“More than you might think. There are things going on right now that I cannot speak about. What they’re saying around the office is that the rules are changing. But I don’t know what that means. The Director is flying down to Colombia soon to meet with the Attorney General, and – oh! I’m not supposed to tell anybody that. It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“I will tell no one,” Cortez assured her.
“I really don’t know that much anyway,” she went on carefully. “Something new is about to start. I don’t know what. The Director doesn’t like it very much, whatever it is.”
“If it hurts the criminals, why should he not like it?” Cortez asked in a puzzled voice. “You could shoot them all dead in the street, and I would buy your federales dinner afterwards!”
Moira just smiled. “I’ll pass that along. That’s what all the letters say – we get letters from all sorts of people.”
“Your director should listen to them.”
“So does the President.”
“Perhaps he will listen,” Cortez suggested. This is an election year…
“Maybe he already is. Whatever just changed, it started there.”
“But your director doesn’t like it?” He shook his head. “I do not understand the government in my country. I should not try to understand yours.”
“It is funny, though. This is the first time that I don’t know – well, I couldn’t tell you anyway.” Moira finished her salad. She looked at her empty wineglass. Félix/Juan filled it for her.
“Can you tell me one thing?”
“What?”
“Call me when your director leaves for Colombia,” he said.
“Why?” She was too taken aback to say no.
“For state visits one spends several days, no?”
“Yes, I suppose. I don’t really know.”
“And if your director is away, and you are his secretary, you will have little work to do, no?”
“No, not much.”
“Then I will fly to Washington, of course.” Cortez rose from his chair and took three steps around the table. Moira’s bathrobe hung loosely around her. He took advantage of that. “I must fly home early tomorrow morning. One day with you is no longer enough, my love. Hmm, you are ready, I think.”
“Are you?”
“We will see. There is one thing I will never understand,” he said as he helped her from the chair.
“What is that?”
“Why would any fool use powder for pleasure when he can have a woman?” It was, in fact, something that Cortez never would understand. But it wasn’t his job to understand it.
“Any woman?” she said, heading for the door.
Cortez pulled the robe from her. “No, not any woman.”
“My God,” Moira said, half an hour later. Her chest glistened with perspiration, hers and his.
“I was mistaken,” he gasped facedown at her side.
“What?”
“When your director of federales flies to Colombia, do not call me!” He laughed to show that he was kidding. “Moira, I do not know that I can do this for more than one day a month.”
A giggle. “Perhaps you should not work so hard, Juan.”
“How can I not?” He turned to look at her. “I have not felt like this since I was a boy. But I am no longer a boy. How can women stay young when men cannot?” She smiled with amusement at the obvious lie. He had pleased her greatly.
“I cannot call you.”
“What?”
“I do not have your number.” She laughed. Cortez leaped from the bed and pulled the wallet from his coat pocket, then muttered something that sounded profane.
“I have no cards – ah!” He took the pad from the night table and wrote the number. “This is for my office. Usually I am not there – I spend my days on the shop floor.” A grunt. “I spend my nights in the factory. I spend weekends in the factory. Sometimes I sleep in the factory. But Consuela will reach me, wherever I might be.”
“And I must leave,” Moira said.
“Tell your director that he must make it a weekend trip. We will spend two days in the country. I know of a small, quiet place in the mountains, just a few hours from here.”
“Do you think you can survive it?” she asked with a hug.
“I will eat sensibly and exercise,” he promised her. A final kiss, and she left.
Cortez closed the door and walked into the bathroom. He hadn’t learned all that much, but what he had found out might be crucial. “The rules are changing.” Whatever they were changing to, Director Jacobs didn’t like it, but was evidently going along. He was going to Colombia to discuss it with the Attorney General. Jacobs, he remembered, knew the Attorney General quite well. They had been classmates together in college, over thirty years before. The Attorney General had flown to America for the funeral of Mrs. Jacobs. Something with a presidential seal on it, also. Well. Two of Cortez’s associates were in New Orleans to meet with the attorney for the two fools who’d botched the killing on the yacht. The FBI had certainly played a part in that, and whatever had happened there would give him a clue.
Cortez looked up from washing his hands to see the man who had obtained those intelligence tidbits and decided that he didn’t like the man who had done it. He shrugged off the feeling. It wasn’t the first time. Certainly it wouldn’t be the last.
The shot went off at 23:41 hours. The Titan-IIID’s two massive solid-rocket boosters ignited at the appointed time, over a million pounds of thrust was generated, and the entire assembly leapt off the pad amid a glow that would be seen from Savannah to Miami. The solid boosters burned for 120 seconds before being discarded. At this point the liquid-fuel engines on the booster’s center section ignited, hurling the remaining package higher, faster, and farther downrange. All the while onboard instruments relayed data from the booster to ground station at the Cape. In fact, they were also radioing their data to a Soviet listening post located on the northern tip of Cuba, and to a “fishing trawler” which kept station off Cape Canaveral, and also flew a red flag. The Titan-IIID was a bird used exclusively for military launches, and Soviet interest in this launch resulted from an unconfirmed GRU report that the satellite atop the launcher had been specially modified to intercept very weak electronic signals – exactly what kind the report didn’t specify.
Faster and higher. Half of the remaining rocket dropped off now, the second-stage fuel expended, and the third stage lit off about a thousand miles downrange. In the control bunkers at the Cape, the engineers and technicians noted that everything was still going as planned, as befitted a launch vehicle whose ancestry dated back to the late 1950s. The third stage burned out on time and on profile. The payload, along with the fourth, or transstage, now awaited the proper time to ignite, kicking the payload to its intended geosynchronous height, from which it would hover over a specific piece of the earth’s equator. The hiatus allowed the control-room crew to top off their coffee, make necessary pit stops, and review the data from the launch, which, they all agreed, had been about as perfect as an engineer had any right to expect.
The trouble came half an hour later. The transstage ignited early, seemingly on its own, boosting the payload to the required height, but not in the expected place; also, instead of being perfectly placed in a stationary position, the payload was left in an eccentric path, meandering in a lopsided figure-eight that straddled the equator. Even if it had been over the right longitude, the path would negate its coverage of the higher latitudes for brief but annoying periods of time. Despite everything that had gone right, all the thousands of parts that had functioned exactly as designed, the launch was a failure. The engineering crew who managed the lower stages shook their heads in sympathy with those whose responsibility had been the transstage, and who now surveyed launch control in evident dejection. The launch was a failure.
The payload didn’t know that. At the appointed time, it separated itself from the transstage and began to perform as it had been programmed. Weighted arms ten meters in length extended themselves. Gravity from an earth over twenty thousand miles away would act on them through tidal forces, keeping the satellite forever pointed downward. Next the solar panels deployed to convert sunlight into electricity, charging the onboard batteries. Finally, an enormous dish antenna began to form. Made of a special metal-ceramic-plastic material, its frame “remembered” its proper configuration, and on being heated by sunlight unfolded itself over a three-hour period until it formed a nearly perfect parabolic dish fully thirty meters in diameter. Anyone close enough to view the event would have noticed the builder’s plate on the side of the satellite. Why this was done was itself an anachronism, since there would never be anyone close enough to notice, but it was the custom. The plate, made of gold foil, designated the prime contractor as TRW, and the name of the satellite as Rhyolite-J. The last of an obsolete series of such satellites, it had been built in 1981 and sat in storage – at the cost of over $100,000 per year – awaiting a launch that had never actually been expected, since CIA and NSA had developed newer, less cumbersome electronic-reconnaissance birds that used advanced signal-gathering equipment. In fact, some of the new equipment had been attached to this obsolete bird, made even more effective by the massive receiving dish. Rhyolite had been originally designed to eavesdrop on Soviet electronic emissions, telemetry from missile tests, side-lobes from air-defense radars, scatterings from microwave towers, even for signals from spy devices dropped off by CIA officers and agents at sensitive locations.