Feeling a shift in Ricci’s balance as he struggled with Antonio, Kuhl flailed beneath him, planting both hands on the floor to gain some leverage. Like a man doing a push-up, heedless of his shattered knuckles, he straightened his arms and heaved himself off the floor. As Ricci went spilling from on top of him, Kuhl scrambled to his feet and looked hurriedly around for his pack.
Then he glimpsed it behind him. Behind Antonio. In the room containing the ISS module.
In there with the other Sword operatives.
Kuhl saw the choices before him, and again took the one that was unfortunate but unavoidable.
Antonio’s voice fading until it was barely a shiver on his lips, Ricci finally kicked free of his still-clinging fingers, sprang to his feet, and looked down the corridor.
All down its length, it was empty.
He rushed straight ahead toward the loading bay, plunged from the darkness of the hall out into the lesser darkness of the night.
The man with whom he’d been struggling was nowhere to be seen.
Gone.
And though Ricci would search for him for the next hour, and immediately order a cordon placed around the space center’s grounds, Kuhl would
He had, however, left his backpack behind.
Epilogue
A secure conference room, Uplink International corporate headquarters, San Jose, California.
“We’ve landed on our feet,” Gordian said, “but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking we’re on anything close to solid ground.”
At the table with him, Megan Breen and Tom Ricci were sober.
“Our mole’s still in his burrow,” Megan said. “We know now that he was familiar with the layouts of the Brazilian compound, the Cosmodrome, and presumably the KSC’s vehicle assembly building. That he not only revealed detailed information about the design of the ISS service module, but also where to plant the HMP device so it would be hidden from sight and able to feed off the solar sails.”
“Takes real access, and a lot of technical expertise,” Ricci said. “Same for whoever did the dirty work on
“How about the one you got the device away from?” Gordian asked. “Any leads on him?”
Ricci shook his head. In the grounds search that had followed the man’s escape from the cargo-processing facility, his teams had found two murdered VKS guards, one garroted to death, the other with a broken neck. Ricci figured their quarry had killed them both and taken off in their missing patrol vehicle.
“Rollie holds firm that he wasn’t the guiding force behind the strikes,” Megan said.
Gordian looked at her. “Reasons?”
She shrugged. “He calls it a gut feeling.”
“That it?”
She nodded.
“Sometimes,” Ricci said, “following your gut’s the best thing you can do.”
Gordian expelled a long breath.
“The longer I think about all this, the more unanswered questions arise,” he said. “A primary one being what the HMP generator’s target was going to be once it was placed in orbit.”
They all sat very still in the room’s electronic envelope of silence.
“Small steps,” Ricci said after a while, his voice so quiet it seemed he’d been talking to himself.
Then he noticed Gordian had turned to face him.
“That’s how you count your gains,” Ricci explained. “It’s what I learned in the service and had reinforced when I was working the streets as a cop, and maybe almost forgot till recently. When it seems like there are ten lousy situations you can’t do anything about, for every one where you can make a difference, it’s all about putting your right foot forward, and just taking those small steps.”
“You did a hell of a job in Kazakhstan, Tom,” he said at length. “I’m glad to have you aboard.”
Megan nodded, looked at him.
“Ditto,” she said.
Ricci met her gaze.
“You see what I mean,” he said.
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
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.
