me to come here tonight and offer you the option of giving up your partner instead of facing the inquiry alone. I will tell the senator you prefer to take your chances with a judge. You can tell the court what you told me-you're not embezzling funds and you didn't lie about the PODS software." She gave a grim smile. "But after that lame press conference you gave two weeks ago, somehow I doubt it." Gabrielle spun on her heel and strode across the darkened PODS laboratory. She wondered if maybe she'd be seeing the inside of a prison instead of Harper.
Gabrielle held her head high as she walked off, waiting for Harper to call her back. Silence. She pushed her way through the metal doors and strode out into the hallway, hoping the elevators up here were not key-card operated like the lobby. She'd lost. Despite her best efforts, Harper wasn't biting. Maybe he was telling the truth in his PODS press conference, Gabrielle thought.
A crash resounded down the hall as the metal doors behind her burst open. "Ms. Ashe," Harper's voice called out. "I swear I know nothing about any embezzlement. I'm an honest man!"
Gabrielle felt her heart skip a beat. She forced herself to keep walking. She gave a casual shrug and called out over her shoulder. "And yet you lied in your press conference."
Silence. Gabrielle kept moving down the hallway.
"Hold on!" Harper yelled. He came jogging up beside her, his face pale. "This embezzlement thing," he said, lowering his voice. "I think I know who set me up."
Gabrielle stopped dead in her tracks, wondering if she had heard him correctly. She turned as slowly and casually as she could. "You expect me to believe someone is setting you up?"
Harper sighed. "I swear I know nothing about embezzlement. But if there's evidence against me... "
"Mounds of it."
Harper sighed. "Then it's all been planted. To discredit me if need be. And there's only one person who would have done that."
"Who?"
Harper looked her in the eye. "Lawrence Ekstrom hates me."
Gabrielle was stunned. "The administrator of NASA?"
Harper gave a grim nod. "He's the one who forced me to lie in that press conference."
Chapter 88-91
88
Even with the Aurora aircraft's misted-methane propulsion system at half power, the Delta Force was hurtling through the night at three times the speed of sound-over two thousand miles an hour. The repetitive throb of the Pulse Detonation Wave Engines behind them gave the ride a hypnotic rhythm. A hundred feet below, the ocean churned wildly, whipped up by the Aurora's vacuum wake, which sucked fifty-foot rooster tails skyward in long parallel sheets behind the plane.
This is the reason the SR-71 Blackbird was retired, Delta-One thought.
The Aurora was one of those secret aircraft that nobody was supposed to know existed, but everyone did. Even the Discovery channel had covered Aurora and its testing out at Groom Lake in Nevada. Whether the security leaks had come from the repeated "skyquakes" heard as far away as Los Angeles, or the unfortunate eyewitness sighting by a North Sea oil-rig driller, or the administrative gaffe that left a description of Aurora in a public copy of the Pentagon budget, nobody would ever know. It hardly mattered. The word was out: The U.S. military had a plane capable of Mach 6 flight, and it was no longer on the drawing board. It was in the skies overhead.
Built by Lockheed, the Aurora looked like a flattened American football. It was 110 feet long, sixty feet wide, smoothly contoured with a crystalline patina of thermal tiles much like the space shuttle. The speed was primarily the result of an exotic new propulsion system known as a Pulse Detonation Wave Engine, which burned a clean, misted, liquid hydrogen and left a telltale pulse contrail in the sky. For this reason, it only flew at night.
Tonight, with the luxury of enormous speed, the Delta Force was taking the long way home, out across the open ocean. Even so, they were overtaking their quarry. At this rate, the Delta Force would be arriving on the eastern seaboard in under an hour, a good two hours before its prey. There had been discussion of tracking and shooting down the plane in question, but the controller rightly feared a radar capture of the incident or the burned wreckage might bring on a massive investigation. It was best to let the plane land as scheduled, the controller had decided. Once it became clear where their quarry intended to land,