The Touch of Treason Read Online Free Page A

understands the implications of what’s being guarded.” But Randall wondered whether he hadn’t become the instrument of the government’s paranoia. Fuller wasn’t writing of military secrets. He was describing his method of analyzing the past conduct of each member of the Soviet leadership, whose protégé each was, how he’d climbed the ladder. He had studied those people the way good constitutional lawyers study the justices of the Supreme Court so they could try to predict their future actions on given subjects. “Don’t let him die before he finishes,” Perry had said. “Not with what’s at stake.” Randall knew the number of nukes didn’t make the difference. Brains did. He was supposed to guard Fuller’s brain. Perry, always joking, had said, “Your job is to see that Fuller dies from natural causes. After the work is finished.” I’m not God Randall had wanted to shout at him. But he knew what Perry meant. Fuller himself had said In previous centuries terrorists were crazy freelancers. Today they are psychopaths and ideologues trained by governments to traffic in premature death. Randall remembered Perry saying, “The Soviets don’t want Fuller dead. They want to know what he’s telling us. Protect the manuscript first, then the man.”
    But Randall, being human, had his own priorities. Once he had showed up at the house with what he called an interim query from Washington while the Fullers were still at breakfast and he observed with alarm that on a paper napkin next to Fuller’s bowl of cereal, there were eight pills and capsules, none of which he’d had a chance to have tested in the lab.
    “Randall,” Fuller had said, “I’ve been taking mega vitamins for years.”
    Randall had to admit to himself that Fuller, at the age of eighty-two, had the lean, physical vigor of a much younger man.
    “Does Doc know you’re taking these?” Randall asked.
    “Physicians,” Fuller said, “know as little about nutrition as about Soviet affairs.”
    It was then that Leona Fuller said, “Those eight pills are his fountain of youth. See, I take them, too.”
    Randall knew that Mrs. Fuller, that remarkable woman, was not an imitator. She had to be independently convinced of everything. If she was taking all those vitamins, they had to be safe.
    After he finished his present work, Fuller would presumably be free to loaf for the first time in his long life, to travel not out of necessity, as he’d done for the government from time to time, nor on the run, as he’d done long ago when he and Leona had been part of the movement, but to places of their choice where he and Leona could take the sun, or read the best books again, or talk to intelligent strangers who knew or cared nothing about Soviet affairs. He wanted as much time as the higher powers would give him. Ever since he had abjured authoritarianism in all its forms, he’d thought of gods in the plural, the way the Greeks did, male and female, each with a specialty in mortal affairs. Monotheism was too simple. If you examined life long enough, nothing was simple. Except the clock that ticked relentlessly over everyone, tolling each year that would not return.
    Randall knew that the President had once remarked that Martin Fuller looked like he would live forever. The President thought of Martin Fuller’s brain as a national asset of immeasurable worth to which no harm could be allowed to come. But the President’s wish was Randall’s responsibility. Few people knew that Randall had once had part of the responsibility for John Kennedy and then for Robert Kennedy. Randall was a realist; he lived in increasing fear that the successful conclusion of his assignment was ultimately impossible. Yet he found himself envying Fuller when he happened to see him emerge from his study after a fruitful morning’s work, his eyes exuberant with discovery. Fuller’s work gave Fuller life.
    Randall had to put up with Fuller’s teasing. The old man would tell