“Oh, fuck me,” Jerry said. A guy going in gave him a funny look. He didn’t care. He dug a dime out of the coin pocket on his jeans and got a paper. Where am I going again? he wondered. And what am I doing in this handbasket?

XIV

Jerry sat down on the brickwork supporting a planter and tore through the story. It had holes, bad ones. The reporters thought the lost Russian sub lay at the bottom of the Atlantic, not the Pacific. I saw the Atlantic and the Pacific / And the Pacific wasn’t terrific jangled through Jerry’s head. And both submarines the story identified as possible targets were nuclear powered, which the K-129 wasn’t, and had gone missing after 1970.

Nor did the photo of the Soviet submarine on the front page look much like the one Humpty Dumpty actually sank. But the photo right next to that one was of the Hughes Glomar Explorer.

So the guys from the Times had got a lot of things wrong. But they got the most important one right: the Glomar Explorer wasn’t an ocean-mining ship. It was built to raise a sunken sub.

After a moment, Jerry shook his head. The reporters had missed the most important thing. The story didn’t say a word about spaceships or flying saucers or any of that sci-fi nonsense. Either the men from the Times hadn’t peeled down to that layer of the onion or they had but didn’t believe what they’d found. They might have decided it was bullshit meant to throw them off the sensible, logical Cold War story they’d begun to unravel. And who could blame them if they had?

How much did any of that matter, though? Azorian wasn’t a secret anymore. Maybe Midlothian still was … for now. But what if the two men from the Times kept prodding and poking? Even more to the point, how many other people were or would start looking for answers?

Still almost as much in shock as he had been after Steve showed him the photos of the Midlothian object, Jerry walked to his car. He got on the southbound San Diego Freeway as usual, but instead of staying on it he took the westbound Santa Monica to the city of Santa Monica and RAND Corporation headquarters.

As before, he asked to speak to Stephen Dole. As before, Steve agreed to see him (his Friday visitor’s badge was purple where the Thursday one had been blue, which confirmed that speculation). And, as before, his escort was Angela Simmons. “Oh, hello,” she said, smiling. “I remember you.”

“Likewise.” He smiled back.

“It’s nice you made friends with Doctor Dole while you were working together,” she said, as they walked down the corridor to Steve’s office.