6
Golden, Colorado
Hammond stepped onto his back patio and lifted a beer out of a cooler built into the stone retaining wall. He downed half the bottle before he was caught in his wife’s disapproving glare, and flopped into a lounge chair with an exhausted sigh. “Relax, Abby. I’m not going on a bender.” But it was tempting. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d had more than two in a single day. Though he couldn’t recall much about the times he’d had more, either.
“That’s right, you’re not,” Abigail Hammond said sharply. “Your head needs to remain thoroughly uncluttered, my dear.”
“A little less browbeating, please,” he said tiredly. “Afraid it’s too late anyway. My head’s already cluttered to hell and gone.”
Normally they would sit quietly and enjoy the sunset silhouetting the Front Range. Tonight it felt pointless: the crescent moon overhead might as well have been sent by fate itself to mock him.
Abigail settled in by his side and spread a blanket over them anyway. “Sorry. You must be exhausted.” They’d not had time to speak since he’d left in a rush early that morning. She laid her head on his chest and remained still until she could wait no longer.
“This is bad, isn’t it?”
He screwed his eyes shut as if simply thinking about it brought physical pain. Before he could answer, the doorbell rang from inside the house.
Abigail squeezed his hand. “I’ll get it. You stay here and try to relax.”
Hammond’s expression settled into one of grim detachment. “It’ll take a lot more of these,” he muttered, lifting the bottle as she walked away.
. . .
Abigail returned a few minutes later, escorting an olive-skinned man whose beard matched the charcoal of his impeccably tailored suit. Well north of six feet, he towered before Hammond and deliberately bowed his head in deference to his host.
“Please forgive my intrusion, but it is important that we speak. My name is Ibrahim al-Aqsa.”
Hammond was too weary to conceal his surprise. “Have a seat, please. Can I offer you anything?”
Their guest was likewise not very good at hiding his distaste, assuming Hammond meant alcohol. “I’m afraid not.”
“Suit yourself. We have plenty of other refreshments.” He polished off the beer for effect.
Al-Aqsa settled onto one of the cedar chairs beside Hammond. “Impressive architecture. I’ve always found the Victorian style appealing.”
“Abby didn’t want anything bigger. She refuses to hire housekeepers.”
“An honorable woman, then,” Al-Aqsa offered, as if that were a rarity. They stood quietly and admired the distant mountains, now purple in the retreating sunset.
“I must say, you have the perfect setting for appreciating nature’s spectacle. The view is stunning, Mr. Hammond.”
“Thanks. I put the patio in myself.”
“A man of your resources who still works with his hands? There are too few like that in this world.”
“It’s a good way to blow off steam. Keeps you grounded.” Hammond turned to face his guest. “No need to lay it on so thick, Mr. al-Aqsa. And I’m tired as hell so let’s dispense with the small talk. What brings you here?”
The man didn’t miss a beat. “Your missing spacecraft, of course. I once worshiped with one of your passengers, Kam Varza.”
“I see.” Now we can get down to business. “Rest assured we are doing everything we can to locate your friend and our ship,” he said. “Solving intractable problems seems to be our specialty.”
“Indeed,” Al-Aqsa said through a thin smile. “You reference prior events, of course. The saboteur who almost destroyed one of your Clipper planes in orbit? Tell me, how does a foreign operative find his way into an organization this complex? And how can we know you’re able to prevent it from happening again?”
“That’s not exactly something that turns up in our employee background checks. Counterespionage is more of the FBI’s purview,” he explained. “Let’s just say it was a complicated situation and leave it at that.” And not all of it had made the news, thanks to a government gag order in the name of national security. He knew they just didn’t want the embarrassment.
“A common problem when the FBI gets involved,” al-Aqsa observed sourly, then shifted gears. “Your business model is unusual to say the least, Mr. Hammond. And please forgive me, but it is fraught with risk.”
Hammond waved it away. “There’s nothing to forgive…I’m sorry, is it Mister Al-Aqsa? Reverend? Grand Poobah? I’m not too clear on titles.”
“Our community calls me ‘Imam,’ but ‘Ibrahim’ is fine.”
“Ibrahim,” he said. “To your point…yes, our profession is inherently hazardous. Flying is in general, but the airlines have managed the risks down to the point where the average passenger barely gives it a second thought. Spaceflight, however, still has some way to go.”
“I’m not particularly well versed in these matters, but it seems obvious that the environment would be much less forgiving.”
“Correct again,” Hammond agreed. “The distances and speeds involved are too great. That’s why we build so many redundant systems into these vehicles, particularly things like pressurization and life support.” In other words, the stuff that could kill you fastest.
“And is that what you believe happened here?” he asked anxiously. “How could anyone survive such a thing?”
“We have no way to know yet. Please don’t take my comments as anything but speculation.”
“Nevertheless,” he said calmly, “Varza and his associates were on one of your ships. Now it is missing, though it may not be entirely lost.”
And how would you know that, Ibrahim al-Aqsa? Absent your prophet announcing it to you in a dream or something. Hammond fought to appear unimpressed while carefully considering his answer. “We got a signal for about twenty minutes. Someone’s still alive up there and in orbit, judging by the Doppler shift.”
Al-Aqsa’s eyes were wide. “Signals?” he finally asked. “What sort of signals?”
“Old-fashioned Morse code,” Hammond said. “S.O.S.”
The Imam turned away, slowly stroking his beard. Clearly this was not what he’d expected to hear. He stood, smoothed down his suit, and once again bowed slightly. “Mr. Hammond, you’ve been most gracious. I will not take up any more of your time,” he said, and offered a business card. “I trust you will notify me as soon as you learn of anything else?”
. . .
Hammond waved politely as Al-Aqsa’s car pulled away. Abigail emerged from the front portico a moment later. “What was that about?”
Hammond frowned while studiously turning over al-Aqsa’s business card. “Pretty sure I don’t know.” He pulled his phone from his pocket, scrolled through the contact list, and thumbed a number. The phone rang once: Hammond could always count on his security chief to pick up quickly. “Tony, I’m about to send you a scan. Stand by,” he said, and swiped the card across the phone.
. . .
Hammond turned in bed, exhausted yet maddeningly unable to sleep as his mind wound through any number of increasingly implausible scenarios. His phone rang as if answering his own silent plea for a distraction: Posey. He thumbed the speaker. “What do you have, Tony?”
Posey answered in his stately baritone. “Interesting character, Arthur. How do you know this guy?”
“Old drinking buddies,” Hammond joked. “He dropped by my house a few hours ago, felt like he was pumping me for information.” He described their brief visit. “He knows the lead pax on Shepard.”
“Then we just blew right past ‘interesting,’ boss. This guy showed up on watch lists under a couple different aliases, then went dark about ten years ago. Near as I can tell, he gave you his real name.”
“So he turned legit without attracting attention to himself?” That in itself wasn’t particularly surprising. Nor was it especially comforting. He could sense Posey’s suspicions. “And we’ve never been ones to believe in coincidence, have we?”
“As my kids say, ‘true dat,’” Posey said. “It gets worse. The Feds haven’t exactly been encouraging my newfound interest in our load manifest.”
“That’s too damned bad,” Hammond said testily. “They’re quick to forget it’s our property. Just because we had to hand over the master copy doesn’t mean they own it.”
“Agreed, but they can sure tie things up if their lawyers get involved. When Kruger got wind that I was cross-referencing the manifest against possible aliases the same way I did with your boy Ibrahim, he promptly told me to not concern myself. He says they’re on top of it.” Posey’s sarcasm at that last point practically dripped from the phone.
“Don’t I feel better,” Hammond fumed. He looked up at the Moon, imagining their missing ship and wondering if there’d been any more cryptic transmissions. None of this added up to begin with, and new variables kept getting added to the equation. Kruger was a meathead, running around their property like he owned the place. The types of law enforcement assigned to work alongside NTSB were usually a lot more tuned-in than that, at least in the airline world.
Nobody else is flying cruise liners around the moon, genius. There wasn’t a lot of resident expertise out there. “I’ve had just about enough of us being someone else’s political football. I need to know exactly what this Kruger character does.”
“Thought you might,” Posey said, “so I shook a few trees. It didn’t take long for stuff to fall out. He works for Homeland Security’s counter-terror branch.”
That revelation hung heavily as Hammond processed this latest surprise: why had this particular agent been assigned to an accident team? “You don’t suppose he’s been transferred out of that recently?”
“Doesn’t sound like it,” Posey said. “He’s actually pretty far up in the Fed’s food chain. His field work is…selective, I’d say.” Which meant DHS only let this guy off the leash for the really high-profile cases.
“That actually helps make sense of this,” Hammond said, considering the many unknowns that had roiled his mind. “But what we’re left with just got a hell of a lot harder.”
“Maybe not. We have another interested visitor that you need to know about.”