His eyes narrowed into gray slits, which sent a chill up her spine. “You are the wonder, Miss Lambert. Because of your precious fiancé, six good men lie buried in the black dirt of a riverbank. Six! And you’re upset because I left him lying peacefully on the floor of your living room? You say you’re outraged that I dragged you up here against your will? Then tell me, Miss Lambert, where was your outrage when a whole village was trucked like cattle to a place five hundred miles from their homes? Why wasn’t your voice trembling with fury then?”

She rocked back, as though he had struck her, her face drained of color.

“You talk about gall to me?” he said, spitting out the words like red-hot slivers of steel. “When I stick probes into the brain of a six-year-old and send her crumpling to the floor because she was accidently ‘overprogrammed,’ then you can talk to me about gall. And on the day I push the buttons to execute an old man for the highly treasonable act of wanting to be free, then you can fill your voice with horror and talk about my arrogance.”

“I didn’t push the buttons,” Nicole whispered.

“You were there!” he thundered. “Did you try to stop them?”

The blood drained from her face. “I—”

His voice was suddenly deathly quiet. “Did you even so much as protest?”

She looked down quickly and stared at her knuckles, white now as they gripped the plate.

“Did you?”

She shook her head almost imperceptibly.

“Well, so much for offended conscience and flowers in the fire.”

CHAPTER 20

For several moments Nicole stared at the flickering shadows on the pine needles directly over her head before her mind registered where she was. After the blowup at dinner, Eric had worked swiftly to construct a small but snug shelter of pine boughs stacked against an A-frame. He had then laid nearly six inches of additional branches on the ground and rolled out her sleeping bag on top of them. When she had crawled in, she found it surprisingly soft and comfortable and had dropped instantly into a deep sleep.

Now it was full dark, though moonlight filtered through the trees and mixed with the faint light from the campfire. As she lifted up on one elbow, she saw Eric’s dark shape across the fire, dragging a large rectangular-shaped object, and realized that that was what had awakened her. As she watched, he sat down on a rock, leaned over the dark shape, then began to speak.

“Home Base, Home Base, this is Eagle One. Do you read me?”