Elaine felt any inner resistance she might have mustered collapse in defeat. There was no point in trying to bluff or evade. He knew everything. And the only way he could have known was as he had just intimated: the posthypnotic suggestion hadn’t worked properly; the other Sarda had come out of the process remembering. The whole scheme was blown. . . . She looked up to meet Troon’s eyes as the implication hit her. He seemed to be waiting, as if reading her thoughts and giving her time to put the obvious conclusion together. At least, in his own strangely capricious way, he had shown grace enough to spare her a direct conflict from the beginning.
“He was the other Leo—the one that I talked to,” she whispered.
“Of course. You’ve got your one hidden away somewhere. We’ve no way of tracing him.”
The call had been a trick. She stared at the cup in front of her on the desk, and considered her options now. Troon waited. She could get up and leave, putting herself back in the situation that had been getting more unbearable by the hour; or she could wait and see what kind of alternative there was. Put that way, it didn’t leave a lot of choice.
“Very well, Mr. Troon,” she acknowledged. “What do you want?”
He nodded in a satisfied way; at the same time, his manner became businesslike. “I think you’ve worked out for yourself what happened. I can’t guarantee anything, but obviously your best way to make things easiest for yourself would be to cooperate and come clean. We need to know where the original Sarda and Henry Balmer are now, and how far they’ve progressed with the rest of the plan. . . .”
Elaine had stopped listening somewhere around halfway through what Troon was saying. She gasped barely audibly and slumped back in the chair, shaking her head in protest. For what it meant was that the Leo she thought she had glimpsed again briefly on the screen less than an hour ago, the person she had felt for and wanted to preserve, was the one who now knew her only as a betrayer. Revenge would be his only motive now; restitution, his object. The only Sarda she had prospects of sharing the future with was the one at present in hiding—the one she had come to despise and reject.
All she knew was that she couldn’t face the Leo that Troon was presumably intending to confront her with now. Somehow she was on her feet, as if another power had taken over her body and she were just a spectator of its movements. “I’m sorry, I can’t . . .” She clutched a hand to her mouth. “It’s too much. . . .”
Troon watched, his eyes reading her intently; yet he remained sitting, unmoving. She turned, and the surroundings blurred into a tunnel of confused impressions leading her toward the door; then she was outside in sudden darkness beneath the flashing colored lights, and climbing into her car. She was vaguely aware of starting the motor, backing out from beside the Kodiak, expecting Troon or someone else to run out and stop her. But nothing happened. Then she was back on the roadway and heading in the direction of Lowell center. . . .
When her mind began functioning coherently again, she was through the Trapezium and halfway back to Embarcadero, with no clear recollection of getting there.
16
Sarda burst out of the side room opening off Alazahad’s office just as Kieran turned the overhead light on from the switch by the door. “What do you think you’re doing?” Sarda demanded shrilly, waving his arms in agitation at the door. “You let her go! Now she’ll go straight to Balmer and the other me with the story. . . . And we still don’t even know where they are!”
The outer door opened, and June came in with Mahom. They had been positioned outside in one of the cars lined up on the front of the lot. One press of the recall button on the phone in Kieran’s pocket would have activated June’s number, giving them the signal to pull up behind Elaine’s car to prevent her from leaving. Evidently, Kieran had chosen not to. “What happened?” June asked, sending a puzzled look from him to Sarda.