But the original family still inhabited it, proud of the house and of their part in its past. Over the years, Malone knew, they had kept it up scrupulously, and the place had been both restored and modernized on the inside without harming the classic outlines of the hundred-and-fifty-year-old structure. A fence surrounded the estate, but the front gate was swinging open. Malone saw it and took a deep breath. Now, he told himself, or never. He drove the Lincoln through the opening slowly, alert for almost anything. There was no disturbance. Thirty yards from the front door he pulled the car to a cautious stop and got out. He started to walk toward the building. Each step seemed to take whole minutes, and everything he had thought raced through his mind again. Nothing seemed to move anywhere, except Malone himself. Was he right? Were the PRS people really here? Or had he been led astray by them? Had he been manipulated as easily as they had manipulated so many others? That was possible. But it wasn’t the only possibility. Suppose, he thought, that he was perfectly right, and that the PRS members were waiting inside. And suppose, too, that he’d misunderstood their motives. Suppose they were just waiting for him to get a little closer. Malone kept walking. In just a few steps, he would be close enough so that a bullet aimed at him from the house hadn’t a real chance of missing him. And it didn’t have to be bullets, either. They might have set a trap, he thought, and were waiting for him to walk right into it. Then they would hold him prisoner while they devised ways to.... To what? He didn’t know. And that was even worse; it called up horrible terrors from the darkest depths of Malone’s mind. He continued to walk forward, feeling about as exposed as a restaurant lamb chop caught with its panty down. He reached the steps that led up to the porch, and took them one at a time. He stood on the porch. A long second passed. He took a step toward the high, wide and handsome oaken door. Then he took another step, and another. What was waiting for him inside? He took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell button. The door swung open immediately, and Malone involuntarily stepped back. The owner of the house smiled at him from the doorway. Malone let out his breath in one long sigh of relief. “I was hoping it would be you,” he said weakly. “May I come in?” “Why, certainly, Malone. Come on in. We’ve been expecting you, you know,” said Andrew J. Burris, director of the FBI. 15 Malone sat, quietly relaxed and almost completely at ease, in the depths of a huge, comfortable, old-fashioned Morris chair. Three similar chairs were clustered with his, around a squat, massive coffee table made of a single slab of dark wood set on short, curved legs. Malone looked around at the other three with a relaxed feeling of recognition: Andrew J. Burris, Sir Lewis Carter, and Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch.