Quickly they took up positions to cover one another in the hallway, and one crept silently down the hall towards the stairway door. This route took him directly past the open door in which Bettancourt lounged with the surviving staff, but all areas were covered by cameras and all of the agents had earpieces connecting them with Riggs and Moosic. It was rather easy to time the quick dart past the door under those circumstances.
The agent heard the voices of Stillman and Cline, and hurried to remove the debris piled up against the access door. It could not be blocked with desks or other heavy objects, since it opened in towards the stairwell.
A small horde of similarly clad agents came through and quickly took up positions to cover all avenues of entrance or escape. Two agents took positions on either side of the door to the hostage room, while others stood poised at the entrance to the command center. They were prepared to move immediately if Cline or Stillman came out and discovered them, but now they waited until the cameras, which the terrorists had left intact to demonstrate their control, told them when Bettancourt would be most vulnerable.
They didn’t have long to wait. The big terrorist grew annoyed at a woman sobbing in the back, got up from his perch atop a desk, and started to walk back to the small crowd, snarling, “Shut that bitch up or I’ll shut her up for good!” At that point his full back was to the door, and Riggs shouted, “Kill him!” through the agents’ earpieces.
The two agents converged as one, and pulled their triggers. The semi-automatics were well silenced—there was a muffled sound like furniture being pulled across a floor, and Bettancourt went down, his back a bloody mess. He never even knew he’d been had.
The hostages began shouting and screaming, and this brought Stillman out of the command center, gun at the ready, moving fast enough that he went right past the agents flanking the door. When he saw what he was facing, he tried to bring up his rifle, but he was quickly cut down.
At the same time, the two flanking the door entered the command center to see a surprised-looking Dr. Cline and an equally surprised Silverberg staring back at them in amazement. Cline was clearly not armed, but she suddenly looked stricken, then cried, “No!”, and popped something into her mouth. They reached her almost immediately, but it was too late. The pill was designed for a very quick death.
Silverberg rose from the chair and looked over at the two agents checking the limp form, and he shook his head sadly in bewilderment. “Why?” he asked softly, of no one in particular. “In God’s name, what would drive someone to this?’’
It took far less time to clean up the mess than to try to sort out what had happened and why. Teams of specialists interrogated the surviving staff workers, who were then hustled off to secure medical facilities, but on the work level there were no physically wounded people—all were either alive or dead. Admiral Jeeter had come down personally in a helicopter to discuss the final stages.
Silverberg had refused all attempts to get him to leave, although he patiently gave his account and his reactions to the clean-up team. With Moosic and Riggs, he went through the command center instrumentation checks and established what he could.
“There’s no question that the two of them went downtime,” he told the security men, “although they seem to have missed their target by a matter of ten days. Ten days early, I would think.”
Riggs nodded. “We were able to create a power drain, operating on the theory that it’s Marx they want to see.”
The physicist sat back and thought for a moment. “I see. So they are now faced with the choice of waiting ten days or returning here. They destroyed the spare suit here, so I assume that you intend to use the one coming back tomorrow morning to go and get them.”
“That is precisely the plan,” Jeeter replied. “How soon can the other suit be charged up enough for a try?”
Silverberg went over to the time suit that remained crumpled on the floor and, with the help of Riggs, pulled it out to its full length and examined it. “The electrical system on this one is shot to hell, but if we have any luck at all in this business, we might salvage the power pack. I would get this up to technical services in a hurry, gentlemen. If we can salvage that much, then we might be able to insert the batteries from this one into the returning suit. It would be a jury-rig, but it might work. If so, we could turn around in, oh, six or seven hours. If not, we would have to wait for the other suit to recharge, and that would cost three or four days.”
“Too long,” the admiral told him. “Six hours I can sweat out, but no more.” He gave the instructions to his aides to get the suit upstairs in a hurry. “This equipment— you’re certain we can’t just pull the plug on them?”
“We could, but they would still have their two weeks, and if we break off the power, we will have no way to monitor them. They could cause a great ripple, perhaps change everything, and we would never even know they did it. Not that it would do us much good to know, but at least we might be able to rest easy if we detect no ripple,” the scientist responded. “No, I would let them go.”
“Then I have no choice but to send somebody back,” said the admiral. “I’m going to have enough grief from this without being accused of letting them get away with this. Besides, there is something unsettling about this whole operation, far more than the penetration.”
Silverberg nodded. “Yes, I think I know what you mean. They acted like they knew the outcome in advance. What could convert dear Karen to such dedicated fanaticism? Surely she had every background check, was under near constant surveillance, passed lie-detector tests—all that, as we all have. I am not saying that she couldn’t somehow fool the system, but she seemed genuinely torn here. She was acting against every instinct, every shred of decency or humanity she felt, yet she felt such conviction that she not only went through with it but died rather than face interrogation and reveal anything. She would have cracked.”
“That’s the most unsettling part, Doctor,” Ron Moosic put in. “I got the same impression of her, just watching her in the monitors. It took a supreme act of will for her to go through with what she did. I have to agree that she would have cracked—and anybody good enough to fool all the security we have wouldn’t have cracked under any conditions. Sandoval said to me that what was at stake was the survival of the human race. At the time, I passed it off as radical rhetoric, but maybe he meant it.”
Jeeter looked worried. “You mean that this isn’t the only time project?”
Silverberg thought it over. “I think it is—now. But suppose, Admiral, that ‘now’ isn’t really ‘now.’ We’ve gone through this in theory for the past few years, you know. Suppose the leading edge of time isn’t right now, but some time in the future? How far? Ten years? Fifty? Five hundred? With cheaper energy, perhaps from sources we don’t even understand at present, and better technology…” He paused a moment. “No, that wouldn’t make sense. If that were true, then they would do their own temporal dirty work, not depend on some silly radicals.”