hoped. The castle command center, like this one, had only eight TV monitors, which were hard-wired into over forty cameras. You could have the computer simply flip through them in an automatic sequence, or select cameras for special use. With a mouse-click, one camera was disabled. If the terrorists were using the automatic sequence, as seemed likely, they probably would not notice that one camera's take was missing during the flip-through. They had to get through the visual coverage of two of them, and the park engineer was ready to flip them off' and on as needed. The moment a hand appeared in camera twenty-three's field of view, the engineer flipped it off.
'Okay, twenty-three is off, Noonan.'
'We're moving,' Noonan said. The first walk took them twenty meters, and they stopped behind a concession stand. 'Okay, we're at the popcorn building.'
The engineer flipped twenty-three back on, and then turned off twenty-one.
'Twenty-one is off,' Clark reported next. 'Rifle Two-One, where's the guy on the root?'
'West side, just lit up a smoke, not looking down over the edge anymore. Staying still at the moment,' Sergeant Johnston reported.
'Noonan, you are clear to move.'
'Moving now,' the FBI agent replied. He and Vega double-timed it across the stone slabs, their rubber-soled boots keeping their steps quiet. At the side of the castle was a dirt strip about two meters wide, and some large boxwoods. Carefully, Noonan and Vega angled the ladder up, setting it behind a bush. Vega pulled the rope to extend the top portion, stopping it just under the window. Then he got between the ladder and the building, grabbed the treads and held them tight, pulling the ladder against the rough stone blocks.
'Watch your ass, Tim,' Oso whispered.
'Always.' Noonan went up quickly for the first ten feet, then slowed to a vertical crawl. Patience, Tim told himself. Plenty of time to do this. It was the sort of lie that men tell themselves.
'Okay,' Clark heard. 'He's going up the ladder now. The roof guy is still on the opposite side, fat, dumb, and happy.'
'Bear, this is Six, over,' John said, getting another idea.
'Bear copies, Six.'
'Play around a little on the west side, just to draw some attention, over.'
'Roger that.'
Malloy stopped his endless circling, leveled out, and then eased toward the castle. The Night Hawk was a relatively quiet aircraft for a helicopter, but the guy on the root turned to watch closely, the colonel saw through his night vision goggles. He stopped his approach at about two hundred meters. He wanted to get their attention, not to spook them. The roof sentry's cigarette blazed brightly in the goggles. It moved to his lips, then away, then back, staying there.
'Say hello, sweetie,' Malloy said over the intercom. 'Jesus, if I was in a Night Stalker, I could spray your ass into the next time zone.'
'You fly the Stalker? What's it like?'
'If she could cook, I'd fucking marry her. Sweetest chopper ever made,' Malloy said, holding hover. 'Six, Bear, I have the bastard's attention.'
'Noonan, Six, we've frozen the roof sentry for you. He's on the opposite side from you.' Good, Noonan didn't say. He took off his Kevlar helmet and edged his face to the window. It was made of irregular segments held in place by lead strips, just like in the castles of old. The glass wasn't as good as float-plate, but it was transparent. Okay. He reached into his backpack and pulled a fiber-optic cable with the same cobra head arrangement he'd used in Bern.
'Noonan to Command, you getting this?'
'That's affirmative.' It was the voice of David Peled. The picture he saw was distorted, but you quickly got used to that. It showed four adults, but more important, it showed a crowd of children sitting on the floor in the corner, close to two doors with labels-the toilets, Peled realized. That worked. That worked pretty well. 'Looks good, Timothy. Looks very good.'
'Okay.' Noonan glued the tiny instrument in place and headed down the ladder. His heart was racing faster than it ever did on the morning three-mile run. At the bottom, he and Vega both hugged the wall.
The cigarette flew off the roof, and the sentry got tired of looking at the chopper, Johnston saw. 'Our friend's moving east on the castle roof. Noonan, he's coming your way.'
Malloy thought of maneuvering to draw the attention back, but that was too dangerous a play. He turned the helicopter sideways and continued his circling, but closer in, his eyes locked on the castle roof. There wasn't much else he could do except to draw his service pistol and fire, but at this range it would be hard enough to hit the castle. And killing people wasn't his job, unfortunately, Malloy told himself. There were times when he found the idea rather appealing.
'The helicopter annoys me,' the voice on the phone said. 'Pity,' Dr. Bellow replied, wondering what response it would get. 'But police do what police do.'
'News from Paris?'
'Regrettably not yet, but we hope to hear something soon. There is still time.' Bellow's voice adopted a quiet intensity that he hoped would be taken for desperation.
'Time and tide wait for no man,' One said, and hung up.
'What's that mean?' John asked.
'It means he's playing by the rules. He hasn't objected to the caps he can see on the TV, either. He knows the things he has to put up with.' Bellow sipped his coffee. 'He's very confident. He figures he's in a safe place, and he's holding the cards, and if he has to kill a few more kids. that's okay, because it'll get him what he wants.'
'Killing children.' Clark shook his head. 'I didn't think-hell, I'm supposed to know better, right?'
'It's a very strong taboo, maybe the strongest,' Dr. Bellow agreed. 'The way they killed that little girl, though… there was no hesitation, just like shooting a paper target. Ideological,' the psychiatrist went on. 'They've subordinated everything to their belief system. That makes them rational, but only within that system. Our friend Mr. One has chosen his objective, and he'll stick to it.'
The remote TV system, the park engineer saw, was really something. The objective lens now affixed to the castle window was less than two millimeters across at its widest point, and even if noticed, would be mistaken for a drop of paint or some flaw in the window glass. The quality of the image wasn't very good, but it showed where people were, and the more you looked at it, the more you understood what initially appeared to be a black-and- white photograph of clutter. He could count six adults now, and with a seventh atop the castle, that left only three unaccounted for-and were all the children in view? It was harder with them. All their shirts were the same color, and the red translated into a very neutral gray on the black-and-white picture. There was the one in a wheelchair, but the rest blended together in the out-of-focus image. The commandos, he could see, were worried about that.
'He's heading back west again,' Johnston reported. 'Okay, he's at the west side now.'
'Let's go,' Noonan told Vega.
'The ladder?' They'd taken it down and laid it behind the bushes on its side.
'Leave it.' Noonan ran off in a crouch, reaching the concession structure in a few seconds. 'Noonan to Command, time to do the cameras again.'
'It's off,' the engineer told Clark.
'Camera twenty-one is down. Get moving, Tim.'
Noonan popped Vega on the shoulder and ran another thirty meters. 'Okay, take down twenty-three.'
'Done,' the park engineer said.
'Move,' Clark commanded.
Fifteen seconds later, they were in a safe position. Noonan leaned against a building wall and took a long breath. 'Thanks, Julio.'
'Any time, man,' Vega replied. 'Just so the camera gadget works.'
'It will,' the FBI agent promised, and with that they headed back to the underground command post.
'Blow the windows? Can we do that, Paddy?' Chavez was asking when they got there.
Connolly was wishing for a cigarette. He'd quit years before-it was too hard on the daily runs to indulge-but at times like this it seemed to help the concentration. 'Six windows… three or four minutes each… no, I think not, sir. I can give you two-if we have the time.'
