Collision

by William S. Cohen

  She opened the passenger door, slipped in gracefully, leaned across, and gave Taylor a kiss that touched his cheek and a corner of his lips. “Good evening, Ben,” she said. “Where have you been keeping yourself?”

  “Work, work, and more work,” he said, instantly regretting his pathological inability to make small talk. “Well, not really,” he added. “I think I’m becoming dull, dull, and more dull.”

  Thiessan laughed and touched his cheek with a soft, cool hand. “You still look good to me,” she said, kindling his memory of the night two years before when, after a retirement party for a mutual friend, he had wound up in her bed. That had started something. They had dated a few times after that, but she had left for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California on a temporary assignment and had not found a way to start something again.

  She directed him back to the highway and toward the gate that led to the Laser Ranging Facility, on the western edge of the campus, as employees usually called the center. He turned off the highway more than a mile from the cluster of buildings that was the heart of Goddard. The guard gave her a hearty hello, glanced at Taylor’s visitor ID, and waved them down a two-lane road that could have been a country lane. Moonlight rippled through the dark trees flanking the road.

  “You’ve been to the range before, haven’t you?” she asked.

  “No. The moon wasn’t on my agenda much.”

  “Too bad. It’s an interesting place.”

  “Cole, you know, said that being assigned to the Laser Ranging Facility was like being exiled.”

  “A lot of the moon rangers say that,” Thiessan said, laughing. “But most of them wind up liking it out here, far from the chatter and the office politics.” She was cheery and easygoing, a rare quality in a bureaucracy full of grim-faced men and women who managed Goddard through budget cuts, layoffs, sequesters, and government shutdowns.

  She had once claimed that a good way to get a proposal started at Goddard was to come up with a snappy acronym, and LOLA was a fine example. The acronym had become famous at Goddard. And her project had been launched so smoothly that managers of other projects claimed it all had to do with its catchy name, and the inevitable claim that “Whatever LOLA wants, LOLA gets.”

  “So, Ben. What’s this all about?” she asked.

  Taylor told of how Cole had called and acted frightened. “But he was shot before he had a chance to tell me anything,” Taylor said. He had decided not to mention Cole’s encrypted message. “I had an idea … just an idea that it had something to do with what he was doing here.”

  “Do you think Cole’s murder had anything to do with the shooting at that law firm?”

  Surprised, Taylor said, “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, Ben. I knew about the Black Musketeers long before that awful Grudge Report story. Certainly it must have occurred to you that there was a connection.”

  “God, Karen, you really know how to get right to the point. Yeah, I did think of that. I’ve been questioned by the FBI. They took over Cole’s murder from the DC cops. But, honest, I don’t know what the connection is—or if there is one.”

  “What makes you think there’s some answer out here?” Thiessan asked with a sweeping motion of her hand. Before Taylor could respond, he could see the moonlit outlines of the trailers and sheds that jutted up along the outpost’s narrow road.

  “Pull up over here,” she said, pointing to four cars and a pickup truck parked in a paved area alongside the road. She took a flashlight out of her handbag and pointed to a figure coming toward them. “Dick Gillespie,” she said. “He’s the manager. We’re in luck.” When they got out of the car, she did not turn on the flashlight. “They don’t like lights out here.”

  She introduced Gillespie and said, “Ben was a friend of Cole’s.”

  “It’s a privilege to meet you, Dr. Taylor,” Gillespie said, shaking hands. He led them into a windowless, unpainted concrete-block structure that looked as if it had started out as a garage. A dim, flickering fluorescent light fixture hung from the low ceiling over a wooden table with a scarred top. Three metal chairs had been unfolded and placed around the table. Gillespie sat on one side, Taylor and Thiessan opposite him.

  “Welcome to the moon base,” Gillespie said. He pointed to a wooden bookcase in a dark corner. “You go through the journals on those shelves and you’ll find some of your publications. Like I said, Doctor, a privilege. Karen says you were a friend of Cole’s.” He paused, then lowered his voice and asked, “Do you know what happened? Why it happened?”

  “Call me Ben, Dick,” Taylor said. He shook his head and repeated what he had told Karen Thiessan. “I had an idea that he may have said something out here that could give me a lead to what was … frightening him.”

  “Cole usually didn’t have much to say,” Gillespie replied. “Except once in a while he’d talk about de Chardin and the future of the human race. Heady stuff. But it seemed to come naturally to him.”

  Taylor smiled and nodded. “I got a couple of doses of de Chardin, too.”

  “Cole was here, you know, when that asteroid skimmed over that Russian city—the same day that another asteroid came close. That really got him going.”

  Taylor knew that the day had been a turning point for Cole, but he did not want to mention the encrypted Cole message. “What happened?” he asked. “What did he do?”

  “He sat down at that computer over there,” Gillespie said, pointing to a vintage PC on a table near the bookcase. “And he began pounding away at a memo to the director of Goddard with a copy to the administrator of NASA.”

  “What did the memo say?” Taylor asked.

  “Essentially, he wanted an overnight change in NASA’s missions. He wanted us to begin a major effort to start a defense of Earth. That’s what he called it. A defense of Earth.”

  “What happened?” Thiessan asked. “I never heard anything about it.”

  “Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing,” Gillespie answered. “So he sent another and another. He believed that the Russian airburst was a sign—not from a divine source but from collective human consciousness, a warning that we must defend Earth against asteroids on collision orbits. Finally Human Resources sent him an invitation for a consultation. He ignored that and all of a sudden he focused all his energy right here.”

  “How?” Taylor asked. “What did he do?”

  Gillespie looked at his watch and stood up and said, “Maybe if we walk around and you see what we do out here, you’d understand.…”

  61

  Gillespie led them up the road to two trailers that were attached together alongside a platform for what looked like the dome for a small telescope. As they mounted the steps to the platform, they heard a fusillade that sounded nearby. Taylor ducked and flattened himself against the platform.

  “That’s the Secret Service training center on a night exercise,” Gillespie said. “They’re our neighbors on this great big piece of federal real estate. They could give us warning when they start shooting. But it’s hush-hush. They make believe we aren’t here and we make believe that they aren’t here.”

  Gillespie opened the trailer door and yelled to someone inside: “Okay, let her rip!”

  The white dome swung around, a lid slid back, and from what looked like the tube of a telescope came a narrow green light that cut across the sky toward the moon. “That’s a laser beam that is enclosed in a kind of radar envelope,” Gillespie said. “If the radar detects an aircraft nearing the beam, the beam is automatically turned off so that it will not disturb or harm pilots.”

  “So the beam is aiming at the moon. Looks like an easy target tonight,” Taylor said.

  “But what we’re aiming at, Ben, is a bit smaller,” Gillespie said. “Our target is the lunar reconnaissance orbiter spacecraft that’s zooming at nearly thirty-six hundred miles per hour in its orbit around the moon. And inside is Karen’s wonderful LOLA, the lunar orbiter laser altimeter.”

  “She—of course,
LOLA is a she—sends back distance measurements accurate to within about four inches,” Thiessan said. “We need accuracy like that for the maps we’ll need before we send anybody back to the moon.”

  “It’s getting a little chilly down here on Earth,” Gillespie said. “Let’s go inside.”

  The joined trailers were crammed with electronic panels. Gillespie, Taylor, and Thiessan walked single-file, squeezing past shelves and narrow tables bearing computers whose screens displayed ever-changing lines that peaked and plunged across graphs or turned into squads of digits marching left to right, then right to left. Taylor could infer what some of them were reporting. But there were so many displays of data that they became to his eyes pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that was undoubtedly interesting.

  “Measurements. Measurements. Measurements. That’s what we do,” Gillespie said. He was pointing to one of the screens. “That’s one of the measurements that Cole began obsessing on. Without going into detail, it’s one of the data points he used in his gravitational studies. And it’s what brought him down.”

  “I don’t get it,” Thiessan said.

  “His defense of Earth,” Gillespie said, “was defense against asteroids. Part of that defense was determining precise forecasting of near-Earth asteroids. And that involved knowing all there was to know about the gravitational interplay between the moon and the Earth.”

  Words in Cole’s message popped into Taylor’s mind. Gravitation. Gravitational keyhole. Imprecise measurements. “What happened?” he asked.

  “When I was here, I could control him. Or thought I could. He was insisting on data that were not in our regular drill. Essentially, he was trying to run his numbers inside our numbers. He was a fanatic about it. I tried to humor him and at the same time stay on our regular LOLA schedule. Then one night I wasn’t here and all hell broke loose.”

  He paused, not for dramatic effect, Taylor believed, but because he was recalling a painful event.

  “I told you that we don’t fire a beam if radar indicates there’s an aircraft in the airspace of the beam. Well, that night he was running the show, and the radar picked up an aircraft. Cole ordered the beam fired. The guys on duty refused. But Cole, he could be a tyrant, like those guys who think they’re on the list for a Nobel. So he did it on his own. The aircraft was Air Force One.”

  “My God!” Karen said.

  “It so happened that the Secret Service’s number-two guy was next door. He got word as soon as the aircraft and its pissed-off pilot landed. A big black SUV roared up and Cole was whisked away. Next morning, the head of Human Resources and a couple of people from the director’s staff are talking to Cole at a Secret Service office downtown. And Cole agrees to a leave of absence.”

  “But he went to work for SpaceMine,” Taylor said. “How did—”

  “I know. The whole thing was hushed up by the Secret Service. I guess so that nuts wouldn’t get ideas. And the director himself signed off on a glowing recommendation. Cole was a genius, you know.”

  They followed him out of the trailer and back to Gillespie’s moon base. “Those e-mails that Cole sent about the asteroid explosion,” Taylor said, “could I see them?”

  “I’m sorry,” Gillespie said. “Those little gems were deleted from the system.”

  “By whom?” Thiessan asked.

  “I have no idea,” Gillespie said. “I just work here. But I do have this.” He went over to the bookcase and from a wire basket on top of it he pulled out a sheet of paper. “Cole sent me this e-mail. It’s from him at SpaceMine, asking for the latest LOLA measurements.”

  “When is it dated?” Taylor asked.

  “September thirtieth,” Gillespie answered.

  “I think that was his last day at SpaceMine,” Taylor said. “And five days later he was killed.”

  62

  Falcone knew he had to move carefully when dealing with Philip Dake, who did not give information. He traded what he knew for what you knew. Falcone realized that the instant he asked, “What do you know about Kuri Basayev,” Dake would start his what-have-you-got-to-trade game.

  “You must be psychic,” Philip Dake said when Falcone called him and asked about Basayev.

  “No one has ever accused me of being psychic,” Falcone said. “Where does that come from?”

  “It’s my project on Hamilton,” Dake said. “I was just writing up some notes on Kuri Basayev when you called. Seems he appeared in Hamilton’s radar a while back, just about the time Hamilton announced the startup of SpaceMine. I can’t figure Hamilton mixing in with Basayev. So why all of a sudden are you wondering about Basayev, too?”

  “I want to talk about him with you,” Falcone said. “Can you come over, have some phone-in food, and give me a bit of Basayev?”

  “Glad to. Because I’m familiar with your phone-in cuisine, I’ll bring some decent sandwiches. What’s the rush?”

  “Something has come up,” Falcone answered. “I’ll tell you when you get here.” The game had begun. How much can I tell him?

  “Okay. I’ll pull together some bits on Basayev and drop by in an hour or so.”

  *

  Falcone envisioned Dake’s Georgetown home office. Filing cabinets lined the walls. In the cabinets were file folders bulging with information from precomputer days. And nearby were two or three computers, where Dake and his assistant typed away, putting facts into hard drives instead of filing cabinets.

  Dake had a passion for finding information where nobody else could find it. And no one had ever successfully challenged him on any substantial fact, but his conclusions and accusations created controversies—and made his books into best sellers. In a book describing the administration that preceded Oxley’s, for example, Dake once accused a high-ranking Pentagon official of getting kickbacks from defense contractors. Sued for libel, Dake triumphed, and the official went off to eight years in a federal prison.

  While waiting for Dake, Falcone went into his office and turned on the PC standing on his mahogany desk and brought up Kuri Basayev on Wikipedia. He was described as the son of one of the few Chechens to reach the zenith of riches and power in postcommunist Russia. The Wikipedia entry, as usual, bristled with what appeared to be facts but refrained from analysis. How the hell did a Chechen become an oligarch?

  Falcone went on to read that Kuri “was a brilliant student at the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the diplomatic school for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. An avid linguist, he became proficient in German, English, and Sesotho, three of the fifty-six languages taught at the institute. He spent three years as a cultural affairs officer at the Russian Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa.

  “Kuri Basayev’s diplomatic career ended after his father’s death in an automobile accident in Moscow. He took over the family’s holdings and added interests in mines in South Africa. Basayev’s immense wealth came from oil, natural gas, and the mining of palladium, a relatively rare metal that was becoming an important ingredient in electronics and catalytic converters.”

  *

  Falcone was still wondering about Basayev’s curious career when the concierge called to say that Dake had arrived. Falcone met him at the entrance hall. Dake was carrying a cloth bag containing sandwiches and wine. Slung over his shoulder was a laptop bag. God! Another laptop, Falcone thought as he stood at the doorway.

  At the kitchen counter they unpacked the sandwiches and filled their wineglasses. After a sip and a smile of appreciation, Dake opened his laptop, turned it on, and said, “To talk about Kuri Basayev, you begin with his yacht. She’s a target for the paparazzi whenever she finds a yacht basin that’s big enough to accommodate her.”

  On the screen appeared a frozen-video image of a sleek white ship with layers of multiwindowed covered decks. “This is a video taken at Antibes on the French Riviera,” Dake said. “The spot is known as the Millionaire Quay, a quaint name that ought to be updated to Billionaire Quay.

  “Superrich guys seem to compete for who h
as the biggest yacht. This is Basayev’s entry. She’s five hundred and thirty-two feet long, has four topside decks, and is second only to the five-hundred-and-ninety-footer owned by the president of U.A.E. Basayev’s Aglaya—it means ‘splendor’ in Russian—has two helicopter pads, two swimming pools, and accommodations for a couple of dozen guests.

  “Because Basayev has so many enemies he’s rightfully paranoid. The yacht’s bridge and his private suite are protected with armor plating and bulletproof glass. Aglaya also has a laser shield that detects and sizzles electronic devices, particularly cameras. Watch this.”

  Dake turned on the video. The image of Aglaya changed from bows-on to a starboard view as the video camera began circling the yacht. Suddenly there was a blast of light and the screen went blank.

  “Bingo!” Dake exclaimed. “Basayev doesn’t like being photographed. And he has teams of experts working to keep him as invisible as possible. For the past couple of years, he has mostly lived aboard Aglaya, rarely coming ashore. Folks trying to keep an eye on Aglaya—such as the NSA or Russia’s Federal Security Service—find she’s hard to track. I’m told that she sails a course based on handoffs from one communications satellite to another. Not going anywhere in particular, favoring areas where satellite signals are spotty.”

  Dake pulled up the image of Basayev and the bodyguard that had appeared in the New York Post. “He’s usually surrounded by big, tough-looking Chechens,” Dake went on. “And they flatten the photographer along with his camera.” Then he noticed the credit: GOOGLE GLASS IMAGE. “Modern technology. No camera but he still gets a couple of kicks. I’ll bet he is on his way to the Aglaya, which is—”

  “Docked at Pier Ninety,” Falcone said, laughing at Dake’s surprise.