The next morning, his carefully casual wanderings brought him to a shop specializing in electronics from cell phones to laptops, where he asked to see the proprietor. A short, squat man whose butt and thighs were so massive they waddled independently of the rest of him, he listened to Akil's needs with eyebrows like black caterpillars politely raised over a swarthy, sweating moon face. "Of course," he said. "The battery is of no moment. The other, a few hours, no more. Over here, if you please, senor." He took Akil's photo, and repeated, "A matter of a few hours only, senor. Be pleased to return this evening after seven." And that evening Akil returned to the shop to pick up his camera, along with a set of identification papers in the name of Dandin Gandhi.
He had already checked out of his hotel. He went directly to the station and boarded an overnight train for Bilbao, where he boarded a plane for Paris de Gaulle. In Paris he took the Metro to Gare du Nord and a train for Amsterdam. From Amsterdam, he took a train to Germany.
Nowhere was his identity questioned. Truth to tell, except when he boarded a plane, his papers were almost never checked. The European Union was very accommodating to travelers.
4
HOUSTON, NOVEMBER 2006
She'd been named to the astronaut program five years before. She'd lived, worked, hoped, prayed for the day when she would be named to a shuttle crew.
In another four years, the shuttle program would end. The space shuttle would be retired, and NASA would move on to the next new thing. The next new thing was sounding a lot like the old new thing that scientists had been advocating for years, the return of the big dumb rocket, reminiscent of the days of the Saturn V. Preferably a big dumb unmanned rocket.
Atlantis was already scheduled to be cannibalized for parts for Discovery and Endeavour. The astronaut corps could hear the clock ticking down on the time left. There was already covert talk of what they were going to do after.
After, Kenai might open a vein and climb into a nice warm tub.
Today, she'd been named to a shuttle crew.
It was, however, nothing like she had imagined it would be. She had imagined joy unconfined, trumpets sounding, bells pealing, the exploding of champagne corks. She had imagined calling her parents and hearing their pride, and their fear. She had imagined the envy of her peers in the astronaut corps.
She hadn't imagined the spare, dry voice of Joel Minster, director of flight operations, informing them that there would be a sixth member of their crew, not an astronaut. What, in their more charitable moments, the astronauts referred to as a part-timer. Joy unconfined was checked, to be replaced by a stunned silence when they found out who it was.
"Please tell me you're kidding, Joel," Kenai said at last, with as much control as she could muster up on the spot.
Joel, known to some as the Great Conciliator and to others as the Great Suck-up, spoke her thought out loud. "I don't know what you're complaining about, Kenai. You've got your first mission. Doesn't happen to everyone."
Won't happen to a lot of them, was the thought in everyone's mind. And picking public fights with the man who might one day be in charge of assigning her to a precious second wasn't the smartest thing she could do, so this time she bit her tongue and kept her mouth shut.
Joel tucked his clipboard beneath an arm, gave a general nod, and left.
The door had barely closed behind him when the trash talk ensued.
"I don't know about you but this is just what I want on orbit, some dipshit rich kid fucking around on board." Bill White, an ex-Navy test pilot flying his second mission as pilot, was furious.
"We're launching the replacement for the Hubble, we're launching a communications satellite and an orbital observatory, we're conducting- how many experiments is this mission up to now?-and on top of all that we've got to babysit some spoiled brat?" This not-quite-shouted comment from Mike Williams, a mission specialist with a postdoc in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California who divided time into par-sees and as a result was usually the most patient and laid-back of astronauts. Today he waved long, lanky arms in emphasis, accidentally knocking the back of one hand against a table edge. He swore, which shocked them all into momentary silence, and sucked his bloody knuckles.
Into that silence stepped Laurel Freeman, a physicist from Stanford. She was almost sputtering with rage, but then Eratosthenes was her baby and as payload commander she took as a personal insult anything that affected its timely and successful deployment. Her father had been a stevedore on the Long Beach docks and in times of stress it showed up in her vocabulary. She was short and burly with a square face beneath a mop of untidy brown curls and it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine her offloading containers herself.
When Laurel paused for breath the mission commander stood up. "All right," Rick Robertson said. His voice was low and even, which had the natural effect of making them all shut up so they could hear him. "This is what's been handed to us. It sucks. Are any of you ready to give up your seat in protest?"
None of them were. There wasn't one of them who wouldn't have volunteered to be ballast on this mission or any other. Rick knew it. They all knew it. Rick was a test pilot from Texas Tech by way of the Air Force. This was his third shuttle flight and his second as commander. At five feet seven inches, he held himself with such parade-ground erectness that he seemed six feet tall. He looked at Kenai and said in his slow drawl, "Anything to add, Kenai?"
He'd deliberately mispronounced her name again, and it worked to defuse the situation. "It's KEE-nigh, not Kenya." She paused long enough for the delay to be felt. "Sir."
There was a very small laugh, but Rick gave her a brief, approving smile.
"Who's this guy again?" Bill said, his flush subsiding.
Rick consulted the bio Joel had handed him. "Well, at least he isn't a prince."
"The shuttle program already has its quota of princes," Mike said with feeling.
"Also U.S. senators," Laurel said, still steaming. "And U.S. representatives."
Heavily, Rick said, "He is a sheik, however."
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Bill said. "And what lame-ass experiment is he bringing along?"
"Way-ull," Rick said, drawing out the word in the best Chuck Yeager imitation so dear to all aviators, "he ain't got no lame-ass experiment. We are deploying his satellite."
"The ARABSAT-8A?" Kenai said. "He's a Saudi?"
"No, Qatari," Rick said. "His family has a controlling interest in a media conglomerate." He paused, and then, with obvious reluctance and not a little apprehension, said, "A media conglomerate which owns, among many other things, Al Jazeera."