Authors: Robert Silverberg
“We are approaching the next Rasheed rendezvous now,” Andy announced grandly. “Frank and Charlie, West Colorado Street at the corner of Pacific.”
Did those street names mean anything to any of them? Probably not, except maybe to Cindy, if at her age she could still remember anything about her life in Los Angeles. Or Peggy, perhaps, though the years had made her mind pretty foggy too. But Andy had actually been in Glendale within the past five years. Had known a reasonably amusing woman there, for a time, in his pardoner days. Had in fact set foot once or twice on Colorado Street. Whereas these others had lived their lives out hidden away safely here at the ranch, largely ignorant of the world beyond.
Anson was getting edgy again. He went out for another walk.
“Coming up on Rasheed transfer,” Andy said, as the crimson halo left Frank’s car and shifted to Charlie’s. Andy, who was in touch with everyone by audio as well as on-line, sent a couple of quick impulses down to Frank to tell him to get over to the Glendale gate and wait there for further instructions, now that he had dropped off his passenger. Mark, his morning’s work also behind him, was already parked outside the Burbank gate. Cheryl was still in motion, well east of Charlie’s position, making her southward journey around the city through Arcadia and Temple City and looping upward toward her rendezvous with Charlie in Monterey Park. They were nearly four hours into the mission.
That was interesting, Andy thought, that Anson would have given the key assignment to Cheryl. Andy could remember some cheery romps with her when he was in his mid-teens and she a year or two older; but mostly what he remembered was that she had kept her eyes open even when she was coming. Those big blue Carmichael eyes, with nothing much behind them. It had never seemed to Andy that there was anything to her, except, of course, a trim and pleasantly rounded body that she had used skillfully but without much imagination in their sporadic encounters in bed. And now here she was getting the job of taking Rasheed right into Los Angeles, delivering him to the very perimeter of the Objective Zone, and getting him out of there again after the assassination. You never could tell about people. Maybe she was smarter than he had supposed. She was the daughter of Mike and Cassandra, he reminded himself, and Mike was a capable guy in his way, and Cassandra was the closest thing to a doctor they had here.
“Approaching acquisition of explosive device,” Andy said loud and clear, since no one in the room except, perhaps, Steve would be capable of making sense out of the scrambled macaroni on the screen without Andy’s verbal guidance. His audience just now, a quick glance over his shoulder told him, consisted of his sister Sabrina and her husband Tad, Mike and his sister-in-law Julie, and Anson’s sister Heather. Cindy had returned, also, but she already seemed to be on her way out the door again, walking in that painfully slow but fiercely determined way of hers.
A dotted yellow line marked the progress of the nursery truck that was bearing the bomb up from the factory in Vista. Nestling among the poinsettias, it was, tucked away amid all that gaudy red holiday foliage. He liked that idea. A sweet little premature Christmas present for Prime.
The nursery truck was in Norwalk, now, chugging up the Santa Ana Freeway toward Santa Fe Springs. Andy got in touch with the driver by audio and told him to get a move on. “Your client is heading toward the depot,” Andy said. “We don’t want to keep him waiting.”
Charlie, with Rasheed aboard, had reached Pasadena, and was moving south on San Gabriel Boulevard toward Monterey Park. It was in Monterey Park that the transfer of the explosive device to Rasheed was supposed to take place, just before Charlie handed him over to Cheryl.
Dotted yellow line, moving faster now.
Green line with crimson halo, traveling toward rendezvous.
Deep-purple line heading in the same direction from the opposite side.
Dotted yellow converging with green. The signal coming from Charlie: successful acquisition.
“Rasheed’s got the bomb, now,” Andy announced. “Going on to rendezvous with Cheryl.”
This is easy, he thought. Fun, even.
We should do one of these every day.
Half an hour later. Deep-purple line bearing crimson halo now approaches great black slash that represents the Los Angeles wall on Andy’s master screen. Shimmering vermilion chevrons indicate the Alhambra gate. On audio Andy asks Cheryl for confirmation of position and gets it. All is well. Cheryl is about to enter the city, with Rasheed sitting quietly beside her and the bomb reposing in his backpack.
Andy listens in. Gatekeeper stuff going on. Routine demand for identification.
Cheryl must be making her reply, now, sticking out her implant to be scanned by the gatekeeper. A pass number has been provided for her use. It is, in fact, the pass number of one of the LACON men who had so unkindly trussed Andy in that straitjacket on that bad day on Figueroa Street. Will it work? Yes, it works. The Alhambra barrier opens. Cheryl passes unchallenged through the wall.
Beaming in satisfaction, Andy glances up and around at the current group of onlookers in the communication center: Steve, Cindy, Cassandra, La-La, and the wide-eyed little boy. Why aren’t the rest of them here, all of them, now that the big moment is practically at hand? Aren’t they interested? Especially Anson. Where the fuck is Anson? Off playing golf? Is the suspense too much for him?
To hell with Anson.
“Rasheed is now within the wall,” Andy says, resonantly, majestically.
The crimson circle has separated from the deep-purple line and is moving at a nice steady clip through the shabby streets of the Los Angeles warehouse district. Andy brings up the resolution on his street-map underlay, and sees that Cheryl is parked just east of Santa Fe Avenue near the old and rusting railway tracks, and that the street along which long-legged Rasheed is currently briskly striding is Second Street, heading toward Alameda.
Andy lets five minutes more elapse. According to the screen, Rasheed now is practically on the threshold of Prime’s snug little hideout. Time for one final bit of voice-to-voice confirmation.
“Rasheed?” Andy says, via the audio channel.
“I am here, Andy.”
“Where is that?”
“Perimeter of Objective Zone.”
Rasheed’s voice, tiny in Andy’s headphone, does not waver in the slightest. To Andy he sounds marvelously cool, calm, completely serene. Pulse rate normal, absolutely unhurried, no doubt. All quiet within Rasheed, quiet as the grave. That boy is a wonder, Andy thinks. He is a superhuman. Walking right up to that building with a bomb on his back and he’s not even perspiring.
“This is our last audio contact, Rasheed. Everything digital from here on. Acknowledge digitally.”
A trio of pulses light up Andy’s screen. Rasheed’s implant is operating properly, therefore. So is Rasheed.
Steve reaches over, just then, and lets his hand rest lightly on Andy’s forearm, only for a moment. Offering reassurance? Making a show of confidence in Andy’s capabilities? In Rasheed’s? All three, maybe. Andy gives his father a quick smile and goes back to his screens. The hand is withdrawn.
Crimson circle advancing unmolested. Rasheed must be almost at the first checkpoint. He will be moving with a sleepwalker’s ghostly tranquillity, untroubled in any way by thoughts of the thing he has come here to do, because that is what his training has equipped him to do. Andy sees to it that his own breathing is slow and regular, his heartbeat normal. He will never have the same kind of supernatural bodily control that Rasheed has achieved, but he wants to keep himself as calm as he can, anyway. This is not the moment to get overexcited.
Checkpoint.
Rasheed has halted. Implant access is being provided. The password-protocol code that Andy has dredged up out of Borgmann’s antiquated files, and refreshed by a probe only yesterday through the interface into the heart of the Entity security spookware, will be tested now.
A long moment slides by. Then the crimson circle begins moving forward again. Password accepted!
“In like Flynn,” Andy says, speaking to no one in particular.
He wonders what the phrase means. But he likes the sound of it. “In like Flynn.”
Checkpoint Number Two.
Where the hell is Rasheed now, actually? Andy can’t even imagine what sort of lair they might keep Prime in. A pity that there’s no video on this linkup. Well, Rasheed can tell us all about it afterward. If he survives.
Is he moving between rows of lofty gleaming marble walls? Or, Andy wonders, circling past some fearsome ring of fire behind which the overlord of overlords reclines in splendor? Are there subordinate Entities sitting around casually in there, sipping soft drinks, playing pinochle, amiably waving their tentacles at Rasheed as the unflappable human intruder, rock-solid in his serenity of soul, equipped with all the right passwords and broadcasting not one telepathic smidgeon of his sinister purpose, goes deeper and deeper into the inner sanctum? And, Andy supposes, there are some humans in there too, Entity slaves, humble servants of the great monarch. Borgmann’s files had indicated that that was the case. They would pay no attention to Rasheed, naturally, because he would not be in here unless it was all right for him to be in here, and therefore it was all right for him to be here. The slave mentality, yes.
The Checkpoint Number Two password is requested. Rasheed obliges, giving implant access.
Streams of digits provided by Andy flash from Rasheed to whatever kind of thing is guarding the door at this checkpoint.
Password accepted.
Once again, crimson circle goes forward.
Sixty seconds elapse. No further news from Rasheed. But he’s still moving. Eighty seconds. One hundred. Andy stares and waits. Blue shadows surround his master screen. The faint hum of the equipment starts to turn into a tune, something out of grand opera, Mozart, Wagner, Verdi.
No news from Rasheed. No news. No news. De-dum, de-dum, de-dum, d
e-dah.
Andy wonders how long it actually takes for Rasheed’s coded messages to travel up to him across the 150 miles that separate him from Los Angeles. Speed of light: fast, but not instantaneous. He divides 186,000 miles per second by 150 miles, which is easy enough to do, somewhere about 1200, but when he tries to convert that result into the appropriate fraction of a second that is the actual lag his mental arithmetic fails him. He must be doing this all wrong, he decides. Maybe he should have divided 150 by 186,000. Usually he’s better at stuff like this. Difficult to concentrate.
Where the hell is Rasheed?
Has someone caught on to the fact that this big-eyed and elongated young human has no business being where he is?
Impulse from Rasheed arrives. Thank God.
Checkpoint Number Three.
Okay. This is a major decision point, and only Rasheed can make the decision. Perhaps he’s far enough inside the Objective Zone now so that he can plant the bomb right where he is. Or perhaps he needs to go through one more checkpoint. Andy can’t tell Rasheed what to do; Andy has no way of seeing what’s actually there, no idea of the distances involved, and Rasheed can’t describe anything except by audio, which now is too dangerous to use. Rasheed will have to use his own judgment about whether to continue on through Checkpoint Three. But these password protocols come without guarantees. Two have worked, but will the third? If Rasheed tries it and it bounces, they will grab him with their nasty elastic tongues and stuff him into a gunny-sack and haul him away for interrogation, and God help us all.
Andy has one fallback, if that happens. He can detonate the bomb while it’s still in Rasheed’s backpack, which would not be very nice for Rasheed, but which might just get Prime as well, even as Rasheed is being spirited off for questioning. Rasheed is aware of this option. Rasheed is supposed to send the appropriate signal to Andy if it should become necessary to make use of it.
But that is very much a last resort.
Andy waits. Breathes. Counts heartbeats. Tries to divide 150 by 186,000 in his head.
Rasheed is offering the password for Checkpoint Number Three. He has decided, evidently, that he is not yet sufficiently close to Prime’s personal place to plant the bomb.
Andy realizes that he has stopped breathing. No heartbeat to speak of, either. He is suspended between one second and the next. Through Andy’s mind race, over and over, the combinations that will trigger the fallback detonation. A mere quick twitch of his fingers will set them up. All Rasheed needs to do is send him the one despairing signal that means he has been caught, and—
Crimson circle starting to go forward again.
Rasheed has passed through Checkpoint Number Three.
Andy resumes regular breathing patterns. Time begins moving along once more.
But Rasheed isn’t telling him anything as the moments go by. The only information Andy has is that crimson circle gliding across his screen—the symbol for Rasheed, coming to him by telemetry. Tick. Tick. Ninety seconds. Nothing happening.
Now what? An unsuspected fourth checkpoint? Some formidably efficient security device that has instantaneously and fatally taken Rasheed out of the picture, before he could even sound a distress signal? Or—surprise!—Rasheed has discovered that Prime has gone on vacation in Puerta Vallarta?