Away about a mile, Romeriz took out a small metal box, raised an antenna, then flipped up a cover to reveal a single contact switch. He pulled it down, and two very small muffled explosions could be heard in the distance, panicking some gulls.
“I hate to lose her, but we can’t afford to keep her any more,” Corwin told them. “She’ll be on her way to the bottom now with any luck, if those explosive boys were right, and nobody’ll ever know we were here.”
They put in at a small, deserted beach of black sand, then deflated the raft and took it back out into the water, letting the motor’s weight sink it to the bottom.
Air Nowhere certainly knew its business. They walked over a huge amount of driftwood piled up in back of the beach and then up an almost overgrown trail to a small turnout near a two-lane road. A small camper truck was parked there, but it didn’t seem to bother the pilots, and Romeriz went up, selected a key off his key ring, and unlocked the thing. They waited for some general traffic to pass, then got Angelique and the others inside.
“This we will not sink or blow up,” Corwin told them. “It was rented fair and square in Astoria for a week and it’s going back there when we’re through. Settle back—we’ve still got quite a drive. Either of you want to take the wheel, you’re welcome to do it. After we drop you off, this gets turned over to an innocent and unsuspecting family that wants to drive north along the coast road in a camper, and they’ll check it back in. It’s rented in their name, so anybody who wants to trace this will have one hell of a time proving anybody was ever in it that they want.” And that was how they got Angelique to San Francisco.
“Outside of theaters and espionage circles I don’t think there’d be much of a call for this stuff, eh?” MacDonald commented, applying another batch of a seemingly clear liquid to his hair and beard and then showering it off. It had the effect, over a period of time, of turning dark hair gray and doing so convincingly. Applied to both hair and beard, it had the effect of adding twenty years to his apparent age.
“Rather simple stuff, old boy,” replied a tall, distinguished-looking man in his sixties or early seventies. He wore an aloha shirt and brown slacks, but somehow he still looked quite the British civil servant which he used to be.
Lord Clarence Frawley, who insisted on being called “Pip” by everyone unless under formal circumstances, had quite a lot of experience in that end, being, for some eleven years, the real-life counterpart of James Bond’s legendary “Q”, the master of gadgetry for spies. His own Ph.D. was in chemistry, but he knew an incredible amount about almost everything in the sciences. He had not, of course, been the one man show of the cinema, but rather the administrative head of a research-and-development wing that employed only the best and the brightest and the most secure. A staunch materialist and top scientist, he’d been one of Sir Reginald’s bosses at one time when the renegade computer genius had worked for the British government and he was also familiar, as a prior Fellow of the Institute, with the actual layout of Allenby Island.
For that reason, he was Queen’s Rook.
The house itself was quite large and set back from the ocean, but also set apart from any other houses atop a large hill about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. The place itself was actually owned by a Hollywood writer who leased it out for the six months of the year when he had to be in Los Angeles. None of them had ever heard of the writer, who apparently wrote television spy shows for some series or other and had gotten his start as the author of a series of spectacularly successful low-budget hack and slash horror movies, and none knew how the house had been secured, except that it had been done by agents of the King.
Pip fixed himself a whiskey and soda and sank down on the couch. “We’ve got the tests back on her, and they’re quite amazing,” he said simply.
Greg MacDonald, equally relaxed but in a bath robe, joined him. “How’s that?”
“Well, the fingerprints are certainly hers, and I think it’s pretty certain that she is indeed Angelique Montagne.”
“Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that. Otherwise this was all one hell of a waste.”
“The bone structure, cellular structure, and the like though, is simply amazing. They didn’t merely give her a disguise. As near as we can tell, she is genetically what you see. That, and our mysteriously youthful nurse, tell us a lot.”
“Such as?”
“Well, they can really do it, that’s what. Someone, sitting up there, using that marvelous computer, found a tremendous breakthrough. The implications are enormous!”
“And scary.”
“Well, yes, that too.” he agreed, accepting the idea almost as an afterthought. “I can’t see any other way to do it but to somehow encode a human body inside a computer, every little bit of it—and then introducing whatever physiological changes the programmer desires and then recreating the person with the changes. It’s energy into matter with the most complex organism we know—and it’s alive!”
“Well, maybe,” MacDonald responded. “But if that’s the way they do it, why keep the fingerprints? And why worry about Angelique at all? They could just take one of their own, change her into Angelique so absolutely that nobody could prove any difference, and go on from there. All this makes no sense if you’re right.”
“Exactly so, my boy,” came another, deep, melodious British voice behind them. Into the room walked Lord Alfred Whitely, retired Bishop of Burham at Yorkminster, professor emeritus of theology and philosophy at Christ’s College, Oxford. “One can never trust a Cambridge man to think things through.”
The Bishop was about the same age as Lord Frawley, but round-faced and hawk-nosed with thick white hair and a ruddy complexion. The Bishop was also wearing very unclerical red plaid Bermuda shorts and a tee shirt which read, “I left my cash in San Francisco.”
“And I suppose you have a better idea?” Pip asked sarcastically.
“Why of course! Researchers on my end have come up with wonders. But do go on. I would like to hear what you’ve found—excluding the speculation, of course, on miraculous and vaporous gadgets that don’t exist and don’t make sense.”
The look the Bishop got would have fried an egg.
“Well,” Pip went on, “we also discovered a legitimate physiological cause for this aversion to most materials. It’s a definite series of allergies, far too severe to be treated without long hospitalization and lots of experimentation, but we tested a number of things after wondering why she didn’t come down with problems using the straw and the like. That suggested that there were things she could tolerate, and we found one that works.”
“Oh, really?” Greg was very interested. “What?”
“Silk. Real silk, not the synthetic variety. We also discovered a range of non-alkaloid dyes that could be used, and even now we’ve got folks working on things. We’ve taken many fittings, and perhaps we can have something this afternoon. The real problem is that we must tailor with silk thread as well. Do you know how bloody difficult it is to get that much natural silk these days?”
“The facial tattoos, I fear, are permanent. We can’t figure out even now how they were done. Those long rectangular stripes are actually set into the skin, for example, as if the face was actually molded around them. They’re thick and solid, although pliant. They’d have to be removed surgically and the face would be a mess. The scars would never color, either. Still, it’s a small price to pay if we can get her dressed and allow her some mobility.”