Jon interrupted. “Thanks, Marty. But finish what you were saying about Chambord’s second prototype.”
Marty blinked. He looked at the blank expressions on Peter’s and Randi’s faces and sighed dramatically. “Oh. Very well.” Without missing a beat, he picked up where he had left off. “So, Emile’s second setup vanished. Poof! Into thin air! Emile said he’d dismantled it because we were so close to the end that there was no need for another system. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but it was his decision to make. All the bugs were ironed out, and it was only a matter of fine-tuning the prime system.”
“When did the second one disappear?” Randi asked.
“Less than three days before the bombing, even though all the remaining big problems had been ironed out more than a week earlier.”
“We’ve got to find the second one right away,” Ranch told him. “Was Chambord missing from the lab for any length of time? A weekend? A holiday?”
“Not that I remember. He often slept on a bed he had put into the lab.”
“Think, lad,” Peter pressed. “A few hours perhaps?”
Marty screwed up his face in concentration. “I usually went to my hotel room for a couple of hours’ sleep every night, you see.”
But he continued to think, summoning memory the way a computer does. From the hour the bomb had exploded at the Pasteur, his mind screened back minute by minute, day by day, his neural circuits connecting in a remarkably accurate reverse chronology until at last he nodded vigorously. He had it.
“Yes, twice! The night it disappeared he said we needed pizza, but Jean-Luc was off somewhere, I don’t recall exactly where, so I went. I was gone perhaps fifteen minutes, and when I returned Emile wasn’t there. He came back in another fifteen minutes or so, and we zapped the pizza in our microwave.”
“So,” Jon said, “he was gone at least a half hour?”
“Yes.”
“And the second time?” Randi urged.
“The night after I noticed the second setup was gone, he was gone nearly six hours. He said he was so tired he was driving home to sleep in his own bed. It was true he was pooped. We both were.”
Randi analyzed it. “So the night it disappeared, Chambord wasn’t gone long. The next night, he was gone about six hours. It sounds to me as if the first night he probably just took it home. The second night, he drove it somewhere within three hours of the city, probably less.”
“Why do you think he drove?” Peter asked. “Why not fly or go by rail?”
“The prototype’s too big, too clumsy, with too many parts and pieces,” Jon told him. “I’ve seen one, and it’s definitely not portable.”
“Jon’s right,” Marty agreed. “It would’ve required at least a van to transport, even dismantled. And Emile would’ve trusted no one but himself to move it.” He sighed sadly. “This is all so incredible. Horribly incredible. Incredibly horrible.”
Peter was frowning. “He could’ve driven anywhere from Brussels to Brittany in three hours. But even if we’re looking for a place less than two hours away, we’re talking hundreds of square miles around Paris.” He considered Marty. “Any way you could use that electronics wizardry of yours to solve our problem? Locate the bloody prototype for us?”
“Sorry, Peter.” Marty shook his head. Then he picked up his new laptop from his bedside table and put it on his crossed legs. The modem was already connected to the phone line. “Even assuming Emile left the security software we designed for it in place, I wouldn’t have the power to break through. Emile has had plenty of time to change everything, including the codes. Remember, we’re up against the fastest, most powerful computer in the world. It evolves its codes to adapt to any attempt to locate it so swiftly that nothing we have today can track it.”
Jon was watching. “So why have you turned your laptop on? Looks to me as if you’re going online yourself.”
“Clever of you, Jon,” Marty said cheerfully. “Yes, indeed. As we speak, I’m logging onto my supercomputer at home. I’ll simply operate it from this laptop. With the use of my personally designed software, I hope to make a lie out of what I’ve just told you was impossible. Nothing to lose, and it’ll be fun to try” He stopped speaking abruptly, and his eyes grew large with astonishment. Then dismay. “Oh, dear! What a rotten trick. Dam you, Emile. You’ve taken advantage of my generous nature!”
“What is it?” Jon asked as he hurried to the bed to look at Marty’s screen. There was a message in French on it.
“What’s happened?” Randi asked worriedly.
Marty glared at the monitor, and his voice rose with indignant outrage. “How dare you enter the sanctity of my computer system. Youhellip;you sinister satrap! You’ll pay for this, Emile. You’ll pay!”
As Marty ranted, Jon read the message aloud to Peter and Randi in English:
Martin,
You must be more careful with your defensive software. It was masterful, but not against me or my machine. I’ve taken you offline, closed your back door, and blocked you out totally. You are helpless. The apprentice must yield to the master.
Emile
Marty raised his chin, defiant. “There’s no way he can defeat me. I’m the Paladin, and the Paladin is on the side of truth and justice. I’ll outwit him! Ihellip;Ihellip;”
As Jon moved away, Marty’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and his gaze grew hard and focused as he tried to convince his home system to power itself back on. Glumly, Jon, Peter, and Randi watched. Time seemed to be passing much too swiftly. They needed to find Chambord and the prototype.
Marty’s fingers slowed, and little spots of sweat appeared on his face. He looked up, miserable. “I’ll get him yet. But not this way.”
Outside Bousmelet-sur-Seine, France
In his quiet, windowless workroom, Emile Chambord inspected the message on his monitor. As he suspected he would, Zellerbach had contacted his home computer system in Washington, at which point he had received Chambord’s message and the system had shut itself off. This made Chambord laugh out loud. He had outwitted the arrogant little American. And now that he had a trace on him, he would also be able to find him. He typed quickly, beginning the next stage of his search.
“Dr. Chambord.”
The scientist looked up. “You have news?”
Brisk and compact, Captain Bonnard took the chair beside Chambord’s desk. “I just received a report from Paris.” His square face was unhappy. “Our people showed your photo of Dr. Zellerbach to the store clerk. He said Zellerbach wasn’t with the man who used the credit card to buy the laptop. However, it did sound as if he could be one of Jon Smith’s accomplices. But when my man checked the records for the sale, the address given was for Washington, D.C. There were no notations of any Paris address or phone number. Of course, since Zellerbach could merely have sent this man into the store, our people canvassed with the photo. Bad results again. No one recognized Zellerbach.”
Chambord gave a small smile. “Don’t give up, my friend. I’ve just learned a lessonthe power of the DNA computer is so limitless that one must readjust one’s thinking of what’s possible.”
Bonnard crossed his legs, swinging one foot impatiently. “You have another way to locate him? We must, you know. He and the others understand too much. They won’t be able to stop us now. But laterhellip;ah, yes. That could be catastrophic to our plans. We must eliminate them quickly.”
Chambord hid his annoyance. He knew the stakes better than Bonnard. “Fortunately, Zellerbach visited his home system. I anticipate that he took precautions first, probably bouncing the signal around from country to country, from whatever phone number his modem is using. He may also have tried to further disguise his path by going through a large number of servers and an equal number of aliases.”
“How can you trace through all that?” Bonnard asked. “That’s standard to disguise an electronic trail. It’s standard, because it works.”
“Not against my molecular machine.” With confidence, Dr. Chambord returned to his keypad. “In minutes, we’ll have the phone number in Paris. And then it’ll be a simple matter to discover the address that goes with it. After that, I have a little plan that’ll put an end completely to anyone’s pursuit.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Paris, France
“So here’s our situation.” Jon was telling Randi, Peter, and Marty. “All of our agencies are working on this. Our governments are standing at highest alert. Our job is to do what they can’t. From what Marty’s told us about the second prototype, Chambord and Bonnard have to be somewhere two hours or so from Paris. Now, what else do we know, and what don’t we know?”
“They’re an ivory-tower scientist and a junior French officer,” Randi said. “I wonder whether they did it all alone.”