Impact wf-3

by Douglas Preston

  Abbey was momentarily distracted and the coffee she was pouring slopped over the edge of the cup.

  "Oh, I'm sorry."

  "Don't worry about it," said the tall man. "Really."

  She looked at the man for the first time. Angular, large hooked nose, jutting jaw--lean and strong in a curiously pleasing way. When he smiled, his face changed dramatically.

  "Hello? The tartar sauce?" came a loud voice from the next table.

  The tall man nodded, winked. "Better take care of them first."

  She hurried off and returned with tartar sauce.

  "AFT," the man said, snatching it up and spooning it onto the clams.

  She went back to the tall man, ticket in hand. "What can I get for you?"

  "I'll take the haddock sandwich, please."

  "Anything to drink besides coffee?"

  "Water's fine."

  She hesitated, glanced over at the Boston table to see if there was anything else, but they were busy eating. He followed her glance. "Sorry about them."

  "Not your fault."

  "You live around here?"

  Lately this had been happening a little too frequently. "No," she said, "I live out on the peninsula."

  He nodded thoughtfully. "I see. Then you must've gotten a good view of the meteorite a few months ago?"

  Abbey was instantly wary, taken aback by the unexpected question. "No."

  "You didn't see the meteorite's trail or hear the sonic booms?"

  "Not at all, no, I didn't." Feeling that her denial had been too emphatic, she cast about, trying to cover up her reaction. "That's meteor, not meteorite."

  The man smiled again. "I always get those two terms mixed up."

  She quickly went on. "Anything on the side? Salad? Fries?"

  "I'm fine."

  She put in the order and hurried back to the table with the two people from Boston, who had finished eating. "Can I get you anything else?"

  "What, you need the table already?"

  The wife said, "I think it's inexcusable when they try to hustle you out."

  She checked her other tables, picked up the haddock sandwich, brought it over.

  "Hey, where's our check?" came a cry from the Boston table. "Can't you see we're done?"

  She pulled out the ticket, went to the cash register, rang it up, printed it out, and came back and laid it on the table. "Have a nice day."

  The man flipped open the check, ostentatiously examining the total. "What a rip-off." He counted out some money on the table, a lot of change and crumpled bills, and left it in a heap on the check.

  The tall man left a while later, leaving a tip so large it made up for what she had been stiffed by the Boston table. As she cleared his table, she wondered why he asked pointed questions about the meteor. The man seemed nice but there was something shifty about him--distinctly shifty.

  41

  Wyman Ford had crossed the Wiscasset Bridge when he finally pulled off the road in front of an antique shop. He threw the car into park and sat there, thinking. He couldn't put his finger on it, but something wasn't adding up. It had to do with the odd behavior of the girl in the restaurant and this crazy story in the local paper. He picked up the paper, which he'd tossed on the passenger's seat. The girl in the restaurant was definitely the girl in the news story, the one searching for the pirate treasure. When he'd asked her about the meteorite, she'd suddenly become nervous. Why? And how many small-town waitresses knew the difference between the terms meteor and meteorite?

  He pulled out and headed back the way he had come. Ten minutes later he walked into the restaurant. The girl was still there, bustling around, and he watched her from the maitre d's station at the door. She was definitely the one from the story in the papers--in fact, she was the only African-American he'd seen on his entire trip to Maine. Short black hair that curled around her face, bright black eyes, slender and tall, with an athletic frame. Walking around with a sardonic, even ironic expression on her face. No makeup at all. A stunningly beautiful girl. Twenty-one, maybe?

  As soon as he stepped into the dining room she saw him, and a guarded look came into her face. He nodded at her, smiled.

  "Forget something?" she asked.

  "No."

  Her face frosted up. "What do you want?"

  "I'm sorry, I don't mean to pry, but aren't you the girl who was involved in that incident I read about in the paper?"

  Now her face became positively cold. She crossed her arms. "If you don't mean to pry, then don't." She turned to leave.

  "Wait. Give me a minute. This is important."

  She waited.

  "You corrected me on my use of the word meteor versus meteorite."

  "So?"

  "How'd you know the difference?"

  She shrugged, folded her arms, glanced back at her section.

  Ford wasn't even sure where he was heading with this, what he hoped to find out. "It must have been exciting when that meteor streaked overhead."

  "Look, I have to get back to work."

  Ford looked at her steadily. She was oddly nervous. "You sure you didn't see it? Not even the trail? It persisted in the sky more than half an hour."

  "I already told you, I didn't see it at all."

  Her eyes were tense. Why would she lie? He pressed ahead, still unsure of where this was going. Clearly she wasn't used to lying, and her face betrayed confusion and alarm. "Where were you when it fell?"

  "Sleeping."

  "At nine-forty-four P.M., a girl your age?"

  She faced him directly, crossing her arms. "You're really interested in that meteorite, aren't you?"

  "In a way."

  She narrowed her eyes. "You looking for it?"

  "As a matter of fact, I am."

  She seemed to consider this, then she smiled. "You want to find it?"

  "That would interest me very much."

  She stepped closer and spoke in a low voice. "I get off in half an hour. Meet me in the bookstore cafe down the street."

  A half-hour later, the girl arrived. She had changed from her waitressing uniform into jeans and a plaid shirt.

  Ford rose and offered her a seat.

  "Coffee?"

  "Triple shot of espresso, two shots of cream, four sugars."

  Ford ordered coffees and carried them to the table. She looked at him directly, her brown eyes disconcertingly alert. "You start first. Tell me who you are and why you're looking for the meteor."

  "I'm a planetary geologist--"

  She gave a sarcastic snort. "Cut the bullshit."

  "What makes you think I'm not?"

  "No planetary geologist would have mixed up the words meteor and meteorite. A real planetary geologist would have used the scientific term, meteoroid."

  Ford stared at her, flabbergasted at being smoked out so easily--by a small-town waitress no less. He quickly covered up his confusion with a smile. "You're a bright girl."

  She continued to look at him steadily, her arms folded in front of her on the table.

  Ford extended his hand. "Let's start with an introduction. I'm Wyman Ford."

  "Abbey Straw." The cool hand slipped into his and he gave it a shake.

  "I'm sort of a private investigator. That meteoroid interests me. I'm trying to track it down."

  "Why?"

  He thought of lying again, decided on a half-truth instead. "I'm working for the government."

  "Really?" She leaned forward. "Why's the government interested?"

  "There were certain . . . anomalies about the fall that make it interesting. I hasten to say I'm not here in any official capacity--you might say I'm freelancing."

  Abbey seemed to be thinking, and then she spoke slowly. "I know a lot about that meteoroid. What's it worth to you?"

  "Excuse me." Ford was nonplussed. "You want me to pay you for the information?"

  Abbey reddened. "I need money."

  "What kind of information do you have?"

  "I know where it landed. I've seen the
crater."

  Ford could hardly believe his ears. Was she lying? "Care to tell me about it?"

  "Like I said, I need money."

  "How much?"

  A hesitation. "One hundred thousand dollars."

  Ford stared at her, and then started to laugh. "Are you crazy?"

  Her face faltered. "I only ask because . . . well . . . that's what it cost me to find the crater."

  "For a hundred thousand dollars, I could find the crater five times over."

  "Trust me, Mr. Ford, you could search that bay a hundred years and not find it--unless you knew exactly where to look. It's small and unrecognizable from the air."

  Ford leaned back, sipped his coffee. "Perhaps you might tell me how you made this discovery and why it cost you a hundred thousand dollars."

  The girl took a long sip of her coffee. "I will. Back on April fourteenth, I had just bought a telescope and I was taking a time exposure of the constellation Orion. Wide field. The meteor passed through and I got the streak on film. Or rather digitally."

  "You photographed it?" Ford could hardly believe his luck.

  "Then I had an idea--I checked the GoMOOS weather buoy data on the Internet. No waves. I figured it must have hit an island instead of the water. So, by angulating from the photograph, I was able to identify a line along which it must have fallen. I borrowed my father's lobster boat, took a friend, and went out looking for it."

  "Why so interested in meteorites?"

  "Meteorites are worth a lot of money."

  "You're quite the entrepreneur."

  "To cover our tracks we circulated a phony story about looking for a pirate treasure."

  "I'm beginning to see the real story," said Ford.

  "Yeah. Our meth-addicted stalker was addled enough to believe it and attacked us, sinking my father's lobster boat. The insurance company wouldn't pay."

  "I'm sorry."

  "My father's making payments on a boat that doesn't exist. We might lose our house. So you see why I need money--to get him a new boat."

  Emotion welled up in her eyes. Ford pretended not to notice. "You found the crater," Ford said easily. "So what did the meteorite look like?"

  "Did I say I found a meteorite?"

  Ford felt his heart quicken. He knew instinctively the girl was telling the truth. "You didn't find a meteorite in the crater?"

  "Now we're getting into the information that's going to cost you."

  Ford looked at her steadily for a long time. Finally he spoke. "May I ask what a girl with your brains is doing waitressing in Damariscotta, Maine?"

  "I dropped out of college."

  "What college?"

  "Princeton."

  "Princeton? Isn't that somewhere in Jersey?"

  "Very funny."

  "What'd you major in?"

  "I was supposedly pre-med but I took a lot of physics and astronomy courses. Too many. I flunked organic chem, lost my financial aid."

  Ford thought for a while. What the hell. "It just so happens a hundred thousand dropped in my lap the other day which I don't really need. It's yours--to buy a new boat. But it comes with conditions. You're working for me, now. You'll be absolutely quiet, tell nothing to no one, not even your friend. And the first thing we're going to do in this new boat is visit the crater. Agreed?"

  The girl surprised Ford by the sheer wattage of her smile. She stuck out her hand. "Agreed."

  42

  Mark Corso tossed the mail on a table and threw himself into an armchair in his friend's basement apartment on the Upper West Side. His head dropped back against the cushion and he closed his eyes. He felt logy, an incipient hangover creeping up behind his eyeballs. For the last three nights he had worked double shifts at Moto's, one to one, and to get through them he'd been nursing screwdrivers under the bar. Even with the long hours he still wasn't making enough to pay his overdue share of the rent. He needed that severance check from NPF and he needed it fast. In what little free time he had, he'd been job hunting and obsessively going over the images on the hard drive, refining and polishing them. He'd hardly slept. And on top of it, he missed Marjory Leung awfully, fantasized about her long, nude, springy body day and night. He'd talked to her a half a dozen times but it was clear the relationship wasn't going to continue--although they remained good buddies.

  Fighting the urge to sleep, he roused himself and eyed the mail. Depressingly slim responses to his job queries and applications. With an effort of will he scooped up the pile, tore open the first letter, and read the first line. Crumpling it into a ball he dropped it, opened the second, the third, the fourth.

  The pile of paper at his feet grew.

  The sixth and last letter stopped him dead. It was from the personnel office at CalTech, which administered NPF. At first he thought it might be his severance check, but when he opened it all he found was a letter. He scanned it in disbelief, his eye fixing on the first paragraph.

  "After reviewing your employment records and the notice of termination for cause from your former supervisor at NPF, we have determined that you do not qualify for the severance package or unused leave compensation as outlined in your employment contract. We refer you to regulations 4.5.1 through 6 in the Handbook for Employees . . ."

  He read it twice and tossed it on the table. This wasn't happening to him. They owed him two weeks' severance and two weeks' unused vacation: over eight grand. After six years of graduate school and eighty thousand dollars in student loans, here he was, crashing in a friend's basement apartment with less than five hundred dollars in his bank account, no job, no prospects, and a brick of maxed-out credit cards so thick he couldn't fit them all in his wallet. And now he couldn't even pay the back rent.

  Slowly, inexorably, his anger built. Those bastards at NPF would pay. They owed him eight thousand dollars and he would get his money, one way or another. There had to be a way to get back at them.

  The door opened and his roommate stood in the doorway. "Hey, Mark, I hate to be a jerk about that back rent, but I need the money. Like now."

  Mark Corso arrived on the doorstep of his mother's old brownstone in Greenpoint, suitcases in hand, and rang the bell. The hangover was now full-blown, his eyeballs throbbed and he had a mouthful of paste. He hadn't been able to bring himself to call ahead. Inside, he could hear the shuffling of feet, the sound of locks being turned, and then his mother's quavering, uncertain voice.

  "Who is it?"

  "Me. Mark."

  The final lock was turned and there was his mother--short, plump, iron-gray hair--her face lighting up. "Mark!" The arms went around him in a suffocating embrace, once, twice. She smelled of fresh pasta and her arms were patched with flour. "What have you got here, suitcases? Are you moving back in? Don't stand outside in the cold, come in! Are you here to stay or just a visit? You look so tired!" Another embrace, this one with a hint of tears.

  She led her son, unresisting, into the parlor, and sat him down on the sofa.

  "I'll make you your favorite, a Fluffernutter, you just stay right there and relax. You're so thin!"

  "I'm fine, Mom."

  Corso kicked off his shoes, stretched out on the sofa, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared up at the swirls of brushed stucco on the ceiling of his childhood home, thinking about the money NPF owed him. They couldn't deny him two weeks' severance just like that, without due process. And vacation time? He'd earned that. This was not right. He wondered if Derkweiler wasn't actively interfering with his efforts to find a new job--he hadn't even had a nibble. Incredible: here he was, sitting on the scientific discovery of a lifetime, unable to do anything with it, and being treated like shit by the establishment.

  He had an ace in the hole: the hard drive. He wondered when they would miss it. An idea began to form. Years back, he recalled, a classified hard drive was misplaced at Los Alamos National Labs. It made the front page of The New York Times and led to the canning of the director and a bunch of scientists. Maybe the NPF drive needed to show up in som
e FBI office. The very fact it was outside the fence would cause a scandal. And who would get blamed? The mission director.

  He sat up. That was it. Chaudry's career would be ruined if it became known someone in his unit had walked out with a classified hard drive. And Derkweiler would also be toast. He had them both by the short hairs. But there was no point in taking them down just for revenge. No . . . The threat of going to the FBI would only be his leverage. The stick, so to speak. The carrot was that he had a discovery that would make both of them famous, as well as himself--if they had the wisdom to reinstate him.

  Now this was a plan. A quick phone call, nothing in writing. He would ask for nothing more than he deserved, something that Chaudry could do for him with the mere stroke of a pen--rehire him. With his discovery, all would be forgiven. He felt a mounting excitement. If Chaudry rejected his overture and reported the stolen drive, the man's career would be ruined. He'd never work with classified material again. Chaudry was smart, he was cool-headed, and above all he was ambitious. He would see the lay of the land.

  Corso looked at his watch. Ten A.M. in New York, seven A.M. in California; Chaudry would still be at home. Perfect.

  It was a matter of thirty seconds to get the home phone number off the Internet. Corso dialed it with slow deliberation, his heart hammering in his chest, while rehearsing his message. I have a classified NPF hard drive which contains all the high-res pictures of the planet. Freeman sent it to me before he was murdered. And on this drive is an image of an alien artifact. A machine. Trust me, you won't find it. But I did.

  So here's the deal. Rehire me, you get the hard drive back, no one will know about the security breach--and we'll share credit for the greatest scientific discovery of all time. Refuse and I mail this drive to the FBI anonymously and your career is over. Finished. Nada. Remember what happened at Los Alamos?

  The choice is yours. Think it over before doing anything stupid.

  The phone began to ring. "Hello?" came Chaudry's cool voice.

  43