The Tower

15

Liv woke just as dawn was starting to bleed into the eastern sky. She was lying on the ground next to the grave of the Ghost, her head full of strange symbols and the sky full of fading stars.

She had been dreaming she was back in her old apartment, watering the hundreds of plants that lined the walls. She had grown plants since she was small, squeezed between her father and her brother as they potted and seeded like other kids baked cakes with their moms. It was her dad’s way of spending time with his kids and getting them to help out with his gardening business. He taught them the names of everything, though he also let her make up some to keep her amused. Some of them had stuck. To this day she still called Physillis an orange eyeball tree.

She opened her eyes and the loamy smell of the earth escaped from her dream and drifted across the desert. It took her a few moments to recall where she was as she hung for some blissful heartbeats suspended between the past and the present before she remembered. The apartment was gone, incinerated along with everything in it by someone who had been looking for her. Her father was dead, so was her brother — and Gabriel was gone. It all struck her like a fresh loss, so hard that she just wanted to curl up again, go back to sleep and escape into the bliss of her dream.

Then she heard the noise, like the soft hiss of a huge snake.

Instinctively she rolled away from it, right across the grave, coming to rest so she was staring across the stone at the source of the sound.

Tariq was curled up and sleeping on the ground nearby, his AK-47 cradled in his arms, his mouth forming words that escaped as sibilant whispers from his dream.

— Saa’so Ishtar — Saa’so Ishtar—

She watched him twitching in his sleep, whispering the words over and over until the lightening sky woke him too.

“What is Ishtar?” She fired the question at him while he was still blinking awake. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands then looked over at her, his forehead creased in a question. “You were saying it over and over in your sleep — what is it?”

“Ishtar is a goddess,” he said, pushing himself up and automatically checking his rifle for sand, “an ancient goddess from the time when all these lands were green. She was the goddess of fertility, and love, and war. It was she who made everything grow and gave names to every living thing.”

Liv remembered her dream and the memory of naming plants by her father’s side. “I heard people calling me that — among other things.”

Tariq unwrapped the keffiyeh from around his neck, shook it out and carefully laid it on the ground. “There is an old tale,” he said, as well-practiced hands removed the magazine from his rifle, ejected a shell from the breach then began taking it to pieces. “It is a nomad tale from the ancient times. It tells how Ishtar was tricked by jealous men and made prisoner in the caves of the underworld. She was kept in darkness, away from the sun, to make her weak. Her powers were stolen so that the men who had imprisoned her might live as gods, never aging and never falling ill. And because of this the lands that had been nourished by her dried up and everything died.” The top cover of the rifle and the recoil spring were carefully laid in turn on his keffiyeh.

“But the story also tells that when time reaches the end of its long road Ishtar will escape from the darkness and return again, bringing back the water so the land may be reborn.” He blew hard into the firing chamber, inspected inside then did the same with the other parts he had removed. “And you brought the water, that is why they call you Ishtar.”

Liv laughed. “I’m an unemployed, homeless reporter from New Jersey. Does that sound like a goddess to you?” She stood up and stretched the kinks out of her back. “Listen, you said yesterday you could take me anywhere I wanted to go. You think you could take me as far as the Turkish border?”

“If you wish,” he said, snicking his rifle together again with impressive speed and smacking the magazine into place. “But first, let me show you something.” He rose from the ground and slung the rifle over his back, heading around the perimeter fence to where the holding pits had been dug. They had been intended to catch the overspill of crude oil from the central well but were now brimming with water. Tariq helped Liv up the side of one of the banks and pointed past the edge of the second pit. “There,” he said. “You see it?”

From her elevated position Liv saw how the water had breached the holding pits in several places, creating rivulets that snaked away across the baked earth, carving new channels as they went.

“The blood is flowing back into the land,” Tariq said. “And see”—he pointed along the edge of the water—“the land is starting to live again.”

All along the banks of the new rivers, green shoots were bristling. “See there, we call that Ya’did or skeleton weed. And there, you see those tiny yellow flowers?”

“Groundsel,” Liv said. “And that is Artemisia, or some other sort of ephemeral grass; and that looks like a tamarisk seedling.”

Tariq turned to her, smiling. “You see, you know the plants, you can name them all.”

Liv shook her head. “Don’t read too much into it. My dad was a horticulturalist and I had no mother, so I grew up digging and planting instead of playing with dolls; I’ve got dirt in my blood.” She followed the lines of the water to where the heat rippled the air. In the distance a column of dust was rising, another illusion to raise her hopes that Gabriel might be returning. She stared at it, waiting for it to melt away like her hopes always did. Only this one didn’t. “Someone’s coming,” she said, hope swelling in her chest.

Tariq looked up and saw it, his chin rising too, as if he was sniffing the air. “Horses,” he said, “many horses.”

“Yours?” Liv gazed at the distant dust as if her eyes were the only things keeping it there, hoping maybe that the riders had gone looking for Gabriel and were now bringing him back.

“Maybe,” Tariq said, his hand unconsciously drifting to the shoulder strap of his rifle. “We should get back to the compound — I have a bad feeling about this.”

16

By the time Liv and Tariq made it back inside the compound the approaching dust cloud was clearly visible in the sky and everyone had emerged from the silver-sided buildings and gathered by the central pool, all eyes looking in the same direction, waiting for whatever was heading their way to arrive. With everyone gathered together like this, Liv realized how few of them were left. She counted thirteen including herself — a mixture of oil workers and a couple of the riders who had stayed along with Tariq.

“Thirty riders!” a voice called from halfway up the steps to one of the guard towers. “Maybe more.”

“Ours?” Tariq called back.

There was a pause as the man reached the top and raised a pair of field glasses to his eyes. “No,” he shouted down, “not ours.”

Tariq snapped to attention like a shotgun being closed. “Close the gates,” he barked at a startled-looking rigger still wearing his white work overalls. “NOW!” He watched the rigger scurry off then called back up to the watchtower. “How long until they get here?”

“Five minutes, maybe less. They’re riding pretty hard.” The man paused again and stared through the field glasses. “They have guns.”

Tariq turned to the assembled few. “Who knows how to operate the fifty-caliber cannons?” He was met with silence and a ring of frightened faces. “What about rifles — can anyone fire a rifle?” A couple of drill technicians put their hands up nervously. “Good, go and get weapons from the locker in the transport hangar and push some of the vehicles outside to give us cover. We’ll use that as a fallback position and try and keep them at bay using the tower guns if we need to.”

Liv looked on with a sense of detachment. Part of her felt anxious about the approaching men and what their intentions might be, but another, stronger part felt that preparing to meet potential violence with more violence was the wrong move. The land wasn’t even theirs and neither was the water running out of it.

“Stop!” she said. “This is wrong, this is not how it is supposed to be. We should not fight. We should welcome them.”

Tariq looked at her as if she had gone mad. “But they are riding here at speed and they are armed. Their intentions are clear I think.”

“And what of our intentions — if we meet them with closed gates and pointed guns, what does that say about us?”

“It says we are strong and we are prepared to defend what is ours.”

“But this isn’t ours. A few days ago I had never even set foot here and neither had you. And now you are prepared to take men’s lives and risk your own for it? Doesn’t that strike you as insane?”

“It is the way of things. It has always been the way of things.”

“But things can change. People can change. Open the gates and put down your guns. Whatever happens is meant to happen. Nothing here is worth fighting for. And nothing here is worth dying for either.”

17

Shepherd drove through the barrier and back into Quantico a little after midnight, just as the storm was finally blowing itself out. Franklin had been on the phone most of the way. He’d called O’Halloran first to give him a pared-down headline account of what they’d discovered at Marshall, then spent the rest of the time liaising with the tech guys who had finished processing Kinderman’s office and were now heading back. Shepherd drove squinting through the spray and the darkness, trying to glean what he could from Franklin’s half of the conversations and wondering what would happen when they got back to base.

The van was already parked up by the laboratories when Shepherd pulled up next to it and shut off the engine.

“Thank you, driver,” Franklin said. “That will be all.” He slid out of his seat and was already halfway to the entrance before Shepherd managed to fumble his own door open.

“What do I do now?” he called after him.

Franklin didn’t look back. “I want your report on my desk by 0800. After that you’re free to return to your training.”

Shepherd got a sinking feeling in his gut. He had suffered Franklin’s disdain all the way through the few short hours he’d been on this investigation that he hadn’t wanted to be assigned to in the first place, but now, as it was about to be taken away from him… he desperately wanted to remain part of it.

He took a step forward, aware that Franklin was about to walk through the door. “Maybe I should take a look at Dr. Kinderman’s hard drive.” Franklin stopped but didn’t turn around. “I can help sort through the data. Sift through the e-mails and the technical stuff to look for anything unusual. It’s bound to be full of astronomical terms and acronyms that could easily confuse someone unfamiliar with the jargon.”

Franklin grabbed the handle, pulled open the door and stepped through without saying a word.

Shepherd watched it slowly swing shut: closing on his last chance. He was about to turn and walk back to the dorms when Franklin reappeared around the edge of the door. “Report on my desk by 0800, Agent Shepherd,” he said. “Until then your time is your own. So if you’d rather spend it staring at a computer screen than getting some shut-eye then maybe there’s hope for you yet.” Then he shot him the smile and was gone.

18

Liv felt the ground tremble as the riders poured through the open gates and quickly surrounded them on all sides. She kept her eyes fixed on the lead horseman who halted the line with his upheld hand and trotted on alone on his pale horse. He removed his keffiyeh as he approached, revealing a dust-rimed face burned almost black around the eyes by years in the fierce desert sun.

“See who is with them,” Tariq whispered.

Liv scanned the line of riders and saw Malik smiling back at her. It was he who probably brought them here, though for what reason she could only guess at. She stepped forward, opened her arms and smiled. “Welcome,” she said in fluent Arabic that surprised the rider. “You must be thirsty after your long ride, your horses too.”

The rider looked down from his lofty position and circled her slowly, scrutinizing her down the curve of his long nose. She could smell the dust and dung of his panting horse, feel the heat radiating from its damp flanks as it was brought to a halt in front of her. The rider turned to his men. “I was hoping Ishtar would have more meat on her,” he said loudly.

The riders erupted in laughter, Malik included.

He turned back, his lined face now split in a smile of his own to reveal an incomplete set of long, broken teeth. “You don’t look much like a goddess to me.”

Liv smiled, her eyes flicking to Malik then back to the rider. “You shouldn’t believe everything people tell you.”

“Are you calling me a fool?”

“No. Why don’t you tell me your name, then I can call you that.”

He leaned forward, his worn saddle creaking beneath his shifting weight. “They call me Azra’iel. You know what that means?”

It was an odd quality of her new fluency with language that she often saw images rather than meanings, and felt the words rather than interpreted them. Azra’iel. A picture formed in Liv’s head of huge black wings and she felt fear. “It means ‘Angel of Death.’ ”

The broken smile returned. “Maybe you are a goddess after all.” His hand passed across strips of bright ribbons on his chest and in a movement too fast to register Liv found herself staring down the barrel of a pistol. “Maybe I put a bullet in your brain to find out.”

Before Liv could react Tariq stepped in front of her, shielding her body with his. “Take it,” he said. “It’s the water you want, you do not have to kill to get it.”

“Do not tell me what I want. No one tells Azra’iel what he wants.”

“It’s okay,” Liv said in English, moving from behind him, doing her best to ignore the gun as it swung back to point at her.

“What are you — American? English?” the rider said, picking up on the switch in language.

“American. I’m from New Jersey.”

Azra’iel sat high in his saddle and swept his arm across the desert landscape. “This is where I am from. My family has lived on this land for two thousand years. We have seen the great caliphs come and go, then the Mongols, and then the Turks.” He jabbed the barrel of his gun at the ribbons on his chest. “Saddam Hussein gave me these himself for defending his republic against the American invaders, but he was an idiot and now he is dead. I was not fighting for him, I was fighting for the land. And now the land belongs to me.”

Liv held his gaze and slowly shook her head. “The land does not belong to any man,” she said. “It is we who belong to the land.”

“You are wrong, goddess. It belongs to any man who will fight for it — this is what my people have learned — and you did not fight.”

“No. We welcomed you. We invited you to share it, in peace. Isn’t that a better way?”

The jagged smile returned. “Better for me.” He turned away and raised his voice so all could hear. “This oasis is ours now. I give you a choice. You can leave or you can die. You have two minutes to fill your canteens. I advise you to take as much as you can. The desert is not as friendly or as welcoming as your goddess.” He turned his horse and started walking it away.

“We could fall back to the transport shed,” Tariq whispered. “There are guns there. We could make a stand. Or if we make a diversion when we head through the gates I think I might be able to make it to the top of one of the towers and turn the big guns on them.”

“Then what? Bury the bodies, wait for the next group of people to show up and kill them too?”

“What else can we do? We won’t last two days out in the desert without water. Better to fight and maybe die here quickly than slowly out there in the furnace.”

“Better not to die at all,” she said.

“You have something else in mind?”

She swept her hand through the water, her fingers dragging through the cool, wet earth at the bottom, remembering the symbols on the Starmap. “No,” she said, watching the swirls of earth eddying in the clear water, turning it a dusty red. There was something familiar about all this, she had seen something like it in the stone. She tried to concentrate on it and bring it to the front of her mind, but it continued to elude her, like something glimpsed at the edge of her vision. “If you want to go, then go,” she said, turning to Tariq. “I’m sure you could make it to Al-Hillah on foot before the thirst takes hold.”

“What about you?”

She glanced up at the grave site, visible through the line of riders and the chain-link fence. “I’m staying here,” she said, “or as close as I can manage without getting shot.”

Her hand passed through the water again, sending larger clouds of red mud spreading in it as she stood and walked toward the riders.

“Good-bye, Malik,” she said as she passed through the line.

His smile faltered and he made as if to reply but she was already gone, striding toward the open gate and out into the desert without once looking back to see if anyone was following her.

19

The National Cyber Crime Task Force was buried deep in the Maryland bedrock and housed a huge bank of central databases that fed the entire law enforcement network as well as hard drives and backup files relating to hundreds of thousands of cases — everything from simple Internet scams and corporate fraud to online pedophile rings and major terrorist networks.

The main machine room was practically deserted by the time Shepherd stepped into its air-conditioned gloom. He had stopped to splash water on his face and grab something to eat after Franklin had failed to make good on his offer to buy him a burger, wolfing down a doughnut and a cup of coffee on his way over. No food or drink was allowed in the cyber crimes labs. A seated figure was silhouetted against three large flat-screen monitors on the far side of the room, his fingers punching code into a keyboard so fast it sounded like tap dancing. He turned at the sound of Shepherd’s approach and smiled a greeting. “Agent Franklin said you’d be along.”

Agent Smith was one of the senior instructors in the cyber crimes division. There was a rumor that did the rounds each year that the Agent Smith of the Matrix movies had been based on him and there was certainly more than a passing physical resemblance — same dark hair receding from a widow’s peak, same sharp features on top of a whip-thin frame — but that was as far as the comparison went. The real Agent Smith was just about the friendliest instructor in the building, generous with his time and endlessly patient with those who were never going to pound the cyber beat but needed to understand enough to pass the module anyway.

“I’ve set you up with a ghost file,” he said, nodding at the terminal to the right of his.

Shepherd sat at the desk and assessed the data. In cyber crime there are two types of evidence: physical and digital. Physical evidence is the actual hardware itself. Often in the chain of evidence it has to be shown that a suspect has used a certain computer, so fingerprints or even microscopic flakes of skin beneath the keys of keyboards are sought to prove it. Digital evidence is different. Files and directories can be cloned or copied and worked on by several teams of people at once to crunch the data faster. These clones are called ghost files and Shepherd was looking at one now, an exact copy of everything on Dr. Kinderman’s hard drive. “Find anything yet?” he asked.

Smith continued to machine-gun code into his terminal. “The most interesting thing I’ve found so far is nothing.” He hit a key and folders started opening, rippling down his main screen like a deck of cards, every single one of them empty. “Everything you would expect is there up until eight months ago, then there’s nothing at all. No directories, no subdirectories, no caches. Whoever cleaned this out really knew what they were doing.”

Shepherd had been hanging on to the hope that Smith would find something in Dr. Kinderman’s personal files, an e-mail, or a virus that had originated elsewhere with a pathway that might give them a new lead. But the efficiency and skill with which the drive had been forensically wiped just threw more suspicion on Kinderman. “You want me to start checking through the older data, see what I can find?”

“You can if you want but I think it will be a waste of time. Anyone this thorough is unlikely to have left anything behind — I’m pretty sure anything incriminating on the drives would have been in the chunk of data that’s now missing. I was just about to run it through CARBON, see what that throws up.” He hit return and a progress bar popped up on the screen, then he sat back with a small grin on his face that had “ask me” written all over it.

“What’s CARBON?” Shepherd obliged.

“That is something very confidential that I can divulge to you only now that you’re a serving special agent. But what I am about to tell you does not get mentioned in the classroom, understood?” Shepherd nodded.

“Back in the typewriter days, before photocopiers even, the only way you could get an exact copy of a typed document was to sandwich carbon paper between two blank sheets. The force of the typewriter letters striking the top sheet would leave a carbon trace on the bottom one, producing a copy. This application does a similar thing. It records keystrokes, only the user doesn’t know anything about it. In fact very few people do.

“After nine-eleven, when homeland security became the number one priority and the usual concerns for civil rights and privacy went out the window, the U.S. government cut a very high-level deal with all the major computer chip manufacturers. Not sure if you know this but ninety-nine percent of all the world’s microchips are made in South Korea. So you can imagine, having the American government in your corner when you’ve got North Korea as a neighbor must have been a powerful persuader in the discussions. Anyway, the deal was simple. All they had to do in exchange for Uncle Sam’s undying gratitude and future unspecified favors was to modify their product a little. Ever since then, each new chip produced has an extra partition of memory built into it that doesn’t show up on any directory and can only be accessed by certain approved law enforcement agencies with the right software.” He pointed at the progress bar on the screen as it closed in on 100 %. “CARBON. Basically, they created the ultimate in spyware. Normal virus protection doesn’t even see it because it’s not code, it’s built right into the hardware.”

The progress bar disappeared and a document opened, crammed solid with words and numbers. “The data is pretty raw,” he said, his fingers resuming their tap routine, “and because of the covert nature of the technology the memory cache is relatively small to keep it hidden, so it has to constantly dump old data to keep recording new stuff, just like media discs on security cameras. Usually it holds about a week’s worth of activity. I’m just going to run a filter to split the data out a little and pick out any hot or unusual high-frequency words.” He executed a new command and another window popped open. “This is where you can make yourself useful.”

Shepherd leaned in as words started to appear in the window, gleaned from the raw data. He recognized almost all of them. “Ophiuchus is a constellation,” he said, working his way down the growing list. “Andromeda is a galaxy and all those long numbers beginning with PGC are from the Principal Galaxy Catalog. Red-Shift is an astronomical term for what happens to distant light…”

They continued in this way for several minutes, Smith highlighted everything Shepherd recognized until they reached the bottom of the list and Smith hit delete to get rid of all the isolated words. There were now just two remaining:

Shepherd fished a notebook from his pocket and flipped back through the entries he had made at Goddard. There was the T again in the last entry Dr. Kinderman had made in his diary:

A thought struck him, something about the T and what it might mean in relation to Hubble. He found the contact numbers he had taken down and dialed one, checking the time as he waited for it to connect. The line clicked a few times before a ring tone cut in. Shepherd held his breath as he waited for someone to answer.

20

Two floors above Shepherd, Franklin sat in a small office, door closed, his face illuminated by a different computer screen.

During his more than twenty years’ service in the Bureau he had learned a lot about himself. He knew he wasn’t the most instinctive of investigators, didn’t have the genius he had seen in some to ask exactly the right question at exactly the right time and had never been the one in a midnight incident room to make the single connection that pulled everything together. But he was dogged and he knew people. He could tap them like a tuning fork and listen to the sound they made. He always knew when the note was wrong, and right now, with Shepherd, it was screeching like nails on a blackboard.

On the screen in front of him were Shepherd’s Bureau application forms and résumé. He had been scouring them for the last twenty minutes, cross-checking the missing two years against social security records, credit-scoring agencies, anything that might give him a steer on where Shepherd was and what he had been doing. So far the only small discrepancy he had found was on the standard questionnaire for national security positions. There was a new addition to the form, a declaration of faith, added by a Republican government riding high on the wave of post 9/11 hysteria. The Democrats had fought it, citing it as a dangerous erosion of the Constitution and its separation of religion and state, but the Republicans maintained that it would help identify Muslim candidates whose background and cultural knowledge could prove insightful in the war on terror. The bill had just squeaked through, but only after a compromise had agreed that the new section should be optional and no candidate could be penalized for not filling it in. Shepherd had exercised that option and left his blank.

This in itself was unremarkable, but in Franklin’s experience the only people who chose not to fill in the faith section were atheists. Shepherd’s résumé showed he had spent several years at a hard-core Catholic boarding school and yet he hadn’t ticked the box declaring himself to be Catholic. It was a small point but it added to Franklin’s distrust of him. There was something hardwired into his DNA that could not allow him to entirely trust anyone who did not, in one way or another, have a healthy fear of God. It was one of the central tenets of the Irish, whispered down to him on whiskey breath by his father and uncles when they were swaying with patriotism for a country none of them had ever set foot in: never trust a man who does not have God in his heart, and never trust a man who will not take a drink with you.

He sat back in his chair, reaching for his phone.

Thinking about his da’ had tugged at something inside him. Maybe it was Christmas and the usual guilt that came with that. It was too late to call so he scrolled down the contacts list to the entry for Marie and opened up a blank text:

He pressed send and watched the message go. It was odd that he still thought of the house as home even though he didn’t live there anymore.

He’d closed all the files, shut down the terminal and was pulling his jacket off the back of the chair when his phone buzzed. Marie had gotten straight back to him.

Franklin read the words and felt the ache inside him twist a little more. She was right of course, but he’d gotten tired of apologizing to her a long time ago. He slipped his jacket on and headed for the nearest exit, swapping the phone for a crumpled packet of Marlboros. Another bad habit he had been trying for a long time to quit.

21

“Hubble Flight Team.”

The line was noisy and Shepherd covered his other ear so he could hear better. “Merriweather?”

“Speaking.”

“It’s Agent Shepherd. Where are you?”

“I’m at Goddard. I’ve stepped out for some air and patched my calls through to my cell in case anyone needed me. How can I help?”

“Before the attack you said Hubble was exploring a piece of thin space in the constellation of Taurus.”

“That’s right.”

“What do you use as shorthand for Taurus?”

There was a pause. “If I was writing it down I’d use the astrological sign, a circle with two horns.”

“Not the letter T?”

“No.”

“What if you were typing it?”

“If I was typing it I would put in the whole word, or maybe just the first few letters and then predictive text would do the rest.”

Shepherd wrote “T” and “TAURUS” in his notebook and added a large question mark after them. “What about MALA?” He spelled it.

“Nothing, sorry. What are these in relation to?”

“They showed up in some raw data we recovered from Dr. Kinderman’s computer. It’s probably nothing but we have to check.” Shepherd wrote “MALA” in his notebook and added a question mark after that too. “Thanks, Merriweather. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“No problem. Listen, if you find anything else let me know, I’m as eager to get to the bottom of this as anyone…”

“I’m sure you are.”

“… and you can always get me at this number. I’ll keep it patched through to my cell and leave it switched on just in case, though I’m planning on sleeping at my desk until either Hubble comes back online or someone forces me out of here at gunpoint.”

Shepherd smiled. “I’m sure of that too. You take care, Merriweather. We’ll sort this thing out, one way or another.” He put the phone down just as the door opened on the far side of the room and footsteps approached.

“Found anything?” Franklin’s voice boomed across the empty space.

No, Shepherd thought.

“Yes,” Smith said, cheerful as ever. “We recovered some CARBON data, and Agent Shepherd has been helping me sort through it.”

“Good for Agent Shepherd — anything useful?”

Shepherd looked down at his notes. “We found a couple of unusual words. I think the T might refer to Taurus but I have no idea what MALA means.”

“Interesting.” Franklin leaned forward in a wash of coffee and cigarette smoke. “Watch and learn, rookie.” He clicked on Google and typed MALA into the search window, hit return and pages of results popped up. “Sometimes the simple, direct route gets the best results.” He clicked on the top hit and a Wikipedia page opened up.

Shepherd turned to Franklin, who was smiling his trademark smile. “If you’d paid a little more attention you would have seen the Mala mentioned more than once in those old newspapers we found back in Kinderman’s pad. I told you the Bureau got involved. They were the terrorist group blamed for the attacks on the Citadel in Ruin.”

Shepherd turned back and continued to read.

Shepherd bristled at this last word. “The letter sent to Kinderman was signed Novus Sancti.”

Franklin nodded. “Looks like the religious angle is starting to fly. Read on.”

Shepherd sat back in his chair. “The letter also called Kinderman a member of the occult tribe.”

“Which would explain why Kinderman was targeted by religious freaks, though not why he would sabotage Hubble.” Franklin turned to Smith. “Can you dig anything else out of Kinderman’s drive? Maybe the context of these words will give us something to go on.”

Smith hammered in more commands, so hard that Shepherd wondered how many keyboards he went through a year. He hit return and the program went to work.

Shepherd looked down at the question marks in his notebook, feeling that his usefulness to the investigation was slipping away. He was already thinking of the report he would have to write before dawn and getting through the next day of classes having had no sleep.

“Looks like he was talking to someone,” Franklin said.

Shepherd looked up and read the new messages.

“It’s network mail,” Shepherd said, recognizing the repeated number as a directory code. “It’s an encrypted, stripped-down version of e-mail they use to share data between different departments and facilities. He was talking to someone else at NASA.” He grabbed the desk phone, hit redial and put it on speakerphone so everyone could hear. This time it barely rang before being picked up.

“Hubble Flight Team.”

“Merriweather, Shepherd again. Do you have a network mail directory handy?”

There was a pause punctuated by the muffled rattle of a keyboard. “Yeah, I got it.”

“Could you tell me who has the directory code 408?”

Three muffled taps then a louder one. “That’s Professor Douglas.”

Shepherd felt the ground fall away beneath him. “Joseph Douglas?”

“Who else.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“You need anything else?”

Franklin leaned over. “This is Agent Franklin. Please do not mention this conversation to anyone. Not even Chief Pierce, understood?”

“You got it.” Franklin disconnected before Merriweather could say anything else, picked up the handset and dialed the number for transport. “Looks like I’ll be heading back to Goddard with an arrest warrant.”

“Professor Douglas isn’t at Goddard,” Shepherd said, “he’s at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. That’s where they’re testing all the components of the James Webb Space Telescope prior to launch. Professor Douglas is in charge of the whole project.”

Franklin’s face went dark as he registered the implications. “This is Franklin,” he barked down the phone at whoever answered. “I need a ride, as soon as humanly possible, to fly me as close to Huntsville, Alabama, as possible.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Make yourself useful, Shepherd, find me the name of whoever is head of security at Marshall and get him on the phone.”

“You should take me with you.”

Franklin looked genuinely amused. “Really? And why’s that?”

“Because I know Professor Douglas,” Shepherd replied, sensing that the door closing on his part of the investigation might just be starting to open again. “I used to be his student.”

22

Carrie perched on the edge of one of the sunken motel beds, watching Eli sleeping on the other. There wasn’t much to the room: a bulky air-con unit built into the window; a fifties-style table with cuss words carved into it and two mismatched chairs swamped beneath their drying camo jackets. They were pushed up against the solitary wall heater, steaming slightly and filling the trapped, mildewed air in the room with the fresh, wet smell of the forest.

The phone lay next to her on the worn bedspread. She could never sleep when she was waiting for new orders. It was a limbo state she had never relaxed into, something that came with command. The grunts could always sleep like babies, but the officers and NCOs were like parents, with all the responsibility and worry that came with that.

Outside, the rain had settled into a steady drumming, like the noise Humvee tires made over a decent blacktop. The only other sound came from an antique TV set bolted high on a wall. When they had first come into the room and switched it on it had been tuned to a porno channel, the unmistakable fake panting making her fumble for a button to cut the sound or change the channel. She hadn’t been quick enough. The screen had briefly flashed pink with the urgency of flesh before she managed to turn it off. Neither of them mentioned what they had seen, though she knew it had chimed with something unspoken in both of them. The TV was now tuned to a local news station, the volume on low, in case anything came up that might be relevant or useful.

She glanced at Eli’s sleeping form, feeling the frustration that, even though they were alone in this seedy motel room with the caved-in mattresses whispering of all the things they denied themselves, their still unfulfilled mission was keeping them apart. She just wanted it to be over so they could get married and finally be together, to face the coming judgment as man and wife, blessed in the eyes of God.

Eli let out a small sound, like a frightened animal. Eight times out of ten he would jolt himself awake, staring around for the horrors that came out to play when he slept. When she’d first met him in the mission hospital outside Kandahar, he couldn’t sleep at all without screaming himself awake, so this was an improvement. He was getting better and it was she who was making him so. If she had enough time she would heal him completely, but she wasn’t sure how much time they had left.

The phone rang and she pounced on it, rising from the bed and moving away to the farthest corner of the room.

“Hello.” She faced the wall and kept her voice low so as not to wake Eli.

“You were right about the people you saw,” Archangel’s voice hummed in the earpiece. “They were FBI.”

Carrie let this sink in. It would make their job harder, but not impossible. They just needed to find Kinderman before the feds did, and Archangel would help with that. She was still in awe of the reach of the network she was only one tiny part of. Archangel had contacts like you wouldn’t believe. She turned and saw Eli, his eyes open now and looking at her with the glassy mix of fear and suspicion he often carried with him from his dreams. She smiled and blew him a silent kiss. “You want us to keep our ear to the ground, see what we can find out?”

“No. I want you to get a few hours’ sleep and then pull out. The Lord has many enemies and the Devil never sleeps. But I have a new target for you, a new sacrifice to make, one just as important as the one that got away.” Carrie leaned forward, anxious to hear what he had to say, a calmness flowing through her like it always did when she finally got a new mission. “How quickly do you think you can get to the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama?”

23

The C-130 bumped and lurched as the wheels lifted from the tarmac of Turner’s Field. Shepherd was strapped tight into a jump seat facing inward in the paratrooper position, the sound of the twin props filling his ears and vibrating through his entire body as they struggled to grab hold of the slippery air.

They were in what was known as a Bubird, part of the Bureau’s varied and colorful fleet of mostly confiscated aircraft. The C-130 was generally used for transport rather than passengers, but this had happened to be the one gassed up and ready to go when Franklin put in the call. It had previously belonged to a Mexican drug cartel, the pilot had cheerfully told Shepherd as they were prepping for takeoff. The Mexicans had obviously stripped the interior to the bare fuselage in order to cram in as much product as possible. So far no one had deemed it necessary to put any of those little comforts back in again — things like soundproofing or heating or padding for the sharp, metal-edged seats that were already cutting off the circulation below his knees. He adjusted his position in a vain attempt to get more comfortable, hugging to his chest the field laptop Agent Smith had given him and wrapping the shoulder strap around his hand for extra security.

They started to bank to starboard, into the weather over the Chesapeake Bay, and the plane shook in protest, dipping and yawing as the wind batted it around like a kid’s toy.

Franklin was strapped into an identical chair directly opposite. He had the visor down on his flight helmet, so Shepherd couldn’t tell whether he was looking at him or not. Shepherd felt pretty sure Franklin would can him from the investigation at the first opportunity and send him straight back to Quantico, exhausted and way behind on his work. At least it was nearly Christmas, so he could catch up over the break when everyone else went home.

Home

He closed his eyes and did his best to zone out of the hellish flight, remembering back to a time when the word home had almost meant something to him. His folks were already old when they had him — a mistake, his aunt had said, but then she said a lot of mean things. They died within months of each other when he was five years old. What little he could still remember of them played out like scratchy fragments of an old newsreel: his father, cowed and frail, sitting alone at the dinner table, his weak eyes magnified behind foggy glasses, always fixed on an open book in front of him; his mother, staring out of the kitchen window, a slender cigarette pointing out at who knew what, looking like she envied the smoke for being able to drift away and escape. They were aged beyond their years: she from the cigarettes she could never give up, he from a life of worn-down disappointment.

Shepherd got his brains from his dad, who had burned through books as fast as his mother went through Virginia Slims. His father always worked several jobs at once and one of them was always a night-watchman position, so he could do his rounds and then read in solitude and quiet. When his heart gave out, a couple of months after his mother’s lungs had done the same, it was discovered that he had been smart enough to hide some of his income from his wife and stick it in policies in his son’s name. The will made his aunt his guardian and stipulated that all of the money — bar a small lump sum for his aunt — was to be held in trust and used only to pay for his education. Furious perhaps at the sum her brother had managed to save and the relatively small amount left to her, the aunt sent him — the son of her atheist brother — to the strictest religious institution she could find, an overly fancy boarding school, which took him away from what blood relatives remained and introduced him to a new kind of loneliness.

There is something particularly cruel about tossing a poor boy into a moneyed environment. They called him “the Nigger,” though he was as white as they were — which told you as much about them and their world as it did about him and his situation.

There had been nothing nurturing about St. Matthew the Apostle: no kindly principal who saw and encouraged his potential; no tight-knit group of friends looking out for one another and bound together by their otherness. He had been on his own from the moment he stepped through the grand, arched doors.

He had withdrawn into his studies, the one area where he could take them on: in math and science in particular it didn’t matter how much money your daddy had, only whether you got the questions right. There was also much less chance of being cornered and beaten up in the study rooms because there was — almost always — a tutor present. But for all this misery, there was one good thing that had come out of St. Matthew’s. It was here that he had discovered and fallen in love with the stars.

In the summer he would crawl out onto the flat lead roof of the dormitory building, away from the “night patrols” of his tormentors, and sleep there instead. Lying with his back against the soft metal, still warm from the heat of the sun, he would gaze up at the speckled dark, picking out patterns in the distant points of light. Study time from then on had new material to fill it. When the classwork was done he scoured the library for books on astronomy and devoured their contents, putting names to the patterns until he could lie on the cooling roof, look up at the night sky and name it all. That had felt something like home to him: warm and safe and far away from people, taking comfort in objects that were millions of light-years away while the trapped heat of the nearest star warmed him in the cold night.

The true extent of his aunt’s revenge only became apparent when he started looking at colleges. It was then that he discovered the fees at the hateful school she had chosen for him had been so high he had already burned through all the money that should have seen him through college and beyond. This was when he found NASA’s graduate program.

College was the first time he’d encountered a tribe of people who didn’t all seem to hate him. This had felt like home, for a while — though whenever the holidays came around and everyone went back to their real homes he was reminded of how temporary it all was. He started volunteering for every graduate-work placement going just to keep himself busy in the quiet times until NASA became a sort of home too, with its womblike control centers and extended family of obsessives.

But in truth he had only ever experienced what he imagined home was supposed to feel like just once in his life. And the truly surprising thing was, it turned out not to be a place at all. He pictured her now—Melisa. Meeting her had been like coming home. Only with her had he ever felt able to let his carefully constructed defenses down. Only with Melisa could he truly be himself, with no apology and no pretense. She made him feel better as a person than he knew he really was. And then she had gone.

The C-130 rose up into a cloud bank and the shaking increased as furious turbulence took hold of the tin-can plane. Shepherd’s eyes opened in instinctive alarm. Franklin was smiling straight back at him. The smile broke and his lips moved, the scratchy sound of his voice cutting through the howl of the engines and rumbling through the comms into his head. “Anytime you want to share your confession with me, Agent Shepherd, I’ll be more’n happy to listen.”

Shepherd looked away.

Goddamn if he wasn’t a mind reader too.

He hugged the laptop tighter as the bucking plane continued to try everything it could to jerk it free. Right now it was the most precious thing in his life, that and the opportunity fate had given him. He had thought it would take months, even years, before he would get proper access to the vast resource that was the FBI missing persons file. So when Agent Smith had handed him the field unit and set him up with a temporary Bureau user ID it was like getting the keys to the kingdom. Every single law enforcement agency worth a damn, domestic and foreign, was linked in on some level to the FBI’s MPD database. In terms of looking for someone who had slipped off the map it was like going from pinning photocopied sheets to a community notice board, to sticking a full-page ad on the front cover of every newspaper in the Western world.

But he would have to be very careful: usage was strictly monitored. He would have to try and work his way around the monitoring software if he wanted to avoid getting canned from the Bureau before he had barely stepped through the door. And abusing agency privileges and access was also a felony. But there was another problem. The level of clearance he had been given by Smith was directly linked to the urgency and importance of the investigation he had been assigned to. The moment he was taken off it, all those privileges would be removed. His window of opportunity was very small and closing fast. It might take him years to regain this sort of clearance, by which time Melisa’s trail would be colder still. He felt closer to her now, bouncing around in this cloud, than he had in long months.

He turned his head to the front of the plane in time to see the nose break through the clouds, revealing the stars in the clear night. The turbulence melted away almost instantly and his arms relaxed around the laptop — but only a little.

He could sense that Franklin was still smiling at him but he did not look in his direction. He might tell him the story of his lost years one day, but not yet. Not until he had learned the ending for himself. Until then, he would do his level best to stay on the investigation for as long as he could. So he closed his eyes and sifted through what he knew, trying to work out the links between a missing Nobel laureate, nearly a year’s worth of lost space data and something that had happened in the city of Ruin eight months earlier.

24

Gabriel slipped across the Orontes River, marking the border between Syria and Turkey, just after midnight on the fifth day. He had walked his horse for much of the way, resting it during the heat of the days and wary of the dry dust kicked up by galloping hooves. Several times he had spotted patrols in the distance and pulled the horse to the ground, lying beside it until they had passed, shivering despite the desert heat and the fever that rose and fell inside him like lava.

During the nights he had shivered from real cold as the chill of space settled back on the earth, the crackle and boom of distant battles showing him where the civil war raged so he could steer a course around it. He rode harder then, his way lit only by the stars and his desire to keep going.

At the height of his fever, rocked almost unconscious by the movement of his horse across the vast desert, he had imagined his father riding with him, pointing out the spots of long-ago battles and bringing forth the ghosts of those who had died here. Ottoman sultans, Persian caliphates, Roman emperors, Alexander the Great, they had all fought for a land no man could ever really own. St. Paul had walked here too, converting to Christianity on the long road to Damascus, moving away from the very place Gabriel was trying so hard to get to.

By the time he reached the river marking the end of Syria and the beginning of Turkey, he was half dead from the disease that consumed him from within and half frozen from the cold. He found a spot between two checkpoints and slipped into the dark night river, clinging to the swimming horse as if he were crossing the Styx and the horse was the only thing stopping him from drifting away into the underworld.

Not yet—he told himself and held on tighter—just a few more hours, then death could have him.

He rose with the horse, throwing his body over it so it lifted him clear of the river, then lay across its back, dripping and shivering, letting the horse drink for a long while before finally spurring it forward one last time.

The civil war had brought battalions of troops to the border, so he moved slowly at first, picking his way carefully past the military posts, before galloping the last fifty miles along the long, dusty tracks that ran for miles through the olive and pistachio groves.

He entered the city of Ruin as dawn was lightening the sky and the city was beginning to stir. Ahead of him he could see the Citadel rising sheer and black at the center of the city, so high the summit was lit by sunlight that had yet to rise above the rim of the surrounding mountains.

He kept to the center of the great wide boulevard running straight to the heart of the city and away from the early risers who stared mutely at this lone horseman moving past the cars and souvenir shops. He knew the Old Town, locked each night behind its portcullises and twenty-foot-thick walls, would be preparing to let the first tourists of the day inside. As soon as the sun peeped above the mountains and bathed the Old Town with light the gates would open and he would charge straight at them, relying on his appearance and the flying hooves to scatter the tourists. He would then ride to the top of the hill and ring the ascension bell at the Tribute dock, demanding that they pull him up and into the mountain. The monk Athanasius would know why he was there. They had to let him in. Just a few more minutes and his journey would be over.

He reached the end of the boulevard and cut across Suleiman Park toward the main public gate. It was the widest of all the entrances and would, he hoped, allow people to get out of his way when he charged at them. He didn’t want to hurt anyone and certainly didn’t want to touch anyone and risk passing on the fever that burned inside him.

He passed under the final tree, the foliage parting to reveal the Old Town wall. Then he saw them, two ghosts standing sentinel in shrouds of white. In his delirium he thought they must be visions of death, waiting to claim him, but as his horse carried him closer he saw that they were real.

The skull-like eyes of one turned to him then motioned to the other.

He heard the rustle of their sterile suits as they moved toward him, saw the hazmat chevrons and quarantine sign behind them, and realized — as exhaustion and defeat finally dragged him from his horse — that he was too late. The disease he had carried out of the Citadel, and traveled so far to bring back again, had already spread.

25

The transport plane dropped below the clouds barely two hundred feet above a field of whiteness so bright Shepherd had to squint to make out Redstone Army airfield with the space center beyond stretching all the way to the horizon.

“Pilot, you sure this is Alabama and not Alaska?” Franklin’s voice crackled through the drone of the engines.

“They got weather like this all over the South,” the pilot replied, “biggest dump since records began. Christmassy though, ain’t it? If it’s nice weather you wanted we should have flown north. Apparently they got a heat wave in Chicago. World’s gone crazy.”

“End of days,” Franklin muttered loud enough for Shepherd to hear. “Maybe Kinderman was on to something.”

The tires squealed against the frozen tarmac as they touched down on the cleared runway and the smell of scorched rubber seeped into the hold, making Shepherd feel slightly sick. He hadn’t slept all night, had barely eaten anything and the flight had been so bumpy he felt like he’d been beaten up.

“You think NASA might stand us a little breakfast?” Franklin asked, demonstrating again his uncanny knack of sniffing out a raw nerve and tweaking it.

“I can take you to the canteen,” Shepherd said, breathing in freezing air that smelled of rubber and trying hard not to think about the greasy piles of bacon and hash browns laid on each morning for the seven thousand space center personnel.

Franklin smiled. “In that case I’m actually glad I brought you along.”

The plane jerked to a stop with the same lack of grace as the rest of the flight and freezing air flooded the hold as the rear-loading ramp began to lower.

Outside, a Ford Explorer was waiting for them, its engine running and sending thick clouds of exhaust fumes past the NASA logo on the side. A man in a dark blue parka with a security badge stitched on the sleeve got out of the passenger door and stood with his hands crossed in front of him. He was a carbon copy of the security chief at Goddard: same solid weight-lifter’s build; same flat face; Shepherd bet he had the same neat office with a picture of his youthful self on the wall.

“Dave Ellery,” the man said, extending his hand to Franklin, who led the way down the ramp. “I’m chief of security here.” He wore gloves against the cold and didn’t bother taking them off when he shook hands. Not friendly at all. It was a territorial thing stemming from the fact that the FBI had cross-state jurisdiction and could take over an investigation if they decided to. No one likes meeting a bigger fish, especially in law enforcement. Ellery gestured to the rear doors and got back into the front-passenger seat without saying another word.

The inside of the basic Explorer was like five-star luxury after the plane. It was superheated, the seats were padded and Shepherd felt an ache in his fingers and toes as blood started working its way back into them.

“You fellas sure picked a day for it,” Ellery said, staring out from behind black shades at the white landscape.

“From what I heard they done hijacked your weather and shipped it off to Chicago,” Franklin said, subtly upping his southern accent to match Ellery’s. It was a technique they taught at Quantico called subject mirroring that implied kinship and helped promote trust, though Shepherd suspected it might be somewhat lost on the frosty security chief, who had probably done the same course.

“I didn’t mean just the weather,” Ellery said without elaborating.

“Bad day already?”

“I’ll say. I’m running short staffed and we’ve had to evacuate one of the research facilities because of a helium leak. You can’t mess with that stuff. Had to shut the entire building down.” He removed a box file from an attaché case by his feet and handed it to Franklin, in the backseat. “I dug out those documents you asked for.”

The word THREATS was written on the file in thick marker pen. Franklin opened it and slid out twelve clear plastic folders, each containing correspondence from a different month. JANUARY contained a one-page note typed on an old-fashioned typewriter that said:

“Course that’s just the physical stuff,” Ellery said. “We get ten times as much mail over the Internet. I can show you that in my office if you want.”

Franklin sorted through the plastic folders until he found one marked MAY, the month Dr. Kinderman had received his first card.

“Is it true what I heard, Hubble got knocked offline?” Ellery asked.

“That’s classified information. And whatever you heard we would ’preciate you keeping it under your hat, sir. You know how rumors can get in the way of an investigation.” Franklin’s accent was traveling down through Georgia and getting farther south all the time.

He handed JANUARY through APRIL to Shepherd and popped the fastener on MAY, carefully sliding out the contents to keep them in order. May had clearly been a bumper month for the crazies. Top of the pile was an almost illiterate letter written in crayon with some photos of astronauts stuck to it with their faces burned out by a cigarette. Below that was a photo of the Challenger shuttle exploding, with a future date and I WILL MAKE THIS HAPPEN AGEN written on it. The next item was a postcard with a Renaissance painting of the Tower of Babel on the front. Franklin showed it to Shepherd then flipped it over. On the back, in a familiar neat hand was written:

“You get any more like this?” Franklin held up the card and Ellery’s head swiveled around to see it.

“One a month since May, reg’lar as clockwork.”

“Was the professor bothered by them?”

“Not especially.”

“But he did see them?”

“Sure, they were addressed to him.”

“Did you mention them to Chief Pierce over at Goddard?”

Ellery snorted. “Why would I do that? Chief Pierce has his own fair share of nut jobs to deal with and I’m damn sure he don’t need any of mine.”

Franklin handed the remaining files to Shepherd, leaving himself with DECEMBER. “Did you get another one this month?”

“No. Matter of fact we did not.”

Franklin popped the fastener. “Don’t tell me, you got a letter instead, one that was typed but similar in tone.”

Ellery paused. “How did you know that?”

Franklin didn’t answer. He had already found the twin of the A5 manila envelope that had been sent to Kinderman. It was in its own plastic folder next to the letter it had contained. Franklin held it out so Shepherd could read it. It was identical to the first one except for one small detail.

“Least he didn’t call this one a Sodomite,” Franklin said so only Shepherd could hear. “You follow this up?” he asked Ellery.

“Of course. We take threats seriously here, no matter how strange, vague or misguided they may appear. I sent the original up to Langley, that one there is just a copy. I sent one of the postcards too.”

“They find anything?”

“Who knows? These things don’t rank too high on the ‘hurry up’ scale. Anything more important comes along — which is just about everything — stuff like this gets bumped to the bottom of the pile. Here we are, gentlemen.”

Shepherd looked up as the Explorer eased off the main road and approached the front of a mirrored building that reflected the sky, making it seem as if it was hardly there. Beyond it in the distance the launch towers rose above various research facility buildings that sprawled across the campus. One of them had a small crowd of people outside it wearing white, clean-room suits and was surrounded by parked emergency vehicles, their lights turning slowly.

“Is that where the helium leak happened?” Franklin asked.

“Yup, that’s the cryo lab — biggest vacuum-testing facility in the world. They got a test room there where they can suck every molecule of air right out of it and freeze it down to space temperatures. We use it to test all the expensive hardware before it gets launched, make sure it won’t break up in space.”

Something tightened in the pit of Shepherd’s empty stomach. “What are you testing in there now?”

“Mirrors.”

“What for?”

“Same thing we’ve been testing all year — James Webb.”

Franklin jerked forward in his seat. “Driver, you need to take us over there right now.”

“Now wait a second.” Ellery swiveled around. “This is my facility. You can’t just come here and start ordering people—”

“Yes I can,” Franklin said, cutting him off. “That’s exactly what I can do. Start driving, son.”

The driver obeyed, throwing the wheel over hard and sending the Explorer into a sharp U-turn. Ellery opened and closed his mouth like a landed fish but said nothing. Ahead of them the cryo lab swung back into view, leaking thick clouds of helium vapor as if the whole place was ready to blow.

“When did the leak happen?”

“The alarm went off ’bout a half hour ago.”

“And had you spoken to Professor Douglas by then?”

“Excuse me?”

“Had you told him we were coming?”

“No. I’d spoken to him but I didn’t say what it was about.”

“What did you say exactly?”

“I said some people had been asking for him, but I didn’t say who.”

“And when was this?”

“Just as soon as I got off the phone to you.”

Franklin shook his head. “Driver, you need to get us over there as fast as you can.” The Explorer lurched, pushing everyone back in their seats as the driver floored the accelerator.

“What the hell is this about anyway?” Ellery growled, trying to claw back a bit of authority.

“Those mirrors you’ve been testing, are they expensive by any chance, difficult to replace if they got broken?”

“They cost about fifteen million dollars apiece. They’re precision engineered and coated in gold. We got six of them in the chamber at the moment.”

“Really? Well, there’s a very real chance that right now, while everyone else is standing around outside, Professor Douglas is inside using his car keys to scratch his name on them.”

26

The speeding Explorer crunched to a stop just short of the building, sending the crowd of bunny-suited lab techs scattering. Franklin was out of the door before it had even stopped. Shepherd had clipped his safety belt on out of habit and was now cursing as he fumbled to release it. He opened the door and ran around the car, the freezing air like razors in his lungs.

Franklin stood to the side of the main entrance, listening. Shepherd noticed that he was holding his gun. He undid the buttons on his coat and reached for his own, falling in line behind Franklin and standing slightly away from the wall like he’d been taught. Franklin turned and beckoned Ellery over.

It all felt so familiar to Shepherd from his recent intensive training that he had to remind himself this was not a simulation and the bullets in his gun would not fire paint. Also, the man they were looking for with drawn guns was his old professor, a man he respected more than pretty much any of the long procession of people who had lined up to cram knowledge into his head. Professor Douglas, with his sharp, kind eyes and his Boy Scout enthusiasm. Professor Douglas who was a vegetarian because he couldn’t bear the thought of a living thing having to die on his behalf. Professor Douglas — suspected terrorist, wanted by the FBI.

Ellery joined them in a rustle of goose-down parka, his eyes darting around. Nervous. “Tell me about the building,” Franklin said, keeping his eyes on the door. “Where are the exits?”

“There’s this one and a fire exit out back.”

“You need to get someone there to cover it. What about inside? Tell me about the layout?”

“The layout is kind of tricky.”

“Then you’ll have to come with me. I don’t want to get lost in there. Shepherd, you cover the rear exit.”

“We’re going inside?” Ellery looked like he was going to pass out.

“I can guide us,” Shepherd said. “I worked in this building for a while. There’s a door leading away from the lobby to a changing room. From there you pass through a scrubbing station and an air lock to get to the central chamber. The coolants are fed into it from storage silos on the far side of the building. They come in through deep underground pipes to aid the insulation. If there’s a leak then it will probably be in the main chamber.” He looked at Ellery for confirmation. He badly wanted to go inside and be there when Franklin confronted Douglas, for the professor’s sake as much as anything.

Ellery nodded, all his earlier bravado now gone. “That’s about the size of things. You’ll need access codes for the doors but they’ll all be the same because the system is in evac mode. It’s star, four zeros then the hash key.”

Franklin nodded. “Okay. You go organize your men to cover the exits. We’ll go in the front and try and flush him out.”

Ellery nodded and hurried away. Shepherd watched him go, taking in the crowd beyond him — the emergency vehicles, the shivering people — his senses made sharp by adrenaline and fear. In the distance he noticed that the trees were heavy with snow and what looked like black fruit. A car door slammed and the fruit took flight, rising in the air like a column of living black smoke, thousands of migratory birds flying out of season and resting on trees that had never known snow. Nature turned on its head.

End of days.

“Ready?” Franklin said.

No, Shepherd thought. “Yep,” he said, turning back to the entrance and raising his gun.

“Good, ’cause you’re on point.” He stepped around and behind Shepherd so the front of his body was tight to Shepherd’s back—nuts to butts. “Cover and move,” he murmured, “just like in Hogan’s Alley.”

Except the bullets are real, Shepherd thought. The bullets are real.

Then he stepped forward and opened the door.

27

Shepherd went in low, sweeping the entrance lobby from left to right while Franklin stayed high and swept in the opposite direction. It was exactly as he remembered it, a row of five chairs stretched along the far wall below a huge picture of the space shuttle, a watercooler in the left corner with a wastebasket next to it half full of paper cups, a heavy door to the right with a thick window built in at head height and hazmat and radiation symbols below it. Nothing else.

He stepped forward and moved across the foyer, heading for the door and repeating the training mantra over and over in his head: check and move, check and move.

Franklin stayed close enough to make them a single entity with two sets of eyes and two guns.

Star, four zeros then the hash key. Through the door. It swung shut behind them with the suck of rubber seals, cutting off all sounds from outside. In the quietness they heard something new, a low, steady hiss, as though a huge snake was waiting for them somewhere inside the building.

Shepherd stepped to the side of the door — gun in front, heart pounding — and scoped as much of the room beyond as he could through the small window. The gowning room was all white tiles, bright lights and shelves full of rolled-up suits and gloves. There were some full suits hanging like ghosts on the wall, which made his finger tighten on the trigger.

He glanced up at Franklin, who had taken a position on the other side of the door. Nodded once. Reached out with his left hand and punched the code into the door. The lock clicked. Franklin twisted the handle. Shepherd pushed it open from the hinge and followed it low, just as before, left to right, corner to center, while Franklin stayed high and swept the opposite way. A movement made Shepherd’s gun twitch around. One of the hanging suits had moved. He blew out a long breath as he realized it was only the air from the opening door that had shifted it.

The hissing sound was louder now. It was coming from beyond the air shower that led into the main chamber.

They moved toward it, their shoes catching on the sticky mats there to pull impurities from the soles of lab boots before they entered the high-pressure air shower that would blast off the rest. Shepherd stopped as he reached the clear screen that marked the entrance. “Let’s go,” Franklin said, joining him by the door and seeing there was nothing inside.

“We should be suited up before going in there.”

“Really?” Franklin turned and opened the door.

“Wait!” Shepherd ducked in after him just as a tornado of wind rushed at them from all sides, sounding like a thousand hand dryers going off at once. Franklin ducked and crabbed over to the far door, leading with his gun as if the noise was some kind of attack. The racket lasted for ten seconds then cut out. Franklin turned back to Shepherd. “What were you saying?”

“Never mind.”

The window in the final door revealed little of the large chamber beyond. The entire upper part of the room was hidden behind a thick wall of white vapor, as if someone had captured a cloud and was storing it here. “Helium,” Shepherd whispered.

“Poisonous?”

He shook his head. “There’s a danger of oxygen starvation if you inhale too much. Other than that it just makes your voice sound funny. It’s the same stuff you get in party balloons. Biggest risk is frostbite and cold burns. It boils at minus four hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit and in the pipes it will be liquid, so even colder. The professor won’t be in there if it’s a liquid spill. Not unless he’s dead. No one can survive long in cold like that.”

Franklin smiled and stepped behind him. “You first.”

Shepherd looked again through the window at the gas cloud and took a breath. He felt the grip of the gun pressing into his palm as he held it tight in one hand and punched the code into the door with the other. The lock clicked, he pulled it open and stepped inside.

It was beyond freezing inside the room and the hissing was sinister and loud. Above him the underside of the cloud shifted as the opening door stirred the air, making it look like something was moving inside it.

He swept the room the same way as before. The vapor in the air reduced visibility but he could make out the lower third of the circular door to the vault in the center of the room. This was where the hardware was tested and where the leak would most likely be coming from. He moved toward it, keeping low and well below the freezing cloud. It had been cold outside in the freak winter weather but nothing compared with this. His breath was frosting the moment it passed his lips. He glanced up at the thick cloud above his head, formed by the lighter than air helium filling the chamber top down, like smoke. There was something wrong about it being there. He dredged his mind for what he knew about the facility. Fragments came back to him, bits of technical information about how it worked — then it hit him.

Laminar flow.

He looked back up at the cloud. The room kept itself clean using laminar flow, air blown constantly in parallel streams from top to bottom to sweep particles down to the filters in the floor. But the cloud was not being blown downward. It just sat there, filling the upper part of the room with freezing vapor. He remembered how it had shifted when he had opened the door. There was no airflow in the room at all. Maybe it had been damaged by the leak. Maybe not.

He spotted something else that was wrong. In the clinical environment of the clean room, nothing should be out of place, everything had to be stowed away and locked down to prevent dangerous and potentially costly accidents, but there was a laptop lying on the floor over by the vault door. He moved closer to it, squinting through the thick air to get a better look. Shifting hardware in and out of the cryo unit was incredibly precise. Even a scrubbed glove could leave contaminants on a component, so it was all done by computer-controlled robotic lifting arms. The laptop was hardwired into the control panel of one of these. The arm was extended, the gripping claw disappearing into the dense cloud above his head. Shepherd took a step toward it, moving sideways to bring the screen of the laptop into view. There was a number on it, two zeroes followed by a one and an eight. As Shepherd watched, the eight turned to a seven. Then a six. Then a five.

Countdown.

He darted forward, grabbing one of the high-pressure hoses used to clean components and pointed it up at the cloud, pulling the trigger at the spot where the top of the arm had to be. The hiss of air joined the shushing sibilance of the room as the cloud parted above him, just long enough for him to see what the arm was holding.

He dropped the hose and spun around, grabbing Franklin by the arm. “GET OUT!”

In his mind he was already sprinting back to the entrance, dragging Franklin with him, but the world had gone into slow motion.

How long left before the counter hit zero? Not long enough and he dared not turn to look. Say ten seconds at most. Ten seconds to get as far away as possible.

Something tugged on his arm, holding him back. He looked back and into Franklin’s face, confused and angry. “RUN!” he screamed, pulling him toward the door. No time to explain. No time for anything.

He counted every step, imagining each one corresponding to the countdown on the laptop.

…nine…

…eight…

Until now, Shepherd had not been fully committed to the idea that his old professor was in here somewhere, sabotaging key components of Hubble’s successor.

…seven…

…six…

But everything was so deliberate and planned. He made it to the door and yanked it open, heaving Franklin through and charging after him.

…five…

…four…

The roar of the air shower kicked in and for a second he thought he’d gotten his timings wrong. He kept running, straight through the second door with Franklin right next to him.

…three…

…two…

So clever.

Evacuate the building so no one gets hurt… flood the upper part of the chamber with freezing gas… lift a reserve tank of coolant into it with the arm so the gas keeps it cool… until the countdown tells it to drop the tank onto the hard, relatively warm floor…

…one…

In front of him, Franklin was halfway through the final door and Shepherd threw himself forward, bundling him out of the scrubbing station and down onto the floor of the entrance lobby.

Down.

Stay down. Helium is lighter than air. Helium rises.

…zero…

Shepherd heard a muffled crump then the percussive wave of the explosion ripped through the building, turning the world into torn metal and broken glass.

And then darkness.