”But the plane crashed.”
“Yeah,” said Harry Franks defensively, “but we don’t know yet—“
“Something went very wrong. We know that much,” Jake Graf- ton said. “The plane went into three inverted spins. Rita was trying to get it out and succeeded twice.”
“Maybe she—“
“Uh-uh. Nope. She knew exactly what she was doing. She recov- ered from more inverted spins at Test Pilot School than you’ve even seen.”
The vice president of AeroTech had a cherubic, round face. The face looked like it had spent two days in the tropical sun when he faced Jake an hour later and said. “I don’t know how it happened, but the data is wrong on this chip.”
“How’s that?”
He gestured futilely. “I mean we’ve run the data three times, and I don’t know how the heck it happened, but the E-PROM data on this chip is just flat wrong. Look here.” He nipped open a thick computer printout “See this line here?” He read off the number, which was all it was, a number. “Now look here. This is the data on this chip.” His finger moved to another computer printout, one Jake had just watched running though the printer. Jake looked. It was a different number.
“How could this happen? I thought you people checked these things.”
“We do check the data. After the chip is cooked, we check every damn number. I don’t know what — I’m at a loss what to tell you.”
‘This is only one box,” Harry Franks said. “There were three of them. Maybe this is the only one that was defective.”
“Well never know,” Jake Grafton said slowly, surveying the faces around him and trying to catalogue their reactions. “The other boxes got smashed and burned. This is the only one left in one piece.”
“I don’t know what to say,” the AeroTech executive said.
Jake Grafton walked out of the room, looking for a phone.
Luis Camacho listened to Admiral Henry’s voice on the telephone and doodled on a legal pad. Today he was drawing houses, all with the proper perspective of course. He had the roofline and baseline right, he decided.
”Okay, so AeroTech sold you a defective E-PROM chip. Or two or three of them. Sue the bastards. What do you need the FBI for?”
“I had the aircraft’s control data base printed out from our computer. It’s wrong. Now, I don’t know if the AeroTech chip has this data on it or not, but the stuff in the Pentagon computer is wrong. So I got on the phone to that National Security Agency computer doctor who tends our stuff, Kleinberg, Fred Kleinberg. He played with his top secret programs that I’m not supposed to know jack about, and tells me the last guy who made a change on that data base was Harold Strong.”
Camacho extended the lines of the roof, eaves, and base of the house until they met at the perspective convergence point. Of course, Albright’s house had more shrubs around it, and with the fence and all you would never see it looking just like this.
“You still there, Luis?”
“Yeah. I’m still here.”
“I want you and your guys to look into it.”
“You called NIS?” NIS was the Naval Investigative Service.
“Nope- Since you are apparently the only guy inside the beltway who knows what the fuck is going on, I want you to investigate this.”
“Investigate what?”
“This computer screw-up, you spook asshole. A four-hundred- million-dollar prototype airplane that’s supposed to be black as the ace of spades just made a smoking hole in the ground and the pilot is at death’s door. The data on the computer chips that fly the plane is wrong. The last guy who messed with the data is dead, murdered. Somebody, someplace is bound to have committed a federal crime. Now get off your fat ass and figure out if the Mino- taur or some other bastard is screwing with my program! God- damn, what have I got to do? Call the Director? Go see the Presi- dent? Maybe I should put an ad in the Post?”
“I’ll be over in a little while.”
The admiral slammed the phone in Camacho’s ear. The agent cradled his instrument and went to the door. “Dreyfus? Come in here.”
At three o’clock Eastern Daylight Time that afternoon Lloyd Dreyfus and two other FBI agents boarded a plane at National Airport for a flight to Detroit, where a man from the local field office would meet them. They planned to drive straight to Aero- Tech’s headquarters in the suburbs.
The Minotaur
The agents were airborne somewhere over Pennsylvania when Toad Tarkington arrived at the hospital-at the air force’s Tonopah facility. He stopped at the nurses’ station. “How is she?”
The nurse on duty had been there yesterday when they brought Rita in. She was an air force captain. She looked at Toad with sympathy. “No change. Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”
“The doctor around?”
“He’s eating a late lunch. He’ll be back in a half hour or so.”
“Can I see her?”
“Sure.”
The ICU nurse nodded and Toad pulled a chair over near Rita’s bed- Her chest was still rising and falling rhythmically, the IVs were dripping, the green line on the heart monitor was spiking— she lay exactly as he had seen her yesterday and this morning when he looked in.
The IV needles were in her left arm, so he picked up her right hand and massaged it gently. In a moment he wrapped her fingers around two of his. “Rita, this is Toad. If you can hear me, squeeze my hand a little.”
The hand stayed limp.
‘Try real hard, Rita.”
Nothing.
“Harder.”
He gave up finally and continued to lightly knead her fingers.
There was a window there by her bed. When he pulled the cur- tains back he could see the distant blue mountains. Clouds were building over the peaks. ‘
Life is not fair. Good things happen to bad people and vice versa, almost as if the goodness or badness of those who bear the load was not factored into the equations for that great computer in the sky. Toad stood facing out the window and ruminated upon it Somehow he had survived this last ejection all in one piece and Rita hadn’t. It wasn’t because he was a good person, or because of his pious rectitude or exemplary morals or conspicuous faith. He was physically okay because he had been lucky, sort of. And Rita was smashed up because her luck deserted her. Yet perhaps the ejection had cost him something more valuable than his life.
Your luck won’t last forever, Tarkington. The day will come, Toad-man, the day will come. Regardless of how you live or the promises you keep, on that day to come your luck will desert you. You won’t recognize the morning, you won’t recognize the noon, but that will be the day. And on that day you’ll lose her forever.
He slumped into the chair. Looking at Rita in her bandages was hard, looking at the IV racks, respirator, and heart monitor was harder. He twisted, trying to get comfortable.
Somehow, someway, the E-PROMs in the fly-by-wire computers were screwed up. He had heard them talking this afternoon. How could it happen? How could TRX and AeroTech’s checks and double checks and Quality Assurance programs all go south at precisely the same time?
Someday hell! She might die today, or tomorrow. Or the day after. You could lose her any day.
He picked up her hand again and massaged it slowly and gently. Finally he placed it carefully back on the covers. He leaned over Rita and kissed the two square inches on her forehead not covered with a bandage. “Hang tough, Rita. Hang tough.”
24
