Strangers

our heads." Grimacing, she withdrew two steak knives and put them on the seat between her and Ginger.
        Surprised, Ginger said, "Where'd you get these?"
        "This is why I insisted on drying the breakfast dishes while Nancy washed them. Putting away the silverware, I swiped these. Didn't want to ask straight-out for a weapon; that would've meant bringing Nancy and Elroy into it, which it was clear we weren't going to have to do. I can return them later, when this is over." She picked up one of the knives. "The end's nicely pointed. The blade's sharp and serrated. Like I said, not much help if they've got a gun at your head. But if they were to run us off the road and try to force us into their car, you keep the knife a secret until you get your opening, then stab the bastard."
        "Got it," Ginger said. She grinned and shook her head.
        "Someday, I hope you'll get a chance to meet Rita Hannaby."
        "Your friend in Boston."
        "Yes. You and Rita are a lot alike, I think."
        "Me and a high-society lady?" Faye said doubtfully. "Can't imagine what we'd have in common."
        "Well, for one thing, you both have such equanimity, such serenity, regardless of what's happening."
        Putting the knife back on the seat, Faye said, "When you're a service wife, you either learn to go with the flow, or you go crazy."
        "And both you and Rita look so feminine, soft and dependent on the outside - but inside, each of you is, in your own way, tough as nails."
        Faye smiled. "Honey, you got a bit of that yourself."
        They drove the last quarter-mile of the pińon-shaded driveway, out of the shadows and into the midday gloom of the pending storm.
        The brown-green, stripped-down government car was still parked along the county road. Two men were in it. They looked impassively at Ginger. Impulsively, she waved at them. They did not wave back.
        Faye drove down toward the floor of the Lemoille Valley.
        The car followed.
        

        
        Miles Bennell slumped in the big chair behind his gray metal desk and looked bored, and Miles Bennell ambled around his office while answering questions in a tone of voice that was sometimes indifferent and sometimes amusedly ironic, but Miles Bennell never fidgeted, groveled, looked frightened, or became angry, as almost any other man would have done in the same situation.
        Colonel Leland Falkirk hated him.
        Sitting at a scarred table in one corner of the room, Leland worked slowly through a stack of personnel files, one for each of the civilian scientists who were conducting studies and experiments in the cavern with the immense wooden doors, where the secret of July 6 was contained. He was hoping to narrow the field of possible traitors by determining which men and women could have been in New York City during the time the two notes and Polaroid snapshots had been mailed to Dominick Corvaisis in Laguna Beach. He had told Thunder Hill's military security staff to do this work on Sunday, and they professed to have completed the inquiries and to have found nothing to pinpoint the leak. But in light of the screw-ups in their investigation thus far - including two sabotaged lie detectors - he no longer trusted them any more than he trusted Bennell or the other scientists, He had to do it himself.
        But right away Leland ran into problems. For one thing, during the past eighteen months, two damn many civilians had been brought into the conspiracy. Thirty-seven men and women, representing a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines, had possessed both high-security clearances and specialized knowledge essential to the research program Bennell had devised. Thirty-eight civilians, counting Bennell. It was a miracle that thirty-eight eggheads, utterly lacking in military discipline, could have kept any secret so long, let alone this one.
        Worse, only Bennell and seven others were engaged in the research full-time, to the exclusion of all other professional pursuits and to the extent that they actually lived in Thunder Hill. The other thirty had families and university positions they could not leave for long periods of time, so they came and went as their schedules permitted, sometimes staying a few days, maybe a few weeks, rarely as long as a few months. Therefore, it would be a long and arduous job to investigate each and determine if and when he - or she - had been in New