And I realize with horror that my sister picked up the same rogue signal the Secret Service did. From my pen, and not knowing who was coming, she fled. Or if she knew it was me, she feared both of us would get shot if she hung around. So, she bolted but left a calling card that also could be used to track her had she carried it with her. My sister deliberately left the computer. I’m certain of it.
She was just here, had been hiding up here for a while. No doubt switched the dish to Local mode so someone didn’t remotely move it, possibly injuring her as she was controlling the PONG.
Focus. Focus. Focus.
Finding the control pendant. Then the rectangular box that I know is yellow and connected to a junction box by a 10-foot multiwire electrical cable. Recognizing the big switch, red if I could see it right now, and I flip it from Local to Remote mode.
Then I step back outside, shutting the access door behind me, and I put my hands in the air. Because I really would prefer not to end this day being dead. Walking fast, slip-sliding toward the agents, three of them and Dick.
“It’s me, Calli!” yelling at them. “My gun and creds are in the backpack! Get me to Mission Control now!”
00:00:00:00:0
THE ARM remains broken, and Peggy Whitson and I are on a tether. A quantum one. Or simply Q, as I think of our radio connection.
The astronauts are happy that Mission Control is back. Sort of back. But they don’t know what’s going on, why the Space Station lost telecommunications and power to the arm. Commander Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer likely don’t know that a Wallops antenna dish was hacked or that the resupply rocket blew up with all their holiday goodies in it.
Even if the crew inside the Station got that Grinch-worthy news, it wouldn’t be shared with astronauts on a dangerous spacewalk when paying attention and staying calm are the difference between life and death.
“Captain Chase, do we have comm back?” Commander Whitson sounds in my headset as I sit at my station just like before.
Only now Dick is next to me, and next to him is the bearded guy from the 7-Eleven. And next to him is the woman with long hair.
“No, I’m transmitting through Q,” I radio back to outer space.
Both video and audio are up and running on Q, and I can see what Commander Whitson is looking at through the camera built into her helmet. There’s also a camera on the dead robotic arm, the images severe-clear of her stuck in outer space while tethered to a quantum node that she remembered to power up, just as she’d been told.
Sort of a Space Force portable “cop” radio, but a terribly expensive and cumbersome one. Of course, by the time they actually make such a thing, it will be small enough to wear as a watch.
“Can you relay to Houston the plan?” Commander Whitson asks me over our now-activated Q-comm, because she can’t ask Rush.
He’s at Wallops, and it isn’t on Q yet. Only Ames, the Space Station and Langley so far, and there’s no one else to sit in this pilot’s seat, so to speak, except me right now. The plan we’re to relay to Houston is what the astronauts have improvised during a crisis so they can install the node anyway.
Thinking on their feet in microgravity, they’ve decided the safest option is for Commander Whitson to do some sleight of hand with tethers. The pair of 3-foot-long ones at her waist made of webbing instead of 3/32-inch-thick braided stainless steel wire. We watch on the live feed as she hooks the two waist tethers together, looping them like a belt around the arm’s tip boom.
I hold my breath during the really risky part, when she disconnects her safety tether from the arm. Before connecting this off-nominal rigging to a D ring on her suit as if she’s an astro-lineman. Slowly shimmying along a telephone pole, only this one is 35 centimeters (14 inches) in circumference and weighs close to 2 tons. Inchworming her way along in an unprecedented maneuver never taught, trained for or anticipated. Minutes ticking by, and everybody nervous. But it’s working like a charm, already dubbed “doing a Whitson,” doing whatever it takes to save your bacon when lost in space.
Down she goes while Jack Fischer waits for her by the truss, ready to snag her with a safety tether. Together they’ll move hand over hand, walking their precious payload the length of the station to that remote research platform. From there they can just head home on their own. It’s only a tether away should they take a spill.
“Can I get you something?” Dick keeps asking me that, and I know he feels bad.
Not sorry but regretful that I had to be patted down. That he pulled off my right glove to check the scar on my finger, making sure it was me. Not to mention all his lies.
“This may take a little while, and you should eat something.” Trying to be paternal again, trying to be my friend. “Eat a little of the fruit at least.”
Pushing the plate farther away. I couldn’t possibly, and it’s all I can muster to block out those images. The boot tracks in the snow, one set headed away from the radome to an area of the roof where there’s no ladder. No maintenance stairs. Nothing but air.
“Coffee?” Dick persists.
Shaking my head, staring straight ahead at the live feed of the astronauts and their long wires shining like spaghetti-thin laser beams. Moving along the truss with their payload on its pallet.
“Don’t punish me,” under his breath, in my ear.
“If you weren’t going to let me look, then show me the pictures,” I sotto voce him right back, and if people didn’t know better, they might think we’re having a lovers’ spat.
As windblown and teary as I must look, shaking inside like that rocket before it blew apart. All because Dick won’t offer me the common courtesy of proving my sister is alive. I don’t see how she could be. But her body hasn’t been found, not on the snowy ground by the hangar where she should have landed. I know that for a fact because Fran keeps checking, sending me texts.
Carme hasn’t turned up dead or alive anywhere as far as I know, and everybody’s looking. Nobody’s offering me data. But I know what I saw. One set of boot prints leading to the edge and stopping. No place to go but down.
Or up.
I suspect Carme was on the roof before the snow started, probably about the time the PONG decided to introduce itself to me while I was getting out of the shower. My sister could have ensconced herself in the windowless egg 10 stories off the ground. Who would think to look for her up there?
No doubt she had a small tactical light and could see just fine while she was there, and the radome also has a low-noise heater that I’m sure she turned on. She could have made herself reasonably comfortable for hours or days, out of the elements, inside her protective shell, virtually above the fray and invisible to it.
“Captain Chase, do you have the PGT settings?” Commander Whitson in my headset.
“Yes,” I radio back. “Bravo 2, clockwise 2, expecting 10 turns on each bolt.”
“Starting turns on bolt 2, settings bravo 2, clockwise . . . 9.5 turns, green light,” she fires back, and Jack Fischer floats closer to help, moving along the handrails.
“I’ll stabilize and you go for bolt 4 next . . . ,” his voice in my ear, as I feel Dick’s shoulder pushing against me.
Setting down his phone in front of me, a photograph on the display of the boot prints at the edge of the roof. I never got that close to look, was in too much of a panicked hurry to get back here. And nobody was of a mindset to let me wander anywhere, not that there was time.
Picking up Dick’s cell phone, enlarging the image of the disturbed snow. The boot-shaped impressions with an unusual tread pattern. Terminating a good 6 feet from the rooftop’s edge, telling me everything as I remember the jogger in non-reflective black. The powerful gait, running after dark on ice and in bitter weather as if it was nothing. Remembering the creepy feeling I had, as preoccupied as
I was driving Dick back to Dodd Hall. Reminded of the barking dog, and the light that blinked on.
It makes more sense now that Dick would act nonchalant when I inquired about who else might be staying there. Because it had been my impression that nobody else was. Just him on such a desolate night only hours before a furlough. He didn’t want to tell me that members of a Secret Service cyber-posse were staying there. He didn’t want me to know that they were looking for Carme even as I sat in my truck talking to him about her.
I’m pretty sure that’s who was out running the very same fitness path she always runs. Maybe it was my sister who scared the dog that was barking nonstop as if confronted with an extraterrestrial or a Darth Vader–ish robot. My sister was out and up to something, and probably hiding in a Langley radome when she wasn’t on the farm, and I never knew it.
“Captain Chase,” Jack Fischer raises me on the air again, “after lever is over center, do you want the backup data connection next?”
“Yes. It’s the smaller cable,” I reply, watching him on the data wall sorting through cable labels. “W1111 mated to J-1,” I remind the two of them. “After you get that in place, we will do the power-on procedures from here.”
“W1111 mated to J-1,” Commander Whitson repeats. “It’s a tight fit for my hand . . . ,” struggling to get the plug-socket connector’s lever over center. “I am having problems getting my hand in here . . .”
Not good. Bad if after all this they can’t get the blasted thing up and running, but what I say is, “Copy.”
“. . . Let me try a different position . . . ,” her voice comes back, and I can hear her working hard. “. . . Maybe I can do it with my fingertips . . .”
“Copy,” reminding me of one of those tasks in space I might not have been able to do had my accident in the break room turned out worse than it did.
And I recognize the big hand gently gripping my shoulder, the gleam of the simple gold band on Dad’s wedding finger. Then a plate piled high with bacon and a bagel slathered with cream cheese magically lands next to my keyboard. Looking up at Dad’s kind face, one arm holding Easton in his space-dinosaur pajamas, like a mini-me crash dummy, sound asleep.
“Eat,” he says, his eyes keen behind his old-style black-framed glasses, his thick gray hair sticking up everywhere.
“Here, hon.” Mom’s right beside him with a carton of cranberry juice, straw already in it.
“Captain Chase, how much time left?” Jack Fischer asks me from space for all of Mission Control and my family to see.
Including Carme. Hoping she’s watching from somewhere. Somehow.
Please be alive.
“We’re ready here as soon as the data connection is mated,” I reply as I think of sensors and robotics, of flying cars, tourists orbiting Earth, of jet packs, habitats on the moon . . .
“Working on it . . . ,” Commander Whitson struggling away.
Most of all, I’m thinking about exoskeletons. Ones being designed for superhuman chores in space, and all sorts of helpful tasks down here. Humans outfitting ourselves to do the work of machines, ironically. Lifting great weights, running faster without fatigue. And flying without a cockpit or a cape.
“Mated!” Commander Whitson announces, and everyone inside the control room begins cheering and applauding the way they do when watching in real time as a rover lands perfectly on Mars or flies by Ultima Thule and beyond Pluto.
Some people are even hugging each other, having no idea that what just got plugged in isn’t an atmospheric reader named LEAR. Taking a sip of my juice, chewing on a piece of bagel, looking at Mom smiling proudly at me, not worried about Carme, I can tell. Dad’s just nodding his head, and as frazzled as he is, he’s not worried either.
If they’re okay, then I am, too, and we know exactly what to do, know all about not asking and telling.
“Okay,” I radio back to outer space. “Let’s get the prime power and data hooked up so we have redundancy.”
As a video file lands on my mobile phone, and starts playing on its own. The mirror ball PONG in my bathroom again, filming in the mirror over the sink, taking a selfie as it slowly spins.
About the Author
Photo © Patrick Ecclesine
In 1990, Patricia Cornwell sold her first novel, Postmortem, while working at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. An auspicious debut, it went on to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity Awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure prize—the first book ever to claim all these distinctions in a single year. Growing into an international phenomenon, the Scarpetta series won Cornwell the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author, the Gold Dagger Award, the RBA Thriller Award, and the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her contributions to literary and artistic development.
Today, Cornwell’s novels and iconic characters are known around the world. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has written the definitive nonfiction account of Jack the Ripper’s identity, cookbooks, a children’s book, a biography of Ruth Graham, and two other fictional series based on the characters Win Garano and Andy Brazil. While writing Quantum, Cornwell spent two years researching space, technology, and robotics at Captain Calli Chase’s home base, NASA’s Langley Research Center, and studied cutting-edge law enforcement and security techniques with the Secret Service, the US Air Force, NASA Protective Services, Scotland Yard, and Interpol.
Cornwell was born in Miami. She grew up in Montreat, North Carolina, and now lives and works in Boston and Los Angeles.
Also by Patricia Cornwell
THE SCARPETTA SERIES
Postmortem
Body of Evidence
All That Remains
Cruel and Unusual
The Body Farm
From Potter’s Field
Cause of Death
Unnatural Exposure
Point of Origin
Black Notice
The Last Precinct
Blow Fly
Trace
Predator
Book of the Dead
Scarpetta
The Scarpetta Factor
Port Mortuary
Red Mist
The Bone Bed
Dust
Flesh and Blood
Depraved Heart
Chaos
NONFICTION
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed
Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert
ANDY BRAZIL SERIES
Hornet’s Nest
Southern Cross
Isle of Dogs
WIN GARANO SERIES
At Risk
The Front
BIOGRAPHY
Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham
OTHER WORKS
Scarpetta’s Winter Table
Life’s Little Fable
Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text
copyright © 2019 by Cornwell Entertainment, Incorporated
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781542094061 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542094062 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503905092 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503905098 (paperback)
Cover design by Kaitlin Kall
Printed in the United States of America
First edition
Quantum Page 32