They moved quickly, silently, following Pitt. He stopped outside the hospital and paused at the door.
"Why are you stopping here?" Weatherhill asked softly.
"We'll never find our way around this complex without a map or a guide," Pitt murmured. "Follow me inside." He pushed the door button and kicked it back against its stops.
Startled, the nurse-receptionist looked up in surprise at seeing Pitt burst through the doorway. She was not the same nurse who aided Dr. Nogami during Pitt's earlier visit. This one was as ugly and ruggedly constructed as a road grader. Even as she recovered, her arm snapped out toward an alarm button on an intercom communications unit. Her finger was a centimeter away when Pitt's flattened palm struck her violently on the chin, catapulting her in a backward somersault onto the floor unconscious.
Dr. Nogami heard the commotion and rushed from his office, stopping abruptly and staring at Pitt and the MAIT team as they flooded through the door before pushing it closed. Oddly, the expression on his face was one of curious amusement rather than shock.
"Sorry for intruding, Doc, Pitt said, "but we need directions."
Nogami gazed down at his nurse who was lying on the floor out cold. "You certainly have a way with women."
"She was about to set off an alarm," Pitt said apologetically.
"Lucky you caught her by surprise. Nurse Oba knows karate like I know medicine." Only then did Nogami take a few seconds to study the motley group of people standing around the prostrate nurse. He shook his head almost sadly. "So you're the finest MAIT team the U.S. can field. You sure don't look it.
Where in hell did Ray Jordan dig you people up?"
Giordino was the only one who didn't stare back at the doctor in mute surprise. He looked up at Pitt.
"Do you know something we don't?"
"May I introduce Dr. Josh Nogami, the British deep cover operative who's been supplying the lion's share of information on Suma and his operation."
"You figured it out," said Nogami.
Pitt made a modest hands-out gesture. "Your clues made it elementary. There is no St. Paul's Hospital in Santa Ana, California. But there is a Saint Paul's Cathedral in London."
"You don't sound British," said Stacy.
"Though my father was raised as a British subject, my mother came from San Francisco, and I attended medical school at UCLA. I can do a reasonable American accent without too much effort." He hesitated and looked Pitt in. the eye, his smile gone. "You realize, I hope, that by coming back here you've blown my cover."
"I regret throwing you in the limelight," Pitt said sincerely, "but we have a more immediate problem."
He nodded toward the others. "Maybe only another ten or fifteen minutes before Kamatori and three of his security robots are discovered. . . ah. . . incapacitated. Damned little time to set off an explosive charge and get out of here."
"Wait a minute." Nogami raised a hand. "Are you saying you killed Kamatori and zapped three roboguards?"
"They don't come any deader," Giordino answered cheerfully.
Mancuso was not interested in cordial conversation. "If you can please provide us with a diagram of this complex, and quickly, we'll be on our way and out of your hair."
"I photographed the construction blueprints on microfilm, but had no way of smuggling them out to your people after I lost my contact."
"Jim Hanamura?"
"Yes. Is he dead?" Nogami asked, certain of the answer.
Pitt nodded. "Cut down by Kamatori."
"Jim was a good man. I hope Kamatori died slowly."
"He didn't exactly enjoy the trip."
"Can you please help us?" Mancuso asked urgently, insistently. "We're running out of time."
Nogami didn't seem the least bit rushed. "You hope to get out through the tunnel to Edo City, I suppose."
"We had thought we might take the train," said Weatherhill, his eyes aimed through the door into the corridor.
"Fat chance." Nogami shrugged. "Since you guys penetrated the complex, Suma ordered the tube guarded by an army of robots on the island side and a huge security force of specially trained men at the Edo City end. An ant couldn't get through."
Stacy looked at him. "What do you suggest?"
"The sea. You might get lucky and be picked up by a passing ship."
Stacy shook her head. "That's out. Any foreign ship that came within five kilometers would be blown out of the water."
"You have enough on your minds," Pitt said calmly, his eyes seemingly fixed on one wall as if seeing something on the other side. "Concentrate on planting the explosives. Trust the escape to Al and me."
Stacy, Weatherhill, and Mancuso all looked at each other. Then Weatherhill nodded in agreement.
"You're on. You've saved our lives and got us this far. Be downright rude not to trust you now."
Pitt turned to Nogami. "How about it, Doc, care to tag along?" Nogami shrugged and gave a half smile. "Might as well. Thanks to you, my usefulness here is finished. No sense in hanging around for Suma to have my head lopped off."
"Any suggestions for a place to set explosives?" asked Weatherhill.
"I'll show you an access hole to the electrical cables and fiber optics that feed the entire complex. Set your charge there and you'll put this place out of business for a month."
"What level?"
Nogami tilted his head toward the ceiling. "The level above, the fifth."
"Whenever you're ready," Weatherhill said to Pitt.
"Ready now." Cautiously, Pitt slipped into the corridor and dogtrotted back to the elevator. They all followed and piled in and stood silent as it rose to the fifth level, tensed for any trouble they might face when the doors opened. Suddenly the elevator dropped down instead of going up. Someone had beat them to it by pressing the button on the level below.
"Damn," Mancuso swore bitterly. "That's all we need."
"Everybody!" Pitt ordered. "Push the doors together to keep them from opening. Al, lean on thèdoor close' button."
The elevator stopped and they all pressed their hands on the doors and pushed. The doors tried to spread apart but could only jerk spasmodically without opening.
"Al!" Pitt said softly. "Now hit five!"
Giordino had kept one finger pressed against the "door close" button so tightly the knuckle went white.
He released it and pushed the button marked 5.
The elevator shuddered for a few moments as if torn in two directions, then it gave an upward jerk and began rising.
"That was close, too close," Stacy sighed.
"Going up," Giordino announced. "Housewares, kitchen utensils, dishes, and hardware--" Abruptly he broke off. "Oh, oh, we haven't tagged home base yet. Someone else wants on. The light on five just blinked."
Again alerted, every eye unconsciously rotated toward the panel and the small indicator light that was flashing for the fifth level. Then, as if activated by the same set of gears, they turned and crouched, ready to spring into action.
A white-coated engineer was standing there wearing a hard hat, intently studying notations on a clipboard. He didn't even look up as he entered the elevator. Only when it began to seep through to him that the elevator wasn't moving did he gaze around into the Occidental faces. None that he observed were smiling.
He opened his mouth to shout, but Pitt clamped one hand over the engineer's mouth and squeezed the carotid arteries with the other. Even before the eyes rolled back in the head and the body went limp and sagged to the elevator floor, Nogami was out and leading the others into a passageway.
Weatherhill was the last to go. He paused and looked at Pitt. "When and where do you want us to join up?" he asked.
"Topside in twelve minutes. We'll hold the cab."
"Good luck," Mancuso muttered, hurrying after the others, wondering what the man from NUMA had on his canny mind.
Giordino looked down at the unconscious engineer. "Where do we stash him?"
Pitt pointed up at the access door in the ceili
ng of the elevator. "Tear his lab coat into strips, then tie and gag him. We'll park him on the elevator roof."
As Giordino pulled off the white lab coat and began ripping it apart, he gave Pitt a half-crooked grin.
"I heard it too."
Pitt grinned back. "Ah, yes, the sweet sound of freedom."
"If we can snatch it.
"Optimism, optimism," Pitt muttered cheerfully as he launched the elevator upward. "Now let's show some speed. It's twelve minutes to show time."
<<55>>
The MAIT team deep in the Dragon Center could not have been under heavier stress than the two men sweating out the minutes in the communications room of the Federal Headquarters Building.
Raymond Jordan and Donald Kern sat watching a huge clock and listening anxiously for the team call sign to be beamed from a satellite in a fixed synchronous position over Japan.
As if triggered by the sudden buzz of a telephone sitting on the table between them, their eyes met, their faces drawn. Jordan picked up the receiver as if it carried the plague.
"Yes, Mr. President," he answered without hesitation.
"Any word?"
"No, sir."
The President went quiet for a moment, then said solemnly, "Forty-five minutes, Ray."
"Understood, sir. Forty-five minutes until the assault."
"I've called off the Delta Forces. After a conference with my other security advisers and the Joint Chiefs, I've come to the decision that we cannot afford the time for a military operation. The Dragon Center must be destroyed before it becomes operational.
Jordan felt as though his world was slipping away. He threw the dice one more time. "I still believe that Senator Diaz and Congresswoman Smith may be on the island."
"Even if you're right, their possible deaths would have no bearing on my decision."
"You won't change your mind and give them another hour?" Jordan pleaded.
"I wish I could find it in my heart to let you have more time, but our national security is at high risk. We cannot allow Suma the opportunity to launch his campaign of international blackmail."
"You're right, of course."
"At least I'm not alone. Secretary of State Oates has briefed the leaders of the NATO nations and Soviet President Antonov, and they have each agreed that it's in all our mutual interest to proceed."
"Then we write off the team," said Jordan, his frustration showing in his tone, "and perhaps Diaz and Smith."
"I deeply regret compromising the lives of dedicated Americans, some of whom were good friends.
Sorry, Ray, I'm faced with the age-old quandary of sacrificing a few to save many."
Jordan set the receiver in its cradle. He seemed strangely hunched and shrunken. "The President," he said vacantly.
"No reprieve?" asked Kern grimly.
Jordan shook his head. "He's scrubbed the assault and is sending in a nuclear warhead."
Kern went ashen. "Then it's down to the wire."
Jordan nodded heavily as he looked up at the clock and saw only forty-three minutes remaining. "Why in God's name can't they break free? What happened to the British agent? Why doesn't he communicate?"
Despite their fears, Jordan and Kern were not remotely prepared for an even worse disaster in the making.
Nogami guided the MAIT team through a series of small side passageways filled with heating and ventilating pipes, skirting heavily populated offices and workshops, keeping as far out of the mainstream of activity as possible. When confronted by a roboguard, Nogami engaged it in conversation while one of the others slowly angled in close and shut down its circuits with a charge of static electricity.
They came to a glass-enclosed room, a large expansive area filled with electrical wiring and fiberoptic bundles, all branching out into narrow tunnels leading throughout the Dragon Center. There was a robot standing in front of a huge console of various dials and digital instruments.
"An inspector robot," said Nogami softly. "He's programmed to monitor the systems and report any shorts or disconnects."
"After we queer his circuits, how long before his supervisor sends someone to check on him?" asked Mancuso.
"From the main telepresence control, five or six minutes."
"Plenty of time to place the charge and be on our way," said Weatherhill casually.
"What do you figure for the timer setting?" Stacy asked him.
"Twenty minutes. That should see us safely to the surface and off the island if Pitt and Giordino come through."
Nogami pushed open the door and stepped aside as Mancuso and Weatherhill entered the room and approached the robot from opposite sides. Stacy remained in the doorway, acting as lookout. The mechanical inspector stiffened at his console like a metal sculpture as the statically charged hoses made contact with his circuit housing.
Smoothly, skillfully, Weatherhill inserted the tiny detonator into the plastic explosive and set the digital timer. "In amongst the cables and optical fibers, I think."
"Why not destroy the console?" said Nogami.
"They've probably got backup units in a supply warehouse somewhere," explained Mancuso.
Weatherhill nodded in agreement as he moved up a passageway a short distance and taped the charge behind several bundles of heavily insulated cable and optical fibers. "They can replace the console and reconnect new terminal leads in twenty-four hours," he lectured, "but blow a meter out of the middle of a thousand wires and they'll have to replace the whole system from both ends. It will take them five times as long."
"Sounds fair," Nogami acquiesced.
"Don't make it obvious," said Mancuso.
Weatherhill looked at him reproachfully. "They won't be looking for something they don't know exists."
He gave a love pat to the timer and exited the passageway.
"All clear," Stacy reported from the doorway.
One at a time they moved furtively into the corridor and hurried toward the elevator. They had covered nearly two hundred meters when Nogami suddenly halted and held up his hand. The sound of human voices echoed along the concrete walls of a side passage followed by the soft whirr of an electric motor. Nogami furiously gestured for them to move ahead, and they darted across the opening and rushed around a corner before the intruders came into sight of the main corridor.
"I misjudged their efficiency," Nogami whispered without turning. "They're early."
"Investigators?" Stacy asked him.
"No," he answered quickly. "Telepresence supervisors with a replacement for the robot you put out of commission."
"You think they might be onto us?"
"We'd know if they were. A general alarm would be sounded and a horde of Suma's human security forces along with an army of roboguards would have swarmed through every corridor and blocked all intersections."
"Lucky someone hasn't smelled a rat from all the robots we've wasted," grunted Mancuso as he rushed along the corridor in Nogami's trail.
"Without obvious signs of damage, the telepresence supervisors will think they suffered from simple electronic malfunctions."
They reached the elevator and lost a full two minutes as they waited for it to rise from a lower level.
After what seemed half a lifetime, the doors finally opened to an empty interior. Weatherhill was the first in, and he pressed the button for the surface level.
The elevator, with the three men and one woman standing grimly and silently, rose with excruciating slowness. Only Nogami had a watch, the others having lost theirs when they were captured. He peered at the dial.
"Thirty seconds to spare," he informed them.
"Out of the fire," murmured Mancuso. "Now let's hope there's no frying pan.
All that mattered now was their escape. What plan did Pitt have circulating inside his head? Had anything happened to him and Giordino? Had Pitt miscalculated and was he recaptured or dead? If he was, then all hope had vanished and they were left with nothing, no direction for freedom, their only hope of escape struck dow
n.
They had lost track of the number of times they'd prepared for the worst, crouched ready to spring at whatever or whoever stood outside the elevator. They stiffened as the doors pulled apart.
Giordino stood there big as life, a broad grin on his face. When he spoke it was as though he was standing at the gate of an airport. "May I see your boarding passes, please?"
Ubunai Okuma and Daisetz Kano were top-level robotic engineers, highly trained in the teleoperation of computer vision and artificial intelligence, as well as the maintenance and troubleshooting of sensory malfunctions. In the telepresence control room they had received a signal that robot electrical inspector Taiho, whose name meant "big gun," was nonfunctioning, and they immediately moved to replace him for repair.
Sudden breakdown from myriad problems was not uncommon. Robotics was still a new science, and bugs cropped up with maddening frequency. Robots often stalled abruptly for reasons that became readily apparent only after they were returned to a reconditioning center and probed.
Kano circled Inspector Taiho, making a quick visual check. Seeing nothing obvious, he shrugged.
"Looks like a faulty circuit board."
Okuma glanced at a chart on a clipboard that he carried. "This one has a history of problems. His vision imaging has caused trouble on five different occasions."
"Strange, this is the fourth unit to be reported as failed in the past hour."
"It always runs in streaks," muttered Okuma.
"His systems need updating and modifying," agreed Kano. "No sense in giving him a quick fix. I'll schedule him for a complete rebuild." He turned to the replacement robot. "Ready to assume inspection duties, Otokodate?"
An array of lights flashed and Otokodate, a term for a sort of Robin Hood, spoke in slow but crisp words. "I am ready to monitor all systems."
"Then begin."
As the replacement robot took its place at the monitor, Okuma and Kano hoisted the malfunctioning robot onto a motorized dolly with a small crane. Then one of them programmed a code word into the dolly's computer and it began to move automatically toward the conditioning area without human control.