I was cleaning out my desk and putting all my files in cartons when my printer began to hum. I looked around to see the handwritten fax as it dropped into the tray:
Never fuck with the gods.
The fax came unsigned, but when I double-checked the number at the top of the page against my Rolodex, I saw that it had originated from Huygens’s extension at CybeServe. His company was going down the tubes, but he was damned if he wasn’t going to take me with him.
And now here I was, in another place and another time, fucking with the gods again.
“Huygens wanted to get me out of there,” I said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something he doesn’t want me to know about. I screwed him up once … he doesn’t want that to happen again.”
John nodded his head. “Could be. Could be …”
“I spotted the woman I met last night,” I said as I cinched my seat upward again. John drove up the eastbound ramp to I-64, the car sliding into the dense midday traffic heading downtown. “Just before Huygens found me. She was across the room from us …”
“You did?” Tiernan looked mildly surprised; he passed a tandem-trailer rig that was chugging down the right lane and squeezed in behind a twenty-year-old BMW with Illinois tags and an expired gas-user decal. “What did she look like?”
“African-American, about five-six … um, sort of plump, about forty to forty-five. Some gray in her hair. It was her, all right.” I hesitated, then added, “I used the camera to zoom in on her badge.”
“Yeah?”
“Found out her position, too. Printed right on the badge.”
“No kidding …”
“No kidding.”
I fell silent. He waited for me to go on. “Well?”
I pointed at the shitbox ahead of us. Pale fumes billowed from its exhaust pipe. “Can you believe that they’re still allowing cars like that on the road? I mean, I thought they were supposed to be enforcing the phase-out laws, and here’s this clunker-”
“Gerry …”
“I think I’m going to do a column about this. I mean, I don’t mind much if someone like Chevy Dick’s got an antique in his garage and takes it out once every now and then, but when you see something like this in broad daylight … y’know, it’s just disgraceful …”
John sighed. “Okay, okay, knock it off. What do you want to know?”
I grinned. It was an old game between us dating back to our college journalism days: quid pro quo information trading. You tell me your secrets and I’ll tell you mine, tit for tat. Sometimes the game had been played for higher stakes than this: when he wanted to know the name of the cute brunette in my Econ 101 class, I traded it to him for the home phone number of the university chancellor. It worked out pretty well; I was able to call the chancellor on a Sunday afternoon while he was watching a football game to ask him embarrassing questions about next semester’s tuition hikes, and for this John received the name of his future wife.
“Ruby fulcrum,” I said. “What’s it mean?”
John sighed. “It’s a code phrase of some sort. To be honest, I don’t know much about it myself, except that it has something to do with the Sentinel program. This lady keeps mentioning it, though, so it must be important somehow.”
He suddenly snapped his fingers, then reached above the windshield to pull down the car’s flatscreen. “Let’s see if CNN has anything on the launch.”
“‘Don’t know’ doesn’t count …”
“Okay, okay.” Keeping one eye on traffic and one hand on the wheel, John switched the CTV to bring us CNN. “Ask me another one.”
“Why are you talking to this woman?” I asked. “What’s this story all about?”
John didn’t say anything for a moment. On the screen, the CNN anchor was reading a story about the deployment of Army troops on the Oregon border. Footage of rifle-toting soldiers tramping down the ramp of an Air Force transport jet, APCs and tanks rolling down highways between coniferous forests, antiwar demonstrators attempting to barricade military convoys …
“It has to do with a murder,” he said, carefully picking his words. “My source-and yeah, I think it’s the same lady, though I’ve never seen her-says that a Tiptree scientist was killed recently. Even though the police are still calling it random homicide, she claims it’s part of a conspiracy and has something to do with this Ruby Fulcrum business.”
The footage on the screen changed back to the CNN newsroom; a window in the right corner displayed the NASA logo. “Here we go,” John said as he turned up the volume.
“… launched a half-hour ago from Cape Canaveral, Florida,” the anchorwoman intoned as the screen switched to a shot of the shuttle Endeavour lifting off from its pad. “In its cargo bay are the final components of the Sentinel 1 ABM satellite.”
Animated footage of the massive satellite, identical to the holographic image that had been displayed in the Tiptree atrium, replaced the live-action shot. “Linkup between the shuttle and the twenty-billion-dollar satellite is expected sometime tomorrow afternoon.”
“A murder?” I asked. “What’s this got to do with-”
“Forget it.” John reached up to switch off the CTV as he finally found room to pass the BMW. I caught a glimpse of the driver as we moved around the clunker: a redneck wearing a baseball cap, a cigar clamped between his teeth. “That’s all I’m giving you,” he continued, “and I shouldn’t have told you that much. Your turn.”
“Beryl Hinckley,” I said. “Her badge listed her as a research scientist. If you want, I’ll get Jah to print you a copy of her photo so you can recognize her when you meet her at Clancy’s tonight.”
John nodded. “I’d appreciate it.”
We fell silent for the next few miles as the suburbs thinned out and the towers of the uptown business district of Clayton hove into view. Clayton had come through the crisis pretty welclass="underline" new office buildings, rich homes, not many indications that a 7.5 earthquake had socked this part of the city. Of course, much of the federal disaster relief funds had been channeled in this direction. The government had been fully aware of who was wealthy enough to be able to repay the loans, and everyone in St. Louis knew where the influential voters resided.
“Stay out of it,” John said after a while.
“Excuse me?”
“Stay out of it,” he repeated. “I know you’re looking for a good story, and I know you’re nervous about your job, but … just let me handle this one by myself, okay? If I need help, I’ll call you in and we can share the byline-”
“C’mon. You know that’s not what it’s about …”
He looked askance at me and my voice trailed off. It was a lie and John knew it. No, I wasn’t nervous; I was desperate. If I didn’t deliver something impressive PDQ, Pearl was going to find a new staff writer and I’d be back on the street. At best, I’d be some poor schmo freelancer, peddling video reviews to the Big Muddy for nickel-and-dime checks while living in a homeless shelter.
I didn’t want to encroach on my friend’s rightful territory, but this bit with Tiptree and Beryl Hinckley and Ruby Fulcrum was a hot potato I couldn’t afford not to catch.
“C’mon, man,” I said, “you can’t-”
“I know.” John kept his eyes locked on the highway ahead. “Look, you’ve got to trust me on this one. This is serious business, and not a little bit dangerous. Just … y’know, let me handle this by myself. All right?”
“All right.” I raised my hands. “Okay … whatever you say.”
John didn’t have my problems. He still had everything I had lost. A nice car, a house in the ’burbs, a wife who didn’t despise him, a job that was secure. A kid who was still alive. I envied him, sure …
For a moment, despite our long friendship, I caught myself hating him. He must have read my mind, because he nervously cleared his throat. “Look, if you want my advice,” he began, “you’re going to have to put some things behind you.”