The Cyclops Conspiracy by David Perry

pictures of the dry dock and the aircraft carrier.”
    * * *
    The gleam of midtown gave way to older edifices as Jason drove south along Warwick past Mercury. It was an urban purgatory, where well-dressed white men were eyed with suspicion and targets for a quick, knife-brandishing roll. The only seedling of optimism was a rescue mission, feeding and housing the homeless in exchange for exposure to the word of the Lord.
    The first site was an abandoned, dilapidated store on a corner lot, which leaned precariously. Intersections of joints and miters formed parallelograms and trapezoids instead of right angles—a geometry teacher’s delight. New graffiti was being painted over the old. A drunk crumpled near one corner was sipping an unknown spirit from an equally crumpled brown bag. Jason walked the site, snapping photographs.
    The final two spots weren’t much better.
    When he’d finished at the sites, Jason parked the Mustang on Riverdale Road on an escarpment overlooking the dry dock.
    It would be his final stop of the day. As he climbed out of the Mustang, he’d come to a decision. He would call a commercial real estate agent to search for some realistic sites, and he would push Lilyto abandon this part of town. His job was to tell her when she was on the wrong road and get her back on course.
    Jason scanned the sight before him. Penrose Gatling Shipbuilders was the only shipbuilder in the nation capable of building aircraft carriers. It had grown steadily over more than a century on the James River, gorging itself on fat government contracts. Locals simply called it the Yard. It had begun as the Jamestown Dry Dock Company in 1902. The first warship had slid into the James River six years later. And in the hundred-plus years since, the Yard had constructed thirty-eight aircraft carriers (including the one Jason looked at now), eighteen battleships, seventy-five submarines, and a host of destroyers, cruisers, and landing ships.
    Visible for miles, the words
Penrose Gatling
were scrawled across the beam of the crimson gantry crane, towering two hundred feet over the dry dock. Beneath the crane, in the flooded space, sat the aircraft carrier
Jacob R. Hope
, surrounded by smaller, but still enormous, boom cranes. Workers scurried like ants about on her decks. The number painted on the island superstructure, eighty-one, stretched ten stories. Painted and spiffy, the massive vessel dwarfed surrounding homes and shipyard workshops. Local newspapers and news programs were carrying reports in preparation for its christening, Saturday, October 7. Ten days away.
    Jason twisted the two-foot-long, 300 mm telephoto lens and clicked it onto the body. He lifted the camera, rotated the focusing ring, and the fuzzy view came into sharp focus. He clicked off several frames from different angles. Ten minutes later, he put on the smaller 80 mm. As he finished up, a blue pickup truck with a swirling, yellow light pulled to a stop a few feet away.
    “Hey, what are you doing, bud?” A rotund, squirrel-cheeked man sat behind the wheel. A lump of chewing tobacco was rammed into one cheek. His face was red and mottled, no doubt from nightly visits to local pubs. He spit a long, brown trail of tobacco juice on the ground near Jason’s feet.
    “Just taking a few photographs,” he declared weakly. The word
Security
was stenciled above the Penrose Gatling logo on the door of the cab.
    “You wouldn’t be taking pictures of the Yard, now, would ya, pal?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Stay right there,” he commanded, lifting a radio handset. He barked instructions. The radio crackled in response. In less than a minute, two unmarked, official-looking sedans skidded to a stop near them. Four grim-looking men in dark suits jumped out, and encircled Jason.

C HAPTER 15
    Plastic visitor badges hung from breast pockets and signaled that these men were not shipyard regulars. Jason spotted a gold, star-shaped badge clipped to one man’s belt, portending