by Tom Clancy
Come on, she thought. Keeping her gaze on the screen, waiting for the crew to emerge from the spacecraft. Where are you?
Then, suddenly, she thought she saw several figures appear on the railed platform on the west side of the service structure—the side where the escape baskets were located. But the distance of the video cameras from the pad, and the obscuring effect of the smoke, made it hard to be immediately certain.
Annie watched and waited, her eyes still narrowed on the screen, locked undeviatingly on the screen.
She had no sooner grown convinced that she had, in fact, spotted Orion’s crew, or at least some of its crew members, than the first explosion rocked the service structure with a force that was powerful enough to rattle the LCC’s viewing window. Annie seemed to feel rather than hear that sound, feel it as a sickening, awful percussion in her bones, feel it in the deepest part of her soul as a huge blast of fire ripped from the tail of the shuttle, leaping upward, engulfing the lower half of the stack.
She snapped forward in her seat, mouthing a prayer to any God that would listen, watching the tiny human shapes on the tower scramble into the rescue baskets as the flames rose behind them in a solid shaft. She couldn’t distinguish one from another, nor even be certain how many of the astronauts were on the platform. From her perspective they were barely larger than insects.
The rainbirds above the pad had activated, flooding it with water. For a long, excruciating moment Annie could see nothing through rising clouds of steam and smoke . . . nothing except the hideous glare of the fire raging, unquenched, around the shuttle.
And then one of the baskets was released. It arced toward the ground with tremendous speed, moving away from the tower just as a ragged tendril of a flame shot through its metal framework, lashing greedily at the platform. Horrified, Annie could still see members of the team on that platform, their bodies outlined against the flaring edges of the blaze. And then a second basket was released, descending the slide-wire ten or fifteen seconds behind the other—a delay that would have been unacceptable during practice aborts. Annie wondered about it briefly, but pushed her thoughts aside before they had a chance to fully form.
Yet she had seen what she had seen . . . and would later reflect that the thoughts you tried notto let into your head sometimes turned out to be the ones that took deepest hold, lingering with the tenacity of restless ghosts.
The next few minutes were sheer torment. Along with everyone around her, she had been unable to do anything but wait for the astronauts to resume communications from the bunker. Wait, and stare at the monitor, and try not to surrender to the madness of what she’d been witnessing.
There was silence. And more silence.
Annie gnawed at her bottom lip.
Finally she heard an excited voice in her headset.
“Launch Control, this is Everett. Second basket’s down and I think we’re all—”
He abruptly broke contact.
Annie sat without moving, her heart slamming in her chest. She didn’t know what was going on, didn’t even know what she was feeling. The relief she’d experienced upon hearing Lee’s voice had gotten all tangled up with profound despair. Why had he ceased to respond?
Control was hailing him now. “Lee? Lee, we’re reading you, what is it?”
Another unbearable measure of silence. Then Everett again, his tone distraught, almost frantic: “Oh, God, God . . . where’s Jim? Where’s Jim? Where’s . . . ?”
Annie would remember little about the moments that followed besides a sense of foundering helplessness, of the world closing in around her, seeming to suck her into an airless, shrinking hole.
And there was one other thing that would stand out in her memory.
At some point, she had glanced over at Roger Gordian. His face pale, his posture somehow crumpled, he appeared to have been violently thrown back into his seat. And the empty, blown-away look in his eyes after hearing Lee’s anguished question—
It was a look that told Annie he knew its answer as well as she did, knew it as well as anyone else in the room.
Colonel Jim Rowland . . .
Jim . . .
Jim was gone.
TWO
VARIOUS LOCALES
APRIL 17, 2001
5:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
THEY HAD LEFT PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL JETPORT in a rented Chevy that had seen better days, taking the Maine Turnpike north for over a hundred miles to the Gardiner terminus, where it merged with the interstate leading by turns northwest and northeast past Bangor to the Canadian border. Now the traffic, sparse since the Bath-Brunswick exits, had entirely dissipated, leaving theirs the only car on a road flanked by a profusion of evergreens and a variety of hardwoods denuded by the long, sedentary New England winter.
The toll stop was unmanned, with no barricade or surveillance cameras, and an exact-change basket that took the requested fifty cents or whatever the driver's conscience decided was adequate.
Pete Nimec fished two coins out of his pocket and tossed them in.
"Quarters?" Megan Breen said from the passenger seat. They were the first words she'd spoken in almost an hour. "Never knew you were such a choirboy."
He regarded her through his dark sunglasses, his foot resting lightly on the brake.
"You should've looked closer," he said. "They were Canadian coins some toll clerk stuck me with on my last trip to this state. Been waiting to return the favor ever since."
"How long ago was that?"
"A year," he said. "Or so."
Nimec drove on through. About fifteen miles beyond the toll he turned right at the Augusta exit, stopped for gas, then continued past some worn-looking strip malls and a couple of traffic circles onto Route 3, a hilly stretch of two-lane blacktop rolling eastward toward the coast.
Beside him, Megan looked out her window and fell back into preoccupied silence. The sky was a drab gray sheet of clouds, the wind becoming increasingly aggressive as they neared the coast. It sheered off the sides of the car, skirling into the interior through invisible spaces between its doors and frame, blowing across the dashboard in chill currents that slowly brought the heater into submission. In between long unvaried stretches of woods there were filling stations and junk dealers, and more filling stations and more junk dealers, few with any customers, the scenery rambling on with a kind of lowering, stagnant monotony that seemed endless. Meg could have easily believed the haphazard piles of reclaimed sinks and bicycles and Formica tabletops and dishes and garden rakes and knickknacks being hawked out of shacks or trailers along the road had been accumulating for decades and never went anywhere at all.
Shivering, she sank her chin deeper into her collar. She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and black ankle boots. Her thick auburn hair was pulled back in a ponytail under a duckbilled Army field cap.
Nimec thought she looked uncharacteristically tired around the eyes.
"Wonder who'd buy those old throwaways," she said. "I don't know," he said. "You've got to keep in mind that everything in this part of the country has an afterlife, including inanimate objects."
"Sounds unholy."
He shrugged. "Some might call it Yankee frugality."
She gave him a wan smile, leaned forward, and turned on the radio, but the Boston all-news station she'd been able to pick up earlier in the ride had grown unintelligibly faint. After almost a minute of listening to static drift, she pushed the "Off" button and sat back.
"Nothing," she said.
"Probably better for you."
She glanced over at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"We saw the newspaper headlines at the airport, heard the updates on the radio driving out of Portland," Nimec said. "I'm no less anxious to hear about the Orion investigation than you or anyone else. But it gets to where you know there won't be any developments for a while and are just letting the media beat you over the head with information that's already been reported a thousand times over."
"I'm not prone to self-abuse, Pete."
"That wasn't my meaning. But I can't help thinking it might've been better for you to postpone this trip--"
"We had an agreement. You show me yours, I show you mine."
"Nice way of putting it," he said. "Still, you've had a rough couple of days."
Megan shook her head.
"Rough is what happened to those shuttle astronauts. To Jim Rowland and his family. I just want to know the reason it happened," she said. "I never understood, at least not fully, not viscerally, why it almost always becomes important for the loved ones of plane crash victims to learn the minute details of what went wrong with the aircraft ... whether it was engine failure, structural problems, pilot error, whatever. I thought sometimes that knowing wouldn't change anything for them, wouldn't bring anyone back. That it might be better if they were encouraged to try moving on and letting the investigators do their work." She shook her head again. "What bothers me now is that I could've been so damned thick."
He sat very straight behind the wheel, his eyes on the road. "That won't get you anywhere. It's hard to put yourself in people's shoes when such extreme circumstances are involved."
She didn't say anything. Outside, the repetitive sequence of gas stations and ramshackle shops had been interrupted as they came up on Lake St. George State Park, its wooded campgrounds extending up the rugged granite hillside on their left, the smooth gray opacity of the lake spreading out to the right. Wet and heavy with snowmelt, the carpet of fallen leaves along its near bank seemed lasting and immovable, wholly resistant to the wind's attempts to sweep it apart.
"You obviously consider our appointment worth keeping," she said finally. "Enough so you didn't rush off to Florida."
He shrugged. "The FAA and a half-dozen other federal agencies are already on-site, and that's not counting NASA's in-house people. Gord's also pushing his agency contacts to let UpLink send in a group of its own technical personnel as observers. But a launchpad accident is altogether outside my area of expertise. At the Cape I'd just be in the way. Here I can get something accomplished. We--"
Nimec suddenly paused, clearing his throat. He had been about to say, We need to find a replacement for Max, and was grateful he'd caught himself before the words slipped out.
Before his recent death, Max Blackburn had been Nimec's second in command in UpLink's security division, a role that had evolved into his becoming the designated troubleshooter at their international facilities, particularly in hot spots where his covert skills sometimes became indispensable. But there was a high price to be paid for Max's eagerness--even overeagerness--to put himself at personal risk. Max had not died peacefully in his sleep. Far from it, he had gotten killed long before his time, killed in a way Nimec still found difficult to accept or even think about. And in his efforts to avoid thinking about it today, he'd almost forgotten the rumors that Blackburn and Megan had been briefly involved in an intimate relationship.
Perhaps, then, the shuttle accident--terrible as it had been--wasn't the only reason for her moodiness. No matter how delicately he tried to frame it, how convenient it was that neither of them had mentioned Blackburn's name at any point on the way here, there was no hiding the fact that finding someone to take his place was the reason they had traveled to Maine. If Colonel Rowland's shadow had been hanging over them since they'd left San Jose that morning, then so too had Max Blackburn's.
"We need to shore up our end of things," Nimec resumed, choosing his words with care. "Those new robot sentries we're using at the Brazilian ISS plant are fine and dandy, but well-trained manpower's the foundation of any security operation. We need to beef up our force strength and tighten the organizational structure there. And that really ought to go double for the Russians in Kazakhstan." He paused. "I only wish Starinov wasn't under parliamentary heat to keep us out of the loop. You'd expect our saving his skin a few years ago would help on that front, but it's actually worked against us. Seems his government has made proving it can look out for itself a point of nationalistic pride. Typical paranoid Russkie thinking, you ask me. Give them another two centuries and they still won't have gotten over Napoleon taking Moscow."
"As if we'll ever forget it was one of their politicians who ordered Times Square leveled at the turn of the millennium."
"Not to be compared. Pedachenko was a rogue and a traitor to his own country. And last I heard, Napoleon wasn't an American--"
Megan raised her hand. "Wait, Pete. We can get into all that later if you want. But there's something you said a second ago ... were you implying that you suspect the shuttle explosion wasn't an accident?"
"No," he said. "Nor do I see any cause to be suspicious. But I like to be ready."
"And you honestly feel Tom Ricci's the best person to get things in shape?"
Nimec paused again, no stranger to her skepticism in connection with Ricci.
"I appreciate your reservations and agree he's a long shot," he said. "But you ought to keep an open mind. At least meet the guy before ruling him out as a candidate for the job."
She frowned. "Pete, I'm sure Ricci's a good man, and if I wasn't willing to give him a fair shake I wouldn't be here. But if we've learned anything from Russia and Malaysia, it's that UpLink's global enterprises can put us smack in the middle of some incredibly volatile political situations. You and Vince Scull have both insisted we need to raise our security force to a higher level of performance so we can adequately respond next time we're caught in the cross fire. I'm just agreeing with you, and proposing that someone with a less, shall we say, checkered background would be best qualified to implement the changes that have to be made."
Nimec furrowed his brow. He'd heard her argument before, and certainly acknowledged that it had a degree of merit. But ...
But what? Was he simply being mulish insisting that Ricci had what it took to help restructure a world-spanning organization that was, as Megan had suggested, increasingly coming to resemble the military in style and scope?
Surprised by his own doubts, Nimec gave the matter a rest and concentrated on his driving. The lake area behind him now, he made a left turn off Route 3 in the town of Belfast and got onto U.S.1 northbound, crossing the bridge that spanned the harbor inlet, then heading on along the coast. Here the roadside junk dealers were shuffled in with restaurants and summer resorts and had obvious upscale pretensions, their deliberately quaint shop fronts geared toward tourists rather than hardscrabble locals. Most had the word ANTIQUES hand-painted across their windows in ornate lettering. Many were closed for the winter. The motels, inns, and cottages were also battened down for the dregs of the season, their lawn signs wishing patrons a happy and joyful Christmas and inviting them back after Memorial Day.
They continued north on the coastal highway, talking very little for some miles, catching frequent glimpses of Penobscot Bay behind and between the tourist traps on the right side of the road--its shoreline extending in belts of jumbled stone and harsh wind-carved ledges, giving intimations of a primal wildness that seemed dormant rather than lost, capable of hostile reassertion. There was a constant sense of nearness to the sea, the sky swirling with gulls, the water refracting enough pale sunlight to lift some of the cloud cover's gravid heaviness.
"It's much different here from inland, isn't it?" Megan said at length. "Still sort of forlorn, but, I don't know..."
"Beautifully forlorn," Nimec said.
"Something like that," she said. "There's a disconnection from the rest of the world that makes me understand why Ricci chose this place to hide out. If you'll pardon my choice of words."
"Nothing wrong with it," Nimec said. "That's exactly what he's been doing for the last eighteen months."
Nimec nodded toward a green and white road sign ahead of them that read:
ROUTE 175--BLUE HILL, DEER ISLE, STONINGTON
"Looks like we're coming up to our turn," he said. "Another forty minutes or so and you'll be meeting my friend and former colleague for yourself."
As it happened, he was right about the turn but wrong about the length of time remaining on their trip, for only ten minutes later Megan Breen got her introduction to Tom Ricci ... as well as two local law-enforcement officers.
It was by no means a pleasant encounter for any of them.
Nor was it one Megan would soon forget.
2:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time
It always struck Nordstrum as fascinating that Roger Gordian, who had made opening up and changing the world through telecommunications a crusade, rarely opened himself up to the world, and possessed the most contained and unchanging nature of anyone he knew. But that sort of contradiction seemed a familiar story with men of towering accomplishment, as if by directing vast amounts of energy outward to achieve their broad public goals, they drained off reserves that most ordinary people applied to their private lives.
Or maybe I'm getting carried away and Gord just likes his furniture, Nordstrum thought as he entered Gordian's office.
He paused inside the doorway, giving the room a bemused visual audit, comparing the way it looked now to how it had looked a decade ago, a year ago, or the previous autumn, when he'd last been inside it. Not to his surprise, everything was precisely the same--and in the same condition--as always. The place was a testament to careful upkeep, a paradigm of maintenance and preservation. Over the years, Gord's desk had been refinished, his chair reupholstered, the pens on his blotter refilled, but heaven forbid that any of them ever might be replaced.
"Alex, thanks for coming." Gordian got up from behind his desk. "It's been too long."
"Gord and Nord, together again for one outstanding SRO performance," he said. "How are Ashley and the kids?"
"Pretty good," Gordian said. He hesitated. "Julia's moved back home for a while. Personal reasons."
