company.
'Ti, can you get in here right away. Carl's just come in and things have gone sour in Boston. On second thought, find some chairs and coffee, we'll come to you. We're probably going to have to include your computer in this conference.'
He hung up without waiting for an answer and dialed another three-digit number.
'Aaron, Ti's lab as quickly as you can make it. Find Pol and Gadgets. They're somewhere in the building. Bring them along.'
Brognola pushed his chair back and stood up, but made no move toward the door. 'Perhaps you'd better reintroduce us,' he told Lyons.
'Hal, this is Deborah Devine, state cop. Deborah, this is Hal Brognola, head Fed.'
Deborah gave Brognola a firm handshake.
Brognola headed for the door. 'Come on,' he said over his shoulder. 'I want to hear what happened, but you might as well tell it to everybody at once.'
When they filed into Ti's lab, the Bear, Pol and Gadgets were already there.
Ti looked furious. 'Mr. Brognola,' she said formally, 'you hung up on me before I could give my report — I also have bad news.'
Brognola just shook his head. 'Report,' he sighed.
'About twenty minutes ago, there was a long-distance collect call from Boston to the computer center in Santa Clara. The computer recorded it. I was listening to it when you called. Now, there has been a sudden burst of computer activity. They're using the interface with the smaller computers in their major cities to send the messages.'
Brognola held up his hand to stop Ti at that point. 'Let me tell everyone what happened in Boston. Then the rest of your report will make more sense.'
Ti nodded.
'You and your computer had already determined that Jishin's most probable target was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the lab where they're doing work on supercooled, superspeed computers. We rushed Manning and McCarter there just in case. They set up an ambush and sprang it as soon as they made a positive identification of the terrorists. Unfortunately Jishin was able to sacrifice her homegrown terrorists and get away with the hard-core international killers, ones that were Moscow trained.
'They had already wiped out the driver and six passengers when they commandeered a bus. They used the bus to drive back to Logan International Airport. There they simply killed passengers for their tickets and bookings and climbed onto domestic flights where they wouldn't have to show identification. That left twenty-two more bodies at the airport. Manning and McCarter are having the destinations of the victims checked out, and are standing by for further instructions.'
Ti did not give them time to discuss the tragedy in Boston. Her fingers flew over the computer keyboard. Suddenly Jishin's hoarse voice rasped from a speaker.
'This is Commander Jishin. I wish orders sent out to all branches immediately.'
'Yes, Commander.'
'Condition red. All base commanders are to destroy their targets tomorrow at twelve hundred hours. Have you got that?'
'Yes, Commander.'
'Then send it immediately. I'll call in a few hours for acknowledgments.''
The line went dead. Over the dial tone, the man in Santa Clara said, 'Yes, Commander.'
The group sat in silence. Brognola stood up. 'I have a telephone call to make. Everyone please wait for a couple of minutes.' Then he strode out of the lab.
By the time Lyons had introduced Deborah to the rest of the Stony Man crew, Brognola was back. He sat behind the desk and sighed.
'It's up to us,' he announced. 'As I said at the top of this mission, this is an election year. The President will not use the army, the FBI nor the Justice Department against HIT. He seems worried that it'll appear that he's attacking the unemployed.'
'Politics,' Gadgets spat. He said it as a dirty word.
No one else said a thing.
'So we have only ourselves and a strike planned from each of the HIT training centers,' Brognola said. His voice was heavy.
'Not quite,' Ti corrected. 'Our computer is holding the command. It hasn't passed it on to the branches yet. I thought we might just not pass it along, but give phony acknowledgments.''
'Do you know the acknowledgment routine?' Brognola asked.
Ti shook her head.
'Then let's pass the command along but stagger the orders. One city every two days. That will give us time to cope.'
Deborah spoke up. 'It won't work. There's a daily log. The change in orders will be discovered by five o'clock tonight.'
'Let's figure the minimum time spread we need,' Gadgets said. 'We'll send the first order to strike on schedule and spread the rest. That will give us some acknowledgments. We can use those to fake the rest.'
'What cities do we have to cover?' Brognola asked Ti.
'Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City and Seattle.'
'All those. Start by eliminating Boston. We're standing by there already.'
Ti's fingers flew over the keys. 'Done,' she reported.
'I think we'd better get Yakov to Seattle right away,' Pol suggested. 'He's the only one close enough to do anything if we don't manage a decent delay.'
Brognola turned to Kurtzman. 'Run me a package of all the information we have on the Seattle branch of HIT. I'll give it to Yakov as soon as I can get him to the telephone.
'The rest of you work out a schedule for covering these various branches. We can't afford to lose more computer people.'
Brognola picked up a telephone and began the tedious process of placing a secure call to the head of Phoenix Force, who was a guest of the Canadian government at an antiterrorist conference somewhere in or near Vancouver.
Kurtzman wheeled up to the desk with a few sheets of printout before the call was through. The call took nineteen minutes to place and six minutes to transact, including relaying all the information that Kurtzman had summed up.
Brognola hung up the telephone, then spent another six minutes arranging arms and transportation for the Israeli terror fighter. When he was finished, he leaned back and | looked at his team.
'What have you come up with?'
'First, while you were on the telephone, the acknowledgment came back from Boston,' Ti said. 'It was negative. Apparently the Boston commander feels that he's already lost all those with enough training to conduct a raid.'
'I'm in favor of letting the message go through and seeing what the reaction is,' Brognola said.
'Can't hurt,' Politician said.
Ti picked up the report on the group discussion. 'We can rule out an attack here in Atlanta. There's no one to do it. We think the command should go through to sit in the untended computer in case Jishin returns.'
Politician took up the report while Ti worked. 'The next most difficult place for us to reach in decent time is Minneapolis. My guess is that some of those professional terrorists are going to each destination to back up the local HIT teams.
'Gadgets and I have a business there. My sister, Torn, runs it. We suggest that you arrange for the FBI to take Toni along and meet the next couple of flights from Boston. The idea is to try to find a reason to hold the terrorists and prevent them from beefing up the locals. If we schedule things correctly, Gadgets, Carl and I can take care of Kansas City and have Jack fly us to Minneapolis, and later, on to Salt Lake City. If we put a four-or-five-hour time differential in their attack orders, we should be able to handle all three cities ourselves.'
'Besides,' Gadgets added, 'we'll have Toni keeping an eye on things in case they break wrong.'
