"It's all right," Gail said dryly. "We're all kind of mixed up in my family. If we weren't, I wouldn't be here."
"And then," Romero said to me, "just as we had things all set up to catch everybody with the goods-Naldi, your girl, Gunther, everybody-this lady comes wandering into the trap with Gunther. Well, that was all right. More grist for the mill, we figured. Then somebody heaved a knife and everything went to hell. None of my people could get where they were supposed to, the way everybody was milling around. You practically ruined me when I tried a fast retrieve-and who the hell were you? You ran off with the lady and the goods, saving the day for the other side, as it looked to us. Gunther got away in the confusion. Naldi… well, we had nothing conclusive on Naldi, so there wasn't anything we could do but keep an eye on him. He was too big to grab on mere suspicion. It was a mess."
"Tough," I said. "If your chief in Washington had been willing to cooperate with mine, we might all have got to-gather in time."
"Hell, your girl went over," Romero said. "He wasn't going to explain our set-up to you after that, maybe putting us all in jeopardy-me, for instance, making love to that damn mike in broken English. Anyway, there wasn't a damn thing for me to do, afterwards, but take off after you and try to get the films back. I sent a query to Washington on you, of course, but I guess nobody was speaking to anybody by that time."
"What films?" I said. "They were sent off the next morning."
"How was I to know that. You did have them. At least she did," he said with a gesture towards Gail. "I was lying there on the stage, groaning loudly, remember, while they were being passed. Weggann, Carrizozo, the kid said before she died. I hated that. It was a new name to us; I thought it might be a lead. I gave it to Peyton with the rest of it, of course; but he said for me to work on it myself and try to do a better job than I'd done to date. You know that damn, cold, sneering voice of his."
Romero grimaced. "I guess I got over-eager, so here I am."
"How did they catch you?"
"I was watching the filling station. A character in a power wagon drove in and made contact with Wegmann. I followed when the guy left. He came up in this direction. I was doing fine, shadowing him just like the manual says. Then I got stuck in the snow. That damn snow!"
"That'll teach you to follow a four-wheel-drive truck with an ordinary sedan," I said, "and when will you border characters learn the use of chains?"
"When we get enough snow to practice on regularly," Romero said, "instead of just being buried in it once every couple of years. I was busy trying to dig out when they jumped me. They ditched the car somewhere and brought me here. It doesn't make me look very brave and bright, I know. Now let's hear about you."
I told him enough to bring him up to date-enough to make him look curiously at Gail, revising his first opinion of her in the light of the information I'd given him. I guess he'd assumed she was one of us, a pro or at least a loyal and dedicated amateur. She didn't like my telling him so much, but we were all going to have to work together, and it was no time to horse around with the truth out of regard for her sensitive feelings.
"Stop glaring at me and get your hands up front here, glamor girl," I said. "Pull my shirt out of my pants. Make me look real untidy. I don't have far to go, after the way they worked me over down there, I guess."
She gave me a surprised look. "Pull your.. In Heaven's name, why?"
"Don't ask," I said. "Just do… So there you have it, Jaime," I said, pronouncing it Haymie, Spanish fashion.
"The name is Jim," he said stiffly.
"Jesus!" I said. "The bird flies at ten, and I have to consider your tender Castilian pride, Mr. Romero? Call me gringo if it makes you feel better." I glanced irritably at Gail. "Watch it, I'm ticklish there… Now help me work the belt buckle around to the back where I can get at it."
I hadn't thought about it up to that moment. I hadn't let a picture of it form in my mind. I hadn't let the words be part of my vocabulary. There had been no such thing as belt or buckle. After all, Wegmann had been around. If I could think of it, he could.
"Slip it around," I said. "The belt loops are big enough, unless somebody's miscalculated badly. If you hear anybody coming, flop the shirt down over it."
Romero said, "Ten o'clock is the time? It must be well past nine already."
I said, "Of course, something may abort the flight. It sometimes happens. Or the thing may blow up on the launching pad or whatever they fire it from. If so, it'll make quite a bang, from what Wegmann said."
"We wouldn't be so lucky," Romero said. "If they were sending up one of the new ones, maybe, but this is straight routine, I understand, just to give some instruments a ride and check a few tracking procedures."
"I'm surprised they'd shoot at all with all those important people on the reservation."
"There would have been no conflict if Rennenkamp's bunch hadn't postponed a week. Anyway, they're well over to the west, protected by half a range of mountains. I guess somebody figures it's safe to go ahead on schedule. Those old Wotans are reliable as streetcars nowadays."
"What's a Wotan?" Gail asked. "What happens at ten? What are you talking about, anyway?"
"Dear lady," Romero said, "a Wotan is a lousy damn guided missile of the ground-to-ground variety. That is, it's fired from the surface and hits a target on the surface instead of going off to chase airplanes or something. In other words, it's a kind of sell-propelled artillery shell, a great big bullet with a brain. Not the giant intercontinental kind they fire at Canaveral, of course, but big enough. You don't want to be around where it lands. Comprendre?"
"Well, vaguely, but-"
"This particular Wotan," the little dark-haired guy said, "will be armed and sabotaged in certain ways, Wegmann claims… Has he taken you on his guided tour, Matt?"
"No, I guess he thought there wasn't time."
"He showed me around when he first brought me up here. They're all alike, these masterminds. After working under cover so long, they like to share their triumphs with somebody. He's very proud of that thing in the tower."
"So I noticed," I said. "What bothers me is, if it's half as good as he seems to think, why does he want to tell the world all about it? I should think they'd keep it as their ace military secret."
"I wouldn't know," Romero said. "It hadn't occurred to me… He didn't say anything about that. He did say it was going to create a world-wide sensation and impress a lot of people with the power of Soviet science. There's no doubt he's right, if he can really pull it off."
"Can he?" I asked.
"Something's been raising hell with our missile tests down here, for years, off and on. There's never been a really good explanation for it. He claims to be it. If he is… "
Gail said angrily, "Look, I'm just a poor little Texas girl who flunked math and physics. Will you bright, bright men just tell me in words of one syllable what it's all about?"
I said, "Honey, at ten o'clock, if Wegmann's got the time right, that missile will take off and come whistling up the range. A bullet with a brain, Jim just said. A brain that can take orders. Well, our friend Wegmann has a machine that gives orders. You saw it. Now do you understand?"
"But-"
"At a certain number of seconds or minutes past ten," I went on, "that gizmo in the tower will pick up the approaching Wotan and assume control, blanking out all other signals in some way, don't ask me how. Then Wegmann will swing his sights around towards that camp across the valley, full of congressmen and senators and scientific geniuses including Dr. Rennenkamp himself. Even if Wegmann can't see it from here, he's already got the bearing, you heard him say so. I don't suppose his machine is bothered by a little haze. And the big bird, if everything works right, will just ride the beam right down into camp… Can they actually turn one of those things through ninety degrees?" I asked Romero.