“Negative launch, Shepard. Safe your weapons. Acknowledge.”
“He’s coming up fast,” the sergeant was saying as the fighter lead replied.
“Roger, Crown, negative launch. Weapons safed. Standing by, and we have the target climbing steeply.”
“Jeez Louise,” the sergeant chimed in. “He’s climbing like a… a…” The sergeant glanced up nervously at the general, who smiled back in relief as he shook his head.
“Climbing like a striped-ass ape? Don’t worry, I’ve heard just about all of them.”
“I was gonna say a homesick angel.”
“Sure you were,” MacAdams chuckled, taking a very deep breath as he tightened his grip on the mike and pressed the transmit button to send the F-15s back to Elmendorf.
When the copilot had returned to the cockpit, Captain Gene Hammond, the chief test pilot for Uniwave, turned control over to him and came back to talk to Ben Cole, unsure whether to hug him or punch him out.
“So, Ben, what happened with Winky?”
“I… really wish you wouldn’t call it that.”
He could see the pilot’s features harden in a flash of anger.
“When a stupid piece of silicon tries to kill me, I’ll call it anything I damn well please. Now what the hell happened?”
“I don’t know.”
The pilot looked perplexed as he gestured to the array of computers. “But… you said you needed time, and you disconnected it successfully.”
“No, I said I had to check to make sure it wouldn’t plunge us nose down if I turned the computer off, which is what I finally did. I had to check a series of… of readouts. The program was holding the latching relays closed, but in a complex sequence, and I don’t know why.”
“You don’t know what went wrong?”
“No.”
“You don’t even know if the problem will repeat?”
“No.”
“But you told General MacAdams we’re through for the night. You do realize the company brass were listening, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Hammond sighed and shook his head. “Then God have mercy on all of us, Ben. At best, we’ve got one more shot at a test flight to make this salable, and I’ll bet with MacAdams right now we’re hanging by a thread.”
“I know it,” Ben replied quietly, his mind already chewing over the chances of finding and fixing in time what might be a single glitch in a software program of more than six million lines of binary code. With any luck, he thought, he could complete the job by the time he reached the age of seventy.
But Uniwave would need the problem solved in forty-eight hours.
TWO
TUESDAY, DAY 2 UANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA 8:25 A.M.
In a high-rise condo overlooking Vancouver’s west end, the incongruous sounds of barnyard animals wafted through the carefully decorated interior and scratched at the exposed ear of the sleeping owner, the abrasive vibrations subtly turning a strange dream to the bizarre.
April Rosen opened one eye and tried to focus on something coherent as her mind grappled with the possibility that pigs had found the twenty-third floor, bringing what sounded like a flock of chickens and geese along for good measure.
She pushed herself up from the bed and blew a curtain of jet-black hair from her eyes as she turned, half expecting the TV to be the culprit, her mind spinning up rapidly and eliminating possibilities one by one.
The TV sat dark and silent in the built-in credenza, yet the pigs persisted.
April threw off the bedcovers and slid to her feet, disconcerted by the cacophonous concert, unaware that she was gloriously naked in front of a wall of uncovered floor-to-ceiling windows, with several of downtown Vancouver’s high-rise offices across the way.
What in the world is that noise? Annoyance was replacing shock, her ears guiding her gaze to the bedside, where a new electronic alarm clock sat, happily spewing the wake-up call from hell. She leaned over and examined it, turning the volume down before sliding the switch to “off” to stop the clucking and snorting. The clock was supposed to play soothing noises such as surf and babbling brooks. Nowhere in the little owner’s manual had there been anything about babbling animals.
April sighed and made a mental note to reread the instructions. She stood and stretched luxuriously, stopping suddenly when she realized she was putting on a skin show. There were guys with high-powered binoculars already zeroed in on her condo. She’d caught some of them several times before with her own set of binoculars.
April swiftly dropped to her knees and fished on the bed stand for the remote control that closed the curtains, waiting for Vancouver to disappear before standing again. She picked up a purple satin robe from the floor, where it had slid off the end of the bed during the night, and put it on, tying the belt deftly around her waist.
A motion detector clicked on and a small electronic chime echoed pleasantly through the condo, announcing that its tiny silicon brain had just activated her preloaded coffeemaker and raised the thermostat two degrees as it tuned the music system to light classical. The strains of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto radiated from the hidden ceiling speakers, and she glanced up involuntarily with a smile. Classical was a touch of elegance, even when the apartment was a mess, which it seldom was. The music blended with the rich colors of the collection of paintings she’d spent far too much on, original oils by local artists. She walked into the living room, enjoying the uncurtained, panoramic view of English Bay spread out in front of her. She never tired of seeing all that beauty, and was glad she’d made the decision to mortgage most of her salary and buy the corner unit.
April loved being the newest staff vice-president of Empress Cruise Lines, but she was equally pleased that on such a beautiful morning, she didn’t have to be in her office until early afternoon.
I can have a leisurely breakfast, read the paper, go jogging, or all of the above.
There was one more waking ritual before coffee, and she moved to her computer to figure out where her parents were today.
April typed in her password before triggering the world map and opening the appropriate program, initiating a high-speed connection with the Internet. She could picture the small satellite antenna she’d paid to have installed on top of Captain Arlie Rosen’s aircraft after he’d reluctantly given in to the idea of being actively tracked by his daughter. The GPS-based system sent a burst of radio energy to an orbiting satellite every sixty seconds, reporting its position wherever they were.
“That’s all it is, Dad,” she’d said, hands on her hips as she stood alongside his beautifully refurbished World War II amphibian aircraft at the dock in Seattle months before. The interior resembled the parlor of a luxury yacht, with a bedroom, living room, galley, and bathroom, and her folks used it at every opportunity.
“You’re spying on your mother and me, right?” her father had accused.
“Wait… hold it,” April had replied, laughing. “That’s my line!”
“What do you mean, your line?”
“When I was a little girl—”
“You’re still a little girl.”
“Dad! When I was just starting to car date and you wanted me to take a cell phone with me, I accused you of spying on me.”
“Yeah, well, you were right. We were spying on you. You were dating boys, for crying out loud.”
“No, Dad, you said the phone was for emergencies.”
“And you believed me?”
“Yes, because you were right.”
Arlie Rosen had turned to her mother, who was trying unsuccessfully to suppress her laughter.