Dance Of Death

In two minutes, he was done and back in his place by the door, breathing slowly and regularly, watch in hand.

Another soft beep indicated the laser beams had gone back on- each one now redirected to a different path, ru

Again, the man waited, looking at his watch. Another soft beep and he was up again, this time carrying the Mylar sheets, which he stuck over the video camera lenses which had been placed in numerous strategic locations. The Mylar sheets, clear to the naked eye, were actually etched with holographs which responded strongly to infrared light, and which reproduced the precise scene that the infrared video cameras were pointed at-minus, of course, the man. When the video cameras came back on, they would see the same boring scene they had seen before. Only it would not be real.

Again, like a cat, the man retreated to his safe corner. Again, he waited until the stopwatch beeped another soft warning.

This time he scurried around the perimeter of the hall, setting a sleek black box in each corner, co

Once the radar jammers were in place and active, the man straightened up, dusted his knees, and gave a low, dry chuckle. Movements now almost languid, he removed a flashlight from the satchel, turned it on, and played the dull green beam about the hall- a precise wavelength of green light chosen because none of the sophisticated electromagnetic sensors in the hall could see it.

The man strolled casually to the center of the hall where a square, four-foot pillar had been constructed, on top of which was set a thick Plexiglas box. He bent down and looked in the box. Resting inside on thick satin was the dark form of a heart-cut diamond of extraordinary, almost incredible size: Lucifer's Heart, the museum's prize gem, which had been called the most valuable diamond in the world. It was certainly the most beautiful.

A fine place to start.

With a small cutting tool, the man opened a hole in the Plexiglas. Then, with a series of slender tools machined precisely for this purpose and some of the tiny, sticky pads, he reached in and removed the diamond, being careful to prevent the trigger pin under the diamond from rising. Another deft movement placed a large glass marble on the same stand, which would keep the pin depressed.

The man held the diamond in his hand, shining the flashlight up through it for a moment. In the green light it looked black and dead, without color, almost like a piece of coal. But the man was not perturbed: he knew that a red diamond under green light always looked black. And this diamond was red-or more precisely, a rich ci

He held it up and peered through it to the flashlight below. He could see his own eyes reflected and multiplied by the diamond's facets, creating a surreal kaleidoscope of eyes and more eyes, hundreds of them, staring every which way inside the gem. He moved the gem back and forth, from eye to eye, enjoying the spectacle.

And the strangest thing of all was that the eyes were of different colors: one hazel, the other a milky, whitish blue.

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."