Wildfire (24 page)

Eric shook his head slowly. "Man, where did you ever find a guy like that?"

"People like Riser are always out there, Eric. It's just a matter of having the initial introduction
and
the proper go-betweens," the older man added meaningfully. "It's a delicate balance. Much like the male and female Black Widow. They need each other, but the negotiations are always perilous."

"So which one are we?"

Harris raised one eyebrow questioningly.

"Hungry or horny?" the young man grinned.

"When you get right down to it, my young friend"—Harris smiled knowingly—"that is always the question."

Harris waited until his young assistant had disappeared through the small metal door and exited into the high-rise parking garage at the other end of the narrow tunnel. Then he quickly reached for his secured phone.

"Ember," he said, "this is Eagle. It's time to fly."

At precisely eight-thirty-five that Friday morning, the driver of a specially converted light-gray van turned into the underground ramp-way entrance of the federal courthouse in Arlington, Virginia, and stopped at the guard booth. Moments later, a black sedan with smoked windows pulled into the downwardly sloped driveway behind the van.

There was a uniformed Federal Protection Service officer sitting behind an armored glass panel in the front of the booth, and a second officer in the back keeping an eye on a panel of monitors. While both of these men were classified as federal officers, they had actually received only a minimal amount of training in investigative law enforcement techniques, and were armed with relatively low-powered 38-caliber revolvers. Their primary job was to confirm the identification of individuals authorized to enter the underground parking area of the courthouse, and to raise an alarm if something went wrong.

The idea was that if such a situation should ever occur, the perpetrators who caused that alarm would suddenly find themselves facing a group of tactical response team officers who possessed a considerable amount of law enforcement training and far more lethal weaponry.

In effect, the officers who manned the guard booths of the federal facility were considered to be the trip-wire portion of the courthouse security system. It was a dubious honor at best.

The guard at the booth window first eyed the driver of the van and then the four passengers. As he did so, he casually brushed his fingers across the raised surface of the panic alarm button.

"Can I help you?"

Wordlessly, the driver held up a laminated pass that contained his photograph.

The guard checked his computer monitor, confirmed the identification of the driver and expected passengers, and then waved them on. He did precisely the same with the occupants of the black sedan.

Fifteen minutes later—after having used the van's pneumatic ramp to unload Gerd Maas and his wheelchair, along with Roy Parker, Jason Bascomb III, two assistant counsels, and two of the four highly trained security guards hired by the firm of Little, Warren, Nobles & Kole to protect their bail money—the light-gray van and the black sedan exited the underground parking area. Both vehicles turned left at the main road that led back to the adjoining town of Oakton, Virginia.

Approximately two blocks away, the man known as Riser reached forward, started up the engine of his nondescript pickup truck, and smiled.

Chapter Fourteen

Mike Takahara looked up from his cereal as Henry Lightstone walked out of one of the bedrooms of their two-bedroom, four-bed, Hyatt Regency Reston suite. Lightstone was wearing a nicely tailored three-piece suit.

"Where are you going, looking like that?"

"Court."

"I thought you finished testifying yesterday."

"Yeah, I did. Figured I'd keep an eye on Dwight, give you a chance to catch up on your reports."

"You sure you want
Henry
watching your back?" the tech agent asked dubiously, turning to the massive agent who was sitting next to him at the breakfast nook, casually finishing off an entire box of cereal.

"Why not?" Stoner shrugged as he got up from the table. "How much trouble can he get us into when we're sitting in a federal courthouse?"

"I'm not sure that's something I'd want to think about this early in the morning," Takahara said as he watched the huge agent wash out his bowl, toss the empty cereal box in the trash, and then disappear into the bathroom.

"Hey, come on, I'm just following Halahan's instructions," Lightstone protested. "You heard what he said. Until he says differently, he doesn't want any of us going anywhere by ourselves."

"Actually, as I recall, I think he was referring specifically to you and Paxton," Takahara said, patting his portable computer. "But hey, that's fine by me. I can use a little catch-up time."

"Okay, my turn in the barrel with Bascomb," Stoner grumbled as he came back out of the bathroom, pulling on his suit coat.

"Good for your character." Lightstone smiled.

"Didn't do much for yours," the huge agent pointed out.

"Well, guys"—Mike Takahara smiled cheerfully—"if something goes wrong, give me a call."

Lightstone was starting out the door when the word
call
suddenly jarred at his memory.

"Hey, that reminds me," he said. "Does the name Wildfire mean anything to you?"

Mike Takahara shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Should it?"

"I'm not sure. It was just something I heard a guy say yesterday in the courthouse. The way he said it struck me kind of funny, like it was a threat or something like that."

"You want me to run it through some of the LE bulletin boards, see if anything pops up?"

"Yeah, I sure would, if you don't mind."

"No problem." The tech agent reached for his computer. "I'd rather play on the net than write reports any day."

At nine o'clock that Friday morning, Harold Ericson Tisbury, wealthy industrialist, chairman of the board of Cyanosphere VIII, and the current chief executive officer of ICER, walked into his son's office and sat down.

"Well, are you ready to go?" Sam Tisbury asked cheerfully.

Sam Tisbury, the CEO of Cyanosphere VIII, the one and only son of the chairman of the board, and the executive secretary of ICER, appeared relaxed and comfortable in his traditional traveling clothes: a light-blue polo shirt, sun-faded chinos, and a pair of six-year-old deck shoes. By contrast, Harold Tisbury was still in a coat and tie, although he had loosened up to the extent of exchanging his glossy-shined brogans for a pair of year- old penny loafers.

"I think so," the elder Tisbury nodded.

"Have you seen the Crucible beta units yet?"

"No, I haven't."

"I just got one in this morning. The first one off the test rack."

Sam Tisbury reached into a cabinet behind his desk and brought out a polished and hinged wooden box that was about eight inches square and sixteen inches long. He placed it on his desk, opened the box, and carefully removed a metal cylinder approximately six inches in diameter and twelve inches long, with extended one-inch knobs at both ends. The entire cylinder was covered with a chemically etched brown-and-green camouflage pattern.

The entire device appeared to be made of three subunits: two identical end pieces, the outer cylindrical surfaces of which were perforated with what appeared to be hundreds of eighth-inch diameter holes, and one center piece. The center piece was actually a hand-adjustable ring with machine-cut numbers 0, 0.1, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10 that stood out clearly on the curved ring's chemically etched brown/green surface. The numerals had been cut into the ring at even intervals along a one-third span of the ring surface. In the exact middle of the remaining two-thirds of the ring surface, an infinity symbol had been cut.

Getting up and walking around to the front of his desk, Sam Tisbury extended the device out to his father.

"Mr. Tisbury," he said with exaggerated formality "allow me to introduce you to Crucible."

"An empty Crucible, I assume." The elder Tisbury smiled as he cradled the heavy polished cylinder on his lap with his shaky hands.

"Yes, of course."

"And these are the sensors at either end?" Harold Tisbury asked, turning the device so that he could examine the knobby structures.

"Actually, they're the new combined transmitter/sensors. That was one of the major design problems we had to resolve. Trying to come up with a detecting
and
a transmitting system that was extremely sensitive, absolutely reliable, and virtually impact-proof."

"I gather our research team succeeded?"

"Far beyond our expectations." Sam Tisbury nodded. "The specs called for a recognition window of a thousandth of a second, with a structural impact resistance of fifty G's. As of this morning the engineers are claiming to have exceeded every one of those specs under routine manufacturing conditions."

"What's the effective range?"

"Through solid rock, the signal will travel a minimum of fifty feet before dropping off the scale of the sensor, which is fine as far as we're concerned because that's far greater than any practical separation of the units anyway."

"Have they tested them out in the open?"

Sam Tisbury nodded. "That was one of the mandatory tests, to find out how far the primed units would have to be kept from the ignition site."

"And?"

"Out in the open, the signal drops off at approximately twelve miles."

"Dear God!"

"Actually it's not that much of a problem," Sam Tisbury said. "It just means that for safety, the initial triggering device should be kept at least fifteen miles from the site until all the primed units are set into place. And, of course, you'd want to keep the units set at the infinity delay setting until they were ready to be put into place."

"Infinity delay?"

"One of the settings on the timing ring," the younger Tisbury explained. "The timing ring basically sets the time delay between the sensor receiving the ignition signal—either directly from the triggering device or remotely from another ignited unit—and the device going off." He showed his father how the infinity marking was lined up with an engraved arrowhead on each of the end pieces of the device.

Harold Tisbury tried to turn the ring and discovered that he could move it easily only in short increments, and that the ring seemed to lock into place at all ten delay-setting positions with nice, solid clicks.

"You can adjust the delay time by hand, with a little bit of effort," Sam Tisbury explained, "but it's virtually impossible for the setting to be moved from the infinity area to one of the time sequences without a deliberate effort."

"Yes, so I see." Harold Tisbury nodded approvingly. But then he thought of something.

"What if one of these devices
does
go off accidentally and then sets off all the others?"

"It would probably create a horrible mess," Sam Tisbury conceded. "But I'm not sure that's a practical concern. We've tried everything we can to set one of the Crucible units off without having it directly linked to the triggering unit—no matter what the delay setting—and we haven't been able to do it yet. And that includes crushing one under a drop press, and trying to blow another one up with ten pounds of C-4."

"Where did you do that?"

"At one of Sergio's test sites in Chile."

"I take it he didn't have to file an environmental impact report first?"

"Exactly." Sam Tisbury smiled.

"What about the manufacturing failure rate? Are we on line there too?"

"Right now we're projecting less than one unit out of a hundred at the beta level, based on the first two thousand units—the testing of which, at the rate they're going, will be completed by five o'clock this evening."

"Excellent."

Harold Tisbury sat there for a moment, rubbing his dry fingers across the bright engraved numerals.

"You know," he finally said, "it's really not as heavy as I expected."

"Part of that is due to the new alloy. The outer container has two primary functions: first, to absorb the shock of placement and protect the sensing and transmitting devices; and second, to contain the source elements that are going to be generating a tremendous amount of heat. As it turns out, designing for one function tended to negate the other. The aluminum alloy we came up with at first really wasn't satisfactory, so our research engineers went after a completely new stainless steel/titanium alloy, and came up with a major metallurgical breakthrough."

"Sounds expensive."

"It is, but it turns out to be nearly as light as aluminum, but tremendously heat resistant. There should be some interesting application developments once we release the patent."

"Why did you add the camouflage coating?"

"Apparently our engineers wanted to do some further testing of one of our new chemical etching techniques—to see how well the coating functions under extreme temperature conditions. A side benefit that will save us the cost of a separate testing program. As I understand it, the camouflage pattern wasn't intentional; it just comes out that way."

"Incredible," the elder Tisbury whispered as he handed the device back to his son.

"Yes, it is. As a matter of fact, I think we should give the entire engineering department an additional bonus this year."

"Good idea, do that." The elder Tisbury nodded absentmindedly.

Sam Tisbury returned the device to its box and then waited a few moments before he said, "So what's the matter, Harold?"

The seventy-nine-year-old industrialist sighed deeply. "Jonathan is scared and Wilbur is deeply concerned. And so, for that matter, is Sergio. I could hear it in their voices."

"About what? The meeting?"

"I'm sure the meeting is an underlying issue, but I believe their primary concern is with Alfred."

"Jonathan's FBI rumors again?"

"Among other things."

"They still don't trust him, do they?"

"No, they don't. Not at all."

"Do you?"

"I don't know, Sam," the elderly industrialist said. "I've known Alfred Bloom ever since he was born. I grew up with his father. A year ago I would never have thought to question either his courage or his integrity."