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decided yet. I have a house in Maine that’s pretty secluded. Perhaps there.” It was a deliberate ploy. If her people in Maine discovered a sudden new surveillance of the house in the next few days, she would know that Richards could not be trusted.
    The psychiatrist let go of her hand. “I’ll go with him, wherever it is,” he said. “He’s my patient, after all. And—I’d like to be your friend.”
    Jo smiled at him. “Thank you, Gene. You won’t regret it.”
    “I’m going strictly on a professional basis, as Stoner’s doctor. Any personal relationship between you and me…well, let’s just allow nature to take its own course, shall we?”
    “Go with the flow,” Jo agreed, thinking silently, He’s enough of a male to want to think that he’ll pick the time and place. The male ego! How wonderfully predictable!
    “And what happens to Healy?” Richards asked.
    Jo looked into the psychiatrist’s eyes, wondering, Is he asking out of loyalty or out of ambition? Is he trying to show me that he’s loyal to Healy or that he wants the chief scientist’s job?
    “He’ll stay here,” she answered. “He’s a competent administrator, even though I can’t trust him with anything really sensitive.”
    “I see.” Richards tugged at his mustache for a moment, then, “Can I ask you one more question? It’s personal.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Stoner has barely mentioned you, and he hasn’t shown any burning desire to see you.”
    Jo felt ice chilling her blood. “I know that.”
    “Yes. But you haven’t asked to see him, either. Why not?”
    “I see the videotapes.”
    “But you haven’t tried to meet him.”
    “Would you allow it?”
    “I think he could handle it. It might even help to bring whatever he’s suppressing up to the surface. But can you handle it?”
    She finally saw the point he was driving toward. “You mean because we were lovers once, do I still have a feeling about him?”
    Richards nodded.
    “That was eighteen years ago,” Jo said. “I was a kid, a student, and he was a very handsome, very glamorous, very important man.”
    “But you were in love with him then, weren’t you?”
    She hesitated, wondering what she should say. Then, “Frankly, I was using him to get ahead in what was then a highly male-dominated field. He wasn’t very deeply attached to me, and I certainly wasn’t madly in love with him.”
    It was a lie, and she thought she could see in Richards’s eyes that he didn’t believe her.
    But he said, “I see.”
    They both let it go at that.

CHAPTER 7
    The new Director of Corporate Public Relations for Vanguard Industries was An Linh Laguerre. To her, the frozen astronaut was more than a news story, more than a company project. It was a personal quest.
    She had been born twenty-eight years earlier in a refugee camp in Thailand, a few miles from the border of Kampuchea, where Vietnamese troops and hard-eyed Communist administrators were turning the former Cambodia into an unwilling, starving colony of Vietnam. Millions had been killed in the years of fighting and massacres, and millions more had been driven from their homes, struggling desperately over shattered highways and tortuous jungle trails toward the relative safety of independent Thailand.
    Relative safety. The camps were bursting with refugees, sick, wounded, dying. Their rickety, makeshift cabins and improvised tents overflowed with the tide of human misery. Rats fought human beings for scraps of food and often won. People died of simple infections, their bodies too malnourished to fight off the fevers that swept through the pitiful, ragged refugees.
    In the torrid sun and paralyzing humidity of the jungle, amid the squalor and filth, the buzzing flies, the loud voices arguing over a cup of rice, the screams of a woman dying even as she gave birth—in such a camp was An Linh born. Her mother died of malnutrition and exhaustion before the sun set on her first day. A young French Red Cross worker, a