Headcase, p.23
Headcase, page 23
‘Zara!’ I whispered, but she ignored me, like she had a death wish.
I hovered, torn between driving away and following Zara into the house. Anyone could have been in there: an MSS clean-up crew, a team of FBI spy hunters, or maybe both, hence the gunshot. I didn’t want to get shot. But I didn’t want Zara to get shot, either.
‘Shit,’ I muttered, and followed her up the painted wooden stairs.
The front door was unlocked. Zara went in first, checking the corners to her left, apparently expecting me to do the ones to the right. I did. No one was waiting in the shadows to jump us.
The foyer had a vaulted ceiling and a polished wooden floor, so dark that it was almost black. Paintings of the landscape around the house hung on the walls, in case the owner felt like looking at a smudged version of what was already visible out their window. They were originals, not prints. I could see the texture of the paint on the canvas.
There were arched doorways to the left and right, and a hallway ahead. A staircase led up to the second level. Whichever way we went, we risked being ambushed from behind. I shifted my weight, and the old floorboards creaked beneath me.
Another gunshot rang out. I ducked instinctively, and unnecessarily. The shooter was somewhere else in the house. I heard what sounded like wordless yelling, but then my brain kicked in and decoded the sound: dogs barking. Somewhere inside.
Zara lowered her gun about ten degrees, just enough that she’d have a chance if an angry rottweiler came running around the corner. None did.
It was hard to tell exactly where the shot had come from, but I didn’t think it was upstairs. Zara didn’t think so, either. She made eye contact, jerked her head towards the hall, and then disappeared through the archway to the left.
I crept up the hall, wondering what the hell she expected me to do if I bumped into a crew of MSS agents, or the FBI. When they saw what was apparently a one-armed porn star, sleeve still stained with fake blood and bleach, they might be too confused to shoot—but then what?
Soon I’d reached the back of the house. The windows overlooked a backyard with a picnic area, an archway covered with ivy, and a well-tended vegetable patch. No movement in the woods beyond.
Another shot. It seemed to come from beneath my feet. But I hadn’t seen any stairs leading down.
I turned around, went back and scanned the walls, looking for seams. Eventually I found them—two faint lines about three feet apart. I gently pushed against the wall, and the hidden door creaked open, revealing a set of stairs, leading down into the dark.
I hated basements, and this one seemed unlikely to change my view. But whoever was down there would have heard me open the secret door and seen the light fall through, so they knew I was up here. My best chance was to go downstairs before they had time to think.
‘I’m not armed,’ I shouted, as I walked down the stairs.
It wasn’t a basement—it was a home laboratory. There was a computer, a workbench and a bulky machine that might have been a centrifuge, all gleaming under the yellow glow of a heat lamp. In one corner was a miniature version of the hypobaric chamber from the museum, about the size of a chest freezer. Four cages were lined up in the middle of the room. Each of them contained a dog—two black labradors, a pit bull and a golden retriever. The pit bull was barking wildly. The other three dogs were dead.
Dr Laurie stood over the cages, wearing earmuffs and holding a rifle. The pit bull snarled and snapped at her.
She pulled the trigger. At this distance, the shot practically deafened me. The dog crumpled instantly.
Laurie turned to look at me. I’d never been so confused.
She clicked the safety back on, then took off the earmuffs and tossed them onto the workbench. ‘I suppose you’ll want to take me in now,’ she said.
CHAPTER 30
What kind of computer would you lick as it spins?
I paced around the unfinished house until long after the sun went down. I told myself I couldn’t sleep because I was desperate to know what Laurie was telling the CIA interrogators. This was kinder than the other two possible explanations—
One: I couldn’t sleep because the hands in the fridge were cold, and thin, while Laurie was warm, and plump, and the CIA would soon be done with her.
Two: I couldn’t sleep because Zara wasn’t in bed beside me.
The second idea made me more uneasy than the first. While I waited, I did research on Zara’s laptop. There was no wi-fi router in the house, so the laptop was getting signal via cell towers, and the data was encrypted, which slowed it down even more. But after a few hours of one-handed typing and bleary scrolling, I had learned a little bit of astrophysics.
First, no country could launch a crewed space station in secret. There was a network of six geostationary satellites designed to detect intercontinental ballistic missile launches, and while they weren’t unbeatable—China had recently tested a nuclear-capable supersonic missile without the satellites picking it up—any vessel capable of getting humans into orbit had to be much, much bigger. The network would detect it.
We’d already known the space station was fictitious. But now I knew it was impossible, even though Sam Garcia, the department head, had told us it wasn’t. It seemed unlikely that a NASA scientist would get that wrong. Were these websites incorrect, or had Garcia lied? If he had, why?
I gave up on the space forums and started researching xenotransfusion—the science of taking blood from one species and injecting it into another. I wanted to know what Laurie had been doing in that basement.
I was surprised to learn that the practice of using animal blood in transfusions dated back to the 1600s, though it usually hadn’t worked. More recently it became possible with pigs, though no one seemed to be doing it. Apparently it’s unethical to raise pigs for their blood, though most people are happy to eat one.
There was nothing about xenotransfusion with dogs. But the research led me to an article which argued that the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act of 1966 had slowed the progress of medical science. I found many other articles that disputed this, but I felt sure Laurie would agree. I remembered that while everyone else described her as brilliant, she herself had only said she had ‘courage’.
Zara still wasn’t back. Thinking of Anders and his daughter, I did some research into Lou Gehrig’s disease. Yes, kids could get it, but it was rare—so rare that it was hard to find doctors with any experience treating it, or medicines that had been approved by the FDA. I couldn’t find any examples of kids with the disease entering respiratory depression and then recovering, like Anders’ daughter supposedly had—maybe she had more than one illness.
The moon crawled up the sky, filtering though the dirty glass of the windows. I scratched mosquito bites, waiting, waiting.
It was almost midnight when Zara finally opened the door. She looked exhausted, and frustrated. There was blood on her knuckles.
‘I want you to talk to her,’ she said. ‘See if you can work out if she’s telling the truth.’
•
The warehouse had no heating, cooling or plumbing. It was off the grid in every sense. To get there, Zara and I had to take a road that wasn’t even on Google maps, bumping across a rough dirt track between towering trees, and then unlock a gate in some hurricane fencing.
On paper, the building was abandoned. Unofficially it was run by the police, who sometimes took suspects there and interrogated them before they’d been formally arrested, at which point the suspects acquired certain inconvenient rights, like the right to an attorney and the right to remain silent. The CIA used the facility even more unofficially whenever it was vacant.
On the way, Zara told me what Laurie had told her. Some parts made sense, given what I’d learned in my online research. Others didn’t. I was starting to worry that we hadn’t caught Rob Cho’s killer.
The interview room had no one-way mirror, no table, no chair for Laurie to sit on. Instead it was a bare concrete cell, and she was shackled to a ringbolt in the floor. There were bags under her eyes, and bruises around her throat, as though she’d been choked.
She looked up. ‘You,’ she spat.
‘Me,’ I confirmed.
‘I should have guessed you were one of them, as soon as you lied your way into my lab. But I like to think the best of people—it’s a flaw of mine.’
It sounded like she suspected the CIA had been watching her from day one, which could only mean she was the MSS spy. Practically a confession, and I’d only uttered one syllable. Zara would be impressed.
I kept my expression neutral.‘Why did you kill the dogs?’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Laurie said.
‘Try me.’
‘No. These ridiculous stunts may feel righteous, but they just expose you as thugs. If you can’t see that, you have no hope of comprehending my breakthrough.’ Laurie rattled her chain. ‘You people have gone too far this time.’
‘You people?’
‘PETA should be listed as a goddamn terrorist organisation.’
I said, ‘You think I work for PETA?’
‘You goddamn vegans have no idea how much you depend on people like me. If not for us, you’d still be in the stone age.’
I examined the bulging veins of her neck for a moment. ‘I’m not vegan.’
She gave me a look that was equal parts disbelieving and imperious.
‘You were testing your formula on the dogs,’ I said. ‘Why kill them afterwards? It’s not like they were going to tell us what you were up to. Not unless you were working on some kind of dog-translator prototype.’ I paused. ‘Were you? Because that’s a billion-dollar idea, right there.’
‘You won’t get away with this.’ Laurie rattled her chain again for emphasis. ‘I have rights.’
‘So did the dogs. I’ve just been reading about that.’
Zara, listening outside the door, was probably wondering when I’d get to the point.
‘They all had burst eardrums,’ Laurie said. ‘It would have been cruel to keep them alive. I’d expect you to understand that.’
‘Ah.’
I didn’t think this sounded judgemental. I had, after all, done far worse things. But Laurie scowled.
‘Do you have a phone?’ she asked.
‘We’re not the police. You don’t get a phone call, a lawyer or anything else.’
She dismissed this with a wave of her hand. ‘You ever heard of Laika? A stray mutt, picked up off the streets of Moscow. The Soviets figured she could handle cold, and hunger. They put her on Sputnik 2 and launched her into space.’
I leaned against the wall. ‘Rings a bell.’
‘It turned out that cold wasn’t the main problem,’ Laurie went on. ‘Laika died when the cabin overheated, although the Soviets claimed at the time that she’d been euthanised with poisoned food. Either way, they learned from the experiment. When they launched Vostok 1 with Yuri Gagarin on board, it had better temperature control, and he survived. If he hadn’t, the space race would have ended right there. Instead, it ramped up. We launched more satellites, and got GPS. We got better laptops, thanks to the Shuttle Portable Onboard Computer. We improved smoke alarms, water purification systems, freeze-dried food, robotic artificial limbs.’ She pointed to my prosthesis. It had no robotic components, but she probably thought I’d be grateful for this advance in principle. ‘And now you have a cell phone. Immediate access to almost anyone, almost anywhere, plus the sum of all human knowledge. All for the low, low price of one dead dog.’
‘Well, you killed four dogs,’ I said. ‘I hope you invented something pretty amazing.’
She said nothing.
I winced. ‘There are more, aren’t there?’
‘Do you have any idea what I’ve accomplished?’ she says. ‘No, you don’t. You’d need at least a masters degree to understand the significance of my breakthrough, let alone replicate it.’
‘Why dogs? Shouldn’t you have used an animal more closely related to humans, like chimpanzees?’
‘You know how hard it is to buy a chimpanzee in Texas?’
Not as hard as it should be, probably. People bought tigers here. Anacondas. Giant jellyfish. I’d met one guy who had a shark in a tank.
‘Let me make sure I understand,’ I said. ‘Your competitors couldn’t make intravenous oxygen work—’
‘Contemporaries,’ Laurie said. ‘I have no competitors.’
‘Whatever. You leap ahead of them using illegal animal testing. You inject dogs with different versions of your formula and then suffocate them, over and over, until you find a recipe that keeps them alive. You offer to sell it to China, but—’
‘What is it with you people and China?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve never been there. I don’t know anyone who lives there.’
Zara had warned me about this. All night, Laurie had denied any accusations of a connection to China. She’d also denied using a worm to delete all records of her formula off the Space City network. She said she’d done it manually, without any malware. It seemed odd that she would be so open about the illegal experiments but lie about the spying. Then again, animal cruelty wasn’t a capital crime, unlike treason.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So who were you selling your formula to?’
‘No one,’ Laurie said. ‘Science doesn’t work that way. I work for NASA, so they own it. They’ll use it to benefit all of humanity. I don’t care about money.’
She said this with the sort of superiority that only rich people could afford. She would probably take a Nobel over an extra million dollars.
‘If you wanted to benefit humanity, then why did you destroy the formula?’
‘I didn’t.’ She tapped her temple.
‘You have it memorised?’
‘Right.’ She looks smug. ‘The animal testing might have been technically illegal—but it doesn’t matter if you expose it. I won’t share what I know without a guarantee of immunity from prosecution.’
‘Humanity’ seemed to have shrunk to just one human. ‘Good luck with that,’ I said.
‘There are no other samples of the formula. My invention could someday be used by paramedics to keep patients alive on the way to hospital. It could save thousands of lives every year. You think the government will give that up over a few dead dogs? That would be barbaric.’
I didn’t tell her I had a stolen sample at the safe house. ‘Okay, you destroyed the samples to blackmail the US government—why now?’
‘Because of you. You asked where the security chief was. You clearly knew about the animals—I had to make my move before I got arrested.’ Laurie looked around at her filthy interrogation cell. ‘I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting this.’
‘She’s the cybersecurity chief. And she’s only the deputy.’
Laurie frowned. ‘Really?’ It seemed like she only had the vaguest idea what her colleagues did for a living.
‘Your plan only works if no one else knows the formula. Did Rob Cho figure it out? Is that why you killed him?’
She scoffs. ‘No one could just figure it out. Rob Cho wasn’t even a doctor.’
‘Was it a human test that went wrong, then? You locked him in the hypobaric chamber to see if—’
‘I didn’t do anything to him,’ she snarled. ‘I didn’t even know he was dead until your psycho girlfriend accused me of killing him.’
I kept pushing. ‘All right, he found out about the dogs. You thought he was going to tell someone.’
‘I didn’t kill Rob! We were friends.’
‘I know it was you. You switched on the hypobaric chamber with your swipe card.’
Laurie looked flummoxed, but not for long. ‘Someone must have stolen it.’
‘The card? You had it when we arrested you.’
‘Arrested’ probably wasn’t the legal term for what we’d done, but she let that go. ‘So someone took it and then put it back.’ She smirked. ‘You have nothing on me.’
‘The security cameras caught you using the computer at the time the chamber was activated,’ I lied.
‘Bullshit,’ she said, without hesitation.
‘You expect us to believe someone stole your swipe card, used it to kill Cho and then put it back, all without you noticing?’
‘It’s not my problem what you do or don’t believe.’
Her version of events didn’t sound credible. It was either a very stupid lie, or the truth. And whatever else Laurie was, she wasn’t stupid.
‘When was Cho’s birthday?’ I said.
‘February nine.’
‘What was his wife’s name?’
‘He wasn’t married.’
‘How long had he lived in Cloverleaf?’
‘He lived in Pearland. Why do you care about any of this?’
Either she really was his friend, or she’d been stalking him. I suddenly wondered if she might have murdered him for fun. Most serial killers start with animals.
But why the ruse with the spacesuit, if she really wasn’t connected to China?
‘Who were Cho’s other friends?’
‘Everyone,’ Laurie said. ‘He was a popular guy.’
‘If you want me to think you didn’t kill him, you should give me another suspect.’
‘I’m not doing your job for you,’ Laurie snapped. ‘Talk to his other co-workers. Talk to his parents. Talk to his crazy sister.’
My ears pricked up. ‘Crazy?’
‘Mentally ill, whatever. She’s been in a psych ward for two years.’ Laurie looked exasperated. ‘You didn’t know that? What kind of investigation are you running here?’
•
‘Was she telling the truth?’ Zara asked as we walked back to the car. Zara put a great deal of faith in my ability to tell whether someone was lying. More than she should have—I’ve been wrong before.
The wind picked up, and the leaves rustled in the trees around us. The moon shone down, a cold blue glow.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She has no connection to China and knows nothing about Cho’s death. She’s just a scientist who thought we were after her for animal cruelty. Also, she thinks we work for PETA.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t correct her—it’s not a bad cover. What about having destroyed all her research? Was she telling the truth about that?’
