Jezebel's Ladder (28 page)

The Mike O’Callaghan Federal Hospital ER buzzed with
activity. Tannenbaum jumped the line of people suffering from softball injuries
and flu symptoms. When they were in an isolated area and the Colonel was
getting the needed attention, Talos asked Jez, “How sure are you about this?”

Jez pointed to the screen. “Look at
the shape of this data plot. See how it keeps dropping? That’s a ballistic
parabola, not an orbital ellipse. Ask NASA to do a curve fit.”

“I think I liked you better talking
shoes,” said the soldier. He pulled out Tannenbaum’s phone and began making
calls.

Jez scanned the data from the
beginning of the launch, comparing intended with actual. She opened her mind
and processed in Simplify mode. It felt like watching a movie in fast-forward.
She got a call from Fortune shortly after she spotted the first anomaly.

The billionaire sounded grumpy. “I
called your house to tell you the good news, but no one was there. The Red
Giant team located an ideal planet, the perfect ending for your boyfriend’s
documentary.”

She snorted. For the first time,
mankind had a place to go in this galaxy, a potential new home. Now, the very
thing that had made it possible was going to be responsible for their doom.

When she said nothing, her boss
continued to grouse, “You’re not supposed to be working weekends. It’s in your
contract. You’re especially not supposed to be ordering people at multiple
sites to put in overtime.”

“Sorry, lots of things are
happening that won’t wait for Monday. Midas called in their favors. I can’t
tell you the details, but I need you to trust me. Someone sabotaged a military
satellite. When I told Tannenbaum it was coming down, he had a heart attack.
The spooks are checking my math now. If I’m right, my dance card is going to be
full for the next three days.”

There was silence on the line for a
moment. “Your new call sign is Quarterback. I’m notifying Crusader of the
change. Is there anything you need?”

She was momentarily stunned by the
cooperation. “Track my phone, give my husband periodic updates, and be ready
for at least one weird request with no questions asked.”

There was another pause. “Benjamin
is a lucky man.”

She felt guilty now for not
inviting him to the wedding. “It was a very spur-of-the-moment ceremony in
Vegas. Claudette was my matron of honor.”

The lonely billionaire sighed. “I’m
glad she’s found a friend like you. She needs…” Jez could tell by the sound of
his voice that the man still loved his ex-wife. That didn’t take a genius IQ or
alien rewiring of the brain.

“Tell her one of your secrets,” Jez
blurted.

“What?”

“Tell her the worst thing about
you, and see how she reacts. She may not fall into your arms, but I’ll bet she
talks to you again,” said the former dancer.

“What kind of secret?” asked
Fortune.

“That’s up to you, but I’ve always
been curious why the courts let a porn king adopt a teenage boy with no blood
ties. Don’t tell me. Whatever it is, I’m betting it makes you human,” she
suggested.

“Some of us take secrets to our
grave, Quarterback.”

“She knows you’re dying, Elias. I
told her,” she admitted. “That’s why she came back to LA with us. I think on
some level she’s willing to give you another try.”

The billionaire was speechless.

Talos sat next to her on a plastic
chair too small for him. “If you’re done shooting today’s episode of Oprah?”

“Quarterback out,” she said, pushing
the end button on her phone.

“NASA confirmed your data,” Talos
said, sounding like he was delivering a eulogy.

“There’s more,” she announced. “The
decay started before the field went up. Tell them to check drift at T plus
twelve hours. The loss of power just accelerated the inevitable.”

The fixer put his head in his
hands, swearing. “You don’t give good news, do you?” Recovering, he grabbed his
phone again. “Talos again. Our source, Mary Sunshine, has stated that drift
data twelve hours after launch means hostile intent. I’ll wait.”

Five minutes later, the fixer let
loose with a stream of invective. That meant she had been right again, a hollow
victory. He called a new number. “General, sir. Sources confirm it was an act
of war. Tell all concerned to seek shelter soonest. Yes, sir, I will.”

After hanging up, he stood. “Come
with me,” Talos ordered. She followed. He got back into the car. “The general
ordered me to get you to Cape Kennedy. We need your analysis in this crisis.”

“Crisis, act of war, what is going
on here?” Jez demanded. “I can’t give you accurate answers if I’m a mushroom.”

On the way to the flight line, the
fixer told her the estimated megatons the satellite would release when it hit.
He typed the password for her to read Nick’s warning message on Tannenbaum’s
laptop.

Her breathing became erratic as she
held back tears. It wasn’t fair. This was supposed to be her honeymoon, the
happiest twenty-four hours of her life.

“Put your head between your knees,
it’ll help,” Talos suggested.

She eventually stopped
hyperventilating by the time they got to the runway, but the grief was still
fresh. “Can’t I call my husband and have him…”

“No. If we’re going to have a
chance of stopping this, we have to keep a lid on things, and not start a
panic.”

“If?” she squeaked. “I have news
for you, soldier: someone is already panicking!”

“Look, someone with high clearance
stole the plans for the Icarus device a week ago. I think the thieves only
arranged for the crash because they wanted to make sure they had the only copy
left.”

“What about the man who invented
the field, Cassavettis?” she asked. “I could still get help from him.”

“He’s escaped,” Talos admitted.

“Now who’s full of sunshine? What
am I going to do in Florida?” Jez tried to come up with some sort of plan.
Assuming Oobie wasn’t a basket case from losing Trina, he couldn’t track the
escapee till after dark. They somehow had to get Oobie in range, get him
clearance, and find Nick with a sample of his DNA. If Tannenbaum were
conscious, this would only be slightly impossible. There was no way finding the
inventor would work in time. Even if they located him, they would need to
stabilize him with the Ethics page and wait for him to wake up. “At least tell
me he’s not dangerous. Tell me this Cassavettis has never hurt anyone.”

Talos shook his head. “The intern
he stabbed is in critical condition. He shot the man he caught sleeping with
his wife. If this man feels righteous anger toward someone, he doesn’t
hesitate.”

She wanted to kick something and
scream.

Talos tried to encourage her. “Most
of life is showing up and not giving up. It’s my job to get the right people to
the right place at the right time. I need you to man up, or whatever it is you
fashionistas do.”

She stared lasers at him and
speed-dialed Brazil. “Quan? You’re going to be getting a call from a very
worried general. Give him everything he needs. Price is no object. You heard me
right. My call sign is Quarterback.”

Talos laughed. “That’s what I’m
talking about.”

“I’ll need this laptop on the
flight and a satellite phone. I’m still not promising I’ll be any use. You need
to find this Crupkin fellow mentioned in the message. He knows more than any of
us. He’s worth three of me.”

“Damn, now you’re giving orders?”
he asked, smiling.

“You’ve got a better idea?” she
asked.

He shook his head. “No ma’am. You’re
right, but a man’s allowed to be amused by it.” Talos got her strapped into a
jump seat in a military transport as he snapped a few orders to the men around
him.

Jez stared at the formula on the
screen. She might be able to solve it in a room full of rocket scientists, but
without the butterfly she’d given to Trina, the effort might well be fatal. Suicide
was wrong. However, she
might
be able to make this sacrifice herself if
she knew she could communicate the answer before dying. On the other hand, even
a few minutes of effort would cost the life of any unborn child she might be
carrying.

PJ woke up in the back of a white van with light-gray
interior, speeding down the freeway. His ankle was handcuffed to a metal
bracket on the wall. He lay on a padded vinyl bench, with Amy fastened by one
arm to the wall beside him. He tasted blood in his mouth from a laceration
inside his lower lip. Most of his muscles felt like he had run in a marathon
and then been rocked to sleep with real rocks. He said something unintelligible,
and Amy’s face lit up.

“You’re awake! Those thugs told
everyone you had heat stroke as they were carrying you out. This van looks like
an ambulance from the outside. Goofy was taken to a police car to ‘fill out a
report.’ I’m not sure where they’re taking him.” She misted up a little. “I’m
sorry. I thought we could trust the senator.”

He put a finger on her lips.
“Shh…headache.”

Wanting to help, she kissed his
forehead. He pointed to his injured lip next and what started out as a brief
peck stretched into a long, exploratory kiss. Her breathing had changed when
she finally pulled away. Amy looked him up and down, as if seeing him for the
first time. Then they kissed again.

About twenty minutes later, the
driver opened the back door of the van and shouted, “Break it up; someone wants
to talk to you both.”

PJ didn’t even know the van had
stopped. Amy smiled smugly, straightened herself, and used her free index
finger to wipe something off the corner of his mouth.

The driver’s face had been heavily
weathered, but the suit was just as clean and crisp as his partner’s. The
younger man had an immaculate haircut and dark sunglasses.

As the driver unlocked them, he
said, “If you try to run again, we have orders to shoot you. Am I clear?”

PJ nodded.

The guards herded the pair through
an empty parking garage into a cement corridor. There were cameras everywhere.
The tunnel ended in an elevator with polished, steel doors. There were two
floor buttons, plus the usual open and close controls. Their escort pushed none
of these; rather, he opened a panel below the emergency call box to reveal a
hidden keyhole. When the guard inserted his key and turned it, the elevator
went down very fast and presumably very deep. PJ realized that the structure
concealed some sort of secret bomb shelter.

The doors opened into a bunker. The
floors were lined with thin, blue carpet. At the fourth, unlabeled, metal door,
they turned right, and the younger guard knocked twice. When the door opened a
crack, Amy was ushered inside for interrogation. The older guard led PJ one
door down to a tiny, metal-lined room containing a caged 40-watt bulb, a metal
chair, and two army cots. The carpeted floor was softer than the bed.
Abandoning escape plans for the time being, PJ covered the floor with blankets
and sheets from the cots, and stacked the pillows for maximum plumpness.

Still, he had no luck resting. The
shouts of recrimination and accusation from the next room leaked over the
transom into his cell. He couldn’t make out details, but her interrogators
seemed to be spending half their time arguing with each other.

Eventually, the older guard rousted
PJ. Amy’s guard led her back to the cell. He saw her for just long enough to
tell she had been crying. PJ couldn’t hold her, and they didn’t get time to
talk. Now he was angry.

He stalked into the room ahead of
his guard, feeling thirty pounds of muscle bigger than he really was. The room
held a nerve center: a conference table surrounded by computers, maps,
communications consoles, and a coffee machine, all unmanned. Seated around the
table were Paulson, the senator, a general, and a nervous weasel with a
clipboard and a white lab coat. His badge read, ‘Wilkes, chief scientist.’ The
name reminded PJ of the guy who shot Lincoln and then broke his own leg—just
the sort of leadership you want in a disaster this big. The general looked
about sixty, with an unlit cigar, an army dress uniform, a glass of water, and
several antacid tablets nearby.

The room was decorated in shades of
military green with tables of dark wood. The open chair matched the small,
metal one in his cell, while theirs were all padded and on rollers. The only
clock in the room was directly behind his chair, where the guard would block
his view. It was all calculated to make the suspect feel helpless and inferior.
PJ decided to play his own game. Before Paulson could even start, he cut in
with, “What did you say to her to make her cry, you bastard?”

He never flinched. “Nothing but the
truth, my boy. Now we’d like to ask you a few questions about Mr. Cassavettis.”
News of the capture must have caught him unprepared, because Paulson was
dressed quite casually. He wore a salmon sweater over his dress shirt, but no
tie.

“You know more than I do,” PJ
griped. “You’ve blocked us at every turn.”

Paulson admitted, “After a review
of the NASA security tapes, it appears that Cassavettis may have had three to
five minutes of unrestricted access to the satellite prior to launch. We think
he sabotaged it.”

Wilkes added, “Probably the fuel
feeds. It’s falling now.”

“Nick told you that would happen
before you even sent it up. The power dampening effect probably killed all
power to the pumps,” PJ said.

This time, everyone looked at the
general. The general remained silent, glaring at Paulson. Both men had obviously
had this discussion before. Paulson took back control of the interview. “We
dismissed his results because he didn’t have the right data. Wilkes took over
for him as the project lead soon after the shooting incident. We’ve been making
improvements to the base prototype and added several redundant components which
should have made his disaster scenario impossible. The super-cooled
superconductors, feasible only in space, increased the potential power yield by
a factor of three. However, there were unforeseeable glitches in some of the
other systems onboard and the field activated.”

PJ shuddered at the thought of an
Icarus field that could be almost a football field wide. “What the hell
possessed you to send that collection of baling wire and spit up there to begin
with?”

The senator chimed in. “Mr. Smith,
ever since I heard about this fiasco, I’ve been asking the same thing. If
someone off the street can see the truth that plainly, then why were the top
scientists on the project ignoring it?”

This was a sore spot with Paulson.
In his best diplomatic tones, he said, “We had eight months to develop a
counter to the Chinese threat. The satellite had to launch when it did. Icarus
was just an insurance policy. We never intended to use it. Once we did, the
surprise value would be gone. We planned to have all the bugs out in the next
generation and have the shuttle do an in-place upgrade.”

“Just turn your toy off by remote
control,” PJ suggested.

Wilkes nearly whimpered. “We can’t.
The protective field causes static on the radio.”

The ghoulish Paulson shrugged.
“Even if they succeed, it may not be in time. The field will take at least ten
hours beyond receipt of the termination order to become completely inactive, but
you’re not here to offer solutions. We want you to give us a list of every
place Cassavettis is likely to run. He’s the only one with experience enough to
resolve this difficulty.”

“Just like my other suggestions,
you’ve probably already got them covered: his mother’s house, Crupkin’s
apartment, and the TV stations. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he showed up
on your doorstep and went postal on you.”

 “Cassavettis has been a thorn in
my side from the first,” Director Paulson said. “Nothing about him has been
convenient, the prima donna. To help us track Mr. Cassavettis, we’ve compiled a
list of every friend and significant acquaintance he’s known since birth. Your
job is to give me five new names which we do not yet have.”

“I’m not going to be a snitch for
this Gestapo trip you’re on. What are you going to do? Lock me up? Lock up my
friends? Intimidate my family? You’ve already done all that, you bastard! If it
weren’t for what might happen to Amy, I’d have beaten you with a table leg by
now.” The guard moved conspicuously closer. “Just leave Nick in peace. If he
knew how to stop the infernal thing, he would have already. Why don’t you just
cut your losses and shoot the bird down?” PJ asked, lowering his volume. “If
the missiles don’t work, use a laser.”

Wilkes said, “Between the
atmosphere and the filtering effects of the field, we can’t hurt it with normal
lasers. We already lost one ground station trying.”

“Then try a gamma-ray or X-ray
laser.”

This time the general intervened,
his voice deep and grandfatherly. “The only one strong enough that’s in working
order and mobile is on the satellite itself. Kind of ironic when you think
about it.”

Senator Braithwaite blew a gasket,
“Jesus, you have an X-ray laser on that thing? Do you know what those things
can do?”

PJ winced at the ‘J’ word. As mad
as he got, he never used that word to swear. It was the one line he never
crossed. “They cook people from the inside out invisibly. Great assassination
weapon,” he replied.

Braithwaite glared at the general,
who waffled, “The CIA insisted on it, but now is not the time to point fingers.
We need to work together to contain this situation to prevent global panic and
international overreaction.”

“Just where is this bird going to
crash?” PJ asked.

Several people fidgeted in their
chairs. Wilkes wheedled, “We could be off by as much as 500 miles in our
estimates of the crash site.”

“It won’t matter. It’ll still hit
the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” said Paulson decisively.

PJ collapsed into the chair
provided. “The bigger the water supply, the bigger the chain reaction. Wormwood,
the star that dries up a third of the waters of the world. I see now why Nick
kept quoting Revelation. Japan, Hawaii, the Pacific Rim, California. Gone.”

Paulson corrected the
understatement, relishing the pain the knowledge caused. “Our simulations
predict much worse than that. The explosion will be measured in mega-Nagasakis.
The Earth’s crust will certainly be ruptured. The oxygen producers in the
world’s oceans are the only thing keeping us breathing today. Without them,
nothing on this planet will live long. The most optimistic scenario is that the
satellite encounters a monsoon with clouds at very high altitudes when it
re-enters. Then it would only rip off the upper atmosphere, all the remaining
ozone layer.” The director sighed. “We’ll be lucky to survive the cosmic
radiation that leaks through afterward unless we all move deep underground.”

PJ could hear his guard’s stomach
churn. The general offered one of his antacids to the man. Evidently, the news
often had this sort of effect on people. How had the president taken it? Had he
even been told yet?

Wilkes shook his head. “Even if we
manage to deploy the solar panels to increase drag, it wouldn’t help. The
best-case scenario is that the satellite slows down enough to crash over
land…which, in the current flight path, would place it over the Bering Strait. The interaction between the Icarus field and ice causes the same chain
reaction, only more tightly focused. Those projections show the explosion
causing a fatal shift in Earth’s orbit.”

The general added, “But we would
never live to see it because the Russians would view the explosion as an intentional
act of aggression. They’d retaliate with every missile they and their allies
possess. World War III. Of course, our primary defense against said attack will
have just crashed. Again, you’ve got to appreciate the irony.

“We’ve seized the Brazilian
civilian launch facility just in case we come up with a plan. They had a
commercial shuttle of their own prepped to launch. The cover story will hold
till Monday morning. However, when they fail to launch, CNN will suspect. By
then it won’t matter.”

“How long have we got?” PJ asked.

Paulson weighed the question.
“Sixty-five hours till splashdown. Anything else? Good. You’re dismissed.”

The leaders were still arguing when
the guard escorted PJ out. Once in the hallway, the older guard whispered, “So
let me get this straight: they’re putting you in a cell for trying to stop this
disaster?”

PJ nodded. “I’ve lost my job, car,
friends, and freedom trying to stop these jerks. Since I got dragged into this
mess, I’ve lived in constant fear except when you shocked me into unconsciousness.
Although, it hasn’t been all bad; I got to meet this really nice girl, Amy.”
The programmer’s face lit up as idea occurred to him. “I’ll give you everything
in my wallet, everything I have left, if you let me spend my last sixty-five
hours with her.”

The guard smiled crookedly and
offered him a cigarette. “The name’s Joe.”

PJ declined. “You know those things
will kill you.”

When Joe lit up, his partner yelped
about regulations.

“Shut up,” the older agent ordered.
He put PJ in Amy’s cell and locked the door shut. Then, Joe said to his
associate, “You don’t know nothin’. Take a walk with me, kid.”

Amy had already stuck gum over the
camera lens in defiance. At first, he just meant to comfort her, but it
escalated fast, kisses hungrier and more demanding. While the others were
casting blame for death, she and PJ took the opportunity to celebrate life.