High Flight (59 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: High Flight
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Their attendant, a beautiful young woman in an immaculate flowered kimono, entered the room on her knees to serve them tiny lacquered trays of artfully arranged seafood and vegetables. She poured each of them saki in Imari porcelain cups and then gracefully withdrew. She glanced up at the hanging scroll in the alcove before she closed the rice-paper door.
“He prospers who values another's life.” The Deputy Director General of Defense motioned toward the printing on the scroll. “Fifty years is not such a long memory for a man of your … wisdom,
Kamiya-san.
”
“I have not forgotten, but you were a snot-nosed kid. You can't remember.”
“Whatever you think of me, I am a student of history. Perhaps I can see the past better for not having been prejudiced by living through it. These are not such simple times.”
“I disagree. These are the 1920s and 1930s all over again.
Dai Nihon
is again faced with terrible choices for her survival. If you do not understand, then come with me to the stock exchange and I will explain the facts of our life to you, Deputy Director General!”
Ota wanted to argue, but Nobunaga gestured for him to be still.
“We are working toward the same ends,
Kamiya-san,
” the MITI director said. “Many of our methods are similar. But yours will surely end in catastrophe.”
“Think what you are saying.”
“I have. But you must think what you are doing. Your misadventures are ego-driven. The last acts of an old man.”
Kamiya smiled. “Then why are you here?”
“Because you and your foolish friends are powerful men.”
“Patriots,” Kobayashi spoke for the first time.
“Misguided.”
“No. I remember as well.”
“Do you fools want to start that all over again?” Ota blurted. “Don't you remember the privations? The humiliations? The patronizings?”
Kamiya leaned forward and stabbed a blunt finger in Ota's direction. “Tell me who we share Yokosuka with? Tell me who we defer to on Okinawa? Tell me whose television, and blue jeans, and pop culture our young people are being force fed?”
Nobunaga leaned forward, his palms on the table. “And tell me who buys more manufactured goods from us than any other nation on this earth? Tell me who provides jobs? Tell me who has become friend from enemy?”
“Then why are you spying on them?” Kamiya asked.
“It is business. It is war. But not your kind of war.”
“We'll see.” Kamiya and Kobayashi got up and made to leave.
“Don't forget your envelope,” Ota said. “If you look inside perhaps you will gain some respect for loyalty.”
“We will stop you,” Nobunaga warned sternly.
Kamiya looked down at him. “I would not suggest you try to arrest us. It would tear the country apart. We have many more friends than you can possibly imagine.”
 
McGarvey spent the afternoon with Socrates and the team of crash engineers that had been assembled after Dulles. Every system on the airplane had worked to its design parameters up to the moment of the crash. The only possible conclusion was that somehow the engine's composite turbine blades had failed.
“But I don't like it,” the chief engineer said.
“Maybe Sir Malcolm will come up with something for us,” McGarvey replied.
“I'm glad you talked to him, and made him see our point. Hell, we're all grateful. But everything is so bollixed up around here that nobody can think straight.”
“Maybe you people should think about postponing the Honolulu flight.”
“Believe me, that's the only thing keeping us going.”
It was almost five when McGarvey went up to Kennedy's office, but his secretary said he would be in conference for at least another two hours, after which he, Mr. Vasilanti, and Mr. Kilbourne would be having dinner in the executive dining room.
“If it's urgent, I can break in on him.”
“Tell him I'll see him tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
From his own temporary office downstairs next to security he tried again to call Carrara without luck. The Deputy Director of Operations was away from his desk.
Next he telephoned Dominique's office, but they would tell him nothing. Her secretary was even hesitant to take a message. Nor was Dominique's answering machine switched on at her apartment. He could understand why she was avoiding him. It was probably for the best. But he wished she had remained in Detroit. In Washington she was impossible to protect.
Before he went out there, however, there were a few things he wanted to take care of here.
Guerin supplied him with a Buick Riviera. He drove south to the affluent suburb of Lake Oswego and was just pulling into the Kennedys' driveway when the garage door opened and Chance Kennedy backed out in a metallic green Mercedes 560SEL.
She stopped when she saw him and powered down her window.
McGarvey got out of his car and went over to her. “Can I have a couple minutes of your time, Mrs. Kennedy?”
“David's not home.”
“I know. I came out to see you. I'd like to ask you a couple of questions.”
She eyed him with mistrust. “You're the spook they hired. What do you want with me? Shouldn't you be chasing bad guys?”
“I am.”
“Peachy. But I have to run now. Maybe if you can
corner my husband long enough to sit down for dinner you can come back Sunday.” She hit the garage-door switch.
“Arimoto Yamagata.”
An abject look of terror crossed her face, and was gone.
“Are you going to see him now?”
She shivered. “What are you talking about?”
“You're having an affair with him, Mrs. Kennedy. But I have to warn you that he represents the people who want to bring Guerin Airplane Company to its knees. His people sabotaged that airplane that went down at Dulles. Some good people were killed. Even more may die.”
“I don't believe it,” she said, regaining some of her composure. “Why'd you come here?”
“To warn you. And to find out how much you've already told him.”
“I don't know where the hell you got the idea that I was having an affair. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—”
“Your husband told me.”
For just a moment Chance looked up, but then her face sagged, and she averted her eyes. “He wouldn't have told you something like that, even if he believed it was true. Not my four-square David.”
“What have you told him?”
“David's a forty-three-year-old Boy Scout. True blue, loyal to the platoon, or corps, or whatever.” She looked up again. “But not to me. Can you understand that?”
McGarvey felt sorry for her. But then, he thought, he wasn't such a hot judge of women. He'd never been able to sustain a relationship.
The job comes first.
Hadn't that always been the line?
“Yamagata is a dangerous man.”
“Somebody give me at least a little credit,” she said, once more in control. “I've not told the man a thing that he couldn't get out of a newspaper or an aerospace magazine. But he will tell me what I want to know. What David wants to know.”
“Stay away from him, for your own sake.”
She laughed. “Even if I were having an affair with him, it wouldn't be any of your business.”
“I'll follow you if need be.”
She laughed even louder now. “Go ahead. I'm having drinks downtown with the girls. But you're welcome to tag along.” She powered up her window and backed out of the driveway.
When she was gone, McGarvey glanced up at the house. Nine days, he thought. He wondered where they'd all be on the day after.
T
he sensor frame was set up in the wine storage room forty feet from the heat monitor unit. Louis had rewired the connector plugs. The thick cable snaked across the basement floor from the workbench.
“This probably seems like a waste of time, but it isn't,” Louis said, adjusting a signal generator's output. “I'm not sure about that first incident. Could have been a fluke. Could have been a real accident, not caused by me.”
“Is that possible?” his brother Glen asked.
Louis looked up. He stank of stale sweat, garlic, beer, and perfume from the whore he'd been with. He hadn't taken a shower in days. “Anything's possible. This is a lot more complicated than you think.”
“I know.”
“No you don't,” Louis said sharply. “It's complicated in a different way. This circuit is designed to look like one thing so that even an expert would be fooled. Really it's something else. And I've got most of it decoded.
Most
of it, Glen. We're not there yet.”
“It'd be a hell of a coincidence.”
Louis smiled grimly. “Would you bet your life on it?”
Glen held his silence for a long moment, but then he shook his head. “Let's get on with it. What do you want me to do?”
“There's a hundred thirty-two leads coming out of the monitor. Almost all of them are interrogators. Asking the frame to ask the engine thermocouples what the temperatures are. The CPU processes the data, and sends it up to the cockpit. I want to check each of those wires, one at a time, for any surprises.”
“You say almost every lead checks temperatures?”
“One should be the common ground to the frame.”
“But it isn't?”
“It comes from the modified CPU in the monitor, but there's a signal on the line when my encoder keys the circuit.”
“To shut down the thermocouples?”
“I thought that. Or to burn out the diodes, like you suggested. But it's not that. The goddamned signal is modulated.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean when I key the encoder, a tone is sent from the CPU to the sensor frame. When I say hello or boom, or when I send an audio frequency signal, the CPU sends out a stream of information. The monitor talks to the sensor frame. It tells it something.”
“Like what?”
Louis shrugged. “I don't know. If I put it up on a speaker the signal sounds like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo all getting pissed off at once. Gibberish.”
“Then what?”
“That's what we're going to find out tonight, just as soon as we finish with the first hundred thirty-one interrogators.” He was being overly cautious, but he didn't want to admit that he was totally at a loss. Whoever had designed this circuitry was cunning as well as intelligent. Alien, the notion popped into his head. It was the Japanese. They thought differently from us.
Their culture and background were vastly different from ours, so their engineering would be different too.
“I don't understand, Louis.”
“I was hoping to find something on the frame. Something that would explain how it works. Something that would make it clear. But I can't see a fucking thing. Wires, diodes, and metal. Aluminum, magnesium. I don't even know that. I'm no metallurgist.”
“If anybody can do it you can,” Glen told him.
Louis flashed a hard, angry look at his brother.
“Don't let it get to you. Take it a step at a time. You're smarter than they are. You've already proved that.”
“If I can't figure it out it becomes a moot point. We won't have anyplace to go.”
Glen lowered his voice. “You worry about the circuit and let me take care of getting us out of here. Just do it, Louis.”
 
“Nothing,” Louis said.
One hundred thirty-one tones, one hundred thirty-one zeroes. Each of the leads from the monitor to the frame came out exactly as they should if they were doing the legitimate work of keeping an eye on conditions in the engine. Nothing in the circuitry would bring down an airplane.
“Maybe we should wait until morning to finish up.” It was midnight, and Glen looked haggard. His eyes were bloodshot.
“All that's left is the modulated ground wire. We'll do it now.”
“Same drill?”
“Yes.”
They had tested all but the ground lead three times. The first with a signal from the monitor, down the harness to the plug before it was connected to the frame. A second time with the harness plugged in. And a third with a signal generated, wire by wire from the engine side of the diodes back to the monitor. Each time Glen watched an oscilloscope attached to the leads for a spike,
a tone, or a modulated signal, which on the scope looked like the odd shapes the old lava lamps made.
Louis clipped the O-scope's leads to four different spots on the frame. If there was any response to the modulated signal sent from the monitor it would show up here. He adjusted the four traces, each at a different potential, from a few millivolts to 1.5 volts, the same as from an ordinary flashlight battery. Glen, his hand resting on the frame, watched intently.
“Don't touch the frame,” Louis ordered. “Might screw up the results.”
Glen did as he was told and Louis walked back to the workbench on the other side of the basement. “Watch the scope.”
“Right,” Glen called back.
Louis keyed the decoder, got the trigger pulse, and a few milliseconds later the audio frequency tone went out.
An intense white light suddenly bloomed in the wine storage room, and an instant later Glen screamed, the inhuman sound torn out of his throat. Louis had to fall back behind his equipment, because the heat blasting across the basement was so intense. He knew what was happening! He knew how it worked!
Glen's screams died as abruptly as they'd begun, and the brilliant light faded.
 
Saturday morning after breakfast, McGarvey decided to drive back out to Gales Creek to talk with Socrates and Kilbourne about the 2622. Since the Honolulu flight was only eight days away he figured they'd be out there. He wanted to know if the 2622 shared any parts with the 522. Especially engine components that had anything even remotely to do with heat management systems. It would be the perfect plane to knock out of the sky on its first VIP flight. Whatever was sabotaged could already be built into the jetliner, and all their searching on the day of the flight would be for nothing. He suspected that line of thinking would be a dead end because Kilbourne
had made the point that the hypersonic jetliner was a brand-new design from the wheel struts up. Nonetheless he wanted to make sure.
Guerin had put him up in an executive turnkey apartment downtown. Within two blocks after leaving the underground parking garage he realized that he had picked up a tail, a black windowless van alternating with a brown Chevy Caprice. He'd tried again this morning to reach Carrara without luck, but there were automatic traces on all lines to CIA headquarters and to its top deputy directors, so his location had been pinpointed. But it was extreme, even for the General, to cut off all contact and then have him followed. Besides, these guys weren't very good.
Instead of heading west out of the city, he stayed in the downtown area between the Hawthorne and Burnside bridges on the west side of the river. When the Chevy was behind him, he slowed enough to be caught by a red light on Salmon Street a few blocks from the World Trade Center. The van was already through the intersection and had to continue with traffic.
McGarvey got out of his car and walked back to the Caprice. The driver hesitated, then lowered his window. He and the passenger wore dark suits, their overcoats tossed in the backseat. Neither of them looked happy that they'd been made.
“You're too obvious to be Company. What are you, Bureau or local cops?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” the driver said.
McGarvey stared at him.
The passenger pulled out his ID and showed his badge. “We're FBI, Mr. McGarvey. Could you tell us where you're headed?”
“Your office,” McGarvey answered. “Call your S-A-C and tell him to meet us there.”
 
It took a half-hour for the FBI's Portland Special Agent in Charge, Jack Franson, to get downtown. When he came through the door he motioned McGarvey to come
into his office, but for the others to remain where they were.
“I understand you gave my agents a hard time this morning,” the older man said. He wore a USC jogging suit. He took off his jacket and tossed it on the couch, then motioned for McGarvey to have a seat in front of his desk.
“I don't like being followed.”
“Nobody does,” Franson said. He picked up his telephone. “Roger, see if we can borrow Kathy or one of the other stenos from downstairs. Have her come up on the double, please.”
“Am I being charged with something?”
“Not at this time, Mr. McGarvey.”
“Are you investigating me in connection with some crime?”
“Sorry, I can't tell you that.”
“Then this conversation ends now,” McGarvey said, coolly. “Before the steno arrives.”
“Where were you going this morning?”
“The next time somebody comes up behind me, I'm going to break their legs just below the knees. Then I'll disarm them. When I find their IDs, I'll apologize. But the streets aren't safe these days, and a man has got to protect himself.”
Franson was unimpressed. “We'll keep that in mind.”
“Do that. In the meantime you obviously know who I am, and you know that I'm working for Guerin and what I'm doing for them. So where's the problem?”
“I'm not going to discuss that with you.”
“Somebody in Washington is pulling your chain. Probably John Whitman, unless I miss my guess. He has pals at Langley, the people who are most interested in me. They must have told you something, S-A-C. Warned you. Told you I was dangerous.”
“Will you answer a few questions?”
“No. But I will exchange information with you.”
“It doesn't work that way.”
“Your call,” McGarvey said getting to his feet. “But if
you want something from me, all you have to do is tell me what you're working on. I'll be happy to give you whatever help I can.”
“Don't screw with us, McGarvey,” Franson warned.
“Tell them in Washington that I'm available anytime for a trade of information. In the meantime I've got work to do, so stay out of my way.”
McGarvey left the S-A-C's office just as a young woman pushing a court reporter's typewriter got off the elevator. No one tried to stop him.
 
Chance Kennedy had been asleep last night when David finally came home, and waking now she could hear him in the shower. She didn't know what to say to him, but they could not go on like this much longer.
Any pretense she might have had about getting information from Yamagata had been dashed by Kirk McGarvey yesterday afternoon. As incredible as it seemed, David somehow knew or suspected she was having an affair. What she couldn't fathom, however, is why he had told someone. And how many other people had he discussed her with? How could she look any of them in the eye?
She felt like public property. Like a common tramp. A slut.
The shower stopped, and a couple of minutes later David came out of the bathroom. Chance feigned sleep. She heard him cross to the closet, get something, then go back. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her from the bathroom door.
“Did I wake you?” he asked.
She glanced at the clock. It was after nine. “It's time to get up. Where are you going?”
“I have to get back to the office.”
She sat up and propped the pillows behind her back. “Stay home. Let's do something today. Maybe take a drive.”
“Sorry, Chance, I can't. Not this close to the flight. But it'll slow down afterward. We'll take a vacation. Europe maybe. How's that sound?”
“When?”
“In the spring.”
“What about the hydrogen engines?” she asked sarcastically. “Someone will have to keep on top of Rolls, won't they? You'll have to make the decision whether to start production. You could end up like Boeing with dozens of planes on the ramp waiting for engines. Remember the problems they had with the 747? And you've got a big job ahead of you on the sell-through. What's your break-even point this time? A hundred airplanes? Two hundred? Three? Lots of travel, David. Meetings. Conferences. Arm twisting. Not to mention keeping the Russians on the straight and narrow. And the Japanese out of your hair.”

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