“He’s not under arrest. Hasn’t even been read his rights. Judas Priest, don’t get so worked up. He’s a kid . . . ,” she says as I pass a sprinkling of cars parked outside Building 2102, where not so long ago I was pulling an all-nighter in Mission Control.
“Intellectually he isn’t,” I reply. “And he’s pretty much had free run of the Langley campus since September,” I think unpleasantly of Dad squiring him around. “Lex may not be a hacker in the criminal sense. Or maybe he is. But for sure he’s capable of it,” I monitor the live feed playing . . .
Lex pushing his chair back from the table and getting up . . .
Walking out of the conference room . . .
Into the main lobby with its blue carpet, red upholstered furniture, and poster-size NASA photographs on the walls . . .
Heading around the corner toward the deputy chief’s office suite . . .
Where Fran, Butch and Scottie are going through Vera Young’s murder and the so-called suicide of the man Carme blew away, the wall-mounted flat-screen divided into quadrants. A fake driver’s license with the name Hank Cougars is in one, and graphic crime scene and autopsy photographs in the others.
Bloated by decomposition, the dead man is about to split his clothing, and I suspect that after the scene was staged, the heater was turned on. It would have kept going until the Denali ran out of gas, explaining the bad shape the body is in during weather that should have kept it refrigerator cold.
Other photos I’m seeing don’t include his grisly stash of weapons and body-disposal accoutrements. It would seem that part of the staging included removing them. Based on what I’m overhearing remotely and Lex is witnessing from the doorway, the real Hank Cougars was an alcoholic who worked construction on and off.
He drove a 2016 silver Denali, was thin with balding blond hair and blue eyes. He in no way resembled the man Carme took out in the parking lot of the Point Comfort Inn, someone Fran and her crew have no clue was an assassin who didn’t commit suicide. It would seem that he parked in a remote area and blew himself away with the Mossberg pump-action 12-gauge found between his legs.
It looks identical to the shotgun I saw in the back of his truck after Carme killed him, and I have a pretty good idea what she must have done. Staging the scene, she placed the barrel in his mouth while he was slouched in the driver’s seat already dead from snake-eyes head shots.
After all was said and done, there wasn’t much left from the neck up, a bearded lower jaw and tongue, lacerated flaps of skin and jagged pieces of skull. Brain tissue, bits of bone and teeth were blown all over the seat, headliner, the back windshield. I suspect Carme retrieved the hollow-point bullets she’d fired earlier, making sure the medical examiner was none the wiser.
“. . . The inn’s not open and would be boarded up this time of year,” Fran is saying to Scottie and Butch. “In other words, it’s a remote location if you don’t want to be found right away. Or maybe the person had some sort of meaningful and symbolic connection to the place.”
She goes on to say it’s more than a little troubling that there was no registration inside the truck. The tag is stolen, the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) eradicated, explaining why the GPS’s history was deleted. The only phones inside were burners, and clearly this isn’t someone who had a social media presence or did anything at all to draw attention to himself.
“He doesn’t profile as the sort who would eat the barrel of his shotgun,” Fran is saying.
None of it is the sort of thing a child needs to hear or see, and she’s out of her chair in a hurry when she notices Lex gawking from the hallway.
“Gotta go!” she ends our call, and I watch her on the live feed intercepting him as he stares in a bug-eyed trance at the disturbing images on the big flat-screen.
“What’s up?” she steers him out of range. “You doing okay . . . ?” she asks as I continue eavesdropping in ways she can’t begin to imagine.
“I need to use the bathroom . . . ,” Lex looks absolutely spooked, and I’ve reached Building 1205, what’s in essence a monster machine shop, three-story brick with tiny windows.
I note several sets of tire tracks in the otherwise undisturbed parking lot, probably one of my colleagues was making routine daily checks. That doesn’t mean there’s not a squatter, and I imagine some desperate researcher whose project might be compromised or ruined by the furlough.
Despite my protests about never getting a mandatory vacation, I don’t know what I’d do if forced to stay home and abandon what I need to get done. I don’t think I could tolerate being forbidden to continue working on a case or a project, especially if it’s a passion, and I ask ART to access the anonymous phone call Fran mentioned.
The audio recording begins playing as I get out of my truck . . .
“NASA Langley, what is your emergency?” the dispatcher in my earpiece.
“I can’t tell you who I am . . . ,” the caller sounds male and British.
“How may I assist you?”
“Obviously, I’m inside Building 1205 contrary to orders or I wouldn’t know to report a hissing sound,” possibly he’s someone older. “But I won’t be here by the time anyone responds so don’t bother looking for me. Second floor, the Durability, Damage Tolerance, and Reliability lab across from the stairwell. I suggest you hurry . . .”
“Now what?” I ask ART, stopping at the building’s nondescript front door, the sun dipping lower, the wind much calmer. “Do I use my smartcard or my WAND?” as I rub my faintly tingling right index finger.
“What gesture would you like to set in memory for accessing outer building doors on campus?” his pleasantly modulated voice is in my ear as if we’re chatting on the phone.
“Sort of a swiping motion over the reader,” I show him. “As if I’m holding my smartcard. Will that work?” and the lock clicks free.
Opening the door, I step inside. The heat and lights are turned low, a long hallway of locked lab doors chilly and spooky with deep shadows, a distant exit sign glowing red.
“All right, we’ll make this quick,” avoiding the elevator, I choose the dark stairwell.
17
TURNING ON my tactical light, I illuminate the Use Handrails warnings painted in yellow on the metal-edged concrete steps.
At the next landing, I emerge on the second floor directly across from the lab the anonymous caller mentioned, and I can hear the hissing through the shut door. My first worry is the liquid nitrogen used in scanning electron microscopy to cool the sample stage. But it’s not what I’m picking up.
My implanted sensors and those built into my CUFF aren’t detecting nitrogen or any other potentially toxic or combustible chemicals that might be leaking. Pressing my ear against the door, I listen to a relentless low hiss, something about it confusing me.
May as well use my new digital gesture, and I unlock the door, pushing it open a little as the hissing gets louder. I’m not seeing or smelling anything, and it seems the noise is coming from the computer workstation on the other side of the lab. My light paints over gas cylinders strapped upright to a wall, and glass-doored cabinets lined with brown bottles of acids and caustics.
The room is overwhelmed by all the usual equipment I expect in metallurgy. Fume hoods, grinding mills, drilling machines, hot plates, vacuum pumps, a drying oven, Pyrex glassware all over the place. My signal-sniffing CUFF detects an audio transmission, and I think I know what’s going on. And can’t believe it.
Except I can, as I approach the workstation, the hissing noise playing through computer speakers. The recording has been activated remotely, and I get out of there as fast as I can, shutting the door behind me as something clatters down the dimly lit corridor. Then all of the lights go out.
“Oh boy, this can’t be good,” shining
my flashlight in the direction of the noise I just heard, and next Fran calls me again.
“I don’t know what’s going on but we’re in the complete dark over here!” her tense voice in my earpiece.
“Me too,” I start walking toward the sound coming from a lab halfway down the deep dark throat of the corridor, something heavy and metallic scraping and clanking against a hard surface. “Is your power off?” I ask.
“Only the lights, which is weird.”
“Probably the same thing here,” and ART lets me know in my lenses that only two locations have had their lights knocked out.
Protective services headquarters and the building I’m in this moment, and that indicates the outage is deliberate and targeted. Someone has hacked into our power grid and who knows what else.
“It happened while Butch was taking the kid to the john. And now he’s gone,” Fran in my earpiece.
“Lex made a run for it?” my gut clenches like a fist as I reach the source of the clanking and scraping, a space assembly lab.
“You need to get here right away,” she says as I think of the look on his face when he was standing in her doorway staring at the gory photos.
Scanning open the door, I discover a robotic arm has been activated, shiny steel flaring in my light, the long truss-boom snaking and writhing on the test floor, folding and unfolding as if demon possessed or seizing.
“What’s all that racket?” Fran’s unhappy voice as I shut the door, and I break into a run.
“Someone up to mischief,” I fly like a bat out of hell toward the red glowing exit sign. “Get everybody available out looking for Lex. Hopefully he’s headed home,” but I sure as heck don’t think so.
The sitemap in my smart lenses shows that the full-scale wind tunnel has a new visitor. The ID number of the smartcard indicates someone just used it to access a maintenance door in the west passage.
“Where are you right now?” I ask Fran, my boots loud inside the stairwell as I light my way in pitch blackness, hurrying down to the first floor, worrying what’s next. “Because if I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re in the full-scale wind tunnel. At least your ID badge is . . . ,” I start to say before she cuts me off.
“Hell no . . . ! Judas Priest . . . !” she bellows as it dawns on her.
“It would seem Lex has your ID badge,” I push through the door that leads outside, pocketing my tactical light.
“That little piece of . . . !” cussing up a storm. “Seriously, Calli, I don’t know how . . . ! Well screw him, I’ll just deactivate it immediately . . .”
“No, you won’t. Not right now,” the cold air feels good on my face as ART remotely starts my Chase Car. “If he has your smartcard, at least we can track him to some extent. Anything’s better than nothing. Do not deactivate it,” I’m emphatic, unlocking my truck with a gesture.
Scrambling into the driver’s seat, churning through snow, and I’m not liking what I’m thinking. There’s no way Lex could have gotten from police headquarters to the full-scale wind tunnel this quickly unless he took a shortcut. If so, he knows our campus frighteningly well, and it suggests premeditation, possibly practice runs. Otherwise, he’d have no idea how to find his way.
“He might be going underground,” I explain to Fran as ART gives me that schematic next, and I can see every building, utility tunnel and trench on our 764-acre campus. “If so, I’m only going to pick him up when he surfaces inside facilities or through the outdoor hatches. Your smartcard can access all the locks same as mine,” and the massive wind tunnel looms up ahead.
Ten stories high, more than twice the length of a football field, at one time it was the biggest in the world. Built in the 1930s, it’s powered by a 12.1 meter (40 foot) wide 9-bladed wooden fan that moves more than a million cubic feet of air at speeds up to Mach 10. I know all the specs from Mom’s lesson plans.
Plus, Dad and I have conducted all sorts of tests in there, and lately Lex has accompanied him. The odd-looking construction reminds me of a monster Slinky soldered together into a rectangular hulking shape that’s eggshell white. Near the main gate, it’s the first thing you see when approaching NASA Langley on Commander Shepard Boulevard.
“. . . You got any suggestions? Because I’m slam out of them,” Fran vents in my ear as I pull into a slushy unpaved service road.
There are no tire or people tracks, and it doesn’t look like anybody’s been back here since the blizzard.
“. . . I’m not sending anybody down into the steam tunnels, and no way I’m doing it either,” she rants on, and of course she wouldn’t, not with all her phobias.
“We’re going to have to intercept him when he surfaces,” I leave my truck. “Get everybody you can patrolling access areas. That’s all I can suggest at the moment,” and I end the call.
00:00:00:00:0
I HURRY through melting snow toward the wind tunnel, which obviously isn’t running at the moment. When it is, you can hear its hurricane roar from one end of the campus to the other. The sitemap in my lenses shows that only 4 people are currently inside the facility. That’s if you don’t include whoever is in possession of Fran’s badge.
Lex, in other words, and I step around piles of wooden pallets amid metal struts supporting the colossal structure. I cut through an improvised break area of white plastic tables and chairs drifted with snow. Trudging around back to the west return passage, I discover a single set of footprints on the small side.
A little smaller than mine, and I recall the rubber snow boots Lex is wearing. The trail leads away from a green metal utility hatch in the ground, stopping at metal stairs leading up to the wind tunnel’s maintenance door that was accessed by Fran’s smartcard a few minutes ago. And this is really bad. Climbing the yellow-painted steps, I unlock the maintenance door with a swipe of my WAND finger.
“Lex,” I call out, entering a concrete passage big enough to drive a car through.
Empty, silent, and I don’t hear or see anyone.
“Hey Lex! Are you in here?” my voice echoes. “Lex! This isn’t a safe place to be!” I shout urgently, walking in deeper. “LEX, HELLO . . . ?” as the 12,000-horsepower electric motor cranks on with a thump and a rush.
The humongous wooden fan I can’t see from here begins to spin, picking up speed thunderously, and I feel the airflow, a gentle breeze that quickly gets stiffer and warmer. I have seconds to beat a hasty retreat before the wind blows me around the bend into the spinning blades. Or smashes me into a concrete wall, maybe dicing me up in airflow vanes, a diffuser grid, none of it a good way to go.
“Shut her down!” I shout at ART.
“I don’t understand . . .”
“SHUT THE ENGINE OFF!” and just like that it stops, and I run the length of the wind tunnel’s passage, squeezing through gigantic flow-straightening vanes.
I emerge into the open bay test area where flustered researchers are gathered around the full-size test model of a blue-fluorescing spacecraft wing mounted on a stinger. No doubt baffled by the fan suddenly starting and stopping, they stare at me with their mouths dropped open, and I keep going.
“Is everything all right . . . ? What’s happening . . . ?” they call out after me.
But I don’t answer, going full tilt down the stairs, taking the steps two and three at a time. Racing through the model prep area with its tugs for hauling the test sample transport carts. Dashing under the scale model of a Boeing 737 hanging from the ceiling. Sprinting along a hallway, past offices and labs, nobody home, my boots thudding loudly.
The empty lobby is plastered with photographs of vehicles tested over the decades including experimental hypersonic planes, submarines, dirigibles, dish antennas, race cars. Boiling out the door into the wind and cold, I stop, looking around, breathing hard, and I don’t see
him.
Not a sign of Lex as I scan the area, and I could kick myself if he did what I suspect, creating quite the distraction, and while I’m running for my life, he doubles back. Leaving through the same access door, down the same stairs, and I’m also betting he went underground through the same maintenance hatch.
“Other than seeing footprints, how are we supposed to know if he goes through a hatch or one of the airlocks? Or if he might be in a tunnel right now?” I ask ART, slogging my way back to the trail I noticed in the snow a few moments ago. “How are we supposed to have a clue where he is?”
“Most airlocks, hatches and tunnels aren’t set up to be remotely monitored,” the reply in my earpiece as I near the maintenance stairs I climbed earlier, and I can see that my hunch is correct, unfortunately.
Lex did exactly what I thought. While I was dealing with the fan he turned on, he retraced his steps, exiting from the same maintenance door, going down the stairs, disappearing through the same hatch in the ground, returning to the same subterranean utility tunnel he’d emerged from earlier.
“There’s monitoring only in highly sensitive areas designated on the sitemap,” ART is saying. “For example, Buildings 1110 and 1111,” but even in those rare exceptions what we’re talking about is mainly motion sensors, not cameras.
“Well, I think we know where he is right now,” I reply, pointing out boot prints in snow leading directly to the green steel hatch with its smart lock and hydraulic-assisted opening mechanism. “And I’m not chasing him down there. I’m not sure I’d even pick up your signal or any signal,” I say to ART as he remotely starts my Tahoe.
Spin (Captain Chase) Page 14