Headcase, p.22
Headcase, page 22
We went back downstairs, where we saw Dr Laurie. The one Anders had called a ‘supposed genius’. She must have just arrived—she had sunglasses tucked into her shirt collar, and a coat draped over one arm. As she walked, she was reading something aloud off the screen of her phone, while a man following behind her scribbled frantically in a notebook.
‘Oh!’ She almost crashed into us. ‘You.’
‘Us,’ I confirmed.
The man was young, with bulging eyes and a long nose. He looked like an intern—Parget’s replacement, I guessed. He said nothing, pen trembling over the page.
‘Have you seen Hazel Cuthbert around?’ Zara asked.
‘The deputy cybersecurity chief?’ Worry crept onto Laurie’s face.
If Zara thought that was a strange question, she didn’t say so. ‘That’s who I meant, yes.’
Laurie took a breath and seemed to recover. ‘Last time I saw her, she was in the pool. Why do you want to talk to her?’
‘Just a follow-up from earlier this week,’ Zara said, which sounded like an answer but wasn’t. Laurie tongued one incisor in a way that made me think she didn’t quite buy it.
‘Which way is the pool?’ I asked, before she could think about it too hard.
She pointed. ‘Just follow the signs to the Weightless Environment Training Facility.’
‘Thanks for your time.’ Zara turned away.
I hesitated—something told me we should try harder to put Laurie’s mind at ease before we moved on. But Zara was already halfway up the corridor, so I attempted a reassuring smile and followed.
When we got to the pool, it was empty except for a lone woman carving through the water, leaving hardly a ripple behind. The pool was smaller than it had looked on the CCTV; maybe thirty feet wide and eighty feet long, though it was still deep enough to give me vertigo when I peered in. At the other end stood a giant cylinder with a crank, the pool cover rolled around it. Chlorine filled the air, making my eyes itch.
With her swim cap and goggles, the woman was hard to identify at first. But no two people have the same fat deposits in the same places, and I always take note of where the good stuff is. Under the midnight blue one-piece, those were Cuthbert’s shoulders, Cuthbert’s buttocks.
Zara crouched by the end of the pool and waited. When Cuthbert finished a lap and came up for air, she startled.
‘Hazel?’ Zara said, smiling sweetly.
Cuthbert pulled off a nose-clip. Her skin was pale in the indentations left behind. ‘Sandra. Timothy.’
‘So sorry to interrupt you.’
‘It’s fine. Give me a second to towel off.’
‘Take your time.’
She swam over to the ladder. Unlike most pools, the rungs went all the way down. I counted twenty-five rungs, meaning the pool was about twenty-five feet deep.
‘You’re a bit late to work today,’ Zara said.
Cuthbert raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not scheduled to start until nine-thirty.’
‘Dropping kids off at school?’ Zara sounded sympathetic, but I could tell what she was thinking. Kids were an easy pressure point to lean on. Intelligence agencies sometimes offered to pay for private schools as a bribe—or they went the other way and threatened to kidnap the children.
Cuthbert laughed. ‘My kids are in their twenties.’ She picked up a microfibre towel from a rail near the edge and pressed it to her face.
‘My mistake,’ Zara said. ‘It’s just that you were here much earlier than this on Wednesday morning.’
‘Was I?’ Cuthbert’s voice was muffled by the towel. ‘Oh, yes—my husband had a cold and didn’t go to work, which meant I didn’t have to make his lunch or drop him off on the way. So I was early.’ She dropped the towel, and the subject. ‘You know they wanted to close this place when they built the NBL.’
‘The basketball league?’
‘The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. The pool there is twice as long and twice as deep. Big enough to hold most of the International Space Station. But I fought them on it.’ She peeled off her swim cap, red hair spilling out. ‘I said they’d lose some of their best people. Onsite pool is a hell of a perk.’
‘And you’re much closer to it, with your new office,’ Zara observed.
‘Not my office,’ Cuthbert said smoothly. ‘Rob will be back in two weeks.’
‘Hmm.’ Zara reached for the cigarettes, already keen to end the conversation.
I looked Cuthbert up and down, already waiting for the CIA to be done with her so I could take the body. The hand-shake hadn’t quenched my hunger.
But talking about office locations had loosened something in my brain.
‘Earlier this week, you told us you requested to work out of the museum,’ I said.
‘Right,’ she replied. ‘It has a great view.’
It did. But that wouldn’t matter to an MSS asset. Why had she chosen to be so far away from any groundbreaking research?
‘It must be much easier,’ I said. ‘Working out of Rob’s office, closer to the action.’
‘No.’ She pulled a sweater over her swimsuit, apparently forgoing a shower for now. ‘All the systems are centralised. I can access everything from any computer in the JSC.’
‘You mean like documentation?’
‘I mean like equipment. I can log in and start remotely driving forklifts. I could change the temperature of my colleagues’ AC as a prank.’ She pointed at the water. ‘If I wanted to drain the pool, I could do it with one click. It’s happened before, by accident.’
This explained why an asset might choose that office. But it also opened up another possibility.
My stomach was screaming at me to shut up. I ignored it. ‘What about the hypobaric chamber? Can that be operated remotely?’
‘If the key was in, I suppose …’ She tapped the air with one finger, as though counting something. ‘Actually, I’m not sure. Let’s find out.’
She pulled on some pants and shoes, no socks. As we followed her upstairs, Zara shot me some meaningful looks, which I ignored.
When we got to Cho’s office, Cuthbert sat down in his chair and logged in with a swipe card.
‘Is that Rob’s card?’ I asked.
‘No, mine.’
‘Then how come it got you into his computer?’
‘I told you, everything is centralised. When I’m logged into it, it’s my computer, not his.’ She tapped at the keyboard for a while, then said, ‘Yup. I can do anything I want to the hypobaric chamber. Turn the pressure up and down, flick the lights on and off, whatever.’
‘Asshole,’ Zara mouthed at me, like it was my fault that our suspect pool had just opened up again. The killer could have been anywhere in Space City when Cho died, not just the museum.
‘Can employees operate these systems from home?’ I asked.
‘No, no, no—our system is air-gapped. Not connected to the internet at all. Can you imagine the chaos if a hacker got in?’
There was a pause as we all imagined pools draining, AC going haywire and rockets blasting off when they weren’t supposed to.
‘Well,’ Zara said gloomily, ‘thank you for your time, Ms Cuthbert.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Do you have a record of who logs in where?’
‘Sure. I’m the deputy cybersecurity chief.’
‘Does it tell you what they did while they were logged in?’
‘Up to a point. Why?’
‘We need to know who activated the hypobaric chamber between five and seven pm on Wednesday.’
If Cuthbert was surprised by this request, she didn’t show it. Her fingers clacked on the keys, and then she swivelled the monitor around.
I knew what I’d see before I saw it. I was remembering the look on Laurie’s face when we said we were looking for the deputy cybersecurity chief.
‘It says here that Dr Laurie depressurised the chamber at five-forty-one,’ Cuthbert said, pointing. ‘Why do you ask?’
CHAPTER 29
What kind of stars do you drink from?
Laurie had a huge head start. She’d had it since we first saw the body, and it had only grown over the course of the last few days. Surely she was gone.
But I ran anyway, down the stairs, into the lobby, and out the front into the sunshine, because if I didn’t, Zara would blame me for letting the killer get away. Even though if it wasn’t for me, the wrong woman would already be drugged in the back of a van.
I looked around the parking lot. The van was missing—by now it would be waiting around the back of the building for us to lure Cuthbert out for a cigarette.
Zara arrived, breathing heavily. ‘You see her?’
I squinted at all the shiny vehicles in the lot, and the empty field beyond. ‘No.’
‘What kind of car does she drive?’
I didn’t know—the entry logs I’d been studying only recorded licence plates, not makes and models. As I opened my mouth to say so, I spotted a small Audi, two hundred yards away, getting waved through an open gate. At this distance I could only tell that the driver was someone with short blonde hair. But I could also see something dark on top of her head, maybe the chunky sunglasses that had been tucked into Laurie’s collar. It was an expensive car, and Garcia had told us that employees here weren’t well paid. MSS assets, on the other hand, could potentially make a fortune.
‘That kind,’ I said, and took off again. Something must have delayed Laurie on her way off campus. We wouldn’t be so lucky twice. If we lost sight of her, she’d soon disappear into a fog of false passports and cash transactions. Or vanish into the Chinese embassy, where we couldn’t touch her.
I pounded the asphalt, heart racing, lungs burning. But I couldn’t outrun a car.
Zara overtook me easily, running like a terminator towards the gates. Her hunger for revenge was greater than my literal hunger—or she was just in better shape. Either way, she quickly had a lead I couldn’t match. The Audi was at the second gate now, the driver flashing a security pass at the guards.
I slowed down so I could breathe and shouted, ‘Hey! Stop her!’
The guards didn’t seem to hear. I was too far away. ‘Hey!’ I bellowed.
The gates started to roll aside.
Zara was yelling, too. ‘Police!’ she yelled. ‘Stop that woman!’
We weren’t police, and she had no documentation suggesting we were. In her panic, she was telling lies she couldn’t back up.
The guard was the same woman I’d talked to two days ago, with the blue eyes and the crow’s-feet. She saw us running towards her, then turned to look back at Laurie’s vehicle in time to see it zoom through the open gate, much faster than she was probably used to. ‘Wait,’ she commanded, but it was too late. The Audi was speeding away.
Zara and I reached the gates, out of breath.
‘What’s the situation?’ the security guard asked. Her name tag read Spence.
‘No situation,’ Zara wheezed, bent over, her hands on her thighs.
‘She forgot her phone,’ I said, holding up my own phone.
The guard’s eyes narrowed. ‘Didn’t you just say you were police?’
Zara shook her head.
‘She said please,’ I put in.
The guard just looked at us, almost certainly not believing our story, but also not sure what to do about us. We weren’t stealing anything, damaging property, or breaking in.
Zara didn’t give her time to decide, turning on her heel and jogging back towards the parking lot. I followed.
‘She’ll be headed for George Bush,’ I muttered, once we were out of Spence’s earshot.
‘No. She’ll go for one of the smaller airports to avoid us. She’ll get out of the state before she tries to get out of the country.’
Zara was right, but the information wasn’t helpful. There were hundreds of small airports in Texas.
‘She’ll have to go to LAX to get to China, though,’ I said.
‘No. She’ll use a buffer country. Fly from Denver to Canada, or O’Hare to Mexico, or Orlando to Japan. Yeah, it’s Cassandra.’ I realised Zara was on the phone. ‘I need something circulated.’
I tuned out her half of the conversation. I’d recovered enough from the sprint to think more clearly. We’d wasted fifteen minutes talking to Cuthbert but still made it outside in time to see Laurie driving away. What had slowed her down?
‘She stole something,’ I said.
Zara muted her end of the call. ‘Huh?’
‘She knew she’d been rumbled, so she went back to her lab.’ I said. ‘Or to someone’s lab, anyway. She stole something that Beijing wants—or doesn’t want us to have.’
I thought of the malware, waiting to be triggered. Not designed to copy—designed to delete.
I started running again, back towards the ARU. I hated running.
‘Like what?’ Zara yelled after me.
‘I don’t know,’ I called over my shoulder. ‘But she didn’t have much time to clean up. I’m thinking it’ll be obvious.’
•
I’d underestimated just how obvious it would be.
Zara had caught up to me. She stared through the little window into the lab. ‘Holy shit.’
The shelves were empty. At first, I thought Laurie had taken all the vials of fake blood with her, perhaps in five or six rolling suitcases. Then I got closer to the window and saw the floor. Or rather, the red lake where the floor was supposed to be.
I pulled the door open and floated in. The blood had trickled into the gaps between the tiles, creating a crimson grid around the puddle in the centre. I crouched and rubbed some between my fingers. It was beautiful, but it was wrong. Too cold, too thin. It was methadone, not heroin. Porn, not sex. Decaf. Stevia. Fake, no matter how much I wanted to pretend.
I put my fingers in my mouth. The fluid was acrid, and gritty with broken glass. Years ago I’d been begging for change on a street corner and had seen a street magician eat a broken bottle. It had seemed odd that passers-by were giving him money to hurt himself but wouldn’t give me money to stay alive.
Some plastic coveralls were piled in the middle of the lab, dripping red. A wrench lay nearby. To the police, this crime scene would be incomprehensible, but it made perfect sense to me. I could picture Laurie striding through the room, dragging the wrench along the shelves to shatter the vials, then stripping in the doorway and throwing the coveralls over her shoulder like a lit match.
‘Why would she destroy all this?’ Zara asked from a few feet away. She’d jumped back quickly enough to keep her shoes dry.
‘She wants to give her formula to the Chinese.’ I walked across the puddle, ripples spreading outwards from my shoes. ‘It’s worth more if the US doesn’t have it.’
‘But we do have it.’ Zara gestured at the mess all over the floor. ‘Even if she triggered the worm and deleted every record of the formula, we could easily scoop some of that up and put it under a microscope.’ She eyed my bloody lips. ‘Assuming some lunatic doesn’t drink it all first.’
‘This is way more fluid than she was storing in the vials,’ I said. ‘She’s thinned it. Mixed it with something. Tastes like bleach.’
My suspicions were confirmed when I turned around and saw an empty jug of hydrogen peroxide on its side in the corner.
Zara leaned forwards, taking a whiff. ‘You think that will change the composition enough that it can’t be reverse-engineered?’
‘I think she thinks that.’ I still had the auto-injector. It was back at the safe house, in the breast pocket of one of my shirts. But I didn’t mention that. Fake or not, I wasn’t willing to give it up. ‘Let’s go to her house.’
‘She’ll be halfway to the airport by now, Blake.’
‘I know. And if you take me to her house, I might be able to figure out which one.’
•
Brenda Laurie lived on a property north of Houston that might have once been a plantation. The grounds were grassy now, but it was the sort of land that could support corn or sugar cane. The house certainly had the look. Two storeys, with white weatherboard, big pillars and a wraparound balcony so some rich asshole could watch his slaves making him even richer.
I’d read that some plantation owners rationalised their crimes using rumours of cannibalism in Africa. Better to be enslaved than consumed, they told themselves—and each other.
Zara parked the car at the end of a long gravel driveway. We got out and looked up at the house. The cold wind cut through my cheap clothes. In case the Houston PD spotted us, I was wearing the moustache and the wig, a tangled black mop that made me look like an ageing porn star.
‘I thought all these places got turned into museums,’ Zara said. ‘After people stopped using them as wedding venues.’
‘Even museums go bankrupt,’ I said. ‘Maybe Laurie got it on the cheap.’ It was also possible that the land had been in her family for hundreds of years, but her Boston accent suggested that it hadn’t. And she didn’t dress like she came from money.
Zara trudged up the gravel towards the house. ‘I wonder who gets it now that she’s gone? If we can find her family, we can lean on them to get her to come back.’
‘That’s assuming her family aren’t already getting leaned on in China.’ I crouched next to the car. There were fresh tyre tracks in the mud next to the driveway. Like someone had driven off-road so they could park around the back.
I pointed out the tracks to Zara. She looked at them for a second, then silently drew her handgun.
‘Wait,’ I whispered. ‘She couldn’t manage all this land by herself. Not if she’s working full-time at the Space Center as well.’
‘You’re thinking a gardener?’ Zara didn’t look like she bought it.
‘I don’t know. I just don’t think we should go in guns blazing—’
Just then, we both heard a shot.
I ducked behind the car, but there was no need. The sound had been muffled—a dull pop from somewhere deep within the building. Whoever was shooting, they weren’t shooting at us.
I looked at Zara. She made some hand signals that were incomprehensible to me, then started advancing towards the house.
