'People are getting hurt,' Schulz said. 'Treat this seriously. Take care.'
'Sure,' he said, his mind wandering. 'I keep telling you, Irwin, this is Japan. We never imported that stuff here.' He stared at the outer skin and frowned.
'George?'
'Wait a goddamn minute, Irwin. You guys getting air miles for these calls or something?'
Damn contractors, George Soames swore to himself. Every week they were supposed to come and clean the dome. Top to bottom, make sure the exterior was spotless, make sure every last rip in the fabric got mended. And here he was, one day after the visit, looking at the biggest blemish he'd ever seen in the dome skin since it was completed.
'I'll kill those guys,' Soames muttered, then walked the six feet that stood between him and the dome fabric and looked again.
'Irwin?' Soames asked.
'What is it?'
'This fancy videophone of yours good enough to let you see a decent picture of something?'
'What?'
'If I knew that I wouldn't be asking the question. Something stuck to the fabric'
'Jesus,' the voice from the videophone shrieked, 'get the hell out of there. Leave this to security. They get paid for it.'
'Don't piss your pants. This thing's no bigger than a matchbox. Maybe it's just part of the gear from something inside that got tacked onto the fabric'
'Call the goddamn security guys!'
Soames looked around. 'Typical. Can't see a damn one of them right now. Tell you what. This thing's up at about six feet or so. Too high for me to try to take it off, but if I hold up your fancy phone here maybe you can get a good look at it.'
Soames stretched his five-foot-three frame to the maximum and tried to point the lens of the phone at the object on the skin. Then, to make sure it didn't penetrate the skin in some way, he opened the small secondary door with his smart card, pushed it open, and walked inside the bright, gleaming interior of the dome, looked at the skin from there. It was unmarked. Soames was beginning to feel pretty mad. With a grunt, he walked back out into the sun, leaving the door open, and called Schulz.
'You see it? As far as I can make out it just looks like a plastic box, it doesn't go through or anything. Something shiny on the side. Like I said. No bigger than a matchbox. Beats me. Where the hell are those security guys?'
Back at La Finca, Ellis Bevan stared at the dark object on the screen and shook his head. 'Means nothing to me. Why doesn't that moron do what we keep telling him to and get someone to look at it?'
'You don't know George,' Schulz muttered. 'He sort of loves that thing.'
'Well?' Soames bellowed. 'I'm waiting.'
'Hell, George, we don't know,' Schulz replied. 'Will you just walk around and find those guys, please? We could be wasting precious ti — ' The videophone went quiet.
'Irwin?' George Soames beamed. 'I knew you'd come up with something. You're thinking. I can hear it from here.'
'How well can you see the front?'
Soames stretched on tiptoe. 'Pretty well.'
'Looks to me like there's some kind of shiny plastic panel there? Just like the kind you get on the front of a TV remote?'
Soames grinned. 'You got it. Someone stuck a TV remote on the side of my dome. I'll disembowel the bastard when I catch hold of him.'
'Let's think about this,' Schulz said slowly, feeling hot, trying to sort through the possibilities. 'Did you put any alarm systems in recently? Some surveillance points?'
'What? We got permanent security supplied by the embassy. Cameras every fifteen feet or so along the perimeter wire. What the hell would we need a burglar alarm for?'
Schulz closed his eyes, squeezed hard, then glared at Ellis Bevan. 'You have any clue what this is? Why anyone would use a simple infrared device on the exterior of a building?'
Bevan shook his head. 'Not a one.'
'George,' Schulz said slowly. 'Just walk away from that damn thing, find the security people, and leave it to them. Okay?'
'Bull,' George Soames answered, and stuffed the videophone into the pocket of his neatly pressed blue shirt. 'No bastard goes around sticking bugs on my dome.'
He jumped up once, then twice, and finally got his hands on the thing. The little black box came away easily from the skin of the dome and sat in his hand. He turned it over. There was a little clasp for a battery compartment, held fast with a single Phillips screw. He swore mildly, then walked back inside the dome and picked up a screwdriver from a bench just inside the door. He worked on the cover, flipped it, opened the back, and looked at two shiny new AAs sitting in a row.
'Would you believe it?' he said into the big empty space, then took the videophone out of his pocket again. 'Hey, Irwin. Take a look at this thing. It is a goddamn TV remote. Now, who the hell has been messing with my dome? That's what I want to know.'
Irwin Schulz stared at the picture on the screen, thought about the two batteries and the infrared eye on the front, then said, 'Okay. What you do is you take out the batteries. Then you pick that thing up and throw it as far as you can and start running in the other direction. You understand me, you get — '
'What?' George Soames's face came back at them, wrinkled with a puzzled frown. 'You hear that noise outside? Sounded like a mosquito farting or something. Damn if that makes sense. No civilian traffic around here for miles.'
He felt cold in the constant midday sun. The whine kept getting louder. He looked through the open doorway. It was coming from the sky. There was a tiny black dot there.
'Where the hell did those security guys get to? Never there when you need 'em. When I get back to the emba — '
'George?' Schulz's voice asked, a tinny sound coming from the phone.
Soames didn't reply. He just stared up through the open door at the bright blue sky. Coming straight down at him was something that was moving so quickly it was hard to focus on the shape. 'Damn me if it isn't some toy plane,' he said to no one in particular, clutching the little plastic box all the more tightly in his hand.
'Get out of there!' Schulz yelled.
Then the picture made a lurch and all Schulz could see on the monitor was tumbling scenery: grass, the bright fabric of the dome, what looked like the red and white wings of a model aeroplane. There was the sound of something breaking, George yelling in pain, what might have been an explosion, then a hissing noise that went on and on.
Schulz watched the monitor, his heart in his mouth, trying to stab at the keys on the workstation, calling for help. He'd just got through to Langley when George Soames's face rolled in front of the camera. It was distorted now, the skin a livid red, eyes bright, bloodshot, and terrified. His tongue protruded between his swelling lips like a fat red lump of tortured flesh. In one swift, convulsive movement, Soames vomited on the ground repeatedly. And then was still.
CHAPTER 24
Return Call
Somewhere over the other side of the world, he guessed, an incoming message icon was flashing on a screen. This was a crazy way to communicate. He'd no idea where he was calling, what was at the other end. Then Helen Wagner answered. Michael Lieberman looked at her calm, tired face and felt some kind of decision being made for him.
'Hey, I thought I might be waking you up. Returning the favour.'
She smiled. 'Not exactly. I had half an hour on the sofa in the office. We have more than a hundred people working on this outside the door, and that's just S&T. How's Sara?' Lieberman blinked. 'She's fine. Resolute, you might say.' 'And the bad news. You heard about Kyoto?' 'Yeah, I got it from Irwin. He's really cut up, knew the guy there. So that's two down, one to go. What the hell happened?'