“How could I tell you, kid?” he cried. “Why couldn’t you figure it out? Why did you have to go by that goddamn book?”
Two Emergency Service men rushed into the room, stepping over Angelo and Rand’s body as they did. One had a Geiger counter. He ran it along the barrel, then looked aghast at his readings.
“Christi” he exclaimed. “Where are the scientists?”
The scientists were already there, alerted by Angelo’s first call, racing down the hall, John Booth at their head. The burly nuclear physicist saw the blue firing case and almost toppled an Emergency Service man leaping away from it.
“Who was here when this happened?”
An Emergency Service lieutenant pointed to Angelo.
“What was he doing?” Booth asked, indicating Kamal’s corpse. “Was he right next to that blue box?”
He gave a grateful sigh at Angelo’s reply. His first concern had been that the case was protected by a proximity detector that will trigger an automatic response if someone approaches it.
“Okay,” he said to the Emergency Service officer. “Two men on the door.
Everybody else out.”
With Jack Delaney, his mountain-climbing friend from the Livermore Laboratories, Booth squatted down on the floor beside the blue box. He saw the word “CORRECT” glowing on its screen. The dead terrorist, he realized, had been trying either to open the box or to give his computer new instructions. He scrutinized the olive-drab plugs linking the case to the aerial and the bomb. He understood instantly there was no question of disconnecting them.
“What do you think, Jack?” Delaney was an expert on firing mechanisms. “Do we try to get in there with the laser cannon?”
“Suppose it’s pressurized with inert gas.”
Booth nodded thoughtfully. That was a classic technique. Stuff the thing with helium or azote to protect it. If the case was opened and the gas started to escape, a gauge detected the drop in pressure and triggered the firing mechanism.
“We’ll punch a pinhole in it first. Go down to a hundredth of a millimeter and take a reading for escaping gas. If there’s any in there we’ll melt the plastic around the hole with the laser and seal it back up.”
“It’s a risk,” Delaney said, “but we could try it.”
A special NEST truck packed with sophisticated defusing devices accompanied Booth’s teams every time they went into action. Over a dozen times, his anonymous beige van had been flown by Booth’s aircraft from Las Vegas to some menaced U.S. city. Never before, however, had he and his fellow scientists had to use the equipment it contained.
Delaney and his two aides rushed in the truck’s highpowered laser gun with its independent power supply and set it up on the floor beside the case.
Booth sprawled flat on his stomach, aiming the gun at the flank of the case like a kid in a shooting gallery taking aim at a target. He marked with a speck of white paint the point at which he intended to punch a hole in the case, so that Delaney could install just below it his gas-detection device.
Booth took a breath and held it to still the nervous fluttering of his hands. He pressed the gun’s button and sent at the case one powerful jolt of light energy thinner than a pin but powerful enough to cut through the wall of a steel safe. Delaney’s eyes were fixed on the gas detector. The two men waited, not speaking, for thirty, forty-five seconds.
“It’s clean,” Delaney said finally.
Booth exuded an enormous sigh of relief and altered the firing mechanism of the gun to expand his beam. Employing it like a remotely controlled knife, be sliced four cuts two inches long in the form of a square into the case’s side wall. Delaney crept over and inserted a razor-thin scalpel into the top cuts. As delicately as a brain surgeon cutting a tumor from a vital nerve, he tugged on it until the plastic plaque tumbled to the ground.
Booth crawled over and with a high-intensity light peered into the transistored jungle of wiring inside. “My God,” he gasped, “how did the Libyans ever get access to something like this?”
Toward the rear of the case he spotted a pair of wires, one red, one blue.
They were thicker than the wires running into the heart of the box from the keyboard. The positive and negative lead from the power supply, he realized. They could slice them with the laser. He hesitated. No, he cautioned himself. Suppose it’s set to detonate if there’s a sudden drop in the current?
He returned to his slow, thoughtful study of the case’s interior. There was only one way to do it: burn out the computer’s memory bank. You could try to do it with an electromagnetic burst. Or flood it with ultraviolet rays.
Booth rolled over on his back, away from the case. He and Delaney weighed the alternatives. This was not something about which you would want to make a mistake.
“Ultraviolet,” Delaney said finally. “There might be some sensing device in there to pick up an electromagnetic beam.”
Again they sent to the truck outside for their specialized equipment.
Carefully, Booth aligned the objective of the ray’s beam-caster on a clump of plaques of resin covered with a forest of wires, the microprocessor chips that stored the computer’s memory. The two Emergency Service men guarding the door watched, their feelings a mixture of terror and fascination.
Finally Booth pulled back. “Jackl” he ordered. “You double-check that alignment.”
Delaney looked along the objective’s line of fire, studying its projected path intently. The transfixed Emergency Service men watched in horrified silence.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I think we’ve got it.”
Booth activated the machine. For fifteen interminable seconds there was not a sound in the room. Then suddenly a beep-beep-beep came from the case. It was faint and shrill, but to the tense men in the garage it sounded like a roar of gunfire.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” shrieked one of the Emergency Service men, furiously blessing himself. “It’s going off!”
Booth rolled over, the release of tension so great he broke into hysterical laughter.
“It’s not going to do anything anymore. It’s all over!” he roared. “The computer’s gone crazy.” Now he knew there was not even a million-in-one chance it could find its firing instructions.
Outside, the crowds, attracted by the shooting, by the dozen police vehicles cluttering Charles Street, were already pushing up against the police lines, gawking, exchanging excited speculation on what had happened. The media were there, the TV stations with the trucks setting up their cameras and their lights right in front of the warehouse doors, ready to record the statement Patricia McGuire, the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, was completing in the front seat of the Commissioner’s car.
A police ambulance pulled away from the curb, and four patrolmen opened a path in the crowd so that it could get out to West Street. It contained the bodies of Jack Rand and Kamal Dajani, riding off side by side on their last journey, to the police morgue.
Angelo slumped against the side of one of the Emergency Service trucks. He was pale and panting, hyperventilating, skirting along the edge of hysteria where tears and laughter are inextricably mingled. Over and over again he thought of Rand. What could I have done, he kept asking himself, how could I have kept him out of that doorway?
A young black patrolman came up to him, eyes sparkling with admiration.
“Hey,” he said, “terrific job. Hear you really blew that prick away.”
Angelo looked at him blankly, thinking as he did of the other body riding off to the morgue beside Rand. It had been the first time in thirty years as a New York police officer that he had to kill someone in the line of duty.
Bannion pushed through the circle of admirers around the detective and clapped him heartily on the shoulder. “Great work,” he enthused.
“Wonderful. You’ll get a citation for this. I’m going to try to swing you Chief of the Telegraph Bureau.
Get you inspector’s money for what you did.”
The officer in charge of the Emergency Service Squad joined them. “Excuse me, Commissioner,” he said, “but shouldn’t we put some of those yellow-and-black radiation warning signs around the area?”
Twenty feet away, in the circle of television lights, the three men could hear the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information reading her prepared text for the press: “… explosive charge attached to the barrel of chlorine gas has now been deactivated. The barrel will shortly be transported in a bomb-disposal vehicle to the explosives range at Rodman’s Neck for further analysis and ultimate disposal.”
The Commissioner turned back to the Emergency Squad officer.
“No,” he replied. “Just put out the usual `Crime Scene’ signs.”