Sobeskaia tried to wave him away. “It is a complicated thing.”
“Pretend I am a simple man. One who could do you a great deal of harm. Like Stalin, for instance. Pretend you are explaining to Comrade Stalin what you have to do in his very special, secret factory. Explain to the maximum psychopath why you, Comrade Sobeskaia, need more of his money and his slaves to give him what he wants.”
The defector appeared to be more than a little perturbed by the idea of having to explain himself to Joseph Stalin. He looked as though even imagining the encounter could be fatal.
“The rods,” he started to explain, slowly and carefully, “are 6.1 meters long, 30 centimeters in diameter, and solid except for a pair of centimeter-wide shafts running from base of the rod to small chamber 1 meter from nose cone.”
“Nose cone?” Harry said, growing ever more alarmed.
“Of a sort. It is really more of the tapering effect. But this is not all. I am also to place four channels at the base of the model. Each one to be at a point same distance from each other …” He seemed to struggle for words now.
“Equidistant,” prompted Harry. “Equidistant from each other. Like the stabilizing fins on a missile.”
“Yes,” said Sobeskaia, staring at him and nodding slowly. “Just like a missile.”
“Okay, I think I’ve heard enough. You’ve earned your get-out-of-jail-free card.”
He reached up to his ear, unconsciously looking for a press-to-talk headset. Damn it …
He was not plugged into the matrix here. He could not call down air support, or extraction, or backup. Not without physically searching out the people he needed to talk to. He thought he had gotten over that habit after so many years in the past. Apparently not.
“Wait here. No. Come with me.”
He took Sobeskaia by the arm and gave him a push, a little more gently this time, toward Plunkett, who was talking into an old-fashioned phone attached to the wall on the far side of the kitchen. Restaurant staff were still running about, jabbering at each other, all panicking at the mess in the dining room. Plunkett saw him coming and hung up.
“We’ll have a car here in four minutes,” he promised. “I can take care of our guest after that, if you wish. Or would you like to ride along?”
A wave of exhaustion rolled over Harry. “What I would like to do is track down my girlfriend, who is fast losing patience with me, have myself a hot bath and a cold drink, and fall into bed with her.”
Sobeskaia looked alarmed at the thought.
“But I can see our new best friend here won’t be having that,” Harry continued, “so I guess we’ll just crack on, shall we?”
“Yes, let’s,” said Plunkett.
Three of his people pushed through the swing doors, as if summoned at that moment. Two men, one woman, all looking severely disheveled. They took up station around Sobeskaia, unshipped their weapons-no inconvenient restrictions for them, Harry noted-and at a gesture from Plunkett, they all moved toward the exit.
“How did the party go?” said Harry as they left the confusion and carnage behind. “I’m afraid I have to leave early.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” replied Plunkett. “You probably didn’t miss much, though. We had the most awful gate-crashers.”