Up and Down (24 page)

Yes.
Yes!

“Monday works, Sarah, but to be clear, Tuesday is just too late. I don’t want us to have to pick another winner, and the plan is to do that on Monday.”

“I can’t promise anything, David, but Monday is my target.”

“Of course, you’ll want to call Landon after speaking with Chatter, but I can tell you right now that you’ll get nothing from her, which I know you’ll dutifully report in the story. She’s
bound to silence and it would be nice if she were seen to be honouring her obligations. Obviously, I can’t say anything on the record. I suggest reporting that calls to me were not returned. I’ll email you the copious notes I took while at Cigar Lake, but please save them to a flash drive and then erase my email. Also, you should leave a message for me at Turner King, not just on my own voice mail, but also with the receptionist, including why you were trying to reach me. It would be helpful if you could also send me an email asking about all of this. I won’t respond, just as you might expect
NASA’S PR
flak to behave in this situation. Does that work for you?”

A few minutes later, I said goodbye to Sarah and hung up. Then, before I lost my nerve, I emailed all my notes to her along with Landon’s cellphone number using my personal Gmail account. Then I spent ten minutes hyperventilating into a paper bag I found in the kitchen. One minute I was congratulating myself on a beautifully conceived plan, executed to perfection. The next, I was deciding between throwing myself off the roof of the cottage onto the rocks below and running myself over with our old 75-horse Mercury outboard. Then I calmed down. The deed was done and I really had no choice now but to strap in for the ride in the hopes that it would eventually allow Landon Percival to strap in for her ultimate ride. I reached for the phone again when my breathing returned to normal.

“ ‘To Sherlock Holmes, she would always be …’ ” I let my voice trail off.

“ ‘
The
woman,’ ” Landon snapped. “Come on, Mr. Stewart. That was lame. At least pick a more obscure reference than that.”

“What, you don’t like ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’?”

“Of course I do. Who doesn’t? But it’s just so, so obvious,” she sighed.

I’d actually been quite pleased with it. She was clearly better schooled in the Sherlockian arts than I.

“Anyway, more importantly, the battle is joined,” I said with some drama. “You’ll soon be getting a call from a Sarah Nesbitt from the
Vancouver Sun
. She’s the science reporter and she will already have spoken to Chatter Haney. Just make sure you stick to the plan and don’t tell Sarah anything other than ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She’ll ask you if you entered the contest. Just say it’s none of her business whether you entered. Then she’ll ask you if I visited you last week. Again, it’s none of her business. Clear?”

“I’ve got it. This is more excitement that I’ve had since the centrifuge seat broke off the boom in mid-spin a few years back.”

I decided not to ask about that incident.

“Does Chatter Haney fully understand what he can and cannot say?”

“I schooled him on your instructions to the letter and he’s on board. He owes me big. Don’t worry about him,” Landon said.

“Then I guess you’re right. Our little plan has a green light.”

“I guess it does. And Mr. Stewart?”

“Yes, Landon.”

“I’m in your debt for this. I know it’s still a long shot. And I know you’ve put yourself at considerable risk. Thank you.”

Finally, as the sun was dipping below the trees to the west, I sat at the dining table with my laptop and plugged in my “rocket stick” to give me Internet access. I started by creating a new Gmail address using an unrecognizable name. I then used it to open a new Facebook account and began building a new Facebook fan page entitled “Send Landon Percival to Space.” I typed in a brief summary of Landon’s story, using simple but powerful language. I provided absolutely no inside information that was not already or soon would be in the public domain. I found and uploaded a photo of the space shuttle with the Canadarm prominently featured as the profile picture. The call to action was for all visitors to hit the Like button and leave supportive comments. I saved the new Facebook fan page but without yet making it live. I wanted to be ready when Sarah’s story detonated, I hoped, on Monday.

That night, I kept the paper bag an arm’s length away on my bedside table. I used it twice before morning.

Sarah’s email arrived just after midnight, Sunday. I’d just returned to my condo after spending the evening with Lauren. I, at least, had the Landon distraction to keep my mind occupied, but I was worried that Lauren might be wallowing. She seemed in reasonable spirits, however, considering the loss of our mother six days ago. But I learned that Lauren did have a distraction of her own. One of the larger downtown library branches had just invited her to apply for a relatively senior position. She decided it was time to get out of the house a bit more and return to full-time gainful employment. She applied. Interviews were already scheduled for the coming week. Knowing for the last six months that Mom’s time was limited had allowed Lauren to ease into this new reality gradually. In hindsight, I guess we’d both started the grieving process some time ago.

I clicked on Sarah’s email. There was a very brief message with a lonely little hyperlink at the end.

“Here’s the piece,” Sarah wrote. “It will run as the lead on the front page with a very eye-catching
Sun Exclusive!
banner stretched above the masthead. You and Landon are in the clear. Thanks so much for this.”

Wow. Front page. With my heart pounding and my stomach knotted, I clicked on the link. The freshly posted story materialized on the home page of the
Vancouver Sun
’s website. The headline summed it up, which, after all, is what headlines are supposed to do.

NASA MAY REJECT ELDERLY ASTRONAUT

The print edition with its explosive front-page story was due to hit the streets in a matter of hours. It was happening. It was really happening. And I was skating on very thin ice, naked, and without water wings. When the plan had come to me, I’d of course played it out in my mind to test it. But I never really thought it might unfold as I’d imagined it.

It couldn’t have been a better story if I’d written it myself, which of course I’d offered to do for her. Sarah had felt that passing on the information was wonderful, but that ghost writing the piece for her might just be a bit much for her editor to swallow. I reluctantly agreed. But I liked what she’d made of it.
TK
’
S
role in the Citizen Astronaut contest, my mysterious trip to Cigar Lake, Landon’s contest victory and her amazing life story, the unexplained 1970 disappearance of her father, Hugh Percival,
her rejection from the astronaut program in ’83, even her home-built centrifuge, it was all there in vivid Technicolor. Initially, I wasn’t thrilled with seeing my name in print, but the story would have been conspicuously incomplete without it. In fact, I figured including me in the story actually distanced me from the act of planting it. Yes, Sarah Nesbitt had covered it all, including my posterior. She had hermetically sealed Landon and me in an airtight chamber of denial. She even described, in some detail, just how the loquacious Chatter Haney had brought the story to her, confirming more than once that Landon had not been prepared to share any information or cooperate in any way. I thought Sarah made Landon’s reticence sound almost noble. The story also reported that several interview requests sent to me had gone unanswered. Nice.

There were two photos in the story, neither one I’d seen before. The first showed a much younger and not unattractive Landon. The frame of the shot cut out the person obviously standing next to her. It looked like it was taken in an urban setting, probably Vancouver, in the 1960s. The second showed a more recent shot of Landon standing on one pontoon of her beloved Beaver, probably at the dock in Mackenzie as the photo credit read
Mackenzie Times
. Towards the end of the piece, Sarah speculated that
NASA
would almost certainly reject Landon because of her age, “thus shutting down one senior citizen’s dream and denying the world a happy ending to one of the most extraordinary, but until now, unknown stories of our time.” I made a mental note to shower
Sarah Nesbitt with rose petals or at least take her out for dinner the next time I was in Vancouver. But it was still early days. In fact, this had really only just begun.

I glanced at the clock, decided it was still early enough in B.C., and called Landon to read her the online story.

“Well, that certainly sounds like a good start, doesn’t it?” Landon said calmly when I’d finished reading the article.

“Good start? Sarah has hit it out of the park for us. We are now irrevocably in this thing for the duration.”

“Did she have to go on so much about my father and tell everyone that I’m still looking for him? It feels a little odd having that out there and kind of makes me sound a little eccentric.”

“Landon, first of all, the mystery of your father’s disappearance is one of the most poignant and compelling dimensions of your story. I’m not surprised in the least that it earned a prominent place in her piece. Secondly, searching for a lost father does not make you eccentric. It just makes you a daughter,” I countered. “On the other hand, building and ‘flying’ a propeller-driven centrifuge in a remote corner of a B.C. forest, well, I admit that might take us into the eccentric zone. But it’s part of your charm, and it certainly strengthens the amateur astronaut angle of your story.”

“So what happens now?” she asked.

“Well, if the story is as big as I think it might be, you’ll likely have a few visitors in the coming days, and some of them will be toting video cameras.”

“So I just stick to my guns and send them packing, right?”

“Right. But before you unleash Hector on them, let’s make sure they get some good shots of you on the dock, working on the Beaver, and generally looking intrepid. Shooting you taking off from the lake would make for some great footage, too. And no skinny-dipping until every last reporter has gone,” I insisted.

“Do I let them wander around and take any shots of the centrifuge?” Landon asked.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I’d even let them off the dock to use the outhouse. Okay – maybe that. But I don’t want you to be seen to be cooperating in any way with the reporters,” I said. “Don’t worry, I have a plan for getting the word out about the centrifuge. The media will have plenty of video to tell that part of your story.”

I didn’t sleep much that night. It was hard to put my mind at rest when it kept conjuring up ever more creative ways Crawford Blake might employ to separate my testicles from their rightful place of residence. So I headed into the office early. But not early enough. A note on my chair in my palatial cubicle told me to come to Amanda’s office as soon as I arrived. It was written in big bold capital letters. In case the urgency might be lost on me, there were nine exclamation marks punctuating the point. Message received.

When I arrived in her office at 7:15, Amanda and Diane were waiting for me. Strangely, Amanda sat next to Diane in the two
guest chairs parked in front of her own desk. Only Amanda’s feet reached to the floor. When I saw the look on her face, I stopped worrying about what Crawford Blake was going to do to me.

“Sit!” they ordered in unison, though in different keys, and pointed me into Amanda’s high-backed leather desk chair.

I sat. Diane started.

“David, first of all, we’re all very sorry about your mother and we hope you’re okay,” Diane said as she leaned over and put her hand on my wrist. “Second, and more pressing right now, we are in such deep shit at this very moment that the three of us may never be found.”

“What have I missed?” I said, feigning surprise. “What’s happened?”

Amanda tossed a scanned printout of the
Vancouver Sun
’s front-page story onto the desk. I grabbed it, scanned the headline, and dutifully doubled over in shock. I thought about upending Amanda’s prized chair, hurling it through the plate glass window, and then following it out, but that would have been a bit over the top. Restraint and nuance were the keys to selling this. And they were watching my reaction very carefully. I looked again quickly at the headline.