“I hear you. These aren’t exactly the best of times.”
“I’ve noticed. Listen, I have a question for you.”
“Sure.”
“You know Aaron Walker retired here? The astronaut?”
Aaron Walker. Jerry needed a moment. He was one of the early Apollo guys. Had been on a test flight, the one immediately after Myshko. “I didn’t know he’d gone to Baltimore,” Jerry said.
“A few years ago, he walked into a liquor store right into the middle of a holdup. Got killed.”
Jerry recalled the story, of course, though not where it had happened. “Yes,” he said. “I remember. Sad end for a guy like that.”
“He left a journal. You ready for this? In the journal, he says he landed on the Moon.”
“He wasn’t on any of the flights that landed, was he?”
“Not according to the record.”
“Well, okay. Then there’s a mistake somewhere.”
“It’s his writing, Jerry. We’ve checked it. Anyhow, what with this other stuff about Myshko, we’re going to use it. I can send you a copy if you like.”
“Ralph, it’s a false alarm.”
“Well, I wanted to give you a chance to comment. Why don’t you take a look at what he said? You should have it now. I can wait.”
The journal entry was dated April 21, 2009:
Hard to believe it’s been forty years since my stroll on the lunar surface. Oops, forgot I’m not supposed to say that. Wonder what that thing was, anyhow?
“What do you think?” said Ralph.
“Is that it?”
“The context is interesting.”
“How do you mean?”
“He was describing a day at the ballpark. He’d gone to the Orioles-Yankees game. He gave up when Robinson Cano homered in the seventh. It gave the Yankees, I think, a 9–2 lead. He got up and left.
“That night he commented on it in his journaclass="underline" ‘That was it. I’d had enough. Sitting up there when I should have been out somewhere celebrating the biggest event of my life. Of anybody’s life.’ Then he tosses in the line ‘Hard to believe . . .’”
“Where’s it been all these years?” Jerry tried to sound skeptical.
“Jane said she’d forgotten he kept a journal. She found it after he died. She’d never really looked at it, beyond reading about when he’d first met her mother. The mother’s been dead a long time. Then when this stuff started about Myshko, she got curious and went back to it.”
“Who’s Jane?”
“Jane Alcott. His daughter. His only child, in fact.”
“Who has the journal now?”
“I do.”
Jerry looked out at the launch towers. “How does the entry read for April 21, 1969?”
“There isn’t one. We have an entry for April 3, describing his feelings, his anticipation, for the flight. Then there’s nothing until May 2. Three days after he got back.”
“On April 21, they were orbiting the Moon?”
“Yes.”
Jerry was getting a cold feeling in his stomach. “So what’s the May 3 entry say?”
“Just how glad he was to see his family again. To be back on solid ground. That sort of thing”
“What does his daughter think?”
“She says she never noticed the ballpark line. She says she was not a baseball fan.”
“I think Amos Bartlett’s still alive,” said Jerry. Bartlett had been one of Walker’s crew.
“We called him,” Ralph said. “Bartlett was the command module pilot. He told us it must be a mistake. Or a joke.”
Jerry nodded. Of course. What else could it be? “That should settle it,” he said.
“Do you have a comment, Jerry?”
“Sounds to me as if Walker was dreaming. Thinking about what might have been. Maybe he’d lost touch with reality. Started making up stuff for his journal.”
“Is that the formal NASA response?”
“No. I’d guess, Ralph, at this point, that we’re strictly no comment.”
—
Jerry went immediately to the archives. For more than seventy hours, while the capsule orbited the Moon, Bartlett’s voice had been the only one heard from the capsule. On the way out, and during the return flight, Walker had dominated the conversation. And occasionally, Lenny Mullen, the LEM pilot, could be heard.
But for almost three days, Walker and Mullen had been silent.
It was a rerun of the Myshko recordings.
5
Bucky Blackstone was in New York when the news broke. He made three quick calls, one to Ralph D’Angelo, two more to D’Angelo’s editor and his publisher—both longtime acquaintances if not exactly friends—and when he was done, he had no doubt that the diary mentioned a landing.
But that was ridiculous. The most important event in human history, and they covered it up for half a century? It made no sense. Even if the government had some reason for a cover-up, how the hell could they get the consent of the crew? There wasn’t a schoolkid anywhere in the Western world who didn’t know the names of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. How could you convince any landers who predated them to forgo that glory? And even if they agreed at the time, why would Myshko and the others keep quiet for twenty or thirty years—or fifty, if any of them were still alive?
He rubbed his chin absently, staring at nothing in particular, and frowned. No one had landed on the Moon before Armstrong. If they had, it would be a triumph, not a secret. We were in a race with the Russians, and Sputnik had predated everything we’d done. We couldn’t have been sure that Khrushchev and the Russians weren’t secretly working on their own Moon landing. If we could have touched down, we would have.
Don’t forget those Kennedy memos that came to light back in 2012, he reminded himself. JFK didn’t give a damn about science. All he was concerned with was the prestige of beating the Russians to the Moon. And if Harvard John didn’t care about the scientific breakthroughs, you could be sure that Landslide Lyndon and Tricky Dick didn’t give a damn either. To all three, the only important thing was getting there first, so of course they wouldn’t hide the accomplishment.
So why did Aaron Walker write that in his diary?
Think, Bucky! he told himself. You’ve already bought half an hour on CNN and Fox News to offer your version of what happened and what’s being covered up, and to challenge the government to prove you wrong. You’d better be damned sure you’re right, or no one will ever listen to you again.
One thing is certain: Walker didn’t write it as a joke. A lot of social mores have changed over the years, but diaries are still private things. He never expected anyone to read what he wrote—so why did he say that?
He checked his Rolex. Thirty-three hours before he had to speak on television. That didn’t give him a lot of time.
He had come with a skeleton staff—Ed Camden; his longtime secretary, Gloria Marcos; and his bodyguard, Jason Brent. (Bucky thought of himself as a pretty fit specimen, more than capable of taking care of himself—but when you’re a billionaire, you’re a target for kidnappers and all the disgruntled rivals you beat, which is to say bankrupted, on the way to your fortune. He hated the thought of traveling with an entourage of bodyguards the way so many others of his economic stature did, so he’d chosen Brent, a one-man wrecking crew who was a crack shot, a karate champion, and had the fastest reaction time he’d ever seen.)
Bucky summoned all three of them to his suite. Well, to the huge living room of the presidential suite. Jason would never agree to stay down the corridor with a locked door between them, and slept in the adjoining bedroom.
“What’s up?” asked Camden.
“You heard the news?” said Bucky.