Dance Of Death

FIFTY-THREE

Larry Enderby sat at his console in the Advanced Technology Center, puffing slightly. The hollowness in his stomach had gone, replaced with an uncomfortable bloated feeling. He felt like a frigging suckling pig, to tell the truth. He belched, let out his belt a notch. All that was missing was the shiny red apple for his mouth.

He glanced over at his co-workers, Walt Smith and Jim Choi. Smitty-who, true to his nature, had acted with restraint-was staring at a bank of monitors, no worse for wear. The same couldn't be said for Choi, who was slumped at his terminal, a glazed expression on his face. During the fifteen minutes Smitty had allotted, Choi had indeed shown a remarkable ability to bolt down jumbo shrimp and glasses of champagne. Enderby had given up counting shrimp at sixty-two.

He eased up another bolus of air, then patted his stomach gingerly. They'd gotten to the food table just in time: the feeding frenzy was almost over. There was a dribble of caviar on his shirtfront, and he flicked it away with a fingernail. But that fourth glass of champagne he'd chugged at the last moment had probably been a mistake. He just hoped he could keep it together for the rest of his shift. He glanced up at the clock: only another hour. They'd verify that the Astor Hall's upgraded security system was fully operational, then go through the procedure of mothballing the old system. No sweat: he'd done it dozens of times before, he could probably do it in his sleep.

A low chime sounded. "That's it," Smitty said. "Twenty minutes." He glanced over at Choi. "What's the status of the Astor Hall system?"

Choi blinked a little blearily at his screen. "Test completed without incident." His eye swept the cluster of video feeds. "Hall looks fine."

"Error logs?"

"None. The system's nominal."

"And the beam modulation?"

"Every five minutes, as programmed. No deviation."

Smitty walked over to the wall of monitors. Enderby watched as he peered at the video feeds devoted to the Astor Hall of Diamonds. He could see case after case of the precious gems, gleaming faintly in the infrared light. There was no movement, of course: once the laser beams were activated after lockdown, not even guards were permitted in the high-security exhibition halls.

Smitty grunted his approval, then walked over to his monitoring station and picked up the internal phone. "Carlos? It's Walt in the ATC. We've completed the twenty-minute shakedown of the Astor Hall laser grid. How'd it look from Central Security?" A pause. "Okay, good. We'll get the standard scheduling online and mothball the prior."

He hung up the phone and glanced over at Enderby. "The Pit says that everything's five by five. Larry, put it to bed. I'll help Jim finalize the automation routines for the laser grid."

Larry nodded and pulled his chair closer to the console. Time to put the old security system in backup mode. He blinked, wiped the back of a hand across his mouth, then began typing in a series of commands.

Almost immediately, he sat back. "That's strange."

Smitty looked over. "What is?"

Enderby pointed at an LED screen sitting on the side of his work-station. A single red dot glowed in its upper left corner. "When I rolled back the first zone into standby mode, the system gave me a code red."

Smitty frowned. A "code red" was the legacy system's alarm setting. In the Astor Hall, this would have been activated only when a diamond was removed from its setting. "What zone was that?"

"Zone 1."

"What's it contain?"

Enderby turned to a separate console, accessed the accession and inventory database, typed in a SQL query. "Just a single diamond. Lucifer's Heart."

"That's right in the center of the room." Smitty walked over to the bank of video monitors, peered at one closely "Looks fine to me. We're dealing with some kind of software glitch here."

He glanced back toward Enderby. "Roll back zone 2."

Enderby typed a few more commands into his primary terminal. Immediately, a second red dot glowed into view on the LED screen. "That's giving me a code red, too."

Smitty walked over, a worried look coming onto his face.

Enderby stared at the screen. His mouth was dry, and the alcohol haze was dissipating fast.

"Do a global rollback," Smitty said. "All zones in the hall."

Enderby took a deep breath, then typed a short sequence on his keyboard. Immediately, he was flooded with dismay.

"Oh, no," he breathed. "No."

The little LED screen on Enderby's desk had just blossomed into a Christmas tree of red.

For a moment, there was a shocked silence. Then Smitty waved his hand dismissively.

"Let's not have a cow here. What we've got is a software glitch. Incompatibility between the new system and the old probably crashed the legacy system. Must've happened when we pulled it off-line. Nothing to get excited about. Larry, shut down the old system, one module at a time. Then reboot from the backup master."

"Shouldn't we report to Central?"

"What, and make ourselves look like idiots? We'll report after we've solved the problem."

"Okay. You're the boss." And Enderby began to type.

Smitty mustered a weak grin and gestured at the video screens of the empty hall, the diamonds glittering within their cases. "I mean, hey-take a look. Does the hall look robbed to you?"

Enderby had to chuckle. Maybe Smitty was acquiring a sense of humor, after all.