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The kindly, protective woman behind the desk in the dorm lobby was called Flo. Flo asked whether she wanted to leave him a return note: the way things were done. Margo shook her head. She could think of nothing to say.

“He’s really sweet, your young man,” said Flo.

“I know he is.”

“You should leave him a note, honey. You know how men are.”

“Later,” said Margo. Heading for the door, she could feel Flo’s eyes censuring her for her rudeness.

She skipped French, Niemeyer’s warning notwithstanding. She knew she would never be able to concentrate, and didn’t want to embarrass herself again. She headed for the library and found a free carrel up in the stacks, quite near the bound back-issues of periodicals
she needed for her term paper for Professor Hadley. But she wasn’t working. She had chosen a spot overlooking the windows of Niemeyer’s suite in the government department. She was watching for the moment his lights went on. She waited. People entered and left the building, but his windows remained dark.

Surveillance, she realized. She was undertaking surveillance. Watching without anyone’s knowing. The notion in some peculiar way reassured her: better to wait actively than passively. And it surely mirrored, in some small way, what her father would have done.

Besides, her classes were less important to her than they had been. That was the perhaps predictable side-effect of Varna; and, now, of Fomin. Margo had spent her life following the rules, but had also found exhilarating her rare moments of disobedience and risk. She remembered a silly night back in eleventh grade when she and three other girls borrowed a car and a bottle and drove down to the shore to go skinny-dipping, Margo not really approving but desperate to belong. They were spotted by a couple walking a dog, and the police arrived. Fortunately, one of the other girls had an uncle who was minority leader of the State Assembly, and there weren’t any charges, even against the lone black girl. Nana, of course, exacted her own punishment, and except at school Margo had seen none of her friends for two months.

But the mad moment of rebellion had been worth it. That was the secret truth behind Margo’s surface obedience, and probably the real reason she had succumbed to Harrington’s blandishments and gone to Varna with Bobby Fischer in the first place. Margo had always led a highly structured life, protected by but also imprisoned within the cold, unassailable bars of familial expectation. She broke the bonds only rarely. When she did, the results were usually painful, but occasionally worth it.

As they were worth it now.

Because, down below, one of Niemeyer’s teaching assistants was hurrying up the front steps of the government department.

She ran. There were elevators, but Margo took the stairs. She raced across the Quad and was in the corridor no more than two minutes
after spotting the TA. But even as her footfalls echoed on the grand tiles, she knew she was too late. Sure enough, Niemeyer’s suite was locked and dark.

The TA was at the other end of the hall, headed for the rear exit.

What was his name? Mitch? Matt? No, Mark.

“Mark!”

He swung around. He was a second-year graduate student, diffident and dead-eyed.

“Yes?”

“Where’s Professor Niemeyer?”

The question seemed beneath him. Like the other Conflict Theory TA’s, he had absorbed something of the great man’s hauteur. “Who are you, please?”

“Margo Jensen. I’m in the course. Class was canceled again today, so I wondered—”

He spoke right over her. “We don’t go sharing the professor’s privacies with every sophomore who crawls out of the woodwork. Now, if you don’t mind, I have things to do.”

“Wait.” She actually put a hand on his arm. She could tell Mark didn’t like it, so she left it as a goad. “I spoke to him night before last. He was supposed to leave a message for me by this morning.”

“Then I suppose he changed his mind.”

“Can you at least tell me what you were doing here? Or is that also classified?”

He was unmoved by her sass. “I was making sure the cabinets were all padlocked, if you must know. We do that when he’s out of town. It’s really Mrs. Khorozian’s job, not mine. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

He marched away.

She considered what he had told her while trying to tell her nothing. That Mrs. Khorozian wasn’t in today. That Niemeyer was out of town, probably for a while. And that, although Mark spoke as though he had no idea who Margo was, he had known she was a sophomore.

Quite a haul for ninety seconds. Donald Jensen would be proud.

She tracked down the department receptionist, who insisted that nobody but the one grad student had been in the suite all day.
Margo’s eye fell on the department directory. Without asking permission, she picked it up and leafed through. The receptionist ignored her.

A minute later, Margo was on her bicycle. She headed west, downhill to Stewart Avenue, crossed the bridge over Fall Creek, and pedaled north along Cayuga Heights Road. Finding the little side street was easier in the daylight than it had been the night before last. Margo arrived at the cottage shaking and sweaty. Once more she ignored the posted warnings. She climbed to the creaky porch, but nobody answered her ring or her knock, and when she went around the side and peered through the kitchen window, she saw no sign of life. She stepped down into the side yard. Through the little squares of glass cut into the garage door she saw the mighty Landau standing where it should, but the practical Buick that Niemeyer used to get around town was gone.

She heard a rustle in the trees. Turning, she saw a heavy shape moving in the woods. A deer? A bear? Surveillance? Littlejohn again? Or just a crazed murderer, which at this point would almost be welcome? Maybe this is what Nietzsche was getting at: when you spent too long jumping at shadows, they started to jump back.

On her bike once more, Margo headed east again. It took her a good half-hour to reach the address she had found in the directory, way up the Dryden Road. It turned out to be not a house, but Mr. Khorozian’s antiques business. As if they didn’t want people knowing where they lived. The storefront was shuttered. At the auto-repair shop on the corner, the mechanic gave her what Nana called the twice-over and offered a crafty smile. Using a soiled cloth to clean grease from his hands, he told her she could try the Khorozians at home.

“Sometimes Mr. K works from there. Sometimes he don’t come in.”

Her sweetest smile: forced, but it still counted. “Would you happen to know their address?”

He did, and, leering, led her into the cluttered office. He grabbed a grimy card file, found the one he wanted, held it out for her to memorize. “But you won’t find them up there,” he added. “Not today.”

“Why not?”

“They left in a hurry yesterday morning. Big black car came for them.” He was still wiping grease from his fingers; and still looking
at her all wrong. “Driver spoke one of those foreign languages. Maybe Russian.”

There was an emergency number at the State Department. Harrington had vouchsafed it to Margo before sending her into the lions’ den, and made her repeat it back until she had it cold. Margo used it now, from the telephone in the back of the repair shop. She had offered to pay for the call, but the mechanic had magnanimously told her to go ahead, while he stood out in the shop ogling her backside through the smeary glass. Her sweaty fingers fumbled at the dial, and she had to try three times before she got it right.

“D.O.,” said the laconic voice at the other end.

Margo recited precisely from her script. She felt idiotic, but the rules were the rules. “This is Hyacinth calling for Miriam.”

She heard pages turning as the duty officer looked up “Hyacinth” and “Miriam” in his codebook. His response, she remembered, should be
Miriam’s not here right now. Can Gwendolyn help you?

Finally, the answer came back. “We don’t have a Miriam,” he said.

Margo stared at the phone. “How about Gwendolyn?” she finally said. “Maybe Gwendolyn can help.”

This time the response was instantaneous.

“We don’t have a Gwendolyn.”

Had she gotten it wrong? Misremembered, as Nana liked to say? Was it Glynis, perhaps, or Guinevere? No. She remembered perfectly. This was something else. They were cutting her off. She didn’t know why, but no other answer made sense.

Margo glanced out the window at the mechanic, who was looking pointedly at the clock above her head. She had promised that the call would only take a minute. She smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. Plainly he thought he’d been had.

She made another try. “Can you connect me with Dr. Harrington?”

“We don’t have a Harrington.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “My name is Margo Jensen. I was in the building last month. I met a Dr. Harrington. I don’t know her first name, but she must have a desk or an assistant or a supervisor or somebody you can connect me with.”

“We don’t have a Harrington,” he repeated.

“I don’t think you understand. My message is urgent. That’s why I called this number. I’m in trouble. There must be somebody who can help in an emergency.”

“Impossible,” said the duty officer, and hung up.

In Washington, it was the same Thursday afternoon, and the ExComm was on the verge of voting for war. The mood in the Cabinet Room was somber. CIA Director McCone had just reported that a handful of the MRBM sites were probably operational, and the President’s advisers were facing the real possibility of their own extinction, perhaps within days. McCone’s announcement had lent to the proceedings an air of reality that had previously been lacking. Until today, the ExComm might have been an academic seminar.

No longer.

Bundy glanced around the table. McCone had said “probably,” but he could see from their faces that the group had missed the qualifier. It was entirely possible that this very afternoon, without waiting for authorization from Congress, the President would allow a dozen or so worried advisers to persuade him to push the button.

“ ‘Operational’ meaning what?” asked Bobby Kennedy, who saw the same danger.

McCone looked straight at him. “Meaning, from launch order to missile away would be about eight hours.”

“Why so long?” asked Gwynn, from State.

All eyes swung his way. The poor man didn’t seem to understand that his job was to shut up and take notes. Watching him, Bundy wondered whether his own alternative plan had any chance of swaying the
President: especially given that he wasn’t quite ready to share it. In a crisis, time was always the enemy.

“Because they use liquid fuel,” said General Curtis LeMay, Air Force chief of staff, whose task it would be to execute the attacks on the missiles if and when they were ordered. He toyed with his slate-gray mustache. He was rarely seen not chomping on his trademark cigar, but had forsaken it for the afternoon. “Ours use solid fuel. That’s another advantage we have over the Reds. We can have a bird in the air on fifteen minutes’ warning. A few years from now”—this almost wistful—“well, that advantage just might have disappeared. It might be a good thing this is happening now instead of later.”

The President frowned. Bundy knew what was going through his mind: McCone said some of the launchers were operative, but the truth was that the Agency didn’t know for sure. In the bureaucratic competition to get information to the table, they were reaching the point where unanalyzed rumor was being passed along as fact.

“Let’s come back to this later,” said Bundy. “I understand the Joint Chiefs have prepared attack plans.”

Taylor and LeMay presented the scenarios together. They would begin with two waves of air attacks, the first aimed at destroying the surface-to-air missiles, the second to take out the MRBM launchers. The ideal follow-up would be a ground assault on the launch positions, just to be sure. The discussion went on for a good forty-five minutes. Most of those at the table seemed inclined toward an attack. Then McNamara threw cold water on the whole thing with a chilly reminder that any attack on the missiles would entail significant Soviet casualties—and, since the attack would have to include napalm to be sure that the launching sites were destroyed, the manner of many of those deaths would be quite horrible.

“So, you still think they’d retaliate,” somebody clarified.

“They’d go nuclear,” said McNamara. “They’d have no choice.”

“We could handle them,” said LeMay. He was one of the most respected commanders in the military, but Kennedy loathed him, and the feeling was mutual. Yet Bundy had to admit that LeMay, for all his bellicosity, had been responsible for building the Strategic Air Command
into the serious deterrent force it had become. “Believe me, Mr. President, they don’t want war with us.”

“We don’t want war with them, either,” Ted Sorensen shot back. But it was plain that the ExComm was inclined in LeMay’s direction. The man was an aggressive spellbinder. The Kennedys were about to lose control of the table.

“I had a conversation with President Eisenhower,” McCone offered. “He proposes ignoring the missile sites and attacking the Castro regime instead.”

It took the group a moment to appreciate the distinction, but Bundy immediately saw the appeal. First, an attack on Havana was less likely to entail Soviet casualties. Second, once a new regime was installed, the Cuban government itself could demand the removal of the missiles, and if the Soviets refused, they would then be committing the act of war against Cuba.

Bundy thought the plan had merit, but Kennedy seemed uninterested, maybe because he had now twice burned his fingers trying to unseat the Castro regime, maybe because the suggestion came from his still-popular predecessor.

Or maybe because, for all his Cold Warrior credentials, Kennedy still believed in the power of words. That was the part that worried Bundy most.

Bundy stood. “The President has a meeting,” he said. “Let’s resume in ninety minutes.”

From the Cabinet Room, the President returned to the Oval Office to meet Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador. Bundy had to be there, but first he stopped Alfred Gwynn in the corridor, drew him away from the others.