“You don’t think they’ll try to play politics with you, Dominick?” Kennedy asked. “We could get bogged down with this approach. It’d be harder for us to make any kind of an alternative deal later.”
“They’ll have their big guns, but we’ll have ours. I’ll take Howard and Jeff with me. Push comes to shove, Mr. Vasilanti can fly out to Washington.”
“In the meantime, Mr. Minister, I assume that we can continue to negotiate here in good faith on the assumption my people will be successful.”
The Russian aviation minister hesitated only long enough for his translator to finish before he smiled and nodded his massive head. “By all means, Mr. Kennedy.”
“Hello, Viktor Pavlovich,” McGarvey said. He stood at the open door to the Russian’s apartment on Kalinin Prospekt. A stereo played softly inside.
“Yeb vas, you come as a very big surprise,” Yemlin said, stepping aside. “Colonel Lyalin is threatening to have someone shot if you are not found.”
“I was busy,” McGarvey said. Yemlin’s apartment was large by Russian standards and very nicely furnished with modern Scandinavian furniture from Helsinki. But the place had not been used for some time. Everything was dusty.
“We must know where you went last night after you disappeared from the hotel.” Yemlin closed the door and followed McGarvey into the apartment.
More had changed in Russia than was visible at first glance. McGarvey’s old friends, those of them he’d been able to find, and who were willing to talk to him, had been frightened. But it wasn’t the SUR they were afraid of. It was starvation. There was no money or food, nor was there any way to get either except by murder, or theft, or prostitution. Even little girls and boys as young as five or six were being offered to pedophiles. Almost all moral order had broken down in Moscow.
“This is very serious, Kirk,” Yemlin persisted. Like everyone else, the former Washington rezident was frightened.
“I went to see some old friends,” McGarvey answered softly. “David Kennedy believes that the negotiations will go well. What about network Abunai? Heard anything yet?”
“The colonel wants to speak to you. I’ll call him.”
“Goddammit, what have you found out?”
Yemlin slapped the side of his leg, vexed. “It’s believed that a group called Mintori Assurance Corporation may be coming after you. But at this point we have no confirmation. Nor does Tokyo Station know to what extent the Japanese are willing to go to achieve their goals, although there are rumors. Do you understand this, Kirk? These are only unconfirmed rumors, but we are trying.”
“Good,” McGarvey said, a measure of relief coming over him, the first in twenty-four hours. “Let’s talk to Colonel Lyalin now. We’re going to need more information, Viktor. And soon.”
It would be a grueling flight that no one was looking forward to. Captain Peter Morrisey and his crew had gone out to the airport earlier to prep the P522, but it was well after midnight before Grant, Soderstrom, and Guerin’s general counsel Howard Siegel showed up. The weather had warmed up a bit with the passage of the front, but the winds had increased, driving the wind-chill factor to nearly 100 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit.
No one said much in the van on the way out from the hotel, nor were any of them inclined to carry on a conversation as they hurried, bent against the bitter wind, across the tarmac and up the boarding stairs into the airplane. Carol Cameron, one of their two attendants, closed and dogged the door, and even before she came back to offer coffee or something stronger the engines were spooling up. They knew what had to be accomplished, and why. For now there was nothing to do but hang on until they got to Washington.
It took all day and most of the evening to drill tiny mounting holes in the printed circuit board and install the several hundred individual components in their proper places. A simple transmitting device would have been infinitely easier to design and build, but this circuit had to do much more. Zerkel was proud of his handiwork, and he sat back with a proffered beer from his brother.
“Is it done?” Glen asked.
“Not yet. Still has to be wired up and then tested.”
The problem was coming up with the electronic code sequence that would trigger the on-board heat sensor’s module. His computer could spit out millions of combinations per second, but the possibilities numbered in the tens of billions. He had designed a multiplex circuit internal to his transmitter that would allow one hundred encoded sequences to be broadcast simultaneously. The sophisticated circuit would speed up the search by a factor of one hundred. Not bad, Zerkel thought, for an afternoon’s work.
In the morning Minister Matushin suggested they spend the day touring the proposed site at Domodedovo Airport. Nothing would be forthcoming from Washington until the next day, so they might as well make good use of their time.
Kennedy agreed.
By 3:00 A.M., Zerkel had finished the wiring and preliminary electrical tests on the circuit board. He’d not slept in what seemed like weeks, but he felt good, fully alert. Whatever shit his brother had given him did the trick, because he was flying. He was invincible.
The interface between the transmitter and his computer decoding program took only a couple of minutes to set up, and once it was in standby he brought up a line into InterTech’s mainframe in Alameda and entered the company’s electronic simulator.
Operating much like the flight simulators pilots use, InterTech’s sophisticated program could be loaded with the schematic diagram of an electronic device, which in turn could be operated and tested as if it were the real thing. A schematic diagram for an ordinary television set could be loaded, and the user could switch channels and receive simulated television pictures. On a higher level, simulated circuits could be tested for malfunctions, for operating characteristics under varying conditions, or even analyzed for function. In this case, Zerkel loaded the heat-sensor circuit from InterTech’s files into the simulator, and then began running the encoded output into it from his transmitter.
It was a little past midnight in San Francisco, which gave him nearly eight hours on this circuit before he’d have to shut down, but a lot could be accomplished in that time. Maybe the whole enchilada.
“Guerin Airplane Company nancy-four-seven-seven-niner-echo, you are cleared for final approach and landing. Report to Dulles Ground Control on one-two-two-one-niner on touchdown.”
“Roger,” Captain Morrisey responded. His eyes were gritty and his back hurt like hell despite the fact he’d managed to get a few hours sleep on the last leg of the flight from Shannon. Providing the company brass didn’t want a quick turnaround he’d be okay by tomorrow for the return flight. Regular commercial pilots did not fly under the same restrictions as airline jockeys. But if they wanted to return to Moscow sooner, a new crew would have to be brought from Portland.
“I’d better get back and check my charges,” Lois Milliken, the second attendant said, smiling. She had come to Guerin almost directly out of Northwest’s flight-attendant school and had had less than three months experience working with the general public. She liked this a lot better.
“Find out if we’re heading back today,” Morrisey said. “I’d like at least twenty-four hours.”
“Roger that,” co-pilot Joe Tobias said. He looked just as tired as Morrisey.
“Will do, Captain,” Lois said. “I’ve got some shopping to do if we get the time.”
Morrisey and Tobias exchanged glances and grinned. “We’ll be on the ground in three minutes,” the captain said.
“Yes, sir,” Lois said, and she left the flight deck.
“Shopping,” Tobias said, and he chuckled.
The encoding solution had come up more than an hour ago, but the simulated heat-sensor circuit had not responded the way Zerkel thought it would. Something was missing. Something in the module had definitely switched to the on mode. There was a tone on the output line, but that signal was being shunted to ground by a capacitive circuit tuned to that frequency. Beyond th
at was a second circuit that Zerkel realized almost immediately would pass only a certain frequency or combination of frequencies. What threw him off at first was the extremely low theoretical values he was coming up with.
They were in the three thousand to eight thousand cycles-per-second range.
Within the audio range, the thought suddenly occurred to him. Within the range of a human voice.
Zerkel brought up a five-thousand-cycle tone and entered it into the simulator program. Immediately a sharp spike showed up on the output line. A couple of volts, at perhaps 150 milliamps or so.
The encoding sequence was merely the key used to cock the mechanism, while the low-frequency tone provided the actual firing pulse.
His brother Glen, who’d gone downstairs a few minutes ago for some breakfast, had left his walkie-talkie behind. Reid had insisted they all keep in constant touch. It was a good idea.
He pried the back cover off the walkie-talkie, and after a quick examination found the modulation section where the voice frequencies were added to the transmitter’s broadcast frequency. He clipped a wire to the input section and led it to the input section of his breadboard transmitter.
A specially built walkie-talkie would be the way to go if you wanted to bring down one airplane at a time. First an encoding tone would be transmitted that would cock the heat-sensor unit, and secondly the operator or terrorist or whatever you wanted to call him would say something into the microphone.
“Boom.”
A spike showed up on the heat sensor’s output line.
“What the hell was that?” Captain Morrisey shouted. They were lined up for their final approach to landing, wheels down, flaps at twenty degrees.
“It’s number one engine, Captain,” Tobias screamed. “It’s going.”
The aircraft was listing sharply to port but there was nothing Morrisey could do about it. Alarms flashed and buzzed all across the panel and overhead.
It was the port engine. The entire engine was gone, flying away in piece! It had swallowed a blade. Something.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” Tobias shouted into the radio.
It was no use, they were well past a ninety-degree list to port now, the end of the runway frighteningly close, and they were still turning over.
It was just like the American Airlines flight out of Chicago in ’90, Captain Morrisey thought.
The instant before they hit he said, “Fuck it!” They were the last words on the cockpit voice recorder.
Glen Zerkel came running up the stairs, Reid and Mueller pounding right after him. They’d been in the kitchen having breakfast when they saw the crash.
Louis Zerkel, his hair flying, his T-shirt untucked and dirty, his eyes wild, danced around the room, hooting and singing. In his left hand he held a walkie-talkie, its back off, wires trailing from its insides, and with his right he was pointing toward the ceiling.
“It worked!” he cried. “Did I tell you it would work? It did! It worked!”
“An airplane just crashed at the end of the runway,” Glen Zerkel said in awe. “It fell over and crashed in a ball of flame.”
Louis Zerkel stopped in his tracks, a large grin on his face. His brother and the others were looking at him. Waiting for him to say something. He shrugged.
“Well, what do you think about that?”
TEN
Minister Matushin put down the car phone, his face grave. “I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you, Mr. Kennedy.”
The day had been gloomy. It was 5:00 and starting to snow as they returned to Moscow from touring the wing-panel factory site at Domodedovo Airport. Kennedy had been having premonitions of disaster all afternoon. “What is it?” he asked.
“You are to call Chris Bradenton as soon as you get to the hotel. Another five minutes. Do you know this name?”
“He’s our director of flight operations.”
“He’s on his way to Washington. The hotel will help get through to him. My staff is setting it up for you now.”
“Chris, on his way to Washington?” Kennedy said. “Why? What’s happened?” He had an ugly feeling.
“Your company airplane crashed on landing at Dulles Airport a little more than an hour ago,” the minister said. He and Kennedy rode in the back seat of the minister’s Zil limousine. The others followed in an Intourist bus. “Apparently there is little chance that anyone survived. There was fire.”
Kennedy slumped back in the seat, stunned. He felt as bad as he had in 1986 when he learned that the space shuttle Challenger had gone down with all her crew. His gut was hollow, and he found it difficult to concentrate. Such a thing was impossible to swallow in one lump. The P522 was the safest airplane that had ever flown. In her eleven-year history she’d only been involved in one fatal crash, the American Airlines accident in 1990. There’d been other minor incidents, but they were just that—nothing to be overly concerned about, although Guerin took even the smallest problems seriously.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kennedy, I understand how you must feel,” Minister Matushin said. “But let me assure you that this accident in no way diminishes our faith in your company and our desire to proceed with the project.”
Kennedy looked at him. Soderstrom was gone. Despite the CFO’s dour, pessimistic disposition and outlook, Guerin Airplane Company had come to depend on his counsel. Vasilanti had called him the “corporation’s conscience.” And the others: Siegel, Dominick Grant, the aircrew. It was impossible to believe they were gone.
“An aircraft and crew will be made available immediately to fly you and your people anywhere you need to go. We understand and sympathize. Completely.”
Kennedy had made tough decisions all his life. As a pilot and then as an astronaut when timing was often critical, his decisions had to be made instantly. But now the consequences of his judgment were more far reaching. Eighty thousand people worked for Guerin Airplane Company. Their futures rode on the future of the company, which rode on the managerial skills of its executives, from Vasilanti down. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, the old man was fond of saying. Either manage or get the hell out of the way. Pearls of the business. “This is not an industry of fainthearted namby-pambies,” Vasilanti said when he hired him. “So if you don’t think you can handle it, son, let’s get it on the table now and spare us all the grief later.”
“Simply tragic,” the Russian said. “No doubt these men were indispensable to your company. They will have to be replaced, of course, and new people brought into the talks. Which will take time, naturally. As will your government’s investigation of the crash, and your own company study … all of it, such a waste. But we will be patient here in Moscow, no matter how long the delay. We know about these things.”
Christ, Kennedy thought. He took a deep breath to clear the pressure in his chest and made his decision. He felt terrible, but there was nothing else he could do.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Mr. Minister,” he said, pulling himself together. “I’ll need to inform my staff, and we’ll need a conference room in the hotel with eight or ten reliable telephone lines, two or three competent bilingual operators, and at least three fax machines. Can that be arranged with a minimum of delay?”
“Of course,” Minister Matushin said. “You’re not returning to Washington?”
“I don’t know yet. If there’s something for us to do there, if we’re needed, then we’ll go. Otherwise we’ll stay to continue our negotiations.”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Kennedy, but your people were to meet with State Department officials about loan guarantees.”
“We’ll send a new team.”
They raced across the river and passed Red Square, the hotel just ahead. Minister Matushin eyed Kennedy with respect. “Life goes on,” he said.
“Yes,” Kennedy replied absently, his mind already ranging to the enormous problems Guerin faced because of the accident and to the distasteful job facing him of telling the others, following in the bus, what
had happened.
Louis Zerkel locked himself in the front bedroom and sat cross-legged on the floor. Reid had been at him all morning, and now it was time to think about what was wanted of him. For a while he had watched all the activity over at the airport from an upstairs window. Ambulances and fire trucks and helicopters had streamed into the crash area just short of the main runway. Two hours after the P522 had gone down the stench of burned kerojet, baked metal, scorched rubber, and incinerated plastics and foams still lingered on the air. No one had survived that crash.
Zerkel knew that he was strange, probably even crazy. At this moment he wanted to talk to Dr. Shepard more than he’d ever wanted anything. All of his life he had been a law-abiding citizen. He never got traffic tickets, he always paid his taxes on time—and never cheated, even if it would have been ridiculously easy for him—nor had he ever stolen from anybody or lied. On the occasions he went with a prostitute he told himself that he really wasn’t breaking any law. It was a matter of geography. If he were in Amsterdam, or Hamburg, or even Nevada the act would be perfectly legal. Simple.
But people had died in that crash, and he had made it happen. He was a murderer. He ran his fingers through his long, unruly hair. Something very odd had been done to him in the past forty-eight hours. Something had changed him from what he had been in California.
In California he had been content to study world conspiracies. Here he had become part of one. He had no illusions now about Edward R. Reid and the others—especially the German. They had their agendas, which they thought they were hiding from him, but he’d seen through their bullshit almost from the beginning. Or, certainly he’d realized what they were up to this morning after the crash when they’d come rushing up to see what he’d done.
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