Astride a Pink Horse (23 page)

“First off, did you skin ’em, Dad?”

“Like cats, sweetie, like cats,” said the man who’d earned his nickname not because of his aerial exploits but because he’d once been an Olympic-caliber springboard diver at San Diego State.

“Who were you playing with?”

“Bernie Watson, Happy LeGrange, and Bob Sowata.”

Bernadette whistled. “Enough military star power there to light up a boardwalk.”

“And me, the lowly one-star,” Jackknife said with a chuckle.

“And the only ace,” Bernadette said to the man who’d taught her to race sprint cars, ride a motorcycle, and ultimately fly a four-engine plane by the time she was sixteen.

“Yeah,” Jackknife said, looking deeply reflective. “So what’s the problem, baby?”

“That Tango-11 investigation I talked to you about a couple of days back has reared an ugly new head.”

“Which means you’ve got yourself one of three problems: a brass problem, a civilian problem, or a political problem.”

“A little bit of all three, I’m afraid.”

“Any chance that bonehead DeWitt is leading the parade? If so, I’ve still got a little juice I can send your way—maybe make that numskull back off a bit.”

“Daddy, please. It’ll only make matters worse. But yes, he’s the problem.”

“So what’s he done now?”

“I’m not sure that he’s done anything. It’s what I’ve done that’s the problem. I’ve made a few wrong turns with my investigation.”

“Like what?”

“For one, I’ve talked too often and too much to the media. Especially to a web-based outfit out of Denver, Digital Registry News. Bottom line is, DeWitt’s pulled me off the investigation and put me on what in the civilian world would amount to administrative leave.”

“So what the heck did you say to the press?”

“Not much, really. But I made the mistake of having a meeting with the Digital Registry News publisher and one of his reporters
last night to talk about the investigation. Turns out DeWitt had one of his lapdogs, a captain named Alvarez, following me.”

“So if you didn’t say anything to either defame the air force or breach security or intelligence, what’s DeWitt’s beef?”

“It’s got more to do with appearance than substance, Dad. That publisher I ran off at the mouth to has taken some serious shots at the air force, and at OSI in particular, for its handling of the Tango-11 break-in. He’s written a couple of pretty unflattering stories that took DeWitt to task.”

“He’s probably not far wrong. I served with the man back when he was a boot-licking first lieutenant, remember? Sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade. Anyway, you’re positive you haven’t had any slips of the tongue that would compromise air force security or national intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“Then my advice for now would be to ride things out. Let DeWitt hang himself with his incompetence. Hell, on most days the man couldn’t find a paper clip in an ashtray if his life depended on it. How long does he want you to stay on leave, anyway?”

“A week, for sure. Maybe two.”

“And what’s he plan to do with the Tango-11 investigation while you’re gone?”

“I’m not sure. All I know is that he’s personally taking over the investigation and claims that by the time I come back, our Tango-11 problem will be solved.”

“Fat chance.”

“Maybe not. That captain I mentioned, the one who fed DeWitt the information about me meeting with the Digital Registry News
people, is pretty sharp. Lecherous but sharp. He might actually end up doing a decent job with the investigation, and of course DeWitt will take the credit.”

Jackknife took a slow, thoughtful sip of lemonade. “Now, that’s a problem. Since you really can’t trust DeWitt or his lackey, what about those two reporters? Can you trust them?”

“I think so. The wingman, Coseia, for sure. His boss is a little squirrelly, but I think he’s been on the up-and-up with me so far. And if worse comes to worst, there’s our base commander, General Preston. I know he’ll play it by the book.”

“I forgot about old Hammerhead being in charge there at Warren. Hell, Happy LeGrange and I pretty much raised him from a pup.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Dad, but no. I need to handle this on my own.”

“Okay, sugar. It’s your call. But if you need me to intervene with Preston, let me know. As for your two media types, what do you think they’re after?”

“Breaking the Tango-11 story wide open—what else?”

“You’re sure they aren’t out to simply grind an ax against the air force?”

“Nope. What they’re after, I’m pretty sure, is to be the first outfit to break the news on who killed Sergeant Giles.”

Recognizing a degree of uncertainty in his daughter’s voice, Jackknife asked, “And just what are you after, Bernadette?”

“I’m after proving that I know what I’m doing, and finding out who killed Sergeant Giles, I guess.”

“Proving that you know what you’re doing’s fine. But figuring out who killed that sergeant isn’t. You’ve told me all along that
your assignment is to determine what led to the security breach at Tango-11 and to help prevent any future ones. Stick with that.”

“I know, but there could be national security issues at stake, Dad. Giles was a former nuclear-warhead maintenance expert, and until six months ago he was working for a Canadian company that manufactures radiation therapy equipment. I don’t know exactly what he did there, but I’m thinking his job might have involved patching up outmoded radiation therapy equipment, which he may have then pilfered and peddled to a Third World market.”

“So what’s the connection to Tango-11?”

“Nuclear, Dad. Nuclear. Applied Nuclear Theratronics of Canada Ltd., the company he worked for, is the largest manufacturer of radiation therapy equipment in the world. Maybe while Giles was globe-hopping and peddling his stolen equipment, he was also supplying somebody out there with technical information about America’s nuclear-missile arsenal.”

Jackknife took another sip of lemonade. “I hope your imagination’s not running wild, Bernadette. Right now, if I were you, I’d find out exactly what Sergeant Giles was doing at that Canadian company. He may have simply been screwing nuts on bolts. Just remember, don’t do anything that might end up costing you your career.”

“I won’t,” said Bernadette, aware of the hidden meaning behind the warning. Her father had let alcohol put an early end to his career, and she knew that it still ate at him every day. The air force, however, with all its camaraderie and macho trappings had never had the same attraction for her that it had had for him. She’d simply always wanted to fly, and although Jackknife
might have passed on his tenacity to her, encouraged her daredevil spirit, and taught her in many ways how to fly by the seat of her pants, she had an equal part of her mother’s athletic and artistic spirit. Those qualities had made her a two-time NCAA tennis champion at UCLA; turned her into an accomplished childhood ballerina until, at the age of fourteen, her five-foot-ten-inch height had ended that pursuit; and led her to become an architect.

Convinced that there had to be a way to unravel the mystery of the Tango-11 security breach and the Thurmond Giles murder without scorching the landscape as her father might have done, she concluded that she would have to tread more lightly in the future. Confrontations with Colonel DeWitt would have to end. She couldn’t blindside him again. There could be no more kicking over-the-hill bikers in the jewels and no stumbling into ill-timed, poorly thought-out meetings with eccentric mathematicians or former antinuclear activists.

“You still there, Bernadette?” Jackknife asked after a lengthy silence.

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, take my advice and don’t overreach on this Tango-11 thing. Like I’ve always told you, this too shall pass.”

“I expect it will,” said Bernadette, wondering how her career and perhaps her life would be affected when it did.

“So, where are you headed on leave?”

“To Denver for a couple of days. Then to La Jolla to spend some time walking the beaches and inhaling the ocean breeze.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Jackknife, recalling the hand-in-hand sunset strolls he and Bernadette’s mother had taken along the same
beaches. “Now, if I can drag my tired old bones out of this chair my butt’s just about molded to, I’ll go see if I can’t find those loser friends of mine.”

“Tell them all I said hello,” Bernadette said, knowing that the men Jackknife had jokingly called losers could no doubt still hold their own behind the controls of a fighter jet. “Love you,” she said, hanging up. Moments later she found herself thinking about what had caused her mother, an Iowa farm girl, the third of five children from the only black farming family in a lily-white county, and Jackknife Cameron, a kid straight off the South Central streets of LA, to click. The answer came quickly—after all, she’d heard her father repeat it often enough over the years:
Your mother didn’t need me to be somebody, sugar. She was already somebody when I met her. Turns out for some reason she just decided to pick up a stray who needed one hell of a lot of couthing
. Whispering to herself, “This too shall pass,” Bernadette rose from the stool she’d been sitting on in her kitchen, snapped open the locket that swung from the chain around her neck, opened it, and glanced at her mother’s picture. Thinking,
Already somebody
, she headed for her bedroom to pack enough clothes for a ten-day absence from Cheyenne.

Rikia Takata’s flight from Laramie to Denver had been smooth and uneventful, and his four thirty connecting flight from Denver to El Paso had started out the same way. But an hour into the trip, the ride had become a choppy, knee-knocking dance around boiling thunderstorms at an altitude of thirty thousand feet.

His seven-hour drive from Heart Mountain that morning and back home to Laramie had been tedious and nerve-racking enough.
The bumpy plane ride was only adding to what had become nearly a daylong stomach upset.

For half the car ride home to Laramie, he’d had to listen to Kimiko read from his grandfather’s diary. He’d left behind some papers he’d intended to bring to his El Paso meeting—papers that would now have to be faxed to him—and after rushing to make his one o’clock Laramie to Denver flight, because of weather he was going to arrive in El Paso an hour and a half late. Trying his best to keep the half-full cup of soda he held from spilling, he thought about the paper his underachieving but articulate graduate student was going to give for him. He’d worried for weeks that he might be rushing along science that needed a little longer gestation period, but he couldn’t take the chance of being scooped. His paper, therefore, had to hit perfect pitch.

When the pilot ordered the flight attendants to take their seats for the remainder of the flight, Rikia gulped down the rest of his soda. As he leaned forward to place the empty cup in the seat pocket in front of him he realized that he’d sweated through the armpits of his new suit.

Although he’d long been fascinated by World War II–era airplanes and the men who’d flown them, he was, in truth, terrified of flying, in part due to his claustrophobia. The fear had surfaced during his childhood when Kimiko had so often locked him for hours at a time in either the pantry or a linen closet as punishment for some real or imagined transgression.

He felt a sense of relief when, twenty minutes later, after bumping through choppy air for what seemed like hours, the pilot announced that they’d be landing in about thirty minutes. But his
relief disappeared when the plane hit an air pocket and plummeted almost a thousand feet. With most of the passengers screaming and the woman next to him sobbing, he found himself recalling Kimiko’s authoritative parting instructions before he’d left Laramie:
We’ve still got this Tango-11 thing hanging over our heads, Rikia. Let me know as soon as you land. Do you hear me?

When he landed thirty-six minutes later, he did just that.

They were laughing at him. He knew they were. Four men whispering to one another at a table in a dimly lit bar as he walked in. He didn’t need to hear their words nor suffer the indignity of their criticism to know that he was the butt of their jokes.

Rikia had never been a drinker or a glad-hander, so he was hard pressed to come up with a good reason for stepping inside the math conference hotel’s stale beer–smelling bar other than, unable to find the hotel’s restaurant, he’d wandered in, in search of a soft drink. Glancing across the room and toward the men at the table, he frowned and turned to leave.

He’d barely made a half turn when one of the men, a white-haired, 250-pound jowly behemoth with muttonchop sideburns, 1920s-vintage wire-rimmed glasses, and a deep, gravelly voice that had always irritated Rikia, rose from his chair and, waving like a cop directing traffic, called out, “Rikia! Rikia! Come join us over here.”

Rikia had just spent fifteen minutes on the phone listening to an excited and worried-sounding Kimiko complain that in his absence, she’d not only had to field a slew of questions from an FBI agent earlier that afternoon, she’d also had to speak with
and schedule face-to-face meetings with the Platte County sheriff and an impatient-sounding Warren Air Force Base OSI colonel to discuss the Thurmond Giles murder. Still unsettled by the call, Rikia was in no mood to spend time with a gaggle of jealous white men who were among his biggest detractors. “Can’t right now,” he said, waving the burly man off. “I’m just looking for a soda.”

Ambrose Weir, a Cal Tech distinguished professor and a man who’d long been as critical of Rikia’s research as he was of Rikia’s MacArthur Genius status, persisted. “Never hurts to talk with friends,” he said, smiling. “As it happens, we’ve actually been sitting here chatting about your work.”

Chatting about who would be the one to put the dagger in my back
, Rikia thought to himself. “I really don’t drink,” he said. The word
drink
came out an infantile, tongue-tied-sounding
dink
.

“Okay,” said Ambrose. “I won’t twist your arm. But let me ask you this, if I may. It relates to your equivalence studies. Since equivalence relations are as ubiquitous in mathematics as order relations are, can you please tell me why you’re so convinced that the algebraic structure of equivalence might play any significant role in combating terrorism.” Nodding toward his three friends, he said, “It seems to me, no, to us, that your assumptions draw primarily on group theory rather than on much more established and reliable aggregates like lattices or even simple categories.” Ambrose smiled. It was a smile that seemed to Rikia to scream,
Wanta answer that for me, Jap?