earlier the November Squad had blown up a Mobil Oil installation, killing eleven Americans and twenty-three Libyan employees.
Chile’s Allende was no Qaddafi; he was a decent, well-meaning man, the first freely elected Marxist president in history. He would die soon enough as it was, and probably at American instigation. Jeff had no intention of hurrying that shameful day.
'I have nothing to say about Allende one way or the other. He’s no threat to the United States. Let’s just leave it at that.'
Hedges tried to draw on the soggy cigarette, but it had gone out again, and the wet paper had begun to split. He threw it off the wharf and into the restless water with dismay. 'You had no such compunctions about telling us Heath will be elected prime minister in England this summer.'
Jeff eyed him sardonically. 'Maybe I wanted to make sure you didn’t decide to have Harold Wilson shot.'
'Goddamn it,' Hedges spat out, 'who set you up as the moral arbiter of U.S. foreign policy? It’s your job to supply us with advance information, period. Let the people in charge decide what’s important and what’s not and how to handle it.'
'I’ve seen the results of some of those decisions before,' Jeff said. 'I prefer to remain selective about what I reveal. Besides,' he added, 'this was supposed to be a fair trade. What about your end of the bargain—is any progress being made?'
Hedges coughed, turned his back to the wind off the bay. 'Why don’t we go back inside, have a warm drink?'
'I like it out here,' Jeff said defiantly. 'It makes me feel alive.'
'Well, I’ll be dead of pneumonia if we stay out here much longer. Come on, let’s go in and I’ll tell you what the scientists have had to say so fart'
Jeff relented, and they began walking toward the old government-owned house on the western shore of Maryland, south of Annapolis. They’d been here for six weeks now, conferring on the implications of Rhoqesian independence and the coming overthrow of Cambodia’s/Prince Sihanouk. At first, he and Pamela had regarded their stay here as something of a lark, a vacation of sorts, but Jeff was growing increasingly concerned over the detailed grillings by Hedges, who apparently had been assigned to them as a permanent liaison. They’d been careful not to say anything they felt could be put to harmful use by the Nixon administration, but it was becoming harder to know where to draw the line. Even Jeff’s equivocal 'no comment' about next fall’s elections in Chile might be rightly interpreted by Hedges and his superiors as an indication that Allende would, in fact, win the presidency; and what sort of covert U.S. action might that assumption provoke? They were walking a dangerous tightrope here, and Jeff had begun to regret they’d ever agreed to these meetings at all.
'So?' Jeff asked as they approached the tightly shuttered house, an inviting column of smoke rising from its red brick chimney. 'What’s the latest word?'
'Nothing definitive from Bethesda yet,' Hedges muttered beneath the upturned collar of his raincoat. 'They’d like to do some more tests.'
'We’ve had all the medical tests imaginable,' Jeff said impatiently, 'even before you people got involved. That’s not the crux of it; it’s something beyond us, something on the cosmic level, or the subatomic. What have the physicists come up with?'
Hedges stepped onto the wooden porch, shook the beads of water from his hat and coat like an overgrown dog. 'They’re working on it,' he told Jeff vaguely. 'Berget and Campagna at Gal Tech think it could have to do with pulsars, something about massive neutrino formation … but they need more data.'
Pamela was waiting in the oak-beamed living room, curled on the sofa in front of a hearty fire. 'Hot cider?' she asked, raising her mug and tilting her head with a questioning look. 'Love some,' Jeff said, and Hedges nodded his assent. 'I’ll get it, Miss Phillips,' said one of the dark-suited young men who stood permanent watch over this secluded compound. Pamela shrugged, pulled the sleeves of her bulky sweater up over her wrists, and took a sip from the steaming cup.
'Russell says the physicists may be making some progress,' Jeff told her. She brightened, her fire-flushed cheeks radiant against the bunched blue wool of her sweater and the flaxen sheen of her hair.
'What about the skew?' she asked. 'Any extrapolation yet?'
Hedges twisted his mouth around a fresh, dry cigarette, lowered his eyelids in a cynical sidelong gaze. Jeff recognized the expression, knew by now that the man held little credence in the notion that they had lived before, would live again. It didn’t matter. Hedges and the rest could think whatever they liked, so long as other minds, perceptive and persistent scientific minds, continued to focus on the phenomenon that Jeff knew to be all too real.
'They say the data points are too uncertain,' Hedges said. 'Best they can come up with is a probable range.'
'And what’s that range?' Pamela asked quietly, her fingers tense and white around the hot mug.
'Two to five years for Jeff; five to ten in your case. Unlikely it would be any lower than that, they tell me, but the high end could be greater if the curve continues to steepen.'
'How much greater?' Jeff wanted to know.
'No way to predict.'
Pamela sighed, her breath rising and falling with the wind outside. 'That’s no better than a guess,' she said. 'We could have done as well on our own.'
'Maybe some of the new tests will—'
'To hell with the new tests!' Jeff barked. 'They’ll be just as
The taciturn young man in the dark suit returned to the living room with two thick mugs. Jeff took his, stirred it angrily with a fragrant cinnamon stick.
'They want some more tissue samples at Bethesda,' Hedges said after a careful sip of the hot cider. 'One of the teams there thinks the cellular/structure may—'
'We’re not going back to Bethesda,' Jeff told him with finality. 'They have plenty to work with as it is.'
'There’s no need for you to return to the hospital itself,' Hedges explained. 'All they need is a few simple skin scrapings. They sent a kit; we can do it right here.'
'We’re going back to New York. I have a month’s worth of messages I haven’t even seen; there might be something useful among them. Can you get us a plane out of Andrews tonight?'
'I’m sorry…'
'Well, if there’s no government transport available, we’ll just take a commercial flight. Pamela, call Eastern Airlines. Ask them what time—'
The man who had brought the cider took a step forward, one hand poised before his open jacket. A second guard came in through the front door as if silently signaled, and a third appeared on the staircase.
'That’s not what I meant,' Hedges said carefully. 'I’m afraid we … can’t allow you to leave. At all.'
SEVENTEEN
'… attempted to storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran but were repulsed by units of the Eighty-second Airborne Division, who have surrounded the American diplomatic outpost since last February. At least a hundred and thirty-two Iranian revolutionaries are believed to have been killed in the fighting, and U.S. casualties stand at seventeen dead, twenty-six wounded. President Reagan has ordered new air strikes against rebel bases in the Mountains east of Tabriz, where the Ayatollah Khomeini is believed to be—'
'Turn the damned thing off,' Jeff told Russell Hedges.
'… the revolutionary high command. Here in the United States, the death toll from last week’s terrorist bombing at Madison Square Garden has now reached six hundred and eighty-two, and a
