“What and who I am has nothing to do with this,” I snapped.
“A cop,” Sam said, with a heavy sigh.
Out of nowhere, Hector spoke up. “Why do you want two months?”
I whirled on the poor guy. “So he can steal as much money as he can from the poor unsuspecting slobs he calls his customers, why else?”
“Yeah,” Hector said, in that smoky low voice of his, “OK, maybe so. But why two months?”
Before I could think of an answer, Sam popped in. “Because in two months I’ll have proved my point.”
“What point?”
“That there’s a viable market for tourists in space. That people’ll spend a good-sized hunk of change just for the chance to ride into orbit.”
“Which you don’t really do,” I reminded him.
“That doesn’t matter,” Sam said. “The point I’m making is that there really is a market for space tourism. People have been talking about space tourism for years; I’m doing something about it.”
“You’re stealing,” I said. “Swindling.”
“OK, so I’m faking it. Nevertheless, people are plunking down their money for a space adventure.”
“So what?” I sneered.
Hunching forward, leaning his forearms on the gleaming desktop, Sam said, “So with three whole months of this operation behind me, I can go back to the States and raise enough capital to lease a Clippership that’ll really take tourists into orbit.”
I stared at him.
Hector got the point before I did. “You mean the financial people won’t believe there’s a market for space tourism now, but they will after you’ve operated this fake business for three months?”
“Right,” Sam answered. “Those Wall Street types don’t open up their wallets until you’ve got solid numbers to show ’em.”
“What about venture capitalists?” Hector asked. “They back new, untried ideas all the time.”
Sam made a sour face. “Sure they do. I went to some of ’em. First thing they did was ask me why the big boys like Masterson and Global Technologies aren’t doing it. Then they go to the experts’ in the field and ask their opinion of the idea. And who re the experts?”
“Masterson and Global,” I guessed.
Shaking his head, Sam said, “Even worse. They went to NASA. To Clark Griffith IV, my own boss, for crap’s sake! By the time he got done scaring the cojones off them, they wouldn’t even answer my e-mail.”
“NASA shot you down?”
“They didn’t know it was me. They talked to a team that the venture capitalists put together.”
I asked, “But shouldn’t NASA be in favor of space tourism? I mean, they’re the space agency, after all.”
“Some people in NASA are in favor of it, sure,” Sam said. “But the higher you go in the agency the more conservative they get. Up at the top they have nightmares of a spacecraft full of tourists blowing up, like the old Challenger. That’d set back everything we do in space by ten years, at least.”
“So when the venture capitalists asked—”
“The agency bigwigs threw enough cold water on the idea to freeze the Amazon River,” Sam growled.
“And that’s when you started Space Adventure Tours,” I said.
“Right. Set the whole company up while I was still working at the Cape. Then I took a three-month leave to personally run the operation. I’ve got two months left to go.”
Silence. I sat there, not knowing what to say next. Hector looked thoughtful, or maybe puzzled is a better description of the expression on his face. Sam leaned back in his high chair, staring at me like a little boy who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but is hoping to get a cookie out of it instead of a spanking.
I was in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. I really liked Sam, even though he had quite literally screwed me. But I couldn’t let him continue to swindle people; that was wrong any way you looked at it, legally or morally.
On the other hand, Sam wasn’t really hurting anybody. Was he? Did any of his customers empty their retirement accounts to take his phony ride? Would any of those retired couples spend their declining years in poverty because Sam bilked them out of their life savings?
I shook my head, trying to settle my spinning thoughts into some rational order. Sam was breaking all kinds of laws, and he’d have to stop. Right now.
“All right,” I said, my mind finally made up. “I’m not going to report this back to your superiors at NASA.”
Sam’s face lit up.
“And I’m not going to blow the whistle on you or bring in the authorities,” I continued.
Sam grinned from ear to ear.
“On one condition,” I said firmly.
His rusty eyebrows hiked up. “One condition?”
“You’ve got to shut this operation down, Sam. Either shut down voluntarily, or I’ll be forced to inform the authorities here in Panama and the news media in the States.”
He nodded solemnly. “Fair enough. In two months I’ll close up shop.”
“Not in two months,” I snapped. “Now. Today. You go out of business now and refund whatever monies you’ve collected for future flights.”
I expected Sam to argue. I expected him to rant and holler at me. Or at least plead and wheedle. He did neither. For long, long moments he simply sat there staring at me, saying nothing, his face looking as if I’d just put a bullet through his heart.
I steeled myself and stared right back at him. Hector stirred uneasily in his chair beside me, sensing that there was more going on than we had expressed in words, but saying nothing.
At last Sam heaved an enormous sigh and said, in a tiny little exhausted voice, “OK, if that’s what you want. I’m in no position to fight back.”
I should have known right there and then that he was lying through his crooked teeth.
Hector flew me back to Panama City and we repaired to our separate hotel rooms. I felt totally drained, really out of it, as if I’d spent the day fighting dragons or climbing cliffs by my fingernails.
Then things started to get weird.
I had just flopped on my hotel room bed, not even bothering to take off my clothes, when the phone rang. My boss from DEA headquarters in Washington.
“You’re going to have a visitor,” he told me, looking nettled in the tiny phone screen. “Her name will be Jones. Listen to what she has to tell you and act accordingly.”
“A visitor?” I mumbled, feeling thick-headed, confused. “Who? Why?”
My boss doesn’t nettle easily, but he sure looked ticked off. “She’ll explain it all to you. And this is the last goddamned time I let you or any other of my people go off on detached duty to help some other agency!”
With that, he cut off the connection. I was looking at a blank phone screen, wondering what on earth was going on.
The phone buzzed again. This time it was Hector.
“I just got a phone call from my group commander at Eglin,” he said. “Some really weird shit has hit the fan, Ramona. I’m under orders to stay here in Panama with you until we meet with some woman named Jones.”
“I got the same orders from my boss,” I told him.
Hector’s darkly handsome face went into brooding mode. “I don’t like the sound of this,” he muttered.
“Neither do I,” I confessed.
We didn’t have long to wait. Ms. Jones arrived bright and early the following morning. In fact, Hector and I were having breakfast together in the hotel’s nearly-empty dining room, trying to guess what was going on, when she sauntered in.
She didn’t hesitate a moment, just walked right up to our table and sat down, as if she’d been studying photographs of us for the past week or two.
“Adrienne Jones,” she said, opening her black leather shoulder bag and pulling out a leather-encased laminated ID card. It said she was with the U.S. Department of State.