Skyhook

TWENTY FOUR THURSDAY, DAY 4 UNIWAVE FIELD OFFICES ELMENDORF AFB, ALASKA

Notification that the final acceptance test flight had been postponed one more time came in the form of a note Lindsey White left on Ben’s office computer.

At first Ben didn’t see it when he returned from Dan Jerrod’s office. It was a folded piece of paper literally taped to the upper right side of his computer monitor, and it was a measure of his current state of distraction that he could miss it for more than an hour. That hour had consisted of stressing out over ways to deny the would-be saboteurs a means of recontaminating the master program on the test flight.

The delay note, when he found it, was tantamount to a stay of execution. All of which meant that Schroedinger would get fed in person for at least one more evening.

The team was growing exasperated with him, Ben could tell, though no one had been bold enough to say anything. His extreme distraction, moodiness, fatigue, and otherwise un-Ben-like behavior was prompting equally uncharacteristic group behavior in response. The room fell silent now when he walked in, and he could feel their eyes following him. Where normally he was a full member of his own team, suddenly he was an oddity, and more of an annoyance than a team leader. That recognition, however, was doing little to cure the underlying malady of frustration and fear.

Ben reread Lindsey’s message, wondering what had prompted this new postponement.

Am I somehow out of the loop and don’t know it? he wondered. It depended on who had made the decision, and that almost certainly would have come from above Joe Davis.

The basic fact remained, of course, that he did not know who fit the description of enemy. Lindsey and Joe had lied about fitting the emergency disconnect to the Gulfstream. “Hey, Ben,” they could have said, “there’s some major problem in getting that installed in time. Would you agree to fly without it?”

Ben snorted, startling himself, as he wondered what his answer would have been. He was too compliant, too cooperative to have said no. But they should have asked, because now they, too, looked like the unseen enemy.

He wandered out to talk to his team members and listen to their exasperated admission that after three days of feverish work they’d failed to find a single glitch in the main program. He refrained, of course, from revealing what the Cray had helped him find. Dan Jerrod’s admonition wasn’t the only reason. It came down to the lonely reality that no one was beyond suspicion.

When all the research team members had left, Ben sat in silence trying to order his thoughts. Perhaps Jerrod could protect them tomorrow when the test flight finally occurred. Sharing his suspicions with Jerrod had lifted his spirits, but there were too many unanswered questions to feel comfortable.

A wave of fatigue rolled over him, and he sat at his desk and put his head down to rest for a few minutes, drifting off into a troubled jumble of dreams.

Will Martin had been alternately pacing his office and staring out the window for the better part of the morning as he fielded phone calls and tried to stay focused. The delays in Anchorage had passed critical, but pressing Joe Davis any more was certain to be counterproductive. There was little he could do now but wait and hope and watch the clock before the day began with a security briefing from Todd Jenkins, his corporate security chief. The possibility, however remote, of a major security breach at the most critical moment in Uniwave’s history had easily captured his undivided attention, but with the daughter of a grounded airline pilot asking too many questions and the pilot himself hiring lawyers, the threat of a breach was real.

“The name is Rosen?”

Todd Jenkins, the head of Uniwave’s corporate security department, nodded.

“Yes, and it’s getting more complicated by the hour, with the man’s daughter pushing at the Coast Guard and the FAA for answers.”

“What does she know?”

Jenkins had shrugged. “Dan Jerrod’s people are watching,” Todd had replied, referring to the Anchorage-based security chief for Skyhook.

Will had leaned forward and leveled a piercing stare at Jenkins.

“I need you in the field. I want you shadowing the situation, too, in person. I don’t trust Jerrod to react in time. This is too serious a situation to take lightly, Todd. Congress is looking for victims among black projects, and if this grounded pilot manages to blow our cover, even a successful flight test won’t save us. I mean, this is survival.”

Jenkins had nodded and said nothing before taking his leave. His greatest challenge had been to keep a large smile off his face. With twenty-eight years in the CIA covert operations, being confined to a desk job had been killing him.