by Bova, Ben
Garrison gave her one of his patented sour looks. “Yep, they’ll hand it back to the Iraqis, all right And specify that we run the operation.”
“Under contract to the Iraqi government,” the woman added.
“Under terms that we set,” Garrison said flatly.
Al-Bashir said nothing. No one asked his opinion. He was content to leave it at that.
Finally Garrison rasped, “That’s it, then, ’less there’s some new business.”
Al-Bashir raised his hand.
Garrison had already started to back his chair away from the table. Frowning, he said, “Mr. al-Bashir.” He pronounced it “awl-Basher.”
“There is the matter of the solar power satellite to be considered.”
Brows rose around the table.
“Astro Corporation?”
“They had that spaceship crash, didn’t they?”
“They’re finished. Going bankrupt.”
Garrison’s flinty eyes went crafty, though. “What about the solar power satellite?”
“I believe we should invest in it.”
That brought actual gasps of surprise.
“Invest in the competition?”
“Help that madman Randolph?”
“He wants to drive us out of business!”
Al-Bashir folded his hands on the table’s edge and patiently waited for them to quiet down.
Garrison made a hushing gesture with both his blueveined hands, then asked, “Why should we invest in that pipe dream?”
Smiling at the board chairman, al-Bashir calmly replied, “There are several reasons. First, it would make very favorable publicity for us. The public sees us as the big, bad corporate giant. For years they have been fed stories about how the oil companies suppress any invention that threatens their grip on the world’s energy supply.”
One of the older directors humphed. “The pill that turns water into gasoline. I’ve heard that one all my life, just about.”
“Exactly,” said al-Bashir. “By lending Astro Corporation a helping hand, we show that we are not such monsters. We show that we are interested in the future.”
“Mighty expensive public relations,”Garrison grumbled. “Randolph’s going to need a billion or more to pull out of the hole he’s dug for himself.”
“There is another reason, also,” al-Bashir said.
All eyes were on him.
“What if it works? What if this solar power satellite actually proves to be successful? Shouldn’t we own part of it?”
“I get it! A strategic partnership,” said the youngest member of the board, down at the end of the table.
Garrison frowned at the junior director and pointed out in his rasping voice, “If we don’t bail Astro out, the power satellite won’t work because Randolph will be busted. So there’s no danger of it being successful.”
“I beg to differ,” al-Bashir said. “Even if Randolph goes bankrupt, the power satellite will still be up there. Someone else might buy it on the cheap and make it work. Then they will get the glory—and the profits. Not we.”
“Who would be that crazy?”
“The Japanese, perhaps,” al-Bashir replied mildly.
Silence fell in the boardroom. One by one the directors shifted their gaze from al-Bashir to the head of the table, to Garrison.
The chairman was staring straight at al-Bashir and tapping his fingernails on the tabletop, obviously thinking it over. No one said a word. For long moments the only sound in the boardroom was Garrison’s absent tap-tap-tapping.
“We maybe could pull a billion out of the exploration budget,” the old man said at last. “Send a few geologists back to their universities for a year.”
The directors stirred to life. A few argued, mildly, against the idea. But al-Bashir knew that it was merely a formality. Garrison had accepted the idea of buying into a possible competitor. Al-Bashir was pleased. It will be much easier to destroy the very idea of power satellites from inside Randolph’s Astro Corporation.
MATAGORDA ISLAND, TEXAS
“For a suit, you’re not a bad engineer,” Tenny said, his dark jowly face dead serious.
Dan took it as a compliment. He was kneeling alongside the twisted wreckage of what had once been the spaceplane’s nose cap. Tenny was squatting on the hangar floor, facing him. Claude Passeau stood on the other side of the nose cap, looking almost elegant in his neatly creased slacks and jacket, although he had pulled his bow tie loose from its collar.
Even this late at night the hangar had been buzzing with government investigators and Astro technicians. With Passeau’s help Dan had shooed them all home. Now only the three men remained in the brightly lit hangar.
The twisted bits of remains from the spaceplane were laid out precisely in their proper places inside the taped outline of the vehicle’s swept-wing shape, exuding a faint odor of charred metal. Every time Dan looked at the wreckage he felt his guts wrench. But he forced a rueful grin.
“Coming from you, Joe,” Dan replied, “that’s pretty high praise.”
Passeau said, “Your degree was in engineering, wasn’t it?”
“And economics,” Dan replied. “Double major.”
“And then you went to Japan to work for Yamagata Corporation.”
Dan got to his feet. “You know a lot about me.”
With a shrug, Passeau said, “You interest me, Mr. Randolph.”
“Dan.”
“Thank you.” Passeau touched his moustache with a fingertip, then said, “Why did you go to Japan? Weren’t there jobs in the States?”
“Not the kind of jobs I wanted. The U.S. space program was just spinning its wheels: scientific research but not much else. Yamagata was building a power satellite. Just a demo, of course, but it meant I could get into space and work in orbit. Real work, building something practical up there three hundred miles high.”
Tenny clambered to his feet, too. “I never been up there. You get space-sick?”
“A little woozy the first hour or so,” Dan admitted. “After four or five flights, though, you learn to adjust. Then it’s terrific.”
“Zero gravity, you mean,” Passeau said.
“I hear the sex is terrific,” quipped Tenny.
Dan laughed. “I wouldn’t know. We were in spacesuits most of the time.”
“You spent weeks up there on each mission, didn’t you?” Passeau asked.
Nodding, Dan said, “Yep. But there were only a handful of women up there and they were all Japanese. They wouldn’t have anything to do with a ketoujin.”
Tenny smirked. “That’s how he got his nose busted.”
“Really?”
“No, but Joe likes to think so.”
The three men laughed mildly. Then Tenny brought them back to the here-and-now.
“The nose thruster’s fuel control valve is wide open,” he said, jabbing a thumb at the twisted wreckage. “It should be shut.”
“It might have been jarred loose when it hit the ground,” said Passeau.
“Maybe,” said Tenny. “But take a look at it. It’s locked in the open position.”
Dan took the battered assembly from Tenny’s hands and tried to close the valve. It refused to budge. “Joe’s right,” he said to Passeau. “It’s locked in the open position. If it had banged open from the crash it’d be flapping loose.”
Passeau fingered his moustache again, thinking. “Then the thruster must have fired during reentry.”
“And kept on firing until all its fuel was exhausted,” Dan added.
“What could have caused that?” asked Passeau.
Dan shot a warning glance at Tenny.
“That’s what we’ve gotta find out,” the engineer said.
“And quickly,” Dan added.
Tenny puffed out a breath. “Well, we ain’t gonna find it standing around here until the sun comes up. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve got a home and a family that expects to see me now and then.”
Sighing, Passeau
said, “I’m living in your wonderful Astro Motel, the only facility between here and civilization, until this investigation is finished.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “And their bar closed two hours ago.”
Dan thought of all the nights he had spent at hotel bars, and the women he had picked up at them. “You’re not missing much, Claude,” he said.
Passeau hiked his brows suggestively. “One never knows. To give up all hope would be a tragedy.”
Laughing together, the three men began walking slowly out of the hangar, leaving the wreckage behind them. Dan nodded to the uniformed security guard standing at the tightly closed hangar door. Two more guards were supposed to be on duty, he knew. Probably making the rounds.
He walked Passeau and Tenny to the parking lot, where the FAA inspector got into his rental Buick Regal and Tenny hauled himself up into his remodeled Silverado. The only pickup in Texas that ran on hydrogen fuel. But then, only someone who had access to Astro’s hydrogen facility could find enough fuel to run the truck. Not even the NASA center near Houston had a hydrogen generation system.
Dan waved the two men good night and headed for his own compact apartment up on the catwalk back inside the hangar.
The thruster’s fuel valve was commanded to open and lock during reentry, he mused as he started up the steel stairs. Somebody sent a bogus signal to the bird.
He stopped halfway up the stairs, his footfalls echoing off the hangar’s metal walls. Which means, Dan said to himself, that somebody really did deliberately sabotage the spaceplane. Hannah’s death wasn’t an accident. It was murder.
Slowly, he started up the stairs again, running it through his mind. Which means that somebody was able to override our command codes and radio the bogus signal to the plane’s computer. Which means that the saboteur had access to our command codes.
As he opened the door to his one-room apartment, Dan came to the inescapable conclusion: Which means that there’s a spy in my company somewhere. A saboteur who wrecked the spaceplane and killed Hannah.
DAN RANDOLPH’S APARTMENT
The apartment was always neat and clean when Dan came back to it from his day’s work. His office was barely fifty yards down the catwalk that circled three walls of the hangar, but Tomasina, his dour-faced, stocky cleaning woman, always managed to get in and straighten the place, even if Dan was gone for only a few minutes. She cleaned his clothes, washed his dishes, and kept the apartment shipshape, all without getting in Dan’s way. Most of the time he didn’t even know she’d been there, except that the place was spotless and tidy. Once in a while she’d leave him a note in neat, large block letters, ordering cleaning supplies that were running low.
As he undressed, Dan wondered what he should do about the problem he faced. I’ve got a spy working somewhere in the company, he kept repeating to himself. How do I find him? Hire a private investigator? Tell Passeau about it? He could get the FBI in here, I suppose.
Yet he hesitated, uncertain. Who can I trust? he asked his image in the mirror as he brushed his teeth. Joe Tenny, I know. Joe’s put as much of himself into this project as I have. Hannah was like a sister to him. No, more like a grown-up daughter.
As he climbed into his king-sized bed, Dan realized that his list of people he could trust ended with Tenny. He didn’t know anybody else in the eight-hundred-odd men and women he employed well enough to trust them implicitly. Any one of them could be the spy, the saboteur.
Wait, he said as he clicked off the bedside lamp. Whoever it is has to be technically trained. It couldn’t be April, for example. She can run the office all right, but she’s no engineer.
But then he thought, That could all be an act A saboteur wouldn’t have to show his technical skills. Or hers. What do they call them in the spy business? Moles, he remembered. I’ve got a mole in my organization.
He lay on his back in the darkness, his mind spinning. Stop thinking, he commanded himself. Get to sleep. Let your subconscious work the problem. By the time you get up tomorrow morning you’ll probably have the answer you need.
He decided he had given himself good advice, turned over onto his side and closed his eyes. But sleep did not come to him. Instead, he remembered seeing Jane again, with Governor Scanwell.
The fund-raiser in Austin had been such a big bash that Dan thought he’d never be able to speak privately with the governor, but Len Kinsky kept telling him to be patient.
“Half the people in Texas are trying to see Scanwell,” Kinsky said over the buzz and clatter of the crowd as they stood by one of the bars that had been set up across the spacious sweep of the hotel’s atrium.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Dan grumbled, sipping at his disappointing Dry Sack. “We’ll hang around all night and never get to talk to him.”
“Wait it out,” said Kinsky. “Hang in there. The drinks are free, aren’t they?”
“And so’s dinner,” Dan admitted.
Kinsky made a sour face to show what he thought of Texas cuisine.
Dan wanted to leave. He didn’t like seeing Jane standing there beside Scanwell. It bothered him, annoyed him. This is the life she chose, he told himself. She’s a politician and she loves all this. Dan wanted to run away.
Instead he weaved through the crush of strangers, nursing his drink and smiling mechanically at the men in their dinner jackets and the begowned and bejeweled women. He didn’t know any of them and none of them knew him. He deliberately moved away from Kinsky, who was talking to a young blonde, a wolfish grin on his face. Wandering through the crowd, Dan wondered why he was wasting his time; he wanted to get away but knew he would stay until the bitter end.
He saw a young redhead who seemed to be equally out of place, alone, clutching a long-stemmed glass of champagne in one hand and an expensive-looking beaded bag in her other. She wore a glittering short-skirted outfit of red and black sequins.
“You’re wearing my high school colors,” Dan said to her, by way of introducing himself.
She was deeply unimpressed, and after a few words Dan drifted away from her. No sense of humor, he decided.
Kinsky found him again when they went into the ballroom, where a sea of round tables had been set up for dinner. Dan and his public relations director sat with eight older men and women. When one of them asked Dan what he did for a living and Dan began to explain it, he quickly changed the subject to golf.
Teams of harried-looking waiters and waitresses slapped dishes onto the table. Broiled steak and baked potatoes, with a medley of overcooked vegetables. Dan glanced at Kinsky: the P.R. director looked like a martyr heading toward the scaffold.
Scanwell made a few remarks from the head table about the wonderful charity this dinner was supporting. Dan hardly heard him. He watched Jane, sitting there beside the governor’s place. She was splendid, completely in her element, smiling and chatting with the others at the head table.
The speeches seemed endless to Dan, a succession of men and women congratulating one another on the wonderful work they were doing. Yeah, Dan said to himself, and not one of them gives a good god damn about the wonderful work I’m trying to do.
He was startled when Kinsky tapped him on the shoulder.
“I told you he’d come through,” Kinsky whispered, leaning so close to Dan that he thought the man was going to stick his tongue in his ear. Kinsky was holding a small white card on which was scrawled the numbers 2335.
“He wants to meet you in his suite,” Kinsky whispered.
Dan took the card in his hand and turned it over. It was the governor’s calling card, complete with the seal of office, his “hotline” phone number, and official e-mail address.
Scanwell didn’t stay for all the speeches. He got up, shook every hand along the head table, and made his apologies for leaving early. Jane went with him.
“Come on,” Kinsky said, nudging Dan again.
Feeling as if he really wanted to get out of this hotel, out of Austin altogether, Dan pushed his chair back and got to his feet.
He followed Kinsky up the glass elevator to the twenty-third floor.
When they got out of the elevator a pair of unsmiling uniformed state policemen big enough to play in the National Football League checked their IDs and directed them down the hall. Dan pushed the doorbell button; an aide in a dinner jacket and black tie immediately opened the door and ushered them into the suite. It was richly carpeted, furnished in big plush pieces and polished oak. The drapes were drawn over windows that spanned two walls of the sitting room.
Scanwell was sitting back on the long sofa, his jacket off, his tie loosened, and a cut crystal tumbler of bourbon in his hand.
“Hello, Governor,” Dan said. “It’s good of you to give us some of your time.”
“Come on in,” Scanwell called to Dan and Kinsky. Gesturing to the bar, “Have a drink.” The governor perched his booted feet on the coffee table.
Jane was nowhere in sight. Two more aides were standing by the bar, the man wearing slacks and a light brown sports jacket, the woman in a tailored pantsuit. Obviously neither one of them had been at the dinner downstairs. Then Dan noticed the butt of a pistol inside the guy’s jacket. Bodyguards.
Dan reached for the San Pellegrino water from the row of bottles lined up atop the bar.
“There’s beer in the fridge if you prefer,” the male aide said. “Lone Star longnecks.”
Dan made a smile and poured the water. “Thanks anyway,” he said, thinking that he’d better stay sober through this meeting.
“I think y’all can wait outside in the hall,” Scanwell said to his aide and the bodyguards. “I’ll yell if I need anything.”
As they were leaving Jane came in from the bedroom, smoothing her hair. Dan’s breath caught in his throat. She smiled uncertainly at him, then went to the sofa and sat beside Scanwell.
“C’mon over,” Scanwell said, waving to Dan. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Dan took the upholstered chair on the opposite side of the glass coffee table. Kinsky sat off to one side.
Scanwell gave Dan a friendly grin. “What I’d like to know,” he said, “is how you talked my parks department into letting you lease part of a state park and turn it into your rocket base:” Dan realized that the governor’s voice was slightly hoarse. Too much talking over the noise of the crowd, he thought.
