"You haven't spoken to my wife lately, have you?"

"No," she said. "Why do you ask?"

Gordian looked at her another moment.

"Never mind," he said, and scratched behind his ear. "It's nothing important."

TWELVE - CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA APRIL 21, 2001

TWELVE

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA APRIL 21, 2001

ANNIE CAULFIELD HAD BEEN THRUST INTO THE ROLE of NASA spokeswoman often enough to have grown philosophical about it. See it as a burden and it would become one, and when it became one it would start to show on camera, and when it started showing on camera you'd be perceived as touchy and evasive, i.e., having something to hide, and the press corps would pound you without mercy. See it as a sort of friendly jousting match with reporters and interviewers, get too cute, and you would come off as one of the gang, an egotistical, overly glib insider who was enjoying the limelight, cozying up to your questioners for personal advancement--perhaps in anticipation of joining their ranks as a pundit, or expert consultant as it was formally called--and had very likely gotten into cahoots with them to put one over on the average citizen. See it as a means of serving the public's legitimate right to know while doing your best to shape a positive perception of the agency, be honest about the facts you disclosed and equally aboveboard explaining instances when you couldn't make certain information available, and you'd be solidly on Annie's preferred course. Yes, it was always part performance and part ritual ... but a performance could be either sincere or insincere, a ritual of light or shadow, and she tried her earnest best to stay on the side of the angels.

It was a tough balancing act that often put her resilience and composure to the extreme test.

The day after she accepted the assignment of Orion task force leader, her face was all over the televised landscape. In addition to being the subject of pieces on virtually every national and local newscast, she made appearances on two of the three morning coffee klatch shows via satellite, conducted the first of what would be a series of regular afternoon media briefings at the Cape, and was the leadoff guest on cable TV's highest-rated prime-time interview program, again via remote feed.

Her first booking was a five-minute spot with the same Gary Somebody-or-other who'd snared her for the cameras just before the shuttle launch was to have taken place. A genial man in his thirties, his plain-vanilla good looks and honey-voiced manner contributed to his talent for reducing conversations about wars, disasters, and the latest showbiz buzz alike into a homogeneous puree that washed down smoothly with breakfast and made him a consistent Nielsen winner. While Gary was certainly opportunistic, Annie had to admit that she sort of liked him, finding him to be further removed from a Gila monster than many of his peers, and a whole lot sharper than his soft and fuzzy veneer let on.