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  “I don’t know what Boone’s about,” she said. “But we know he goes to Vienna twice a year and sees a German businessman named Wessig who’s got a lab like his. The German knows Kirov.”

  “And Kirov? What do you know about him? Is he really involved in parapsychology?”

  “We’re not sure, at least that’s what my boss says. If anyone in the Agency were certain, I’d know.”

  For a moment they studied each other’s expressions. “I heard about him from some Russians I met,” Fall said with hesitation, “but none of them was sure whether he worked for the KGB, or was a double agent, or an American mole, or simply a fanatic believer in psychic research. Some people from Novosibirsk said he helped get the Soviet military interested in the field using his own occult powers. None of my Russian friends had ever met him, though. I’m sure they were telling the truth. The man’s completely hidden from the people in parapsychology who meet foreigners.”

  Fall leaned back in his chair, uncertain how to proceed. If she knew anything more about Kirov, she wasn’t going to tell him—that much was certain now. And she wasn’t going to give him more reasons for the CIA’s curiosity about his experiments with Gorski. To get more leads to Kirov’s network, he would have to get to know her better.

  The restaurant stood high on Telegraph Hill, and on a night like this you could see the lights of several cities across San Francisco Bay. From Tiburon to the north down to Hayward, the East Bay hills were covered by a long electric negligee. But the water between looked cavernous. Staring into its uncertain depths, Natalie Claiborne wondered why she had come here. She had not planned to do so, and had even canceled another engagement. This was not her way at all!

  But the man was transparent, she reassured herself—it would be easy to spot any attempt he might make to get past her defenses. And she might learn something. Clearly, he knew more about Lester Boone, and he might know more about Kirov. That must be the reason she had agreed to this dinner so quickly—to get more information. And yet she was puzzled . . .

  “Do you practice hypnosis?” she asked him. “I had another date tonight, you know.”

  Fall wagged his head to suggest that he might have practiced something, and she smiled playfully. Their exchange was becoming erotic. As their waiter poured them each a glass of wine, he studied her face. Her strong features had softened in the lamplight, giving her new appeal. It would take a deliberate decision to resist her, for the game they were playing gave an extra dimension to this meeting, a subtle charge that heightened her attractiveness.

  As they ate they each put forth a theory about Kirov’s notoriety. Fall said he must operate an espionage network to keep track of Western research on exotic powers of the mind, and Boone might cooperate to get information for his own work.

  “That’s one rumor,” she said, turning her gray eyes toward him. “But I think there’s more. Kirov might be using his knowledge of parapsychology to camouflage his military interests. Lester Boone is a weapons tycoon. There’s no telling what games the Soviets might play to approach him. Kirov might give him harmless stuff about psychic research, throwing in stuff like virtual-state engineering to win his confidence, hoping that Boone will let slip some things about the planes he builds. God knows how Kirov works, but if half the stories about him are true he must be pretty good. Why don’t you ask Boone himself? Does he trust you enough to talk about his Russian connections?”

  “He might. Could I tell him you told me all this?”

  “That might alarm him.” She frowned. “If you do, say that these are my speculations. He’s suspicious about the Agency, even though it funds him.”

  Fall studied her handsome face, so cool in this exchange. Could she be making this suggestion on Agency orders? “How do you know about virtual-state engineering?” he asked. “You’ve done your homework well.”

  She shrugged. “Isn’t it well-known among parapsychologists?”

  “Not really. Who have you talked to about it?”

  For an instant, his widely set blue eyes seemed forbidding. She would have to be careful. “Who was it?” She paused, pretending to remember. “I’m bad with names. There were some people at the Psychical Research Society in Berkeley. And Schroeder and Ostrander’s book, their stuff about psychotronics and Pavlita.”

  From her uncertain response Fall saw she was concealing something, perhaps items she had read about Pavlita in a CIA report. He also saw that she perceived his suspicion. As he sipped his wine, he felt an intimate and strangely familiar mood. He wondered where he had felt it before . . .

  And then he remembered.

  This feeling had appeared with Russian friends like Gorski when they shared their intimate thoughts. The mood, he had decided, came from the complexities involved in friendships with Soviets, complexities that gave drama to the simplest events. But there must be more than that, more to this sense of a secret connection. For when suspicion built upon suspicion without driving two people apart, the essential mystery of the other could become more intensely attractive. Both partners in such an encounter might feel their practiced responses collapsing into a naked unity. . . .

  “Pavlita,” he murmured, turning to avoid her glance. “I met him once in Prague. He’s a strange old bird.”

  “Do you think his generators work?” She pretended amusement. “His ideas sound pretty farfetched.”

  “Can the mind pass into matter?” He peered into his glass. “Can I fill this wine with my bioplasma, like Pavlita says? Some Soviet researchers think so. There’s interest there in his machines.” He paused as a new insight dawned. “But yes—maybe that’s what Boone is up to! He’s interested in a new kind of weapon, something like Pavlita’s psychotronic generator. I think I should try to find out.”

  “You’d better be careful,” she cautioned. “I understand he’s vindictive. How would you go about it?”

  “Go down to El Paso and see him.” Fall shrugged. “I’ll see if he wants me to publish some of their work.”

  Natalie Claiborne felt a sudden sympathy for the complex man she faced. “Why do you take these risks? With all your research work, your publishing, your book, why go running after Boone and Kirov? You could get into trouble.”

  For an instant, a helpless expression crossed Fall’s face. “It might seem crazy,” he said, “but I think the Soviets are doing things that are crucial for my work. The study of the human biofield is more complex over there than it is anywhere in the West. Marxist dogma forces them to look for the material causes of psychic events, to look for subtle energies like ‘bioplasma’ to account for ESP and spiritual illumination. Their thinking converges with my interest in bodily transformation. I believe that out of Russia will come new insights about the relation of spirit to matter.”

  Fall’s already ruddy complexion had grown even redder, and his blue eyes more intense. “Their therapies and parapsychology alone wouldn’t’ve attracted me,” he said. “That’s only the excuse I give. It’s their drive to understand the mysteries, especially the mystery of matter and consciousness.” He paused. “So many of them think about it. I guess their history has forced them to. Gorski, for example, when we planned our experiment, said it might show that the earth is in the soul! ‘The body’s in the soul,’ he said, ‘so the earth is in the world-soul.’ Nearly all the parapsychology people I met there had some kind of vision like that.”

  “But how does that lead to Kirov and Boone?” she asked with a look of concern. “Why get involved in these spy games?”

  “They’re not spy games!” Fall said with a pained expression. “According to the rumors, Kirov is the Soviets’ leading expert in parapsychology. He might teach me something, and Boone could lead me to him. Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “Maybe.” She remained unconvinced. “But I hope you’re careful. People like Lester Boone play for keeps.”

  4

  THE DECREPIT WAREHOUSE stood between three fields of hay and an empty parking lot ten miles from downtown
El Paso. Nothing had been done to improve the building’s exterior since Fall’s visit two years before. The same for sale sign, battered by wind and rain, was attached to a pole in front. The same windows on the side were broken. The place needed a fresh coat of paint. Fall wondered if Boone deliberately left the warehouse in disrepair to conceal the experiments inside.

  Fall drove his rented car down the narrow approach road into the parking lot. Before getting out, he reviewed the story he would tell, rehearsing his answers to Boone’s questions about Stefan Magyar and their mutual acquaintances in Prague. Withholding the CIA’s suspicions about Boone would be his only duplicity, he told himself, and a small one. His story was consistent in all details.

  Following Cruz’s instructions, he went to the back of the warehouse and found Boone’s silver Mercedes. A driver sat behind the wheel. “You the man from San Francisco?” he asked with a flat Texas drawl. “Mr. Boone’s been waitin’ for you. He said he’d meet you in the lab.”

  Opening an unmarked door the driver pointed to, Fall stepped inside. Few changes had been made here, too. Computers and workbenches lined the fiberboard walls, and sunlight streamed through windows fifteen feet above him. In the middle of the long, narrow room stood Cruz’s random-event machines. There were six he recognized, and seven new ones, the largest collection like this outside the Soviet Union. Housed in shining metal cases, they were covered with colored windows and painted displays like slot machines in a gambling casino. Fall remembered Cruz describing them with pride, explaining that each contained an electronic noise generator that triggered lights in the colored windows. In his psychokinesis experiments, subjects tried to order these random signals through a power of their mind. Fall found the machine he had worked with two years before. He had spent an hour with it, rooting for a flashing light to move across a dark green window toward a yellow target. The Argentinian researcher had urged him on excitedly, cheering his successes with with loud olés. Afterward both had been exhausted.

  Fall scanned the room. The place felt clammy, as if it contained something sick. Had Cruz’s experiments left a presence here? Suddenly Fall was self-conscious. Was someone watching? He remembered Cruz saying there was a hidden window.

  Then he jumped back in alarm.

  Hanging directly above him was a body, its feet dangling limply toward the floor. But backing away, he saw that the thing was a dummy. The harness it hung in was a Witch’s Cradle, a metal swing Cruz used to rock his subjects into a hypnotic trance. Leaning against a wall, Fall waited for the sense of shock to pass. The dummy swung slowly above him as if caught in a dizzy reverie. Fall wiped perspiration from his lips, then turned and left the room. As he did, Isaac Cruz came down the corridor.

  Fall followed him back to the laboratory. “Boone will be here soon,” Cruz said with a Latin accent. “We are both interested in news of Magyar.”

  His dark eyes had a bright intensity, a light without compassion, Fall thought, or any trace of humor. Gravely Cruz showed him the latest versions of the random-event machines. Unfortunately, he said, they had not found enough talented subjects to achieve the results they hoped for.

  Isaac Cruz might have been painted by El Greco, Fall thought. His long otherworldly face seemed twisted toward an interior light. “What about that awful thing?” he asked, pointing to the Witch’s Cradle. “What are you doing with it?”

  Cruz raised his hands in a Latin gesture of disgust. “Nothing!” he said. “Not a single thing. It is hard to find people who can use them, people with courage enough to lose their minds! You know Ramón has disappeared. Ramón, our very best subject. He could make these generators dance.”

  Through some intangible power of the mind, a gifted subject could bring order to the random events that these machines produced. Fall thought of the handsome boy from Buenos Aires stroking and kissing these metal boxes as if they were his lovers, passionately urging their flashing lights to move as Cruz directed. It had been a grotesque sight, leaving him uneasy for days.

  “Yes, Ramón was our best until he vanished,” Cruz sighed. “He threw himself into this with all his energy. But it is a problem, keeping good subjects.”

  At these words, Lester Boone came through the door. He made a tall, kindly contrast to his otherworldly associate. “Well, Darwin!” he said with a deep Texas drawl. “It’s about time you got down here again to see us. We’ve been keepin’ up with you.” His blue eyes suggested a depth of intelligence and humor. “I’m gonna’ hold you to that promise you made me, about that book of yours. When are we gonna’ see it?”

  “No one’s seen a copy yet. It may take ten more years to finish.”

  “Well, what’s in it? We read your catalogues, and ask ourselves, ‘Now what’s he up to?’ Sounds like you’re gonna’ finish the skeptics off once and for all!” He squeezed Fall’s shoulder and gestured grandly toward the random-event machines. “Has Isaac shown you our latest ghost traps?”

  “Ramón liked this one most of all.” Cruz pointed to a tall white box with a display of red lights shaped like a Valentine heart. “This is the machine he did best on. He thought it was alive.”

  Experimenting with such devices, Fall had sometimes felt a mysterious connection with them. As he studied the heart-shaped display, he remembered that a similar device had seemed to smile at him as he tried to move it telepathically. A bond of reciprocal feeling could develop between man and machine, it appeared.

  “Ramón scored better than four standard deviations from chance on over a hundred straight runs,” Cruz said, stroking the graceful box. “And for days this machine kept scoring like that no matter who the subject was. Ramón made a field in it that worked for everyone. He invested this machine with a soul!” He paused. “It is still hard for us to get a series of random numbers from it. I think it is crying for its friend.”

  “Ah, Ramón,” Cruz sighed. “He made these boxes dance. And still they pine for him. Fall, do you believe me?” There was a challenge in his voice. “You know about the linger effect, how the results of psychokinesis stay in a particular spot. I remember your articles about it. Didn’t you say there was a connection between it and psychotronic machines? Or did the Czechs say that?”

  “The Czechs are making a breakthrough,” Fall said. “Some friends of mine say they have a machine that will hold a mind’s force for months. I think they’re trying to scramble computers and disrupt satellite codes. Their work has caught the Soviets’ attention.”

  “Darwin,” said Boone, placing a hand on Fall’s shoulder. “We’ve been friends too long to play games. Now who are these friends of yours? Someone you’ve met since ’69?”

  “They’re friends of Magyar’s. Georgi Latko, Stanislaus Kocek—I think you know most of them.”

  “Yes, I know them,” Boone drawled. “So you’ve been stayin’ in touch with Stefan. I hadn’t heard about their smearin’ satellite codes.”

  “That’s what’s gotten the Soviets interested. That and Pavlita’s new work. But maybe you know one of the Russians they’re dealing with.” Fall pulled away from Boone’s controlling grip. “Vladimir Kirov. Didn’t you meet him in Prague?”

  The tall gray figure frowned. “Let’s go upstairs, Isaac,” he said. “I think our friend has something to tell us.”

  They followed Boone up a flight of stairs into Cruz’s office. Boone poured himself a glass of seltzer water, then sat in a reclining chair. Fall sat on a couch to face him. For a moment the silence was broken only by the sound of Cruz stacking papers on his desk.

  “So Kirov . . .” Boone sighed, as if the subject drained his energy. “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much,” Fall said, choosing his words with care. “What I know comes through Magyar’s people, and they’ve sworn me to secrecy. Some say you’re working with him.”

  “That I’m working with Kirov! Well, fuck! Your people in Prague told you that?”

  Fall shrugged. “There are all sorts of stories going ’round.”

>   Boone looked at Fall with amusement. “Now where do you think they’d come up with a story like that? He’s a member of the KGB, isn’t he? How the hell would I work with someone from the KGB?”

  “Magyar’s people think the KGB’s everywhere,” Fall said impassively. “Some of them think Kirov has a network that involves the Starr Foundation. They think you’re part of it.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Boone slapped his knee. “Didn’t know I was gettin’ that famous.” He paused, then leaned toward Fall. “There’s something to those rumors, though. I did meet Kirov once. That must’ve started the stories. But look!” He glanced around the room as if an outsider might be listening. “No money, no secrets, no plans passed between us. I hope you believe that.”

  “So you did meet him!” Fall pretended surprise. “I only half-believed it. You know he’s Russia’s biggest mystery man in parapsychology.”

  “I’ve heard the stories,” Boone whispered. “Some people say he’s running all of Soviet psychic research, but that’s a pile of crap. Most of the stories about him are crap. Has someone from the CIA talked to you about him?”

  “Yes,” Fall said. “I checked Magyar’s stories through them. An officer in the Life Sciences Division said Kirov won an Order of Lenin for espionage work in the sixties. The Agency wants to know more about him.”

  “More about what? More about his work in parapsychology?”

  “Yes,” Fall nodded. “And why he’s stirred up these rumors. They wonder if he’s tapping Americans for espionage work. He’s supposed to be a star recruiter.”

  Boone leaned close to Fall. “Well,” he said, “he’s one tough son of a bitch, I can tell you that. A real tough son of a bitch. But not like you might think. On the surface he doesn’t seem tough at all. Now I don’t want you tellin’ people about this. I’d be awfully unhappy if I knew you’d let this out.” His clear blue eyes were filled with menace. “You understand? I’ll tell the CIA myself about it.”