The President glowered at them all. 'Someone want to tell me what that means?'
Schulz said quickly, 'If the dome here is still in one piece, all she needs is a microwave run up the ridge and they're in business. She's got the software. She's got the know-how. You don't need to build a damn thing else.’
Lieberman closed his eyes and thought of all the activity of the previous day, and the way the soldiers had been stood down, sent home with a shrug of the shoulders as if to say: Game over, go back to base, practise the crowd control. 'She's here,' he said. 'She's been here all along. And we just sent our men away, trailing their guns behind them.'
'You're guessing,' Bevan said defensively. 'This whole thing is just a wild guess.'
'Maybe,' Clarke said. 'But you got less than sixty minutes to find out, one way or another. After that I sign those papers. And God help us all.'
CHAPTER 57
Zenith
'I'll go,' Schulz said.
'You can't do that,' Helen said down the line. 'We have to have someone at La Finca who knows this thing inside out, Irwin. We can't spare you.'
Mo listened to the conversation and shrugged. 'You just need the network brought back on-line, Irwin. I can do it.'
'No, absolutely not.'
'Irwin,' she insisted, 'I want to go.'
'Mo,' Lieberman said, and he knew this battle was lost from the beginning. 'You have nothing to prove. Nothing to feel guilty about.'
'That's easily said.' She picked up a copy of the Unix handbook from the desk drawer, packed a pen down the spiral spine. 'I want Annie with me. They know her. She can't stay here on her own, and she may be able to help too.'
'These people — if they are there, and that I doubt — could be dangerous,' Bevan said. 'I don't want a kid around. We're cutting this fine as it is.'
'We go together or I don't go at all. They won't harm us. They're not like that.'
'But — ' Lieberman said, pleading.
'No.' Annie walked over, sat on her mother's lap, stared mutely at them all.
Bob Davis, the wiry helicopter pilot, came into the room, glanced at Lieberman, and said, 'I've looked and I've looked and this is all we have. One machine pistol. One nice and ladylike little Beretta. You' — he held one of the weapons out to Bevan — 'can take the machine pistol, I'll stick with the kid's stuff. I make this decision on the grounds that you are a better shot than me. I hope I'm not wrong.'
Annie stared at the gun, eyes wide.
'We won't need that crap,' Lieberman said.
'Really,' Bevan answered. 'I'm trying to regroup some forces from Palma but it's going to take an hour or so. If we do find something, we relay the position and wait for them.'
'We can't wait, Bevan. You know that.'
Davis looked at them. 'The girl's coming? You're kidding me.'
'Yes,' Mo said. 'Anyone else here speak Unix?'
'Oh wonderful,' Davis groaned.
He took a set of keys out of his pocket. 'Let's talk on the way. This is one old helicopter we're using here and I want it warming up a good two minutes before we attempt to levitate. Ready?'
Lieberman picked up the videophone, got ready to fold out the screen. Helen's face stared back at him. She looked hurt. It was hard to imagine her in pain, in darkness in the Nevada desert.
'Good luck, Michael,' she said, halfway across the world. 'It's my turn to say that now.'
'Yeah,' Schulz agreed, toying with the keyboard. 'You stay in touch. The moment you get an IP address, you let me in there. We can do this, I believe that.'
'I know.' He wished he could get rid of the image of Charley's face, wished he didn't feel such foreboding about just the chance of meeting her again. They went out to the dry flat ground of the helipad, climbed inside the purple-covered Squirrel that sat there, alone now.
'Three in the back, one in the front. And you' — the pilot pointed at Lieberman — 'are the front man. I need you to be my eyes. It's hard trying to fly this thing and scour the ground at the same time.'
Lieberman climbed into the left-hand seat feeling his guts start to churn already, thinking, all the time, how much he hated these things. Davis played with the controls, the engine whined, and slowly the rotors started to turn. Davis motioned for him to pick up the headset and put it on.
'Only two sets of cans in here, I'm afraid. So the people in the back will just have to lose their hearing for a little while.' The machine began to lift beneath them, rise and steady in the hot, unstable air.
Lieberman hit the talk button. 'Irwin? You hearing me?'
'Yeah,' said a distant tinny voice.
'And Helen?'
'Yes.' It sounded as if they were the same distance away, both trapped in some remote digital universe. 'So what am I looking for? Dishes?'
'Absolutely,' Schulz said. 'Maybe just one. Maybe several. It depends where they're based and what the terrain is like between them and the dome. This is line-of-sight. And they don't need to be big either.'
'Right.'
Helicopters and computers. These were, he was fast beginning to realize, his two least favourite things in the world. 'Irwin? You think they've been piggybacking off our network for some time?'
'Makes sense, if they tapped into the link. Even when we had control, we only used the network when we needed it. They could have used dead time, then locked us out when they decided to take control. Could have been messing with it for weeks.'
Lieberman shook his head. 'I still can't believe you wouldn't notice someone building an alternative microwave link up to your dome.'
Schulz sounded touchy. 'Really. Well think of it this way: If they have the protocols, and Charley seems to have taken them with her, all they need to get through is a dish the size of a satellite TV antenna. You tell me how easy that is to spot up there. And you're looking for it. Which we never were.'
'Point taken.' Lieberman watched the big mountain rise up in front of them. The dome was hidden from this angle. On the seaward side of the range, pine forest ran green and uninterrupted all the way to the water's edge, not a building, not even a track in sight. Davis passed him a large-scale map of the island. 'You work it out,' he said. 'Where are these people supposed to be based? In a building? In a cave? Or what?'
Lieberman pressed the transmit button. 'Irwin, what do they need to run a control centre like this? Power, obviously, but lots of space too?'
'Just what you saw here at La Finca. What they had in that place in Nevada too. We built that big command centre on the mountain underneath the dome because that was handling traffic from Kyoto and Lone Wolf on top of everything local and we did some R&D there too. That was like the server for the whole system. But if they're just dialling in, all they need is room for ten or so workstations and a line-of-sight microwave set-up.'
He still couldn't picture it. 'I'm trying to think of the kind of place we're looking for.'
'Michael, you're looking for Yasgur's Farm, surely. Only the real one this time.'
And then it came to him. He could almost see it. Schulz was right. Creating this simulacrum in the desert of their real home was just the sort of joke Charley would like.
'Fly to the top of the peak,' Lieberman said, letting go of the talk button. 'Let's check our base assumption first.'
The machine rose sluggishly in the hot, thin air. The day was bright and cloudless, the sun relentless. No interference. No shocks. More proof, if you needed it, Lieberman thought. Charley kept the island clear of attacks for practical reasons.
If she blasted La Finca, she could be blasting herself. The helicopter cleared a low col, spiralled upward, and, with a sudden lurch that left his stomach in midair, they crested the mountain. He looked down on the dome, and beyond to the blackened hulk of the command centre. He nodded at Mo in the back, then hit the talk button. 'The dome's perfect. Not so much as a crack in the skin.'