"Yes, we do have a Learjet coming up for bid, next Monday in fact," the young secretary in the DEA Disposals Office in Houston told her on the phone the next morning. It hadn’t taken much time to find out where it was located. "I’m afraid I don’t know much about it," she continued, "But I don’t know much about airplanes, anyway."

"Who would I talk to about it?" Jennlynn asked.

"Oh, Mr. Rexroth would be who you need to talk to, but he’s out of the office until next Monday," she said cheerfully. "He’s on vacation in Las Vegas. I do know the plane is at Bronco Aviation at Hobby Airport. There might be someone there who could help you with it."

"Thank you," she replied. "I might just have to check that out." Maybe that’s an omen, she thought, hanging up the telephone. Bronco Aviation was where the 310 was parked, and she’d spent the night in a motel just up the street. She hadn’t noticed a Learjet sitting around, but it could have been inside.

She grabbed the few things from her room, went to the motel office to turn in the key, and managed to get the courtesy car to take her back to Bronco, where she hunted up the sales manager. "I understand the DEA has a Learjet here that they’re putting up for bid," she said. "Do you know anything about it?"

"Not much," the man said. "I do know it was seized as part of a drug operation. Drug runners usually use stuff like 411s, or QueenAirs or like that, and the DEA often uses the ones they capture as chase planes. So, some druggie got the bright notion of using this Lear to outrun them. It worked several times, but the Feds wised up. A Lear can outrun a QueenAir, but it doesn’t do a damn for outrunning an F-16."

"Win a few, lose a few," Jennlynn said. "Any chance I can look at it?"

"You can look at it, but I don’t have the key to get in it, so I can’t show you the books or anything," he said. "It’s an old one, a ’67, 24A model. I will say it looks like a pretty decent bird. I guess the bid date on it is in a month or so. I’m thinking we might even try to bid on it, just to roll it over."

"I don’t know," Jennlynn said, realizing that this guy didn’t have the piece of information she’d learned from the guy up at the Redlite Saturday night and confirmed by the secretary this morning, and given the circumstances, she wasn’t going to wise him up. "Seems to me that with a drug bird, you don’t know for sure what the deal is."

"That’s true," he said. "But in general, the druggies want the planes to be capable of making the flight. I mean, it goes down, that’s an awful lot of cash dissolving in salt water."

"Yeah, I hadn’t thought of it that way," Jennlynn agreed. She gave him a big smile. "Can you show me where it is?"

"Of course," he smiled back at the good-looking babe who knew something about planes. She knew what he was thinking as there weren’t a lot of looker-type pilots running around, after all, and who knew what the chances were? A better chance than he thought if he’d come to the right place in Nevada, but he didn’t need to know that, even though he was kind of cute.

They got in his car and drove to a hangar about halfway around the field. He unlocked the side door of the hangar, then hit the switch to open the main door. As the sunlight hit it, Jennlynn was impressed on first glance.

It was a Learjet, and that said quite a bit. While not the earliest of the business jets, it was easily the best looking one ever made. It had a shark-like beauty to it that made it look like it was going five hundred miles an hour still sitting in the hangar. It was small in the cabin – she knew there was nowhere near enough room to stand up – but that helped make it fairly easy on jet fuel. While there were newer bizjets out there, better ones in many ways, she knew that the older Learjets were considered to be sort of the classic sports cars of the field. One look told her why.

This was a good-looking airplane with the appearance of being well maintained. Its white paint had the shiny deep gloss of Imron, the best aircraft paint in the business, and she didn’t notice any obvious chips or scrapes. Slowly, she walked around it. Without being able to look inside, there was no way of telling a lot of things, but some of the things she knew to look for on the outside showed that the airplane had been well taken care of – no obvious leaks of fuel or hydraulic fluid, no dents. "Not bad," she said. "Any idea of what the avionics package is like?"

"I got a glance at it, and about all I can say is that it struck me that it wasn’t very up to date," he said. "I doubt it was original, but it hasn’t had much done to it for a while. You wouldn’t expect druggies to worry much about avionics, anyway."

"I suppose not," she said. "I’ve seen what I needed to see. I’d heard it was something of a dog and I’d hoped I could get a deal, but it looks too rich for my blood." That was a blatant lie, but one with a purpose.

"Yeah, it’ll go high," he said. "I don’t think it’s been advertised yet."

"Something to think about," she shrugged. "Oh, well, thanks for letting me have a look. I guess you can button it up now and run me back to the office. I need to call a cab, I’ve got a couple errands to run."

"Sure thing, glad to be of service," he said as he set the hangar door to closing.

Damn it, she thought. The fix is probably in, so the fix is in. Even if I do bid, the bid will probably get lost. On the other hand, it costs me a cab ride to the Federal building and back to file a bid, and get it hand stamped as bid received. It’s a long shot, but it might be worth it.

* * *

The following Friday evening, seats 3A and 3B in the first-class compartment of the Southern Airlines Washington-Phoenix redeye were not happy places. Stan had the window seat, not that there was much to see in the darkness. Next to him, Jennlynn was gloomy herself. Three days of meetings in the Pentagon had left them with no clear answer on anything to do with the Butterfly.

"Really," Stan sighed, in a voice so low only she could hear. "It’s up to them. I wish we hadn’t sold the idea so well in the first place."

The amazing part was that the project still showed signs of life, despite the seven failures of the core system. The basic idea had a lot of potential, once it had been thought through a bit – it could easily be more than a way to take out a surface-to-air missile. So, while the discussions had not been all that promising, the Pentagon people had been reluctant to give it up.

"It comes back down to what Mike said right at the beginning," Jennlynn nodded and whispered back. "Too much power in too small a space. Let’s face it, Helotes and Greenlee were talking out their ass."

"Right," Stan agreed, hearing her sneer the names of the two consultants who had been canned in the middle of the Butterfly project. "You have to figure that if you get the first brick in crooked and don’t correct it, you wind up with a stupid looking building. It’s clear to me they were wrong in the first place, so we got off on the wrong foot and stayed that way."

"That leads us right back to the question of whether it can be done at all," she nodded. "It’s an open question, since they were the ones who were largely responsible for the feasibility study."

"True," he nodded. "What do you say that we just put the project on the back burner for the moment? We can take some of the man-hours we’ve been expending there and throw it at some of the civilian stuff we’ve let get backlogged while we’ve wrestled with this monster. Then, if they decide to fund us again, we start over, if we can figure out a different approach."

"It’s still an operational program, so I don’t think we want to shut it down entirely," she observed. "I think maybe Monday I’ll start getting together a few small groups in-house to just sit around and see if there are clean-paper alternatives we haven’t taken a look at."

"Worth a try," Stan observed. "The problem probably is that Helotes and Greenlee have polluted our thinking, too. I think we need someone to take a real fresh approach to it without the preconceived notions that we’ve allowed ourselves to get stuck with. In any case, I think we all need to step back from the damn thing and think about something else for a while. I realize that amounts to giving up, at least temporarily, but like the song says, know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em. Piss."

He was silent for a moment, then glanced out the window at the lights passing below. Jennlynn leaned back in her seat and just mentally tried to get the last few days out of her mind. Engineering was one thing, she could do that, but the politics and salesmanship was another thing. She did not like that as much, and she’d been having to do more and more of it. It was even worse for Stan; though he liked to think of himself as an engineer, he was mired so heavily in the sales and administrative end of the business that about all he could add anymore was perspective. This trip to Washington hadn’t been the first; there’d been more time spent in airline seats than she liked. Like many pilots, she didn’t much care about flying on airliners anyway, since someone else was in control of the flying. It wasn’t logical – commercial airline pilots are highly trained and qualified, and she knew it – but there it was.

For the first time in a couple days the Learjet crossed her mind. That would have put a different spin on this trip to begin with. She couldn’t believe that she was going to win the bid on that white one down in Houston; she’d known from the moment she’d heard about it that the bid was fixed. But it had cost her little to try and had gotten her into thinking in a new channel, and while she’d been home Tuesday evening, she’d found a several-weeks’-old copy of Trade-A-Plane, just to see what the market was like. There were a few under a million dollars, and that still seemed awful steep. She’d scribbled a few back-of-the-envelope numbers on operational costs, still largely guesswork but at least on paper rather than in her head, and they just didn’t quite work out, at least not with a bird with that kind of capital cost.

It would have been nice to be up at the Redlite this weekend, but it was already Friday night, so if she left to go up there tomorrow it would only be for one night, hardly worth the effort. Besides, until the new expansion was in, George and Shirley were keeping the place full of girls on the weekends, so there might not be a room for her this weekend anyway.

She made a mental note to get together with Mike and talk it out, maybe over the weekend, maybe some night next week. There was no rush; it pretty obviously was something that wasn’t going to happen real soon, but maybe up the road a ways. When the time came, it would be better if she had some idea of the real numbers, rather than just guesses. And a lot depended on what happened with the Butterfly, too.

Most of the time she liked engineering, but right now it wasn’t what she wanted to be doing. Oh, to be a kid again, that first summer at Bettye’s eight years ago! That may have been the happiest period of her life. What had happened to Claudia, to Cindy? Shirley and George said they hadn’t heard a word in years. Oh, to have things that simple again – or, even better, to just be with Will, out riding fence in the Nevada desert. Right now, that would be heaven. There ought to be some way out of this rut . . .

One of the things that Jennlynn hated most in life was the telephone interrupting her when she was trying to think about something, or talking with someone, or whatever. Besides the loss of concentration it cost, there was something about it that seemed very rude, and that bothered her.

So when the phone on her desk went off early Monday morning while she was having a conference with three other Butterfly engineers, trying to generate a new approach, she was understandably irritated. People around Lambdatron had learned it was better not to phone her, because they didn’t want to face the "What is it?" she’d snarled into the phone.

"Is this Jennlynn Swift?" a man on the other end of the line said.

"Yes it is," she replied icily.

"I’m Kirk Rexroth of the DEA in Houston. I’m informing you that you are the high bidder on Learjet N2030G. You have forty-eight hours to make a settlement of $107,622 before the bid acceptance will be withdrawn."

"What?" she said, hardly able to believe her ears. She’d beaten the fix, and this Rexroth guy was obviously trying to weasel out! Better try to play innocent. "I was told the bid opening wasn’t going to be until next month some time."

"Whoever told you that misinformed you," the man said in a hard tone. "If you’re not prepared to settle on the bid, perhaps you’d like to withdraw."

"No, no," she said. "I’ll just have to work it out. I make the settlement in your office in Houston, right? I take it you want a cashier’s check?"

"That is correct," he replied, rather snottily, Jennlynn thought. He probably blew his payoff money at the slots in Vegas, and now he’s caught coming and going.

"Out of curiosity, how many bids were filed?" she asked.

"There were four," he said. "Yours was the highest by a hundred and twenty-one dollars."

"Might as well cut it close," she smiled, thinking that she must not have been the only person that idiot druggie had shot off his mouth to. "All right, I’ll see what I can do about finding that much money on short notice. Is there anything else?"

"No, that will be all. Please inform us if you decide to withdraw before the time limit."

"Thanks for letting me know," she said, trying to sound contrite, but as soon as she hung up the phone, she just about split the ears of everyone in the meeting with a "Yeeeeeee-HAAH!"

"I take it that didn’t have anything to do with the Butterfly," Bob said dryly as she quickly punched the number for her stockbroker into the phone.

"Nope," she replied, then said into the phone, "Hi, Marty, this is Jennlynn . . . just fine, thanks . . . Marty, I have an emergency need for a hundred and ten thousand in cash. Take whatever is weak and roll it off, right away . . . yeah, Microsoft, I don’t care, I just want to pick up a check in an hour or so . . . thanks, Marty, I owe you on this one. Catch you in a few."

She put a finger on the hook of the phone. "You guys throw it around by yourselves for a while," she said. "We’ll kick it around in a couple days." She lifted her finger and started punching numbers again, and added with a smile, "The game’s afoot!"

No one moved to get up; the curiosity was intense, so no one said anything either.

Jennlynn’s next phone call was to Mike Hanneman. "Mike, how are you today?"

"Pretty decent," he said. "I was just getting ready to go out and shoot a round for the hell of it. Has something come up?"

"Something has," she said. "Mike, do I remember you saying you had a fair amount of time in the C-21?"

"A couple hundred hours," he said. "I flew one off and on for a while. That was how I was maintaining my currency when I was commanding the AWACS crew."

"How different is it from the Lear 24A?"

"Not real different," he said. "The C-21 is the same as the Lear 35, which has a slightly longer fuselage than the 24. The big difference is that the 35 has the Garrett TFE-731 turbofan engines, while the 24 has the older GE CJ-610s."

"You wouldn’t have any problem flying a 24, then?"

"Shouldn’t have," he said. "I’d be a little rusty, but no big deal."

"Good enough," she said. "Tell Nancy I’m borrowing you for a while. We need to get heading for Houston this afternoon, tonight at the latest."

"Joe has the 310 in San Francisco, he won’t be back until tomorrow," Mike reminded her.

"Then we’ll have to go airline," she said. "But, we need to be in Houston, the sooner the better, not later than tomorrow morning."

"What’s in Houston?" he asked.

"The Learjet 24A that I’m in the process of buying."

"THE WHAT?"

"Learjet 24A," she laughed. "It was a drug bird; the DEA busted it with some help from the Air Force, seized it, and put it up for bid. I bid pretty low and didn’t think there was a chance in hell of getting it, but the guy just called and said I’ve got forty-eight hours to close the deal."

"That doesn’t sound right," he frowned. "There’s something fishy."

"There is," she said, and glanced up at the three sets of eyes that were rapt with curiosity at the discussion. "I pretty much know what it is, but now’s not the time to tell you."

* * *

"I’m sorry, Miss Swift," Kirk Rexroth said in the DEA Disposals office in the Federal Building in Houston the next morning. "This is a cashier’s check, but it’s not drawn on a local bank."

"Come on," she replied. "A cashier’s check is a cashier’s check."

"I’m sorry, we can’t honor that as payment."

Mike had followed Jennlynn into the office and then stood behind her like he was waiting to take care of business. "This is going to hold me up," he said to the girl behind the counter. "Can I borrow your phone for a second?"

"I suppose," she said. "So long as it’s a local call."

"It’s not, but I’ll put it on the credit card." She handed him the phone and he started punching numbers, while Jennlynn and Rexroth continued to go around – but their verbal fencing came to an instant halt when he said, rather loudly, "Ben Rosenbloom, please. This is General Mike Hanneman."

Jennlynn got an evil grin on her face as Rexroth turned toward the Hanneman and sighed, "All right, General. That won’t be necessary. How do you know Mr. Rosenbloom?"

"He was in the 304th with me years ago," Mike grinned, hanging up the phone. "He decided to do a double dip, rather than just put his feet up. You know how it is; some people can’t get enough of serving their country."

"I suppose," he sighed. "All right, Miss Swift, it’s irregular but I think we can accept this check. The aircraft is down at Bronco Aviation, and the logs are in it."

It took a rather sullen half hour for the paperwork to get done, and Jennlynn knew there was still more to do at the Federal Aviation Administration office, but both she and Mike were grinning when they walked out the door. "Looked to me like a classic case of being between a rock and a hard spot," Mike laughed.

"A couple of rocks," Jennlynn joined in. "As long as you’re throwing the clichés around, I’d have to say that was more a case of counting his chickens before they were hatched. Do you really know this Rosenbloom guy?"

"I met him a couple times, and I was hoping I could bullshit my way through. If I hadn’t, Rexroth would have wound up talking to a dead phone."

"General Hanneman," she laughed, "You’re a handy guy to have around. I think I owe you one."

"You still luck out," he snorted. "Hell, Nancy would kill me if I tried to collect."

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