Dragon's Eye

by Christopher Stasheff

  Harris tapped his head.

  Falera raised his eyebrows. "For numbers so long?"

  "A misspent youth," Harris said. "Train spotting was my great hobby."

  Falera smiled. "A pity you will not be able to spend more time here. You would find our train system interesting. At any rate, the other matter to be dealt with is simpler: I must suborn the vaults' master alarm and access systems in preparation for our entrance, since they cannot be forced physically. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately for the security firms involved, the computers and routines controlling entry schedules and protocols can be reached by dial-up access—this being how the banks schedule their deliveries to the secure areas. The system developed a fault some months ago, and a phone repairman had to come to see to it." Falera smiled gently. "He repaired the fault . . . but also left a 'drop-in' bug attached to the circuit board which the security system uses to call out for assistance. The system can therefore he reprogrammed remotely to allow us in; and since records will show that the Kantonalpolizei in Zurich authorized the bug, seemingly at the request of the banks, there will be no danger of detection. In any case, I will now need from you your exact intended times of entry and exit. There can be no change of these times after this access: I am intending to coincide my computer access with a normal UBS-scheduled one, and to cut it off when we are done in such a manner that the system will mistake it for a 'failed connect' and raise no alarms when the UBS themselves call in."

  "We don't intend to linger," Harris said. "We'll be at the entry you designated at one thirty-eight a.m. on the fourteenth of the month. Leaving at one-fifty."

  "The doors will seal again at that point," Falera said. "Be sure you have left yourself ample time, as they cannot be forced from inside or outside once they shut. It would be embarrassing for you to have to greet the bank officials at the next scheduled opening in the morning."

  "You would be there too," Harris said softly.

  "Yes," Falera said, "of course. Now then, let us slip into the Telepac system and do what we must." He tapped at the keyboard again, then drank a sip of his beer and waited a moment, while the modem's speaker sang a soft hurried tone sequence. There followed the long soft beep of the Swiss ringing signal.

  "Are you quite sure they won't notice such an odd entry and exit time?" Harris said.

  Falera laughed. "There's nothing unusual about it. Entrances and exits are purposely kept as random as possible, to prevent them being noticed by people like you, and are staggered through all hours of the day and night. Indeed there's a slight preference toward nighttime entries: they're less noticed—there's not much nightlife in Zurich. Ah—"

  The phone on the other end picked up. The model shrieked briefly, then fell silent as it fell into synch with its partner at the other end, and data began to flow. Falera typed a period, then sat back: The screen said CONNECT 9600, and then TELEPAC: 4 792 0723. Harris expected Falera to start typing again, but he simply sat back and began drinking his beer again, and the screen said R 17911303, and was answered a line or so down with "TELEPAC: call connected to 1 791 1393. . . ."

  "It's all batch-file automated from here," Falera said after another sip, "the less time I spend online, the better—the banks' own connects are all automated so, and a long connect would attract attention." He sat back, looking over the dome of the post office to where another huge white cloud, dark-bottomed, was sailing over the Calanda mountain, tailing a veil of rain behind it. "So," he said, "when did you stop transporting and go on to jotting down British Army jeep numbers for your masters, Mr. Harris?"

  Harris frowned. "I might as well ask you when you started working as a double agent for the Kantonalpolizei and the Army here," he said, "except that it would be none of my damned business."

  Falera lifted his eyebrows, a faintly satisfied look, and Harris bridled again, stung by the superiority of the expression. "At least we have a cause we're working for," he said. "Unlike some people, who simply do it for money."

  Falera glanced at the screen and laughed. "As if the Wild Geese of old Ireland didn't fight on half the battlefields of Europe for five hundred years," he said, "and send their pay home to their families all the while. No, Mr. Harris, you won't find any chink in my armor there: money's no less good a cause, always depending on what you do with it. Preserve a way of life, perhaps . . . rather than destroy one, as you're trying to. My conscience is intact. But is yours, I wonder?"

  Harris frowned harder, but there was no use, the man just didn't seem to care, and his tone of casual scorn only made it plainer to him that they really were going to have to kill Falera when this was all over. "Really," Falera said, "it's no wonder that you're having to pull heists like this, now, and having to enlist outside help for them: your people were never much good at thinking things through, at taking the long view. Didn't it occur to them that the Americans would catch on at last, that the 'armed struggle' they were contributing to in the little Irish bars in Boston and New York, was killing their relatives by accident as often as it was killing the Brits? And some of them were actually finding out, now, what you intend for Ireland after you get the 'Brits Out.' A tidy little Marxist-socialist government it's supposed to be, after you overthrow the clownish little democracy that runs the place now. Hasn't it occurred to you what the UN will do, if you manage that? Do you think sanctions apply only to the Serbians and the South Africans? What happens when your poor little island is blockaded, and trade sanctions go into place, and your access to British ports is closed down, and Europe leaves you to your own devices? It'll be another famine you'll have then, and 1848 will be nothing to it."

  "At least our people will die free," Harris muttered, able to think of nothing else to say.

  "You might ask them whether they want to die at all," Falera said, "but they've been telling you what they wanted for a long time now, and you haven't listened to that either. . . ."

  A silence fell, angry and uneasy on Harris's side, and infuriatingly, a calm and untroubled one on Falera's. "Here we go," he said, "we're into the UBS system. Let's see if I'm right about the cryptography keys."

  "And if you're not?" Harris said.

  "Then I give you your money back," Falera said.

  And we kill you anyway, Harris thought. You smell like a turncoat, Mr. smartarse Falera. You sound like you're going to sell us to the police here as soon as you get a chance. But he kept his face still, for this work was more important than his personal feelings . . . for the moment. Later, he would hope he was the one who got to watch this insolent face go terrified before he pulled the trigger.

  "It was the third set," Falera said, "as I thought. Programmers everywhere get lazy after they've been working in a given job for a while: they really ought to change these people more often. . . ."

  He leaned back. "And as for my double agentry, if that's the word we're looking for," Falera said, "you know enough about it to have come to me in the first place, having heard that I was very, very good at it. Not that you were able to find anything much about my life before World War II, but that's as I prefer it. I have been here a long, long while, using one weapon or another for my pay, and being well paid, and using the money to preserve what matters to me. And none of your damned business what that might be, indeed."

  Harris blinked, for there again had come out that oddly Irish phrasing, very strange in this accent. Could he be working for the Brits after all, came the thought. But no, their own sources inside the British camp, which they trusted, had been very sure about that.

  "The cryptography's handled now," Falera said. "Output will be in the clear; we're sitting just 'outside' the inventory database for the specialist gold reserves. Are you ready?"

  "Yes," Harris said. 'We're looking for registration numbers beginning with DB14."

  "A few moments yet," He hit the carriage return.

  The screen went dark for a moment, then began to fill up with figures which scrolled rapidly past. Harris stared at the screen, watching them go by, t
hen said, "Stop!"

  Falera paused the display instantly. Harris pointed. "That one," he said, pointing. "And that one—four numbers down."

  Falera nodded and noted down the numbers on his pad. "All right," Harris said. "Next—"

  The numbers scrolled again. For several minutes Harris watched the display, then said "Stop!" again, and pointed at the screen. Falera noted down a third number, said, "No more from there?"

  "No, let it go again—"

  Once more the figures scrolled by at high speed. Then Harris said "Stop!" one more time, pointed. Falera nodded, noted the number. "Any more?"

  Harris shook his head.

  "Right. Now for locations." Falera typed in the four registration numbers and added a few characters, hit the carriage return.

  The screen said, PALETTE 254, 266. 266, 268

  "There are the pallet numbers where the bars in question are to be found," Falera said with satisfaction. "It's not a caged area; we won't need the wirecutters. Here—" He noted the pallet numbers down and handed the whole pad to Harris. "Now we can get out of here and make the call that will take care of the entry proper." He tapped at the keyboard again.

  NO CARRIER, the screen said, and then another phone number appeared on it, and the computer began dialing again. "You're sure you're allowing yourself enough time?"

  "If the vault map you sent us is accurate, yes," Harris said.

  Falera nodded. The computer made another modem connection, shrieked briefly, fell silent again. "This should take less time," he said. "Can I interest you in another beer? The weissbier is really quite good."

  Harris shook his head. He watched the computer screen fill up again with query and response, query and response, and finally, after several screenfuls of security queries and passwords, a menu labeled ZUGANG ZUM TRESOR, with blanks for time and date input. Falera touched a key, and his computer went automated again, filling in the necessary data. GERETTET, the screen said after a moment.

  "There," Falera said. "It's saved the new access and exit times. That's our work done, Mr. Harris."

  A few more messages fleeted across the screen, followed at last by the NO CARRIER herald. Falera sat back and pulled the cellphone's connector lead out of the back of the computer, tucking the phone into his jacket pocket.

  "That's it," he said. "Now all you need to do, Mr. Harris, is meet me at Linth-Escher-Gasse 16, by the delivery entrance, fifteen minutes before the time appointed for entry into the vaults. There should be no problem with passing security, but for the sake of outward appearances, in case anyone should pass and see us in the street, I'll be sending you PTT coveralls to wear: the understanding will be that we're there to do something about the phones. You won't be changing addresses between now and then?"

  "No, we're at the same rental apartment in Zug."

  "Very good. Until then—" And Falera turned his attention back to his computer.

  Harris got up and walked slowly away down the winding cobbled street, heading for the train station. He was absolutely determined that this should be the last time that the man would dismiss him like a schoolboy.

  Behind him, Falera slipped his cellphone out of his pocket and began dialing.

  Their third and last meeting took place at one twenty-three in the morning, on the fourteenth of the month, outside a dark doorway in Linth-Escher-Gasse in Zurich. The doorway was set in a bland-looking limestone-faced building; it was a silvery aluminum accordion-folding doorway, big enough to admit trucks, with PARKEN VERBOTEN painted across it. A small door in its side was open, and inside a man-shaped shadow waited for them: Falera, in another of the yellow PTT coveralls, carrying a toolbox.

  Silently they slipped through the door, and Falera closed it behind them. "To the back of the loading ramp, if you please," he said, "the door on your right. Turn right as you go through it and proceed down the hallway."

  "You first," Smyth said.

  "With pleasure," Falera said, as if totally uncaring of the tone of menace in Smyth's voice. He led them up the steps of the concrete loading ramp where trucks would normally park, through the doorway he had indicated, and down the hall. It was a perfectly ordinary-looking hallway, painted in the kind of industrial beige-yellow that typifies office building basements. He pulled open a door on his left: it squeaked loudly as it opened, and they went through it, following him down the fluorescent-lighted stairwell.

  They went several floors down, Harris judged, before coming to the bottom of the stairs and another door. Falera opened it and went ahead of them into a long bare hallway—beige-painted walls, beige linoleum floor. It sloped very gently downwards, and stretched ahead of them for what must have been about a city block. It was about halfway down it that Harris realized how completely all noises of the city had now faded away. The silence was total, except for their footsteps.

  At the end of the long corridor was a bare steel wall. The three stopped, and Smyth stared at it. "Now what?''

  "Now we wait," Falera said softly. "A few extra minutes were budgeted into the timing to allow for delays."

  They waited. Smyth was quite calm about it: Harris was more excited—both by the prospect of what they were about to pull off, and by the prospect of what Headquarters had told him he would be allowed to do to Falera in a week and a half. Falera, for his part, stood there as calmly as if he were waiting for a bus. Enjoy it while you can, you arrogant son of a bitch, Harris thought.

  There was a clicking noise, loud as a revolver being cocked. Both men's heads snapped around to stare at Falera, but he only smiled slightly at them, and looked back at the steel wall.

  The wall swung outward toward them. Harris and Smyth hurried backed away from it as it swung out, and Falera immediately slipped in through the widening opening. They went in after him.

  At first there was nothing to be seen but another hallway, identical to the first, about a hundred yards long. They hurried down it, toward the unmarked door at its far end. Falera reached it first, pulled it open: darkness lay on the other side. They followed him.

  Inside the door, as it closed behind them, they stopped. It was not truly dark; the lighting was simply dimmer than the hallway outside, and it took a moment for their eyes to get used to it. Harris and Smyth looked around them. They were standing in a long, long room, surprisingly high-ceilinged, that reached far off to the right and left of them, and was about fifty feet wide where they stood. They had little time to tell anything more about it, for piled up on row after row of pallets, stretching away to right and left, lay something which mellowly reflected the lights in the ceiling in many soft bright patches of sheen and glimmer.

  Gold. Gold. Gold by the acre. . . .

  "This way," Falera said, heading off to the right. It was a moment before either Harris or Smyth could react, for the sheer presence of so much gold in this dimness made the place seem more like a church than a vault. There was a smell to it, a warm metallic scent, as if it were something alive. Slowly at first, then more swiftly, they made their way after Falera. The pallets had numbers stamped on them: they were only in the mid-100's. Falera was well ahead, and shortly they caught up with him. The warm smell of the gold seemed to get stronger as they went. They walked for what seemed a dreadfully long time, though by Harris's watch it was only three minutes.

  "Pallet 254," Falera said. Harris looked down, there to their left, and saw it: gold in a single layer, the bars labeled 999 FINE, and there among them one that had more than the bare words, but the eagle gripping the laurel wreath that encircled the swastika, and the registration number starting with DB14 stamped on it. He reached into his coverall for the soft leather bag he had had stowed inside it, unfolded it and reached down to the gold bar.

  It took both hands to lift it, and two tries: the first time he pinned his index finger under the thing and blacked the nail, and swore as he got it up at last. Behind him, Falera was already leading Smyth further down to pallet 266. Smyth bent over the pallet, found another of the Nazi-stamped bars, picke
d it up more carefully and put it in his bag, then started on the second. Harris went along to pallet 268, where the last bar lay: he huffed and puffed as he carried the bag with the first one, not being able to do it two-handed because of the injured finger. At pallet 268 he stopped, found another of the bars with the eagle and wreath, lifted it and slipped it into the bag. The sound of gold striking gold was soft and final, like the odor of an expensive car shutting.

  Then he heard another sound: a long, slow, soft growl.

  Harris saw the gleam of gold in the dimness, but the gold moved.

  He fumbled inside his coverall for his gun, and looked around for Falera. Falera was nowhere to be seen.

  "Come you, you bastard!" Harris shouted, as Smyth came up behind him. "Come out or we'll bloody waste you!"

  "No," said Falera's voice softly, from somewhere deeper in the dimness, somewhere behind whatever it was that was golden, and moved: "No, whatever is wasted today, it will not be me."

  The gold moved again, and abruptly, Harris saw the eyes looking at him and Smyth. They were golden too, and from the head in which they were set, that warm, metallic scent breathed thick. The eyes watched them, and they stood horrified as the slow shape clambered over pallet 270 and slipped toward them, deliberate-footed, heavy and huge.

  Smyth pulled out his gun and shot the thing, most precisely, between the eyes.

  The bullet whined away, making a dull clunk as it ricocheted into a gold bar somewhere else in the room. "Oh, no," Falera's voice said from behind the huge golden creature. "It takes a bit more than that to kill a felddrache. I should know."