“Now,” he said, holding out his hand. “Let’s have the payment.”
The outlaw gestured briskly toward one of his men, who stepped forward to pass him a leather satchel much like the one Sergei had been given. He opened the bag himself, then angled it so both Russians could easily see inside. This time it was stuffed with authentic packs of U.S. bills.
“It’s all here. Send our regards and goodwill to your bochya, Vostov,” he said, using the Russian slang term for godfather as he handed the satchel over to Molkov with a little bow.
Molkov removed one of the banded packs at random and riffled its edges with his thumb, holding it close to his eyes. Satisfied, he put it back inside, closed the bag, and slung it over his shoulder.
“Okay,” he said to Alexandre. “Let’s go.”
They turned back toward the waiting Citroen, careful to avoid stepping in the blood that had pooled around Sergei’s body.
It was Alexandre, chancing to glance through the windshield, who noticed that their driver was no longer in the car, his door flung wide open. Instantly realizing what that meant, he jerked his head toward Molkov.
But by the time he opened his mouth to warn him, it was too late for either of them.
Even as the Citroen had arrived and their leader and comrades-in-arms broke cover to meet it, a dozen other members of the Albanian fis, or outlaw clan, had remained concealed amid the vegetation uphill, their attention and weapons trained on the road.
Everything had gone wholly according to plan. When the Russian physicist was shot by his supposed body-guard, the Citroen’s driver had taken advantage of the momentary distraction to exit the car unnoticed and plunge into the roadside brush, putting himself safely out of harm’s way and leaving his brethren with a clear field of fire.
They had watched their leader hand the second satchel to the larger of the Russian gangsters. Watched him open it and inspect its contents — again, exactly as anticipated. As soon as he had confirmed receipt of their actual payment to the second Russian, the men lying in wait had readied themselves, their guns angled downward, their targets in steady view. To insure that the Russians would not be alerted to the deception in time to use their own weapons on their clansmen below, they had held their fire until the mafiyasi started back toward the car, turning away from the guerrillas.
In the moment before the trap was sprung, it appeared the wiry Russian had recognized the deception and turned to alert his partner.
He hadn’t had the chance. The gunmen on the slope opened up on the Russians, cutting both down where they stood. The volleys continued for several seconds, spraying the dead bodies, riddling the left side of the car, near which they had fallen, with bullet holes, dissolving its windshield in an avalanche of jagged glass shards.
At last the shooting ceased, its echoes rapidly swallowed by the engulfing silence of the defile. Bits of leaves and branches that had been trimmed by the gunfire fluttered to the road.
Down below, the guerrilla leader waved approvingly to the men behind the screen of foliage, then strode over to Molkov’s bullet-riddled corpse and knelt to retrieve the satchel of money that was still slung over his shoulder.
Their mission had been easily accomplished.
Now all that remained was to inform Harlan DeVane.
NINE
The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, a cluster of one hundred buildings located off Interstate 45 midway between downtown Houston and the Galveston Island beaches some twenty-five miles southward, is the primary administrative, testing, and astronaut training facility for NASA’s manned space exploration program. Its Mission Control Center (Building 30), a windowless, bunkerlike structure at the core of the 1,620-acre complex, has been the locus of ground support and monitoring operations for American space flights since the Gemini 4 launch in June 1965, and contains two Flight Control Rooms — or fickeres—manned round the clock by large teams of flight controllers for the duration of any given mission. For the thousands of scientific researchers, engineers, and management officials who have dedicated their lives to “the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space”—the agency’s mandate as defined in its Eisenhower-era charter — the JSC is where that goal has been advanced through imagination, intelligence, audacity, ingenuity, and irrepressible perseverence. For the far smaller handful of candidates who apply and qualify for the astronaut program, it is something even beyond that, a kind of Oz where they are bestowed the magical ruby slippers that will transport them to their hearts’ most wished for destination… only not the familiar terrestrial landscapes of home, as was the case with Dorothy, but the beckoning, mysterious heavens.
“Just click your heels together three times and say there’s no place like Betelgeuse,” Annie Caulfield muttered dryly to herself, aware she was about to make one of the most crucial decisions of her life. Immersed in thought, she sat looking out her office window at the tram that was moving across the JSC’s landscaped grounds as it delivered personnel and visitors to its various installations. Then she rotated her swivel chair and began absently studying the three framed photos on her otherwise bare desk. By chance the first one her eye fell upon was of her parents, Edward and Maureen, an 8 x 10 taken five years ago at a party to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary.
Annie smiled a little. Their preferred travel itineraries aside, she’d had a thing or two in common with Dorothy in her formative years, being an only child whose beginnings had been in rural Kansas. Her father had operated a one-man air transport service, and their family had lived so close to the airfield where he’d hangared his rattletrap Cessna that Annie could observe his take-offs and landings from her second-floor bedroom window.
Perhaps that had been what eventually led to her interest in sky-watching, she didn’t know, but when she was coming up on her eighth birthday Annie had asked for and received an inexpensive 60mm Meade refraction telescope for her gift, along with a Carl Sagan Cosmosphere that she had used to locate the planets, constellations, and galaxies from her porch on countless spring and summer evenings, Dad helping her level and rotate the tube on its tripod until she was old enough to manage it by herself. Seven years later he’d helped her accomplish another of her goals in the same attentive, patient way and given her flying lessons. By the time she was eighteen Annie had earned her license and was making air runs for him during breaks from school.
It seemed a sure thing in hindsight that her obsessions with astronomy and flying would converge into a desire to become an astronaut, though her decision to start her career by joining the Air Force had come as a total surprise to her mother and father. It had also been a source of great anxiety to them given the potential risks of warfare, risks that seemed particularly high in an age of limited regional conflicts for which the military relied heavily, and often exclusively, upon airpower to achieve their precision objectives. But her proficiency in the cockpit during her years of active duty had convinced her she could cut it with NASA, and Annie had submitted her application to its Astronaut Selection Office long before her F-16 Fighting Falcon was reduced to burning scrap metal while on a surveillance mission over northern Bosnia.
After her rescue, she had been reassigned stateside by her C.O. in keeping with standard Air Force policy to shunt pilots who had been downed in combat away from the theater of operations, regardless of their eagerness or apparent fitness to get back in the air — the understandable concern being that they might have suffered some hidden trauma that would cause them to blink for a split second when they needed to act, or conversely, overreact to a perceived threat, not a good idea either way when you were roaring over enemy territory at speeds upwards of five hundred miles per hour. Whatever inclination she’d had to argue the matter had been offset by her concern for her parents, whose fears for her safety had been borne out by events. For nearly a week before NATO searchers picked up the signal from her emergency locator beacon, it had been thought likely she had perished in the crash of her plane, and she hadn’t wanted to put them through that kind of gut-wrenching ordeal again.