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.The anger burned up inside him again.Killed.Joe didn’t die in an accident.He designed that double-damned hydrogen facility.He knew every weld and flange.It wasn’t an accident.Somebody blew it up.Somebody murdered Joe.And Hannah.Maybe I’m next.Strangely, that thought calmed him.You want to come after me? he silently asked the unknown murderer.Okay, you try it.In the meantime, I’m coming after you.I’ll find you, you gutless sonofabitch.Me.Myself.I’m going to nail your balls to the wall.He thought of Passeau and the swarm of government investigators working on the spaceplane crash.They’re still working under the assumption that there was something wrong with the plane.Passeau knows better, but he hasn’t convinced the rest of his crew that it was sabotage.Maybe he’s not trying to.Maybe he’s in on it.No, Dan told himself, shaking his head.He couldn’t have had anything to do with the crash.He was in his office in New Orleans.At least, that’s what he said.Maybe I should check that out.The list on his screen showed the names of the staff people whom Tenny had called over the weeks since the spaceplane’s crash.I have to retrace his steps, Dan thought wearily.I’ll have to go through every double-damned one of those names.Without consciously thinking about it he commanded the computer to rearrange the list in chronological order.Last one first, he thought.I’ll talk to the people Joe called the day he was killed and work backwards from—He stopped, staring at the screen.The last people Joe had checked on! he realized.Three names were listed for that date.Joe talked to these three people, and that night he was killed.One of them is it! Has to be!Elyana Mechnikov.Peter Larsen.Oren Fitch.One of them is it, Dan repeated to himself.Maybe more than one of them.Maybe all three!Despite his queasiness at being on the water, Roberto took the last ferry to Matagorda Island and drove the battered pickup truck he had borrowed to the motel a few miles up the road from the Astro Corporation’s fenced-in compound.No one paid much notice to a Hispanic man in work-stained coveralls checking in there, despite his size.The greatest difficulty Roberto had encountered the last time he’d come on the island was getting through the Astro main gate, but even with the spaceplane crash less than a month behind them, the guards at the gate hardly glanced at his phony ID.They saw the security guard uniform he wore and assumed that he was what he claimed to be, a new hire reporting for the night shiftFor this job he didn’t even have to get inside the Astro facility.The prey would come to the hunter.Roberto parked the pickup in front of the dimly lit front door of his motel room, went inside, and dropped his overnight bag on the sagging bed.Then he walked back to the bar that adjoined the motel’s reception desk.He was a big man, with a weight lifter’s shoulders and thickly muscled arms.He kept his face clean-shaven and the sleeves of his gray coveralls buttoned at the cuffs so that the tattoos he had acquired during his street-gang youth in Los Angeles would not show.Downhearted country music twanged out of the speakers set into the ceiling above the bar.The barmaid was a tired-looking bleached blonde, trying to look sexy in a push-up bra.“Yew want dinner, the kitchen closes in ten minutes,” she said over the nasal whine of a cowboy singer.“No thanks,” said Roberto.“Jus’ a beer.Dos Equis dark.”“We got Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Mick Light, and Corona.”Roberto sighed.“Mick.”“Light?”“No, heavy.”She poured the beer and placed the mug on the bar in front of him on a round paper coaster.“Kitchen closes in ten minutes,” she reminded him.“You tole me that.”“Oh, yeah.”“What time do you get off?”She gave him a wordless sneer and walked down the bar to start talking with a trio of Anglos.Roberto stared down into his beer, hiding his rage.Sure, spit on the greaser, he seethed inwardly.What would she think if I went over there and kicked the cojones off those three assholes?He took a long pull of the beer.Stay cool, man.You don’t want nobody to notice you.You get paid to be invisible.Wait.You got a job to do.The job walked into the bar, looking uncertain, worried.Peter Larsen was a short, slight, middle-aged man with thinning hair, bulging thyroid eyes, and the beginnings of a potbelly.Despite the jeans and biker-style denim jacket he wore, he looked every inch the techie geek, down to the square MIT ring on his left hand like a wedding band.Roberto saw him in the mirror behind the bar and thought that Larsen looked more like a frightened little bird than anything else.I could snap him like a wishbone, he told himself.Larsen didn’t come up to the bar.He just looked around until he recognized Roberto sitting alone, separated by several stools from the guys the barmaid was talking to.Then he walked out, quickly.Roberto finished his beer, left a five on the bar, and walked out into the night.It was still hot and muggy, the sky overcast.Crickets were chirping and Roberto saw swarms of insects flitting around the lamps that stood on high poles at the corners of the parking lot.One of the cars flicked its lights.A boxy gray Volvo.Roberto went to it and slid into the passenger’s seat.He felt cramped, confined.“We’ve gotta talk,” Larsen said, his voice whining, high-pitched.“Tha’s why I came, man.I know you’re worried.”“I didn’t expect you to kill Tenny!”Feigning surprise in the darkness of the car, Roberto said, “Me? Wrong, man.It was an accident, pure and simple.”“Pretty lucky accident, for you.”Roberto shrugged.“I mean, Joe starts asking me questions, so I call you.That night Joe gets killed in an accident.”“Shit happens, man.”“I want out of this,” Larsen said, urgency in his voice.“I want to get as far away from all this as I can.”“Can’t say I blame you.”“I’ll need money.Cash.”Roberto pulled in a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh.“Well, what about it? If you don’t—”“Hey, man, simmer down.You’ll get cash.You wan’ it, I got it for you.Le’s drive over to your place.More private than a fuckin’ parkin’ lot.”Larsen.had an apartment in the company-built low-rent housing six miles down the road from the motel, on the other side of the Astro complex.The next morning his landlady found him dead, hanging from the broken ceiling fan in his living room.The police suspected suicide, especially after playing his phone messages and hearing a threatening voice demanding that Larsen pay his gambling debts or else.The voice, of course, belonged to Roberto, who slept late in his room that morning, quite tired after walking the six miles from Larsen’s apartment complex back to the Astro Motel.SEATTLE, WASHINGTONIt was drizzling again, after a cheerfully bright sunny morning.Rick Chatham looked out the rain-spattered windows and wished he were back in Arizona, where rain was as rare as sunshine here in Seattle.The house he was staying in looked out over the working harbor, where freighters from China and Japan unloaded their cargoes of toys, appliances, automobiles, and god knew what else.Globalization.Chatham hated the idea
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