Snake asked, "What makes you think so?"

Martha shrugged. "The usual. He has a great deal of difficulty communicating head to head. He can do it, but not easily, and not all of the time."

"Any pain?"

"He says that it hurts his head when he tries to do it."

It was the classic sign of the failed ace, and it brought more silence. Sammy looked up from what he was doing, and said, "That doesn't have to mean that he's a deuce. I've known kids with the same problem, and they've broken through."

"So have I," said Martha, "but…" She waved the thought away. "I hope you're right."

The telephone rang. Sammy picked it up, said a few words, put it down, and announced, "Our visitors are here."

3

THE Prisoner dreamed every night, and every night the dream was the same. He dreamed of a young girl, ten or eleven years old, whose face was smooth and oval, whose eyes were dark and deep, and whose hair was a wave of chestnut that a loving mother had drawn into braids. That was what The Prisoner saw at the start of each dream, but at the end of it the oval face was shattered, the eyes were sightless, and the little girl's hair was matted with blood and bits of brain.

In his dream, The Prisoner knew that it would not have happened if the child had not screamed. It would not have happened if the mother had been able to control her. In an airplane operation the silence and obedience of the hostages are essential to the success of the mission. It has to be that way, but the little girl had screamed, had gone on screaming, and so Amir had hit her on top of the head with his pistol. Even then, she had not stopped, and Amir had had to hit her several times before she was silent. That was the way that The Prisoner remembered it, although sometimes his memory played tricks on him, and in recollection it seemed that it had been Murad, not Amir, who had beaten the child. Amir or Murad, one or the other. Both of them were dead now, hunted down by the Zionist murder squads. Of the four on the mission, only Zahra and The Prisoner were still alive, she undercover in Paris, and he in the camp that he thought of as a prison.

He wondered if Zahra ever dreamed of the child, and he doubted it. It was eight years now since the airplane job, eight years since the four of them had snatched Pan Am 307 out of the sky, but it was only during the last six months that the face of the child had begun to come to him in the night. He wondered at that, because down through those years there had been much more blood and many other faces, but the face of that child was the only one that was able to unsettle his sleep.

The Prisoner always woke at the end of the dream, but he did not wake in horror or in sweat. Nor did he cry out. The dream was a companion now, and he had learned to live with it. At the end of the dream he would open his eyes, and repeat to himself the words of Muhammad Taqi Partovi Sabzevari.

"It is Allah who puts the gun in our hand," he would whisper to himself, "but we cannot expect Him to pull the trigger as well, just because we are fainthearted."

Then he would sit up in his cot and look around in the darkness at the other men sleeping in the long, rectangular tent that was open at both ends to the breezes of the desert. Each night when he woke from his dream he would check to see that they all were well. There were twenty-two others who slept in the tent, and as their leader The Prisoner could have slept in a tent of his own, but he preferred to be with his brothers. The only time that he used a private tent, and they all did then, was during the monthly visits when the women were sent in from the outside. But other than that single day each month, they lived communally, sleeping, eating, and training together. The number of them varied. There were twenty-two now, but The Prisoner could remember a time when there had been as few as six. They came and they went, some never to return, and whenever that happened The Prisoner would remind his men that, unlike other religions, which consider death to be the end of a man, in the vision of the Qur'an death is not the end of life but its continuation in another form. He told them that man's evolutionary movement toward infinity continues after death. He told them that death is no more than a hyphen between the two parts of man's existence. He told them that sincerely, for he believed it all, most of the time.

And then, having checked to see that his men were well, he would lower himself to his pillow again, and compose himself to return to sleep. A lesser man at a time like that might chase the dream of the little girl by conjuring up a soothing vision: a golden day, a verdant field, a ring of children playing gaily. But that was not the way of The Prisoner. Instead, he would turn his mind to the broken bodies of all the Arab children he had seen in his life, the children of Gaza, of the camps in Beirut, of the villages of the Bekaa. Some of the children had been the victims of poverty and malnutrition, others had been slain by the Nazarenes, and still others by the Zionist warplanes. There were many that he could count, hundreds, perhaps thousands, and as he lay on his cot The Prisoner would stack them into piles in his mind, one pathetic corpse on top of the other, until the pyramids of their bodies managed to mask one broken, oval face, and then he would sleep undisturbed until dawn.

4

SAMMY was sore. He was hopping mad, and the only reason that he wasn't actually hopping up and down was that he didn't want to give our Agency visitors the satisfaction of seeing how upset he was. There were five visitors, and only two were acceptable on the premises. One was Roger Delaney, the Deputy Director for Science and Technology. Bluff, hearty, and not too bright, he was our liaison, and the only Agency official with unrestricted access to the Center. With him was Alex Jessup, the new DDO, who was there with Sammy's reluctant permission. Jessup had asked for it, and Sammy had granted it. It isn't easy to say no to the number three man in the outfit that owns you. So Delaney and Jessup were welcome in the Center, but the other three definitely were not. They stood against the wall of Sammy's office, and stared at us with cold eyes. They were young, and they were cold. Everything about them was cold, and everything about them screamed security. They had good tailors, their clothes did not bulge, but they had the look that goes with being armed. They had no business on our side of the wire, and Sammy so told Delaney.

"Can't be helped," Delaney replied. "Necessary evil, I'm afraid."

"Bullshit, you can't march into my office with a bunch of thugs and…"

"Sammy, we're carrying something rather sensitive, you see."

"That?" Sammy pointed to a large metal box that Jessup had set on a table.

"Exactly. Now, if you'll just give me a chance to…"

"Is that what the guards are for? You think we're going to pinch it?"

"No, of course not."

"Then get them out of here. They make me nervous."

"Afraid I can't do that." He turned to Jessup for help. "Alex, perhaps if you explained."

Jessup cleared his throat. "As Roger said, the material we have here is highly sensitive. It would have been impossible for us to bring it from Langley without some form of security."

Sammy said, "Then you should have held this meeting at your office, not mine."

"Your presence at Langley would have been noticed. For reasons of security, I wanted to avoid that."

"So you brought along your storm troopers. What kind of security is that with them standing here listening? What kind of clearance do they have?"

"Their clearance is my business, not yours." Jessup turned angrily to Delaney. "What kind of a ship are you running here? I thought these people were under your control."