< previous page page_334 next page >

Page 334
stream, and one of the people most responsible for this potential catastrophe sits beside me, laughing like a crazy man.
Karmann said abruptly, "You look at me as though you would like to kill me."
"There's no point in talking about it," Morgan said curtly, turning to regard the slowly moving traffic around them. The van window was higher than the car next to them, a Porsche. The driver had his seat belt buckled, but his trousers belt undone, a victim of vanity over comfort, obviously. A boomer apparatchik, car phone to his ear. A prick, Morgan thought. How fast does that Porsche go, Mac? It doesn't matter, because three times faster still wouldn't get you out from under the fallout of an eighty megatonner.
"They amuse you, your countrymen?" Karmann asked.
"Was I smiling? No, my countrymen do not amuse me. No more than yours do." Morgan found it difficult to be civil.
Karmann nodded at the stream of cars. "I sailed once with an East German naval commander who was convinced that all the colorful and neat cities full of modern cars and prosperous-looking people that appeared on Western television were maskirovka, all pure propaganda, meant to deceive the people in the East. He stopped watching years ago, even though he loved the television story about Dallas. Watching Western programs corrupts the socialist soul, he said. Imagine that."
I suppose Karmann is trying to tell me something, but I'm damned if I'll listen, Morgan decided. Instead, I'll let myself think about Anna. What would life have been like in the house in Leesburg with Anna there? He tried to imagine it, to see her meeting him at the door, feeding Tripoli, watering the shaggy garden, making love with him in his bed, sheets rumpled and warm, laughing and crying and just plain living together.
But Joan's face kept intruding on the domestic images, and the pain of her loss was as strong as ever. Anna Neville was not a domesticated woman, and Morgan doubted that she ever had been. Her life had been so different from his that they had

 
< previous page page_334 next page >