BEN BOVA
REMEMBER, CAESAR …
We have never renounced the use of terror. — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
She was alone and she was scared.
Apara Jaheen held her breath as the two plainclothes security guards walked past her. They both held ugly, deadly black machine pistols casually in their hands as they made their rounds along the corridor.
They can’t see you, Apara told herself. You’re invisible.
Still, she held her breath.
She knew that her stealth suit shimmered ever so slightly in the glareless light from the fluorescents that lined the ceiling of the corridor. You had to be looking for that delicate little ripple in the air, actively seeking it, to detect it at all. And even then you would think it was merely a trick your eyes played on you, a flicker that was gone before it even registered consciously in your mind.
And yet Apara froze, motionless, not daring to breathe, until the two men — smelling of cigarettes and after-shave lotion — passed her and were well down the corridor. They were talking about the war, betting that it would be launched before the week was out.
Her stealth suit’s surface was honeycombed with microscopic fiber optic vidcams and pixels that were only a couple of molecules thick. The suit hugged Apara’s lithe body like a famished lover. Directed by the computer built into her helmet, the vidcams scanned her surroundings and projected the imagery onto the pixels.
It was the closest thing to true invisibility that the Cabal’s technology had been able to come up with. So close that, except for the slight unavoidable glitter when the sequin-like pixels caught some stray light, Apara literally disappeared into the background.
Covering her from head to toe, the suit’s thermal absorption layer kept her infrared profile vanishingly low and its insulation subskin held back the minuscule electromagnetic fields it generated. The only way they could detect her would be if she stepped into a scanning beam, but the wide-spectrum goggles she wore should reveal them to her in plenty of time to avoid them.
She hoped.
Getting into the president’s mansion had been ridiculously easy. As instructed, she had waited until dark before leaving the Cabal’s safe house in the miserable slums of the city. Her teammates drove her as close to the presidential mansion as they dared in a dilapidated, nondescript faded blue sedan that would draw no attention. They wished her success as she slipped out of the car, invisible in her stealth suit.
“For the Cause,” Ahmed said, almost fiercely, to the empty air where he thought she was.
“For the Cause,” Apara repeated, knowing that she might never see him again.
Tingling with apprehension, Apara hurried across the park that fronted the mansion, unseen by the evening strollers and beggars, then climbed onto the trunk of one of the endless stream of limousines that entered the grounds. She passed the perimeter guard posts unnoticed.
She rode on the limo all the way to the mansion’s main entrance. While a pair of bemedaled generals got out of the limousine and walked crisply past the saluting uniformed guards, Apara melted back into the shadows, away from the lights of the entrance, and took stock of the situation.
The guards at the big, open double doors wore splendid uniforms and shouldered assault rifles. And were accompanied by dogs: two big German shepherds who sat on their haunches, tongues lolling, ears laid back.
Will they smell me if I try to go through the doors? Apara asked herself. Muldoon and his technicians claimed that the insulated stealth suit protected her even from giving off a scent. They were telling the truth, as they knew it, of course. But were they right?
If she were caught, she knew her life would be over. She would simply disappear, a prisoner of their security apparatus. They would use drugs to drain her of every scrap of information she possessed. They would not have to kill her afterward; her mind would be gone by then. Standing in the shadows, invisible yet frightened, she tongued the cyanide capsule lodged between her upper right wisdom tooth and cheek. This is a volunteer mission, Muldoon had told her. You’ve got to be willing to give your life for the Cause.