Della
Eight days out, Monday morning, the first thing on fire was a dead man, and he was the only thing on my list that couldn't get any worse.
I was on a green leather sofa in Royce Ambler's office with the price tag still zip-tied under one arm. Halyard ran its mission control out of a furniture outlet off the highway in Titusville, and when they moved in they'd kept the carpet, the smell of new sofa and, in Royce's office, the sofa. Royce was in the corner with his back to me and his phone against his ear, in a quarter-zip, shouting. He'd been cancelling things since seven. A podcast. A children's hospital. A cereal shoot with a cartoon tiger. Every few minutes he'd hang up, dial, and start shouting again.
I took out my phone and recorded a memo, low, as I always did.
"One. Find a Mack. Two. Find out who signs for flight operations. Three. Coffee. Four. Do not tell Royce about one until two is done."
Behind me Royce said something loud with "pull it" in it, twice, and the rest went into his collar. Another bit of Mack's diary going in the bin. I didn't turn round. I'd heard him cancel the tiger in the same voice.
He hung up and sat on the edge of his desk, which he did when he wanted me to know he was about to say something important.
"Here's the thing," he said. "Stay with me. If we scrub, the window's gone for five weeks and Boyd walks. There is no five weeks."
Boyd Castellane was buying Halyard at splashdown. Boyd Castellane was the only reason Royce still owned a quarter-zip. I knew this. Royce knew I knew it. He said it anyway, because Royce never had a thought he didn't say out loud at least twice.
"Then the flight goes," I said.
"Without a commander."
"With a commander."
"He's dead, Della."
"I heard." I held up my phone. I'd typed three words into it while he was cancelling the tiger. Mack Tolliver lookalike. "Who's going to know?"
Royce looked at the phone for a long time. Then he looked at me like I'd brought him a slide.
By five o'clock that afternoon a man in a flight suit and a paper birthday hat had said yes to me before I'd finished saying the number, and I wrote that down, because a man who says yes that fast will say anything that fast, and somebody would have to stand next to his mouth for eight days.
Nine. Eight. I'm bad with numbers. It was eight.
Tuesday, the county coroner's building in Rockledge, a cold room with a drain in the middle of the floor. Things I knew about Mack Tolliver's death, in order. He'd been a recluse between press events for years, so nobody expected to see him. His wife had called the company before she called anyone else, so there'd been no ambulance, no siren on a Cocoa Beach street, no neighbour with a phone up. And the county coroner was a man Halyard had bought a great many lunches for. He'd written natural causes, pending, on a form, and he was in no hurry at all to un-pend it.
That was the whole of it.
Bette Tolliver stood on the other side of the steel table from me with her handbag held in front of her in both hands. Sixty-something, short grey hair, a cardigan in a room that needed a coat. She'd been a Navy nurse. She looked at the sheet the way nurses look at sheets.
I don't do faces. I looked at his hands, which were outside the sheet. They were big. Bigger than the lookalike's. I said into my phone, quietly, "One. Gloves."
Bette heard me. "Gloves?"
"Mrs Tolliver, I'm going to say something that'll sound insane, and I need you to let me get to the end of it. The flight goes on Tuesday. The company would like the commander's seat filled."
"Fine," said Bette.
I stopped. "I haven't told you what it is."
"You're going to put a man in his suit and wave him at the television." She didn't look up from the sheet. "Tolliver would've loved it. He loved anything with a camera on it. Fine."
People say yes fast for two reasons. Either they've thought of it already, or they want you out of the room. I decided it was the second, and I was pleased with myself for deciding so quickly, and I let her walk me out to the car park without another word. At the door she said, "Eat something, Ms Quint. You've got the look." Then: "He hated his own hands. Tell your man to keep them in his pockets," and got into her car, and drove off.
I wrote that down too.
Wednesday I met the flight director, and he said no.
Halyard's control room was the showroom. The front wall was screens where the bedroom suites used to be. The desks were rented, in rows, and on each one a person in a polo shirt was looking at a screen of numbers as if the numbers owed them money. Sully Kessel's console was front and centre, up a step, like a pulpit.
He was a big man, sixty-something, white crewcut, reading glasses on a cord round his neck, and he didn't get up. He'd been forty years in the business and was Mack Tolliver's oldest friend, and on the public loop he was the voice of every launch Halyard had ever flown. The whole country knew that voice. Low and rough, like a truck on gravel. When it said go, people went.
"I'm not signing for a clown," he said.
"He's not a clown. He's a professional lookalike."
"He does birthday parties."
"He does them very well."
Sully put his glasses on, looked at me through them, and took them off again. "Ms Quint. That ship flies itself, and I've spent four years making sure of it. The seat's there for a picture and for one line in a licence that says somebody aboard is certified. Mack was certified. Your clown is certified to make balloon animals. I sign that paper, I'm lying to the Federal Aviation Administration with my name, and I'm sixty-six years old and I've never done it once."
"Then who signs?"
"Nobody. You scrub. You do it right in five weeks with a pilot."
"Boyd walks in five weeks."
"Then Boyd walks." He turned back to his screen. "And if you do find some fool to sign it, here's how it goes. He touches nothing. He says nothing. He sits. If he stands up, I scrub it myself."
I liked him. I didn't want to. He was the only man in the building who'd said no to my face since Monday, and I've always had a weakness for no. I went into the Fishbowl, the glass meeting room at the back where Royce had put me so everyone could watch me think, and I didn't throw anything, because it was glass.
Then I went looking for a way round the problem I'd been saving.
The console tech in the second row was a skinny kid called Kip, in a lanyard, with four empty energy-drink cans lined up on his desk like he was keeping score. I'd decided he was a child the first time I saw him, and nothing he did that afternoon changed my mind.
"There's a recorder in the cabin," I said. "Records everything said in there."
"Basically, yes. It's the cabin voice recorder. It's like an airliner's black box, except it's orange, and it's indestructible."
"Can we take it out?"
He looked at me like I'd asked him to take out his own heart. "No. It's bonded into the hull. Glued. There's a seal on it, and the seal's number is filed with the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA. If anybody opens it, the flight's grounded and the whole ship gets taken apart to find out why."
"Can we turn it off?"
"Basically no."
"Can you say one sentence without basically?"
He thought about it. "No," he said, which I'll admit was funny, and I didn't laugh.
Thursday morning the signature arrived.
It was in my inbox at six, with Sully's name at the bottom and two words typed above it: under protest. I read it three times. Then I went and found Royce, who was eating a protein bar in the kitchen that used to be the returns desk.
"How?"
"I handled it." He looked very pleased. "He signed under protest. I put the order in writing, it's on file. Don't ask how. That's what handled means."
I didn't ask. I'd been sure, bone sure, that Sully Kessel would never sign a thing he didn't believe in, and he had, and the right question was sitting in front of me eating a protein bar. I said, "Next," out loud, and went to the press event.
The press event was in a hotel ballroom in Cocoa Beach with a carpet like a migraine and a big screen with Mack on it, grinning, in the suit. Mack had a head cold, said the press release, which I'd written, and was resting before the flight. Royce did twelve minutes on the future. The four passengers sat in a row on the stage in matching jackets. Boyd Castellane took the microphone without being offered it.
He was big and silver and loud, with a voice like a brass band in a tunnel, and a flight jacket covered in patches.
"Y'all, I'm not just riding this rocket," said Boyd. "I'm buying it. Splashdown, the papers get signed, and Halyard's a Castellane company." He let them clap. "And I'll tell you something else, and you can write it down. I'll sit where Mack sits by Christmas."
They loved that. The cameras loved that. I hated it in my teeth, because it was good, and it wasn't mine.
He found me afterwards at the coffee urn. He stood too close, the way big men do when they want you to notice they're big.
"Darlin'," said Boyd, "how sick is the commander, really?"
"A cold."
"He looks peaky in photographs."
"He's resting."
"I've had colds. I flew with colds. I never once looked peaky in a photograph." He smiled at me with all his teeth. "You let me know if he gets any sicker. I'm right here. I'm not doing anything Tuesday."
I said, "Noted," and walked away, and in the car I said into my phone, "One. Boyd wants the seat. Two. Keep Boyd out of the seat. Three. Find out what peaky means."
Friday I gave Ronnie the rules.
We did it on a video call from the Fishbowl, me at the table with my laptop and him in his room over the tyre shop, which had a poster of Mack on the wall behind him that he kept trying to get out of shot. Every few seconds a pneumatic wrench went off downstairs and he jumped.
"Rule one," I said. "The ship remembers everything. Every word in that cabin goes on a recorder you can't switch off and nobody can open. It's a parrot with a perfect memory and no sense of humour. Never say your real name in there."
"Never," said Ronnie.
"Not as a joke. Not in your sleep."
"I don't talk in my sleep. I've been told I sing, but that's a whole thing."
"Rule two. You say nothing. Mack was a quiet man in a capsule. You're quiet."
"Quiet. Got it. I can be so quiet. You'd be amazed. People say to me, Ronnie, the thing about you is the quiet."
"Nobody has ever said that to you."
"Nobody has ever said that to me," he agreed.
"Okay so, we're going to practise. One minute. No talking. I'll time it." I put my phone on the table with the stopwatch on it and pressed start.
He sat very still. He folded his hands. He looked into the camera with Mack's face, the calm one, the one from the posters. Downstairs the wrench went. He didn't jump. I was impressed for about nine seconds.
At eleven seconds, he said, in Mack's voice, slow and warm, "Folks, what you're seeing here is a man not saying anything."
"Lark."
"This is a very difficult manoeuvre, folks," Mack went on, low, like a golf commentator. "Only a handful of men in history have attempted it. He's coming up on fifteen seconds now. Look at the concentration on that face. He's thinking about his family. He's thinking about his country. He's thinking about a sandwich."
"Lark, for the love of God."
"And he's broken, folks, he's broken at twenty-two seconds, a tragic day for silence."
I laughed. It came out of my nose before I could stop it, and Kip looked up through the glass from the second row like a dog hearing its name. I stopped. I put my hand flat on the table.
"Again," I said. "From the top. One minute."
He did forty seconds. Then fifty. On the fourth go he did the full minute and sat there at the end of it with his eyes shut and his mouth pressed into a line, like a man holding a lit match in it, and I said, "Time," and he breathed out so hard the laptop speaker crackled.
"Was that good?"
"That was fine."
"Fine. Fine's good. I'll take fine. Fine from you is like a standing ovation from anybody else, I can tell already, I've known you four days."
Royce put his head round the Fishbowl door. He didn't come in. He never came right into the Fishbowl in case somebody took a picture of him in it.
"Is that him? Great. He looks great. Great face." He knocked twice on the glass with one knuckle, already leaving. "And the fallback?"
"Writing it," I said.
He went. On the laptop Ronnie had gone properly quiet for the first time that afternoon, and he was looking at me through the screen with Mack's face and his own eyes.
"Rule three," I said. "Don't trip."
At midnight I was in the Sentra in the car park with the seat all the way back and the engine running for the air, and the control room was a lit box across the tarmac with nobody in it but the night shift and Kip's cans. The Sentra had a dent in the passenger door and a phone mount that dropped the phone on every left turn. I'd been living in it since Monday. It was the only room in Titusville I could swear in.
I had the video of the silence drill on my laptop. I watched it once for his hands. He'd kept them on the table. I watched it again for the face. On the fourth go I watched him at eleven seconds, opening his mouth, and Mack's voice coming out of it, and his own eyes above it, delighted with himself, scared to death.
I picked up my phone. "One. Sleep. Two. Stop watching that."
I put the phone face down on the passenger seat. It slid off onto the floor, because the Sentra was parked on a slope, and lay there with its light on.
I watched it once more, for the gloves.