Red Thunder (24 page)

We made it back to the Middle of Nowhere in about an hour, then to
Caleb's trailer-home in fifteen minutes. Travis was in a big hurry. We
took hasty showers, said our good-byes, thanked Grace for the
food—and accepted a picnic basket crammed with more of
it—then piled back into our vehicles and hit the road.

When Kelly saw that Nephew Billy had washed all the road grime and
bugs off the Ferrari she kissed him on the cheek. I shook his hand
anyway.

IN WHAT I thought was an excess of paranoia, Travis
insisted the three vehicles not drive together, but maintain a
five-minute separation. We were taking Alligator Alley back to Fort
Lauderdale, so it wasn't hard.

"I've been asleep at the wheel as far as security goes," he told us
during a cellular conference call. "From now on, we're going to be more
careful than we've been. You gotta remember—"

"Travis," I interrupted. "If we're going to be careful... do you think we should be discussing these things on cell phones?"

There was silence for a moment. Kelly looked over and gave me a thumbs-up.

"Manny, you're a genius and I'm a jerk-off idiot. Everybody hang up and meet me at Bahia Mar in Lauderdale. We'll have lunch."

BAHIA MAR IS one of your nicer marinas. About a
zillion dollars' worth of rich folks' playtoys were tied up at the
finger piers, motor and sail, blinding white and those deep blue tarps
they wrap sails in. We found each other easily enough, and Travis led
the way to a pretty city park and we all unloaded Grace's lunch onto a
picnic table. There was a bucket of fried chicken and a big Tupperware
box of potato salad and scratch buttermilk biscuits and a watermelon
for dessert. There was also a red-and-white checkered tablecloth to put
it all on, heavy plastic plates and spoons, and a big thermos of grape
Kool-Aid.

"I have screwed up just about everything I've tried so far," Travis
said after the food had been distributed. "You notice my crazy neighbor
lately? He's ready to take off on a flying saucer with Jesus. Which is
what he saw the day I landed you all in the pool by fiddling with
something I didn't understand.

"As for today's fiasco... what was I thinking?"

"I'm sorry, Trav—"

"Not your fault, Jubal."

"It was a decimal point, jus' a little—"

"I know, Jube, I know. But I can't afford to drop any more decimal
points. Friends, Jubal did a search while I was driving... show 'em,
Jube."

Jubal went to
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/RealTime/JTrack/3D/JTrack3D.html on his
computer. I knew the site. It kept track of all satellites in orbit. We
saw a display of the Earth surrounded by thousands of dots, many of
them in a ring at the geosynchronous distance of 22,500 miles. Jubal
zoomed in on Florida, then the southern tip of Florida, and entered the
time of the launch. We saw a handful of satellites and lines
representing their orbits. Jubal moved the cursor over one.

"Dat be Friendship Station. She were 'bout two hunnerd miles away when de rocket go shootin' by."

"Jes... You mean we could have hit it?" Alicia asked.

"It would have been a trillion-to-one shot to hit it," Travis said.
"That doesn't worry me. No, the thing that worries me is that our bird
would have showed up on their radar. Also this satellite, and this one.
Not to mention ground radars. Now some people in our government know
there's something out there that can outperform any rocket in their
arsenal. I mean, our bird was accelerating at
twenty gees,
and it would have kept it up until it was out of radar range. When they
lost it, it was traveling faster than any man-made object has ever
traveled.
Ever,
in the history of the world."

We all digested that for a while. Suddenly I didn't feel so hungry.

"Now our government knows there's somebody out there with a powerful
new technology. I'm sure they're going to want it. And what I worry
about is our alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. FBI, CIA, NSA,
DIA."

"What about SMERSH?" I asked, joking. Travis didn't laugh.

"I've often asked myself that question," he said. "Is there a super,
super
secret agency in the government, accountable to no one, licensed to
kill, like in a James Bond movie? I hope not, but there's no way for us
to know. By its nature nobody would ever have heard of it."

" 'If I told you, I'd have to kill you,' " Dak said.

"Exactly. So it's a waste of time to worry about something like that. I'm worried enough about the ones we
do
know about.

"By triangulating the radar signatures they know where we did it. I
can't think they would learn much from the launch site. It's hard
digging in the 'Glades. That hole in the ground filled up with muddy
water before we even left.

"What worries me most is that I stupidly let us drive into a small,
isolated town in three of the most memorable vehicles in Florida."

I looked at our little automotive fleet. It was so obvious once he'd
said it, but it hadn't occurred to me. Even now, there were half a
dozen neighborhood kids standing around the vehicles, gawking.

"They've got satellites that can read a license plate from orbit,
and it was a clear day, but I strongly doubt they took any pictures.
Why would they?"

"But people will talk," Kelly murmured.

"You said it. Old man McGee saw us, and so did those tourists. As
for McGee, he wouldn't be apt to have much to say to a federal agent,
on account of the five years of federal time he did behind a marijuana
smuggling conviction back in the '70s. Not to mention that he'd assume
they were revenuers out to find his still.

"We drove straight through town. Those folks aren't inclined to gab, but it will come out, and it may be linked to Caleb."

That was the worst news I'd heard so far. How far would those snoops
go, if they suspected Caleb and his family had something to do with the
launch?

"What's done is done," Travis said. "We can't take it back. But we
can lie as low as we are able for a while, and we can be more careful
in the future. Deal?"

We all agreed... and pretty soon Dak wished he hadn't.

"Kelly," Travis went on, "I guess you'll be putting that Roman
firebomb back in your father's lot. Not much we can do about it, I
guess. I'm hoping that anyone comes snooping around won't figure a
Ferrari demonstrator was likely to be the one showed up in Everglades
City today."

Kelly looked thoughtful for a moment.

"I can probably do better than that. Let me think on it."

"Good enough. Dak..." I could see Dak hadn't gotten it yet. "Dak, could you... could you garage that blue beast for a while?"

Dak's eyes widened with surprise, then he gave a deep sigh.

"Sure, Trav. For a while. You got a bicycle I could borrow?"

"No, but I've got another bike somewhere. You could use that." Dak
looked a lot happier. "Manny, you keep the Triumph for a while."

"Oh, gosh, do I have to?"

"Such a sacrifice," Alicia laughed, and slapped my back.

Kelly held out the chicken wishbone, hooked around her greasy pinkie finger. I took the other end and pulled.

Oh, please, let us build this thing.

Short end.

"Don't worry, sweetheart," she said. "Maybe we wished for the same thing."

"JUBAL THINKS AMERICANS ought to be the first people
to set foot on Mars," Travis said. "I agree with him, but before a few
weeks ago it was impossible. Now it is possible, with something Jubal
has made, and I'm going to tell you how it can be done."

Travis, who had been pretty much on the wagon for several weeks, had
told us he had to have a shot or two... or three, before facing an
audience scarier than any he had ever faced in his life: Mom, Aunt
Maria, and Dak's father. Alicia had doled the whiskey out to him, and
he had walked into the lion's den.

The three of them sat in Mom's living room on the old sprung couch
and easy chair that qualified as a "family heirloom" in my poor family.
It was after midnight, the VACANCY sign had been turned off and the
office door locked. It was now just the six of us and the three of
them. Travis was going to explain how he and Jubal proposed to build a
spaceship and take their precious sons to Mars.

You couldn't find stonier faces on Mount Rushmore.

Sitting on the coffee table along with a couple open two-liter
bottles of generic cola and some Dixie cups was a pitiful torn bag of
stick pretzels and a small plastic container of cold supermarket
guacamole dip. I swear, if Fidel Castro himself climbed out of his
grave and came to visit, Aunt Maria would have at least heated up a
little refried beans and salsa.

Travis sighed deeply and started in on his spiel. I squeezed Kelly's hand and said a silent prayer to Ares, the God of War.

THE NIGHT AFTER we launched the test rocket we all
pulled into the lot behind Strickland Mercedes and parked. Travis and
Jubal got out of the Hummer and squeezed into the backseat of
Blue Thunder.
Dak beeped the horn once as he pulled out, and Kelly and I went to the
back door. One of her keys opened it, and she hurried over to the
security control on the wall and punched in a five-digit code.

Kelly's dad was the kind who liked to keep a close eye on his
employees, even when he was busy with other things. Therefore, he'd had
his office located above and slightly behind the salespeople's
cubicles. He could look down through a glass wall onto the tops of
their desks, and beyond them to the showroom floor.

"Master of all he surveys," Kelly said as we climbed the broad
spiral staircase. Another key got her into his office, and another
five-digit number entered into another keypad got us secure access.

I couldn't help feeling like a burglar, and like a goldfish in a
bowl. I knew I hadn't done anything illegal, Kelly had a perfect right
to invite me in, but I also knew I was emphatically not welcome by her
father. And what Kelly was going to do
was
illegal. I hated
it that I could see right outside to the new cars parked out in front,
and the road, and the I-95 freeway just beyond it. Traffic was light at
three A.M.

She booted the computer and I pulled up a chair to watch an artist at work.

"Enter Daddy Dear's security code, right out of the book... done,"
she muttered. "Password... oh, my, now whatever could his password be?"
She looked at me, and I shrugged.

"Let's try something..." She typed, her fingers moving too fast for
me to get any of it. In the password box ************ appeared, then
the security page disappeared and a menu came up.

"Pretty good," I said. She smirked at me, and pulled out a flat wood
panel above the side drawers on the big executive desk. She turned it
over. Taped to the bottom was a piece of paper with the word
ferraristud
in ballpoint, and several numbers.

"PIN numbers," she said.

"Dumb."

" 'Ferraristud' is his online handle, too. He uses that when he goes
to an escort service website and has one of the girls drop by here when
he's working late. I have quite a file on him. I read all his mail. I
know all his secrets, and believe me, some of them could get him ten to
twenty in Raiford."

She called up an internal database and easily changed the color of
her borrowed Ferrari from "red" to "black." She did something involving
dealer plates and registrations that I didn't really understand. Then
she went to the DMV.

"Every car dealer in America has some kind of fiddle going with
somebody at the DMV, if they can afford it," she said. "The guy I'm
leaving an e-mail with makes good money on the side by doing little
chores for us, when the need arises."

A patrol car was passing along the street out there. His turn
indicator was on, and he was about to enter the lot. I tapped Kelly on
the shoulder and pointed.

She stood and waved. The officer riding shotgun spotted her and waved, said something to his partner, and they sped off.

"Safer up here," she pointed out. "The cops are used to me working late."

When she shut the computer down we went to her office, where a
printer was chattering. She pulled the paper out. It was a dealer's
window sticker listing equipment and options and price. She pointed to
where it now listed the color as black. She said it was listed that way
in all the documentation at the dealership, and in the morning it would
be listed that way at the DMV, too.

"They'd have to go all the way back to Italy to hear any different,"
she said. "We don't have any red Ferraris in inventory. They'll have to
look elsewhere."

"The one problem I see with that," I pointed out, "the car actually
is
still red."

"Not for long."

Out back, a guy was sitting in the car scraping the old dealer
sticker off the window with a razor blade. Another, younger man was
standing by the car. The older guy smiled at Kelly.

"Midnight black, right?" he asked.

"As soon as possible." She held up two key rings.

"Let my boy drive the Hummer. This is my son, Josh." Kelly tossed him the Hummer keys. "What color you want it?"

"Whatever's most ordinary."

"That would be Desert Storm beige. Most of the right-wing militia
generals in Florida drive around in Desert Storm camouflage Hummers."

They drove off, and Kelly told me that by this time tomorrow
Travis's flamboyant red-and-black super-jeep would look like a Gulf War
veteran.

"Sounds expensive," I said.

"Bob owes us some favors. He almost got himself in trouble a few
years back, some pesky business about changing engine block numbers and
paint on some cars whose ownership was... not quite crystal clear,
let's say."

"Stolen."

"We car dealers don't like that term much. Misplaced." She grinned
at me, and I realized Kelly was more of a pirate than I'd ever
suspected.