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.It was the worst possible news.She said, “Have you got a time course?”EURO—JAPANESE CONSORTIUM NOW COMPRISES MORIKAWA (JAPAN) / GERLICH (GERMANY) / VOORSTER (AMSTERDAM) / UNFORTUNATELY HAVE RESOLVEDDIFFERENCES NOW IN COMPLETE ACCORD / MONITORING US CANNOT ANTICIPATE SECURE TRANSMISSIONS ANYTIME HENCEFORTH / ANTICIPATE ELECTRONICCOUNTERMEASURES AND WARFARE TACTICS IN PURSUIT OF TWO—B GOAL / THEY WILL ENTER CONGO (RELIABLE SOURCE) WITHIN 48 HOURS NOW SEEKING MUNRO /“When will they reach Tangier?” she asked.“In six hours.You?”“Seven hours.And Munro?”“We don’t know about Munro,” Travis said.“Can you booby him?”“Absolutely,” Ross said.“I’ll arrange the booby now.If Munro doesn’t see things our way, I promise you it’ll be seventy-two hours before he’s allowed out of the country.”“What’ve you got?” Travis asked.“Czech submachine guns.Found on the premises, with his prints on them, carefully applied.That should do it.”“That should do it,” Travis agreed.“What about your passengers?” He was referring to Elliot and Amy.“They’re fine,” Ross said.“They know nothing.”“Keep it that way,” Travis said, and hung up.4.Feeding Time“IT’S FEEDING TIME,” TRAVIS CALLED CHEERFULLY.“Who’s at the trough?”“We’ve got five tap dancers on Beta dataline,” Rogers said.Rogers was the electronic surveillance expert, the bug catcher.“Anybody we know?”“Know them all,” Rogers said, slightly annoyed.“Beta line is our main cross-trunk line in-house, so whoever wants to tap in to our system will naturally plug in there.You get more bits and pieces that way.Of course we aren’t using Beta anymore except for routine uncoded garbage—taxes and payroll, that stuff.”“We have to arrange a feed,” Travis said.A feed meant putting false data out over a tapped line, to be picked up.It was a delicate operation.“You have the consortium on the line?”“Sure.What do you want to feed them?”“Coordinates for the lost city,” Travis said.Rogers nodded, mopping his brow.He was a portly man who sweated profusely.“How good do you want it?”“Damned good,” Travis said.“You won’t fool the Japanese with static.”“You don’t want to give them the actual co-ords?”“God, no.But I want them reasonably close.Say, within two hundred kilometers.”“Can do,” Rogers said.“Coded?” Travis said.‘Of course.““You have a code they can break in twelve to fifteen hours?”Rogers nodded.“We’ve got a dilly.Looks like hell, but then when you work it, it pops out.Got an internal weakness in concealed lettering frequency.At the other end, looks like we made a mistake, but it’s very breakable.”“It can’t be too easy,” Travis warned.“Oh, no, they’ll earn their yen.They’ll never suspect a feed.We ran it past the army and they came back all smiles, teaching us a lesson.Never knew it was a setup.”“Okay,” Travis said, “put the data out, and let’s feed them.I want something that'll give them a sense of confidence for the next forty-eight hours or more—until they figure out that we’ve screwed them.”“Delighted,” Rogers said, and he moved off to Beta terminal.Travis sighed.The feeding would soon begin, and he hoped it would protect his team in the field—long enough for them to get to the diamonds first.5.Dangerous SignaturesTHE SOFT MURMUR OF VOICES WOKE HIM.“How unequivocal is that signature?”“Pretty damn unequivocal.Here’s the pissup, nine days ago, and it’s not even epicentered.”“That’s cloud cover?”“No, that’s not cloud cover, it’s too black.That’s ejecta from the signature.”“Hell.”Elliot opened his eyes to see dawn breaking as a thin red line against blue-black through the windows of the passenger compartment.His watch read 5:11—five in the morning, San Francisco time.He had slept only two hours since calling Seamans.He yawned and glanced down at Amy, curled up in her nest of blankets on the floor.Amy snored loudly.The other bunks were unoccupied.He heard soft voices again, and looked toward the computer console.Jensen and Irving were staring at a screen and talking quietly.“Dangerous signature.We got a computer projection on that?”“Coming.It’ll take a while.I asked for a five-year run-back, as well as the other pissups.”Elliot climbed out of his cot and looked at the screen.“What’s pissups?” he said.“PSOPs are prior significant orbital passes by the satellite,” Jensen explained
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