Powersat (The Grand Tour)

by Bova, Ben

  Quill nodded and Dan got the impression that Jane had already briefed him about this.

  “Second,” he went on, “high-tech ventures usually involve a large investment. You can’t build satellites and spacecraft on a shoestring budget.”

  “You’re talking billions of dollars?” asked one of the senators.

  “Hundreds of millions, at least.”

  “What’s the third factor?” Quill prompted.

  “Time,” said Dan. “The investor’s money is going to be tied up for a long time, years, maybe a decade or more.”

  “Not a ninety-day turnaround,” Jane said with a smile.

  “No, not at all,” Dan replied. “If you put all those three factors together—high risk, high investment cost, and a long time before payout—you can see why it’s so difficult to raise investment capital.”

  “Would a government guarantee of long-term, low-interest loans be of help?” Jane asked.

  “It already has,” Dan said. “Astro Corporation has been working from loans raised in the private sector for the past several months. I’m certain that this legislation you’ve introduced in the Senate has opened that door for us.”

  One of the senators quipped, “Well, if it’s worked that well for you, maybe we won’t have to pass the bill.”

  A few of the other senators chuckled tolerantly. Jane did not, Dan noticed. He suppressed an urge to snap a snotty answer at the flippant senator.

  “Any other questions for this witness?” Quill asked, looking up and down the table. “If not, then the witness is excused.”

  “Before I go,” Dan said, “I have a short statement to make, Senators.”

  Quill looked down at Dan. “As long as it’s short.”

  Dan didn’t quibble with the senator’s choice of words. “I just want to tell you, Senators, that we intend to start beaming power from the satellite in two weeks.”

  The hearing room erupted. The cameras all focused on Dan. Reporters flicked open their cell phones and began yammering into them. The senators looked at each other up and down the long banquette while the audience burst into dozens of chattering conversations.

  In the midst of it all Rick Chatham leaped to his feet, ponytail flying, and shouted, “You can’t do that! I’ll get a court injunction!”

  Quill began tapping on the wooden block in front of him, harder and harder, the impatience on his face morphing into red-faced anger. But it did no good. The reporters swarmed around Dan yelling questions at him. Vicki Lee was among them, but Dan looked past them all to search for Jane. Her chair was empty. She had already left.

  DUBAI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  Asim al-Bashir strode along the sand-toned carpet, which was patterned in curling arcs such as the wind would stir on the desert floor. Golden replicas of graceful palm trees lined the corridor of the Sheik Rashid terminal. Tourists and pilgrims thronged the duty-free shops where goods from all over the world were on display for the avid travelers. Al-Bashir disdained the merchants and buyers alike. Beyond the terminal’s windows he could see the garish skyline of high-rise office towers and hotels, including the thirty-story-high sail shape of the Burj al Arab Hotel. Western ostentation, he sneered inwardly. Instead of resisting the West’s garish culture, they imitate it and even exceed it.

  When he entered the private lounge that had been reserved for him, the Egyptian was already there, looking distinctly morose in his poorly fitted white linen suit. Al-Bashir himself wore a hand-tailored silk suit of royal blue.

  No, al-Bashir decided, the Egyptian is not depressed; he’s apprehensive, fearful. This business of the power satellite is beyond his capacity.

  Al-Bashir had bowed to The Nine’s wish for a face-to-face meeting between the two men; the Egyptian had insisted it be in a location in the Moslem Middle East, where they would be relatively safe. Relatively, al-Bashir thought, with a thin smile. The United States Army occupied Dubai and the other Emirates; despite occasional suicide bombings the Americans were tightening their stranglehold on the Gulf. Well, that will change soon enough, al-Bashir thought.

  The Egyptian sat with his back to the window and its view of the skyline while a uniformed airline employee poured coffee for the two men and then made his quiet departure.

  “You seem apprehensive, my brother,” al-Bashir said to the Egyptian.

  “Randolph plans to turn on the power satellite in ten days.”

  “Yes. He made his grand announcement at the Senate hearing last week.” Al-Bashir picked up the delicate cup and sipped at the coffee.

  “Randolph made a bold gesture.”

  Al-Bashir smiled. “I have come to know the man. He is an egomaniac at heart.”

  “Still … will we be ready in ten days?”

  Tapping the data disc encased in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, al-Bashir replied, “I have the complete blueprints of the satellite. Once it begins beaming power to the ground, we will seize it and shift the beam to Washington.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Quite easily. While Randolph’s technicians in Texas are trying to determine what’s gone wrong with their satellite, we will concentrate the microwave beam and kill thousands.”

  “Including their President?”

  “It is all arranged. Despite his own high opinion of himself, Randolph is a trusting soul. A typical American. I helped him to get the financing he needed, so he believes I am his friend. He has opened his entire operation to me. They are all pathetically naïve.”

  “You are certain this will work?” the Egyptian asked, reaching for his own coffee cup. “The others of The Nine are rather … concerned.”

  “Tell them it is written. Once the power satellite begins to work we will turn it into a death weapon against the enemies of Allah.”

  The Egyptian smiled minimally and appeared to relax somewhat. Al-Bashir smiled back at him. As they sipped the strong, hot, sweetened coffee al-Bashir told himself sternly, Let him believe that we strike in the name of Allah. Let the others believe that I am a fighter in the war between Islam and the West. But don’t let yourself fall into such a belief. Religion has its purposes. Use their faith, but remember your goal: Tricontinental Oil, and the power to bend nations to my will.

  The skyline of Houston was almost as garish, and much larger, than Dubai’s. Sitting behind his desk in the FBI building, Nacho Chavez took a bite of the breakfast burrito he was holding in his right hand, wrapped in a napkin that was already soaked with grease.

  “It’s got to be al-Bashir,” said Kelly Eamons.

  “What evidence do you have?” he demanded.

  “This Roberto goon was working for al-Bashir,” Eamons said, sitting tensely on the front three inches of her chair. “Al-Bashir didn’t use any other driver when he was in Houston.”

  “So?”

  “Roberto was the muscle. He probably killed Larsen.”

  “The Astro employee who committed suicide?” Nacho asked through a mouthful of burrito.

  “It wasn’t suicide. Roberto murdered him.”

  “Prove it.”

  Eamons’s blue-green eyes snapped at him. Redheads and their Irish temper, Chavez thought.

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “We have his voiceprint from that phony message he left on Larsen’s answering machine. We need to find him and get a voice match from him.”

  Still playing the devil’s advocate, Chavez replied, “We don’t know where he is, and even if we did we don’t have anything to hold him on.”

  “He jumped bail on the assault charge.”

  “Local rap. Not our jurisdiction.”

  “He’s probably fled the state, gone back to L.A.”

  Chavez chewed thoughtfully, then said, “Probably.”

  “That makes him a fugitive, doesn’t it? Interstate. That’s our jurisdiction, isn’t it?”

  Chavez had to grin at her earnestness. “Kelly, do you think for half a microsecond that the suits upstairs are going to okay a manhunt for a guy who’s jumped
bail on a measly assault charge?”

  Eamons said immediately, “Nacho, you could phone the L.A. office and ask them to look for him.”

  “Yeah, L.A.’s so small that one particular Hispanic guy will be dead easy to find.”

  “Come on! It can’t hurt to ask. He’s got those gang tattoos, according to his sheet. That’ll help, won’t it?”

  Putting the remains of his burrito on his desk, Chavez asked, “Wait. Back up a minute. Why are you so interested in Roberto?”

  “Because he murdered Larsen. Maybe Tenny, as well.”

  “And you think if we nail him he’ll roll on whoever hired him.”

  “Right. Al-Bashir. The man’s probably a terrorist. He’s the one who sabotaged Astro’s spaceship and he hired Roberto to cover his tracks.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He was part owner of the tanker that blew up beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, Nacho.”

  “And the other tanker? In Florida?”

  She shook her head. “Different company. But I bet if we keep digging we’ll find he had a hand in that one, too.”

  “Maybe,” Chavez admitted. “But what of it? He owns a chunk of Tricontinental Oil, too. Does that make him a terrorist? Hell, they’re funding Astro Corporation and the power satellite project.”

  Eamons said nothing.

  “It’s too thin, Kelly,” said Chavez. “You don’t have anything except your suspicions. There’s no real evidence at all.”

  “The voiceprint.”

  “Well, that might be useful,” Chavez agreed. “If we had Roberto and could match him to it.”

  “So try to find him!”

  With a patient sigh, Chavez said, “I suppose I could call a guy I know in the L.A. office. But I don’t think anything will come of it. Hell, Roberto could be in Hong Kong, for all we know.”

  Eamons nodded glumly. It was very thin, she agreed silently. We’re just spinning our wheels, trying to find Roberto. Al-Bashir’s the one we’re after and I’ve got to figure out a way to get to him.

  BAIKONUR COSMODROME, KAZAKHSTAN

  “Welcome to purgatory!” said Yuri Vasilyevich Nikolayev, jovially. He wore a heavy overcoat and a fur hat squashed down on his thick eyebrows. His breath made clouds in the chill air.

  The two men who had just alit from the wearily chuffing old train looked around uneasily. As far as the eye could see the land stretched away, flat, brown, and dusty. The sky was enormous, bright blue, cloudless. They were both bundled in thickly padded coats; one wore a woolen watch cap, the other was hatless. The wind whipping in from the arid wasteland blew what was left of his thinning hair.

  “You come on good day,” Nikolayev said as the two others hefted their travel bags and followed him toward the train’s baggage car, where their equipment was being unloaded. “Fine weather. Maybe spring will arrive, after all.”

  Nikolayev spoke in thickly accented English, the only language that all three men understood. The other two said hardly a word as they toted the bulky loads of equipment to the minibus Nikolayev had waiting for them. They allowed no one to touch their packages, not even the Russian cosmonaut.

  Gilly Williamson coughed as he climbed into the ice-could minibus. “Dust in me throat,” he said, half apologetically.

  “Much dust,” said Nikolayev, nodding sympathetically. Clambering into the driver’s seat, he pointed skyward. “Soon we will be above it all.”

  Williamson’s face was a map of Ireland: pale skin, green eyes, light brown hair that fell boyishly across his forehead. But his face was old, aged beyond his years. His eyes were guarded, suspicious. Born in bloody Belfast, at age three he had been orphaned and nearly killed himself by a car bomb that had been set off in a crowded shopping street. By the time he was old enough to go to university he was an expert wiring man for an offshoot group of the IRA. The organization helped to pay for his schooling, but once he graduated with an engineer’s degree he left Ireland for good and built electronic systems for a major American aerospace firm. Then the company had been bought out in a hostile takeover and Williamson was laid off. Worse, a routine physical for another firm that was about to hire him revealed he had lung cancer. He was unemployable.

  That was when a former IRA man contacted him and told him about a job that was available. Very hush-hush. At first Williamson was puzzled: What would an ex-IRA man be doing working for the bloody government? Soon enough, Gilly discovered this was not a government job. Far from it. For nearly a year he had trained for this job in space. He couldn’t help feeling nervous about flying into orbit, but he was determined not to let anyone see his fear. After all, why should a man diagnosed with terminal lung cancer be afraid of flying into orbit?

  The third man of the team was Malfoud Bouchachi, a slim, balding, dour Algerian engineer who had helped to devise the plan for destroying the Golden Gate Bridge. Slightly older than Williamson, Bouchachi was a veteran of several terrorist strikes. Possessed of iron self-control, cold and calculating, he trusted no one, not even this Russian who was supposed to fly them up to the Yankee power satellite.

  Nikolayev chattered happily as he drove them and their equipment in the minibus from the train station toward the wooden barracks where they would be quartered until their flight.

  “Not a luxury hotel,” he warned them, “but toilets work most of time and food is passable. You get the joke? Passable!” He laughed by himself.

  Once they cleared the train depot they could see the cosmodrome’s rows of gantry cranes standing against the empty sky, steel latticework towers, silent, rusting.

  “My grandfather helped to build those,” Nikolayev shouted over the grumble of the minibus’s engine, pointing as he drove along the rutted road with one hand. “Back in Khrushchev’s time this was busy place, spaceport to the universe, let me tell you.”

  The Irishman and the Algerian said nothing, simply gaped at the long rows of rusting towers.

  “Now, not so busy,” Nikolayev went on. “Government doesn’t have money for space anymore. Private companies—maybe sometimes. Not much, though.”

  Williamson said, “Our people are paying quite a lot for this flight.”

  And Bouchachi thought, Quite a lot, considering that this will be a one-way mission.

  Dinners with al-Bashir ought to be pleasant, April thought. Yet she always felt tense near him, wary. The best restaurant in Lamar wasn’t all that much for a man of the world like him, she supposed, but he gave every appearance of enjoying his steak and never let the conversation go dull. At least once a week they dined together. Sometimes they went dancing afterward, although it wasn’t easy to find a place where they played anything other than country and western stomps.

  April enjoyed the attention and al-Bashir never got grabby or demanding afterward. She would kiss him good night at the door of her apartment building and that was it. He didn’t even try to get her to invite him upstairs to her apartment.

  Yet there was something in those dark brown eyes of his, some secret amusement or anticipation that he wasn’t sharing with her. Does he really like me, April wondered, or is he just dating me to find out more about what Dan’s doing? It can’t be that, she told herself. Dan’s given him free rein to go everywhere and talk to anybody he wants to.

  For weeks April puzzled over the situation. An American guy would have made his move long before this, she knew. And from all she had heard about Arabs, they treated women like possessions. Yet al-Bashir was outwardly gentle and pleasant. A good conversationalist, good dancer. She thought that she should enjoy being with him. Except—his eyes bothered her. The way he looked at her, she felt like a deer being watched by a wolf. He strips me with his eyes, April realized. It made her uneasy.

  She found herself wondering what it would be like to go out with Dan. Would he be gentle and patient and pleasant? She knew he wouldn’t. And she realized that she wouldn’t want Dan to be.

  Al-Bashir enjoyed his dates with April, as well. She was lovely, intelligent,
and eager to learn from him. He especially liked the way she listened, wide-eyed, to his tales of world travels and international business affairs. She was reluctant to get romantically involved, but he knew that there was plenty of time for that. And there were plenty of women in Houston to satisfy his sexual needs.

  April is like a beautiful, sensitive doe, he told himself. She’s not to be hunted so much as won over, like the ancient story of beauty and the beast.

  After the power satellite has done its work, he told himself. After I’ve destroyed Astro Corporation and Dan Randolph has been crucified by the politicians and the news media. After she has no job and no hope. Then she will turn to me and offer herself. I will get her and get rid of Garrison at the same time. I will be the most powerful of them all.

  Al-Bashir smiled to himself. The future will be sweet, indeed.

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  From her little cubicle down the hall from Chavez’s office, Kelly Eamons phoned April at her Astro Corporation of fice.

  April’s image on Eamons’s desktop screen looked surprised once she recognized the FBI agent.

  “Hi, Kelly! How are you? Have you found out anything new?”

  Wishing she had something positive to say, Eamons replied guardedly, “Not really. What’s happening with you?”

  “This place is jumping. We’re going to turn on the powersat next week. Every news outfit in the country is buzzing around. They all want to interview Dan and Gerry Adair, our astronaut. They’re even asking for interviews with the engineers.”

  Eamons tried to hide her disappointment She’d been hoping that April wasn’t too busy to help her stalled investigation.

  “I thought Dan made a mistake to schedule the turn-on for the Sunday of the holiday weekend,” April was rattling on, “but he’s a lot smarter about these things than I am. It’s a slow news day, and the media’s practically frothing at the mouth to have a big story for Sunday.”