He let his eyes move from one piece of test equipment and power point to the other. But there was nothing wrong here. Nothing.
The floor lurched slightly. For a second Ripley thought a sudden gust of wind had rocked the tower or that something had hit them, but he suddenly realized that the floor was sinking.
The room, or at least the floor, was an elevator. For some reason his coming inside the white house and closing the door had activated it, and he was heading down, slowly and silently.
“The bastards,” he said, suddenly understanding what was going on. The original satellite had been brought up to the white house, and after his Tiger team had completed their final checks, it had been moved below the tower, where it had been switched for the satellite he’d spotted in the rocket’s payload. It had been done in secret through the enclosed central core. It was something the Japanese had planned for when the tower had been designed. This wasn’t some last minute add-on.
The question in his mind was, why? The NSDA was publicly getting set to launch a module up to the Freedom space station. That’s what they wanted the world to believe. Instead, they had switched the satellite for something else. Something as massive as a Greyhound bus, ten metric tons, sheathed not in gold foil, but in some black material.
There were no longer any innocent explanations, as far as Ripley was concerned. For the first time since coming to Tanegashima he was worried about his safety and the safety of his team. Whatever the Japanese were doing here was not meant for outsiders to see.
Five minutes after the floor of the white house started down, the smooth walls of the shaft suddenly opened on a large, white-tiled room that was almost the twin of the clean room at the top of the tower. Sitting on a dolly in the middle of the room was the original satellite, its gold foil gleaming in the dim lights.
The room was empty, except for the satellite. A huge door, the twin of the one above, was closed, and test equipment like above lined the walls.
Ripley tried to take it all in, to made some sense of it. Whatever was going on here had to be stopped. There would have to be explanations, full disclosure, before whatever was strapped aboard the rocket was lifted up to the space station.
He stepped off the elevator and started toward the satellite when the floor silently began to rise again. He caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, and without thinking, jumped back on before it got out of reach. He did not want to be stuck down here. He had to get topside and use his satellite phone to call Houston. It was coming up on eleven in the morning over there, and Hartley would be in his office. There was no other option, Ripley decided, because the plain fact was that he and his Tiger team were strangers in a strange land, outnumbered and outgunned. They were astronauts, not spies.
McGarvey walked into his office a couple of minutes after twelve. He’d stopped first at Bethesda Hospital to make sure that Kathleen and Liz were doing okay, then had gone back to his apartment where he packed an overnight bag with a few items of dark clothing and a pair of soft boots. He tossed in his passport and cash, along with a Belgian passport, credit cards and IDs under the work name Pierre Allain.
Ms. Swanfeld’s mouth dropped open. “Heavens. You’re the last person I expected to see again today.”
“Grab your notebook. I want you to sit in on a meeting,” McGarvey told her. He glanced in his office. His desk was piled with files and memos, and the light on his voice-mail was blinking furiously. “When we’re finished, you haven’t seen me since this morning.”
Ms. Swanfeld looked dubious. “Mr. Murphy is screaming for your hide—”
“I need your help, Dahlia, more than I’ve ever needed anybody’s help,” McGarvey said urgently. “I’m doing nothing wrong. In fact I may be the only person in Washington who’s doing anything right. But I need you to trust me a little longer.”
“And cover for you?”
He smiled wryly, and nodded. “You should have gone home when you had the chance.”
“No way, boss,” she said, grinning. She grabbed a steno pad and pencils.
McGarvey checked the busy corridor to make sure that Murphy wasn’t charging his way, then led his secretary down to Rencke’s cubicle. The room was a mess, papers strewn everywhere, two wastepaper baskets overflowing with computer printouts, milk cartons and empty Twinkies packages littering the floor. Otto, his fingers flying over a keyboard, streams of numbers flashing across a lavender-hued monitor, didn’t bother looking up.
“Just a second,” he said excitedly. “Just a second.” He stopped typing, and the data stream on the monitor began to speed up, so fast that the numbers became an indistinct blur. He hesitated a moment, then pointed a finger at the screen. “Bang,” he cried in triumph. The numbers flashing across the screen stopped, leaving only one. “There,” he said.
“What is it?” McGarvey asked.
Otto looked up, an odd, frightened expression on his face. “I know what you’re thinking, Mac, and it won’t work. This time you gotta listen to me. No shit, you’re going to get your ass shot off this time.”
“We’re running out of options. The White House isn’t going to do a thing to stop it, and convincing someone down in Houston without proof isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
“That’s right. But NASA’s got five people out there to help with the launch. Technical support, you know. That kind of shit. The head guy is Frank Ripley and I came up with his satellite cell phone number.”
“He’s probably just as much in the dark as everyone else,” McGarvey said. “They sure as hell aren’t in on it.”
“Call him and ask.”
“Excuse me,” Ms. Swanfeld broke in. “Would you two mind telling me what’s going on?”
“Mac wants to stop the Japanese from launching their satellite, and he thinks the only way to do that is to go over there and do it himself. But if you can convince Ripley that something’s rotten in Jap-land, maybe he can come up with the proof — something we can take to Houston. There’s only thirty-nine hours left, but maybe Ripley could buy us some time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Whatever the Japanese are going to launch has nothing to do with the space station. I don’t know what it is, but it has something to do with the nuclear explosion in North Korea. Maybe an orbiting laser weapon or something to knock out a missle attack. You know, Star Wars?”
“Mr. Murphy can take this to the President—” Ms Swanfeld said. Then she got a funny look on her face. “Mr. Nance … oh. You already told him.” Her eyes widened as she took the thought to the next step. “They didn’t believe you, and the President fired you. That’s why Mr. Murphy is screaming bloody murder.”
“Exactamundo,” Otto said. “What your boss wants to do is fly over there, sneak onto the base past all their security — and by now you gotta figure they know he’s going to try something like that — find Papa-san Lee and twist his arm.”
“That’s crazy,” Ms. Swanfeld said, then her face dropped. “I’m sorry, Mr. McGarvey, but Mr. Rencke’s right, you’d never get away with it. You’ll get yourself killed.”
McGarvey couldn’t face them. He looked at the number on the computer monitor. A CIA psychologist had once told him that he was a man with unrealistic expectations, not only for himself, but for everyone around him. He judged the world through his own viewpoint, which was distorted by the things he had done in his life. Soldiers returning from a war took years to come back to normal, to see the world around them in noncombat terms so that they wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and blind panic thinking the noise they heard wasn’t an enemy soldier sneaking up on their position. It was called battle fatigue. The psychologist had kindly suggested that McGarvey quit the Company before his battle fatigue killed him. What the psychologist didn’t understand was that McGarvey could not change. It was who he was, right to the core. In old-fashioned terms, he was simply a man who when faced with a job to do, got on with it in whatever way he could. Nothing could dissuade him. His problem was that the jobs he picked always seemed to be the impossible ones.