It had been a long, damned time since he’d had nightmares about Afghanistan. What the hell was Samantha doing in his dream?
He glanced at his watch, saw that it was zero-five-twenty. He had a meeting with Tower and Shields in forty minutes.
Knowing he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, he dressed and hit the gym for a quick run before heading back to his room to change and grab his computer. By the time he had dressed, Jones and Segal were in the hall waiting for him.
Jones took one look at him. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just a long night.”
Jones grinned. “With the journal or with Dr. Park?”
“The journal.” Thor headed up the stairs to the second level. “How was the greenhouse—or did you and Kristi find someplace else?”
“Jesus.” Segal shook his head. “The greenhouse, man? Seriously?”
“How’d you hear about that?”
“Women talk to each other.” Thor made his way to the small conference room. He logged in while Segal and Jones made coffee and traded barbs over Jones’ sex life.
“I’m just saying it’s unprofessional, man. Do it on your own time.”
“You’re just jealous because you’re not getting any.”
Segal laughed. “I just have higher standards for myself than boning the first chick who will have me while I’m on assignment.”
“You two done?” Thor’s finger hovered above the trackpad.
They shut their mouths and joined him at the conference table.
He clicked to start the meeting, sat, and took a sip of his coffee.
A moment later, Tower and Shields appeared on the screen.
“Great work yesterday,” Tower said. “The analyst team has gone over the interviews and yesterday’s events with Barclay, as well as the pages from Dr. Holcomb’s journal. Shields?”
The view switched to Shields. “We can cross Jason Huger off our list. We were able to download the records from Huger’s computer. He was where he said he was that night—hanging out online with his gaming buddies. We can take Dr. Park and Ms. Chang off the list as well. We assess that their answers are authentic. The money deposited into Ms. Chang’s account was part of an inheritance from an uncle.”
That left Lance Barclay, Bai Zhang Wei, and Kazem Hamidi.
Shields went on. “As for Barclay, the journal entries suggest he’s telling the truth. I’m not ready to rule him out as a suspect entirely. He has the skills, and he lied about where he was that night. Also, his jealousy could be a motive. But I’m more interested in Kazem Hamidi. He hasn’t admitted to his aggressive confrontation with Dr. Holcomb, and he still can’t account for his whereabouts.”
“What about Zhang Wei?” Segal asked. “He says he got the nights confused and changed his story to say he worked late.”
“He’s still on the list, too. No one you interviewed remembers seeing him, either.”
Then Tower’s face appeared on the screen. “Dr. Holcomb’s journal confirms that her murder and the attack on the satellite are connected, as the analyst team believed. We know the killer’s motive now. He wanted to silence her. It’s our job to make sure he fails. The question is, what’s our next move?”
Thor had thought about this. “We need to force the killer’s hand, draw him out.”
Tower nodded. “What do you suggest?”
“We can tell everyone that Jones and Segal are flying home with the package, while I’m staying to find the killer. We make it look real—flight schedule, all of it. This bastard wants the package. The moment it’s in the air, he’s lost his chance. He knows that. I’m betting he’ll do whatever he can to get his hands on it before our fictional plane lands. With any luck, he’ll get sloppy.”
Tower considered it. “It’s a risky plan.”
“It is.”
Desperate men were dangerous.
* * *
Samantha watched the readouts as the telescope finished observing four sky fields at declination minus forty-five degrees and then moved to the next four. She’d had time to look at yesterday’s observations, the data from all thousand detectors coming together to create an image that was unmistakably an elliptical double-ringed galaxy. The work was a welcome distraction from the chaos that was life on station. This is what she was here to do, not obsess about murderers and hacked satellites and former KGB agents.
Still, her mind kept drifting to Patty’s murder.
On the walk over, she’d told Thor about Vasily and the switchblade, and he hadn’t been happy with her.
“I wish you’d let me know,” he’d said, a grumpy frown on his face. “Vasily is not someone you want to hang with.”
“For the record, I wasn’t ‘hanging with’ him. He came up on me out of the blue.”
Then Thor had warned her not to be alone with Kazem or Bai. He hadn’t given her an explanation, but it didn’t take a doctorate to understand that Cobra must have narrowed their list of suspects and that both men were still on it.
It was hard for her to imagine either of them as a murderer. Both were scientists dedicated to their work. No, Kazem hadn’t taken Patty’s rejection as well as he might have, but he hadn’t done anything violent. And yet someone here—someone everyone considered a friend and colleague—had killed her.
Samantha willed herself to focus, checking each amplifier channel’s output before heading into the back to make more coffee. She reached for the canister and remembered it was empty. She’d used the last of the coffee grounds this morning.
She walked to the hallway and unlocked the door that separated the SPT control room from the BICEP half of the building. She made her way to the shared storeroom for another bag of coffee, Kazem’s and Greg’s voices drifting up from their control center.
“Try rebooting it now.”
“I hope this works.”
“Yes!”
She returned to her side of the building and brewed a fresh pot of coffee, carrying the steaming mug back to her desk, her thoughts drifting again.
None of this made sense to her. How could the killer possibly think he could get away with it? They were all here for the duration of austral winter in a closed environment. Under normal circumstances, no one came, and no one left. That meant the pool of suspects was small and static.
But what if the bastard hadn’t planned it—or at least hadn’t thought it through? Methanol poisoning was slow and easy to expose. All she’d needed was the bottle of wine and a lighter. Surely, the killer had understood that the autopsy would reveal…
Chills skittered down her spine.
Under normal circumstances, Patty’s body would still be here. She’d be frozen solid somewhere in the service arches below the station, waiting for a flight home in austral spring. There would have been no autopsy until November, and by that time, no one here would have remembered what had happened that night. An investigation would be almost impossible.
Maybe the killer believed he could get away with it. No one on station had imagined that the Pentagon would risk sending a team of operators to retrieve components for the satellite. Or that Patty’s body would go home on their plane. Or that those operators would take on a murder investigation.
The killer hadn’t planned for any of that.
He hadn’t planned for Cobra.
“Shit.” She needed to tell Thor.
She picked up her radio but hesitated. He was probably busy. It’s not like she had new evidence for him. This was nothing more than a few connected dots. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would unmask the killer.
“Samantha?”
She gasped, dropped the radio, and turned to find Kazem standing behind her in his snow pants and a long-sleeved shirt. She must have forgotten to lock the door to the walkway when she’d returned with the coffee.
Shit.
She would have picked up the radio, but dropping it had broken the plastic casing, and the batteries had rolled beneath her desk. “Damn it, Kazem! Why the hell did you s
neak up on me like that?”
“I’m sorry. I did not mean to scare you. I hoped we could talk.”
She held up a hand. “Hang on a second. I was just about to call in.”
“Okay.”
She picked up her station-issued radio. “Charli, Charli, this is Samantha out at the Dark Sector Lab.”
“Charli here, Sam.”
“Hey, Charli. I’m here in the lab talking with Kazem.” That was Samantha’s insurance. “Can you please let Thor know I need him to come out here?”
“Will do. Is everything okay?”
“Yes, I think so. Tell him it’s urgent.”
“Got it. Over.”
It would take Thor fifteen minutes to make it here, which meant she was alone with Kazem until then. But now Charli knew he was here. If anything happened to her…
Samantha set the radio aside, gestured toward Patty’s chair, and did her best to look like she wasn’t unnerved by Kazem’s presence. “What’s going on?”
He stayed where he was, his expression crumpling into misery, a pleading look in his eyes. “Please help me. I didn’t kill Patty, and I didn’t hack the satellite. They think I did it because I am from Iran. But it wasn’t me.”
Samantha didn’t know what to say. “Did you tell them this?”
“Yes, but they do not believe me because I have no proof. You must talk to them. Explain to them that I would never hurt her.”
“Kazem, you’re going to have to do that yourself. I don’t know where you were or what you were doing that night. They’re not interested in anyone’s opinion. They just want facts.”
His shoulders slumped. He walked to Patty’s chair and sat. “I told them I was in the lounge with the others, but it was a lie. I wasn’t there.”
“Where were you?”
“If I tell them, people in Iran might find out. I would be … I would be hanged.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked toward the hallway.
Samantha followed his gaze to find Bai Zhang Wei standing there, the same pleading expression on his face.
“Kazem can’t tell them where he was because … he was with me.”
* * *
Thor ran the kilometer between the station and the Dark Sector lab, the cold air burning his throat even with the mask. He and Shields had been going over his plan for drawing out the killer when he’d gotten word from Charli that Samantha was in the Dark Sector Lab with their top suspect. Why he’d heard it from Charli and not via radio from Samantha he didn’t know. But if she’d forgotten her radio again, the two of them would have a little talk.
Coughing, he reached the stairs and took them two at a time. He drew his pistol, looked through the small window in the door, and saw Samantha sitting at her desk and talking with both Kazem Hamidi and Bai Zhang Wei.
Hva’ fanden? What the hell?
He holstered the pistol, stepped inside, and pulled off his mask. “Are you okay?”
Samantha stood, walked to the door, grabbed her parka. “We need to talk.”
She opened the door and stepped out into the cold, zipping her parka to her chin.
“Why didn’t you call me directly on your radio?”
“I had the radio in my hand to call you for a different reason.” She wasn’t wearing a hat or a mask, her breath rising in a cloud of ice crystals. “Then Kazem came up behind me, and I was so startled that I dropped it. The batteries rolled under my desk. I did the best I could at the moment, okay?”
“Okay.” Thor coughed, his throat raw from his run through the cold. “What the hell are they both doing here?”
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. They’re lovers. They say they were together the night Patty was poisoned.”
“What? Jesus!”
“Kazem is terrified that if he tells you the truth, the Iranian government will find out he’s gay. Apparently, people get hanged for that in Iran. That’s why he lied about being in the lounge and Bai lied about being in his room.”
Thor shook his head. “I don’t buy it. Wei was at the IceCube lab that night.”
“Yes.” Samantha huddled deeper into her parka. “That’s where they hook up. They’re afraid of being seen together, so they meet there after hours. They bring food from the galley and have romantic dinners. There’s a sofa bed. They can hold hands and kiss and … stuff without being seen.”
“Didn’t Kazem try to ask Patty out more than once? Why would a gay man ask a woman for a date?”
“Isn’t that obvious? Patty was supposed to be his cover—proof that he’s not gay.”
Thor wasn’t sure he could buy any of this. “Why did they come to you?”
“I guess they thought they could trust me. Kazem is terrified to the point of tears. You have to find a way to keep what he tells you out of the official record. I don’t want to be the reason he ends up swinging from a rope.”
Thor’s gaze moved over the skin on her face. “You shouldn’t be out here without a hat and mask. Let’s get you back inside.”
She stopped him with a hand to his chest. “Please, Thor. I believe them.”
“Trust me, okay?” Thor opened the door, held it for her, and followed her inside.
Kazem sat in one of the office chairs, dread on his face, Bai behind him, his hand on Kazem’s shoulder.
“Dr. Hamidi. Dr. Wei.” Thor took off his mask, unzipped his parka, and met each man’s gaze. “Samantha has just shared what you told her. I understand your situation.”
Kazem shook his head. “I don’t think you can understand, Mr. Thor. You are from Denmark. Bai and I have been to Denmark. We visited last summer. It is a paradise for gay men. Men can get married and walk together on the streets, like other couples. But in Iran, I would be arrested, tortured, and hanged. If the wrong person finds out...”
What he’d said about Denmark was true. It was one of the world’s most progressive countries when it came to gay rights and had been for nearly a century.
“Then you know that I wouldn’t do anything to put you in danger.” Thor bent down and gathered the broken pieces of Samantha’s radio. “I need the truth from you both, but there’s no reason the details need to be a part of the official record. Cobra can protect you, but you need to tell us the truth.”
They all walked back to the station together. While Samantha went to the galley for dinner, Thor met with Jones and Segal in the conference room to question Kazem and Bai separately. Segal handled most of it, going at them hard while Jones taped it to send back to Shields.
Afterward, Thor sat with Jones and Segal in the conference room, going over what each man had said. There were no holes in their stories, no red flags.
“They could have worked this out ahead of time,” Jones said.
Segal nodded. “They could have, but there was nothing rehearsed about their answers. We’ll have to see what Shields says, but I think they’re telling the truth.”
“There’s one way to find out for certain.” Thor glanced at his notes. “They said they visited Denmark last summer. I’m going to give Shields their passport and credit card information and see if their story checks out. If they really did spend a week together in Copenhagen last summer, there’s no reason not to believe the rest of their story.”
“Fuck.” Jones leaned back in his chair, bent his arms behind his head, laced his fingers together. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
Thor nodded. “We’re back where we started.”
17
Still breathing hard, Thor lay on Samantha’s bed, his gorgeous body glistening with sweat. He reached for her, drew her down against him. “Where did you learn to do that? That was … incredible.”
“You sound surprised.” She moved up his body, snuggled against him, rested her head on his chest. “I used science.”
“Science? I fucking love science—especially now.”
She did her best to explain. “Penises enjoy the stimulation of vaginas, right?”
Thor cou
ldn’t disagree. “Right.”
“I theorized that oral sex would feel best for men if their partners made their mouths and hands work together to feel more like a vagina, while focusing on the most sensitive parts of the penis.”
Thor grinned. “So, you just logicked your way through sexual physics and dick anatomy and came up with … whatever you just did? A world-class astronomer reasoning her way to giving incredible head. Do you have any idea how cute that is?”
“Cute?” She raised her head, looked up at him. “Why are you laughing?”
“You amaze me, Samantha.” His brow furrowed. “By the way, why does everyone call you Sam? Patty called you Samantha—at least in her journal. I call you Samantha. It’s a pretty name. Should I call you Sam instead?”
“I prefer Samantha, but it seems to be too much for most people to say.” She’d tried correcting people her first winter here, but it hadn’t worked.
“You should tell them, let them know not to call you Sam any longer.”
“It seems like a lot of fuss over something trivial.”
He stroked her hair. “It’s not trivial. It’s your name, and you’re worth the fuss.”
“I suppose you’re right.” She threaded her fingers through his chest hair. “I’m glad you’re not leaving yet.”
“So am I.”
He’d told her this evening that Cobra was flying Jones and Segal home when the next weather window opened in about a week, but that he would be staying to finish the investigation. She knew he’d be leaving eventually, but she’d take every day—and every night—she could get with him.
Are you falling for him?
No, of course, she wasn’t. She’d given up on men. She was doing what Kristi was doing—taking what she could and enjoying herself.
“You should know that things could become more dangerous when the killer or his contacts hear that Jones and Segal are leaving and taking the package.”
She propped herself up on her elbow, saw that his expression was serious. “You think the killer might try to stop them?”
“The person who brought that satellite down loses any chance to profit by that action the moment the plane leaves. Yes, I think they’ll try to stop us—or try to get the package from us. And then there are the Russians—or whoever is paying this guy. The people who wanted those components might become a threat, too. Be extra careful, okay? I’ll get you another radio in the morning.”
Hard Line Page 16
