Headcase, p.2
Headcase, page 2
‘Nothing. I mean, I wasn’t out here—I was at my desk. Sam Garcia spotted something on the sat feed and sent me to take a look.’
‘Was the body positioned exactly like this?’ I asked.
‘Pretty much. I took his helmet off.’ Anders gestured helplessly at the helmet, which lay next to a pile of dull red stones.
‘Why?’
Anders swallowed. ‘To see if he was still alive.’
I’d been told that the astronaut had fallen from the sky. But apparently Anders didn’t believe that was what had happened. No point checking the pulse of a guy who hit the ground at terminal velocity.
I wasn’t sure I believed it, either.
The dead man’s space suit was white with blue nylon webbing and decorated with patches like a boy scout’s uniform. The stitching was frayed in places, and the patches had faded, like the guy had fallen not just out of the sky but out of the past. The boots had velcro straps and scuffed, dirty heels. The rest of the body was clean.
Detective Jones hadn’t yet noticed I wasn’t retreating towards the tape—or he was waiting for the rest of his team to arrive, so there would be someone to haul me away while he stayed with the body. It was strange they weren’t here already.
‘What language is that?’ Jones pointed at the patches.
Anders looked uneasy. ‘Japanese, maybe?’
Jones grunted, frowning at the characters like he could read them through sheer willpower.
Anders was wrong. The text on the patches was Mandarin. That was why I was here.
At a data centre in Bluffdale, Utah, giant supercomputers trawl through a vast, ever-changing ocean of information. Emails, text messages, phone calls, photographs, videos, flight records, credit card transactions, 401(k) payments and a thousand other metrics. The web, the dark web, the deep web and whole other continents of cyberspace that don’t even have names. Churning through all this are algorithms no human understands because they were created by other algorithms. They connect keywords, people and places via unknowable means and dredge up anything the Central Intelligence Agency might be interested in.
Early that morning, the AI had intercepted a text message about a space launch in Guizhou and an email that mentioned a spy satellite. Both were then linked to a phone call between the Houston Police Department and Sam Garcia, a communications engineer at the Johnson Space Center, reporting that a Chinese astronaut had crash-landed in their Martian training area.
That was bad news, and not just for the astronaut. Officially, there were only nine people in space. Four Americans, three Russians, a Japanese woman and a French man. All alive and well. This corpse was a mystery—or, as the CIA branch chief put it, ‘an intelligence failure’.
I’d been sent to talk to Sam Garcia, because I knew him, and what he’d done. But first I wanted to see the body. For purely professional reasons.
‘You’re an atmosphere scientist,’ I said to Anders. ‘Is this what the vacuum of space does to a person?’ I gestured to the astronaut’s bruised skin.
Anders looked panicked. ‘I really couldn’t say.’
‘Was the helmet attached properly?’ I asked.
‘I guess? It was hard to take off, at least.’
‘It didn’t look defective, or damaged?’
‘Not in any obvious way.’
I lifted one of the astronaut’s arms, feeling the flesh through the fabric. Fat is liquid at ninety-eight degrees, the temperature of a living human. After death, the body cools, and the fat firms up. This guy had a good amount of it, padding the muscle.
‘I need you to step back,’ Jones snapped. His hand was on his belt, near the pouch that held his handcuffs.
I laid the arm back down. ‘Well, the impact didn’t kill him.’
‘How’s that?’
‘If he was alive when he hit the ground, he’d have tried to protect his head with his arms. They’d be broken. His legs, too. And he wouldn’t have landed face up.’
‘He could have bounced. Bodies do that. I’ve seen it many times.’
I bet he had. Cops spend more time dealing with suicides than murders, and Houston has plenty of high-rise buildings.
‘On concrete, sure. Not here.’ I prodded the soft dirt with my shoe. ‘This surface would have absorbed the force. Is it possible that his suit malfunctioned during a spacewalk, or something? So he asphyxiated and then fell off his spaceship?’
‘Everything you’re saying is impossible,’ Anders said.
We both looked at him.
‘Firstly, astronauts are tethered during spacewalks,’ Anders said. ‘And if one became untethered somehow, they wouldn’t “fall”. They’d spin off into space. Secondly, no astronauts are missing. There’s no way to get astronauts into orbit secretly.’
I thought he might be surprised what the CIA has done in secret, but I said nothing.
‘Thirdly, what are the odds he would land here?’ Anders continued.
Detective Jones cocked his head. ‘Meaning what?’
Anders gestured at the field around us. ‘If he was on a ship orbiting Earth, he could have landed anywhere on the planet. The ocean, the Sahara desert, Antarctica, wherever. The Earth’s surface is 196 million square miles, but he landed right in the middle of the Johnson Space Center. Doesn’t that seem like a hell of a coincidence?’
He was right. A cold wind tugged at the collar of my shirt. I tightened my jacket, thinking.
‘Even if you ignore all that, why didn’t he burn up on re-entry?’ Anders asked. ‘Orbital velocity is at least 17,000 miles per hour. Hitting the atmosphere at that speed creates a tremendous amount of friction. That’s why shuttles have heat shields.’
‘Maybe he got frozen and the heat just thawed him?’ Jones said thoughtfully.
That seemed unlikely to me. In a frying pan, frozen human flesh doesn’t thaw—it chars. I studied the fabric of the space suit. ‘What’s this made of?’
‘Kevlar,’ Anders replied. ‘Like a bulletproof vest. It protects the astronaut from micrometeoroids.’
‘Could that explain why he didn’t burn up?’
‘No,’ Anders said, looking annoyed.
‘What’s the visor of the helmet made of? Glass?’
‘Polycarbonate, but it’s only an eighth of an inch thick, and it’s designed to withstand pressure from inside the suit, not outside. Even if the visor somehow made it through re-entry intact, it would have cracked when he hit the ground.’
Everything Anders said made sense. But there was something off about the way he spoke. Urgent, worried. Glancing at me and Jones to read our reactions. Like he was keen to convince us.
I’d already established that none of the astronauts who trained here were missing, and no Chinese astronauts had been visiting the complex. The Johnson Space Center was surrounded by a daunting security fence. If this guy hadn’t fallen out of orbit, then who was he, how did he get here, and what killed him?
I kneeled next to the corpse’s head. I’d never seen a body with bruising like that. Maybe it tenderised the meat. The hunger grew and grew.
Don’t, I told myself.
A van pulled into the parking lot in the distance. There was a satellite dish on the roof and a rainbow peacock logo on the side. The door rolled open and a woman climbed out, carefully, so as not to stretch her pencil skirt. She had a microphone and a bouncy mane of red hair. A burly guy wearing a wool cap followed, a huge camera on his shoulder.
‘Uh oh,’ I said. ‘MSNBC is here.’
As Jones and Anders turned to look at the van, I leaned towards the dead man’s ear, and opened my jaws wide.
‘Did you call them?’ Johnson demanded.
‘Hell no!’ Anders sounded alarmed. ‘I haven’t talked to anyone!’
I was already standing up again. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I mumbled. It was hard to talk with the dead man’s earlobe tucked into my cheek.
I had intended to save it for later. But the taste was overwhelming. Unable to resist, I crushed it between my molars as I walked off. It was plump and juicy.
This meat hadn’t been frozen, nor burned.
‘Mr Blake,’ Jones called.
I pretended not to hear.
‘Mr Blake!’
I looked back at him and raised an eyebrow.
Jones held up the card I’d given him. ‘Don’t leave town.’
He was smarter than he looked. I nodded, like that wasn’t a problem.
‘You’re bleeding,’ Anders said.
I wiped the trickle of pink drool off my chin and swallowed. ‘Sorry. Root canal, this morning.’
The simulated Martian landscape ended a hundred yards away. Soon I was walking across the dead grass that made up the rest of the field. I was headed for the parking lot, but I took the long way around, not wanting to end up on the news.
Partway there I saw a depression in the ground and paused for a closer look. It was a footprint.
There had been no footprints in the Martian soil except for mine, Anders’ and Jones’. I realised now that there should have been, if people trained there regularly. Someone had swept the area around the body, obscuring any tracks.
I crouched next to the print. In real life it’s usually impossible to identify a shoe from a print outdoors. This print was smudged, incomplete and mostly hidden by flattened grass. But I could tell it had been made by a large shoe. The print was pointed towards the body, and it was recent. A mayfly had been squashed by the sole and hadn’t yet been devoured by other insects.
Someone had found the body before Anders had. And instead of telling anyone it was there, they had simply swept the dirt clear.
CHAPTER 3
Where does a space station make a choice between two bits?
‘The branch chief is riding my ass,’ Zara said. ‘He wants to know if there really are Chinese astronauts in orbit, and if so, how long they’ve been up there. Everyone’s losing their shit. What have you got?’
She sounded distracted, like I’d caught her in the middle of something. I couldn’t tell what, because the software that encrypted the call also eliminated background noise from her end, and I had the car stereo cranked up on mine. The cheery babble of advertising was supposed to thwart eavesdroppers.
The commercials themselves were fake, running from a hidden app on my phone. They had been recorded in a CIA studio—apparently real commmercials could be filtered out too easily.
From where I was parked, I could see Jones and Anders still arguing in the distance. The body itself was hidden behind a slight rise in the dirt. The media had stayed behind the tape, so far.
‘I’m not a rocket scientist,’ I said. ‘But Franklin Anders, the guy who found the body, thinks it’s impossible. And he’s one of these NASA nerds. He’d know.’
‘Anders? I sent you to talk to Sam Garcia.’
‘He’s next on my list.’
‘You don’t have a list,’ Zara said. ‘I gave you one name. A single item is not a list.’
I kept silent. The radio made a valiant attempt to sell me a tumble dryer.
Zara let it go. ‘If the guy didn’t fall off a secret space station, where does Anders think he came from?’
‘He doesn’t know,’ I said. ‘But if you get me the rest of the body, maybe I can figure it out.’
‘“Rest of”?’
‘I, uh, only got to see him from the neck up.’
Zara sighed. ‘Sorry, Blake. There are too many eyes on this. It’s about to turn into an international diplomatic catastrophe.’
She didn’t sound scared. Zara was a seasoned CIA agent, well used to catastrophes. We first met three months ago, when she’d been undercover among a group of psychopaths who sold torture porn on the dark web. After I blew the operation, she could easily have disappeared. Instead, she came back to recruit me for special off-the-books jobs. Usually domestic intelligence gathering, which was supposed to be done by the Department of Homeland Security, not us.
She’d promised me food and still hadn’t delivered.
I said, ‘Someone else found the body before Anders did.’
A squeal broke through the noise suppression on Zara’s end of the call. A cat wailing, or car tyres screeching. I heard a thud, like maybe Zara had closed a window, and then she was back: ‘How do you know?’
‘I found a footprint. From a big shoe.’
There was an unimpressed silence.
‘The body was positioned face up,’ I added. ‘Like someone had rolled him over.’
‘You don’t work for the FBI anymore. You’re an Agency asset. I sent you to talk to Sam Garcia, not to play CSI. Hurry the fuck up.’ The line went dead.
This case was personal for her. We’d been in Los Angeles last week, and followed a target into an underground nightclub. While we were there, someone else had tipped a small vial of colourless fluid into Zara’s absinthe. I’d stopped her from drinking it just in time, but the perpetrator had escaped into the crowd, and we hadn’t been able to identify him. Zara suspected the Ministry of State Security—China’s equivalent of the CIA—had been behind the attack.
A few years ago, a key CIA communications channel was compromised, exposing dozens of American assets in China. They were caught by the MSS and executed. Our whole network went dark, all at once. All the CIA agents I’d met talked about this event like it was 9/11—although, to be fair, they also talked about 9/11 like it was 9/11. The old guard were still around, shellshocked and paranoid. They remembered how suddenly an intelligence failure could lead to things like bodies falling from the sky.
Zara only had one asset left in the People’s Republic. The identity of that asset was the most closely guarded of all her many secrets.
Emboldened, the Chinese Communist Party cracked down on civil rights in Hong Kong, testing the waters. Washington remained silent, so the CCP started eyeing off Taiwan. It had once been part of China, and the CCP wanted to reunify the country. But the US didn’t want to lose such an important ally in Asia. Both sides edged closer and closer to war.
And now a body in a Chinese space suit had been found at NASA. The world might be one step closer to nuclear annihilation if we didn’t figure this out. Or even if we did.
It was hard for me to care about any of this. My son was dead. The love of my life had left me. But if we were all going to die, I didn’t want to die hungry. Since Zara wouldn’t give me this body, I would have to find another.
A car pulled up next to me. I glanced over. The occupants were both men, white, wearing sunglasses and dark blue windbreakers. The FBI had arrived.
One of them clocked me, and I looked away, too quickly. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see he was still staring. I tapped at my phone a few times with my good hand, as though putting an address into the maps app. Then I mounted it on the dash and started the engine. I checked my mirrors as conscientiously as a student driver before I reversed.
I wasn’t supposed to be here. Officially, the CIA didn’t conduct clandestine operations on US soil. If I got caught, I’d be on my own. Burned, in their parlance.
As I pulled out of the parking lot, I finally glanced back. The FBI men were getting out of their car, neither one looking at me. I told myself they were low-level agents, just here so their field office director could claim there had been interagency cooperation with the Houston PD.
But Zara was right. I needed to hurry the fuck up.
•
The Johnson Space Center was nicknamed Space City, and I could see why. There were at least a hundred buildings, including hangars, warehouses and office blocks. Well-maintained roads, some four lanes wide, connected everything. Cyclists in Spandex pedalled furiously, some almost keeping up with the cars.
The complex was surrounded by a mixture of flat fields and dense woodland. Maybe the radio equipment needed some distance from other built-up areas to work properly. One of the fields had a pair of longhorn cows in it. I wondered if that was part of an experiment. They’ve sent dogs into space—why not cows?
It had just gone nine-thirty, and gaggles of pedestrians with lanyards and go-cups were everywhere. They must all have been workers, since none glanced up at the decommissioned aircraft that lined the roads, mounted on poles with brass plaques affixed to them.
I could see police cars in the distance, clustered around a giant airliner like remoras around a shark. Detective Jones would be pissed when he realised the rest of his team had gone to the wrong place.
Most Texans drove one-handed, but that didn’t mean it was easy, even in an automatic. There were three left turns between me and my destination, each tight enough that I had to slow way down to work the wheel. I parked in a lot outside a sleek monolith of glass and steel, three levels high, where a sign said Atmospheric Research Unit. As the crow flies, it wasn’t far from the Martian training area, but there was no direct line of sight. Hopefully Jones assumed I’d left the complex.
As I was fumbling with the seatbelt, some more media approached me. A tall Latino guy with a jawline that could cut glass, and a white woman with a clipboard and a headset mic who was probably his producer. Behind them was a cameraman who looked exactly like the one from the first van. Probably grown in the same vat. The camera had the peacock logo on it—I wondered why the same company had sent two teams. Maybe this one was for B-roll footage or something.
‘Excuse me, sir?’ The guy with the jaw tried to flag me down as I got out of the car.
I wanted to know who’d tipped off the media, but there was no way he’d tell me. ‘No, thank you,’ I said, heading towards the sliding glass doors at the front of the ARU.
He followed. ‘Our colleagues saw you talking to the police earlier.’
The burly camera guy swung the lens to face me.
I kept my head down as I walked.
‘Is it true that it’s a Chinese astronaut?’ Jawline asked.
Apparently the story was well and truly out. Zara wouldn’t be happy.
‘Shit,’ I said, knowing they wouldn’t use any footage with coarse language. The sliding doors opened for me, and I escaped through.
The lobby of the ARU was fittingly airy and well lit. Potted plants soaked up the early spring sunshine near the windows. Behind a curved blue desk sat a forty-something receptionist with several earrings, nose rings, eyebrow rings and a tongue ring. He probably spent his whole life avoiding magnets.
