re 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 was no sound except
for the faint whoosh of their breathing through the gas masks they
were wearing, and the muffled hiss from a tank nearby.

There was no reason why the plan shouldn't work. Malone told himself.

It looked foolproof. But he didn't believe it would work. This was the
time, he assured himself, that his luck ran out. He'd been lucky for
too long, and now the wheel was going to turn and he'd be lost. All he
could do was wait for it, and hope.

Her Majesty had said definitely that this would be the place the
Spooks would hit tonight. She had no doubts about it. And Malone
couldn't think of a single reason why she 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....

His hunch about drugs had been correct, or at least everybody had said
it was correct. Dr. O'Connor had assured Boyd that the deleterious
effects of drugs on psionic abilities had been known ever since the
early days of Dr. Rhine's pioneering work, more than twenty years
before. And Good Queen Bess had admitted the same thing. She never
drank, she said, because on the one occasion when she'd tried it,
she'd lost her telepathic ability, and "My goodness, it was just like
going blind."

Burris had had to put on the pressure, but it had worked. The Queen
had been flown to New York, under psychiatric guard just as soon as
possible after Boyd's phone call, and she'd been able to pick up Mike
Fueyo without any trouble at all as soon as she was within the same
city, and close enough to him.

It doesn't do much good to know where a teleporter _is_, Malone
thought. But it's extremely handy to know where he's _going to be_.
And if you also know what he plans to do when he gets where he's
going, you've got an absolute lead-pipe cinch to work with.

The Queen had provided that lead-pipe cinch. Reading Mike's mind,
she'd told Malone that he planned to raid the sporting-goods store
with the rest of the Spooks that night. Lucky again, Malone thought;
he might have had to wait two or three days before the Spooks set up a
robbery.

But, of course, he might just be riding for some kind of horrible,
unforeseen fall.