“My wife thinks she’s a psychiatrist,” Kaiser said.

“Does she.”

“I went home for breakfast, right? She spends half an hour analyzing the bastards. All I want’s a quart of coffee and baconeggs, I get headshrinker guesses on why they snatched Fairlie.”

“And why did they?” Lime pushed a typewritten sheet aside and overturned the next one.

“I didn’t listen too much. She had it all doped out, their parents rejected them or something. It’s all shit, you know. I can tell you what motivated them. Somebody put them up to it. Somebody recruited them, somebody trained them, somebody programmed them. Somebody took a bunch of damn fools and wound them up like walking toys and pointed them at Cliff Fairlie. Just like somebody pointed those seven assholes at the Capitol with fused bombs in their cases. Now we ought to find out who and why. You ask me we’d do worse than poke around Peking and Moscow.”

“I don’t know.” Lime wasn’t a subscriber to the conspiracy theory of history.

“Come off it. There used to be a day when we responded to this kind of crap with the Marines. This country used to be willing to go anyplace in the world with any cannon they needed to get back any lousy citizen of ours, let alone a President.”

“Where would you send the Marines, Fred? Who would you shoot?” Lime kept most of the sarcasm out of his voice.

“Aagh.” A phone rang: Kaiser turned with military abruptness, picked up the phone and talked and listened. Lime went back to his papers. Kaiser was a political infant but it didn’t annoy him; people like Kaiser inhabited a masculine technical sphere, they didn’t have to understand reality—only facts.

Kaiser rang off. “Why Fairlie?”

Lime glanced at him.

“I mean, I know he was handy and all. But the son of a bitch is a flaming liberal. You’d think they’d pick on somebody pure American. Somebody they really hate.”

“They never do. The best scapegoat’s the innocent one.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. The Aztecs used to choose virgins for their human sacrifices.”

“Sometimes you don’t make a hundred per cent sense, you know that?”

“It’s all right,” Lime said. “Distribution limited on a need-to-know basis.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You need a checkup, I swear to God.”

Lime closed his eyes and nodded agreement. When he opened them they were aimed at the clock and as if by extrasensory signal Satterthwaite appeared.

Satterthwaite whirled into the room, topcoat flying, more cluttered and disordered than ever; stopped, swept the room with his magnified myopic stare, spoke while shouldering out of his coat: “Anybody got anything important to tell me? If it’s not vital save it for later. Anybody?”

No response: like a classroom full of children too shy to volunteer the spelling of a test word. Satterthwaite scrutinized them all, very fast, stance shifting as he went from face to face. When he got to Lime he flung out his arm, leveled his index finger, overturned his hand and beckoned imperiously. “Let’s go.”

Without waiting acknowledgment Satterthwaite wheeled. Lime got to his feet, pushing the chair back with his knees, feeling curious eyes on him. Kaiser muttered, “Watch out for the son of a bitch’s teeth.”

Lime found Satterthwaite in the corridor unlocking one of the No Admittance offices. They passed inside. It was a small private conference room, windowless and bare, air fluttering from ventilator ducts. Heavy wooden armchairs for eight, a walnut conference table, a stenographer’s desk in the corner. Lime closed the door behind him and located an ashtray and headed for it.

Satterthwaite said, “I understand you have a theory.” Icily polite.

“Well theories are a dime a dozen, aren’t they.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I didn’t think we had time to waste trotting out every wild speculation that comes along.”

“David when I ask you to give me details I think we can assume we’re not wasting anyone’s time.”

Lime scowled furiously at him. “By what curious process did you arrive at the conclusion I had anything useful to contribute?”

“It’s not a conclusion, it’s a surmise, and it’s not mine. It’s Ackert’s. He saw you staring at the map as if you’d discovered a message in secret ink. Come on David, I haven’t time to drag it out of you word by word.”

“If I had anything hard do you think I’d keep it to myself? What do you think I am?”

“I’m sure you don’t really want an answer to that question. It’s throwing raw meat on the floor.”

“Look, I admit I had an idea. I played around with it but it shot itself full of holes. It turned out to have far too many ifs in it. It’s not a theory any more, it’s a pipe dream—acting on it would distract us from what we ought to be doing. We need more to go on.”

Satterthwaite tucked his chin in toward his Adam’s apple, showing his displeasure and his determination to carry on. “I think I know the direction your theory’s taken. Are you afraid to risk getting thrown into the arena personally? David, we’re talking about one of the most despicable crimes of the century. They’ve taken an innocent hostage—a man who’s vitally important to the whole world. It’s the kind of buck you just can’t pass.”

Lime grunted.

“David, we’re talking about needs. Realities.”

Lime looked down at his shoes as if he were at a high window looking down through smoke at a fireman’s rescue net. “I guess we are,” he said. “I do tend to hate an amateur who tries to tell a professional how to do his job.”

“Get off it. Do you think I’m a patronage hack? I’m a dollar-a-year man, David, I’m not in this for glory. I do my job better than anyone else who’s available.”

“Modesty,” Lime breathed, “is an overrated virtue.”

Satterthwaite gave him a cold look. “You were born with an innate grasp of the subtleties of the hunt which most men will never learn from years of training. When it comes to operating in the western Mediterranean you’re the only expert alive Worthy of the name.” And now Satterthwaite sank the knife, twisting it: “And when it comes to the Western Desert who else can you possibly pass the buck to, David?”

“I haven’t been out there since Ben Bella.”

“But I’ve hit it, haven’t I.”

“So?”

“You want Sturka for this one too, don’t you. Why? Intuition?”

“I just don’t believe in coincidences,” Lime said. “Two well-organized capers, both on this scale, both with the same target.… But there are no facts. It was just an idea. You can’t put it in the bank.”

Satterthwaite jabbed his finger toward the chair. “Come back here and sit down. Are you ready to start working?”

“It’s not my department.”

“Whose job do you want? Hoyt’s? He’s due for the chop anyway.”

“You can’t fire civil servants.”

“You can find shelves to put them on where they can’t do any damage. Ackert’s job? Would you settle for that? Name your price.”

“There’s no price for a fool’s errand.” He hadn’t stirred toward the chair. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, the smoke stinging his right eye.

“Come on, let’s finish thrashing this out. You know I’ve got you over a barrel.”

“I’ve got no facts to go on. Can’t you understand that? No facts!” He took a step forward, filled with anger. “I’ve got no price—I’m not auditioning for your approval or anybody else’s. I’m not lacking in conscience—if I knew I was better equipped to handle the field assignment than anybody else I’d take the job, you wouldn’t need to degrade us both with stupid bribe offers.”

Satterthwaite pushed his glasses up against his eyebrows. “You’re not a superman, David, you’re only the best chance we have among a variety of poor chances. You spent ten years of your life in that part of the world. You grew up in NSA before it rigidified into the kind of bureaucracy that became capable of fucking up the Pueblo affair—in your day imagination still counted for something. Do you think I don’t know your secrets? I’ve sized you up, I know your talents, your choice of friends and entertainments, your record, how much you drink and when. You were the man who opened the channel between Ben Bella and De Gaulle. Christ if they’d only had the sense to send you into Indochina.”