“Yeah.” Despite his relief, Sandy is still worried. “I don’t know what Bob is going to say about this.” Actually, he does know; Bob will be furious. For a while, anyway.

“Well hey, it looks to me like they had a pretty bad information leak.”

“Maybe. Still, to put the stuff right under LSR. They’re sure to have security of some kind. I suspect I am going to be status but not gratis with the San Diego boys.”

“To hell with them.”

“Easy for you to say.”

And there won’t be any payment without the goods delivered. Sigh. “Well. We’d better go get stoned and think it over.”

“No lie.”

Chapter 41

41

Sandy decides that the best thing to do is return immediately to Reef Point and recover the drums, and he calls Bob Tompkins to explain about the delay, also to complain about the apparent information leak. But Tompkins is in Washington to do some lobbying, and that same afternoon Sandy is visited by a worried-looking Tashi. “Did you see the news?” Tashi asks.

“No, what’s up? San Clemente Island blown to smithereens?”

Jim looks up from Sandy’s computer. “Where’d that word come from?”

“Ignore him,” says Sandy. “He’s testing my new drug, Verbality.”

“Verbosity, more like. Here, check out the news.” Tash clicks on the main wall screen and taps in the command for the Los Angeles Times. When it appears he runs through it until he reaches the first page of the Orange County section. The screen fills with a picture of what appears to be a twentieth-century newspaper page, a formatting gimmick that has gotten the Times a lot of subscriptions down at Seizure World. “Top right.”

Sandy reads aloud. “LSR Announces Increased Security For Laguna Hills Plant, oh man, because of recent spate of sabotage attacks, defense contractors in OC, perimeter now patrolled, blah blah blah so what,” so Tashi cuts in and reads a sentence near the bottom of the article: “The new measures will include cliff patrols and boat patrols in the ocean directly off LSR’s seacliff location. ‘Any sea craft coming within a mile of us is going to be under intense surveillance,’ says LSR’s new security director Armando Perez.”

“They must be joking,” Sandy says weakly.

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s illegal!” Panic seeping in everywhere.…

“I doubt it.”

Jim looks up. “What could be the difficulty that is encumbering and freighting your voices with the sounds of sturm und drang, my brethren?”

“Scrap that new drug,” Tashi suggests.

“I will. The difficulty,” Sandy explains to Jim, “is that we have stashed twelve big drums of an illegal new aphrodisiac at the bottom of a bluff now under the intense scrutiny of a trigger-happy private security army!”

“Zounds! Jeepers!”

“Shut up.” Sandy rereads the article, turns it off. The initial shock over, he is again thinking furiously. “I’ve got an idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Let’s go to Europe.”