Powersat

Matagorda Island, Texas

It took an effort for Dan to keep his mind on business. Scanwell loves Jane, he kept thinking. And she’s right there, by his side almost every day, while I’m down here trying to sort out the wreckage.

“So was it sabotage or not?” Dan snapped.

Tenny, seated backward on a chair with his chin resting on his hairy forearms, hiked his dark brows at his boss’s impatience. “I’m damned sure it was. But I can’t prove a friggin’ thing.”

Dan got up from his desk chair and walked to the window. Down on the hangar floor a dozen men and women were still moving among the twisted bits of wreckage, more than half of them in blue work shirts with FAA or NTSB stenciled on their backs.

“They’re never going to leave, are they?” he muttered.

“Federal employees, boss,” said Tenny. “They can spend another year on this.”

“While we go broke.”

“That’s not their concern.”

Turning back to the engineer, Dan blurted, “Joe, what the hell do we do? Tell Passeau about it? Call the FBI? What?”

“Passeau’s coming around to the sabotage idea on his own. Give him another couple days.”

“And then what?”

“Then he’ll call the FBI, I guess.”

“And then what?”

Tenny shrugged. “They find the skunk in the woodworks.”

Heading back to his desk, Dan said, “Joe, I want a list from you of everybody on our payroll who might have done it. Everybody with the technical smarts to sabotage Hannah’s flight.”

“That’s not gonna do much good, boss. Anybody smart enough to knock off the spaceplane is smart enough not to let us see how smart he is.”

“I still want the list,” Dan said, knowing it was most likely nothing more than busywork.

With a stubborn shake of his head, Tenny replied, “You’re on the wrong track. It isn’t one of our tech people.”

“Says you.”

“Says logic,” Tenny snapped. “Remember logic? Thinking with your brain instead of your glands?”

Dan plopped down in his desk chair and waited for the engineer to continue.

“If it was a spurious command to the thruster that caused the crash, it had to come from a ground station or a plane in flight along the reentry ground track. That means outside people. People who are organized. People who have high-tech toys to work with.”

“Not one of our employees?”

“Our people were all here, Dan, on the job. Everybody in their places with bright shining faces.”

“So how’d the bastards get our command codes?”

Tenny grimaced. “Bribery. Blackmail. Threats. How the hell do I know.”

“You’re saying that somebody in the company sold the command codes to an outsider.”

“Or gave them. Maybe under duress.”

“Who in the Seven Cities of Cíbola could it be?”

“Anybody who had access to the codes. Not just techies, either. Secretaries. Cleaning crew. Anybody.”

Dan huffed out a breath. “That’s a big help.”

“That’s the facts, boss.”

“They’d have to know the ground track of the reentry path, too. And the timeline. They’d have to know where the plane was when it started its reentry maneuver.”

Tenny’s brows rose. “Right! Now you’re starting to think.” “So whoever sold us out had to be somebody with access to the command codes and access to the flight’s timeline and ground track.”

“That narrows it down,” Tenny said. He jumped up from the chair and headed for the door. “Okay. Now I’ve got a small-enough list to work with.”

“Keep me informed,” Dan called after him. Silently he added, And don’t tell anybody else about this. He thought Tenny already knew enough to keep quiet.

As soon as Tenny breezed out of the office April appeared at the door, looking cool and in charge of herself. Dan thought of the old aphorism, If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs—it shows you don’t understand the seriousness of the situation.

“You got two calls,” April said, “while you were in conference with Dr. Tenny.”

Dan tapped the keyboard on the credenza that extended from the left side of his desk. The computer screen showed a call from Wendell T. Garrison of Tricontinental Oil. And a call from Senator Jane Thornton in Washington, D.C. His breath caught in his throat.

Suddenly embarrassed, he waved April out of the office with a gruff, “Okay, thanks, kid,” and clicked his mouse on Jane Thornton’s name and number.

She wasn’t available, of course, but a serious-faced young aide told Dan that the senator would call him back. Telephone tag, Dan fumed as he clicked on Garrison’s name.

To Dan’s surprise, the old man himself appeared on the screen.

“Mr. Randolph,” Garrison said in his creaky, raspy voice, smiling genially. “Nice of you to return my call so quick.”

“It’s good of you to call,” Dan responded, wondering how much bullshit they would have to throw at one another before they got down to serious talk.

“My board of directors is interested in your powersat project,” Garrison said.

Surprised at the man’s directness and even more surprised at his interest, Dan said merely, “Really?”

“Yep. Think you can find the time to come up to Houston and talk to me about it?”

Dan thought, Another shark in the water. Better count your fingers when you shake hands with him. And your toes.

But he said, “I’d be happy to. I’ll tell my secretary to set it up with your people.”

“Good,” said Garrison. “Put your secretary on the line and I’ll do the same from this end.”

“Right.”

Before Dan could switch the call, Garrison added, “I assume you’ll want to set this meeting for sometime this week, right?”

“If that’s convenient for you,” Dan replied.

“I know you’re in a bind. No sense wasting time about this.”

Nodding, Dan said again, “Right.” Yep, he told himself as he blanked the screen, the old shark smells blood in the water and he’s moving in.

He went through the motions of doing a day’s work while his mind spun the possibilities and unknowns like a wild symphony that would never end. Who’s the spy in our midst? Why did they sabotage Hannah’s test flight? Can Joe find the bastard or will we have to bring the FBI into this? Yamagata’s offered financial help and now Garrison is nosing around. How the hell can I hold onto my own company when the big guys are moving in on me? What’s Scanwell going to decide to do?

Why doesn’t Jane call back? What’s she up to in all this? Does she want to help me, or Scanwell? Or both of us? Why hasn’t she called me back?

All day long he kept coming back to that question: Why hasn’t Jane called back?

It was nearly midnight when she did. Dan had spent a long evening going over his financial situation with his chief accountant, an exercise that always left him depressed. He trudged along the catwalk back to his apartment, trying to keep his eyes off the wreckage sitting silently in the shadows of the dimly lit hangar floor. Nobody else in the building, he realized, except the security guards making their rounds. Even Tenny’s office light was off.

Feeling tired and grimy, he went to the kitchenette without turning on any lights and opened the refrigerator. Pretty bare. Pulling open the freezer door he saw that Tomasina had stacked three frozen dinners in among the pizza slices, ice cream, and instant juice containers.

The phone buzzed. Dan slammed the fridge shut and peered through the shadows at the screen on his night table: the caller ID spelled out SENATOR THORNTON, WASHINGTON D.C.

“Phone answer,” he called as he hurried to the bed.

Jane’s face appeared. She seemed to be in her office; Dan saw some photographs hanging on the paneled wall behind her. She was wearing a tailored blouse, but her auburn hair hung loosely to her shoulders. After hours, Dan guessed. Alone in the office after a long, busy day.

“Hello Jane,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I got your call,” she said. “I wanted to wait until everybody was out of the office before I called you back.”

“Yeah, I figured that’s what you’d do.” It was a lie, he knew, but now that he thought about it he realized he should have known it all along.

“Morgan was very impressed with you.”

“It was good to see you again,” he said.

“He wants to work your satellite program into his energy policy, Dan.”

“Haven’t seen you since the day after the bridges went down.”

“Dan, let’s stick to the business at hand.”

“You’re the business at hand, as far as I’m concerned.”

She tried to frown at him, but a tiny smile curved the corners of her mouth slightly. “Dan, that was a long time ago.”

“Six years, one month and…” it took him a moment to count it out in his head, “…eleven days.”

She looked away for a moment, and when her eyes returned to him she had regained control of herself. Completely serious now, she said, “If you want Morgan’s support, Dan, you’ve got to promise that you’ll support his candidacy.”

“Sure, I know. One hand washes the other; that’s politics. But you’re the only one I’m interested in.”

“And not your power satellite?”

He took a breath. “You come first, Jane.”

“I didn’t in San Francisco.”

“You do now. I’ll drop this whole project. I’ll sell it off to Yamagata or Garrison or the local junkyard.”

This time she really smiled. But her eyes remained sad. “I know you think you would, Dan. But we both know it’s not true. You couldn’t give up your work, your life.”

“Try me.”

“And you mustn’t sell out your project to the Japanese or the oil interests.”

“I’ll be a senator’s husband. I’ll sit home and stay quiet and show up at parties with you and take you home and make love to you all night long and well into the morning.”

Her smile faded. “Dan, it’s too late for that.”

“Why? You tied up with Scanwell?”

“It’s just too late for us, Dan. We both have more important things to do.”

“I don’t give a damn about any of that. I love you, Jane. There’s nothing more important to me than you.”

“Yes, there is!” she insisted. “Getting Morgan elected president is more important. Getting the United States off its dependence on Middle Eastern oil is more important.”

He shook his head. “Maybe it is, but that’s not my department. The world will have to take care of its own problems. You’re the only one that I’m interested in.”

“Dan, the country needs Morgan Scanwell in the White House. None of the other candidates have the guts or the vision—”

“You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you?”

The question didn’t seem to surprise her. She replied stiffly, “That’s none of your business, Dan.”

“Yeah. Right. And neither is Scanwell. You can both go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Dan, you can’t

“Good luck on your way to the White House, Jane.” He banged the phone’s OFF button so hard he nearly knocked the console off the night table.