At the very end of the Avenue of the Cosmonauts, Hardcastle stopped. He looked around expectantly.
Footsteps rang on the intersecting path that formed a T-junction with the avenue. “Garner,” Hardcastle hailed.
Lance!
Minus his rucksack.
The two men talked quietly. Skyler was on fire. He felt certain that Hardcastle’s life was in imminent danger. Lance had said several times that he suspected Hardcastle of being a Chinese spy. It was a great way of deflecting attention from himself. And what better way to ‘prove’ his suspicions than for Hardcastle to end up dead, no doubt with compromising evidence on his body?
Skyler edged closer.
The men were just dim silhouettes against the vast, cloudy night sky. The wind blowing off the steppe made the trees sough overhead, so Skyler couldn’t catch their words.
Near the end of the avenue, four holes had been dug in readiness for Ivanov, Hardcastle, Qiu, and Xiang to plant their saplings. Plaques bearing each name already stood in place. Skyler crouched down there, instinctively making himself small.
Would it be his lot to save a life today? To make up, in some screwy way, for the death of Oliver Meeks? Yeah, and how? he mocked himself. He didn’t have his Glock on him. Bringing a gun into what was, after all, a Russian military base would have been a bit too audacious.
Lance and Hardcastle shook hands and parted.
Each man went the way the other one had come. Lance walked back towards the hotel, along the Avenue of the Cosmonauts. Trapped, Skyler hunkered close to the ground.
Lance walked past without seeing him, so close that Skyler could hear the zipper of his coat jingling.
As Skyler crouched there, heart thudding, his gaze fell on the nearest plaque.
The name of an SoD astronaut was written in raised white letters on a dark background.
Cyrillic, sure. Skyler’s Russian was pathetic, but to facilitate occasional collaboration with Russian intelligence agencies, he’d learned their alphabet.
Those letters did not say Alexei Ivanov, or Qiu Meili, or Xiang Peixun. Or Adam Hardcastle.
They said Lance Garner.
*
Skyler ran after Hardcastle, who’d taken the other path. He caught up with him near the front gate. Hardcastle had circled around the hotel, instead of taking a shortcut through the main building. Skyler accosted him by grabbing his elbow.
Hardcastle whirled around, shaking him off. When he recognized Skyler, his stance relaxed, but his expression stayed wary. Skyler could see his pudgy face well in the light from the gates.
“You’re overweight,” Skyler said. “Did you even pass the medical?”
“Yes, I passed the medical,” Hardcastle said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“You’re not going on the Spirit of Destiny, are you?”
“Of course I’m not going on that goddamn bottle rocket. I’ve got kids.”
Skyler saw it all now. He didn’t want to look stupid, even though he felt like the stupidest dweeb in the northern hemisphere. He said, “I just need to ensure your safety.”
“Is there some problem?”
Yes, there was a problem. There was a kiloton-yield problem which had just gone off in Skyler’s face. But all he said was, “Where are you heading to now?” He placed a hand lightly behind Hardcastle’s elbow to encourage him to start walking again.
“The Hotel Cosmodrome,” Hardcastle said, swinging obediently into motion. “That’s right, isn’t it? I hole up in Garner’s room, watch porn, and order room service for the next two weeks.”
It was a good plan, Skyler agreed. He said, “I’ll scout ahead. There were a lot of hacks here earlier.”
There weren’t any now. The media would be back tomorrow morning for the symbolic closing of the gates. This had been the perfect moment to make the switch.
Hardcastle followed him out past the guard kiosk, wearing a baseball cap which partially shadowed his face. Skyler accompanied him across the street and into the Hotel Cosmodrome. The security guard on duty greeted “Mr. Garner” with the faintest suggestion of a wink.
So the hotel staff had been paid off. The important people, the officials and ground techs at the Cosmodrome itself, would have been squared away. All that mattered now was hiding the switcheroo from the US media, who’d be shocked, shocked if they discovered that one of America’s Heroes™ had changed places with a spook.
Yup, they’d be almost as shocked as Skyler was.
Hiding his dismay, he reconfirmed Hardcastle’s plans. These amounted to flying home to the US as soon as the ‘bottle rocket’ left Earth orbit. “Wait here,” Skyler said. He ran next door, took his Glock out of his suitcase, checked that it was fully loaded, and brought it to Hardcastle’s room in the Hotel Cosmodrome. “You’d better have this.”
“What for?” Hardcastle said. He’d already stripped to his boxers and t-shirt. The fake fire in his room blazed. The television yakked. He was making himself comfortable, but his shoulders slumped. Skyler guessed—hoped—the man was ashamed of his part in this deception. He was an astronaut, after all.
“Just in case,” Skyler said with his enigmatic NXC smile. He placed the Glock on Hardcastle’s dressing table. He didn’t feel 100% sure that Hardcastle was scheduled to survive this. There was more than one way to pay off a Russian security guard. At least this way, Hardcastle would have a chance to see his kids again.
Skyler went back next door to his own, much shabbier accommodations. He locked the door, opened the window, and lit one of his rare cigarettes.
He’d been played for a fool.
All this time he thought he was Director Flaherty’s favorite, it had been Lance, after all.
How long had they been planning this? Long enough to have a custom Soyuz seat made for Lance, anyway.
Those horrible trips he and Lance had taken into orbit, supposedly because they were needed to help out with the construction of the SoD? Training. For Lance.
Lance’s suspicions of Hardcastle? Prefabricated as an excuse for booting Hardcastle off the mission, when the US media eventually did find out. (Poor Hardcastle.)
And all the work Skyler had done with Laura and Guillermo and Curtis, and the rest of the ‘second string,’ with Flaherty’s encouragement and approval, preparing them to step in at the last moment …
… not to mention the work put in by the official reserve astronauts from each country, who were just there for show, but they’d still had to spend years of their lives in training …
… all of it, all a complete fucking waste!
Really angry now, Skyler paused in his pacing to ash his cigarette out the window. He glowered at the Cosmonaut Hotel on the far side of the street. Presumably Lance was now settling in, using his good ol’ boy charm on his flummoxed crewmates. Bastard. In his head, Skyler used the Russian insult: dog.
OK. OK, but wait.
Maybe Hardcastle actually was a Chinese spy. In which case his replacement had been wise and necessary.
No, no. That was bullshit, and it always had been bullshit.
This was an NXC power play, pure and simple.
Flaherty and his allies were on the verge of pulling off a coup. Skyler had been incidental to the plot. He’d just been used.
He lit another cigarette, and his phone rang. Flaherty.
“Taft.”
“You catch up with Lance?”
A long moment of silence. “Yes,” Skyler said. “I did.”
“You just gotta find shit out for yourself, don’t you?” Flaherty said. “I was gonna put you into the picture next week. Wouldn’t have cost a business-class ticket on Aeroflot, either.”
“What can I say, boss? I had a craving for borscht.”
Flaherty gave his unamused chuckle. “I’ll see you at KSC on Monday.”
Stubbing out his last cigarette of the night, Skyler replayed the brief conversation in his head.
You catch up with Lance?
Not yet,
boss. But I’m going to.
*
Monday. KSC, Kennedy Space Center, the most valorized facility in the entire US space industry.
Skyler sat in a conference room in the astronaut crew quarters with Director Flaherty, who’d put on weight over the years and now carried a pregnant-looking belly above his belt buckle.
In an ironic contrast to the poetic touches at Baikonur, the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building was a concrete cuboid that evoked the word ‘Stalinist.’ Down the hall, the astronauts were settling into their bedrooms. Skyler sat in front of a view of a parking lot. Above half-empty bookcases, a guitar hung on the wall. It made him feel sad.
He laid a sheaf of photos before Flaherty. He’d selected, cropped, and printed them off his iPhone. They showed Lance with his Chinese contact in Beijing.
Flaherty leafed through the stack, expressionless.
“And there’s this,” Skyler said, producing his trump card. He had printed out an itinerary of Lance’s that included a swing through Western China late last year. It cross-referenced perfectly with NRO data on the mysterious activities at the Korla missile complex.
“You’re taking the position that Lance is … what, Skyler? Tell me.”
“Working for the Chinese,” Skyler said. “That’s why we never tracked down the cause of the sabotage incident.”
“In that case, you’re gonna have to answer one question,” Flaherty said. “Why the hell would the Chinese take the risk of recruiting an American spy, when they’ve already got two of their own nationals on board?”
Skyler had thought of that. “We’re putting Lance on board to make sure nothing else happens. Right? So if they’ve got to him, there’ll be no one to stop them.”
Flaherty shook his head. He pushed Skyler’s carefully assembled piles of evidence back at him. “You’re forgetting something. Lance is a redblooded, flag-waving patriot.” His cool gaze reminded Skyler that he himself never had quite come up to scratch in that regard. The taint of the cosmopolitan intellectual elite still clung about him. Of course, it went without saying that a Ph.D from Beacon Hill could never be as patriotic as a redneck from West Virginia.
“They might have convinced him it would benefit the United States if the mission failed,” Skyler said.
“How?” Flaherty said.
And to that Skyler had no answer. He sagged. He never had managed to solve the riddle of Lance’s motivation to his own satisfaction.
“The woman?” he said.
“No reason an American patriot can’t bang a Chinese chick.”
Skyler nodded. In Flaherty’s ultimately simplistic worldview—which was also Lance’s—relations between men and women always came down to banging. Skyler tended to over-complicate things. He had thought of a love affair, which didn’t really fit … but banging did. And the trip to the environs of Korla? A coincidence.
Skyler’s suspicions added up to a pile of nothing. He was wrong. He’d pieced together a case against Lance for the reason that he hated his fucking guts, and no other.
“OK, boss,” he said. “I just felt that I should bring this stuff to your attention.”
“And I’m glad you did, because it makes me feel good about you.” Flaherty started to laugh—the full-on laugh that meant he’d caught a glimpse of the absurdity underlying the surface of life. “Did you think of this, Skyler? Lance’s balls are gonna be blue. Five years! Five years with no pussy! Heh, heh, heh. Even I am not that much of a patriot.”
They parted. Skyler walked down the corridor with his heart full of foul, swirling darkness. He might as well unpack his suitcase, since he’d be staying here with the astronauts for the next two weeks.
CHAPTER 42
Down, up.
Down, up.
Exhale and hold.
Jack’s arms started to shake. He thought about Koichi Masuoka. They had lifted together a few times. The Japanese astronaut weighed a stone less than Jack, but he had muscles of steel, and more importantly, he focused. Now he was gone, because he’d helped Jack that night in Beijing. Saved his life, maybe. Jack still remembered the office in the Japanese embassy where they’d spent the rest of the night: the safety posters featuring cartoon characters; the bitter green tea served by Masuoka’s foreign-service buddy, at two in the morning.
Now back in Japan, Masuoka was preparing to go into space again. He’d be stationed at the ISS after the SoD left. Hopefully that would make him feel better about not going on the SoD, although it couldn’t make Jack feel better about it.
Down, up.
Malignant forces swirled around the mission, as anonymous as those two gunmen in Beijing. They’d killed Theodore Zhang. Jack had seen it in the news. He’d rung the Foreign Office, told them that Zhang had probably been killed to stop him from talking about Unit 63618. That’s fascinating, they’d said. What is Unit 63618? I don’t know, Jack had been forced to say. It’s not on Google. Oh, I see. Well, thanks, we’ll certainly look into this.
Yeah, right.
How many more people would have their lives overturned like chairs at a bad party? How many more people would die?
Motherfucking MOAD.
Down, up.
He was benching 140 kilograms. Giles Boisselot stood behind him, spotting.
One more rep.
Up. Exhale—
—oh shit—
A grunt tore out of Jack’s lungs. His arms shook uncontrollably.
Boisselot’s mind, travelling in some distant galaxy, returned to planet Earth. His fingers closed on the bar just before it would have slipped through them and crashed onto Jack’s chest.
“Putain de merde!” Boisselot swore. With considerable difficulty, he replaced the bar on the rack. Jack slid out from underneath. “Sorry, Jack!” It came out as Jacques.
“No, I’m sorry,” Jack said. He stood, feeling a bit dazed. Bench press fails could be lethal, if your spotter wasn’t paying attention. So Jack was sorry—sorry he’d asked Boisselot to spot for him. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
“You’re OK?”
“Fine, thanks. I ought to’ve known that was one rep too many.” Jack toweled off sweat, drank some Gatorade. He moved over to the leg curl machine and embarked on a set.
He was pushing it in the gym, getting stronger, because he’d spend the next five years getting weaker. They’d have 0.3 gees in the habitation unit of the SoD. Exercise machines. But no one knew exactly what years of microgee would do to the human body. Jack was trying to stack the deck in his own favor by bulking up. He’d been working on this project for the last two years, and had stepped it up since they entered quarantine, because frankly there wasn’t much else to do.
Boisselot evidently did not share his concerns. The Frenchman exercised for the minimum time required, full stop. Now he was doing bicep curls. Jack craned to see which dumbbells he was using. Cripes. Hannah Ginsburg could have lifted those with less effort.
There were two kinds of astronauts, both in general and on the SoD crew. There were those who came from a military background. Jack, Menelaou, Alexei. Qiu, Xiang, Hardcastle. And then there were those who possessed some unique expertise. Ginsburg fell into that category. So did Giles Boisselot.
That pigeon-chested man over there, struggling to lift 10kg dumbbells, was the best xenolinguist in the world.
That’s how the media described him. A more accurate description would have been ‘the best xenolinguist in the world, who’s under eighty, and isn’t married, and doesn’t have crap eyesight.’ And when you took into account the fact that pre-MOAD, the number of xenolinguists in the world could be counted on two hands …
Well, Jack just hoped Boisselot could pull his weight in the other areas he’d trained for. Hydroponics and advanced life-support, God help us.
At least the Frenchman was willing, Jack reflected, as he went over and offered Boisselot some friendly tips on his form. Boisselot accepted these in the wholly non-smug spirit Jack meant them, nodding with his c
haracteristic enthusiasm. He apologized again about the bench press incident when they left the gym together, towels draped around their necks.
“Sacre bleu, don’t worry about it,” Jack said, massacring the antiquated French phrase to make Boisselot laugh at him, which he did.
Boisselot went into his bedroom. Jack carried on to his.
The crew quarters at Kennedy Space Center dated back to the Apollo missions, and apparently hadn’t been redecorated since then. The NASA-blue carpets and wood-paneled walls made the place feel even more cramped than it actually was. At least they had their own rooms, which wouldn’t be the case for the next five years. Jack resolved to enjoy his privacy while he had it. Mentally debating whether to select Platoon or American Sniper for his evening’s entertainment, he opened the door to his room.
On his bed sat Skyler Taft.
The NXC agent got up.
Jack, standing in the doorway, said, “I was trying to choose between a classic depiction of the brutality of war, or a feel-good appreciation of a great soldier. I hadn’t considered a well-deserved arse-kicking. But come to think of it, that would be entertaining.”
Skyler said, “Jeez, do you think I’m coming onto you or something?”
It hadn’t occurred to Jack. As soon as Skyler said that, however, Jack added Probably gay to his mental dossier on the NXC agent, with the obligatory footnote Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
“What do you want?” he said roughly, closing the door behind him.
Skyler said, “I just wanted to show you this video.” He messed around with the remote control for the television. Jack had time to wonder if this was actually just some training thing. If so, he should feel ashamed of his brazen aggression. Funnily enough, he didn’t. He peeled off his sweat-soaked t-shirt, dropped it on the floor, and dug in the drawer for a clean one.
The TV came on. Skyler turned around. He flinched, a tiny but visible reaction to half-naked Jack. That was primal. It was Holy shit this guy could break me in half. Jack was angry enough to enjoy this unseemly little victory. He gestured at the TV screen. “What in the fuck is this shit?”
Freefall: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 1) Page 27
