d importance in
separate little piles.

"Next time you tear up the pea-patch," she informed him resentfully,
"I'm going to get in some help." She eyed him with somber speculation,
added, "I hear the Sec-Gen turned in early last night."

"You've got big ears," said Lindsay.

"I get around," she said. "I'm supposed to keep tabs on you, boss."

"Then you must know someone tried to kill me early this morning when I
came back from Natchez."

Nina's eyes narrowed alarmingly under the glasses that covered them. She
said, "Why didn't you report it?" She sounded like a commander-in-chief
questioning a junior aide for faulty judgment.

"I won," Lindsay said simply. "There was no danger."

"Who was it?" she asked. And, when he hesitated, "I'm not going to shout
it from the housetops, boss."

"It was Pat O'Ryan."

"_You_ handled _Pat_?" she asked, apparently astonished. Something in
her tone told him Nina knew his would-be assassin.

"Why not?" he countered. "It wasn't much of a brawl."

"But Pat...." she began, and hesitated. Then, all business again, "We'd
better get at some of this. You have a date to be psyched by Dr. Craven
at two o'clock."

"What for?" he asked, startled.

"Routine," she told him. "Everyone connected with UW has to go through
it. But cheer up, boss, it doesn't hurt--much."

"Okay," he said resignedly. "Let's get to work."

While he dictated Lindsay found himself wondering just who was paying
Nina's real salary. If she were a spy for the same group that had sent
O'Ryan to kill him, his position was delicate, to put it mildly. But for
some reason he doubted it. There were too many groups working at once to
make any such simple solution probable.

When she departed briefly to superintend a minor matter out of the
office, he found himself staring at the wastebasket by his tilt-chair. A
heart-shaped jewel-box of transparent crystoplastic lay within it.
Curious, Lindsay plucked it out. It had evidently held some sort of
necklace and bore the mark of Zoffany's, the Capital's costliest
jeweler. Within it was a note that read: _For Nina, who lost last
night--as ever...._ The signature was an indecipherable scrawl.

Lindsay stuck the card in his wallet, returned the box to the
wastebasket. Who in hell, he wondered, would be sending this sort of
gift to his slatternly thick-bodied secretary. The answer seemed
obvious. The sender was her real boss, paying her off in a personal way
that would obviate