“Well, don’t count on me opening the office tomorrow morning,” Kelly said, expecting to be led toward the door of the congressman’s private office. Instead, Bianci guided him with a finger of his left hand into what was basically the workroom of the suite in the Old House Office Building, a bull pen where the mainframe, the coffeepot, and a crowd of desks and files would not normally be seen by constituents. “I’m on El Paso time and anyway, I always need to wind down awhile after I get off a plane. Figured I’d key in my report if you weren’t around for a verbal debrief tonight.”
“Well, how was the demonstration?” Bianci asked. He leaned back against a desk whose legs squealed slightly on the hardwood as they accepted the thrust.
“It really was a test,” Kelly said, frowning as he made the final decisions about what to present to his employer, “and I guess the short answer is that there’s bits of graphite composite and synthetic sapphire scattered all over West Texas and New Mexico.”
“Sounds like I was right six months ago,” said the congressman, with a nod. “Overripe for the ax, exactly the sort of boondoggle that weakens the country in the name of defending it.”
“That’s the hell of it, sir,” Kelly said with a deeper frown, the honorific given by habitual courtesy to a man he felt deserved it. “Like you say, typical interservice wrangling. And you bet, the ferry went off like a bomb, she did that. But – ” He shrugged out of his overcoat, his eyes concentrating on that for a moment while his mind raced with the real problem. When he looked up again, it was to say, “Damned if I don’t think they’ve got something useful there. Maybe useful, at any rate.”
” ‘Hard-nosed Investigator Suckered by Military’?” said Bianci, quotes in his voice and enough smile on his lips to make the words a joke rather than a serious question.
“Yeah,” said Kelly, sitting straddled on a chair across the narrow aisle from his employer, the wooden chair back a pattern of bars before him, “it bothers the hell outa me to believe anything I hear from the Air Force. I remember – ”
He looked up grinning, because it hadn’t happened to him and this long after the fact it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. “I remember,” he said, rubbing his scalp with a broad hand whose back was itself covered with curling black hair, “the Skybolt missile that was gonna make Russki air defense obsolete. Hang ’em under the wings of B-52’s and launch from maybe a thousand miles out, beyond the interceptors and the surface to air missiles. …”
He was tired and wired and there were too many memories whispering through his brain. ‘B-52’ had called up transparent images, unwanted as all of that breed were unwanted except in the very blackest moods. The Anti-Lebanon Mountains were lighting up thirty clicks to the east with a quivering brilliance, white to almost blue and hard as an assassin’s eyes: seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs, over a thousand of them, dropping out of the stratosphere in a pattern a kilometer wide and-as long as the highway from Kelly’s family home to the nearest town. The flashes could be seen for half a minute before the shock waves began to be heard at Kelly’s firebase; but even at that distance, the blasts were too loud to speak over.
“Damn, that was a long time back,” Kelly muttered aloud, shaking his head to clear it, and Representative Bianci nodded in agreement with what he thought he had heard, part of a story about a failed missile. “Early sixties, yes?” he said aloud, again giving Kelly the impression that he was being softened up for something on an agenda the congressman had not yet broached.
“Oh, right,” the younger man said with an engaging smile to cover an embarrassment known only to him. He couldn’t lose it with Carlo, couldn’t have his mind ricocheting off on its own paths in front of his boss. Kelly and Representative Bianci were as close to being friends as either’s temperament allowed, and his support – what he told Kelly he had done, and what the aide knew from the result he must have done – had saved the veteran from the very bad time he’d earned by the method of his separation from the National Security Agency. But Carlo couldn’t afford to associate with a psycho, a four-plus crazy like some people already said Tom Kelly was.