The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott

by Jonathan Lowe

  ~ * ~

  Stepping onto the deck of the yacht christened BIG DIPPER, David felt an immediate yet odd sense of complicity in being there, as though it had just been discovered that he deserved some exclusive privilege, the kind of which he'd previously been unaware. Now that he shared this secret favor, and its implicit responsibility, even the most lavish accommodations seemed somehow appropriate, if not familiar. He was not surprised, then, by all the polished brass and lacquered teak, nor was he as eager as Doug to explore the control room above or the staterooms below decks. The jade Jacuzzi, however, finally broke the trance, and drew him back from his singularly subjective experience of the tour. Still, it was not envy he felt. He wasn't sure what it was, but not that.

  "There is a Little Dipper too, in case you're wondering," Aazad informed them, his tone matter-of-fact. "A Frers-designed Hylas sixty-one sailboat, with hand laid fiberglass, divinycell cored topsides, and a seventy-five horse Yanmar diesel. But only three small cabins. So Bill Gates was not aboard that one." He stuck his tongue into his cheek for a moment, then added, as a remembered aside to David, "Oh, and it pays to be a big tipper here, too, if you expect to be treated well. No cell phone tip calculator at restaurants, please. If the meal is a hundred, you leave two. Simple hundred percent success rate at being remembered next time around."

  Etherton chuckled. David smiled, dutifully. "What do you leave," he asked, "at a wake or a funeral?"

  Aazad laughed. "Welcome aboard, gentlemen," he said. "May I interest you in some fine cigars for our little excursion?"

  The Big Dipper was ordered to depart at half throttle, out and around the Palm, past the Atlantis resort, the Jumeirah coastal belt, and then Business Bay, where the Burj Khalifa and Dynamic Tower appeared to have been untouched, since their minor damage did not face the ocean. The skyline was magnificent in the early afternoon, and before long, as they stood on deck smoking Havana Royals, David was able to grasp something of the nature of his new mindset. His new faculty. He looked at Aazad, standing over there, talking to Etherton. He picked up their conversation on the breeze. Looking out at the ocean, as he listened, the shallow waves roiled from a prow that angled the swells out into a V shaped pattern that quietly fell behind and were dissolved into the ship's aft turbulence.

  "Any exciting research on the mountain these days?" Aazad asked.

  "Certainly," Etherton replied. "We've imaged the shock wave of an old nova outburst in Ophiuchi. A white dwarf there is still ejecting a hundred million degree plasma through the stellar wind of a red giant companion star. Velocity is three thousand kilometers a second."

  "Interesting," Aazad responded. "I'd love to see those photos."

  "Absolutely. I'll have them emailed to you. By the way, did you know that Nasheed has a special interest in stellar evolution and demise?"

  "No, I didn't."

  "He's a great supporter of solar research on the mountain, and our new solar telescope. Our sun, as the nearest star, is the only one whose hiccups might directly affect our fate, but of course if a hypernova were to occur with a thousand light years of Earth, and the polar jets of the blast were aligned with us, that could fry us too."

  "And do you see that happening anytime soon?"

  Etherton laughed. “Oceans will boil and freeze a few times before that. And there’s few stars of sufficient mass close enough to cause it. But there are a few O or B class blue-white supergiants within range to blow in the next couple million years. The bigger the star, of course, the hotter and faster it burns, and the shorter its lifespan. Stars like ours aren't hot or massive enough, although they do reach sixteen million Kelvin at the core."

  "Sixteen million Kelvin," Aazad repeated in amazement. "That's our own sun?"

  "Well, you don’t have to worry about the sun referenced by the Jumeirah Universe development yet, of course." Chuckles. "At the very core of Sol, yes. The core burns about, say, the equivalent mass of a million limousines per second in a PP chain or proton-proton reaction. High energy gamma rays created by fusion there then get jostled around for about two hundred thousand years in the radiative zone surrounding the core while being degraded into photon energy, which then enters the convective zone before reaching the surface, where it's only about ten thousand Kelvin. If there were no radiative or convective zones around the core, you can imagine we'd all be dead in around eight minutes, as soon as the gamma radiation reached us."

  "Nice," Aazad said.

  "And bear in mind our sun is only an average star, which wouldn't even be visible from many of the stars you can see in the sky at night. If you look toward Orion, you'll see a lot of blue or red supergiants, in a place where stars are still forming from giant molecular clouds of hydrogen twenty light years across."

  "Indeed," said Aazad, "Orion is quite beautiful, and I've seen it many times through my telescope. I suppose you mean Rigel or Betelgeuse, the variable red supergiant?"

  "Exactly. Or the belt stars, which are burning fast and will all go boom in a few million years when the hydrogen at their cores is gone. No more gas, metals go up, and that's what happens. Worlds end, kinda like this one." Etherton laughed.

  "What is the largest star in our galaxy, then?"

  "We think it's what we call the Pistol Star, near the center of the Milky Way, not far from the central black hole. But the dust is so heavy along our line of sight that it's hard to tell for sure. Another candidate is closer. Eta Carinae actually exploded part of its outer shell not long ago, now visible as two monster lobes of expanding gas moving around eight hundred kilometers a second out from the poles. But that was just a hiccup. The big explosion is yet to come. The star is just unbelievably huge. Our sun would be dwarfed by it. Its mass is a hundred fifty times greater, and it's four million times brighter. When it pops it'll probably create a black hole, and at its peak the visible radiation will rival the sun from our perspective."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Deadly. You know, in ten fifty-four, when the neutron star now at the heart of the Crab nebula blew, the Chinese reported seeing it in broad daylight, shining brighter than the moon. Eta Carinae would dwarf that star."

  Listening, David envisioned one of the tiny rooms where he'd slept during those days before his observations and calibrations on various telescopes during endless quiet nights. He tried to resurrect the singular loneliness that had been as deep as the sky, whose stars numbered the grains of sand on the beach. Was it why he'd quit, using the economic downturn on projects as an excuse? He flashed on walking the high desert paths between various telescopes across mountain tops. . . the bitter cold, the often windy nights. The reason didn’t seem right, though. Something was missing. Something eclipsed, blotted out.

  He let that go, for the moment, and thought instead about the people he’d met during his mostly solitary career. The rare gregarious astronomer he'd avoided, even in their cafeteria cliques. The others, who had mostly looked at him, if at all, as an outsider. As someone who came and went on short term assignment, and never opened up much, just did his work and moved on. Etherton had been his most recurrent contact, of course, as director of Kitt Peak. Still, he had to admit, he really didn't know the man well, either. He'd felt more in common with the native Americans who lived in small villages to the north of the mountain---those who, in turn, looked up at the sky and imagined their ancestors looking down at them.

  Now what remained seemed a mystery, like his own personal Chandrasekhar limit--a baffling inner near implosion due to the gravity and pressure of certain observations. How exactly had he come so close to that point of no return, that event horizon at the nadir of his life, to be saved only at the last by a singularity in the form of a key? Was he so blind that he should suspect his other observations as well?

  ~ * ~

  When the circuit had been completed, and they were finally motoring back, Aazad came over to him, as David knew that he would. Perhaps sensing his restrained, more contemplative demeanor, the billionaire said, "Anything I can
get you, Mr. Leiter? Fancy fulfilling some desire in the make-a-wish category, perhaps?"

  "Yes, actually," David replied.

  Aazad smiled, knowingly. "Okay, what is it, then?"

  He looked at this impossibly rich man with his own steady, imperturbable, but curious gaze. Here was someone who could buy anything, go anywhere. Countless people wanted to meet him, to be his friend or advisor. Their motives were Legion, and he knew them all. Was he hoping to be surprised for once?

  "I'd like to meet two people," David said, "who I have no access to."

  "Two. . . celebrities?"

  "Not in the way you mean. One is a former televangelist, the other a disgraced banking executive. Both live in Dubai now."

  "Shall I guess why you want to meet them?" Aazad asked, after a pause.

  "If you like."

  Aazad tossed the stub of his cigar overboard. "You lost money to one, or to both."

  David shook his head. "No, not me. It was my deceased mother. For me, it's more complex. I want to see who they are now. I know who they were. Or at least I know who I thought they were."

  "Interesting. What do you propose?"

  "A party at your place."

  Aazad sniggered at his brazen suggestion, then broke out another Havana, cut off the tip, and lit up. "And what is my interest in these two to be?"

  "Let it be a mystery. We'll ignore them completely."

  Aazad nodded. "I'm liking this idea more and more. Go on."

  "Jeffrey Innes will be impressed immensely by you. He will be curious. Looking for his angle, seeking redemption, whether he knows it or not. He's cheated his employees and investors out of millions. Unless he's a sociopath--which might be likely, I have to admit--he must feel guilty. He escaped justice on a loophole, and sailed here on a golden parachute. Ted Cashman, on the other hand, was a pimp for God."

  "Your televangelist's name is Cashman?"

  "Yes. It's his real name. His entire ministry was a sham. He took Social Security money, and bought a jet with it. He took donations from the elderly, and bought jewelry for his wife. He promised prosperity, but all his followers got was a tax write-off. When his finance director threatened to blow his cover by appearing on 60 Minutes, he took his retirement early and moved into the Al-Jumeirah Tower."

  Aazad blew a breath of smoke out over the bow. "But we just ignore all this."

  "Completely. We let them find each other. We seat them together, and listen to their conversation."

  "For what purpose? What do you expect them to say?"

  "It's not what they say, it's how they say it."

  Aazad's watery eye's narrowed. Then a slight smile crossed his lips. "You're a curious one," he said.

  "I know," David admitted. "Will you do it?"

  10

  "You what?" Etherton whispered hotly as they bypassed the Palm toward an approach to the World Islands.

  David leaned sideways against the deck railing, and looked past Doug toward the dark windows of the control room behind him. "I made a wish, like dying kids do to get ball players to visit them. Aazad is going to grant it. He's having the phone calls placed now."

  "Are you crazy?" Doug asked.

  "Don't worry, it won't jeopardize his generosity with you."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I'm not sure, I just do."

  "Wow, that's a relief. I thought you were going to help me on this."

  "I am, trust me. You'll just get the job done a little earlier, is all."

  Doug shook his head, angry at himself now. "Oh, never mind," he said. "It's my fault. I shouldn't have approached him. Should have let it ride until next week. And then I--" He paused, staring at the inlet into which the Big Dipper now carefully maneuvered, following a narrow, deep-water channel between the first two of many symmetrical islands of sand.

  "Then you what?" David asked.

  "I made an even bigger mistake. When you were out here, looking at the skyline, I gulped a whisky, then told Aazad my theory."

  "You mean about Victor Seacrest?"

  Etherton winced, then glared at him in stunned amazement. "How did you. . ."

  "I deduced it by your reaction, and what you said about their rivalry."

  "Yeah, but that's quite a leap, even for you."

  "Or you? You said the men hated each other. There's motive. All that's left is means. So what if Seacrest got the idea to create a diversion by hitting the Burj Khalifa first, before targeting Swann's family condo at the Dynamic Tower? It would be some revenge for him, and no one the wiser."

  "Sounds insane, though, hearing somebody else say it." Doug bit at his lower lip. "Okay. Like Aazad asked me, then, how in hell would Seacrest get access to drone military aircraft?"

  "Who's proven they're military? Maybe he had them engineered. Or if they are military, maybe he bought them on the black market. Didn't a few drones go missing a couple years ago?"

  Doug squinted into the blue distance, as though the memory there needed resurrection. Finally, he cleared his throat. "Yeah, okay. Say they are the same ones, then. Pulling this off would still require a lot more than using a checkbook. There's targeting logistics, launch guidance, not to mention surveillance. It'd require a whole team of professionals."

  "Which can't be bought at any price, even among all the terrorist cells training somewhere out in the desert? It'd be fairly easy to convince someone such an operation would make the U.S. military look responsible."

  Etherton looked out at a passing dhow--an old wooden ship incongruously navigating between the Palm and the World, as though poor fishermen were among those ogling the rich. "Hope I'm wrong. Hope we're wrong, I mean. More than likely, though, those paranoid delusions you mentioned having are rubbing off on me. It's why I had questions in the first place. Biggest one now, of course, is why hasn't he hit the Swann Tower, if that's his beef."

  "Maybe it's next," David said. "Day after tomorrow is another nine-eleven, after all, and the buzz is that what's happened is only a lead up to that."

  Doug grimaced, then sighed. Finally, he slapped David's shoulder. "Let's grab a whisky, and forget about this nonsense for now, shall we?"

  ~ * ~

  Watching from the control room as Aazad Baloum's primary residence neared, David felt his newly induced mystical acuity being seriously tested. The white sand-lipped island was scarcely three acres, yet it exuded an overpowering sense of mastery over one's physical environment---an exclusive air of luxury that extended from its flawlessly contoured landscaping to its artistically rendered architecture. The central structure was a two-story white granite home whose upper floor boasted a vaulted ceiling framing a massive span of tinted glass. Date palms rose strategically from a rock garden to one side, and along paths leading in one direction to a pool, and in the other to a helicopter pad and boathouse. A row of lounge chairs faced forward from an elevated deck beside a long reflecting pool fed by a ten foot fountain. The main dock fronting the property edged out from the shallows near a perfect beach to join a pillared platform accommodating craft requiring deeper clearance.

  The Big Dipper, bearing its big tipper and guests, maneuvered into position like a space shuttle docking station-side. A whistle sounded, announcing the feat. Then a gangway was extended, and they stepped from the cool comfort of the pilothouse into the warm reality of paradise.

  "Where's Ricardo Montalban?" Etherton asked one of Aazad's staff, attempting to disguise--with levity--the amazement that his face nonetheless telegraphed.

  Aazad himself led them alongside the reflecting pool toward the house, gesturing both right and left. "My neighbors. . .Rod Stewart being one, David Beckham another, by the way. . . live in other countries far, far away, as you can see," he said. "But in this magical place, you can sip wine in France, eat lobsters in Maine, and make love here in Tahiti all on the same afternoon."

  "I trust it's all not this afternoon," Etherton quipped.

  ~ * ~

  The staircase rising from the house's lower lev
el boasted framed art of planetary nebula: the Helix, M27 the Dumbbell, and the ghostly Ring Nebula of Lyra. The largest, facing the top of the stairs, was the Horsehead, a red emission nebula in Orion. The fine detail within the dark pillar of illuminated gas, lit from behind by the fires of birthing suns, made David suspect it to be an original reprint from the Hubble catalog. More impressive yet, the great room at the top of the stairs overlooked an elevated deck and sculpture garden to the rear of the house. The centerpiece of the garden was a gazebo housing a full size reproduction of Michelangelo's David. It reminded him of the scale reproductions of the Taj Mahal, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and Pyramids being developed at Dubailand. Here, the placement of Michelangelo's sculpture seemed just as incongruous, too, given that the other sculptures surrounding it were modern or even post-modern, made not of stone or bronze, but of colored sheet metal and glass. Even more curious, there were numerous black metal poles positioned throughout the array bearing light fixtures more appropriate to the computer game Myst. David was about to question Aazad about one of the sculptures he suspected was by Naum Gabo when he turned to see that the billionaire had been replaced by a Filipino butler in a white coat, and wearing white gloves. The little man had been waiting for them to complete their appraisal of the grounds, not wanting to interrupt.

  "Where's Aazad?" David asked, prompting Etherton to turn from his admiration of the twelve foot domed observatory near a back row of cypress trees.

  "Mr. Baloum has instructed me to provide whatever you need while he's gone," Aazad's servant sedulously explained.

  "But. . . where has he gone?" Doug queried, puzzled.

  "Why, to prepare for your party on Sunday," the man replied, as though the matter had been previously understood.

  "Sunday," Doug repeated, confused. "This is Friday afternoon. What are we to do until then?"

  "Anything you wish," the Filipino suggested, opening his hands invitingly to either side. "There is a media room with television, internet conferencing, and fax machine. In the den there is a billiard table, ping pong, pinball, and bowling alley. There is also a library and study with a bar, or you may use the pool, hand ball court, or the jet skis in the boathouse. If you need a change of clothes or bathing suits, we have everything in store. If you need me for any other reason, all you need do is buzz." He handed each of them a palm sized controller. "I'm the red button on the top right. The one on the left provides access to the pool and boathouse gates. Dinner is at seven, but if you require nourishment before then, I will have the chef prepare whatever you wish. Now, may I show you to your rooms, gentlemen?"