down a proper highball. The know-it-all who, teetering past the edge of his knowledge, was discoursing about contemporary Chinese politics to his companions-employees?-who politely disguised their resentment.
There were hundreds just like them, all with their peculiar patterns of fascination, boredom, peevishness, and anticipation-daubs from the palette of ordinary human emotion. None of them was the person Ambler was looking for. He knew the type. He couldn't analyze it; he just recognized it when he saw it or, really, felt it, like the wave of cold you feel when opening a freezer on a warm day. It was the glacial deliberateness of the professional killer, the man who was too alert to his surroundings, the man whose anticipation was not simply of what he would witness but of what he would do. Ambler could feel it, always could.
But now-when it mattered most-nothing.
Nothing.
Panic swelled inside his chest, and, again, he pushed it down. He race-walked to the rear of the long hall and mounted the narrow terrazzo stairs to the balcony. In the center, he saw a battery of three stationary cameras and half a dozen irregulars, from media companies across the world. The balcony would be an ideal site for a gunman; it would take relatively little skill to hit the target from such an elevated perch. Ambler met Laurel's eyes-a parched man taking a quick sip from a desert oasis-and then glanced at the others, his eyes seeking out each strange visage.
Nothing.
No twitch on the dowsing rod, no click on the Geiger counter-nothing.
The camera eye could prove his salvation. Wordlessly, he came over to Laurel and took the camera she had prepared for him, the one with the 48X zoom lens. For purposes of show, she had stationed herself at an older twin-lens camera, even more dinged and dented than his. Struggling for calm, he angled the camera head downward with the knobbed level and took in the members of the audience below; the nature of the sight lines meant that an assassin in the audience would have to position himself in the front half of the seating section. This still left five hundred candidates. How had he ever imagined he would have a chance? He felt as if a band were tightening around his chest, as if he were breathing against resistance. To think of the odds-but no, such things were best left to the likes of Clayton Caston. Ambler breathed a different atmosphere. He had to banish self-consciousness, banish rationality.
He could not fail.
If he had been faltering, at least the camera was working just as they had hoped. Its automatic focus provided almost immediate clarity of field.
Don't think. See.
The faces were sometimes in silhouette, often at odd angles, but the camera electronics were sophisticated enough to compensate swiftly for variations in light level, and the level of detail was astonishing. He studied face after face in the viewfinder, waiting for the prickling that would tell him to pause, to look again.
Laurel , standing close behind him, murmured something encouraging at him. "It'll come, my dear," she said softly.
He could feel the warmth of her breath against his neck, and it was the only thing that kept the black miasma of despair from engulfing him. In a world of falsity and pretense, she was the one true thing, his polestar, his lodestone.
It was his belief in himself that was unsustainable. He had peered at row after row, and he could only conclude that his instincts, at last, had failed him. Would someone dart in from the entrance doors at the last moment? Was there a face he had somehow not seen?
Presently a rustle went through the crowd, and he heard the sound of the side doors shutting, locked now to outsiders. The guards would not open them again until after the speech was concluded.
Briskly the founder and director of the World Economic Forum, a tall, nearly bald man with steel-rimmed glasses, strode across the stage to make a few introductory remarks. He wore a dark blue suit and a blue and white tie, the colors of his organization.
Ambler turned around and glanced behind him, where Laurel was standing, tousle haired and beautiful and alert, peering through the eyecup of her own bulky, long-lensed television camera; and he tried to conceal the abyss that he felt in his own soul.
He knew she was not fooled. She mouthed the words I love you, and it was as if a glimmer of light appeared in a long, dark tunnel.
He could not give