, as a direct result of what he and Pamela had told Hedges of the dictator’s future policies and actions. Not that Jeff mourned the death of a bloodthirsty maniac like that, but it was widely assumed that the CIA was linked to the murder, and those well-founded rumors had led to the creation of a previously nonexistent terrorist outfit called the November Squad, headed by Qaddafi’s younger brother. The group had vowed a lifetime of revenge in the name of its slain leader. Already, a massive petroleum fire raged out of control in the desert south of Tripoli, where three months
