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.Do you suppose you would like to be a heroine?”“He’ll kill you,” she said.“He had his chance.Now he plays my game and dances to my tune.The trouble with wanting something in this life is that someone else is always able to deny it to you.Devereaux wanted you and he wanted to be left alone.I was in a position to deny both things to him.But I left him an out.I let him have his three or four days to prepare to come after me.I wondered what game he would play against me.But I always had you.”“I might not have followed.”“Then I had both of you in any case because the KGB would have been informed of your… existence.”Now, in the palace, she waited to speak because her voice was dry and not sure.When she found it, the president was next to her on the white couch, staring serenely at her with pale, watery eyes.“Your colonel brought me here,” she began.“I asked him—”“He is working against you.Did you know that? He said he plans a revolution against you.”Claude-Eduard smiled as though she might be a child or an idiot.“No such thing,” he said.“There is no revolution.Even the rebels in the hills under Manet understand that.Everything is as it is in St.Michel.Nothing will ever change from that.”“He means to kill me.I’m an American citizen.” Her mouth was very dry and she could smell his cologne and it was as damp and stinking as the heat of the late afternoon.“I want to see the American consul.”“Of course,” said the president.“Has anyone denied you?”“You have reporters under guard at the airport.The American government won’t put up with this—”“The American government is so great and we are so small that I am certain they could not care about our actions.If the Americans come as friends, we are friends; if they come as our enemies, they will be destroyed, just as Manet will be destroyed.”The voice was so calm, she thought, and it sickened her because Claude-Eduard seemed to be speaking to himself.“The Communist whores in the streets.They all work for Manet—”“They all work for Celezon,” said Rita Macklin.“In Switzerland, I heard Ready tell Celezon to buy trinkets for the whores, they all work together, everyone is part of the conspiracy against you—”“My dear, it is common, I understand, for paranoia to rule American reporters.You have so many conspiracies in your country.”She couldn’t talk to him.She thought of a nightmare she had suffered as a child in which she spoke again and again to others and they did not understand her, no matter how clearly she spoke, and she was tolerated by everyone, as though she were mad.But she wasn’t the mad one now; the world was.“Do you know what they say about me, the whores, the Communist whores who work for Manet, in the street of the whores in Madeleine?”She stared at him.He was changing colors like the sea.He was close to her.He was azure and green and a streak of gold dancing on the water.“They say I sleep with my sister.To have intercourse with her, I mean.”It was the horror she could not resist.She dropped her pencil on the white rug.“It is disgusting and unnatural,” he said.“But I would sleep with you.” He reached his hand between her legs and she hit him and stood up.“I am sorry,” he said.“I’m much affected by events.”“The nuns.”“What nuns?”“Colonel Ready killed nuns.”“I’m sure you’re mistaken.There are no dead nuns on St.Michel that I know of.”“They’re in the morgue.”“In that case, let us go there.”And she saw Devereaux in front of her eyes.He would be on the slab in the morgue, naked and dead.He was dead.Colonel Ready knew everything, saw everything, he could not be resisted.Down the halls and stairways.The president tugged at her arm.She held back like a reluctant child.Down and down and the rooms were cooler beneath the ground.And there was a sweet odor mixed with the damp in the basement and the president pushed open the door of the morgue.The naked bodies were on the tables and a large portion of Sister Agnes’s skull sat in a metal tray next to her large and flabby body.Before she fell to the floor, she saw there was one empty table in the morgue.17ANGELFrank Collier tried to sit perfectly still, tried not to tap his fingers, tried not to jiggle his right leg which he always did when he was nervous, tried to listen to the words and accept them calmly.He was in Room 236 of the Pier House hotel near Mallory Square in Key West, Florida.It was 6:34 P.M.Peter Jennings, the anchor of ABC World News Tonight, was speaking in that clear, crisp Canadian accent, almost without inflection, and on the screen there were still photographs of three women.“… The nuns, all Americans, had been ambushed apparently by rebel guerrillas outside the city of Madeleine on the southern tip of this impoverished Caribbean island.Meanwhile, Reuters reports that correspondents from ABC and the other networks, as well as newspaper reporters dispatched to St.Michel, are being held in custody at the St.Michel airport.…”Operation Angel was fourteen hours old.It could only be aborted with minimal casualties now.It could not be put on hold; it could not be reversed.Another abortion.Like the Bay of Pigs.Frank Collier could not help himself.In the darkness of the room, sitting in his boxer shorts and black socks on the only upholstered chair, he began to jiggle his right leg up and down in a frenzied telegraph.That was when the phone started to ring.He let it ring six times and then he reached for the receiver.Peter Jennings was speaking of London now, where there had been a car bombing.“You heard,” said the voice from Washington, D.C.“What do we do?” Frank said.He saw it all wasted, thirteen months of planning, of making deals, of setting up all the actors in all the right spots.And getting the funding through… that had been a miracle itself.No one had a clue to this operation except the principals and six men at the highest level of Central Intelligence.And, of course, the president’s senior advisor.“That’s what the director wants from you,” the voice said.“He called a session at four P.M.We don’t know how this affects us, to tell you the truth.We were aware of missionary work—”“I know that, I know all about the goddamn nuns—what I want to know is what do we do? All we can do is abort or push on—”“We want other options, Frank—”“There are no other options [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]