That throaty laugh again. "David Engels was right, then. You're solitary as a bear. No wasted effort, no chasing all the lady bears out of raunch season. And definitely, no learning to ride a bicycle just to be a circus bear."
He sipped, took a bit of cheese. "Yeah, Dave's probably right. I'd like to think of me as being like Nijinsky out there," he nodded toward the back of the cabin, yawned. "But deer are gregarious critters, full of grace and helium. And they don't hibernate, and I do." He stretched until his joints cracked. "You must've figured out some sensible sleeping arrangement."
"The best. You under a sheet, me above 'em. Best-kept secret of the New England bundlers, or so Conklin tells me. But you go ahead. I'll stoke the fire later and set the detector up close."
He undressed, wondering that he felt no particular unease in her presence. Once she glanced toward him and smiled, raising her cup in a silent toast, then faced the fire again. He doused the lights and, scissoring his legs briskly between the sheets to warm them, heard her low chuckle. "Now what," he asked.
"That's what I do," she said. "Go to sleep." He rolled onto his side, faced the wall. Just parts in a machine, he insisted to the image of Dave Engels. You don't know everything, buddy. Yet the last image he recalled that night was the halo of yellow made by lambent firelight on the mane of Gina Vercours.
SATURDAY, 13 DECEMBER, 1980:
He awoke to the odors of omelet and coffee, sat up quickly, noting that Gina evidently slept in a loose culotte arrangement. "Whoo," he rubbed hands briskly over his face as she turned; "for a second there, I forgot all this. Mind-bending."
"Your friends in Denver wouldn't let me forget," Gina replied. "You had a call a few minutes ago. Agent Fulton; I promised to have you coherent when he calls again. Did I lie?"
"Nope, unless you promised I'd be decisive, too." She gestured with a plate and he nodded, waving it to him with both hands. He took the steaming plate and settled it into his lap.
"Don't expect this kind of service every morning," Gina teased, going back for the coffee. "I'm feeling sorry for you today, is all."
Between mouthfuls of omelet: "Why?"
" ‘Cause you're indecisive."
"Did I talk in my sleep?" He had stopped chewing, the cup poised halfway to his mouth.
"No-oo," she said, a full-octave drop within that one word managing to convey mild irritation, bewilderment, and desire to drop what had begun as banter. "Or if you did, I didn't listen. What's got into you—or should I ask?"
He destroyed the rest of the omelet before replying; and when he did, it was with reluctance. "I know what Fulton wants. And it isn't an easy decision. When I didn't respond to his hints yesterday, he finally laid it on the line. The FBI thinks I should drop out of sight, with a faked media release about my going into the river with those two men in the BMW."
"You mean take a new identity? Pretty drastic," she said, the hazel eyes unblinking over her cup.
"You have a real gift for understatement. But I've been thinking it out, and there may be an alternative," he said, as the telephone rang.
The scrambler was not perfect, requiring him to speak slowly for clarity. "Thanks, Fulton, I'm fine," he said, grateful that Gina had chosen to take her shower during the call. "Yeah, I've thought about it. God knows how you'd get total silence from that little cook, uh, Bohlen? And I couldn't very well continue to perform my Commission duties from the grave, so to speak."
He listened, nodding as if into a videophone. "I'll take your word for that, but look: what if I were listed as seriously injured?" Pause. "I don't know; Walter Reade, San Diego Naval Hospital, Brook General maybe; whatever sounds convincing. You could say I'd been shot or whacked, and collapsed later. Internal hemorrhage, even a relapse from the licking I took at Pueblo. Hell, call a doctor and work it out; I'm open to suggestion, so long as it'd let me continue my work through a mail drop."
He sipped the coffee through a longer pause, one corner of his mind occupied with the liquid slither of a nude blonde soaping herself a few paces away. A nude blonde butch, he reminded his libido; forget it.
Then he heard Will Fulton's last suggestion, which made it easy to forget women. "Oh no, fella; that's out." Brief pause. "I can't tell you why, exactly, but the idea lacks appeal. I've been Maury Everett too long. And who'd foot the bills?"
He barely noticed Gina's return, immersed in a debate he felt that he was losing. "Okay," he said at last. "I'll think about it, and you set up a scenario. I'll be around here somewhere until you can convince me this'll work. Remember, Fulton, in some ways I'm like any other working stiff." He watched Gina as she sat on the bed to slip from culottes to slacks, then forced himself to look away. "Sure; and I appreciate it, Will. 'Bye."
Everett would not discuss his problem with Gina until he had thought it out in a more pleasant setting. Over her objections, they canvassed Empire, then Golden, for an extra set of snow-shoes. She objected again at the price, observing that they made the ugliest, most expensive pair of hand-chewed tennis racquets in her experience. It was past noon on Saturday before they were properly shod for the trek, Gina quickly learning the widestance shuffle, carrying her shoulder bag easily for the first hundred meters.
Maury Everett stopped frequently to let her rest, and laughed as she stumbled down a slope. "Lean back until you have the hang of it," he advised. "You're not on skis."
Grumbling pleasantly, wiping snow from her goggles, she moved with him across the mounded blue-white wilderness, pausing now and then to inspect animal tracks. They had covered more than a kilometer before Everett found a sunny overhang sheltered from the wind and, with his clasp knife, cut boughs for insulation. They took off the snowshoes and sat on them, leaning against the green boughs, silently sharing cheddar and crackers.
The sunlight was warm on her face, distant peaks sharply visible in the thin clear air. It was no longer so difficult to see how a man of solitary habits might prefer winter in the Rockies, alone, to any other time, any other place. She said as much.
"Only we're not alone; and neither is Nijinsky," he replied, and indicated a copse of trees in a ravine far below. Gradually she traced the patterns that revealed several deer among the mass of conifers, as Everett launched into a discourse on the fleet animals.
"My fanny's like a waffle from sitting on these snowshoes," she said, shifting, and provoked a lecture on the differences between her bobtailed `bearclaw' snowshoes and the long-tailed types used for less rugged country. Gina suddenly realized that the big man was temporizing, focusing on familiar topics, using her as a stimulus to deflect his thoughts. From what? "My face is frozen in a permanent squint," she said then, to change the subject. "Could we get moving again?"
Single file, they followed the mountain's contours, Everett taking the lead. Eventually Gina admitted that her stamina was waning again in the high altitude and, after another quiet breather, they retraced their path. In another hour they stood in a grove of trees above the cabin.
"Let me go first," she insisted. "I'll wave you in if it's okay."
He hesitated, then shrugged. "I'll never get used to this," he said, motioning for her to go ahead.
He watched her circle the cabin, aware that there were ways to locate and deactivate the Oracle sensors, ways to counter the most sophisticated passive system. Gina Vercours herself was the active system that must probe the site. She disappeared into the cabin then, finally emerging to scan the heights where he stood.