"We are not due back at Pipa-got Naval Base for five days."
"They are telling us to put in at Nampo."
Nampo! Yokang thought. Narnpo was not the home port of the SA-I-GU. But at the terminus of the Tae- dong River, it was the nearest port to the capital. Could Pyongyang have gleaned the truth behind the lost U.S. submarine?
"Send acknowledgments," Yokang said. "And inform the first mate that we are defecting to South Korea."
"Why?"
"Because somehow Pyongyang has learned the truth!" Yokang snapped, locking the door to his closet.
All choice had fled in the night. All that remained was to save their skins. It was something Captain Yokang Sako had learned to do very well over the course of his career.
Chapter 26
Chip Craft was having second thoughts as he drove downtown to his Park Avenue town house in his frosted gold Idioci coupe.
Maybe he had been too hasty. After all, Friend had made him wealthy and powerful beyond his dreams as a mere installer not so many years ago. He had catapulted XL into the stratosphere of information-systems technology and was poised to take complete advantage of the coming new age of fully integrated interactive computer and television and telephone networks.
Personally Chip couldn't imagine what people would want with five hundred channels. And being able to send and receive faxes at the beach or on roller coasters seemed to defeat the point of beaches and roller coasters.
But it was progress. And if there was money to be made from it—and the numbers being floated were incalculable—Chip Craft figured he deserved a big chunk of it.
A little matter of blackmailing the US. government seemed almost incidental, given the power and position the new technological revolution promised.
Chip seat his Idioci into the cool confines of the building garage and took the elevator to his town house with his mind actually humming.
Yeah. Why not? He was thirty-five years old in a business climate that almost guaranteed that you were washed-up once you turned forty. Unless you turned forty as king of the mountain.
Besides, Friend had never failed before. Not once. He was a perfect thinking machine, and machines like him never made mistakes. If he promised success, then success was assured.
Besides, there were those decomposing inner-city bodies sealed in the XL SysCorp world headquarters subbasement.
Chip unlocked his door and flicked on the indirect lighting that brought out the simple elegance of his two-tiered living room. This, at least, wasn't virtual. It was as real as concrete.
He tossed his hand-tooled leather briefcase onto a chair and walked over to the bar to mix himself something relaxing. It was Saturday night. He had two days off before having to go into work on Tuesday. Coming back from vacation the Saturday before Labor Day wasn't so bad with two additional days to relax.
"Do not bother mixing that," a dry voice warned from a shadowy corner of the room.
Chip dropped the frosted glass and turned.
"Who's there? Who said that?"
A figure sat in the shadows, his back to the curtained picture window. He stood up now, and a beam of moonlight showed the blunt gray snout of a .45- caliber automatic.
"Take whatever you want," Chip squealed. "I won't stop you."
"What I want is information," said the indistinct individual. He stepped forward so that his face came into the bar of light.
"I don't know you, do I?" Chip asked, gulping.
"You tell me," said the man whose crisp white hair and rimless glasses looked vaguely familiar.
"I'm sorry, did you work for XL before? Are you one of the programmers we were forced to lay off?"
"My name is Smith."
"Harold Smith?"
"You do know me."
"I thought you had been neutralized," Chip said, unthinking.
"You thought wrong."
"Am I under arrest?"
"I have no power to arrest you—you know that."
Chip Craft breathed a hot sigh of relief.
"You know too much to be allowed to tell your story," Smith said flatly.
"I don't know that much. The computer—"
"The ES Quantum 3000, you mean."
"Yes."
"The ES Quantum 3000 is behind this?"
"Behind what?" Chip said, trying to keep the betraying flutter out of his strained voice.
"That is all I need to know," said Harold Smith, stepping up to Chip Craft and, with his face a cold mask of repressed anger, pumping eight closely spaced shots into Chip's jerking body. Chip Craft collapsed on the rug, gasping and gurgling and trying to explain that it wasn't him. It was Friend. All that came out was blood. In a spray at first, but as his heaving lungs ruptured, in a flood that carried with it all the warmth and life and intelligence that had been Chip Craft's in life.
His face stiff, Harold Smith wiped his automatic clean of fingerprints. He wore gray gloves as he had while breaking into Chip Craft's town house, but he was not a man to take chances.
Leaving the weapon beside the body, he searched the still-jerking body and found nothing of interest. A billfold with too little cash and too many credit cards. A digital watch that was too elaborate by half. But nothing that remotely resembled an office or building key.
A stray beam of moonlight caught the peculiar design of Craft's heavy gold tie clasp. Smith noted the bar code and pocketed the clasp.
Chip Craft's briefcase proved just as unfruitful, except for the 9 mm Glock pistol. Smith pocketed that, too, and left as quietly as he had entered.
He had only one regret. The automatic had been his during his Army days. It had sentimental value to the normally unsentimental Smith.
But it was absolutely untraceable. And that was what mattered most, even now with his life unraveling and approaching its conclusion.