The Last Second (A Brit in the FBI #6)(77)

“Yes, yes, I have the tapes ready.” He moved out of the camera’s view and a screen flickered to life.

Norgate fast-forwarded through the six hours of footage to the moment Patel drifted away. “I know it’s hard to see everything, the cameras missed a portion of the event when they repositioned. It’s a full fifteen seconds of her spinning, then she resists the spin, turns, and comes back to the hand rungs.”

“Okay. So how’d she do it?”

“Remember, this was early on, things are tighter now, so we never, ever can have this happen again. You can see she and Verlander get their lines crossed somehow, and she tries to get them untangled. The cables snap, and with the sudden pressure, the trailing line breaks. Somehow, she released the main safety line when she was doing that. Or maybe it yanked free, we don’t know. Her third failsafe was a jet pack—what’s known as Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue, or SAFER. It’s basically a life preserver for astronauts. According to her colleagues, she activated it and propelled herself in the right direction. It was a smart move, gutsy. If she’d activated when she was facing the wrong direction she could have shot herself further away from the ISS and Verlander wouldn’t have been there to catch her. We couldn’t move the robotic arm to save her in time, either. It was a fluke, and we were lucky she made it back in one piece. We changed a few things on the suits and our procedures afterward to make sure it never happened again.”

He chewed a lip, then said, “Watch where I point, okay?” Norgate rewound the video, hit play. “See here? The video should show the vapor from the SAFER. It’s nitrogen gas propulsion. There is none. But by the time anyone thought to check, the pack had been reset. We have no way to prove or disprove she actually used it. She claimed it didn’t work, that the—Numen, she calls them—pushed her back to the hand rungs. We’ve never told anyone that fact, Mr. Grace. I trust you will only use it if absolutely necessary.”

Grace said, “Back up. So it’s possible she’s been telling the truth all this time?”

“I’m supposed to say no, absolutely not.”

“I see. Let’s hear what her fellow astronauts are saying.”

Norgate hit play. Patel’s voice was clear on the tape.

“How do you know my name?”

Grace said, “She’s talking to someone, who’s she talking to?”

“We don’t know. It wasn’t an appropriate response to anything anyone was saying to her. She’s wearing what we call a Snoopy cap, which allows for regular communication with the ISS and command. She wasn’t talking to us, responding to us, or otherwise in conversation with us.”

Patel again: “I will tell them. Thank you for saving my life.”

Norgate said, “Then she’s back on the hand grip. Verlander grabbed her, maneuvered her into the airlock. We hastened the depressurization, blew out Verlander’s eardrums doing it, but we got her back inside the station. Doc checked her over, we talked to her extensively. Or tried. She wasn’t making sense, but we assumed that was part of the—event.” He paused, face strained in recall. “It was a bad day.”

“There’s an understatement. What was she saying?”

“She was talking about ‘new men.’ We didn’t know until later she meant the Numen. Dictionary says Numen are a divine spirit. Knowing the stress this event caused, we chalked it up to her panicking, losing her breath, having a few moments of hypoxia which caused a hallucination, though she said she didn’t see anything, only felt their presence and heard the words.”

“Did anyone talk to her fellow astronauts on the space station? What did they say about the incident?

“Sure, everyone was thoroughly debriefed. We take accidents seriously, Mr. Grace. When she came back in, she was talking crazy, so we made the decision to sedate her. When she woke up, she kept insisting there were beings outside the space station. An alien race who wanted to bring us peace. We did a full workup, of course, but it didn’t show anything. She couldn’t shake it. The decision was made to end her mission early, rotate her off the space station when the next round of astronauts came up. She had another few months on her tour, but by then—her actions were colored by this event. We had no choice but to bring her home.”

“Who made that decision?”

“Our flight psychiatrist, Dr. Rebecca Holloway. She worked closely with Nevaeh and all the team from the beginning of their mission two years earlier. You can’t talk to her, though. She’s deceased, drowned in her pool. She’d recently been through a divorce, so they looked at her husband, but found nothing. He was out of town. They ruled it an accidental drowning.

“Anyway, once Nevaeh was back on Earth, Dr. Holloway spent a lot of time with her, then decided to ground her. Nevaeh didn’t take it well. She quit, and I didn’t hear from her for a year. She came back out of the blue asking to be assigned a new mission. When I told her she wasn’t ever going back to space she was devastated.”

Grace said, “Just so you know, we think it’s very likely Dr. Holloway was murdered. We have a record of Dr. Patel and her bodyguard in Houston the week Holloway died. They were also in Idaho the same week. She left behind two bodies, one of which was the research scientist who worked at Idaho Research Facility. Made it look like a murder-suicide.”