He had just come off his most notorious stunt of all, getting the first skipper of space station Freedom to punch the abandon ship alarm and riding back down to Earth in an emergency escape capsule with some young woman from a movie studio. He had to be hospitalized after they landed; he claimed it was from stress during reentry, but everybody at the Cape was wondering who was reentering what.
Anyway, there was his formal request for a three-month leave of absence, all filled out just as neat and precise as I would have done it myself. He was certainly entitled to the leave. But I knew Sam. Something underhanded was going on.
I called him into my office and asked him point-blank what he was doing. A waste of time.
“I need a rest,” he said. Then he added, “Sir.”
Sam’s face was as round and plain as a penny, and his wiry hair was kind of coppery color, come to think of it. Little snub of a nose with a scattering of freckles. His teeth had enough spaces between them so that he reminded me of a Jack-o’-lantern when he grinned.
He wasn’t grinning as he sat in front of my desk. He was all perfectly polite earnestness, dressed in a tie and a real suit, like an honest-to-Pete straight-arrow citizen. His eyes gave him away, though: they were as crafty as ever, glittering with visions that he wanted to keep secret from me.
“Going anyplace special?” I asked, trying to make it sound nonchalant.
Sam nonchalanted me right back. “No, not really. I just need to get away from it all for a while.”
Yeah, sure. Like Genghis Khan just wanted to take a little pony ride.
I had no choice except to approve his request. But I had no intention of letting the sneaky little sumbitch pull one over on me. Sam was up to something; I knew it, and the glitter in his eyes told me that he knew I knew it.
As I said, I’m no detective. So I hired one. Well, she really wasn’t a detective. My niece, Ramona Perkins, was an agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency—a damned stupid name, if you ask me. Makes it sound like the government is forcing people to do drugs.
Well, anyway, Ramona wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of trailing a furloughed astronaut for a few weeks.
“Yes, Uncle Griff, I have three weeks of vacation time coming, but I was going to wait until December and go to Alaska.”
That was Ramona, as impractical as they come. She was pretty, in a youngish, girl-next-door way. Nice sandy-blonde hair that she always kept pinned up; made her look even younger than she was. And there was no doubt about her courage. Anybody who makes a career out of posing as an innocent kid and infiltrating drug gangs has more guts than brains, if you ask me.
She had just gone through a pretty rough divorce. No children, thank Pete, but her ex-husband made a big to-do about their house and cars. Seemed to me he cared more about their damned stereo and satellite TV setup than he did about my niece.
I made myself smile at her image in my phone screen. “Suppose I could get you three months of detached duty, assigned to my office. Then you wouldn’t use up any of your vacation time.”
“I don’t know….” She sort of scrunched up her perky face. I figured she was trying to bury herself in her work and forget about her ex.
“It’d do you good to get away from everything for a while,” I said.
Ramona’s cornflower-blue eyes went curious. “What’s so important about this one astronaut that you’d go to all this trouble?”
What could I tell her? That Sam Gunn had been driving me nuts for years and I was certain he was up to no good? That I was afraid Sam would pull some stunt that would reflect dishonorably on the space agency? That if and when he got himself in trouble the agency management would inevitably dump the blame on me, since I was in charge of his division.
I wasn’t going to have Sam botch up my record, dammit! I was too close to retirement to let him ruin me. And don’t think the little SOB wasn’t trying to do me dirt. He’d slit my throat and laugh about it, if I let him.
But to my sweet young niece, I merely said, “Ramona, this is a matter of considerable importance. I wouldn’t be asking your help if it weren’t. I really can’t tell you any more than that.”
Her image in my phone screen grew serious. “Does it involve narcotics, then?”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “That’s a possibility.” It was a lie, of course; Sam was as straight as they come about drugs. Wasn’t even much of a drinker. His major vice was women.
“All right,” she said, completely businesslike. “If you can arrange the reassignment, I’ll trail your astronaut for you.”
“That’s my girl!” I said, really happy with her. She’d always been my favorite niece. At that point in time it never occurred to me that sending her after Sam might put her in more danger than the entire Colombian cartel could throw at her.
The three weeks passed. No report from her. I began to worry. Called her supervisor at DEA and he assured me she’d been phoning him once a week, just to tell him she was okay. I complained that she should’ve been phoning me, so a few days later I got an e-mail message:
EVERYTHING IS FINE BUT THIS IS GOING TO TAKE LONGER THAN WE THOUGHT.
It took just about the whole three damned months. It wasn’t until then that Ramona popped into my office, sunburnt and weary-looking, and told me what Sam had been up to. This is what she told me:
I know this investigation took a lot longer than you thought it would, Uncle Griff. It was a lot more complicated than either one of us thought it’d be. Nothing that Sam Gunn does is simple!
To begin with, by the time I started after him, Sam had already gone to Panama to set up the world’s first space tourist line.
That’s right, Uncle Griff. A tourist company. In Panama.
He called his organization Space Adventure Tours and registered it as a corporation in Panama. All perfectly legal, but it started alarm bells ringing in my head right from the start. I knew that Panama was a major drug-transshipment area, and a tourist company could be a perfect front for narcotics smuggling.
By the time I arrived in Colon, on the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal, Sam had established himself in a set of offices he rented on the top floor of one of the three-storey stucco commercial buildings just off the international airport.
As I said, my first thought was that he was running a smuggling operation, probably narcotics, and his wild-sounding company name was only a front. I spent a week watching his office, seeing who was coming and going. Nobody but Sam himself and a couple of young Panamanian office workers. Now and then an elderly guy in casual vacation clothes or a silver-haired couple. Once in a while a blue-haired matronly type would show up. Seldom the same people twice. No sleazebags in five-hundred-dollar suits. No Uzi-toting enforcer maniacs.
I dropped in at the office myself to look the place over. It seemed normal enough. An anteroom with a couple of tacky couches and armchairs, divided by a chest-high counter. Water stains on the ceiling tiles. On the other side of the counter sat the two young locals, a male and a female, both working at desktop computers. Beyond them was a single door prominently marked S. GUNN, PRESIDENT AND CEO.
Most smuggling operators don’t put their own names on doors.
The young woman glanced up from her display screen and saw me standing at the counter. Immediately she came out from behind her desk, smiling brightly, and asked in local-accented English, “Can I help you?”
I put on my best Dorothy-from-Kansas look and said, “What kind of tours do you offer?”
“An adventure in space,” she said, still smiling.
“In space?”
“Yes. Like the astronauts.”