and was eager to conclude field tests in Guam with a crack team of scientists from Japan and Britain. The resolution capabilities of this digital satellite imaging—within ten feet of an object—had massive global implications. Armenian Jewish, Avra Salarian had top secret security clearance; however, her project conflicted with Ozay’s political perspective. Although he saw the GPS project as primarily a means of spying on people, Avra nevertheless immediately felt an emotional connection with him. In the course of events, Ozay and Avra worked on various aspects of the GPS program together, particularly the data receivers.
Ozay’s security clearance was pending background checks. At the annual company picnic, he and Avra’s relationship went to another level. At first they tried to be circumspect., but escalation was inevitable. The occasional clasping of fingers in inconspicuous ways, a hand resting briefly on the shoulder or the waist, caught the attention of white male colleagues and changed the climate for Ozay and Avra. After an unexpected meeting with her boss, Mr. Greely, Avra arranged to meet Ozay at a Palo Alto restaurant bar.
“Greely called me in this morning,” Avra said in a barely controlled voice. “The bastard!”
“What happened?”
“He threatened me! He said that my clearance put strict limitations on what I say and who I can say it to. He found your file missing. I told him that I had it, but convincing him that I wasn’t deliberately holding up your final evaluation was tougher than I expected. He told me to think seriously about actions that might jeopardize my future at TEVEX. Then I told him I thought he was being vindictive about me rejecting his previous, obnoxious come-ons.”
“Hell! Am I surprised?”
“What’s ironic,” Avra said with the beginning of a smile, “is that we haven’t even slept together yet.”
“It’s what they suspect we’ve done,” Ozay commented. “So maybe we shouldn’t disappoint them.” They both smiled.
“I have a confession to make.” Ozay squirmed, searching for the right words. “I lied on my application. I have a 4-F draft classification.”
“You know, Ozay? At this moment, I don’t give a flying fuck!”
Their hands met in the center of the table; their eyes scoured every square inch of each other’s hands and faces, soaking each other in. Ozay could see the twitching of Avra’s upper lip as she fixed her gaze on his mouth.
“My place?” Avra asked, knowing the answer. Greely had pushed them right where they wanted to go. They made victorious, passionate love that evening.
Before Greely and the others knew about Ozay and Avra’s relationship, Ozay was supposed to be a part of a GPS research team on the US sector of the island of Guam for two weeks. By this time Ozay had demonstrated his his quick mastery of the company’s GPS receivers and his exceptional skills at making systems work. Ozay and Avra were the only ones from the Milpitas office going to Guam. The GPS project used a trilateralization system, very similar to triangularization in tracing telephone calls, with a minimum of three satellites providing digitized images of a portion of the earth; it’s operation required highly skilled personnel. The British team,whose expertise was in atomic clocks, along with a Japanese team expert in signal distortion calculations, joined Avra and Ozay, who were there to test TEVEX’s ground receivers.
The weeks went by fast, the TEVEX systems worked perfectly and it turned out that Ozay was glad for the trip to be over. For one thing, he was getting too fond of the local kava kava drink. More importantly, the two weeks had proved one thing: he and Avra weren’t as compatible as they had thought. Good friends, yes, but nothing else. When Ozay returned, he was terminated: Greely had found out about his draft classification. Later, Avra left TEVEX to work for a solar technology firm in Santa Barbara, California. Ozay decided to go into real estate—buying fixer-uppers to resell.
His first fixer-upper was in Berkeley, where he met Shelly Wright and impulsively married her two weeks after they met. Ttwo years into the marriage, after their second child was born, irreconcilable differences led to a separation. Sex had been their opiate, their answer to every crisis. Their love was like a Roman candle—great in the beginning, but then quickly fizzling out. Stress levels were high, with the whole family living in an old, unfinished fixer-upper while trying to extensively remodel it at the same time. And Ozay’s own inexperience led to cost overruns and errors; he had simply overextended himself.
To make the house note every month, Ozay worked on the side as a handyman/carpenter, while Shelly worked part-time for a travel agency. Their marriage was really over even before the first child came along, and they both knew it—they just couldn’t figure out how to end it. Finally, the house was sold and they divorced four years after their marriage. Ozay had more than tripled his money, but he needed something different in his life. Crowded, dirty city life had become stifling. By now Ozay had been single for almost two years, helping to support the kids and taking them on weekends. Not quite 40, he felt it was time for a major change: get out of the city.
Ozay finished sorting the magazines, letters and photos in his wooden Carnation Milk Company crate and continued packing.
Disappearance
Ozay had had his fill of other people’s agendas. Having eked out a degree in electronic engineering and given the tech world a whirl that was less than fruitful, he now chose self-employment. His public school experience had at one point encouraged him to aspire to a secure government job, but it was a path he did not pursue. At the same time, he realized that unless your parents owned a business, entrepreneurial support just didn’t happen. In the mid-sixties, Ozay had moved to Berkeley from LA to get away from big-city congestion, sprawl, and smog and southern California conservative politics. Berkeley was caught in the middle of the East Bay’s development surge, particularly evident in Contra Costa County and southward in San Leandro and Hayward in Alameda County. A few trips to the Marin coast whetted Ozay’s appetite for open space, where the wilderness defined communities, not the other way around. On one visit he found the quiet ocean community of Bolinas; it was not only a tolerant place, but the rustic beauty of this farming and artist’s town made it a place he felt he could live permanently.
Unexpectedly, while packing, Ozay received a call from his Los Angeles past. Though more than ten years had passed, Marina James’s British accent still sounded familiar through his Pacific Bell handset, a line that would soon be disconnected. Marina and Ozay had had a secret affair—secret because she was married—that ended on friendly terms, so her call wasn’t out of the ordinary. Except for the hiatus, her reason for calling was.
“Lenny is missing, Ozay! At least that’s the way it appears,” Marina said, still with a British flair in her voice—even after more than ten years in the US—and with a decided urgency.
“Marina, it’s good to hear from you, but what do you mean, missing?” Ozay asked.
“Lenny’s gone with no indication as to where. No note! Nothing!”
“Aren’t you two divorced?”
“Yes, but the separation was amicable. As you probably remember, I always did most of the paperwork for his various businesses. So, I continued to do a little work for him, if it interested me. In fact, I had just finished some research on American Indian land grant treaties, and I was supposed to drop a packet off at his house two nights ago. I drove by to deliver the work, and I found the door wide open, no Lenny, no sign of struggle, and nothing touched or stolen. It seemed as if he’d stepped out for a while and accidentally left the door open. Ozay…”
“Marina, did you call—.”
Marina continued, cutting in, “I think he may have been kidnapped.”
“Now, wait a minute! Did I miss something? Motive, maybe? Why would someone—?”
“Lenny may have had dealings with some shady people lately. He was pretty broken up over the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. I don’t know if you know it, but he was no more than two feet away from Bobby when he was shot, and afterward he almost lost it,