windows on three levels and a smaller dome on top.Lardis was lost for words; he found it too fantastic. But Jake only grunted and said, 'You should see Las Vegasf While in his own mind he wondered: A holiday campp A fantastic hotel complex for the jet-setters and beautiful people? Or maybe - 'An aerie!' sighed Lardis. 'Now wouldn't that make a wonderful aerie? Er, without all this sunlight, of course.'The precog was still wearing his headset, and he had been conversing with the pilot. Now he put a hand over the mike and said, 'Xanadu, and the centrepiece there ... why, that can only be Kubla Kahn's pleasure dome! Put on your headsets. The pilot knows some stuffJake and Lardis complied, heard the pilot tail off:'... There were some private homes here, hence the road up the mountain. But after the fire some kind of tycoon bought up the land and built this place. He's a philanthropist, uses the money from this for other "good works", allegedly. Huh! A typical tax gimmick, if you ask me. All of these fat-cat rich bastards are the same. Xanadu, yeah, that's what it's called. The dome's a casino, all three floors of it.''The fire?' said Goodly. 'You mean the Brisbane Fire?'
'Nah, not the Great Fire,' said the other. 'This was back in '97, an earlier El Nino. The place was a tinderbox, and the fire must have started in one of the weekend homes. They were simple timber cabins, holiday homes, you know? Went up like so much kindling.'
'Take her lower, can you?' The precog was plainly interested.'So what's on your mind, boss?' With a chuckle, the pilot leaned his machine into a descending spiral. 'You want to wave at the girlies around those pools?''Er, something like that,' said Goodly.And certainly the girlies were there, and sun-bronzed fellows, too. There were three pools situated equidistant from the central dome; they glittered like dazzling blue jewels in Mediterranean settings, and were surrounded by low windbreak walls and mosaic-paved sundecks. The sundecks were dotted with chairs and sunbeds. And sure enough, as the chopper circled lower, the girls were sitting up, tilting their mirror-shades at the furnace sky, waving lazy arms at their imagined aerial 'admirers'.'That's low enough/ Lardis muttered, nervously. 'The next thing you know, I'll be swimming!'And the Major said, 'Mightn't we attract a little too much attention?' He was on the headset and the pilot heard him.'So what's the problem?' he inquired. 'Are you worried the people who run the place will complain? Nah! It's good free advertising, and we do this all the time. Tourists who can afford it sometimes take time out after they've seen it to come up for a few days' relaxation - though how anyone with red blood in his veins could relax up here is beyond me!'
Then the precog said, 'That ... that's enough. We'd better get on our way now.' And there was a certain edge to his piping voice that had Jake looking at him across the aisle.
He saw that Goodly's face was suddenly drawn, and noticed how his hands gripped the armrests of his seat...
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
PART FOUR
The Hell Of It
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Here Be VampiresThat evening at the safe house, when Trask's people had eaten, he got them together in the Ops Room to debrief them and start them working on the correlation of their findings. For he knew by then that they had been partially successful - or at least that they'd detected something out of the ordinary - and that a lot might soon depend on their observations.For instance, the military contingent: it was most likely that the siting of the SAS back-up teams would be based on the as yet unproven suspicions or 'hunches' of Trask's espers. And in just two days' time those men and vehicles would start arriving and moving into harbour areas whose locations were as yet undecided. Time was of the essence.After Trask had settled his people down, David Chung described his temporary contact with something during the landing at Gladstone, and went on to talk about the system of triangulation that they had devised.'Taking Gladstone as the centre of a clock face,' the locator said, 'the first reading would see the minute hand at some thirteen minutes past the hour, or a few degrees north of east. As for the second reading, over Sandy Cape, that would be about twelve and a half minutes before the hour, or north-west.'
Chung stood