by Bova, Ben
Then he blanked the invitation. The screen showed what he had been poring over before Jane’s message arrived: a list of the names compiled from the personnel files that Tenny had checked into the day before he was killed.
The anger burned up inside him again. Killed. Joe didn’t die in an accident. He designed that double-damned hydrogen facility. He knew every weld and flange. It wasn’t an accident. Somebody blew it up. Somebody murdered Joe. And Hannah. Maybe I’m next.
Strangely, that thought calmed him. You want to come after me? he silently asked the unknown murderer. Okay, you try it. In the meantime, I’m coming after you. I’ll find you, you gutless sonofabitch. Me. Myself. I’m going to nail your balls to the wall.
He thought of Passeau and the swarm of government investigators working on the spaceplane crash. They’re still working under the assumption that there was something wrong with the plane. Passeau knows better, but he hasn’t convinced the rest of his crew that it was sabotage. Maybe he’s not trying to. Maybe he’s in on it.
No, Dan told himself, shaking his head. He couldn’t have had anything to do with the crash. He was in his office in New Orleans. At least, that’s what he said. Maybe I should check that out.
The list on his screen showed the names of the staff people whom Tenny had called over the weeks since the spaceplane’s crash. I have to retrace his steps, Dan thought wearily. I’ll have to go through every double-damned one of those names. Without consciously thinking about it he commanded the computer to rearrange the list in chronological order. Last one first, he thought. I’ll talk to the people Joe called the day he was killed and work backwards from—
He stopped, staring at the screen. The last people Joe had checked on! he realized. Three names were listed for that date. Joe talked to these three people, and that night he was killed. One of them is it! Has to be!
Elyana Mechnikov.
Peter Larsen.
Oren Fitch.
One of them is it, Dan repeated to himself. Maybe more than one of them. Maybe all three!
Despite his queasiness at being on the water, Roberto took the last ferry to Matagorda Island and drove the battered pickup truck he had borrowed to the motel a few miles up the road from the Astro Corporation’s fenced-in compound. No one paid much notice to a Hispanic man in work-stained coveralls checking in there, despite his size. The greatest difficulty Roberto had encountered the last time he’d come on the island was getting through the Astro main gate, but even with the spaceplane crash less than a month behind them, the guards at the gate hardly glanced at his phony ID. They saw the security guard uniform he wore and assumed that he was what he claimed to be, a new hire reporting for the night shift
For this job he didn’t even have to get inside the Astro facility. The prey would come to the hunter.
Roberto parked the pickup in front of the dimly lit front door of his motel room, went inside, and dropped his overnight bag on the sagging bed. Then he walked back to the bar that adjoined the motel’s reception desk. He was a big man, with a weight lifter’s shoulders and thickly muscled arms. He kept his face clean-shaven and the sleeves of his gray coveralls buttoned at the cuffs so that the tattoos he had acquired during his street-gang youth in Los Angeles would not show.
Downhearted country music twanged out of the speakers set into the ceiling above the bar. The barmaid was a tired-looking bleached blonde, trying to look sexy in a push-up bra. “Yew want dinner, the kitchen closes in ten minutes,” she said over the nasal whine of a cowboy singer.
“No thanks,” said Roberto. “Jus’ a beer. Dos Equis dark.”
“We got Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Mick Light, and Corona.”
Roberto sighed. “Mick.”
“Light?”
“No, heavy.”
She poured the beer and placed the mug on the bar in front of him on a round paper coaster. “Kitchen closes in ten minutes,” she reminded him.
“You tole me that.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“What time do you get off?”
She gave him a wordless sneer and walked down the bar to start talking with a trio of Anglos. Roberto stared down into his beer, hiding his rage. Sure, spit on the greaser, he seethed inwardly. What would she think if I went over there and kicked the cojones off those three assholes?
He took a long pull of the beer. Stay cool, man. You don’t want nobody to notice you. You get paid to be invisible. Wait. You got a job to do.
The job walked into the bar, looking uncertain, worried.
Peter Larsen was a short, slight, middle-aged man with thinning hair, bulging thyroid eyes, and the beginnings of a potbelly. Despite the jeans and biker-style denim jacket he wore, he looked every inch the techie geek, down to the square MIT ring on his left hand like a wedding band. Roberto saw him in the mirror behind the bar and thought that Larsen looked more like a frightened little bird than anything else. I could snap him like a wishbone, he told himself.
Larsen didn’t come up to the bar. He just looked around until he recognized Roberto sitting alone, separated by several stools from the guys the barmaid was talking to. Then he walked out, quickly.
Roberto finished his beer, left a five on the bar, and walked out into the night. It was still hot and muggy, the sky overcast. Crickets were chirping and Roberto saw swarms of insects flitting around the lamps that stood on high poles at the corners of the parking lot.
One of the cars flicked its lights. A boxy gray Volvo. Roberto went to it and slid into the passenger’s seat. He felt cramped, confined.
“We’ve gotta talk,” Larsen said, his voice whining, high-pitched.
“Tha’s why I came, man. I know you’re worried.”
“I didn’t expect you to kill Tenny!”
Feigning surprise in the darkness of the car, Roberto said, “Me? Wrong, man. It was an accident, pure and simple.”
“Pretty lucky accident, for you.”
Roberto shrugged.
“I mean, Joe starts asking me questions, so I call you. That night Joe gets killed in an accident.”
“Shit happens, man.”
“I want out of this,” Larsen said, urgency in his voice. “I want to get as far away from all this as I can.”
“Can’t say I blame you.”
“I’ll need money. Cash.”
Roberto pulled in a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh.
“Well, what about it? If you don’t—”
“Hey, man, simmer down. You’ll get cash. You wan’ it, I got it for you. Le’s drive over to your place. More private than a fuckin’ parkin’ lot.”
Larsen. had an apartment in the company-built low-rent housing six miles down the road from the motel, on the other side of the Astro complex. The next morning his landlady found him dead, hanging from the broken ceiling fan in his living room. The police suspected suicide, especially after playing his phone messages and hearing a threatening voice demanding that Larsen pay his gambling debts or else. The voice, of course, belonged to Roberto, who slept late in his room that morning, quite tired after walking the six miles from Larsen’s apartment complex back to the Astro Motel.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
It was drizzling again, after a cheerfully bright sunny morning. Rick Chatham looked out the rain-spattered windows and wished he were back in Arizona, where rain was as rare as sunshine here in Seattle. The house he was staying in looked out over the working harbor, where freighters from China and Japan unloaded their cargoes of toys, appliances, automobiles, and god knew what else. Globalization. Chatham hated the idea. Americans are supporting sweatshops and slave labor camps just so they can pay a few dollars less for their luxuries.
He had been christened Ulrich, which in German means “wolf rule.” The name pleased him, although he never told anyone about it. There was a lot about himself that he never told anyone. Rick Chatham was a man of secrets.
He hardly looked the part. He was a bland-seeming man in his late thirties, so average in stature that he could f
ade into a crowd without anyone noticing him. He wore his long, sandy hair in a ponytail and kept a neat little beard ringing his unexceptional face. He had a tiny diamond stud in his left earlobe but no other jewelry. Chatham’s great talent was his mind, his intelligence; he prided himself on seeing farther than others, and on understanding how to rally people to his point of view.
When the Astro Corporation spaceplane had crashed, Chatham had barely paid attention to the news coverage. Until he discovered the enormous ecological havoc that a solar power satellite could wreak. He discovered it quite by accident: one of the TV news broadcasts covering the spaceplane accident and its aftermath gave a brief, animated explanation of how a powersat would work. That was enough to set Chatham firmly against the very idea of allowing a solar power satellite to go into operation.
“It beams out microwaves,” he was telling the small group of people who had assembled to listen to him. “Microwaves, for chrissakes! Like you use to cook! They could cook you!”
There were eight other people in the living room, sitting on the overstuffed sofa, the New England rocker, or on pillows strewn across the polished oak floor. This was the nextto-last stop on Chatham’s itinerary. One more little gathering like this in L.A., and then back home to Tucson.
“Microwaves?” asked one of the women.
“Microwaves, just like you use in your kitchen,” Chatham replied.
“The government wouldn’t let them do that,” she said. The others around her snickered.
Chatham explained patiently. “They tell you that a power satellite is clean and environmentally friendly. Doesn’t burn any fuel. Uses solar power. Yeah, right But how do they get the energy from the satellite up there in space down to us on the ground? They beam it down with microwaves. Five or ten billion watts’ worth of microwaves!”
“They can’t do that!”
“They will unless we stop them.”
“Now wait a minute,” said the lean graying man who was Chatham’s host. He and his wife wore matching bulky gray cable-knit turtleneck sweaters. “They’re going to send the beam down to an isolated area, aren’t they? White Sands, from what I remember.”
“Yeah, that’s what they claim they’re going to do,” Chatham admitted.
“And the beam will be spread out over a dozen square miles or something like it, so it won’t be strong enough to hurt anything.”
“If you believe what they say,” Chatham replied. “They claim that birds will be able to fly through the beam without being hurt.”
“So what’s the problem?” His host smiled to let Chatham know that he was merely playing devil’s advocate.
Chatham smiled back tightly. “The problem, sir, is that we have no idea of what the long-term effects will be. Remember, ecology is the science of understanding consequences—”
“Frank Herbert wrote that,” one of the others murmured, loud enough for everyone to hear. Admiration shone on her face.
“And he was right,” Chatham snapped. “Suppose a bird circles around in the beam. How many circles can it make before it’s cooked? Or blinded?”
“Blinded?”
Warming to his subject, Chatham said, “Back in the nineteen fifties the U.S. Defense Department put up a string of big-ass radars, up above the Arctic Circle, in Canada and Alaska. They were supposed to provide early warning of an attack from the Soviet Union.”
“What’s that got to do with power satellites?”
“Let me tell you,” said Chatham. “Eskimos found that the area around those huge radar antennas was warmer than the rest of the region, so they started setting up their camps near the radars. And pretty soon they started going blind.”
“Blind?” asked a woman.
“Blind. Those radars were pumping out microwaves. That’s why it was warm near them. The microwaves cooked the Eskimos’ eyeballs. Hard-boiled them.”
“Oh my god!”
Almost triumphantly, Chatham added, “And the microwaves those radars put out are puny compared to what the powersat will be beaming to the ground.”
One of the younger men, wearing a scruffy-looking UCLA sweatshirt, objected: “But I’ve seen pictures of cows grazing in a field where the power satellite’s receiving antennas are set up.”
“Drawings, yeah,” Chatham said. “If they try that in reality they’ll be cooking their steaks on the hoof.”
That brought a few distressed laughs.
Chatham went on, “What’s more, nobody’s done any studies of what the long-term effects on the atmosphere will be if we start beaming gigawatts of microwaves all over the place. Nobody.”
“You mean it might affect the weather?”
“Does a bear sleep in the woods?” Chatham replied, grinning.
“The point is, I think,” said the group’s host, “that we’ve got to do whatever we can to stop this threat to our environment.”
“No,” Chatham snapped. “We’ve got to do whatever it takes to stop the power satellite.”
MATAGORDA ISLAND, TEXAS
Dan found out about the apparent suicide when he tried to phone Larsen at his cubicle in the engineer’s building that stood next to Hangar A. The man wasn’t at his desk, so Dan asked April to track him down.
She came into Dan’s office nearly half an hour later, her face drawn.
“What now?” Dan asked.
“Pete Larsen hanged himself.”
“What?”
Without Dan telling her to, she sank into the chair before his desk. “I talked with a sergeant I know from the county sheriff’s office. He said that Pete committed suicide. The Mafia or somebody was after him.”
“The Mafia?”
April nodded. “He owed a lot of money from gambling.”
“Pete Larsen?” Dan asked again, incredulous. “He wouldn’t even bet on the Super Bowl pool.”
“That’s what the sergeant said. He hanged himself because he owed money to gamblers.”
Dan frowned at his assistant. “April, you knew Pete. Was he a gambler?”
“I didn’t think so. But the police said he was.”
“And rain makes applesauce.”
“But—”
“No buts, kid. Look. Hannah gets killed in the crash. Joe Tenny thinks it’s sabotage and Joe was trying to figure out who did it. He talked with Pete the afternoon he was killed. That night, boom! Joe is murdered.”
April flinched visibly at hearing the word murder.
“Now Pete’s dead,” Dan continued. “If you ask me, I’d say Pete was involved in the crash, and when Joe started sniffing too close they killed him. Then they killed Pete to keep him quiet and shut off any chance of our finding out who’s behind all this.”
Staring back at him, April asked, “Is that what happened?”
“That’s what I think.” Then Dan realized how tenuous it all was. “Of course, I could be having paranoid delusions. I could be chasing my own tail.”
“Oh no,” she said, her gold-flecked eyes wide and earnest. “You must be right, Mr. Randolph. I mean, I knew Pete Larsen pretty well. I even dated him a couple of times. He didn’t strike me as a gambler. Not at all. And it doesn’t seem right that Dr. Tenny would have an accident with the hydrogen equipment. He designed it himself, didn’t he?”
Dan nodded.
“What are you going to do now?” April asked. “Do you want to talk to the county sheriff about Pete?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that’d do any good. They’re calling it suicide. Let it rest there. If I try to make a fuss the cops’ll think I’m a crank or, worse, a nut case.”
“And it would alert whoever killed Pete that you’re still after them.”
“Right,” Dan said, his estimation of April rising another notch. Are you part of this? he asked her silently, locking his gaze onto her’s.
“But you can’t track down the killers by yourself, Mr. Randolph. You should get the FBI into this. Or maybe the Texas Rangers.”
“The FBI’s suppose
d to be investigating the crash. I haven’t seen any action from them, though. Have you?”
Her brows knit slightly. “All right, then. What about a private investigator?”
“I’ve thought about that. I just don’t think that a private gumshoe would be much help. They’re mostly involved in divorce cases, tapping phones and photographing husbands with telephoto lenses.”
“Mitch O’Connell? The head of your security department?”
“Useless for anything more than hiring rent-a-cops and filling out forms. Hell, if our security was any good we wouldn’t be in this fix.”
“I suppose,” she said, sounding disappointed.
“Maybe I ought to talk to the local FBI office and try to goose them up,” Dan said halfheartedly. “I don’t know what else to do.”
April’s slender jaw set in a look of determination. “Let me talk to my father, back in Virginia. He’s a county district attorney and he might know an investigator here in Texas who can do something more than peep through keyholes.”
She didn’t wait for Dan to agree. Instead, April got up from the chair and went straight to the office door, so firmly intent that Dan just sat in his desk chair, speechless.
But he was thinking: Is she one of them? Being my assistant is a good spot for a mole. Is she calling her father, or one of the guys who killed Hannah and Joe and Pete?
April Simmonds was cursed with good looks. From the first beauty contest her mother had put her into, when she was five years old, she had found that she could smile and dimple and everyone would admire her. But as she grew into a shapely teenager and began to understand the power of sex, she started to realize that being beautiful was not enough. Not for her. Yes, the good-looking girls got picked first for the cheerleaders’ squad and teachers excused them for being late with assignments or forgetting their homework. That was fine. But April learned soon enough that others—especially men—didn’t expect anything from a beautiful woman except for her to be pretty. And compliant. They were frightened by a beautiful woman with brains.
April had a first-class brain. At first she didn’t realize this because when she got As in class she (and everyone else) assumed it was because she smiled brightly and caused her teachers no trouble. No one was more surprised than April when she sailed through the toughest courses in high school, including algebra and trig, without the slightest difficulty.