Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life (14 page)

She called her rep in PE&C Accounting, Julia Schottlander, and explained the mystery as much as she understood it.

“Yep,” Julia said, “and nope. Money’s not here, and no record of our receiving the check.”

“But they have a postal receipt from someone named B. Glaser,” Callie insisted.

“Let me pull up the company directory. Yep, first name Bernie. In the mailroom. He probably signs a thousand of those things a week. It must be a mistake.”

“What should I do?”

“Tell your client to void the first check and send us another—on the second invoice, please,” Julia replied. “And if it helps keep you on the client’s good side, tell him we can waive the surcharge—but just this once!”

“That’s not going to work,” Callie said. “Their bank shows the check’s been cleared. So the money is already gone from their account.”

“Whoops!” Schottlander said. “Well then, it’s got to be somewhere. Likely somebody intercepted the check in the mail, faked our endorsement, and cashed it.”

“Who would have the balls to cash a certified check for forty-three mill made out to a publicly registered corporation?”

“The thieves these days are pretty sophisticated.”

“You’d better find this Glaser fellah and grill him.”

“We’ll surely do that,” Schottlander promised.

“And then run an audit to find the money.”

“We’ll do whatever we can on our end.”

Then Callie called Hal Cromwell back to break the bad news. When she stopped speaking, the line was quiet for a moment. Then he said quietly, “Son of a bitch.”

“Look, Hal … this is nothing you and I can unsnarfle here in Denver. I’ve already referred the matter to our accountants for a full audit. And either way, I’m pretty sure we have insurance that covers against this kind of loss.”

“You might carry such insurance,” he said. “I know the art commission doesn’t. And I just checked the U.S. Postal Service website. They don’t insure anything for more than twenty-five thousand—which is about the cost of the envelope.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.”

“Somebody better,” he said and hung up.

It was a mystery, pure and simple, and Callie Praxis hated mysteries. But then, she was an engineer and architect, not an accounting or finance expert. Someone in the firm would find out what happened. Callie packaged the whole mess of documents with a note to Julia Schottlander, reminding her to start a formal audit, and fed it all through the trailer’s fax machine. By the time she was finished, the morning was shot and she had accomplished almost nothing.

* * *

John Praxis ran in the Presidio 10K, his first organized run, on his sixty-sixth birthday. He thought it would be a good choice, because the course wound across the flats of Crissy Field, the former army airfield right inside the entrance to the Golden Gate, and then up through the hills on the old army base, the Presidio—familiar territory since he’d started his daily exercise program. Of course, ten kilometers was longer than his usual morning run, longer than any three of his runs put together, so he gave himself the option of stopping at the five-kilometer mark and not feeling bad about it.

Standing with a thousand other runners on the roadway before the start, he shivered and could feel his skin contracting into goose bumps. A stiff westerly breeze was coming through the Gate. The feeble morning sunshine of late April hardly warmed him. Coupled with the cold, he was feeling self-conscious. He knew people had seen him out on the public streets, or at least running along these wooded roads, wearing just a tee shirt and running shorts. But this was the first time he had put on a numbered bib and pretended to be a competitor.

When the race started, he let the crowd sort itself out and adopted his own pace. After an initial lap around the field, the pack headed onto the service road that climbed through the trees below Doyle Drive. The crowd thinned even more as the grade took its toll. For Praxis, who ran from Sea Cliff uphill to the Légion d’Honneur and around the Presidio Golf Course every morning, the ascent was a simple matter of adjusting his pace and breathing.

In a few minutes they passed through the parking lot of the Golden Gate Bridge visitors center and out onto the roadway of the bridge itself. Praxis had assumed the race course would follow the pedestrian walkway, but with automobile traffic generally thinned out by the price of gasoline in a euro-dominated market, the race organizers were able to get three of the bridge lanes cleared and coned off. Surprisingly, after the thinning out on the grade, Praxis found himself running in a tight cluster near the front. He realized he was committed to reaching at least the end of the bridge, because if he slowed down here in midspan, stumbled to a stop, and bent over clutching his knees, he would block runners behind him—perhaps even cause a number of them to go down.

The wind on the bridge deck, two hundred feet above the water, was even colder. Streamers of fog blew in from the ocean and threaded between the orange-painted suspension cables a hundred feet above his head. But Praxis found he was warmer, now that he was moving. He thought about what it would mean if he quit at the north end of the bridge. He would have to wait at the exposed overlook for someone to come pick him up. And who would that be? Even though he had a cell phone tucked into his shorts, he couldn’t call Adele. She hardly drove anywhere anymore. The only other person at the house, Miranda, didn’t drive. He couldn’t call either of the boys, because they would be off somewhere with their families. And Callie was in Denver on her project. He would have to call for a taxi, and they would take forever on a Sunday morning with a big race going on nearby.

Praxis realized that he really had no choice but to turn around at the north end, come back with the pack, and finish the race. If he took his time and paced himself, he just might do it. He glanced at the heart monitor built into his fancy GPS watch, which read signals off a belt strapped around his chest. The display showed a steady 130 beats per minute. He kept his eyes on the number over the course of half a mile and it didn’t change. More than two beats per second, and his new heart was working like a well-oiled machine.

He probably should have discussed entering this event with his cardiologist. But what was the doctor going to say? No? And would John Praxis have listened to him even then? At this point, it wasn’t his heart that was going to give out. Not unless it went spectacularly,
blooey,
like an overheated tire exploding. But so far he sensed no distress, nothing impending. If anything was going to fail, it would be his sixty-six-year-old ankles or knees. But in his chest he had the full-grown heart of a baby less than a year old, and he had toughened and trained it over the months since its creation with his morning runs.

Praxis made the decision to take more time each morning, start earlier, and double or triple the length of his daily run. And then, if his legs could stand it, he might even try a marathon next.

* * *

Brandon Praxis was pulled out of his civil engineering class, CE436 Structural Steel Design, at Stanford University by a U.S. Army recruiting sergeant from Menlo Park. The sergeant wore his battle dress uniform, or BDUs, in urban-camouflage gray and didn’t bother to mention his own name, although the tag on his chest said “Roxbrough.” As they stood in the corridor outside the classroom, the man held up and read aloud Brandon’s commission as a second lieutenant, swore him in with the officer’s oath, and handed him a sealed envelope containing his orders. He then saluted Lieutenant Praxis and informed him he had two hours to pack his gear and get down to Moffett Field in Sunnyvale.

“Excuse me, but what gear is that?” Brandon asked.

“Your ROTC stuff. Better wear battle fatigues.”

“But—but what’s all this about, Sergeant?”

“The Army needs you, sir. Right now.”

“But you don’t understand. I’m not a soldier. I’m a student. My dad runs one of the world’s foremost engineering companies, and he expects me to graduate in June and join him in the business.”

“That’s nice, sir. But no, sir. You’ve had three years of military training. You’re a gear head. And your country assumes that, being a bright California boy of good family, you have the right attitude. This is a national emergency, and you’ve been called up to serve.”

The sergeant saluted again, turned on his heel, and hurried off. He was already consulting a printed list and pulling another set of commission papers from his gray-camo messenger bag.

Brandon stood with his mouth hanging open. He had started with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps during his sophomore year, primarily as a backup plan. He knew all along that his family—his father Leonard most of all—expected him to step right out of college and into a responsible position somewhere on the upper rungs at Praxis Engineering & Construction. Brandon felt he didn’t have the courage to refuse this future outright, and he’d majored in civil engineering as his father recommended. But still, he wasn’t altogether comfortable with the prospect. Joining the family company, becoming the “golden grandson” of the fifth generation, meant he would never have the opportunity to prove himself. It also meant everyone around him might be whispering secret doubts about his actual abilities. So he had hedged his bets by joining the Army ROTC.

It wasn’t exactly a blind choice. He remembered his grandfather John once mentioning the good work the Corps of Engineers did in maintaining the country’s waterways and environmental resources, and how much he admired their public service when they could easily take home two or three times their military pay by joining the private sector. Brandon also liked the idea of playing around with the hydrology of big systems like the San Francisco Bay Delta or the Mississippi River. But he never took the program’s scholarship money, and it was always going to be his choice whether to finally accept the commission. He never expected the U.S. Army to just come and take him.

Two and a half hours after being sworn in, Praxis and a dozen other military personnel were marched aboard a C-130J transport at Moffett. As the plane taxied for takeoff, he opened and read his orders. They told him he was being attached to the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps under the command of a Major Anthony Ruysdael. Their mission was to fly to Flagstaff, Arizona, relocate immediately to Camp Navajo, which was ten miles to the west, and secure any and all strategic materiel there. His orders noted that, although the camp was officially maintained by the Arizona Army National Guard, its munitions storage facility remained an inspectable site under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START.

He held up the paper for the soldier, an older man, who was strapped into the webbing seat next to him. Praxis pointed out the reference to munitions storage. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means support for nukes, son.”

“And we’re going to get them?”

“Does seem to be the drill.”

“With our bare hands?”

“If necessary, yes.”

But then the man waved at the cargo strapped to the deck just beyond their knees: two Humvees, each mounting a .50 caliber machine gun in its roof, and an eight-wheeled armored car with a blunt, boat-shaped nose, the Stryker Transport/Combat Vehicle.

“Are we expecting hostilities?” Brandon asked.

“We are expecting anything at this stage.”

“I not going to be any good at this. I mean, they taught me to march and shoot a rifle. And I might be able to drive that jeep-thing, given some time to practice. But you understand I’m really just a student, civil engineering.”

“That’s sweet, son, but no,” the soldier said, echoing the anonymous sergeant who’d sworn him in, what, three hours ago now? “We are anywhere from two months to two days away from a shooting war on this continent. We will need every able and committed soldier to make sure this thing goes down the right way. So … what’s you’re role? I guess you’d better stick close to me. You can take notes when we start inventorying the ordnance. And if we need to blow up a bridge or knock down a door or something, then your education might come in handy.”

“Thank you, I guess. Um, what’s
your
name, soldier?”

The man turned in his seat and pushed out his collar tab with a thumb. It had a splotch of brown thread sewn on in the shape of a leaf. “Ruysdael, son. You can stand up and salute me later.”

* * *

Late in the workday, the internet news services flashed a report that the federal government had ordered units of the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force to move into any of the states that had signed on to that “Committee of Secession.” Their orders were, first, to disarm the local National Guard units and, second, to “establish a presence” in the state capitals. Some of the correspondents, and various members of Congress they were interviewing, were already calling the action a “coup.” But the official language described it as a “preventive measure” necessary to “maintain the peace.”

Antigone Wells was with Ted Bridger when the news came up. He stared at the screen thoughtfully. “What are the legal ramifications of open warfare, I wonder?”

“A lot of wrongful death suits,” Wells said. “Maybe.”

“A whole lot of property damage, too, I would guess.”

“Too bad we aren’t practicing in Texas or Oklahoma.”

* * *

Richard Praxis hardly blinked when Julia Schottlander, an analyst from the Accounting Department, brought him the report on a misplaced check for the Mile High project in Denver.

“Why bring me this?” he asked. “You should take it up with my sister. She’s managing that project.”

“I know, sir,” Schottlander said. “She tossed the problem over to my department in the first place.” The woman closed the door to his outer office, walked over to the chair in front of his desk, sat down, and slid a manila folder across his blotter. “Before going back to Ms. Praxis,” she went on, “I thought I should talk to someone higher-up first. I showed this to my manager, and he said I should come to you.”

Richard opened the folder and saw on top several pages of data extracted from the company’s accounting software. In a couple of places, lines and entries were highlighted in yellow marker, including some conspicuous blanks. Further down in the folder were half a dozen pages of fax, including two of the company’s invoice forms and various images of checks, front and back, from the Denver Arts Commission. “So what’s going on?” he said. “Walk me through this.”