Shadow Watch

TWO

They had left Portland international jetport in a rented Chevy that had seen better days, taking the Maine Turnpike north for over a hundred miles to the Gardiner terminus, where it merged with the interstate leading by turns northwest and northeast past Bangor to the Canadian border. Now the traffic, sparse since the Bath-Brunswick exits, had entirely dissipated, leaving theirs the only car on a road flanked by a profusion of evergreens and a variety of hardwoods denuded by the long, sedentary New England winter.

The toll stop was unmanned, with no barricade or surveillance cameras, and an exact-change basket that took the requested fifty cents or whatever the driver’s conscience decided was adequate.

Pete Nimec fished two coins out of his pocket and tossed them in.

“Quarters?” Megan Breen said from the passenger seat. They were the first words she’d spoken in almost an hour. “Never knew you were such a choirboy.”

He regarded her through his dark sunglasses, his foot resting lightly on the brake.

“You should’ve looked closer,” he said. “They were Canadian coins some toll clerk stuck me with on my last trip to this state. Been waiting to return the favor ever since.”

“How long ago was that?”

“A year,” he said. “Or so.”

Nimec drove on through. About fifteen miles beyond the toll he turned right at the Augusta exit, stopped for gas, then continued past some worn-looking strip malls and a couple of traffic circles onto Route 3, a hilly stretch of two-lane blacktop rolling eastward toward the coast.

Beside him, Megan looked out her window and fell back into preoccupied silence. The sky was a drab gray sheet of clouds, the wind becoming increasingly aggressive as they neared the coast. It sheered off the sides of the car, skirling into the interior through invisible spaces between its doors and frame, blowing across the dashboard in chill currents that slowly brought the heater into submission. In between long unvaried stretches of woods there were filling stations and junk dealers, and more filling stations and more junk dealers, few with any customers, the scenery rambling on with a kind of lowering, stagnant monotony that seemed endless. Meg could have easily believed the haphazard piles of reclaimed sinks and bicycles and Formica tabletops and dishes and garden rakes and knickknacks being hawked out of shacks or trailers along the road had been accumulating for decades and never went anywhere at all.

Shivering, she sank her chin deeper into her collar. She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and black ankle boots. Her thick auburn hair was pulled back in a ponytail under a duckbilled Army field cap.

Nimec thought she looked uncharacteristically tired around the eyes.

“Wonder who’d buy those old throwaways,” she said. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve got to keep in mind that everything in this part of the country has an afterlife, including inanimate objects.”

“Sounds unholy.”

He shrugged. “Some might call it Yankee frugality.”

She gave him a wan smile, leaned forward, and turned on the radio, but the Boston all-news station she’d been able to pick up earlier in the ride had grown unintelligibly faint. After almost a minute of listening to static drift, she pushed the “Off” button and sat back.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Probably better for you.”

She glanced over at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We saw the newspaper headlines at the airport, heard the updates on the radio driving out of Portland,” Nimec said. “I’m no less anxious to hear about the Orion investigation than you or anyone else. But it gets to where you know there won’t be any developments for a while and are just letting the media beat you over the head with information that’s already been reported a thousand times over.”

“I’m not prone to self-abuse, Pete.”

“That wasn’t my meaning. But I can’t help thinking it might’ve been better for you to postpone this trip—”

“We had an agreement. You show me yours, I show you mine.”

“Nice way of putting it,” he said. “Still, you’ve had a rough couple of days.”

Megan shook her head.

“Rough is what happened to those shuttle astronauts. To Jim Rowland and his family. I just want to know the reason it happened,” she said. “I never understood, at least not fully, not viscerally, why it almost always becomes important for the loved ones of plane crash victims to learn the minute details of what went wrong with the aircraft… whether it was engine failure, structural problems, pilot error, whatever. I thought sometimes that knowing wouldn’t change anything for them, wouldn’t bring anyone back. That it might be better if they were encouraged to try moving on and letting the investigators do their work.” She shook her head again. “What bothers me now is that I could’ve been so damned thick.”

He sat very straight behind the wheel, his eyes on the road. “That won’t get you anywhere. It’s hard to put yourself in people’s shoes when such extreme circumstances are involved.”

She didn’t say anything. Outside, the repetitive sequence of gas stations and ramshackle shops had been interrupted as they came up on Lake St. George State Park, its wooded campgrounds extending up the rugged granite hillside on their left, the smooth gray opacity of the lake spreading out to the right. Wet and heavy with snowmelt, the carpet of fallen leaves along its near bank seemed lasting and immovable, wholly resistant to the wind’s attempts to sweep it apart.

“You obviously consider our appointment worth keeping,” she said finally. “Enough so you didn’t rush off to Florida.”

He shrugged. “The FAA and a half-dozen other federal agencies are already on-site, and that’s not counting NASA’s in-house people. Gord’s also pushing his agency contacts to let UpLink send in a group of its own technical personnel as observers. But a launchpad accident is altogether outside my area of expertise. At the Cape I’d just be in the way. Here I can get something accomplished. We—”

Nimec suddenly paused, clearing his throat. He had been about to say, We need to find a replacement for Max, and was grateful he’d caught himself before the words slipped out.

Before his recent death, Max Blackburn had been Nimec’s second in command in UpLink’s security division, a role that had evolved into his becoming the designated troubleshooter at their international facilities, particularly in hot spots where his covert skills sometimes became indispensable. But there was a high price to be paid for Max’s eagerness — even overeagerness — to put himself at personal risk. Max had not died peacefully in his sleep. Far from it, he had gotten killed long before his time, killed in a way Nimec still found difficult to accept or even think about. And in his efforts to avoid thinking about it today, he’d almost forgotten the rumors that Blackburn and Megan had been briefly involved in an intimate relationship.

Perhaps, then, the shuttle accident — terrible as it had been — wasn’t the only reason for her moodiness. No matter how delicately he tried to frame it, how convenient it was that neither of them had mentioned Blackburn’s name at any point on the way here, there was no hiding the fact that finding someone to take his place was the reason they had traveled to Maine. If Colonel Rowland’s shadow had been hanging over them since they’d left San Jose that morning, then so too had Max Blackburn’s.

“We need to shore up our end of things,” Nimec resumed, choosing his words with care. “Those new robot sentries we’re using at the Brazilian ISS plant are fine and dandy, but well-trained manpower’s the foundation of any security operation. We need to beef up our force strength and tighten the organizational structure there. And that really ought to go double for the Russians in Kazakhstan.” He paused. “I only wish Starinov wasn’t under parliamentary heat to keep us out of the loop. You’d expect our saving his skin a few years ago would help on that front, but it’s actually worked against us. Seems his government has made proving it can look out for itself a point of nationalistic pride. Typical paranoid Russkie thinking, you ask me. Give them another two centuries and they still won’t have gotten over Napoleon taking Moscow.”

“As if we’ll ever forget it was one of their politicians who ordered Times Square leveled at the turn of the millennium.”

“Not to be compared. Pedachenko was a rogue and a traitor to his own country. And last I heard, Napoleon wasn’t an American—”

Megan raised her hand. “Wait, Pete. We can get into all that later if you want. But there’s something you said a second ago… were you implying that you suspect the shuttle explosion wasn’t an accident?”

“No,” he said. “Nor do I see any cause to be suspicious. But I like to be ready.”

“And you honestly feel Tom Ricci’s the best person to get things in shape?”

Nimec paused again, no stranger to her skepticism in connection with Ricci.

“I appreciate your reservations and agree he’s a long shot,” he said. “But you ought to keep an open mind. At least meet the guy before ruling him out as a candidate for the job.”

She frowned. “Pete, I’m sure Ricci’s a good man, and if I wasn’t willing to give him a fair shake I wouldn’t be here. But if we’ve learned anything from Russia and Malaysia, it’s that UpLink’s global enterprises can put us smack in the middle of some incredibly volatile political situations. You and Vince Scull have both insisted we need to raise our security force to a higher level of performance so we can adequately respond next time we’re caught in the cross fire. I’m just agreeing with you, and proposing that someone with a less, shall we say, checkered background would be best qualified to implement the changes that have to be made.”

Nimec furrowed his brow. He’d heard her argument before, and certainly acknowledged that it had a degree of merit. But…

But what? Was he simply being mulish insisting that Ricci had what it took to help restructure a world-spanning organization that was, as Megan had suggested, increasingly coming to resemble the military in style and scope?

Surprised by his own doubts, Nimec gave the matter a rest and concentrated on his driving. The lake area behind him now, he made a left turn off Route 3 in the town of Belfast and got onto U.S.1 northbound, crossing the bridge that spanned the harbor inlet, then heading on along the coast. Here the roadside junk dealers were shuffled in with restaurants and summer resorts and had obvious upscale pretensions, their deliberately quaint shop fronts geared toward tourists rather than hardscrabble locals. Most had the word ANTIQUES hand-painted across their windows in ornate lettering. Many were closed for the winter. The motels, inns, and cottages were also battened down for the dregs of the season, their lawn signs wishing patrons a happy and joyful Christmas and inviting them back after Memorial Day.

They continued north on the coastal highway, talking very little for some miles, catching frequent glimpses of Penobscot Bay behind and between the tourist traps on the right side of the road — its shoreline extending in belts of jumbled stone and harsh wind-carved ledges, giving intimations of a primal wildness that seemed dormant rather than lost, capable of hostile reassertion. There was a constant sense of nearness to the sea, the sky swirling with gulls, the water refracting enough pale sunlight to lift some of the cloud cover’s gravid heaviness.

“It’s much different here from inland, isn’t it?” Megan said at length. “Still sort of forlorn, but, I don’t know…”

“Beautifully forlorn,” Nimec said.

“Something like that,” she said. “There’s a disconnection from the rest of the world that makes me understand why Ricci chose this place to hide out. If you’ll pardon my choice of words.”

“Nothing wrong with it,” Nimec said. “That’s exactly what he’s been doing for the last eighteen months.”

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.”

“That’s the short version, yes. But it misses too much that’s really disturbing. Information about the O-ring weakness and other potential launch hazards was suppressed — consciously, actively suppressed — because those managers were looking out for their own competitive interests to the exclusion of everything else. Funding needs, political pressures, and production deadlines drove agency officials to lower the bar on safety practices. A lot of people were worried about the launch, yet nobody wanted to be the one to stand up and make the decision to scrub. It wasn’t that they intended to put the astronauts at increased risk, it was that they’d succumbed to a kind of organizational group-think that conditioned them to see the risks as being less serious than they clearly were. With every launch, they became more like problem gamblers, telling themselves their luck would hold and everything would work out okay. They made their mistakes with their eyes wide open.”

Gordian had been watching Nordstrum quietly as he spoke. Now he crossed his arms on the desktop and leaned forward over them.

“Alex, it isn’t the same with Orion,” he said. “The space agency is a different entity these days. More cohesive and goal-oriented. More transparent in its internal operations. Its standards have been restored. I never would’ve committed UpLink’s resources to ISS if that hadn’t been demonstrated to me.”

Nordstrum looked thoughtful.

“Gord, you may be sold,” he said. “But the currency of trust NASA built up with the public during its Mercury and Apollo years is almost depleted. Selling them is going to be a problem.”

“You aren’t sounding very sanguine.”

Norstrum expelled a breath. “The accident creates uncertainty even for those of us who believe in space research. And long before Orion, a great many taxpayers, maybe a majority, considered the program a wasteful frittering away of their money. For its critics, a forty-billion-dollar international space station, with hundreds of millions going to bail out the Russians — who couldn’t pay for their end despite Starinov’s pledges to the contrary — is emblematic of that waste. They haven’t seen any practical value in it and nobody’s done an adequate job of making them feel otherwise. And now, with the death of Colonel Rowland…” He spread his hands. “I wish I could be more optimistic.”

Gordian leaned further across the desk.

“Okay,” he said. “What do we do?”

Nordstrum sat quietly for several moments before answering.

“I’m not your paid consultant anymore. Not a newspaper columnist. I can only speak to you now as someone who sees the workings of government and big industry as countless other people in this country do, from the outside through shaded windows, and maybe that’s a good place to come at this from, maybe it makes it easier to be their voice.” He paused. “Convince them, convince me, that the Orion investigation is going to be completely aboveboard. I don’t want to hear about its progress from some evasive media spokesman who believes his primary responsibilities are to spin the facts and keep me mollified while those in the know go about their work in secrecy. I’m sick of those types and am going to hit the clicker the instant they show their faces on my TV screen. When something surfaces that hurts, let it hurt. For once, just once, I want the truth straight up. And I want it from someone I can trust.”

He fell silent, studying the brawny shoulder of Mount Hamilton through the window.

The silence lasted awhile.

At last Gordian unfolded his arms, lifted them off the desk, and reclined in his chair so slowly Nordstrum could hear every creak of its burnished leather as a separate and distinct sound.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes.” Nordstrum checked his watch. “Don’t let another news cycle go by without a statement to the media. There’s still time to put one out before the end of the business day. And before the six-thirty network broadcasts.”

Gordian smiled a little.

“Hell of a mouthful,” he said. “Just like the old days.”

“The sole difference being,” Nordstrum said, “that in the old days I got handsomely compensated.”

Their insertion technique highly modem, their means of delivery an airborne relic, the twelve HAHO jumpers vaulted from a blacked-out DC-3 that had carried Allied troops on missions of liberation during World War II.

This was a very different sort of mission, plotted by men with very different objectives.

The propeller-driven transport had flown from a hidden airstrip in the Pantanal, a sprawling wetlands in central Brazil, to within a dozen miles of their drop zone outside the frontier city of Cuiabá. While a traditional parachute jump might have occurred at an altitude of three thousand feet, they were ten times that distance from the ground when they exited the plane. It was a height at which the atmosphere was too thin to support human life and where, even in the tropics, the extreme cold could damage the flesh and freeze the eyelids shut.

Survival for the high-altitude-high-opening team therefore hinged upon specialized equipment. Oxygen canisters rigged to their jumpsuits made it possible for them to breathe. Protective goggles allowed them to keep their eyes open in the frigid, lashing wind. Pullover face masks and thermal gloves offered insulation against the worst effects of exposure.

Free fall through the moonlit sky was brief. Their airfoil-shaped chutes released moments after they jumped, unfolding front to back, then from the middle out to the stabilizer edges — a sequence that checked their deployment until they were just below the backwash of the props, reducing the opening shock.

Their canopies filled with air, hands on their steering toggles, the jumpers descended at an initial rate of about eighteen feet per second, passing through a high layer of cirrocumulus clouds composed of supercooled water and ice. Fastened to their harness saddles, the bags containing their assault weapons doubled as seats that helped distribute their weight and compensate for drag.

The lead jumper was a man who had gone by many names in the past, and presently chose to be called Manuel. He snatched a glance down at the altimeter atop his reserve chute, checked his GPS chest pack unit for his current position, and then signaled the HAHO team to form up in a crescent around him. He wore a small, glowing blue phosphorous marker on his back, as did three of the other jumpers. Another four had orange markers, the remaining four yellow ones. The colored markers would allow them to maintain close formation as they glided through the inky darkness, and provide easy identification when they broke off into separate groups on the ground.

For now, however, it was vital that they stay together through their long cross-country flight, silently riding the night wind, sweeping down and down toward their target like winged, malicious angels of death.