Visibly trying to contain his fury, Humphries said, “I’m sorry for the interruption.”
Pancho shrugged. So I’m not invited for dinner, she realized. Should’ve known.
“Is that your wife?” she asked coolly.
“No.”
“You are married, aren’t you?”
“Twice.”
“Are you married now?”
“Legally, yes. Our lawyers are working out a divorce settlement.”
Pancho looked straight into his icy gray eyes. The anger was still there, but he was controlling it now. He seemed deadly calm.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s finish up this business meeting so y’all can get down to dinner.”
Humphries picked up his glass again, drained it, and placed it carefully back on the bar. Looking up at Pancho, he said, “All right. I want to hire you.”
“I already have a job,” she said.
“As a pilot for Astro Manufacturing, I know. You’ve been working for them for more than six years.”
“So?”
“You won’t have to quit Astro. In fact, I want you to stay with them. The task I have in mind for you requires that you keep your position with Astro.”
Pancho understood immediately. “You want me to spy on them.”
“That’s putting it rather crudely,” Humphries said, his eyes shifting away from her and then back again. “But, yes, I need a certain amount of industrial espionage done, and you are ideally placed to do it.”
Pancho didn’t think twice. “How much money are we talkin’ about here?”
CUENCA
Dan Randloph felt a wave of giddiness wash over him as he stood at his hotel window and looked down into the rugged gorge of the Jucar River.
This is stupid, he told himself. You’ve been in high-rises a lot taller than this. You’ve been on top of rocket launch towers. You’ve been to the Grand Canyon, you’ve done EVA work in orbit, for god’s sake, floating hundreds of miles above the Earth without even an umbilical cord to hold onto.
Yet he felt shaky, slightly light-headed, as he stood by the window. It’s not the height, he told himself. For a scary moment he thought it was one of the woozy symptoms of radiation sickness again. But then he realized that it was only because this hotel was hanging over the lip of the gorge, six stories down from the edge.
The old city of Cuenca had been built in medieval times along the rim of the deep, vertiginous chasm. From the street, the hotel seemed to be a one-story building, as did all the buildings along the narrow way. Inside, though, it went down and down, narrow stairways and long windows that looked out into the canyon cut by the river so far below.
Turning from the window, Dan went to the bed and unzipped his travel bag. He was here in the heart of Spain to find the answer to the world’s overwhelming problem, the key to unlock the wealth of the solar system. Like a knight on a quest, he told himself, with a sardonic shake of his head. Seeking the holy grail.
Like a tired old man who’s pushing himself because he doesn’t have anything else left in his life, sneered a bitter voice in his head.
The flight in from Madrid had turned his thoughts to old tales of knighthood and chivalrous quests. The Clippership rocket flight from La Guaira had taken only twenty-five minutes to cross the Atlantic, but there was nothing to see, no portholes in the craft’s stout body and the video views flashing across the screen at his seat might as well have been from an astronomy lecture. The flight from Madrid to Cuenca, though, had been in an old-fashioned tiltrotor, chugging and rattling and clattering across a landscape that was old when Hannibal had led armies through it.
Don Quixote rode across those brown hills, Dan had told himself. El Cid battled the Moors here.
He snorted disdainfully as he pulled his shaving kit from the travel bag. Now I’m going to see if we can win the fight against a giant bigger than any windmill that old Don Quixote tackled.
The phone buzzed. Dan snapped his fingers, then realized that the hotel phone wasn’t programmed for sound recognition. He leaned across the bed and stabbed at the ON button.