“Jim, I don’t feel like talking to you right now.”
“No, Hana, no—I’m sorry!”
But she’s hung up.
“Shit!” He slams down the phone so hard it almost cracks. After a moment he dials the number again. Busy signal, hateful sound. She’s left the phone off the cradle. No chance for contact. It’s so stupid! “Oh, man.”
He wants to go up there, beg her forgiveness. Then he gets angry at the unfairness of it, he wants her to beg his forgiveness, for being so unreasonable. “Come on! I was just having dinner with a friend! After the funeral of another friend!” But that isn’t exactly true. He pulls his big Mexican cookbook from the shelf and furiously slams it to the floor, kicks it across the kitchen. Very satisfying, until the moment he stops.
An hour later, angrier than ever, he calls up Arthur. “Arthur, have you got anything ready to go?”
“Well—come on over and we’ll talk about it.”
Jim tracks over to Arthur’s place in Fountain Valley. Arthur’s face is flushed, he is in a strong field of excitement, he takes Jim’s upper arm in a tight grip and grins. “Okay, Jim, we’re on for another strike, but this one’s a little different. The target is Laguna Space Research.” His straightforward blue gaze asks the obvious question.
Jim says, “What about the night watchmen they made the announcement about?”
“They’ve been taken out of the plants and are out on the perimeter.”
“Why?” Jim doesn’t understand.
Arthur shrugs. “We’re not sure. Someone bombed a computer company’s plant up in Silicon Valley, and a janitor inside was killed. Not our doing, but LSR doesn’t know that. So they’re going to automatic defenses and a perimeter watch. It’s going to be a little more dangerous. We’ve got them all running scared. But this time—well, I wasn’t going to call you, because it was LSR.”
Jim nods. “I appreciate it. But it’s the ballistic missile defense system we’re going after, right?”
“Right. LSR has the lion’s share of the boost-phase defense, Ball Lightning as they call it. A successful strike against it could be devastating.” Arthur’s excitement is evident in the tightness of his grip on Jim’s arm.
“I want to do it,” Jim says.
It’s the only avenue of action left to him, and he can’t stand not to act; the tension in him would drive him mad. “My father’s in another program, this won’t have anything to do with him. Besides, it has to be done. It has to be done if anything is ever going to change!”
Arthur nods, still looking at him closely. “Good man. It’ll be easier with your help, I’ll admit that.”
Gently Jim shifts his arm out of Arthur’s grip. Arthur looks at his hand, surprised. “I’m wired,” he confesses. “It’s tomorrow night, see. Tomorrow night, and I thought I was doing it on my own.”
“Same procedure?”
“Yeah, everything’ll go just the same. Should be simple, as long as we keep a good distance away and under cover, and…”
Jim listens to Arthur absently, distracted by his own anger, by everything else. He thought the commitment to action would release some of the tension in him; instead he is more tense than ever, he almost needs to bend over, give in to the contraction of the stomach muscles. Laguna Space Research… Well, do it! None of these companies should be exempt! Something has to be done!
It’s time to act, at last.
69
Sandy hears about the planned attack on LSR from Bob Tompkins, who gives him a call that afternoon. “Good news, Sandy. Raymond is going to give us a hand in the matter of the lost laundry. Our guardian angel is going to have some trouble tomorrow night, at about midnight. One of those accidents that have been happening lately, you know.”
“One of Arthur’s ventures?” Sandy asks.
Brief silence at the other end. “Yeah, but let’s not talk about it in too much detail now. The point is, when the accident happens our guardian angels will have their hands full, and it’ll be on the side opposite our little aquatic problem, so we think surveillance there will be temporarily abandoned. If you’re ready out there, you’ll be able to rescue the laundry you had to put on hold.”
“I don’t know, Bob.” Sandy is frowning to himself. “I don’t like the sound of it, to tell you the truth.”
“We need that laundry, Sandy. And since you put it there, you’ll have the easiest time finding it again.”
“I still don’t like it.”
“Come on, Sandy. We didn’t make the mess. In fact, we’re the ones making you the opportunity to get out of it gracefully. Solvently. Just go for a little night boating, cruise in to your beach, collect the laundry, and return. There won’t be a problem tomorrow night, and all will be well.”
Sandy recognizes the threat behind the pleasantry, and in some ways it does sound like a very easy out of a sticky dilemma, which up to this point has only offered him the choice of either big debt, or the permanent loss of his Blacks Cliffs friends (at best). And it does sound like it will go.…
“Okay,” he says unwillingly. “I’ll do it. I’ll need some help, though. My assistant from last time probably won’t be interested.”
“We’ll send someone, along with the keys to a motorboat based in Dana Point. In fact I may come myself.”
“That would be good. What time does this happen?”
“Tomorrow, midnight.”
“All right. And you’ll show when?”
“I’ll give you a call tomorrow morning. Me or a friend will meet you in Dana Point in the evening.”
“All right.”
“Tubular, man. See you then.”
Sandy calls Tash and asks for his help, but as he expected, Tash refuses to have anything to do with it. “It’s stupid, Sandy. You should pass on the whole thing.”
“Can’t afford to.”
This gives Tashi pause, but in the end he still refuses.
Sandy hangs up, sighs, checks his watch. He’s already late for half a dozen appointments, and he’s still got twenty calls to make. In fact he’s going to have to pinball around all day and tomorrow morning to get ready for this rescue operation. No rest for the weary. He lids some Buzz and Pattern Perception, starts tapping out a phone number.
As the line rings he thinks about it.
Now he knows that Jim is working with Arthur, and Arthur is working for Raymond, and that Raymond is pursuing a private vendetta for private purposes—and perhaps making a profit on the side, or so it appears. The shape of the whole setup is clear to him.
But now—now he’s in a situation where he can’t do anything with what he knows. All his detective work was done with the idea that he could tell Jim something Jim didn’t know, help him out, perhaps warn him away from trouble. Tell him what was really going on, so that he wouldn’t continue thinking he was part of some idealistic resistance to the war machine, or whatever he is thinking—so he could get out of it before something went wrong.
Now Sandy can’t do anything of the kind. In fact he has to hope that Jim does a good job of it. “Come through for me, Jimbo.…”
70
Lemon gets a call from Donald Hereford in New York. It looks like a sunny evening in Manhattan.
Hereford gets right to the point: “Have you gotten all of the night watchmen out of the plant out there?”
“Yes, we did that right after you visited. But listen, the Ball Lightning team reports some significant breakthroughs, and I thought I should tell you about them—”
Hereford is shaking his head. “Just keep the situation in the plant stable, especially in the next few days.”
Lemon nods stiffly, frustration tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Do you know…”