“Mr. Medina’s in Washington.”
“How about his chief of administration, Jean Schlessinger?”
The guard reached for the telephone.
Five minutes later Jean emerged from the elevator, took one look at Forte, and fainted dead away. She came to with Forte sponging her lips with a handkerchief soaked in bourbon from the guardhouse bottle. “Mr. Forte,” she murmured weakly, looking up with a puzzled frown. “They said you were dead.”
“Wishful thinking.”
She licked her lips and sat up. “But that airplane crash-and the body.” She shuddered.
“Phony-as I hope you’ll assure the gentleman here who’s itching to draw his forty-four and bag himself an imposter.”
“It’s all right, Cecil. This is Mr. Forte,” Mrs. Schlessinger said. “You’ll have to forgive Mr. Allen, Mr. Forte,” she went on as Forte helped her to her feet, “but he’s a bit loopy on the subject of security.”
“The only way to be,” Ripley assured her. “In SD-1 we can’t take any chances on a spy or saboteur sneaking in to do his dirty work. Shall we?” He gestured toward the open elevator doors.
It was months since Forte had descended the 1,450 meters to the laboratories and workshops of Sunshine Industries, which his father Gwillam had hollowed out of an ancient salt dome nearly thirty years before. In that time, face-liftings and shifts in research and production priorities had periodically transformed the underground facilities. One of the constants had been the manufacture of such weapons as the most recent development, the Jim Bowie rail gun, named for the famed Texas knife fighter who could chop up an enemy with as much deadly certainty as his modern namesake.
The subterranean barracks that were to house the 3,000-man work force should nuclear war rage above-ground had been enlarged to accommodate the extra 1,400 economists, engineers, draftsmen”, transportation and housing experts drafted into service to plan dikes around the major coastal cities and the evacuation of those left unprotected. They commandeered the laboratories for working space, ripped out all the weapons-testing equipment, and installed desks, drawing boards, and filing cabinets. They produced tons of detailed plans each week, ready to be shipped to the appropriate sites for execution the moment the president gave them the go-ahead.
For the sake of security-after all, the future of the United States and the free world rested on the implementation of the plans-every room in which plans were drawn up was heavily guarded, with admission only on a need-to-know basis, except for Mark Medina and a few of his top administrators. To minimize damage from possible fires, high-pressure sprinkler systems had been installed. And outside each of the twenty-odd locked storerooms where the completed plans were stored were stationed two armed guards, around the clock.
As sole owner of SD-1 and employer of Mark Medina and the others in the SD-1 hierarchy, Ripley Forte had the responsibility, now that he had risen from the dead, to assure himself that the installation was indeed impervious to penetration by the enemy. But to Denton Fulda, the government’s chief of security, Forte’s concern bordered on paranoia.
“I understand your reservations, Mr. Forte,” the sandy-haired young man said respectfully, “but I think, when you have had a look around, you’ll agree that no precaution has been neglected.”
“Maybe,” said Forte. “But you haven’t had as much experience with the Russians as I have. They’re the trickiest people on earth. Half of the Soviet Union spends its waking hours figuring out new ways to diddle us-and the other half spies on them to make sure they’re doing their job.”
“Well, it’s all wasted effort as far as SD-1 is concerned,” Fulda assured him. “Every man down here has been screened to a fare-thee-well. Lie detectors, voice stress analysis, pupillary-contraction monitoring, muscle-tension examination-we used them all on every man and woman you see down here. We’ve run deep-background checks, and everyone with even so much as a citation for spitting on the sidewalk was excluded. Once down here nobody has been permitted to leave, even to attend the marriage or funeral of a loved one.
Even the three who died since the project got under way are still here-refrigerated. Nobody except Mark Medina-and your own self, of course-has permission to enter and leave. Only when the project plans are complete and delivered to competent authorities for execution will anybody be permitted to see the sky again. There are no phones or radios from SD-1 to the outside … So you’ll see that the installation is hermetically sealed. Safe as houses, as the Brits say.”
“Look at the Brits’ houses, with Russians quartered in the best of them, and maybe you’ll pick another simile,” Forte said. “What about physical penetration-the enemy digging a shaft into SD-1?”
“Impossible. Every wall surface contains hundreds of sensors. Computers filter out the background noise- earth shifts, traffic overhead, and so on; a gopher trying to tunnel in would trip every alarm in SD-1.”
Forte was impressed and said so. But he wanted to see for himself and so was taken on a grand tour of the project. It lasted the better part of the day. At its conclusion, he pronounced himself satisfied, except for one small detail.
“The storerooms?” said Fulda. “But they are locked and guarded by two guards at all times.”
“And the walls?”
“Walls?” Fulda said blankly.
“The storerooms are sandwiched between working spaces, aren’t they?”
“Yes, sir. That’s been done to minimize transportation of documents. Each department has its own storeroom, adjacent to its work spaces.”
“And no connection between work and storage spaces?”
“No, sir. The storerooms are four walls, ceiling and floor, with a single combination-locked door-guarded day and night.”
“And who guards the walls?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow, Mr. Forte.”
“Isn’t it conceivable that a saboteur has, just for the sake of argument, foxed your security investigators? That he had managed to obtain office space next to one of the storerooms? That he has access to tools? That he has surreptitiously bored a hole through one of the adjacent walls? That he will now be in a position to pour a flammable fluid into that hole, so that it will be soaked up by paper inside the storeroom? That, at a time of his choosing, he will ignite that flammable fluid and thus destroy a room full of documents? That these documents and plans are inextricably integrated with those stored elsewhere in SD-1? That, in short, one determined man might wreck the entire project and jeopardize the existence of Texas and the United States?”
Denton Fulda was overwhelmed. Forte’s logic was impeccable, even if his argument did rest upon the presence of a saboteur in SD-1. The investigation of each man and woman had been too intensive, too exhaustive, for a foreign agent to slip through the net. But Fulda was too experienced in security work to trust anybody, including himself, one hundred percent. Human nature was little understood and even less predictable. Brainwashing, psychological preparation, a sudden inexplicable change of allegiance, spite, mental aberration-any of these could inspire even the most thoroughly cleared worker in SD-1 to commit the arson Ripley Forte feared. And it had taken an outsider to demonstrate, almost offhandedly, that he, Denton Fulda, had been remiss in the execution of his job.
He drew himself up and looked Ripley Forte in the eye. “I guess the best thing for me to do, under the circumstances, is to put my responsibilities in the hands of someone better qualified. I’ll have my resignation on the desk of-”
Forte laughed and put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders. “Let’s not do anything drastic-not until we see if we can handle the problem in another way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Simply that you’re probably right in believing that SD-1 is clean. And if it is clean up to now, maybe we can guarantee that it remains that way.”
“How?”
“When I was in Johannesburg a couple of weeks ago, I was shown an interesting device. It looks like an ordinary felt pen. But it’s actually a mass of sensors and a miniaturized transmitter. It can detect vibration, such as that given off by an electric drill. It can detect a change in air quality, such as would be apparent if gasoline or other flammable were introduced into a closed chamber. It detects heat through an infrared sensor. In short, any change in the status quo causes the device to transmit an alarm, which is picked up and identified as to source by its particular wavelength. The receiver is installed in the security operations room. Even a tiptoeing mouse will set bells ringing.”
Fulda tried to be calm. “Do you think we could get some of those sensors?”
“Well,” said Forte, “I can always try.”
Three days later President Horatio Francis Turnbull was awakened from a sound sleep at three-thirty in the morning by his military aide, Major General Habib T. Noonie.
“What time is it?” said Turnbull, rolling over on his back and rubbing sleep-swollen eyes.