Free Flashpoint by Dan J. Marlowe Page A

silencing the tiny buzzer which had caused Erikson to fall silent.
        Bergman rose to his feet. "An important telephone call," he said. "You will excuse us, please?" Erikson pushed his desk telephone toward the stocky man who smiled wryly. "You jest, my friend. We prefer to accept the call in privacy. Shalom."
        The two men left Erikson's office. The fluorescent tube above my head blinked a goodbye as Ravish crossed the threshold. The red light near the monitors turned green, and Erikson opened the wall panel and looked in at me. "Come on into the office."
        I followed him inside after turning off the switches on the television and tape-recorder monitors. "Wasn't that whole business a waste of time?" I asked him.
        "It depends on how you look at it. By letting them sound off, I may have prevented their doing something."
        "I doubt you've prevented that Ravish from doing anything he made up his mind to do. He looks like a handful."
        Erikson smiled. "If it came down to guns, I'd bet on you. Let's see what sort of gun he carried."
        "What the hell do you mean, what sort of gun? How do you know he was carrying one at all?"
        "You noticed the flickering fluorescent light? It's not a bad tube; it's a signal. The frame of the door has an imbedded sensor wire. If there's a concentrated metal mass on an individual passing through the door, which could equate to a pistol or a knife, the sensors trigger the light tube. It's only a warning, of course, but in the split second during which a person walks through the door, other data are fed into a computer across the hall. Let me show you."
        Erikson took a ring of keys from a locked drawer in his desk and led the way from his office. While crossing the hallway, he took out his wallet and extracted from it what appeared to be a white, plastic credit card. I could see that the card had only a network of thin copper wires imbedded under the surface.
        "Printed-circuit code lock," Erikson said as he inserted the card into a concealed slot at the edge of the doorframe. An inner latch clicked, after which he used a normal key.
        "Too fancy for a country boy like me," I commented.
        "Don't ever try to pick one of these, as I've been given to understand you do occasionally with conventional locks," Erikson said with a smile. "Without the coded card release to disarm the lock, you'll set off an alarm. And if you persist in forcing it, there's a shaped explosive charge which will blow off your hands."
        The room inside wasn't much larger than a janitor's closet. Erikson and I almost filled it when we entered. On a sturdy shelf extending from the far wall was a machine that looked like a teletypewriter. "Did you ever see either of those agents before?" Erikson asked as he closed the door.
        "Never."
        Erikson removed the cover from the machine and punched half a dozen buttons. A whirring, thumping noise followed; then a sheet of yellow paper blossomed jerkily from an aperture at the top. A dozen lines of squarish print covered the paper.
        Erikson quickly decoded figures and symbols that were meaningless to me, as I leaned over his shoulder. "Well, here it is. At nine-twelve, Bergman and Ravish entered the office. The first man through the door, Bergman, was clean. The second, Ravish, was armed with a 7 mm Luger, validity factor eighty-three percent. The weapon was carried between the waist and the shoulder. Ravish is six feet, one and one quarter inches tall, weighs one hundred and eighty-six pounds, and has steel lifts in his shoes."
        Erikson ripped the printed sheet from the machine and dropped it into a chrome-rimmed receptacle. Flashing knife-blades chewed the paper into tiny, pinhead-size confetti, and a rush of water through the receptacle flushed even that fragmentary evidence away.
        "That bit of science fiction won't hold enough water to float a teacup," I told