"Your guess is as good as mine, Mr. Mackey. Gather a few of those up for me, would you? Not all together, a sampling from the stack—"
Hopper was interrupted by a noise outside the office, across the hallway. Her light clicked off immediately, and she silently moved to the window to peer out the edge of the blinds. Mackey stood behind her, trying to see. Luckily, the Assistant Secretary was a head shorter than he was. A man in a suit had just exited the steel door and was walking down the hall, back in the direction of the elevator.
"Mackey! Let's go, grab the files."
He quickly raked a number of folders together and stuffed them under his arm, along with the Climate Projections file which, it suddenly and unreasonably occurred to him, probably didn't contain anything of the sort. Hopper turned the doorknob silently, watching the steel door slowly swing towards shut, as the man in the suit proceeded down the hall.
"Now!" she whispered.
The Assistant Secretary stepped silently out the door. Mackey was right on her heels, jamming his hat back on his head. He pulled the door shut as quickly and quietly as he could and turned, just as Hopper was about to put her hand in the path of the closing steel door.
Suddenly, the man in front of them stopped, as if forgetting something, and turned on his heel. Without missing a beat, Hopper turned her sleeve, as if merely stretching her extended arm, and kept walking. The steel door clicked shut.
Mackey tried not to move awkwardly, but was sure that he did. He walked behind Hopper, trying not to look directly at the man who was now heading back, staring at them, unable to ignore their sudden appearance in the hallway behind him. Out of the corner of his eye, Mackey caught the man's face. He recognized him. The large brow, the balding hair, the expensive but slightly unfashionable suit. He had met him before. But when?
Hopper walked past, her steps as efficient and single-minded as ever. Mackey thought about flipping casually through the files he was carrying, but thought better of it, instead digging into his interior coat pocket as if looking for his glasses, which were already on his face. The man passed them, giving them a long look, and stood in front of the steel door, pausing. Mackey didn't dare look back, but waited to hear the sounds of the security console. He heard nothing. Hopper turned the corner of the off-yellow hallway, and Mackey followed her.
"Quickly now, let's beat it!" she whispered as soon as they were out of sight, and began moving as fast as possible without breaking into a run. Footsteps sounded on the tile behind them as they rounded the corners, until suddenly they were confronted with a dead end.
"What do we do?" hissed Mackey, his pulse pounding in his ears.
"Against the wall, back in the corner! Stay as flat against the wall as you can, and say nothing, no matter what happens!"
Hopper shoved him hard, with incredible strength for her size, and wedged him into the corner beside the last door in the hallway. From inside her suit jacket she removed a long, thin metal strip with odd, scalloped ridges and, unfolding it on silent metal rivets, increased its length four times.
She slapped it vertically against the wall between them and the corridor where the strangely familiar man would no doubt appear in his pursuit, within seconds. It stuck as if magnetized, and then sizzled in the air, glowing, as a small veil of smoke emanated from the long strip, as tall as Mackey himself. There was a slight breeze, and Mackey saw the smoke swirl in an odd, vertical vortex, several inches from the exothermic metal.
Hopper pressed her back up against the wall behind the strip, as if she was attempting to hide behind a lamp post. Mackey, unable to think of anything else useful to do, imitated her.
The man appeared, and stopped, staring down the hallway at them. He turned, looked the other way, and hurried off, as if still in pursuit of two interlopers, down another passage.
Hopper exhaled but remained against the wall. After thirty seconds, she gingerly grabbed the strip from the wall and shook it to cool it down, then quickly wrapped it into a coil, bending the metal into a small whorl which she stowed in her jacket.
"Let's go. Quietly, back to the elevator."
They doubled back, sneaking quietly around all corners until they arrived at the elevator.
"What just happened? Why didn't he see us?"
Fata Morgana. Exothermic compound generates heat, and channeled convection currents create a duct, which along with a bit of haze creates an atmospheric lens effect, bending the light around us. He saw nothing but the end of the hallway."
"A Fata . . ."
"Fata Morgana. Similar principle to a mirage. Named after the Arthurian sorceress. Sailors used to say that she would create floating castles over the sea, to lure men to their deaths." Hopper smiled wryly, and opened her briefcase.
"Put all the files in here, Mackey." She held it out to him. Inside were a number of manila envelopes, a pencil, a gas mask, a spool of thin black wire, a radio handset, and a handgun, made entirely from what appeared to be white plastic.
"The tools of the trade," she said, snapping it shut. Mackey turned around quietly, his pulse finally catching up with his adrenaline.
They quickly made it back to the parking area without incident, and Hopper recalled the car from the terminal. It arrived in just a couple of minutes, and they quickly boarded.
The Assistant Secretary then reached into the pocket of her jacket and withdrew a new punch card, popping it into the navigational console of the vehicle. The car began to whir up and out of the tunnel back into the daylight, but Mackey couldn't relax until they were out of the main gate and heading down the road under the enveloping canopy of forest above their heads. And then, finally, his memory clicked into place. Like well-oiled tumblers in a lock, names and titles spun into place, and a mental dossier assembled itself in his consciousness.
"I know that man. The one from the corridor outside the door."
Hopper turned her head slightly. "Who is he?"
"Alfred Gregory. He's the Assistant Director of Data Management, at the Census Service. I saw him give a speech at a bureaucratic conference several years back. Bright fellow. Methods of records digitization was the topic. Benefits of magnetic storage over punch cards, and so forth. We spoke, briefly anyway. I wonder if he recognized me."
"He's not G-rated, is he?"
"No—at least he wasn't. B level, if I recall."
"Then he doesn't have the cognitive mnemonics training that you do. He'd likely be hard pressed to remember all of his administrative staff, let alone a cross-Department engineer from years back. Well done, Mr. Mackey. I knew you would come in handy today."
Mackey unclipped the badge from his jacket and turned it over in his hands, reading the awkward name of Frank Lanagan over his photo.
"Back to the Electromagnetic Bureau now?" he asked, attempting not to make it sound hopeful.
"Oh my no, Mackey! Our day is just beginning. I'm going to let my bet on you ride, and see if you end up even more useful than you already are. We'll be heading to Dulles now, to a sub-orbital jet. We have some new evidence, a new set of clues that have only made the puzzle more complex. I make use of experts, you understand. Expert skills for expert problems. The expert we need to speak to now is across the country, at the Aeronautics and Space Technology Bureau's Ames Research Center. We're going to Mountain View, California. To the heart of Bureaucrat Valley, where we will see James Webb."
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Chapter 3
Sacrifices
His heart was still pounding from their adventure in unauthorized federal facility access, but on the short ride to Dulles, Mackey regained most of his composure. He gripped the edges of the bench seat with both hands, until he decided it looked too much as if he was holding on for dear life, so instead folded his hands, placing them on top of his crossed knees. In this position, he could squeeze his fingers together tightly without it being too obvious. With the restoration of level pulse and breathing, he began to feel slightly embarrassed for his adrenaline. He did not want to let on to Hopper that his stomach was still doing a soft-shoe around his torso.
He had just participated in an illegal entry and theft from a facility of an executive Department. That wasn't something to simply brush off. Mackey had never stolen in his life, at least not on purpose. But he had just walked briskly out of an office in an underground Weather Service complex carrying a stack of files he had no permission to remove, let alone handle, let alone read. He had certainly never contemplated a life of crime, but even if he had, it would not have played out this way. He tried to count the number of procedural violations that had occurred in the span of their visit to Mount Weather. He tried to count the felonies, and then decided not to think about it.
Assistant Secretary Hopper, for her part, seemed entirely unperturbed. She picked up the radio phone from the cabinet beneath the control console in the P-car and made a number of calls, apparently arranging their transit to California. She had been so cool, so collected during the entire intrusion into the Weather Service. Not simply as if this was part of her daily business, but as if she had the utmost confidence that everything would work out. Indeed, in less than forty-five minutes, they had found precisely what she had been looking for. Did that always happen when the Assistant Secretary had set herself to a task? Or had they just been lucky?
Mackey could pick up nothing from the woman's facial expression, as she stared past his head out of the Perspex at the speeding landscape, listening to whatever the voice on the other end of the receiver was telling her. Hopper was acting as if this had been a brief errand at a pedestrian mall. All signs showed this to be a routine day's work for the Assistant Secretary, in her cloak and dagger career with the Department. Orthogonal Procedures, indeed.
Mackey did not know what to call Hopper, other than a spy. That was what he felt like. This is what spies do, don't they? If she had spied on the Nazis during World War Two, that would have been an action that was distant, faded, as if in a historical film. A memory of a world that worked differently, that had different rules. But today, in the present, he had witnessed the Assistant Secretary spy on the United States' own government, at the behest of that government. And he had let himself be sucked into the plot. He had spied on the United States' government.
Mackey was an engineer, and rules were his bread and butter. It was his job to understand rules and to design within them, to cut across the distance between two points in the straightest line possible. He was not a rule breaker.
But he was now. He could no more avoid that truth than he could leave the P-car, traveling at high speed down the sunny track towards the airport. Even if he could exit, magically teleport back to his desk at the Electromagnetic Bureau, how would he really escape?
He knew there was no way to dodge the woman with the neat hat and wry smile talking on the radio phone across the car from him. At least not for long, if only part of what he knew about her was true. He had to follow, and hope that all was what she said it was, and she knew what she was doing.
It was her car he was riding in, figuratively as well as literally.
If he was going to follow the Assistant Secretary to California, he didn't want her to think he was nervous, as tough as that might be to hide. There was something about Hopper which didn't exactly inspire confidence so much as demand it. He could tell she expected the best. She used experts, as she had said, and for whatever reason she had chosen Mackey, plucked him from his office among his reports and diagrams, and made him one of them. He felt that he couldn't let her down, any more than he would want to fail in one of his tasks that landed on his own desk. Which, it suddenly occurred to him, were no doubt piling up in his absence. He frowned anxiously at the thought.
The action that the Assistant Secretary could stimulate with a few phone calls certainly inspired a confidence of some kind. Mackey had seen a few such phone calls in his time with the Bureau. But nothing quite like securing jet transportation within half an hour. They were less than ten minutes from the airport, but a Department of Transportation sub-orbital was fueled and ready for them when they arrived.
Hopper sent her car to parking, and they hustled through the terminal, largely empty as it was now midday. Bright fingers of light stretched through the beveled floor-to-ceiling windows, in between the bright white concrete columns canted at an angle not dissimilar from the vertical stabilizers of the Postal Bureau passenger jets out on the flight line. Postal personnel guided them through a special door that took them below the ticket counters, and onto an underground shuttle that took them out across the airport. Coming out of the ground onto the level of the tarmac, they disembarked directly in front of a small sub-orbital, parked in a special hangar for Department of Transportation executive flights. Certainly, the Assistant Secretary was used to moving with speed and a purpose.
The pilot and co-pilot saluted them as they boarded the small sub-orbital, arms at strong angles, like the white swept wings of the aircraft. Hopper nodded, and Mackey did the same, careful to follow her lead. "Welcome aboard, Assistant Secretary," one of the pair said, deferentially.
"Thank you, Major Briggs and Major Drecker," Hopper greeted them, reading their name tags. They were dressed in the uniforms of Postal Bureau pilots. Mackey could see that both were decorated as having served in Electronic Conflicts, and he decoded the colors of their service ribbons. West Africa, Middle East, both in 1959 and 1963, India, Greece, and the Western Pacific. That was quite a bit of service, to now be flying an sub-orbital. But, Mackey supposed, the Assistant Secretary would warrant the best pilots.
He might have expected the lavis
h, executive features of the interior of the jet, given the pristine technological edge of Hopper's car. Six high-backed, leather upholstered chairs in the cabin, complete with desks, communications consoles for radio and satellite radio phones, as well as video connections. And a kitchenette, although with the rush to depart there was no service staff on hand. As they took their seats, Hopper set her briefcase on her desk.
"Mackey," she turned to him, "I'm sorry to ask, but would you mind heating us a few sandwiches in the galley while I make these calls? And if you don't mind, a few for our pilots as well."
There hadn't been any food preparation training with Mackey's level G bureaucratic literacy rating, but he didn't mind an idle task, his actual skills seemingly not needed for the moment. He had no idea what sort of business would require the Assistant Secretary's attention, and he did not ask. But operating a microwave oven seemed a duty suitable for Mackey's somewhat impressionable head space.
He had only been on a plane a few times before, and certainly any device aboard an executive sub-orbital was equally fascinating and novel to him. The microwave was top of the line, smaller than any unit he had ever seen, complete with a clock display formed with lensed light-emitting diodes printing the time remaining in the cooking cycle in small red text.
All the technology aboard the jet was of a similar grade, jacketed in a chromed steel alloy, rendered both heavy-duty and yet light enough to be packed aboard the sleek jet, making them completely different in appearance from their counterparts on the ground.
Orthogonal Procedures Page 4
