Well, Queen Elizabeth had seemed pretty certain when she'd pointed him out in Dr. Dowson's office. And the fact that she'd apparently changed her mind didn't have to mean very much. After all, how much faith could you place in Her Majesty at the best of times? If she'd made a mistake about Burris in the first place, she could just as well have made a mistake in the second place. Or about the spy's being at Yucca Flats at all.
In which case, Malone thought sadly, they were right back where they'd started from.
Behind their own goal line.
One way or another, though, Her Majesty had made a mistake. She'd pointed Burris out as the spy, and then she'd said she'd been wrong. Either Burris was a spy, or else he wasn't. You couldn't have it both ways.
And if Burris really were the spy, Malone thought, then why had he started the investigation in the first place? You came back to the same question with Burris, he realized, that you had with Dr. O'Connor: it didn't make sense for a man to play one hand against the other. Maybe the right hand sometimes didn't know what the left hand was doing, but this was ridiculous.
So Burris wasn't the spy. And Her Majesty had made a mistake when she'd said….
"Wait a minute," Malone told himself suddenly.
Had she?
Maybe, after all, you could have it both ways. The thought occurred to him with a startling suddenness and he stood silent upon a peak in Yucca Flats, contemplating it. A second went by.
And then something Burris himself had said came back to him, something that—