Headcase, p.30
Headcase, page 30
It’s not exactly bustling. A man is sleeping on a bench, two young women chat in hushed voices, and a cashier reads a magazine behind the pay window. I walk into the bathroom, which smells of piss and tobacco. No one’s in there. I pull off the wig and moustache and rearrange my clothes so I’m wearing my shirt over the top of my jacket, which gives me a bulkier silhouette. I walk out looking homeless.
Despite this, it’s easier to hail a cab the second time. Plenty of them are hanging around the bus station. I tell the new driver to take me to the Johnson Space Center. It’s a big fare, so he demands payment upfront. I give him the last of my cash. Looking pleased, he zooms out into traffic.
I look out the window. The sun hasn’t set yet. Hopefully Sam Garcia will still be at the complex. If he’s gone home already, I don’t know what I’ll do. It seems unlikely that I’ll live to see another sunrise.
‘You work here?’ the cab driver asks me, when we approach the security gate, angling to make this a regular arrangement.
‘Not for much longer,’ I say, and leave it at that.
At the gate, the guard with the blue eyes and the crow’s-feet approaches us. Spence.
I buzz down the window.
‘Haven’t seen you in a while,’ she says.
‘Yeah.’ I realise I don’t even know what day it is. Hopefully not Saturday, or Garcia won’t be here. I won’t last until Monday.
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ Spence says. ‘But you got taken off the after hours visitors list.’
I take a gamble. ‘I have an appointment with Sam Garcia. You can call him to confirm.’
Spence chews her lip for a moment, then backs away, so she can use her radio without me overhearing.
The cab driver is looking increasingly uneasy.
‘You might get another fare out of me,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a long way back to my hotel.’
He perks up a bit.
Spence comes back. ‘Open the trunk, sir.’
The driver pushes the button. Spence examines the inside, then sweeps her stick mirror around, checking the undercarriage. ‘All right,’ she says finally, and hauls the gate open.
As we drive towards the Atmospheric Research Unit, the cab driver says hopefully, ‘Perhaps you’ll need a ride home later?’
I’d like to think so, but I’d be kidding myself. ‘The odds are against that,’ I tell him.
•
The receptionist with all the piercings isn’t there. I don’t sign the register, but I take one of the free pens. It’s not much of a weapon, but it worked on Wilcox. And it’s free.
Sam Garcia’s door is open. He looks worse than when I saw him last. Bags under his eyes, his head bowed over the desk. He’s lost a little weight, though he’s still a big guy. Big enough to leave those footprints I saw in the field the first time I came here. I should have guessed it was him immediately. This could all have been over on day one. But I was thrown, because the video alibied him for Rob Cho’s death, and because he seemed to genuinely believe in the Chinese space station. The one I thought was an obvious lie.
He looks up. Sees me. His eyes are sad.
‘Shut the door,’ he says.
I do.
‘You’re CIA, aren’t you?’
‘I was,’ I say. ‘Now, not so much.’
He harrumphs, not believing me. For some reason people only seem to doubt me when I tell the truth. It’s like an ironic curse from a Greek myth.
‘I’m not the guy you’re looking for,’ Garcia says.
‘I know.’
‘You have to believe me. I swear I didn’t …’ He trails off, catching up with what I said. ‘You know?’
‘Most of it,’ I say. ‘I’m hoping you can tell me the rest.’
He scratches his head with one huge paw, like an anxious dog.
‘You may as well,’ I say. ‘How much worse could things get?’
Actually, they could get a lot worse. But Garcia must be hurting, hiding the truth all this time. There’s a pressure difference, like in the hypobaric chamber. A gap between the weight of his knowledge and the vacuum of the world’s ignorance.
‘I didn’t kill Rob Cho,’ he says.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘But you killed Harold Broughton.’
His mouth contorts. His hands twitch on his desk.
‘I kept wondering why a man would confess to kidnapping a girl he’d never met,’ I continue. ‘Now I know—it was because you’d committed a worse crime that you didn’t want us to know about. If you’d told us where you really were, you would have gotten a lot more than seven years.’
Garcia is trembling in his chair. Angry? Scared?
‘You realised your wife was having an affair.’ I rub my shoulder. It’s still sore from the fight with Wilcox. ‘You were furious. You went to the mall to buy some rope, a ski mask and a gun. Then you go find the guy—I don’t care how—get him drunk, and take him to the river. You make him put on a bathing suit at gunpoint. Then you tie him up and toss him in the water. Hold him under the water until the bubbles stop coming. After that, you stuff his body into the mangroves. You needed him to be found, or Esmerelda would spend the rest of her life wondering what had happened to him. Pining, maybe. You can stop me at any time.’
Garcia is looking at my jacket, maybe wondering if I’m recording this conversation.
‘Okay, fine. You bought the gun on the same day you killed him,’ I say. ‘That tells me this was a crime of passion. You didn’t really think it through. Didn’t even check which way the river ran. But, incredibly, it worked. I can imagine how lucky you felt, when the cops believed the drowning was an accident. When no one suspected you, not even your wife. And then, I can imagine how unlucky you felt, when you discovered that a twelve-year-old girl had gone missing from the mall at the same time you were there. That you were one of only three suspects. That your alibi was this: you were at the river, drowning a guy. So …’ I wave my silicone hand. ‘You confess and go to prison, but not for long, because the girl you supposedly kidnapped puts in a good word for you with the judge. Of course she does—you saved her life. If her father had found out she’d tried to run away, he would have killed her.’
I can see by the look on his face that Garcia hadn’t known this. It must have been a mystery, all this time, why Lilah had lied.
‘All this explains why you didn’t call the cops when you found Cho’s body in the hypobaric chamber,’ I say. ‘Because they wouldn’t have looked at anyone but you. And then you would have ended up imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit, again. Right?’
Garcia gives the slightest of nods.
‘But it doesn’t explain why you stole a Chinese spacesuit, put Cho in it, and then put him on Mars,’ I go on. ‘You must have known people would see through the ruse right away. There are a million better ways to make a death look like an accident. For all you knew, the death was an accident. Except he told you something, didn’t he? Before he died. Something that made you realise it was murder, and who was responsible.’ I lick my lips. ‘I thought I had it figured out. I thought there was a Chinese spy here at the Space Center, and Rob found out about it, and he told his crazy sister. Then the spy killed him, and used his body to make it seem like there was a space station overhead. But I had the whole thing ass backwards, didn’t I?’
Garcia finally speaks. ‘The space station exists. Or something does. A satellite. I haven’t seen it, but it’s there.’
‘I know,’ I say.
Outside the window, thunder rumbles. A haze of rain creeps out from the darkening horizon.
‘I grew up with this kid named Ritchie,’ I say. ‘Every time someone new came to live at the group home, he’d do a magic trick where he’d tell them to think of a card, any card. Then he’d show them that the only card in the box he was holding was the ace of spades. Most of the time he was wrong. But he did it with so many kids that eventually he was right with one of them. They thought it was magic, not just luck.
‘Rob’s sister has hundreds of conspiracy theories. I suppose it makes statistical sense that eventually one of them would turn out to be true. Like you said: on a long enough timescale, unlikely things become inevitable. The last time Rob went to visit Harmony, she told him her latest theory—that there was a secret Chinese space station over our heads, messing with the news. For once, this was a story Rob was in a position to check. He thought he could help her get better by proving her wrong. He knew that for a space station to be watching the USA day and night, it would have to be in geostationary orbit above the equator, probably right over Ecuador. So he asks you some casual questions about how to send signals to and from the telescope, then when no one’s around, he scans a certain patch of sky—and holy shit. There is something up there.
‘Rob was smart guy, and he understood cybersecurity. He knew that if no one had spotted this before, that meant there was malware in the network, periodically deleting any record of the space station from the automatic scans. And because the Space City network is air-gapped, that malware must have been installed in person, possibly by one of his colleagues. He wasn’t sure who to trust. He took some time to think about it, because he didn’t know that the malware had already sent a notification to the spy, warning them that he had done a manual scan and spotted the spacecraft.’
Garcia looks haunted now. His face crumples.
‘Cho trusted you, though,’ I say. ‘You’d gone to college together. He was the only person you’d told about what really happened on the night of Lilah’s kidnapping. You owed him for helping you get this job. But when he told you what he’d seen, you didn’t believe him. Right?’
There are tears in Garcia’s eyes. He opens his mouth, and the seal breaks. The pressure equalises. The whole story comes rushing out.
CHAPTER 39
I surround you but keep my distance, with no beginning and no end. What am I?
Garcia tells me a lot of things I’d already worked out, and a few things I hadn’t.
Cho invited Garcia for beers on the rooftop after work. Garcia accepted, even though it was a Monday. Cho was a good friend. He knew Garcia was a murderer, but had visited him in prison, watched his remorse grow, and forgiven him.
Yet, when Cho told him there was a Chinese space station circling the Earth, and a spy in Space City who had installed malware to periodically erase it from the records, and that his crazy sister had somehow known this, Garcia hadn’t believed a word. Not until the following night, when he found Cho in the hypobaric chamber, bloated and purple.
Garcia tried to give him CPR, but the body was already cold and his oesophagus was packed with his own shredded lungs. Cho had been murdered, horribly, by a Chinese spy—but no one else would ever accept that. Garcia was an ex-con, not to be trusted. His friend’s death would be written up as a bizarre accident, or Garcia himself would get the blame.
Maybe he was mad with grief. His plan, in retrospect, wasn’t a sane one. But if China had done this, then Garcia was determined to make it backfire on them. He stole a Chinese spacesuit from the museum and dressed Cho in it. Garcia carried him halfway to Mars, and then, when the dead man became too heavy, he dragged him by the wrists. Then he left Cho on the dirt, staring up at the billions of stars that made up the night sky.
Garcia takes a deep breath. ‘And that’s pretty much it.’
‘Really?’
He avoids my eye. ‘Yeah. The next morning, the first person to arrive was Anders. When I saw him go into the parking lot, I went to my office, checked the sat feeds, saw what I knew I would see, and then told him to check it out.’
‘Then you told the media.’
‘Right. I wanted the story about the Chinese astronaut to be everywhere, so the whole thing would blow up in their faces.’
‘Only a few dozen people were in the complex at the time of Cho’s death,’ I say. ‘You seem like a guy who pays close attention to his team. You must have noticed one of those people behaving strangely.’
‘Everyone’s been behaving strangely,’ Garcia says. ‘A dead body in the field, Rob missing, cops and FBI and CIA everywhere, sabotage in Laurie’s lab—it’s been a madhouse here.’
I don’t tell him that, in my experience, actual madhouses are much less chaotic than what he’s describing.
‘I thought it might be Laurie,’ Garcia says. ‘She vanished for a little while. But now she’s back—apparently it was just an illness. If she was the spy, she wouldn’t be back, right?’
Laurie’s plan to hold her own research for ransom seems to have succeeded.
‘The Chinese government went to a lot of trouble to hide whatever’s up there,’ I say. ‘They told their asset to kill Rob Cho. When you called the media, they dumped a stealth plane into the ocean to make it look like it was a fighter pilot who fell out of the sky rather than an astronaut. They installed malware on the Space City network—and presumably on some other networks, right? Otherwise someone would have found the space station before now. This isn’t the only place with a powerful telescope.’
Garcia nods.
‘So whoever’s behind this is highly capable. Is there anyone you work with who hasn’t been acting oddly?’
Garcia thinks about this, then shrugs helplessly.
I close my eyes for a second, imagining I’m the killer. I sabotage the alarm in the hypobaric chamber. I trick Cho into going into the chamber. (How? Don’t know. He’s the cybersecurity chief—maybe I tell him it’s been vandalised.) I trap him in there by blocking the door, and then hang a sign over the window. I steal Laurie’s swipe card while she’s in the pool. Then I go to an access terminal and use Laurie’s card to activate the chamber. Zara said there was no video footage of the killer at the terminal, so I must have used one a fair way away. I return Laurie’s card while she’s still swimming. Then I go back to the hypobaric chamber, check that Cho is dead, and remove the sign and the blockage so no one realises he was trapped. Then I go home. Maybe I spend a sleepless night, wondering if I’ve forgotten something, or if I left a clue behind …
I open my eyes. ‘Did anyone seem unusually tired the following day?’
Garcia frowns. ‘Not that I remember.’
‘Did anyone arrive at work earlier than usual?’ Like they were anxious to check that the ruse had worked?
Garcia thinks about this. But I realise he’s already given me the answer.
I think of the first time I saw the body. The anxious scientist hovering nearby, saying that a real astronaut would have burned up on re-entry, and trying to convince me that the writing on the flight suit was Japanese.
‘I need to borrow your car,’ I say. ‘And your phone.’
•
Ten minutes later I’m wandering around the parking lot, looking for Garcia’s brown Hyundai. It’s dark now. No moon. The rain hasn’t reached me yet but I can hear it, hissing in the distance. Thunder rumbles.
As I circle around, I dial Thistle’s cell number from memory. The phone rings and rings in my ear.
‘You’ve called Agent Reese Thistle. Leave your name and number.’
She’s changed her voicemail message, by just a couple of words. She’s always looking for ways to do things slightly better.
‘Hey. I escaped from the mental hospital.’ I laugh nervously. ‘That’s not a great start, is it? Not if I want you to believe me. But now I can’t take it back. Story of my life. Anyway.’ I clear my throat. ‘I figured the whole thing out. Rob Cho was murdered by a NASA scientist named Franklin Anders, who’s secretly working for Beijing. Cho had seen a Chinese spacecraft on a scan, and Anders killed him to cover it up. If he finds out that we know about it, he might come after us, too.’
I finally spot Garcia’s car, parked all the way over on the far side of the lot. I break into a jog towards it.
‘Garcia gave me Anders’ address. I’m on my way there so I can …’ Actually, I’m not sure what I’ll do when I get there. Hopefully I’ll find some way to prove his guilt. But if it comes down to hand-to-hand combat, I’m in real trouble.
‘The point is,’ I say, ‘you should take some steps to protect yourself, in case I screw this up. Remember, he’s not just one guy—he’s got the Chinese Ministry of State Security behind him. Sweep your car for bugs and then go to a different field office, somewhere they won’t think to look for you. Take a gun, and keep your phone switched off. Look …’ I unlock Garcia’s car as I approach. ‘I’m really sorry I dragged you into this. I didn’t mean to. I thought—’ My throat closes up. ‘I thought you were done with me, so it didn’t matter if I threw my life away. I should have guessed my problems would end up being your problems.’ I take a breath. ‘I know you think I’m crazy. Can’t say I blame you. But please, please—’
There’s a beep. I check the screen. The call has ended. There must be a limit on how long a voicemail can be. Probably for the best. I delete the record of the call, just like Garcia did when he was pretending he hadn’t contacted the media.
I unlock Garcia’s car, climb in, and throw the phone onto the passenger seat. It’s a fancier car than I’m used to. When I start the engine, a warm, bassy stereo comes to life. The speed—currently 0 mp/h—is projected onto a little glass square that unfolds between me and the windshield. There’s a warning beep, and a seatbelt symbol flashes. I buckle up and wait for the noise to stop.
Garcia has told me he’ll stay in his office. He’s safest there, for now. If the MSS comes after him, they’ll want to get him somewhere private, like his home.
That damn beeping is still going. I squint at the message under the seatbelt symbol: Fasten passenger seatbelt.
I sit perfectly still. Acting natural. Wondering what to do. Too late. Strong hands shoot out from behind me. A forearm locks across my throat, cutting off my air. A palm clamps down on my forehead, crushing me backwards against the seat. My heart hammers my ribs. I claw at the arm crushing my throat, but my attacker has anticipated this. He’s wearing gloves, and a leather jacket.
