Softly, then, Creighton said: "Hammer's dead, Billy. Suicide. He shot himself in the eye with his service pistol. The Project Blue specs were on his desk. I guess he thought leaving them there was all the suicide note anybody would need."
Starkey closed his eyes. Vic Hammer was... had been... his son-in-law. How was he supposed to tell Cynthia about this? I'm sorry, Cindy. Vic took a high dive into a cold bowl of soup today. Here, have a "downer." You see, there was a goof. Somebody made a mistake with a box. Somebody else forgot to pull a switch that would have sealed off the base. The lag was only forty-some seconds, but it was enough. The box is known in the trade as a "sniffer." It's made in Portland, Oregon, Defense Department Contract 164480966. The boxes are put together in separate circuits by female technicians, and they do it that way so none of them really know what they're doing. One of them was maybe thinking about what to make for supper, and whoever was supposed to check her work was maybe thinking about trading the family car. Anyway, Cindy, the last coincidence was that a man at the Number Four security post, a man named Campion, saw the numbers go red just in time to get out of the room before the doors shut and mag-locked. Then he got his family and ran. He drove through the main gate just four minutes before the sirens started going off and we sealed the whole base. And no one started looking for him until nearly an hour later because there are no monitors in the security posts - somewhere along the line you have to stop guarding the guardians or everyone in the world would be a goddam turnkey - and everybody just assumed he was in there, waiting for the sniffers to sort out the clean areas from the dirty ones. So he got him some running room and he was smart enough to use the ranch trails and lucky enough not to pick any of the ones where his car could get bogged down. Then someone had to make a command decision on whether or not to bring in the State Police, the FBI, or both of them and that fabled buck got passed hither, thither, and yon, and by the time someone decided the Shop ought to handle it, this happy ass**le - this happy diseased ass**le - had gotten to Texas, and when they finally caught him he wasn't running anymore because he and his wife and his baby daughter were all laid out on cooling boards in some pissant little town called Braintree. Braintree, Texas. Anyway, Cindy, what I'm trying to say is that this was a chain of coincidence on the order of winning the Irish Sweepstakes. With a little incompetence thrown in for good luck - for bad luck, I mean, please excuse me - but mostly it was just a thing that happened. None of it was your man's fault. But he was the head of the project, and he saw the situation start to escalate, and then
"Thanks, Len," he said.
"Billy, would you like - "
"I'll be up in ten minutes. I want you to schedule a general staff meeting fifteen minutes from now. If they're in bed, kick em out."
"Yes, sir."
"And Len..."
"Yes?"
"I'm glad you were the one who told me."
"Yes, sir."
Creighton left. Starkey glanced at his watch, then walked over to the monitors set into the wall. He turned on 2, put his hands behind his back, and stared thoughtfully into Project Blue's silent cafeteria.
BOOK I CAPTAIN TRIPS Chapter 5
Larry Underwood pulled around the corner and found a parking space big enough for the Datsun Z between a fire hydrant and somebody's trash can that had fallen into the litter. There was something unpleasant in the trash can and Larry tried to tell himself that he really hadn't seen the Stiffening dead cat and the rat gnawing at its white-furred belly. The rat was gone so fast from the sweep of his headlights that it really might not have been there. The cat, however, was fixed in stasis. And, he supposed, killing the Z's engine, if you believed in one you had to believe in the other. Didn't they say that Paris had the biggest rat population in the world? All those old sewers. But New York did well, too. And if he remembered his misspent youth well enough, not all the rats in New York City went on four legs. And what the hell was he doing parked in front of this decaying brownstone, thinking about rats anyway?
Five days ago, on June 14, he had been in sunny Southern California, home of hopheads, freak religions, the only c/w nightclubs in the world with gogo dancers, and Disneyland. This morning at quarter of four he had arrived on the shore of the other ocean, paying his toll to go across the Triborough Bridge. A sullen drizzle had been falling. Only in New York can an early summer drizzle seem so unrepentantly sullen. Larry could see the drops accreting on the Z's windshield now, as intimations of dawn began to creep into the eastern sky.
Dear New York: I've come home.