Seaspun Magic (29 page)

"I'm not sure I like being called a 'weapon.'" Arianne sighed softly under her breath, beginning to feel somewhat dejected, especially now that the testing was over. She was exhausted.

"I'm taking her home now, gentlemen," Leo said quietly, beginning to draw Arianne out of their small group.

"But if we could do just one more series—"

"No." Leo remained firm. "She's had enough."

Dr. Ekhart looked as if he were going to argue the point, but at Leo's raised eyebrow he stepped aside. Leo propelled her out of the enclave to a chorus of good-nights and sleep-wells and more questions even as they went.

"Do you dream? What about? Have you ever tried to decipher your dreams? Have you ever been hypnotized? Which type of psi do you use most often?" Each doctor wanted to get in at least one eager query. Arianne started to reply, but Leo just kept on walking, and so, expediently, he had them on their way through the darkness of the night.

On the last leg of their journey, up the staircase to the bedrooms above, Leo had to carry her; his strong arms managed her weight easily. After a detour to look in on Rae, he laid her down on her bed, and she might have fallen right asleep had he not helped her undress, his hands quick, efficient... and caressing. Then he tucked her under the covers, slid in beside her, and his body warmed her and held her close. The last thing she remembered was the soft stroking of gentle fingers in her hair.

***

When Arianne awoke late Sunday morning Leo was already up. She guessed he must be downstairs with Rae, for neither male was anywhere to be seen and Rae's bed was made and his room was as neat as the proverbial pin. Listening at the top of the stairs, she heard them doing something that sounded like lovely fun, judging by the laughter that came floating up.

Leo must have heard her moving about upstairs, for when she came out of the bath, toweling her hair, he was making their bed. Arianne helped him with the last of it, whereupon he promptly pulled her down onto it and rolled on top of her, thoroughly mussing the spread.

"If you're wondering where Rae is, he's having lunch with Uncle Art." He put a finger over her lips. "'Uncle Art' is the admiral's cook. He's going to be staying here to look after you and the baby until this thing is over. If anyone asks, he's your father's brother, visiting you from Miami. As soon as it's dark, we have to return to the fort. We're not taking the chance of anyone seeing you down there, or coming and going, so we have only nighttime to run those tests. Barnes is back next door. I suggest you phone him to say that 'tuba' is wrong, too, and give him 'hippo,' instead. The sooner we can get things going, the sooner we can put him away. But say Rae has a cold or something, so that he stays away." His lips covered hers for just a second, hard and fiercely possessive. "Are you ready for breakfast? I understand Uncle Art makes a mean eggs Benedict, and I'm starving!"

"So am I," Arianne said laughingly, her gaze sparkling into the green eyes fastened on her face. She was so madly in love with him; she felt so filled with sheer emotion that she didn't know how to begin to tell him.

Winding her slender arms around his neck, she lifted her chin to kiss his. Just this bit of encouragement had his hands pulling the robe apart and molding the warm flesh beneath, the soft and willing curves that responded heatedly to the urgency of his loving touch....

***

Arianne's phone call to Larry went well; he was aggravated over "tuba" being of no use to him, but was pleased her recent uncooperative mood had gone, at least long enough to give him another possible password—"hippo." He wasn't quite so easy to convince regarding the necessity of staying away, though. Arianne had to give both Rae and Uncle Art the flu before he was satisfied that her house was no place to be visiting at the moment. He asked her why he hadn't seen Leo about lately, and was further delighted when she told him her paying guest had gone for good. But she realized Leo would have to be very careful in his comings and goings, so as not to alert Larry to anything odd.

Right after a scrumptious breakfast of eggs Benedict served with a small, beautiful bunch of purple grapes on the side of each plate, Leo departed for work at the fort. Since it was only a week until Christmas, Arianne wove a couple of pine wreaths to decorate the front and back doors, chatted with the admiral's cook and played with Rae. Leo came home for an early dinner, and immediately after that, they slipped through the blackberry briars and down to the beach. Arianne supposed her cortege of guards was somewhere in the black gloom, but she never saw them.

On the way, Leo told her Barnes had used her new password at precisely four thirty-five that afternoon. He had logged on and promptly accessed ring two, and had started to copy the vast amount of data onto floppy computer diskettes small enough to be hidden inside his jacket or sweater.

When they arrived at the fort, Arianne was given the special piece of information that was supposed to travel from her to Larry to the network by word of mouth.

"You tell Barnes," the admiral began, "that the U.S. has assembled Soviet combat aircraft—a minisquadron of Floggers and a baker's dozen of their MiG-21s.... Yes, that'll do it. Barnes will have a pretty good idea of what that means, and it should put him on the boil. He'll know that information's worth a lot of money. That's just enough to whet the network's appetite, too, and should work its way through the ranks without delays."

Thereafter, Arianne went through thirty more series of ten runs, twenty-five calls each, for more telepathy testing. Then, after a short break, she sat for another doctor, precognition testing this time, using all the same tools, only instead of a control person shuffling and flipping through cards upstairs, this time there was a random number machine as control. It was filled only with twenty-five cubes, five symbols, five cubes each. After she had marked her choice of symbol on the record sheet, the random number contraption was spun and out fell a cube, and this cube was paired to her 'future sight' call.

All the while she was performing these tests, she was also running a third on clairvoyance. This one was as simple as the others, only Arianne found it a lot more interesting. The control person had gone out driving in a car, without a specific destination or route in mind; his orders were to drive wherever he fancied in the United States and Canada, and keep on driving until he was told to turn around and come back. At half hour intervals, Arianne was supposed to figure out where he was with her "far sight." The first half hour after the start of the test, she enlightened the doctor not only as to where the ensign in question was on the map, but also that he'd taken his girlfriend along for the trip!

The examination went on and on for hours. While computer programmers and technicians worked here and there in the canyons of the machined wall, Leo divided his time between them and Arianne's station at the center of the room.

Larry telephoned her again on Monday, wanting the password for the third ring. Instead she gave him the information the admiral had given her, and Larry was so ecstatic with that, he wanted to take her out for dinner, since Uncle Art was home to baby-sit. Arianne said she couldn't possibly leave Rae when he was sick. And neither could Larry come over to visit her, because she had the flu now, too.

She had to work that day at the shop, and so Monday flew by, and Tuesday did, as well. But there were always the early-morning hours before dawn that she and Leo had all to themselves. Meanwhile the testing continued relentlessly. In suspense, everyone waited for Larry to carry the MiGs tip to his contact in Seattle. Under surveillance, all Larry's movements and conversations with his contacts could be overheard by various devices and spies.

Wednesday night, about ten o'clock, those down in the bowels of the computer overheard a segment of tape that had been recorded about an hour earlier: Larry and two of his contacts at a singles bar, the officer repeating word for word what Arianne had told him. Then the two men got into an argument about money and how it was to be paid. A great many dollars were about to change hands; their casual undertones belied what was actually taking place.

The admiral switched the tape off halfway through a sentence, and everybody turned to look at Arianne. She found it most unnerving.

"That settles it." The admiral shook his head. "We bring Barnes in."

"You could bring him in for questioning," Leo suggested, "on those old charges of theft. That gets him out of commission and leaves you more options in dealing with him... and the network remains intact, feeling smug and safe."

"You've a scheming mind," the admiral remarked with a faint smile.

"I need it to stay one step ahead. Despite appearances sometimes, Barnes is no slouch. He latched right onto a good thing when he saw it—" Leo glanced at Arianne "—and he simply used his resources to get what he wanted—lots of dough!"

The order went out and the navy closed in on Lieutenant Barnes. Still, there was tension in the air. Until the officer was actually behind bars, Arianne was to be treated like a very valuable piece of fine china.

Thursday morning, as Arianne was getting ready to go to work, Uncle Art came in from taking the garbage out, inordinately excited. Taking out the garbage was a means of relaying messages back and forth between the fort and the house. It seemed he had learned en route to the cans and back—from Arianne's assembly of navy bodyguards stationed out of sight in the trees—that Lieutenant Barnes had slipped through the fingers of the hand of justice closing in on him and was presently AWOL. Not only that, but he had turned up at the contact's apartment. He had told the contact about Arianne and had demanded one hundred thousand dollars, just for her name. He had added that the network was getting an incredible bargain, but with the navy on his back, he was cutting his losses and leaving the country, fast.

Naturally, Uncle Art went on, the contact hadn't believed Barnes's ravings any more than the admiral had believed Leo's. He wasn't giving Barnes one dime unless he had proof. The contact told Larry to ask his psychic who was funding their little project. Who was it that supplied him with the money he paid Barnes? Which was precisely what they all wanted to know.

"Arianne...?" Leo asked.

"I can't—I'm so involved. And that interferes. It never works for me," she said, sighing sadly. "Why don't you let me give him an answer? He's already spilled the beans on me.... Isn't the primary object to discover the head of the network? If Larry's out of commission, maybe we'll never find out. And he's only coming to ask me a question. He's hardly going to kidnap me in broad daylight out of a very busy shop! He'll not give away my name, not until he gets his hundred thousand, right? I'll be fine. Besides, there's my bevy of bodyguards. Come on, I'm sure the admiral will go along with me!"

Some rapid relaying took place between the fort and the elegant Victorian house, with messengers sneaking up to meet bodyguards in the dense cover of the forest.

They, in turn, passed the most recent news on to Uncle Art, gathering pine cones supposedly for Christmas decorations. The end reply was, yes, Barnes was going to be allowed to run back and forth on his hectic mission until the navy had what they wanted.

"You must give him the wrong answer to discredit yourself. They
must
dismiss his psychic as the ravings of a frightened lunatic. Let me think.... They figure you'll never guess who they are, so their identity can't be obvious. They're not a powerful enemy interested in our defense. They can't be Mother Russia, for instance, so that's what you'll say to Larry, that his contacts work for the Soviet Union. He'll believe it, too."

Leo went to the fort; Arianne, to the shop. Larry didn't even bother to come to the store; he telephoned her, instead, from Seattle. With great circumlocution, he posed his question to her, and she replied after a convincing show of reluctance. Arianne couldn't wait to get home to find out what had happened since.

On the last stretch of the road home, in a hurry, she had to floor the brakes of her car. Out of a hidden side road shot a bright-red Corvette. The little sports car effectively blocked her path. As her car rocked with the force of her stop, her heart leaped. Where were her bodyguards now that she needed them?

Larry slammed his door and then started coming toward her at a trot. Before she had a second to formulate an escape plan he'd opened her passenger door and was sliding in on the seat. Frozen with fright, she simply stared at him.

"About your answer, the Soviet Union... you're sure that's right?" The words fell bluntly, harshly, from his lips. "You're absolutely sure?"

Numbly she nodded.

"You... wouldn't be having me on?"

She shook her head.

"I don't like to be messed around with, baby!" he threatened, most unpleasantly.

"Whatever are you talking about?" Her voice quavered a little with nervousness. "Why would I be messing around? You're hardly making sense, Larry. And you scared me half to death, driving your car out right in front of me! Are you crazy?"

In the dim greenish light of the dash, he stared sharply at her. Arianne's heart seemed to fill her throat, and again she wondered where on earth her guards were?

"I told you before, Larry, not to set too much store by me. I mean, I do try, but that's really all I can do." Schooling her voice to sound as normal as she could took a huge amount of effort, since in her terrified condition she could scarcely remember what normal was, let alone produce it. "Are you coming over to the house? Everyone's still sick with the flu, you know—" she coughed "—and to tell you the truth, I'm beat after the day I had in the shop.'' She did her best to imitate a hacking cough.

He seemed deep in thought. "No, uh, I was just leaving. I'm on duty in an hour. So I hardly have the time to sit here chatting with you!" He added this as if she'd been the one to stop his car.

As he opened her door, out of the corner of her eye she saw a shadow slip back into the dark shadows of the pine forest. Was it one of the guards? She felt immensely better.