Two of the white supremacists, a man and a woman, rose at the blast but stood still. Gurney did not. He rose, threw the laptop at Park, and reached his right hand under the table.
Park lowered his gun and’caught the computer. “Take him!” he shouted to Arden.
Arden was ahead of him. He swung his 9mm over as Gurney drew a Sokolovsky.45 automatic from a holster attached to the underside of the computer table. The.45 spat first, the first bullet catching the edge of Arden’s Kevlar bulletproof vest. His left shoulder was shattered, but the impact threw him away from the fan of bullets. As they struck the wall behind him, Arden squeezed off rounds of his own. So did Park, who had crouched, set the computer down, and fired.
One of Arden’s bullets caught the neo-Nazi in the left hip, the other in the right foot. Park put a hole in Gurney’s right forearm.
Snarling viciously from the pain, Gurney dropped the .45 and fell to his left. Park hurried over and put his gun to the man’s temple. During the four-second exchange, neither the woman nor the other man had moved.
There was no gunfire from the floors below, though the brief exchange on the third floor had brought the backup team racing into the building. They ran upstairs as Park was cuffing the bleeding gunman. DiMonda and Johns had put their own prisoners against the wall, face in, hands behind their backs. As they were handcuffed, the woman screamed that diMonda was a traitor to his race, and the man threatened retribution against his family. Both of them ignored Johns.
Three members of the backup team arrived and entered in two-one formation— two agents rushed in, fanning left and right, while the third dropped to her belly in the doorway, covering them. When they saw Arden and the white supremacist lying on the hardwood floor, and the other two neo-Nazis cuffed, they called for the ambulance.
As the backup team took charge of the prisoners, diMonda hurried to Arden’s side.
“I can’t believe this,” Arden gasped.
“Don’t talk,” diMonda said. He knelt by his head. “If something’s broken, you don’t want to displace it even more.” “Of course something’s broken,” Arden wheezed. “My goddamn shoulder. Twenty years on the force and not one injury. Man, I had a no-hitter going till that prick tagged me.
And it was a sucker punch. The old gun-under-the-table.” Despite his wounds, the gunman said, “You’re going to die. You’re all going to die.” DiMonda looked over as he was loaded onto a stretcher. “Eventually, yeah,” he said. “Till then, we’re gonna keep beating the bush and flushing out snakes like you.” Gurney laughed. “You won’t have to flush.” He coughed, and said through his teeth, “We’re coming to bite you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN Thursday, 2:45 P.M., Hamburg, Germany
Hood and Martin Lang had both been startled when Hausen returned and announced that he had to leave.
“I’ll see you later, in my office,” he said as he shook Hood’s hand. Then bowing slightly to Stoll and Lang, he left.
Neither Hood nor Lang bothered to ask what was wrong.
They simply watched in silence as Hausen walked briskly to the parking lot, where he’d parked his car earlier.
When he pulled away, Stoll said, “Is he Superman or something? ‘This looks like a job for šbermensch’?” “I’ve never seen him like that,” Lang said. “He seemed very unsettled. And did you notice his eyes?” “What do you mean?” Hood asked.
“They were bloodshot,” Lang said. “He looked as if he’d been crying.” “Maybe there’s been a death,” Hood suggested.
“Perhaps. But he would have told us. He would have postponed our meeting.” Lang shook his head slowly. “It’s very strange.” Hood was concerned without knowing why. Though he barely knew Hausen, he had the impression that the Deputy Foreign Minister was a man of unusual strength and compassion. He was a politician who stood by what he believed because he felt it was best for his country. From the briefing paper Liz Gordon had prepared, Hood knew that Hausen had shouted down neo-Nazis at the first Chaos Days years before, and had written a series of unpopular newspaper editorials demanding the publication of the “Death Books from Auschwitz,” the list the Gestapo kept of people who had died in the concentration camp. For Hausen to run from anything seemed out of character.
But the men still had work to do, and Lang tried to put a business-as-usual face on things as he led them to his office.
“What do you need for your presentation?” the industrialist asked Stoll.
“Just a flat surface,” Stoll said. “A desk or floor’ll do.
The windowless office was surprisingly small. It was lit by recessed fluorescent lights, and the only furniture was two white-leather sofas on opposite sides. Lang’s desk was a long slab of glass resting on a pair of white marble columns.
The walls were white and the floor was white tile.
“I take it you like white,” Stoll said.
“It is said to have therapeutic psychological value,” Lang said.
Stoll held up the backpack. “Where can I set this up?” “On the desk is fine,” Lang said. “It’s quite sturdy and scratch resistant.” Stoll set the bag beside the white phone. “Therapeutic psychological value,” he said. “You mean like, it’s not as depressing as black or as sad as blue— that kind of thing?” “Exactly,” said Lang.
“I can just see me asking Senator Fox for the money to redo Op-Center entirely in white,” Hood said.
“She’d see red,” Stoll said, “and you’d never get the green.” Hood made a face and Lang watched intently as Stoll unpacked the bag.
The first object he removed was a silver box roughly the size of a shoebox. It had an iris-like shutter in the front, and an eyepiece in the back. “Solid-state laser with viewfinder,” he said helpfully. The second object resembled a compact fax machine. “Imaging system with optical and electrical probes,” he said. Then he removed a third object, which was a white plastic box with cables. It was slightly smaller than the first. “Power pack,” Stoll said. “Never know when you’re going to have to rev up in the wilderness.” He grinned. “Or on a laboratory table.” “Rev up… what?” Lang asked as he watched attentively.
“In a peanut shell,” Stoll said, “what we call our T-Bird.
It directs a fast laser pulse at a solid-state device, generating laser pulses. These pulses only last— oh, about one hundred femtoseconds, which is a tenth of a trillionth of a second.” He pressed a square, red button on the back of the power pack. “What you get are terahertz oscillations that wriggle around between the infrared and radio wave area of the spectrum. What that gives you is the ability to tell what’s inside or behind something thin— paper, wood, plastic, almost anything. All you have to do is interpret the change in the waveforms to tell what’s on the other side. And coupled with this baby”— he patted the imaging device— “you actually get to see what’s inside.” “Like an X-ray,” Lang said.
“Only without the X’s,” said Stoll. “You can also use it to determine the chemical composition of objects— for example, the fat in a slice of ham. And it’s much more portable.” Stoll walked over to Lang and held out his hand.
“Could I borrow your wallet?” he asked.
Lang reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and handed his wallet to the scientist. Stoll placed it on the opposite side of the desk. Then he went over and pressed a green button beside the white button.
The silver box hummed for a moment, and then the fax-like device began to scroll out a piece of paper.
“Pretty quiet,” Stoll said. “I was able to do this in your lab without the technician next to me hearing it.” When the paper stopped moving, Stoll retrieved it and took a quick look at it. He handed it to Lang.
“Is that your wife and kids?” Stoll asked.
Lang looked down at the slightly fuzzy black-and-white image of his family. “Remarkable,” he said. “This is quite amazing.” “Imagine what you’d get if you ran the picture through a computer,” Stoll said. “Cleaned up the rough edges and brought out the details.” “When our lab first developed this technology,” Hood said, “we were trying to find out how to tell what kinds of gases and liquids were inside bombs. That way, we could neutralize them without getting near them. The problem was, we had to have a receiver on the other side of the object to analyze the T-rays as they came out. Then our R&D team figured out how to analyze them at the source.
That’s what made the T-Bird work as a surveillance tool.” Lang said, “What’s the effective range?” “The moon,” he said. “At least, that’s as far as we’ve tested it. Looked inside the Apollo 11 lander. Armstrong and Aldrin were pretty tidy guys. Theoretically, it should work as far as the laser can travel.” “My God,” Lang said. “This is beautiful.” Hood had been standing off to a corner, and came closer now. “The T-Bird is going to be a vital component of the Regional Op-Center,” said Hood. “But we need to make it more compact and also refine it to work with greater resolution so operatives can carry it in the field. We also need to be able to filter out extraneous images— for example, girders inside walls.” “That’s where your smaller chips come in,” said Stoll.