Summit by Richard Bowker Page A

Culpepper was trying very hard not to smoke. His hands were playing with a book of matches, going through the comforting gesture of lighting up until he willed them to stop at the last possible instant. Watching him didn't make Fulton feel any less nervous. "This is all top secret, of course," Culpepper said. Telling secrets probably didn't help Culpepper's state of mind. "We have a source of information who is present when Borisova does this thing that she does. There is apparently a kind of dialogue that takes place at the same time to give the targeted person a rational basis for believing in his so-called conversion."
    "The dialogue is hardly sufficient to account for what we have observed, however," Williams was quick to interject. "And this source has provided us with the names of some of the people Borisova has 'converted.' Lawrence?"
    Another slide, another face. This one lean, pale, self-confident.
    "Archibald St. Crispin," Williams said. "Second Secretary at the British embassy in Moscow. You may have read about his defection a couple of years ago."
    Fulton hadn't. Williams gestured, and another face appeared. Thick glasses, thin black hair brushed straight back.
    "How about this fellow?" Williams asked. "Howard Morrison. A State Department trade official who visited Moscow eighteen months ago. By the time he came along we had our source of information in place, so we knew about him right away. We caught him passing government secrets to a Soviet embassy official here in Washington. We interrogated him afterward, and he really had become a convinced, dedicated communist—as a result, so he maintained, of an afternoon's discussion in some Russian's apartment. He's in prison now, and we've watched carefully to see how complete his conversion has been. Believe me, there's no evidence that the effect wears off with time."
    Williams paused again, and again Fulton wondered what he was supposed to say, what the meeting was leading up to. "I don't understand why this makes her the most dangerous person in the world," he remarked.
    "Because, Mr. Fulton, we don't know what she's capable of. Because we don't know how to stop her. Basically, because we don't understand her power. And until we do, this woman scares me more than any number of nuclear warheads."
    "But what about the scientist—Trofimov? Wouldn't he be the one to worry about? After all, it's his machine."
    Williams nodded to Houghton. "We have studied Trofimov and his hyperspace amplifier just as much as it's possible to study them," Houghton said. "We stole the plans and built our own. We hired psychics and tried to make it do what Valentina Borisova apparently makes it do. We had leading scientists study every word the man has written. In fact, the machine doesn't work. It can't work."
    "In fact," Williams said, "Professor Maxim Trofimov is a crackpot, and his machine is a bunch of junk. I know a good deal about these things, Mr. Fulton, and he espouses just about every loony and half-loony idea out of pop parapsychology, from pyramid power to charged ion beams to the ganzfeld. We can't make it work, and he couldn't make it work either. Until he found Valentina Borisova."
    "She's the key," he continued excitedly. "Why her? Is she just some sort of genetic freak-—a sport of nature that can't be replicated? We know her mother was involved in a nuclear accident out in Siberia while she was pregnant with her. Or is there something more going on? Did she train herself, for example? Can she train others? Lately she seems to have been less successful. Why? We have to find out. And if we can't find out, at least we have to keep the Soviets from using her. Which means we have to get our hands on her."
    At the word "hands," Fulton noticed, Culpepper looked down at an almost-lit match, and once more caught himself in time. Fulton had to look away. "You want her to defect," he said.
    "Precisely," Williams agreed. "And that's where you come in."
    Fulton waited.
    "Our