The Last Second (A Brit in the FBI #6)
Catherine Coulter
To my beloved brother-in-law, Blaise, who died recently after a valiant fight with cancer. He was a caring husband, father, brother, grandfather, friend, a man filled with such love and kindness, always ready for a laugh, always ready to hug a grandchild. You will be missed forever. Ah, the wonderful memories all of us will cherish.
—Catherine For my daddy, who helped steer the winds, and for Randy, as always.
—J.T.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Catherine, who lets my imagination run free, then teaches me how to make it all come together. This has been quite a journey! Imagine, we’ve made it all the way to space!
I was blessed to grow up in an aerospace family, but I couldn’t have put the concept of this together nearly as well without the help of my dad and my brothers, who answered innumerable questions about the ways EMPs worked, how to put one in space, and how they could be stopped. And thanks to my mom for listening and suggesting ideas over the dinner table—during the writing of this book, and my whole life.
To the Tuesday porch: thank you for keeping me honest, the word count stacking up, and for all your constant support.
And my darling Randy, without whom none of these books would happen. I’ll go up in a rocket with you anytime, baby!
—J.T.
PROLOGUE
NASA Johnson Space Center Texas
Houston,
March 2011
There was a large mirror on the wall of the white room. Dr. Nevaeh Patel sat in a hard plastic chair, leads from a lie detector machine hooked to her left hand, a thick cord wound around her chest.
She was the one who’d insisted on the lie detector. After the embarrassment of having her mission cut short, being replaced by another astronaut and brought back to Earth, two weeks on the ground of tests, physicals, conversations, polite glances, and outright stares, she’d gotten tired of their disbelief and insisted on being tested.
Still, this final indignity was almost too much for her to bear. All she’d done was tell the flight director and flight doctor the truth about what she’d seen during her EVA—extravehicular activity—outside the International Space Station, what she’d heard. It had been real, they had been real, and the powers that be didn’t believe her. On board the space station, they’d subjected her to batteries of tests, extensive psychological profiling, and concluded she had merely been suffering from zero-gravity-induced hallucinations. They rotated her off the ship and grounded her in Houston so they could do it all again.
Which was an affront to everything they claimed to want from their mission—NASA’s ultimate goal was to find exoplanetary life, for heaven’s sake. Which she’d done.
The flight director himself, Dr. Franklin Norgate, now sat across from her, a clipboard in his hand. He wore a gray plaid short-sleeved button-down and a skinny black tie, his normally kind eyes guarded. He was as smart as she was, maybe more so. She’d always respected him, seen him as quietly intimidating.
To his right was the examiner, a blank-faced man introduced only as Jim, in his fifties, bald as an egg, a mustard stain on his black tie, like a Rorschach blot. There had been Rorschach tests, too, earlier today and during the innumerable conversations with NASA’s psychiatric team over the past two weeks.
What was wrong with them? They were being idiots. Nevaeh had successfully made contact with an alien species. The Numen, they were called, gentle, kind, fascinating beings. And NASA was treating her like she was insane.
She shivered.
Franklin asked, “Are you cold?”
“It’s chilly in here, yes.”
“I’ll see if they can make it more comfortable for you.” He stared at the mirror, and a moment later, she felt the air-conditioning kick off. She nodded her thanks.
The examiner gave her the same strangely blank polite smile all the other experts had been giving her.
“Ready to begin?”
“Yes.”
“Good. As I mentioned earlier, only yes or no answers. Are you comfortable?”
“Yes.”
“All right then. I’m going to ask you some control questions in order to develop a baseline. Is your name Dr. Nevaeh Patel?”
“Yes.”
“Is your first name—Nevaeh—‘heaven’ spelled backward?”
“Yes.”
Silence, scribbling, then, “Did you attend Stanford University?”
“Yes.”
“Did you study physics and astronomy?”
“Yes.”
“You received your Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT?”
“Yes.”
“Are you an astronaut?”
“Yes.”
“Do you live in Michigan?”
“No.”
“Do you live in Texas?”
“Yes.”
“Are you being truthful with me?”
“Yes.”
“Did you speak with an extraterrestrial being on the International Space Station on your last mission?”
“Yes.”
A pause. The men shared a glance.
“And did this extraterrestrial being tell you to harm anyone on Earth?”
“No. No, of course not.”