“They have succeeded in killing an SDEC director, a man we couldn’t even locate. And now, as a gift of pride, they are going to give us the pope himself. No more meddling in our western Polish border. The pope. The SDEC director dead and the pope about to be dead.”

  “Let me tell you about the Koreans. There is a saying that when one brings a Korean to wield a knife, one hires not a servant but a master. It’s true. Never trust a Korean assassin.”

  “I am not saying trust.”

  “This is something you might not know, boychik, but it is an ancient saying. The czars tasted the bitterness. One of the first things we did was to get their records. I was the one who made the decision to employ some of the czar’s best policemen. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Mother Russia used special Koreans extensively. Do you know who got killed as often as a czar’s enemy? The czar. There is a saying in this country that nothing comes out of Korea but your own death. No to Koreans. No. Never. I say it. The czars before us said it. And our grandchildren will say it.”

  General Ivanovich snapped to attention while sitting. His back became straight, his heels touched, his chin lifted to level, and Zemyatin knew the young man was afraid again. But the old field marshal had not said this to instill fear. It was something he had trusted over the years, an order he had given when the KGB first began using satellites. Use anyone but a Korean. The KGB had followed it blindly like good bureaucrats.

  One of the electronic consoles beeped, and the old bodyguard shuffled over and quickly had it going.

  Ivanovich looked back at Zemyatin, the Great One, who gave a small nod. The young general understood that there had been a question as to whether this information could be shared with him in the room. Without even a spoken answer, the field marshal’s shrug indicated the exact level of information that was allowed to be discussed with the general present:

  “They have fired it again,” said the old bodyguard.

  “Where?” said Zemyatin.

  “Egyptian Sahara. An area of one hundred square kilometers. Our people are there already and risking quite a bit to get us the information. The Egyptians work closely with the Americans.”

  “One hundred square kilometers. That’s an area any army would occupy. An entire army.”

  “And fired in a single second.”

  “That is their last test. Their last. No more testing. What would they have to test for?” said Zemyatin.

  “Is this the weapon the American is protecting?” asked the young KGB general.

  Zemyatin dismissed the question with a hand. The old man thought awhile, his face becoming even older, more grave. Lines of death showed. The eyes seemed to be looking into hell.

  Finally, the younger man asked:

  “What is our next step toward their special person? Should we accelerate some tracking operation on him at this point?”

  “What?” said Zemyatin as though coming out of a sleep.

  “The American.”

  The bodyguard touched the clean crisp general’s uniform. “Leave,” he said. The American was of no importance now.

  Shortly thereafter reports came in of two more firings in the area. On a map it clearly showed that in a strip of Egyptian desert equal to the size of the Balkans, Russia’s soft underbelly, the sand had come under such intense solar heat that it had fused into a hard, slick, slippery surface not unlike glass.

  To Zemyatin it was clear why they had chosen the Sahara. The transformation of the sand to glass was the one instant effect observable from a satellite. The Americans could, as he was doing now, plot the range of their weapon. All they would have to do was recalibrate, and lay Russia defenseless. There would be no more tests. The attack, he was sadly sure, could come at any moment. It was time to launch his own. In this moment, Alexei Zemyatin, the man who had only wanted to be a good butler as a boy, would show his true military genius.

  He ordered the Premier to immediately inform the Americans that Russia would now share information about the fluorocarbon beam that could harm them all. He did this by telephone because it was faster.

  “Tell them there have been certain effects on the missiles. Just certain effects. Do not tell that the missiles are or are not destroyed. Certain effects.”

  “But, Alexei…”

  “Shhh,” said Zemyatin. It had been suspected but not yet proven that the Americans could bug any telephone line in the world from outer space. “Do it. Do it now. Have it done by the time I get there. Yes?”

  His bodyguard noted that the young general had not drunk his tea.

  Zemyatin was driven by another old bodyguard to the Premier’s dacha. The weather was crisp and hard and there were many soldiers outside. They stood in greatcoats and shiny boots looking formidable. Alexei was still in his bathrobe.

  He walked through the soldiers outside, and through the officers inside, and nodded the Premier into the back room. The Premier wanted to take some generals with him.

  “If you do I’ll have them shot,” said Zemyatin.

  The Premier tried to pretend he had never been so lavishly insulted in front of his own military. Zemyatin had never done this before. Why he was starting now, the Premier did not know. But there were certain formalities that should be observed.

  “Alexei, you cannot do this to me. You cannot do this to the leader of your country.”

  Zemyatin did not sit. “Did you contact the Americans?”

  “Yes. They are sending their Mr. Pease back again.”

  “Good. When?”

  “They seem to be as nervous about this as they say we should be.”

  “When will he be here?”

  “Fifteen hours.”

  “All right, we will have some technical people add to what we know to stretch out our information. Figure eight hours for the first conference, then we all sleep. That should get us another twelve hours. We will stretch this for two days, forty-eight hours. Good.”

  “Why do we give them faulty information for forty-eight hours?”

  “Not faulty. We just won’t give them the fact that their beam totally destroys the electronics in our missiles until the second session, and in that session we keep them locked up with us until the forty-eighth hour has passed.”

  “Why, are we giving them the truth about our missiles being useless?”

  “Because, my dear Premier, it is the one thing they don’t have yet,” said Zemyatin. “Look. At this moment they have everything they need to launch an attack with this weapon and do it successfully. Everything. We would be through. They could sit in Moscow tomorrow and you could throw stones at them.”

  “So why give them the last thing they do not know?”

  “Because it is the only thing for which they might delay. The only thing they need now is absolute assurance that our missiles—not their own, which I am sure they have tested this weapon on—but ours, do not work when hit by the unfiltered sun’s rays. They will delay because we will give ourselves up on a silver platter.”

  “Do we want to do that?”

  “No. What we have done is past the point of no return. While they are delaying for the last thing they need, our new missiles will go off.”

  “You mean in two days?”

  “Within two days.”

  “When exactly?”

  “You do not need to know. Just talk peace,” said Zemyatin. He did not, of course, trust the head of the Russian government with this information now that the top bureaucrat had given him permission to launch the missiles in their very building. That was the reason for the time data given to every commander who perilously trucked the huge cumbersome death machines into the new Siberian sites. Alexei Zemyatin did not trust all of them to fire at once, given a sudden order. The trigger on the gun had already been pulled. Two days from now the holocaust would come out of its barrel.

  · · ·

  In Washington, McDonald “Hal” Pease was told that the Russians were willing to share secrets now. They had realized that they shared a fragile planet with the rest of the human race.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Pease.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IF THERE WAS A REMOTE CHANCE that Alexei Zemyatin might call off the attack on the suspicion that America might not itself be really planning its own attack, a simple cassette would smother that faint suspicion with brutal finality. Actually there were twenty little cassettes in a cheap plastic case with a colorful brochure. The packages cost three dollars each to manufacture, and sold for eight hundred.

  They promised to bring out the leadership potential in every man. What they did was hypnotize people into ignoring reality. On his steady corporate rise Reemer Bolt had bought many such self-fulfillment programs. Their basic message was that there was no such thing as failure.

  There were facts and there were conclusions. One had to separate them. When Reemer Bolt looked at a field of useless cars, it was not a fact that he was ruined, his cassette program told him. The fact was that fifty cars had been ruined. The fact was that he had notched his company one step closer to ruination. But Reemer Bolt himself was not ruined.

  Look at Thomas Edison, who, when he had failed in ninety-nine different ways to make a light bulb, said he had not failed. He had really discovered ninety-nine ways not to make a light bulb on his sunny road to success.

  Look at General George Patton, who had never let ideas of failure bother him.

  Look at Pismo Mellweather, who had produced the cassette tapes. Mellweather was a millionaire many times over, even though he’d been told as a child he would never amount to much. Teachers had even called him a swindler. He had spent time in jail for extortion and embezzlement. But now he had homes in several states because he had dared to face his own self-worth. The key to succeeding was not succumbing to the false notion that you had failed in some way.

  Failure, the tape said, was a state of mind just like success. One only had to accept the fact that one was a winner and one would become a winner. Pismo Mellweather had sold three hundred thousand of these cassette programs with the astronomical markup, and had made himself a success for life.

  Reemer Bolt had bought one of those programs and had listened to it so many times that at moments of despair he would even hear Pismo Mellweather’s voice. And so while he now looked at a field of disaster, by nightfall he was able to see the car experiment not as a failure, but as just another way the miracle device should not be used.

  “Reemer,” he was told by an assistant, “we blew it.”

  “Little men blow things. Big men create success from what others call disasters.”

  “You can’t manufacture anything with an electronic part in it,” said the assistant. “You can’t use the rays here in the world. The world is electronic. Good-bye. Good night. Do you have the employment section of the paper?”

  “No,” said Bolt, with the gleam of a true believer in his eyes. “We have discovered that we must manufacture nonelectronic products.”

  Many products were not electronic, the assistant pointed out, but none of them lent themselves to cheaper manufacture by exposure to the unfiltered rays of the sun.

  Bolt’s leadership kit solved that problem. Its message was that every problem had a solution if only a person unlocked his leadership power through a simple and tried method. One should think about a subject very hard, the tape advised, and then put it out of one’s mind and go to sleep. In the morning, the answer would come.

  In this hour of trial for Reemer Bolt, he did just that and the answer did come to him in the morning.

  An assistant phoned him with a suggestion. Heated sand made glass. Glass was not electronic. Glass was still used. Why not make glass at the source? Undercut the price of even an Oriental laborer.

  Thus was conceived the experiment that convinced a nuclear power that it was going to be attacked. The Sahara was chosen because it had the most sand. If the process worked, you only had to send your trucks out to the desert with a glass cutter and haul back the cheapest and perhaps the most perfect glass in the world.

  “Why most perfect?” Reemer Bolt was asked.

  “I don’t know. It sounds good,” he said. When the results came in he was so ecstatic he called a meeting of the board to announce an even greater breakthrough. Indeed, the initial survey showed that the glass was perhaps as clear as anything this side of a camera lens. And they had just made several hundred square miles of it. They could produce a million square miles of perfect glass every year. Forever.

  “Forever,” screamed Bolt in the boardroom of Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts, Inc. And then, in case anyone with a remaining eardrum had not heard him, he yelled again. “Forever.”

  “Reemer,” said the chairman of the board, “what happened to that wonderful car-painting procedure?”

  “A minor problem, sir. We are going to wait for that to come to its full fruition. Right now I am going to get us all our money back and then some. Once that is done we’ll push ahead with the car-painting process.”

  Several of the members were puzzled. No one seemed to be agreeing.

  “I will tell you why I asked,” said the chairman of the board. “While the glass concept is good, by creating several hundred square miles of glass in Egypt you have just ruined the glass market for the next sixty-five years according to my calculations.”

  “Can we cut the price?”

  “If they don’t need as much as you have put on the market, you already have. No profit from cheap glass.”

  “I see,” said Bolt. He felt something strange and warm running down his pants leg.

  “Reemer, have you just wet your pants?” asked the chairman of the board.

  “No,” said Bolt with all the enthusiasm of a man who understood his leadership potential. “I have just discovered a way not to go to the bathroom.”

  · · ·

  It was a night of exhaustion. Delirious, delicious exhaustion, with every passionate nerve aroused and then contented.

  That was before Kathy made love to Remo. That was in Hanoi, going from one government office to another. From one military base to another. That was in the dark alleys while a city went mad searching for the killer among them.

  Several times the police would have gone right by if Kathy hadn’t knocked over something. And then she saw them come against this wonderful, magnificent, perfect human being, and die. Sometimes their bones cracked. Sometimes death was as silent as the far edge of space. Other times, those special times when they came roaring down upon them, the bodies would go one way and the heads would go another.

  It was before dawn when Remo said, “It’s not here. They don’t know where it is.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Kathy.

  “Then why do you have that silly grin on your face?” asked Remo.

  “No reason,” purred Kathy. She nestled into his arm. It didn’t feel very muscular. “Are you tired?”

  “I’m puzzled. These people don’t know where the fluorocarbon thing is. They never heard of it.”

  “That’s their problem.”

  “What else do you remember about it?”

  “Just that awful man in San Gauta.”

  “I dunno,” said Remo. They were in a warehouse marked “People’s Hospital.” It had been labeled that way during the Vietnam war so that when the Americans bombed the warehouses they could be accused of bombing hospitals. The reporters never mentioned that it stored rifles, not wounded.

  It still stored weapons, Remo and Kathy saw, but now they were for battles in Cambodia or on the China border.

  So much for the peace everyone had predicted if America left.

  “Are you ready to move?” asked Remo.

  “No. Let’s just stay here tonight. You and me.” She kissed his ear.

  “Are you tired?”

  “Yes, very.”

  “I’ll carry you,” said Remo.

  “I’ll walk. How are we going to get out of here? We’re white. It’s a police state. Are we going to walk out through Indochina? That will take months.”

  “We’ll go out through the airport.”

  “I know you can get us through any guard, but they’ll shoot down any plane you get to. There are no alleys to hide in. It’s flat. You might make it somehow, but I’ll die,” said Kathy. She was still wearing the suit and blouse she had arrived in. The shoulder was ripped, but she felt this only made her sexier. She knew her own deep satisfaction had to be sending out signals to this man, making him desirable as well. After all, hadn’t he suddenly taken her here into this warehouse when the killing was over?

  “Would you mind if I died?” asked Kathy. She wondered if she were acting like a little girl. She grinned coyly when she said this.

  “Sure,” said Remo. She was the only one who knew anything about this mysterious device that could end life on earth.

  “Do you mean it?” She hated herself for asking that question. She’d never thought she would. She’d never thought she would feel like all the other girls in school had felt, giggly all over, fishing for any little compliment from the man she loved.

  “Sure,” said Remo. “Don’t worry about the airport. People only see what they’re trained to see.”

  “You can make us invisible?”

  “No. People don’t look.”

  “I thought Orientals were more sensitive to their surroundings.”

  “Only compared to whites. They don’t see either.”

  She was amazed at how simple and logical it all was, so natural. The human eye noticed what startled it, what was different. It noticed what it was supposed to notice. The mind didn’t even know what it saw. People thought they recognized others by their faces, when actually they recognized them by their walk and size and only confirmed the identification by face.

  This Kathy knew from reading. The way Remo explained it, it sounded more mystical but still logical. He said the mind was lazy, and while the eye really saw everything, the mind filtered out things. It filtered out twenty men and blurred the message into a marching column. Remo and Kathy easily joined a line of marching guards, and by being part of the mass, just moved with it. If she had dared, she would have moved her head to look into the faces and see them actually staring through her and Remo. But Remo had told her to listen to her own breathing and stay with him. That way she would remain part of the natural mass of the moving column. He told her to think of his presence.