George Chesbro: The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone

There was a radiator in one corner of the room. I went to it, used the butt of my Seecamp to tap out an SOS in Morse code. I did it three times, then paused and listened.

The signal, clear and strong, came back. Three times.

Now we were getting someplace, I thought, barely managing to stifle a raucous cheer that probably would have been heard all the way down in the meeting hall. Garth was not only in one of the rooms, but-judging from the strength of the return signal-almost certainly in that corridor.

I hurried to the door, then abruptly stopped when I heard a sound that caused the hairs on the back of my neck to rise.

The sound of my brother's voice was muffled, but unmistakable; he was singing not Wagner, but a Mozart tune.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star …"

Welcome back, Garth, I thought, wanting both to laugh and to cry and knowing I didn't have time for either.

"I certainly am wondering where the hell you are …"

I was too close to the meeting hall to run up and down the corridor shouting, and so there was nothing else to do but try to home in on the singing. I picked the lock and went in the room across the corridor, immediately came back out when I could no longer hear the singing. In the corridor I could hear it again.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star …"

I entered the room next to the first one I'd tried. Garth wasn't in it, but something else was that caused a chill to run up my spine. There were a number of small, oblong cardboard cartons strewn about the room, and in the bottom of one I found a piece of gray, gummy, claylike material that I immediately recognized as C-5 plastic explosive.

If placed properly, there would have been enough plastic explosive in the empty cartons to blow up ten stages-if that was what Carling was planning to blow up.

"… how I wonder where you are. High above-"

Garth and two men in green jackets were in the next room, handcuffed to pipes. On a small table in the center of the room was a black case with three hypodermic needles, each filled with a pinkish fluid.

"It's about fucking time you got here, brother," Garth said with a grim smile.

"Pick, pick, pick. You know how busy everybody gets during the holidays."

"Well, I suppose it doesn't make any difference. You wouldn't have found us here before last night; we were kept someplace else."

"Are you all right, Garth?"

My brother nodded, swallowed hard, grimaced. "Yeah. But for a week I've had what feels like a hangover you wouldn't believe."

"I believe," I said, walking over to him and examining the pipe to which he was handcuffed; it, like the ones the other two men were cuffed to, was solid, with no chance of breaking it at the seam. The cuffs themselves were of high quality steel, and I knew I was going to have a difficult time unlocking them.

"Remind me not to eat any more of that spy dust shit."

"I'll remind you," I said as I began sorting through my picks, looking for the smallest.

"There's no time for that, Mongo," Garth said in a low, tense voice. "Incidentally, this is Aaron Lake and Samuel-"

"Mossad," I said, nodding to the two men. "I know."

The man cuffed to the pipe on the wall behind me said, "Carling has one of the support girders under the dome laced with plastique. If that dome goes, it could kill everyone in the hall."

"Mongo, get the hell out of here and warn those people," Garth said tersely. "I know something about handcuffs, and I'm telling you you're not going to get these suckers open with those toothpicks you're using. Carling knows you're on the loose, and he'd have put a guard outside the door if he hadn't been afraid it would attract attention from the TV people. He was here forty-five minutes ago, and he'll be back. He's going to blow the place when the hall is filled, so you haven't got a hell of a lot of time. You've got to go warn those people."

The pick I'd been using was no good; I selected the next larger one, inserted it in the narrow keyhole and began twisting. Nothing was happening. "Which girder, Aaron?"

"I don't know," the man on the wall behind me said.

"How does he plan to set it off?"

"We think he's set a number of charges along the girder, and they'll all go off if an electrical current runs through them."

"He told you this?"

"No, but there were plans. Samuel and I found them; the Russian found us. Each charge has a primer embedded in it which is radio controlled. Carling is carrying a transmitter; the charges will go off fifteen minutes after he activates the primers. Samuel and I will be found in the rubble, with documents linking us to Mossad, and the transmitter on one of us. It will look like we accidentally blew ourselves up in an explosion we set off."

"Mongo, go, damn it!" Garth snapped. "You don't have time to screw around with these cuffs; he's going to be back here any minute."

"I'm not going to leave the three of you cuffed to these pipes," I said curtly. "It will take me longer to lock all the doors I left open around here than it took me to unlock them. If Carling even suspects I've been here, he'll just cancel the preliminary parts of his pageant, shoot the three of you, and blow the dome."

"Now that won't be necessary, Mongo," Tommy Carling said from behind me. "The show will go on as scheduled."

I wheeled around, grabbed for my Seecamp, froze when I saw Tommy Carling standing just inside the room with a 9mm pistol aimed at my head. The woman, still dressed in her nun's habit, was standing beside him.

"Drop your gun, Mongo. Do it!"

I did it. "Tommy-"

"Colonel Vladimir Kreisky," the K.G.B. officer with the pony tail and earring said easily. "You may as well know me by my real name, Mongo."

"Tommy," I repeated. "You have all the information you could possibly want on the effects of NPPD poisoning. Why do you have to kill us and all of those people out there? It doesn't make any sense."

"I'm truly sorry, Mongo," the man said as he nodded to his companion. "You have a point, but I have my orders."

I watched as Sister Kate picked up one of the hypodermic needles, pressed the plunger slightly, and shot a thin stream of pinkish fluid into the air. "Cut new orders. For Christ's sake, Tommy, take what you know and go home. All of this killing isn't necessary!"

"You're wasting your breath," the Israeli chained to a pipe against the far wall said.

"What you're planning won't work, Tommy."

"Really, Mongo? Why not?"

"For one thing, Mr. Lippitt knows all about you, and he knows about your plan to pin all these murders on the Mossad. He'll get the truth out."

"Will he? Somehow, I don't think the word of the Director of the D.I.A. will be believed when it's weighed against the evidence that will be found here." He paused, took a small gray box with a black button out of his pocket, held it up for me to see. "I'm sorry none of you will be around to see how the debate is finally resolved."

At another nod from Colonel Vladimir Kreisky, the woman went over to Garth and pulled up his left sleeve. The man I had known as Tommy Carling was watching her. .

Shhhh.

I hurled Whisper and flung myself to one side as the gun exploded. A bullet slammed into my right thigh, spinning me in the air-but not before I had seen Whisper bury herself to the hilt in Tommy Carling's chest. Blood spurted from the man's mouth and nostrils, and he slumped to the floor.

Lying on my side and clutching at my bleeding thigh, I glanced over at the woman. The hypodermic needle had fallen from her hand, and she was staring in shock at Tommy Carling's corpse. The Seecamp was ten feet away, closer to me than to her, and I started crawling for it.

But Sister Kate was closer to the door. She recovered, saw that I almost had the gun, then snatched the gray control box from her companion's lifeless hand and darted from the room.