"Sir Kenneth?" Dorothea said. "Sir ... Ken? His mind?"
"Never mind it," Malone said. "What do I do now?"
Her Majesty said: "Don't worry about anything. And use your own psionic talents. You can catch those dear boys now, you know. You're better than they are."
"Me?" Malone said. "But they've had—"
"Practice, of course," the Queen said. "But you have a talent they don't."
"I do?"
"Well," the Queen said, "you've been calling it 'luck' for years. You're much too modest, Sir Kenneth. If you'll think back, you'll remember that every time you had a bit of your so-called luck, it was because you were at the right place at the right time. There's no other way to explain the fact that you wandered at random through Greenwich Village—of all places!—and just happened to end up at the very same red Cadillac that young Mike was going to come to—before he got there!"
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.