Spin (Captain Chase)

by Patricia Cornwell

  Unzipping the dead woman’s black leather jacket, I check for inner pockets, discovering that she also was carrying a wallet.

  “Fang Yanshi,” I read from a driver’s license, and in Chinese the surname means agreeable demo, ART lets me know in my lenses, as if it might be helpful. “A Los Angeles address, 34 years old,” and I ask out loud if there’s an apartment, home, anything in that name around here.

  It dawns on me that there’s no problem talking to ART in front of my sister, who knows him better than I do. But I’m unsure what will happen when we query him at the same time or how he’ll decide who to answer first. I’m not sure artificial intelligence or quantum computing could make the right choice, one that feels comfortable for all parties, and not dismissive or hurtful.

  “There’s nothing in the greater Hampton area that’s owned or rented under the name Fang Yanshi or anything similar,” ART informs me in my earpiece.

  “What about the name Beaufort Tell, if that’s who this dude really was?” and it’s Carme asking, looking at a rental receipt from the Dog Beach Marina, confirming the very darn thing I’m worried about.

  She’s hearing ART in her earpiece the same way I am, helping herself to him as if she has special status rather much like she does with everyone. Although to be fair, they’ve worked together for the past 6 months based on what Dick relayed this morning, and I’ve known ART less than a day.

  “Anything in the name of Beaufort Tell or anything close? That’s what’s on the driver’s license and the boat rental receipt, paid in cash,” Carme is talking to ART. “And switch to audible. It’s just us. He might have called himself Bo for short. Bo Tell, and that’s a good name to have if you want to be teased a lot.”

  “I bet some people pronounced it bottle or teased him to Bo tell it on the mountain,” I agree, knowing all too well what it’s like to have a name people make fun of, at times brutally.

  Like Callisto or Carme with a last name like Chase, our initials are CC as in carbon copy. I’ve been around the mean-spirited schoolyard more than once, and I guess killing strangers for pay is one way to get revenge.

  “Negative,” ART lets us know out loud. “No residences or hotel rooms in the name of Beaufort Tell, Bo Tell or anything similar.”

  “Fang Yanshi might have been the hitman’s wife or girlfriend,” I suggest.

  “Because of the rings she’s wearing,” Carme says. “The same ones he had on, remember?” as if I could forget. “It’s looking like I likely took out Fang’s main man, and I’d say she was pretty motivated to settle a score tonight.”

  I ask ART to give us the names of every rental at the Dog Beach Marina apartment complex where the Cherokee was last caught on camera.

  “But run an algorithm that excludes people who don’t fit the profile,” I’m saying. “Such as families, young or elderly couples . . .”

  Instantly names begin appearing in my lenses, and I assume in Carme’s too. But she doesn’t seem to notice what’s crawling by right now, and if my hair could stand on end, it would.

  “Speaking of getting teased in school,” I say, dumbfounded. “Especially during roll call when the teacher said the last name first. Kracker comma Jack and everybody laughs. Kracker with a K,” and ART gives us the address.

  “Now what?” I ask Carme. “I don’t know what you’re thinking but someone might want to get their bodies out of here before Fran comes back. She won’t appreciate the creative way we handle things.”

  “I was thinking of letting the police deal with it.”

  “Why play by the rules now?” and I can’t believe what I’m hearing.

  “They’re in our favor because what went down was caught on our security cameras,” Carme checks out the gas cans on the dock, 4 of them, a total of 8 gallons. “Enough to torch the place,” she announces matter-of-factly. “With everybody in it, I suspect. After they shot whoever happened to be here, and it’s as good a case for self-defense as you’ll ever find.”

  We start walking back to the house.

  “ART, alter the metadata so we’re not on film at the same time,” she adds.

  “Is this the way it’s always going to be? That we can’t be seen together?” I’m more bothered by that than anything else, including the people we’ve killed.

  “We’re more powerful when we’re apart,” she echoes what Dick says.

  “And you believe that?” I detach the suppressor from my Bullpup, and they’ve cooled enough for me to tuck them in my vest pocket.

  “For the most part,” she says as we climb the porch steps.

  “Seriously?” I protest, and I don’t want it to be true that I’ll wake up tomorrow finding her gone again. “Then explain what we just did, Carme? Because all kidding aside, both of us took them out.”

  “The way this needs to go down, Sisto, is you handled the situation yourself. You get all the credit. The only embarrassment is it took an owl and 8 rounds to get the job done,” she playfully, affectionately nudges me with her elbow like the old days.

  34

  AT LEAST while I was drugged, roped and tied inside suite 604, I caught up on my sleep, and it’s a darn good thing. When Dick picks me up at 0600 hours sharp, I’ve not been to bed.

  “Morning,” he says as I climb into the back seat, setting my bags on the floor by my feet.

  “Good morning,” I buckle up in the dark, looking at the backs of the agents up front, neither of them greeting me.

  “Let’s go,” Dick says to them, and he asks me how I’m doing.

  “Fine, thanks.”

  I act as if the morning has been like any other, the past few hours a marathon of interrogations that began when Fran sped home from the mobile home park, her emergency lights going full tilt after Mom called her about the shooting. By then, Carme and her Chase Car had vanished again, leaving me to explain that I supposedly took out both assassins single-handedly.

  Fran and other police are busy on our property, all kinds of investigators roaming about as I’m driven off in Dick’s black Suburban. I recognize his Secret Service detail from the aviation hangar when I rushed there after the rocket exploded and the Space Station was hacked. The agents sitting up front were part of the posse looking for Carme.

  Or that’s what I assumed when in fact they were dealing with other dire problems including the missing GOD chip. Except I’m wondering how missing it really is as I think of comments Mom made when we were talking earlier on the porch and in the kitchen. Dad shouldn’t have told Lex a darn tooting thing, she said, and she saw what was coming.

  She knows from painful experience what can happen when Dad tucks his latest ward under his wing. If my unstoppable, secretive mother saw what was coming, she would do something about it. And not tell anyone. Ever. Not even Dick, who’s all business this morning, decked out in dress blues, a chest full of ribbons, 4 shiny silver stars on his epaulets.

  There are few cars on the road, and nobody talks as we drive fast with the grille lights strobing, the Suburban’s cockpit, storage boxes and other extra features the same as my Tahoe’s. Dick is busy on his phone as usual, and I monitor my own communications and updates in my SPIES as we head to NASA Langley’s 10-story hangar.

  Fifteen minutes later we’re crossing the Southwest Branch Back River, then following Perimeter Road around the airfield, headed to the hangar looming in the dark. Its massive sliding door is closed as we drive across the lighted ramp, my attention seized by what awaits on the helipad. Flat gray, sleek and elegant, and I don’t need the specs from ART to know what I’m looking at.

  The Agusta 109 helicopter has a fully articulated 4-bladed rotor system, twin Pratt & Whitney engines, and can cruise all day at around 155 knots (178 mph). I’ve piloted a few but nothing tricked out like this one with its search
light, FLIR, and mounts for machine guns and missiles, and what I wouldn’t give to fly it.

  Grabbing our bags, we head that way as two men in black flight suits meet us, neither of them military or they’d salute Dick to the point of genuflecting. Instead, they shake our hands, the younger of them flashing me a smile and winking. I’m stunned when he greets me by name, and I recognize his voice.

  Only Conn Lacrosse isn’t really CIA as it turns out. He’s a member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force and assigned to the Central Intelligence Agency, I’m informed.

  “So Calli, how badly are you salivating right now?” he says, and I also didn’t know he was a chopper pilot.

  He’s much younger than I thought, I’d peg him mid-30ish, someone who spends serious time in the gym, and probably eats all the right stuff like hummus and salads. Easy on the eye, he has wavy chestnut hair, a clean-shaven square jaw, and perfect teeth that he might whiten.

  There are no identifying patches, no name tag on his flight suit, and the material looks suspiciously woven with sensors. His fitness-tracker-type bracelet and tinted glasses are remarkably similar to my CUFF and PEEPS.

  “No stick time for you today,” he picks on me just like he’s always done over the phone, only I never knew he might be flirting. “You get to be chauffeured.”

  “It makes me sick,” as I do a walk around, feeling one of the worst cases of aircraft envy I’ve suffered in a while, and I ask if he’s the pilot in command.

  “Who other?”

  “Then you’d better hope you do a good job because I’m watching,” I point at my eyes and his, the way Carme does when she’s being aggressive, and the gesture sets off the Suburban’s car alarm, the engine gunning.

  The awful honking and roaring stop as quickly as they started, and Dick has a bemused smile as we climb into the cabin of the helicopter, sitting down in the forward-facing seats.

  “That’s happened twice now,” I let him know. “I cause a misfire, setting off the car alarm, the accelerator gunning and sticking.”

  “Our bad,” he admits. “Pointing at your eyes sent the wrong message to ART. He confused the gesture with a different one I don’t need to bore you with,” translated, he’s not going to tell me. “Suffice it to say what you witnessed is a misinterpreted gesture that causes misfires. A programming error that needs to be sorted out.”

  We begin fastening our 5-point harnesses, and it frosts my cupcake. I want to be up front flying right seat, not sitting back here like I’m in a taxicab, talking. I don’t care who it’s with.

  “The intercom will be set to crew only,” Dick informs me as Conn and his copilot begin going through their preflight checklist. “I’ll give you the upshot of what’s about to happen, Calli. And I don’t want you to get upset.”

  “Why would I?” I feel the blood drain from my face, always dreading that he’s about to deliver terrible news, because he has before.

  These days I worry most that it will be about Carme. I’ve always known that if something happens to her, Dick would be the one who tells me. Somehow, he’d get word first, before her own family because of who he is. I ask him if she’s okay as I hear the sound of the Agusta’s battery turning on, my built-in spectrum analyzer picking up electronic signals like mad.

  “She left before Fran or anybody else showed up, didn’t say where she was going and I’ve not had any contact with her since she left,” I explain.

  Carme also didn’t mention if and when I might see her again, and I hope I’ll get used to living like this. Here today. Or maybe not. Showing up when least expected just in time to shoot someone and hide the evidence.

  “You don’t need to concern yourself about her,” Dick says as the first engine fires up, the blades turning, and we put on our headsets. “You need to worry about yourself,” his voice over the intercom now, and I turn down the volume, my hearing more sensitive than it used to be.

  “What is it I might get upset about?” I push the foam-covered microphone boom closer until it’s touching my bottom lip as the second engine fires up, both of them in flight idle.

  “It was never my intention to throw you into the fray this soon. Much sooner than ever intended,” Dick’s voice in my headset. “I wouldn’t blame you for being angry and feeling put upon,” as the blades spin faster.

  We can’t hear the chatter between the pilots or their calls to the tower, and Dick assures me they’re not listening to us either. It seems an irony that he would expect me to believe that considering who we’re talking about. The CIA and Secret Service. The commander of Space Force and a NASA cyber investigator. I don’t know why any of us would trust anybody, least of all each other.

  “What things are you talking about?” I insist. “Beyond what I learned at Dodd Hall.”

  The helicopter is getting light on its wheeled landing gear, and I feel us lifting off, nosing forward to gain speed.

  “I realize you were preoccupied at the Gantry yesterday afternoon,” he changes the subject as he does so artfully, referencing my foot pursuit with Lex while the test model was splashing down. “What did you think of the MOBE?”

  “I guess it’s like patenting an invention, then seeing it in a store, and nobody told you,” I reply, the NASA Langley campus below dark, empty and slushy with melting snow.

  The Gantry hulks blackly against the horizon, the first morning light touching vacuum spheres that look like ghostly planets from up here.

  00:00:00:00:0

  FLYING OVER Smith Lake, we cross I-95 at an altitude of 365.8 meters (1,200 feet), ART lets me know. He’s thoughtful enough to give me constant flight updates on our speed, heading, aircraft in the area, nearby cell towers and other obstructions.

  After hearing me complain to Dick about how badly I wanted to be at the controls instead of a passenger, ART gave me my own heads-up display in my PEEPS and SPIES. I’m able to monitor the same maps the pilots have in the cockpit. I almost believe my artificial friend feels a little bad for me.

  By now it’s obvious where we’re headed but I’m not sure why or what’s expected of me. For the past 40 minutes, Dick and I have been discussing the extensive research I conducted on the MOBE, although it wasn’t called that then. Helping with the design of such a vehicle was one of my first tasks when I began working at NASA Langley.

  I remember driving myself crazy imagining every far-flung potential and worst-case scenario. It was on me to anticipate conditions and failures that could cause catastrophic problems, if the heat shielding got damaged, for example. Or a thruster malfunctioned, causing the spacecraft to go into a spin, running out of fuel and spiraling down into the Earth’s atmosphere. In other words, toast.

  Less than 10 minutes out from our destination, and Quantico is directly under us now. Usually one doesn’t fly over the Marine Corps base, and is polite enough to give the FBI National Academy a wide berth. But our pilot in command navigates through restricted, sensitive airspace as if he answers to no one, gracefully banking east toward the Potomac, the sun low over the river as we begin to follow it.

  When the visibility is as good as it is right now, I’m reminded that the past is always present, and at times I get the uncanny feeling that nothing begins or ends, everything happening at once. In creeks and shallow water along the shoreline are the coffin-shaped charred hulls of Civil War fleets set ablaze more than a century and a half ago.

  Chimneys and other ruins stand starkly alone in fields where marauding soldiers burned homes to the ground. Nearing Washington National Airport, we cross the Potomac, entering the District of Columbia, and Dick gets around to telling me why I’m headed to a secret briefing.

  He informs me that 5 days ago, alarming orbital maneuvers were detected in the geostationary belt (GEO), 35,786 kilometers (22,236 miles) above Earth’s equator. The area of space
is where some communications and spy satellites live, and this is the sort of thing I’ve feared.

  “We already were aware of something unusual,” he explains. “We’ve been monitoring the strange activity since we first picked it up on radar 6 months ago,” and by we, he must mean Space Force. “But this was different and far more aggressive.”

  “Six months ago, Carme was implanted with her network,” I put two and two together.

  “After she was almost a casualty to what I suspect is going on, and you’ll hear more about that at the briefing,” Dick says. “We wouldn’t have escalated like this but the boom was dropping, Calli, and now the situation has gone critical,” he continues sharing information drop by drop, reminding me of how stingy he was with the space bag of lemon punch.

  “And what role does MOBE play in all this?” I hate to ask.

  “Your escape vehicle has a very important one.”

  “What do you mean, my vehicle?” besides the fact I helped develop it more than a little bit, I’m tempted to brag like my sister but I don’t.

  “The MOBE is an emergency escape vehicle for a spaceplane you haven’t met but know a lot about,” Dick says, as usual not answering what I asked. “The escape module is attached to the winged vehicle at launch, and concealed in the fairing of the rocket until you reach space. Prior to your return to Earth, the MOBE will be detached and left to orbit.”

  “In other words, it’s parked up there for future use,” I fill in the blank because it’s not a new concept with us.

  Besides the MOBE there eventually could be other specialized modules for laboratories, debris collection, drone deployment, and also potential escape vehicles if something happens to your spaceplane, the mothership. Eventually, there will be a school of MOBE-type vehicles launched and left up there. Or that’s what we talked about, I remind him.