The Victor Project (12 page)

     “Cratzer?  He wasn’t in my top five.  Neither was anyone from your group,” answered Sherman.

     “I want him in the next group,” said Ben.

     “He’s number nine on my list,” said Sherman.

     “If  we don’t catch these fuckers before Phase I begins, we could all end up hanged,” said Ben.

     “When are you scheduled to leave?” asked Sherman.

     “On the fifteenth,” replied Ben.  “The son-of-a-bitches got me going almost dead last, just to make sure the project executes as it should.  Hell, they know that as long as my ass is still on the ground, I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep it on schedule.  They got me over a god damn barrel.  What about you?”

     “Somewhere toward the end also.  I don’t remember the exact date,” said Sherman.  “What about the president?”

     “Are you kidding?  He’ll probably sit in the cockpit of the first shuttle out of here,” said Ben.

     “I guess all the municipal facilities will continue to run after evacuation-day plus one,” stated Sherman.

     “I got a hunch that once the word is out we’ve all skidaddled, it’ll get pretty ugly around here,” said Ben.

     “Yea, if nothing else after the virus starts to spread, it will be holy chaos without old Uncle Sam to take care of the masses,” said Sherman.

     “How long you think we’ll have to be up there?” asked Ben.

     “Who knows?  I guess it depends on the virus and how many survive.  But I guess there is a chance that you and I could grow old and die up there,” said Sherman.

     “We’re already old,” said Ben.  “I just don’t want to die up there.”

     “Did you see this memo?” asked Sherman as he tossed a piece of paper toward Ben.

     “Look at that last paragraph.  The figures say that this virus eradicates approximately 98.676% of all human life forms it comes in contact with.  And the asterisk says that is a conservative estimate,” said
Sherman.

     “And the animals?” asked Ben.

     “In the middle somewhere it states that non-human life has not been affected by it,” answered Sherman.

     “It just hates us,” said Ben.

     “Why isn’t there some virus out there that kills fucking Cockroaches,” said Sherman.

     “Maybe to mother earth, that’s what we are,” said Ben.

CHAPTER 8

     The elevator seemed to move slower than it ever had in the past.  Val had wanted to be in and out of the building before 9:00am, but it was already ten after.  She had laughed many times about her habitual lateness, but this time it wasn’t even slightly amusing.  She never worked on the weekends, her job just didn’t require it, so the only excuse she could think of if anyone caught her on the floor was that she had left something personal in her desk.  Up to this point she couldn’t think of a personal item to use as an excuse.

     There weren’t many cars in the garage when she had pulled up, in fact there had been only seven on the level where she parked.  None of them she recognized as being one of her peers or bosses.  When the elevator door opened, Val took a minute to compose herself and enter the premises as if she had a logical reason and not with a madness that she had displayed up to this point.

     Fortunately, she knew exactly where Trish kept the schedules for the Travelers.  That was one of the few documents that weren’t classified in the CVD’s black hole of secrecy.  If she found the item quickly she could easily make a copy and be back in the elevator within minutes.  The aroma of coffee floating down the hallway signaled the mission to be more of a challenge.  Somewhere in the office was an early bird, which now made her the worm.  Stepping out of his office toward the end of the hall was the biggest foul in the entire building, Sherman Crane. 

    Val shortened her steps and gave the man a small wave as she made a razor sharp turn down an aisle toward her cube.  She was hoping that she would easily find some personal item to grasp and build a story around.  The first item that caught her eye when she opened the drawer was a bottle of nail polish.  It was a thin excuse but would have to do.  Silently she waited for
Sherman to stick his nose into the cube entrance.

     After a few moments, she began to realize that
Sherman probably didn’t give a shit who was on the floor, as long as they had clearance and didn’t bother him.  Sherman knew her face, he was confident of that.  They had chatted a few times at the water fountain and at times when he interrupted conversations between her and Frank.  It was probably a safe bet that the man wasn’t on the phone calling for the guards. 

     Val slipped the nail polish into her pocket and as if a frightened little mouse, began weaving through the aisles between the cubes.  Trish’s desk was luckily out of the line of sight from
Sherman’s office.  The tray where the Travelers lists were filed was in plain site with approximately forty pages stuffed into it.  Thumbing through forty pages out in the open would be too risky, so she grabbed the stack and squirreled back through the maze to her cube. 

     As Frank was leaving his office, he heard a noise near Trish’s desk and thought it was
Sherman, searching for some item that Trish had forgotten to deliver.  But as he rounded the corner, he caught a glimpse of a woman hurrying down an aisle.  He had thought that he and Sherman were the only two working this early.  Rarely was anyone from his department in on a Saturday, much less at 9:00am.  Curious to see whom was wondering about the place, he stepped into the next aisle and waited for more rustling.

     Val had quickly found the list for Rick Mallory and desperately wanted to read it for possibilities, but there was no time for that.  Whatever the list held, challenge or no challenge,
it would have to do.  The copier was just down the hallway and past the elevators.  If William wasn’t so concerned about heightening the government’s awareness, she would just steal the damn sheet and head for the stairway.  For now caution would have to be substituted for irrationality.  Val placed the list under a few documents she had grabbed off her desk and headed out the back of the aisle and along the wall toward the elevators.

     Frank could easily hear the rustling of some paper coming from the next row, but it had stopped a moment earlier and he could swear that footsteps were now circling him.  Peering over the top of the cube he caught a glimpse of a woman with dark hair moving quickly and silently.  As she moved along the wall and stepped into the hallway, Frank poked his head from the cubical and got a clean view of the woman as she moved further away.  There was only one woman on the floor who had a body like that and her name was Val DeDory.

     Of his entire staff, she was definitely one of the employees that had no business on the floor on a Saturday.  He began to wonder if Sherman had seen her yet this morning.  If he did, the paranoid freak would no doubt think she was up to something mischievous.  Sneaking along the walls didn’t help.  Right now a little bout of paranoia was hitting him.

     The good news was that the copier was already warmed up and ready when she entered the room, the bad news was that someone else besides
Sherman must have been on the floor, because the big cheese never made his own copies.  Val was pretty sure the goober didn’t even know how to turn the machine on.  Quickly she slipped the documents into the machine and hit the button.  The noise it made as it sucked in the paper sounded like a jackhammer on the quiet floor.  She had never noticed the noise before, during the regular rush of the day.  Ten seconds later the sheets were out and Val proceeded to make her way back toward the cube.

     Frank had now taken a position in another cube on the opposite end of the hallway to give him a better view of the woman’s return path.  The sound he had just heard was no doubt the copier.  He hoped
Sherman didn’t pop out of his office and catch him playing cat and mouse.  The whole scene would turn ugly, in many different ways.  Val appeared into his view only for a brief second as she darted along the back wall.  A moment later she passed the end of the first aisle and back up the second.  Frank could now only see the top of her head.  As it disappeared for a moment and then re-appeared, the figure astonishingly stopped at Trish’s desk.

     From where he stood, the best he could see was the set of documents that Val was holding in her hand.  Near the bottom of the set, Frank could make out the distinct contrast of blue colored pages.  He never thought of himself as much of a detective, but at the moment he seemed to be holding his own.  He could probably even teach those CIA punks a few things.

     After depositing the stack of papers on Trish’s desk, Val headed straight for the stairway, guiding the metal door as it opened and closed for optimal silence.  The elevators in the building didn’t signal arrivals with bells or tones, it was just the simple noise from the mechanical doors that Val would rather avoid as she exited.  Near the bottom of the stairs she realized that in her right hand she had been waving the documents like a flag.  Quickly she separated Rick’s list from the others and folded it to fit in her pocket.  As long as she was in the building, there was still a chance that she could run into someone.

     As she drew closer to her car she felt her steps quickening.  What she wasn’t fond of was the way her heart had been racing over the past twenty minutes.  She also could never recall her hands sweating the way they were at the moment.  Maybe it was because she had never been this close to danger, even though many times in the past she thought she had been. 

     Only thirty seconds outside of the garage, she began to wonder if she had replaced everything on Trish’s desk the way she had found it.  Her subconscious had executed a lot of the task while her conscious was battling the fear.  She was pretty sure she had put the stack back in the tray, although she couldn’t remember performing the exact task.  What she feared most was that the feeling that she had placed the papers she took from her desk into the stack by mistake.  Her name was most definitely on one of them.  How would she explain that, if she even got the chance?  At least she didn’t leave the bottle of nail polish anywhere conspicuous.  At the moment it was annoyingly pushing against her pelvis bone.

      Frank walked over to Trish’s desk as soon as Val entered the stairwell.  There was an enormous amount of paper randomly tossed about Trish’s desk.  She was a great secretary, but was far from being a neat-freak.  Why he had never noticed such a mess was beyond him.  Maybe this was just the way her desk looked on a Friday, he thought.  Scanning the entire desk, there was only one stack of paper with pages of blue protruding from it.  It sat in the top of a two-level tray waiting for its next action. 

     The first piece of paper in the stack gave a whole new edge to his theory about Val’s last few minutes in the building.  At the top of the page was the name Rick Mallory.  The stack was the Traveler’s lists for the next round of duty.  Beneath that page were three obviously miss-filed sheets with the name Val DeDory printed all over them.  Beneath those three were nothing but more Traveler’s lists.  Frank had never been to spy-school, but he was pretty sure that covering your tracks would be taught in one of the first classes.  Val must have skipped that day.

     It was easy to ascertain that she had copied Rick’s list, the question was why.  But even that question only had two possible answers, she was either going to meet him or follow him.  At the moment, Frank couldn’t see any point in alerting either Rick or Sherman.  His common sense was telling him that Rick’s life was not in danger, at least not from being killed.  Interacting with a woman always carried an entirely new set of dangers.

     Although there were many obvious choices of action in response to what he had just witnessed, only one of them was a good idea and that idea was to make a copy of Rick’s list for himself and become the spy.   Short of anything but plotting to blow up the zone, he wouldn’t intervene.

     Val pulled the car into an empty parking lot and turned off the engine.  The store that the lot accompanied was evidently closed for the morning.  After a moment, a weird instinct guided her to press the lock button on the doors.  The list of items filled only one side of the page and it was just halfway down that she found instructions for Rick to attend a movie.  Unfortunately, it didn’t state the movie he was to see.  The Renault had sixteen theaters and was a fairly huge facility.  It would be impossible for her to watch and see what ticket he would purchase, so the only two options were to either greet him at the ticket gate or purchase one and wait inside.  Val began searching the list for another meeting place, maybe a movie theater wasn’t such a good idea. 

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     The inspection by the board wrapped up without anyone from the engineering staff being shot, at least not yet.  This morning’s post-inspection meeting was being held by the FSC and associated personnel to review the findings of the board.  They also needed to reset C-Orbit station construction back on track.  Upon seeing the meeting invitation list, John noticed that there was going to be a full complement of management in the meeting.  This was to ensure that everyone would be assigned a hand that could pat them on the back.  There would also be fair amount of tactful and aggressive ass-kissing as part of the free-for-all event.  John planned on non-participation in either of the two contests.

     Just down from the elevator, facing directly at him, were the two doors leading into the conference room.  They had been propped open and a fair amount of noise was already emanating down the corridor.  Inside, about twelve or so attendees were strewn about the room making casual conversation, no doubt discussing how well they had performed their duties.  The food table was nearest to the doors and John detoured along the side of it before finding a seat.

     Somehow every drop of coffee that John had drank since joining the C-Orbit team seemed to be the best he had ever tasted.  Not brewed by just a specific person or originating from a specific module, the entire space station had great coffee.  Off all the crops that RAS could produce, John had never heard anyone refer to any home grown coffee being harvested from the module.  If it did, that could be one answer for the delectable taste.  It didn’t seem logical that artificial gravity or space water could influence the brewing.  The only other explanation was that space somehow altered one’s taste buds, but if that were true he would have certainly noticed a palate alteration for other foods, more specifically the jelly donut in his right hand.

     Lying on the table in front of each chair was a stack of paper that was at least one inch thick.  It had been less than forty hours sense the board had left and in that little amount of time, someone had been able to generate one inch of data.  That someone was more than likely a team of twenty FSC personnel that had worked around the clock.

     Within a few minutes, there were close to twenty-five people in the room, many of them already seated.  Scattered about were a few peers and close friends.  Brent Fallset and Dan Carron, two of his coworkers from the engineering team, had entered the room late and were now seated by the door.  Brent gave a nod when their eyes met. 

     Most of the other faces in the room John recognized from roaming about C-Orbit.  A good number were from the committee, others were management from the Operations, Services and Logistics.  One was the big cheese himself, the head of the entire space station, here to give praise to the little people.  Of the rest of the participants, there were five that John had never seen.  They weren’t just some civilian visitors.  That was obvious.  They were cut from the mold, straight edged from top to bottom, possibly military, most likely hard-core politicians.  The five even made sure that they sat next to each other, all had matching briefcases along with their matching inflated egos.  Something about the five men just didn’t fit in with the current crew.  It was as if they purposely wanted everyone to know they were not from the C-Orbit mold.  They were the closest thing to bad guys John had seen in a long time.