Code to Zero (26 page)

The first-stage engine must be switched off sharply, and separated immediately, otherwise gradual thrust decay could cause the first stage to catch up with the second and misalign it. As soon as pressure drops in the fuel lines, the valves are closed, and the first stage is separated 5 seconds later by detonation of spring-loaded explosive bolts. The springs increase the speed of the second stage by 2.6 feet per second, ensuring that it separates cleanly.

Anthony knew the way to Luke’s house. He had spent a weekend there, a couple of years back, soon after Luke and Elspeth had moved from Pasadena. He reached the place in fifteen minutes. It was on Echols Hill, a street of large older homes a couple of blocks from downtown. Anthony parked around the corner so that Luke would not be forewarned that he had a visitor.

He walked back to the house. He should have felt quietly confident. He held all the cards: surprise, time, and a gun. But instead, he was nauseated with apprehension. Twice already he had felt he had Luke in his hands, and Luke had eluded him.

He still did not know why Luke had chosen to fly to Huntsville rather than Cape Canaveral. This inexplicable decision suggested there was something Anthony did not know about, an unpleasant surprise that might leap out at him any moment.

The house was a white turn-of-the-century colonial with a pillared verandah. It was too grand for an Army scientist, but Luke had never
pretended to live on what he made as a mathematician. Anthony opened a gate in a low wall and entered the yard. The place would have been easy to break into, but that would not be necessary. He circled around to the back. By the kitchen door was a terra-cotta planter with bougainvillea spilling out of it, and under the pot was a big iron key.

Anthony let himself in.

The outside was pleasantly old-fashioned, but the interior was right up to the minute. Elspeth had every kind of gadget in the kitchen. There was a big hall decorated in bright pastel colors, a living room with a console TV and a record player, and a dining room with modern splayed-leg chairs and sideboards. Anthony preferred traditional furniture, but he had to admit this was stylish.

As he stood in the living room, staring at a curved couch upholstered in pink vinyl, he recalled vividly the weekend he had spent here. He had known within an hour that the marriage was in trouble. Elspeth was flirtatious, always a sign of tension with her, and Luke adopted a forced air of cheery hospitality that was quite uncharacteristic.

They had given a cocktail party on the Saturday night and invited the young crowd from Redstone Arsenal. This room had been full of badly dressed scientists talking about rockets, junior officers discussing their prospects for promotion, and pretty women gossiping about the intrigues of life at a military base. The gramophone had been stacked with long-playing jazz records, but that night the music had sounded plaintive, not joyous. Luke and Elspeth had got drunk—a rare thing for both of them—and Elspeth had grown more flirty while Luke became quieter and quieter. Anthony had found it painful to see two people he liked and admired so unhappy, and the whole weekend had depressed him.

And now the long drama of their interwoven lives was playing out its inevitable conclusion.

Anthony decided to search the house. He did not know what he was looking for. But he might turn up something that would give him a clue to why Luke was coming here, and warn him of unforeseen danger. He put on a pair of rubber gloves he found in the kitchen. There would
be a murder investigation eventually, and he did not want to leave fingerprints.

He started in the study, a small room lined with shelves of scientific books. He sat at Luke’s desk, which looked out onto the backyard, and opened the drawers.

Over the next two hours, he searched the house from top to bottom. He found nothing.

He looked in every pocket of every suit in Luke’s well-filled closet. He opened every book in the study to check for papers concealed between the pages. He took the lids off every piece of Tupperware in the enormous double-door refrigerator. He went into the garage and searched the handsome black Chrysler 300C—the fastest stock sedan in the world, according to the newspapers—from its streamlined headlamps to its rocket-ship tailfins.

He learned a few intimate secrets along the way. Elspeth colored her hair, used sleeping pills which were prescribed by a doctor, and suffered from constipation. Luke used a dandruff shampoo and subscribed to
Playboy
magazine.

There was a small pile of mail on a table in the hall—put there by the maid, presumably. Anthony shuffled the letters, but there was nothing of interest: a flyer from a supermarket,
Newsweek,
a postcard from Ron and Monica in Hawaii, envelopes with the cellophane address window that indicated a business letter.

The search had been fruitless. He still did not know what Luke might have up his sleeve.

He went into the living room. He chose a position from which he could see through the venetian blinds to the front yard, and also through the open door into the hallway. He sat down on the pink vinyl couch.

He took out his gun, checked that it was fully loaded, and fitted the silencer.

He tried to reassure himself by imagining the scene ahead. He would see Luke arrive, probably in a taxicab from the airport. He would watch him walk into the front yard, take out his key, and open his own front
door. Luke would step into the hall, close the door, then head for the kitchen. As he passed the living room, he would glance through the open doorway and see Anthony on the couch. He would stop, raise his eyebrows in surprise, and open his mouth to speak. In his mind would be some phrase such as “Anthony? What the hell—?” But he would never say the words. His eyes would drop to the gun held perfectly level in Anthony’s lap, and he would know his fate a split second before it happened.

Then Anthony would shoot him dead.

A system of compressed-air nozzles, mounted in the tail of the instrument compartment, will control the tilt of the nose section when in space.

Billie was lost.

She had known it for half an hour. Leaving the airport in a rented Ford a few minutes before one o’clock, she had driven into the center of Huntsville, then taken Highway 59 toward Chattanooga. She had wondered why the Components Testing Laboratory should be an hour away from the base and imagined it might be for safety reasons: perhaps there was a danger that components would explode under testing. But she had not thought very hard about it.

Her directions were to take a country road to the right exactly thirty-five miles from Huntsville. She had zeroed her trip meter on Main Street, but when the revolving figures reached 35, she could not see a right turn. Feeling only mildly anxious, she went on and took the next road on the right, a couple of miles farther.

The directions, which had seemed so precise as she wrote them down, never quite corresponded with the roads on which she found herself, and her anxiety grew, but she carried on, making the likeliest interpretation. Obviously, she thought, the man she had spoken to had not been as reliable as he had sounded. She wished she had been able to speak to Luke personally.

The landscape gradually became wilder, the farmhouses ramshackle and the roads potholed and the fences broken-down. The disparity
between what she expected and the landmarks she saw around her grew until she threw up her hands in despair and admitted to herself that she could be anywhere. She was furious with herself and with the fool who gave her directions.

She turned around and tried to find her way back, but soon she was on unfamiliar roads again. She began to wonder if she was going around in a huge circle. She stopped beside a field where a Negro in dungarees and a straw hat was turning the hard earth with a walking plow. She stopped her car and spoke to him. “I’m looking for the Components Testing Lab of Redstone Arsenal,” she said.

He looked surprised. “The Army base? That’s all the way back to Huntsville and across to the other side of town.”

“But they have some kind of facility out this way.”

“Not that I ever see.”

This was hopeless. She would have to call the lab and ask for fresh directions. “Can I use your phone?”

“Ain’t got no phone.”

She was about to ask him where the nearest payphone was when she saw a look of fear in his eyes. She realized that she was putting him in a situation that made him anxious: alone in a field with a white woman who was not making sense. She quickly thanked him and drove away.

After a couple of miles, she came upon a dilapidated feed store with a payphone outside. She pulled over. She still had Luke’s message with the phone number. She put a dime in the slot and dialed.

The phone was answered immediately. A young man’s voice said, “Hello?”

“May I speak to Dr. Claude Lucas?” she said.

“You got the wrong number, honey.”

Can’t I do anything right? she thought desperately. “Isn’t this Huntsville JE 6-4231?”

There was a pause. “Yep, that’s what it says on the dial.”

She double-checked the number on the message. She had not made a mistake. “I was trying to call the Components Testing Lab.”

“Well, you reached a payphone in Huntsville Airport.”

“A
pay
phone?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Billie began to realize she had been hoodwinked.

The voice at the other end of the line went on, “I’m about to call my mom and tell her to come get me, and when I pick up the phone I hear you asking for some guy named Claude.”

“Shit!” Billie said. She slammed the phone down, furious with herself for being so gullible.

Luke had not been taken off his plane in Norfolk and put on an Army flight, she realized, and he was not at the Components Testing Lab, wherever that was. That whole story was a lie designed to get her out of the way—and it had succeeded. She looked at her watch. Luke must have landed by now. Anthony had been waiting for him—and she might as well have been in Washington, for all the use she had been.

With despair in her heart, she wondered if Luke was still alive.

If he was, maybe she could still warn him. It was too late to leave a message at the airport, but there must be someone she could call. She racked her brains. Luke had a secretary at the base, she remembered; a name like a flower. . . .

Marigold.

She called Redstone Arsenal and asked to speak to Dr. Lucas’s secretary. A woman with a slow Alabama voice came on the line. “Computation Laboratory, how may I help you?”

“Is that Marigold?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dr. Josephson, a friend of Dr. Lucas.”

“Yes.” She sounded suspicious.

Billie wanted this woman to trust her. “We’ve spoken before, I think. My first name is Billie.”

“Oh, sure, I remember. How are you?”

“Worried. I need to get a message to Luke urgently. Is he with you?”

“No, ma’am. He went to his house.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Looking for a file folder.”

“A file?” Billie saw the significance of that immediately. “A file he left here on Monday, maybe?”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” said Marigold.

Of course, Luke had told Marigold to keep his Monday visit secret. But none of that was important now. “If you see Luke, or if he calls you, would you please give him a message from me?”

“Of course.”

“Tell him Anthony is in town.”

“That’s all?”

“He’ll understand. Marigold . . . I hesitate to say this, in case you think I’m some kind of nut, but I guess I should. I believe Luke is in danger.”

“From this Anthony?”

“Yes. Do you believe me?”

“Stranger things have happened. Is this all tied up with him losing his memory?”

“Yes. If you get that message to him, it could save his life. I mean it.”

“I’ll do what I can, Doctor.”

“Thank you.” Billie hung up.

Was there anyone else Luke might talk to? She thought of Elspeth.

She called the operator and asked for Cape Canaveral.

After discarding the burnt-out first stage, the missile will coast through a vacuum trajectory while the spatial attitude control system aligns it so that it is exactly horizontal with respect to the earth’s surface.

Everyone was bad-tempered at Cape Canaveral. The Pentagon had ordered a security alert. Arriving this morning, eager to get to work on the final checks for the all-important rocket launch, they had been made to wait in line at the gate. Some had been there for three hours in the Florida sun. Gas tanks had run dry, radiators had boiled over, air conditioners had failed, and engines had stalled then refused to restart. Every car had been searched—hoods lifted, golf bags taken out of trunks, spare wheels removed from covers. Tempers frayed as all briefcases were opened, each lunch pail unpacked, and every woman’s purse dumped out onto a trestle table so that Colonel Hide’s military police could paw over her lipsticks, love letters, tampons, and Rolaids.

But that was not the end of it. When they reached their laboratories and offices and engineering shops, they were disrupted all over again by teams of men who went through their drawers and file cabinets, looked inside their oscillators and vacuum cabinets, and took the inspection plates off their machine tools. “We’re trying to launch a goddamn rocket here,” people said again and again, but the security men just gritted
their teeth and carried on. Despite the disruption, the launch was still scheduled for 10.30
P
.
M
.

Elspeth was glad of the upset. It meant nobody noticed she was too distraught to do her job. She made mistakes in her timetable and produced her updates late, but Willy Fredrickson was too distracted to reprimand her. She did not know where Luke was, and she no longer felt sure she could trust Anthony.

When the phone at her desk rang a few minutes before four o’clock, her heart seemed to stop.

She snatched up the handset. “Yes?”

“This is Billie.”

“Billie?”
Elspeth was taken by surprise. “Where are you?”

“I’m in Huntsville, trying to contact Luke.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Looking for a file he left here on Monday.”

Elspeth’s jaw dropped. “He went to Huntsville on Monday? I didn’t know that.”

“Nobody knew, except Marigold. Elspeth, do you understand what’s going on?”

She laughed humorlessly. “I thought I did . . . but not anymore.”

“I believe Luke’s life is in danger.”

“What makes you say so?”

“Anthony shot at him in Washington last night.”

Elspeth went cold. “Oh, my God.”

“It’s too complicated to explain right now. If Luke calls you, will you tell him that Anthony is in Huntsville?”

Elspeth was trying to recover from the shock. “Uh . . . sure, of course I will.”

“It could save his life.”

“I understand. Billie . . . one more thing.”

“Yeah.”

“Look after Luke, won’t you?”

There was a pause. “What do you mean?” Billie asked. “You sound like you’re going to die.”

Elspeth did not answer. After a moment, she broke the connection.

A sob came to her throat. She fought fiercely to control herself. Tears would not help anyone, she told herself severely. She made herself calm.

Then she dialed her home in Huntsville.