"You just don't put out hard contracts on reporters, Mr. Conklin," one newsman rapped out. "Every thug in the world knows that."
"They forgot it with Bolles," Conklin replied, as two young men shoved in front of the cameras. One was dark and bearded, the other clean-shaven.
The men marched quickly toward Conklin. A seated reporter, reacting more quickly than the rest, stood to face them, only to back away as he saw what the cameras did not reveal at first: a heavy .45 automatic leveled at Conklin. The bearded intruder produced a museum piece, a long-barrelled naval Luger with a small drum clip. Over angry shouts could be heard the man with the Colt automatic: "They did not forget, you reactionary scum! Nor did they forget in Turin when La Stampa's editor was executed." The accent was German, the features fiercely handsome above a strongly built frame. The camera zoomed in for an extreme closeup, the ENG man holding his camera steady despite frantic efforts by the assembled men to flee. The German turned a wolfish smile on Conklin who was slowly rising, face leaden with apprehension. "And we have not forgotten this man's efforts to seduce Egyptians into a fool's paradise with the dammt Israelis," the German continued, obviously intending to be heard by microphones over the turmoil. He wrenched Conklin's collar, twisted hard. The correspondent's mouth trembled but he did not respond. There was no point in crying, `why me'; a media man who dabbled in Middle-East diplomacy assumed new risks. Conklin knew why him.
"This man must be re-educated," cried the bearded man, waving the Luger to clear a path through the ranks of journalists. Some IRE members were shouting, some lying prone, one actually taking notes as he stared at the unfolding drama. A lithe young woman with long honey-red hair, her ENG equipment shoulder bag emblazoned with the letters of an independent station, backed away, stumbling toward the door at the rear of the room. Her face registered terror.
A second camera angle showed why the room had not emptied quickly: a dozen reporters faced a swarthy young man who guarded the doorway. He held a Schmeisser machine pistol, his lips stretched away from bad teeth in a rictus that could be pleasure or wild hatred.
"Weitergehn, Chaim," the German barked, and the youth at the door whirled, moving into the rotunda beyond the room. A man across the rotunda glanced around, saw the Schmeisser and screamed like a woman. He ran for the glass doors toward the outside. He never made it, as a burst of gunfire from the Schmeisser cut his legs almost in two. At this point the camera angle plummeted; the cameraman had dived for cover.
Another ENG man was of sterner stuff, recording the scene as he followed the two men who herded Conklin. They hustled the correspondent toward exit doors, the German pressing his Colt against Conklin. The honey blonde stumbled again, fell to her knees near the youth withthe Schmeisser as his companions urged Conklin through the exit and into bright sunlight. There the cameraman had stopped, his view momentarily obscured by others.
The blonde woman seemed dazed, reeling up without her equipment bag as the youth waved his gun barrel in obvious warning against any newsman foolish enough to try following the German outside.
Then the woman pivoted, her right elbow ramming deep into the youth's midriff as she forced the weapon muzzle down with her left hand. The Schmeisser loosed a brief hail of slugs, some smashing into a meter-thick bronze cuboid sculpture nearby. The blonde continued her move, the youth holding onto his weapon, providing her with a lever as she spun him crashing against the metal cube. Her own mass added to the impact as the youth faltered face-forward into sharp-edged bronze.
The woman was a flailing, snarling puma, clutching the Schmeisser as she kicked the youth repeatedly in the groin, her free hand a hatchet against his face and neck. She hammered him until he slumped, leaving a sticky splotch crimson against the golden sheen of bronze.
She leaped away with the weapon, kicked her shoes off, fumbled with her prize before scudding it across the floor. "Take him," she cried, snatched up her bag, and sprinted down the rotunda away from the exit.
The screen went blank in the FCC chamber. Wills cut through the excited murmur of his colleagues with, "Those were the segments prohibited by the injunction."
"Je-zus, who's the Amazon," breathed David Engels. "I know some people who could use her."
"So does she, Mr. Engels," was Wills's amused reply.
Then Engels fingers popped again, and this time everyone jumped. "Vercours? That was Vercours?" He was grinning incredulously at the chairman.
A single stately nod.
"Now that Mr. Engels has identified our mystery challenger," said John Rooker with malicious humor, "perhaps he can inform the audience."
"The tapes that were made public are on this reel, if I may go on," Wills put in.
Engels nodded to Rooker. "Then you'll see." "Roll the tape, roll the tape," Everett demanded, irked.
Wills complied. The new scene was from near ground level, just outside the rotunda in the open air. A half-dozen men had taken up positions behind outcroppings of the adobe brown walls of the Convention Center. All were peering down the broad walk. Fifty meters away a uniformed policeman sprawled unmoving, his service revolver glinting just beyond him. The bearded man writhed some distance further, his Luger forgotten. He knelt on the paving, tearing at his belly, then rolled onto his back and tried to stand erect again. The policeman's fragmenting Glaser slug had gut-shot the man. Effectively, he was dead when the slug burst in his peritoneum; but this death was merciless. "Fri-i-itz," the man screamed, thrusting bloody hands aloft.
A second policeman risked a shot: dust spanged from the concrete lip of a shallow pool beyond the dying man. The German, protected by his hostage, reached the pool and tumbled with Conklin into the water. Even at maximum zoom the details were fuzzy, but it seemed that the German hoped for protection in the pool. The water was too near the lip, but slowly whirring near one end of the pool were elements of a monumental sculpture in steel and aluminum.
Jerome Kirk's "Tiered Orbits" was already a noted piece of mobile sculpture, its concentric metal circles glittering red on stainless steel axes as they turned. The piece would have fresh celebrity now. The German wrestled his hostage to the two-story mobile, seemed to be arguing. A faint, "Schnell! Schnell!" sounded among the shouts that punctuated the scene.
The Colt now in his stomach, Wallace Conklin reached up to grasp the outermost of the great metal circles. The German, head twisting furiously around to check the terrain, followed. At the edge of the screen, then, a honey-gold flash heralded the young woman from the rotunda, who had doubled back through the building in a flanking maneuver.
She dived crabwise and rolled twice, cradling her shoulder bag, coming to rest behind a concrete tube that surrounded a small tree near the pool. The earth-filled concrete tube was easily a meter high and two broad; the woman, evidently shaken from impact against the concrete, lay for a moment on her back. Then she pulled the bag onto her abdomen and peered inside it.
The policeman began to curse the crazy reporter, waving helplessly until he saw the German aim in his direction. The .45 is not one of your quicker slugs, but it hits like Reggie Jackson. The cop sought cover.
The bearded man lay flopping and twitching, a fleshy sackful of aimless synapses. Conklin, at gestured orders from the German, managed to climb astride the great metal arc, then hugged it and lay horizontal. The German, too, straddled the metal, the Colt again only centimeters from Conklin's expensive head. For moments the scene appeared frozen, the kidnapper vulnerable to a sniper yet with a peculiar advantage: the slowly rotating sculpture constantly changed his position and his cover while he scanned the area, working out some new strategy. He seemed intent on the busy street beyond.