Jezebel's Ladder (29 page)

Jez stared at the computer screen until her plane passed into
darkness and the low battery warning prompted her to shut down or lose her work.
She wanted to learn everything about the abomination that would destroy all
life on this planet. Eventually, she couldn’t see through her own tears. She
wasn’t smart enough. Worse, her Ethics training warred against itself. If she
did nothing, the world was doomed. If she cheated, it was murder. And they
wouldn’t let her phone her family to use a lifeline.

God, she wanted a drink.

When she least expected it, Talos
gave her hope. “I found that scientist you wanted, Crupkin. NASA is holding him
for questioning, but no one’s coming for him until Monday. I can get him sprung
and flown anywhere you want tonight, but he doesn’t trust the government.”

“Liberal?” she asked raising her
voice over the loud engines.

“Russian,” he replied.

“Stable?” she asked.

“Rock solid, but poor as a church
mouse,” Talos informed her.

“Get me a phone line,” she shouted.
A few minutes later, he did one better, supplying her with a noise-cancelling
headset.

A thick accent answered her, “To
whom am I speaking?”

Jez said, “My name is Jezebel
Hollis. I’m better at this in person. Do you know my husband, Buddy Hollis?”

The voice brightened. “I loved him
in that movie!”

“Yes, well the two of us work for
Fortune Aerospace. He’s on the public relations side and I manage the think
tank.” She listed a few names in the organization.

“I’ve heard of it,” Crupkin said
warily.

“We need your expertise. I’m willing
to double your current salary.”

The man laughed, “I don’t have a
salary. I’m a peon.”

“Want a place in the most advanced
science organization in the world, a credit card with no limit, and an office
with any toy you can imagine?” she offered.

“Who wouldn’t? How do I know you’re
for real?”

“Name a scientist you know off my
list.”

“Phineas. I’ve met him at a
conference. Very funny.”

“I’m going to give you his home
number. Ask him if you can trust me. Better yet, ask him about the new planets
we’ve discovered in the Goldilocks zone. Tell him Butterfly said it was okay to
share.” She read off the number from her phone.

“No shit? This is fantastic! If it
checks out, I’m in. Why are you asking me now?”

“Because you need to fly to Brazil tonight,” she said. “You’ll get the rest of the details when you’re in the air.”

“The right people, the right place.
You listen,” said Talos with approval.

****

Over the headset, Crusader heard
from his man walking by the boarded-up house. “Cornflake is leaving. She’s
wearing the same clothes as this morning.”

“Follow her,” he ordered as his
driver raced down the freeway toward Long Beach.

“She’s leaving in Steve’s car,
heading north.”

“Fall back, don’t get spotted. When
we leave, you’re responsible for checking the house. Wait till she’s out of
sight for two minutes.”

“Roger.”

“Car one, follow at a safe
distance. She’s heading my way. I’ll turn around and use the tracking device to
stay just ahead of her. After fifteen minutes, we’ll switch. By then, we’ll
have the helicopter in position.”

There was a lot of weaving through
traffic and a sharp turn that rattled his teeth. After several loops, they were
halting on the northbound ramp, ignoring angry honks.

His phone rang; Dirt Bag’s name
showed on the caller id. “Busy,” Crusader snapped.

“Where’s Claudette?”

“My man Steve has burns over 30
percent of his body, and I’ve got a lead on the bitch who did it to him. Your
wife’s body wasn’t at the scene. We’ll assume she’s unharmed. If I don’t catch
this killer today, we might never see her again. She’s packed her bags, cleaned
her back trail, and your son gave her everything in his bank account. I think
it’s highly unusual that the only other person in your will disappears after
Daniel makes a payment to an assassin.”

“I’m sure Daniel had nothing to do
with it.”

“He’s not thinking clearly.”

“She can keep the money. I just
want Claudette safe.”

“That’s what kidnappers count on,
sir. If you’ll excuse me, I’m in hot pursuit.” His car accelerated to 70 in the
next few seconds, and he shut off his phone.

The plan went well till they got
close to the city, and she pulled off onto surface streets. The helicopter
couldn’t follow, so he called their resident hacker over the headset. “Where is
she going?”

“She Googled singles nightclubs
from her phone,” said the hacker.

He listed several of the top
choices before Crusader stopped him. “They’re all within a few blocks of one
another. Call in everyone we have. Get them to that triangle now. I don’t care
what you need to do, threaten, or promise. We’re playing catch-up.”

He got lucky. They kept the target
under covert surveillance while gathering resources. She hopped from club to
club, men buying her alcohol at every stop. One spotter said, “Talk about jail
bait. She’s a fish, sucking down every drop and dancing like there’s no
tomorrow. She’s been putting out feelers for a three-way.”

“Good, I want her loaded and
clueless when I drop the hammer.”

When everything was in place, he
had twenty-three men surrounding her in the current club. Crusader got out of his
car at nightfall and chambered a round in his gun. The music was painfully loud
and repetitive, but the head of security couldn’t have repeated the words if
asked. He was focused on one task alone, stopping this killer.

He could feel her from across the
dance floor. She stopped the grind she was performing against a pair of
football players and bopped over to her tiny booth. She tipped back a fluted
glass and drank something sweet and melon colored. Afterward, she collapsed
onto the red, leather seat, her well-formed ass sticking up in the air.

Crusader knew this was a
distraction. She was on to them. “Light her up,” he ordered, pulling his
sidearm. Around the room, and perimeter, the other men did the same. Red laser
pinpoints danced on her chest and forehead. “Freeze, Horvath!” he bellowed, not
four feet from the blonde.

Sedna pulled a pack of explosives
out of her oversized purse. From the size of the package, she could take at
least fifty people with her. Attached to the bomb by a leash of wires was a
held-held detonator. A green LED lit up when she squeezed the control.

“That’s a deadman’s switch, no one
fire!” Crusader shouted.

The music stopped.

“You and me,” he offered into the
silence.

Sedna nodded, licking a drop of
Midori off her lip.

“Get these people the hell out of
here!” Crusader ordered. People screamed and his men did their best to evacuate
over a hundred civilians.

When the room had been cleared of
all innocents and his men had pulled back to the perimeter, he held up his
hands and placed his gun on the floor.

“Your backup, too,” she insisted.

He pulled the gun off his ankle and
put it beside the first.

“Come sit next to me,” she ordered.

 “Why?” he demanded. At this
distance, he had a slight chance of survival. Any closer and he didn’t have a
prayer.

“You killed my sister.”

“I didn’t expect to survive that
fall. I was just trying to take one of you traitors with me.”

“It doesn’t matter. We can’t stop
the wheels now. You made the trade, your life for all those others. I didn’t
ask for that.” She looked vulnerable and beautiful, but he knew this was going
to be his last night on earth unless he handled the viper very carefully. She
held the detonator in her left hand and patted the seat beside her. Terrified,
he sat beside her.

“Am I pretty?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Smart?”

“The best mass-murderer I’ve ever
faced,” he admitted.

She smiled at this. “That means a
lot coming from you. You’ve probably studied me more than any man on this
doomed planet.”

“What do you want?”

Suddenly, she was crying, surprising
them both. “I don’t want to be alone. My…my sister couldn’t be here with me.
She has a family of her own now.”

He nodded.

“Hold my hand,” she said.

He grasped her right hand with his
left.

“I have to burn my DNA,” she
explained. “It’s part of the rules.”

“I understand. Leave no evidence.
You can’t get caught.”

She sniffed, “Finally, someone who
gets me. How screwed up is that?” After a pause, she asked, “Do you think I
have a soul?”

“I think it’s pretty damn tattered,
but yes,” Crusader said, trying to keep hope alive.

“Give me a kiss and tell me it’s
the best you’ve ever had.”

He leaned in, and when their lips
touched, Crusader grabbed for the detonator. She let go a fraction of a second
before he got there. She knew a moment of pure peace, like the instant before
the supplicant is crushed by the idol of the Jagganath.

PJ and Amy lay in each other’s arms on the blanket later
that night, neither of them talking for a long time. Eventually, she broke the
glowing silence by speaking his name, “Percival.” It sounded great when she
said it. “I guess I’ve always had a weakness for white knights. Tell me more
about how you got your name.”

“That would be the story of my mom,
Gwenevere. You’d like her. Her family was British, Grandpa was in the military.
Mom vowed she would never move around like that again and her husband wouldn’t
be gone six months out of the year. After they settled in Canada, she went to nursing school in Pennsylvania where she met Dad. He was an accountant for the
state who had never left his hometown except to visit the seashore one week
every summer. His father was a missionary who had died overseas during some
outbreak. I guess the wandering gene skips a generation, because I’m a
techno-gypsy. I haven’t been in one place for more than two years since age
eighteen.”

“My, a poor Virginia girl seduced
by a man of the world,” she embellished with a Scarlett O’Hara accent.

PJ felt a little sheepish, not
wanting to imply anything of the sort. “The end of the world has a powerful
effect on people. Normally, I wouldn’t do this on a first date. I don’t think
you would either.”

He ran his hand over her beautiful
hip as he struggled with how he could tell her. Barely audible, he mumbled,
“This was the first time I’ve ever gone all the way.”

PJ expected a lot of reactions:
that explains it, what’s wrong with you, and so forth. Instead, she nuzzled
into his chest and said, “I think it’s sweet. My husband was a virgin when we
met, too.”

When he drew back involuntarily, she
continued, “Easy, my husband died.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Amy said. “It was over
six years ago. We were together for a year. He was a cop. I got my driving
habits from him. One night he was issuing a speeding ticket when a drunk from
the other lane swerved toward him. They head for the lights, just like moths.
Brad knew that. I met the senator while I was lobbying for victims’ rights, and
I’ve spent most of my time since crusading for one grand cause or another.”
Echoes of happiness and tears mingled. “My only regret about my marriage is all
the things we left undone. I don’t want to make that mistake again.”

He held her close for a while,
admiring her, feeling her, breathing her in.

“So little time,” she mourned.

When he could no longer stand the suspense,
PJ asked, “Why me?”

She shrugged with her bare
shoulders. “If people knew exactly why they fell in love, it might spoil the
whole effect. You scientists can’t put a chemical or a gene on everything.”

“Come on,” he begged. “I’m fishing
for some compliment. My frail, male ego needs it.”

“All right, I suppose I knew when I
held you in my lap in the ambulance. Something was different about you. Your
vulnerability probably triggered my maternal instincts, too.”

“So you’re saying that my
personality benefited from electroshock?”

“No, although I think it would help
men in general.” She smiled but tried to hide it behind her hand.

“Don’t cover your smile; it’s
beautiful. You should do it more often.”

She kissed him for the compliment.
“I think I’ve smiled more in the past two days that I have the whole year.”

He kept trolling for an answer. “So
if not the electroshock, what attracted you?”

She mused, managing to look sexy
even in an army blanket. “You knew what was going to happen with the senator
before I even suspected. I trusted the creep, but you took steps to make sure
he wouldn’t get away with it. In the middle of all this, somehow you made me
feel safer.”

Amy cursed the satellite,
surprising him with her breadth of vocabulary. “Why would anybody build such a
thing?”

A day ago, he would have given the
trite and true “because he could.” Now, his mind wandered over all the horrors
they had learned about since that fateful e-mail. PJ started out being mildly
sarcastic about the Sandia accident, but by the time he said it out loud, he
saw the answer. “So people could accelerate to relativistic velocities.”

Calmly, he stroked her hair and
said, “After we get dressed, I need to talk with Wilkes about turning our bomb
into an engine.”

****

Joe agreed reluctantly to take him
to the room that Wilkes was using as an office. Computer print-outs were strewn
all over the desk and floor. The chief scientist smelled of stale sweat.

“Wilkes, what is the Icarus field
exactly?”

He shrugged. “Personally, I think
it’s the proof of some fundamental principle of the universe. Only we don’t
know what principle that is yet.” He seemed irritated by this admission and
snapped, “Is there some point to this question or are you just trying to avoid
spending time in your cell?”

PJ grinned. “Like I’d rather be
arguing with you than spending time with Amy! The Apollo space program started
with the V2 buzz bomb. We can do the same thing here. You said ice focused and
channeled the Icarus effect. How much ice would it take, placed like a shaped
charge, to vector the satellite away at escape velocity?”

Wilkes’ expression shifted from
annoyance to surprise, and then quickly to one of deep concentration. Wilkes
scribbled a few figures on a printout. He pulled out a pocket calculator and
tapped for a moment. Then he checked his results at the computer terminal. Five
minutes later, he said, “At the right angle, less than fifty kilograms.” The
idea gained momentum. “The International Space Station has plenty of equipment
sitting idle up there that we may be able to use. I have to tell Paulson
immediately!”

Somewhere, a digital clock was
counting down—sixty-one hours.

Unfortunately, Paulson was nowhere
in the shelter. In fact, his office had been thoroughly cleaned out. PJ did
manage to find a shower in the executive suite. He told Amy about it on the way
through so she could clean up.

When Wilkes and PJ went to the
elevator, things took a turn for the perverse. The reader blinked red when the
scientist ran his card through the slot. After the third failure, he muttered
some lame excuses and tried the door to the emergency stairs instead. It was
locked as well. The familiar nervous quaver crept back into his voice as he
shouted into the intercom. “This is Wilkes; we seem to be having a reader
malfunction. I need to come up.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” a voice replied.
“You’re not authorized to leave at this time.”

Wilkes swallowed, his Adam’s apple
bobbing like a sewing machine needle. “I just need to talk to Director Paulson.
I’m technical lead…”

“Dr. Paulson is not reachable right
at this moment. Would you like to leave a message?” This could have been a
machine for all the emotion in the voice. “His helicopter is passing through a
heavily mountainous region. He’ll be out of contact until he reaches the shelter.”

“I guess you didn’t make the cut,”
PJ said to the scientist.

“I’ll call Washington and clear
this up.” Wilkes ran for the conference room. Picking up the phone, he stared
at the silent handset in horror. “It’s… disconnected. Son of a b-b-bitch!” He
slammed the receiver against the cradle.

“You know too much,” PJ said. “We
all do. What Paulson can’t control, he buries.”

Wilkes collapsed, sobbing against
the table. “We’re all going to die.”

PJ gave him a moment, uncertain how
to put the pieces back together. “Everyone dies; it’s just a matter of how and
when. I, for one, intend to go down fighting. Is there anything heavy we can
use to batter down that door?”

Wilkes sniffed. “They’d only kill
us. There are guards with guns upstairs with orders to shoot on sight.”

“Show some spine, Wilkes. When this
is over, we’re going to be heroes! What about the computer lines?”

He shook his head. “They don’t use
phone lines. It’s too remote. They use a radio modem or satellite link, I
think.”

All the computers in the control
room turned out to be dead. “Right. Where’s the transmitter? It can’t all be
controlled from top-side, not if this is supposed to be a real shelter.” He
took PJ to a small room that could have been a closet. There were numerous gray
electrical boxes with a small, ancient terminal underneath. “Bingo!” said PJ.

Wilkes was still negative. “It’s
all password-protected. I’m sure he took me off the access lists just like we
did Nick. It galls me that the crazy b-b-bugger was right all along.”

The programmer pulled out the
terminal, powered on the screen, and began his magic. “All a good engineer
needs is enough of a discrepancy, enough of a loophole to make something work.”
A few minutes later, he had the network in the control room reconnected. The
video conference connection to the Brazilian commercial space center had never
been severed. “We can’t open any new lines, but we still have the coded link to
the US-controlled launch center.”

Amy met them in the hall, clothed
but barefoot. “Do you guys know why the water shut off on my shower before I
could wash my hair?”

Wilkes said, “If Paulson wants to
dispose of us, the drinking water will be disabled, too.”

To Amy, PJ said, “Maybe you should
help Wilkes with the bureaucrats while I see my guard Joe about the water.”

Sure enough, Joe found that all the
water supply had been shut off. “The place is in mothball mode,” he explained.
After tossing the place for provisions, the younger guard broke the news to the
others in the conference room. The K-rations in the pantry were almost twenty
years old, and none of them wanted to open a can to see if they were still
good.

Wilkes talked to someone in Brazil over the video link. He was holding up a magic marker sketch of some sort of harness
attached to a triad of telescopes. There were three scientists and two people
in blue dress uniform crowded into a small office to hear Wilkes sell the idea.

PJ whispered to his lady love,
“Looks like we have a pitcher of water, a bag of chocolate kisses, and half a
ham sandwich to last us the rest of our lives. Any idea how long that’s going
to be?”

Amy whispered back, “The next
launch window is in nine hours. The whole team will have to work through the
night to scrape together everything they need, but it’s possible.”

“I thought he said they could be
ready on a moment’s notice.”

She shrugged. “I guess with space
launches, nine hours is a pretty small moment. Right now, we have to worry
about the media. The change in schedule has made people curious.”

“No,” insisted the Asian man in uniform.
“It has to be three rods. Three points define a plane. What happens when you’re
even a fraction of a degree off with a cue stick in pool?”

“The resultant vector is uncertain,
and you could end up sinking the eight ball,” said Wilkes.

 “To get the angle of approach just
right, each lens will focus on a different star. The Hubble algorithms and the
Lucasfilm camera gear will enable the apparatus to keep the cameras, and
therefore the ice rods, on course.”

His collaborators in Brazil weren’t entirely convinced. “We don’t have an official set of design specifications
on this yet, let alone the time to test it right. We’ll have to coordinate with
Kennedy. Maybe we should wait for Director Paulson to give his okay.”

“Absolutely not,” Wilkes shouted,
showing backbone for once. “Paulson cannot be reached. I am the project lead
and have full authority to run Project Phoenix until he reaches the command
bunker. This is the fourth contingency plan, Colonel Quan, and our last. Do you
have any better ideas?”

There was a long pause, during
which the colonel looked around the room. “No, sir, Project Phoenix is a go. I
have a few problems, though. This is need-to-know, gentlemen.” The people
trapped in the bunker waited while he cleared the room at his end. “I know the whole
truth about Icarus; I just found out this afternoon. Who else can I tell?”

“Just the team on the shuttle. The
team building and programming the apparatus should be kept need-to-know.”

The colonel nodded. “Agreed. What
do I tell the Russians?”

“They’re being invited to witness
the experiment that could herald the beginning of the Interstellar age. When
you stop at the International Space Station, tell them the telescope assemblies
are to prove that the evidence has not been tampered with in any way. Their
technical teams will share the same live-camera feed that JPL and Houston are
getting. They should be more than willing to cooperate. They may try to demand
an astronaut on board. If pressed to the wall, we have the son of one of their
nuclear physicists already en route to your position. He’s an expert who just
got clearance. The Russians know they can’t get anyone else to the Brazil site by launch, so they’ll take Crupkin. He can cross-check any computer models you
do. He’s the one that built ours.”

PJ whistled softly. Goofy just got
a big promotion.

“And CNN?”

Amy stepped in. “Beat them to the
punch. Call a press conference, a huge media event for…how long will it take to
get the equipment off the International Space Station and get into position?”

“Give me ten to twelve hours past
launch for the International Space Station. Add another ten to get to the rogue
satellite, maybe more,” the colonel guessed.

“Ouch,” she said.

“This isn’t a trip to the corner
store,” said Quan.

Amy nodded. “I understand, but if
this shot fails, we won’t get another.” She took a breath, resumed her public
relations role. “After the equipment has been obtained from the International
Space Station, announce that an experiment is about to be performed by an
international team of scientists launched from neutral territory, which is the
culmination of a five-year effort more monumental than the Manhattan Project.
This experiment is to prove that Earth now has the technology to accelerate
spacecraft to near-light speeds powered by an environmentally safe fuel source.
They’ll all get press packets after the fact.”