by Jeff Pollard
“I need this money.”
“Then I suggest you find someone with lots of money and ask them nicely. You know, you can sell more of your share in the company. You don't need to own any of the company as long as you're CEO. Just make sure that a majority stake of the company is held by allies of yours, otherwise you'll be on your ass.”
“Who can I trust?”
“Why don't you call your Russian gangster friend?”
“That's a good idea.”
“I was kidding,” Brittany says.
“Just keep the Kokes off me,” K says.
“What would they be doing on you?”
“Convincing a majority stake in the company that it'd be better to sell the Eagle Heavy flight rather than launch it at a loss and using our already limited funds to bail out another company.”
“That wouldn't be a tough sell. Come to think of it, why are you doing that?”
“Because we need Bigelow. They were gonna make the space station, we were gonna be their ferry. But now, we have no destination. Movie stars aren't gonna pay twenty million dollars to ride around the planet in a van for two weeks.”
“It can't be worse than this closet. I'm gonna go now,” Brittany says, opening the door. She steps out and Kingsley closes the door after she leaves, remaining in the closet. Brittany stands in the hallway, looking at the closet door, brow furrowed. She opens the door and looks in at K in the shadows. “What are you doing?”
“I didn't want people to see us leaving together.”
“You're not off your meds or something are you?”
“You should really be more worried when I'm on my meds,” K says.
Kingsley parks his T-38 Talon in a commercial hangar, shutting down the engines and opening the canopy. The former NASA aircraft has two steps built into the left side of the nose, allowing Kingsley to exit without assistance. A twenty year old kid with a clipboard heads towards K.
“You need to sign this, we charge 999 dollars a day to house your aircraft, if it's still here at noon tomorrow we will charge you for two days,” the kid says as he's said a thousand times before. Kingsley takes off his flight helmet and the kid sees his face for the first time, “initials here, here, here, and sign-You're Kingsley!” The kid practically shouts, going instantly from bored to excited.
“To see how quickly your face changed, you'd think I just showed you my tits.”
“I don't understand,” the kid says with a huge smile on his face. “Picture, can we get a picture, of us, together.”
“Absolutely not,” K says.
“Alright.”
“I'm kidding.”
“Oh...okay, cool.”
“Just don't put it on Facebook,” K says as the kid whips out his phone and K puts the kid in a headlock.
“Why not!?”
“Zuckerberg is a dick,” K says as they get the picture.
“If I waive your parking fee will you send me to space?”
“Well a ticket costs twenty million, a day parking here is a grand. So if I leave it here for twenty thousand days and you waive the fee for me, then we'll call it even.”
“Dude, that's awesome. How do you do that?”
“Do what? Math?” K asks as he signs the clipboard. An orange Dodge Charger whips into the hangar, tires squealing. Two scary looking Russians in nice suits exit the car and approach Kingsley, looking quite intimidating. “Looks like my ride is here.”
“Is the blindfold really necessary?” K asks from the back seat of the Charger as they drive east on the Long Island Expressway.
“Da.”
“You realize I'm his business partner, not a snitch right? Also, my phone has GPS, so when we get there I'll totally be able to tell where I am,” K says. Just then his cell phone starts ringing, playing the song “Ball & Chain,” by the Indiana band Murder by Death, indicating to Kingsley that it is indeed Caroline calling. Blindfolded, K retrieves his phone from his pocket, then tries to input his unlock code without looking, failing a number of times, resulting in the song continuing to play. The mobster in the passenger seat laughs at K's attempt.
“My ball and chain,” K sings along, still trying to unlock his phone. He finally just takes off his blindfold, which unleashes a wave of shouting from the front of the car.
“Kingsley's Fudge Factory,” K answers.
“What's all that shouting?” Caroline asks.
“Could you guys keep it down,” K suggests to the mobsters. “Nothing honey, just some Russian mafia guys, n-b-d.”
“Okay,” Caroline says uneasily.
“Hey, chauffeur in chief, cool your jets, I'm just talking to the wife, not snitching to the FBI.”
“Snitching to FBIs!?” the mobster's English isn't good enough to understand what K said and this only alarms him further.
“You might want to make it quick dear,” K says. The mobster reaches into his jacket for a gun.
“Here, I'll put her on speaker,” K says.
“Well, umm, your baby mama called,” Caroline says on speaker-phone.
“Yeah, and?” K asks.
“She said the FBI called her and was asking questions about you,” Caroline says. The mobster cocks his gun.
“What kind of questions?” K asks.
“She was scared, she didn't say. She just wanted to give you a heads up that the FBI is looking into you.”
“Well now the NSA knows that she told me, but we'll talk about that another day.”
“NSA!?” The driver asks, looking over his shoulder threateningly.
“Okay dear, thanks for the heads up. I'll probably be dead in time for dinner. Talk to you later,” K says, hanging up quickly. “I'll just put this back on,” K says, pulling his blindfold back down. “So, how about that. . . Yankee game?” There is no response. K twiddles his thumbs. “You know, if we predictably end up in Brighton Beach, I'm gonna be kinda mad about the whole fake kidnapping thing.”
“You can take that off,” a deep voice says. Kingsley removes his blindfold and finds himself in a backyard of an extravagant house with a few boats tied up to a small dock just down the way. Rather than Brighton Beach, K discovers himself in a posh setting off Manahasset Bay. Sergei Kuznetzov stands up to meet K, shaking his hand while towering a foot over him. Sergei is dressed in pastel yellow shorts and a white polo, looking like he just came back from a game of tennis.
“Sit sit sit, you want drink? I make great Long Island Iced Tea.”
“Sure,” K replies, sitting at a pool-side table. Sergei brings over a silver tray with six unlabeled bottles of clear liquid, pre-sliced lemon and lime wedges, an ice bucket, the works. Sergei starts making K's drink, pouring a shot from each of the unlabeled bottles, adding lemon, then stirring the whole concoction with a glass stirrer and then adding ice with tongs.
“This is my take on the drink, try it,” Sergei says, setting the high-ball glass in front of K.
“What's in those bottles?” K asks suspiciously.
“I distilled them myself,” Sergei says proudly. Sergei takes a seat on the other side of the table.
“Doesn't a Long Island have five things not six?” K asks.
“The sixth is a surprise,” Sergei says. He takes a drink from his glass, then chomps on some ice cubes.
K, worried about being poisoned by a mad Russian gangster takes a sip anyway. “Oh that's good,” K says.
“Thank you, it's secret recipe, so don't even ask.”
“Rose vodka?” K wonders aloud.
“How did you-who told you?” Sergei asks, miffed. K simply points to Sergei's large garden with many roses.
“I've got a pretty good palate,” K says.
“Well, why are you here?” Sergei asks begrudgingly.
“You don't leave here very much, huh?” K asks.
“Everywhere I go, FBI follows.”
“Why not go back to Russia?” K asks.
“Putin.”
>
“Ah,” K replies.
“Besides, I've got my garden, my distillery in cellar, it's nice here.”
“Quite a view too,” K says. “Manahasset Bay, this is where The Great Gatsby was set. I believe this was the old money side. Apparently it's the new money side now.”
“When I move here, everyone around here talks about it constantly, how they live in the greatest place on Earth, because it was the Greatest Gatsby that wanted to live here. I finally got bored enough, I read this Gatsby.” Sergei says as he constructs a new drink for himself in a nine-step process he's refined to an art-form. “I don't think I get it. New money, old money. Must be something American about it. Do you understand this?”
“You just don't get it because you're new money,” K says like a debutante. Sergei gives K a stern look. “Hey, I'm new money too.”
“I just don't get why anyone would want to be like the old money. Old money means you didn't earn it, you just born into it. New money means you achieved greatness, you earned it, you built a life for yourself. What asshole thinks he's better because he didn't earn his greatness? And why would you try to impress such assholes. Makes no sense to me.”
“Fair point,” K says.
“Anyway, why did you want to talk to me?”
“I need some new money,” K says with a smile.
“I don't follow.”
“I need a hundred and fifty million dollars, and I need it secretly. I will pay you back. And I don't need it all now, just thirty million now.”
“For what?”
“I'm building a space station. A space hotel really. This hundred and fifty million dollars will buy me a space hotel that's larger than the International Space Station. But the company that's building it is about to go bankrupt and I need to advance them the cash so they can stay open.”
“Why come to me? Why doesn't company just buy them?”
“I'm trying to keep this quiet, and I don't want the Kokes to know about this. I promise I'll pay you back, you have my word.”
“I will do this for you,” Sergei says, taking a pause, “if you do me one favor.”
Kingsley's heart sinks, this is the moment where the gangster asks you to do something horrible to get that money.
“I would like to live there,” Sergei says.
“Live where?”
“Space station,” Sergei replies seriously.
“Oh! Sure, we can put you up on the next Griffin, that's no problem. You can spend a month on board, hanging out, yeah, no problem at all.”
“You don't understand,” Sergei replies. “I want to live there. . . permanently.”
“Why?”
“I'm not sure how much longer I will be free man. I can't leave my house as it is. When you make Putin your enemy, you don't usually get to stick around for long. I need to, how you say, get out of dodge.”
“I don't know,” K says. “Apparently the FBI is calling my old girlfriends and asking questions about me. I don't know if that would be the best move right now.”
“You know what,” Sergei says.
“What?”
“I will give thirty million anyway,” Sergei says with a smile.
“Without favor?”
“Without favor.”
“Why?”
“Because I can't spend that money anyway. And besides, maybe you'll change your mind.”
“Right,” K says suspiciously.
“But you must swear to me,” Sergei says very seriously, leaning in close.
“Swear what?”
“That you will never tell a living soul,” Sergei's eyes dart back and forth, “about rose vodka.”
“I swear.”
Chapter 2
“This is a pretty contentious law suit. Do you feel like your personal life is under the microscope?”
Kingsley is in the middle of a media-blitz on ULA. SpacEx lawyers have sued to halt the ULA monopoly on DoD launches and expedite SpacEx's certification. This has led to a couple of Senate Defense Appropriations Committee hearings and some press attention, but as usual, Kingsley finds the press impotent. And while scoring points in committee meetings and making better arguments is well and good, it doesn't translate into actual action if the politicians aren't feeling any pressure from their constituents. The gun lobby throws plenty of PAC money at any politician that supports gun rights and against anyone who opposes them, and thus there are almost unlimited gun rights in the country. No such group exists when it comes to NSA spying and thus the people might hate it, but the politicians don't feel any real pressure to do anything about it. So in order to generate some pressure on the issue, Kingsley is out on media tour, currently hitting morning talk shows. But of course, he finds the “reporters” constantly try to turn the conversation around and make it about Kingsley's celebrity persona.
“I do, but I don't particularly care about that,” K replies, trying to steer the conversation back to the DoD contracts, the lawsuit, and the ULA monopoly.
“Well, your opponents say that they are primarily concerned with national security, and frankly, I haven't heard stories about the CEO of Boeing partying in Vegas and getting into shenanigans that rival the Hangover movies.”
“That really has nothing to do with the issue,” K replies. “The issue is essentially this: the only two competitors merged into ULA, then promised that by handing them this monopoly rather than competing against each other, they would save the American taxpayers money. But their prices have tripled since then. So now they don't make that argument anymore, instead they say that their prices aren't the issue, that it's about national security, that you need both of their launch systems so that there's not a single failure point. But guess what, with the Ukraine situation, we're throwing sanctions at Russia, they're throwing sanctions back at us, and ULA doesn't actually make the rocket engines that power their Atlas rocket, they buy those from Energomash in Russia. So if they cut off that supply from us, suddenly we're out of Atlas rockets. So why are we relying on Russian engines when you have SpacEx making entire rockets from scratch right here in America?”
“ULA says they can make those engines in America if Russia cuts off the supply.”
“They say that like it's no problem, but by their own optimistic estimate, it would take at least three years and a billion dollars to get that assembly line going. And if you've watched them as closely as I have, you'll be skeptical of both of those figures. They should never have been allowed to merge, and now that there's a competitor that's capable of competing with them, they're trying to find legal tricks to keep us out so they can keep their monopoly. You wanna know why we haven't been back to the Moon? It's shit like this. And the media deserves some blame for this too.”
“The media?”
“Yeah you,” K replies. “You guys love your false dichotomies, this appearance of balance stuff. He says she's a liar, she says he's a liar, back to you. That's not reporting. Reporting is digging in and figuring out who's telling the truth. They won't disclose what the actual price they are charging the taxpayer is for each launch. So I asked them in the Senate, under oath, what exactly are your prices? They said that was proprietary information. I asked them why they need the government to hand them a billion dollars a year to maintain their infrastructure, when we have lower prices and no big subsidy. You know what they said? They basically said, hey Congress are the idiots that came up with this deal, so don't blame us. As if they didn't think this scheme up and lobby their asses off to get the deal in the first place.
They defended their monopoly by saying that we need two rocket families, that way we don't have a single-failure-point that can keep the military from replacing spy satellites or what have you. So that's why the DoD has to spend a little more to maintain both of ULA's fleets. But if you dig a little deeper, the Atlas rockets rely on Russian built engines, and if this Ukrainian situation gets any worse, hey look, we're down to just one rocket family and a whole host
of single-failure-points. And even if that doesn't happen, they're moving to a common upper stage that will power both Atlas and Delta. So then, if you have a problem with the upper stage, it doesn't matter that you have both Atlas and Delta families, because they use the same upper stage. I asked them why we need two rocket families if they're both going to use the same upper stage and thus we'll have a single-failure-point. You know what they said? They spewed out a paragraph of legalese about their heritage. Basically their answer was, 'we'll make it good, so it's fine.'
And all this talk of single-failure-points and needing two rocket families as justification for their monopoly makes no sense when they're at the same time arguing to keep us out, when allowing us to compete would make it three rocket families, and none of our engines are made in Russia.
But you know what they asked me? They asked me about Vegas. They talked about a Tezla crash. They asked me about a tweet I made. I tweeted a joke that in the space business, two years behind is actually on schedule. That's a joke tweet, making light of the entire space industry, including them. But they read this tweet to the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee as if it was a smoking gun, they asked why I thought two year delays were okay. That's the best they could do. And when you weigh the serious questions I was asking and the bullshit answers they had against the bullshit questions they had for me, any rational person would realize who won the argument. But all the press fixated on was the fact that an argument existed and just repeated a few talking points. 'ULA says Pretorius is risky. Kingsley says ULA is a monopoly. And now the weather.' But we all know, if there's sex and drugs the press won't see anything else. Nixon should have just made himself into a sex scandal and water-gate would have gone away.”
“Isn't your personal life a relevant part of the story. Let's go back to Vegas that night, and walk us through what happened when Gwenyth Paltrow-”
Kingsley knows from experience that he can talk for fifteen minutes about Congress, lobbyists, corruption, you name it, but if he talks for forty seconds about sex, drugs, or celebrities, that's all that will make it into the final cut. Thus he's learned to avoid giving the press what they really want and just hope that they use some of the material he really wants out there.