The KSC staff commissary, Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Pete Nimec regarded the plate in front of him and frowned.
“Tell me if I sound crazy,” he said, “but this Western omelette looks like it’s made out of powdered eggs.”
Annie smiled thinly from across the cafeteria table.
“What else would you expect here but astronaut food?”
“That the reason you’re only having coffee?”
She looked at him.
“Do you want to know a secret?”
He nodded.
“I prefer facing the press on an empty stomach,” she said. “Hunger approximating their perpetual state of being, it helps remind me what I have to deal with every day.”
It was Nimec’s turn to smile a little.
“Makes sense,” he said.
He raised his knife and fork, took a single bite of the omelette, decided he’d had enough, and pushed the plate aside. This would, at least, be his last meal at the commissary. In about an hour, Annie was to hold an early press conference and make the official announcement that sabotage of the SSME had been judged the cause of the Orion fire. From that point on, the investigation would fall into the hands of law-enforcement agencies… and, quietly, into Sword’s hands as well. Although Nimec had promised Annie he would do everything humanly possible to find out who had done the deed, and had also promised to keep her abreast of developments as they came up, his presence at the KSC was no longer needed, and he would be flying back to San Jose the next morning. She, too, would soon be leaving Florida, for that matter, returning home to Houston.
Nimec found himself thinking — as he had more than once over the past few days — that the air travel time between the two cities was fairly short.
He took a deep breath.
“Annie,” he said, “how about dinner this evening? At a real restaurant. With real food. Where we can relax. Get to be friends as well as colleagues.” He paused. “It’d be fine with me if you want to bring the kids.”
She sipped her coffee, lowered the cup onto its saucer, stared thoughtfully down into it.
“Friends,” she said.
He nodded.
They looked at each other silently for a while.
And then Annie smiled again.
“I’d like that, Pete,” she said. “I’d like it very much.”
The passenger cabin of a private jet over western Bolivia.
Harlan DeVane stared out the window as his ascending plane pierced the clouds and the landscape below dissolved into far-reaching blankness.
What had happened in Kazakhstan was truly regrettable, he thought. The Colombian and Peruvian leftists had paid him a large sum of money to settle their various grudges. As had the Albanian guerrillas… as, unknown to them, had their sworn enemies in Belgrade. And there would have been a long line of future clients, many with sharply conflicting interests, all willing to abide by his insistence on neutrality and confidentiality. Just last week, when things had looked so promising, Iran and Iraq had both made generous offers meant to cause problems for each other. New York, Washington, Moscow, Baghdad, Teheran… DeVane was quite the egalitarian when it came to selecting his targets of destruction, and would have been leasing time on the Havoc device for many weeks to come before an astronaut team could be sent up to disable it.
He sighed. It was over, he had to concede that. Over for now. But he had never told his customers that success was a certainty, and he’d given Roger Gordian quite an initial workout, hadn’t he?
Really, it was best to look at the bright side.
A world full of strife was a world full of profit, and DeVane saw no end in sight to either.