by Dean Ing
Allington smiled at his display, then cocked an eyebrow upward toward Tom Schultheis. “You tell them, Thomas; they know what a liar I am. ”
Schultheis raised a fist in triumph, his voice husky. “Three hundred and twenty. Mr. Sage, we’ll race anything on rails.” An instant’s silence, then a cheering pandemonium, and Patrick Sage’s voice rang as loud as any.
An hour later, after a turnaround and a return run that bettered three hundred miles an hour, the maglev hovered stationary near the now-deserted bleachers. Wes Peel pocketed a document that was as good as money in the bank and bade the Santa Fe men good-bye before lifting toward Hayward in Delta One. He understood that Glenn Rogan would ride the maglev back to the Barstow facility. What he did not understand was that, thanks to careful misdirections that were not quite lies, the Santa Fe test engineer signed off where he had boarded, twenty miles from Barstow. Perhaps the good man thought that Delta One would carry that maglev away as freight. He certainly thought, and said with confidence, that those canards had raised the potential of maglevs a notch.
He was wrong; the canards amounted to a quantum leap. Glenn Rogan, with the innocent brakeman still aft at his post, waited until Delta One had disappeared from his horizon before backing northeastward to the end of that laser-straight rail section. The brakeman, moments later, quit watching from his window and, with eyes clenched shut, started praying as that vibration hummed louder. That is why he was not watching his console and could not tell the Santa Fe what Rogan told Tom Schultheis later that night. Not bad for a maintenance unit, not too shabby even for a rocket sled. Yes, it gobbled power, but when Rogan throttled back near the end of that straight stretch his fifty-ton lancehead became an orange lightning bolt shooting toward Barstow at nearly five hundred and eighty miles an hour. At that speed, Rogan admitted, she did want to “hunt” a bit between her rails. Tom Schultheis would have to do something about that.
SIXTEEN
Kosrow Nurbashi had not kept a hit team in place through naivet6, and he knew how Great Satan infected young men even while they denied it. In an Iranian village, surrounded by the faithful, they would not dream of doubting a mullah’s inspired decisions. Here, he had exactly three dedicated lunatics left, and instead of replacements from home, only excuses. Well, he would use what he had and then return, beat thornbushes for new recruits if he had to.
And those recruits, on American soil, would doubtless begin to show the same American infection as the present crop. They might refrain from questioning an order aloud, but Nurbashi sensed unspoken questions. It was therefore essential to justify some of his orders - without seeming to. He justified placing Majid Hashemi’s holy suicide ahead of Golam Razmara’s with a lie, claiming that Golam was not ready.
Golam was as ready as any to perform the Peel necessity, fired with holy ardor, stoked with faith. But Golam had another talent. He charmed unquestioning allegiance from a slip of a girl, Zahra Aram. Zahra’s surveillance work bordered on the magical though she had the distressingly expensive habit of flying back to be near Golam after each mission. It was the price extracted by old-fashioned girls.
Nurbashi paid without complaint. Thanks to her findings, he could send any of his three remaining zealots to dispatch John Wesley Peel with an excellent chance of success. He would not send Golam Razmara on any suicide mission so long as the girl performed her task so well. It was an irony rich enough to delight Nurbashi: Golam’s success with the girl denied him the right to blow himself to paradise - for now. Nurbashi gave the Peel sanction to homely little Majid Hashemi instead, in a ceremony worthy of Allah’s greatest warriors; gave him a thorough private briefing, gave him a fistful of cash, and finally the keys to a Buick.
The only visitor to this ceremony was a man known to Farda’s young members as “Hassan,” except that twice that night, Golam heard the mullah call him Winthorp. Golam did not give it much thought at the time, but he got the distinct impression that Hassan Winthorp was some sort of half-caste academic.
The following night in Lansing, doling out snippets of that meeting to Zahra though he would never divulge the holy ceremony to a mere woman, Golam toyed with her black tresses and looked wise. “Yes, Hassan Winthorp is without doubt an academic,” he repeated, lowering lashes as long and as beautiful as Zahra’s own.
Zahra, who did not much care at the moment, faked interest for the same reason she faked orgasms. “From the university?”
“Not from ours,” he replied. “But I would know that above-it-all smirk anywhere.”
“Perhaps a gynecologist,” she said, and gathered from Go-lam’s reaction that hers must have been strictly a woman’s joke. Golam was in no mood for jokes anyhow. Zahra gathered that his funk grew from the mullah’s choice of another young man, Majid Hashemi, for some unspecified holy task. Zahra might have forgotten the entire conversation if Hashemi’s name had not cropped up soon afterward in American newspapers.
Majid Hashemi drove to California because, with American chemical trace sensors now so commonplace, a vest sewn full of plastique slabs was hard to get past airport security. The day before the maglev trials, Majid learned that the Buick’s air conditioner was broken while crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert on U. S. 80, licked sweat from his luxurious mustache across most of Nevada, and damned near drove off the shoulder several times while studying Nevada billboards. A small, slight fellow with an outsized nose and rabbit teeth which that mustache could not entirely hide, Majid had never enjoyed Golam Razmara’s luck with women and, until now, he had always found himself shy in their presence. Those billboards seemed to offer the near certainty of luck with games of chance, and with the kind of statuesque bimbo Majid imagined in his version of paradise. Somehow, thought Majid, he did not think he would be shy now. Something about the certainty of imminent death gave him confidence, a plan for the evening, and a monumental hard-on.
Perhaps Allah had guided the Buick’s prow to Reno, to give Majid a foretaste of the houris allotted to holy martyrs, and with Divine help Majid might win enough cash to rent the commercial lady of his choice. A foretaste of paradise, so to speak.
Majid drove around Reno until he found a casino the size of the Pyramid of Gizeh. He lost half of his two thousand dollars in an enormous pile of masonry called the MGM Grand in the expectation that Allah would guide his hand. But Majid lost Allah somewhere between the crap tables and the slots, and bitterly reproached Him for the lesson while lying alone in a fever of fury in a cheap motel near the edge of town.
The next day, as the maglev trials began near Barstow, Majid pointed his big nose past Truckee and Sacramento and, as the summer evening waned, managed to get himself magnificently lost somewhere between Walnut Creek and Castro Valley, California. Twisting the Buick down a steep blacktop toward Hayward, he spotted a street sign and realized, for the first time, that he had just traversed Crow Canyon Road. Instead of seeking another motel, Majid felt the lure of kismet. It was beyond belief that his bumbling up Crow Canyon had been pure chance.
Majid retraced the winding road upward between stands of eucalyptus, studied cryptic notes he had taken in Michigan, and parked off the road near the acreage of John Wesley Peel with his hood up for protective coloration. From the trunk, he drew a deceptively heavy little black silk vest, inserted fresh batteries in the detonator’s plastic holder, and donned a light jacket over the vest. Then he knelt, guessing at the direction, and prayed.
The high fence and the automatic gate did not keep little Majid from monkeying over and across fifty yards of unkempt lawn in the friendly darkness, to the base of windows above the grassy berm. The lights said that someone was home, and Majid trembled with the expectation of luck he had missed in Reno. He had committed pictures of Wes Peel to memory. As he pressed the doorbell, Majid wondered what he would say if one of Peel’s servants opened the door. His command of English was fair, but which words should he use? Car trouble; yes, that was it. And by the way, if he could please speak to the owner of this fine place
. . .
But the lights had lied. Wes kept no servants, and while Vangie Broussard had waked in Wes’s bedroom that morning, she had spent her day at the Hayward plant. Vangie was still there, helping Wes and his staff celebrate after Delta One whispered to her home moorage at dusk. If Majid had seen the evening papers, he might possibly have guessed at that celebration.
Majid scuttled back to the Buick, put the vest away, and found a motel in Hayward, feeling only slight anguish after he bought a newspaper. One thing Nurbashi had promised him was that, if Peel’s latest gamble triumphed, the man intended to throw a pasha’s party. That event was the one for which Majid Hashemi had been dispatched in the first place.
SEVENTEEN
The major sensation of Wes Peel’s party, until the gobbets of human meat started flying, was the sight of Vangie Broussard’s legs. “She claims that you insisted on that dress. Now every woman on these five acres hates her when it’s you they should be hating. You ought to be ashamed, Wes,” said Alma, watching Vangie move among guests who strolled between the house and the pool. It was dusk, and nearly everything on Wes’s property was well-lit, including some of the early arrivals.
Wes saw Alma’s envious glance and grinned. “Oh, I am ashamed. But how else were we ever going to learn whether the lady had legs?”
“The usual way, and you may as well not lie to me about her. I’ve known you too long, my dear.”
He accepted die congratulations of a syndicated science writer who had just walked in, recommended the diorama he’d arranged in his shop, pointed him toward the booze, and turned to Alma again. “I admit nothing, and I hope nothing shows.” “Nothing obvious,” she admitted.
“Not as obvious as you and Rogan, anyhow.”
She arched her brows to manufacture a look that was part innocence, part challenge. “Are we being a little paternal, Sire?”
“Nope. Blessings on you both. But unless I misread some signs, it’s Tom’s blessing you need.”
He was startled by the sudden narrowing of her eyes, the twitch at her jaw. Alma grasped the sleeve of his suede shirt - Vangie had chosen it and the matching slacks despite his complaint that they made him look half Daniel Boone, half Truman Capote - and pulled him toward privacy, a burst of castor bush foliage near the pool. “Listen, if it weren’t for sweet little hotpants Ellie, Glenn would have my brother’s blessing. If I told her not to jump in your pool, Ellie would do it to spite me. So I don’t know how you’ll manage it, but if you don’t keep my sister-in-law away from my man, I’m going to bless her with a champagne bottle.”
Wes stared, realized his mouth was gaping, and fitted it against his glassful of ginger ale. The sip gave him time to resolve a small nagging mystery. “Isn’t that Rogan’s responsibility?”
“He’s avoiding her. He would have avoided her at another party a long time ago if he’d known she was married. Not that she knows it when she gets a tankful. And she’s tanking up tonight.”
“And Tom knows about . . . whatever happened?”
“He caught them. Among the coats tossed on a bed. You want the, you should pardon the expression, blow-by . . . ?” “Good God, spare me!” And yet Tom brought Glenn Rogan to us, he thought. That’s dedication. Wes assumed that the dedication was to Wes himself, and scanned the pool area. He saw Rogan, thumb-stoppering a squat bottle of Anchor Steam, in earnest conversation with Tom and an old fellow who was built like Rogan’s bottle. “I’ll dragoon another singleton and tell him who Ellie is,” Wes promised.
“Just don’t tell him what she is,” Alma bit the words off.
“We like to keep it in the family - and you’re practically family yourself.”
Wes nodded. Jim Christopher was a romantic figure, of sorts; perhaps he could pair Chris with Ellie. Surely, if Chris knew who the bosomy, curvaceous little Ellie was, he wouldn’t end up among the fur coats with her. “I’ve thought of somebody. Hey, wasn’t your father coming tonight?”
In answer, Alma jabbed a finger toward the green phosphorescence of the lighted pool, where Reese Masefield was swimming in borrowed trunks. “Across the pool, with Tom and my man. But first things first, Wes. Please?” She watched him move off in search of that safe singleton, saw her father’s stubby fingers weaving an obbligato to his words, and smiled grimly. At least old Wolf did not know Ellie’s weakness.
At the poolside, distant from the ebb and flow of other guests, Glenn Rogan sat with one booted foot on the diving board, the other stretched out, and took up the thread as old Wolf Schultheis finished. “Hell of a risk to the hardware, just for a dead-stick landing,” Rogan said, taking the younger Schultheis in with his gaze. “I’m all for it, though. It’s my butt in Highjump, and I’ll have a chance to see if I could pitch her over and fall clear, or climb out if I had to. There’s no ejection seat, you know.” He said it almost apologetically.
“No room, and too big a weight penalty,” Tom put in, answering the old man’s sudden look of concern.
Wolf Schultheis let the silence extend a few moments. By now, Rogan was used to the slow careful phrases. Highjump, he knew, was as much the work of this short, balding, barrelshaped German as of anyone else, so this was one old codger he didn’t want to rush. The old man’s voice, when he finally used it, was deep, with the softness of one who had nothing left to prove in this world. Bifocals bounced perilously atop his head whenever he nodded, and from time to time he pushed them back with a forefinger. “Den I think maybe you will
want first-stage separation at de highest velocity yon can get, Thomas. Give Mr. Rogan more time to test his options.” “Can’t do it, Dad,” Tom said, palms out. “Without second-stage boost, there’s too much drag on the bird for a high-velocity separation.”
“I accept your word,” said old Wolf, and was silent again for ten seconds. Then, “Maybe you can try a liddle second-stage boost,” he said, smiling shyly, his thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart.
Tom laughed at the extravagance of the idea. “God love you, Dad, you don’t ask for much!” A three-beat pause. More seriously then, “It means purging the system, a real dry-run for the big jump, and getting some fuel stored ahead of time. But we might manage it. Maybe we ought to.”
“With just the few guys we have?” Rogan shifted his weight, and his leg brushed that of Tom Schultheis. Tom did not move away as he would have done a month previously; conspiracy had taken its toll on Tom’s outlook. “And I don’t think you can afford to bring anybody else into this little shebang. Not this late in the game,” Rogan added.
They argued the logistics of high tech conspiracy as equals, gazing at the brownian movement of guests in proper suits, in slacks, and a few in the trendy lederhosen. Masefield climbed dripping from the pool nearby, donned a huge bath towel, and sloshed away toward the house. He saw the small figure scurrying from Wes’s driveway in the black suit with the shiny lapels, and assumed the man was part of the catering staff - which was precisely what Majid Hashemi had hoped with his rented tuxedo.
Masefield emerged fully dressed, ruffling damp hair and smiling, from a guest bedroom as Wes finished making his plea to Jim Christopher near the dining room. “Just look for the little brunette with the cleavage and maybe one martini too many,” Wes was saying. “Basically a nice girl, Chris.”
“If she’s Tom’s wife, I’ll treat her that way,” Christopher smiled.
Wes had time to reflect, Tom’s now using Rogan’s name, and Chris is on first name terms with them all. Getting to be a friendly bunch, and then he saw Vangie with the refreshed Masefield. The journalist’s smile faded as Vangie spoke. “You’re no longer one of the great unwashed,” Wes said to Masefield as he approached.
“What’s this about a prowler?” Masefield said, not smiling. “Wes thinks it was some freelancer trying to get a scoop after the maglev runs,” Vangie went on. “I thought you might know if they did things like that.”
“The tabloids are capable of anything,” Masefield admitted ruefully. “Did they get into the
house?”
“No inside alarms,” Wes said, faintly peevish that Vangie had mentioned it. “Just a silent telltale at the front fence, and it was two nights ago, for God’s sake. I shouldn’t tell you these things, Vangie,” he grumped.
“You can’t know everything in this world, suh,” she said charmingly. “You don’t even know how many people might be jealous of Peel Transit, now.”
Wes: “And you do?”
Something fled past her eyes before she donned her most ravishing smile. “Maybe I’m a better guesser than you are.” “My guess is, it was some kid after those Satsuma plums in your yard,” Masefield said. “But I’ll keep an eye open for any known paparazzi."
“Or any unknown thugs,” Vangie put in, clearly working on some private agenda.
Masefield made a helpless gesture. “Vangie, half these people are unknown to me.” He met the gaze of Jim Christopher, who had paused nearby to collect a plateful of hors d’oeuvres. The two exchanged nods. If the delta pilot was listening, he gave no sign. “Just let me know if you see anybody that I ought to, um, interview,” Masefield added to Vangie. “I could spot a phony very nicely on that footing.”
“Much ado about nothing,” Wes predicted, and moved toward a fast-dwindling plate of bacon-wrapped escargot. “Vangie, could you wheedle some more of this stuff from the caterer?’ ’ She went one way, Wes another, steering Christopher by an elbow. “I’ll point Ellie Schultheis out, and you can stuff her with that fish food,” he said to Christopher.
Masefield stood alone, munching an escargot that would have cost three dollars at Scandia, replaying that conversation. Whatever Vangie Broussard was worried about, it wasn’t some camera-toting dipshit with a deadline. At last he sighed and moved toward the front door. The shoulder holster was in Oakland, but his snub-nosed little .32 Colt revolver lay in its usual under-dash clip in his Thunderbird. It was probably dumb, and he already regretted it, but the Colt would fit against his kidney if he wore his coat. A sport coat on a night like this! The things a man did for friendship ...