Ace in the Hole Page 0,98

head as if hearing the acclimation for the first time. He shook his head in feigned bemusement.

Puppetman exulted. Gregg channeled a portion of the stolen response into himself. He gasped at the pure, undiluted strength of it. He raised his hands for quiet as Puppetman loosened the strings slightly-it took long seconds before he could be heard at all over them.

His voice was choked. "Thank you. Thank you all. I think mavbe Ellen deserves to be your nominee; she's worked as hard or harder at this, even when she was tired from the pregnancy or a little sick in the mornings. If the convention doesn't want me, maybe we'll place her name in nomination instead."

That brought more applause and outright cheering, sprinkled with sobbing laughter. All the while, Gregg gave them a wan, strained smile that had nothing of Puppetman in it. Part of him seemed to be simply, scornfully, observing.

"I just wanted all of you to know that we're still in this fight despite everything. I know Ellen is watching this from her room and she wants me to thank you for your sympathy and your continued support. Now, I'd like to get back to her myself. Ms. Sorenson will answer any other questions you might have. Once again, thank you all. Amy-"

Gregg raised his hands in salute; Puppetman yanked hard. They cheered him, tears streaming down their faces. He had it all back.

It was his, now. He knew it. Most of him rejoiced.

2:00 P.M.

The sound of a soap filtered through the cardboard and cottage-cheese stucco walls of the cheap motel room. On the screen of the room television a pretty young joker woman with bright-blue skin was trying to guess the password from Henry Winkler's clues. Wrapped in a cheap, stiff housecoat her mysterious benefactor had bought on sale at Kmart, Sara sat on the end of the bed and stared at the screen as if the images on it mattered.

She was still trying to pull together the broken glass pieces the news flash had left in her belly. The wife of Senator Gregg Hartmann has miscarried in the wake of her tragic fall... The senator was bravely containing his grief as he fought for political survival on the convention floor. Just the sort of persevering spirit America needed to carry her into the nineties, or so the commentator's tone seemed to say. Or had that just been the blood in Sara's ears.

Bastard. Monster. He sacrificed his wife, his unborn child, to save his political hide.

An image of Ellen Hartmann's face surfaced through the shrouds she laid over her memories of the W.H.O. tour. A wan, brave smile, knowing, forbearing ...infinitely tragic.

Now she lay broken and near death, the child she had so desired lost.

Sara was never the strident kind of feminist who saw every human interaction in terms of grand collectives, political synecdoche wherein a man was Men and a woman, Women.

Yet this struck her deeply, offended her on some primal level. Angered her: for herself, for Ellen, for all of Hartmann's victims, yes, but especially the women.

For Andrea.

There was a thing the man who had hurried her from the hotel last night as the police cars wailed their red-and-blue way to the latest battle scene, had suggested when they talked in the early hours of this morning. She had promised to consider it before he left about whatever errands he had to tend to-not even reporter's curiosity made her really want to know. Because his suggestion was natural enough, she supposed, for a self-confessed Soviet spymaster. But it shocked a Midwestern girl, transplanted into the neurasthenic garden of the New York intellectual set, even one who prided herself on her case-hardening in the streets and back rooms of Jokertown.

But still, but still... . Gregg Hartmann had to be stopped. Gregg Hartmann had to pay.

But Sara Morgenstern didn't want to die. To follow Andi oh-so-ungently into that night she could not believe was good. That was the covert caveat of George Steele's suggestion, neither hidden nor overtly stated.

But what, what chance do I have with that--thing--after me? The laughing, twisted leather boy, who humme to himself and walked through walls. She could not hide forever. And when he found her. .

She shook her head, whipstinging her cheeks with the ends of her hair, blinded by hot sudden tears.

Onscreen the blue woman cleaned up in the End Game. Sara hoped it made her happy.

3:00 P.M.

"Stop it." The steady angry flipping of the magazine's pages ceased.

"Why?" Blaise's tone was