Powersat

Washington, D.C.

“Senator Thornton!”

Jane turned at the sound of the voice. She didn’t recognize the young man elbowing his way toward her against the crowd streaming down the crowded marble corridor of the Hart Senate Office Building. Denny O’Brien, walking beside her, looked over his shoulder and whispered, “Gerry Zisk, Wall Street Journal.”

It was almost four o’clock, the nominal end of the working day for staffers, and already the corridors were jammed with office workers on their way to the homeward-bound traffic rush. The young man striding briskly against the human torrent looked too scruffy to be a reporter for the redoubtable Journal. He was balding but had a silly-looking goatee springing from his chin. He wore slacks and a baggy pullover shirt and, Jane noticed, expensive Birkenstock sandals that looked as if they had seen plenty of miles. But no socks.

“He covers high tech, science, that sort of stuff,”O’Brien explained before she could ask.

Zisk reached them and stuck out his hand. “Thanks for waiting up for me,” he said, grinning happily. “I just want to ask you a few questions about the bill you introduced on the Senate floor this afternoon.”

“Why don’t we go over to my office, where we can be comfortable?” Jane suggested.

Zisk nodded enthusiastically.

As they started walking upstream, with Zisk between Jane and O’Brien, he asked, “Is this bill part of Governor Scanwell’s plan for energy independence? I mean, it’s aimed at helping to raise capital for high-tech companies, isn’t it?”

“Yes, to both halves of your question,” said Jane.

They rounded a corner and went to the SENATORS ONLY elevator. O’Brien pushed the button, muttering about how the elevator stops on every floor when the staff are emptying out of the offices on their way home.

“Do you really think it’s possible for the U.S. to become totally independent of Arab oil?” Zisk asked.

The elevator arrived and a fresh flood of employees streamed out, forcing Jane and the two men to retreat back away from the doors. Jane thought of the old saw about Civil Service employees: How many people work in this office? About a third of the staff.

They got into the elevator and Zisk repeated his question as the doors slid shut.

“Totally independent of oil imports?” Jane mused. “That’s our goal. How close we can get to it, and how quickly we approach that goal, depends on who’s leading the nation.”

Zisk grinned at her. “I’m covering technology, Senator, not politics. Is it possible, technologywise?”

“Of course it is. A lot of the necessary technology already exists, and we can develop what isn’t ready today.”

They reached the top floor and headed down the corridor for Jane’s suite of offices. Instead of going in through the outer rooms, Jane pecked at the electronic lock on the door to her private office.

Zisk seemed unimpressed by the handsome, dark mahogany furniture. He barely glanced at the window and its view of the Supreme Court building.

“You’re really confident we can develop stuff like this solar power satellite?”

“We got to the Moon, didn’t we?” O’Brien snapped, heading for the refrigerator hidden beneath the ceiling-high bookshelves.

“And it cost twenty billion bucks.”

Jane took one of the green-and-white-striped upholstered chairs near the window. Zisk sat in the facing chair.

“You want something to drink?” O’Brien called, hoisting a chilled bottle of spring water.

“Beer?” Zisk asked.

“What kind?”

“Lite anything.”

“I’ll have a tonic with lime,” Jane called to her aide.

“Coming up,” O’Brien replied.

Hunching forward in his chair, Zisk asked again, “Do you really think this power satellite can work?”

Jane hesitated. The reporter didn’t have a notepad in his hand. There was no evidence of a recording device, unless he had one burrowed inside his pullover or jammed into a pants pocket.

“Are you recording this?” she asked.

He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “I’ve got a good memory.”

Jane gave him a wintry smile. “Then perhaps I’d better make a record of what we say.” As O’Brien handed her a tall glass of tonic, she asked, “Denny, would you turn on the machine?” Looking back at Zisk, “We can provide you with a copy, if you like.”

“Whatever,” he answered, shrugging carelessly. “Now, about your bill: this is a bailout for Astro Corporation, isn’t it?”

O’Brien shot her a warning frown as he headed for her desk. Jane waited until he had clicked on the digital recorder before replying.

“My bill is intended to provide help for struggling companies in areas of new energy technology without costing the taxpayers a penny.”

“Unless a company like Astro defaults on the loans.”

“The government has done this before,” Jane pointed out. “For Chrysler Corporation, for Lockheed. It’s nothing new.”

“But it is intended to bail out Astro, isn’t it?”

“It should help Astro, certainly. And other companies struggling to establish private ventures in renewable energy technology.”

“Name two,” Zisk said, grinning.

“Rockledge Industries has plans to build a hydrogen fuel facility, I hear,” Jane replied immediately. “And several companies are looking into the possibilities of establishing windmill facilities—wind farms, they call them.”

Zisk’s grin widened. “What about Sam Gunn and his zero-g honeymoon hotel?”

“That’s not a form of energy technology,” said Jane coolly.

Zisk changed his tack. “Word we get is that Astro’s going to sell out to Tricontinental Oil. Or maybe Yamagata. Looks to me like they won’t need your help, after all.”

Jane had a technique for hiding her surprise. She took a sip of the drink she’d been holding, then smiled as pleasantly as she could manage for the reporter, all the while thinking furiously of what her reply should be.

At last she said, “If that’s the case, then Astro won’t need the assistance my bill offers. But there are other new, sttuggling high-tech companies that will.”

Zisk nodded, his grin wider than ever.

That evening, Dan was sitting in a booth at the Astro Motel bar with Claude Passeau. They had shared a mediocre dinner and decided that some strong drink would be better than the desserts the restaurant offered.

“You must come to New Orleans,” Passeau said. “The food is infinitely better than here.”

“At least I got them to put in a halfway decent brandy,” Dan said, swirling his tumbler of El Presidente.

Passeau shook his head. “You should try Armagnac, Dan. Much better.”

“Armagnac?”

“It comes from the region of France next to Cognac, but it’s smoother and better tasting.” Passeau placed a hand on his chest. “That’s my opinion, of course.”

“Armagnac,” Dan muttered. “I’ll have to remember that.”

Passeau looked around the place. A couple of Hispanics were at the bar, quietly drinking beer. The barmaid was on the phone, talking intently, her free hand gesturing as if she were being hysterical in sign language. Country music seeped from the speakers set into the ceiling, some guitar-strumming lament about lost love.

“Whatever made you decide to build your headquarters here?” Passeau asked. “It’s like the end of the Earth.”

Dan sipped at his brandy. “We can launch over the Gulf of Mexico from here. And I had an uncle who was able to sweet-talk the parks department into letting us lease this half of the island from the sovereign state of Texas.”

“Ahh,” said Passeau. “Money talks.”

“Especially when it’s in unmarked bills being passed under the table.”

Passeau laughed. “You’re really something of a scoundrel, aren’t you?”

Feigning surprise, Dan replied, “I didn’t bribe the parks people. My uncle did that.”

“And look where it got you.”

“It’s not exactly a tropical paradise, is it?” Dan admitted.

“I’ve been to Cape Canaveral,” Passeau said. “I thought that was run-down. But this…” He waved his hand vaguely toward the bar.

“This will be a metropolis someday,” Dan said, grinning.

“Not in our lifetimes.”

With a shrug, Dan conceded, “Maybe not.”

“You worked for the Japanese, didn’t you?”

“Yep.”

“Up in space?”

“I wasn’t an astronaut, technically. I was what they call a mission specialist. In my case it meant being a construction worker in zero gravity.”

“Hmm. Did you like it?”

“Loved every minute of it.” Touching his nose lightly, “Even the fights.”

The look on Passeau’s face was somewhere between disbelief and fascination.

Dan let him take a swallow of the scotch he was drinking, then hunched forward slightly on the booth’s table and said in a lowered voice, “Claude, we’re ready to fly the backup spaceplane.”

Passeau backed away slightly. “I can’t authorize another test flight until we definitively prove what made the first plane crash.”

“We know what made it crash. Sabotage.”

“You may believe that, Dan. As a matter of fact, I believe it myself. But we haven’t any proof.”

“That’s because the proof isn’t in the wreckage.”

“Then where is it?”

“In Pete Larsen’s skull.”

Passeau pulled in a breath. “Then it’s permanently beyond your reach.”

“Look,” Dan said, hunching even further over the table. “Pete had access to the command codes for the plane’s control systems. And he knew the ground track. He sold that information to somebody. That somebody operated a radio transmitter that sent the command to fire the nose thruster. They knew how to activate the plane’s control system and they knew where and when to do it:”

“But the pilot could have overridden the command.”

“Not during reentry!” Dan whispered urgently. “Every microsecond is crucial at that point in the flight. Hannah had just started the pitch-up maneuver that angles the plane so the heat shield on its underside takes most of the reentry heat. Firing the thruster that pushed the nose down knocked the plane out of control. No pilot could’ve recovered. The plane was doomed.”

“Why didn’t she eject?”

“She probably tried,” Dan said.

“This is all conjecture,” Passeau said.

“If we flew the backup and nothing went wrong, that would prove that the crash was caused by sabotage, wouldn’t it?”

“No, it wouldn’t. There could be—”

“I want to fly the backup.” Dan insisted. Then he added, “Unmanned.”

“Without a pilot?”

Dan said, “Completely automatic. But this time we keep the command codes to ourselves and we don’t tell anybody what the ground track’s going to be.”

“You can’t fly like that, even unmanned,” Passeau objected. “There are other planes in the sky, you know. You’ve got to clear a flight path, get the FAA to allow—”

“That’s your end of the game, Claude. I need a big swath of airspace, wide enough so the murdering sons of bitches won’t know exactly where the plane’s going to be on reentry.”

“That’s impossible. You’re asking the FAA to clear half the continent of North America for you.”

“Just for half an hour, during the reentry phase of the flight. While the bird’s in orbit she’ll be all right.”

“It can’t be done, Dan. I’m sorry, but it can’t be done.”

“You mean you won’t—”

Dan’s cell phone began playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He grimaced., plucked the phone from his shirt pocket and flicked it open.

Jane’s face was on the tiny screen. She looked decidedly unhappy.

Before Dan could begin to say hello, she said, “Dan, we need to talk.”

With a glance at Passeau, he asked, “Face-to-face?”

“Yes.”

“I could fly up to Washington for the weekend, I guess.”

“No, not here. At the ranch.”

Dan hesitated and looked at Passeau again. He was making a great show of trying to catch the eye of the barmaid, who was still gesticulating with the bar phone pressed to one ear.

Lowering his voice, Dan asked, “Will Scanwell be there?” Jane said, “No. He’s got to run up to New Hampshire.” Breaking into a smile, Dan said, “I’ll be there Saturday in time for lunch.”

Jane said, “Come alone.” And abruptly cut the connection.