Jezebel's Ladder

by Scott Rhine

“Our people are sitting ducks up there. If someone wanted them dead, we wouldn’t be able to see it in time to warn them.”

  Amy’s face showed a cold fear, reinforcing his instincts. “Why would anyone want this disaster to happen?”

  “Maybe they don’t know the scale. Maybe it’s really going to hit California or Hawaii. Remember Pearl Harbor? Since the bases in the Philippines and Okinawa closed, we would have no way to interfere on the Pacific Rim,” he said, thinking the worst. “Maybe they don’t want us to save the satellite because they want the only copy. Who knows? There might be evidence leading back to the culprit.”

  “You’re getting paranoid. How could someone possibly shoot our people down? It took hours for the shuttle to get there.”

  “A rogue missile from the war exercises off the coast of Taiwan could go a lot faster, but it doesn’t have to be a ground-based attack. It could just be another satellite veering off course,” PJ guessed.

  Amy considered this as she stood. His first thought was how planes were built for people her size. His second was how great she looked in that skirt. She said, “I think we need to bring in the FBI counter-espionage unit. I’m going to ask the stewardess for a drink to take some aspirin.”

  “Get me a deck of cards!” he said as she left.

  Meanwhile, he rummaged through his paper sack. Martha had packed them a veritable feast, complete with peach cobbler and fried chicken that the Colonel would give a fortune for. He was polishing off a drumstick with gusto when Amy came back. “Every time I turn around, you’re eating,” she complained.

  “It’s a substitute for other carnal pleasures. What can I say? I get hungry when you’re around. Want some? It’s great. As far as I’m concerned, this proves her story about the peace treaties.”

  She sighed. “I might as well. We’re not calling anyone by radio this close to landing. The crew politely explained that it was against company policy. I want to try some of that corn bread you were raving about.”

  “Settle for peach cobbler?”

  “Settle? Give it here!”

  Amy tasted the cobbler with an expression of bliss. She moaned, “Oh, this is wonderful and it’s still warm!”

  Given the companionship and the circumstance, PJ considered it the best meal of his life. To the envy of their fellow passengers, the two finished and cleaned up just in time for the fasten seat belts sign. The meal had the unfortunate side effect of reminding PJ of how tired he was.

  At the airport, they were met by two men carrying signs with their names. The greeters wore reversible blue jackets with FBI written in yellow on the flip side. One agent was a thirtyish Hispanic beefcake, and the other looked like an old, Jewish man PJ used to see at the beach. Both were wearing flak vests and packing heat. In an airport where they won’t let you carry a hammer or screwdriver onboard, that was identification enough. Amy made a show of inspecting the badges: Goldberg and Alvarez.

  “So where’s the car?” PJ asked, heading for the exit.

  Agent Goldberg said, “We need some proof of ID.” Amy showed her badge from work and her credit card. PJ could only flash his drivers’ license.

  “The helicopter pad is over this way,” said Agent Alvarez.

  PJ’s stomach dropped. All that wonderful food was going to go to waste! Stalling, he said, “Just so we’re clear, what exactly are your orders concerning me?”

  Alvarez waffled, “The Regional Director said that every cooperation...”

  Goldberg cut him off. “We’re pressed for time, if you don’t mind? We were told you might know the suspect. Is that true?”

  PJ described Joe’s wrinkled clothing, his fiftyish appearance, and his mannerisms when talking with a gun in hand. “He’s been up for over two days now, but don’t judge him too harshly. I think he could have been Sheriff of Mayberry if he hadn’t been drafted.”

  Both men nodded. “Who is he?” Alvarez asked, taking out a note pad and pen.

  “Joe. I don’t know his last name. He works for some general, probably security for a special projects division.”

  Alvarez stared at him. “So what you’re saying is that Joe you-don’t-know-who, working for I-don’t-know, with military training but no sleep is holding twelve hostages.” PJ considered adding that his partner Mad Dog could give more details but he didn’t know the man’s real name or his present location.

  Amy interrupted, “What’s Joe want?”

  Goldberg answered in confidential tones. “He says someone there is a traitor, and no one gets to leave until someone confesses.”

  “Actually, that’s not so crazy,” PJ countered.

  “The shrink says he’s paranoid-delusional with a hair trigger. We left the air conditioning on because we didn’t want him to get worse,” Goldberg said. “When we tried to get him to let hostages go, he said that the world will blow up if he does. The guy is a fruitcake.”

  PJ decided to bluff in order to speed things along. “I work with the NSA. I’m not anybody important, just the only one with clearance that they could get here. Joe and Wilkes work for NASA and were our contacts inside. I don’t have a badge, but you can call Paulson directly on this thing to confirm it.” He tried to hand the older agent the spook phone.

  Goldberg waved it off and said, “Paulson’s out of reach right now.”

  “Joe’s a crack agent who’s right about the leak. If you can let me talk to him for two minutes and guarantee that you will have counter-espionage agents detain and question everyone in that room, I can end this thing before anyone gets hurt. I’d bet next month’s paycheck that one of those people killed Wilkes to cover his or her own tracks. Call now, and we can even spare the taxpayers the cost of a helicopter ride.” And the cost of scrubbing the interior, he added silently.

  Goldberg put PJ through to Joe on his phone.

  As soon as he recognized the voice, Joe blurted, “Am I glad to hear from you. We have a bloody mess here. I was suckered in by a call from Wilkes.”

  “Save it. I know all that. Things just got worse. I need you to do me a favor and then let the counter-espionage team take over the interrogation.” PJ paused to let things sink in. “This whole thing was a diversion. China is going after the space station; they blinded you so there would be no warning.”

  “Jesus,” Joe said.

  PJ let the ‘J’ word pass, because it could have been construed as a prayer for help. Since God has a tendency to help those who are already working as hard as they can, he added, “Warn them and get out of there alive. You’ve done your job.”

  “Roger that,” Joe said, and hung up.

  Alvarez blurted out more profanity.

  “Will that be all?” PJ asked.

  Goldberg, who looked at Smith like he’d just found a glowing meteor in his back yard, said, “We’ll have to keep you around until this is all straightened out. We can drive back to the Cape, I guess.”

  By the time they arrived at Mission Control, the snipers were off the rooftops and the sun was going down. The folks in charge swarmed the car on arrival. They buzzed around the escorts for a moment and then headed straight for PJ. A woman with close-cropped hair said, “I’m Agent Bell, a psychologist with the Hostage Team. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions, Mr. Smith?”

  Alvarez pried Amy away and insisted on allowing his superiors to question them separately.

  “How’s Joe doing?” he asked.

  “He surrendered. We have guards on him as well as the hostages. From what you’ve been saying to these agents, we’re not sure who needs guarding more. Your friend is asleep now, refusing to speak until a lawyer arrives,” said Bell.

  “When he wakes up, tell him I brought a deck of cards for him this time.” That puzzled them.

  “If he hadn’t surrendered at your request, you’d be held as an accomplice. We’re still not sure whom to charge with what,” said Bell. “You showed up in the NSA database with an astronomical clearance, but your file is missing. No one at the main office knows you. Ca
re to explain?”

  PJ smiled. Someone had been busy. “There’s no reason for them to know me; I’m small potatoes. All that’s important is that I have a clearance and I’m the only man alive that’s talked to Paulson, Nick Cassavettis, Wilkes, Commander Quan, and Joe in the last day. It makes me uniquely qualified to assist you.”

  “How did you know Wilkes was murdered?” she demanded.

  “Do you know for sure?”

  Bell nodded. “Our forensic team had to really dig to find that. The only way you would know is if you had a part in it.”

  PJ said, “I was having lunch at an ex-president’s mansion at the time. How’s that for an alibi? I know Wilkes was killed for three reasons. One, he only knows one way to physically subvert a computer; I showed it to him. It doesn’t involve electrical cable. Two, he already had all the access he needed by the time the Brazilians launched. This meant he had no reason to go into the machine room afterward. Three, there is definitely a security leak on the Icarus team. Wilkes could have plugged the leak after the launch was done, once he had time to think. The period immediately after the launch would also be the only window of time where Wilkes might have let his guard down and gotten suckered into some trap. So we have all the ingredients for a murder: motive, method, and opportunity.”

  She had a dozen new questions already. “What’s Icarus?”

  “That’s classified,” PJ replied. Bell’s face clouded up and he could see an objection forming. “Trust me when I say that you don’t want to know the details. I will tell you that Icarus is highly dangerous, and it was on the satellite launched earlier this week. Someone here, one of the people Joe held hostage, sabotaged it. That’s another reason we need your people.”

  Bell asked, “What’s going on with the space station? Joe, as you call him, made a call there via the Fortune Aerospace.”

  “I don’t know for sure. We suspect a hostile power is about to launch an assault to stop the mission. Certain people don’t want Project Phoenix to succeed. We think it’s the Chinese,” PJ said.

  “Precisely five minutes before you arrived, the International Space Station exploded. We have no data on the cause or the casualties,” Bell said, watching my reaction. “One of the old Axis of Evil countries claimed we had weapons of mass destruction on board.”

  “Actually, they might be right. The general may have planted a nuke on board the shuttle as a failsafe. Did the Phoenix crew make it?” he asked in a panic.

  She nodded. “Your friend ordered them to blow the airlock and leave immediately; however, we still don’t know who made it out alive.”

  “There goes the cover story we planned about international brotherhood and cooperation.”

  Bell hammered him with a hundred more questions, but now that the sun was down, he didn’t have the energy for elaborate answers. Her last question was, “News vans are starting to arrive early for a nine o’clock news conference, some big announcement that the folks on the space station were supposed to make. Do you know anything about that?”

  “That would be hard to do without the space station,” he said.

  Amy was still answering questions when he went inside. PJ found himself a big, cushioned chair in a glassed-in office and caught a nap.

  Chapter 50 – They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

  PJ was rudely awakened by a persistent buzzing in his jacket pocket. It was dark in the room, but florescent light leaked in from the main floor through the Venetian blinds. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and gawked at it like an idiot. It shook again like an electric razor. He finally mustered the brain cells to push TALK. “Yellow,” he said through a sleep-filled haze.

  “PJ?”

  “Nick. Are you okay? You had us worried.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. Everyone else is trying to contact the crew of the Phoenix mission. What time is it?”

  Nick sounded really rough. “I couldn’t sleep. I’m shaking, and when I close my eyes, I see horrible things.”

  His friend tried to make his voice as soothing as possible. “Listen. It’s probably the drugs they gave you in the hospital. The withdrawal is probably tearing you apart.”

  “The sky is falling. I see the faces, straight out of those Biblical paintings in the National Museum, the ones of the people in the Great Flood and in Revelation. I’m going to be responsible for starting it. I brought down Wormwood,” he ranted.

  PJ tried more small talk, but it didn’t work. He had to nip this in the bud quick, because the next step in this parade was a suicide. “Would you stop being so blasted egotistical? The fate of the world does not rest solely on your shoulders. I happen to think that God does this like the Greeks did democracy. Each person only carries the world for one day. Yours was last Wednesday. Mine was yesterday. Today is Crupkin’s.”

  “Why, what is he doing?” Nick asked.

  “I can’t tell you all the details over the phone, but he’s part of the Phoenix mission that’s going to try to stop your nightmare from becoming reality. I came up with a plan, but the scientist who did the design work left us suddenly. We can’t trust any of the ones we have left here.” PJ paused before asking the big question. “Since you can’t sleep anyway, do you think you could lend us a hand?”

  “After what you’ve done for me—years of friendship, your help with my escape, and the plan to fix my mistake—you could ask for anything. Where’s here?” Nick asked.

  “Ground control at the Cape. I can meet you at the gate.”

  Nick paused at the other end, struggling with a dozen replies, choked betrayals, and questions. “You’re working for the bastards?”

  “No,” PJ said, a little annoyed. “I don’t have a job thanks to you. But I’ve got this girl now who likes the vagrant type, so I’m going to let you off on that one. I’m just trying to support the shuttle crew so they can keep the rest of our asses on this side of the pearly gates.”

  “You’re letting them approach that satellite in a shuttle?”

  “It’s not like they can get out and walk,” PJ responded.

  “We programmed that laser to shoot down anything traveling at a relative speed of over 100 miles an hour within its kill zone!” Nick shouted.

  “This proves how much we need you. If you don’t want to come here, at least give me a list of the people on your project who might have finked out your raid to Paulson and stabbed Wilkes in the back before he knew what hit him. We can’t trust anyone until we find the spy. You’re about the only one left alive who can do that.”

  He rattled off five candidates, which PJ scribbled on the back of a boarding-pass envelope.

  With prodding, Nick added more names of people who might personally hate him or Wilkes enough to kill. PJ had to flip the envelope over, there were so many suspects. Then they moved on to people who were suspicious because Paulson had personally brought them onto the team.

  “Thanks. I’ll deliver this list to the FBI right after we contact Quan, but they’ll have a whole lot of questions that only you can answer.”

  Nick went silent for a time. “We’ll see.” Then he hung up.

  From his watch PJ could tell that his nap had only lasted about an hour.

  ****

  When PJ found the senior NASA official at the scene, they had been in voice and video contact with Quan for twenty minutes. However, they were forced to keep the communications specialist under constant watch. Nearly every question the Feds asked was answered with security stonewalling. The most Quan would say was, “Thanks for the advance warning, Control. Next time, could you give us more than a few minutes?”

  There had been no people aboard the space station, but they were forced to leave important equipment behind and blow their external airlock to escape in time. Evidently, shrapnel from the explosion or a botched evacuation left the shuttle with a hole or two in the hull, and not every compartment could hold air anymore. Commander Quan spoke from inside a spacesuit.

  Unfortunately,
the Cape technicians who had been called in late on a Sunday night were still adapting to the unusual situation and had to answer a number of Quan’s requests with delays, ignorance, or refusals of their own. The people most qualified to be running the show were still under suspicion of espionage; only four or five had been interviewed since the arrival of the FBI, and there were about twenty left to go. This was a recipe for disaster. PJ introduced himself and pulled the NASA shift supervisor into his private office.

  His name was Bruce “Buzz” Palaczek, and he was sweating in spite of the air conditioning. His superiors were out of contact. He had no idea what was happening with the Phoenix mission and very little information about the espionage investigation. He was forty, dressed in a thin, white, short-sleeved, dress shirt, and had a haircut and glasses straight out of the 1950s.

  “Buzz, since you’re the only person who could make this mission work. I’ve decided to raise your clearance level.” PJ proceeded to give him the essentials of the Phoenix mission as fast as he could. The background data cleared up several mysteries, including repeated offers of assistance from Russia’s atmospheric tracking network. After swearing him to secrecy about Icarus, PJ told him what Nick had said about the approach speeds, and his mood brightened visibly.

  “Hell, that we can do something about! If the Bureau didn’t have most of my people penned up, I could have an optimum course plotted for them in under an hour.”

  “I…came up with a filtered list of suspects.” PJ handed over the boarding pass, and Buzz scratched off the people who were off-site. They were left with only four suspects for the killing and sabotage.

  “This will help, but we still don’t have enough administrators. I’ll be too busy managing the trajectory team to wrestle with the red tape with the FBI,” Buzz complained.

  PJ snorted. “A certain regional director said they had to help me, but my official capacity here ended with the hostage crisis.”

  Buzz leaned back a little. “What is it exactly that you do, Mr. Smith?”

  “I’m currently between jobs.”