The Trikon Deception

28 AUGUST 1998 ATLANTA

“Aaron, Aaron.” Ed Yablon smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand, sending a crack through the cold dry air of his office. He swiveled his chair so that he faced the window, turning his back to Aaron Weiss. Twilight steamed over Atlanta. A thin band of dirty orange was all that remained of sunset. Ghostly hulks of skyscrapers were dappled with yellow office lights.

Yablon could see the reflection of his own office in the tinted glass of the window. His cigar stub glowed weakly, like the sun through fog. Weiss paced on the far side of Yablon’s desk like a cat contemplating a leap from a ledge. He twirled his Donegal walking hat from hand to hand. Beyond Weiss, Zeke Tucker was wedged into the only section of couch not littered with papers and boxes. Yablon couldn’t understand how the equable cameraman had tolerated Weiss for seventeen years. He himself had been the reporter’s bureau chief for a mere three and he was certain the experience would launch him toward early retirement, if not a coronary.

“You like the whale story,” said Weiss. He sailed his hat toward a coat rack where a faded cardigan sweater dangled limply. The hat bounced between two hooks, then landed on Tucker’s lap. Tucker brushed it to the floor.

“I like the whale story,” said Yablon. “I love the whale story. But I don’t see the connection between dead whales and space stations.”

Weiss’s image disappeared behind the desk, then rose again into view, hat on head.

“Am I talking English, Zeke?” he asked the cameraman. “I mean, I thought I explained the connection.”

Yablon slowly rotated his chair until he was facing Weiss. He leaned his elbows onto the desk and let his head hang between his hands.

“Tell me again.” He spoke softly in an attempt to appear calm. Blue smoke curled toward the ceiling and bits of ash drifted down to his lap.

Weiss plopped into the creaking leather-covered chair in front of the desk. Leaning forward intently, he said, “Forty-six whales have died since the last week in July, and these are only the ones we know about.” He swiveled the chair to glance at Tucker and then looked back at Yablon. When each nodded in mute agreement, he continued. “We also know that the diet of these whales consists of plankton.” Another pause for more nods. “And we know that they died of starvation. Therefore, the level of plankton in the oceans has dropped.”

“Wait a second,” said Yablon. “There’s no official word that those whales died of starvation.”

“The people I talked to believe they did.”

“Your people? English-lit students working at Sea World for the summer?”

“I had to start somewhere,” said Weiss. “And you forgot Helga Knuttsen.”

“Another fine example of the scientific mainstream,” said Yablon. “What about Ted Adamski? Why didn’t you start with him?”

“We aren’t on speaking terms.”

“He thinks the whales are suffering from an unidentified virus,” said Yablon.

“Ted Adamski is a paid debunker of the truth,” said Weiss.

Yablon smiled obscenely. There was no reason to mention the old court battle between Adamski and Weiss. The smile said it all.

“He’s still a paid debunker of the truth,” Weiss insisted.

“All right,” said Yablon. “Let’s suppose the whales did starve to death. What makes this any more than a typical August, slow news story?”

Weiss looked at Tucker and rolled his eyes as if asking heaven what he had done to be cursed with working for such an imbecile. Tucker shrugged.

“Right whales eat phytoplankton. Little plants,” Weiss added sarcastically. “But those little plants contribute as much oxygen to the atmosphere as all the rain forests in Africa and South America. In other words, Ed: The story isn’t one of no plankton, no right whales. The story is no plankton, no oxygen, and no oxygen, no fucking human race!”

Yablon let out a genuinely amused laugh. He leaned back in his chair and puffed smoke out of both sides of his mouth.

“Who told you that one?” he said.

“Peter Karlis. He’s a professor at Colorado State University.”

“That’s great.” Yablon’s laugh grew heartier. “You want this network to broadcast a story that sounds damned alarming, if not outright apocalyptic, on the say-so of a whale expert located in the goddamn Rocky Mountains?”

“He isn’t a whale expert,” said Weiss. “He’s a meteorologist who once worked for NASA. He’s done lots of studies on the composition of the atmosphere fifty, a hundred, five hundred years in the future. He has computer models showing the depletion of the oxygen supply over different time frames. One of the factors involves a decrease in the total land covered by trees. The other is a decrease in the amount of phytoplankton. He tells me that the rate of plankton decrease already exceeds his worst-case scenario. The whale deaths are scaring the shit out of him.”

Yablon turned back to the window. The orange light had completely left the sky. Atlanta glowed a sickly, muddy yellow in the humid air.

“If you think I will run a story based on Professor Karlis’s doomsday predications, you are sadly mistaken,” he said. “This is a responsible news bureau, not an electronic tabloid.”

Zeke Tucker let out a long, plaintive sigh. He had warned Weiss that Yablon would be dead-set against running a story on Weiss’s latest discovery. It looked as if he had been right.

But Weiss wasn’t finished.

“Trikon International is working on a secret project with environmental ramifications,” he said. “Maybe they have foreseen this problem. Maybe they caused it.”

“Our average viewer doesn’t give a good goddamn about Trikon,” said Yablon.

“We know that.”

“But the average viewer goddamn cares about the whales. We know that, too,” said Weiss. “Look, I can’t prove there is a connection between Trikon and the whale deaths. But I feel it. Trikon’s CEO, Fabio Bianco, is going to Trikon Station on the aerospace plane. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I want to be on that flight.”

Yablon pulled the cigar out of his mouth and studied it closely. Suddenly, Zeke Tucker started to laugh.

“What the hell’s so funny, Zeke?” Weiss snapped.

“You on the space plane?” Tucker struggled to form words around his laughter. “You don’t even have a driver’s license because you don’t like cars.”

“You’re being a real pal, Zeke.”

Yablon’s chair squealed as he slowly rocked back and forth. Tucker’s laughter died away into stifled snorts of amusement.

“Fabio Bianco’s going up to Trikon Station?” Yablon muttered. “Are you sure?”

“I have it on the best authority. His personal secretary when he’s in New York was once a big fan of mine. She told me about the arrangements.”

“Did she say why he was going?”

“She couldn’t be specific except to say that he was taking over control of a research project. Now the way I see it—”

“Shut up, Weiss.” Yablon leaned back and stared at his cigar. “I wonder. Bianco needs a traveling drugstore with him wherever he goes. And now he’s going into space. Hmmm.”

“It can’t be a coincidence. The whale deaths. Bianco taking charge. There must be a connection.”

“I heard you the first time,” said Yablon. He looked Weiss dead in the eyes for the first time. “Two seats on the space plane are out of the question. We don’t have that kind of pull.”

“Arrange with TBC for the use of their transmitter on Trikon Station. I can handle a Minicam myself,” said Weiss.

“You’re going by yourself?” Tucker wailed.

“Sorry, Zeke.”

“You’re going on the space plane and to Trikon Station without me?” Tucker seemed stunned.

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” said Weiss. “Yeah, but you’re doing it anyway.”

“This is big, Zeke.”

“So I’ve been hearing.”

Russell Cramer was running out of time. Rather, Kurt Jaeckle’s efforts at reversing Tighe’s decision to send Cramer Earthside were running out of time. Tighe refused to discuss the issue. Period. End of story. So Jaeckle turned his attention elsewhere. He spent an entire afternoon on his private comm unit lobbying everyone he could contact at NASA and ESA. Tighe was acting precipitously, he said. The project would be severely hampered without Cramer; he was the Mars Project’s chief biochemist.

The effort was a failure. Everyone at both agencies deferred to the decision of Commander Tighe.

“For Chrissakes, Kurt,” said one NASA bigwig who had been Jaeckle’s staunchest supporter at the agency, “the guy went berserk! You can’t expect to give him some aspirin and send him back to work.”

Jaeckle was wounded by the rebuke. It made him feel like a little boy, and a boy he wasn’t. He was a world-famous astronomer. He was a best-selling author. Millions of people recognized him by his face alone.

He needed to get his mind off Russell Cramer.

He decided to visit the observatory. The log showed that the Deep Space Study’s instrument pod was due to be recalibrated. Normally, he dispatched the astronomy payload specialist to perform this menial task. But today he would go himself. And he would take Lorraine along with him. Otherwise, what was the point?

Lorraine accepted the offer. A little warily, Jaeckle thought, but at least she accepted. Somebody still likes me.

They met at the main airlock just after the dinner hour. The space suits were stored in lockers lining the connecting tunnel.

“I think a size Small will be best for you,” said Jaeckle, floating along the row of lockers until he reached the end. Lorraine noticed that he picked out a Small for himself, too.

“Why do they have to call them EMUs?” she complained, pointing to the letters stenciled on each locker door.

Taking her question literally, Jaeckle replied, “Government jargon,” with a small sniff of distaste. “It sounds more official to say extravehicular mobility unit.”

“I mean, why can’t they just call them space suits, like everybody else?”

Pulling one of the empty suit torsos from its locker, Jaeckle repeated, “Government jargon,” as if that explained everything.

The suits looked like haunted sets of armor, arms floating out slightly, as if occupied by a headless, handless ghost. The helmets bobbed loosely on short tethers attached to the shelf at the top of each locker. They towed the bulky gear to the airlock and sealed themselves inside.

Helping Lorraine to slip an oxygen mask over her chestnut hair, Jaeckle said, “We’ll have to prebreathe pure oxygen for one hour.”

Lorraine nodded. She said nothing, and Jaeckle did not see the look in her eyes that said, I know about the prebreathing requirements. I’m the station’s medical officer, after all.

Neither of them was very adept at donning a space suit. Pulling on the legs was easy enough, although Lorraine had to wiggle her feet furiously to worm them into the attached boots. Then came the struggle of working her arms into the sleeves of the hard upper torso; it was like trying to pull on a sweatshirt made of armor plate. And it kept bobbing away from her. She finally had to ask Jaeckle to hold it still for her. When at last she popped her head through the neck ring Lorraine felt as if she had been underwater for half an hour. By the time they were safely buttoned in, with the life-support backpacks connected and all the seals and couplings checked out, the prebreathe was almost complete.

Jaeckle cycled the airlock. The pumps clattered for a few minutes, then Lorraine could no longer hear them. The hatch slid back to reveal utter darkness. Jaeckle stepped to the rim of the hatch, his suit looking gray and bulky in the dim lights of the airlock. He turned and extended a gloved hand to Lorraine. The glove was ridged with the metal “bones” of its force amplifier and knobbed with their tiny servomotors, like mechanical knuckles.

She took his hand and stepped out into black emptiness.

The station was on the night side of the Earth, but flying quickly toward another dawn. Lorraine had gone EVA only twice, and always on the day side. The scene—or lack of a scene—stretching below her was scary, chilling. She had gazed down upon the night side of the Earth from the observation blister. It was deep black with occasional flashes of lightning and the dim web-like patterns created by lights from larger cities. But viewing night from the protective bubble of the blister was nothing like experiencing it outside the station.

She was floating in emptiness, surrounded by the blackest black she ever had seen. Were it not for the sound of her own breathing within the bubble helmet, she would have been very close to total sensory deprivation.

“We’ll wait until we’re back in the light.” Jaeckle’s voice in her earphones startled her. “If we miss the observatory in the dark, the next stop is the moon.” He chuckled at his little joke. Lorraine shivered.

Dawn was coming up quickly. Jaeckle and Lorraine backed themselves into manned maneuvering units mounted along the outer skin of the connecting tunnel. Lorraine felt the connector latches click into place on her space suit as she gripped the controls set into the MMU’s armrests. Then, without needing instructions from Jaeckle, she pressed the control stud that unlocked the MMU from its mount. The astronauts called the MMUs “flying armchairs.” But they were chairs with no seat and no legs.

The dawn broke swiftly, a breathtaking spectacle of colors rimming the Earth’s curved horizon. Lorraine could not help but gasp with delighted awe as she watched the world below her come into the light, deep blue oceans and radiant swirls of white clouds, sparkling and fresh and gloriously beautiful.

With Jaeckle in the lead they jetted off, looping out a safe distance around the module raft and directing themselves toward the observatory at the zenith of the station’s skeleton. Jaeckle chattered in her ear, using his lecturer’s skill to highlight some of the more interesting stars and constellations.

Lorraine oohed and aahed, even though she could not see much of the stars through her tinted helmet visor. But flying an MMU was pure excitement. It was like a magic broomstick, a flying carpet from fabled Baghdad. The realization that she—Lorraine Renoir, the little girl from Quebec City who had dreamed of becoming an aerospace physician—was accompanying the great Kurt Jaeckle to the observatory only added to the thrill.

They parked the MMUs at the attachment points near the observatory’s airlock and pulled themselves inside. As they waited for the airlock to repressurize, Jaeckle explained the scientific reason for the visit.

“The project administers an astronomical study of deep space. There’s a pod of instruments here aimed directly at Polaris, the North Star. Due to effects such as thermal expansion, the pod occasionally becomes misaligned. So we inspect it periodically and, if necessary, realign it manually.”

A green light on the control panel indicated that the air pressure in the airlock had reached a safe level. Jaeckle twisted his helmet off and took a deep breath of air. Suddenly he started to shake, and for a horrifying second Lorraine thought he had been stricken by a seizure. Then she understood: he was trying to struggle out of his suit.

“Things are cramped inside,” he said by way of explanation. “You’d better take your suit off, too.”

Lorraine soon saw that he was telling the truth. Although the observatory itself was the approximate size and shape of an old Apollo command module, it was so crammed with instruments that the interior was barely as large as a sleep compartment. It was dimly lit, like a photographer’s darkroom, with most of the light coming from illuminated dials and readouts. Lorraine drifted slowly along one wall, her eyes drinking in the Christmas-tree colors of the instruments.

“Where’s the telescope?” she asked. Jaeckle did not answer. When she turned she saw that he was staring at her. He had shed his flight suit and wore nothing but briefs.

“Here,” he said, pointing at his crotch, where something was telescoping indeed.

My God, Lorraine thought, he’s like a twelve-year-old. She was not quite surprised, but she felt somewhat cheated. Too bad you didn’t stay in your space suit, she berated herself. Too late.

Lance Muncie shot a jet of water to the back of his throat, closed his mouth, and swallowed. The water tasted like warm plastic from his having clutched the thin polystyrene bottle in his hand for the entire shift. He had tried letting the bottle float free in the cool air as he watched Russell Cramer between pages of a paperback thriller he had borrowed from a Trikon scientist. But the bottle kept drifting into the dull silver expanse of the rumpus room. Lance found this tendency to be the most annoying aspect of micro-gee. Objects did not remain where you put them, unless you bungeed them, or Velcroed them, or corralled them in a compartment.

Ten feet away, a sedated Russell Cramer hung silently in a sleep restraint that fit snugly over his pear-shaped body. His helmet was tethered to the wall to prevent his head from bobbing with the pulse of his carotid arteries. The zipper of the sleep restraint was locked.

Lance closed the book over a flattened straw he used as a mark and bound the covers with a rubber band. It was almost midnight, the time he would be relieved by Freddy Aviles. He pulled himself close to Cramer and stared intently at his face. Cramer’s eyes were partially opened, the lids welded in place by dried white gunk. His jaw was slack. A strawberry-shaped bruise discolored one cheek.

“Hey, man.”

Lance shot away from Cramer with a start. Freddy Aviles, trailing a flight bag from his shoulder, slowly spiraled through the rumpus room. He deftly arrested himself by hooking a handhold with a single finger.

“You get any closer to him, people goin’ to talk.”

Lance’s face hardened. “That isn’t funny, Freddy.”

“Hey, man, don’ look at me. I don’ care. I’m very liberal, you know?”

“It’s not funny.”

Freddy undipped the flight bag from his shoulder and attached it to the wall. He removed a banana and a squeeze bottle containing a bright red liquid.

“Hawaiian Punch,” he said. “Wan’ some?”

Lance waved away the offer. “Why did you say that?” he asked.

“Is a joke, okay?”

“You know I’m not like that.”

“Forget it.”

“I was looking at him because I’m interested in what happened.”

“Lotsa people interested,” said Freddy, “here and on the ground.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Orbital Dementia. Tha’s what the doctor’s report said.”

“What if that isn’t the reason?” said Lance.

Freddy felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle.

“Whatchyou mean?” he asked. “What else could it be?”

Lance shrugged.

“You made it sound like you knew something.”

“Just a feeling,” said Lance.

“Well, he had all the symptoms we learned in preflight. Cranky. Recluse.”

“I know all that,” said Lance. “But what if something else caused it?”

“Like what?”

“Something evil.”

Freddy shook his head and took a bite of the banana.

“Something so evil and so clever that it makes itself look like Orbital Dementia.”

“You reading too much of that shit.” Freddy nodded toward the book tumbling slowly behind Lance’s head. To accentuate the point, he fished around in his flight bag for a thin volume devoted to computer esoterica.

“I’m not talking about fiction,” said Lance. “I’m talking about real evil. The devil, maybe.”

“The devil is fiction, man.”

“If the devil is fiction, why do you wear that crucifix?”

“Is a gift,” said Freddy. He tugged at the chain until the crucifix popped out from under his shirt. “Besides, I can believe in Jesus Christ without believing in the devil. The devil is what we all can be if we don’ got God.”

“All right, suppose it isn’t the devil. Suppose it is Orbital Dementia. Maybe that’s a sign we shouldn’t be here.”

“That sound awful strange from somebody who say he always wanted to be an astronaut.” Freddy grinned as he stuffed the crucifix back inside his collar.

“I don’t know,” said Lance. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”

Freddy had relieved Lance at midnight three nights in a row. Each time, Lance had managed to linger well into the morning by starting some mildly philosophical conversation. Freddy knew that Lance had no intention of pursuing his half-baked theories on the cause of Russell Cramer’s madness. Lance simply wanted to deflect attention from his loneliness.

“I talked to Becky tonight,” said Lance.

“See? No problem, eh? Wha’d she say? She love you. She miss you. She can’ wait to see you.”

“She did, but—” Lance’s features hardened.

“But what?”

“She laughs funny.”

“Laugh funny? How you laugh funny?”

“It sounds different,” said Lance. “Not like it did on Earth.”

“Those phones are funny, not the laugh.”

“I know that, Freddy. Believe me, this is different. It’s like there’s someone with her, someone she doesn’t want me to know about.”

“She lives with her parents, right? Who the hell with her there?”

Lance ignored the direction of Freddy’s logic. “And she says stuff. Like about my birthday coming next month. She says she’s attracted to older men.”

“You getting older, no?”

“Freddy, I’m going to be twenty-four. She must be talking about someone else.”

“Lance, I think this girl driving you cuckoo.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” said Freddy. “Now my cousin Felix, before he marry his wife she drive him crazy. She talk about this other guy, she stay out all night. But when he felt crazy, he din’ sit around and think about she did this or she said that. He’d go out with another chick.”

“You mean he would cheat on his girlfriend?”

“Not cheat,” said Freddy. “He call it the fine art of getting perspective.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Sure you could.”

“Yeah, where? On Trikon Station?”

“Hey, man, there are chicks here. And you ain’t exactly a bad-lookin’ guy. Remind me of myself before my accident. I see these chicks checkin’ you out in the wardroom.”

“Like who?” Lance asked. A hint of a smile softened his features.

“All of them, man. Even the Swedes.”

“Really?”

“Would I shit you?”

Lance’s smile went into full bloom, creasing his face. Freddy plucked the paperback out of the air and pressed it into Lance’s hands.

“Get some sleep, man. We talk more about perspective tomorrow.”

“Yeah, Freddy,” said Lance. “You really think these chicks like me?”

“Tomorrow, eh?”

Lance wedged the book and the bottle under one arm and used the other to propel himself across the rumpus room. He paused at the hatch to wave at Freddy before diving into the connecting tunnel.

Freddy washed down the dregs of the banana with a few squeezes of Hawaiian Punch. Lance wasn’t a bad kid, he thought, just a little too hung up on his girlfriend. Maybe if he found some diversion up here he’d be a little less intense, and not so much of a leech.

Freddy removed a tiny aerosol can from an inner pocket of his flight bag. The can contained a stimulant much more powerful than smelling salts. He took off the cap and inserted the can’s thin rubber nipple into Russell Cramer’s nose. Cramer snorted. Freddy pressed the nipple. Cramer’s head shot back as if he had been punched in the jaw. His eyelids blinked and his lips trembled. Freddy shot more spray up the other nostril. Cramer groaned and shook his head. His eyelids separated. His eyes were bloodshot, but focused.

“Tha’s good,” said Freddy. He clamped one hand over Cramer’s mouth, and slowly worked the tiny brown bottle out of his pocket with the other hand. He held the bottle before Cramer’s face. The Martian’s eyes bugged.

“Now we on the same wavelength, eh?” Freddy spoke into Cramer’s ear. “You gonna talk?”

Cramer shook his head. Freddy held the bottle in his teeth while he shot more spray into Cramer’s nostrils.

“Burn, eh?”

Cramer coughed and gagged against Freddy’s hand. A giant tear loosened itself from his eye and floated away.

“Next one won’ be so nice. Next one burn you right down to your lungs.”

Cramer mumbled behind Freddy’s hand. Freddy allowed him some space.

“Okay, okay,” rasped Cramer.

“Good,” said Freddy. He pressed the brown bottle between Cramer’s eyes and held the aerosol’s nipple up his nose.

“Who gave you this shit,” eh?”

Sir Derek burst into the small room off the library that had been converted into the most sophisticated communications center in the whole shire of Avon. The operator on duty, a ruddy-faced man named Trane, snapped to attention.

“Any word yet from Ramsanjawi?” barked Sir Derek.

“Not a peep, sir,” said Trane, removing his headset. “There’s been a rather lengthy discussion progressing. A female and a private detective in the United States. All very hush-hush stuff.”

“Goddamn him,” muttered Sir Derek. Then he said to Trane, “I want the transcript of the conversation as soon as you get it.”

“But, sir, I believe you have a houseguest on the way.”

“I know I have a houseguest on the way! I want that transcript!”

Sir Derek stormed out to the closest of the many balconies that protruded from the limestone manor house like the parapets of a medieval castle. The sun was just down. The Mendip Hills humped toward a darkening horizon. Sir Derek took a deep breath of the evening air, then coughed it into his hand.

Objectively, the project was progressing far better than expected. Even the most pessimistic of the Lancashire lads agreed that the superbug was retaining its viability despite the enormous levels of genetic complexity engrafted by Ramsanjawi. Success hinged on Ramsanjawi, and Sir Derek was confident that his reading of Ramsanjawi’s personality was accurate. The Indian’s obsession with achieving a sense of belonging in English society far outweighed any of the personal enmity that had developed between the two men. Still, Sir Derek worried. There was always the slim chance that Chakra would do the unpredictable.

The trees beneath the balcony suddenly brightened. Gravel crunched loudly as an automobile ground to a halt. The Rolls-Royce Corniche, bearing Sir Derek’s houseguest, had arrived.

Her named was Joanna Ames. She was a Latin instructor at Oxford, twelve years Sir Derek’s junior, and the longest running of the several affairs he managed to conduct concurrently. She had green eyes, long sandy-colored hair, and a body that remained tautly slim from jogging thirty miles each week. She also had a flair for the dramatic and a high tolerance for pain.

Joanna had not always been so compliant. In the late seventies, during her first term at Oxford, she became enamored with the smoothly arrogant Chakra Ramsanjawi. At the time, Ramsanjawi was a faculty celebrity. He was on the fast track to the chairmanship of the world-renowned biology department and was treated as a guru by the more avant-garde elements of the university community. But in addition to dispensing wisdom, he dispensed drugs. They were mild synthetic hallucinogens he cooked up from common lab materials, and were supposedly harmless. He did not use them himself and he did not sell them. They were too new to be illegal. Ramsanjawi maintained until the end that he never accepted a penny for any of his wares, a claim no one could disprove. He would just bring them on the weekend party circuit and offer them to whoever expressed a desire to perceive an alternate reality.

Sir Derek, who was living not far from Oxford, attended several of these parties. The university scene was a refreshing change from his job as an under secretary in the foreign office. Relations with his would-be brother Chakra were cordial, almost friendly. That changed the moment his eyes found Joanna.

Thinking back, he was not sure whether he wanted Joanna for herself or because she was in love with Chakra. Perhaps the reasons were inextricably bound. She liked Sir Derek. He was, in her words, “comedically cute.” But it soon became apparent to him that she never would take him seriously as long as Chakra was in the picture.

Sir Derek sent anonymous tips about an unnamed Oxford drug wizard to three Fleet Street tabloids. His avowed intent was to have Chakra plastered all over the gossip columns, thereby making him infinitely less desirable to the beautiful Ms. Ames. What actually happened was a full-blown sex-and-drugs inquiry that resulted in the expulsion of a score of students and the firing of a dozen faculty members, including Chakra.

Joanna was spared the sword even though she had indulged in more than one of Chakra’s concoctions. The price was to agree to succumb to Sir Derek’s unusual advances. By now, in the late 1990s, she had grown accustomed to his tastes. And his rewards.

Sir Derek leaned back against the pillows and admired the diamond choker Joanna wore around her neck. It sets off her other accoutrements quite nicely, he thought. She was naked except for the straps that bound her arms tightly behind her back.

“Will it be necessary to gag you?” he mused aloud.

“Please don’t,” said Joanna softly.

“I think I should.”

“Won’t you want to put something else in my mouth, instead?”

A fist thudded twice against the bedroom door. Joanna frowned and rolled onto her back. Sir Derek mouthed the words important business. He reached for a blanket and draped it over his bare legs and the hunched figure of Joanna huddled between them.

“Come in,” he called after clearing his throat.

Trane entered with a look of pained embarrassment on his face and a neatly bound sheaf of papers in his hands. He crossed the room with his eyes fixed somewhere on the farthest wall, handed Sir Derek the papers, and left at double speed.

Joanna wriggled beneath the blanket. Sir Derek pulled off the covers and gave her a sharp smack across her bare buttocks.

“You’ll have to be still for a while,” he said sternly. “Content yourself with thinking about what is to come.”

She made herself look frightened and rested her head against his scrawny thigh.

Sir Derek quickly scanned the transcript. For the first time ever, there were no genetic data embedded in the code. Toward the end, he unearthed a message: The research pace had slowed to a crawl, especially in the American/Canadian lab module. Ramsanjawi suspected that this new American scientist O’Donnell was to blame. Perhaps he was protecting data under the guise of performing related experiments.

There were obstacles, thought Sir Derek, there always were obstacles. All the great ones had encountered them: Arthur, Alfred, Drake, Cromwell, Churchill. The true measure of a man was how he met those obstacles. He knew that he would do whatever was necessary; he always had. But he was earthbound, separated by an insuperable three hundred miles from the stage upon which this drama would be played. He wondered whether Chakra would have the nerve.

In his frustration and anger he threw the transcript to the floor and grabbed a handful of Joanna’s dark hair.

“Now you’ll pay,” he whispered fiercely to her.

“Oh please,” she whispered back, knowing they were Sir Derek’s two favorite words.