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Jensen say about this?”
    “He said to ask you what you could do for them.” Any ease that had been in Parsons’s voice before was entirely gone.
    A long, terse silence followed this exchange. Hal and Parsons stared each other down. The men couldn’t be more different, Parsons with his dark suits and his sallow complexion, Hal big and jovial.
    Hal wasn’t a bad boss per se . He was hands off, which indicated he believed in her, but it also meant he wasn’t concerned with the daily minutiae. He wanted the work done well, and he wanted the credit. He was more concerned with his relationship with Stan Jensen and the computing industry beyond ASD, and he didn’t want to be embarrassed. That was his bottom line.
    She’d worked for worse men before and probably would again. She could handle him.
    Right now, clashing with Parsons, his good old boy charms were brittle and thinning.
    Then they cracked. Hal looked away, pursing his lips and picking at his cuticle. “What’s their problem anyway?”
    “Rodger will take you through it.”
    The guys from retrieval explained the problem, which related to the angle of reentry, probability, and search grids for the ships after splash down. As the unmanned testing phase for Perseid wound down, it was suddenly occurring to them that finding the capsule, and the astronaut, in the wide blue ocean wasn’t going to be easy.
    Charlie rolled her eyes. It was an eminently predictable problem, which was probably why, as the presentation progressed, Parsons gripped his pen with enough force to turn his fingertips white. He was always thinking ten steps ahead, so why wasn’t everyone else?
    At least, she assumed that was the cause of his rigid posture.
    When Rodger Jardinier had finished speaking, Parsons looked at Hal. “What do you think?”
    Hal shrugged sanguinely. “I’m sympathetic, but we’re overworked enough as it is. They’ll figure something out, and if they don’t, Joe Reynolds will spend an extra hour in a life raft.”
    An hour if they were lucky.
    Parsons seemed even less impressed than she was. “We can have this conversation with Jensen if you want, but I’m presenting this to you this way as a courtesy. This isn’t an assignment you can turn down. You will help retrieval with the calculations and probabilities.”
    “If I don’t want to, I’m not going to help them find their car keys.”
    There was a gasp from behind her—maybe from Jefferies. He was certainly someone who’d never dream of crossing Parsons.
    As much as she was enjoying the territorial spectacle the men were playing out, there was no need for this. She cleared her throat. “I don’t want to speak out of turn, but it seems to me—”
    “Then don’t,” Hal snapped.
    At that, Parsons’s expression went murderous, his fist tightening on his pen as if it were the hilt of a knife. “Do it, Hal. Just get it done. I want spec notes by tomorrow.”
    He was up and out of the room before Charlie could exhale. His secretary, a pale blonde woman, stood, blushed, and tripped after him. She evidently had never practiced dramatic exits.
    There was a brief, stunned silence. But not too brief—Parsons’s temper wasn’t unknown, although this had been a bit extreme today. The folks from retrieval, the engineers, and all the rest rose and followed. Rodger gave her what appeared to be a sympathetic smile on his way out, but she didn’t need it. She wasn’t even particularly miffed that Hal had barked at her. There wasn’t room for egos in this—but she seemed to be the only person who knew that.
    After everyone had left, the clock on the wall ticked off eleven seconds.
    Hal at last swiveled in his chair and looked at her. “Don’t ever contradict me in a meeting again.”
    “I didn’t.”
    “You were about to.”
    Next time, she’d let him keep measuring out the rope for his hanging. “But I didn’t. I agree with you.”  
    That definitely surprised him. “You do?”
    “It’s