Chapter 4
FOUR
Alexandria, Virginia
Kathryn bit her lip and sat back, her chair creaking. Alone in the darkened office, so late at night, it sounded far too loud. She stared at the screen, trying to figure out the pattern she had noticed.
“It’s not illegal,” she whispered to herself. It was just that the pattern didn’t make any sense. What did she have, aside from an indication that someone was doing something? “Super definitive, Kath.”
But when she’d shown it to her boss, he’d failed to see the point she was trying to make—that none of this made sense.
Her cousin would know what to do with the information. Marina always knew what these things meant, and when Kathryn had been stalked by that guy on the dating app she used to use, Marina went nuclear.
Kathryn didn’t want to know what was left of the guy after Marina had destroyed him online and donated all his money—including his entire 401k—to a cat shelter.
Her phone buzzed.
She tilted it to look at the screen and saw that Marina had replied.
If you think something is going on, download everything to your flash drive. When you get home, send it to me and I’ll take a look at it.
Okay, she could do that.
Kathryn used the flash drive on her keychain, the one Marina had actually given her to keep copies of psycho Carl’s messages. Turned out she’d also set Kathryn up with a way to copy official FCC documents and remove them from the office.
She was going to talk herself out of this if she kept on thinking about how illegal it was to take documents from the Satellite Licensing Division and show them to someone whose work had nothing to do with FCC orbital policy analysis.
Kathryn clicked the mouse and tried not to think about this while she waited for the files to download. She got her purse from the lower desk drawer, stuffed her phone in, and gathered the rest of her things. Stood up and pushed her chair in.
Transfer complete.
Kathryn ejected the flash drive and pocketed her keychain. The dim lights overhead flickered for a second. She logged off, shut down her computer, and headed for the elevator.
Inside, the gentle strains of some pop song could be heard, re-created by stringed instruments. Kathryn sang along for a second. “You came in like a wrecking ball.” Hopefully, that wouldn’t turn out to be some kind of omen.
She shuddered, moving as fast as she could through the lobby with its gleaming floors. “Goodnight, Colin.”
The security guard barely looked up from his novel. “Have a good one, Miss.”
The doors slid open in front of her, and she tried not to run on her low heels all the way to her pride and joy, a brand-new compact that she’d bought three weeks ago when it only had nine miles on it.
She checked the back seat for serial killers, because she was a single woman who lived alone and had pepper spray, but not a gun, who also talked to herself too much. Saw too much. Worried too much.
Certain she was alone except for the voices in her head, Kathryn slid behind the wheel and texted Marina before she headed for home with the satellite radio station turned up loud enough to distract her with the “easy sounds of late night with Tricia.”
Kathryn gripped the wheel with both hands, half listening to Tricia talk about her health journey between songs while she headed southwest out of Alexandria.
This was probably all just paranoia because she’d been reading too many thriller novels lately, right?
But something was going on.
“Be definitive.” She let out a long breath. “Okay, something is definitively going on.”
Someone—
No. An “unknown party.” That was better.
“Unknown parties” over the last several months had been quietly purchasing orbital control from small nations. Exchanging use of their allocated satellite space for much-needed financial assistance wasn’t illegal, but a pattern of it gave one entity far too much control of the skies.
Countries in economic trouble—or leaders who used the funds to seize control and had no intention of deploying satellites in their assigned orbital slots—had jumped at the chance to sell. Turned out it was an asset they could exchange for what they needed more—namely, money.
Kathryn hit the gas, flying down the Franconia-Springfield Parkway heading to her home in West Springfield.
The biggest problem was that the sales hadn’t been flagged. She’d noticed them only because it was her job to watch those transactions. When she took the information to her boss, he’d given her that look. The one that said, Why are you bothering me?
Two days later he’d had a heart attack in the hot tub at his house.
One of the international regulators had been signing off on all the transactions.
This wasn’t just one company, or a few people trying to get into the space race or expand communications assets. This was a plan being put into action.
Just not according to her boss.
Sure, each one of the orbital slots had been purchased by a different company, or a subsidiary of some company, and it was all perfectly legal.
But if it was what Kathryn suspected the pattern might indicate, then someone was seizing control of huge portions of satellite space for their own use, which was a kind of monopoly that could spell a serious problem if no one looked into it.
Someone could at least ask the company—companies—what they had planned.
The dash lights on her car flickered.
“Whoa.” Her speed started to dip, but Kathryn hadn’t moved her foot from the accelerator. She lifted it now, pushing down to pick her speed back up. But she continued to decelerate.
A car buzzed around her, honking his horn.
“I’m trying.” She gripped the wheel and tried to encourage the car to pick up speed again. In a few seconds she managed to get back to the same speed as the flow of traffic around her. But the car kept accelerating. She moved her foot to the brake, pushing down. No response. “What on earth?”
As the car continued to speed up, Kathryn changed lanes to avoid slamming into another vehicle in front of her. She had to use the shoulder to avoid a collision. The car still sped up. She tried to engage the emergency brake, but nothing happened.
“Call 911!”
Instead of the onboard system acknowledging her, the volume on her stereo increased until the level was deafening. Kathyrn whimpered, twisting the dial to no effect while Tricia screamed in her ears. A song started, the music even louder now. Turning it down did nothing.
Kathryn pumped the brake. “Call 911!”
Nothing.
The car careened around a corner, nearly sideswiping another vehicle, and all she could do was hold on. It was supposed to have all these built-in safety features. Was she doing it wrong, or could the system just not hear her over the deafening music?
She reached over and dug in her purse, still holding the wheel with her other hand.
It turned of its own accord. What on earth?
Finally, Kathryn got her fingers around her phone. She shifted back to sit straight, and the car swerved. The phone fell out of her hand and landed in the footwell.
Kathryn looked at it, crying out, “No!”
She needed help.
She needed—
The car bumped off the road, swerving to the side, and slammed into a tree.