“How much do we have for gambling?” she asked.
“Two thousand dollars of the taxpayers’ money,” Weatherhill replied as he dodged the heavy traffic.
She laughed. “That should keep me going on the slot machines for a few hours.”
“Women and the slots,” he mused. “It must have something to do with grabbing a lever.”
“Then how do you explain men’s fascination with craps?”
Stacy wondered how Pitt might have replied. Acidly and chauvinistically, she bet. But Weatherhill had no comeback. Wit was not one of his strong points. On the drive across the desert from Los Angeles he had bored her almost comatose with unending lectures on the possibilities of nuclear space flight.
After Weatherhill had escaped from the truck that hauled the bomb cars, he and Stacy were ordered by Jordan to return to Los Angeles. Another team of surveillance experts had taken over and followed the car transporter to Las Vegas and the Pacific Paradise Hotel, where they reported it had departed empty after depositing the cars in a secure vault in an underground parking area.
Jordan and Kern then created an operation for Stacy and Weatherhill to steal an air-conditioning compressor containing a bomb for study, a feat that was deemed too risky during the break-in on the road. They also needed time to construct a replica replacement from the dimensions recorded by Weatherhill.
“There’s the hotel,” he finally said, nodding up the boulevard to a giant sign festooned with neon palm trees and flashing dolphins that soared around the borders. The main attraction featured on the marquee promoted the greatest water show on earth. Another sign stretched across the roof of the main building, blinking in glowing pink, blue, and green letters and identifying the huge complex as the Pacific Paradise.
The hotel was constructed of concrete painted light blue with round porthole windows on the rooms. The architect should have been flogged with his T-square for designing such a tacky edifice, Stacy thought.
Weatherhill turned in the main entrance and drove past a vast swimming pool landscaped like a tropical jungle with a multitude of slides and waterfalls that ran around the entire hotel and parking lot.
Stacy gazed at the monstrosity of a hotel. “Is there anything Hideki Suma doesn’t own?”
“The Pacific Paradise is only one of ten resort hotels around the world he’s got his hands in.”
“I wonder what the Nevada Gaming Commission would say if they knew there were four nuclear bombs under the casino.”
“They’d probably care less,” said Weatherhill. “So long as his dealers aren’t mechanics.”
“Mechanics?”
“Cheats for the house.”
He pulled the Avanti to a stop at the main entrance and tipped the doorman, who removed their luggage from the trunk. An attendant parked the car, and they registered at the front desk, Stacy looking starry-eyed and smiling demurely in an attempt to seem like a new bride, an event she had trouble remembering in her own past.
In their room, Weatherhill tipped the bellman and closed the door. He immediately opened a suitcase and removed a set of blueprints of the hotel and spread them on the bed.
“They’ve sealed the cars inside a large vault in a third-level basement,” he said.
Stacy studied the sheet showing the plan of the entire lower basement and a report from one of the surveillance team. ” ‘Double reinforced concrete with a steel overlay,’ ” she read aloud. ” ‘One large steel door that raises into the ceiling. Security cameras and three guards with two Dobermans.’ We won’t be breaking in from the front. Easy enough to beat the electronic systems, but the human factor and the dogs make it tough for just the two of us.”
Weatherhill tapped a section of the blueprint. “We’ll go in through the ventilator.”
“Lucky for us it has one.”
“A requirement in the construction code. Without ventilation to prevent expansion and contraction of the concrete, cracks could form and affect the foundation of the hotel.”
“Where does the vent originate?”
“The roof.”
“Too far for our gear.”
“We can make entry from a utility room on the second underground parking level.”
“Want me to go in?”
Weatherhill shook his head. “You’re smaller, but nuclear devices fall in my department. I’ll make the entry while you handle the lines.”
She examined the dimensions on the ventilator duct. “It’s going to be a tight fit. I hope you’re not claustrophobic.”
Carrying tote bags and rackets and dressed in white tennis togs, Weatherhill and Stacy passed unobtrusively as a couple going to play on the hotel courts. After waiting for an elevator free of people, they rode it down to the second-level parking garage, where Weatherhill slipped the lock on the door to the utility room in less than five seconds.
The small interior was laced with steam and water pipes and digital-dialed instruments that monitored temperatures and humidity. A row of cabinets held push brooms, cleaning supplies, and jumper cables for stalled cars in the parking area.
Stacy quickly unzipped their tote bags and laid out a variety of equipment as Weatherhill donned a nylon one-piece suit. He clipped on a Delta belt and body harness, attaching it around his waist.
Stacy then assembled a spring-powered piston tube with a wide-diameter barrel oddly called a “beanbag gun.” Then she attached it to a “hedgehog,” a strange object that was covered by round ball bearing-like wheels with a pulley in its center. Next she uncoiled three lengths of thin nylon line and connected them to the hedgehog and beanbag gun.
Weatherhill consulted the blueprint showing the ventilating system for the final time. A large vertical shaft falling from the roof joined smaller ducts that ran horizontally between the ceilings and floors of the parking areas. The duct running to the vault that held the bomb cars ran between the floor beneath their feet and the ceiling of the basement below.
He took a small battery-operated electric saw and began cutting a large hole in the thin sheet-metal wall. Three minutes later he set aside the cover, took out a tiny flashlight, and beamed it inside the duct.
“It drops about a meter before branching out toward the vault,” he said.
“Then how far?” Stacy asked.
“According to the blueprint, about ten meters.”
“Can you get through the elbow where the duct curves from vertical to horizontal?”
“Only if I hold my breath,” he replied with a slight grin.
“Radio check,” she said, setting a miniature microphone and receiver over her head.
He turned and whispered into a tiny transmitter on his wrist. “Testing, testing. Am I coming through?”
“Clear as crystal, and me?”
“Good.”
Stacy gave him a reassuring hug and then leaned into the ventilator and pulled the trigger on the beanbag gun. The springloaded piston shot the hedgehog into the darkness, where its momentum and roller bearing wheels took it smoothly around the bend. They could hear it sailing through the duct for a few seconds, dragging the three nylon lines behind it, before there was an audible clink, signaling that it had stopped on impact with the filter screen set in the vault’s wall. Then Stacy pulled another trigger, and twin rods shot out of the hedgehog against the sides of the duct and jammed it solidly in place.
“I hope you’ve been working out at the gym,” said Weatherhill as he slipped the rope through the clips in his harness. “Because your little old muscles will be taxed tonight.”
She smiled and pointed to a pulley she’d already attached to one line and a water pipe. “It’s all in the leverage,” she said slyly.
Weatherhill clamped the small but powerful flashlight around one wrist. He bent down and took what looked like an exact replica of an air-conditioning compressor out of his tote bag. He had constructed it to replace the one he was about to steal. Then he nodded. “Might as well get going.”
He leaned into the ve
rtical shaft and slowly dropped down headfirst, extending the dummy compressor beyond his head as Stacy took up the strain on one line. There was plenty of room here, but when he came to the elbow into the horizontal duct, he had to contort his body like a snake and squeeze through. He entered on his back in order to bend his body around the narrow curve. And then he was in.
“Okay, Stacy, pull away,” he spoke into his wrist radio.
“How’s the fit?”
“Let’s just say I can hardly breathe.”
She pulled on a pair of gloves and began to heave on one of the nylon ropes that wound around the pulley on the hedgehog and attached to Weatherhill’s harness, pulling him through the narrow confines of the ventilation duct.
He could do little to help her, except exhale when he felt her tug on the rope. He began to sweat inside the nylon suit. There was no air-conditioning running through the ventilator, and the outside atmosphere that wafted down from the opening on the hotel roof was hot and stifling.
Stacy wasn’t enjoying mild temperatures either. The steam pipes that ran through the utility room kept the heat and humidity close to that of a steam bath.
“I can see the hedgehog and ventilator screen,” he reported after eight minutes.
Another five meters and he was there. The blueprints had not shown any TV cameras in the vault, but he peered into the darkened interior for signs of them. He also removed a small sensor from a sleeve pocket and checked for laser or heat-seeking scanners. His inspection thankfully came up dry.
He smiled to himself. The elaborate defense and alarm measures were all on the outside of the vault, a flaw that was common in many security systems.
He twisted off the screws, tied a small string to the screen and lowered it to the floor quietly. He slipped the lever that released the hedgehog anchor prongs and lowered it into the vault along with the bogus compressor. Then he slowly descended headfirst until he finally rolled onto the concrete floor.
“I’m inside,” he told Stacy.
“I read you.”
He shined the light around the vault. The bomb cars seemed doubly menacing, sitting ominously in musty blackness and surrounded by thick concrete walls. The awesome destruction in such a cloistered area was difficult to imagine.
Weatherhill came to his feet and detached his harness. He moved around the nearest bomb car and laid out a small packet of tools that had been tied around one leg and spread it on one fender. The replica compressor he set on the floor. Then without bothering to glance inside the car, he reached in and pulled the hood lever.
He stared at the actual bomb unit for a moment, sizing it up. It was designed to explode from a coded radio signal. That much he knew. Activating the detonation mechanism by a sudden movement was doubtful. Suma’s nuclear scientists would have built a bomb that could absorb the shock from an automobile driven at high speeds over rough roads. But he wasn’t about to take chances, especially since the cause behind the blast on the Divine Star was still unknown.
Weatherhill brushed all dire thoughts from his mind and set to work removing the pressure hoses from the compressor. As he’d discovered earlier, the electrical leads to the evaporator coils that acted as an antenna were quite elementary. The electronics were exactly as he would have designed them himself. He delicately spliced off the leads and reconnected them to the fake compressor without breaking their circuits. He could now take his time to remove the bolts on the compressor’s mounting brackets.
“Bomb safely out of the car,” he reported. “Will now make the switch.”
Six more minutes and the fake compressor was in place and connected.
“Coming out.”
“Standing by to retrieve you,” Stacy answered.
Weatherhill stepped back to the ventilator opening and snapped on his harness. Suddenly he noticed something he’d missed in the darkness of the vault.
Something was sitting in the front seat of the car.
He flashed the light around the vault. He could now see that all four cars had some sort of mechanism seated behind the steering wheels. The vault was cool, but Weatherhill felt as if he was in a sweat-box. He was soaked inside the nylon suit. Still holding the flashlight in one hand, he wiped his face with a sleeve and crouched until his head was even with the window frame on the driver’s side of the car.
It would be ridiculous to call the thing behind the wheel a mechanical man. It was stretching things to even consider it a robot, but that’s what it was. The head was some sort of computerized visual system perched on a metal spine with a box full of electronics for a chest. Clawlike steel hands with three fingers gripped the steering wheel. The arms and legs were articulated at the proper joints like a human’s, but any remote resemblance stopped there.
Weatherhill took several minutes and studied the robot driver, fixing the design in his memory.
“Please report,” Stacy ordered, becoming anxious at his late return.
“I found something interesting,” he replied. “A new accessory.”
“You better get a move on.”
He was happy to leave. The robots that sat in dark silence waiting for a command to drive the car to their preprogrammed targets began to look to him like skeletons. He clipped the ropes to his harness and lay on the cold floor, raising his feet above his head, up the wall, back to the wall.
“Pull away.”
Stacy braced a leg against a pipe and began tugging on the rope that circled the pulley on the hedgehog. On the other end, Weatherhill’s feet reached the ventilator and he went in as he’d come out, on his back, except this time he was holding the compressor containing a nuclear bomb in outstretched hands beyond his head.
As soon as he was completely in the shaft he spoke over his headset. “Okay, stop while I replace the hedgehog and ventilator screen. Won’t do to leave a clue to our visit.”
Hand over hand, working around the bomb compressor, he raised the hedgehog and sprung its rods against the ventilator walls. Then he pulled the screen up by the string and quickly screwed it back in place. Now he allowed himself to relax and go limp. He could only lie there and be dragged up the shaft, leaving all physical effort to Stacy, staring at the bomb and wondering about his life expectancy.
“I can see your feet,” Stacy said at last. Her arm muscles were losing all feeling, and her heart was pounding from the exertion.
As he came out of the narrow horizontal shaft, he helped her as much as he could, pushing out and up. There was room now to pass the bomb over his shoulder to where she could reach down and pull it safely into the utility room. As soon as she wrapped a soft cloth around the cylinder and laid it in the tote bag, she finished hauling Weatherhill through the opening in the ventilator shaft.
He quickly released the nylon lines and shrugged out of his harness as Stacy actuated a second trigger releasing the jamming prongs on the hedgehog. Then she reeled it up through the shaft, curled the nylon lines around it, and set it in a tote bag. Next, while Weatherhill changed back into his tennis sweater and shorts, she used duct tape to reseal the panel over the forced opening.
“No interruptions?” Weatherhill asked her.
She shook her head. “A few persons walked by after parking their cars, but the hotel employees stayed clear.” She paused and pointed at the tote bag containing the compressor. “Almost impossible to believe we have a nuclear bomb in there.”
He nodded. “One with enough power to vaporize the entire hotel.”
“Any problems?” Stacy asked.
“None, but I did find that our friend Suma has come up with a new twist,” he said, stuffing his suit and harness in a bag. “The cars have robotic drivers. They don’t require humans to drive the bombs to their detonation points.”
“The bastard.” The tiredness and stress were gone, replaced with vehemence. “No human emotions to contend with, no second thoughts by a defector who refuses to deploy the bomb, no one to question or betray the source if police should stop the car.”
“Suma didn’t get where he is by being stupid. Using robots to do his dirty work is damned smart. Japan leads the world in robotics, and an investigation will undoubtedly prove his scientists and engineering facilities at Edo City are heavily into the design and manufacture.”
A shocked understanding came into Stacy’s eyes. Her voice came in whispered foreboding. “The detonation center, what if it’s manned and guarded by robots?”
Weatherhill gave a final zip of his tote bag. “That’s Jordan’s problem. But my guess is we’re going to find it next to impossible to penetrate.”
“Then we can’t stop Suma from coming on-line and priming the bombs.”
“There may be no stopping him,” he said with grim apprehension in his tone. “Our best resources fall far short of his.”
42
TOSHIE, WEARING A very brief ungeisha-cut kimono loosely tied at the waist with an obi sash, discreetly bowed her head and held up a large soft towel for Suma as he stepped from a tiled steam room. He wrapped the towel about his body toga style and sat on a low pillowed stool. Toshie dropped to her knees and began massaging his feet.
Toshie was the daughter of a poor fisherman, the fourth of eight children, when Suma first saw her. She had been a skinny, unattractive child whom the boys ignored until, that is, she began to develop a body that was beautifully proportioned, with breasts far more ample than most Japanese girls. Bit by bit her facial features became defined with prominent cheekbones that were enhanced by eyes that were large and dark.
Suma, walking alone at sunset, had spied her standing in the surf casting a net into the rolling breakers. She stood serene and golden under the rays of the dying sun. A thin shift was all she wore, dampened into transparency by the waves, revealing all and hiding nothing.
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