Now, however, the fugitive was making matters more difficult for them. He launched two bombs straight downward, in widely scattered directions. Cursing under his breath as he saw them fall, Jules brought the car into a slight dip to give his sister a better shot. The female d’Alembert picked off these two projectiles with the same uncanny accuracy, but by the time Jules could bring the car back up into pursuit they had lost two more seconds of valuable time.
Again the traitor’s vehicle shot out bombs endangering innocent lives, and again the d’Alemberts reacted to protect the people of Earth. This time there were four of the bombs, and they were dropping so fast that it took a full ten seconds to blow them out of the sky and return to their flight path. ‘We’ll never catch him at this rate,’ Yvette cried.
‘Oh, I think the Head still has a few tricks up his sleeve,’ Jules replied. ‘Look there.’
He pointed at the scanner and Yvette looked in the indicated direction. There, at the extreme left edge of the screen, was a swarm of bright little shapes moving eastward. Their path would just about intersect that of the traitor’s car. ‘Tampeta division,’ Yvette guessed.
‘Right, they’ll try to cut him off and turn him back. If he should somehow make it by them, there’ll be other fleets just waiting for him. The Head probably has every fly able vessel in North America in the air right now, hovering on alert and waiting for developments to break. Nobody, not even Grandon, could wiggle out of a cordon like that.’
Even though the odds were now against their capturing the runaway colonel themselves, the d’Alemberts continued to watch the developments playing out on their screens. Grandon had spotted the Tampete fleet as soon as Jules had, and was now in the process of taking evasive action. His own car was smaller and more maneuverable than most of the SOTE craft in that formation, and he used that fact to masterly advantage. The fugitive dipped and soared through the atmosphere on an unpredictable roller coaster that kept his pursuers guessing. His flight path veered sharply off of the northwesterly course it had been following and began moving straight north. This, of course, invalidated the intersection course of the fleet and caused them to readjust their direction; after which, Grandon veered again. He was count ing on the maneuverability of his craft to help him skirt around the approaching fleet, flank them and outdistance them.
It almost worked.
Just over Jacksonville, Grandon encountered another blip a commercial airliner on its regular route down to Miami. The treacherous colonel had dipped very low into the atmosphere in an evasive maneuver when suddenly the plane appeared out of nowhere, coming at him almost head on. He banked quickly, and just did miss hitting the plane, but his reflex action cost him dearly. At that speed, and with his air resistance at that altitude, his car lost control. Buffeted now and helpless in the face of a series of crosswinds, the car shook and trembled. Down he plummeted, and the lower he went the less control he had.
With his vehicle that out of control, the d’Alemberts were able to gain on him. Crandon’s car was still too far away to be visible in the darkness of the early morning, but their scanners told them the story. The fall would be fatal, they could tell that; it had already gone too far to ever come under control, and they were still too far away to make any attempt to save it. Jules and Yvette could only watch helplessly as the final catastrophe hit.
With a blinding and deafening crash, Grandon’s car plunged headfirst into a suburban park. Only by the most fortunate of coincidences did it miss impacting in a residential neighborhood, and consequently no innocent human life was lost. But the vehicle itself made a pretty scene. Special Service cars like that one were never meant to be inspected by the general public, and were equipped with self-destruct mechanisms. As the vehicle smashed to earth, it turned into an enormous fireball that illuminated the landscape for kilometers around with a light brighter than a dozen suns. The sound of that tremendous explosion shattered windows within a ten block radius, and the shockwave could be felt halfway across the city. Nothing remained of the car and its contents but a fine dust that rained down on the city of Jacksonville for more than six hours afterward.
Colonel Grandon did not get to become the chief of SOTE’s Internal Security division by being stupid. When his vehicle began to slip from his control after the close brush with the airliner, he knew instantly that this present situation was hopeless. Being a man who could act quickly on reflexes, he moved at once to improve his chances of survival.
Consequently, at the very instant his car was being volatized on impact with the ground, Colonel Grandon was floating suspended in air by a parachute, one kilometer above ground level. He was reasonably certain he would not be spotted. At nighttime he would not be a visual attraction to anyone’s eye- and to pick him up on an infrared scanner, an observer would have to know precisely where to look for him. That was unlikely. So, as he drifted leisurely down to earth, he had time to think about what to do next.
His car was gone, and with it the man he’d tried to save from SOTE’s probings, probably under nitrobarb.
He did not regret his action – that man, had he been forced to reveal what he knew, could have given SOTS a clear enough description of Grandon to blow the colonel’s cover anyway. But, with the destruction of the car, he would probably also lose his pursuit. There was no possibility of any body surviving in the wreckage, so they would have no way of knowing he’d escaped. The Head would no doubt lay out a search pattern for him just on the possibility that he had eluded destruction, but of necessity that search would have to be a general one. With nine billion people currently inhabiting the surface of the planet Earth, any man who knew what he was doing could easily avoid detection by that type of search.
He landed in a residential section. His chute was of a specially designed material and vaporized at the touch of a match, leaving virtually no trace of its existence. He walked for several blocks to the nearest subway entrance, and took the first available train to anywhere. He changed trains three times at random before finally going to his destination – the monoliner station. At the ticket counter he bought a pass to Angeles-Diego, but used the passenger option and converted it once he was aboard the train to the Boswash Complex.
The Atlantic Seaboard from Massachusetts to Virginia was jammed with a population of more than a hundred million souls. Within that seething mass of humanity, of fleshpots and rampant confusion, a highly trained professional like Colonel Grandon easily avoided all the nets that had been cast for him. Twenty-four hours after arriving in Boswash, the fugitive had safely boarded the first in a series of airliners to relay him to his real destination – Moscow.
Twelve hours later, he was proceeding through channels to report to the man who’d paid him to betray the SOTS. A call to the proper number was relayed up the chain of command; and after a delay of only one hour – which indicated an efficient organization – his instructions came back: he was to go to a certain address and report to whomever he found there.
The house was an old one, a decrepit building on the seamier side of town. The windows were all boarded up and the bricks were grimy from decades of air pollution. There seemed to be no decent people on the streets – only what the colonel would have classified as ‘the criminal element’- though many people looked at him through drawn shutters. The banister of the outside stairs was covered with dust, undisturbed for months. This house was not a frequently visited spot.
Inside, the house was not much better. The smell of old cobwebs assailed his nostrils, the walls were covered with faded old wallpaper and the floor was bare except for an old board or two scattered about the floor. Grandon reached for a light switch, but nothing happened when he flipped it. The only light available was that which managed to filter in through the boarded up windows.
‘Hello,’ he called out.
‘Over here, Gospodin
Jones,’ came a muffled voice from behind one wall, calling him by the prearranged code name. Grandon took a step toward the voice. ‘Your Majesty, I…
‘Do not come any closer.’ The voice coming from the next room was still muffled, but sharp. ‘You will s tay at all times where I can see you and you cannot see me. It is a necessary precaution. And you are not to refer to me by that title – yet. I will not claim what I have not earned. It will come, in its season. Meanwhile, you will call me Gospodin Ivanov. It is not my name, but it will serve.’