Velocity (7 page)

All this will happen because he lost his keys. It will never occur to him that those lost keys are the only reason he’s still alive.

**

Henri watches the Galaxy disappear into the night. ‘Let’s go.’ The four men move quickly. They wipe down the RPG-7s, deposit them in a dumpster beside the hangar, navigate the airport building using the keycard and numeric codes in the envelope supplied by Claude, then make their way to the white Citroen C4 parked on the street outside.

Dirk drives as Henri leans back in the passenger seat and gazes out the window at the streetlights that whip past overhead. It’s hypnotic. The Tigers are safely ensconced in the Galaxy’s hold, on their way to their destination, just as planned. Tonight has gone well but it will only become more difficult from here. He must stay the course. He must not falter. He owes his wife that much —

‘Commander?’ Dirk’s voice wrenches Henri back into the present. ‘Is everything in order?’ The German gestures to the glove box. Henri opens it and finds it stacked with documents. He picks them out and flips through them, nods to Dirk. Claude has provided everything they need for their next journey.

The Citroen takes a right turn into Brisbane International Airport’s long-term parking station. It certainly will be long. They’ll never return for this vehicle.

**

Three hours and forty minutes later Henri, Dirk, Nico and Cobbin have checked in, passed through immigration and now relax in the Qantas Club. From the leather sofas they watch the distant Pacificspatiale hangar on the far side of the airport. Only now, long after the fact, does there seem to be any activity around the hangar.

Aboard the 747 ten minutes later, Henri pulls down the window shade beside his business-class seat, sets the GMT-Master his wife gave him to the time of his destination, slips on an eye mask and settles in. He has many hours to sleep, and dream of her.

**

5

Someone has to cook the meals and clean the house and wash the clothes and pay the bills and feed the cats. Rhonda can’t do it, she’s too busy preparing to command
Atlantis,
and there’s no spare cash to hire someone. Astronauts don’t get paid that much. So the job falls to Judd as he doesn’t, currently, have a mission to train for. Sure, he works in the Astronaut Office part-time and has a role in the White Room during launches, but that still leaves him with a relaxed schedule.

Judd opens the lid to the washing machine and dumps in today’s load of dirty clothes.

Clink, clank, clunk.
Something clatters into the machine’s stainless-steel drum. He reaches in, snags it. It’s loose change. Six coins. All quarters. They fell out of Rhonda’s jeans.

He continues to load the washing machine and doesn’t think about the coins for another seven minutes.

Judd cuts his thumb as he chops up chicken for tonight’s dinner. At the sink he runs cold water over the gash and stares out at the small back garden. The Ghost and The Darkness wrestle on the grass, roll into the overgrown hedge, disappear from view.

Rhonda never wears jeans. Rarely, anyway. She doesn’t think them appropriate for the office. They accentuate her hips too much. She only wears them when she’s going out. When she wants to look good.

She wore them the day before yesterday. Saturday. She’d gone to JSC for another meeting on the external tank’s foam-shedding saga, the longest-running soap opera currently playing on the NASA channel. The shuttle will be decommissioned and that problem will not have been solved.

So she wore them on Saturday. Jeans were fine on a Saturday.

He continues to run his thumb under the cold water and doesn’t think about the coins for another five minutes.

Judd has almost completed pruning the overgrown hedge in the back garden. The Ghost and The Darkness rumble at his feet.

Why did she need six quarters? In all the years he’s known her he’s never once seen her buy a chocolate bar or a bag of corn chips or anything from a vending machine. She never eats junk food and always carries her own water.

Why would she need six quarters?

He continues pruning and doesn’t think about the coins for another three minutes.

Judd triggers the spray gun and waters the flowers. It rained earlier but the flowers look like they could do with a little more hydration.

Rhonda never carries change in her pockets. It annoys her, coins jamming into her thighs every time she sits down. And it’s not like she doesn’t have a purse. She doesn’t need quarters for tollways and she doesn’t need them for parking meters because everywhere she parks is free, either at home or at JSC.

He can’t stop thinking about the damn quarters. What’s that saying about idle minds? He can’t remember exactly but it has something to do with overthinking everything if you’re bored, and maybe there’s something about the devil in there too.

The quarters were in her jeans. But she never wears jeans. Unless she wants to look good . ..

‘No.’ He releases the spray gun’s trigger and stares at the rhododendron in front of him, its petals bobbing under the weight of water.

Judd drops the spray gun and strides into the house. His heart thumps, his face suddenly flush and clammy. He finds his iPhone, dials Rhonda’s number. Voicemail answers. He doesn’t leave a message.

He grabs his wallet and keys, locks the front door behind him and moves to the ‘82 DeLorean parked in the driveway. It was fully restored and upgraded by DMC Houston two years ago, and is worth enduring every Doc Brown-Flux Capacitor-Marty McFly joke. He slides inside but doesn’t feel better, the way he usually does when he sits behind its wheel. Instead an icy sliver of dread turns in his chest.

‘It can’t be.’

He starts the DeLorean to find out if it can.

**

Dusk.

Judd parks the DeLorean beside the curb. To his right is a parking meter. It only takes quarters. This is the only street in Houston he knows of that has yet to be upgraded to include a credit-card payment system.

He still has Rhonda’s quarters in his pocket. They dig into his thigh. He turns, looks across the quiet street at a parked Toyota RAV4. Rhonda’s RAV4. There’s a parking ticket on its windscreen. Guess she didn’t have enough quarters for the meter because she left them in her jeans.

He’s not sure what to do next. He dials her number again, glances at the time on his iPhone’s screen. 6.02 p.m. She told him she’d be at JSC until seven. Yet there’s her RAV4 in the middle of a leafy Houston suburb, nowhere near JSC.

Her phone goes to voicemail. Judd hangs up, opens the DeLorean’s door and steps out. He takes four of Rhonda’s quarters and slips them into the parking meter. It gives him half an hour. He doesn’t think it’s going to take that long, whatever he’s about to do.

He walks towards the apartment block he’s been to just once before. It was eight months ago and he was attending a forty-sixth birthday party for Will Thompkins, short but good-looking in a midget-Hasselhoff kind of way. He’s also an introspection-free robo-exec with the easy charm and unblinking expedience perfectly suited to the upper reaches of NASA management. He had been a test pilot of some note and, oh yes, he’d piloted the shuttle. Twice. He’s a frontrunner to take over the Astronaut Office, where crew assignments are decided and careers are made and broken. His current duties include managing the external tank’s foam-shedding team. Rhonda’s been spending some time with him on that project.

Judd moves down a flight of wide steps to the apartment’s open entrance. He pauses. Does he really want to do this? He can leave now and go home. No one will be the wiser. Sure, Rhonda’s been more distant that usual but that’s because she’s been busier than usual. Or has she been more distant than usual because she’s been getting busy with Thompkins?

He steps into the open walkway. It’s gloomy, the opaque saucer-shaped lights overhead all but useless, the dark-grey astroturf still wet from this morning’s rain. His heart thumps in his chest as he devises a plan, tries to remember where he’s going.

He remembers. He moves down the walkway to the right, jumps the waist-high barrier and drops into the garden below. He wades through a row of big-leafed plants and reaches the corner of the building. It has three levels with three apartments on each. The rear balconies overlook a steep, grassy slope that drops away to a garden 30 metres below. An expansive view of downtown Houston is laid out in front of them. Will Thompkins’ place is on the ground level, third balcony along.

He moves past the first balcony. His feet skid on the narrow strip of wet grass at the top of the slope. He grabs the balcony’s iron railing to stay balanced. One wrong step and he’ll slide straight down the hill.

He takes baby steps, looks into the first apartment. The sliding glass door is closed, the lights are off and nobody’s home. He edges onwards, navigates the gap between balconies, reaches the second apartment.

A tubby, middle-aged guy lies slumped on a sofa. He wears a T-shirt but is naked from the waist down. He holds a Corona bottle in one hand and a remote control in the other. The only light in the room comes from the flicker of the television he watches.

Judd ducks down, inches along the balcony - and then he hears it. Wafting towards him like pollen on a breeze. The Doobie Brothers. Rhonda loves the Doobies. She always listens to seventies West Coast yacht rock when she wants to relax. And unwind. And, he remembers sourly, get busy.

Judd leaves the tubby guy behind and edges towards the third and final balcony. ‘What A Fool Believes’ grows louder. He reaches the last balcony and looks inside the apartment. The lights are low and the glass doors are open. A long black leather sofa blocks his view of the living room. He can’t see what’s happening but he can hear faint voices over Michael McDonald.

A laugh. Her laugh. The laugh he fell in love with. The sound jars. It’s strange to hear it when he isn’t the one making it happen. Rhonda’s a serious woman, not humourless but, well, earnest much of the time. She doesn’t just laugh at any old thing. You have to work at it, so when she does laugh it means something. When was the last time he made her laugh like that? He doesn’t remember but it was a long while ago.

He grabs hold of the balcony’s railing and pulls himself up. His feet slip on the grass but his arms take the weight and he peeks over the railing. He can see her hand, draped across the back of the sofa, the white-gold ring he gave her visible on her finger. He can’t see anything else. The back of the sofa is too high. Leather creaks. Something’s happening on the sofa.

Adrenaline takes over. Judd pulls himself up and over the railing, drops quietly to the balcony, crouches low, the back of the sofa providing cover, and edges forward. What is this feeling in the pit of his stomach? Fear, at the thought of losing the woman he loves. He stands, to reveal his presence and learn the truth.

Rhonda lies on the leather sofa, head and shoulders propped up by a pillow. She’s alone, reading a report. She shifts and the leather creaks. In front of her the coffee table is a mess of paperwork.

Will Thompkins is in the kitchen, his back to her and Judd. They’re in the middle of a conversation. ‘Think so?’

Rhonda doesn’t look up from the report. ‘Worth investigating.’

‘It just adds so much weight.’

‘— it might be the trade-off we need to make. There must be a lighter compound in the works that could do it. If it had the right elasticity it could be an option —’

Judd ducks down behind the sofa, unseen.
Christ!
There’s nothing untoward going on. From the tone of Rhonda’s voice she’s deep in work mode. That’s why she’s been distant. She’s been busy doing her job! But then why are they at Thompkins’ place?

As if on cue Rhonda speaks: ‘Thanks for doing this. I’m sorry about the conference room being double-booked this week.’

‘Not your fault.’

‘I’ll get going in fifteen. Judd’s cooking and I don’t want to be late. We’ll have to pick this up after the mission. I won’t have time before that.’

‘No problem.’

Judd again feels fear, but this time it’s about whether he can find a way out of this. He’s made a
huge
mistake, except it’s neither a mistake nor huge until somebody finds out about it.

He hears Will walk from the kitchen and sit on the sofa. Good. It means they’re both facing away from him. Judd backs up until his left heel touches the balcony’s railing. He stands and climbs over it in one swift, silent movement, lowers himself to the ground below, his arms taking the strain. His feet touch the ground and he holds the railing tight; doesn’t want to take an inadvertent trip down the hill. He waits a moment. No movement at the sofa. They didn’t hear him. He’s going to get out of this! He turns to go, then stops dead.

The tubby guy is now standing on the next balcony, still naked from the waist down. He sways from the effect of the Corona in his right hand as he looks out at the twinkling lights of Houston and takes a monster leak over his railing, making exuberant figure eights in the air with the stream.

Judd draws himself into the shadow of Thompkins’ balcony as the leak goes on. What’s the saying? You don’t buy beer, you just rent it for an hour. Tubby finally runs dry, puts the Corona down on top of the railing and makes to zip up his pants. Shocked to find he’s not wearing any, he turns and walks unsteadily into the apartment, presumably to find them.