at bedtime.
Lazard grasped the managing attendant by the arm. 'Quickly. you must stop the boats.'
The attendant, a blond, lanky boy no more than twenty years of age, simply stood there in mute uncomprehension.
Lazard, obviously a man who disliked wasted conversation, moved hurriedly across the landing to the controls, disengaged the underwater traction chain that pulled the excursion boats, set the handbrake and turned to face the stunned boy again.
'Two men, two men together, have they taken the ride?'
'Don't know for sure, sir. There… there's been so many. I can't recall them all-' Kippmann stepped in front of Lazard and showed the boy the photographs of Castile and De Croix. 'Do you recognize these men?'
The boy's eyes widened. 'Yes, sir, now I remember.' Then a frown spread across his youthful face.
'But they weren't alone. There were two other men with them.'
'Four!' Kippmann shouted, turning about thirty heads. 'Are you sure?'
'Yes, sir.' The boy nodded his head violently.
'I'm positive. The boat holds eight people. The first four seats held a man and woman with two kids. The men in the photographs took the rear seats with two other men.'
Pitt arrived just then, his breath coming in short pants, his hand clutching the handrail as he fought off the pain and exhaustion. 'Was one of them a big guy with a bald head, hairy hands? A-nd the other, red-faced with a huge mustache and shgulders like an ape?'
The boy stared dumbly for a moment at Pitts disguise. Then his expression took on a half smile 'You hit them exactly. A real pair. Like tough-looking Mutt and Jeff characters.'
Pitt turned to Kippmann and Lazard. 'Gentlemen,' he said, his voice slightly muffled under the rubber wolf's head, 'I think we've just missed our boat.'
'For God's sake!' Kippmann murmured in exasperation. 'We can't just stand here.'
'No.' Lazard shook his head. 'We can't do that.'
He nodded at the boy. 'Call extension 309. Tell whoever answers that Lazard has relocated the missing party in The Pirates of the Caribbean. Tell them it's a red situation-the hunters are in there too.' He turned back to Kippmann and Pitt. 'The three of us can work along the catwalks and the backdrops until we reach them, and only hope we're not too late.'
'How many boats ago did they board?' Pitt asked the boy.
The dazed boy could only stammer. 'I… 'Ten, maybe twelve. They should be sitting about between the building and — '
'This way!' Lazard almost snapped the words.
He disappeared through a doorway at the end of the landing marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
As they moved into the blackness that cloaked the mechanical workings of the pirates, the sound of voices from the passengers of the stalled boats could be beard murmuring throughout the cavernous amusement ride.
Castile and De Croix, as well as their assassins, Pitt reflected, could have little suspicion as to the delay, but even so, it didn't seem to matter: there was every possibility that Kelly's and Rondheim's scheme had already been carried out. He fought off the ache in his chest and followed the squat, dim form of Kippmann past a storyland setting of five pirates burying a treasure chest. The figures seemed so lifelike it was difficult for Pitt to believe they were only electronically controlled mannequins. He was so engrossed in the simulated reality of the scene that he rammed into Kippmann, who had stopped abruptly.
'Easy, easy,' Kippmann protested.
Lazard motioned to them to stay where they were as he moved catlike along a narrow corridor and leaned over the railing of a workman's gallery running over the canal that supported the boats. Then he waved Pitt and Kippmann forward.
'We got lucky for a change,' he said. 'Take a look.' Pitt, his eyes not yet accustomed to the dark, stared below at a sight that never was-a wild fantasy night scene containing a band of at least thirty pirates burning and looting what seemed to be a replica of a miniature Port Royal or Panama City. Flames were shooting out of several buildings. while silhouettes of laughing buccaneers chased screaming make-believe girls around and around the back-lighted windows.
Boisterous singing was reverberating out of hidden speakers, giving the illusion that rape and pillage were merely good clean fun.
The canal the boats circuited through cut between the town buildings, lifting the viewers' eyes from a pair of pirates trying vainly to get a mule to pull a wagonload of their loot on the left to a trio of their shipmates drinking on a pile of wildly swaying wine barrels on the right. But it was the center of the canal that drew Pitts attention. There in a boat almost directly under a bridge that ran over the water were Castile and De C-roix, happily pointing out details of the wondrous scene like two schoolboys playing hookey at a Friday matinee. And, sitting ominously like disinterested statues on the seat directly in back of the South American Presidents, Pitt could make out the two men who had held his arms while Rondheim bad battered him to a pulp only two days before in Reykjavik.
Pitt glanced at the luminous dial of the orange faced Doxa watch on his wrist. Stan an hour and twenty minutes before Kelly's countdown. Too early, far too early, yet there were two of Rondheim's killers sitting not three feet from their intended victims. A very large Piece was missing from the puzzle. He had no doubt that Kelly told the truth about his timetable and that Rondheim would stick to it. But would he?
If Rondheim meant to take over Hermit Limited, it stood to reason that he just might make a change in plans.
This is your show, Dan.' Kippmann spoke softly to the security director. 'How do we take them?'
'No guns,' Lazard said. 'The last thing we want is a stray shot killing a child.'
'Maybe we'd better wait for reinforcements,' Kippmann said.
'No time,' Lazard said. 'We've kept the boats stopped too long already. Everyone is starting to get edgy, including those two characters in back of Castile and De Croix.'
'Then we'll have to take a risk.' Kippmann wiped a handkerchief across his damp brow. 'Get the boats moving again. Then as soon as the one with our friends begins to cross under the bridge, we'll take them.'
'Okay,' Lazard agreed. 'The bridge will give us cover to close within fifteen feet. I'll work around and come out of that doorway under the gunshop sign.
Kippmann. you hide behind the mule and wagon.'
'Need an extra hand?' Pitt asked.
'Sorry, Major.' Lazard gave Pitt a cool stare.
'You're hardly in shape for hand-to-hand combat.' He paused and gripped Pitts shoulder. 'You could play a vital role though.'
'Say the word.'
'By standing on the bridge in your wolf costume and miming with the pirates, you could distract those two in the boat long enough to give Kippmann and myself a few more seconds of insurance.'
'I guess it beats hell out of matching wits with the three little pigs,' Pitt said.
As soon as Lazard found a call phone and ordered the attendant to start the canal boats moving in two minutes, he and Kippmann dropped into the burning village behind the realistic-looking burning fronts and took their positions.
After he stumbled over the stuffed body of a pirate who supposedly had passed out from too much wine, Pitt reached down and relieved the mannequin of its cutlass and was surprised to find that it was a steel replica of the real thing. Even at close range he could only marvel at the true-to-life appearance of the mechanical pirates. The glass eyes set in brown wax faces stared unerringly in whatever direction the head was set, and the eyebrows raised up and down in unison with the lips as the strains of 'Sixteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest' boomed from speakers concealed within their aluminum-frame bodies.
Pitt moved to the center of the arched bridge over the canal and joined in the singing amid three merry buccaneers who sat with their legs dangling over the fake stone parapet, swirling their cutlasses around in circles in time with the songfest. Pitt in his Big Bad Wolf suit and the frolicking pirates presented a strange sight to the people in the boat as they waved and sang the famous old seafaring ditty. The children, a girl about ten and a boy, Pitt guessed, no more than seven,oon recognized him as the three-dimensional cartoon character and began waving
