“You underpaid.”

“Oh?”

Camden nodded. “Yeah.”

“Okay, what did my three hundred grand buy me?”

“Let me read you an entry from January 19, 1979.”

“Go ahead.”

Camden turned to the proper page. “‘Ten years and nobody’s even hinted at it. I can’t believe Washington could keep a secret for so long.’”

“That’s it?”

Camden shook his head. “Here’s December 1986. ‘It’s almost seventeen years, and still not a word of it. I must be one of the few guys left who knows the truth.’” Camden turned to another page. “And January 19, 1988: ‘Another year of silence. Just amazing.’”

“Let me guess,” said Bucky. “January 19 is the anniversary of when the Myshko flight took off?”

Camden shook his head and smiled. “Almost.”

“Son of a bitch!” exclaimed Bucky. “It’s the anniversary of when it would have landed!”

“Give the man a cigar,” said Camden.

6

Jane Alcott lived with her husband and four kids in Sparrows Point, Maryland, outside Baltimore. They occupied a two-story white frame house with a large front yard in a neighborhood filled with trees. They were within a few blocks of Chesapeake Bay, the kind of place Jerry would have liked to settle down in if he’d had a family. He arrived in the early evening, as the sun was slipping below the horizon, and couldn’t help thinking how much easier his life might have been had he been living out here doing public relations for one of the TV channels and living with Mandy Edwards, the only woman he’d ever really cared about. But she was a long time ago.

He still thought about her when life got quiet. He was over her, finally. Or at least that’s what he told himself. Two years ago, she’d earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Now she worked for NASA in Houston. She was one of the reasons he’d joined NASA, with the possibility their paths might cross. In any case, she knew how high he’d climbed. Undoubtedly, she saw him now and then doing a press conference, or on the Agency’s TV channel. He liked to think she regretted tossing him aside.

Now, in a rented car and under a bright moon, he pushed her out of his mind as he cruised down F Street and turned south onto Ninth. He passed more trees and sculpted lawns and broad driveways. The house numbers were hard to see in the dark, but Alcott had described the house, red brick with green shutters and two white cars in the driveway. The post light was on. He spotted it, parked, and looked around to assure himself there were no reporters in the area. Then he climbed slowly out of the car and started up the walk. A dog was barking somewhere, and a couple of kids next door were taking turns missing long shots at a basketball hoop mounted over the driveway. Basketball, he thought, was never really out of season. A cool breeze blew in off the Bay. He took a deep breath, thought again how the smart thing to do would be to go home and forget the whole thing. No matter how this played out, he was going to become a target for everybody’s jokes. A comic figure representing an agency that belonged to the past.

He climbed a set of wooden steps onto the front deck. Lights blinked on, and the door opened before he reached it. A middle-aged woman, with dark hair and a nervous smile, looked out at him. “Mr. Culpepper?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He could hear excited kids and sound effects inside. A war game in progress.

“Come in, please.” She opened the door wide. The combat was coming from another room. “I hope you don’t mind the noise.”

“Not at all,” Jerry said, walking into a tastefully decorated living room. A pair of vases filled with flowers stood on a table near the window, framed by lush, raven-colored drapes. The furniture was leather. Pictures of family members, mostly children, dominated the walls. A photo of Aaron Walker, in a commander’s uniform, occupied a spot between the flowers.

She indicated a chair. “Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Culpepper. Can I get you something to drink?”

“No,” he said. “Thank you very much. And my name’s Jerry.”

“I know. I’ve seen you on TV.” She sat down on the sofa. “I’m Jane.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Jane.”

“You’ve seen the journal, right?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I don’t think I have anything to add. I was surprised by the entry. Jolted, as a matter of fact.”

“I understand you’d never really looked through it before?”

“No, sir. Umm, Jerry. I’ve had the journal since my father died. Never really opened it until recently. He was living with us. Here. He had a room in back. A whole wing of the house, in fact.”

“You must have been very proud of him, Jane.”

“Oh, yes. He was a remarkable man. I miss him.” Her eyes fluttered. “You would have liked him.”

“I’m sure I would.” He commented on how attractive the home was, and the neighborhood, then got to the point: “Do you have any idea what he meant by that passage?”

She leaned back and shook her head. She was an attractive woman though there was a sadness in her eyes. A sense, perhaps, that something incredible had happened in her father’s life, and she’d somehow contrived to miss it. “No. I came across it about a year ago. We were housecleaning, trying to make some room, and we started throwing a lot of stuff out. And we discovered the journal. Actually, I’d known that he kept one because I’d seen him sometimes writing in it at night, but I’d forgotten. Then I opened a box, and there it was. Along with some of his books.

“I sat down and looked through it. But I didn’t see much that interested me. Most of it was a record of visits with friends and family members. He’d been keeping it ever since college. I went back and read the sections about Mom, how he’d first been attracted to her, and all that. And some of the stuff about his Navy days.”

“Yes,” I said. “He was a naval pilot.”

She smiled. “A naval aviator, Jerry. Those guys are something else. They get insulted if you call them pilots.” The kids’ voices were getting louder. She got up, excused herself, and went in to make peace. While she was gone, Jerry looked more closely at some of the photos. In one, Jane posed with a man in a dark suit. Her husband, presumably. Something about him suggested that he was a lawyer, but it turned out he was a political consultant. The kids were between six and twelve, two of each gender. It was young male voices creating the nearby clamor.

Then they went quiet, and two boys came out into the living room, looking sheepish. Jane introduced them. They seemed subdued at that point. She’d probably told them that Jerry was directing the next Moon shot or some such thing.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “They get carried away sometimes.”

They went back to their game, and Jane reclaimed her seat. “Where were we, Jerry?” Her brow wrinkled, and she looked down at the rug. “Oh, yes, courting my mom, and some of the Navy stuff—he got shot down in Vietnam. Made it back out to sea, fortunately, before he had to bail out. He got picked up by a destroyer.” She sighed. “A month later, he was back at it.”

“Did you read about his time as an astronaut, Jane?”

“Yes. Though only after that business about Sidney Myshko came out. I’d never really looked at it before that. I knew when he came back from the Moon mission that they’d gone down in the ocean, of course. He was picked up by a destroyer again. But until recently, I wasn’t much interested in looking at the NASA entries because he always seemed kind of disappointed that he didn’t get to do one of the landings. On the Moon. And I—just—didn’t need any more of that.”