WHEN AGGIE, FAYE, AND BETTIANN arrived at their alma mater late Saturday afternoon, there seemed to be no one around. The university still sprawled its mellow brick across green acres under mossy oaks and maples a century older than the structures they sheltered, but humans were few and scattered.

“He said he’d have someone meet us at the admin office,” said Bettiann.

The old administration building was locked. The student center was open but empty, except for a few people in the kitchens.

“Didn’t I hear about a new admin building?” Aggie remarked.

“Of course,” Bettiann snarled to herself. “Of course there is. Over where Harridan Hall was.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” said Aggie. “The poor woman’s name was Lou Anna Harrigan.”

“Everybody called it that then,” said Faye without apology. “It probably went unisex; they mostly did.”

Outside the new administration building, a car was parked. As they approached, an angular woman with an air of brisk efficiency got out of the driver’s seat and came toward them.

“Mrs. Carpenter?”

Bettiann stepped forward. “Yes. I’m Bettiann Carpenter, from the Carpenter Foundation. I spoke to Fred Willard.”

The woman glanced at her watch, lips compressed. “I’m Rose Jensen, the office manager. I’ve got the keys right here. Come on in.”

Bettiann introduced Faye and Aggie as they trudged up the stairs. The heavy door was unlocked to let them through, then locked again behind them. Bettiann was saying they had just flown in her husband’s private plane; she’d been thinking for years about making a gift to memorialize her old friend; her husband often said, invest in education, that’s where our future lies.

By the time they reached the offices, Ms. Jensen had warmed up considerably. “You really want to talk to the people in the development office when you decide on the terms of your gift,” she said, “but I can access the alum files to find the information about your friend.…”

They went through a large outer office into a smaller one, and through it into one smaller yet. “This is a separate system, not connected to anything else, so it’s not vulnerable to hackers who want to make their records look better than they were. All the alum files are in this computer,” she said over her shoulder. “At least almost all. We’re back to 1892, thus far, and I told the dean just the other day we’ll be back to the founding fathers by the end of the year.”

“Eighteen fifty-two?” cried Bettiann. “Well, congratulations.”

“It was really fifty-three before they took any students,” Ms. Jensen said. “Now. What was your friend’s name?”

“It’s an odd name. Sovawanea aTesuawane.” Bettiann spelled it. “She was in the class of sixty-three, as we all were. We called her Sophy.”

Screens lighted, scurrying lights made beeping noises. The class of sixty-three appeared in alphabetical order. The cursor hunted up Sovawanea aTesuawane and went digging for another file, while Bettiann babbled indefatigably on:

“When Sophy died, we all thought of a memorial, of course, but we were too upset, too bereaved to think straight. We decided to wait until we could consider it calmly. Well, we’ve just held a meeting, and we’ve decided to see if we can’t set up a scholarship fund for girls from her community—”

“But we couldn’t remember exactly where she was from,” said Faye, getting into the act.

“We seem to be having somewhat the same difficulty,” said Ms. Jensen in a tone of annoyance. “We’ve added some new software to this system, but only Friday I was assured they had the bugs out of these files. Look at that! Unknown. Not found. Silly. It says right there she was a recipient of a Susan R. Lagrange scholarship. She didn’t get that sitting in the middle of a mud flat. They must have had an address for her.”

More tapping, digging, glancing at watch and muttering. Aggie rubbed her fingers under the tight white band that bound her forehead. Normally the band shaped the wimple, served as the anchor for the short veil, and was otherwise ignored. All the way out on the flight, however, she had felt as if it were squeezing her brain, tighter than it should be. Ever since Sunday morning the habit had felt unfamiliar to her, though she’d worn it now for over twenty years, and before this one, another one that was even heavier.

“Do you miss the old habits?” asked the woman at the keyboard with a sideways glance. “Two of my aunts are nuns, and they say they miss the old long habits with the big wimples. So beautiful they used to look back in the fifties and sixties. Like angels.”

“I do miss the longer skirts sometimes,” said Aggie. “There was a certain gravity to all that weight of fabric. A kind of gracefulness.” A kind of peacefulness, too. A sense of stability. Like an anchor.

“I always thought so, too.” She cast a quick smile in Aggie’s direction, then said, “Ah. There it was all the time. Sovawanea aTesuawane. Piedras Lagartonas, New Mexico. Only it says care of someone, someone, here it is. Chendi Qowat. Postmaster. Isn’t that an odd name? It must be Indian.”

Bettiann was already writing it down. “Do you have any other information on her at all? If she received a scholarship, surely …”

“Well, her transcript is here, of course. Language major, wasn’t she? Gracious! French, Spanish, special studies in Asian and African languages … a very good student, too. The scholarship information wouldn’t be here. All that would be over at the Lagrange Foundation office: her application for a scholarship, and supporting letters from her teachers or community people. Since she’s deceased, I’m sure there’ll be no problem getting access to it. They’re very sensible people over there, not long on formality. Though you won’t be able to see them until Monday, of course. Everyone will have gone home by now.” She glanced at her watch again. “As must I! We have a family date for a birthday party!”

They were out, going back down the long hall, Ms. Jensen saying good night to the janitor, good night to the security guard at the door, good night to them. “Sister, Ms. Carpenter, ma’am, so nice to have met you.”

And gone, with a little kindly wave, trip-trip down the sidewalk, off to feed the family, the dog, the cat, off for the birthday party. Past her trotting figure the sun sank onto the treetops, barring the campus with long shadows.

“I know some people with the Lagrange Foundation,” said Bettiann. “I’ve attended workshops with some of the trustees. The founder inherited a lot of money. She decided to use it to educate minority students, ghetto kids, recent immigrants, that kind of thing.”

“What will they have in the way of documents?” Agnes sounded exhausted. Her eyelids were swollen, as though she’d been weeping.

“Just what she said. There’ll be a letter of application. No doubt some supporting letters from people who knew her. If the foundation kept them, which they may not have done. It was a long time ago.”

“Monday,” said Faye. “That’s a pain, when we don’t even know if they’ve kept the information.”

Bettiann said, “No, that’s what I was saying. I know the president of the Lagrange board of trustees. His name is Matt Rushton. I’ll call him now.”

“An imposition,” murmured Aggie.

“Of course it is, Ag. But it’s important. You know how important.” She laughed, a breathless little sound, both deprecatory and amused. “Money has its privileges, Aggie. Faye has her talent, you have your faith, what’ve I got? Might as well use it, whatever.”

By the time they met in the hotel dining room for supper, Bettiann had already made her call.

“They’ve kept everything,” she said. “Unfortunately, the stuff before the midseventies isn’t computerized. It’s in document boxes in the basement, and if we want it before next week, we’ll have to find it ourselves, because there’s no one working this week at all. One of the young women who works there will come down in about an hour and let us in.”

“Good work,” said Faye with a sidelong glance at Aggie.

Aggie seemed not to have heard. Aggie seemed lost in some private vision.

“What is it, Aggie?” Faye whispered.

“Lost,” said Aggie. “And mistaken. All those years.”

Faye reacted to closed and dusty spaces—attics, basements, storerooms—as some people reacted to graveyards—with a superstitious edginess amounting almost to aversion. Beth, the young woman who let them into the small, dimly lit room in the basement of the Lagrange Foundation building, seemed to feel only annoyance.

“This is a mess,” she said frankly. “It should all be cleaned up, but I’ve only worked here for three months. The executive secretary, Mr. Johnson, he left at noon Friday on his vacation, and the person I replaced moved to Memphis, so I can only tell you what they told me. There’s corporate business, and there’s grant information. They should be in separate boxes; the year is on the outside of the box. Inside the boxes things are supposed to be alphabetical. Some scholarships are processed months before they’re used, you know. So if this friend of yours started at the university in fifty-nine, then the papers may be in fifty-eight. Okay?

“Since you know Mr. Rush ton personally, he says it’s okay to leave you the keys. When you’re finished, please put stuff back where you found it and lock the door to this room behind you. Call this number from a phone upstairs, and a security man will come to let you out and reset the alarm and walk you to your car. Leave the keys with him. I’ll get them from the security office on Monday.” She handed them the keys and a card and was gone.

“Well,” breathed Bettiann, suddenly wordless. The small room was airless, the only light from a wire-encased bulb above their heads. The walls were bare gray concrete; the shelves were metal, spray painted the darkest possible green, like funereal cypresses.

Faye shuddered. “Let’s find it.” She started down the aisle formed by two rows of boxes. “These are all nineties.”

“Eighties,” said Aggie from a dry throat. The boxes sagged onto one another, their edges softening, becoming shapeless. “Seventies.”

“Sixties here,” Faye murmured. “Sixty-five, sixty-four. Here’s sixty-three.”

Bettiann had come along the wall, on the other side of the pile. “Fifties here,” she said. “At least four … no, five boxes for fifty-eight and fifty-nine.”

There was a long table by the door. They unstacked the boxes to get at the fifty-nines, lifted them to the tabletop, then stared at one another helplessly. The tape sealing the cartons was heavy, untearable.

“What would you all do without me?” said Faye, fishing in her pocket for her all-purpose knife-cum-screwdriver-cum-can opener. She slit the taped boxes neatly down the middle and at each end. Each of them took a box and fumbled with it, turning it so the folders inside faced front.

“This is invoices,” murmured Aggie. “Paid bills, month by month.”

“Same here,” said Bettiann. “This one’s grant-related correspondence.” She lifted out a handful of folders. “Ts. Maybe they put her in the T’s. Tabor. Terres. Thomas. Thompson. Talley. Tully. Trujillo. Turner. Tyson.”

“Alphabetical?” Faye remarked.

“Maybe they were originally. They’ve been shuffled.” She piled the ones she had looked at on the table and took out the S’s, finding among them two Ts and a W. “Let’s alphabetize.”

They set the invoice boxes on the floor and made piles of folders down the long table, AB’s, MNO’s, WXYZ’s. No Tesuawane. No aTesuawane.

They alphabetized within piles and refiled them in the boxes. “What other name?” asked Aggie. “If not under her name, then under whose?”

“Qowat,” said Faye. “The postmaster. Chendi Qowat.”

Bettiann turned back to the Q’s. “No Qowat,” she said.

“Piedras Lagartonas,” said Faye.

“Here it is,” said Aggie, busy with another folder. “Piedras Lagartonas.”

They moved closer together, as though to conserve warmth, laying the folder on the table before them. Inside, only two sheets, yellowed at the edges. One a printed application form, laboriously completed in ink by someone at the Piedras Lagartonas Public Schools. The second a form letter from the Lagrange Foundation. “… regret we have committed all our funds for the upcoming year … keep the application for your students on file.…”

“But the university files said she got it,” Aggie cried.

“This could be about someone else,” mused Faye. “Let’s try fifty-eight.”

There was nothing at all in fifty-eight, or in sixty or sixty-one. Or in sixty-two.

“She was never here,” Aggie laughed dryly, without humor. Was this like everything else about Sophy? A lie?

“I don’t think that’s it.” Bettiann was examining the tape on one of the boxes. “You know, this layer of tape is sticky and not at all yellowed. Some of these boxes have been resealed very recently. The ones from fifty-nine. Somebody’s been into them, just within the last few days. Someone in a hurry. Someone who wanted to go home or out on a date and who found the things they wanted, then just shoved everything back in any old which way.”

“Things they wanted?” Aggie asked.

“To answer a phone query, maybe,” said Faye. “Bettiann isn’t the only person with clout. There are others. They call, they say, get all information out of your files on this person.”

“Why?” Aggie asked. “Who besides us is interested in Sophy?”

“Well, that’s really the question, isn’t it? Someone is. Some flunky gets sent down here to pull the file. That person takes the files … where?”

“Upstairs,” said Bettiann. “To the copying room if they’re supposed to make copies. To the boss’s desk if he or she wants to look at them first. Or in a file basket somewhere if they’re to be brought back down here.”

“We have the keys,” said Faye, jingling them. “Let’s look.”

They looked. To the left of the entry hall was a large boardroom with rest rooms and a kitchen behind it. To the right, behind a small waiting room and receptionist’s area, were two offices with names on the door, Executive Secretary, Deputy Secretary. Past the offices was a file room, and behind it, across the back of the building, the secretarial area, four desks sharing one large many-windowed room with a door onto a small sunny garden. The desks were clean, neatened up for the holiday, with very few papers showing. The papers pertaining to Sophy were in a wire basket on one of the desks, originals in one folder, copies in the other, with a note. “Mr. Johnson, these are the files you wanted.”

“Can we make copies of this stuff?” asked Faye.

Bettiann led them back into the file room, where the copier stood against the wall. “No log,” she said. “No lock. Evidently they don’t worry about people using the machine. Which makes it nice for us.” She stocked the feed tray with experienced hands, pushed all the right buttons, handed the copies to Faye, and put the originals back in the folder: an application, letters of support, a high-school transcript.

“You seem to know your way around,” said Faye.

“I have a foundation of my own,” Bettiann retorted. “I work there sometimes. At the Carpenter Foundation we couldn’t have got away with this. We keep a copy log. And a fax log. And a postage log.”

Agnes took the folder and went back into the clerical room. “We’ll leave these where we found them.”

“Johnson’s name is on the director’s office door. Somebody asked him for this information,” said Faye. “Why? Who?”

“As you pointed out, we have the keys,” said Bettiann. “Let’s see if he made notes.”

The office door wasn’t locked. The space inside was carpeted and paneled; it held a leather chair, a mahogany desk. Several small yellow notepads lay at the front of the unlocked shallow top drawer. Agnes leafed through them, coming upon the note almost at once:

“Here,” she said, putting it before them.

The firm black lettering said simply, aTesuawane, writer? Books? Other writings? Lagrange 1959–63. biographical info, known associates for agent Crespin, FBI. And a phone number.

“Books?” whispered Aggie. “Writings?”

“Remember Carolyn telling us the FBI had a dossier on us?” said Faye with a jeering laugh. “Crespin FBI is Carolyn’s cousin Albert. Maybe we’re all under investigation.”

Bettiann asked, “Do you suppose the local library will be open?”

“Not today,” said Agnes. “What do you want, Sophy’s books?”

“Of course. I’d like to know what the FBI wants with her writing. I can’t remember anything in them that would interest the FBI. They were simple stories of actual things that happened to women and girls, plus some folktales and some essays. Of course, I’ve got the stuff I’ve been writing without knowing why. It’s in my suitcase. Carolyn asked me to bring it for show-and-tell.”

In the suite Bettiann had arranged for, they took the brown manila envelope containing what Bettiann called her “spirit writing” and dumped it onto the table.

“All Sophy’s stories were about women,” said Aggie.

“These aren’t anything like that,” said Bettiann.

“There’s a lot of paper here,” Faye commented. “How long you been doing this, girl?”

“Too long. A couple of years, I guess.”

They leafed, stopping to read bits, sometimes silently, sometimes to one another. Suddenly Agnes said in a voice that was almost amused, “Listen to this!

“Sister lizard dancing, back foot, front foot,

sun hot rock sitter, rising on her toes,

warming on the rock-top, skipping from the rock’s-root,

left foot, right foot, so she goes,

watching for the wing-swoop, talon-snatch and beak-scoop,

sequin scaled and glittering, what is it that she knows?”

“I remember that one.” Bettiann shook her head. “I was on the phone with this man who wanted a donation to his church, and he wouldn’t stop talking, and I doodled and doodled, and when he finally hung up, that’s what was on the paper. Later on I saw a nature program on PBS and they showed a lizard doing that, lifting its feet so they wouldn’t burn on the hot rocks.”

Aggie said firmly, “You didn’t write this, Bettiann.”

“I wasn’t conscious of having written it, no. Sophy wrote it.”

“It doesn’t sound terribly Sophy-like, either. She didn’t do jingly stuff like that.”

“She did, too. She wrote songs for us all the time. You just wouldn’t sing them.”

Faye moved between them. “Come on, Aggie! Don’t get in an uproar over Bettiann’s subconscious. We’re looking for clues, so let’s look for clues.”

“I deny lizards in my subconscious,” Bettiann said firmly. “And I can’t rhyme cat and mouse.”

“I’m still wondering why the FBI would be interested in an almost forty-year-old dossier,” snapped Faye.

“We don’t know that it’s all that old,” Bettiann replied. “All we know is that’s when Carolyn’s cousin started it. Maybe he’s been adding to it right along.”

“We don’t even know he’s still alive. And adding what?” Agnes cried, turning to them. “For heaven’s sake, what could he have added? We’re all boringly blameless!”

Bettiann replied, “Rumors. Myths. Conjecture. Remember when we met with Carolyn last time and Hal was talking to us about the old FBI paying informers for information? How the informer makes his living that way, so if he doesn’t have anything real, he makes something up.”

“Right. Maybe he’s got the Sisters of St. Clare down as a terrorist organization.” Faye stretched, snarling. “So far we’ve got nothing except the name of a place. Sophy’s letter of application to the foundation is three paragraphs. The three people who wrote in support could be anybody. Her high-school transcript is unremarkable; most of us had better ones. She sent a couple of essays along with the application; they’re no more subversive than her books were.”

“Still, we’ll want to talk with the people who wrote letters in support.”

“Tess somebody. Flo somebody. All in Piedras Lagartonas, New Mexico. No point going back with this little bit. Let’s finish what we have to do here in the area. Let’s find some of the women Sophy used to take in.”

“From Mystic?” asked Agnes.

“I don’t even remember any names from there,” said Bettiann.

“From Vermont, then,” said Faye.

“Jessamine will know.” Bettiann yawned widely. “She used to send outgrown clothes for the children. Lord, it’s almost midnight. Let’s call.”

Carolyn, Jessamine, and Ophy were assembled in Carolyn’s bedroom, waiting for Faye’s call, which came at about ten o’clock. Faye sounded appropriately weary as she recited the facts they had elicited thus far: Piedras Lagartonas, the names on the support documents, Agent Crespin of the FBI, and Sophy’s writings. They were going to Vermont first thing in the morning. Did the western contingent remember the names of any of Sophy’s abused women?

Jessamine ran to get her address book, returning momentarily to prop the phone on one shoulder and leaf through the entries. “Names, yes, but no addresses. I used to send packages of clothes my girls had outgrown, but I always sent them in care of Sophy. Here are the women I used to send things to: Laura Glascock, Betty Hotchkiss, Sarah Sourwood. You remember Sarah. She made that marvelous chowder.”

Ophy sat up, staring at Jessamine. Sarah. Sarah Sourwood. It was Sarah Sourwood who had been sitting in the waiting room at MSRI with her friends, the bag ladies. It had to be coincidence. It couldn’t be the same woman.

Jessy went on. “Here’s one—Rebecca Rainford. She was Sophy’s lieutenant, her assistant. I can’t imagine it will be easy finding any of them.”

“Probably not,” Faye replied. “Though I’m amazed at how capable Bettiann manages to be.” She gave them the phone number at Middlebury Mansionhouse, where they’d be staying, and Jessamine wrote it down.

They had put off having dessert until after Faye’s call, and now they went back to the kitchen and got out the brownies they’d made during the afternoon, topping each with a mound of vanilla ice cream. Brownies with ice cream, cocoa with marshmallows, popcorn in gallon lots—ritual foods of the DFC, reminiscent of dormitory gatherings in a time when their dormitories had been all female and pigging out was the limit of their depravity.

“Middlebury,” mused Carolyn around a mouthful. “That takes me back. Remember when we stayed there?” She got up to fetch a pad and pencil and jotted down quick notes between bites. Piedras Lagartonas wasn’t a name she recognized. “Hal? Piedras Lagartonas. Mean anything?” When he shook his head, she reached for her Spanish dictionary. Piedras was “stones,” of course, but lagartonas?

“Lizards,” she said. “Lizards, female. It also means ‘sly minxes.’ We’d say ‘foxy.’ The stones of the sly ones, clever ones, something like that. Hell, I’ve never heard of it!” She reached for the state atlas, with its series of maps of every road in the state.

“I don’t much like the turn this is taking, this FBI involvement,” said Jessamine.

“I see Albert Crespin’s filthy little mind in that,” said Hal. “Are you finding it, Carolyn?”

Carolyn shut the atlas with an irritated shake of her head. There was no Piedras Lagartonas.

Ophy asked, “What is he—are they—up to?”

Hal laughed without humor. “If you mean the FBI, they’re looking for terrorists! They’re after Ophelia Gheist and Carolyn Crespin and Jessamine Ortiz-Oneil. As soon as this sex thing happened, I’m sure the whole Bureau went crazy, burrowing off in all directions, digging into old files like a bunch of rabid gophers. I haven’t the slightest doubt that Albert lied to me about erasing the DFC file.”

“I don’t think I’d like Albert,” Jessamine grated between clenched teeth.

“I never liked him, either,” said Hal as he left them and headed down the hall toward his den.

Carolyn sighed. “I was young and stupid then. Teasing him like that was just dumb. Like smarting off at your mother, telling her you’re going to try drugs, or move in with your boyfriend.”

“What you told him was true, in a way,” said Ophy.

Jessamine tapped her fingers on the table, a drumroll. “We wanted fewer nasty old men saying they were controlling us for our own good.”

“I wouldn’t have put it that way,” Ophy said chidingly. “But, yes.”

Carolyn agreed. “Of course we did. Of course we do! But Albert was FBI, and he was Albert. He was rigid, self-satisfied, totally sure that his view was the correct one. If Albert were growing up today, he’d join a militia because he’d be positive that he knows what’s right for America! I knew what he was like. I just wasn’t paying enough attention to that, or to what was going on in the world.”

“A lot of antiwar stuff in the sixties,” Ophy mused. “Protests. Sit-ins. Students occupying administration buildings or turning into terrorists overnight. Even some unlikely women robbing banks, driving getaway cars, like that one who turned herself in a few years back. Given the context, I can see why he believed you.”

“Simon is going to love this,” Ophy said with a lopsided grin. “His wife, the subversive. I’ll never live it down.”

“Faye said they couldn’t find anything informative in the scraps Bettiann’s been writing,” Jessamine fretted. “I wonder if Sophy’s books had anything in them.…”

“I have them,” Carolyn said. “We can look.”

Hal was in the study, immersed in another road atlas. Carolyn leaned across him to fetch Sophy’s three slim volumes from the corner they had occupied for years.

“Nothing in there,” he grunted. “I’ve looked.”

“Well, Jess wants to look again.” She went back to the kitchen and passed the books around. “One for each of us. We can take them as bedtime reading tonight.”

They leafed through the books between spoonfuls, without much energy. Ophy gathered up the empty plates, put them in the sink, then picked up book one.

“I’ll take it to bed with me.”

Hal returned to report no progress on finding Piedras Lagartonas.

Carolyn yawned. “Let’s not lose sleep over it. Despite all this furor, the trial has to be put out of the way first.”

Jessy and Ophy trailed off to bed, leaving Carolyn and Hal alone.

“I wish Albert’s mother had believed in abortion,” growled Hal.

“Aunty Fan? She loved Albert dearly. According to Aunty Fan, Albert could do no wrong. I’m so thankful you saved me from Albert.” She laughed quaveringly. “Sometimes I scare myself, thinking what might have been, instead of what was. If I hadn’t met Faye, or Ophy …”

“It’s been a good life.” He tilted her head down and kissed her on the lips, a soft, lingering, lovely kiss. Not passion. Something better, more lasting, than passion—the complete understanding they had always had, from the beginning. A mated pair, they were. Like geese. Hal had always said so.

“How’s your leg?” she asked, caressing it with her fingertips. “Able to get you back to the bedroom?”

“Always able to do that.” He rose, leaning on her slightly. She turned off the lights behind them.

Sunday morning Jagger went into town for a meeting with Raymond Keepe. Keepe had asked for the meeting, at Webster’s direction.

“I tried to call you yesterday,” said Jagger. “But you were away.”

“I was away, yes,” said Keepe through his teeth. “Mr. Webster summoned me back! The place was like an anthill. Now that we know what’s going on, all the weirdness makes sense. Have you heard about the lab in Washington that’s been doing hormonal assays? Testosterone levels in men are only one fourth what they were six months ago.”

“All men?” asked Jagger tonelessly.

“I haven’t heard that anyone is immune.” Keepe scowled, drew his lips back in a grimace. “According to Mr. Webster, all our allies are in a tailspin. They’re threatening World War Three. Iran and Libya have pulled out of the Alliance. They’re blaming the Great Satan for infecting the Islamic world with this disease. They’ve proclaimed a jihad against all unbelievers, and they’ve started stoning women in the streets, sort of indiscriminately, for supposedly having spread the disease. The U.S. military has been put on full alert.

“Japan accused China of putting birth control in the water supplies to control its population, thereby affecting the fish that are eaten by Japanese. The commentator said there were rumors of nuclear threats having been made. Three countries not known to have atomic weapons are claiming to have them. The President’s going to appear on TV this afternoon—”

“So what?”

“So Webster has put the Alliance plan on hold. For now. Until this sorts itself out, any move might be in the wrong direction. All active political campaigns are off for now. We’re going into a holding pattern.”

Jagger heard this as he might have heard the clamorous echo of a tomb door slamming shut with him inside. It was all he could do to keep from screaming in frustration. “Until when?”

“Until somebody finds out what caused this. The U.S. has evidently had every available laboratory working on it for some time. This is what all that CDC nonsense was about, of course. Other nations are no doubt doing the same. Webster says the cause will no doubt be found very shortly, and someone will figure out how to fix it.”

“Like we fixed AIDS,” said Jagger in a heavy voice.

“It’s nothing like AIDS.”

“You don’t know what it’s like! Nobody knows.”

Except, he thought, a group of women near this very city, who had said on Sunday that one or more of their members had started this thing.

He asked, “What if I could tell Mr. Webster who caused it?”

Keepe looked up alertly. “Foreigners? What? Iranians? Chinese?”

“Americans.”

Keepe smiled thinly. “Oh, come on, Jake.”

“Women.”

“Women? Some kind of psychological castration? Chop it off you—yes, they’re good at that. But something like this? Women haven’t the brains for something like this. They don’t think that way.”

“Most women don’t, right, but there’s always a freak.” His eyes were fixed on something distant. “Anyhow, suppose it was people I could name? Would that make a good campaign issue? Would that move me up in the estimation of the Alliance?”

Keepe thought about it. “If you could prove someone specific was responsible, male or female, and if you could get them to cough up the cure or antidote or whatever, I suppose you might come off as a hero.”

“The public likes heroes.”

“Oh, yes. You could probably be elected President on the strength of finding out who caused it. But, personally, I find it very far-fetched, and in my opinion, so will the Alliance.”

“But if I could do it?”

Keepe shrugged. “It couldn’t be a kind of Joe McCarthy bluff with your waving a piece of paper and saying you have the names. You’d have to have more than that. You’d have to have the cure.”

Jagger got up angrily, thrust his face at the other man. “Quit patronizing me, damn it. If I named real people, if I could prove they did it, then even if they didn’t have the cure, knowing how they did it will tell us where to look for the cure!”

Keepe pushed his chair back, shook his head slowly, his brow furrowed. “You’re serious.”

“Keepe, if you knew me at all, you’d know I’m rarely anything but serious!”

Keepe stared at him, forehead creased. “Listen, Jake.…” He licked his lips, looked around himself, as though fearful of being overheard. “Listen, if you’re going to get involved in something like that, you should talk to Webster right now. He doesn’t like people going off on their own, and he finds out everything that happens. I don’t know how he keeps up on things the way he does, but he’s … omniscient in some ways.”

Jagger tapped his fingers on his desk, fascinated despite himself. “Omniscient?”

Keepe laughed, a hollow sound. “Anything Webster cares about, he’s right on top of, even when you think he’s somewhere else. Like he was … twins or triplets or something.”

Jake guffawed. “In two or three places at once?”

“Don’t laugh, Jake. It’s not a joke. I swear to … Well, just take my word for it!”

“So he’s got a double,” said Jake dismissively. “Or several doubles. It wouldn’t be the first time. Celebrities do that.”

Keepe breathed deeply, not quite a sigh, more a gasp. “Whatever, Jake. If you’re going to do something, tell Webster. He doesn’t take kindly to people trying to go around him.”

“It was just a brainstorm,” Jagger said, staring out the window. “An idea. I’ll have to think about it.” He, like Keepe, found it hard to believe that women were bright enough to do something like this. He would have said women weren’t smart enough or efficient enough, but, then, their taped conversation hadn’t sounded so much like a plot as it had a mistake. Women could make mistakes, no doubt about that. And it didn’t really matter whether it had been done accidentally or purposefully. One of the women had done a stupid thing, and another one of them had done something worse and then disappeared, and they had all covered it up. They were all responsible.

The man who brought them to account would be a hero. Especially if it led to a cure.

“What are you going to do?” asked Keepe.

“I don’t know. Even if the Alliance plans are on hold, I still have a trial to finish. And, as I said, it was just a brainstorm. Something that clicked. I’ll think it through. If there’s anything in it, I’ll do what you suggest.”

Keepe was accustomed to reading faces, and he found Jagger’s features easy to decipher. Jake didn’t intend to consult Webster, and this fact placed Keepe in an awkward position. Whatever Jake did, the Alliance would find out, at once or eventually. And when they did, Webster would find out also that Keepe had known about it.

As soon as he could, he got to a phone and dialed the emergency number he had been given. It yielded a voice that gave him another number, and that one another yet. At last he got someone who asked a few brief questions; then came a series of clicks and tones that ended when Webster’s familiar voice came on the line.

“What?”

The single word rocked Keepe on his feet, stunned him, left him shaking as he told his story, making it as brief as possible. Something about Webster’s voice was different!

“You think he knows of women who really did have something to do with it?” Webster asked.

The vocal difference had to do with … with timbre. As though in all previous conversations Webster’s voice had been somehow muffled and now it was not. Something in the phone line, perhaps? Or the place Webster was speaking from? To make this cutting resonance, this agonizing sound.

“Keepe! I asked a question!”

Keepe moved the receiver well away from his ear and moistened his dry mouth. “I have no way of judging that, Mr. Webster. The one thing I’m sure of is that Jagger thinks so, though how he would have become aware of it, I have no idea.”

He heard something that might have been a chuckle, it, too coming through the phone with that unmuffled clarity, like the slash of a rapier. Keepe shut his eyes and squeezed them tight. He had been injured by that laugh. He knew he had. Cut, somehow. Somewhere. He waited for the pain that would come, had to come as the voice went on:

“Oh, I have a very good idea, Keepe. Jake is a creature of habit, but, then, most creatures are, have you noticed that? Break a dog to the whip, and he cringes when you speak. Give a dog running room—I like to give my dogs running room—and he jumps gates. Perhaps Jagger has jumped one gate too many. You did tell him that winning the case wasn’t the most important thing? You did give him the hint …?”

“The hint, sir?” Keepe croaked. He swallowed deeply and tried again. “Hint?”

“That I want men willing to lose if I tell them to.” The words came out of the phone into his head and manifested themselves as wheels of fire, hot and dangerous. Behind his eyes they spun, sparkling.

Keepe had to swallow again before he could answer. What was the matter with him! “Oh, yes, sir. More than a hint, sir.”

Webster laughed again, and Keepe almost dropped the phone as he jerked it farther away from his ear. Oh, to stop that sound. If only he could … could stop that sound.

Webster said: “Jake evidently didn’t take the hint. Poor Jake. He wants to win so badly. He’s probably bugged the home or office of opposing counsel, female, which probably means the women Jake is talking about are friends or acquaintances of hers. Very interesting. Certainly more of a lead than I’ve had from any other source. Thank you, Keepe. I have a record of all Mr. Jagger’s recent visitors and conversations. Stay where you can be reached.”

Stay where you can be reached. Each of those six words came with that razor clarity, that fiery power, cutting him through, cauterizing the cuts, leaving him afraid to move. If he moved, he’d fall into pieces, into shreds. He had to heal first, had to let his cells regenerate; otherwise, he would fall on the floor in strands, like noodles. The image was clear in his mind.

Still, his mouth moved, Keepe surprised that it was possible to move any discrete part of himself without detaching it. “Of course, Mr. Webster.”

He dropped the phone onto the floor in his attempt to hang it up. He couldn’t pick it up, he was shaking too much, his muscles kept going into spasms. He nudged the phone into the cradle with his foot, leaving it on the floor. Oh, my, he said to himself, as to a child. Oh, my, my.

Keepe had had a wife once. He did not often think of her, but he remembered her now. Elaine. She had told him it was a mistake to work for Webster. She had told him she couldn’t stay with him if he worked for Webster. He had laughed when she went away. He had called her a stupid bitch. He had understood even then that Mr. Webster was an extremely powerful and dangerous man with motives and strategies that were outside Keepe’s experience, but Keepe had been sure he could work for Webster without getting involved in whatever it was Webster was doing. Elaine had said it wouldn’t work, but Keepe had said he could do his work and get paid for it, that Webster didn’t own Keepe, he only hired him.

“Give me credit for some sense,” Keepe had told her. “I stand at a professional distance, on my own separate ground as an independent person.”

“You’re building a house upon sand. You’re a fool, Raymond.”

“How dare you!”

“I dare. Just now, I must.”

Later he learned she was pregnant. Later he learned she had had a child, but those were the last words she had said to him. When he had returned home that evening, she was gone and he never heard from her again. Now that professional distance he had bragged of was gone as well. Now his separate ground was gone. Elaine had been right. It had been sand; it had melted away; he had felt it go from beneath his feet. There was no distance at all between himself and Webster; there was no independence. He and Webster were of one substance—Webster’s substance. They were of one purpose—Webster’s purpose. That intent lapped around his feet like a flow of lava, its heat charring his flesh. His feet were going to burn off, and when they did, he would fall into the stream of Webster’s self. This was not metaphor. He saw the red glow of that self, smelled the brimstone reek of it, felt the pain of burning. There was no way he could stay alive, not even by letting his feet be burned off. Inside himself a trapped creature screamed and ran to and fro.

Now, now, he assured himself, squeezing his eyes shut, swallowing deeply, moving abruptly as to break the mental webs that bound him suddenly to this place. Now, now, this would not do; it was time to call a halt, time to reassert individuality, time to redefine the relationship. Perhaps it was even time to resign from this job.…

Some separate part of his mind said all these things in solemn words, which he heard quite clearly, words that echoed slightly in the fiery and vacant vaults where he found himself, like someone calling a lost child in a place too huge to search. He heard the words, he understood the words, but they had no connection to reality. His body paid no attention to the words. The only reality was where he was.

His hip joints burned away until he leaned against the wall. He felt his backside sliding down the wall, his knees burning, bending, deeper and deeper until they could bend no more, at which point he fell forward, folding in upon himself, curling, crouching, until he was tight against the floor, huddled in the smallest possible compass over and around the silent phone, as though he and the phone were one organism, as though it were the umbilicus that bound him to the source of all his life. No matter what the words in his head said, he was doing what Webster had commanded. He was staying where he could be reached. Forever, if need be.