The Last Second (A Brit in the FBI #6)(53)
“No, it’s night here. I’m sure the moment dawn breaks, it will be all over the news.”
“Copy that. Anything new on your end?”
“Gray is running a bunch of scenarios and is working with the nuke folks at U.S. Strategic Command, looking for the nuclear signature prior to the launch. The company whose satellite was launched July 14—P-Tel Communications, out of Valencia, Spain—is being raided to cover all the bases.
“There’s another team at the Idaho Research Facility trying to figure out what happened with the missing plutonium. But no one has any idea where the nuke is now. As you can imagine, people are starting to freak out. It’s all going to leak soon, media’s already planning stories. Thankfully, no one wants to start a worldwide panic, so they’re going carefully.”
“Media and discretion, that’s gotta be a first time. With any luck, we’ll track it down and stop it from blowing up before it does any harm. We’re back on the Blue Mountain jet, heading to Lyon, Galactus headquarters, so we can talk to Jean-Pierre Broussard’s second-in-command, Dr. Nevaeh Patel. She’s our primary suspect. Everyone is asleep right now, but—”
Adam’s face lit up. “Wait. Dr. Nevaeh Patel, the former NASA astronaut? She spent almost six months on the International Space Station before an accident forced them to bring her back down to Earth? That Nevaeh Patel?”
“I remember now something about her. What happened?”
“Oh, man. I’ve been researching her as part of the whole Galactus company.”
“Talk to me. What kind of accident did she have?”
“A bad one. She was on an extravehicular activity—EVA—what they call a spacewalk—when her tether broke. A less-experienced astronaut probably would have died, because she was literally floating away from the space station and her jet pack failed, but she somehow managed to maneuver herself back and grab a hold of a truss. It was a miracle she survived, changed a lot of their procedures for EVAs, too.”
“Why don’t I remember? Surely something like that would have made her a heroine and she’d have been all over the news.”
“Nope. Turns out they grounded her afterward, and she left NASA under guarded circumstances. No one said a word at NASA and neither did she. I turned up some in-depth research that she had a bunch of psych evaluations when she got back to Earth, nothing reported. A year later, she resurfaced and went to work for Broussard.”
“Sounds like a normal thing to do if someone almost died on a mission. The FBI would react the same way, put us through our paces, make sure we were fit for duty. But then again, how she managed to save her own life, why didn’t anyone make a big deal out of it?”
“Hey, look what I just found. Listen to this. Says here a small contingent of people claim she told them she spoke to aliens when she was untethered, and they were the ones who helped her back to the space station.”
“Tell me what you mean by a small contingent, Adam.”
“Well—all right. Just maybe I took a quick gander at the personnel database. You didn’t hear that.”
Mike laughed. “No, of course not. My hearing isn’t what it used to be.”
“Hey, these are exigent circumstances—plus, interestingly, she was one of NASA’s most promising astronauts, you’d think her leaving would cause a ruckus. But like I said, no one said anything. Was she dismissed, did she quit, did they make life untenable? She was officially grounded, that’s for sure. Also, when I just happened to stumble onto her personnel file, I saw she didn’t pass her psych evals. So, no way they’d ever let her back to space. They can’t afford dead or crazy people on a space station. Now that would make for bad press.”
“Okay, let’s come forward. So, where was Dr. Patel when the plutonium went missing from Idaho?”
“2015? I’m assuming in France. Lyon. Breaking major ground in the private space industry working for Jean-Pierre Broussard. Maybe, I’m not sure yet.”
Mike was silent. “I don’t know what to think. But Grant swears he heard Devi, Broussard’s lover, say Nevaeh’s name right before she was shot and killed. And then the yacht was taken out by a Hellfire missile.” She glanced at Broussard, heard a gentle snore, and whispered, “I trust Grant. I don’t think Broussard can be all that objective, yet. Do a deep check on where she was when the plutonium was stolen in 2015. Also, we need to know if Patel has been in France this whole time, or if she’s somewhere down here in Malaysia. Maybe putting a bullet in Broussard’s lover and trying to kill him and steal the Holy Grail.”
“Holy Grail? He really believes he found it? Wow. Well, you and Nicholas will find out, one way or another. Hey, Mike? Get some sleep. You need it.”
“Thanks, Mom. I will.”
“Hey, that’s my line.”
She pulled out her earbuds, ate more M&M’s, and did a few searches herself. She pulled up photographs of Nevaeh Patel on her screen. Patel in a Time magazine spread on female astronauts, Patel as a young astronaut all suited up. Patel as a successful executive. The most recent news showed her statements to the media regarding her missing boss.
Patel was fifty-seven now, forty-eight when she was chosen for a mission that meant she’d spend nearly a year aboard the ISS. She had bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy, a master’s degree in earth and planetary sciences from MIT in 1984, then a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the same. Mike did some quick math—Patel had started college when she was only sixteen.