The Last Second (A Brit in the FBI #6)(73)

Mills went to stand, realized he couldn’t. “Then hurry up and call Langley, talk to Mr. Grace. Time’s a-wastin’.”

Nicholas said, “Grant, cover him, please. Mike, with me.”

Grant pulled Nicholas to one side, said, “We need to get Broussard to hospital. He’s still unconscious, his pulse is too sketchy.”

“I hear you. Give us a moment.”

In the kitchen, Nicholas pulled his hands through his hair. Little bits of dirt and glass rained down on Patel’s floors. “I hate this—that character is CIA, and what’s worse, I believe him. Imagine, playing the notorious terrorist, Al-Asaad, working with Byrne and Patel. And we didn’t know a blessed thing about it.”

Mike said, “Nicholas, why would anyone bother telling us? Imagine, his handler is Carlton Grace. A multiyear undercover op in a terror organization sounds just like him. We need to confirm Mills’s story. Get Adam on the phone.”

Adam’s voice came through. “Good timing, was about to call you. I think I have a lead on the telescope.”





CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE


T-MINUS 20 HOURS

Nicholas said, “Tell me.”

“It was delivered to Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2016. I traced it to a mountain dead center in the middle of the country. And there’s a very good chance Patel is there, too. She has a set of architectural drawings on her computer, very detailed, and there are several references to ‘Aquarius.’ I think that might be the name of her observatory. I’ve sent them to you. Nicholas, you’re going to want to check this out. I found them in an old cache, they’d been deleted, were several years old. The files were degraded. I don’t have an exact location.

“But I just matched a tail number of a deadheading jet that landed in Colombo, Sri Lanka, a few hours ago. Her name wasn’t listed, and I’m trying to get their CCTV to look for a facial match. But my gut says it’s her.”

“Sloppy of her. Sound like she’s not trying to cover her tracks anymore. Good job, Adam, thank you. Listen, I have an emergency. We need to verify a set of bona fides with Carlton Grace from CIA. Get him for us, I don’t care where he is. Crash their mainframe, break down the doors, whatever you need to do. We must speak with him immediately. If you get any resistance, call the White House, get Vice President Sloan on the phone, and tell her it’s life or death.”

“Jeez, okay. What are we confirming?”

“Just get me Grace. I’ll handle the rest.”

“Copy that. I’ll ring you back when I have him.”

And he was gone.

Nicholas smiled at Mike. “I’m so glad Adam came into the light.” He had his tablet out, looking up the map. “Well, Sri Lanka is one of the places that will experience the full lunar eclipse.” He looked up, stared at Mike. “My God, she’s timed this down to the minute and place. What are the odds, Mike? Surely this is where we’ll find the controls to the nuke. But you know, my biggest question is, why is she doing this?”

“I might be making a leap here, Nicholas. But say Patel wasn’t happy about being sacked from NASA. Could she be trying to get revenge on them, somehow? Or maybe she blames her co-astronauts on the ISS.”

Nicholas said, “I don’t think you’re far afield. From the snippets of her conversations with—we still don’t have a clue who—she got progressively more angry, more bitter. There was hate there, and then, later, the thirst for power. Are we talking revenge, too? Could she be going after the International Space Station? Can you imagine a nuclear bomb going off in space, taking out the space station? It would halt a huge swath of the space program in its tracks. Not to mention the astronauts aboard who would die, and decades of research destroyed. The space station is hardened against solar flares and other types of natural EMPs, but a bomb of this magnitude—I’m not sure they could survive it, even with precautions. And assuming it doesn’t take a direct hit, if it couldn’t be powered because of an EMP, it would degrade into orbit and fall to Earth.”

Mike nodded. “We’d better look at its orbit, see where it’s going to be at the apex of the lunar eclipse.

He typed it in. “You nailed it. ISS will be passing over the same area moments after the eclipse begins its hour and a half of totality.”

“Here’s my question. If she’s in Sri Lanka, and the ISS will be overhead and the moon will be in eclipse—and assuming the nuke is in a low Earth orbit—won’t she be directly in the line of the blast? That would make it a suicide mission.”

“I don’t know, Mike. We’re going to have to hunt her down, see what all this is really about.”

“Yep, find out everything before the bomb goes off. Hey, not all that much for us to do. And we have that bearded idiot in there to contend with.”

The sirens wailed to an ear-splitting crescendo, then squawked as they shut off suddenly. There were shouts from the front lawn.

Nicholas said, “They saw the bodies, I assume.”

“This is insane.” Mike cursed. Nicholas was so shocked, he stared at her. “Sorry, but like you, I know Mills is telling the truth. And I’d really like to belt him. And Carlton Grace. Hey, the whole lot of them for dealing this down to the wire.”

“Agreed, but first things first. Let’s focus on getting Broussard patched up and safe. Then we can deal with Mills—and Patel.”