“You're opening a lock?” Reid asked.
Zerkel grinned. “Something like that, only it's electronic, and I'm just guessing that there's a circuit internal to the new module that makes up an encoded receiver. Input the correct sequence of digital pulses, and the module will spit a signal out the other end.”
“A signal to do what?”
“Trigger an explosive in the engine,” the engineer said. “Maybe confuse the heat sensors into believing the engines are running too cold. If the heat builds past a critical level the turbine could fail. Might swallow a blade, blow the engine apart.”
“But would it bring down the plane?”
Zerkel nodded.
Reid thought it out, careful to keep his excitement off his face. “Once you get the transmitter built, how will you know it works?”
“Simple. I'll tie into InterTech's circuit simulator and see what happens when I push the button. If the frequency is right, and I can hit the proper digital sequence, we'll see an output.”
“Then what?”
“That's up to you, Mr. Reid. But if it works, and if the Japanese have installed these modules in all the heat sensors Guerin got from us, you'll be able to do the same thing the Japanese can do. And that's to bring down Guerin airplanes. What do you think about that?”
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“We've got the bastard nailed,” Phillip Joyce said, coming back into the autopsy theater at San Francisco General. He and McLaren had stayed with Dr. Shepard's body from the moment they'd found it on the houseboat.
“Did you talk to ballistics?” McLaren asked. He was having a cup of coffee with one of the lab technicians. The autopsy was finished, and the body had been zippered up in plastic and put in a refrigerated drawer.
“The bullet dug out of her skull was fired from the Beretta we found in Zerkel's apartment. No doubt whatsoever.”
McLaren nodded tiredly. The sun was just coming up. It had been a very long night, and the new day stretched ahead of them. “They found semen in her vagina, O-positive. Same as Zerkel's blood type.”
“He raped her, then killed her?”
“No. He killed her first then raped the body,” the lab tech, an older man, said. “Couldn't have been very pleasant, no lubrication.”
“Ah, shit,” Joyce said, turning away in disgust.
“We'll put out an APB on him,” McLaren said. “But I'm wondering if this has anything to do with Tallerico's murder.”
“We'll ask him,” Joyce snarled. Two years ago his fifteen-year-old daughter had been raped by her boyfriend. As a result, Joyce had developed a special aversion for that type of crime.
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Zerkel started by drawing the transmitter wiring diagram on layout paper. He took care to trace and retrace each element of the circuit to make absolutely certain there were no mistakes before transferring it onto a sheet of etch-resistant rub-on paper and then transferring that onto the copper side of a blank printed circuit board twenty inches on a side. He was a design engineer, not a technician, so he wasn't used to working with his hands. But he understood the theory, and he forced himself to slow down, to take his time.
Across the hall in the bathroom he'd set up a plastic dishpan in the bathtub for the etching solution of ammonium persulphate. The solution had to be kept at a temperature between 90 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit, so Zerkel rigged an ordinary heat lamp just above the pan. It took him a couple of hours before he got the height of the lamp just right to keep the etch bath at the proper temperature. Once that was done he added a small amount of mercuric chloride crystals, which served as an activator for the bath, and placed the circuit board into
the solution, holding it with a set of long wooden tongs so that he could keep the board in continuous motion. Where the etch-resistant wax was laid down on the circuit board, the copper would be untouched by the chemical. Everywhere else on the board the copper would be eaten away, leaving behind a complicated web of interconnected copper strips that made up the wiring of the transmitter circuit.
His brother was watching him. “How long do you have to keep that shit up?”
“About an hour.”
“Then what?”
“Wash it with water, dry it off, and start wiring up the components.”
“I can do this part,” Glen told his brother. “You've got other shit to do.”
Louis nodded. “Thanks,” he said, and he went into the other room to begin assembling the parts. He hated mindless, repetitive tasks and was grateful for his brother's help. Maybe Glen wasn't so bad after all.
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Darkness came early to Moscow at this time of year. Kennedy sat beneath the yellow glow of the chandelier listening to Soderstrom and Topper discuss purchase orders with Russian Federal Bank representative Ilya Lyukshin and Aeroflot Acquisitions Director Aleksei Voskoboy. They'd been at it for more than an hour but didn't seem to be any closer to an agreement than they had at the start of the meeting. Part of the problem was the transfer of credits from Washington for the deal. Guerin would get a tax break at home, but in order for Aeroflot to acquire eighty P522s and thirty P/C2622s over the next eight years, the purchases would have to be backed by U.S. loan guarantees, something Soderstrom had cautioned could be a stumbling block.
“Boeing and McDonnell Douglas could argue that Washington is subsidizing us. Could cause a glitch.”
A possible way around the problem would be for the Russians to divert available Western credits from other needs to purchase the airplanesâor at least come up
with the down payments that Guerin needed to surviveâand get U.S. loan guarantees to replace them. The Russians were balking because if Washington decided not to go along with the loan guarantees it would create a problem for the Kremlin. Russia needed wheat, corn, and butter more than it needed high-tech jet airliners.
Dominick Grant, Guerin's tall, thin, patrician-looking government liaison, sat forward. “What if we get Washington's approval beforehand?”
Voskoboy started to say something, but Minister Matushin waved him off. “This would take time.”
“Thirty-six hours,” Grant replied. He turned to Kennedy. “It's a little before 9:00 A.M. in Washington. If I could get out of here tonight, I'd be at the State Department first thing tomorrow morning. Tom Bruce knows what's going on. He'll give us a reading as fast as humanly possible.”
“You don't think they'll try to play politics with you, Dominick?” Kennedy asked. “We could get bogged down with this approach. It'd be harder for us to make any kind of an alternative deal later.”
“They'll have their big guns, but we'll have ours. I'll take Howard and Jeff with me. Push comes to shove, Mr. Vasilanti can fly out to Washington.”
“In the meantime, Mr. Minister, I assume that we can continue to negotiate here in good faith on the assumption my people will be successful.”
The Russian aviation minister hesitated only long enough for his translator to finish before he smiled and nodded his massive head. “By all means, Mr. Kennedy.”
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“Hello, Viktor Pavlovich,” McGarvey said. He stood at the open door to the Russian's apartment on Kalinin Prospekt. A stereo played softly inside.
“Yeb vas,
you come as a very big surprise,” Yemlin said, stepping aside. “Colonel Lyalin is threatening to have someone shot if you are not found.”
“I was busy,” McGarvey said. Yemlin's apartment was large by Russian standards and very nicely furnished
with modern Scandinavian furniture from Helsinki. But the place had not been used for some time. Everything was dusty.
“We must know where you went last night after you disappeared from the hotel.” Yemlin closed the door and followed McGarvey into the apartment.
More had changed in Russia than was visible at first glance. McGarvey's old friends, those of them he'd been able to find, and who were willing to talk to him, had been frightened. But it wasn't the SUR they were afraid of. It was starvation. There was no money or food, nor was there any way to get either except by murder, or theft, or prostitution. Even little girls and boys as young as five or six were being offered to pedophiles. Almost all moral order had broken down in Moscow.
“This is very serious, Kirk,” Yemlin persisted. Like everyone else, the former Washington
rezident
was frightened.
“I went to see some old friends,” McGarvey answered softly. “David Kennedy believes that the negotiations will go well. What about network
Abunai
? Heard anything yet?”
“The colonel wants to speak to you. I'll call him.”
“Goddammit, what have you found out?”
Yemlin slapped the side of his leg, vexed. “It's believed that a group called Mintori Assurance Corporation may be coming after you. But at this point we have no confirmation. Nor does Tokyo Station know to what extent the Japanese are willing to go to achieve their goals, although there are rumors. Do you understand this, Kirk? These are only unconfirmed rumors, but we are trying.”
“Good,” McGarvey said, a measure of relief coming over him, the first in twenty-four hours. “Let's talk to Colonel Lyalin now. We're going to need more information, Viktor. And soon.”
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It would be a grueling flight that no one was looking forward to. Captain Peter Morrisey and his crew had gone out to the airport earlier to prep the P522, but it
was well after midnight before Grant, Soderstrom, and Guerin's general counsel Howard Siegel showed up. The weather had warmed up a bit with the passage of the front, but the winds had increased, driving the wind-chill factor to nearly 100 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit.
No one said much in the van on the way out from the hotel, nor were any of them inclined to carry on a conversation as they hurried, bent against the bitter wind, across the tarmac and up the boarding stairs into the airplane. Carol Cameron, one of their two attendants, closed and dogged the door, and even before she came back to offer coffee or something stronger the engines were spooling up. They knew what had to be accomplished, and why. For now there was nothing to do but hang on until they got to Washington.
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It took all day and most of the evening to drill tiny mounting holes in the printed circuit board and install the several hundred individual components in their proper places. A simple transmitting device would have been infinitely easier to design and build, but this circuit had to do much more. Zerkel was proud of his handiwork, and he sat back with a proffered beer from his brother.
“Is it done?” Glen asked.
“Not yet. Still has to be wired up and then tested.”
The problem was coming up with the electronic code sequence that would trigger the on-board heat sensor's module. His computer could spit out millions of combinations per second, but the possibilities numbered in the tens of billions. He had designed a multiplex circuit internal to his transmitter that would allow one hundred encoded sequences to be broadcast simultaneously. The sophisticated circuit would speed up the search by a factor of one hundred. Not bad, Zerkel thought, for an afternoon's work.
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In the morning Minister Matushin suggested they spend the day touring the proposed site at Domodedovo Airport. Nothing would be forthcoming from Washington
until the next day, so they might as well make good use of their time.
Kennedy agreed.
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By 3:00 A.M., Zerkel had finished the wiring and preliminary electrical tests on the circuit board. He'd not slept in what seemed like weeks, but he felt good, fully alert. Whatever shit his brother had given him did the trick, because he was flying. He was invincible.
The interface between the transmitter and his computer decoding program took only a couple of minutes to set up, and once it was in standby he brought up a line into InterTech's mainframe in Alameda and entered the company's electronic simulator.
Operating much like the flight simulators pilots use, InterTech's sophisticated program could be loaded with the schematic diagram of an electronic device, which in turn could be operated and tested as if it were the real thing. A schematic diagram for an ordinary television set could be loaded, and the user could switch channels and receive simulated television pictures. On a higher level, simulated circuits could be tested for malfunctions, for operating characteristics under varying conditions, or even analyzed for function. In this case, Zerkel loaded the heat-sensor circuit from InterTech's files into the simulator, and then began running the encoded output into it from his transmitter.
It was a little past midnight in San Francisco, which gave him nearly eight hours on this circuit before he'd have to shut down, but a lot could be accomplished in that time. Maybe the whole enchilada.
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“Guerin Airplane Company nancy-four-seven-seven-niner-echo, you are cleared for final approach and landing. Report to Dulles Ground Control on one-two-two-one-niner on touchdown.”