The Third Twin by Ken Follett Page A

shock with someone. And Preston could be an astute strategic thinker. “We just have to find a way to control the situation.”
    “Who brought Steve Logan into the university?”
    “The new associate professor we just hired, Dr. Ferrami.”
    “The guy who wrote that terrific paper on criminality?”
    “Yes, except it’s a woman. A very attractive woman, as a matter of fact—”
    “I don’t care if she’s Sharon fucking Stone—”
    “I assume she recruited Steven to the project. She was with him when I met him. I’ll check.”
    “That’s the key to it, Berry.” Preston was calming down now and focusing on the solution, not the problem. “Find out how he was recruited. Then we can begin to assess how much danger we’re in.”
    “I’ll get her in here right away.”
    “Call me right back, okay?”
    “Sure.” Berrington hung up.
    However, he did not call Jeannie immediately. Instead he sat and collected his thoughts.
    On his desk was an old monochrome photograph of his father as a second lieutenant, resplendent in his white naval uniform and cap. Berrington had been six years old when the Wasp went down. Like every small boy in America, he had hated the Japs and played games in which he slaughtered them by the dozen in his imagination. And his daddy was an invincible hero, tall and handsome, brave and strong and all-conquering. He could still feel the overpowering rage that had gripped him when he had found out the Japs had killed Daddy. He had prayed to God to make the war go on long enough for him to grow up and join the navy himself and kill a million Japs in revenge.
    He had never killed anyone. But he had never hired a Japanese employee or admitted a Japanese student to a school or offered a Japanese psychologist a job.
    A lot of men, faced with a problem, asked themselves what their father would have done about it. Friends had told him this: It was a privilege he would never have. He had been too young to get to know his father. He had no idea what Lieutenant Jones would have done in a crisis. He had never really had a father, just a superhero.
    He would question Jeannie Ferrami about her recruitment methods. Then, he decided, he would ask her to have dinner with him.
    He called Jeannie’s internal number. She picked up right away. He lowered his voice and spoke in a tone that his ex-wife, Vivvie, used to call furry. “Jeannie, it’s Berry,” he said.
    She was characteristically direct. “What the heck is going on?” she said.
    “Could I talk to you for a minute, please?”
    “Sure.”
    “Would you mind stepping into my office?”
    “I’ll be right there.” She hung up.
    As he waited for her, he wondered idly how many women he had bedded. It would take too long to recall them one by one, but maybe he could approximate scientifically. It was more than one, more than ten certainly. Was it more than a hundred? That would be two point five per year since he was nineteen: he had certainly had more than that. A thousand? Twenty-five per year, a new woman every two weeks for forty years? No, he had not done that well. During the ten years he had been married to Vivvie Ellington he had probably had no more than fifteen or twenty adulterous liaisons in total. But he had made up for it afterward. Somewhere between a hundred and a thousand, then. But he was not going to take Jeannie to bed. He was going to find out how the hell she had come into contact with Steve Logan.
    Jeannie knocked at the door and came in. She was wearing a white laboratory coat over her skirt and blouse. Berrington liked it when the young women wore those coats as dresses, with nothing else but their underwear. He found it sexy.
    “Good of you to come by,” he said. He drew out a chair for her, then pulled his own chair around from behind his desk so there would not be a barrier between them.
    His first task was to give Jeannie some plausible explanation for his behavior on meeting Steven Logan. She would not be easy to fool.