Freefall: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 1)

by Felix R. Savage

  Gravity rolled Meeks’s head back to its original position.

  Meeks wasn’t staring at the ceiling, Jack realized. He was looking far, far, farther away. Those dead eyes stared eternally at the stars. At Europa.

  Jack distantly took in the other people in the kitchen—crime scene technicians in masks and paper overshoes—and the broken windows, glass on the floor, bullet-holes in the kitchen cupboards, Meeks’s wheelchair lying on its back.

  He sat on the three-piece living-room suite that they never used. An officer who smelt of perspiration and Listerine took his details. Jack mindlessly gave his name and address. He had to fish out his phone to provide contact information for Meeks’s parents in Wales—he’d only met them a few times. Meeks had not been close to them.

  “And what is your relationship to the deceased?”

  “We were friends,” Jack said.

  “Were you visiting him from the UK?” the officer said, picking up on Jack’s accent.

  “No. I live here. I’m an American citizen.”

  Another policeman came in. He was severely overweight, and wore a suit instead of a uniform. His dress shirt gaped at the collar. He sat down across from Jack. “Did you observe that Mr. Meeks was depressed recently?” he said.

  Jack’s head jerked up. “You can’t be implying he offed himself.”

  “Please answer the question. Did Mr. Meeks exhibit any unusual behaviors, or did you have other reasons to be concerned about his state of mind?”

  “Ollie did not commit suicide.”

  “A little over a month ago, he purchased two guns. Never owned a gun before.”

  “Home defense.”

  “It appears that his company was in trouble. He was on the edge of bankruptcy.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “It’s unfortunately not uncommon for people to end their lives when they are facing financial ruin.”

  Jack clenched his fists on his knees. Needles of pain stabbed through the first three fingers on his left hand. He scarcely felt it. “You can’t have missed the state of the kitchen! The windows are blown out, there are bullet holes in the walls!” Another detail of the scene etched in his mind sprang out. “The computers are gone! There were two computers on the kitchen table.”

  The detective’s gaze slipped away. He stared at the wall behind Jack. It was a thousand-yard stare, not entirely dissimilar to the look in Meeks’s dead eyes. “The diameter of the entry and exit wounds is consistent with a .45 caliber bullet,” he said.

  “Then someone else shot him with a .45.” Saying it out loud, Jack believed it. He remembered another clinching detail. “The exit wound was on the right side of his head. He was right-handed. If he’d shot himself it would have been on the left side.”

  The detective stood up. He gestured for Jack to stand up, too. “I understand this is very difficult to deal with, Mr. Kildare.” The detective sounded like a robot. “It’s a shame you had to see him like that.”

  “I was in Iraq,” Jack said.

  “Kidding? Me, too.” The detective didn’t smile. But his mask slipped for a moment. He shook Jack’s hand. “I’m sorry.” The words seemed to carry a deeper meaning than the obvious one. “I am genuinely goddamn sorry about this.”

  Jack nodded wordlessly.

  The detective looked at Jack’s left hand. Dried blood caked his fingertips. “What happened there?”

  “Climbing accident. I was stupid.” Two fingernails had been torn off halfway down their beds.

  “Do you want medical attention?”

  “Thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Probably wise,” the detective said. Afterwards, Jack would replay the words, making sure he hadn’t misheard them. “We would have to put you in the system, and you do not want that.” The detective cleared his throat. “I’m afraid you will not be able to stay here tonight. There’s a motel in Mesquite. An officer will escort you if you want to pack up any of your belongings.”

  Jack drove out on the road to Mesquite, like he had told the police he would. A mile out of town, he U-turned and drove back through Bunkerville. He blasted down the highway towards Las Vegas.

  Sleep?

  You’ve got to be fucking joking.

  Now that the reality of Meeks’s death had sunk in, rage and grief burned through his system like the ephedrine he used to take before missions in Iraq. This required action. Immediate action.

  Unfortunately, the vast spaces of America intruded onto his reality. After the day he’d had, adrenaline could only carry him so far. He checked into a roadside inn near Flagstaff, Arizona, and slept like the dead. When he awoke, he lay in bed for a moment, staring at the pattern of lucky horseshoes on the curtains, asking himself if he really wanted to do this.

  Answer: Yes. He did.

  He got up and went downstairs to the breakfast buffet. The room was full of young people in weird costumes, congregating around the grill station like hummingbirds around a feeder. Jack distinctly smelled marijuana. He leerily eyed the off-beat crowd while he ate.

  Back on the road, he slid an Eminem CD into the Toyota’s stereo and gunned it in the fast lane.

  The fast lane didn’t stay fast for long. Traffic conditions were horrible. By the time Jack reached Houston, Meeks had been dead for almost two days.

  It felt dreamlike to revisit his old stomping grounds around Johnson Space Center under these circumstances. Scratch that. It felt like a nightmare, the kind you can’t wake up from even if you fight it.

  Cruising past JSC, he saw that every window in Building 13 was lit up. The NASA administrative personnel used to be nine-to-fivers. Clearly those days were past.

  Jack knew he ought to wait for tomorrow morning, but the need for immediate action returned powerfully. He couldn’t face another night of darkness and doubts.

  He circled around, passing by a vast building site where construction work continued under floodlights. That used to be the park where Jack and his fellow astronauts would eat lunch on rare days when the Houston weather was neither wet nor sweltering.

  It was sweltering now, even hours after sunset. Jack lowered his window as he rolled towards the new, military-style security checkpoint.

  “ID, please.”

  Jack held up an old NASA visitor pass in a plastic cover.

  “Thank you very much, sir.”

  Jack smiled to himself as he got out of the car to walk through the newly installed body scanner. He’d had to turn his old NASA ID in when he was fired four years ago. But he’d happened to have this one—issued on a day when he’d forgotten his own ID. He’d kept it as a souvenir. Evidently it still passed inspection.

  Mentally rehearsing his next actions, he drove on towards the parking lot for Building 4 South, where he used to work.

  When he realized his mistake, he circled around, parked outside Building 13, and repeated the ID rigmarole at the security desk.

  Could feel the energy in the air as soon as he stepped into the building.

  A background hum of voices, laughter, work.

  Longing tugged at his heart.

  God, to be back here again—

  No.

  Fuck NASA.

  He pressed the button to call the lift. He didn’t know exactly where to go, but the top floor seemed a good bet.

  The lift doors opened and out stepped Inga Pitzke.

  Jack jumped. Inga went pink. “Warum?” she said, reverting to her native German in astonishment.

  “Where can I find the director of the Spirit of Destiny project?” was what came out of Jack’s mouth, while the gears of his brain whirred furiously.

  “Seventh floor,” Inga said. She was carrying a laptop bag and her handbag, obviously on her way home. Her V-necked t-shirt outlined the undercurves of her breasts. That Valkyrie hair lay over her shoulder in a thick braid that Jack itched to undo.

  “Thanks,” he said. As the lift doors closed, he added, “We should have a drink sometime, catch up,” and was rewarded by a
look of horror on her face.

  People eddied in the seventh-floor hallway, talking in bright, absorbed tones. The energy in this place was something else. Jack walked through them, past an unoccupied secretary’s desk, and into the office of Richard Burke, the leader of the five-country, 2,300-person team designing the Spirit of Destiny.

  Burke glanced up from his computer. “What is it?” he said, revealing no impatience with an unannounced visitor. He frowned slightly, as if he thought he should recognize Jack but couldn’t place him.

  Jack sat down in the visitor chair at the side of Burke’s desk. He let his legs sprawl across the carpet. He really was exhausted from driving … from everything. “It’s regarding a little matter of murder,” he said.

  Burke spun his chair to face Jack. He crossed his legs and laced his hands on his knee. His face displayed concern. Confusion. “I’m not sure if we’ve met.”

  “Yes,” Jack said. “Back in 2009. At the Orbiter Processing Facility 2. You were supervising a payload loading. I was about to fly on the last Hubble servicing mission …”

  Recognition flooded Burke’s eyes. “Jack Kildare! What a surprise!” Under other circumstances Jack would have been hard put not to laugh, seeing Burke remember him—and then remember that Jack had the rare distinction of being an astronaut who’d gotten fired. “I’m sorry,” Burke said. “How did you get in here?”

  “The security always was quite crap. Evidently it still is,” Jack said with a shrug.

  “I hate to say this, Jack, but you’ll have to leave.” Burke sighed. “If you’d like to schedule a meeting—”

  “No! I would not like to schedule a fucking meeting! I would like to discuss the murder of Oliver Meeks!”

  Burke physically flinched from Jack’s shout. Jack knew intuitively in that instant that Burke was innocent. He knew nothing about Meeks’s death. He probably didn’t even know who Meeks was.

  The door of the office opened. Jack lurched to his feet, ready to physically resist eviction, no matter how pointless he knew that would be.

  Instead of security guards, a skinny young man came in. He wore jeans and a t-shirt. Tevas. Peace symbol on a thong around his neck. He reminded Jack of the weirdos at the breakfast buffet in Flagstaff. Through the red haze of his anger, Jack initially thought he was looking at an IT guy with bad timing.

  Then he recognized the bogus FAA official who’d confiscated their boilerplate unit at McCarran Airport.

  Every fiber of his body yearned to take a swing at the guy’s face.

  CHAPTER 28

  In a different universe, a better one, Jack pummelled the twerpy little guy into the floor.

  In this universe, there were abundant good reasons not to do that. Granted, Jack rarely did anything in his life for what most people considered good reasons. But rather than the fear of consequences, curiosity restrained him.

  The guy stared at him.

  Jack stared back, pulse thudding.

  The guy moved unconsciously into a defensive posture, holding his forearms. Covering the pale pink scars left by Jack’s butcher knife.

  He doesn’t know that was you, Jack reminded himself. Play it cool. Play it cool, damn it.

  Burke said, “Skyler, this isn’t a great time.”

  Skyler. What had possessed his parents? Jack had to admit the name suited the little twerp.

  “It’s important,” Skyler said to Burke, with a meaningful glance at Jack.

  To Jack’s surprise, Burke pivoted obediently. “Jack, give us a minute. You can wait in my secretary’s office. Don’t steal the office supplies.”

  Manager jokes.

  Jack collapsed on a chair against the wall of the secretary’s office.

  He stared at a Spirit of Destiny poster on the opposite wall.

  God, that dove logo was epically awful.

  As the brain-fuddling buzz of anger faded, he asked himself again what he was doing here. He had driven twelve hundred miles over two days, chasing a vision of justice for Meeks. But the vision had soured. Turned into a nightmare.

  Vividly, his mind coughed up the memory of the wrecked kitchen. Meeks’s wheelchair lying on its back.

  A fresh wave of loss crashed over him.

  The best part of him had died with Meeks, he thought. If he was the kind of man who cried, he’d have wept then. He wasn’t, but he mashed his hands against his face. He hadn’t just lost a friend, he’d lost a job, a dream, a future. All that remained was this lousy, destructive impulse to lash out at those who’d done it.

  He lowered his hands, blinking rapidly, and stared at the dove logo. The closed door muffled Burke and Skyler’s voices.

  The outer door opened. An angular, middle-aged woman with cropped blonde hair looked in. Her eyes widened. “Kildare!”

  It was Katharine Menelaou, who’d been station captain on the ISS when Jack was there. The last time they’d seen each other was in orbit. Unlike Burke, she was clearly one of those who never forgot a face.

  Jack leapt to his feet, flustered.

  Menelaou came in, smiling. “I think I’d be less surprised to see the Dalai Lama waiting outside Burke’s office. How the hell are you, Killer?”

  Her nickname for him.

  She carried a stack of folders. She shifted them to her left elbow and they shook hands.

  Jack had never warmed to Menelaou when they were on the ISS. He’d felt that she was too high-handed, and casually fomented tensions among the crew. But seeing her now took him back to a better time. As when Alexei had rung him, he responded with unfeigned pleasure. “Kate, it’s been a while. I hear congratulations are in order?”

  Menelaou’s appointment as commander of the Spirit of Destiny had made the news last week. That one had come as no surprise to Jack, given that it was inevitable the mission should have an American commander. Menelaou was an active astronaut with command experience, past child-bearing, unattached, with no family history of cancer—important, this—going back three generations.

  “‘A victory for all women,’” Jack mischievously quoted the headline that had been repeated throughout the media, with minor variations. “What does it feel like to be a trailblazer, Ms. Menelaou?” He held out an imaginary microphone.

  “I told them it feels like volunteering to go to jail for five years,” she joked. “Except with worse food.” She swatted away his invisible microphone. “And let’s not discuss the company.” She glanced at the closed door of Burke’s office. “Actually, that’s what … aha.” She measured him with a gaze. “At least you’ve stayed in shape, I see.”

  “Just ignore the gray hairs,” Jack said, wondering what she was on about.

  Menelaou tapped her stack of folders straight with the flat of her hand. “Is he in there with someone? I’ve got an appointment with him at nine.”

  The top folder was labelled IVANOV.

  Those folders represented Spirit of Destiny crew members. There were seven of them.

  Belatedly, Jack realized she’d asked him a question. “Er, yes, he’s in there with a bloke called Skyler.”

  “Oh God. Him.” Menelaou saw Jack’s doubtful expression. “You haven’t been around here for a while. Skyler Taft is one of our so-called Feds. Basically, they’re spooks. They prowl around making sure we’re not stealing classified information, not that it would make any difference now that the place is infested with Chinese nationals. I’m going to be saddled with two of them on my crew, as well. Look here. Xiang … Qiu … how do you even pronounce that?” Menelaou sighed and shook her head. “Hell with this. I’m not standing here waiting for him. If they ever get through, tell Burke to call me on my cell. Oh, and good luck!” she added, as she left.

  Jack paced between the closed doors. A security camera above the outer door swivelled, as if clumsily tracking him.

  Instinct told him to leg it before he got arrested.

  But at the thought of jail, he once more remembered the police detective in Bunkerville. That man, an Army veteran, gone to fat
, making a good fist of a bad job, had told Jack as clearly as he could, without putting it into words, that the fix was in. Meeks had been murdered. And someone wanted it covered up.

  Jack gritted his teeth, clenched his good fist. He was working himself up into a right royal rage again when the inner door opened and Burke waved him back into his office.

  Burke’s mouth smiled. His eyes were worried. “All right, Jack, sorry about that. We’ve discussed the situation, and …” Abruptly, the experienced manager seemed to run out of words. “I’ll let Skyler explain it to you,” he said, and left.

  So now it was Jack and Skyler alone in the seventh-floor office with a view of the world’s biggest construction site.

  Skyler appeared to have the situation in hand. Standing, he faced Jack across the big desk as if he were the manager of the Spirit of Destiny project. “You’ve got great timing,” he said. “I mean that literally. I’ve looked into your NASA record. You were the best shuttle pilot of your generation. You’re credited with saving the Atlantis after that debris strike.”

  Jack just looked at him, wondering if this was the man who’d killed Meeks. Spook or not, he didn’t look capable of murder. Then again, a .45 was a great equalizer.

  “So the point being,” Skyler went on, “I hear on the grapevine that you’re out of a job again. I have to say I’m very sorry about your—your friend. Suicide is a tragedy like no other.”

  Jack lost control. He lunged around the desk, grabbed Skyler’s forearms, and slammed him against the wall. The back of Skyler’s head met the window with a sharp crack. Skyler mewled.

  Jack stared down at the younger man with loathing. “Suicide. You should be ashamed of yourself. He was murdered. You murdered him.” He shook Skyler, making his head snap back against the window again.

  “I didn’t lay a finger on him!”

  The denial sounded genuine. But denial was what spooks were best at.

  “You murdered him for our technology,” Jack spat. “I’ve reliable information that the Spirit of Destiny is using our engine design. Inga Pitzke must have given it to you.” Two and two made four. There was no other reason for Inga to be here at JSC. “But she didn’t have everything. So you had to come back.” Another shake. “Why didn’t you just hire Ollie, instead of killing him?” Jack asked. He dropped Skyler’s shoulders and stepped away.