The astronaut laughed. “Call me Jordie.” His tone returned to seriousness after a moment. “You’re going to have some trouble. The rest of the crew isn’t going to like Pie Komalko being kicked to have you put in.”
“Is there an official explanation as to why?” Schwarz asked Brognola.
“You’re one of the few Burgundy Lake survivors in any condition to work with the experimental prototypes that survived the assault,” Brognola replied. The big Fed glanced at Sabrina Bertonni, whose expression had darkened at the mention of the incident that had claimed the lives of so many colleagues.
“Right. A few had been sent on ahead,” Schwarz replied with a nod, giving Bertonni’s hand a reassuring squeeze. Her green eyes flicked to him, and her mouth turned up in the closest thing to a smile she could manage. Schwarz sympathized with her. “We’ll work on upgrading the test samples to meet the current generation that was lost.”
“We?” Broome asked. “So the nickname fits. You can work on the thrusters?”
“I’ve been discussing the work with him on the flight over,” Bertonni noted. “He’s a quick study, and assisting me, we’ll get everything running better than the modules you were going to take up.”
“Of course, that’s between my preflight responsibilities,” Schwarz noted.
“Komalko will help you out with that. With the two of you working on it, you’ll be able to halve the time needed for the checks, freeing up room for the module upgrades,” Broome stated. “But first, you’re going to have to meet the rest of the crew.”
Schwarz nodded. His introduction as an outsider would leave him vulnerable to anyone in NASA who could have been a turncoat. If the enemy had been able to slip an insider into Burgundy Lake, a top-secret facility with only a small staff, the sprawling Cape Canaveral could potentially be a minefield of danger.
That was Schwarz’s job, though. To flush the enemy by setting himself up as bait. Glancing at Bertonni, he realized that she would be under the gun, as well, so he had more than his own life at stake.
Staring into the bright blue Florida afternoon, he knew both of their lives were on the line to keep the sky from falling.
CHAPTER SIX
Union Park, Florida
Andre Costa took the glass topper off his carafe of brandy to pour his third drink in as many minutes. His phone had rung five minutes ago, informing him of a new arrival at Cape Canaveral, taking the place of one of the crew of the space shuttle Arcadia.
It was supposed to be because of a need to upgrade the experimental prototype thruster modules that had been lost at Burgundy Lake. His hand shook, liquor sloshing around inside his crystal tumbler, and he wished that the alcohol would take effect faster. He took a hard pull on the brandy, then choked as he drank too quickly. The brandy burned in his sinuses and he wiped tears from his eyes. A sneezing fit left him dizzy, compounded by the alcohol burning through his bloodstream.
He’d performed a quick relay of phone calls to the next contact down the line after he’d gotten the call. It had taken only a minute of dialing, but he was shaken, wondering how the hell he’d gotten hooked up in all of this. Costa stood up, trembling from his burning nostrils and tear ducts, wishing that the allure of easy money as a drug lawyer hadn’t brought him to Orlando. Though it wasn’t the kind of hot spot that Miami was, it still received a lot of cases. The lion’s share of cases he took were on behalf of the students at the University of Central Florida, charged with possession, not intent to sell. Of course, this attracted the attention of El Toronado, one of the biggest suppliers in Union Park, who took an interest in some of the students who were selling for him to get a little extra cash on the side for their extracurricular activities.
El Toronado was the only name Costa knew him by, but it was enough. One of the most feared businessmen in Orlando, he had his fingers in cases that stretched from Winter Garden on the shores of Lake Apopka all the way to Titusville.
More than once, Costa had been asked to help out at Cape Canaveral Air Station with civilian employees who had attracted attention. Costa was glad that the Judge Advocate General and the code of Military Justice kept him out of protecting whichever Naval airmen were involved in El Torondo’s operations, but he still had staff members running research to assist the JAG defenders in those cases.
Costa was glad he never was involved in defending any of El Toronado’s shooters, but that pleasure ended when he was approached by a man with photographs of his meeting with the Union Park drug lord.
“You’ll be our conduit,” the man stated.
“For what?” Costa asked.
“Just take the calls and pass them on. You’ll be protected from prosecution under attorney-client privilege,” the stranger told him. “Fail at any point…”
The stranger handed him a shotgun shell.
Costa looked at the brass and red-plastic cartridge, turning it over in his fingers, hearing the buckshot rattle inside. “You’ve already got enough to disbar me and make me useless to El Toronado.”
The man reached out and took the shell. Costa noticed his latex glove.
“This will end up at a crime scene,” the man told him. “You just need to know that when forensics takes your fingerprints off this shell, El Toronado will not be happy with your continued existence.”
The man set down a stack of photographs. As he saw through smears of crimson puddles, Costa’s eyes widened at the horrors that could be inflicted on a human body.
“That man was still alive when those photographs were taken. I am told he lived two days afterward,” the stranger stated. “As you can tell, his quality of life was…negligible.”
Costa looked at the photographs. Toronado’s agent turned and left after depositing a small, nondescript black-leather notebook on the table in front of Costa. It contained the numbers he had to call. The ones he’d spent the past few minutes dialing.
His gut burned with brandy, and he wished that he was somewhere else.
A THOUSAND MILES TO the north, Aaron Kurtzman was leading the effort to pick up any phone calls from the Titusville area. There were hundreds of calls going out, but only one call came from a pay phone all the way to a lawyer’s office in Orlando. While the pay phone was geographically easy to track down, its user wasn’t. The call was only fifteen seconds, hardly a business call. The brevity of the communication, plus the call to a lawyer who was on the DEA’s radar, raised a flag. It was one of twenty calls that could have been suspicious in the hour since Schwarz landed at Canaveral.
It was a warrantless search, and it would have been frowned upon in the press, a mass net thrown out looking for something suspicious. Kurtzman kept rolling on the searches, poring through dozens of phone numbers, correlating the checks between the digits and their owners. In the second hour after Schwarz’s arrival, five more suspicious phone calls were made out of the phone junctures at Titusville, and the Stony Man staff was hard at work tracking everything from point of origin to length of call. Even with Wethers, Tokaido and Delahunt working on it, the twenty-five phone calls that rang their alarms took another hour to go through, checking phone patterns of the callers of landlocked lines.
The only oddball in the stack was the pay phone call to André Costa, but even by then, Lyons, Blancanales and Grimaldi had their helicopter waiting at Space Coast National Airport in south Titusville, ready to move on anything that the cybernetics team had worked up. It was after sunset by the time Kurtzman had narrowed down the phone calls.
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