Headcase, p.15
Headcase, page 15
She hesitated. But whatever her explanation was for being here, I was sure she didn’t want her boss to hear it.
She slotted the test tube she’d been holding into a rack. A fine grey powder settled inside.
‘I’ll be back in twenty minutes,’ she said.
Laurie glared at her. ‘Make it fifteen. I’ll need you as soon as the sample tray cools down.’
Parget rubbed some sanitiser on her hands, like an Olympic weightlifter preparing to grip the bar, and followed us out the door.
‘There’s a rec room on level two,’ she said. ‘Private, at this time of day.’
I stayed close to her as she climbed the stairs, in case she tried to run from me again. She didn’t.
The rec room had a beer fridge, a pinball machine, a pool table, some beanbags and no people. It was the kind of place management showed to prospective employees to lure them in but then fired them if they ever used it.
Parget picked up a pool cue. ‘You play?’
‘No,’ Zara said.
I indicated to my prosthesis. Parget did a double take, then shrugged and chalked the tip of the cue, avoiding our gaze.
‘Almost everyone here plays,’ she said. ‘They spend all their work time calculating trajectories and collisions, then spend their breaks doing basically the same thing. They’re good at it, but they take forever lining up their shots. They all suck at pinball, because the machine doesn’t wait for them to be ready.’
The way she said this implied that she was good at pinball—and at thinking on her feet. I got the feeling she was deliberately running down the clock. Using up the fifteen minutes her boss gave us.
‘You changed your name,’ I said.
She nodded.
‘Why?’
‘You try being the girl who got kidnapped. It was all anyone wanted to talk about.’ Parget gathered the balls into a frame up one end of the table. ‘I figured it would die down, but it never did. Every time I met someone new they’d google me, and the whole mess would drop into my lap again. Everyone was so goddamn sorry for me. I needed a fresh start. New friends.’
‘New family?’ I added.
She glanced sharply at me, then turned back to the table. ‘My dad was already controlling,’ she admitted. ‘After the kidnapping, he got a million times worse. He put a lock on my door, location tracking on my phone, cameras all around the house. Said it was for my safety. He wanted regular urine samples to test for drugs. He said that was for my safety, too. I left when I turned eighteen.’
I remembered Jeb Parget. The coldness in his eyes, the rage in his voice when he asked me: Who took my daughter?
‘So he doesn’t know about your new name,’ I said.
‘He’s probably figured out that I have one. But he doesn’t know what it is.’ She took a shot. The cue ball shattered the triangle, colours rolling in all directions.
‘What about your mom?’
Parget said nothing in a way that said everything.
‘Why did you run when you saw me?’ I asked.
‘I recognised you. I thought you might have told Garcia who I was. It didn’t seem smart to stick around.’
‘Garcia doesn’t recognise you?’
‘We never met.’ She hesitated.‘Except when he kidnapped me, but that was just a few frantic seconds, and it was seven years ago. I don’t think he’d remember.’
‘He would have seen pictures,’ Zara put in.
Parget gestured at her shaved scalp. ‘I don’t look much like my picture these days.’
‘Do you remember the kidnapping?’ I asked.
She shook her head. I still didn’t believe her.
After I got my reward, I didn’t follow Parget’s case closely. But I had heard from Luzhin that she had written a letter to the judge, saying she’d forgiven Garcia, and begging for leniency. She’d sent a similar letter to the parole board. It was thanks to her that he’d been released so early. Luzhin had been disgusted.
Victims sometimes became sympathetic to their kidnappers during long periods of captivity. Stockholm syndrome. But not after ‘a few frantic seconds’.
Zara was looking around the rec room. ‘You ended up working in the same building as your kidnapper.’
‘Dr Laurie is a genius.’ Parget made a shot, pocketing a ball. ‘She was on the team that invented lab-grown meat. Since then she’s made several important breakthroughs. Scientists all over the world have been working on intravenous oxygenation. She’s miles ahead of all of them.’
‘Don’t pretend that’s why you’re here, though,’ I said.
I could see Parget wanting to pretend exactly that. ‘No,’ she admitted finally.
‘So how’d it happen?’
‘I got a scholarship to study at the University of Texas in Austin. The application essay was supposed to be about hardship—I guess none of the other candidates had a story as good as mine.’
I wondered how it had felt, running away to college to escape from a trauma, only to need that same trauma to get accepted.
‘I was studying pre-med when I heard Garcia worked here, at Space City,’ Parget went on. ‘So I went for an internship. That was actually much harder than the scholarship. You wouldn’t think there’d be much competition for an unpaid position, but actually it was a long time before my application was accepted.’
I leaned on the edge of the pool table. ‘And NASA never found out that you weren’t who you said you were?’
Parget glared at me. ‘The name change is legal. I am Rachel Cochran now. NASA found out about my past, but I explained my situation to Rob Cho, who’s in charge of vetting candidates, and he cleared me to work.’
‘Did you tell him about the kidnapping?’ Zara said. ‘Or just about your father?’
Parget bounced the cue on the toe of her shoe, not speaking. I could guess the answer. Cho wouldn’t have let a victim work right downstairs from her kidnapper.
‘Why would you want to work anywhere near Garcia?’ I asked.
‘I wanted to find out why he did it.’
‘And have you?’ Luzhin had never found any child exploitation materials on Garcia’s computer, or any links to human traffickers. The motive for the kidnapping had remained a mystery.
‘No.’ Parget pocketed one last shot and then checked her watch. ‘And that’s our fifteen minutes.’
We walked back downstairs. Something seemed off about the whole conversation, but it wasn’t until after Parget disappeared into the lab that I realised what it was. She’d never thanked me for rescuing her.
•
‘Well,’ Zara said, ‘all that had nothing to do with anything.’
I wasn’t so sure. I stared out the car window, looking at the distant forest as we drove towards the museum. Still no sign of a parachute, or an ejector seat, or a fugitive.
I turned to my phone and quickly searched for Faith Parget, Lilah’s mom. Based on Lilah’s reaction, I expected to find she’d been murdered by Jeb. But there was nothing on the crime sites. A broader search turned up an obit. Apparently she’d died of a stroke. She was survived by her ‘loving husband and treasured daughter’.
‘A body shows up in the middle of the night right next to the office of a kidnapper and his victim,’ I said, mostly to myself. ‘That can’t be a coincidence.’
‘How could a dead Chinese fighter pilot have anything to do with an American kidnapping that happened seven years ago?’
I had no answer for that.
‘I’m sorry, Blake,’ Zara said. ‘Your copilot theory didn’t pan out. Now it’s our job to make sure everyone believes the cover story about the diabetic coma.’
I’d been so sure. The footprint, the swept dirt, the way the body had been posed—everything suggested the dead man had been dragged to the rock yard by someone who knew him. But without evidence of a second Chinese pilot, I couldn’t make the story add up. It was infuriating to be back to square one.
I sighed. ‘Run me through the details again.’
Zara turned the wheel, taking us towards the parking lot. At the front of the museum, a pair of workers in hi-vis were installing a new window, while a third looked on with a clipboard.
‘The body was a technician named Brian Jane,’ Zara said. ‘He went for a run wearing the flight suit to test it out and then lapsed into a diabetic coma. He’s in the hospital, recuperating. He has a birth certificate, a social security number, employment records and a Facebook profile. No one remembers him because he wasn’t here very long, and no one will ever see him again because he’s about to get transferred to DC.’
‘Why was he wearing a Chinese flight suit?’
‘He wasn’t. He was wearing a backpack with a Cantonese slogan printed on it, and witnesses got confused.’
It was a pretty good cover. ‘But the news already ran stories about a Chinese astronaut. Won’t Beijing realise we found their pilot?’
‘I’m just telling you what our orders are.’ Zara eased the car into a bay and shut off the engine. ‘We need to seed that rumour at the ground level of the organisation. It’s like toppling a dictator—you don’t replace someone at the top and hope that the country as a whole starts behaving the way you want. That never works. Instead, you speak with the people at the bottom and get them talking among themselves. By the time anyone starts listening to what they’re saying, it’s too late. There’s too much momentum.’
She said this as though it was an everyday analogy.
We got out of the car and headed into the museum. After signing in at the front desk—I stole another free pen—we went walking. Last time we had gone around to the right, exploring the building counterclockwise. This time we went left, looking for people we hadn’t already met and deceived.
I slowed down as we walked past something that looked a bit like a giant shipping crate. The door had fat hinges and a circular window cut into it. The hinges opened outwards—I could see faint scratches in the concrete floor where the door had dragged across it.
I peered through the window. It was dark inside, but I could tell the glass was thick, as though the shipping container was soundproof, and airtight. Two mechanical claws dangled in the shadows, like in an arcade machine. There were two buttons next to the door. One was marked DECOMPRESS. The other said RECOMPRESS.
Zara noticed I wasn’t following. ‘Weren’t you in a hurry, like, five seconds ago?’
I tapped my knuckles on the side of the crate. ‘What do you think this is?’
‘Are you sure you used to be an investigator?’ She pointed to a sign: Hypobaric Chamber.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but what does that mean?’
‘Can I help you?’
We turned around and saw Hazel Cuthbert, the glamorous deputy cybersecurity chief. She was carrying a laptop under one arm and holding a croissant in her other hand. On her way to eat breakfast at her desk, I guessed. Still trying to catch up after her boss’s premature departure.
Cuthbert looked puzzled as she recognised us. ‘Oh! You’re back.’
‘Just finalising our report.’ Zara tucked a pen behind her ear. ‘Thanks for your help yesterday. Do you know Brian Jane?’
Cuthbert frowned. ‘Maybe?’
‘Well, he was the technician who had the seizure outside yesterday,’ Zara said. ‘You can tell his other friends that he’s been discharged from the hospital and he’s going to be fine.’ ‘What a relief,’ Cuthbert said, with enough conviction that I would have believed Brian was a friend of hers, had he existed.
I jerked a non-existent thumb at the hypobaric chamber. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a hypobaric chamber.’ Cuthbert tapped the sign.
Zara gave me a smug look.
‘I see that,’ I said. ‘What’s it for?’
‘Oh. We use it to demonstrate how objects behave in a vacuum. The chamber was out of order a couple of days ago, but someone must have fixed it. I think a school group is coming through later today—one of the curators is going to show them how a bowling ball and a feather descend at the same rate when there’s no air in the chamber to slow the feather down.’
‘No air in the chamber,’ I repeated.
‘That’s what I said.’
I got the tingles then—the fluttering feeling in my gut that meant I was close to a breakthrough.
If Thistle had been there, she would’ve been getting the tingles too. But when I glanced at Zara, her face was flat, affectless.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘We should get going.’
‘Hey.’ I tapped the thick glass. ‘If someone got stuck in the hypobaric chamber and it got switched on by mistake, what would happen?’
Cuthbert’s eyebrows went up. ‘That would depend on whether they were wearing a spacesuit.’
‘Because if they weren’t, they’d die, right?’
‘Horribly. There was an accident like that on a drilling rig in eighty-three. Five people died in a decompression chamber when the lock failed and the door burst open. A sudden shift from nine atmospheres of pressure to one.’ She parted her hands in a boom gesture.
Zara’s eyes were wide. ‘Sounds awful.’
‘I’m told it rained blood,’ Cuthbert agreed.
I took a moment to imagine that, then said, ‘A person stuck in this chamber wouldn’t explode, would they?’
‘No, but they’d suffocate very quickly.’
I nodded. The first piece of the puzzle fit. ‘The break-in on Tuesday night.’
Cuthbert looked thrown by the change of topic. ‘What about it?’
‘Have you worked out what was stolen?’
‘I’m in cybersecurity, but I haven’t heard about anything missing—sorry, who do you work for again?’
‘ClearHorizon,’ Zara said. She was watching me the way you might look at a rattlesnake in the corner of your dining room. ‘A consulting firm hired by NASA to improve your security protocols.’
‘I’d like to examine some of the exhibits,’ I said.
‘All right,’ Cuthbert said slowly. ‘I’ll get Simone to escort you. Simone?’
Silence. There was still no sign of her PA.
‘You could take us?’ Zara suggested.
Cuthbert looked forlornly down at the croissant she’d been planning to eat at her desk.
‘All right,’ she said finally, then led us back the way she’d come.
Soon we were in a gigantic hall, surrounded by glass cases and plaques. Cuthbert gestured at the various space-faring objects around us. ‘Like I said, nothing’s missing. What would you like to look at?’
‘Do you have spacesuits from a bunch of different countries?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but they’re not on display right now.’
‘Why not?’
Cuthbert shrugged. ‘It’s a museum. The curators rotate the exhibits so people keep coming back. At any given time, roughly thirty per cent of our stuff is in storage.’ She frowned. ‘You think someone stole an exhibit that wasn’t even on display?’
‘Can we see the storage area?’
‘Sure.’ Cuthbert ushered us to a door marked Staff Only. She swiped her card to let us through, then led us down a dark corridor to a cavernous storage room filled with giant plastic crates, arranged in a neat grid with narrow corridors between them. Each one was labelled and barcoded. Some crates were transparent, but the contents were hidden by bubble wrap. A huge dehumidifier roared above our heads.
Cuthbert was looking around for the crate of spacesuits, but I was pretty sure I’d already spotted it. The lid was slightly crooked, as though it had been replaced in a hurry.
The second piece of the puzzle fit.
I nudged Zara and pointed to the unsealed crate of flight suits. Her eyes widened.
‘I assume there’ll be a stocktake,’ Cuthbert is saying. ‘But I doubt the thieves could have gotten in here. Even if they did, how would they sell what they stole? What’s the street value of Neil Armstrong’s toupée?’
I wondered if that was an actual exhibit. ‘Okay. Thanks for showing us.’
Looking relieved, Cuthbert led Zara and I back out of the storage area.
‘It must be a pain in the ass,’ I said casually as we walked back towards the reception area. ‘Having a break-in exactly when Rob Cho goes on vacation. What are the odds?’
‘It’s not really a vacation—he’s visiting his sister in hospital. And like I said, he was supposed to go next week.’
‘Did he tell you he was leaving early?’
‘I haven’t heard anything at all, actually.’ Her voice had an undercurrent of frustration.
‘Say, is he an Asian guy?’ I asked.‘Five foot ten, a hundred and eighty pounds? A mole just below his right eye?’
‘Oh, you met him?’
I glanced over my shoulder in time to see Zara’s expression as she realised that piece number three was a perfect fit.
She mouthed a single word: Motherfucker.
CHAPTER 19
Breathe me before I fool you and cool you. What am I?
‘Explain to me what you think is happening,’ Zara said. ‘Because I’m pretty sure you’re about to realise that your theory makes no sense.’
‘Challenge accepted.’ I slurped my coffee and some ran down my chin. Cream, two sugars and a dash of salt. The barista at ‘Grounds Control’ hadn’t even blinked when I ordered it.
We were in the Starport Cafe, under some retro-futuristic lights that reminded me of UFOs. There were lots of people around—babbling tourists, grumbling staff on a coffee break, and a group of screaming schoolkids, probably the ones who’d be visiting the hypobaric chamber for the demonstration with the feather and the bowling ball. The air-con rumbled under everything. Contrary to popular belief, a private place is the worst place to have a private conversation. Private places are easy to bug. What you want is somewhere loud, full of confusing echoes.
‘On Tuesday evening, around five pm, Rob Cho goes into the hypobaric chamber,’ I began. ‘Someone else switches it on by mistake. Cho suffocates. The killer realises what they’ve done. They don’t want to go to prison, so they quickly come up with a plan. They’re going to hide the body in plain sight, disguising Cho as a Chinese astronaut who’s fallen out of the sky.’
