The Tower

PROLOGUE

The basement is dark and quiet.

A figure, stripped to the waist and kneeling, takes the blade in his right hand and draws it across the skin at the joint of his left arm and shoulder, tracing the scar of a previous cut. The blade is sharp and the scar opens easily, letting blood run down skin quivering at the bite of the knife.

“The first,” he says, his voice low in the darkness. “This blood binds me in pain with the Sacrament. As it suffers, so must I, until all suffering will end.”

He switches the blade to his left hand and repeats the cut on his right shoulder.

“The second,” he says, continuing the ritual learned from a hospital worker in the southern Turkish city of Ruin, a man loyal to the cause who had faithfully recorded everything the dying Sancti said through their delirium and suffering. The knife continues to cut, drawing fresh blood from old wounds, carving the same pattern he has seen on the bodies of the sacred monks, captured on a camera phone by the same spy after their suffering had finally ended. It is a ceremony that remained secret and locked in the Citadel at the heart of Ruin for thousands upon thousands of years. The enemies of the church believe that the death of the Sancti and the breaching of the Citadel mark the end of the old ways.

They are wrong.

When the ceremony is over he cleanses his wounds, flushing them with saline solution before drying them and sealing them with superglue that stings as it binds the flesh back together. The pain sharpens his mind, and so does its purpose. Only through suffering can redemption be reached, and only through sacrifice can the enemy be beaten.

He dresses quickly, buttoning his high-collared shirt to hide the scar on his neck and fixing his tie. Only a very few know him by the name he wears down here in the dark: Novus Sancti, keeper of the sacred flame.

But he is not alone in the shadows. There are others, many others like him who have devoted themselves to the silent and secret protection of God’s sacred mission on earth. They are everywhere, woven into the fabric of society — lawmakers, politicians, opinion formers — the crosses around their necks the only sign that they serve a higher law than those of the lands they live in. They are legion, for they are many, an army waiting to be mobilized when judgment day draws near.

And that time is now. He knows this to be true, for he has seen the signs and felt the call inside him. God has spoken to him and now he will answer.

He slips on his jacket then mounts the stairs back up into the modern world like a man rising from the dead.

Reborn.

Renewed.

Ready.

1

Merriweather looked up at the bank of screens.

Something was wrong.

He glanced behind him though he knew he was alone in the control center. Everyone else was at the interdepartmental party they threw each year to mark the start of the Christmas holidays. Merriweather wasn’t big on parties. He didn’t drink and couldn’t do small talk so he’d volunteered for the caretaker watch to garner some points with colleagues on the Flight Ops Team and bag a little heavy-duty processor time to crunch the deep-space data he was working on for his PhD.

He leaned forward in his chair and cocked his head to one side, listening to the chatter of the hard drive. Some people could listen to a car engine and tell you what was wrong with it, others might hear one bum note in a symphony played by a sixty-piece orchestra, Merriweather knew computers — and this one definitely sounded hinky. There was a hitch in the processing tone, like a broken tooth on a clock wheel or a fresh scratch on one of the classic 45s he liked to collect. He stroked his knitted tie nervously as he considered what to do. Unlike the other techs at the Goddard Space Center, Merriweather was strictly old school. He wore a tie every day, along with pressed trousers, horn-rimmed glasses and neatly combed hair — just like his boyhood heroes, the Houston mission controllers of the sixties and seventies. He also liked rules and order. He didn’t like it when things went wrong.

A tap on his keyboard banished the Pillars of Creation screen saver, the most famous image taken by the Hubble telescope, controlled from this room and currently orbiting earth 353 miles above Merriweather’s head. He ran through the standard checklist of the latest telemetry: temperature normal, speed steady, all systems green, no fluctuation in the solar wind — nothing abnormal.

He typed in a string of commands and the big screen on the wall flashed an updated image from the main reflector feed. It showed the luminous swirl of Cosmos-Aztec6, 13.4 billion light-years away — the farthest system ever observed from earth.

The processor crunched again, making Merriweather wince, then something happened that he had never seen before. An application autoloaded onto his desktop, a large window filled with numbers.

“Virus,” he said. “We have a virus!”

No response. No one there.

The numbers remained on-screen for a few seconds then disappeared. Merriweather tapped the keyboard and shook the mouse. He kicked back, rolling his chair away from the desk and across the floor to another workstation. Same thing: frozen screen, frozen keyboard. The processors chattered feverishly as they continued to feed on whatever digital poison had somehow found its way into the pristine system.

The main screen flickered and Merriweather looked up. The image was beginning to shift and disintegrate. Whatever had locked him out was now taking control of the guidance systems. The telescope was moving.

He fumbled for a desk phone, knocking the receiver to the floor, pulling it up by the cord and stabbing a button marked “Dr. Kinderman — cell phone.” On the screen the image continued to break up as the telescope turned. In his ear the ringing tone began. Somewhere down the hall a marimba tune rang in synch with it.

Merriweather clamped the phone under his chin and went through every reboot command he could think of to try and unlock the keyboard. Nothing. The ringing tone continued in his ear. He dropped the phone on the desk and launched himself toward the exit.

Outside in the corridor the marimba was louder. It was coming from Kinderman’s office. He arrived at the door, knocked once out of habit then opened it.

The state of the office came as a complete shock: wrenched-open drawers, papers everywhere, books all over the floor. The cell phone was on the desk. It shimmied a couple of times, vibrating in time to the ring, then stopped. In the silence that followed Merriweather heard the crunch of the pernicious code coming from Kinderman’s terminal. He moved cautiously into the room, wading through drifts of paper, until the monitor came into view. He stopped dead when he saw the message on the screen:

2

Shepherd took a deep breath then let it out slowly, trying not to make a sound as he edged forward down the dark corridor, gun first toward the solitary door. It was open slightly, the splintered timbers around the lock evidence of how many times it had been kicked in over the years. Somewhere above him the Virginia winter wind moaned through broken windows, filling the derelict town house with whispering voices. It was two below outside, probably colder in here, but he was sweating beneath his body armor.

He stopped a foot short of the door and leaned against the wall, feeling the flex in the plasterboard and timber frame — not much good for stopping bullets. He hunkered down below eye level like he’d been taught and slipped his scoping mirror from his belt then past the edge of the doorjamb.

Daylight leaked in through high, narrow windows, sketching the outline of a room: another door set into the far wall, a table in the center spilling over with various items — a man and a woman standing directly behind it.

The skin tightened on Shepherd’s scalp. The man’s eyes, framed by safety goggles, seemed to be staring straight at him. He saw a hand clamp tighter across the face of the terrified woman, held in front of him like a shield, saw the other hand rising up.

He leaped away just as gunfire shattered the cold silence and bullets smacked into the wall where he had been resting. He rolled into a new position farther down the corridor and leveled his gun at the door. “FBI!” he shouted. “Drop your weapon and come out slowly with your hands on your head. We have the building surrounded.”

Not true.

He was a lone agent following a cold lead that had just gone volcanic.

He heard noises coming from the room, something clattering to the floor then footsteps scuffing away. He moved forward in a crouch, gun just below his line of sight, free hand reaching for a stun grenade on his belt. He pulled the pin and tossed it around the door frame.

The grenade clattered across the floor, clanged against the metal leg of the table then detonated with a lightning flash that Shepherd saw even behind his closed eyelids. A sharp, percussive boom shook the wall and he was up and into the room.

No one there. Far door open.

He ran through the white magnesium smoke, performing a quick inventory of the table as he passed: 9-volt batteries, wire cutters, soldering iron, duct tape, vacuum packs of plastique. Bomb-making equipment.

The smart move would be to regroup and call for backup, but the suspect knew he was cornered. He had fired shots and fled, even after Shepherd had identified himself as FBI. He was desperate, and therefore unpredictable.

And he had a hostage.

If Shepherd waited for other units to show, the suspect would probably kill the woman and make a run for it. But right now he was vulnerable, his ears ringing from the pressure wave of the grenade, his eyes useless in the gloom of the basement. Shepherd had the advantage, but it was slight and wouldn’t last for more than the next few seconds. He had to make a choice.

He took a breath and swept his gun arm around the edge of the door frame, following it into the second room. The suspect was in the far corner, backed up against the wall, the hostage still in front of him and terrified.

Shepherd stood square on, maximizing the cover of his body armor, his gun steady in a good two-hand hold, trying to fix the front sight on what he could see of the suspect’s face. With his peripheral vision he sucked in the detail of the room: a single mattress on the floor; a low table next to it; a movie poster tacked to the wall with a burnt orange sun and slashed white lettering. His mouth went dry as buried memories rushed out of his past.

The dank smell…

…the same sun on the same poster…

…a room just like this.

He tried to zone it all out, keeping his eyes on the suspect and his mind on the here and now, but the sun kept pulling at him with something like real gravity, dragging him back to that dark, dark place he had done everything he could to forget.

His hand began to tremble. The suspect was shouting but he couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then he saw a hand rise up. Something in it. Some kind of button with a wire trailing down to the belt bomb wound around the hostage’s neck.

Behind them the sun blazed on the wall like an omen of the explosion to come. Shepherd felt weak. He couldn’t hold it together. His whole world condensed to the end of his gun and the suspect’s face came into focus along with the words on the movie poster.

Apocalypse Now

He pulled the trigger.

Adjusted for recoil — everything muscle memory now, drilled in deep from hours on the range — squeezed off another round. Saw an explosion of red beyond his gun sight. Then he watched in silence as both suspect and hostage fell in crumpled slow motion to the ground.

In the stillness that followed, Shepherd felt everything drain out of him. His eyes drifted back to the molten sun, his hand dropped to his side, the red-handled gun dangling from his curled trigger finger. He didn’t even feel the instructor take it from him, or register the fluorescent lights flickering into life above his head. In his mind he was still back there, staring at the same poster on a different wall — the room where she had found him and they had saved each other.

“…Shepherd…!”

The voice seemed to come from very far away.

“SHEPHERD — YOU OKAY?”

The granite face of Special Agent Williams slid into view, obscuring the poster and breaking the spell.

Shepherd blinked.

Nodded.

“You made some tactical errors.”

He nodded again.

“Get yourself over to the Biograph for a debrief.” The practical applications instructor slapped him on the back with a hand made solid from years of pulling triggers and turned to the two actors, already on their feet and tugging wet wipes from their pockets to clean away the red dye from Shepherd’s training pistol. They each had an impact mark on their foreheads, just above the eye. Kill shots both.

“Back to initial positions,” Williams barked. “Next trainee coming through in five.”

3

Shepherd stepped out of the front door of the town house 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, drugstore, 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 learned 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 onto the sidewalk from the foyer of the Biograph, named after the movie theater in Chicago where John Dillinger had been gunned down in the midthirties. 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 town house 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 around.

“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 counselors 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 toward him, buttoning the jacket of his suit and flashing an old, steel Timex. “Take off your body armor Shepherd and walk with me awhile.”

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 afterward. 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 toward 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 afterward.

“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 ongoing, 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 midwestern 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 toward 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 honors 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 toward 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 subdivision 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 gray 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 flat-screen 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 résumé,” 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 upward 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.”

“Okay, 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 center 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?”

“Nine-eleven happened — sir. Homeland defense 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 continue 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 traveling to clear my head and try and work out what I was going to do with my life now that 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, traveling from place to place, working cash jobs in bars and as migrant labor 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 nine-eleven 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 fund-raising 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 farthest 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 anymore.” 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 aboard 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 windshield wipers and hiss of tires over wet tarmac punctuated only by the rustle of paper as Franklin read through the file. Occasionally he jotted a note in a pocket book 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 armory 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 favor,” 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 rearview mirror. Behind him he could see the lights of the gray 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 capital. 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 spun 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 checks 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 goddamn 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. “Okay, 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 roared 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. “Okay, 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 165-foot 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 on to 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.”

“Okay, 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 on to 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 anymore — 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 e-mail 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 quickly 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.”

“Okay, 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 nonsensitive, 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

When Gabriel Mann pointed the horse toward 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 traveled 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, fueled 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 toward, 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.

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 that the oil had gone, but some were about her. Angry whispers drifted up like smoke from a smoldering fire, calling her names in a variety of languages—

Hawwāh

Ishtar

Lilith

Some spoke in her defense, 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 center spewing water now from deep, deep underground — and everywhere rust-colored 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 jackhammering, 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 trapdoor 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 that 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 freshwater spewing out of the ground below. She dragged the canteen toward 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, analyzing 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 U.S. military was 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 had 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 toward 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 awhile, 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 toward 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 humor. 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-colored 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. “Okay,” 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, adrenaline 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, 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, flatbed pickups were kicking up dust as they bounced across the desert a couple of hundred yards to his left. Their windows were smoked black and the 50-caliber 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 that 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 catalog 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 reread his note she had her answer.

“You okay?” The voice surprised her and she turned to find Tariq close by, his AK-47 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 center 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 center 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:

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 Plow.

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 hangarlike 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 first and second floors and none at all on the other four. Most of the offices and control centers 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 around 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 weight lifter 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 8:05 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 center 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 e-mails, 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.”

“Okay, 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 toward the center 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. “Okay, boys,” he said, “get to work.”

The two techs swooped into the room, one shaking open various-size 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:

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.”

11

The Space Telescope Operations Control Center was roughly half the size of a tennis court and smelled of warm circuitry and ozone. There were no windows in the room and therefore no daylight. The only illumination came from the occasional desk lamp and the combined glow of a few dozen flat-screen monitors facing a larger central screen. All of them were displaying the same message:

A man stood as they entered, his clothes and horn-rimmed glasses making him look like he had beamed in from the fifties.

“Merriweather, these are Special Agents Franklin and Shepherd from the FBI.”

They shook hands. Franklin nodded at the big screen. “That the same message you found on Kinderman’s computer?”

“Yes, sir—” He cleared his throat and stared up at the screen rather than at anyone in particular. “Well, I mean it was part of the program that did it — I think. Or rather — this message was the last thing that uploaded and now it’s everywhere and we can’t take it down. The whole system’s locked.”

“Any idea what it might refer to?”

Merriweather blew out a breath and raised his eyebrows. “Hubble’s a telescope, all it does is look at stuff — it could refer to anything.”

“It’s not looking at anything anymore though, is it?”

Merriweather shook his head and Shepherd felt for him. He knew how attached people got to the projects they were working on, how they often became the most meaningful relationships you had. Hubble had just been attacked, possibly put out of action for months, and Franklin was talking about it like someone had dented a car.

“Talk us through the sequence,” Shepherd said, trying to steer the conversation back to the investigation. “What was the first physical manifestation of the virus?”

“It hit the guidance system first. That was when I knew it was serious and went looking for Dr. Kinderman. I found his office in a mess and this message on the screen. Actually no, first there was a command box with what looked like a decaying googolplex in it, then the message popped up.”

“Tell me about the googolplex.”

“Wait a second,” Franklin jumped in, “would you mind translating for those of us who flunked physics?”

“A googolplex is a mathematical term for a particularly long number,” Shepherd said, his eyes staying on Merriweather. “It’s where we get the word Google from. All those zeros you get when a search comes back refer to the googolplex. And the fact that it was decaying simply means it was getting smaller.”

Franklin nodded. “Okay, got it.” He turned to Merriweather again. “So a big number flashed up on the screen followed by this message?”

“Yes, sir. I think the googolplex was probably something to do with the initialization of the malware and I just happened to be there to see it.”

“And you were alone in the control room when all this happened?”

“Yes.”

“Is that standard practice?”

“No. I mean usually there are at least… everyone else was at the party.” He looked at Pierce for support.

“Merriweather volunteered to man the graveyard shift,” Pierce said. “I checked on the staff rota. He was the only one here.”

“Mighty public spirited of you, staying back here to watch the store while everyone else gets to go off and party. Not so great that that’s when the store got knocked off though, huh?” Franklin stared hard at Merriweather for a long few seconds then smiled in the way Shepherd was fast getting used to. “Don’t worry, son. I reckon you’re too smart to hang yourself out to dry by throwing a spanner in the works on your own watch. Tell me about Dr. Kinderman. When was the last time you saw him?”

Shepherd recognized the interview method Franklin was using. He was moving the questions around, rapidly changing topic and tone to give the subject no time to think and shake away any subterfuge he might be clinging to. It was a technique you used on someone you thought might be lying.

“He was still in his office at around five thirty. I walked past on my way to get a snack before everyone else left.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“No. He was at his desk, working.”

“Did he seem anxious to you?”

“Not that I could tell.”

“Did you notice him acting strangely at all in the past few days?”

Merriweather shrugged. “I can’t really say. Dr. Kinderman doesn’t exactly conform to conventional notions of behavior.”

Franklin took a deep breath and seemed to double in size. “Listen, son, you can either choose to help us or you can choose to be obstructive, and one of those options is a federal offense and comes with jail time. Just answer the question.”

Merriweather’s face went blank, like a shutter had just come down and Shepherd realized Franklin had taken a seriously wrong turn. Threats wouldn’t work with someone like Merriweather. His loyalty to the project would be fierce and would far outweigh any personal agenda or self-regard. NASA was like a religion, and the faithful did not abandon their beliefs just because someone threatened them.

“Listen,” Shepherd said, cutting across Franklin to try and rescue the situation. “I know what you’re thinking: there’s no way Dr. Kinderman would do this, am I right?” Merriweather looked at him blankly, the shutters still down. Shepherd was aware of Franklin glaring at him, furious that he had broken rank and taken over the questioning. “I know exactly what you mean about him being unconventional. I crunched some data here on one of the last Explorer missions; remember that?”

Merriweather nodded. “They shut it down a while back.” His voice sounded hollow, as if he was talking about someone who had died. In that moment Shepherd knew exactly where all his nervousness was coming from and it wasn’t guilt: it was fear of what would happen next. “Tell me what happens if you can’t reestablish contact with Hubble?”

Merriweather looked up, locking eyes with Shepherd for the first time. “The only way to reboot it would be to manually restore the system.”

“So you’d have to launch a mission. Someone would have to physically go into orbit to fix it?”

Merriweather nodded.

“And is that likely?”

Merriweather took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because of James Webb.”

“Anyone mind telling me who the hell James Webb is and what he’s got to do with any of this?” Franklin said, directing the question to the room.

Merriweather took off his glasses and rubbed at the indentations they’d left on the bridge of his nose. “James Webb was the architect of the Apollo program, the one who put a man on the moon. But in this case it’s not a who it’s a what.” He sank down at the laptop he’d been working on and typed something. The screen filled with an image of what looked like a wide flat coffin with a golden satellite array on top like a sail. “Say hello to Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. It’s bigger, will have a much higher orbit and will see much, much farther. They’re building it right now. My guess is, if we can’t fix Hubble from down here then they won’t bother fixing it at all. They’ll just shut us down and wait for James Webb to come online.”

“And you’ll most likely be out of a job?” Shepherd said, knowing exactly how painful that felt.

Merriweather nodded.

“Is that why you think Dr. Kinderman couldn’t be involved,” Franklin said, picking up the line of questioning, “because he wouldn’t sabotage his own project and betray his colleagues?”

Merriweather shrugged. “Why would he do it? Why turn his back on his life’s work, all of our work? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Franklin pulled out a chair and sat next to Merriweather, bringing his eye level down to his. “People do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, son.” His tone had softened considerably. “But if Dr. Kinderman was coerced in some way, if someone put him in a situation that forced his hand in this, then we can help him. If he’s in danger we can bring him to safety. So anything you can give us, anything at all that might help us understand what has happened here will be a great benefit. And you won’t be being disloyal, you’ll be doing him a favor.”

Shepherd had to hand it to the old bastard. He might have pitched it wrong at the start of the interview but he was playing it pitch perfect now.

Merriweather balanced his glasses back on his nose and ran his thumb along the line of his lower lip. “Okay,” he said, punching a new command into the laptop. The image of the James Webb telescope was replaced with streams of code. “I’ve been trying to pin down the virus ever since it was uploaded, but whoever designed it knew what they were doing and covered their tracks unbelievably well. The only way I can see anyone getting a program big enough to do what it did to get past the network security would be by junk-streaming it.”

Franklin glanced at Shepherd, one eyebrow raised in a question mark. “Junk-streaming is when you attach tiny bits of code to genuine traffic. They’re too small to be picked up by the firewalls, so they pass through it and then activate and clump together when they’re on the other side. It’s a bit like sending component parts of a bomb onto a plane one piece at a time then building it onboard. But in the same way, if one piece doesn’t get through or gets corrupted in transit then the whole thing won’t work.”

Merriweather continued to tap commands into the keyboard. “But uploading the virus is only part of the story,” he said. “What it then managed to do was very sophisticated and precise. It didn’t just knock out the comms and send Hubble spinning off into space. It actually reprogrammed the guidance systems causing the onboard rockets to fire and carefully move Hubble out of position.”

“Dangerously so?”

Merriweather glanced up at him. “Sir?”

“I mean has it been effectively weaponized? Is it currently hurtling toward Manhattan or Washington?”

“No, no — nothing like that.” He turned back to the laptop, finished his sequence of commands and hit return.

High on the wall next to the main screen four rows of red LED numbers flickered into life.

“See that top figure—353, that shows the telescope’s current altitude in miles. As long as the number doesn’t start getting smaller there’s no danger of Hubble crashing back to earth. So far it hasn’t changed. The next two readings are the relative long and latitudinal positions and the fact that they are changing shows that Hubble is drifting, but in a very controlled way. But it’s the last reading that’s the most interesting and seems most relevant to the message. That shows us where Hubble is pointing. Before the attack it was in the 270-degree range, locked on to a piece of thin space in the constellation of Taurus. But now it’s shifted round to dead zero where it’s remained ever since. Zero degrees is the home position. It means Hubble is now pointing directly at earth.”

Shepherd glanced at the message shining out from every screen — MANKIND MUST LOOK NO FURTHER — its meaning more resonant and emphatic now that the instrument of man’s farthest gaze had been turned inward.

“You think this could be some kind of cover-up?” Franklin asked. “Maybe Hubble saw something out there and Kinderman didn’t want anyone else to know about it, so he put up this warning and turned the telescope around so no one else could see it?”

“Maybe. Hubble’s not like a conventional telescope where you look through an eyepiece and see stars; it builds up images from the data it collects. People like me work on specific batches of gathered information and just see a tiny part of the puzzle. Dr. Kinderman’s the only one who gets to see the whole picture.”

Franklin turned to Pierce. “Any chance we can take a look at the archives?”

“No,” Merriweather replied, hunching over the laptop and rattling in new commands. “After the crash I initialized a system check to isolate any infected files. That’s when I discovered this.”

A new directory opened listing dates running back for weeks. Merriweather clicked today’s date and a new window opened.

It was empty.

He clicked another, then another, working his way back through the week, each file as empty as the one before. “All the recent data has been wiped. I checked the backups too. There’s no trace of anything Hubble has been looking at for the last eight months. It’s all gone.”

Franklin nodded. “So maybe Kinderman did see something — the only question is what?”

Shepherd’s eyes flicked between the telemetry and the biblical message shining out of the screens. “You said Hubble was investigating a piece of thin space before the attack.”

“In Taurus, yes.”

“Were you looking for something specific?”

“Not that I was aware of, I was just looking at edge radiation — heaven data.”

Franklin turned to Shepherd. “Could you kindly translate?”

“Sorry. The known universe was created by a single event, the so-called Big Bang, which happened around fourteen billion years ago. Since then everything has been constantly expanding outward. Thin space is where the edge of the universe is closest to earth. Beyond it lies whatever was there before everything else came into being. Some think this is where God resides.” He frowned as a new thought struck him.

“When the Hubble project was launched wasn’t there a lot of noise and protests from various religious groups?”

“Yes,” Pierce answered. He stepped forward out of the shadows and into the light. “I’d just started working here, had to run through protest lines to get to work sometimes: people waving doom and judgment placards in your face, calling it all a heresy, daring to gaze so far into heaven.” He stared hard at the message on the screen, his mind ticking behind his eyes. “I didn’t really connect all that with this until just now, but—”

He snapped to attention. “Come with me, gentlemen, there’s something I need to show you.”

12

Cold neon tubes tinked into life in the visitors’ center as Pierce held the door and Franklin and Shepherd hustled in out of the weather. It was a big, rectangular space large enough to accommodate the busloads of schoolkids who came here every day to look at the old rockets and dream of riding them to the moon. Shepherd had been one of them once.

“In here, gentlemen,” Pierce said, shrugging out of his rain slicker and punching a code into a door next to the ticket desk.

His office had none of the romance of the public areas. There were no pictures on the walls of man’s extraordinary exploration in here, no forming galaxies or wonders of creation, just a framed photograph of Pierce in his state trooper days wearing a dress uniform and looking a little more lean and a lot more mean than he did now. A coffeepot sat in the corner. The heating plate was turned off but the smell of burned coffee still filled the room with a smoky aroma that twisted Shepherd’s gut. He hadn’t had time to eat before leaving Quantico and they hadn’t stopped anywhere on the way. Franklin didn’t seem to need food.

Pierce fitted a small key into a large filing cabinet and heaved open the bottom drawer. “We get crank mail here all the time, mostly reports of UFO sightings and/or conspiracy theorists and moon-landing deniers who think Hubble is NASA’s latest hoax and all the images are done in Photoshop. Most of it comes in as e-mail but we still get some the old-fashioned way.” He lifted a well-stuffed hanging divider out of the drawer and started sorting through it. “This past year it’s gone nuts. I don’t know if it’s all this weird weather we’re having, or the business in Rome that knocked the Church on its ass or what it is but something sure got the doom and damnation crowd all worked up. ’Bout eight months ago we started getting these.” He took a clear plastic wallet out of the divider and handed it to Franklin. It was full of postcards, all variations on the same theme — old-master-style paintings showing a monumental tower under construction. “They’re all pictures of the Tower of Babel. We got the first one in May, then a new one on the first day of every month since. We date-stamp everything when it comes in, so you can see in what order they arrived.”

Franklin snapped his nitrile gloves back on and carefully tipped the cards out onto the desktop. He picked one up, stared at the strange painting for a second, one stone coil inside another corkscrewing up into the clouds, then flipped it over to read the handwritten message on the back:

The words transported Shepherd straight back to the oak-paneled horror of his school where his Latin teacher had started each term by reading the same passage from a well-thumbed leather Bible. “The quote is from Genesis,” he said, “the Tower of Babel story.”

“Yep, and they were all sent directly to Dr. Kinderman,” Pierce added. “The postmarks are from all over but the writing looks to me like it’s the same person. I didn’t know what to make of them when they first started coming in, but we keep everything on file, just in case. Each month there was a different quote, always from Genesis and always referring to the Tower of Babel. Then last month we got this.” He pulled a single brown envelope from the file and handed it to Franklin. It too was addressed to Dr. Kinderman only this time with a printed label. Franklin shook out a single sheet of folded paper and opened it to reveal a typed note:

Franklin looked up at Pierce. “You report this to state PD?”

He nodded. “Fancy language aside it’s still a serious threat. There’s a crime reference number in the file.”

“Novus Sancti,” Franklin muttered. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“It’s Latin,” Shepherd said. “It means ‘new holy’ but by the context I would say it’s being used here as a name.”

Franklin turned back to Pierce. “Did the state-ies follow this up at all?”

“They registered the complaint, told Dr. Kinderman to be extra vigilant, asked me to keep them updated on any new developments.”

“That’ll be a no then.”

Pierce bristled. “There were over four hundred murders in this state last year; they’ve barely got the manpower to investigate those, let alone divert resources to every crazy with an axe to grind.”

Franklin pointed to the fourth line. “What does that mean—Sodomite and member of the occult tribe—are they saying he’s a devil worshipper?”

“Not necessarily,” Shepherd replied. “ ‘Occult’ actually just means ‘hidden’ or ‘secret.’ It could just as easily mean he’s a Freemason.”

“What about ‘Sodomite’?”

Pierce cleared his throat. “Well, that’s a reference to… Dr. Kinderman was — I mean I don’t think he is now, but in the past he had—”

“Dr. Kinderman is gay,” Shepherd cut in to put Pierce out of his misery. “It’s no big secret, it’s mentioned in his Wikipedia entry. When he was a student he apparently had a brief fling with some guy who outed him when his star began to rise. There was a mild bit of tabloid interest at the time but it didn’t fly very far. Dr. Kinderman just made a statement confirming it and saying something like we all do foolish things when young. He also stated that for the past twenty years his only committed relationship has been with his work.”

“That true, do you think?” Franklin addressed the question to Pierce.

“Who can say? What Dr. Kinderman did in his own time is nothing to do with me. He certainly spent a whole lot of time here. He was always around — he practically lived here.”

“Did he seem particularly concerned or surprised when this letter arrived?”

“Like Merriweather said, Dr. Kinderman wasn’t what you would call the conventional type. He didn’t seem scared or anything like that. He listened to what the state trooper had to say about being careful then got straight back to work.”

“What about religion — is Kinderman a man of faith?”

“No, at least not that I’m aware of.”

“And how many other people are working on this project?”

“About forty or so.”

“Yet they only targeted him.”

“Dr. Kinderman is the most high profile, and generally these kinds of stunts are for publicity, which is exactly why we try and play them down.”

Franklin nodded. “We’re going to take these away with us and run them through our labs, see if the paper or the ink talk to us at all. The guys in Kinderman’s office are also going to have to remove his hard drive so we can go through it and see if there’s anything there. Any security codes you know of that will make it easier for us to gain access would be much appreciated.”

“Of course.”

“You said Dr. Kinderman spent most of his time here. Does he have an apartment on-site?”

“No, but he has the next best thing. He has a house in Presley Park, just the other side of the road you came in on. You could walk it in less than five minutes.”

Franklin glanced through the window at the rain-whipped night. “Thanks, Chief, but if it’s all the same to you I think we’ll take the car.”

13

Shepherd drove. Franklin stared ahead, facing down the stormy night and saying nothing.

Since voicing his suspicions about Shepherd’s missing two years, he had barely spoken to him at all. Shepherd guessed he was sore at him for butting in on his interrogation of Merriweather too. The silence had become an almost tangible thing between them, taking on presence and weight.

When he had applied to the FBI he had counted on the gap in his record not being a problem. He had not been arrested or done anything in those missing years to put him on any of the databases they checked when screening new candidates. As far as the standard computer searches were concerned he was clean. But Franklin was a duty-hardened agent with instincts honed by years of dealing with people in all their broken forms. He’d sniffed out the shadows in his story immediately. But trust worked both ways and he didn’t know nearly enough about Franklin to risk telling him the truth.

Ahead — turn left.

The flat voice from the sat nav punctured the silence. Shepherd reached out and tapped the screen, broadening the scale of the map until the space center appeared directly north of them. Proximity to Goddard had obviously been way up on Dr. Kinderman’s wish list and the usual status symbols of cars and big, grand houses didn’t really matter to him. As Pierce had suggested, you could probably cut through the woods and walk to Presley Park faster than Shepherd had just driven it.

Turn right in twenty yards, then you will have reached your destination.

Shepherd turned into a narrower road and headlamps swept across a row of evenly spaced houses, slightly smaller than those on the main drag.

“There!” Franklin pointed at a one-story, brick-built ranch house set back a little from the road. Shepherd pulled into the empty drive next to it and cut the engine.

The Kinderman residence was entirely unassuming. There was a small patch of grass in front, a tree planted in the center and neat borders filled with utility plants that would pretty much look after themselves. There was nothing modern about it, no additions, no carport or garage. It still had the original steel and glass porch over the front door. Behind the low building a wall of tall trees surged and flowed in the wind. There were no lights on inside.

“Let’s see if the good doctor is home.” Franklin popped open his door and stepped into the rain. Shepherd killed the headlights and followed.

The distance from the car to the house was barely ten yards but Shepherd was more or less soaked by the time he made it to the porch. Franklin was already leaning on the doorbell, listening to its chimes echoing inside the house through the loud drumming of rain on the glass overhead. He pressed it again and they listened, standing uncomfortably close in the slender shelter of the porch as they waited for movement inside or a light to come on behind the pebbled glass surrounding the front door.

“Nobody home,” Franklin said after a suitable wait. “Watch the street.”

He dropped down, stuck his Maglite between his teeth and started probing the lock with a pick he had taken from his pocket.

“Shouldn’t we get a warrant first?”

“And wake up some poor old judge on a night like this?” The lock clicked and Franklin stood up. “If we find anything we’ll get a warrant, then we can find it all over again: no harm no foul.” He swapped the pick for his gun and held the Maglite in a fist grip so the beam shone where the barrel was pointing. Shepherd automatically did the same, months of simulations on Hogan’s Alley kicking in as adrenaline and muscle memory took over and the words of Agent Williams whispered in his head: try not to put yourself in any situation where you may have to draw this weapon.

So much for that.

Franklin took up a position by the door and gestured for Shepherd to take the other side. “Remember this is not a drill, Agent Shepherd. This is the house of a suspected terrorist we are entering and, though I don’t think we’ll find anyone inside, I’d rather be prepared than dead. So nice and slow, just like you were taught, and do not move until you are covered.”

Shepherd got in position. Franklin reached forward, turned the handle and threw open the door in a single smooth movement.

Time stretched slowly as the door swung wide, revealing a yawning darkness beyond. Shepherd tensed, his pupils fully wide, watching for movement. Franklin moved forward, gun first, the beam of his Maglite probing the dark in a sweep from left to right. Shepherd followed, keeping close, going right to left until the beam of his torch crossed Franklin’s in the center of the hallway.

No one there.

They moved quickly and silently through the rest of the house — cover and move, cover and move — until they had satisfied themselves that Dr. Kinderman was not here and neither was anyone else. It didn’t take them long. The house was not that big.

Franklin hit the lights and they stood in the middle of the modest living-room-slash-kitchen-slash-dining-room taking in what they had previously only glimpsed by flashlight.

If anything, the inside of Dr. Kinderman’s home was even less impressive than the outside. A small oak-floored hallway led away from the front door to three others: a small bathroom, a bedroom, and some wooden stairs leading down to the basement. “Tell me, Agent Shepherd,” Franklin said, “you ever seen inside a safe house or a terrorist cell?”

“No, sir, I have not.”

“Well, look around, they look exactly like this. Functional, clean, unlived in.”

“We don’t know that he’s a terrorist.”

“No, but the evidence is stacking up, wouldn’t you say?” He nodded at the large picture of Christ the Redeemer hanging above the fireplace, arms outstretched and looking down at the sprawling city of Rio de Janeiro. “Pierce didn’t think Kinderman was religious.”

“Maybe he just likes big statues, or Brazil.”

“Or maybe he found God on the quiet and felt so bad about sticking his telescope up the Almighty’s nose that he switched it off and ran for the hills.”

Shepherd shrugged. “I guess anything’s possible.”

“I guess it is.” Franklin pointed at the bedroom. “Take another look, see what you can find, I’ll check the rest.”

The bedroom was as plain as the rest of the house, the picture hanging over the neat double bed the only clue as to the person who slept there. It showed the Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula, clearly a favorite image for the man who had been responsible for discovering them. Shepherd felt odd standing here, in the private space of one of his heroes. It seemed like an intrusion and his presence implied a degree of complicit agreement in Dr. Kinderman’s as yet unproven guilt. He put it from his mind, swapped his gun for the blue nitrile gloves and got to work.

The wardrobe held lots of white shirts, pressed and cleaned and still in their laundry wrapping, a few suits of the tweedy, academic kind Kinderman favored and four pairs of identical black, wing-tipped shoes, polished and lined up on newspaper, ready to be stepped into. There was a gap where a fifth pair would fit, presumably the ones Kinderman was now wearing.

The drawers contained more clothes but no answers. There were no new death-threat letters stashed away at the back of the sock drawer, no drugs or guns or dubious pornography or bundles of money or anything else that implied a secret, dangerous life. Everything was neat, tidy and unremarkable. He finished his search and stood for a moment in the center of the room, taking in its incredible ordinariness. It felt like Kinderman might have just stepped out for a late dinner and would be coming back soon. Part of him hoped he would, but the chaos of his office at Goddard told a different story. Shepherd flicked off the light and closed the door on his way out.

He found Franklin in the living room, hunkered down by the fireplace. “Take a look at this.” He pointed at a fire basket containing a few logs, some sticks and several old newspapers. “Notice anything funny about the papers?”

Shepherd picked one up. It was a copy of the New York Post, a relatively unusual paper to find in Maryland. On the cover was a picture of a man dressed like a monk, standing on top of a dark mountain with his arms outstretched, looking just like the statue in the picture above Kinderman’s fireplace. Shepherd checked the date. The paper was eight months old. The story of the man climbing to the summit of the Citadel in the ancient city of Ruin had been more or less a front-page fixture in the spring. Recently Ruin had been in the papers again, this time because of the sudden outbreak of a viral infection that had resulted in the entire city being quarantined.

He picked up another paper, a copy of USA Today dated a few days after the New York Post and showing a photo of the same mountain, this time with smoke pouring out of a hole in its side; the headline read:

The other newspapers were the same, all covering versions of the same story and dated around the same time. Some showed the monk on top of the Citadel, others showed the moment he fell to his death, or pictures of bloodied monks being stretchered out of the mountain following the explosion, their bodies stripped to the waist by paramedics to reveal strange networks of ritualized scars from multiple cuts deep in the skin.

“Lots of people have old newspapers in their fire baskets,” Shepherd said, scanning one of the articles to remind himself of the details.

“Yes, but not normally a collection of different papers all covering the same thing. The Bureau got involved in this in a small way trying to help locate a couple of the terror suspects who were American. One was a female journalist from Jersey, the other an ex-army guy, Liv Adamsen and Gabriel Mann.”

“They’re mentioned here.” Shepherd held up one of the papers and showed him a mug shot of a handsome man in his early thirties with short dark hair and blue eyes and a pale, blond woman with eyes so green they glowed beneath the poor print quality of the paper.

Shepherd picked up the last newspaper. On the cover was a photograph of a plump cardinal looking imperious in his red and black robes beneath the headline:

He remembered that one too, the biggest scandal to rock the Church in a long time. Something to do with mortgaging all the Church’s treasures and buildings in order to fund some doomed oil venture in Iraq. Some of the more lurid tabloids had even suggested they were drilling for oil where Eden used to be.

“All from eight months ago,” Shepherd mused, dropping it in the basket with the rest, “the same time the postcards started arriving.”

Franklin stood up and stretched the kinks out of his back as he paced the spartan living room. “So how does any of this link up? Does any of it link up? We’ve got an attack on government property that may or may not be connected to the attacks outlined in these newspapers. We got a missing person who’s our number one suspect. We got a potential religious angle, which could shake out either as Kinderman seeing the light and going rogue, or somebody else putting the frighteners on him to do God’s work for them — maybe even the same guys who were involved in these attacks eight months ago. What else…?”

Shepherd dug his notebook from his pocket. “There’s the Tower of Babel references and the death threat written in biblical tones and signed Novus Sancti. We also have the missing data, which also dates back eight months, though that could just be a coincidence.”

Franklin shook his head and wandered into the kitchen. “I’m not a great believer in coincidence.” He stood by the sink with the lights off, staring out into the night. The ambient light from the street picked out a small strip of grass and the line of storm-shaken trees that marked the edge of the property and the beginning of the woods. “Maybe we’re massively overcomplicating things. Nine times out of ten it’s about money. Look at this place, it’s not exactly a palace.”

“But you heard what Pierce said, he was always at work, this is just where he slept.”

“Maybe, but he wouldn’t be the first smart person in history who dug himself into a deep hole and then got bought by someone offering him a ladder.”

Shepherd thought about it and shook his head. “I don’t think it can be money. Dr. Kinderman never struck me as the material kind and he won the Nobel Prize nine years ago.”

“You get paid for that?”

“You get a cut of how much money the Nobel Foundation made that year. It’s usually something like a million — million and a half. If there’s more than one winner they share it. Dr. Kinderman won it on his own.”

Franklin whistled through his teeth. “Man, I should have paid more attention in science class. Still, I reckon I could easily burn through a million bucks in nine years. Maybe pick up some expensive tastes along the way and get myself in some situations that a blackmailer could get his hooks into.” Franklin took a last long look at the meager, anonymous home. “Come on, we’re wasting time here. Let’s head back to base, see what the techs have come up with. I might even buy you a burger on the way back — but that still don’t mean I trust you.”

14

The crosshairs followed Franklin until he left the kitchen and disappeared from sight. The finger in the nonslip glove relaxed on the trigger and an eye flicked up from the scope.

Carrie Dupree was in the trees, back from the house a little and low enough on the trunk not to be shaken too much by the wind. She had been in position since way before the storm hit, waiting for Dr. Kinderman to come home. She watched the lights in the house go out and listened through the surf sound of the wind-tossed branches until she heard the front door bang shut then a car start up and drive away.

She probed the darkness, everything glowing a phosphorescent green in the night sight. The house remained dark and silent.

Nothing moved.

She felt a slight vibration in the sleeve pocket of her camouflage jacket and swung the rifle around ninety degrees to a neighboring tree. She could just make out the slim outline of Eli, the hand holding the phone that had sent the alert making a chopping sign across his throat.

Time to pull out.

Exfiltration was fast and practiced. She capped the scope and powered it down, slung the rifle crossways over her back then dropped down from her tree. Eli joined her and stood sentry while she broke the rifle down further and bagged it so it could be stashed quickly in the trunk of the car once they made it back to the road, then they headed away through the woods. Occasionally, they came across the stacked branches and litter of a den built by the neighborhood kids who slinked from their houses and went feral in these woods. There was no one around now, the late hour and weather had seen to that.

They drew close to the edge of the trees and Eli stopped. The dark yard they had passed through earlier was now bright with light spilling from several rooms in the house and a TV was blaring loudly somewhere inside. Too chancy to go back that way and risk being seen.

Eli pointed right and moved off, keeping the boundary lines of the properties in sight as they moved through the trees looking for another way out. They found a quiet house, no lights on, no movement inside, no car in the drive, and no security lights pointing out at the yard ready to light up anything that moved across it. There were no toys or trampolines in this garden, just a lawn surrounded by a wooden fence running all the way around the property. Carrie wondered if it had been put up to keep the neighborhood kids out. Either way, it wouldn’t stop them.

She went first, springing over the fence and landing in a crouch, her hands feeling the cold, wet earth through her gloves. She heard the creak of the fence and the squelch of Eli’s boots as he followed her, crouching down behind her, so near she could feel him. She savored the delicious closeness, a momentary distraction that made her slow to react.

The dog appeared out of the dark in an explosion of noise and teeth. It launched itself straight at her, a large, angry animal, black as the night, all muscle and rage. She turned and raised her arm to protect her face from the claws and the bite, but the dog did not reach her.

Eli’s boot caught it just behind the head, turning the snarl into a yelp and sending it spinning away. It landed on its side, rolled and scrabbled to get to its feet, but Eli was already on it, grabbing its rear legs and heaving it up, flipping it high with an arch of his back then down hard, smashing its head against the ground. Another yelp squeaked from it as the soft earth stunned it but did not knock it out. The dog clawed at the ground again, weaker now, its back legs kicking free from Eli’s grip, desperate to get away from the source of its pain.

Eli stepped forward, his trailing leg whipping through the air, connecting with the dog’s throat in a wet thud that snapped the dog’s head back. This time it did not yelp at all because its windpipe had been crushed. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, bloody and twitching as it fought for breath. Eli moved over it, raising his boot high and bringing it down hard, stamping the life out of it repeatedly in fury until Carrie laid a hand on him, pulling him away and past the house to where the streetlights swayed in the wind.

They vaulted the chain-link gate with the BEWARE OF THE DOG sign on it, keeping in the shadows of the trees until they made it back to the Little League baseball park where they’d left the car, well away from the streetlights.

Eli got in the passenger seat. Carrie drove, the heater on full, filling the car with dry air and noise, neither of them speaking until they were a couple of miles down the road.

“You okay, baby?”

Eli didn’t reply.

Carrie let it slide and settled into the roar of the heater and the rumble of the road, worrying about what lay beneath his silence.

She had never seen him kill anything before tonight and there had been something magnificent and terrible about the way he had done it. Eli wasn’t physically imposing, if anything his height made him appear slimmer than he was, but there was something about the way he carried himself, something lean and dangerous, like an old-fashioned razor — and she knew where it came from.

Like all true lovers, part of their intimacy lay in the secrets they shared. Eli had confessed his in the mission military hospital where he’d been released after being locked up for seven months for nearly killing someone. One by one he had detailed, in a quiet, expressionless voice, all the people he had killed in his relatively short life. It had started with the kid in juvie who had tried to touch him somewhere he shouldn’t. He hadn’t expected the skinny, younger boy to fight back and had been caught off guard when he did, slipping on the tiles in the shower block and cracking his head. Eli told her how he had jumped on top of the boy, grabbed his hair and hammered his skull against the tiles until someone else found them and dragged him away. Eli’s tormentor had died in the infirmary two days later.

I just wanted to make sure he stayed down—he told her—but then I couldn’t stop.

This first homicide kept him institutionalized until he got a release into the army where his country turned his aggression to good use. Carrie had listened as he listed all the people he had killed while in uniform, stroking his head and letting him talk them all out as if he was exorcizing demons. Killing was his gift, but also his curse, and she knew his true secret, whispered to her alone in the quiet of a psychiatric cell he’d been sent to after killing a sergeant in a fight over a toothbrush:

I like it — the killing. I like it. It’s the only thing I ever been good at. But killing is a sin, so I must be damned to all hell for liking it so.

She looked across at him now, the muscle in his jaw working in that way it did when something was eating him up inside.

“Hey, baby, it’s okay, honey — you were only looking out for me,” she told him. “Saving someone you love from hurt is a righteous thing to do. And some poor dumb animal don’t have no immortal soul.”

He shook his head. “Animal or a man,” he said, “it’s all the same for me.” He stared ahead, his face lit by the wash of oncoming headlights, his eyes focused on something darker than night.

She wanted to stop the car and hold him, stroke his head, but they needed to get away. Stopping a car by the side of the road in this weather was just inviting some do-gooder or a highway cop to come snooping, and they couldn’t afford to be seen.

“You want to make the call? Tell Archangel what we saw at the house,” she said. “I’ll look for a motel where we can rest up.”

Eli dug a phone from his pocket, the screen lighting up his face as he searched for the number. He switched it to speakerphone and the sound of dialing and connecting chirruped in the enclosed space.

Carrie had never been concerned with killing or death the way Eli and many other men like him seemed to be. She had heard all the arguments against the deployment of women in theaters of war and thought most of it was just horseshit. The first time she had watched an Iraqi tank commander’s head snap back after she squeezed the trigger of her M24 she’d felt nothing, nothing at all. Never lost a single moment’s sleep about it neither. And it was the women who gave birth, and then watched their sons and husbands go off to war. Living on when everything you’d loved had been taken away, that was the really tough stuff. Killing was easy.

The ringing tone purred amid the rumble of the road. Someone picked up and Archangel’s voice joined them in the car.

“Is it done?”

“No,” Eli said, “he wasn’t there, but someone else was. Cops of some sort I think.”

“Did they see you?”

“No.”

There was a pause on the line. “He can’t have gone far. Let me see what I can find out. Go somewhere safe and wait for my call; until then God bless and keep you both.”

Then the phone went dead.