Autopsy(Kay Scarpetta #25)(50)

“What we’re about to show you could incite a War of the Worlds panic.” The vice president looks around the room. “I’m sure most of you are familiar with the nineteen thirty-eight radio broadcast of the H. G. Wells novel about Martians invading Earth?” she adds to heads nodding yes.

“I think all of us are keenly aware that misrepresented facts or fiction of any sort can result in disaster,” the president reminds everyone. “And many people listening to that radio broadcast eighty years ago believed it was real.”

“If that was a problem back then,” the vice president adds, “just imagine what would happen today with disinformation campaigns, social media, propaganda on the Internet and all the rest.”

“I think the War of the Worlds hoopla has been largely debunked,” says the senator from California, who was around at the time. “Like Roswell,” referencing the 1947 alleged crash of an extraterrestrial flying disk on a Roswell, New Mexico, ranch.

“Well, I don’t necessarily place much faith in anything the government might have decided to debunk,” says the senator from the state where the incident happened.





CHAPTER 20

DEBUNK IS JUST ANOTHER way of changing the message to what you want people to believe.” The senator from New Mexico looks around the table. “No way it was a damn weather balloon.”

“Once you start denying what else might be out there, you can’t undo it,” the senator from Massachusetts says in his blunted accent.

“Declassified documents show image after image of UFOs. Many of them explained. And a lot of them not,” adds the Secretary of Defense.

“What about history?” says the senator from Florida. “There are paintings and stone carvings from thousands of years ago depicting spaceships and extraterrestrials.”

Others continue commenting, and it seems nobody has any idea what to trust, what’s true or to be counted on anymore. Including me, I can’t help but think, sitting here staring up at images on the data walls, feeling lost in space, no pun intended.

“Let’s talk about what we’re dealing with right now some three hundred miles above the planet in what’s called low-Earth orbit.” The president glances through his notes. “And yes, we’ve got to be very careful how the news gets out.”

Otherwise there may be those who believe we’ve been attacked in space by extraterrestrials. That we were fired upon by them early this morning, NASA adds, as I halfway wonder if I’m hearing things right.

“Earth will be invaded next,” DARPA suggests with all seriousness. “When it’s highly unlikely such a thing is going on.” But he’s not saying it’s impossible, and I don’t dare glance at Benton.

I don’t want anyone to catch the look I might give him. It’s not that I’ve ever been so arrogant as to think humans are the only life in the cosmos. But I never imagined that one day I would be pulled into such a discussion, most of all inside the White House.

“We can’t swear yet that there’s been an attack, and if so by whom or what,” the president adds to my astonishment. “Just that something disastrous has occurred.”

I reach for another bottle of water, unscrewing the cap, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. Insatiably thirsty, I’ve been drinking a lot since leaving the house, and it might have been wise to visit the ladies’ room before getting down to business. I tell myself not to think about it, to pretend that as usual I’m at a crime scene with no access to plumbing.

The president laces his fingers on top of the table, looking directly at me. He begins to explain what happened at 11:27 last night East Coast time. That’s when Houston lost all communication with a top secret orbiting laboratory and the two crewmates still on board it, a male and a female, one American, the other Russian.

Scientists and experienced commercial astronauts, they’ve not been heard from since heading out on a spacewalk shortly before midnight. Their third crewmate, Jared Horton, is an American biomedical engineer who lives in Virginia. He’d been in space before but this was his first long-term mission, and the story is he escaped with his life. He’s now back on the ground and out of reach in Central Asia.

“He’s not talking to us directly.” The story NASA tells goes from bad to worse. “What’s a fact is that at around three o’clock this morning, he departed in the Soyuz spacecraft that he and his crewmates had arrived in eleven weeks ago. It’s since touched down without incident in Kazakhstan.”

We can see it for ourselves on the data walls, the crew capsule landing in the desert steppes rather much like a wrecking ball. Then a Russian helicopter is setting down, clouds of dirt billowing up from sagebrush and feathergrass.

“If it’s top secret,” says the senator from Virginia in his lilting accent, “then why are the Russians involved?”

“They’ve been our partners on the Space Station since nineteen ninety-eight,” NASA reminds everyone. “We’re still using their Soyuz spacecraft.”

On the data walls, we watch the Russian search and rescue team helping Horton out of the scorched-looking crew capsule’s hatch. They carry him off in a chair as he barely holds up his head, feeling the crushing effects of gravity after months without it.

“His story is that the orbiter and his two crewmates were struck by a swarm of projectiles, possibly debris too small to be picked up on radar,” the president goes on to describe. “And if at the end of the day it turns out to be space trash, junk, fragments of something? Then the damage is accidental, obviously. But we don’t know that yet.” He looks around at the intense faces.