“I’ve got a lot of uncles. None of them are named Randolph and all of them have their own credit cards that can’t be traced back to me.”
Shaking his head, Passeau said, “You’re a scoundrel, Dan!” “Just a businessman trying to survive.”
Passeau was smiling now. “It would be wonderful, a week on the Riviera. But it would end with the two of us going to jail.”
“Not if we time it right.” Dan leaned forward across his desk. “You take a week off. By the time you get back we’ve run the test flight. You express great outrage that I sneaked it in behind your back. Nobody else knows about it except you and me.”
Passeau stared at Dan. He’s tempted, Dan thought It all depends on how much he really wants to help me. He’ll be taking a risk, but it’s a pretty small one. I’ll be betting the farm, the family jewels, and my cojones on the test flight.
“No one else will know about it?” Passeau asked, in a silky whisper.
“No one,” said Dan. He realized that April had already made the hotel reservation, but he was confident he could trust his executive assistant.
“And how will you be able to tow your rocket out onto the launchpad and place the spaceplane atop it without anyone noticing?”
“Mating test,” Dan replied innocently. “As far as the government is concerned, and the news media, we’ll just be testing the connectors between the booster and the spaceplane. Alignment, electrical connections, systems compatibility, that sort of thing.”
Passeau said nothing.
“The booster’s solid-fueled. We won’t need to fill her tanks and go through all that long a countdown. The plane will be crewless, nobody aboard.”
A cloud of suspicion crossed Passeau’s face. “You promise that? Nobody aboard?”
“I swear it,” Dan said.
For long moments Passeau remained silent, obviously thinking, weighing his options, all the possibilities.
“This could destroy me,” he said at last.
“I’ll hire you if the FAA throws you out.”
“We could both go to jail.”
“You’ll do it?”
Passeau hesitated another few moments, then murmured, “I’ve never been to the Riviera.”
“You’ll love it!”
“If this doesn’t go well, I may have to stay there and ask the French for political asylum.”
If this doesn’t go well, Dan thought, there’s no place on Earth that I can run to.
Astro Motel
The Sun was dipping below the scrub pines as April Simmonds parked her baby blue Sebring next to the empty handicapped space and headed for the motel’s bar entrance. No sense locking a convertible, she had learned. If anybody wants it badly enough they’ll slash the top open. Besides, nobody around here would bother her car. All the Astro people knew it was hers, and none of them were car thieves.
Pushing through the door brought her into the frigid air-conditioning of the bar. It’s cold enough in here to raise goosebumps, she complained silently. Then she remembered reading somewhere that they kept topless bars real cold so that the dancers’ nipples would be stiff.
It had been a long day at the office, with Dan in a sweat to get a booster set up on the launchpad so that they could mate the backup spaceplane to it. Most of the FAA people had left, though, and a crew of technicians had started gathering up the pieces of the first spaceplane’s wreckage to store in precisely marked cartons that eventually would be stacked in a warehouse.
The lounge was jammed with after-work people, most of them crowded around the bar three deep, men outnumbering women at least two to one. Country music was thumping from the speakers in the ceiling but the conversations and laughter and calls to the barmaids for drinks were so loud she could barely make out the song: “Lay Your Head on My Shoulder,” a classic. Dr. Tenny had always called it the transplant song.
Thinking of Joe reminded her why she was here. April wanted to talk to the barmaids, find out what they remembered about Pete Larsen, if anything. She herself had come to this bar with Pete once, on one of her dates with the man. Pete had shown more interest in the computer game console off in the corner than he had in her.
April hesitated just inside the doorway. The thought of worming through the crowd to the bar discouraged her, and she’d never get to talk to the barmaids anyway; they were too busy.
“Hey, April, what’re you drinking?”
It was one of the technicians. April recognized his face but couldn’t quite place his name.
“White wine?” she said, falling back into the slightly defensive mode of speech that she had inherited from her native Virginia.
The guy dove into the crowd and reappeared a minute later with a glass of wine in one hand and a tumbler of something stronger in the other.
“Haven’t seen you around here for a while,” he said, guiding her toward an unoccupied booth with a big grin on his face.
She accepted the wine and his hand on the small of her back. “It’s been terribly busy.”
“Yeah, the crash and then Tenny getting killed. Most of the people in my group are wondering how long we’ve got before Randolph lays us off.”
“He’s fighting awfully hard to avoid that,” April said, sliding into the booth, resigning herself to the fact that her attempt at detective work was going to result in nothing more than listening to this man’s troubles and finding an excuse to get away without hurting his feelings.
Across the crowded, noisy room, though, another Astro employee watched April chatting with the technician. He was a data manager in Astro’s personnel department, and he knew that Dan Randolph’s executive assistant had been reviewing personnel records for the past several days. She had scanned Pete Larsen’s file several times. He had a buddy in Houston who paid good money to be informed about what Randolph was up to. He decided to call his buddy, who worked at Tricontinental Oil, and let him know what April Simmonds was doing. The rumor was that Tricontinental was going to buy Astro out. A lot of money is going to change hands, he thought. I might as well get some of it for myself.
By the time Claude Passeau entered the bar, the after-work crowd had dissipated. April was long gone, driving alone to catch the last ferry of the evening. The technician who’d bought her a drink drove his own car into the ferry and even followed April partway to her apartment in Lamar, but lost his nerve halfway there and turned back to his own place, a house he shared with three other Astro employees.
A soft instrumental was purring from the music system, a blessed relief from the usual doleful nasalities that the bar’s clientele seemed to enjoy. Passeau grimaced at the thought of trying to pick a decent wine from the selection stocked at the bar. Instead be ordered a brandy, longing for a sip of Armagnac but settling for the Presidente that Dan had recommended.
Sitting alone in the same booth that April had occupied, he wrestled with his conscience.
Dan wants to launch his spaceplane, to prove that the crash was sabotage. I can’t be a party to that; it would ruin my career. So Dan cleverly offers me a free vacation on the Riviera.
The nerve of the man! Despite himself, Passeau smiled at the thought of it. Out-and-out bribery. We’d both go to jail.
And yet—Passeau admired Dan’s drive, his daring, his willingness to risk everything. And, at heart, Passeau agreed that the first spaceplane’s crash was no accident. Someone very cleverly sabotaged the plane. Someone with deep technical capabilities and enormous resources. Someone extremely dangerous. If only there were a shred of evidence to show!
A young woman entered the bar. The few men still perched on stools swiveled their heads to check her out. Pert, thought Passeau. That’s the kind of woman that defined the word. She was slim, cute, a sprinkling of freckles across her snub nose, strawberry blonde hair cut short. She wore a T-shirt with some sort of slogan across the chest and a pair of ragged cutoffs. Good legs, not much bosom.