by T. E. Cruise
Gold and Linda were lying on their sides, facing each other. He stroked her supple curves as he moved his lips across her full breasts, pausing to suck her nipples, not stopping until he had her moaning and pleading for mercy, her hip’s silken swell writhing beneath his touch. Gold sighed softly as she reached out for him, pulling him closer, one hand on his shoulder and the other gently encircling his erection, drawing him into her smoothly with no fumbling. Gold closed his eyes. The feel of her body was both the same as he remembered and also very different; she was an exotic but familiar land to which he’d returned after being too long away.
They began to move together slowly, silently, gradually speeding up their rhythms until the wind sighing off the roaring ocean mixed its brine scent with Linda’s flowery perfume and the sea-salty musk of their lathered, locked-together bodies. The currents of scent and touch swirling around Gold tumbled him into further dizzying waves of exquisite sensation. Linda wrapped her long, tawny legs around his waist to grind herself against him. It went on like that forever, impossibly delicious and unbearably long, until at some point in their dance they found themselves looking into each other’s eyes.
“Hello.” She laughed breathlessly between nibbling kisses.
“Hello…” For some damn reason, he was crying. His tears softly plopping onto her breasts ran a helter-skelter course down her cleavage.
“Welcome,” she began, but suddenly her back arched and her mouth stretched wide; in her climax her words melted to an unintelligible moan. It was long moments before she managed within the lessening throes of her orgasm to come to her senses, and then her voice in his ear was the hiss of the wind-wracked sea: “Welcome home—”
The two of them lay side by side in Gold’s bed, letting the breeze dry them as they shared a cigarette. Gold, watching the ashtray balanced on his stomach rise and fall with his breathing, found himself thinking of Linda’s ex-husband. Whoever this guy was. Gold was damned glad he lived in Chicago. It was amazing and a bit frightening how fiercely jealous and protective he felt toward this woman lying beside him.
“Do you want to hear about it?” Linda asked, breaking the silence.
“Hear about what?”
“My marriage.”
Gold couldn’t help flinching. What’d she read my mind? It was damned spooky.
“Well, you’re not answering,” Linda continued. “But if you don’t mind, I’d like to get this out of the way between us once and for all.”
“Yeah, sure,” Gold hedged. “I mean, if you want to…”
She chuckled. “Okay… First off, it was a good marriage. We loved each other. I’m not saying we loved each other the way you and I love each other.” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye as she took the cigarette from him. “I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable by saying that?”
“Well, I uh…” Gold couldn’t seem to get his mouth in gear.
“Because if I did just embarrass you, that’s too bad, but I’ve been putting up with your damned foolishness for what seems to me to be my entire life, and I’m getting too old to go chasing after you or any man with a butterfly net. But that’s really neither here nor there at the moment.” She paused for a breath and a tug on the cigarette. “Anyway,” she pressed on, exhaling smoke toward the bedroom ceiling, “anyway…”
Gold abruptly realized that Linda was exorcising her husband’s ghost more for her own sake than his.
“Anyway, the first couple of years of marriage were fine: my husband, who is an attorney, was doing well at his L.A. law firm, and I was a reporter on the local news broadcast, up for a correspondent’s slot on that affiliate’s network evening news. Well, I got that job—”
“I seem to remember seeing you on TV once or twice,” Gold interrupted. “At least, I don’t think I switched channels when you came on.”
Linda laughed, and Gold let her think it was a joke. Actually, he had always switched the channel when she came on the air, but it was only just now that he understood why he had. All of his life it had been his way to firmly turn his back on those things he wanted but for some reason couldn’t have.
“My husband and I moved to New York in order for me to accept that network job. It was no hassle for him to do that: He had his pick of job offers in the Big Apple. We continued to live happily ever after.” She paused. “I mean, I guess things were okay, but to be fair I have to add that in those days our individual schedules were so hectic, and we got together so infrequently, that when we did see each other it was almost like we were still dating.…” She trailed off, lost in private, brooding reveries.
“So what happened?” Gold demanded, anxious to snatch her back to the here and now.
“What happened was he got a supreme-o job offer in Chicago. I remember how excited he was about it—it meant a senior partnership for him—but all I felt at the time was anger: ‘What about my career?’ I remember demanding. ‘What am I supposed to do? Quit my job and follow you to fucking Chicago with the kids on my hip like some fucking pioneer woman?’”
Gold, his head beside Linda’s on the pillow, could hear the resentment building in her voice as she once again lost her way in the past. He raised himself up on one elbow to look down at her. “You’re just upsetting yourself,” he warned. “You yourself told me it was history, right?”
“Right.” She nodded, mollified.
“Let’s not talk about it any more if it upsets you. Okay?”
“Okay.” She smiled. “Anyway, you must have the picture by now. We realized our ambitions meant more to us than our marriage. Of course, we were still young—”
“Wrong!” Gold corrected her. “You were merely younger.”
“Oh, right,” she said, chuckling. “I forgot I was talking to Barrie’s original role model for Peter Pan.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that some things really never do change,” she countered, amused, and then gestured toward the bedroom doorway. “Like, for instance, when are you going to break down and buy some furniture?”
Gold shrugged. Pop had bought up a bunch of Malibu oceanfront back during the Second World War, when people were worried about the Japanese invading California. Herman Gold had put up houses on most of the lots, including this house with its three bedrooms and a double garage, one of the largest on the beach. Herman Gold’s estate had left this house to his son, but Steve Gold had been living in it for several years previous to that, ever since he’d been reassigned to the Los Angeles Air Force Station. Despite the length of time Gold had been living here, the only real furniture in the house was the stuff in the bedroom. The other rooms were empty of furnishings, except for some rattan-woven rugs on the teakwood floors, and, in the living room, some beach chairs, a liquor cabinet, and a wall unit to hold Gold’s extensive stereo equipment and the TV.
“I bought furniture once,” Gold joked. “A set of custom bucket seats for my Corvette…”
“And this bed.” Linda added.
“Well, sure, this bed,” he agreed.
She sat up, reaching across Gold in order to retrieve her watch from the night table. Her breasts brushed his chest as she grabbed the watch, and Gold stroked the small of her back. She sighed, wiggling under his touch. Gold could feel himself thickening in response; his erection was nudging insistently at her thigh.
“My God!” she exclaimed. “It’s almost four o’clock! What’s happened to the afternoon?”
Gold smiled. Hours ago they’d left the trade show to get some lunch, and then one thing had led to another until they’d ended up here. Linda had followed him to Malibu in her own car, a “71 silver Mercedes 280 SL ragtop.
Gold reached for her, murmuring, “Time flies when you’re having fun.”
She patted his bobbing erection. “Hold that thought.”
“Why don’t you hold it?”
“Because I have to use your phone,” she fretted, snaring the telephone from the night table and putting it like a wall betwe
en them on the bed. “I’ve got to call my housekeeper and tell her when I’ll be home. I promised my boys I wouldn’t be late this evening.”
She paused in her dialing. “What’s that sour look for?”
“Nothing, I guess…”
“Spit it out, buster.”
“It’s nothing really,” Gold said reluctantly. “I guess it’s just that I grew up with housekeepers…. My mom was hardly ever home.”
“Hey,” she began, looking very serious as she hung up the phone. “Let’s get one thing straight right now. I’m a superior mother.”
“I’m sure you are,” Gold placated.
She stopped him. “No offense, cutie, but I don’t need you to be sure, because I’m sure. I have made some supreme-o sacrifices for my kids. When the network wanted to bump me up to be their Paris correspondent—a job my professional peers would have killed for—I turned it down because I didn’t want to raise my kids outside of the U.S.A., and because as a single parent I didn’t want to be apart from them for months at a time. It was for the sake of my kids that I decided to leave New York: I wanted them to have a goddamned backyard to play in. It was for them that I decided to try my hand at free-lancing, so that I could be there for them.”
Gold held up his hands in surrender. “Okay! You’ve convinced me! I apologize.”
Linda smiled, calming down. “Apology accepted.”
Gold listened as she made her call, telling her housekeeper in fluent Spanish that she would be home in about an hour, depending on the traffic. When she’d hung up, Gold moved the telephone back to the nightstand, saying, “You know, it’s funny you talking about being there for your kids, and your kids being there for you. I just found out something about my own father I never knew. Before I ran into you this morning, Tim Campbell put this bug in my ear about something he and Pop were involved in a lot of years back. Campbell told me to ask Don Harrison about it, so just before we left the trade show—while you were finishing up your note-gathering—I managed to collar Don long enough to get the story.”
“Story about what?”
Gold paused. “This is probably going to piss you off, but I’ve got to say it: What I’m about to tell you now is not for publication. It’s totally off the record, or whatever the phrase is, okay?”
Linda spread her arms wide, her breasts rising, her nipples looking rouged against her pale skin “In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have my notebook and pen,” she said coolly. “But would you like to frisk me for a wire?”
“Come on, Linda. You know what I mean.”
“I suggest you thoroughly explore all the usual hiding places…” She went up on her hands and knees to present him with her heart-shaped bottom.
Gold lunged and bit her on the ass. She squawked in outrage, spinning away to the foot of the bed and facing him.
“Now that I have your attention,” he began, exasperated. “Once upon a time we tried not to keep secrets from one another, but this is different. I’ve got responsibilities to the company. I need to know the ground rules on what I can tell you concerning GAT, and what I can’t.”
Linda thought about it. “Fair enough, considering what I do for a living, and the book I’m currently working on,” she admitted. “How’s this: Unless you tell me otherwise, or I specifically ask, I’ll always assume that our conversations are off the record.”
“Okay…” Gold reached for his cigarettes. “As I was saying, this all took place back in the fifties, when GAT and Amalgamated-Landis had individually come up with the industry’s first jetliner prototypes, and both firms were competing for orders from the airlines. It was about this same time that the CIA and the Air Force approached my father about the possibility of GAT designing and building a high-altitude spy plane that could be used over the Soviet Union….”
He hesitated, watching Linda, wondering just how much detail about this to go into with her, because it was this same spy-plane project that had broken up their romance back when Gold had been a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. Gold had been set to leave the military in order to settle down with Linda in Los Angeles, but then the CIA had tapped him, borrowing him from the Air Force in order to put him in charge of the spy-plane pilot-recruitment program. The day he’d backed out of his promise to resign from the Air Force without being able to tell Linda why—the spy-plane project was ultra top secret—was the day she’d stormed out of his life.
“I remember the Mayfly MR-1 spy plane program very well,” Linda was saying. “Especially the flap when the Russians managed to shoot one down, and how embarrassed Eisenhower and the country was when the Reds put our pilot who’d been captured alive on trial for espionage.”
“That’s right,” Gold said. “Well, anyway, it was GAT who built that spy plane for the government. Back then, as always, GAT had the best research-and-design department, and at that point the company already had a long history of working with the government on top-secret—or, more to the point, clandestine—programs concerning aeronautical espionage.”
“What does this have to do with GAT’s jetliner competition against Amalgamated-Landis?”
“Everything.” Gold sighed. “The AL-12 jetliner was luring away the airlines from the GAT GC-909, the production costs for which had been enormous. My father was financially over extended. If the GC-909 didn’t emerge triumphant in this competition, GAT was finished. Meanwhile, concerning the spy plane, Pop knew that he had the government over a barrel. GAT had the best engineering talent in the industry for that sort of project. If GAT couldn’t—or wouldn’t—build the spy plane, the CIA would have to go without.”
“And?”
“And so Herman Gold cut a deal. He agreed to build the spy plane if the CIA used its influence with the Civil Aeronautics Board to get CAB to reconsider its prior approval of the AL-12’s design specs.” He shook his head. “As you can imagine, the news scared the airlines right off the AL-12 and right into the waiting arms of GAT. The GC-909 was a success. The AL-12 was sucker-punched into history. Amalgamated-Landis’s perfectly good airplane suffered such a tarnished-by-innuendo reputation that it never even made it into production. End of story.”
“Wow…,” Linda said slowly. “Double-wow… That’s a best-seller’s worth of airline industry dirt right there.”
“Hey!” Gold exclaimed accusingly.
She winked. “Just kidding, cutie.”
Gold nodded, feeling bad.
“Hey, come on now,” Linda comforted. “It was a long time ago, and your father just did what he had to do in order to save his company.”
“I guess.”
“And from what I know about Tim Campbell, that guy’s no angel.” She took Gold’s hand. “Steve, it was business, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I know that,” Gold replied. “It’s just that I grew up with this image of Pop as always being on the up-and-up. A guy in a white hat, you know? But I guess I never really knew him. We started to communicate once the Air Force transferred me to L.A., but there was so much ground to cover between us, and so little time….”He trailed off.
“And now it’s too late,” Linda finished for him.
Gold frowned, angry and frustrated. “I can’t help thinking about all that wasted time when I was growing up and could have gotten to know my father. What the hell use is hindsight when we can’t go back to amend our mistakes?”
Linda kissed him. “Sometimes you can.”
CHAPTER 4
(One)
Gold Aviation and Transport
Burbank, California
12 February, 1974
Don Harrison was seated at the head of the table in the empty executive conference room. The room was windowless and darkly paneled, illuminated by brass wall sconces and ceiling fixtures with green glass shades, and dominated by the massive, rectangular mahogany conference table surrounded by leather chairs. The conference room had always reminded Harrison of the interior of the New York Public Library. Herman Gold had favored this men’s-club lo
ok with lots of brass, dark wood, and antiques. Harrison preferred a lighter touch, and eventually intended to have the conference room redecorated, but today he had more important matters on his mind.
The door opened, and Steve Gold entered the room with a thick stack of folders under his arm. Harrison and Steve chaired this weekly meeting of department heads and project managers scheduled to begin in twenty minutes, and Harrison felt the lengthy meeting progressed more smoothly when he and Steve could take a few minutes beforehand to set the agenda.
“Good morning.” Steve settled into the chair at the opposite end of the table.
Harrison glowered. “Why do you always choose to sit down there?”
Steve glanced up from shuffling papers. “Pardon?”
“Why don’t you sit beside me for once?” Harrison said irritably. “Say, here on my right?”
“Because I’m not your right-hand man,” Steve replied agreeably. “I’m your partner.”
“But it would look better to the others if we weren’t facing each other like opposing forces.”
“The others care more about how we act together than where we sit,” Steve countered, lighting a cigarette.
Harrison shook his head. “I still say it speaks volumes the way you insist upon sitting down there, like…”He thought about it. “… like an opposing king on a chessboard.”
“Why think of it that way?” Steve shrugged. “Why not think of us as, say, a pair of aircraft engines? You’re on the starboard wing and I’m on the port wing, simple as that. We’re not opposing one another, we’re working in tandem.” He winked at Harrison. “At least, that’s the way I see it. Now, can we get on with this?” He glanced at his watch. “The others are going to be here soon.”
“All right,” Harrison said grudgingly. He wasn’t sure how much his perceptions were being tainted by his own foul mood, or if Steve was pulling his leg concerning all of that tandem-engine stuff…. He glanced at his agenda sheet. “What’s happening with the GXF-66?”