Munro stroked his mustache. "Blue diamonds," he said, nodding. "It makes sense."
Ross said that of course it made sense.
"You can't dope them?" Munro asked.
"No. It's been tried. There was a commercial boron-doping process, but it was too unreliable. The Americans had one and so did the Japanese. Everyone gave it up as hopeless
"So you've got to find a natural source."
"That's right. I want to get there as soon as possible," Ross said, staring at him, her voice flat.
"I'm sure you do," Munro said. "Nothing but business for our Dr. Ross, eh?" He crossed the room and, leaning against one of the arches, looked out on the dark Tangier night. "I'm not surprised at all," he said. "As a matter of - "
At the first blast of machine-gun fire, Munro dived for cover, the glassware on the table splattered, one of the girls screamed, and Elliot and Ross threw themselves to the marble floor as the bullets whined around them, chipping the plaster overhead, raining plaster dust down upon them. The blast lasted thirty seconds or so, and it was followed by complete silence.
When it was over, they got up hesitantly, staring at one another.
"The consortium plays for keeps." Munro grinned. "Just my sort of people."
Ross brushed plaster dust off her clothes. She turned to Munro. "Five point two against the first two hundred, no deductions, in Swiss francs, adjusted."
"Five point seven, and you have me."
"Five point seven. Done."
Munro shook hands with them, then announced that he would need a few minutes to pack his things before leaving for Nairobi.
"Just like that?" Ross asked. She seemed suddenly concerned, glancing again at her watch.
"What's your problem?" Munro asked.
"Czech AK-47s," she said. "In your warehouse."
Munro showed no surprise. "Better get them out," he said. "The consortium undoubtedly has something similar in the works, and we've got a lot to do in the next few hours." As he spoke, they heard the police Kiaxons approaching from a distance. Munro said, "We'll take the back stair."
An hour later, they were airborne, heading toward Nai?robi.
Chapter 4
DAY 4: NAIROBI
June 16,1979
1.Timeline
IT WAS FARTHER ACROSS AFRICA FROM TANGIER TO Nairobi than it was across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to London - 3,600 miles, an eight-hour flight. Ross spent the time at the computer console, working out what she called "hyperspace probability lines."
The screen showed a computer-generated map of Africa, with streaking multicolored lines across it. "These are all timelines," Ross said. "We can weight them for duration and delay factors." Beneath the screen was a total-elapsed-time clock, which kept shifting numbers.
"What's that mean?" Elliot asked.
"The computer's picking the fastest route. You see it's just identified a timeline that will get us on-site in six days eighteen hours and fifty - one minutes. Now it's trying to beat that time."
Elliot had to smile. The idea of a computer predicting to the minute when they would reach their Congo location seemed ludicrous to him. But Ross was totally serious.
As they watched, the computer clock shifted to 5 days 22 hours 24 minutes.
"Better," Ross said, nodding. "But still not very good." She pressed another key and the lines shifted, stretching like rubber bands over the African continent. "This is the consortium route," she said, "based on our assumptions about the expedition. They're going in big - thirty or more people, a full-scale undertaking. And they don't know the exact location of the city; at least, we don't think they know. But they have a substantial start on us, at least twelve hours, since their aircraft is already forming up in Nairobi."
The clock registered total elapsed time: 5 days 09 hours 19 minutes. Then she pressed a button marked DATE and it shifted to 06 21 790814. "According to this, the consortium will reach the Congo site a little after eight o'clock in the morning on June 21."
The computer clicked quietly; the lines continued to stretch and pull, and the clock read a new date: 06 21 79 1224.
"Well," she said, "that's where we are now. Given maximum favorable movements for us and them, the consortium will beat us to the site by slightly more than four hours, five days from now."
Munro walked past, eating a sandwich. "Better lock another path," he said. "Or go radical."
"I hesitate to go radical with the ape."
Munro shrugged. "Have to do something, with a timeline like that."
Elliot listened to them with a vague sense of unreality: they were discussing a difference of hours, five days in the future. "But surely," Elliot said, "over the next few days, with all the arrangements at Nairobi, and then getting into the jungle - you can't put too much faith in those figures."
"This isn't like the old days of African exploration," Ross said, "where parties disappeared into the wilds for months. At most, the computer is off by minutes - say, roughly half an hour in the total five-day projection." She shook her head. "No. We have a problem here, and we've got to do something about it. The stakes are too great."
"You mean the diamonds."
She nodded, and pointed to the bottom of the screen, where the words BLUE CONTRACT appeared. He asked her what the Blue Contract was.
"One hell of a lot of money," Ross said. And she added, "I think." For in truth she did not really know.
Each new contract at ERTS was given a code name. Only Travis and the computer knew the name of the company buying the contract; everyone else at ERTS, from computer programmers to field personnel, knew the projects only by their color-code names: Red Contract, Yellow Contract, White Contract. This was a business protection for the firms involved. But the ERTS mathematicians could not resist a lively guessing game about contract sources, which was the staple of daily conversation in the company canteen.