"Then you cannot easily slip it under the door, can you?"
"Dieter, you sissy prick! Open this door. It's a slaughterhouse up there."
"If it becomes a slaughterhouse down here, you will give a yell, won't you?"
Then another voice came through the door, high, ringing, angry.
"I seek the fiend who calls himself Dieter Banning."
"Here's in there," Ned Doppler said instantly.
Banning snarled, "Traitor!"
"Why don't I leave you two alone?" added Doppler, his footsteps going away.
"I think it only fair to warn you," Dieter Banning called to the person outside the vault door, "I have no intentions of coming out."
"In that case," the voice replied coldly, "I am coming in."
Dieter Banning gave a little laugh. It sounded so hollow in the great vault he got a little worried in the silence that followed the last lingering echo.
The next sound brought Banning's manicured hands clapping over his ears.
They were shrieks, howls and other sounds. Metallic sounds. Human beings weren't making them. Machines were. They must be. But what kind of machine sounded like an ocean liner going through a Veg-o-matic?
When the great door showed cracks of lights around the rounded seams where it met the door casing, Dieter Banning knew the sound was that of the bunker door being breached.
Then the vault door fell and the gaping hole framed the sight of the person who wanted Dieter Banning so badly he had blown through ANC like a frenzied tornado.
A tiny Asian man with fingernails like talons.
"You will reveal the truth about Cheeta Ching," the attacker told Dieter Banning, "or you will die on the spot where you stand!"
"Glad to. Cheeta Ching is in collusion with her husband to delay the baby until sweeps month. I plan on breaking the story the day she gives birth."
The tiny Asian's facial wrinkles compressed in stages, like a mainspring being wound to the snapping point.
Then, the mainspring sprung.
"Oh, bugger," Dieter Banning muttered, "I'm fucked."
And he felt a sudden hot weight in the seat of his pants that he couldn't explain unless-ridiculous thought he had lost all bowel control.
Chapter 21
Harold W. Smith returned to his office exactly thirty minutes after he left it.
"He's still here, Dr. Smith," said Smith's secretary.
"Thank you, Mrs. Mikulka."
Frowning, Harold Smith entered his office. He disliked leaving it alone, but he felt confident that the cable installer would come across nothing untoward. The only unusual items in the entire office were the red telephone, safely locked in a drawer, and the CURE terminal, which Smith had sent slipping into its secret desktop reservoir.
Smith stepped into the room to find it unoccupied.
"My God!" he said hoarsely.
A waving hand lifted a screwdriver above the level of his desk.
"Be done in a second," a disembodied voice said.
Smith came around the desk and peered into the foot well. There, the installer was on his hands and knees, tacking the cable down with a staple gun.
"Is there a problem?" Smith asked.
"Naw. Usually, people put their TVs against an outside wall and it's just a matter of plugging her in. I didn't think you'd want a loose cable at your feet so I'm tacking it down. That's okay, isn't it?"
"That will be fine," said Smith. Hovering over the man, he felt awkward. His chair had been pushed off to one side. Unable to sit at his own desk, he stood with his gangling hands hanging loose-fingered out of his coat sleeves.
Presently, the repairman stood up and reached for the tiny TV set on Harold Smith's desk.
"Let's see how she fires up," he said, hitting the on switch of a cable box that perched atop the too-small set like a pit bull on a possum.
The screen came on. It was black. Two words, No SIGNAL, glowed in thin ivory letters.
"Funny."
"What?" Smith asked.
"I got it turned to MBC."
"MBC is blacked out," Smith pointed out.
"Yeah, so I heard. But you're hooked up to cable now."
"Yes?"
"The signal the cable company transmits isn't picked off the air, you know. We'd have a piss-poor signal quality if we did it that way. We get it off a microwave transmission. New York Skypath. Direct." The man began switching channels. "Whatever's jamming the airwaves shouldn't affect you now that you're cabled up. But look at it. Everything network is black. Except KNNN. And they're broadcasting snow."
"Can you explain how it is possible to intercept both broadcast and cable-fed network signals?" Smith asked.
"It's not."
"Yet it is happening."
"No, it's not."