The zenith angle (21 page)

“Yesterday’s Technology at Tomorrow’s Prices.” That was how the National Reconnaissance Office had gotten itself a marble office complex and the best cafeteria in Washington—even though, officially, nobody had ever heard of the National Reconnaissance Office. They ran satellites. They were real. Real, real secret.

The Smoking Room. The Grease Machine. The military-industrial complication. Van’s head was swimming. “Mmmm.”

Dottie was concerned. “Is it your altitude sickness?”

“Yeah, honey. Sorry.” He hated disappointing her.

“Sweetie, you just relax awhile now.” She took Ted away from him and put the baby back in his crib. Then she fluffed up a pillow, flopped Van on the bed, and pulled his shoes off. “It’s so late. Did you eat anything? You know what? I have some really good Chardonnay. That’ll fix you up.”

Van had to laugh. It was doing him such good to hear her rattle on. “How good is it?”

“It’ll relax you, you’ll fall right asleep.” Her blue eyes were full of wifely promise. “Tomorrow, though, we’ll do everything.”

Van accepted a glass. Van didn’t much care for sweet, girly chardonnays, but this one was good enough to get him up on his elbow. “Wow, honey, this stuff’s great.”

“I can afford it,” she told him. “They pay us a lot and there’s nothing to spend money on up here. Housing is free. All our meals are catered. We even get dental.”

“Wow.”

She sat on the bed demurely and looked down at him with a tender smile. “You know why it’s like that around here? Because it’s still the 1990s up here, that’s why. When DeFanti set this all up years ago, he thought it would be really hard to get any top technical people to live way up here. After all, we don’t even get to have cars . . . So he budgeted us for big dot-com-style perks. Tony would change all that if he could—that guy is such a cheapskate—but that’s the way DeFanti angled things with the feds. So it’s just stuck in cement. Nobody’s got the authority to change any of it.”

“I thought Tom DeFanti went nuts.”

“He did, but that doesn’t matter now. This telescope is supposed to be his monument. He really, seriously wanted it to last for a hundred years. DeFanti was always kind of strange that way, but . . . Derek, this is such a good place. This is just what life was like when people just like us were really happy. The work is challenging. We get creative freedom. They really pay us. It’s a beautiful little campus. The food is fantastic, there’s all kinds of cool hardware, there’s day care . . . I love it up here.”

“That’s great.”

Her smooth brow wrinkled. “Whenever I go out of town, to Boulder or Denver, then I see how bad it’s getting outside. People out there are crazy now. Everyone is completely terrified.”

“It’s not that bad,” Van lied.

“Yes, it is.”

“Yeah, Dottie, you’re right, it is that bad.”

There wasn’t much more to say on that topic. It was too depressing. Dottie arranged the sheets and quilt around him. “Honey, this bed is too small for us. Tomorrow we’ll go down to DeFanti’s ranch. I made us reservations. They’ve got cottages and a hot tub! Is your head any better now?”

“Yeah.” A drink always helped Van with his altitude sickness. Alcohol flushed open important blood vessels inside his skull. Van sat up and pulled his pants off. He’d bought new slacks in order to confront General Wessler, hoping to look more professional. As he dropped them to his ankles, his brand-new knife fell out of his pocket.

Helpfully, Dottie scooped it up. “Is this a new gadget, honey?” It was a fist-sized lozenge the color of soot. She picked at its thumb lever, and a black, razor-sharp serrated blade slid out. Dottie dropped the knife, scarring the floor. Startled words tumbled out of her. “Oh, honey, this is like some awful thing that people would like murder somebody with!”

“It’s a hunting knife,” Van lied, plucking it up. “Tony always talks about the great hunting up here in the mountains.” Hickok had talked him into buying a tactical SWAT knife at the survival store. The knife was blacker than a Gothic ninja. It featured a carbon-fiber handle and a titanium carbonitride blade finish.

“You got that thing for Tony?”

Van closed the knife and hid it at the bottom of his pack. Van had never mentioned the existence of Michael Hickok to Dottie, because every single thing regarding the KH-13 was so entirely off-limits. A brilliant lie burst out of him. “Nowadays, they never let this kind of thing on airplanes. But I came here by car, so, you know, I’m just holding it.” He sipped more wine.

Dottie’s sweet face clouded. “Why would he want that ugly thing from you? What is wrong with that man? Nothing ever satisfies him!”

Van blinked. “What’s so wrong with Tony?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all, I guess. Except for his nineteen-year-old girlfriend! Derek, he is
buying
that woman. This Indian movie starlet, this creature with snaky black hair who hangs all over him and has eyes like two headlamps. Does that sound healthy to you?”

Van knew very well that Tony’s girlfriend Anjali was twenty-three, but seeing Dottie’s reaction, he wisely held his tongue about it. “Boy, that’s a big shame.”

“I worry so much about Tony. In all the years I’ve known him, he has never had one stable, adult relationship. That woman is taking advantage of him, I just know it. He is completely besotted.”

Van choked back the urge to snicker. “Besotted”? What kind of word was that? The last time he’d enjoyed a talk with Tony, back in Washington, Tony had been rolling his eyes like a cartoon wolf over this little Indian actress.

It was very funny to Van that Tony Carew, the poster boy for jet-setters, had finally found the one woman in the whole round world who could lead him around by the nose. An Indian movie star, of all the wild things. It was so like him. Van had been plenty curious about the girl, so he had found one of the actress’s Hindi-language movies on an Indian-made DVD. Tony’s sex-bomb girlfriend turned out to be this sugary, Technicolor hoochie-coochie girl who didn’t even kiss her co-stars. The whole ridiculous thing gave Van a warm, bubbly, glowing feeling. Poor Tony, poor old Tony, that lucky slob. Jeez, at an altitude like this, that Chardonnay had some kind of kick. He patted her hand. “Precious,” he said, “we should just let old Tony just be Tony. You and me, we get to be you and me. We can be happy, if they give us a chance. That’s what counts.”

A flush rose to her cheeks. Dottie’s shoulders started to shake. Oh, for heaven’s sake, she was going to cry. Van’s heart smoldered guiltily within him. Well, why shouldn’t she cry? She had good reasons. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Honey, it’ll be all right now. It’ll be good for a while.”

Dottie only sniffled all the more. Why could he never tell her the right thing? Sometimes he almost got it all straight in his head. But he had a cramp in him that would never let him give her the right words. The baby was asleep again. They were stuck in this small cold room. Dottie was crying and his head still hurt from the thin mountain air. But at least they were alone, and no one was bothering them. Dottie’s little room didn’t seem so bad once Dottie was inside it. It was lots bigger than his tiny Vault office, and probably much less weird, too. Dottie was here with him, that was the point. He wasn’t freezing outside the Facility’s gates in the dark. He should be grateful for that. Plus, there weren’t any Space Force generals around here. Life wasn’t so bad, it was pretty good after all, wasn’t it? Yes, life had to be good. He pulled his shirt off.

Dottie’s eyes widened as she wiped away her tears. Van grinned at her. Yeah, in her absence, he’d really been hitting the gym! He’d shed a lot of flab! Thanks to those Nautilus machines, he’d never been in better shape . . .

“What happened to your
shoulder
?”

Van glanced at the fading blotch of purple and yellow. He had hammered his shoulder black-and-blue with the bouncing butt of a South African combat shotgun. The thing had a spinning drum magazine that spewed shells as if they were confetti.

Dottie touched the bruise in wonder. “Honey, you really got hurt!”

Of course the blazing shotgun had hurt him some, but it had been so exciting that he hadn’t even cared.

“A little accident at work,” he lied. He stretched out on the taut, narrow bed. In a moment she had slid in next to him under the heavy quilt. They never shared the same bed much as a couple. With lives in separate cities, they had never fallen into that habit, somehow. This bed was much too small. Dottie clung to him as if they were stuck on a life raft. He was too tired and winded to make love to her, but he was taking huge comfort in the heat of her skin, in the even sound of her breathing. His star girl. A gift to him from the universe. On some silent level of his soul he had felt a profound terror, a deadly conviction, that he would never hold Dottie again.

Dottie pillowed her head on his arm, locked a leg around him, and fell fast asleep. The room was very dim. He could barely make out the sweet line of her nose, her cheekbone. How frail the world was.

He’d never known, until he stepped behind the curtain of power, that civilization was mostly a matter of keeping up appearances. Up at the very top of the power elite, in the little counsels and committees of the great and the good, even the people who happened to be scientists and engineers had to become witch doctors. Yes, he was a politician now, too. To run the world, you had to find it in yourself to grit your teeth and just fake it. Just stare them down, never back off.

That was where he’d blown it with the General. He hadn’t come to that man with a warrior’s air of command-and-control. “The aura of inevitability.”

Van closed his burning eyes. Tomorrow, just for once, he had nothing to do but to be together with his wife and child. Why should that seem like such a fantastic privilege to him now? Because he had volunteered for all this. He had willingly turned himself into a weapon. Van hovered at the brink of sleep, his chest heaving at the thin air. The shining image of his grandfather’s gun occurred to him. The gun pressed against his mind’s eye, heavy with dream-importance. The ray gun had run out of solder as he worked on his doomed KH-13 presentation. That’s when he had opened it up, removing four tiny steel screws, and discovered that the engineers of the Skunk Works had built a fake jet engine inside there. When he’d popped off the butt of the ray gun, he was looking right up the round model rocket rump of an SR-71 Blackbird. To make the gun work, you had to shove solder wire up the jet’s exhaust, round as a gun barrel. That was true geek humor. Very crew cut and bow tie, very 1960s styling. No wonder his grandfather had always treasured the thing. Wine and weariness came down on him and pressed him flat.

At 3:00A.M. the baby’s screams woke them. “Oh, Derek,” she said, muddled and confused, “I always let Ted sleep in here with me.”

There was nothing for it but to jam lonely Ted into the bed with the two of them. The sleepy and irritable Ted wriggled like a flannel otter, wedging his body between his parents and hacking for space with knees and heels. Van, who had been hovering at the edge of altitude suffocation, came wide awake. Van climbed out of the bed, then put all his clothes on, because the room was icy. He wrapped his shoulders in Ted’s abandoned blanket, sat at the desk, and woke Dottie’s laptop from its sleep. Dottie’s room might be neater than a convent, but he had never seen Dottie’s computer in such an awful mess. It horrified him to realize that Dottie Vandeveer, his very own wife, was using Windows Outlook Express on broadband without any security enhancements. She’d customized all her icons, too. They were not her usual dainty stars and comets, but icons that a Goth chick would have gone for: bats, UFO

aliens, witches’ cauldrons. Important files were scattered all over her screen, most of them named with doubled exclamation points!! and shouting CAPITAL LETTERS. Van was staring straight into an X ray of his wife’s unconscious mind. The news here was not good.

Van had finally reached some kind of peak event in his marriage: he was sending his wife e-mail from her own machine.

Dear Dottie, I never told you how hard this new life would be for both of us
No, that wasn’t it at all, that way was just no good. His words vanished into the left-moving vacuum of herDELETE key.

Dearest Dottie, I can’t tell you why this hasn’t worked out as I hoped
Dottie, I’m not allowed to say just what

Dear Dorothy

There was a sudden electric snapping. Power failure. All the lights went out. Van groped his way back toward the bed in pitch-blackness, and he lay down fully clothed.

TEN

PINECREST RANCH, COLORADO, FEBRUARY 2002

D
ottie prodded him flirtatiously with her bare toes. “Well, hero, now you know what you were fighting for!”

Van nodded, breathing hot steam. He balanced his cold German beer on the edge of the hot tub. To judge by his surroundings, he was fighting for the right of eccentric rich guys to buy the whole planet. Thomas DeFanti’s “cottage” had once been a pioneer Colorado farmstead, all hard rock and tough gray timber. Then some pet architect had transformed the place into a billionaire’s secret love nest. It was all done-up inside in black-and-chrome, high 1980s style. It was like Hugh Hefner seducing
The
Unsinkable Molly Brown.

Pinecrest Ranch, to judge by what Van had seen of it, was a mix of Hong Kong and Hollywood Western. Mrs. DeFanti, the zillionaire’s fourth or fifth wife, was the guardian of the old man and his big spread. Mrs. DeFanti was turning his Ponderosa into a bonsai Chinese ranchero. She was dusting the buffalo, she was grooming the antelope . . . She was a chip mogul’s daughter from Taiwan, and she was re-creating Colorado as a Pacific Rim luxury spa.

Guest meals were served up in the main ranch house, in a sunny conservatory with a stunning mountain view. Van had started his day with Russian eggs Benedict with spinach and caviar, plus pineapple juice and an inch-thick buffalo breakfast steak. His altitude sickness was banished. The protein, vitamins, and half a gallon of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee had definitely gotten his motor running. Dottie, who was off the pill, had surprised him with a condom, which they promptly broke. Van was shocked to see her shrug off this mishap, and even laugh about it. She was in a mood he had never seen. The cottage’s hot tub was like a little amphitheater, surrounded by black solar-water heaters. The tub gave off a volcanic Jacuzzi sizzling in the crisp winter air. Van had never made love in a hot tub before. As the pulsing currents beat and sizzled against his naked flesh, he got it about the appeal there. It was like having more sex without even needing to move.