“Distance of the transmission is about five and a half miles, General,” she said.
“So?”
“We don’t need laser for that distance, sir. Difficult to pinpoint when we could simply track modulated infrared from your engines.”
“No doubt. But if Bigmouth is put out of action, I want the option of relaying my tapes directly through O’Neill One. Remember, from a strategic standpoint, our secondary tactical objective is more important than our primary tactical objective. We need to establish publicly that such prisons exist, and execute a graphic demonstration that we Cadre are not the terrorists and racketeers Lawrence Powers has been accusing us of being.”
Another hand was raised, belonging to one of the commandos. “Lieutenant LaRue?”
“Can we still be damn sure about no ground resistance, sir?
None?”
“Unless our data is out of date, we can be sure. The on-call garrison is a good three miles away, and knows nothing except to respond to an alarm. Once you put the relay tower out, 212
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we don’t have to worry about reinforcements since Gamma and Beta both use it. Remember the theory behind this lockup. The security system relies almost totally on a few trusted men and electronic control. Mr. Powers wants as few witnesses to his private concentration camp as possible. The very design specifications for his fail-safe verify this. He would rather see all the prisoners—and his own men—in ashes than have proof of this get out. And, ultimately, this provides us with the Achilles’ heel we need. Anything else?”
Hearing no response, Guerdon waited several moments before saying, “Very well. See if you can catch an hour’s sleep. Dismissed.”
At 0545 hours, 27 February, a lone, unmarked police sedan turned right at a red brick church house about six miles north of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, climbed a hill, and turned left onto a desolate country road, snow-plowed into banks on each side. A young Chinese man wearing a gray suit with tie drove the vehicle; behind him, separated by a soundproof glass partition, were a young man and woman handcuffed to each other. It was while they were standing still at Nobody’s Road that Elliot asked Lorimer if she were scared.
Lorimer nodded. “You?”
“Shitless.”
Lorimer smiled slightly. “I wish I had a cigarette.”
“Listen, Lor,” Elliot went on. “This is probably a crazy time to get into it, this late and everything, but you’re not going to have any—well—problems in there, are you?”
Lorimer regarded him scornfully. “You should know mebetter than that by now. I’m not the fainting type. Why, are you?”
“No, you’re not following me.” Elliot adjusted his handcuff to chafe slightly less. “Let me try it from another angle. If I hadn’t stopped you, would you really have shot your father?”
“Oh, yes,” she said simply.
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“Because he drove your mother to suicide?”
She shook her head. “Look, you think you can become coldblooded when you have to. You’re an amateur compared to me, and it’s a trait I inherited from my father. How did he seem to you, in the hotel?”
“Controlled. Cool. Rational.”
“He’s always that way,” Lorimer said, “and he always has been. I can’t ever remember seeing him furious or ecstatic or releasing any strong emotion.”
“Now I’m not following you.”
“Don’t you know any psychology at all? A human being can’t bottle up emotions forever. There has to be an outlet. My father’s is pretty much out of Machiavelli. He likes to give orders. When a man like this gets his hands on a police organization, the only sensible thing to do is kill him before he kills others.”
“And what’s your outlet?” Elliot asked her.
Lorimer did not answer.
Chin received a radio signal that Winged Victory had knocked out the communications relay tower and was now positioned around Gamma.
A few minutes later, the sedan pulled up to the electrified main entrance gate to Utopia.
A quarter-century earlier, in more prosperous times, the property had been a private summer camp where urban children—mostly from New York—escaped their nagging parents for eight weeks of hiking, boating, and ceramic-ashtray making; in winter, it had been a ski camp. And it was on these grounds, over two holiday weekends one fall and one spring, that small groups of libertarian investors had gathered to discuss a then-infant science of countereconomics. Now, through an eminent domain that had taken the property from later owners for a federal highway that was never built, the property had passed into less innocent hands. 214