The Face

observed.
        “There was lightning earlier today.”
        “Only a little. I told you, Trotter, we in government control the storm. When we want lightning, it strikes where we need it, and when we don’t want lightning, not one bolt leaves the quiver.”
        [525] In addition to being inflated with nonflammable helium instead of hydrogen, the blimp was different from a zeppelin in that it had no rigid internal structure. The skin of the Hindenburg -a vessel as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall, nearly as long as four Boeing 747s standing nose to tail-had been stretched around an elaborate steel frame that contained sixteen giant gas cells, great cotton sacks made airtight by a coating of plastic, as well as an entire luxury hotel. Trotter’s blimp, any blimp, was just a flat bag when deflated.
        With no missing strawberries to obsess about and with no roller bearings to manipulate obsessively in one hand, a la Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, Captain Queeg von Hindenburg studied the slowly seething fog overhead, squinting to catch a glimpse of the clouds above the fog. He looked worried. He looked angry. With his orange hair pasted to his head by rain, his protuberant eyes, and his walrus mustache, he looked like a cartoon. “I don’t like this at all,” he muttered.

CHAPTER 84
        
        ON THE THIRD FLOOR, AT THE NORTH END OF the west wing, across the hall from the thirty-five-hundred-square-foot suite that included the Face’s bedroom, Ethan arrived at the blue door. No other door in the house resembled it.
        Ming du Lac had seen the appropriate shade of blue in a dream. According to Mrs. McBee, the interior decorator had then gone through forty-six custom blends of paint until the spiritual adviser had been satisfied that reality had been matched to dream.
        As it turned out, the necessary blue was precisely the same as that on any box of Ronzoni pasta.
        Merely dedicating a telephone line to calls from the dead and hooking up an answering machine to service it was not sufficient to satisfy Ming’s and Manheim’s vision of a serious investigation of the phenomenon. A space apart had been required for the equipment, which grew in complexity from a simple answering machine. And they decreed that the ambience of this chamber must be serene, beginning with the color of the door.
        A sacred place, Ming called it. Sacrosanct, Channing Manheim had instructed.
        [527] The simple lockset-no deadbolt-featured a keyhole in the knob. If he wasn’t able to loid the latch, he’d kick his way into the room.
        A credit card, slipped between door and jamb, forced the spring latch out of the striker plate, and the blue barrier opened to reveal a sixteen-by-fourteen-foot room in which the windows had been covered with waďlboard. The ceiling and the walls had been padded and then upholstered in white silk. The carpet was white, as well. The inside of the door was not blue but white.
        In the center of this space stood two white chairs and a long white table. On the table and under part of it was what Fric might have called a shitload of high-tech equipment supporting a computer with tremendous processing capacity. All the equipment had white molded-plastic casings; the logos had been painted over with white nail polish. Even the connecting cables were white.
        You could go snowblind in this room if the lights were turned too bright. The concealed cold-cathode tubes in the coves near the ceiling came on automatically when someone entered, and they were set at a comfortable level that caused the silk walls to shimmer radiantly like fields of snow on a winter twilight.
        Ethan had been in this room once previously, during his first day of orientation, when he’d been new to the job.
        The computer and supporting equipment operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
        Ethan sat in one of the white chairs.
        On the white answering machine, the indicator light had gone dark. Line 24 was no longer in use.
        The blue screen, a different shade from the door, provided the only vibrant color in the room. The icons were white.
        He had never used this computer before. The software that organized the incoming calls was, however, the same used for the rest of the mansion’s telephone system.
        Fortunately, the letters, numbers, and symbols on the keyboard [528] had not been painted white and thus obliterated.