Saucer (29 page)

But what?

“Well, as I live and breathe, if it ain’t the ol’ tapeworm kid himself.” An American voice.

Rip looked up, straight into the face of Bill Taggart. Standing beside Taggart was the tall Aussie from the Sahara, Red Sharkey. Behind Sharkey were two other men, both carrying rifles.

Rip got to his feet, wiped his hands on his trousers. “What are you doing here, Taggart?”

“Becoming a millionaire, kid.” From his shirt pocket Taggart produced a check. He fluttered it in the air. “Ol’ Hedrick pays his debts, I’ll say that for him. I told him about the saucer. Made myself some serious money.”

Rip was infuriated. “You had no right to do that.”

“All the right in the world, kid. That saucer belongs to me as much as it does to you. I figured out a way to make a dollar on the damned thing, and by God I did.”

“Enough jawing,” Red Sharkey said and laid a heavy hand on Rip’s shoulder. Rip shrugged it off and swung at Taggart, who took the punch on his neck and went down like a stunned ox.

Sharkey and his men grabbed Rip’s arms.

“I thought I’d seen the last of you when you stole the saucer in the desert, boy,” Sharkey said. “Left us to the tender mercies of Qaddafi’s camel jockeys, so you did. You owe me.”

Red Sharkey drew back and drove a fist at Rip’s chin. Rip managed to take most of the impact on his shoulder and the side of his face, but the blow staggered him.

One of the men spoke up. “You’ll get us fired, Sharkey, scuffling on the lawn.”

“This little bastard deserves it,” Taggart snarled, rubbing his neck. He got slowly to his feet, looking sour as hell.

Red Sharkey twisted Rip’s arm up behind his back. “Come along like a gentleman or I’ll twist your arm right out of the shoulder socket.”

Sharkey marched Rip into the house. Taggart stood on the sidewalk watching them go.

They took Rip to a small room with several chairs. “Watch him,” Sharkey told the two who were with him and left them there.

Rip fell into a chair. He sat there flexing his arm, trying to work out the soreness.

In less than two minutes Sharkey was back with Hedrick in tow.

“Mr. Cantrell, it is you. This is quite unexpected,” Hedrick said, smiling. “Welcome to Australia.”

Rip didn’t reply.

Hedrick’s smile faded. “How did this man get here?” Hedrick asked Sharkey.

“I don’t know, sir. We found him outside, playing with lawn lighting junction boxes.”

“Take him down to the hangar, show him to Ms. Pine. Then lock him up somewhere. And leave someone to guard him.”

Rip’s legs almost failed him when he saw the saucer sitting in the middle of the hangar. So close and yet so far.

Sharkey called to Charley through the hatch. She came out, stood there looking at Rip, who was flanked by Sharkey’s hired muscle.

“Mr. Hedrick said to show him to you. Now you’ve seen him.”

Rip jammed his hands into his pockets so no one would see them tremble.

Charley looked so beautiful.

She walked over to him, reached for his cheek.

“That’s enough romance,” Red Sharkey said sourly. “I’m getting all choked up.”

They turned Rip around and led him away.

Charley stood rooted, staring at Rip’s back. Sharkey paused beside her. “Hedrick said to make it crystal clear: Any funny business and he gets it.”

Charley Pine climbed back into the saucer.

The engineers announced themselves satisfied a few minutes after twelve o’clock and lowered themselves through the open hatch. Charley went through the hatch after them.

Rigby stayed in the saucer. The engineers wandered toward the main personnel door and left the building.

What is Rigby doing in there?

She stretched, did several deep knee bends, bent over and touched the toes of her steel-toed leather flight boots.

No one else in the hangar.

Where have they taken Rip?

She should fly the saucer out of here. Fly it right through the door, light the rockets and be gone.

Hedrick wouldn’t hurt Rip. The man would have to let him go—Even as she thought it, she didn’t believe it. She was standing there, forlorn, tired, and dejected, when Rigby dropped through the saucer’s hatch. Bent over, he walked toward her.

He was just clearing the leading edge of the saucer and coming erect when she leaped clear of the floor and kicked with her right foot. She was aiming for Rigby’s larynx and missed; her flight boot smashed into his mouth.

His head slammed back against the leading edge of the saucer, then he went to his hands and knees, blood gushing from his mouth. Rigby spit teeth, shook his head, trying to get it together.

His head came up and his eyes found her. His lips twisted. He coiled himself to rise.

She kicked him again with everything she had, with all her weight moving forward into the kick. Her foot caught Rigby square in the nose with a sickening thunk, ripping the bandage off. The impact threw Rigby backward onto the concrete, where he hit with a splat. He lay there totally relaxed.

Unconscious. Blood flowed freely from his mouth and the misshapen lump of flesh that had been his nose.

Steeling herself, Charley Pine bent down and checked under Rigby’s armpits. Nothing. She half rolled him and felt the small of his back. A holster.

She pulled out the pistol, a nice little Walther .380, loaded, with a full magazine. She put it in the pocket of her flight suit and climbed into the saucer.

In the cabin she stood erect, trying to get her breathing under control, looking around, trying to think.

If those engineers hid a bomb in here, where would they put it? They must have known that the saucer might be inspected again. Or two or three times.

She started in the equipment bay.

Ten minutes later she was back in the main cabin.

One of the Chinese had looked under the floor panels.

She pried up the panels he had opened. And found a bomb with her fingertips. It was wedged as far forward as one could reach, in a cranny impossible to inspect with the naked eye. She gingerly pulled it from its hiding place and inserted it in a pocket of her flight jacket.

Did the German engineer also look in there? She couldn’t remember.

She hunted for another ten minutes, looking everywhere that she had seen any of the engineers look. Nothing.

Rigby was lying on the floor of the hangar exactly as she had left him. He hadn’t moved.

Perhaps he was dead.

Maybe she should check to see if he was breathing.

Naw…

Outside on the mat were four large jets. Two of them were Grumman Gulfstream V’s, one was a Russian airliner, another was a Boeing 737. One of the Gulfstreams sported the Hedrick family coat of arms on the tail; Charley Pine walked over for a look.

The soldiers in front of the hangar made no move to follow. They were guarding the hangar, not the airliners.

Charley Pine put one of the bombs in the right main gear well of the Gulfstream wearing the Hedrick coat of arms. The Chinese bomb went in a gear well of the Boeing, which carried the insignia of the Chinese national airline.

When she walked away from the airliners, heading toward the house, the soldiers were talking among themselves, paying no attention.

• • •

Lunch was a harried affair. The members of the delegations were tense and preoccupied and said little. They ate quickly and rushed from the room to confer with their groups and make last-minute overseas telephone calls.

Charley was dawdling over a full plate, abandoned by her luncheon companions and unable to eat, when Bernice came bouncing in wearing a wide grin.

“It’ll be over soon, Roger says. Somebody will get the saucer this afternoon.” Bernice giggled. “Roger is so excited! He’s going to be the richest man on earth.”

“I’m happy for him,” Charley Pine said.

“Oh, I am too,” Bernice gushed. “He’s worked so hard for this.”

“Right.”

“Just think, we’re watching history being made! I can positively feel the electricity in the air.”

She strode away, off to the library, probably, leaving Charley to her uneaten lunch.

Charley filled her coffee cup and took it across the hallway to a television room. She settled into one of the overstuffed chairs and began surfing channels.

She stopped when she glimpsed Professor Soldi’s tanned mug.

“… Of course, we have no evidence to prove my theories, but archaeologists have none to disprove them, either.”

“But your thesis that Homo sapiens came to earth in the saucer would necessarily mean that the fossil record of hominid development here on earth was wrong.”

Soldi shook his head. “No, sir; Not wrong. The record is fragmentary at best, and some of it may have been misinterpreted. The fact is that the earliest archaeological evidence we have for Homo sapiens—modern man—is only one hundred thousand years old. Before that we find Neanderthal man and Homo erectus.”

“Could the saucer people have displaced the hominids that evolved on earth?”

“Displaced, killed, or simply survived while the natives perished. We don’t know enough even to guess.”

“Professor, you have admitted that your theory is based on the assumption that evolution followed a similar course elsewhere. Could you comment on that?”

“I think evolution follows similar courses when similar conditions exist,” Professor Soldi explained. “All things being equal, the evolutionary pressures will also be equal. A statistician might note that while all things are rarely equal, on occasion they may be essentially so. For example, if a star similar in size to our sun had a planet of about the right size, at about the right distance, then we can expect the laws of chemistry and physics to operate to make the planet very similar to earth. People seem to forget, there are at least a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, our galaxy. There are billions of galaxies.

“There are not one or two planets similar to earth in the universe,” Soldi said with narrowed eyes. “There are hundreds. Thousands. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. Could any of those hundreds of thousands of worlds similar to ours contain creatures similar to us? I submit that it would be astounding if they didn’t.”

“So we are not alone in the universe?” the interviewer prompted.

“Of course not. Ask anyone who has seen the saucer. Ask what he or she thinks.”

Charley Pine reached for the remote control. After she turned the television off, a male voice behind her said, “I think the damned thing was made in Brazil.”

She turned. Sharkey.

Charley Pine got up and walked down the hall to the library. The door was closed and there was an armed man sitting on a stool. He didn’t say anything. Charley opened the door and went inside.

• • •

Rip Cantrell was sitting in an empty horse stall in the barn. There was no door on the stall. In front of the stall on the far side of the barn sat a guard on a stool with a rifle across his knees.

Above Rip a shaft of sunlight shown in through a small glassless window. He sat in the hay trying to think. He wasn’t tied up or chained. The only thing keeping him here was the guard’s implicit threat to shoot him if he tried to leave.

The guard was maybe forty, slightly above medium height, with a modest spare tire around his middle. The butt of an automatic pistol protruded from a holster under his left armpit. He kept his rifle, some kind of army assault weapon, pointed in Rip’s general direction. His right hand rested on the trigger assembly.

“Hi,” Rip said conversationally.

The guard didn’t even blink.

Rip moved around a bit, trying to get comfortable.

He still had a screwdriver in his pocket. Sharkey had forgotten to search him. He could feel the screwdriver against his arm as it rested on his lap. About four inches long, the screwdriver had a standard bit.

Without moving, he mentally took inventory of his pockets. He still had his wallet, a key to the borrowed car, a hotel room key, American and Australian coins, some paper money, a paper clip, a ballpoint pen, and a small piece of newsprint that he had torn out of a paper a few days ago at Egg’s house, a story about compulsive eaters.

Taggart… he had never even suspected. Well, it was his own fault for trusting him.

He wondered about Dutch Haagen. Did Dutch double-cross him too?

Well, he was good and stuck. Until that clown with a gun went to sleep or left, he was going nowhere.

Rip sighed, leaned back against the wall behind him, and tried to relax. After a bit he closed his eyes, tried to sleep.

Charley Pine… he touched his cheek where she had touched him, and shivered.

• • •

Charley sat in her usual seat by the safe in the library. The tension in the room was palpable. Of all the bidders, only the Europeans looked halfway relaxed. Roger Hedrick was all business, his emotions buried behind a mask of studied calm. Still, Charley thought that she caught occasional glimpses of the man who lived in there, a man who knew that he was holding a royal flush.

Pieraut finished writing on his bid sheet, signed it with a flourish, and put it in an envelope. He handed the envelope to Bernice.

That was the last one. Bernice handed all four envelopes to Hedrick and took her seat with the Australian deputy prime minister and the tax man, who were here again today.

Hedrick opened the envelopes, arranged the bids on the desk in front of him, moved one from right to left, looked up deadpan.

“Gentlemen, we have bids for seventy-six billion, eighty-two billion, eighty-six billion, and one hundred and fifty billion.”

The Chinese, Japanese, and Russians sat stunned, staring at the other bidding parties. Pieraut beamed genially.

The leader of the Chinese team stood and stuffed his papers in his briefcase. His colleagues did likewise. When they were packed, they marched from the room without a word to anyone.

The Japanese slowly picked up their papers. One by one, the members of the delegation bowed to Hedrick, bowed to the remaining bidders, then filed out.

“I must consult with my government,” the senior Russian, Krasnoyarsk, said.

“Please do,” Hedrick said genially. “We will reconvene here in twenty minutes.”