if it costs me my job. I want the person, the people, who killed my brother. Because they're part of a much larger disease, and it's got to be stopped-not by bureaucratic debate, but by individual decision."
Courtland leaned back in his chair. Finally, he spoke.
"And you, Colonel?"
"I've been a soldier all my life, but here I must reject the chain of command. I can't wait for some Congress to declare war. We are at war."
"And you, Mrs. de Vries?"
"I gave you my husband, what more do you want?"
Ambassador Daniel Courtland leaned forward in his chair, both hands on his forehead, his fingers massaging his flesh.
"I've lived with compromises all my diplomatic life," he said.
"Maybe it's time to stop." He raised his head.
"I'll probably be demoted to Tierra del Fuego, but go for it, you rogues. Because you are right, there are times when we can't wait."
The three rogues were taken down to the supercomputer thirty feet below the cellars. It was both enormous and frightening; an entire ten-foot wall was covered by a plate of thick glass with whirling disks behind it, dozens spinning and abruptly stopping, trapping information from the skies.
"Hi, I'm Jack Rowe, one half of your deep, under-the earth geniuses," said a pleasant-looking sandy-haired man of less than thirty years.
"My colleague, if he's sober, will be here in a few minutes. He landed at Orly a half hour ago."
"We didn't expect to find drunks," exclaimed Witkowski.
"This is serious business!"
"Everything's serious here, Colonel-yes, I know who you are, it's standard operating procedure. Youtoo, Con sOp guy, and the lady who probably could have run NATO if she were a man and wore a uniform. There are no secrets here. They all spew out on the disks."
"Can we get at them?" said Drew.
"Not until my buddy arrives. You see, he has the other code, which I'm not allowed to have."
"To save time," said Karin, "can you collate the data from my office with specific dates as I recalled them?"
"Don't have to, it's one and the same. You give us the dates, and whatever you recorded on those days will show up on the screen. You couldn't change it or erase it if you wanted to."
"I don't care to do either."
"That's a relief. When I got the hurry-up from the Big Man, I figured we maybe had one of those Rose Mary Wood things we read about in history books."
"History books?" Witkowski's brows arched in indignation.
"Well, I was about six or seven when all that stuff happened, Colonel. Maybe history is the wrong word."
"I hope to kiss a pig it was."
"That's an interesting phrase," said the young, sandyhaired technician.
"Root linguistic vernaculars are kind of a hobby with me. That's either Irish or Middle European, Slavic probably, where sus scrofa-pigs or hogs-were valuable property. To 'hope to kiss a pig' implied ownership, a status symbol, actually. And if you supplant the a with a my, therefore my pig, it meant you were either pretty rich or soon expected to be." .- "Is that what you do with computers?" asked an astonished Latham
"You'd be surprised at the mountains of incidental intelligence these Big Birds can hold. I once traced a Latin chant, a religious chant, to a pagan cult in Corsica."
"That's very interesting, young man," interrupted Witkowski, "but our concerns here are speed and accuracy."
"We'll give you both, Colonel."
"Incidentally," Witkowski said, "the phrase I used was Polish."
"I'm not sure of that," said Karin.
"I believe it stems from Gaelic roots, Irish in fact."
"And I don't give a damn!" cried Drew.
"Will you please concentrate on the days, the time spans, you can remember, Karin?"
"I already have," replied De Vries, opening her purse.
"Here they are, Mr. Rowe." She handed the computer expert a torn piece of notebook paper.
"These are all over the place," said the technician partial to linguistic vernaculars.
"They're in sequence, it's the best I could do.," '"No problem for the biggest bird in France."
"Why do you call this thing a bird?" asked Latham.
"Cause it flies into the ether of infinite recall."
"Sorry I asked."
"But this helps, Mrs. de Vries. I'll program my side, so when Joel arrives, he can key in and the sideshow can begin."
"Sideshow?"
"The screen, Colonel, the screen."
As Rowe inserted the codes that released his side of the massive computer, and typed in the data, the metal door of the subterranean complex opened and another technician, this one perhaps in his early thirties, perhaps older, walked in. What distinguished him from his colleague was a long, neatly bound ponytail, held in place