Deadly Star

by CJ Petterson

  He gazed into the darkness for several moments. When he turned toward her, she saw sadness in his eyes.

  “I don’t take pleasure in my work, Mirabel. I do what has to be done. I’m not going to give you a spiel about the world we live in and all that garbage, but those two?” He paused a long beat. “Yes. I’m glad they’re dead. I won’t apologize — ”

  “You don’t have to,” she said softly. She couldn’t deny what she knew was true. “I wanted them dead and buried and burning in hell.” Guilt and dread washed over her, deflating her like a balloon. “What’s happened to me? What have I become, Sully?”

  “We’re alive, you and I. Saint John and Karadzic will never kill another innocent.”

  “That can’t make it right. It can’t. How can you think there’s enough justification in that to expect forgiveness?”

  “That’s not something anyone on this earth can do for me.”

  “When I first saw you with Saint John at my home, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew. You’re an assassin,” she whispered.

  “I’m a government agent. It’s what I do. Not who I am.” He reached out to take her hand.

  She stepped back, avoiding his grasp. Not daring to let him comfort her. “Stay away.”

  She wanted to stay horrified at what he’d done. The tenderness in his eyes melted her resolve. She pointed at the SUV. “Someday, someone like Saint John will do that same thing to you.” The thought he was likely to die a violent death brought with it a fresh stream of tears.

  He started to lift his shoulders then stopped as if he realized a shrug might make any answer too cavalier.

  She knew her eyelids were puffing, that her nose was reddening. She didn’t care. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want you to die.”

  His face softened. “I don’t plan on doing that any time soon.” He dug around in a back pocket, pulled out a white handkerchief, and handed it to her. “To be born is to die, Mirabel.”

  She looked at the cotton square in her hand and then swiped at her dripping nose and searched for words to explain how she felt. “But not like Saint John, not like that. Look at you.” She waved the soggy handkerchief in the air. “You’re the guy who still carries a clean handkerchief in his pocket for the maiden in distress. You’re supposed to fade away sitting on a porch, watching the sunset.”

  “I thought that was ‘ride off into the sunset like John Wayne.’ You want me to end my days rocking away in an old folks’ home, gumming pureed peas, a crocheted afghan warming my knobby knees?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “No.” He sighed. “No, it’s not. But it’s also not ever going to happen, and you know that. Come on. Let’s get out of here.” He reached for her hand.

  They walked toward the convertible still spotlighted in the Expedition’s headlights. “Please tell me it’s over now,” she said.

  “Sometimes the most obvious solution doesn’t solve a problem. It just rearranges everything.”

  “And sometimes you make absolutely no sense.”

  “I mean it’s not over. The fat lady hasn’t sung yet. Wait here,” Sully said when they had gotten past Saint John’s vehicle.

  She kept her back to the SUV and crossed her arms over her chest. While he returned to the Expedition, she concentrated on the outline of her feet on the dirt road. The engine died. When the headlights went out, she was immersed in darkness and silence. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the night lit only by the lopsided, cherubic grin of a waxing moon. Then she heard the click of the door closing. She waited in the pale light, listening to the crunch of Sully’s boots in the dirt.

  “Where are we going?” she asked when he drew along beside her.

  “To take care of some loose ends.” He draped his arm over her shoulders.

  “Is Ray Briggs one of those loose ends?”

  He shook his head. “I’m talking about the satellite.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Yesterday, on a clear sunny day, in a rice paddy in Vietnam, farmers reported a series of lightning strikes. They heard humming and felt a vibration that made their hearts race.”

  She stopped and took a step backward. A wave of dread permeated her body, and it seemed a black hole had opened in front of her. It, whatever “it” was or was going to be, had begun. “I’m suddenly very scared.”

  He reached back for her. “There’s a NIH team on the way to assess damage.”

  “Maybe the attempt failed,” she said. “Or maybe not.”

  “CIA will relay the intel to the Air Force and NASA. Those two agencies will be the guys working to get Itoh’s nanosat out of the sky before it hits another target.”

  “You’re CIA? I kind of thought you were FBI like Frank. Instead, you tell me you’re a CIA spook.”

  “Spook? You’ve been watching too much TV.” He waited for her to settle into the car seat then shut the door of the convertible behind her. “Until everyone’s accounted for, you and I are joined at the hip.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Sully poured a cup of coffee and held it out to Mirabel, who leaned against his kitchen counter as she looked around. The blinds over the windows in the house were still closed, and she saw that a new deadbolt had been installed in the back door.

  “We’re okay, Mirabel. Frank and Pete are outside, and we’re staying just long enough to pick up some things.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’ll be moving around. Right now, I thought a familiar place would help you concentrate. You know more about what’s going on than you realize.”

  “Well, I hope you’re not counting on me to give you any lessons on astronomy.” She took a sip of black coffee, hoping the jolt of caffeine would fend off the exhaustion creeping into her bones. “I’ll help in any way I can, you know that.”

  “Here’s what we know right now. The target is rice. The satellite you spotted is a bio-weapon programmed to genetically reengineer that particular grain.”

  “Oh, wow,” she gasped. “One plus one equals me. I once asked myself when did being a botanist get to be so dangerous. I guess it was when I took up astronomy.”

  “You gave yourself a unique set of skills.”

  “Lucky me.” She took another drink of coffee. “Did you know that rice is grown on every continent except Antarctica? Any attack on rice crops would affect hundreds of millions of people. As a matter of fact, about a third of the world’s population depends on rice for more than half of their daily calories.”

  “How far along are you in your research?”

  “I’m done. There’s an international collaboration on rice research that includes Japan, China, Thailand, and the United States, among others. The program’s timetable called for the rice genome sequence to be completely decoded by the end of 2004. I was one of the research biologists recruited for the validation process to prove out the results.”

  “You were in charge of the project.”

  “Not really, but I was given the lead for this part of it and was the liaison with NIH. I had to make sure results were reproducible — could be duplicated at any time. The project isn’t news, Sully. Preliminary data has been in the public domain for a long time.”

  “Tell me about artificial lightning.”

  Mirabel gaped for several seconds. “How do you know about that?”

  “I watch a lot of Oprah.”

  She was too surprised at the question to smile. “Laboratories routinely use mild electric shock to genetically engineer bacteria. Electricity causes the bacteria to grow. Lightning, natural or artificial, is electricity.”

  “Someone floated the idea that the satellite might be programmed to blast natural bacteria with some sort of artificial lighting or microwaves that could cause them to mutate in the field
. Is that possible?”

  She whistled softly. “Frankenfood.” She paced a slow, small circle as she pulled the threads out of memory. “I read an article in a scientific journal a few months ago on a theory that natural lightning might have speeded up the evolution of the first bacteria. The question is could it affect more than a few plants with a single bolt? Granted, natural lightning strikes can be conducted over distances through the ground and have been known to injure animals and people a mile or more away, but an entire rice field?”

  “Then how about peppering a crop like a shotgun firing scattershot? Or instead of a single bolt, what if someone could generate a field of electric energy?”

  “Then I’d say it’s doable. It’d have to be laser powered so the energy didn’t dissipate over long distances. It’d be like a flashlight beam that broadens out once it leaves the source. The satellite passes over the rice crop, paints it with energy, done deal. To what purpose?”

  “International blackmail.”

  “O-kay.” The word came slowly while she collected her thoughts. “It’s on record that even starving countries have refused donations of genetically engineered food from the U.S. They don’t trust it. Mostly they’re scared it could cause cancers, gene mutations, birth defects.”

  “That goes for a lot of our John and Jane Q. American Publics, too.”

  “Remember the Bt and monarch butterfly story?” She saw the blank look in his eyes. “Guess not. In 1996, scientists looking for a silver-bullet defense against the European corn borer genetically engineered a corn plant to produce its own insecticide, Bacillus thuringiensis delta endotoxin. Great idea, right?”

  “I think you’re going to tell me it wasn’t,” Sully said.

  “The jury is still out, but what happened is this: In 1999, another scientist writing in a small magazine mentioned that in high concentrations, Bt corn ‘might’ have a negative effect on the monarch caterpillar. All he said was ‘might.’ The media picked it up and ran a story that monarchs were being killed by pollen from Bt corn. The threat rolled over onto the food supply, and there was a huge public outcry. So, even if that thing up there can’t alter rice, just a news leak attributed to some anonymous reliable source that rice crops might have been GE’d could have an incredible impact.”

  Sully nodded. “A perfect blackmail threat.”

  “Most scientists agree that genetic engineering is a slippery slope. We have to thoroughly consider the ramifications of everything we do. Mother Nature doesn’t react predictably when changes are introduced into her environment. A mutated gene could definitely have negative effects on non-target organisms.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Transgenomics. Transference from one species to another. The monarch butterfly?”

  Sully shook his head. He still didn’t understand where she was going.

  “It’s what happens when altering the DNA of plants alters the bugs that feed on the plants,” Maribel said. “For instance bees. Say the nectar of an altered plant becomes sterile. It not only won’t reproduce another plant, it has no substantive food value for the bee. The bee starves to death. No pollination, no crops. Slippery slope.

  “Or in the case of pests, GE’ing could possibly make them stronger, more resistant to controls. It’d be a domino effect. Another slippery slope.”

  Terrible possibilities swirled in her mind, and her words picked up speed.

  “Implementing GE without proper research and testing would be disastrous. What if altered pests attacked other cereals that have no defense against them? It could take years to develop a counter defense even after we found out what the problem was. And that’s presuming we could readily identify why normal preventive measures against familiar insects were no longer working.”

  Her voice rose.

  “If this kind of grand-scale genetic engineering were used to alter, say, fruit trees or vegetables, there might be more transgenomic mutations. What if the insects didn’t die? What if their appetites simply changed from plant to animal? What if a mutation could be passed from one animal to another? We wouldn’t be able to immediately defend ourselves.” Her hands moved higher and wider as each domino fell into the next. She saw disbelief in his eyes.

  “If you think that’s nuts, then think about this — we’re still working on a cure for the AIDS virus that transferred from monkeys to humans.”

  “Breathe, Mirabel.” Sully took a deep breath as if to show her how. “Breathe before you pass out.”

  “Give me a break. I’m not going to pass out. I’m giving you what-ifs. Maybe I’m stretching a bit — okay, maybe I’m stretching a lot — but the reality is, there’s no way to predict how far-reaching the damage could be.”

  He captured both her hands in his. “I understand. We’re looking at the potential for a chain of catastrophic events.”

  “So destroy the satellite.”

  “There are … complications.”

  “What complications?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “That’s pretty lame, Mr. O’Sullivan. What complications?”

  “Complicated ones. Political ones,” he added when she opened her mouth again. “Ones affecting national security.

  “Which is it? Politics or national security?”

  “They’re one and the same. I don’t know all the details right now.”

  “Shoot it out of the sky. Do whatever it takes, but do something.”

  “We’re working on it. We’ll get it down.”

  She stared at him and then shook her head to clear the swirl of questions. “You have to do better than that. How are you working on it?”

  “If we can disarm — ”

  “When.”

  “When we disarm it, NASA will send up a team of astronauts. They’ll use the recovery arm to pull the nanosat into the cargo bay of the shuttle and bring it down. The next launch window is in two days.”

  “You talk like they’ve been given a grocery list to fill at the local market. What you’re really saying is that someone has two days to figure out how to disarm the thing.”

  “That’s the deadline.”

  “I have to call the NIH.”

  He pushed her cell out of her reach. “Whoa, Mirabel. Slow down.”

  “I need to warn the NIH. I’m only one botanist. They can call in others who worked on the project. We can brainstorm how to protect the rice crops,” she said.

  “I’ll run it up the flag pole to my boss. If he likes the idea, he’ll want to set up a liaison between the agencies.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Where are we going again?” Mirabel said before she put her bagel between her teeth and set her Styrofoam coffee cup on the floor between her feet while she buckled her seatbelt harness.

  Sully put his cup on the floor between the seats. “Sacramento.” He pulled the headphones over his ears and checked out the instrumentation in his Cessna.

  “And why did I have to get into this business casual outfit?” She leaned forward and brushed bread crumbs off her chest, watching to make sure the bits missed the legs of her pants suit.

  Sully gave her a once-over and smiled. “You do clean up good.”

  “I know blarney when I hear it.” She looked down at what she was wearing: a black, V-neck silk sweater, black linen slacks, and a sea foam green linen jacket. “This was the only thing left in my closet that wasn’t a pair of jeans. I set fire to the rest of my extensive wardrobe in the desert, remember? I wish I’d known your idea of business casual was a blue blazer over a T-shirt and blue jeans — then I wouldn’t be so overdressed.”

  “You’re fine. Perfect, in fact. The FBI field office has a teleconference call set up with the Secretary of State and an official from the Japanese embassy.”

  A thick chunk of jade dangled from a gold
chain around her neck and nestled into the V of her sweater. She lifted the pale green gem. “This jade piece won’t be too ‘in-your-face,’ will it? I mean, if we’re going to see someone from the Japanese government?”

  “Won’t be a problem. Jade symbolizes beauty and perfection in Chinese culture.”

  She felt a warm flush of embarrassment at her gaffe. “I knew that. You just said the FBI set up the meeting. Now I’m confused. You told me you were CIA.”

  “I am. This op is now assigned to a joint taskforce under the umbrella of Homeland Security.” The engine whined, began a slow grind then coughed and caught.

  She went weak, and her heart thudded in her eardrums. She hadn’t expected to feel so vulnerable. She switched her breathing to shallow puffs through pursed lips. I’m okay, I’m okay.

  “You all right?”

  She gulped her coffee. “I will be. I’ll do whatever it takes to get Dan’s killer.”

  “It’ll be a smooth, short flight. I promise.”

  The words rocked her. “That’s what Dan said.”

  He cupped his hand over hers. “We left the bad guys for the coroner.”

  “Not all of them.” She took a deep breath. “Get this thing in the air before I change my mind.”

  Sully’s taxi and liftoff were as smooth as he’d promised. “You can open your eyes now,” he said.

  “Not until we’re in the air.”

  “Open your eyes.”

  She looked down at miles of sand below them, and her stomach twisted into a nauseated knot. “I don’t feel so good.” She felt cold, and beads of sweat were popping up on her forehead.

  He grabbed her hand. “This plane was secured from the time I landed a week ago until we took off this morning. The hangar mechanic checked everything. I checked everything. We’re okay.”

  “Why can’t I believe that?”