Hawk chuckled. "Dick's always been a grouser."
"I'll have a straight scotch," said Nick. "On the rocks." He glanced around the restaurant. It was paneled in bamboo to table level, with wall-to-wall mirroring above that and wrought-iron pineapples on each table. A horseshoe-shaped bar was at one end and beyond it, enclosed in glass, the discotheque — at present the "in" spot for the Golden Youth of the Rolls-Royce set. Elaborately jeweled women and men with smooth, well-fed faces sat at tables here and there, picking at their food in the vague half-light.
A waiter arrived with their drinks. He wore a colorful aloha shirt over black trousers. His flat Oriental features were expressionless as Hawk upset the martini that had just been placed in front of him. "I take it you've caught up with the news," said Hawk, watching the liquid disappear into the damp tablecloth. "A national tragedy of the gravest dimensions," he added, pulling the toothpick out of the olive that had spilled from the drink and beginning to jab at it absent-mindedly. "It will delay the moon program at least two years. Perhaps longer, considering the mood the public is in at present. And their representatives have caught the mood." He glanced up. "That Senator what's-his-name, the chairman of the subcommittee on space," he said. "He wants the program delayed at least five years to make certain no more lives are lost."
The waiter returned with a fresh tablecloth and Hawk abruptly changed the subject. "Of course I don't get down too often," he said, popping the remains of the olive into his mouth. "Once a year the Belle Glade Club has a pre-duck-hunting banquet here. I try always to make that."
Still another surprise. The Belle Glade Club, Palm Beach's most exclusive. Money wouldn't get you in; and if you were in, you might suddenly find yourself out for some obscure reason. Nick peered at the man who sat across from him. Hawk looked like a farmer or perhaps the editor of a small-town newspaper. Nick had known him a long time. Intimately, he'd thought. Their relationship had been very near to that of father and son. Yet this was the first inkling he'd had that Hawk's background was a social one.
Don Lee arrived with a fresh martini. "Would you like to order now?"
"Perhaps my young friend would," said Hawk, speaking with exaggerated care. "I'm fine." He glanced at the menu that Lee held in front of him. "It's all glorified chop suey to me, Lee. You know that."
"I can have a steak ready for you in five minutes, Mr. Byrd."
"That sounds good to me," said Nick. "Make it rare."
"All right, two," Hawk snapped testily. When Lee had gone, he asked suddenly, "Of what earthly use is the moon?" Nick noticed that his S's were beginning to slur. Hawk drunk? Unheard of — yet he gave every indication. Martinis weren't his drink. One scotch and water before dinner was his usual fare. Had the deaths of the three astronauts somehow gotten under that grizzled old skin?
"The Russians know," Hawk said, without waiting for an answer. "They know minerals will be found there unknown to students of this planet's rocks. They know that if nuclear war destroys our technology, it will never recover because the raw materials that would enable a new civilization to evolve have been exhausted. But the moon — its a great floating ball of raw, unknown resources. And mark my words," space treaty or no, the first power to land there will eventually control all of it!"
Nick sipped his drink. Had he been dragged away from his vacation to attend a lecture on the importance of the moon program? When Hawk finally paused, Nick said quickly, "Where do we fit into all of this?"
Hawk glanced up, surprised. Then he said, "You've been on vacation. I forgot. When was your last briefing?"
"Eight days ago."
"Then you haven't heard that the Cape Kennedy fire was sabotage?"
"No, the radio reports didn't mention that."
Hawk shook his head. "The public doesn't know yet Perhaps they never will. There's been no final decision on that as yet."
"Any idea who did it?"
"It's quite definite. Man named Patrick Hammer. He was the gantry-crew chief…"
Nick's eyebrows rose. "The news reports are still touting him as the hero of the whole affair."
Hawk nodded. "The investigators narrowed it down to him in a matter of hours. He asked for police protection. But before they could get to his house he killed his wife and three children and put his head in the oven." Hawk took a long swig of his martini. "Very messy," he muttered. "He slit their throats, then wrote a confession on the wall with their blood. Said he'd planned the whole thing so he could be a hero, but that he couldn't live with himself and didn't want his family to live with the shame of it, either."
"Very thoughtful of him," said Nick dryly.
They were silent while the waiter served their steaks. When he had gone away Nick said, "I still don't see where we enter the picture. Or is there more?"
"There is," said Hawk. "There's the airplane crash that killed the Gemini 9 crew a few years ago, the first Apollo disaster, the loss of the SV-5D re-entry vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base last June. There's the explosion of the J2A rocket test facility in the Air Force's Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tennessee in February, and there are the dozens of other accidents that have been logged in since the project began. The FBI, NASA Security, and now even the CIA, have been investigating each of them and they've reached the conclusion that most, perhaps all, are the result of sabotage."
Nick picked silently at his steak, mulling it over. "Hammer couldn't have been in all those places at once," he said finally.
"Exactly. And that last message he scrawled — strictly a red herring. Hammer used the hurricane shelter of his bungalow as a workshop. Before killing himself, he soaked the place in gasoline. He apparently hoped a spark from the doorbell would ignite the escaping gas and blow the whole house up. It didn't, though, and certain incriminating evidence has been found. Microdots with instructions from someone using the code name Sol, photographs, scale models of the capsule's life-support system with the pipe he was to cut painted in red. And — interestingly enough — a card from this restaurant with a notation on the back that read: Sol, midnight, 3/21."
Nick glanced up, surprised. In that case, what in hell were they doing here, dining so placidly, talking so openly? He had assumed they were in a "safe house" or, at the very least, in a carefully "neutralized" zone.
Hawk watched him impassively. "The Bali Hai's cards are not given out lightly," he said. "You have to ask for one, and if you're someone of little importance, chances are you won't get it. So how did a $15,000-a-year space technician end up with one?"
Nick looked past him, seeing the restaurant through new eyes. Alert, professional eyes that missed nothing, that probed for the elusive element in the pattern round him, something disturbing, not quite within reach. He had noticed it earlier but thinking they were in a safe house, he had dismissed it from his mind.
Hawk signaled the waiter. "Have the maitre d' step over here a minute, please," he said. He took a photograph from his pocket and showed it to Nick. "This is our friend Pat Hammer," he said. Don Lee appeared and Hawk handed the photo to him. "Recognize this man?" he asked.
Lee studied it a moment. "Sure, Mr. Byrd, I remember him. He was in here about a month ago. With a gorgeous Chinese chick." He winked broadly. "That's how I remember him."
"I take it he got in with no difficulty. Is that because he had a card?"
"No. Because of the girl," said Lee. "Joy Sun. She's been here before. She's an old friend, as a matter of fact. She's some kind of scientist up at Cape Kennedy."