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lover,” she said disdainfully. “I am not ticklish.” And she tightened the lock momentarily, warning me to keep to my proper business.
    Then I lifted my right hand and brought it down hard, striking her foot. I was going for a particular bone that would in turn impact on the key nerve. This was at best a difficult trick, and my present circumstance was far from the best.
    But it worked. Her foot stiffened as the pain lanced through it. Involuntarily she drew it away, breaking the lock her legs had on my body. Ready for this, I whipped my left hand about and forward and down to her inner thigh as I withdrew from my prior thrust, giving myself some room. I jammed my thumb into another nerve there.
    Tasha gave a truncated scream of amazement and discomfort, for suddenly her entire leg was numb.
    Now she could not hold me, and I withdrew and scrambled with my legs, pushing my body into a forward somersault. Her hands had to let go, lest her wrists be broken.
    Even as I rolled across her face, I twisted, catching her head. I found my place again and dug into the nerves of her neck, half stunning her. She was helpless, unable to make her own body respond.
    Then I had the respite to reconsider. I had known this woman for three weeks, and had read her many times. Nothing had suggested that she was capable of such an attack. How could I have been mistaken?
    Was my talent going bad, or was there something else?
    I realized that I had to question her, and not politely. But torturing women has never been my notion of fun. How could I get her to tell me what she was surely conditioned never to reveal?
    Well, she evidently had a hankering for terminal sex. Perhaps I could reverse this.
    I assumed the original sexual position, setting her hands loosely against my throat, clinging to my collar.
    But I had pressed the nerves in her shoulders, and now her arms lacked volition; she could not throttle me. I set her legs about me as before; their hold too was ineffective. We had the form but not the substance of her reverse cross lock.
    I thrust into her, as before. “I am about to climax,” I said. “What will you do then?”
    Dazed by my succession of nerve blocks, she responded, “I will strangle you to death.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you represent a threat to the system.”
    “What system?”
    “The established order of Saturn.” This was working well; she believed I was about to die, so her resistance to imparting information was relaxed. Perhaps she even wanted to reveal it, as part of her expiation. “The nomenklatura?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    “How did they get an assassin past the screening process?”
    “They have many moles.”
    A mole. A person who performed some routine office for an indefinite period, then abruptly surfaced as a spy or agent at a critical occasion. Such a person could be conditioned not even to know she was a mole, until the correct circumstance triggered the transformation. That explained how Tasha had eluded my discovery. I read a person's attitude and intent; I could not read what the person did not know.
    Tasha had been conditioned to manifest as an assassin when I, or perhaps any man, entered her body sexually. Obviously she had been well trained for this. I had left my shirt on, giving her the opportunity to use the cross lock; had I been entirely naked, that would not have worked, but she would have used some other technique. There are many ways to kill a naked man bare-handed. Perhaps I was fortunate that she had chosen this one, so that I had had the chance to remember my counter to it.
    So I had foiled the nomenklatura plot. But was that enough? If they could get a mole through Khukov's defenses once, they could surely do so again—and next time it might be a man equipped to kill without warning, with a single strike. I remained vulnerable.
    Unless I found a way to deceive this enemy about the prospects of my demise. Tasha had not been on any fixed schedule; she had manifested as an