Jezebel's Ladder (36 page)

“Yes,” Benny said, feeling buoyant
as he plowed through the throngs.

“Ours has a clause about earning
redemption through restitution. You might consider adding one to yours. We
accept your answer. You may proceed to the next phase.”

Then the person he thought was an
FBI agent vanished.

PJ managed to find his way to the cots and catch some Zs. At
about one o’clock, someone shoved a flashlight in his face. Bell asked,
“Smith?”

“Never heard of him.”

“There’s some joker outside by the
name of Daedalus with an armed escort, demanding access. He says you know him,”
she informed him.

It took a second for the dime to
drop. He didn’t know any Daedalus… except the father of Icarus—Nick! “Uh… yes.
He’s a specialist,” PJ improvised. “I invited him earlier.”

Bell frowned. “He’s not on the
access list, and we don’t allow armed strangers inside the perimeter.”

“I apologize. He was supposed to
call me, and I was going to meet him at the gate without disturbing you.
Daedalus is cleared. If necessary, you can run his fingerprints, but I don’t want
anybody but you knowing his real identity.”

Nick’s escort bothered him. If the
gunslinger had been government-issue, he’d have been inside already. If the
escort were a spy, Nick would be dead since his friend couldn’t be the leak.
The most likely alternative was that his mom hired some muscle to protect her
only child from the harsh cruelties of life, or to keep Nick from offing
himself. “The other guy is his personal bodyguard. Daedalus doesn’t go anywhere
without one anymore, not since the last attempt on his life. I can probably
talk him into checking the artillery with your people. He’s the one who
invented the device on that satellite up there, but the press can’t know about
him, not yet.”

Bell shook her head. “I can’t
operate in a vacuum. You’ve got to tell me the whole story, no BS.”

He looked her straight in the eye
and said, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Just as the vein began to stand out in
her forehead, PJ added, “But Amy will give you the Senate oversight summary
while I go out and brief our visitor.”

Bell nodded grudgingly. “If this
checks out from two sources, he gets in, but his real name goes in my report.”

He put out his hands innocently.
“That’s all I’m asking.”

While she hunted Amy down like a
bloodhound, the new liaison snuck out to the media circus to meet Nick at the
fence line. He took a minute to recover from his first glimpse. Nick looked
bad. His face was bruised, scratched, and swollen. One eye was puffed almost
completely shut, while the other had a manic gleam to it. PJ steeled himself
not to react as he took the sign-in sheet from the guard shack and walked over
to greet his friend.

“Daedalus,” PJ said, managing a
weak smile. “Good to see you.”

“Who was the traitor?” Nick
whispered angrily.

“Sure, we can talk. Over here is good,”
PJ said, leading him away from the crowd. Nick moved slowly, with some degree
of pain. The hired gun didn’t introduce himself. The guy could have been an
extra in a biker movie, with long, black, greasy hair and a tattoo on his
well-developed bicep that read ‘Roadkill.’ Without the tattoo, he could have
passed for a cave man.

Nick cursed loudly. “Who betrayed
us?”

“Nothing has been proven. The FBI
has the last suspect in some local jail.”

“Cocoa Beach?” Nick asked.

Before PJ could stop himself, he
nodded. Nick exchanged a look with Mr. Roadkill. “We’re really glad you showed
up when you did. It’s less than four hours till the Phoenix makes its
rendezvous. We can’t send the destruct sequence because someone changed the
codes.”

“Who the hell told you that?” said
Nick.

“Mr. Spacely. He just went to the
jail, too.”

Nick muttered, “I hope you’re
jamming the destruct frequency.”

PJ gaped at him. “Why?”

Nick treated him like he was an
idiot. “Because if it looks like you’re going to succeed, the pricks behind this
operation are going to blow the satellite up and take all those astronauts with
it.”

“I never would have thought of
that. We need you to come in and help us if we’re going to pull this off,” his
friend said, trying to appeal to his ego.

“Can’t,” Nick said. “I have some
debts to repay before the night’s over.” Mr. Roadkill grinned and nodded.

PJ grabbed Nick’s arm and
whispered, “If we don’t succeed, it won’t matter. They’ll all be dead anyway.”

Nick smiled in a twisted way. “My
father used to tell me it didn’t matter if my food mixed together, because it
all went to the same place. Well I want these people to taste every bite. I
want them to feel everything I felt before they die.” Nick had never been the
warmest person; however, now he was so cold that it burned to touch him. The
Darwinian side of PJ was screaming at him to get away before Gloria’s prophecy
could come true. Still, he couldn’t give up on a friend. The rest of the
species needed what he knew too much.

“Nick, you’re too important to
lose. Paulson took all the Icarus documents with him, and Wilkes was killed.
Nobody on our side really understands this thing but you.”

“What makes you think I’m on your
side?” he said. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Nick added. “Very
well, for the sake of history I kept copies of all my notes.”

“The, um, people interrogating you
didn’t get them?” PJ asked, trying to be tactful.

“They never asked, or I would have
told them. Besides, the notes were already mailed to your parents’ house, book
rate. I figured that a few weeks would be long enough for Big Brother to stop
reading their junk mail. With those notes, any competent university could
reproduce the results. I need the name.”

“That doesn’t do us a whole lot of
good right now. We need help with our plan.” PJ flipped the guest roster over
and sketched the Icarus sphere and the tripod of ice. Drawing thrust arrows, he
explained his idea to make the weapon into a spacecraft.

Nick blinked a few times, turned
the picture sideways so he could see it from the point of view of the Earth,
and grunted. “You don’t need my help. If the fly boys don’t screw it up, this
has about a one-in-four chance of working.” Nick grabbed the pen and paper and
drew on the sphere. “This would be the basic engine.” He drew a pencil shape
extending from the field and started labeling parts: water tanks, heater,
controlled cooling tubes, ice-feed mechanism. The lines he drew to maintain
proper ratios and the incidental equations he scrawled along the edges made the
paper resemble a da Vinci sketch. For the ship, he made a dumbbell model with a
field sphere at each end.

Mr. Roadkill was bored, bobbing his
head to a tune on his ear buds, while Nick casually explained one of the
fundamental scientific foundations of the next century. “Velocity isn’t a big
problem outside the gravity well. With a mass drive, the hard part is
deceleration. Let’s say you achieve near-light speed.” He wrote equations
across the top. “E=m
_A
c
²
is the amount of energy you get
from perfect atomic conversion of mass A. The kinetic energy of a ship going
that velocity is 1/2 m
_B
c
²
for the ship of mass B. Solve
and you’d have to burn half the mass to go that fast and the other half to
brake. Ignoring the weight of the passengers and engine, it would be a
straight-line, one-way trip—not much of a TV series.”

PJ nodded, trying to take it all in
and ask the right questions while Nick was there. This was the future of Man,
worth several patents, and he had tossed it off as casually as a memo. Because
the math was still sloppy, the programmer argued, “Not necessarily. The mass is
lower each time you fire, so it would be half of half. And that’s assuming you
do it all at once and at full speed. With passengers, you could really only
accelerate…”

“Whatever. I don’t have time for Zeno’s
paradox right now. Give me the name,” he demanded. As Nick’s voice changed,
Roadkill took off his headphones.

“But you’re a genius! And the NSA
is probably guarding the guy. Don’t throw all of this away. If you get caught,
they’ll shoot you,” PJ said.

His breathing grew erratic. “None
of that matters any more!” People were starting to stare, “They broke me, PJ. I
stopped being me days ago. The only thing that’s kept me alive since then is
planning what I’m going to do to the bastards before the impact.”

His friend grasped at straws. “With
all that Bible reading you’ve been doing, aren’t you worried about going to
hell?”

Nick shook his head. “You’ve been
preaching the Dark Side for years now, brother. You’re even wearing the devil’s
mark on your jacket,” he said, pointing to PJ’s new badge. “Don’t hold back now
that I want to go the easy road. If our friendship ever meant anything to you,
tell me.” When PJ delayed, Mr. Roadkill moved closer to him, revealing a knife
handle. Odds were that he would be able to gut the skinny Quaker before any of
the guards could stop him. Reporters were starting to gather around the corner,
smelling the potential for blood.

PJ didn’t see the rooftop sniper’s
crosshairs on the biker, or the others moving closer to protect him.

“Kemp.”

Wheels turned in Nick’s head.
“Good,” he said absently, and then left without another word.

PJ told Buzz about jamming the
destruct frequencies. He wasn’t sleepy any more.

****

Daniel had located Jez from the air
on their plane’s approach—the county jail infirmary. Trina wasted no time
getting the information to Benny. The actor beat them to Jez’s side because
Trina had to wait for her make-up and gun collection at the baggage claim.
Invisible, Daniel stood watch over Jez until her husband arrived.

Benny bent over the bed, kissed her
forehead and whispered, “Take these broken wings.”

Her eyes fluttered open. When she
saw him, she smiled. “You’re supposed to sing it.”

“You know I can’t sing; it’s my
only flaw.”

When she snickered, he handed her
the purse. She could feel the butterfly calling to her. “All right. I’ll only
stroke your ego because you have your occasional uses.”

Seeing the panty liner in the
purse, she looked down at the ground. “I have to tell you…”

“I read your medical chart,” he said,
wrapping an arm around her.

Still sad, she leaned into his
comfort. “It’s so weird finishing someone else’s sentence, having no secrets.
Maybe we need to change our name to Jezny.”

“Or Bezebel,” he countered, putting
his name first. She pulled back and stared. “Bad example. I got a hotel room
nearby, courtesy of your Assistant Corps. They’re amazing. I wanted you to get
a shower, food, do whatever you need to do to get yourself ready before I
introduce you to a few dozen of my newest friends.”

Time crawled by. At around two in the morning, Quan
requested that the Pentagon ready all available missiles for launch immediately
after the attempt. Buzz responded, “Sure, if it doesn’t work, we can try
overloading the satellite’s defenses. Of course, we’ll want to give you time to
get clear first.”

Quan said, “Even if we succeed, you
may need them. Whoever arranged this doesn’t like losing. Have you heard any
more about who that might be?”

Buzz sighed. “That’s a negative, Phoenix. We’ve been calling the jail for the last hour and we’re getting no response.”

Then they had Quan do a sound bite
for the news media. One of the astronauts had brought some of the air-recycling
gear over from the space station as a souvenir for the space museum. “It
doesn’t quite fit, but it’ll get us home.” When the broadcast light turned off,
he added, “There, they love that mission in jeopardy crap. Phoenix out.”

Buzz grimaced. “I wish my stomach
loved it, Phoenix. I’m going to need a new one tomorrow.”

When PJ finally located Amy, she
was a few buildings down, in the chapel. He could tell she had been crying. “Do
you believe in God?”

PJ nodded. “I think He’s a
fantastic engineer.”

“Do you think we’re being
punished?” Amy asked.

He thought about that for a moment.
“He’s just letting his kids face the consequences of their own actions—helping
us to grow up. I spent a night in jail once because my dad wouldn’t bail me
out. It was one of the best things he ever did for me.”

Amy laughed awkwardly through the
tears. “Great, you seduce me and then tell me you’re a jailbird, too. What were
you in jail for?”

“I showed my scout troop how to
hack into a mainframe from the school computer. One of my buddies used the
tricks to get into a power company computer. A local hospital lost electricity
for several minutes. Someone died.”

She pulled back and looked at him
askance. “Anyone ever tell you that you pick weird friends?”

“My whole family, at every holiday
gathering.”

“So what happened with the jail
thing?”

He sighed. “I refused to fink out
my friend, but I showed the company how to fix those security holes in exchange
for a reduction in sentence. I got a sentence of one hundred hours community
service at the hospital from the judge and two years of the same from my Dad. I
can’t complain too much, though. Security consulting paid my way through
college.”

“I think your family sounds great.
My folks are Catholic, but I haven’t been to Mass in years. I came here because
I needed to confess.” She seemed very anxious.

PJ laughed. “What could someone as
nice as you possibly have done wrong?”

That triggered a fit of weeping. “I
lied to you.”

He was suddenly more alert than
when Roadkill had pulled a knife on him. “I’m not going anywhere. Go ahead.”

“I implied I was a virgin when I
got married, but only my husband was. I’ve been with a number of men—less than
a dozen.”

PJ stuttered, “That’s…not so bad. I
was worried you were going to confess to being a Chinese agent or something. If
I didn’t care enough to ask you before we… I have no right to get mad at you
afterward. You are who you are.”

“I slept with Braithwaite,” she
blurted.

The cold knife of reality cut his
spine. He couldn’t move, couldn’t focus. Amy could see the betrayal in his
face. “He was so charming, such a champion of the underdog. It started as hero
worship. We worked late so often, and his family is in Colorado.”

His face was numb. “He’s married?”

“Yes, I was his mistress. That’s
why I trusted him so much, but I haven’t slept with him in months.”

PJ concentrated on his next breath.
“I’m going to need a few minutes.”

“You hate me. God, I’ve screwed
this up so badly. Don’t just sit there staring at the wall. Call me a bitch,
shout, do something!”

“Did he want you to go with him
when he left the bunker?” PJ asked.

“Yes, he mentioned that during the
interrogation, but…”

PJ laid a finger on her lips. “Then
you made a choice. You chose me, even though it meant imprisonment and probably
death.” She nodded slowly. “Then I have nothing to complain about. I meant what
I said. I just need a few minutes to adjust.”

She stared at his pale face in
wonder.

He shed a few tears of his own and
finally admitted, “Amy, you could be pregnant with his child, and I’d still
want you.” She grabbed him tightly, and the crying changed tenor into relief.
He flopped a clumsy arm over her.

They held each other in silence
till around 3:00 a.m. At long last, he said, “If we make it through this, Amy,
nothing’s going to break us.” PJ still had the long stare, but he was talking.

Unable to bear any more suspense,
she said, “Let’s head to the control room to watch the last hour of Phoenix’s approach pattern.” It was only when they tried to get past the guards Buzz had
posted at the doors that PJ discovered that his new badge was gone.

****

When Benny told Jez about his
encounter with the phantom FBI agent, she said, “That’s incredibly exciting if
we survive.”

She called everyone. When Crusader
didn’t answer, Benny told her about the upcoming funerals.

“Sedna got what she wanted,” Jez
said at last.

When she reached Fortune, the
billionaire said, “We’ve done everything we can, Butterfly. It’s in God’s hands
now.”

“Who is it?” she heard a sleepy
Claudette say.

Smiling, Jez told him, “Go back to
your wife. Tonight’s my turn to watch and see what God does.” She sent orders
to all observatories to prepare to film at the highest speed and resolution
possible in every part of the spectrum.

She explained to Benny, “For
science to study and history to remember.”

“And if we fail?”

“For archaeology and for another
culture to heed as a warning.”

By half past three, most of the
extended Ladder project was awake and watching the skies. The press wouldn’t
stop taking pictures of the rescued Jezebel. When they asked her for a
statement, she rubbed her butterfly to watch the Out of Body messengers
frantically popping around the complex. “Soon.”