"Oh, dear," Serena said, putting a great deal of distress into her voice. "This is very important information that you've found. I think I should send one of my employees down there." She accessed flight information and booked a ticket as she spoke. "Could you rent another car, darling, and meet him at the airport?
He's arriving at one-fifteen."
"Si, senorita," Marco answered automatically, transported to the edge of ecstasy by the word "darling."
Serena allowed her voice to go breathy again. "Oh, thank you," she said, putting enough feeling into it to suggest you big, strong, capable man you! was also being said. "One-fifteen, remember." She made a kissing sound and broke the connection.
I shouldn't have enjoyed that so much, Serena scolded herself. But she had and she felt wonderfully wicked because of it. She was also pleased that her first Terminator had returned unscathed from such a successful trial run. She'd program him for Spanish immediately. Serena went to a file cabinet and drew out a folder. Inside were the false documents she'd just received for her first Terminator. Her timing had been excellent. Oh, she thought, proud and pleased, this should be a piece of cake.
She sent a silent command that summoned her most experienced Terminator from its work in the cellar. It came, massive and impassive, smelling slightly of chemicals and mold, standing with an eerie motionlessness before her desk.
"Sarah Connor is in Villa Hayes, Paraguay," she told it. "You will be flown to Paraguay tomorrow. You will be met at the airport in Asuncion by a human named Marco Cassetti. He will take you to Villa Hayes. Have him find out for you exactly where she can be found. Go there. Kill her, kill her son, John, who is sixteen. Terminate any witnesses; this will include anyone Marco Cassetti might have spoken to about Connor. Mission priority is to remain undetected, followed by the termination of John and Sarah Connor. Prioritize your actions according to circumstances."
For a moment she considered having von Rossbach terminated, then decided against it. The last thing she wanted was an organization like the Sector taking
an interest in her affairs.
"Return to the airport in Asuncian," she continued, "park the car in the lot there.
Your return flight is at eight o'clock. Contact me if there are any significant deviations from the plan."
She sat it down and uploaded a Spanish program from her own internal computer. The Terminator would be fluent in under an hour. There was some information on Guarani; she downloaded what was available, as well as a short text on the local customs and political situation. Then it would turn to studying maps of the area.
She'd drive it to the airport herself tomorrow morning. It was still stiff in its manner, but she didn't think it would attract attention to itself.
It just wouldn't make any friends.
VON ROSSBACH ESTANCIA, PARAGUAY: THE PRESENT
Dieter sat in his office in the late afternoon studying the police reports that Jeff had sent him. The light breeze carried a hint of roses from the garden and he looked up and out into the fading sunlight on the whitewashed adobe, enjoying the tremble of bougainvillea for a moment before he returned to his reading.
These were the unadulterated versions of the Sarah Connor file, complete with personal notations in the margins by people who had been there, files the public would probably never see. And he could understand why: they were completely unbelievable.
The first time in her life that Sarah Connor came to the attention of the police for more than a parking ticket was the day that two other women with the same name were shot to death in L.A.
Execution-style hits, he noted. One large-caliber pistol round in the head, then the magazine emptied into the body.
She heard about the second killing on the news and called the police from a nightclub. Dieter smiled at the club's self-consciously clever name: Technoir.
Before the police could get to her there was a shoot-out in the club. Witnesses said that the main aggressor was a very big man in a grubby jacket decorated with chains. They claimed that though he'd been shot multiple times, he got up and ran after two people who escaped from the back of the club.
Kevlar vests were just coming into wide use then, he thought.
The people who ran were Sarah Connor and a man who called himself Kyle Reese. He claimed to be a soldier from the future sent back to protect Connor from a killing machine he called a Terminator.
The next part of the report included a videotape of a man in sunglasses and a leather jacket walking through a police station calmly shooting anyone who got in his way. He did not miss anyone who fired at him and he usually killed anyone at whom he leveled his weapon.
Even I can't do that, Dieter thought, watching the man use an automatic shotgun as if it were a pistol. And I'm better than most with a gun.
He could also swear, though the picture was really too grainy to be certain, that this man was shot by the police defending the station. Dieter shook his head.
One of the few survivors suggested that he was hopped up on PCP. But he seemed too controlled to von Rossbach; there was none of the bug-eyed, teeth-bared wildness that was a trademark of the drug. If the man hadn't been so obviously real, he'd have sworn that this was a CGI animation rather than an actual human being.
Reese and Connor had fled the police station together and taken refuge in a motel. Somehow the maniac, being relentlessly single-minded, succeeded in tracing them—something the police were unable to do until well after the fact.
What followed, according the report, was an extremely violent chase involving a tank truck that was completely destroyed in an explosion.
Connor and Reese then sought shelter in a nearby factory, which was also severely damaged. At the end of the night Kyle Reese was dead, Sarah Connor was hospitalized with various wounds and shock, her mother, her roommate, and her roommate's friend were dead, and there was property damage left in their wake to the tune of almost a million dollars.
Upon her release from the hospital, after what must have been the worst night of her life, Sarah Connor, then pregnant, had gone to Mexico, Central America, and farther south. Eventually she had sought out mercenaries, gunrunners and smugglers, dragging her little boy behind her and talking about the end of the world.
A corner of Dieter's mouth lifted. Well, a lot of those types are crazy, too. She probably fit right in. I pity the poor kid, though.
He picked up the report on John Connor. Trespassing, shoplifting, disturbing the peace, vandalism—he was quite the little hoodlum under his court-appointed foster parents' care. He'd been placed with Todd and Janelle Voight after his mother had been shot and arrested for attempting to blow up a computer factory.
With a sigh von Rossbach put aside the report. Given John's upbringing and the things he'd been taught to believe, there must have been an unbridgeable gulf between him and the Voights. With his mother in an institution and everything in his life a lie, it was no wonder he'd rebelled.
His mind turned to the boy he'd recently met. That young man seemed so centered, so assured. It was difficult to imagine him as a petty thief or the intimate of mercenaries and madmen.
Dieter picked up the other report and read for a while, then flipped to the end, to the section on Connor's raid on Cyberdyne. This time, bizarrely, the man who'd been attempting to murder Connor had been at her side.
The casualty report almost made his jaw drop; the sheer numbers were incredible. Amazingly most had been shot in the leg; none were killed. This /