by CJ Petterson
Sully teared up as he took in Griebe’s condition. White sheets and green blankets swathed his friend’s body. Plastic tubes snaked from under the pale green hospital gown and hung in soft loops draining fluids into plastic bags. The gown gaped loosely on his chest, and Sully could see patches of skin stained purplish-red by the sterile solution they had poured over him. Blood spatter, dried to a deep brownish red, dotted his beard.
Griebe rolled bloodshot eyes in Sully’s direction. “Saint John’s got Mirabel,” he said, his tongue thick.
Sully let himself smile. “Not any more. She’s with Pete.”
Griebe flicked his eyes toward the nurse and waited for her to walk away. “Shooter was Saint John’s goon, Karadzic.”
Sully nodded. “SinJen called. I got eyes out there. Somebody’s going to spot him.”
“He was looking for the doc’s astronomy notes.”
“That’s not good, but it explains why he’s after Mirabel. Means our bird’s been spotted by other interested parties.”
Griebe dragged his tongue across his lips.
“Can I get you anything? Want some water or something?”
Griebe made a face. “Make me barf. Sorry. Did … piss-poor job.”
“Sure surprised me. I thought you were bullet-proof. How did he get off a shot?”
“Mistake.” He blinked wide as if to refocus. “Lights went out. I fired. Stupid. Gave him my flash to shoot at.”
“You missed because you couldn’t get your gun up fast enough. You need to retire that cannon.”
“Don’t want to retire.” His eyelids drooped.
“It’s time to get something lighter, maybe a Glock. That .357 weighs at least three pounds.”
“You nag like my old lady,” Griebe whispered with his eyes closed.
Sully shook his head. “Good thing Margie’s not here. She’d whip my butt if she knew I let you get shot.”
“My screw-up,” Griebe growled, his words drifting into nothingness.
Sully watched his friend fade into a drug-induced sleep, and then he walked over to the scrub sink. He returned with a small pan of water, a wet cloth, and a towel. He began to clean away the dried blood that stiffened and matted Griebe’s white beard.
“Dan, Mirabel, now Frank.” Sully talked to himself as he gently wiped away the gore. “You blew it, SinJen. You made it personal.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sully’s shoes crackled over the dry, brittle grasses, and he stepped into the glow of Ridley’s flashlight.
“How’s — ” Ridley started.
“Holding on,” Sully said and motioned to Ridley. “Come here.” The two men walked off a short distance and talked in low tones. Then Sully strode in a direct line to Mirabel and wrapped his arms around her. “Good to see you, babe,” he murmured into her ear.
It took all her willpower to keep from melting into him, and she was trembling when she stepped back. “Good to see you, too.”
“Pete says you were already free and ready to fight by the time he got to you. Seems like my mild-mannered scientist has turned into Wonder Woman.”
“You always told me the best defense is a good offense.” Mirabel did feel strangely different. She had surprised herself when she escaped. “And it seems like you have more secrets to tell me,” she said and pointed a finger.
“Getting back to the reason we’re here — ”
“We don’t have a telescope,” she said.
“Oh, ye of little faith.” Sully pointed into the darkness toward something she couldn’t see. “Got a major model up there on the knoll, and it’s connected to a computer.”
“You do keep surprising me.” She squinted when he aimed a slender Magnalite at her face and traced the length of the cut on her cheek.
“You’re going to have a doozy of a black eye. And you’re going to need stitches, maybe a plastic surgeon.”
“Another character line in my old age.”
“You don’t need any more character. Come on with me. We have a problem. I just took a look, and the X on your picture doesn’t mark the spot. At least, not that I can find.”
“Step aside, oh ye of little experience,” she said when they reached the computer and telescope setup. “That picture was taken weeks ago, and the X is not a constant. The world turns, and the spot moves. I’ll have to recalculate the coordinates. Hold the flashlight so I can see.”
She heard a rasping noise then smelled the sulfur of a flaring match head and tobacco smoke when Ridley lit up a cigarette. “I’ll be by the car if you need me,” he said, and his footsteps crunched off into the distance.
It took Mirabel a few minutes to get satisfied with her adjustments then she leaned into the eyepiece and began to search. The lens glass was filled with tiny points of light of varying sizes and brightness. All of the hours she had spent at her kitchen table searching and identifying the location of the mysterious twinkle paid off almost immediately.
“Eureka,” she said. “We have found it.” She straightened, stared at Sully, and then set her eye against the glass again, longer this time. She stepped back and pointed to the telescope. “See for yourself.”
Sully bent close and studied the sky for several minutes.
Mirabel stood at his shoulder. “Do you see what I see?”
“Don’t rush me. I want to be sure.” After a few more minutes, he stood up.
She concentrated on his face. It was a blank slate, and she knew she wasn’t wrong. “There are two of those things up there, aren’t there?” Mirabel grabbed Sully’s sleeve and pulled him around. “What is going on up there?” she said. “Better yet, what’s going on down here?”
“I don’t — ”
“Don’t say you don’t know and don’t say you can’t tell me, Sully.”
“Mirabel, I swear, I know nothing about that second twinkle up there. Maybe it’s a natural phenomenon. Your scientific training should tell you we need more information before we can make that kind of call.”
“My unscientific instincts tell me otherwise. Okay. What about down here? Someone’s trying to kill me, and I think it’s time I deserve to know why.”
“Guess you do,” he said. He looked up at the velvet sky. “Only I don’t have the perfect intel you think I have.”
Mirabel opted to believe him and let go of his sleeve. “Then tell me what you do know.”
“I know that nine weeks ago the Air Force made a successful in-flight launch of a nanosatellite without news media fanfare.”
“A secret launch.”
He nodded. “They thought because of the nanosat’s small size, once it reached orbit, it could fly a few months undetected.”
“That’s ridiculous. Nothing man-made could be small enough to escape detection. NASA can spot anything.”
“They’re profoundly underfunded and don’t have the personnel to track everything that’s up there. Manmade or otherwise. They’re lucky to pick up about half.”
“Well, oops, I found it.”
“Oops is right.” Sully was quiet for a long minute then said, “I’ll make a call,” and punched in a speed dial number on his cellphone. “My boss, Marshall Davis.”
“Davis.” Marshall’s twang answered on the first ring.
“Marshall. I’ve got Mirabel with me. I’m on my cell and you’re on speaker so let’s keep this short. When did we send up a second satellite?”
“Mirabel, nice to meet you, sort of, and to answer your question, Sully, we didn’t.”
“Then we have a larger problem. She — we — spotted a second one tonight.”
“Not possible. We’d have seen another satellite. There’s no way our tracking systems would miss it. Space Command in Colorado can track things as small as a baseball, and Spain has a telescope capable of
tracking space debris as small as one centimeter.”
“Remember the North Korean launch in 1998?” Sully said. “That was definitely bigger than a baseball, and we didn’t even see that one go up. We said they fired a ballistics missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead; they said they sent up a satellite. The Pentagon said something about being ‘highly skeptical.’ And why hasn’t Spain spotted ours?”
There was a short pause on the open line. “Okay, I’ll concede the point,” Davis said. “We’ll point NASA in the right direction and see what they find.”
Sully closed his cellphone with a snap. “Why do I get the feeling this has turned into something very, very complicated?” he murmured.
“What is your nanosatellite doing up there?”
He toyed with his flashlight, aimed it at the sky, and peered into the blackness. “It’s a test. NASA is looking to establish a subspace platform to launch even smaller exploration satellites farther into space. Kind of a boost-up.”
“Space exploration is not a good enough reason for a super-secret launch. Wait. This afternoon, you said DARPA funded the research.” She leaned in and took a hard look at Sully’s blank face. “The nanosatellite is a weapon!” she said, triumph in her voice. “Just like I said. They’ve put a weapon in the sky.”
“It’s a platform, not a weapon.”
“Not a weapon yet. Altruism isn’t the government’s strong suit. They don’t fund research out of the goodness of their hearts. They want at least a dual purpose.”
“Defensive deterrent.”
“Ah, yes. My gun is bigger than your gun.”
He looked into the telescope again and didn’t answer.
“What exactly is your job, Sully?”
“To keep your sighting from going public before we can get it out of the sky.”
“You could just blow it out of the sky.”
He shook his head. “Not a good idea. Our friends would join our enemies asking about the strange explosion in the sky. No one can know about this.”
“I can’t believe you!” she yelled. “Your best friend is dead, and you want to keep it quiet?” Dan’s face crossed her mind, and her voice hardened. “Just how far are you willing to go to keep a lid on this thing?” She dreaded his answer and slapped at him. He caught first one wrist and then the other and twisted her around, tying her up in her crossed arms. She fought then sagged against him. He released her arms but held her until she regained her balance.
“I don’t know you anymore,” she groaned. “Did you have anything to do with Dan being killed?”
“If you can ask if I had something to do with Dan’s death, then no, you don’t know me,” he said into her hair, his words clipped and hard-edged.
“Is Ray dead?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice sounding tired, “but I don’t think so.”
She looked up at a sky littered with stars. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you … ” she began. “Sully, that other twinkle is another nanosatellite launched by another government?”
He began to shake his head.
“Sully, please. Who are you trying to fool — me or yourself? Nano technology isn’t new, and even what’s up there can’t exist in a vacuum for very long. Our scientists aren’t singularly endowed with this kind of knowledge and expertise. If, as you say, we can make a nanosatellite, why can’t someone else?”
Sully was quiet. “Then maybe you’ve stumbled onto something someone will go to any lengths to keep secret.”
“Like hiring someone to kill me?”
He nodded. “We really could be looking at some kind of weapon.”
“Like the DARPA nanosat isn’t?”
He ignored her taunt. “The answer to all this is Saint John. Right now, he’s the only link we have to finding the who and the why behind the contract on you.”
She studied the stars while she made up her mind. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Yes. It does matter. It matters because Frank Griebe is lying in the ER with a hole in his chest. It matters because — ”
The anger gushed out of her. “Frank was shot? I didn’t … you didn’t … what happened?”
“He went to the lab looking for you and ran into Saint John’s goon.”
“Because I sneaked out of the house and ran right into Saint John’s ugly arms. Oh, Sully, I am so sorry.”
“Stop it. I can’t say I’m happy you did that. But Dan, Ray, and Frank? What happened to them is not your fault. Put the blame where it belongs — on Saint John and whoever hired him.”
She knew there was plenty of blame to go around. “Will Frank be all right?”
“The doc says he’ll pull through. Only — ” He cleared his throat when his voice turned to gravel. “He’s not sure if he’s going to be paralyzed.”
Mirabel gasped.
“He said they’d know more in a day or so.”
“I wish I’d — ”
“Wishing won’t change anything,” he said. “Right now, we need to focus on finding your friend Ray.”
She swallowed a big gulp of self-pity and nodded. “Evan and his deputy Esther Lee have been looking for him for days.”
“I think their search is being, shall we say, misdirected.”
“By whom?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe by one of them.”
She was glad it was dark enough he couldn’t see her jaw drop. “I … don’t think Ray’s girlfriend, Lisa, knows anything,” she said. “Who else can help us?”
“I have a lot of assets out on the streets — ”
“Assets?”
“People who, sooner or later, will serve up the info we need to find Ray. I think it’s time we make it sooner. Pete?”
Ridley’s long shape materialized out of the blackness. “Right here, Boss.”
“Ray Briggs. He’s — ”
“Been gone too long. I’m on it.” Ridley turned and merged with the darkness.
Mirabel turned to Sully. “Did he just read your mind?”
“Scary, isn’t it?”
Ridley’s engine started with a throaty cough and rumbled away.
“The sound of Pete’s muffler reminds me of the Harley you used to ride,” she said softly.
He spotlighted her chin with a shaft of light, putting his face in shadows. “Memory like an elephant.”
“I’ve been thinking about us a lot lately. About how we used to be. Well, maybe not a lot. More like sometimes.” She pressed her lips together and wondered why she couldn’t just spit it out — tell him she was sorry they hadn’t been able to work out their problems all those years ago.
“I think about us sometimes, too,” he said. “I remember midnight rides on the Harley into the cool night air of the desert with you hugging my back.” As he talked, he wedged the flashlight under his arm, putting his face in dim light, squatted, and disconnected the laptop from the telescope. “Now those were bumpy rides I never complained about,” he said. He gave her a broad smile. “Loved those bumps.”
Her smile came and faded. She twisted the screw that released the telescope from the tripod. “It used to be good between us. I mean, when we first knew each other; it was good, wasn’t it?”
He nodded while he worked on the laptop.
She pushed the tripod into its case. “What changed?”
He looked directly into her eyes. “You mean besides me?”
She knew he was expecting, waiting for an accusation, but she didn’t want to resurrect the arguments and the complaints buried in the legalese of the divorce decree. “That’s not what I mean.”
He searched around for the computer’s carrying case. “I guess we grew apart. That’s the politically correct response, isn’t it?”
>
She grunted. “I don’t know why I started this. We’re way past time for a postmortem.” She cleared her throat. “Where to next?”
“My house, for safekeeping. There’s no one else to watch you. First, we’ll stop by the little clinic on Main Street and get that cut stitched up.”
“You have a first-aid kit at the house, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“All I need are some butterfly bandages until my doctor can look at it. You do it,” she said and finished knocking down the tripod.
“You never cease to surprise me.” He handed her the flashlight. “Ready to go?” he asked and picked up the telescope and computer.
Mirabel shouldered the strap of the tripod case, and they followed the wavering light beam toward the Jeep. She left him to pack the equipment into the rear seat and felt her way onto the darkened front seat. She combed her fingers through her hair as if she didn’t know the curls wouldn’t stay in place.
• • •
Twenty minutes later, what began as a glow on the horizon turned into a necklace of street lights as they neared town.
Sully pulled on her arm. “Slide down out of sight.”
She slipped sideways and laid her head on his blue-jean-covered thigh. His leg was hard muscle and bone. She pillowed her cheek on top of her hand and closed her eyes. She felt his thigh muscles relax, contract, and lift as his foot switched from the accelerator to the brake pedal each time he slowed, stopped at stop signs and the one traffic light that still worked after eleven o’clock at night.
“When I pull in the driveway, that’s your cue to slip out.”
“If I open the door, the light — ”
“Disconnected.”
“Duh,” she said. “Now I know why the light didn’t come on when I got in.”
Sully pulled into his drive, and Mirabel slipped into the darkness and ran to the back of the house. He stomped up the steps, walked through the darkened house, and let Mirabel slip in the back door and into the bedroom. She sat on the edge of his bed while he turned on the kitchen light and made domestic noises: filling a pot with water, rattling silverware, and closing the fridge door hard enough to make glass clink together.