"No!" Cally screamed, but it was already too late. Before Chris
Schneider even saw it coming, Ramirez shot him precisely between the
eyes, neatly and without fanfare. The precision was almost clinical,
and he was dead by the time he collapsed onto the gray linoleum tiles
of the floor. His body lay motionless, his head nestled in a growing
pool of dark blood.
Georges LeFarge looked on unbelieving. Had he really seen it? No, it
was too grotesque. Chris, murdered in cold blood right before his eyes.
They had been talking only yesterday about going to Crete for the
weekend, maybe renting a car. . . . Death had always been an
abstraction, never anything to view up close. He had never seen a body.
He had never even imagined such things could really happen; it was only
in the movies, right? Until this moment he had never confronted actual
murder ever in his life.
Calypso Andros felt a shock, then a surge of emotional Novocain as her
adrenaline pumped. Right then and there she decided that she was going
to kill this bastard herself, personally, with her own hands. Number
One, whoever he was, was a monster. No revenge . . .
Then the superego intervened. He's still got the gun. Wait, and get the
son of a bitch when he's not expecting it.
"Georges," she said quietly, finally collecting herself, "you'd better
do what he says."
LeFarge was still too astonished to think, let alone talk.
This horror was outside every realm of reason. He had no way to file it
within any known category contained in his mind.
"She is giving you excellent advice," Number One was saying. "You would
be wise to listen. In any case, I merely want you to demonstrate the
technical capabilities of this system." He smiled as though nothing had
happened. "An intellectual exercise."
Georges looked at Cally and watched her nod. Her eyes seemed almost
empty. Was it shock? How could she manage to carry on?
Well, he thought, if she can do it, then so can I.
Slowly he revolved and examined the computer terminal in front of him.
The cool green of the screen was all that remained recognizable, the
only thing to which he could still relate.
"All right." He barely heard his own words as he glanced down at the
sheet. "I'll see if I can put in a run."
The room around them was paralyzed in time, the single thunk of the
pistol having reverberated louder than a cannon shot. Like Georges,
none of the other young technicians had ever witnessed an overt act of
violence. It produced a new reality, a jolt that made the senses
suddenly grow sharper, the hearing more acute, the periphery of vision
wider.
Still in shock, he typed an instruction into his Fujitsu workstation,
telling it to start back-calculating the trajectory of an abort
splashdown for various locations. Then he began typing in the numbers
on the sheet. The first coordinates, he realized at once, were
somewhere close. But where?