Deadly Star

by CJ Petterson

“You’re scared, Mirabel.” He caressed her cheek with the back of his fingers. “Plus you’re flying on an empty stomach. Try to eat some of that bagel.”

  She managed to choke down a bite then chased the dry bread with a sip of lukewarm coffee. When everything stayed where it belonged, she took another nibble. The nosh needed to last for the entire hour-and-a-half flight.

  After Sully taxied to a halt next to the charter plane hangar in Sacramento, Mirabel dropped down onto the tarmac and pinched color back into her cheeks. She straightened her shoulders and rolled her head in a small circle. “Told you I’d be all right.”

  Sully walked up behind her, placed his hands on the back of her neck, and probed with thumbs and fingers to massage the tension knots. “Yes, you are,” he whispered into her ear. He pointed over her shoulder to a long, black Lincoln limousine parked next to the hangar. “There’s our ride.”

  Mirabel stretched her legs long to match Sully’s strides to the car, but she was still a few steps behind him. He waited for her at the open door. She ducked into the rear seat, and Sully slid in beside her.

  “Mirabel, this is Marshall Davis, my boss. Marshall, meet Dr. Mirabel Campbell.”

  She saw a bulky man with graying, close-cropped hair and thick, horn-rimmed glasses. His pinstriped black suit was tailored to perfectly fit his broad shoulders. She would have guessed he worked as a CFO of some corporation except for the yellow silk tie. The financial officers she’d met took themselves much more seriously than that. She took the outstretched hand. “Mr. Davis.”

  “A pleasure, Dr. Campbell,” Marshall said and threw an exasperated look at Sully. “I’ll admit to being the person he reports to on this op, but I’m not his boss. Please call me Marshall.”

  “If you call me Mirabel.”

  “Agreed.” He turned to Sully. “Where do we stand?”

  “This is your field of expertise, Mirabel,” Sully said. “Why don’t you fill him in?”

  In a monotone born of repetition, she delivered the same dire predictions she’d related to Sully. When Marshall nodded at something she said, she stopped. “I get the impression you’ve heard this before.”

  “Some of it. I’m still waiting for our analysts to fill in the holes. Please. Keep going.”

  It took Mirabel twenty minutes to brief Marshall and answer all his questions.

  “Your hands-on info is just what we needed, Mirabel. Thanks.” Marshall looked at Sully. “Unfortunately, this is the tip of a very large iceberg. It goes … ”

  When Marshall hesitated, Mirabel realized he was worried about how high her security clearance went. “The project I just briefed you on was completed in a top secret environment, Level 3,” she said. “We were the berg part of another iceberg.”

  “Access to what I was about to tell you requires a higher level.” Marshall paused a beat and held up a delaying hand to Sully. “I know what you’re going to say. She’s one of the linchpins … All right, but I want to emphasize that this information is for your ears only.”

  She felt his eyes pin her down like a botanist pins a butterfly. She held his gaze and said, “Of course.”

  “To help you two understand the situation, let me give you a little history lesson. North Korea began abducting Japanese citizens as early as the 1960s and ’70s.”

  What does this have to do with what’s happening now? She felt her smile turn to paste and hoped she could keep her eyes from going vacant.

  “After a lot of international pressure, they admitted in 2002 that they’d abducted ‘a few’ Japanese people to act as translators and interpreters. They returned some of the abductees, but they didn’t return the children that were born in North Korea. They claimed they were North Korean citizens.”

  “Aren’t babies born in the U.S. American citizens at birth, no matter what citizenship their parents claim?” Mirabel said.

  “True,” Marshall said with a nod, “unless the baby is born to a foreign diplomat. Embassies are considered built on soil native to that particular country. That fact aside, Tokyo doesn’t recognize North Korea’s claim. They’re demanding the return of the children, who, by the way, don’t even speak Japanese and probably have been indoctrinated by North Korea’s anti-Japanese programs.”

  “Children as political pawns. That’s sick,” she said.

  Sully shook his head. “No, that’s perfect. Innocent, vulnerable, malleable children are perfect hostages because they almost always bring the desired response. Not the first time they’ve been used that way; not the last.”

  “One particular child is the key to what’s happening now, but I’ll get to that later.” Marshall pulled a roll of mints out of his jacket pocket, and after Mirabel and Sully declined, popped one in his mouth. “After Pyongyang’s governmental stooges admitted to the kidnappings, they apologized, then they accused the Japanese of doing the same thing. And that’s true. The Japanese have abducted thousands of Koreans and made them slave laborers. Many of the women were forced to become what they called ‘comfort women.’ Sex slaves.”

  “I read somewhere that that happened during World War Two,” Mirabel said. She was a bit awed at how easily Marshall spouted off facts about events that had occurred in another part of the world more than five decades before.

  Marshall nodded. “True to a point. Actually, the kidnappings started prior to 1945 and continued during the war. Unlike North Korea, Japan hasn’t bothered to apologize, and the feud carries on. That brings us to now.”

  Mirabel perked up. That meant the history lesson was over. An Asian war of politics had transitioned into the malevolent action that involved her.

  “Our government is demanding that North Korea shut down their nuclear power program. Japan wants the return of the children of kidnapped Japanese citizens included in the package.”

  Sully whistled softly. “Japan is trying to drag us into their ongoing conflict with North Korea. They want a confrontation.”

  Marshall nodded. “And they’re also using behind-the-scenes diplomacy to persuade other countries to put pressure on the U.S.”

  Mirabel inserted herself into the conversation. “Where does Itoh’s nanosatellite fit in?”

  “One of the Japanese offspring in North Korean custody is a relative of his.”

  “Related how?” Sully asked.

  “Nephew, after a convoluted fashion, courtesy of the older sister of his brother’s wife. Itoh says he wants the boy back. What he really wants is retribution for all those past grievances.”

  “What makes him think he’s entitled to revenge after what Japan did during all those years?” Mirabel was astounded at the length of time hatred could fester.

  “We think Itoh’s plan is to send up the satellite, attack a few rice fields — which he did two days ago — and then blame North Korea. He’ll say it’s their fault that he was forced to such extreme measures.”

  “For his nanosat to fly in our shadow,” Sully said, “the launch had to be precisely matched to Procyon’s orbit. No way that kind of timing is random. I think we have a leak.”

  Marshall diverted his attention to a document in his hand. “That’s always a possibility. Anyway, Itoh and his nanosat are the bigger problem.”

  Sully’s face went blank. “Do we have a solution?”

  “We believe his bio-weapon will deactivate in the longer term,” Marshall said. “After a few months, it’ll become another inert hunk of metal in a decreasing orbit. Eventually, it’ll burn up in the earth’s atmosphere.”

  “And short term?”

  As the conversation volleyed between Sully and Marshall, Mirabel’s attention bounced from one to the other. She was getting the impression that Sully had some doubts.

  “Short term, which is all we have right now, we have no viable solution,” Marshall said. “If we get caught with Procyon still
up there, Itoh could tell the world the U.S. has a nanosatellite in spy orbit which, to state the obvious, we do.”

  Sully’s smile was grim. “We’d be hard-pressed to repair the diplomatic fallout after that one.”

  The conversation lagged long enough to let Mirabel edge in again. “Marshall, does the DARPA nanosatellite have built-in obsolescence?” That pinned-butterfly feeling swept over her again when Sully and Marshall turned to look at her. “I mean, did you ever intend to bring it down in one piece?”

  “No, but we aren’t going to blow it to bits, either. Once it completed its specified number of orbits, we planned to send a signal to spin it out of the sky. The idea was to make it look like an asteroid burning up in the earth’s atmosphere.”

  “Another pretty shooting star,” Mirabel said. “When was that supposed to happen?”

  “We tried to make it happen when the second nanosat showed up, but the computer program failed. NASA is working on a solution. Right now, we’re okay. Itoh’s nanosat is still hiding behind Procyon, and, as far as we know, the rest of the world’s powers are unaware of either orbiter’s existence, present company excepted.” Marshall glanced her way.

  “Never again, I can tell you. I’m trading astronomy for a safer hobby, like skydiving.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Mirabel got out of the car in the garage of the FBI field office, her head still swimming in the flood of information Marshall had dumped. They took the elevator to the second floor, which was occupied by a couple of dozen men and women, most of them no older than thirty-something. Those not moving quietly about sat at desks inside cubicles with walls padded in dark gray tweed where they softly conversed on telephones or clicked away on keyboards in front of glowing computer screens.

  “I’ve never seen so many dark suits in one place,” she whispered to Sully.

  “They don’t like to hear it, but that’s their uniform,” he whispered back. “They’re the police arm of the government. The CIA is counterintelligence. We get to wear whatever it takes to disappear into our surroundings.”

  I’d like to believe I was more than part of your surroundings, Mirabel thought.

  Marshall opened an unmarked door. “We’re in here.”

  Mirabel was ushered into a rectangular room roughly the size of her living room and dining room put together. A wall-sized projection screen was pulled down at the far end of the room. She mentally counted twenty tubular chrome chairs with gray tweed seats rimming the perimeter of a walnut and ebony table. Ten or so of the chairs had someone sitting in them. Two men and a woman wore the prerequisite FBI uniform.

  “This is Dr. Mirabel Campbell.” Marshall motioned in her direction. “She’s one of the lead scientists on the rice genome project.”

  She nodded. That’s right, folks. I do have clearance to be here.

  “Are we up and running?” he asked.

  A technician checked video connections and tested the sound then nodded.

  “We’re good to go on this end,” one of suits said. “Just waiting for someone to show up in the D.C. office.”

  Mirabel gave in to curiosity and checked out the audience. Fragments of whispered conversations caught her attention. “ … knock it out of the sky … firepower to do it … why not? … debris field … danger … astronauts … communications for decades … ”

  She remembered having that same conversation. “Nice to know I’m not the only one out of the loop,” she muttered.

  “I missed that,” Sully said.

  “I’ll bet you a buck the man over there in the wrinkled cords, blue plaid shirt, and red plaid clip-on tie is a scientist,” she whispered.

  Sully glanced over. “The NIH liaison.”

  “How about him?” She tipped her head toward a man who sat in the back of the room out of camera range. Olive complexioned with slicked-back, black hair, the man wore a silvery shirt and tie under a double-breasted, charcoal gray suit. His size, broad-shouldered and thick, and his green eyes testified to a mixed heritage. Mirabel guessed Japanese-American. “Is he FBI or CIA?”

  Sully leaned over and whispered in her ear. “I am extremely jealous of that piece of jade.”

  “Pervert,” she muttered, and understood he wasn’t going to answer her question. She checked her necklace. The stone had slid inside her neckline and rested atop the rise of her left breast. She moved it back into view, and her attention was drawn to the empty room that appeared on the screen. The microphone on the other end of the teleconference call had picked up the noise of a door opening and closing.

  A man with an American flag pin on his lapel appeared in front of the camera. Knowing television cameras project a skewed image, Mirabel guessed the man was neither as short nor as heavy as he appeared on the screen. She’d gauged his height against the window behind him when he walked in and decided he was close to six feet tall. His face was tanned, and his coiffed black hair was rooted in white at the temples. He glanced around, unbuttoned his suit coat, and sat down at the end of the table. Then he adjusted a pink tie over the front of his white shirt, interlocked his fingers on the table in front of him, and smiled into the camera.

  Your suit probably cost more than I make in a month, maybe two, Mirabel thought.

  “Marshall,” the man said in a smooth baritone. “Nice to see you again. Who do we have with us today?”

  “Nice to see you, as well.” Marshall looked around the table. “These are representatives from our joint taskforce. The people to your immediate right are FBI, beyond them are CIA analysts, and then Dr. Eugene Brewer with the National Institutes of Health. To your left is Robert O — ”

  “A familiar face. Sully, you’re looking well.”

  “Thank you, sir. Doing fine, sir.”

  “And this must be the famous Dr. Campbell,” the senior official said and fixed her in his gaze. “We’re glad you’re able to join us. We’ve heard so much about you.”

  Her lips parted in surprise, but she tried not to look like a doe in headlights and managed to keep her jaw from dropping open.

  He laughed.

  That perfect little laugh took years of practice, she thought. Not a chuckle, not a snicker, not too loud. Just an elegant, diplomatic sound.

  “Don’t look so stricken,” the official said. “It was all good, I assure you. Marshall tells me you’re expert on the rice genome project.”

  “I’m a botanist on the project’s review process, yes, sir.” Of course he’d know who I am, she thought.

  “Good. Well, Marshall, my aide is waiting outside the door with a stopwatch in his hand, but you have my undivided attention for the next thirty minutes.” He looked to either side. “I think everyone is here, and the tape is rolling. Let’s get started, shall we? For this briefing, I should be referred to as a senior White House official. I understand you have new information subsequent to what the president received in his daily briefing yesterday.”

  “The material you’re being handed is Code 4 Security Level, Sensitive Compartmented Information.” Marshall waited while the senior White House official pulled a pair of half-lens glasses out of his pocket and reached for the document a State Department staffer held out to him. After the official scanned through the document and looked into the camera again, Marshall continued. “That is a copy of our latest intel. We have confirmation that the person who launched the satellite is Soujiro Itoh. He plans to launch an attack on the rice fields of our allies and place the smoking gun in the hands of the United States. I direct your attention to pages five and six of the report.”

  Mirabel took note of Sully’s frown as the official scanned through the pages.

  “What do these graphs show me?” the senior official asked after a minute or two.

  Speed reader, Mirabel thought.

  “The potential scope of the threat. Crops this yea
r can be expected to exhibit some deterioration as they react to the bio-weapon, but the main thrust of the threat is to the germination of future food supplies.”

  “And this will happen how?”

  “We think there will be some sort of artificial lightning strikes.”

  “Think?”

  “At this time, we’re going forward on the premise that Itoh’s nanosat has the capability to manufacture artificial lightning strikes, much the way a scientific laboratory could. The ramifications of that action are detailed in the report, but intel is still coming in.”

  “The next document” — Marshall paused while the official shuffled the papers in his hands — “is the recap on where we are now. What you have is a bit of the history of where and how this started.”

  “World War Two?” The senior White House official scanned through the next two documents. “It appears we have a lot of balls in the air, no pun intended.” He hesitated, seemed to collect his thoughts, and looked into the camera. “This report of yours tells me we have to accelerate the time table to get Procyon out of the sky, remove an exceptional threat to the world’s food supply, neutralize a potential world-wide public relations disaster from which we might never recover, and find a way to prevent the situation and its solution from ever leaking out after the fact. And if all that weren’t enough, we‘re dealing with a sociopath who has diplomatic immunity.”

  “That he had diplomatic immunity was the assumption we were operating under at first. However, since the time of that report, we’ve be able to confirm he does not have immunity. An Appellate Court ruled that the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations applies to children of diplomats who are either under the age of twenty-one or, if still attending school, under the age of twenty-three. Itoh” — Marshall opened the folder in his hand — “is considerably older. Immunity protocols no longer apply to him.”

  The senior official nodded. “So when we nail him, he’s deportable on many levels. That’s good news.” A door opened, and a young man walked into view. When the senior official glanced up, the young man stepped out of camera range.