Malone felt the back of his head. "That," he said, "was luck?" "You got the notebook, didn't you?" the Queen said. "But of course it wasn't luck. It's prescience--the ability to predict the future. You've had it all along, but you haven't been consciously using it. The only way you'll ever catch those boys is to know where they're going to be before they get there." Malone sat down heavily on the couch next to Dorothea. His mind was whirling with a fine, dizzy rapidity. In a few seconds he was going to try and grab the brass ring. "Oh, I'll help you," the Queen added. "Don't worry about that. I think I can pick up Mike's mind, now that I'm closer to him. And if we can figure out what their plans are, and where they're going to be, we can nab them all, Sir Kenneth. Won't that be nice?" "Ducky," Malone said. "Simply ducky. All I have to do is predict the future while you read minds and we both teleport. And Dorothea can sit around sticking pins in dolls, I guess. Or--" "Well, now," the Queen said, "I don't know. Perhaps she just doesn't have that talent. Besides, why would we want to do anything like that? It seems to me--" "Never mind," Malone said hopelessly. "If we're going to do anything, let's get started." * * * * * Twelve hours later, Kenneth J. Malone was sitting quietly in a small room at the rear of a sporting-goods store on upper Madison Avenue, trying to remain calm and hoping that the finest, most beautiful and complete hunch--only now it wasn't a "hunch" any more, he reminded himself; now it was prescience--was going to pay off. With him were Boyd and two agents from the Sixty-ninth Street office. They were sitting quietly, too, but there was a sense of enormous excitement in the air. Malone wanted to get up and walk around, but he didn't dare. He clamped his hands in his lap and sat tight. They waited in silence, not daring to talk. There wasn't a sound in the room. Malone felt like screaming, but he managed to control himself with an effort. There was no reason why the plan shouldn't work, Malone told himself. According to all the theory he knew, it was fool proof. Her Majesty had no doubts about it, either. She assured him that he had prescience, and several other powers as well. Unfortunately, Malone wasn't quite as sure as she was. Even if the theory seemed to back her up, he thought, there was still a chance that she was wrong, and the theory was wrong, and everything was wrong. His hunch--prescience, if you wanted to call it that, he amended--said definitely that this would be the place the Spooks would hit tonight. Her Majesty was quite sure of it. And Malone couldn't think of a single really good reason why either of them might be wrong. But maybe he'd got the address mixed up. Maybe the Spooks were somewhere else right now, robbing what they pleased, safe from capture--