Stunned, everyone around the table rushed over and inspected the hideous contents of the box. A few reacted like the South African, some reflected shocked horror, others, the ones who had ordered brutal killings during their rise to wealth, stared grimly without displaying emotion at the bloody head of Gabe Strouser, the grotesquely widened eyes, the diamonds spilling from his mouth.
“It seems Strouser’s negotiations were unsuccessful,” said the Japanese, fighting the bile that rose in his throat.
After taking a few minutes to recover, the chairman called in the chief of the Foundation’s security and ordered him to remove the head. Then he faced the members, who had slowly recovered and returned to their chairs. “I ask that you keep what we’ve just seen in the strictest secrecy.”
“What about that butcher Dorsett?” snapped the Russian, anger reddening his face. “He cannot go unpunished for murdering people representing the Foundation.”
“I agree,” said the Indian. “Vengeance must take the highest priority.”
“A mistake to act harshly,” cautioned the chairman. “Not a wise move to call attention to ourselves by getting carried away with revenge. One miscalculation in executing Dorsett and our activities will become open to scrutiny. I think it best to undermine Arthur Dorsett from another direction.”
“Our chairman has a point,” said the Dutchman, his English slow but sufficient. “The better course of action for the present would be to contain Dorsett and then move in when he falters, and make no mistake, a man of his character cannot help but make a grand mistake sometime in the near future.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We stand on the sidelines and wait him out.”
The chairman frowned. “I don’t understand. I thought the idea was to go on the offensive.”
“Unloading his diamond supply will obliterate Dorsett’s reserve assets,” explained the Dutchman. “It will take him at least a year before he can raise gemstone prices and take his profits. In the meantime we keep a grip on the diamond market, maintain our stockpiles and follow Dorsett’s lead by buying up control of the remaining colored gemstone production. Compete with him. My industrial spies inform me that Dorsett has concentrated on gems better known to the public while overlooking the rarer stones.”
“Can you give us an example of rarer stones?”
“Alexandrite, tsavorite, and red beryl come to mind.”
The chairman glanced at the others around the table. “Your opinions, gentlemen?”
The British publisher leaned forward with clenched fists. “A bloody sound idea. Our diamond expert has hit on a way to beat Dorsett at his own game while turning temporarily decreased diamond values to our advantage.”
“Then do we agree?” asked the chairman with a smile that was far from pleasant.
Every hand went up, and fourteen voices gave an affirmative yea.
CATASTROPHE IN PARADISE
Honolulu, Hawaii
A sandy-haired marine sergeant sat in a pair of sunbleached shorts and a red-flowered aloha shirt and drank a can of beer while a movie cassette tape in the VCR played on a television set. He slouched sumptuously on a couch that he had scrounged from one of the two luxury hotels on the Hawaiian island of Lanai that was being remodeled. The movie was an early John Wayne epic, Stagecoach. A virtual-reality headset that he had purchased from a Honolulu electronics store encompassed his head. After connecting the headset into the VCR, he could “enter” the television screen and mingle with the actors during scenes from the movie. He was lying beside John Wayne on the top of the stagecoach during the climactic chase scene, shooting at the pursuing Indians, when a loud buzzer cut into the action. Reluctantly, he removed the set from his head and scanned four security monitors that viewed strategic areas of the classified facility he guarded. Monitor three showed a car approaching over a dirt road leading through a pineapple field to the entry gate. The late morning sun glinted off its front bumper while the rear bumper pulled a trail of dust.
After several months of bleak duty, the sergeant had his routine down to a fine science. In the three minutes it took for the car to travel up the road, he changed into a neatly pressed uniform and was standing at attention beside the gate that barred access through a tunnel into the open core of the long-extinct volcano.
On closer scrutiny he saw that it was a Navy staff car. He stooped and peered in the side window. “This is a restricted area. Do you have permission to enter?”
The driver, in the whites of a Navy enlisted man, motioned a thumb over his shoulder. “Commander Gunn in the back has the necessary entry papers.”
Proficient, businesslike, Rudi Gunn had wasted no precious time in seeking permission to dismantle the huge dish antenna in the middle of the Palawai volcano on Lanai. Unraveling the convoluted thread through the bureaucracy to track down the agency that held jurisdiction over the antenna and then confronting the department that operated the space communications facility would be a month-long expedition in itself. The next chore, an impossible one, would be to find a bureaucrat willing to take responsibility for allowing the dish to be taken down and temporarily loaned to NUMA.
Gunn eliminated the useless red tape by merely having NUMA’s printing department dummy up an official-looking requisition form in triplicate, authorizing NUMA to relocate the antenna to another site on the Hawaiian island of Oahu for a secret project. The document was then signed by several workers in the printing department, on lines under lofty fictitious titles. What normally would have taken the better part of a year, before being officially denied, took less than an hour and a half, time mostly spent in setting the type.
When Gunn, wearing his uniform as a commander in the Navy, was driven up to the gate outside the tunnel entrance and produced his authorization to dismantle and remove the antenna, the sergeant in command of the deserted facility was dutifully cooperative. He was even more cooperative after assessing the exquisite form of Molly Faraday sitting next to Gunn in the backseat. If he had any thought of calling a superior officer for official confirmation it quickly melted as he stared at a convoy of large flatbed trucks and a portable crane that followed in the tracks of the staff car. Authority for an operation of this magnitude must have come from the top of the ladder.
“Good to have some company,” the sergeant said with a wide smile. “It gets pretty boring up here with nary a soul to talk to while I’m on duty.”
“How many are you?” asked Molly sweetly through the rear window.
“Only three of us, ma’am, one for each eight-hour shift.”
“What do you do when you’re not on guard duty?”
“Lay on the beach mostly, or try and pick up single girls at the hotels.”
She laughed. “How often are you able to leave the island?”
“Every thirty days. Then five days leave in Honolulu, before returning to Lanai.”
“When was the last time an outsider visited the facility?”
If the sergeant realized he was being interrogated, he didn’t show it. “Some guy with National Security Agency credentials came and poked around about four months ago. Hung around less than twenty minutes. You’re the first to visit since him.”
“We should have the antenna down and out of here sometime late tonight,” said Gunn.
“May I inquire, sir, where it’s going to be reassembled?”
“What if I told you it was going to be scrapped?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” said the sergeant. “With no repair or maintenance in the last few years, the old dish is beginning to look like it’s been worked over by the elements.”