Up and Down (23 page)

“Wait,” Landon said. “You actually spoke to Chatter Haney in Mackenzie, didn’t you? Just before we met on the dock, right?”

The name rang a bell. I thought back to my arrival on the shores of Williston Lake and remembered the talkative guy at the charter company who was supposed to have flown me to Cigar Lake.

“I’d forgotten his name until you just mentioned it, but yeah, I spoke to that guy.”

“Did you introduce yourself to him, or ever give him your name?”

“Of course. I’d booked his plane and chauffeur to fly me to your place. He had my name and Visa card number.”

“Hmmmm. Was it your personal credit card or a company Visa?”

“It was a Turner King Visa,” I noted. “I try not to use my own card for business if I can avoid it. Why?”

“Well, then there’s our ticket,” she said, as if we’d solved world hunger.

“I don’t follow,” I replied, trying to catch up.

“Why do you think they call him
Chatter
Haney?” Landon asked. “You can’t keep his mouth shut with a pair of Vise-Grips.”

And so it was done. The plan came together easily after the “Chatter” breakthrough. We mapped it all out, refining it as we continued talking. We played out various twists and turns the plan could take and covered off contingencies for them all that still left us safe and beyond implication. It took about forty-five minutes before I was satisfied we had it right. We reviewed our plan and preparations in great detail along with our respective to-do lists, then Landon hung up to make an important call of her own.

You could never anticipate everything, but I felt comfortable we had our bases (and not to put too fine a point on it, our asses) covered. It all hinged on Chatter Haney and whether my relationship with Sarah Nesbitt was actually as strong as I thought it was. If I’d misread it, we might be in trouble. But I considered it a calculated gamble worth taking. Twenty minutes later, the cottage phone rang.

“Hello,” I said, figuring it was Landon but not certain. We didn’t have caller
ID
on the cottage phone. In fact, we still had the original rotary dial from the 1950s. We had only upgraded it from a party line a few years before.

“ ‘One might have thought already that God’s curse hung heavy over a degenerate world,’ ” the voice said in a low, almost furtive
tone, and a bad English accent. The line was familiar but I couldn’t place it.

“Landon?”

“No, it’s Maxwell Smart,” Landon replied, her words marinated in sarcasm. “Who did you think it would be?”

“Well, the traditional telephone greeting is a little less cryptic than yours was.”

“I was just trying to get into the spirit of things. Spies always greet one another with a coded phrase when they’re on an operation.”

“Yes, but it’s helpful if the co-conspirator is in on it, too.”

“Well, I just thought you’d know how to complete that particular line,” she said, disappointed.

“I know it’s from a Holmes story, but I just can’t place it.”

“Well, I confess, I’m a little surprised. I had thought you were quite the Sherlockian.”

“All right, all right, which story?”

“It’s the first half of the second sentence from ‘His Last Bow.’ Among the most important and studied stories in the canon, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’m bigger fan of the earlier stories,” I admitted. “So, can you actually recite the whole line?”

“Of course,” she said before switching back into her English accent. “ ‘One might have thought already that God’s curse hung heavy over a degenerate world, for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air.’ ”

“He could certainly turn a phrase,” I said. “How did your big talk go?”

“Just spoke to the man, and he’s on board.”

“If he’s such a big talker, how do you know he won’t give us up if this starts to go bad?”

“Don’t worry your big-city head about that. Chatter will never squeal on us,” Landon said. “I saved his young son’s life four years ago. The man likes to talk, I grant you that, but he’d go to jail before he’d turn me in. We have a green light.”

“Does he fully understand how critical his role is and exactly what he can and cannot say?”

“Mr. Stewart, give me some credit,” she complained. “I spent twenty minutes on the phone with him. We actually did a rehearsal. That was my idea. Don’t worry, he gets it. We are Go.”

We tied up a few more loose ends and figured out our contact schedule and our next steps. The conversation was winding down when Landon piped up once more.

“So, Mr. Stewart, I’m grateful for your help, but I’m also curious. Why are you sticking your tender foot so close to a bear trap on my account?”

I wasn’t expecting that. I glanced out the window and could just see that big white pine down near the water in that secluded and peaceful corner of our lot. Its branches lifted and settled in the gentle breeze.

“Well, I guess it’s become clearer to me in the last few days since I’ve come back, but it’s really not that complicated. I truly believe
it’s in our client’s interest. You won the contest. You have a great story. You
are
a great story. And it helps that sending you up is so obviously the right thing to do,” I said. “That’s the heart of it.”

After we hung up, I sat in silence in the cottage rehearsing the next move in my mind. The call would either be a solid first step down the right path or solid first step into the yawning jaws of that leg-snapping steel bear trap, which I’d then have to drag behind me all the way to the unemployment office.

Over the next hour, I dialled four times, being sent to voice mail on each attempt. Four times I hung up before the beep. I waited another twenty minutes and called a fifth time.

“Sarah Nesbitt.”

“Sarah, it’s a voice from your past,” I said in greeting. “It’s David Stewart.”

“David Stewart. Great to hear from you, man. And your timing is impeccable,” she replied. “You were about to be a voice from my present. So you’ve just saved me a call.”

“Really? What’s up?”

“I was just speaking to your former minister’s office about a piece we’re doing on the Citizen Astronaut contest,” she explained. “You were next on my call list.”

“So you must know I’m at Turner King now?” I asked.

“David, I’m a reporter. I try to stay abreast of developments on my beat. It’s kind of what reporters do. I’ve done two stories on
the contest already. Your name is at the bottom of every release, and my reading skills are passable. So, yes, I knew you’d made the move to
TK
.”

It was nice to know she more than remembered me.

“And your successor in the minister’s office isn’t exactly making life easy for me the way you always did,” she continued. “I’m missing you and you’re looking better and better in hindsight.”

“Sorry to hear that … I think,” I replied. “But perhaps I can help in another way.”

“My notebook is open,” she said.

“Well, can you close it for a moment? There are some ground rules that come along with this call. But I’m hoping you’ll think they’re reasonable under the circumstances.”

“Okay, my notebook is now closed. Let me know when I can open it again.”

“Strictly hypothetically, if I were to pass along the makings of a sizable story to you and you alone, along with a perfectly logical explanation for how you got it – and not from me – will you keep me out of it?”

“Well, without knowing exactly what we’re talking about, it’s hard to guarantee anything. But you know I’ve always been fair to you and you’ve always played straight with me. I’d say there’s a solid chance we can make this work. Does that cut it?” she asked.

“I think I can live with that,” I replied. “Okay, you can open your notebook again.”

“Actually, that was just a figure of speech. But my computer is
turned on and my fingers are poised over the keyboard. What do you have?”

“Sit back, and I’ll start from the beginning.”

My heart rate spiked as I launched into the tale and officially barrelled past the point of no return. It took me nearly twenty-five minutes to recount the whole story from the time Landon’s name was drawn, all the way to my crash-and-burn conference call with Crawford Blake earlier in the week. Relying on my notes, I took my time presenting Landon’s extraordinary biography. It would be won or lost there. I could hear Sarah’s fingers flying as I spoke. I could also hear her breathing deepen at the poignancy of Hugh Percival’s disappearance and his final diary entry. But she never interrupted me while I was speaking, unless you count twice uttering “Holy shit” – once when I reached the part about Landon’s 1983 astronaut application, and then again when I described her homebuilt centrifuge. As I listened to my own voice, the story seemed even better and more captivating aloud than when it was simply rattling around in my head. I left out any reference to Landon’s sexuality or to her penchant for talking daily to her long-lost father. I also kept to myself her daily naked constitutional dip in Cigar Lake. I moved to wrap up my little speech.

“So the bottom line is, seventy-one-year-old Landon Percival, a doctor, a bush pilot, an amateur astronaut in training, a seeker of the truth about her father’s disappearance in 1970, an honest and caring Canadian who’s worked hard all her life, is the
legitimate winner of the Citizen Astronaut contest for Canada. But she won’t be going anywhere, and no one will ever know about her.”

I paused to let that sink in for a moment. Sarah didn’t let the silence reign for long.

“
Why
? Why won’t she be flying?” Sarah asked, a note of urgency in her voice.

“Simply put, Landon Percival just doesn’t fit the demographic Turner King was looking for,” I explained. “
NASA
has the final say on all candidates. That’s why we haven’t publicly announced the winner yet. But the reality is that even suggesting sending a seventy-one-year-old into orbit will likely put
NASA
’
S
lawyers into orbit. Right now,
NASA
doesn’t even know Landon Percival exists, and they never will if my big boss in
D.C.
has his way. I was kind of flying solo on this and I’m lucky I still have a job. And I may not for long. I simply wasn’t able to come even close to persuading him to bring Landon forward to
NASA
to let them decide her fate. In fact, we’ve been given direct orders from Washington to pick another winner early next week – and to legally enforce the contest’s strict confidentiality rules to gag Landon Percival so no one will ever know about her.”

I stopped talking. About thirty seconds later, I heard her fingers slow and then stop on her keyboard.

“Wow. That is one amazing story, David, and I want it. But I’m feeling a little handcuffed here when it comes to protecting you. The people who really count will know that you’re the only
possible source for this. How am I supposed to use all this without directly tying you to it?” she asked.

Bingo. I was ready for this one.

“Okay. I’m glad you’re with me. Here’s how it’s going to play out. You’re going to get a phone call from a guy named Chatter Haney who runs a little one-plane charter outfit in Mackenzie, B.C. In fact, you may already have a message waiting from him. Talk to him. He’s known around town for being very curious and having very loose lips. He figured all this out on his own. I had chartered his Cessna to take me from Mackenzie to Cigar Lake to meet Landon. He had my name and my company’s name and credit card number. They don’t get too many visitors to Mackenzie so my city-slicker ways caught his attention. Then I was professionally evasive when he asked me why I needed to get out to Cigar Lake. So as soon as I left, Chatter Haney headed straight to Google. In ten minutes he had my story figured out. He knew I had to be there to vet the contest winner. Our own news release a few days before pretty well laid out the process in black and white. It never occurred to me to use a pseudonym or cover my tracks on the trip and no one at
TK
told me to. In hindsight, it probably would have been a good idea. So Chatter Haney called up the only resident of Cigar Lake he figured would have entered the contest, one Landon Percival. Of course, Landon refused even to acknowledge that she knew what he was talking about. But her unusual reticence about it all cemented his belief that Landon Percival was in fact the Canadian winner
of the Citizen Astronaut contest. So Chatter decided to contact you, Sarah. And the rest you did on your own. Does that sound about right?”

I waited.

“And you’ve told no one else about this and won’t pitch this to any other outlet?” she asked.

“Nope, and I won’t, unless you decide you can’t go with this. My goal is to make it very, very difficult for
NASA
to say no to Landon Percival. So if you tell me you can’t use this, I’ll move to the next name on my list because time is short.”

“And who is next on your list?”

“I’d really rather not say.”

I had no one else on my list, but I figured I had the hook well-anchored. I waited for a few seconds.

“Okay, I want it. But this is big, so I’m going to have to get it out fast. If I’ve got it, I want the
Sun
to break it, not just have the deepest coverage. I won’t make the weekend edition, which is a shame, but Monday for sure.”