Lincoln Warner stopped talking. His eyes flicked across the faces of his small audience in search of some reaction. They looked stunned by what he had told them, and pursing his lips, Warner threw up his hands as if both confirming that he had finished and that he was as surprised by his own findings as they were. It added a demagogic touch to what he had just said.
‘You can’t argue with the molecules,’ he said again, by way of epilogue.
‘So much for man’s God-given stewardship of the earth,’ remarked Cody.
‘Amen,’ said Swift.
‘Someone saying their prayers?’
It was Boyd, back under the clamshell and wearing one of the SCE suits. In one hand he has holding a helmet. And in the other he was holding a gun.
‘Are you planning on using that thing?’ asked Jack.
‘If I have to,’ said Boyd. ‘But please don’t make me shoot one of you just to prove that I’m serious. Jack.’
‘That’ll be a first,’ said Swift. ‘You never made much of an impression as a scientist. But go ahead with the good manners if it makes you feel any better about yourself. You’ll still look like a cheap hood with a gun in his hand. What are you, anyway? Some kind of government agent?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Didn’t they tell you? Or were you just too dumb to ask?’
Boyd put down his helmet and, grinning unpleasantly, took a step toward her.
‘You and that smart mouth, Swifty. Think you’re Katharine Hepburn, huh? Well I never did like redheads much.’
For a moment she thought he was going to shoot her. Then he started to say something, but before he had uttered more than one syllable, the ever-present grin had disappeared and he slapped her hard, a backhand blow that knocked Swift off her feet and sent her sprawling to the floor.
Intending to grab the hand holding the gun. Miles Jameson darted forward only to find the barrel of Boyd’s automatic shoved painfully under his ribs. Their eyes met for only a second, long enough for Jameson to relax and return his weight to the back foot.
In his last e-mail. Hustler had only said that he wasn’t to kill any American citizens. He hadn’t said a thing about not killing the citizens of Zimbabwe. Boyd made a tut-tutting noise and pulled the trigger.
Under the clamshell, the noise of the shot left everyone’s ears ringing like a tuning fork. Rebecca started to scream. Boyd let her. She was too important to his plans for him to kill her. Jameson hung on to Boyd’s arm for a moment, like a blind man. He and Boyd were the only two still standing. Thoroughly cowed, most of the team gradually picked themselves up from the crouching, protective poses they had adopted on the floor, as equally slowly, Jameson collapsed. Swift stayed where she was, still stunned by the ferocity of Boyd’s blow. Jutta crawled toward Jameson, in a futile bid to stem the blood that was trickling from his side. His legs jerked convulsively and then he was gone.
‘He’s dead,’ she said quietly when at last Rebecca stopped screaming.
‘You bloody bastard,’ said Mac.
‘You know it’s a pity it had to be Miles,’ said Boyd. ‘I rather liked him. A bit stiff sometimes. But I really did like him.’
Smiling bitterly he wagged a finger at Swift who was sitting up and cradling her jaw with her hand.
‘It only goes to show,’ said Boyd. ‘You never can tell. I was sure it was going to be you I’d have to kill, Swifty. But when it came down to it, I just couldn’t do it. Don’t ask me why. Don’t even thank me. And believe me, I shan’t hesitate to do it again. I’m kind of warmed up now.
‘Okay, people, I think it would be best if everyone went over to the other side of the clamshell. Just in case we have any more unfortunate accidents involving handguns.’
Jutta helped Swift to her feet as Boyd waved the gun impatiently.
‘Come on, come on.’
‘You won’t get away with this, Boyd,’ said Jack.
‘This? This?’ He laughed. ‘You don’t even know what this is all about.’ He paused as something seemed to occur to him. ‘No, that’s not quite true, is it. Jack? After all it was you who guessed about the satellite.’
Noting the look of surprise on all their faces, he permitted himself a smug little smile.
‘I heard you talking while I was lying on my bunk. The clamshell is bugged, of course. You don’t think I’d let you talk about me behind my back without listening in on what you had to say, do you? That’s not nice.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t mind telling you, I thought I was never going to find that bird. But it was you. Jack. You who told me where to find it, for which I owe you my thanks.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Thanks. I’m very grateful to you.’
Covered in Jameson’s blood, Jutta shook her head and said tearfully:
‘Why is this satellite so important that you had to kill him? Why?’
Boyd crouched down and glanced out of the airlock door.
‘The storm is beginning to blow over. But it will be a little while yet before I can leave you folks and finish my job.’ He stepped forward and, drawing up a chair, straddled it, leaning on the back. ‘I guess I can tell you. And me — well, you wouldn’t know it, Jutta, but I’m a natural born storyteller.’
‘It’s like Jack said. A spy satellite. A bird, as we prefer to call them. A Keyhole Eleven, for obvious see-through-your-bathroom-door reasons. Codename Peary, same as the explorer. The bird was to occupy a polar orbit along a seventy-five-degree line of longitude obtaining fine-grained strategic intelligence of specific sites in India, Pakistan, and the People’s Republic of China. In short, to monitor the developing situation in the North Indian theatre.
‘However, on completion of its low-orbit mission, instead of boosting to a higher orbit at thirty-five thousand kilometres, the bird began slipping closer to the earth’s atmosphere. Whoops. We wondered about that. The usual did-it-fall-or-was-it-pushed kind of question? Finally the eggheads decided that it had been affected by recent sunspot activity. Caused an overload in the bird’s solar power cells. You were right about that too, Jack boy. Solar cells supported by a small thermonuclear generator. You’re really a very clever man, for a rock rat. Anyway, the overload caused the computer to miscue both the imaging and the boost to higher orbit. The sunspots also acted to increase the density of the uppermost part of the earth’s atmosphere. But when the density increases, so does the friction acting on the bird, with the result that the bird effectively tripped and fell. Computer forecasts led us to believe that reentry would take place in a nonhazardous location somewhere on the Antarctic continent. That’s where I was at the time. Got myself all ready to go find it. But it turned out that periodically the bird tumbled sideways along its orbit, with the result that the air drag factor soared and the decay rate increased by fifteen or twenty times. So instead of coming down in the Antarctic, it came down somewhere else and it came down early. Whoops again.
‘Our earliest guess as to the location was along the original orbital line. We tracked the automatic distress signals on the existing frequency as long as we could but lost contact as the satellite entered Nepalese airspace. We figured somewhere in the Himalayas. But where? Sent up a few spy planes to try to spot it. No dice. Finally we got our best lead from, guess where? National Geographic magazine. A little article about Jack boy and his partner swept off the mountain in an avalanche caused by a meteorite, on or about the exact time we calculated our bird was in the sky. Wouldn’t you just believe it? Five-hundred-million-dollar aircraft overflying the whole of Nepal looking for a missing satellite, and this is where we find it. In a lousy magazine article. Eeeeeh! One in the eye for the folks at the Pentagon.