Nimec nodded toward a green and white road sign ahead of them that read:
“Looks like we’re coming up to our turn,” he said. “Another forty minutes or so and you’ll be meeting my friend and former colleague for yourself.”
As it happened, he was right about the turn but wrong about the length of time remaining on their trip, for only ten minutes later Megan Breen got her introduction to Tom Ricci… as well as two local law-enforcement officers.
It was by no means a pleasant encounter for any of them.
Nor was it one Megan would soon forget.
It always struck Nordstrum as fascinating that Roger Gordian, who had made opening up and changing the world through telecommunications a crusade, rarely opened himself up to the world, and possessed the most contained and unchanging nature of anyone he knew. But that sort of contradiction seemed a familiar story with men of towering accomplishment, as if by directing vast amounts of energy outward to achieve their broad public goals, they drained off reserves that most ordinary people applied to their private lives.
Or maybe I’m getting carried away and Gord just likes his furniture, Nordstrum thought as he entered Gordian’s office.
He paused inside the doorway, giving the room a bemused visual audit, comparing the way it looked now to how it had looked a decade ago, a year ago, or the previous autumn, when he’d last been inside it. Not to his surprise, everything was precisely the same — and in the same condition — as always. The place was a testament to careful upkeep, a paradigm of maintenance and preservation. Over the years, Gord’s desk had been refinished, his chair reupholstered, the pens on his blotter refilled, but heaven forbid that any of them ever might be replaced.
“Alex, thanks for coming.” Gordian got up from behind his desk. “It’s been too long.”
“Gord and Nord, together again for one outstanding SRO performance,” he said. “How are Ashley and the kids?”
“Pretty good,” Gordian said. He hesitated. “Julia’s moved back home for a while. Personal reasons.”
Nordstrum gave him a meaningful look.
“Husband with her?”
Gordian shook his head.
“The dogs?”
“Probably napping on my sofa as we speak,” Gordian said, and then motioned Nordstrum toward a chair.
Slam, Nordstrum thought. End of subject.
They sat facing each other across the desk. There was, to be sure, an aura of bedrock consistency and dependability here that Nordstrum, who had left his Czech homeland, a White House cabinet appointment, a D.C. town house, possessions, lovers, and most recently his multifaceted career behind with a lightness of foot equal to Fred Astaire sliding across a dance floor, found impressive and reassuring. It wasn’t as if time was standing still — Gord’s hair was a little grayer and thinner than it used to be, his once-petite secretary had filled out around the hips, and on the positive side, both had managed to stay reasonably in line with current fashions. But through tide and tempest, Gord’s office was Gord’s office.
“So,” Gordian said. “How’s temporary retirement agreeing with you?”
Nordstrum raised his eyebrows. “Temporary? You need to check your sources.”
“Spoken like a true journalist,” Gordian said. “Alex, you’re under fifty and one of the most competent and knowledgeable men I know. I’d just guessed you would eventually want to get back to work.”
“I won’t reject the compliments,” he said. “Fact is, though, that after the crypto brawl, and almost being hijacked aboard a nuclear submarine, and getting frozen so far out of the White House that its gardening staff fends me off with hedge clippers if I get too close, I don’t feel the urge to be anything but a couch potato.”
Gordian sat there without comment for several moments, Mount Hamilton visible through the window behind him, thrusting high above San Jose’s urban development, extending the atmosphere of benign yet unassailable permanence beyond the confines of the room.
“I know you were at the Cape for the shuttle launch,” Nordstrum said. “I’d tuned in to watch it on CNN.” He shook his head. “A god-awful tragedy.”
Gordian nodded.
“Not something I’ll ever forget,” he said. “The sense of loss… of personal grief in that control room can’t be described.”
Nordstrum looked at him. “I’ve been assuming,” he said, “that Orion’s why you got in touch.”
Gordian met his gaze and slowly nodded again. “I was conflicted about it,” he said. “While I respect your wish to stay free of involvement, I could use your advice. A great deal.”
“Every time I think I’m out of it they pull me back in,” Nordstrum said.
Gordian gave him a thin smile. “Thanks for sparing me the full Pacino impression.”
“Don’t mention it.”
There was another pause. Gordian steepled his fingers on the desk, looked down at them, then looked up at Nordstrum.
“You wrote an analysis of the Challenger disaster for Time magazine back in the eighties, before we knew each other,” he said. “I never forgot it.”
“And I never knew you read it,” Nordstrum said. His brow creased. “That was my first major piece. If recollection serves, we met a month or two after its publication.”
“At a Washington cocktail party thrown by one of our mutual acquaintances,” Gordian said.
“Coincidence?”
Nordstrum waited.
Gordian didn’t respond.
Nordstrum sighed, giving up.
“After Challenger went down, the media struck up the tune that NASA and the space program were finished,” he said. “I remember hearing this constant rattle about how an entire generation of children had suffered permanent emotional scarring from having viewed the explosion on television, and innumerable comparisons between that event and JFK’s assassination, and predictions that we would never be able to recover or muster the will to go into space again.”
“You very strongly attacked that notion.”
“Yes, for a whole list of reasons,” Nordstrum said. “It allows a terrible accident to be packaged as a neat blend of pop psyche and sensationalism for the nightly news and the Oprah show. It completely discounts human resiliency and says we’re compelled to act as we do by external forces that are beyond our control. Maybe worst of all, it assumes failure to be a given, and then relieves us of responsibility by promoting a linear fiction, a simplistic cause-and-effect explanation for that failure. ‘Don’t blame me, blame my psychological deficits.’ In my opinion, nothing could be more misleading and demoralizing.”
Gordian looked at him. “You see why I miss having you around, Alex,” he said.
Nordstrum smiled a little.
“Lay a soapbox at my feet and that’s what you get,” he said after a moment. “At any rate, the central point of my article was that blaming Challenger for the loss of public confidence in NASA was getting causes and symptoms totally mixed up. We all grieved for the astronauts who died aboard that spacecraft, but the agency’s tarnished reputation after the accident didn’t result from a national trauma. It was a consequence of institutional problems that had been developing and compounding for quite a while, and the ugly blame game that erupted when the Rogers Commission, and later the Augustine Report, brought them to light.”
“Concluding that NASA’s internal bureaucracy had gotten so large there was a total disintegration of authority and decision-making procedures,” Gordian said. “Each manager had become lord of his own kingdom, and their feuding had broken down vital lines of communication.”