The Face

FROM THE CENTER OF HIS BENCH toward the port side of the gondola, Trotter said, “Easy, easy.”
        The sudden shift of Corky’s 170 pounds could cause the mini-blimp to wallow, perhaps even bobble, which was a risk they couldn’t take this close to the roof.
        While Corky moved slowly, balancing breast-down on the gunwale, one leg in and one leg out of the gondola, Trotter employed his own body as a counterweight, shifting starboard on his bench, and he used the controls to fine-tune the attitude of the vessel.
        The blimp wallowed but not dangerously.
        At a signal from Trotter, Corky slid the rest of the way out of the gondola, though he did not at once drop free of it. First he hung by both hands from the gunwale, while the pilot compensated for this further shift of weight.
        As the airship steadied, Corky lowered his left hand from the gunwale to a ballast-tank bracket, then his right. The metal was cold and wet, but with his leather-and-nylon gloves, he got a firm grip.
        Peering down, he saw that his dangling feet were still eighteen or twenty inches from the roof.
        He dared not drop that far. Though he would most likely keep his [538] balance, he would land with too much noise, alerting the two guards who were in the security office that occupied half the second floor of the groundskeeper’s building.
        Evidently, Trotter recognized the problem. He vented a whisper of helium, and the vessel sank until Corky felt the roof under him.
        Straddling the ridge line, one foot on the south slope of the roof, one foot on the north slope, he let go of the ballast-tank bracket. He had touched down almost as softly as Peter Pan.
        Freed of his weight, the blimp at once soared ten feet, fifteen. The tail began to rise, which wasn’t good, but with an adjustment of the rudders, Trotter raised the nose and recovered even as he brought the vessel around for the return trip to the knoll, which he would be making alone.
        With the boy in his control, Corky would leave Palazzo Rospo in style, using one of the automobiles in Manheim’s first-rate collection.
        Back at the ruined chateau, once the three tethering lines were well anchored to truck and trees, Trotter would shoot the two men who served as ground crew. Although the abandonment of the airship would be a wound to his heart, he would leave it behind and walk to a car that earlier today he’d parked two blocks away.
        Immediately upon returning to his canyon home in Malibu, he would switch vehicles and hit the road, leaving behind forever his life as Jack Trotter. Perhaps he would never realize that he’d been duped into believing that a genuine NSA agent had made a deal with him to erase him from every government record and to allow him to live hereafter as a ghost in the machinery of America; because he intended to live like a ghost anyway, he might actually escape all official notice entirely by his own efforts.
        Authorities investigating the kidnapping of Aelfric Manheim would probably stall out when they traced the blimp back to Trotter in Malibu. They would have no way of discovering what new identity he had assumed, what his new appearance might be, or where he had gone.
        [539] If someday, against all odds, they caught up with Trotter, he would have no collaborator’s name to give them except that of Robin Goodfellow, secret agent extraordinaire.
        Still straddling the ridge line, Corky took two cautious steps forward. His boots had been made for true winter conditions, for snow and treacherous ice. Mere rain-slicked slate tiles should be easily negotiated.
        Nevertheless, a slip now would be disastrous even if he avoided or survived a fall. With the estate guards in rooms directly under him, the rain would do little to mask any sounds he made, and silence remained essential.
        The vent pipe that he sought stood where the blueprints had shown it, less than eighteen inches down the south slope from the peak of the roof.
        Feeling like a gremlin engaged in naughty work, Corky would have liked to murmur a suitable gremlin song or to entertain himself with other antics. He recognized that on this occasion, however, he must as never before restrain his natural exuberance.
        Uphill to the east, Captain Queeg von Hindenburg and his Jules Vernesian contraption tunneled through the thickening fog, which closed in his wake, granting