Kitabı oku: «The Tower»

3

Shepherd stepped out of the front door of the townhouse into the teeth of a westerly wind straight off Chesapeake Bay and headed away along Main Street.

Hogan’s Alley covered ten acres of the Marine Base in Quantico and was built as a microcosm of any-town America with its own bank, drug store, hotel, gas station – basically all the institutions criminals targeted out in the real world. Normally, the whole town echoed with radio buzz, shouted orders and the crackle of gunfire from FBI, DEA and other assorted law-enforcement officers as they learnt the art of urban tactical deployment. Today it was almost deserted, like everywhere else, as the whole base wound down for the Christmas holidays. Shepherd noticed a stuffed Santa dangling from an upper window of the Coin-Op Laundromat swinging in the strengthening wind like a hanged man. Someone had shot him in the ass with a paint-round: so much for the Christmas spirit.

He hunched his shoulders against the chill and looked up at the night sky out of habit. The evening star had already risen in the west and, as he looked at it, a huge flock of geese streaked across the sky, their loud honks making him pause. The ancients would have read much into the direction of the birds’ flight and the position of the wandering star in the sky. But Shepherd knew it was just nature and that the shifting star was actually the planet Venus whose brightness had always been a comfort to him, even in his most desperate and lonely nights.

He turned the corner just as the streetlights flickered on in response to the creep of night. At the far end of the block, more light leaked on to the sidewalk from the foyer of The Biograph, named after the movie theatre in Chicago where John Dillinger had been gunned down in the mid-thirties. The marquee above the entrance advertised Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, the last movie Dillinger had ever seen. Shepherd reached the unmanned ticket booth and pushed through the door into the space where the foyer should have been.

The classroom held a hundred students seated in concentric rows around a large screen that could be patched in to a number of audio-visual teaching aids as well as any of the sixty-two security cameras set up around the town. Right now it was showing the basement room of the townhouse with Shepherd in the middle of it, frozen in his two-handed stance, his gun pointing at the crumpled bodies on the floor. A man in a black suit stood before the screen, head to one side as if studying an exhibit in an art gallery. ‘You see a ghost in there, Shepherd?’ he asked without looking round.

‘No, sir, I was just … it was a high-pressure situation.’

The man turned and gave Shepherd the same hard scrutiny he’d been giving the screen. ‘They’re all high-pressure situations, son – every one of ’em.’

Special Agent Benjamin Franklin was one of two active field counsellors permanently attached to Shepherd’s class, there to give a practical dimension to each lesson, answer any questions and tell the new intake how it really was out in the real world. He was one of those solid, square-jawed types seemingly minted in a different time when men still called women Ma’am and cars were covered in fins and chrome. His short blond hair was receding and fading to ash above pale blue eyes like chips of ice that somehow still managed to convey warmth whenever he smiled, which he did now. ‘Might I ask,’ he said, ‘would you fire again, given the same scenario?’ His Carolina drawl gave his words a slow courtliness.

Shepherd thought back to the blur of action as he’d squeezed the trigger, the suspect in his sights but the wrong person ending up dead on the floor. ‘No, sir.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘Because … because I hit the hostage.’

Franklin started up the aisle towards him, buttoning the jacket of his suit and flashing an old, steel Timex. ‘Take off your body armour, Shepherd, and walk with me a while.’

The night seemed darker after the brightness of the classroom and the wind had picked up. It was blowing leaves down the street and into Shepherd’s face as he fell into step beside Franklin.

‘’Bout twelve years back,’ Franklin said, peering at the darkening forest ahead as if he could see the lost years among the trees, ‘I was part of a six-man task force running an investigation into a string of hit-and-run bank jobs across the Ohio–Indiana state line. In each case a lone, masked gunman stormed into a small out-of-the-way bank, grabbed a hostage – always a woman – and threatened to shoot her if anyone tripped an alarm. He was smart to a point because the size of the banks meant security wasn’t top of the line so we didn’t have any decent security camera footage. Also he never got greedy so was always out and away within a couple of minutes. And he always took the hostage with him, saying if he heard so much as a car alarm he would kill her.

‘As you can imagine the local press shook up a hornets’ nest of fear about it all but there was also a bigger concern: none of the hostages were coming forward afterwards. For about a week or so we lived in fear of getting a call from some hunter or dog walker who had stumbled upon the silenced corpse of one of our unfortunate bank customers. Then he hit another bank, third in a month, and we got fresh footage.’

Franklin directed Shepherd away from Hogan’s Alley and towards the path through the forest that led to the main building complex beyond.

‘This is how it went down. Woman walks into the bank, talks to the door guard; gunman comes in and disarms the guard while he’s distracted, grabs the woman, robbery ensues then perp leaves with a hostage. We could see by comparing the clear images of the new footage with the fuzzy older stuff we had that it was the same woman every time. Turns out she wasn’t a hostage at all, she was one of the crew. That’s why no one was coming forward afterwards.

‘We quietly spread the word among the state banks, so when they pulled another job ten days later in Des Moines, a teller tripped the alarm and the cops got there in plenty of time to pick ’em up. When he was cornered the gunman tried to pull the same hostage routine, said he was going to kill her if they didn’t give him a car and a free pass. Cops just told him, “Go ’head, shoot her.” All of which brings us back to your little situation. Tell me what you knew about your suspect from the mission brief?’

Shepherd dug his hands deep in his pockets and tried to focus on something other than how cold he was. ‘The intel said he was on several international watch lists as a known terror suspect. Believed to be a Jihadist, trained in Afghanistan by Al-Qaeda.’

‘And from your reading and case studies do terrorists and other religiously motivated individuals tend to give themselves up to officers of an enemy state they believe they are conducting a holy war against?’

‘No.’

‘No they do not.’

The trees parted to reveal the Quantico Hilton rising up in front of them, all square lines, slit windows and concrete. This was where the labs and active case teams were housed; proper on-going, messy cases with as-yet undiscovered solutions, not the clean textbook ones Shepherd was being weaned on. It could easily have passed for a small mid-western high-school campus had it not been for the sound of gunfire crackling out of the forest behind them. The next recruit must have made it to the basement. Shepherd hoped he or she was doing better than he had. Hearing the shots reminded him of all the paperwork he needed to fill out back at the briefing room. The forms for discharging your weapon during an exercise were thorough, tedious and in triplicate for very good reason: it stopped the recruits from getting trigger-happy.

‘Don’t worry about the admin,’ Franklin said, apparently reading his mind. ‘I’ll square it with Agent Williams. You can fill it in and file it after.’

After what? Shepherd wanted to ask, but Franklin was already halfway towards the glass doors of the main building.

‘Never forget that you are a highly and expensively trained officer, son. In the currency of law enforcement that makes you an asset to Uncle Sam and a much-valued target to a terrorist. If you don’t take the shot, odds are the bomber will push the button anyway and there will be three bodies to scrape out of that basement instead of two. The hostage dies either way. And, given the little story I just told you, how do you know the hostage was even friendly?’ They moved from the frigid night into the brightness and heat of the executive building. ‘You have to wonder what that woman was doing at dusk in a rat-hole basement with a known terrorist in the first place. I can understand you being upset that you shot someone who might be innocent, it’s a credit to you, but don’t lose sleep over it. You made the right choice, Shepherd. Though you do need to work on your marksmanship.’

They passed the honours board that dominated the glass atrium with the name of every top-of-the-class graduate written in gold, dating right back to 1972 when the doors first opened. Shepherd doubted his name would ever grace it. He was a good few years older than the average intake, which showed in his fitness scores, and his shooting was clearly letting him down. The things he really excelled at were not part of the five areas of ability that went towards his final mark; his expertise had not even been thought of when the FBI first came into being.

The elevator door opened and Franklin stepped inside, waited for Shepherd to join him then pushed button number 6. Shepherd’s mouth went dry. The sixth floor was where the most senior personnel lived.

‘You cannot have doubts out in the field,’ Franklin said, his soft voice sounding conspiratorial in the confines of the elevator. ‘Because if you hesitate in a situation like that, you die, or, worse still, your partner does and you end up carrying it around with you for the rest of your life. They don’t put this sort of thing in any of the manuals but I’m telling you how it is, for your own sake and for mine – especially if we’re going to be working together.’

The door swished open before Shepherd had time to respond and Franklin headed down the silent corridor, checking his watch as he passed all the heavy doors belonging to the sub-division chiefs. The corridor was arranged according to rank with the lesser chiefs nearest the elevator. Franklin swept past them all, heading straight for the door at the very end with Shepherd close behind, feeling like he was back in high school and had been summoned to the principal’s office. Only here the ‘principal’ was one rung down from the Director of the FBI, who himself was just one down from the President of the United States of America. Franklin stopped outside the door, checked his watch one last time then rapped twice above a nameplate spelling out: ASSISTANT DIRECTOR.

In the softened silence of the corridor they sounded like gunshots.

‘Come in,’ a deep voice rumbled from the other side.

Franklin gave him the smile, only this time the warmth wasn’t there and it occurred to Shepherd that maybe he was nervous too. Then he opened the door and stepped into the room.

4

Assistant Director O’Halloran was a thin blade of a man worn sharp by a lifetime in the Bureau. Everything about him was hard and precise: the steel rims of his spectacles; the pale grey eyes behind them that looked up as Franklin and Shepherd entered the room; even his gunmetal hair appeared to have been parted with a scalpel rather than a comb. He was sitting at the same immaculate desk he had been photographed behind on the recruitment literature that went with the application form Shepherd had filled out almost a year ago: same flatscreen monitor, same keyboard, same desk phone and framed photograph. The only things different were the two files on the desk in front of him: one plain, the other with Shepherd’s photograph printed on the first page. Shepherd’s pulse quickened when he saw it.

‘You have quite the impressive resumé,’ O’Halloran said, tapping a thin finger on the file with the photograph. ‘Mathematics major with computer science at the University of Michigan. MSc in physics from CalTech. Best part of a PhD in theoretical cosmology from Cambridge University in England – though you never finished that one, did you? Even so, I imagine you could be making six figures and upwards in the financial sector, yet you chose to sign up as a GS-10 with a basic starting salary of $46,000. Why is that I wonder?’

Shepherd swallowed drily. ‘Money’s not that important to me.’

‘Really, you a Communist?’

‘No, sir – I’m a patriot.’

‘OK, Mr Patriot, tell me about your PhD, why didn’t you finish it?’

Shepherd glanced down at the file, recalling the psychiatric evaluations and background checks that had formed part of his recruitment screening. All of it would be in there, at least everything he had told them. But this was the Assistant Director he was talking to so there could well be other things in there by now – things he had hoped to keep hidden.

‘It’s all in the file, sir.’

O’Halloran regarded Shepherd from the centre of his stillness. ‘I want to hear it from you.’

Shepherd’s mind raced. He was being tested and Assistant Director O’Halloran was far too senior for it to be about something trivial. If it was to do with the parts he’d left out of his past then Franklin could easily have questioned him about it back at The Biograph, which meant it had to be about something else. He should stick to the story he’d already told, volunteer no new information, and hope things became clearer over the course of the next few minutes.

‘I had been in academia all my adult life,’ he said, saying the same lines he had spoken to his recruitment officer. ‘It was everything I knew but not everything I wanted to know. Some people like to gather knowledge just for knowledge’s sake, I always intended to apply mine.’

‘NASA.’

Shepherd nodded. ‘A large proportion of my education was funded by Space Agency scholarships. I also spent a lot of research time on various NASA projects, which is pretty standard for anyone on one of their scholarships: they get extra brain power, we get our feet under the table and gain practical experience of the work we will hopefully end up doing.’

‘So what happened?’

‘9/11 happened – sir. Homeland defence and the war on terror became the number one priority. It took a big bite out of everyone’s budget. Almost the entire space program was shelved. I suddenly found myself with no grant and no job to go to even if I did manage to complete my studies. It was … like hitting a wall.’

‘So you dropped out.’

‘That’s one way of putting it, sir.’

‘How would you put it?’

‘At first I felt cheated, like something had been taken away from me. It seemed pointless to carry on studying for a job that was no longer there. There were plenty of private companies offering to fund the remainder of my studies but they all wanted me to sign my life away in exchange. Work for them as soon as I graduated, study stock markets instead of stars. It wasn’t what I wanted. So I took off and went travelling to clear my head and try and work out what I was going to do with my life now NASA no longer appeared to be an option.’

‘Where did you end up? There’s a gap in your file of almost two years where you seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth: no social security records, no job history, no credit card records.’

‘I was off the grid mainly – Europe first then Southeast Asia and eventually Africa, travelling from place to place, working cash jobs in bars and as migrant labour on farms, staying in backpacker hostels that charged by the night. They don’t take credit cards in most of those places. I’d been a student for most of my adult life so I knew how to live cheap.’

‘Then what, you saw the light and decided to rejoin society?’

‘Yes, sir. I realized I was squandering an opportunity. What happened on 9/11 changed my life – but almost three thousand other people lost theirs. My future had been altered; theirs had been taken away. My intention had always been to pay back the money for my education by devoting myself to public service and working for NASA. I came to realize that just because that particular opportunity had been closed to me didn’t mean I couldn’t pay my dues in other ways.’

‘So you signed up for the FBI?’

‘Not immediately, sir.’

‘No, that’s right.’ O’Halloran opened the file for the first time and flipped to a page near the back. ‘First you worked as a volunteer for various aid agencies, setting up computer networks and fundraising pages and teaching computer skills to homeless people and the long-term unemployed.’ He looked back up. ‘You really weren’t kidding about money were you?’

‘No, sir – it’s never been something that has particularly motivated me.’

O’Halloran pursed his lips and studied Shepherd like a poker player deciding which way to bet. ‘I’m not entirely happy that the Bureau I have served all my adult life seems to be some kind of consolation prize for you, Shepherd, but I can’t afford to turn away a candidate with your qualifications.’ He closed the file and laid a hand on the second one. ‘Are you familiar with the Goddard Space Flight Center?’

‘Yes sir, I spent a few summers there running test data off Explorer 66.’

‘Is that anything to do with the Hubble Space Telescope?’

‘Not really. They both collect data from the furthest edges of the universe, at least they did – Explorer is pretty much used as a test satellite now. Hubble does everything Explorer used to and has a much greater reach.’

The lips pursed again. ‘Not any more.’ O’Halloran opened his desk drawer, removed a badge wallet and handed it to Shepherd. ‘I am not in the habit of sending trainees out in the field before they have completed their training or spent at least a year in a field office, but apparently, out of more than thirty thousand currently active Bureau personnel, you are uniquely qualified for a situation that has arisen.’ Shepherd opened the wallet and saw his own photo staring back from an FBI ID card. ‘That will temporarily entitle you to carry a concealed weapon and transport it onboard commercial airlines. You can collect your Roscoe and a box of shells from Agent Williams on your way out.’

Shepherd read the name printed next to a date that expired in a month. ‘My middle name is Thomas,’ he said, turning the badge to O’Halloran.

‘There’s already a Special Agent J. T. Shepherd in the Memphis office and, as no two agents can have the same ID,’ he raised his hand and made a small sign of the cross in the air, ‘I now baptize you J. C. Shepherd. That’s your Bureau name, and you will answer to it. I am placing Agent Franklin in full command of the investigation and you are to follow his lead exactly. You have been assigned to this investigation solely because of your unique and considerable expertise in the field of astronomy. You will use it to assist Agent Franklin in this investigation and give your opinion only when it is requested. The rest of the time you will look upon this as a valuable opportunity to learn on the job from a well-seasoned and highly regarded agent. Once your usefulness to the investigation has been exhausted, your temporary status will be revoked and you will report back here to finish your training, understood?’

‘Yessir.’

‘I trust you know your way to Goddard from here? There’s a car signed out to you in transport.’ He took the plain covered file from the desk and held it up. ‘Agent Franklin can brief you on the way.’

5

Shepherd and Franklin drove for the first ten minutes in total silence, the whump of windscreen wipers and hiss of tyres over wet tarmac punctuated only by the rustle of paper as Franklin read through the file. Occasionally he jotted a note in a pocketbook lit by the glow of a small Maglite clamped in his teeth. Shepherd sensed he was unhappy about the situation. That made two of them.

After his performance on Hogan’s Alley the last thing Shepherd wanted was to be heading out into the real world with a loaded gun tucked into his jacket. As promised, Agent Williams, the firearms instructor, had been ready and waiting in the armoury with an oiled SIG 226, which he made Shepherd speed-load from an open box of 9x19 Parabellums while he looked on. Shepherd’s Catholic education had hammered enough Latin into him to know that para bellum meant ‘prepare for war’. He tried to push the thought from his mind as he slotted fifteen shells into the magazine, fumbling two, before smacking it home and looking up into the pained expression on the instructor’s face.

‘Do yourself a favour,’ Williams had said, as Shepherd signed for the gun and the spare shells, ‘try not to put yourself in any situation where you may have to draw this weapon. Just keep it in your holster and come back as quickly as you can to finish your training.’

Shepherd checked the rear-view mirror. Behind him he could see the lights of the grey panel van that had followed them out of the gates at Quantico. It was a tech wagon, loaded with forensics equipment and two Physical Science Technicians ready to process the crime scene his former workplace had now become. They were on I-95, heading north: the bright lights of DC spread across the horizon ahead of them like a luminous stain, lighting up the low cloud that was spilling monsoon-level rain over everything. The weather was slowing them down but at least it would be too late for commuter traffic to be a problem when they eventually hit the capitol. He figured they would be in Maryland in twenty minutes, though he still had no idea why they were heading there.

The Maglite twisted off in the passenger seat and Shepherd heard the creak of the vinyl seat as Franklin turned to him. ‘That little story you span back there,’ he said, ‘your tale of travel to the far corners of the world to find yourself – I just want you to know, I ain’t buying it.’

Shepherd felt heat on his cheeks and was glad it was too dark for Franklin to see. ‘I don’t follow you, sir.’

‘I’ve spent over twenty years talking to people who have done everything from write bad cheques to kidnap children so they could torture them for fun, and you know what every single one of ’em had in common? They all tried to lie to me. Now you may have all your highfalutin’ degrees in astrophysics and rocket science and whatever else, but I got a degree in people and I know when someone is spinning me a line. I can smell it on them, and right now, Agent Shepherd, you stink.’

Shepherd said nothing and kept his eyes on the road.

‘Now I don’t really care all that much why you’re lying or even what it is you’re hiding, what does concern me, however, is having a partner I can’t trust. Having a partner you can’t trust is like having no partner at all, and that’s dangerous, Agent Shepherd, as you just discovered down in that basement. So if at any point you feel like kicking a piece of the truth in my direction – man to man, partner to partner, in the knowledge that, felonies aside, it will go no further – then we’ll get along a whole lot better. In the meantime, operate on the assumption that I’m apt to doubt every single goddam word that comes out of your mouth, understood?’

‘Sir, I promise you …’

Franklin raised his hand and turned his head away. ‘Don’t make it worse by lying to me again. I’m being honest with you, Agent Shepherd, I’m just asking for you to do the same.’

The seat creaked as Franklin turned back to the briefing documents. ‘OK, now I’ve put it out there so you know where we stand you can make yourself useful and explain to me the wisdom behind spending over a billion tax dollars putting a telescope into space that then costs over forty million dollars a year to run.’

Shepherd stared ahead through the spray and considered the question, relieved to be back on safe, familiar ground. He thought about the unimaginable distances the Hubble Space Telescope could penetrate compared to the relatively puny ones achieved by terrestrial instruments. He thought about the light from dead stars it could gather from the pure nothingness of clear space, carrying information all the way back from the beginning of time. But in the end he kept it simple. ‘How many stars can you see tonight?’ he said.

Franklin looked out into the wet, black night as a Big Rig hooned by, going way too fast for the weather and throwing up so much spray you could hardly see the edge of the freeway let alone the sky. ‘OK, fair point, but why not just build a telescope on top of a mountain in Mexico or somewhere the sun always shines. Hell, why not just wait for a clear night, be a lot cheaper.’

‘They did all that. There’s a fifty-metre dish on top of the Sierra Negra volcano in south Mexico that can observe both northern and southern skies. It’s pretty impressive. Trouble is the earth keeps turning, so it can only study a piece of sky for a few hours at a time. A space telescope like Hubble can lock onto a distant object and keep it in its sights for months, years even, while the earth turns beneath it.’

‘And that costs forty million a year?’

‘It’s a very complicated process.’

Franklin grunted. ‘Sounds like a scam to me.’

Shepherd considered letting it go but didn’t want to slip back into the uneasy silence. ‘How good a shot are you?’ he asked.

‘Better than you, Special Agent.’

‘You think you could hit a tin can on the side of the road from a moving car?’

‘Depends how fast the car is going.’

‘Say it’s doing thirty.’

‘Nine times out of ten.’

‘What if the car was doing eighty-five?’

Franklin considered. ‘Maybe three out of ten.’

‘OK, now imagine the car is doing eighty-five thousand miles an hour and the tin can is on the other side of the country, perched on top of the Hollywood sign. Think you could hit it then?’ Franklin didn’t reply. ‘Hubble could. It could lock onto that can and take a picture of it so steady you could read the label. It’s orbiting the earth at around seventeen thousand miles an hour, and the earth is orbiting the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. That’s a total of eighty-four thousand miles an hour and yet Hubble can still fix onto a tiny patch of sky nearly fifteen billion light years away. It’s one of the greatest miracles of modern technology, the pinnacle of man’s achievements in science. That’s why it cost so much and needs all that money to run it.’

‘And all of that is controlled out of Goddard?’

‘Yes.’

Franklin shook his head. ‘Not any more – right now your gold-plated telescope couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo. It’s spinning around up there like a bottle at a frat party. Someone managed to upload a virus that knocked out the guidance system and shut down all communication.’

‘Really? That would be – very difficult.’

‘How difficult?’

‘When I was working at Goddard they had a small systems security scare. One of the ground operating stations for another satellite was left wide open via an email account and some kid hacked into it. He didn’t do any damage but some of the ops systems got infected with internet junk that flowed in through the hole he’d made. It was picked up pretty quick and fixed but it prompted a review of the whole system. How much do you know about government cyber security?’

‘About as much as you know about firing guns.’

‘OK, so all state owned and operated computer operating systems are rated according to the Orange Book scale drawn up by the Department of Defense. This lays out specific security criteria for all government systems ranging from a D grade for non-sensitive, clerical stuff all the way up to beyond A1 for things like the NSA, the FBI and the military systems that launch the nukes. Following the scare at Goddard all the operating systems had to be upgraded to at least an A1. That means the prospect of Hubble’s ground-based operating system being breached by any kind of regular cyber attack is extremely unlikely. It would be like a junkie with a twenty-dollar pistol knocking off Fort Knox. Whoever did this must have known exactly what they were doing.’

‘You think it’s an inside job?’

‘Has to be. We should talk to Dr Kinderman, he’s in charge of Hubble and helped redesign the new system. He’ll be able to give us the names of everyone with the right kind of technical knowledge and any ex-employees who might have an axe to grind.’

‘Good thinking, Agent Shepherd,’ Franklin said, ‘only problem with your otherwise flawless plan of investigation is that Dr Kinderman is AWOL. Right now he is our number one suspect.’

6

EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

Badiyat Al-Sham – Syrian Desert

Northwestern Iraq

When Gabriel Mann pointed the horse towards the horizon his only wish was to get as far from the compound as possible before he died.

He headed northwest, into the empty heart of the desert, with the heat of the rising sun on his shoulder and the scent of oranges strong in his nostrils. He tried not to think about all he was leaving behind because it only made it harder for him to go, and that was what he had to do – he had to leave her.

Instead, he tried to focus only on staying alive long enough to be far, far away when the disease took him. He didn’t want to risk infecting others or falling where circling buzzards might draw human scavengers who would steal his clothes and weapons and risk carrying away something far more deadly. He needed to die where no one would ever find him, somewhere the desert sun could dry and purify his flesh and the wind could scatter his dust over the sterile ground where nothing grew and everything perished and was forgotten.

He travelled for nearly four hours before the fever struck. The heat had been building for some time, though it was hard to tell how much of it was coming from the sun and how much from him. He was in the scant shade of a low, dry wadi, keeping the hot wind away from his horse, when his skin started to prickle as if biting insects were suddenly swarming all over him. At the same time a sensation welled up inside him like a feeling of uncontrollable grief. Despite his efforts to put her from his mind he had been thinking about Liv, picturing her face, the green of her eyes and how her hair had spread bright and golden over the pillow the last time he had seen her, sleeping in the sick bay. This sadness of leaving her, fuelled by the fever, now spilled out of him and tears rolled through the dry dust on his cheeks. He raised a shaking hand to wipe his face and it came away bloody.

A blight – the monk from the Citadel had called it – a strong smell of oranges followed by a sudden and violent nosebleed.

It’s over, he thought, with something close to relief. Now I can lie down.

He steered his horse to an overhang that formed a small oasis of shadow amid the blinding white. This was it, the place his whole life had been heading towards, this dark nook that looked like a vertical grave.

This was where he would die.

7

Liv spent most of the first day hiding at the top of one of the compound’s empty guard towers, keeping to the shadows, out of the heat.

She had woken in the sick bay to find Gabriel gone and an unsteady peace rippling through the camp. She found the note he had left for her, trapped beneath the tablet of stone known as the Starmap.

My darling Liv,

Nothing is easy, but leaving you is the hardest thing I have ever done. I know now what pain my father must have felt when he had to leave. I hope to return when I can. In the meantime, do not look for me, just know that I love you. And keep yourself safe – until I find you again.

Gabriel

She clutched the note in her hand now, as though it were a spell that might summon him back to her. Her attention shifted between the vast emptiness of the Syrian desert and the fenced-in drilling compound below where arguments flared up in guttural, rapid-fire Arabic that she could somehow understand. Most of the angry exchanges were about money and the lack of it now the oil had gone, but some were about her. Angry whispers drifted up like smoke from a smouldering fire, calling her names in a variety of languages—

Hawwāh

Ishtar

Lilith

Some spoke in her defence, but most did not. The majority denounced her as a witch who had conjured water where oil had flowed and brought ruin upon them all.

Liv remained motionless as rock as she listened to the voices, as if stillness might make her invisible to all the milling men, like hornets disturbed from a nest. Peering down through the gaps in the heat-shrunk timbers of the tower, she studied the wreckage of the battle that had liberated the compound but not her: the hulk of the broken-down military helicopter that had spluttered and died when the water appeared; the lake with the drill derrick at the centre spewing water now from deep, deep underground – and everywhere rust-coloured stains on the ground where men had fallen and bled. She was pretty sure no one had spotted her when she had crept up here but she held tight to the scalpel she had taken from the sick bay, just in case. She was only too aware that she was the only woman in an isolated community of volatile and hostile men – and she knew how that tended to work out. If she could stay hidden until night she could steal down, take one of the horses that drank at the water’s edge and slip away.

It was late morning when she heard the first clang of boots climbing the metal ladder. She rolled silently across the floor, her heart jack-hammering, the scalpel slippery in her sweat-slicked grip. She positioned herself by the trapdoor, her legs drawn up tight to her chest, ready to kick hard at whatever appeared in the gap.

The footsteps rose, heavy and loud, stopping just below the trapdoor. ‘Hello,’ a deep, syrupy voice called up in English.

She didn’t reply.

‘I bring you water and food.’ Very slowly a hand raised the trap and pushed a canteen and a pack of K-rations through the gap, then a pair of eyes appeared. ‘No need to fight,’ the man said. ‘You are safe here. You have my word.’

‘And who are you?’ Liv replied, now there was no point in keeping silent.

‘I am Tariq al Bedu. I rode with Ash’abah – the Ghost. I will watch out for you as he did, in the memory of his name. You must drink. I will bring more in a while.’

She glanced at the canteen, still wet from being dipped in the pool of fresh water below. ‘Thank you,’ she said, then – because she had once written an article on victim survival and remembered it was harder to harm someone if you knew their name – added, ‘My name is Liv Adamsen.’

The man smiled and she could see the warmth of it spread to his eyes. ‘I know who you are,’ he said, and was gone.

Liv listened to his steps ringing away down the ladder, melting into the taunting hiss of fresh water spewing out of the ground below. She dragged the canteen towards her with her foot, still wary of going too close to the trapdoor, unscrewed the cap, sniffed the contents and then took the tiniest of sips. She figured a small amount of any kind of drug wouldn’t be able to knock her out, so she sat for as long as her thirst would allow, analysing how she felt, waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, she took another drink, then another, until the whole contents of the canteen were slipping down her dry throat in thirsty gulps. Within the hour the man was back, bringing more water and an apple to eat, then he left her in peace and made sure everyone else did the same. Then, just before dusk, the soldiers came.

They rolled into camp in a cloud of dust and well-drilled purpose, American marines on a single-minded mission. Armed sentries surrounded the broken helicopter and others quickly winched it onto a flatbed loader while someone else addressed everyone in Arabic offering a ride back to Al-Hillah for anyone who wanted one. Liv used the distraction of their arrival to steal down the ladder, careful not to make a sound, and ducked into the shade and cover of one of the metal-sided buildings. Much as she wanted to leave the compound, she knew the US military were actively looking for her and, after all that had happened, she wasn’t inclined to trust the reasons for their search or whoever had ordered it. She scanned the gathered crowds, looking for Tariq. A shadow fell on her and she turned to discover a stocky man in oily overalls glaring down at her with hate in his eyes.

‘A curse be upon you,’ he said, spitting on the ground at her feet, his hand drawing back to strike. Liv gripped the scalpel ready to fight back when Tariq stepped between them. ‘Go, if you are going,’ he said to the man, ‘and take your grudges with you.’

The man’s hand dropped to his side. For a moment he looked as though he was about to say something but he just spat on the ground again and hurried off towards the American convoy.

‘That’s Malik,’ Tariq said, his eyes fixed on the man. ‘He was in charge of transport here until the fuel turned to water and killed all his engines. He thinks you are responsible.’ They watched Malik join a line waiting to board one of the troop carriers. ‘He’s leaving, along with all the others who now think this place is cursed.’

A marine stepped up to the waiting men and ushered them into the vehicle then hit the switch to seal the rear hatch behind them, ready to move out.

‘I can take you anywhere you want to go,’ Tariq said, ‘or you can stay here a while, for there is much work to be done, is there not?’

The din of revving diesel engines rumbled through the air as Liv considered his strange question. She stepped from the cover of the building as the convoy started to pull out, figuring she could still sprint after them if she chose to, but instead she just stood there, watching the dust cloud drift away until the sound of the engines faded to nothing.

She turned and looked at the people who had stayed. Most of them were riders but there were a few compound staff too, their white overalls singling them out. They gathered around her now, all faces turned towards her. She could feel the expectation coming off them like heat. ‘What do they want?’ Liv whispered.

‘They want to know what they should do next.’

She laughed. ‘And who put me in charge?’

The ring of faces smiled back at her, reflecting her good humour. It was as if the soldiers had taken all the anger away with them, leaving just a few relics of the violence behind – some bullet holes in the skin of the buildings, the rust-coloured patches of earth. ‘What happened to the dead?’ she asked.

‘We put them in a refrigeration truck to keep the flies away,’ Tariq replied, ‘though with no fuel, the cooler isn’t running.’

Liv nodded. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘then that’s what we do first – we bury the dead.’

8

Gabriel had no idea how long he had been lying in the shade of the dry wadi when the sound of engines drifted down to him on the wind.

Instinctively he rolled onto his front, adrenalin flooding through him despite his raging fever and the well-drilled operational part of his brain taking over.

He couldn’t be spotted now, not with the blight burning inside him.

He grabbed the trailing reins of his horse to keep it close and listened out, trying to locate the sound. The hot wind moved it around making it hard to pinpoint, which was a good sign. It meant it must still be some way off.

He used the reins to haul himself to his knees then moved the horse into the sliver of shade, stroking its flanks to calm it and tethering it to a rock. He forced himself up the side of the bank, choking down on the sobs that still battled to burst from him, the scratch of the dry earth blissful against his screaming skin. He reached the top and listened again.

The sound was closer now, coming from the west.

The itch crawled over him like fire ants and he rode the waves of it, clamping his arms to his sides to stop his hands from clawing at the prickling skin. When the itch subsided a little he tipped his head on one side to keep his profile low and slowly raised his eye above the line of the bank.

Two white, flat-bed pick-ups were kicking up dust as they bounced across the desert a couple of hundred metres to his left. Their windows were smoked black and the 50-calibre guns mounted on their backs were manned by soldiers wearing red-and-white-checked keffiyeh around their faces. They were Syrian Army – border patrol.

He slid back down the bank, shaking with the effort of just staying silent. All he wanted to do was lie down and rest and never get up again. But he couldn’t. The patrol had changed everything.

He could backtrack, move away from the border to reduce the risk of being found by the patrols; but that didn’t mean he would be hidden from the people they were seeking. He could try and find one of the alluvial caves that honeycombed the desert and crawl deep underground into a tomb of his own making; that would deal with the buzzards at least. But it wouldn’t account for the human traffic. Other people would seek the same shelter, hiding from the heat and the men with guns. And he could not risk being found.

He lay there for a long while, shaking from the fever, as the inevitability of what he must do grew in his mind. There was only one place he could go, one place on earth where the blight would pose no threat.

He waited a long time, until he was sure the patrol had gone, then led the horse along the gulley, keeping low, looking for better cover. The sun was at its full height now and burned mercilessly into his agonized skin. After a few hundred feet that felt like miles he found a partial cave scooped out of the softer rock, big enough for him and his horse, and fell into the stifling shade, clenching his whole body against the blazing itch. He waited out the worst of the day, preparing himself for the journey he must make. Somehow, he had to evade capture and the company of others and find his way back to where the blight had first started and where he knew it already prospered.

He had to get back to the Citadel. He had to go back to Ruin.

9

Liv chose a spot a good distance outside the perimeter fence and led by example, working by hand now the earthmovers were no use, breaking through rock and dirt baked hard as brick. It felt good to disappear into mindless work after all that had happened to her. Her previous life seemed like an abstract collection of memories now, something she could as easily have read in a book, not experienced herself. It was hard to imagine herself as that person now, the career journalist, subway-surfing through the morning rush hour with a skinny latte in one hand and a smartphone in the other, on her way to yet another assignment, another deadline, flicking through the IKEA catalogue and the Sunday supplements at the weekend. It was an existence she had spent a lifetime building, only to have fate dismantle it in a matter of days.

They finished digging the graves as the afternoon sun was dipping low in the sky and carefully placed the bodies in the bottom of the hole, enemy next to enemy, united in death – all but one. While most of the men had been busy with the communal grave, some of the riders had dug another a little way off and it was to this that they now carried the body of their leader, the one they called Ash’abah – the Ghost. They laid him to rest, said their silent prayers.

After the graves were filled, most of the riders left too, taking their horses and melting away into the desert.

Liv stayed by the grave of the Ghost. She had known him for less than a day and yet in that short time he had taken considerable risks on her behalf and ultimately laid down his life to protect her and Gabriel. She looked down at the mound of dirt and felt a rush of terror at the oblivion of it all. She looked around for something to mark the grave, anything that might signify that someone noble and important had died here. The larger grave was marked by a pile of broken rocks taken from the ground during the digging but she wanted something more distinct for the Ghost, something that had clearly been put there by man, not nature. She tried to think what Gabriel would do and when she re read his note she had her answer.

‘You OK?’ The voice surprised her and she turned to find Tariq close by, his AK47 assault rifle resting across his crossed legs.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Come with me. I might need your help.’

The Operations Room had been looted since the last time she’d been there. The large topographical map still filled the back wall but all the smaller maps and anything else portable or valuable enough to take had gone. The solid block of carved black granite where she had found Gabriel’s note lay where she had left it, half-buried in discarded paperwork and scrolls of seismic data printouts. Liv swept them aside, revealing the carved letter T in the centre of the stone with smaller symbols surrounding it: the dots outlining the constellation of Draco; a symbol of a tree; a simple human figure. Someone had taken a rubbing of both sides of the stone and she was momentarily distracted by it, picking up the curl of paper and staring at the dense symbols lifted from the other side of the stone. There was something in them, something calling to her like a distant voice. She folded the sheet, slipped it into her pocket and grabbed hold of the chipped edges of the stone, hauling it across the table with arms that were already exhausted after an afternoon of hard digging.

‘Let me,’ Tariq said, taking it from her and hugging it to his chest.

‘Thanks,’ Liv said, ‘follow me.’

The Starmap thumped down onto the Ghost’s grave, the weight of it pressing into the loose earth, the carved T-shaped cross standing out in the centre of the stone. It seemed appropriate somehow, marking his grave with the Tau, a religious symbol from before the great religions had even been born. There would be no mistaking the significance of this grave now, or the importance of the person who rested here.

‘I need to go and see to the horses,’ Tariq said. ‘You should come inside the compound, it’s getting dark and it’s not safe for you out here.’

‘I’m fine. I’ll just be a minute.’

Tariq nodded and drifted away, leaving Liv alone by the grave.

She stared down at the stone. Most of the text was on the other side of it, but she reached into her pocket and pulled out the rubbings she had found in the comms room, her eyes seeking the sheet containing the symbols that were now hidden.

The text was written in two languages. One was the lost language she had been able to understand when she was carrying the Sacrament. She concentrated on the symbols and discovered that, even though the Sacrament had left her now, she could still understand it:

The Sacrament comes home and The Key looks to heaven

A new star is born with a new king on Earth to bring order to the end of days

She frowned and felt a coldness creep over her. The first line was clear enough because she had lived it: she was the key that had unlocked the Sacrament, carried it out of the Citadel and brought it home to this lost place in the desert. But that was where her understanding ended. The second line suggested something else entirely, something still to come – something ominous that would be heralded by the arrival of a new star. She looked up at the evening sky, still too bright for the first stars to show. All the other prophecies, the ones that had brought her to this place, had outlined the future in ambiguous terms and with various possible outcomes. This one seemed too absolute, a star would appear and that would be it, the end of days – whatever that meant. There had to be something else here, something in the second block of symbols.

She studied them now, strange icons that looked like no language she had ever seen with the lines of different constellations weaving in and out of them: Draco, Taurus, the Plough.

The symbols were crude and simple but when she concentrated on them the strange facility she had with language, her parting gift from the Sacrament, did not reveal their meaning. Instead, her head filled with impressions of things and feelings, some of them hopeful, some of them disturbing. She considered each symbol individually – a river, an eagle, a skull – trying to link them together into some kind of narrative, like piecing together fragments of an ancient truth she had once known and now forgotten. But though she felt she understood something of what each symbol individually represented, their collective meaning continued to elude her.

She spent a long time studying the symbols, but in the end, the earth turned, the sun set and the symbols faded to darkness before her eyes. And though Liv had not pinned down anything close to a translation, the emotions they had summoned remained. And the overriding thing they had left her with was a sense of foreboding. Whatever was coming, whatever was written on the ancient stone, she could feel its power and she feared it.

10

They arrived at the Goddard Space Flight Center a little after ten, just as the storm got about as bad as it was going to get. Rain gusted into the car as Shepherd cracked a window to flash his pristine ID. The guard handed him two security passes and a visitor’s map and directed him to one of the smaller executive staff parking lots by Building 29, the huge hangar-like structure that sat in the middle of the complex. Shepherd hadn’t been here for almost ten years but as he slid the Crown Vic into gear and hissed through the puddle under the raised barrier, it looked like nothing had changed much at all.

Building 29 rose out of the howling night, a huge white block of a building with two strips of darkened windows on the ground and first floors and none at all on the other four. Most of the offices and control centres inside Building 29 didn’t need windows, drawing their views from deep space rather than the Maryland countryside.

Shepherd slowed as he drove past the entrance. There were lights on inside but he couldn’t see anyone. Maybe it was the late hour, or the weather, or the fact that the Christmas holidays were just around the corner – but the whole place seemed deserted. He eased the car round the edge of the building and the headlights lit up a figure wearing a rain slicker, the hood pulled right over his head in a way that made him appear almost monastic. An arm extended from beneath the wet folds and pointed to two empty parking bays with signs in front of them showing they were reserved for senior project directors. Shepherd drew the car to a halt and the figure glided over to Franklin’s side of the car, producing a NASA golfing umbrella and popping it open just as Franklin opened his door.

‘Mike Pierce, Chief of Security,’ a voice rumbled from beneath the hood. He held the umbrella up for Franklin as he got out of the car and glanced at Shepherd as he did the same. Shepherd saw the eyes take him in, make a quick decision based on seniority and logistics then turn to usher Franklin away beneath the cover of the umbrella, not bothering to wait for the junior agent. The van that had followed them all the way from Quantico pulled in next to him, sending a wave of cold water arcing onto the back of Shepherd’s legs. He locked the car and splashed across the tarmac after the umbrella. He figured if the techs could find fingerprints on cotton and microscopic traces of DNA in a sterile room, they could probably find their way into a building without his help.

Stepping through the open service door into the clean, white-walled corridors of Building 29 was like jumping through a time-portal back to a previous life. Because there were no pictures on the walls and no unnecessary furnishings – to help maintain the sterile conditions required in the ‘clean rooms’ at the heart of the building – everything looked exactly as it had the last time Shepherd had set foot here.

‘Mike Pierce.’ The hooded man crushed Shepherd’s hand in a wet grip. ‘We met before?’ The eyes studied him from within the frame of a too-large face made bigger by the absence of hair. He looked like a weightlifter gone to fat but who still had some steel at his core and clearly felt a need to prove it whenever he shook another man’s hand.

‘I was here for a few months back in spring ’04,’ Shepherd said, letting go of Pierce’s hand to prompt him to do the same.

Pierce shrugged out of the rain slicker in a shower of water and draped it over a seat by the door. ‘I don’t recall any kind of Bureau investigation back then.’

‘Don’t be fooled by the lines around the eyes,’ Franklin cut in. ‘Agent Shepherd here is still wet behind the ears as far as Bureau work goes. He’s just here to help walk me through the tricky science parts.’

‘I worked on Explorer for a while,’ Shepherd explained as a bang behind them announced the arrival of the others heaving various boxes of gear out of the rain and in through the narrow service door.

‘Looks like the gang’s all here,’ Franklin said. ‘Lead on, Chief Pierce: tell us what you know.’

‘Well pretty much everything is in the report,’ Pierce said, closing the door behind them then swiping a card through a lock to gain entrance to an inner hallway. ‘At 20.05 this evening the main system network servicing the Hubble Space Telescope was subjected to a sophisticated cyber attack. Merriweather, the technician who was on duty when it happened, is waiting in the control centre to go through all the specific details for you.’

‘What about Dr Kinderman?’

‘Still no word. I’ve tried contacting him on all his numbers, sent emails, even got Merriweather to ping him on Twitter and Facebook. Nothing. His cell phone was found in his office, which appears to have been ransacked.’

‘Anyone else been in there since Kinderman went missing?’

‘Just myself and the technician who found it.’

‘OK, let’s start there.’

Pierce swiped them through another security door and pointed to an office door halfway down the corridor.

Shepherd had been in Kinderman’s office a few times before, once when he had started working here and again on the day he left. It was something of a tradition at Goddard, being paraded in front of the chief on your way in and out for a chat and a pep talk. He remembered being struck on both occasions by Kinderman’s extraordinary neatness and precision, a memory that jarred heavily with the chaotic mess of files and paperwork now covering most of the floor.

Franklin surveyed it all from the door while he pulled on a pair of blue Nitrile gloves he’d produced from his jacket pocket. Shepherd felt hot blood rising up his neck as he realized he’d left his own back in the car.

Franklin stepped into the office and made his way through snowdrifts of paperwork towards the centre of the room. He stood for a moment, turning slowly, taking it all in: the neat, uncluttered desk; the crooked photos on the wall of various presidents standing next to the same neatly-pressed man; the same man shaking hands with the King of Sweden as he received the Nobel Prize for his work in measuring the rate of universal expansion. In the world of astrophysics Dr Kinderman was the closest thing you could get to a rock star and Shepherd was finding it very hard to think of him as a suspect.

He felt something soft and cold press against the back of his hand and looked down to discover a pair of fresh gloves held low so Franklin wouldn’t see them. He smiled his thanks at the PST who had come to his rescue and quickly pulled them on just as Franklin finished his silent appraisal of the room and looked up. ‘OK boys,’ he said, ‘get to work.’

The two techs swooped into the room, one shaking open various-sized evidence bags, the other scoping every surface with a high-end camera that took both stills and video. Franklin joined Shepherd and Pierce back in the corridor. ‘Looks like someone left in a hell of a hurry.’

Pierce nodded. ‘When I first saw it I thought it was a break-in.’

‘You still think so?’

He shook his head. ‘Not when I saw that.’ He pointed to a small book lying open next to the terminal keyboard. It was photographed and handed out to Franklin. It was a standard appointments diary, a double page to a week, every blank space crammed with small, precise handwriting. ‘I was trying to find out where Dr Kinderman might be, but as you can see it wasn’t much help.’

Franklin flicked through the pages until he arrived at the current week where the writing just stopped. The last entry was in today’s date:

T

end of days

The rest of the diary was blank, as if nothing was going to happen ever again.

Franklin looked up. ‘You said no one has been in this room apart from you and the person who found it like this.’

‘That’s right, just me and Merriweather.’

Franklin handed the diary over to one of the techs for processing. ‘Why don’t we go and say hello to Merriweather.’