The cell phone was a good idea, though, he had to admit. He pulled his own out of the breast pocket of his coveralls and called Kinsky’s office. He got Kinsky’s voice maiclass="underline" “I’m either out of the office or on another line at the moment. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
Roberto didn’t leave his name or number. Not then, and not the next two times he called, either. He simply said, “It’s me. I’m comin’ down to see you. Be at your place eight o’clock.”
By late afternoon, with the lowering sun lancing through the trees blurring by, Roberto began to think Kinsky wouldn’t be in his office all day. I better go straight to his apartment, Roberto thought, before I check in at a fuckin’ motel.
Caracas, Venezuela
Except for the toilet facilities, it wasn’t so bad living at the airport overnight, Van Buren thought. The Venezuelan soldiers patrolling around the area were stiffly polite; their captain—the only one who spoke English—was friendly and as helpful as possible. Two portable toilets had been wheeled up on the back of an army truck; one whiff of them and Van Buren avoided them as much as she physically could. She and her crew slept in the Citation’s cabin: not all that comfortable but not bad once the army rolled up a portable generator to keep the plane’s air conditioner going.
Van Buren talked with Dan Randolph every hour or so and was in constant touch with her launch crew back in Texas. She and her team worked from laptop computers networked to the command and control equipment stowed in the plane’s cargo hold. Using the laptops, they could follow the spaceplane’s flight as it orbited serenely three hundred miles up, circling the Earth every ninety-six minutes. That’s the theory, Van Buren said to herself. We’ll see if it works in the real world. Everything was happening in such a rush, they had to check out the laptops’ links with the command system while in flight from Texas.
It’ll work, Van Buren silently reassured herself. Then she added, God looks out for fools and drunks.
The plan was to bring the plane down on its sixth orbit, nine hours after its launch, which meant Van Buren’s people would have to send a signal to the spaceplane’s control system, ordering it to make a maneuver that would alter its orbit so that it would be aligned properly for a landing at Caracas.
Van Buren sat in a seat in the rear of the Citation’s cabin studying the display screen of the laptop wedged behind the chair in front of her. Its keyboard rested on her lap and she had a headset clamped over her short mouse-brown hair.
Everything’s going fine, she saw, peering at the readouts from the spaceplane’s internal sensors. They could get data from the bird only when it was within range of Matagorda or Caracas; Dan had refused to ask NASA to allow them to use the agency’s TDRS satellites to relay the plane’s telemetry signals.
As the signal from the spaceplane faded out over the horizon, Van Buren looked up at her cohorts, each of them bent uncomfortably over a laptop just as she was.
“One more go-round,” she called out, “and we bring her home.”
They responded with a faint smattering of approval. “Yahoo,” was the strongest term she heard, and that sounded sarcastic, tired.
The incoming message light in the corner of her screen began to flash yellow. Van Buren touched a key and saw HQ: DAN RANDOLPH scroll across the bottom of the screen.
She clicked on his name and Dan’s image appeared on the screen. He looked tired, too. He hasn’t slept any more than I have, Van Buren realized.
“How’s it going?” Dan asked.
“Fine,” she replied. “Except for the Porta Potties. I don’t think they’ll last another whole day.”
He grinned at her. “Bring the bird in and you can spend the night in the finest hotel in Caracas.”
“On the company?”
“Sure. What’s a little more red ink?”
In Washington, Senator Thornton awoke from a troubled sleep. She vaguely remembered a dream, something about Dan being in space, soaring weightlessly away from her while she watched from the ground, helpless, her feet mired in mud or cement or something; it took all her energy to take a single step while Dan floated like a child’s balloon farther and farther away from her.
She sat up in bed, reached for the TV remote control unit on the night table, and turned on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels.
More bombing in Israel. She saw a shattered building, bloody bodies sprawled in the street. Smoke and the chilling wail of ambulance sirens. Not waiting to find out who did what to whom, she clicked through a dozen channels. Local news, children’s cartoons, a cooking show, a pair of political analysts discussing the approaching season of primary elections. As if they know anything about it, Jane groused silently.
Nothing about the spaceplane. Nothing about Dan.
She went back to Fox News, turned up the volume, and went into the bathroom. Half an hour later she was showered, combed, dressed in a light blue skirted suit with a pale lavender silk blouse. Still not a word about Dan’s spaceplane.
Out of sight, out of mind, Jane thought. Dan launched without telling anyone so the news media are snubbing him. Certainly NASA’s not holding news conferences about a private space operation. Not this one, at least.
But that’s going to end, Jane knew. The top item on her agenda this morning was to start the machinery rolling for a Senate investigation of Astro Manufacturing Corporation’s unauthorized launch. She wasn’t on the science committee but Bob Quill was, and he had agreed to call for the investigation.
The nerve of the man! Jane felt all the old anger rising within her. The unmitigated insolence. To launch that rocket without telling anyone, without informing the proper authorities. The gall. That iron-clad ego of his.
Yet, as she checked her lipstick in the mirror by the apartment’s front door, she saw she was smiling. That’s Dan, she told herself, her anger melting away. If only he’d let me help him. If only he’d play by the rules.
She frowned at her image in the mirror and shook her head. If he played by the rules he wouldn’t be Dan Randolph. And you wouldn’t still be in love with him.
“Idiot!” Jane snapped at the face in the mirror. Then she left her apartment, heading for a day’s work in the Senate. As she went down in the elevator a new thought struck her. Dan’s got to land the spaceplane sooner or later. The news media will be all over him then.
There were more than a dozen phone messages on Dan’s computer screen that morning, most of them from news reporters. And April hadn’t shown up for work. That’s not like her, Dan thought. The kid’s been ultrareliable. Then he remembered that she had left early yesterday afternoon. He considered calling her apartment, but the upcoming landing of the spaceplane drove that idea out of his mind almost before he had thought of it.
Still, it bothered him. With his computer Dan could run his office pretty well without her, and he could even get his own coffee down at the machine on the hangar floor. Instead, he decided to drive down to the blockhouse and follow the landing on the big screen there.
Before he could get up from his desk chair, though, Claude Passeau barged into the office with two other men right behind him, both of them wearing gray business suits, both looking like high school principals trying to seem tough. A pair of government bureaucrats, Dan realized: Tweedledum and Tweedledee.