“Search me,” Tom replied. “I don’t even know how he got inside the plant.”
The man was tall, big-nosed, and brawny looking, clad in a dark-colored shirt and slacks. He was panting, and his slick sandy hair was disheveled from the fight. A guard frisked him but found nothing in his pockets except a bracelet containing a small electronic amulet.
“There’s the answer to how he sneaked in without being detected,” the guard said.
Every Enterprises employee was issued one of the amulet bracelets, which were designed to trap radar impulses. Without such a bracelet, the intruder’s presence would have been revealed at once by a blip on the plant radarscope.
“Where’d you get this?” Tom asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know!” snarled the captive.
104 AQUATOMIC TRACKER
Tom turned to the guards. “Take him to the security office and call Harlan Ames.”
Tom went back to his laboratory and examined the wax figure. A bullet had struck the back of its head, and the fall had smashed its features. “Too bad, but you sure earned your trip over from London,” Tom thought. “You saved my life.”
Ames reached the plant twenty minutes later. Both he and Tom questioned the prisoner but could learn nothing.
“Maybe a night in jail will change his mindl” Ames snapped. He telephoned the Shopton police, then ordered the man held in another room until the police car came to pick him up.
“I’ve checked out the serial number on that amulet,” an aide reported. “It belongs to one of our millwrights-Dan Feasler.”
“Have you tried reaching Feasler?” Ames asked.