Able One Read online

  Sometime during that period of half-wakefulness, an officer in Air Force blue entered Harry’s room and shoved an official-looking document at him. “Security agreement,” he said, his tone as flat and clipped as an air traffic controller’s. “Sign at the bottom line.”

  “Security?” Harry mumbled, still fuzzy from the sedatives.

  “About the accident. It’s been classified Secret. You can’t say anything about it to anyone who doesn’t have a certified need to know.” He held the document on a clipboard six inches from Harry’s nose and pressed a ballpoint pen into his hand. “Sign it now.”

  Moving his arm made Harry wince with pain. He scribbled a parody of his signature on the bottom line and the uniformed officer took his clipboard and left Harry to drift back into a drugged sleep.

  When Harry awoke fully, on the fifth day after the explosion, he blinked at the almost-luxurious furnishings of the room in which he found himself. Crank-up hospital bed, he saw, but the rest of the room looked like a first-class hotel, rather than a hospital: cool pastel walls, sleek modern furniture, a big flat-screen TV on the wall. The one window looked out on city buildings. Then he realized there was an IV tube in his left arm, and a bank of monitoring instruments softly beeping on the wall above his bed’s headboard.

  Harry tried to raise himself into a sitting position to see more of the outside surroundings, but his ribs flared with pain. He settled back on the bed and the pain subsided into a dulled ache. They must have me pretty well doped up, he guessed.

  The door to his room opened and a nurse stepped in. She was a bit on the chubby side, but she looked cheerful. Smiling.

  “We’re awake,” she said pleasantly.

  “Yeah,” Harry replied, unhappy with her “we.”

  “Hungry?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” She came to the bed, peered at the instruments over Harry’s head. “You’ve been getting nothing but intravenous for the past four days.”

  “How bad was I hurt?”

  “A few cracked ribs. Superficial burns on one side of your face. Nothing terribly serious.”

  She’s a professional nurse, Harry thought. Indifferent to the patient’s pain.

  “The others? How bad—”

  She shook her head with a slightly disapproving expression on her dimpled features. “I’ll order a breakfast tray for you. See if you can take some nourishment.”

  Twenty minutes later a Hispanic orderly came in with a tray of breakfast. He cranked Harry’s bed up to a sitting position slowly, carefully, obviously aware that the patient’s ribs were painful. Harry felt grateful enough to say, “Gracias.”

  The dark-skinned orderly grinned at him. “Just doin’ my job, man.”

  Harry sipped the orange juice, poked at the rubbery scrambled eggs. Every time he moved his arms his ribs flared up. By the time he’d given up on the breakfast his body felt as if somebody had spent the morning whacking his chest and back with a baseball bat.

  A doctor came in briefly, took his pulse, and told him that he’d be fine in a week or so.

  “The others,” Harry said. “How bad were they hurt? Pete Quintana?”

  The doctor pursed his lips. “I don’t know about anyone else. The medevac chopper brought you in five days ago. You’re my patient. You’re recovering well. That’s all I know.”

  It must be bad, Harry surmised. Pete must be dead. Anybody else?

  Harry spent the day watching television, banal soap operas, game shows where he knew the answers that stumped the dumbbell contestants, phony courtrooms with idiotic people complaining about one another, psychologists offering advice to young couples and old married folks.

  Maybe Sylvia and I ought to go on one of those shows, Harry thought. Then he remembered the marriage counselor they’d seen and the psychologist he’d gone to afterward and how pointless it had all been.

  Where is Sylvia? he wondered. Does she even know I’m in the hospital? Did anybody tell her there’s been an accident?

  Late in the afternoon Monk Delany came into his room. Harry was glad to see the big, shambling engineer, although he thought Monk looked awkward, sheepish, almost embarrassed.

  “How ya doing, Harry?”

  “It only hurts when I breathe.”

  “Come on,” Delany said. “Seriously.”

  “Banged-up ribs. I’ll be okay.”

  “Your face is kinda burned. Like you got too much sun.”

  Harry nodded. The movement sent a twinge of pain along his back.

  “You look okay,” he said to Delany.

  The engineer pulled one of the petite wooden chairs from the wall and sat down beside Harry’s bed. The chair looked almost too frail to hold his bulk.

  “I got a couple bruises,” Delany said. “The blast knocked me down, that’s all.” “Pete?”

  Delany’s face fell. “I told that dumb spic to get his ass inside the blockhouse.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Naw, they’re all okay. You got it worse than anybody. Except Pete, of course. General Scheib tore out both knees of his pants. Levy got a black eye. A real beaut of a shiner.”

  Harry knew that Monk was trying to cheer him up. “What caused the explosion? Any idea?”

  “Six dozen guys are going over the wreckage, including a gang of blue suits.”

  “And?”

  Delany shrugged. “Looks like it mighta been some grease got into the oxy line.”

  “We checked that line,” Harry said.

  “Yeah, I know. But that’s what it looks like.”

  Harry closed his eyes and saw his job going down the drain. Grease in the oxygen line. That shouldn’t have happened. Somebody’s going to get blamed for it. Me. Maybe all of us. Maybe the whole damned program will get shut down.

  “The investigation isn’t over,” Delany said. “Maybe they’ll find something else.”

  Harry started to shake his head, thought better of it. “What’re they going to find? Spies? Foreign agents planted a bomb?”

  Delany sat and stared at him in silence for several long moments, his normally cheerful face looking pensive, almost mournful.

  At last he got up from the flimsy chair. “Take care of yourself, Harry. I gotta get back out to Mohave, help with the investigation.”

  “Thanks for coming by, Monk.”

  “Nothing to it.” Delany stopped at the door. “Anything I can get you, Harry? Anything you need?”

  “My laptop,” Harry answered immediately. “I’ll go nuts in here without my laptop to work on.”

  “You got it, pal.”

  It wasn’t until after Delany had left that Harry wondered when Sylvia would be allowed to visit him. He found that he didn’t really care when she came, or if she came at all. And he realized he wasn’t surprised by his feeling.

  Pasadena: Anson Aerospace Corporation Headquarters

  Victor Anson sat behind the gleaming broad desk of his private office and gave the three men sitting anxiously on the other side his coldest, hardest stare.

  Anson was totally bald but sported a natty little pencil moustache. He was athletically slim and wore an impeccably tailored Italian silk suit of silvery gray, with an off-white shirt and carefully knotted sky blue tie.

  Two of the three men before him were corporate executives in proper business suits and ties; the third was Jake Levy, one of his top physicists, dressed in sloppy, unpressed slacks and a white open-necked short-sleeved sport shirt. Typical scientist, Anson thought: every day is casual Friday for them. At least Levy knew better than to wear denims in his presence, Anson told himself.

  Looking closer at the physicist, Anson saw that his left eye was swollen and bruised bluish. The man looked faintly ludicrous; Anson had to suppress a smile.

  Anson had made the company what it was and he knew it. Starting with nothing but his father’s few millions and a humdrum aircraft-repair operation, Victor Anson had spent his
life, his well-known shrewdness, and his single-minded determination to create Anson Aerospace Corporation and make it into one of the most successful industrial research and development organizations in the world.

  Now he glared across his desk at the man whom he’d trusted to make that goddamned laser into a winner. All he had to show for six years of work was a tangled mess of smoking wreckage.

  “You realize that SDB has already submitted a formal proposal to the Air Force for their version of a high-power laser?”

  Before they could do anything more than nod miserably, Anson went on. “And Vickers has its whole Washington team bending the ears of every major congressional committee chairman, telling them that they can take over the laser program. Vickers! They’re British, for god’s sake!”

  Jacob Levy, who’d been born in Liverpool, replied in his studied Oxford accent, “Vickers couldn’t possibly handle the task, and everyone knows it.”

  “Those congressmen don’t,” Anson snapped. “Those senators don’t.”

  The two men sitting on either side of Levy were James Dykes, the corporation’s chief financial officer, and Milton Haas, who headed Anson’s Washington office. Dykes was built like a fireplug: thick torso, short limbs, a thick mop of dirty blond hair. Haas was as slim and graceful as a ballerina, with the most beautiful dark eyes Anson had ever seen on a man.

  “It’s not all that bad, V.R.,” said Dykes, his voice rough and throaty, as if he’d been hollering at people all morning. “Our contract isn’t up for renewal until—”

  “The goddam Air Force can cancel our goddam contract whenever it goddam wants to and you know it, Jimmy!” Anson snarled.

  Haas raised a slim finger. “There’s no movement in the Pentagon to cancel our contract.”

  “Not yet.”

  “We can rebuild the laser in three months,” said Levy. “Perhaps less.”

  “Not until you find out what made it blow up,” Anson replied.

  “We know what caused the explosion. A speck of grease got entrained in the oxygen line. Once the oxygen was pressurized it ignited—”

  “A speck of grease?” Anson roared. “How in the name of all the devils in hell did a speck of grease get into the oxy line?”

  Unconsciously touching his swollen eye, Levy replied with deliberate calm, “The important thing, Mr. Anson, is to look ahead. I’ve instituted procedures that will make certain all the feed lines are purged with nitrogen before we power up the laser. That will ensure that the lines are clear.”

  Anson scowled at him. “One of your technicians screwed up. Fire the bastard.”

  “I’m not certain—”

  “Find out who’s responsible and fire him!” Anson insisted. “You don’t have to be certain. Pick the likeliest chump and throw him out on his butt. Make an example of him so the others shape up.”

  “But I can’t simply fire someone at random like that.”

  Anson stared at Levy for several heartbeats. Then, “Well, if you can’t—or won’t—I’ll find somebody who can.”

  Levy’s face went white.

  “Find a scapegoat,” Anson said, his voice cold and hard. Then he smiled thinly. “It ought to be easy enough for you. You Jews know all about scapegoats, don’t you?”

  Pasadena: Olympia Medical Center

  It wasn’t until Harry’s seventh day in the hospital that Sylvia came to see him. He had the bed cranked up to a sitting position. His ribs ached, but the tight cast they’d put around his trunk made the pain bearable. The head nurse told him that they were weaning him off the painkillers as she changed the plastic bag of his IV drip.

  “Don’t want to make a druggie out of you,” she said cheerfully.

  Harry grunted, even though it hurt his ribs.

  The nurse left, and before the door closed Sylvia pushed through. Harry felt surprised, then a little guilty. He hadn’t asked about his wife, had hardly even thought about her, since waking up in the hospital.

  “Hi, Sylvie,” he said. It sounded weak to him, as if he were automatically trying to gain her sympathy.

  Sylvia stood uncertainly at the doorway. He was surprised to realize how chunky she’d gotten over the years. The curvaceous girl he’d married had evolved into an almost dumpy matron. Like everything else, Harry thought. Everything goes downhill. I should talk, Mr. Bald Flab Guy.

  For a moment Harry thought Sylvia was going to turn around and leave. But she came into the room a few steps, clutching her purse in both hands.

  “Are you okay, Harry?”

  He tried to smile. “It only hurts when I breathe.”

  She frowned at him. “Don’t try to make a joke out of it. The man on the phone said you were seriously injured.”

  “Cracked some ribs.”

  “What happened?”

  Harry hesitated, vaguely remembering the secrecy agreement he had signed. “I can’t tell you.”

  She came up to the edge of the bed. “You can’t tell your own wife?”

  Harry started to shake his head, but the flare of pain made him stop. Instead he merely said, “Air Force stuff. It’s all classified.”

  “Your own wife?” Sylvia demanded. “Do they think I’m a spy or something?”

  Harry thought of Ben Franklin’s dictum: Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Then he remembered Pete Quintana.

  Sylvia stood at the side of the bed. “Leona Rosenberg told me that one of your crew got killed. That Hispanic guy.”

  “Pete Quintana.”

  “There was an explosion? Your face looks burned on one side.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Harry said. “I should be home in a few days.”

  She said nothing.

  “How’re the kids?” he asked.

  “Vickie’s dating that Vietnamese boy from her class again. I don’t trust him.”

  Harry smiled faintly. “But we can trust Vickie. She’s got a good head on her shoulders.”

  Shaking her head, Sylvia said, “I don’t like the way he looks at her.”

  “He comes into the house, doesn’t he? He doesn’t just toot the horn and expect her to go running out to him. The kid’s got some manners.”

  “For god’s sake, Harry! You’d let your daughter get raped just because you think the boy’s polite!”

  “Don’t start, Sylvie.”

  “I don’t see why Vickie can’t date her own kind of boys,” she grumbled.

  Harry tried to change the subject. “How’s Denise?”

  “She’s fine. Breezing through school. They want her to come out for the orchestra next term.” “That’s good.”

  And suddenly they had nothing more to talk about. Nothing that wouldn’t lead to an argument. Sylvia stood by the bed for a few moments more, looking as if she wanted to get away.

  “I’ll be out of here in a couple of days,” Harry said.

  She nodded. “Good. Call me if you need anything.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve got to be going now. The kids will be coming home from school.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Harry almost said, Don’t bother. But he kept the thought to himself.

  Pasadena, California: Hartunian Residence

  Harry felt silly in the powered wheelchair, but he had to admit that it was better than trying to walk. Sylvia had come to the hospital and stayed alongside him as he rolled down the hospital corridor, checked out at the admissions counter, and then wheeled himself outside and up to the SUV that Anson Aerospace had provided him for the trip home. The driver and one of the hospital’s orderlies helped Harry into the SUV’s right-hand seat with a minimum of agony and then stowed his wheelchair in the back.

  Once home, Harry realized that the world looks a lot different when you’re confined to a wheelchair. The split-level house had only two sets of stairs and they were no more than six steps each, but to Harry they suddenly looked formidable. Carefully, with the SUV’s driver grasping his left a
rm and Sylvia his right, he got up from the chair. Then he stood there with his daughters staring wide-eyed at him while the driver carried the chair down the little flight as easily as if it weighed only a few ounces.

  He walked down the steps like an arthritic old man, Sylvia and the driver holding him again, and settled into the chair once more.

  “I’ll be okay now,” he said to the driver. “Thanks.”

  The guy dipped his chin in acknowledgment, grinned at the two girls standing there, and left the house. Sylvia stood in front of him, looking him over with a disapproving scowl on her face. Harry nudged the chair’s control stick and wheeled past her, down the carpeted hallway.

  As he turned into the bedroom, Sylvia said from behind him, “Not there. I set up the guest room for you.” Her voice sounded edgy. “The doctor said it’ll be better for you.”

  Harry spun the chair around. Sylvia looked strained, almost frightened. He started to say something to her, but gave it up. Without another word he turned the chair around and rolled it to the guest room.

  Sylvia and the girls fussed around him as he got out of the chair on his own and stretched out gratefully on the queen-sized bed of the guest room. His back throbbed and he felt the beginnings of a headache pinching at the back of his neck.

  “You have everything you need right here,” Sylvia said from the doorway. “If you want anything, just holler.”

  “You want some juice, Dad?” Denise asked, her eyes full of anxiety.

  He made a smile for her. “I’m okay, honey. Thanks anyway.”

  Vickie said, “We’ll be your nurses, Dad. We’ll take care of you.”

  “Thanks,” he said, thinking that Sylvia would be happy to let them take care of him. Or anyone else. As long as she didn’t have to.

  In two days Harry felt almost normal. His doctor came from the hospital to remove the body cast he’d been wrapped in and ordered Harry to make an appointment for an x-ray of his ribs the next week. Denise and Vickie looked in on him before rushing off to school and once again as soon as they got back. The rest of the time Harry spent in bed watching television or pecking at his laptop. Sylvia stayed out of the guest room.