My word is that I reached the distraught man barely in time before he tried to kill himself; like he killed Ling. I don’t know if will hold up, but by that time the forensic evidence will be gone.
“I got a notebook from Attwell’s lab. It’s looks like a simple cypher. He kept tabs on all the times he was contacted. I’ll take some photos and send them down. He also gave me a name of someone. Catherine Tidewell.”
“Shit.”
“You know her?”
“Yes. She’s a Deputy Director with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”
“That’s the agency all the others answer to?”
“Yes. She heads Acquisition and Technology. And Attwell said she’s Silverback?”
“He said she’s the one he thought was running him.”
“Shit. That fits. Jesus Christ. I got to get on this. Send me everything. Then come home.”
“Will do.”
“Good work, Dixon. Exceptional work.”
After I transmit all the information back to Earth I take a pass by Warren’s zero-gravity clinic and look through the window.
Attwell is on oxygen as Warren tries to seal up the open sores on his arm. Warren sees me and glares.
I push on.
I put the spacesuit back and head down to the hotel. Samantha is in her room when I knock on the door.
“What happened?”
I’d told her to stay in here until I came to get her.
“It was Attwell.”
“Holy shit.”
She notices the expression on my face. I guess it’s my own state of shock.
“Where is he?”
“Warren.”
“Warren is keeping him prisoner?”
“Warren is treating him.”
“Oh, David, what did you do?” Samantha shakes her head. “Never mind. I don’t need to know.” She pushes open the door. “You look like you need to sit down.”
I lay down on her narrow bed. She takes the space behind me and our rolls are reversed. I just sit here, numb, as she strokes my hair.
After a while I say what’s in the back of my mind.
“I once met a man. A cruel man. He hurt people for a living.”
“You’re not that man.”
“But I look a lot more like him now.”
“Bullshit.”
“I just…”
She puts a hand over my mouth. “Bullshit. End of topic. I’ve known cruel men, David. There are things about…” Her voice fades off. “My point is that I know those kind of men. That’s not what you are. You’re different. I know a little about what you went through before and I don’t know what you just had to do. But I’m going to tell you what kind of man I know you are. You’re the man that has to be cruel — that has to do the horrible things in order to protect us from those men who it comes naturally to. You’re a good man, David. That will never change.”
I fall asleep in her arms, hoping she’s telling the truth.
Sixty-Six
The Farm House
There’s an evening fog hanging over the small valley. A cluster of cows sit at the far end catching the last of the setting sun’s rays, waiting for the night chill.
Dr. Lee Huang, bundled in two bathrobes and a blanket firmly wrapped around his shoulders, gives his Chinese-American nurse a small smile as she finishes tucking in the fabric. She pats his leg and leaves us.
The hospital is a private clinic in rural Virginia used by intelligence agencies. It’s the kind of place a spy would get a face transplant if that was a thing they did. In Huang’s case, it’s where he’s getting his radiation exposure treatment.
He looks miles better than when I first found him on the CS satellite. The current prognosis is that he might actually get ten or more years of life. Maybe longer if certain cancer treatments advance well-enough.
As he convalesced, he was told over and over a variation of what happened. His actual memory was so fragmented he had no clear idea how he woke up in an American hospital.
“They tell me you’re the one that found me adrift,” Huang says in English perfected as a student when he went to the University of Toronto.
“We picked you up on radar when I was doing repairs,” I reply. “It was a shock to find a man alone in orbit.”
“Yes. Yes,” he murmurs and nods his head and tries to piece together what happened. “I am grateful for that.”
There’s a long pause as we watch the first stars begin to twinkle in the purple sky.
“I’ve been given the opportunity to defect. And I couldn’t help but notice all of my nurses are exceptionally attractive.”
“We would very much like it if you chose to stay. Right now your superiors assume that you are dead.”
“Yes. Yes. They let my satellite de-orbit and burn up.”
“Nice guys.”
“Things were complicated. They believed me dead.”
I study his face. “Did they? Or was that more convenient?”
He stares into the valley, ignoring my gaze. “I love my country.”
“As you should. I’ve been. It’s a beautiful place.”
“I do not love the party, though. This complicates things for me. My friends are back home. My work.”
“Your work burned up over New Zealand. If your boss decided to let you go that way, how eager are they going to be to let you pick up where you left off?”
“This is true. I had an argument with my superiors about something. They insisted they were right and made me go up and do as they asked. When things went wrong they blamed me anyway.”
“And left you to die…”
He sighs. “I wanted to be an astronomer. I studied lasers because of interactive optics. Do you know anything about them?”
“Like using a laser beam to see how light gets distorted in the atmosphere?”
“Yes. Precisely. I wanted to discover new planets, go to distant worlds. Instead…”
He still won’t say what the satellite’s function really was. We pretend not to know in case he returns to China.
“You still can,” I reply.
“I don’t see how.”
“Stay here. There’s a college in New Hampshire that has an astronomy program and a nice telescope on a mountain. They’d love to have you.”
This is the offer I was told to bring him after he asked to meet with me.
“I’d always be looking over my back.”
“At first. It’s a rural Christian college, so it’s a bit out of the way. We’d give you a new name, a new background. In a few years it won’t matter.”
“But I would never be able to go home again.”
“Not anytime soon. Can you now? What happens if you go back?”
“Some people will be very surprised. I do not think life will be very good. But my friends and family are there.”
“That’s a difficult choice. But I’m going to give you one more thing to consider. They will never let you go back into space again.”
He sighs. “This is true. I did some research. The treatments you have been giving me don’t exist in China yet. I’m not sure how long I would have lived had they retrieved me. So in a way, I owe my life to you doubly so. But still, I’m not sure if it would be better if I were to die in my home country.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re American. Roots and history don’t matter to you as much. You’re constantly trying to reinvent yourselves.”
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“You come from a country that a generation ago was basically a giant rice paddy that could barely feed itself. Now you’re an industrial giant and a respected world power. You guys are the new masters of reinvention.”
“Perhaps. But there is still a reverence for culture and past. I don’t know that I can turn my back on that.”
I can tell he wants to defect. He just needs the right argument. I was told to talk to him about the American way, a true democracy and freedom. As much as I value those things, I’m throwing those talking points out the window.