The ambulance was on Park Row beside a coffee cart when the sun came up. They’d had to move twice during the night to avoid suspicion. It didn’t matter where they were as long as they were within the two thousand feet of the bots’ radio receiver.
“Hey, what the hell is that?” said Mr. Beckett around a crumbling apple turnover as he suddenly saw something on the screen.
The tablet screen was divided into a grid of hundreds of little boxes now, a view from the camera on each individual bot. Mr. Beckett didn’t know how Mr. Joyce was keeping track of them all. It looked like a lot of gobbledygook to him, but then again, he wasn’t a mathematical genius with an IQ of 170, like Mr. Joyce.
“Which? Where? What?” said Mr. Joyce, who was as frazzled as Mr. Beckett had ever seen him. The guy had been a ball of sweat and nerves all night as he clicked at the keyboard, moving all the bots around. It was a miracle he didn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome.
“It’s a face, I think. In this one. Can you make it larger?” Mr. Beckett said.
Mr. Joyce hit a button and, lo and behold, a confused-looking Hispanic guy wearing a maintenance uniform appeared on the screen, as if he’d just snapped a puzzled selfie.
“Maintenance!” Mr. Beckett cried. “They must have heard the bots in the duct. Shit! Detonate now! It’s our only chance!”
“No,” Mr. Joyce said, clicking the man off the screen and going back to his typing.
“What are you talking about?”
“I need more time,” he said calmly. “It’s not ready yet.”
“Time just ran out,” Mr. Beckett cried as he shook Mr. Joyce’s shoulder. “We’re discovered. We need to go with what we got now!”
“No,” said Mr. Joyce more firmly. He flipped a page in the pile of the building’s schematics on the workbench beside the tablet and began typing even faster.
“I need ten minutes,” he said. “We’re that close. My calculations do not lie. We can still get it done. Think about it. They don’t know what the bots even are. It will take time for them to call the bomb squad and piece it together and sound the alarm. By then I’ll be ready. I promise.”
“Well, hurry up already, would you please?” Mr. Beckett said, going to the aluminum blinds on the ambulance window that faced the target.