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blinding level it had been at all through yesterday. And Protbornov’s restraint was a relief after the shouting and impatience of the other general who had interrogated her initially, before she’d gotten sick a few days earlier. It was all part of a game they played, she told herself. The problem was trying—against fear, fatigue, and a numbing lack of sleep—to tell which of the roles and threats that she had been exposed to were for effect, which were real, and which, depending on expediency, might be interchangeable.
    The bruises on her body still ached from the roughing up she’d been given on arrival at Internal Security Headquarters by two female Russian guards with sow faces and the physiques of weight lifters—a ritual doubtless intended to set roles and establish for future reference whose place was whose. Then had come the ordeal of hour after hour of demands, threats, and the same questions repeated over and over, always with the implication of further possibilities that her treatment by the two guards had represented a first taste of.
    But she hadn’t given away anything. That was the most important thing that she’d forced herself to recite in her mind, as had been drummed into her by Foleda’s people. “Clam up, deny everything, never admit or confirm anything, even if it’s obvious to everyone and staring you in the face,” one of the UDIA men in the Pentagon had told her. “Because one thing leads to another. The first admission is a step onto a slope that gets slippier all the way to the bottom. It’s like after quitting cigarettes: the only way to stay off is to stay off completely. You don’t fool with even one, because there’s a whole world of difference between no cigarette and some cigarettes. But there isn’t a lot of difference between one and two, or between four and five, or nineteen and twenty. Okay? It’s the same with revealing information: once you make that first slip, there’s no place to dig your heels in and stop.”
    Or could she have given away a lot more than she thought, without knowing it? She had fallen ill for a couple of days—so they’d told her—with an acclimatization problem that affected some people on going into space. She couldn’t remember much about it, but from the way she’d felt when she started seeing things coherently again, she concluded that she’d been under some kind of drug. The doctor told her it was a sedative. But she had been told something about drugs, too, before leaving on the mission . . . she couldn’t remember what. She didn’t have clear recollections of anything right now. All she wanted to do was rest and sleep . . . Everything was too muddled and took too much effort to think about.
    “This is getting nowhere,” the figure next to Protbornov complained—a colonel, younger, businesslike, projecting the image of being ambitious and unprincipled. His name was Buvatsky. “Give us just half a day. I guarantee everything you want to know.” Bluff, Paula told herself. Nice guy-bad guy. Part of the act.
    “Let us hope that extremes won’t be necessary,” Protbornov rumbled. “You agree that you came here to Valentina Tereshkova under a false identity, and with the intention of committing acts of espionage?” His voice was louder this time, evidently directed at Paula.
    She shook her head, feigning even greater fatigue than she felt. “What?”
    “You agree that you came here under a false identity, intending to commit espionage?”
    “I don’t agree anything.”
    “But that much is obvious.”
    “I wish to communicate with a representative of the United Sates government.”
    “You know very well that there is no such person for you to talk to here.”
    “I didn’t say talk to. I said communicate with. That can be arranged.”
    “That is impossible.”
    “Why?”
    “For now, it is impossible. And besides, you are hardly in a position to be making demands. I ask you again, Do you not agree that you came here