True, I did make myself a well-known artist. But why did I stop there? I could have decided to make myself a king or a dictator or a Bill Gates billionaire—someone else rich and spectacular. But suddenly I’ve come to the conclusion that whoever I decide to be, I’m still me, regardless of the trappings, the money, the position, and all the education in the world. I think who we are remains the same, and I think inside each one of us is a little child who won’t tell the adult in us what’s wrong. I’m sure there’s a little girl in every woman and a little boy in every man. And very often that little child is still very upset over something that happened so far back he can’t recall the details, only the hurt. So I think in this “new” life of mine, what I tried to palm off on you had everything to do with that little boy in me and what he’s upset about, not Sharon, or even Lucy’s loss.
No, I think in the time I have remaining, which isn’t much now, if I could, I’d call my only sibling, my younger sister, and just tell her I love her. She’s down there, and I can almost see her with every pass, doing that ear tugging thing she’s done since childhood. But I can’t reach her now. It’s too late, and life’s been happening for two years without contact, and even the last time I talked with her, we were still so very much at arm’s length and… Dadlike. No “I love you’s.” My father never used the phrase. Phrases like that embarrassed him.
When I was born, Dad was forty-one. So many years later, here he was an infirm eighty-something, couldn’t take care of himself, and Mom was gone, so I had to act. I found a good retirement facility; I knew he hated it but he went quietly and I sold the house. I was very efficient and took a month off to get everything done. I thought he’d appreciate that—the efficiency. And once I’d made sure everything was okay, I said good-bye. With a handshake, the way he always dealt with me. I was just south in Tucson and I intended to come by at least every month—he was just a couple of hours up the road in Phoenix. But something always came up, and when I’d try to call too late at night, I’d get a small lecture from the night nurse. I didn’t like that, so I used it as a license to stop calling. So life slipped by and one night when I was lamenting the lack of open expressions of love in my family, I decided to go see him and tell him I loved him, words that had never been spoken between us. The decision made me feel good. I was going to take the time because I could never seem to find the right moment to call, and because he was getting very old and frail. I started looking for the right opportunity—which really means that I started making excuses why I didn’t have the time. I was still playing that game when word came that he’d died. Alone. Just up the road.
Every time this spacecraft soars over Phoenix I think about him. All those years, and I could never just call and say, “Hey, Dad, you know what? You don’t have to say anything, but I love you.”
The unique three-dimensional display in the middle of the circular command center is beginning to change, but only one technician sees it. The colored lines representing ground, tower, satellite, and fiber-optic connections across a quarter of the globe are shifting from green, the color of routine voice traffic, to yellow, orange, red, the colors of increased bandwidth utilization, the telltale indication that perhaps as many as a million people more than normal suddenly picked up their phones for a long distance call.
The technician keeps his eyes on the plasma display as he flails his right hand for the attention of the shift supervisor, whose eyes also go to the display. Both men stand in puzzled silence as a third checks with another major telephonic network, discovering the same sudden jump in activity there.
“Globecomm reports the same increase, including overseas traffic, and three of the cellular networks report the same. In fact, there are indications this is happening worldwide.”
More of the personnel in the control center join the head-scratching as they monitor the automatic rerouting of call overloads. Landlines that are normally standby-only have snapped into use, some routing through the old, almost decommissioned, AT&T land-based microwave system that first telephonically united the country in the nineteen fifties.
A young woman with pulled back hair and thick glasses leaves her position several tiers back and comes up quietly behind the supervisor, a laptop computer in her hands.
“I know what’s causing this. I just called my mother, too.”
“’Scuse me?” the supervisor says. “Everyone’s calling your mother?”
“No. Everyone’s calling someone they should have called long ago. It’s Kip Dawson, and what he just said.” She turns the laptop around so the team can read the words on the screen—as ten more trunk lines go red and a routing overload alarm sounds off somewhere in the command center.
Chapter 34
Once the “Enter” key is pressed, she knows there will be no going back.
Dorothy Sheehan thinks over the steps again, restraining herself from sending the benign bit of computer code into the system until she’s as certain as she can be that all bases are covered. The entire assignment has been an exhilarating contest of wills, a shadow fight between Griggs Hopewell and herself, but she’s thinking ahead to the good life to follow in the Beltway, with only an office job and real weekends to herself. Of course maybe she won’t be happy unless she’s walking a tightrope somewhere. Her years with the CIA were terrifying and wonderful at the same time, mainly wonderful because she never ended up caught or compromised.
Okay. Here goes.
Amazing, she thinks, how the tiny click of a key can be the beginning of a causal chain that blocks a billion-dollar launch. She waits for the tiny string of computer code to add itself to the appropriate program and gets the return message before signing off and shutting down. If it works as planned, the minute alteration will disrupt things just long enough to scrub the launch, the code alteration then disappearing.
At least, in theory that’s the way it should go. And if it does, Geoff Shear will have to follow through on his promises.
Dorothy carefully wipes off the keyboard and anything she’s touched before moving back to the door of the empty office, one she selected some days before on learning the normal occupant was out of town.
She thinks back to the close call last night and the wisdom of always figuring out from the outside of a hotel which is her window and checking for lights when she comes back. Otherwise she would have walked right in on whomever Hopewell had sent to search her laptop. There was nothing to find, of course, and she hadn’t planned to use it for a mainframe insertion, anyway. Much too risky, and for the past forty-eight hours she’s hoped that one or more of the legitimate problems she’s found can be accelerated into an aborted launch.
But she’s found that Griggs Hopewell comes by his can-do reputation honestly, and item by item, problem by problem, he’s kept working his magic and driving his team, four hours before liftoff, with everything still a go.
She waits with the office door cracked slightly until she’s sure the hallway is clear, then slips out. Her temporary office in an adjacent building is sufficient for monitoring what’s happening, but its computer terminal absolutely can’t be used outside the boundaries.
Dorothy chuckles at the thought of the people waiting right now to catch her computer’s numeric signature entering the mainframe. They’ll be waiting in vain, of course, but their trap was cleverly laid, and when she got bored enough to go look for it on the mainframe, she almost didn’t find it.