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Authors: Diana Diamond

BOOK: Good Sister, The
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I tried everything that she might use as a password. Her birthday, his birthday, the day they met, the day I first caught them on the living room sofa, her jersey number, his jersey number. One of the nerds at school had an algorithm that ran combinations of numbers by the hour, and even that didn’t work. And then, one day in our bathroom while she was taking a shower, I spotted an ankle bracelet that he had apparently given her. “In love at last” was engraved behind her name. And when I put that into the computer, I had their whole correspondence scrolling in front of me.
Most of it was stupid, even for high school kids. But some of it was very graphic, particularly the Monday exchanges after their weekend dates. As far as I could tell, they weren’t sleeping together, but they had pretty much perfected the art of foreplay. Great reading, I thought, for the gang at school, so I spent a few days editing the old stuff and then selectively adding the new material that was showing up every day. In a little while I had a ten-page document that would make them a laughingstock. Once it got around, he wouldn’t dare show his face around our house. Heck, he’d probably have to drop out of school. Sure, my sister would guess who had done it. But she could never be sure. Anyone who got hold of her password or his, and knew the address that went with it, could have
dialed into their love life. Either one of them could have made a stupid blunder.
So that was it. Just a joke! And maybe a payback for the both of them. As I said, I didn’t know which one I wanted to kill first. Both of them had treated me shabbily. I never planned the rest of it. It just happened when my father put up his first satellite, and suddenly we were rich.
It was high school graduation and we both got sports cars. Mustangs! Convertibles that had recently come back on the market. It was the dolls all over again. Mine was red with a black interior; hers was green with a tan interior. No contest, right? I mean, Ferrari red! At last I had gotten the better of her. But wouldn’t you know it – she comes up with a book about the great age of English road racing, and aren’t all the Coopers and Lotuses painted in her green with tan interiors.
I admit it. I was furious. Probably stupid, because by then you’d think I would have gotten used to her being Daddy’s little girl. But as I say, when people are walking all over you, you can’t simply lie down and take it. At least not if you have any self-respect. And I couldn’t put the doll’s eyes out again. If I had keyed the paint or taken a razor to the leather, the insurance would have covered the repair.
That’s when I remembered the mailing lists she used to keep for my father. He didn’t use them anymore because he had a promotion department now, with much more sophisticated lists than the early ones. But still, most of his important colleagues were still in my sister’s file. So I took her panting e-mail correspondence and sent it all out over the list. For weeks my father and his little favorite were the jokes of the business world, not to mention our entire community. One of the business writers even took to calling my father “Hunky.”
I know it went too far, but you have to admit that it was a stroke of genius. I got her for pushing me aside to get closer to my father. And I got my father for liking her more than me. And the best part of it was that she took all the blame. The list was in her computer, so it stood to reason that she must have put the wrong address code
on the wrong correspondence. For the whole summer you didn’t see her smiling when she tooled around town in her racing-green Mustang!
But it wasn’t as if I set out to destroy her. As I say, we were just rivals, and one thing led to another, and maybe once or twice things did get out of hand. But I never hated her. That’s not why I helped to kill her.
“TROIS MINUTES.”
Henri held up three fingers.
Gaspar nodded. “Three minutes and counting,” he explained.
Jennifer smiled. She made a show of crossing her fingers. Gaspar took her hand and uncrossed them. “No luck involved. Everything is going perfectly.”
Jennifer crossed the fingers again. “It can’t hurt,” she said, and Gaspar flashed his easy smile.
“I suppose not,” and then he crossed his fingers.
There were twenty of them in the bunker, unkempt men in tropical dress, staring at computer screens and babbling French phrases into headset microphones. Each of the screens was filled with columns of data that changed by the second, inspiring nods, grunts, and satisfied smiles.
“
Bon!
” Gaspar said over and over in response to reports called from Henri. He turned to Jennifer. “Absolutely perfect. It’s never gone smoother.”
She nodded in agreement, even though she couldn’t confirm Gaspar’s assessment. Jennifer understood just a few of the phrases and even then had no idea of what they signified. But as long as Gaspar kept saying
“Bon,”
she assumed that nothing serious could be going wrong.
Through the small slit windows on the front wall she could see the ten-story
Ariane 4
rocket that was still wedded to a gantry a quarter of a mile away. On top was a dart-shaped pod that held Pegasus III, her company’s $200 million communications satellite. Put into a precise parking orbit over an exact point on
the eastern coast of Brazil and it would earn back its cost every few months for the next fifteen years. Miss the orbit and Pegasus III would become the latest addition to a growing armada of space junk, flying around uselessly until it incinerated itself in the earth’s atmosphere. Even though she didn’t know all the rules, Jennifer was definitely playing at the high-stakes table.
“
Deux minutes!”
Henri announced.
“Two minutes and counting. Everything is go,” Gaspar translated. In the distance, the gantry backed away, leaving the rocket a delicate finger pointing at the heavens.
The Ariane team had included her in everything since she had arrived from New York—the technical meetings, the rehearsals, the positioning of the payload, even the dangerous process of fueling the bird. She had sweated her way through the jeans and khakis she had bought for the trip and was now wearing borrowed shorts and a men’s T-shirt. At each step the team seemed to defer to her judgment on whether they should proceed to the next task. But it was simply the deference that good business managers show to their best customers. Jennifer had paid for the rocket and was footing the bill for the launch. It was a big bill, already over $120 million, and there were no refunds for failure.
When Martin Pegan had first come up with the idea of a privately owned satellite network, there were no commercial launching companies such as the Ariane group. Rockets belonged to government agencies, and communications satellites were the exclusive property of the international telephone cartel. Satellites should have been the end of long-distance charges. After all, a telephone call via satellite doesn’t travel much farther to reach someone across the country than it does to reach someone next door. But telephone companies weren’t planning on sharing the savings with their customers.
That was Pegan’s big idea, low-cost telephone and video communications from rooftop to rooftop. He had persuaded an American company to build him a satellite. When American aerospace companies refused to sell him a rocket, he had turned to the French at Ariane, who were building a launch center in
the old prison colony in French Guiana. His first satellite, Pegasus I, had blanketed North America, carrying telephone traffic, pager messages, sporting events, movies, and business data over private circuits. Pegasus II’s footprint spanned the Pacific, linking Asia to North America. Now Pegasus III was hoping to close the loop around the Western world, linking North America, Europe, and the Near East. Once in orbit, it would make Pegasus the world’s largest private communications company.
“
Une minute!”
Henri chanted.
Jennifer nodded before Gaspar had time to translate. They were down to the final minute.
Martin Pegan would have groomed a son to take over the business. But there was no male heir. Instead, there were two daughters, Catherine and Jennifer, emerging from college with no particular skills in communications technology and no burning interests in business management. He bribed them both into graduate school; Catherine chose to study business while Jennifer grappled with the rudiments of telephony. Together, he hoped, they might someday replace him at the helm of his venturesome company. But someday came sooner than he planned.
The two girls had just finished their studies and joined the company when a routine physical discovered cancer in Martin’s gut. With his wife dead and his daughters still immature, Martin needed to find a way to keep the company together after his death. Take it public, he was advised, and leave each of the girls a fortune in stock. Sensible, but it didn’t take into account the bond between the man and the company he had fought to create. Pegan hadn’t merely bought Pegasus Satellite Services. He had conceived it, nurtured the concept to life, and then fought governments and global cartels to bring it to birth. Its name was a derivative of his own, its growth the echo of his own energy. He needed a clone of himself to run it.
Those had been his thoughts when he met Peter Barnes, only in his mid-thirties but already making a name for himself in high-tech business. Peter had pioneered new ideas in light-wave communications, outmaneuvered larger competitors, and landed
Pegasus as one of his prime customers. Martin bought the company, claiming he was seeking vertical integration. Actually, it was Peter Barnes he was after. Peter could run Pegasus until the girls were ready to take over.
“
Dix … neuf … huit …
” Henri began tolling the final seconds of the countdown. Gaspar’s grip on Jennifer’s hand tightened. She felt her mouth go dry, even as she felt the rivulets of perspiration under her oversize T-shirt.
White smoke puffed out from under the missile, replaced instantly by bright jets of blue flame. The control bunker began to tremble, the windows rattling.
“Ignition!”
“Here we go,” Gaspar whispered.
“Trois … deux … un … DECOLLER!”
The rocket began to lift, slowly, uncertainly. Jennifer’s breath caught. Something seemed wrong. It was wobbling, more unsure of its footing than anxious to leave the ground. She glanced quickly at Gaspar. His eyes were squeezed shut. “Liftoff!” he announced.
Just barely, Jennifer thought. A few feet at most. All around the room voices were chattering in French. They seemed calm and professional, with no hint of emergency. But still, the
Ariane 4
seemed to be going nowhere.
Martin Pegan had died just two years after hiring Peter Barnes, leaving the company with its single satellite aloft and another scheduled to fit into a slot over the Pacific. Its debts were enormous, but the income from Pegasus I was carrying the interest, and Pegasus II promised to turn the enterprise profitable.
Peter Barnes became president, compensated with a minority share of the business that could make him vastly wealthy. He had promised Martin to grow Pegasus Satellite Services, protect its assets, and pay its debts. But the deathbed commitment he made to his mentor was to nurture Martin’s daughters until they were ready to assume full responsibility. And the deathbed advice Martin had given his daughters was to trust Peter completely.
With Pegasus III, Peter would honor his obligation to grow the company to its potential. He had already met his commitment to the daughters. Catherine was now in charge of marketing operations, finding new customers for the company’s services. Jennifer was in charge of network operations, expanding and maintaining the satellite system. Both had sharpened their skills and earned the respect of their organizations.
Space appeared under the rocket. The jets of blue flame turned white as they lifted the
Ariane 4
out of the initial cloud of smoke. It gained speed and climbed past the narrow window openings. Jennifer looked down at her monitor. Outside cameras framed the rocket perfectly as it eased past the horizon and accelerated into space.
Then the noise stopped. The bunker was no longer vibrating or the windows rattling. The thunderous rumble that had begun with ignition became a distant hum.
“You did it,” Jennifer congratulated Gaspar.
He leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “Not yet. This is just the beginning. Now it has to find its orbit.”
She watched the monitor until the rocket had turned into a tiny dot of light. At that point, the
Ariane
had separated from its first stage. The second stage, with its expensive cargo, was two hundred miles out over the Atlantic, fifty miles high, and traveling at almost three thousand miles an hour.
Gaspar left his place by Jennifer’s side and walked down the line behind the monitors. He peered intently over shoulders, spoke a few words here and there, and finally arrived at a conference with Henri. He was smiling when he returned.
“A small course correction, already accomplished,” he announced.
“Where is it?” she asked.
“Over Africa, directly above the equator. So far everything is right on schedule.”
“What do we do now?”
“Just wait. The Seychelles will take over in another minute, and then they’ll pass her on to Tahiti. We won’t have control
again for …” Gaspar turned to his computer, tapped a few keys, then concluded, “Six hours. You might want to get some rest.”
Jennifer left the bunker and climbed into the Jeep that the launch company had put at her service. She drove the paved road to the housing compound where they had put her up in a two-room suite. She stripped off the sweat-soaked clothes, pulled on a one-piece swimsuit and a terry robe, then drove to the small, stony beach that was part of the Ariane property. She drove to the water’s edge, threw off the robe, and without pausing ran headlong into the modest surf. She dove into the first breaker, and when she surfaced, she was out well beyond the waves. She shook the water out of her eyes, gave a strong kick, and then rolled into a smooth, well-trained stroke. In college, her specialty had been the sprints, but she didn’t hesitate to set off for a mile swim out to the farthest point of land and then back to the beach. It was refreshing to leave the last week’s tensions behind her.
The launch was her responsibility. She had taken the market research from her sister and fitted the satellite’s coverage to include the most important markets in its footprint. Not that she had ever run a formula or touched a screwdriver. The aerospace vendor had armies of engineers who specialized in those things. What she had done was develop specifications and evaluate lab predictions, trading area of coverage for intensity of coverage and swapping less important regions for more profitable target markets. There were months of studies, long and angry meetings with her suppliers, and days of patient bartering with Catherine and Peter. Catherine insisted on coverage criteria that Jennifer couldn’t always deliver; Peter set cost limitations that she couldn’t always meet. They had been difficult partners, just as she assumed each of them would label her a difficult partner.
Then there had been the tradeoffs with the launch-company engineers. Again, she had no useful knowledge of their art, only requirements for a precise positioning to maximize the satellite’s design capabilities, an elegant orbit that would prolong its
service life, and cost control to preserve her allotted budget. Gaspar, she guessed, would also call her a difficult partner.
But she had done her job well, and despite inflamed tempers and bruised egos, Jennifer knew that she had earned everyone’s respect. Catherine, never easy to get along with, had congratulated her in the end. When Peter reviewed her final launch plan, he had smiled and touched a finger to his forehead as if tipping his hat. Then, in the final seconds of the countdown, Gaspar had clutched her hand to steady his own nerves as well as hers. This was where her father wanted her to be, she knew. Right in the top ranks of the company he had built. And she guessed that he probably didn’t want her to stop there. Maybe she was ready for the next step.
But for the moment all that was out of her hands. Pegasus III was hurtling around the other side of the globe at five times the speed of sound, losing speed slowly as it climbed to a higher and higher orbit, its momentum gradually coming into balance with the earth’s gravity. None of her efforts could succeed until it was carefully throttled back to a speed that would hold it in orbit over a specific spot on earth. And even then, nothing was accomplished until it powered itself up and showed that it could receive a signal from anywhere in Europe and pass it down to the East Coast of the United States, or relay an American broadcast to anywhere in Europe.
Jennifer stroked back through the surf and let a wave push her back onto the beach. Then she lay down on top of the terry robe and stretched herself luxuriously in the tropical sun. “Just five minutes,” she told herself. Her indoor complexion, nurtured by long days in the office, would burn very quickly.

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