on a coaster on the end table nearest her, she saw the picture of herself and the children on the far side of the couch. Near Paul Ruben-stein. She remembered when the picture was taken—they had just—
“I, ahh—” Rubenstein began, interrupting her thoughts.
“What?”
“I gotta talk—I shouldn’t, ahh—” and he ex-haled loudly—too loudly. It was as though some-thing were bottled up inside him and just about to escape—she waited, listening, as she moved her hand back from her drink suddenly aware of the fact that for the first time in—how long?—she wasn’t wearing a gun, she was wearing a skirt. She sat on a comfortable couch, in a secure place.
“I think we’re going to be friends, Paul—the children really seemed to take to you. And I think—well—I think, so did I—you can tell me—sometimes just telling somebody is—”
He stood up—too quickly she guessed, because she saw him touch at his left arm as he walked be-hind the couch and stood beside the glass-front gun case—there were empty spots in the case now. All she could hear was the water as it spilled down the falls at the far end of the Great Room and into the pool there. She had no idea where it came from, or where the excess water went, because the pool seemed less than three feet deep—a mother always checked the depth of water her children would be playing near.
Paul Rubenstein started to talk then. “Before I met your husband,” and his voice sounded slightly breathless to her, pain perhaps, but maybe not his arm. And his words were very hurried. “Well—I was just riding a desk in New York City. I had a girl—but New York isn’t there anymore and nei-ther is she. And I guess—shit—” and he turned around and stared at her, his eyes wide. “If what Natalia’s uncle talked about is right—and maybe the world ends but somehow we just go right on living—what the hell am— “ he turned away, her last glimpse of his face showing her that he seemed to be biting his lips, almost physically holding something back.
“That you’ll be lonely,” she whispered. “I know that feeling, Paul. John has me and he has Natalia and you have no one.”
He looked back at her, saying nothing. She watched his eyes.
There was nothing she could say. She closed her eyes.
Chapter Thirty-two
General Ishmael Varakov sat at his desk in his office without walls amid the splendors of the mu-seum. He stared at the mastodons from the dis-tance.
Two extinct creatures fighting each other in death.
He shook his head slowly.
Reports.
No trace of Natalia or of the American Rourke, or of the young Jew who had accompanied Nata-lia. As if all three had disappeared from the face of the earth.
He felt a smile cross his lips—an ironic smile, he thought.
His feet hurt, and shoeless under his desk, his toes wiggled.
Reports.
There was no trace of the American Rourke’s wife and children either. Clandestinely, Varakov had been searching for them for weeks, as further inducement to Rourke—and because it was the de-cent thing, he supposed.
Reports.
Karamatsov’s ghost, Rozhdestvenskiy, had suc-ceeded at the Johnson Space Center. Varakov’s agent inside the KGB had verified that Rozhdest-venskiy had recovered what was presumed to be the serum and twelve of the American cham-bers. The American chambers could be compared to the Soviet chambers, the Soviet chambers modi-fied if necessary. The serum, if Varakov under-stood the way of it, would be enough for thousands.
Reports.
All available army units were being mustered to a central staging area near the Texas-Louisiana border. A final battle with the surviving forces of U.S. II, but not for victory, for slaughter. But not even for that, he realized— simply to keep the army preoccupied, lest the true nature of The Womb be discovered and the horrible, final decep- tion that it constituted.
Reports.
The small band of GRU and army personnel whom he trusted were in place, waiting. They did not know the mission, nor did they know the purpose. But to activate them without his niece and without the American Rourke would have been useless.
They might wait, never activated, until the End.
He stood up, heavily, slowly.
He began to stuff his feet into his shoes, watch-ing Catherine as she slept curled up in the leather chair beside his desk. She had wanted to be with him, because dawn had been coming. But dawn had come and gone.
And they both lived, at least for another day.
He began to walk, his feet hurting him badly be-cause he had slept so little, rested so little. He walked to his figures of the mastodons, studying them as he did in the museum’s shadows. The building was nearly deserted. Some army functionaries, some KGB to keep Rozhdestvenskiy posted as to his—Varakov’s—actions.
Nothing more. Soon, nothing at all.
He looked at the battling giants, battling in death. “Marx was right about history,” he whis-pered in the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-three
Colonel Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy stood in the unopened doorway of the commandeered Lear executive jet, staring through the porthole in the pressure door at the airfield and beyond it Chey-enne Mountain—The Womb.
The Lear finally stopped its movement under him, settled as he peered out on the central eleva-tor pad. And a new sensation of movement be-gan—lowering.
There was brilliant sun like a halo around the field as he stared through the porthole, then a flicker of darkness, shadow, and then the bril-liance of artificial, more yellow light. The copilot was suddenly beside him, working the controls to open the door, the door pushing outward, passenger stairs folding out automati-cally, before him as the down motion stopped. Commander of the North American Branch of The Committee for State Security of the Soviet, Colonel Nehemiah Gustafus Rozhdestvenskiy—he was keenly aware of who he was, what he was— looked to his blue-black uniform’s left shoulder—the green shoulder board bearing the tri-angular formation of three stars denoting him as full colonel, KGB, had a speck of dust on it. He flipped it away with his white-gloved right hand.
Before stepping outside—the band already playing the national anthem—he glanced at him-self in the lavatory door mirror near the exit.
His nearly knee-high black jack boots gleamed with the richness of their leather and the labor of his aide. The brass of his buttons and the buckle of his gold parade dress uniform belt caught the overhead lighting, sparkled. His medals—not all of his medals, for to wear them all would have shown a lack of taste, something he despised in others of his rank or above, something he detested in men beneath his rank—followed the line of his left lapel, plunging in a sharp angle from the uni-form above his left breast toward his belt. The red collar tabs high on his lapels, the redness of the wide band that encircled his uniform cap—he ad-justed the angle of his cap to where it dipped slightly over his left eye. Rozhdestvenskiy turned from the mirror, glanc-ing neither to right nor to left, stepping through the doorway, standing on the top step of the egress, raising his right hand in salute, the voices of the assembled troops raised in chorus, his own joining their voices:
The hammer and sickle—he stared at it as it waved in the breezy downdraft from the elevator opening above him.
