They quickly pulled themselves into the hail and replaced the grate. They hid the grappling hook and ran to an open winding stairway. Chameleon cautioned O’Hara to wait. They looked up and saw a camera shake its head Lack and forth, slowly scanning the staircase and the hail above. As it swept away, toward the hallway, Chameleon ran up the stairs and stopped directly under the camera. He stood with his back against the wail as it moved silently overhead, pointing back toward the stairwell. Then he ran the rest of the way down the hail to a fire door. The locker room was just inside. He had to make a move before the camera completed its swing back, If there was someone in the hallway on the other side of the door, they were in trouble.
He opened it and stepped through. The hallway was empty. Behind him, O’Hara dashed to the spot under the camera and waited until it swung back and then ran to the doorway.
They ran to the locker room and jumped through the door. A man was standing in front of them.
Outside, Eliza and the Magician had driven to the top of the mountain to a point where the road curved close to the edge of a precipice. Eliza pulled off to the side and parked. They could not see into Dragon’s Nest from there, but the Magician was sure the reception would be excellent. He was sitting in the back of the van before three built-in videotape decks and monitors, twisting dials, looking for the signal. There was nothing but static.
‘They’re not in there yet,’ he said.
‘I just hope when they do get in they get it done and get their fannies out of there,’ Eliza said.
‘I just hope they don’t run into one of those sumo wrestlers they have as guards. Four hundred pounds of bad news.’
They had left a Toyota parked near the bottom of the mountain. If they were being chased when they left, Eliza would take the tapes and switch to the car. O’Hara, the Magician and Chameleon would stay with the truck and lead pursuers away from her.
It was O’Hara who had realized that they only needed to get some tape of the pumping system on Midas to prove that AMRAN had stolen the plans. That and the existence of the Midas field itself would be enough for them to justify blowing the AMRAN story wide open.
The Magician looked at his watch.. They had been gone an hour. That’s how long Chameleon had estimated it would take to get into the control-panel corridor behind the big map. The Magician would monitor the video screens in the truck and record anything that was shown. Each of the transmitters was set to beam its signal at a different frequency so the pictures would not overlap. He couldn’t think of anything they had forgotten,
The man in the locker room appeared to be in his fifties. His eyes were faded, his skin was creased with age and his white hair was as thin as wisps of cotton.
‘You’re early,’ he said in Japanese.
‘Yes,’ Chameleon said quickly, ‘there is a problem with one of the air conditioners.’
‘It takes two of you? My, times have changed. It is much too extravagant for a janitor like me. Good night. Don’t work too late.’ He left.
‘Close,’ said O’Hara.
‘Let us hope he does not mention it to anyone on the way
‘What next?’
‘Check the open lockers. The fixing men usually leave their internal ID badges on their coveralls,’ Chameleon said. There were several, and the members of the maintenance crew obviously were not as large as those on the security force. They both found coveralls that fit.
Chameleon handed O’Hara a hardhat and said, ‘Put this on. Keep your head down so the cameras will not see your face. If you see anyone, just nod and go on.. You will find there is little conversation up above. We will go to the top of the stairs and enter the main floor. The map room is immediately to your left, and the corridor leading behind the map is next to it. We are lucky. We do not have far to go.’
‘We hook up, check the map room to make sure the cameras are scanning what we want and then split,’ O’Hara said. ‘No hanging around rummaging through wastebaskets, okay?’
‘I will try to control myself.’
Getting behind the map was a piece of cake. The main corridor was empty and the door was unlocked. The wall was a myriad of TV monitors.
‘It’s going to be tough to find the monitors for the map room,’ O’Hara said.
‘They are marked. See.’
Each of the boxes had its location written on the frame with a felt-tip pen. Checking the inscriptions, O’Hara and Chameleon had no trouble locating th monitors for the two scanners in the map room. They hooked a tiny alligator clamp attached to a thin wire on the ‘video out’ lug of each of the monitor boxes and plugged in the transmitters, which were three by five inches, and an inch thick. The wires connecting the clips to the transmitters were long enough to permit O’Hara to slide the boxes out of sight under the monitors.
Then O’Hara noticed another interesting monitor. It was for the scanner in Garvey’s office. O’Hara hooked it up, too.
‘Okay, let’s check the game room once and get out of here. And let’s hope they’re picking up something outside.’
In the news van, the Magician slowly twisted the small fine-tuning knob on one of the monitors. Suddenly the picture popped in. He was looking at the room Okari had described. The map was easily thirty feet high and twenty feet long. Recessed in it were a dozen diod screens. The camera was moving and the Magician watched ii pan across the room and back. He tuned the other two. One of them was a stationary shot of an office. A small man with a waxed moustache was talking on the phone. The Magician recognized him from O’Hara’s description. It had to be General Garvey.
‘We got it, Lizzie. You’re not gonna believe this. We got two different angles on the map.’
‘Can you see Midas?’
‘Yeah — but the camera’s still mowing. O’Hara’s got to get in there now and freeze it.’
He tuned the sets as sharply as possible. The camera swept to the centre of the room and then started back.
There it was. There were four screens on the Midas location. Two exterior and two interior.
‘Incredible!’ said the Magician.
‘Do we have sound?’
Voices murmured in the map room.
‘Yeah. And a million-dollar picture on all three—’
He stopped in mid-sentence. He was listening to Garvey.
‘Quill. Nine twenty-five, April 8_ 730-037-370. Red urgent. We have not heard from you for twenty-four hours. It is important you make contact immediately.’ He hung up.
‘Well, I’ll be damned. We just got a bonus,’ the Magician said.
‘What?’
‘We got Quill, on film. And guess who it is?’
‘Hooker?’
‘Garvey.’
‘How do we get to the cameras?’ O’Hara asked. ‘Aren’t they pretty high up?’
‘There is a ladder with wheels iii the map room. There will be four men there, five at the most, and they won’t pay any attention — they’ll be too busy. It is from this panel that all the machines on Midas are controlled.’
‘We just walk right in, that it?’ O’Hara said.
Chameleon nodded. They entered the big room. O’Hara was stunned at the size. Then, on two of the diod screens, he saw Midas for the first time.
The exteriors were both eerie. Gray soundless pictures under the sea. One was the dish, a saucer under water with its superstructure hanging down toward the bottom of the ocean.
The other was even more bizarre. A long line of rusted ships, settled deep in the sand, wavered before the camera. Powerful underwater searchlights peered through the murky water, etching the forms and shapes. One of the screens showed a close-up of the pumping station, the heart of the entire system.
There it was, the evidence they needed, in living colour.
Four men were at work at the enormous console. One of them glanced back over his shoulder as they entered the room, then turned back to whatever he was doing. Chameleon rolled the eighteen-foot ladder in place under the cameras. Since there was no way for him to check the parameters of the two cameras, he wanted to make sure one of them was aimed at the crucial part of the map, the TV close-up f the pumping station. And there was no way for them to know for sure whether the transistors were working. At this point ‘they were playing it by ear.