The Tower

28

Gabriel died shortly after noon on the same day he rode into Ruin.

A man in a hazmat suit appeared over him, his visor fogging with hurried breath, drawn by the cardio alarm.

“Over here!” His voice was muffled by the hermetic suit, lost amid the wail of the alarm and the howls of other patients. “HERE!” He reached out a gloved hand and placed it on Gabriel’s chest, pumping hard on the breastbone to massage the still heart beneath it, cursing the fact that his other hand was strapped tight to his chest by a sling.

Another suited figure looked up from another bed and started to walk over, any urgency blunted by the now commonplace nature of death. It was the third time a cardiac alarm had sounded that day and, with so many infected and suffering so hideously, it was hard not to see the release of death as something of a blessing.

“Do something,” the man at the bed said, still pumping rhythmically on Gabriel’s chest with his one good hand.

The new arrival glanced at the monitor, the heartbeat flatlining. He looked down at the still form, bound to the bed. “He’s gone,” he said, flicking a switch to silence the alarm.

The man at Gabriel’s side looked up, anger lighting his face, his breath fogging his visor as he spoke. “What’s your name?”

“Dr. Kaplan, I’m the senior physician in charge; why do you ask?”

“Because I want to spell it right when I write up the charge of medical homicide by neglect.”

The doctor’s eyes dropped to the ID displayed in the clear pocket on the front of the man’s suit and read the name: CHIEF INSPECTOR DAVUD ARKADIAN, RUIN CITY POLICE. Pushing Arkadian’s hand away he moved up to the bed and continued the CPR on Gabriel’s body. His bulky helmet turned back toward the other doctors. “Over here,” he shouted, loud enough to be heard above the din. “Make it fast and bring the crash unit with you.”

Gabriel felt as if he was floating upward, flying in a bright sky. Below him he could see fields and rivers rushing past, flitting between clouds that grew thicker the higher he flew. He felt weightless, peaceful — free.

Through the clouds he saw the land fall away and the vast mirror of the ocean stretch out. Huge flocks of birds flew past him, all heading in the same direction, toward land. Even at this great height he could see other things moving across the water below. They left lines behind them, long, straight, white wakes like scratches on the surface of the sea. Ships. Thousands of them, all heading back to land, the lines of their wakes slowly converging the closer they got to port.

He continued to rise, as if some force was pulling him up to the bright sun that warmed and welcomed him. No. Not the sun, more vast somehow and indistinct. It continued to grow the closer he got, bigger even than the ocean below though he could not see the edge of it. Moving toward it required no effort, it was as easy as falling. But there was something about the ships and the birds that plucked at something inside him. They were all going in a different direction from him, and it made him feel uneasy. He felt as if he should be going the same way too, back to the land, away from the soothing sun that filled the sky.

He tilted himself downward, his head pointing back toward the earth and swept his arms through the air, pulling himself down and away from the light. The steady rise stopped, just a little, then started again, pulling him up as if he was a cork bobbing in water. He fixed on a spot of dry land far below him, reached out with his arms again and pulled forward, kicking hard with both legs.

“Clear!”

Two of the three hazmat suits stepped back from the bed. The third held the defibrillator paddles to the smears of conductive gel on Gabriel’s chest and pressed the twin fire buttons.

Gabriel arched upward, his bound hands twitching into claws at his sides.

Dr. Kaplan stepped forward, checking the ECG monitor and resuming CPR. The line on the screen jumped then settled back to nothing. “Nearly had him. Give him another milligram of epinephrine and get ready to try again.”

The second suit fumbled a syringe into the cannula fitted to Gabriel’s arm, the urgency and his gloved hands combining to make this simple task ten times more difficult. He emptied the plunger and sent a milligram of adrenaline into Gabriel’s veins. Inside his inert body the peripheral vascular system responded, constricting to send a shunt of blood to his core, thereby raising his blood pressure. The doctor placed the syringe on a stand and pressed a button on the defibrillator unit to prime it again.

“Charging,” he called out. The insectile whine of building electricity cut through the air.

Dr. Kaplan continued to pump Gabriel’s heart with his interlaced hands, forcing blood through veins while Arkadian made himself useful as best he could with his usable arm. He stayed by Gabriel’s head, squeezing the bag valve mask affixed to his face, sending a steady pulse of oxygen to his immobile lungs. He watched the line on the screen flicker but stay flat, the heart still not beating on its own. The second doctor got ready with the paddles, placing one high and one low with the heart in between.

“Clear!”

Gabriel arched. On the screen the ECG jumped.

They moved back to their positions, three people working together to carry on functions that were normally automatic, keeping him alive by hand while the ECG continued to dance but refused to settle.

“We can’t keep on with this indefinitely,” Dr. Kaplan said between pumps. “CPR and artificial respiration only go so far in keeping a patient viable. His brain is already being starved of oxygen. Any longer than a few minutes and it becomes increasingly pointless.”

“Then you’d better get a move on,” Arkadian said.

Kaplan nodded. “Okay, spike him up with another mil of epinephrine. Let’s go again.”

Arkadian focused on the bag in his hand, squeezing and releasing it steadily at the same pace Gabriel would breathe if he could. “Come on,” he whispered, dipping his head down level with Gabriel’s ear. “Don’t go out like this. Not like this.”

Gabriel could see the land beneath him getting closer but the effort to reach it was exhausting. Occasionally a gust of wind would help him out, blowing him downward in a sudden surge, but it never lasted long and the upward force would start to pull on him again, working on his mind too, telling him to give up, let go, relax and float away.

The land was also taking form and he continued to focus on it, using it as a hook to pull him down, fixing on a patch of green in the middle of a vast, dry desert. He continued to kick and pull with his arms, swimming in the air as if he was trying to get to the bottom of a crystal-clear lake.

He could see more now, trees and rivers and a lake at the center of the green, reflecting the bright sun behind him. And there was something else, a person, a woman, standing by the edge of the pool and looking around as though she had lost something. She was calling out but he was still too high to hear her. He could feel weariness flooding his whole body and again the voice from above told him to just let go. Then another gust of wind pushed him down, halving the distance so he could finally see who it was and hear what she was calling.

“Gabriel!” Liv hollered into the same wind that had pushed him close to her. “Where have you gone? Why have you left me here?”

Gabriel kicked harder, the sound of her voice and the sight of her pulling at him now with far more strength than the light in the sky. “I’m here,” he called out. “My love, I’m here. I’m coming for you. I’m coming back.”

Then he kicked once more and something seemed to snap. The lights went out and he was suddenly falling through darkness, down to the earth that he could no longer see, and down to the woman he could no longer hear.

“Heartbeat steady at eight nine, BP one hundred over eighty.” Kaplan stood back watching the proof on the heart monitor that had taken over the job he had been doing for the last five minutes.

Arkadian continued to pump the air bag, too scared to stop in case it was the only thing keeping Gabriel bound to this earth. “You can stop that now,” Kaplan said, “he’s breathing on his own.”

Arkadian stepped back, suddenly aware that he was drenched in sweat inside his space suit. “Congratulations, Doctor,” he said, managing a smile, “you just saved a good man’s life.”

The doctor looked down at the figure on the bed. The infected and blistered skin was already starting to sheen again with sweat as the fever came back to life too. “Yes,” he said. “But for how long?”

29

The heat hammered a headache into Liv before she had even made it out of sight of the compound. She was following the line of one of the larger streams that flowed out from the holding pits, tracing it through the contours of the land. She did not stoop to drink from it despite her thirst. She knew the riders would be watching and she did not want to give them the satisfaction. She felt uneasy walking away, though she knew she had no option: each footstep seemed heavier than the last, as if her whole body was rebelling against leaving this place. It was as though her heart was physically bound to it and each step made the bond tighter as it tried to pull her back.

After nearly two hours’ walking, the land started to fall away and she came across a shallow depression in the ground where the water had pooled. She stopped still the moment she saw it and sank slowly to the ground.

An eagle stood on the far bank of the pool, dipping its curved beak into the water, sending gentle ripples across the surface while its powerful talons gripped the wet, red earth like soft flesh. It saw her, held her gaze with its huge amber eyes. She sensed no fear in it, or surprise at her presence, it just stared at her, so intently that she felt it must see right through her. Then the crunch of a foot on dry earth behind her made the bird take flight in an explosion of feathers and water droplets.

Liv spun around and saw Tariq standing over her, his eyes following the bird upward as it rose into the sky. “Hey,” she said, “you followed me.”

He looked down at her and smiled. “We all followed you,” he replied, and stepped aside to let the rest of the refugees file past. Liv watched in silence as they walked down to the water one by one. She felt like crying.

Since Gabriel had gone she had been almost overwhelmed by feelings of loneliness. It gave her hope to see these strangers now, people who had chosen to follow her into the unknown rather than seek their own salvation. There was something happening here — bigger than her, bigger than any one person — and she knew they must feel it, as she felt it, or else why would they be here?

“This is a good omen,” Tariq said, looking up at the eagle. She followed his gaze to where the outspread wings gyred high above them, forming the shape of a T in the sky. She’d seen this before.

She grabbed the folded piece of paper from her pocket and opened it to reveal the rubbing of the Starmap, her eyes focusing on the first line of symbols.

The river

An eagle

A T-shaped cross

Her eyes slid across the remaining symbols and her heart thumped in her chest.

“Stop,” she called out. “Don’t drink it, don’t drink the water.” Faces turned to her and she could see questions and doubt in their eyes.

She focused her mind on the symbols that followed the T.

The river again, a man kneeling next to it, his head hanging down and dripping, then the skull — symbol of death.

Liv looked back along the stream toward the distant compound, now just a shimmering smudge in the distance. For most of its length it ran clear, but even as she watched she could see a change. Far in the distance a current was swelling and surging down the stream toward her. It stirred up the mud as it went, turning the water the reddish color of the earth — the color of blood.

How long before it reached here? Ten minutes? Five maybe. Then the water in the pool would be spoiled too. Unless. She looked at the land, the way the river split, half of it flowing down into the pool.

“We must dam the stream into the pool,” she called out.

She moved quickly without waiting for a response, heading back to where the water split in two. Most of the flow was coming toward her, down a shallow, six-foot-wide stream that was feeding the pool. She picked up one of the boulders that littered the broken ground and stumbled forward, the weight of the rock dragging her down. She reached the fork and the boulder splashed into the water, sinking almost without trace beneath the surface despite the shallowness of the stream. The water continued to flow around it unimpeded. She cast around for another rock and scrambled over to a large, brittle stone that fell apart as soon as she tried to pick it up. She grabbed the two largest chunks and hauled them back to the stream, dropping them next to the first one. Again they sank with barely a trace — and so did her spirits. She was already exhausted; she couldn’t possibly dam the stream on her own. It was hopeless.

A rock hit the surface in an explosion that covered Liv with water. She turned and saw Tariq behind her, brushing dust from his empty hands. He looked at her and smiled. “I’d get out of the way if I were you.”

She looked beyond him and saw something that made her laugh in pure shock. All eleven of the exiles were staggering toward her, each carrying a rock. She jumped away as the first plunged into the stream in a depth charge of water. Another joined it, then another. They were already piling up, a few rising above the surface and visibly slowing the flow. Liv dropped down into the water, scooping the red earth up from the riverbed and jamming it into the gaps between the rocks.

Tariq issued more orders in Arabic, and a curved wall began to form, extending across the stream that had run into the pool and diverting the flow to the other fork.

“Look,” the cry came from one of the workers. He was pointing upstream. Everyone’s eyes followed — everyone’s but Liv’s. She knew what they were looking at because she had already seen it — first on the stone and then in the hazy distance. The river was turning to blood.

“Quickly,” she called out, continuing to scoop mud into the wall of rocks. “We haven’t got much time.”

The sight of the river turning red electrified the weary group. Some rushed to collect more stones, others joined Liv in the water, frantically shoveling mud with their hands to seal the gaps.

Tariq dropped down and shoveled mud next to her, then a hiss like a huge snake drew all eyes up as the red wave closed in.

“Out of the river, everybody!” Liv shouted.

Those in the stream leaped out as if crocodiles had suddenly appeared in it. Some scrambled down the rapidly drying riverbed to help Liv and Tariq fill gaps in the dam wall, others stood back, awed by the sight of the swollen river arriving in a surge of red.

It hit the wall with a slap and slopped over the top of the dam. Liv and Tariq dropped back, digging a reservoir in the mud of the rapidly drying riverbed to catch the overspill. She looked up. Leaks had sprung out on the upper part where the mud had already been washed away. One more breach and the whole thing could collapse. Others sensed this too and everyone joined her in the mud, bolstering the wall with armfuls of silt and whatever rocks they could still find close by.

A stone tumbled down from the top of the dam and a cascade of red water followed it. Without stopping to think, Liv splashed through the water toward it, grabbing the stone and jamming it back in place. She held it there, feeling the sickening flow of red-tinted warm water over her hand as though it really was blood.

From her new position she could see over the top of the dam and beyond. The trickle that had been the second fork of the stream was now a solid red flow. But if the wall broke, all that water would quickly revert to its natural course and find its way down to the pool.

Liv leaned against the dam and braced it with her whole body, arms outstretched, willing it to hold. She could hear the slop of water on the other side of the wall, feel it running over her from the numerous gaps. She could almost sense the whole dam moving, feel the stones slipping out of place under the pressure of the raging river.

Then something shifted.

A stone she had tried to jam back in place moved forward, seating itself tighter into the wall, and the flow became a trickle around it. She looked over the top of the wall, her eyes wide. The water level had dropped. It was still dropping, leaving red tide marks along the lengths of the banks. The surge had ended.

They worked quickly and silently, all energy focused on filling any holes in the dam. But Liv never moved. She remained where she was, crucified on the wall and mired in red, her mind running through the symbols that had predicted all this and wondering what greater terrors might lie in the future, until Tariq laid his hand on her shoulder and told her, “It’s okay. The dam held. You can let go now.”

30

Shepherd opened his eyes to a world of silence.

For a few moments he had not the slightest idea where he was, or even who he was. He could see a floor strewn with debris and a wall that disappeared in a jagged line three feet up from the ground. Beyond it was a whiteness that hurt his eyes and a low gray cloud.

The cloud.

His mind hooked on to the word — and he remembered.

He felt the cold all around and sinking into him — but not from beneath. There was something warm underneath him.

He forced himself up, willing his disconnected arms to move and push him up from the floor so he could see what it was. He feared it might be blood, his blood, but it was just Franklin, unconscious and unresponsive. He felt cold, everything felt cold. He needed to get them both away from here and into the warmth.

He tried to stand but dizziness surged through him, driving him back down again. He focused on the chewed metal edge of what had once been the outer wall, trying to fix on something long enough to stop the world from spinning.

A face appeared above the wall, shouting something his ears could not hear. He tried to raise his hand and call the man over. He tried to push himself up so the man could see Franklin. But in the end these thoughts went no further than his brain and just the effort of thinking was enough to let the darkness back in. His eyes closed. The coldness pressed down. And the whistling whine in his damaged ears faded back to silence.

When Shepherd woke again it was with a gasp that hurt his throat.

He was lying on a bed in a white room, all wipe-clean linoleum and health awareness posters. One listed the symptoms of radiation sickness, another the toxic properties of various chemicals. He had been here before. The same posters had graced the walls in his research intern days when he had come to the sick bay to be treated for a mild helium burn.

Helium.

Burn.

The words pierced the bubble surrounding his brain and it popped in sudden and painful recollection.

“Franklin!” He sat up in bed and the room shifted as though it were floating.

White-coated figures surged through the door. They were all talking to him, at him, he could see their mouths moving but all he heard was a waa-waa sound, their voices muffled and indistinct as if his ears were waterlogged. He worked his jaw and they popped, his hearing returning as suddenly and painfully as his memory had.

“Please,” he said, closing his eyes against the headache brightness and holding his hand up against the noise. “Could someone tell me what happened to Agent Franklin.”

“Nothing.” Shepherd opened his eyes at the familiar voice and looked past the white coats who were now checking his blood pressure and other vital signs. Franklin was leaning against the doorjamb, hands deep in his pockets, the smile back in place as if nothing had happened. “Well, I got blown up — there is that — but apart from that I’m pretty good. Better than you leastways, but then you did take more of the blast than me.” He turned to the medical personnel. “Now if you gentlemen are sure he ain’t gonna die in the next few minutes, might I trouble you to leave us in private for a moment or two?”

Shepherd watched the medics leave and close the door. What was left of his coat was hanging on the back. It looked like cattle had stampeded over it. The laptop case was propped against the wall next to it, untouched because he had left it behind in the Explorer. Franklin sat down by the bed. “Looks like you saved my life back there. Guess I owe you a drink.”

Shepherd swallowed, his mouth still parched from the dry air he’d breathed for so long in the cryo chamber. “I don’t drink.” He swallowed again, missing the look of mild disapproval that flitted across Franklin’s face. “What about Douglas?”

Franklin shook his head. “Missing. If he was anywhere in the facility then he’s dead for sure, but we haven’t found anything yet. The explosion tore everything to pieces. Place looks more like some kind of modern sculpture now than a building. My feeling is he wasn’t in there.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice low. Shepherd could hardly hear it through the whine in his ears. “That thing you saw on the computer before you dragged me out of there, I caught a glimpse of it myself, looked like some kind of countdown.”

Shepherd nodded. “I think it was primed to make the loading arm drop the helium tank once everyone was clear of the building. Was there a fire?”

“No, just an almighty bang.”

Shepherd remembered the crump and the cold, solid wave sweeping over them. “It was a pressure bomb. Helium doesn’t burn. It’s inert. It’s one of the reasons they like using it as a coolant in facilities like this — much less dangerous. But if it’s cooled to liquid form and you heat it up quickly, it expands in an explosive manner.”

He looked down at his battered body stretching away on the bed. At least he was in one piece. They were very lucky, considering. “I’m guessing the Webb telescope mirrors that were in the testing chamber…”

“Destroyed,” Franklin said and nodded. “I doubt you could find a piece big enough to comb your hair with.”

Shepherd closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “They killed James Webb,” he said out loud, as though mourning a friend.

“What?”

“The project, it’s dead. They won’t restart it again after this. The only reason it had managed to keep going for so long was because of existing commitments to the manufacturers. It was already billions over budget.” Something occurred to him and he sat up in bed, steadying himself as vertigo swam through his head. “We should issue warnings to all the major ground telescopes — the VLA in New Mexico, the Keck II in Hawaii; and not just here but globally. If there’s some kind of ‘end of days’ cult at work here, targeting anything that’s staring at the sky, then it won’t be restricted to space telescopes or confined to the U.S.”

“Cool your jets, rocket man, already been done. There’s a high-level alert out on all international security networks with copies of the postcards and details of the two attacks. All potential targets have been advised to beef up their security and report to us if they have received similar threats.”

Shepherd swung his legs off the bed and down to the floor. He still felt dizzy but it was getting better. “What about telescopes under construction? There’s a big one out in Arizona somewhere. I think the Europeans just started one somewhere in Chile. They could be targets too.”

“The alert went out to all national and private observatories, both operational and under construction. I may not have all your fancy degrees, Shepherd, but I’m not an idiot. Oh, by the way — who’s Melisa?” Shepherd felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “You were talking while you were out. Kept saying that name over and over, like you were calling for her, like maybe she was lost. She got something to do with your missing two years?”

Shepherd looked at Franklin’s chest rather than his eyes.

Maybe he should just tell him. But then he knew so little about Franklin. He had no idea if he would honor his word or just feed anything he told him straight back to personnel and end his career before it even got started. His eyes lit on the ID pinned to Franklin’s jacket, his name written in full beneath a stern photo: AGENT BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

“What’s your real name?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your name. I’m assuming that when you became an agent you got baptized just like I did.” He looked up and finally met his gaze. “Or were your parents very patriotic?”

“Only people who know my real name are my family and a handful of people I trust.”

Shepherd smiled. “Give and take. You say you can’t trust me, but trust is a two-way street, Agent Franklin. How can I trust a man who won’t even tell me his real name?”

The door opened behind Franklin but neither of them turned to look.

“I got something,” Ellery said, oblivious of the atmosphere in the room. “Best if I show you in my office.” He pointed back over his shoulder.

“Be right there,” Franklin replied, the chair legs scraping as he stood up. “After you, Agent Shepherd.”

Shepherd stood and the room shifted a little but not enough to make him sit down again. He grabbed the laptop bag from the floor and his battered coat from behind the door. “No,” he said. “You first.”

31

Shepherd walked into Ellery’s office and smiled to himself when he spotted what was hanging on the wall. It was a photograph of the chief’s younger self, glossy and framed and staring out from beneath the sharp brim of his county cap at a small wooden crucifix hanging on the opposite side of the office. The only other attempt at decoration was a potted cactus on the desk that looked like it was shivering.

“Take a seat, gentlemen.” The man the photograph had become was two-finger pecking at a keyboard, his reading glasses forcing his head to tilt back and making him seem old. “After what you said about the situation at Goddard I got the guys to run some background and give me the headlines. I got them to pull up the professor’s e-mail correspondence for the last week, see if there was anything there that might be relevant.” He turned the monitor around so they could see it. An e-mail program filled the screen with an empty inbox. “Somebody, and I’m assuming it was the professor, wiped everything, going back months. I had them check his work files too and it’s the same story.”

“How many months exactly?”

“All the way back to May.”

Eight months.

“If you hand the hard drives over to us,” Franklin said, “our own tech guys might be able to retrieve some of the lost information.”

Ellery shrugged. “Whatever you need; guess this thing is federal now, so it’s your call.”

Shepherd felt sorry for him, this worn-down version of the proud young man in the photograph. He’d been so full of piss and vinegar when he’d met them off the plane, now he seemed powerless and defeated in his own office.

“There’s something else.” Ellery leaned back in his chair, swiping the reading glasses from his face and reaching for a drawer. He pulled out a thin sheaf of printed paper held together with a clip. “That letter you were interested in. I called up the labs, dropped your name and had them put a rush on it.” He handed the documents to Franklin.

It was a report from the Questioned Documents Unit. The top sheet displayed a unique file number and brief description of the items under scrutiny. The next few pages were filled with various test results: pen identification, video spectral comparisons, thin layer chromatography, Raman spectroscopy, paper tests. The final sheet took all these results and translated them back into something the field agents could use. The results for the letter were peppered with the acronym CS/WU, which stood for Common Sample/Widespread Use, basically meaning the item was too commonplace to be of any use in an investigation. But the results for the postcard were more interesting.

“The TV preacher?” Shepherd looked up at Franklin. “He’s our suspect?”

“So it would seem.” Franklin turned to Ellery. “Thank you for this, Chief, most helpful. Now, if you wouldn’t mind giving us a moment here.”

The effect was crushing. Ellery rose from his chair and left the room without another word, the door banging shut like a coffin lid as he closed it behind him.

“Couldn’t you maybe go a little easier on him?”

“You mean old hitch-up-his-pants, ‘I’m the sheriff ’round these here parts’ who gave us such a warm welcome? I am going easy on him.”

“Well, go easier.” Shepherd glanced nervously up at the photo as if it was listening. “He gives us a lead and you humiliate him by sending him out of his own office to stand in the hall.”

Franklin looked amused. “Ah, he deserves it for letting us walk into that exploding building while he stayed back and hid behind his pension. And the reason I sent him out is not because of some badge-related pissing contest, it’s because I need to talk to you in private.” He turned so he was facing him. “How you feeling, Agent Shepherd — any concussion, anything broken?”

“I’m okay.” He wondered where this was going.

“Want to carry on with this investigation? See where it goes? Help your professor if you can?”

Shepherd tried to read his mood. If anything, his tone seemed conspiratorial, which at least hinted at a degree of inclusion. “Yes,” he said. “Yes I would.”

“Good.” Franklin rose and moved behind Ellery’s desk, settling in his empty chair and pulling the desk phone toward him. “Let me tell you the facts of life, son.” He held up the documents from the Questioned Documents lab. “Ellery did us a favor by chasing these down because, even though he used my name, I doubt anyone has linked it to this investigation yet. If they had they would already have handed the information to someone in the field office in Charlotte to go apprehend the good reverend and have a little talk about his penmanship. Do you want that to happen? Of course you don’t want that to happen.

“But there is another way to play this. The way I see it, by the time we’ve brought another agent up to speed, we might just as well have gone to Charleston ourselves. We can fly there as fast as they can drive it and be first on the scene. So providing you’re not seeing double or deaf in both ears, I say we keep on with this thing and follow this lead.”

“What about Professor Douglas?” Shepherd said, sensing a trap. “Shouldn’t we head over and check out his home address like we did Kinderman’s?”

“You think we’ll find him there? Man blows away billions of dollars’ worth of space hardware, you think he’s going to just head home and wait around for a knock on the door?”

“Probably not, but we might find something.”

Franklin drummed his fingers on the desk, something Shepherd had seen him do in class when he was getting annoyed with a slow candidate. “Okay, let me put it this way,” he said, smiling through his evident irritation. “Do you think whatever we might find there will be more or less useful than talking to the man who sent these cards?”

Shepherd said nothing. He still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t some kind of test designed to make him incriminate himself and give Franklin an excuse to can him from the investigation.

“Tell you what.” Franklin smiled and opened his hands as if he was closing the deal on a car. “Why don’t we get Ellery to follow up with the search of Douglas’s home.” He pointed to the picture on the wall. “He has the local connections, he’ll probably do a better job than we would. That way he can claw back some of the self-esteem you think I’ve beaten out of him and it leaves us free to stay on the trail. We got the scent of this thing now, and if Cooper is behind all this, then I want to look him in the eye and know it.”

Shepherd thought it through. The correct protocol for any geographically spread investigation like this was to share any leads on new suspects with the field office nearest the target to enable swift response and arrests and minimize the chance of the subject getting away. The nearest field office to Charleston was Charlotte and, despite what Franklin said, agents from there would still arrive faster than they would because they could fly too if they thought it necessary. He couldn’t work out why Franklin, the seasoned, strictly-by-the-book agent, was suddenly bending the rules and cutting him in on it. It didn’t add up. But he also badly wanted to stay on the investigation. One of his tutors had once told him that when considering any unknown you should always remove emotion from the equation, because if you know the answer you’re trying to reach you’ll skew your formula to get there. A chill slid down his spine as he remembered who it was — Professor Douglas.

“How are you planning on flying to Charleston?” he said, reaching for the laptop case.

Franklin smiled, picked up the phone and started to dial. “Same way we got here,” he said.

Shepherd took the Questioned Documents results from Franklin and slipped them inside the case. Just this simple task made his battered muscles creak and complain. He thought of the cold, hard seats in the hold of the C-130. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

32

Assistant Director O’Halloran put the phone down and listened to the yawning silence stretching out beyond his door. All the other section chiefs had gone — some on leave, the rest God only knew where — leaving a long corridor of empty offices and darkened windows. He’d never heard the building so quiet, even at Christmas when everything generally wound down. He could feel the absence of other people like the lack of a coat on a cold day.

He hit a function button on his computer to turn the sound back on from the CNN news feed. Like most people in the intelligence community he was addicted to information and the twenty-four-hour news cycle helped feed his addiction. It was also useful to keep up to date on what was being reported, just in case a breaking story compromised an ongoing investigation. The Hubble/Marshall story had yet to break. At the moment the lead story was still the freak weather sweeping the nation. He watched for a while, distracted by the novelty of seeing people building snowmen on Miami Beach and New Yorkers in shorts and T-shirts paddling and splashing around in front of the huge Christmas tree outside Rockefeller Center where the ice rink usually stood. Strange days.

He nudged the sound down a little and turned his attention back to an open file on the screen, condensing everything Agent Franklin had just told him into a few bullet points that he added to the Hubble case notes, highlighting the name Fulton Cooper. The reverend’s high-profile Christian charity work, particularly in relation to wounded servicemen and women, had turned him into something of a media favorite. He was an outspoken advocate of what he called a “new crusade,” which favored a stronger and more aggressive military, particularly in relation to non-Christian countries. It was a stance that had made him much beloved of the Republican Party, who often brought him in to lend moral weight to various antigovernment rallies whenever military spending came under review.

The tone of the newscaster shifted up a little as he introduced the next story and O’Halloran glanced up in response. The summery scenes from New York had been replaced by cold gray images of warships and sailors in black uniforms. A Chinese battle fleet had unexpectedly pulled out from around the disputed Senkaku islands in the East China Sea and headed home. The Japanese were claiming it as a victory but the Chinese, true to form, had so far refused to comment. The news anchor listed other unconfirmed rumors of further large-scale troop and military withdrawals elsewhere in the world, name-checking Syria and Somalia before the picture cut again to footage of the U.S. Air Force base at Baghram in Afghanistan. O’Halloran leaned forward, feeling the usual tightening in his gut at the mere mention of the place. It looked like someone had kicked an ant’s nest over, there was so much swarming movement. Thousands of personnel were pouring out of troop carriers and onto massive C-5 transporter planes that then lumbered into the sky. It looked like the whole U.S. presence was packing up and coming home. O’Halloran frowned. He was usually kept up to speed on stuff like this. He opened another window on his monitor and checked the internal mail, scrolling back through the military dispatches. Nothing. Maybe the news had gotten it wrong. Or maybe someone higher up had kept him out of the loop because of his personal history.

He picked up the framed photograph from the desk taken two Christmases ago, just before Michael had been posted. His son stood between him and Beth, a solid slab of a boy who towered over them both and looked like he was still in uniform even in his button-down shirt and jeans. Perhaps it was because he was tired, or that Christmas was around the corner and Michael wouldn’t be home for it, but O’Halloran felt tears drip down his cheeks and glanced up at the door, nervous that someone might come in and find the big chief weeping like a sentimental drunk. He removed his glasses and placed them on the desk, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. What the hell did it matter if anyone saw him like this, there was no one here anyway. He’d signed more leave forms over the past few weeks than he had all year and had to deny even more. It was as if everyone wanted to go home.

He stared at his wife in the picture, leaning against the boy who dwarfed her: his Beth, smiling and radiant in the midst of the family she had created. He hadn’t seen that look in a long time. It had started to slip the moment Michael shipped out to Afghanistan with his unit and he had seen it melt from her face entirely the day they got the news that he had been killed and was never coming home again. He felt a sudden tug to be with her, to hold her in the silence of the home they had built and where their son had grown up. He could easily grab a quick lunch and be back before anyone missed him.

He closed the files, logged out of the system and grabbed his jacket from over his chair. Just as he made it to the door his desk phone rang but he ignored it. He locked the door and walked away down the corridor, leaving the phone still ringing and getting quieter with every step as he headed back home.

33

The river did not rise again. It settled back down to its previous level and the dam held fast. The only visible difference was the color of the flowing water and the red residue it had left high on the banks, as though a massacre had taken place along its entire length.

Once they were sure the dam was solid and the danger was over, everyone shuffled back to the pool, exhausted and thirsty. Liv brought up the rear. She imagined what they must look like, trudging across the desert, caked in red mud like a procession of unfinished clay people, chunks of it falling off the exhausted line ahead of her, turning the sun-bleached desert a dusty pink. She reached the place where the land dropped away and saw the pool again, clear and glittering below her. All she wanted was to fall face-first into it and drink forever, but as she saw the man at the head of the line draw close to the water’s edge, she realized she could not — none of them could.

“Stop,” she called out, breaking into a shambling run. “Stop. We must not wash in the pool.” She could see irritation in the faces that turned to her. “We must not drink either, not until we are clean.”

“We must drink.” The man at the head of the line wore white driller’s overalls so splattered with red mud he looked like a butcher. He turned away and made for the water.

“Wait!” Liv ran to intercept, stepping in front of him to bar his way. “What’s your name?”

The man looked furious. “I am Kasim Barzani.”

“Kasim, I need a drink as much as you do, but after all we did to keep the pool clean we must be careful not to contaminate it.” She pulled at her shirt and a cloud of red dust shook loose and drifted to the ground.

“It is just mud. What difference will a little bit of mud make?” Kasim turned to everyone. “How do we even know the water is poisoned?” He turned back to her. “How do you know?”

Nods rippled down the line of exhausted faces. Liv could sense the thirst raging inside them. It wouldn’t take much for them to trample her into the dust in their rush to get to the water. She thought about telling them of the symbols on the stone and what she had read there but it sounded crazy even to her as she voiced it in her head. “I don’t know if the water is poisoned, not for certain. But if you are so sure it isn’t, then drink some, but not from the pool. Go drink some of the red water on the other side of the dam — then we will see if it is poisoned or not.”

Kasim’s face flushed and Liv instantly regretted losing her temper. “I’m sorry,” she said. She felt like the sun was boiling the brains in her head. She was too tired for this, and she hadn’t asked these people to follow her into the desert — but that didn’t stop her from feeling responsible for them.

“I can wash everyone,” Tariq said, stepping out of the line. All eyes turned to him. “I was working away from the dam when the surge hit.” He held out his arms to show his clothes. “I do not have so much of the red clay on me. I can clean myself with water from my canteen, then fetch more from the pool to clean the mud off everyone else.”

Kasim’s small black eyes darted between Liv and Tariq as if this might be some kind of trick. “Who goes first?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” Liv said, in a voice more breath than substance. She was so exhausted she could barely stand let alone speak. “If it makes you feel any better then I will go last.”

“I will start with the cleanest,” Tariq suggested, “that way I will soon have someone to help me.”

Kasim looked down at himself and nodded his agreement as he realized there were plenty more filthy than he was. Liv looked down at herself painted red from head to foot by the silty water as she had clung to the dam. She looked up at Tariq. “Like I said”—she managed a smile—“guess I’ll be going last.”

Liv observed the cleaning process from a distance, huddled in a thin blade of shadow created by one of the larger boulders that littered the land. After the confrontation with Kasim she didn’t want to risk causing any more tension. She watched Tariq gently pouring water over the heads and bodies of the group, like an Old Testament prophet baptizing the faithful in the desert and studied the Starmap with fresh eyes. She had hoped that, now the events predicted in the first line had been revealed, it would shed new light on the rest of the prophecy. But even though symbols like the skull were repeated elsewhere in the text, their meanings seemed to shift depending on the symbols around them. She knew now that it meant poison in the first line but when it appeared again in the last that meaning did not seem to fit. It was as if each symbol was a mirror, identical in form but reflecting something entirely different depending on where they were placed.

When the last man was clean and had gone to join the others by the main pool she tucked the paper into her pocket and shuffled stiffly across the dust to the red muddy puddle they had left behind. By now her headache was monumental, hammered hard by dehydration, heat and stress and made worse by the torment of seeing everyone else now gathered at the edges of the water, drinking.

“You might want to spread the word subtly that they should maybe go easy on the water,” she said to Tariq as he held out a canteen of water for her. “I’m not sure how long it’s going to have to last us. I’d tell them myself but I don’t think I’m exactly Miss Popularity at the moment.”

Tariq looked over at the others. “I think they have more respect for you than you know.”

“Even Kasim?” Liv poured the water over her face, allowing the last few delicious drops to run into her mouth.

“He followed you into the desert, didn’t he? Don’t worry — I’ll tell them we should ration the water, at least until we know what we’re doing.” He exchanged a full canteen for the empty one. “What are we going to do?”

Liv took another drink of water then let out a long weary breath. “Honestly?” she said. “I have no idea.”

“But you made the water come. You knew the river was going to run red.”

She shook her head. “The water came from the earth, not from me.”

“But you knew it was going to happen. How?”

“You really want to know?” Liv pulled the folded sheet of paper from her back pocket, now stained red. “This is carved on the Starmap — the rock we laid on the Ghost’s grave.” She pointed to the first line. “See here — a river, an eagle, a skull. These are what made me think the water was about to be poisoned. Except…” She frowned as again she tried to express it. “It was more like I felt it.”

“Like a premonition?”

“Something like that, only one that has somehow been captured in these symbols and written down. Not exactly scientific, is it? And please don’t tell the others. The way things are at the moment they might lynch me if they realized I put them through all this because of some ancient warning scratched on a stone.”

Tariq smiled. “Our culture is different from yours; we place more importance on the past and are not so fixed on the future. The wisdom of the ancients is revered, and so are those who can interpret it. Many believe our ancestors saw our future more clearly than we see it ourselves. Did you know writing was invented here?” Liv nodded, remembering her conversations with Gabriel when they had been seeking the Starmap. “Our belief is that the ancients invented the written word precisely so they might record these things, so they could speak to us and pass on the divine knowledge they carried. May I see it?”

Liv handed him the facsimile of the Starmap.

Tariq studied the document, his brow furrowed in thought, while Liv poured water over her hands, watching it run red on the ground.

“This crescent symbol with an arrow next to it,” he said, pointing to the end of the second line. “It is still used by the bedouin.”

Liv studied the symbol and noticed it was repeated again in the third and fourth lines.

“It refers to the phase of moon,” Tariq explained. “In the desert we use the moon to measure the passing of time. Each phase is twenty-eight and a half days. That arrow next to it is the bedu number nine, so together it means ‘nine moons.’ ”

Liv did a calculation in her head. “Two hundred and fifty-six nights — eight months.”

Tariq pointed to the very last symbol, another crescent enclosed by a circle. “That also refers to time. It is the moon inside the sun, representing a day and a night together. It is more generic. It means ‘days.’ ”

Liv looked at it in the light of this new information and something clicked in her head.

“ ‘Days,’ ” she repeated, her eyes drawn back to the skull. “That makes more sense. Whenever I look at this second skull I get a sense that something is ending, like a death. Death of days — sounds pretty apocalyptic.”

Tariq nodded solemnly. “Every culture has its own account of the coming apocalypse. In mine we are taught the Sumerian myth of the god Marduk, who will return one day and destroy the earth. The Sumerians were incredibly advanced in their knowledge and understanding of science, and cosmology in particular. Modern scholars believe that Marduk may actually be a planet whose orbit will one day make it crash into the earth. There are many accounts in the past of near misses. The flood myth for example, present in every culture on earth, is believed by some to have been the result of a heavenly body passing close enough for its gravity to upset the flow of the oceans. Even the Christian nativity, with its bright traveling star, has been attributed to Marduk. Sometimes it is represented as a bull with a sun between his horns, just like this is.” He pointed at the large star on the map, directly between the horns of Taurus.

“Eight months,” Liv mused, “then Marduk returns to destroy the world. And the first line of this prophecy has already come to pass, so I guess we’re already on the clock.”

Tariq handed the document back to her. “I better go tell the others to go easy on the water,” he said. “Otherwise we won’t even make it to eight months, and I would hate to miss the end of the world.”

He bowed slightly then turned and headed away. There was something very comforting about the old-fashioned courtliness of this man. He was like someone from another time. He reminded her of Gabriel a little.

Liv looked back down at the symbols, focusing on one in particular.

Though many of them danced before her eyes, this one remained steady and clear. The sword above the crude horse figure was Gabriel — the warrior, the rider, the sword of justice and the liberator of the Sacrament. It was the one symbol that gave her hope because the sword also appeared toward the end of the prophecy next to another.

It meant two things to her: first, Gabriel was still alive, he had to be if he was to figure in events that would come to pass eight months from now; and second, before those eight months had run their course he would be reunited with the one who was represented by the T: the Sacrament, the Key — her.

34

Gabriel woke to haunted moans echoing off stone walls. He opened his eyes and saw a vaulted ceiling high above him, a host of frozen angels bound to the stone, faces fixed in sorrow, as if in lament for what they saw below.

He twisted his head to the side and saw rows of beds stretching away to the nave of a church. They were filled with the writhing figures of men and women, straining against thick canvas bands that bound them, their skin a riot of boils that burst under the stress of their contortions. Doctors in contamination suits moved among the beds, tending to the worst cases by giving them shots that instantly calmed them. On the far wall he saw images of demons pulling tongues from the damned and devils boiling others in vats of oil and realized where he was. It was the Public Church in the Old Town of Ruin, close to the base of the Citadel. He had made it, but too late. The church was now a howling sick bay full of the infected.

The disease was spreading.

Gabriel gritted his teeth as a wave of fever rolled over him followed by an excruciating urge to scratch violently at his skin, but he was bound to his bed like the others so he could not. He heard footsteps approaching across the stone floor and closed his eyes, quelling the urge to writhe against his bindings and feel the ecstasy of relief from the growing itch. He felt hot, was getting hotter, and sweat trickled down his burning skin, making it worse.

The footsteps stopped by his bed and he battled hard just to remain still. He didn’t want to be knocked out with a dose of strong sedative. He needed to think and for that he needed to be conscious, no matter how agonizing it might be.

“You’ve looked better.” The voice took him by surprise. He recognized it. “Don’t worry,” the voice came again. “I haven’t told anyone who you are. You still have a number of serious outstanding warrants on your head and to be perfectly frank I just can’t face the paperwork.”

“Arkadian!” Gabriel opened his eyes to a figure in a complete hazmat suit, one arm in a sling and a familiar face smiling behind a plastic visor.

“I heard some lunatic had ridden in here on a horse.” Arkadian’s voice was muffled behind layers of material that kept him isolated from the infected air. “How are you feeling? Better than you look, I hope?”

“I feel like I’m dying. I probably am dying.”

“Nonsense. You’re the picture of health compared to some of these people.” He glanced up and across the huge empty space of the church. “Most of them have been driven insane by this thing. They have to be heavily sedated just to stop them from howling and weeping and tearing at their own flesh.”

Gabriel shuddered and clenched every muscle as a new prickling blossomed and spread inside him. He could see how easy it would be to give in and be driven mad by this unbearable sensation. “How many cases?” he managed between gritted teeth.

“Twenty-eight confirmed so far, eighty-four more being held in quarantine. They’re all here in the Old Town too. So far it’s only adults; children seem to have some kind of immunity and everyone’s hoping to God it stays that way.”

“How many dead?”

Arkadian hesitated. He watched Gabriel snatching shallow breaths and guessed he was mindful of attracting the attention of the doctors. “How many?” Gabriel repeated once the spasms had eased.

“Nine.”

“When was the first?”

“Two days ago, a waiter working at his aunt’s café on the embankment. She was the next to die.”

Gabriel closed his eyes. He thought back to the two figures with breathing masks he had seen as he approached the Old Town wall, the paper suits and hazmat signs. If they had reacted fast enough to put a quarantine in place and isolate the infected then perhaps it had been contained. Maybe he wasn’t too late.

“Have all the people infected worked close to the Citadel?”

“Yes — all except you. You have been the cause of much excitement, and also concern. Concern because you’re the only one with the lamentation who hasn’t originated inside these walls, excitement because it seems to have affected you differently. Most people are driven incoherent by it and die within forty-eight hours of the main symptoms appearing. But you can still talk. How long have you had it now?”

“I don’t know. Days.”

“More than two?”

“Five, I think.”

Arkadian’s eyes misted a little behind the visor as he imagined five days of this kind of suffering. “Why did you come back?”

Gabriel shivered, freezing again despite his burning skin. “To protect Liv. I wanted to bring it back where it came from. I wanted to return it to the Citadel.”

“Well — you have done.”

Gabriel shook his head. “Not quite.”

Arkadian looked on until Gabriel had ridden out another spasm. “Listen,” he said, leaning closer. “I’m going to have to let the doctors know you’re awake. They need to ask you some questions and run more tests. Right now you’re the best chance they have of finding an antidote to this thing.”

“Okay. Just don’t tell them who I am.”

Arkadian managed a smile. “You take me for a fool? You’ll be no good to anyone if I have to throw you in jail.”

“But I want you to do something for me first. Send a message to the Citadel. Try and persuade them to open their doors and allow the sick inside.”

Arkadian stared down at him as though he had genuinely lost his mind. “They’re not going to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s the Citadel, they don’t let anyone inside.”

“Things change. This infection started in there, it must be decimating the population of the mountain. They probably need medical help more than anyone else. Tell them doctors will come too, along with all the medical equipment they need to study this thing and try and find a cure. It’s airborne. That’s how I got it. I breathed it in when I was there. And all these people here worked on the embankment closest to the mountain, that’s why they got it. So we need to return it to where it started and keep it contained. Just imagine if this thing spread.”

A sudden noise made Arkadian look up. A woman was fitting and bucking so hard against her bed it started to shift and move across the floor. Three suited medics converged, obscuring her from view. One of them struggled to push the bed back into place while the others fought with the woman who was now howling like a banshee. They were trying to sedate her but she was thrashing so hard they couldn’t get the needle in her arm. The disturbance started to spread and others, tied and bound in the surrounding beds, began to rouse from their chemical slumbers. Then, as quickly as it had started, the thrashing stopped. The woman gave one last howl that sounded like the life was being physically torn from her, then was still.

The three medics stood for a moment, staring down at the body. Then one drifted away to calm another patient, and so did another, leaving only one remaining at her bedside, loosening and unwrapping the tight canvas bindings that were no longer needed.

“Ten,” Gabriel said.

Arkadian looked down at him and nodded. “Who shall I contact in the Citadel?”

Gabriel closed his eyes, exhausted from the sheer effort of keeping it all together. “A monk called Brother Athanasius. He helped me get inside the last time. He is the one who will help us again.” He opened his bloodshot eyes and stared up at Arkadian. “Always assuming he’s still alive.”

35

For the second time that day the propellers of the C-130 clawed their way into the cold air and slung the plane up into the low, buffeting clouds.

Inside, strapped in the same painful jump seat as before, Shepherd’s battered body felt every judder and lurch. He consoled himself with the knowledge that the flight to Charleston would be marginally shorter than the inbound journey had been.

He and Franklin were studying the background files on the Reverend Fulton R. Cooper, fruits of Shepherd’s first real test-drive of the laptop and its ability to probe deeply and effortlessly into the databases of the FBI. He hadn’t had long but even so the speed and range of information it had managed to spit out had been impressive. Of course it didn’t hurt that Fulton Cooper was a public figure.

Shepherd read through the documents chronologically, starting with Cooper’s humble beginnings in the seventies selling Bibles on the road alongside his father after his mother ran out on them. It was his father who had encouraged his son to preach at fairs and small-town chapels, realizing that his son had a rare gift to engage a crowd and that business was always brisker whenever he spoke. At fifteen, Cooper had already started preaching on TV, first as a guest of other televangelists then on his own show where his lively blend of infomercial techniques, personal appeals and assertion that modern Christianity was exemplified in the American dream caught on so fast he was nationwide in less than three years and pulling in half a million dollars’ worth of pledges per show. Then it all came tumbling down.

His wife suddenly left him and appeared on a Primetime Live exposé accusing him of being a habitual drunk and wife beater. The file contained copies of photographs and medical records going back years showing the black eyes and broken fingers Cooper had inflicted on her, as well as screen grabs taken from a security camera, which showed him kicking her repeatedly in the driveway of their house after returning home from a fund-raiser. She filed criminal charges, his TV shows were immediately canceled, and he ended up going to jail for criminal assault.

Cooper staged a press conference the day he was released, repledging his life to Jesus and begging forgiveness for all the sins he had committed while Satan had possession of him. He had spent his time in the wilderness, he claimed, and had put the temptations of the devil behind him now that the Lord had revealed a new path for him as a modern crusader. The last few pages of the file showed exactly how this had manifested itself. There were extracts from his sermons against other religions, details of his various media campaigns outlining his opposition to the construction of non-Christian places of worship anywhere in America and his call to pass a law making Christianity the only religion that could be legally taught in American schools. But by far the most powerful component of his new mission was a charitable initiative called “Operation Savior,” which, according to the literature, gave “spiritual help and healing for warriors on the front line of the holy wars.” It raised money to send medical help and psychiatric counselors to servicemen and — women fighting in religiously sensitive war zones such as Afghanistan and the Middle East and helped them get jobs when they returned home again. It had won Cooper some very high-powered admirers. There were pictures of Cooper smiling and waving onstage at various political rallies, standing shoulder to shoulder with senators, congressmen and members of the cabinet from several administrations.

The buzz of static cut straight through Shepherd’s head as Franklin flicked on the comms. “What d’you think?”

Shepherd stared at the most recent photograph of Cooper, beaming for the cameras at a presidential primary. “He seems an unlikely terrorist.”

“They’re generally the most effective sort.”

“Also, Dr. Kinderman and Professor Douglas are two of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I’m not sure I buy it that someone like Cooper could persuade them to sabotage their life’s work.”

“Maybe he had something on them, every man has his weak spot and every man has his price. Or perhaps they found the Lord and then Cooper found them.”

“Professor Douglas had already found Him.”

“Really?”

“Not all scientists are godless heathens. I heard him deliver a lecture once on the relationship between religion and science where he said studying the stars was just another way of trying to get closer to God. He equated it with saying a prayer. So I’m having trouble seeing how he could destroy the very thing that enables him to do that. It would be like persuading the pope to blow up St. Peter’s.”

Franklin chewed over this last piece of information. “How much do you know about Operation Fish?”

Shepherd flicked back to the top sheet and reread the Questioned Documents results that had thrown up Cooper’s name in the first place. “Wasn’t it some kind of religiously motivated witch hunt?”

“It was if you believe certain sections of the press. It was an interdepartmental internal investigation prompted by whispers that various offices of government had been infiltrated and were now being run by a large Christian network whose agenda didn’t necessarily coincide with the national interest. Part of the investigation was a data-catching initiative to flush out radical Christians; it’s not just the extreme Islamists the government wants to keep its eye on, dangerous and crazy is still dangerous and crazy no matter which God you bend your knee to. Anyway, we put out a story that Darwinian evolution was going to be made a mandatory subject of study in all schools then set up a petition to collect the names of people who were violently opposed to it, which is how Cooper fell into the net. Guess he sees himself more in a “made in the image of God” kind of way than just some high-functioning monkey.”

“What happened to the investigation — did they ever make any arrests?”

Franklin shook his head. “A combination of pressure from both houses and an effective press campaign claiming it was an attack on the First Amendment got it shut down before it could bear any fruit.”

“But isn’t that exactly what a powerful secret network working inside government would do to prevent itself from being discovered?”

Franklin shrugged. “I just obey orders, and there was no political desire to keep the investigation going. Targeting Christians in an overwhelmingly Christian country is never going to win many votes, particularly post 9/11 with Islam becoming the new Communism. The average guy on the street would probably be quite happy to discover that a group of powerful Christians were quietly running the country. But here’s a thought for you — this network was supposed to extend far and wide, not only in central government but also in law enforcement, the judiciary — NASA. So if, as you say, Professor Douglas was a man of faith, maybe he was part of this network, maybe Kinderman was too. And people of strong faith will do anything if they believe it’s God’s will. So whatever preconceptions you have about the Reverend Cooper, or your Professor Douglas, you need to be under no illusion that the ones we are chasing down here are powerful and very motivated people. We need to tread carefully, Agent Shepherd; there’s nothing more frightening than an enemy who thinks death is just a gateway to something better.”

36

The Postilion Gate swung wide and the slow clip of hooves on cobbles echoed across the Public Square as the tribute cart emerged from the seminary complex in the Old Town of Ruin.

Riding up front were two seminarians, dressed all in black apart from the white of their surgical masks. Usually the weekly spectacle of delivering provisions to the Citadel was witnessed by large crowds of tourists who would gather along the route, cameras in hand, ready to get the best view of this timeless ceremony. Today there was no one.

The cart passed through the stone arch onto the embankment encircling the base of the Citadel, heading toward the wooden bridge spanning the moat of waving grass that grew where water once rippled. The wind flapped and tugged at the black cassocks of the two seminarians, ruffling the cellophane around the many floral tributes that still covered the spot on the flagstones where the monk had fallen.

The sound of the wheels changed to a deep rumble as they moved off the flagstones and onto the wooden bridge spanning the dry moat. It jerked to a halt by the waiting wooden platform, secured at each corner by thick ropes that soared up the side of the mountain and disappeared into the dark of an overhanging cave high above them.

Normally, the unloading would take four men about ten minutes to complete. Today it took the two of them less than five. The amount of food had been drastically cut over the past few weeks, suggesting there were far fewer mouths to feed. The only things they had requested more of — much more — were medical supplies.

The weekly bundle of correspondence was the last thing to be loaded. It was placed into the wooden box built into the corner of the platform before one of the seminarians pulled hard on a thin, hemp rope, causing a bell to sound high in the mountain above.

They watched as the ropes creaked and tightened and the platform started to rise, relieved that there were still arms strong and healthy enough to pull it up.

The platform rose steadily, three hundred feet up into the gloom of the tribute cave where it jerked to a solid stop. Hooded figures wearing surgical masks peeled away from the shadows to unload it, stacking the crates of food on various stone shelves cut into the walls and handing the medical equipment straight to the waiting brown cloaks who took it down into the darkness of the mountain where the distant sounds of suffering could be heard.

Brother Osgood watched from the edge of the cave, fiddling nervously with the straps on his face mask. He had only recently been elevated from the lowest order of monks within the mountain to the brown cloaks of the Administrata, not that the old system of apprenticeship had much bearing since the first case of the blight had struck. He waited until most of the supplies had been unloaded then stole forward, feeling the platform rock beneath his feet as he plucked the correspondence from its box and scurried quickly away again, glad to be away from all the people in the tribute cave.

He moved through the dark corridors, clutching the bundle to his chest, probing the blackness ahead for signs of anyone else coming his way. Since the blight had struck, the Apothecaria had advised everyone to minimize contact with others and movement inside the mountain had been severely restricted.

Osgood passed a padlocked door with a handwritten sign nailed to it saying CAVE ROBIGO — BEWARE BLIGHT. Similar signs barred routes all through the mountain, remnants of the initial attempt to contain the disease by sealing off different areas as each new case occurred. No one had bothered to take them down, even though they were no longer relevant. There were far too many other things to occupy the monks and everyone knew to ignore them anyway, at least the ones who were still rational.

A low, guttural moan wormed its way out of the darkness and the cotton mask sucked in and out of his mouth as his heart rate rose. Even after a year he had still not gotten used to the dark of the mountain, and still had nightmares from time to time in the quiet midnight of the dormitory. He would imagine the tunnels closing in on him, or dread creatures pursuing him down the labyrinthine corridors, the sounds of their inhuman grunts getting closer and closer until he woke, breathless and slicked with sweat. And now the nightmares had escaped into this waking world.

He clicked the latch on the heavy wooden door that led into the garden, shielding his eyes in preparation for the blinding daylight about to hit him.

The garden filled a large central portion of the mountain and was surrounded on all sides by high walls of sheer rock, It was the sunken crater of a long-extinct volcano that had bequeathed such rich and fertile soil that it had sustained the men of the mountain for thousands of years, through drought and famine and siege. For so long it had been the living jewel at the heart of the black mountain.

But not anymore.

Osgood blinked as his eyes adjusted to the daylight and made his way past vegetable beds filled with the decaying remains of beans and tomato plants, lying black and shriveled among the sludgy remains of pumpkins that looked like rotting heads. The vines that had covered the rock walls hung in withered curtains and broken branches littered the ground, buried in drifts of brown leaves bearing the black spots that had first heralded the arrival of the contagion. And all around, the air that had once smelled so strongly of earth and loam and life now carried the bitter tang of wood smoke mixed with something Osgood would not forget for the rest of his days. Through the broken trees he could see the source of the smell as well as the group of monks who presided over it. It was the firestone, piled high with tangled branches through which hungry flames licked, and on top of them — three bodies.

They had started to burn the corpses on the third day of the contagion when they began to run out of places to store them and panic had already started to gnaw at the edges of the ordered life of the mountain. It had been decided that diseased corpses posed too much of an additional danger to health and they had to be either buried or burned. Burning was quicker. The fire had been burning constantly ever since, as the bodies kept on coming.

“Brother Athanasius!” Osgood called to the group, coming to rest as far from the heat and stink of the fire as he could manage. “I have brought the dispatches.”

A monk turned to look at him, his bald head and face marking him out in the otherwise long-haired and bearded community of men, the pain and trauma of the last week carved deep into his face.

Athanasius nodded a greeting and stepped forward, holding his hand out for the bundle of dispatches, sensing the novice’s reluctance to come closer. Traditionally the letters could be seen only by the abbot, but the blight had swept through the mountain with no regard for age or rank and most of the senior clerics and heads of the various guilds were now either dead or strapped to beds in one of the many isolation wards set up throughout the mountain. The only ones left of any authority were Father Malachi, the head librarian; Father Thomas, also one of the group by the fire; and Athanasius himself who, as the abbot’s chamberlain, had now assumed his duties.

He took the bundle and was about to return to the fire when he spotted his name written on the top letter. He tore open the envelope and read the handwritten note inside.

Athanasius handed the letter to Thomas, his mind buzzing as he waited for him to finish reading it. In the entire history of the Citadel, no one had ever been allowed inside the mountain who had not been strictly vetted and ordained. Even though the circumstances they found themselves in were exceptional in the extreme, there were still those who would rather die than break with tradition. And this would mean bringing women in too.

Thomas finished and looked up, his intelligent eyes registering the shock of what he had just read. “What do you think?” Athanasius prompted.

Thomas stared into the flames now steadily consuming the latest victims of the terrible blight that no one had so far been able to stop. “I think we need to talk to Father Malachi,” he said. “We cannot sanction this without him, or the support of those he represents. Unfortunately, I’m fairly certain I know what his response will be.”

Athanasius nodded. Malachi was as traditional and conservative as any in the mountain, and the seemingly endless parade of recent calamities that had plagued the Citadel had only made him more rather than less so. He would be a hard man to convince, but the letter in Athanasius’s hand offered the first real glimmer of hope he had encountered in some time and he was not about to let it go.

“Then we will just have to convince him,” he said, and smiled for what seemed like the first time in days as he strode away across the blasted garden, heading toward the Great Library at the heart of the mountain.

37

The Great Library spread like a maze through forty-two chambers of varying sizes, deep in the heart of the mountain. It was one of the greatest treasures of the Citadel, the most valuable and unique collection of books and ancient texts anywhere in the world, gleaned from thousands of years of acquisitions and donations. It was also one of the reasons for the mountain’s millennia-old tradition of isolation and secrecy. There were texts housed in the library’s restricted sections containing knowledge so dangerous that few had ever been allowed to see them, even inside the cloistered and secretive world of the Citadel.

Athanasius approached the entrance, a steel-and-glass door, cut into the solid rock of the tunnel, that looked like it belonged more in a hi-tech science facility than an ancient monastery. He placed his hand against a scanner set into the wall and a cold blue light swept across it to check and verify his identity.

“Don’t show him the letter,” Father Thomas said, arriving breathless at his side. “It is an appeal for us to help save lives. Malachi cares little for people. All that matters to him are his precious books.”

“Agreed.” Athanasius nodded.

The door into the air lock slid open in a hiss of hydraulics. It was only large enough for one person at a time and Athanasius took the lead, stepping inside and waiting for the outer door to close behind him. A light blinked above a second scanner and a downdraught of air swept over him as impurities and dust were cycled down to filters built into the floor. The library was climate controlled: a constant 68 degrees Fahrenheit and a dry, 35 percent relative humidity to protect all the precious paper, papyrus and vellum from moisture and the attendant damage it could wreak. The light stopped blinking and Athanasius placed his palm on a second scanner that controlled the final door into the library.

Nothing happened.

The blue light that should have crept down his hand did not appear and the door leading into the library remained closed. Athanasius peered through the window set into it but saw only perpetual darkness beyond.

“Try it again,” Father Thomas shouted from outside, his voice muffled by the door, his face framed in the window and frowning at the dead scanner as if its failure to do its job was a deliberate act of mutiny. Father Thomas had designed and updated all the security and control systems in the library and took any faults, no matter how small, very personally.

Athanasius placed his hand back on the glass. This time something did happen. The door behind him opened again, allowing him back out into the corridor.

“Someone’s tampered with the entry system,” Father Thomas said, looking as if he was about to explode with anger. He glared past Athanasius at the mutinous locking system then focused on something over his shoulder. “Malachi,” he said.

Athanasius turned and saw what had caught his attention. Through the window of the closed door a small orb of light had appeared in the distant dark of the library, growing larger as it wobbled toward them. This was another of Father Thomas’s genius innovations, a movement-sensitive lighting system that followed every visitor and illuminated only their immediate surroundings as they made their way through the library, leaving the vast majority of the precious collection in almost permanent darkness. The frequency of light even changed as one progressed farther into the collection, turning through soft orange to red when the older and more delicate surfaces and inks were reached.

“Remember our mission here,” Athanasius whispered. “Do not let your anger overshadow our greater purpose.”

Thomas grunted and fumed quietly as the orb of bobbing light drew closer and revealed the bearish, hunched figure of Father Malachi, like a tadpole at the center of a luminous orb of spawn. He shuffled along, taking his time as he followed the thin filament of guide lights set into the floor to lead people through the maze of the library.

“Can I assist you?” he said as he finally reached them, his voice rendered flat and robotic by the intercom that was thankfully still working.

“What have you done to my entry system?” Thomas asked, the peevishness in his voice clearly evident.

“It is not your entry system. It belongs to the library and I have locked it.”

“Why?”

“Because I do not want just anybody to be able to gain free access here. I’m sure, with everything the way it is in the mountain, you understand that.”

Father Thomas opened his mouth to respond but Athanasius held his hand up to silence him, mindful that they should choose their battles and this was not the one they needed to win. “That is why we have come to talk to you,” he said. Malachi’s eyes darkened behind the thick pebbles of his glasses and his bushy eyebrows beetled above them. “We have been contacted by the outside,” Athanasius continued. “They have requested that we help develop a cure for the blight.”

“They have a cure?” Malachi took an involuntary step forward, his glasses magnifying the hope in his eyes.

“No. Not yet. They are working on one, and they would like us to help.”

The shadows on Malachi’s face settled back into guarded suspicion. “How?”

Athanasius took a breath and ran his hand over the smooth dome of his skull. He had hoped the carrot of a cure might have been enough to tempt Malachi away from his entrenched and long-held suspicion of the world beyond the walls. He should have known better. “We are all united in suffering,” he said, “and in our desire to prevent others from suffering as we have.” Malachi said nothing. He just continued to stare through the window like a glowing, malevolent ghost. “We have been asked to allow medical teams into the mountain so they might treat our infected and study the disease at its origin.”

Malachi’s eyebrows shot up in outrage. “Outsiders? Inside the mountain? I hope you are not seriously considering this lunacy?”

“Is it lunacy? To want to try and arrest the spread of this creeping death?”

“We have weathered plagues in the mountain before. You should read your history, Brother Athanasius. We suffered and survived our trials then and we shall do so again, and without the need to welcome the world in to gawp at us and what we guard here — our sacred order is more robust than you give it credit for.”

“The plagues of the past are nothing compared to what we face now,” Father Thomas cut in, stepping into the narrow airlock to join Athanasius. “Historically there has always been greater medical knowledge inside the mountain than outside, so there was never any need to look farther than these walls for cures and treatments. We have also historically enjoyed rude health, have we not? But with the march of time and the loss of the Sacrament neither of those things is now true.”

“Yes,” Malachi replied, his fierce eyes turning back to Athanasius, “and whose fault is that? Had the Sacrament remained here then none of this would have happened. If you want to cure this blight that you have brought upon us then I suggest you concentrate on returning the Sacrament to the mountain where it belongs. That is my answer. Bring back the girl and what she stole and we shall see then how things change.”

Athanasius was not a violent man but if the thick glass of the air lock door had not stood between them he may well have struck Malachi right then and there in the middle of his narrow-minded face. The whole world could wither and perish for all Malachi cared, just so long as his precious library remained unsullied and safe. His act of sabotaging the entry system so he could prevent people freely entering his dark kingdom merely proved it: he had effectively pulled up a drawbridge to create a state within a state, with himself and all the other librarians inside and everyone else without.

“Do you intend to stay locked up in there indefinitely?” Athanasius asked, the hint of a plan starting to form in his mind.

“I do indeed, both to protect the library as well as shield my staff from the dangerous tide of lunatic liberalism that seems to be sweeping through the corridors of the Citadel.”

“So I take it you will not even consider this letter or the proposal it contains?”

Malachi looked at the envelope in Athanasius’s hand as if it were a viper about to strike. “I will not even touch it,” he replied.

“Very well,” Athanasius took a step back and rejoined Thomas in the passage. “As you have effectively removed yourself from the community of the mountain you have also disqualified yourself from its governance. Therefore, Father Thomas and I will now vote on this matter ourselves.”

Malachi looked like he was about to explode. “You can’t do that. Any change in the constitution must be voted on and agreed unanimously by all the guilds. And for that you need me.”

Athanasius shook his head. “If you read the Citadelic statutes closely you will see that in fact a consensus is required from all active guilds, as voted for by their chief representatives. And as you have just made abundantly clear, you and your members are no longer an active part of the mountain. So as sole representatives of the still active guilds within the mountain Thomas and I will consider the merit of this proposal alone. We shall inform you of our decision once it is made, of course, out of courtesy. Good day, Father Malachi.”

Then he turned and walked briskly away before Malachi had a chance to respond.

38

The C-130 dropped through violently churning clouds and banked hard to bring it into the wind and onto its approach heading.

“Jesus, would you look at that,” the pilot’s voice crackled through the comms.

Shepherd peered across the cargo space and through the tiny windows opposite. He caught small glimpses of the city of Charleston below, frozen solid and blanketed with snow. He wondered why the pilot sounded so surprised after what he had told them about the weather earlier. It was like this all over the South he had said. A section of midtown slid into view, the taller buildings looking like huge ice crystals that had punched up through the ground, then the plane shifted again, bringing a new view into the windows.

Below him the broad Cooper River snaked through the heart of the city. It seemed low, just a narrow channel winding its way through flat, snow-dusted banks. The USS Yorktown, a World War Two museum ship at permanent mooring just down from the Ravenel Bridge, looked like it was beached on the white flats. Then Shepherd saw cracks in the white that surrounded it and realized what it was. The river wasn’t low at all and the white flats not the banks, they were the river. The whole thing had frozen solid, leaving just a trickle of water running down the center.

The plane leveled off, bringing more of the city into view and Shepherd finally saw what the pilot had seen. It wasn’t the snow or even the extraordinary sight of a frozen South Carolina tidal river that had drawn the exclamation from his lips — it was what was on the river.

East of the bridge and beyond the cracked edge of the ice sheet where the freshwater met the salt of the sea were more ships than Shepherd had ever seen before in one place. Closest to land were smaller vessels and fishing boats, all crammed together so tightly it looked like you could almost walk across the river using them as stepping-stones. Farther out in the deeper water were bigger ships: container vessels, tankers, cruise liners, military ships and even the immense outline of an aircraft carrier. It was an astonishing sight and there was something both impressive and deeply unsettling about it. Just before the plane started its final descent and cut the view entirely Shepherd realized what it was. They all had their bow inward. Every single one of the hundred or so ships was pointing toward land.

39

Father Malachi surged through the library in his halo of light.

Following his meeting with Athanasius and Father Thomas he was in a state of total shock. A month ago, when the abbot and the prelate still lived and the Sancti still held sway within the mountain, Athanasius would have been executed for even considering the heresy he was now proposing. Secrecy and isolation were how the mountain had kept its great secrets for so long. Now that damned fool with his weak, liberal ideas was going to allow a bunch of total strangers inside — civilians, doctors, women! — all of them carrying this filthy disease. How quickly the solid walls of his world had started to crumble.

He passed through an arch and strode through the Renaissance section, his follow light becoming steadily dimmer as he traveled back through the great archive of man’s learning. While others in the Citadel turned to God in their time of need, Malachi always found divinity and peace in the written word. Every great thought and every profound event mankind had ever had or experienced was written and recorded somewhere in this vast network of caves. There was an answer for everything here somewhere.

When that damned monk Samuel had jumped to his death and the abbot had confided in him that his body may have contained clues as to the identity of the Sacrament, he had come to the library and taken solace in the chronicles of the Rides of the Tabula Rasa. These recorded every historical instance where the identity of the Sacrament had been threatened. Each time the knights had ridden out and each time the traitors had been found and silenced and the Sacrament’s secret had remained. Later, when the blight had appeared, he had found records detailing outbreaks of other contagions throughout the Citadel’s long history. Again, the mountain had always recovered and prospered. It would do so again. He had to believe that. Whatever lunacy Athanasius was considering it was up to him to maintain the true spirit of the Citadel. And with the Sacrament gone it was the library that now held the greatest secrets. He would keep the door locked and the world outside, even if the mountain beyond was awash with strangers. The soul of the Citadel was in these books, and so — somewhere — was the answer to the question now running though his head. “What should be done about Athanasius?”

40

Liv and Tariq stood by the edge of the pool, staring down at the muddy dish of water. They had been in the desert only half a day but already the water level was down by half.

“You did tell everyone to go easy?” Liv murmured.

Tariq nodded and squinted up at the sun, dropping low in the afternoon sky. “It’s not the people who are the problem.”

The combination of fierce desert sun, the dam stopping the river from replenishing the pool and the natural leaching away of water into the dry ground meant the pool was emptying so fast they could almost see it happening.

Liv looked up at Tariq. “We can’t stay here long. Where’s the nearest town or settlement?”

He nodded back toward the compound. “Al-Hillah is half a day’s ride in that direction, so maybe two days’ walking.”

Liv imagined walking for two days in this heat. The few hours it had taken to get here had been hellish enough. “How much food do we have?”

“Hardly any; the riders didn’t give us much time to pack and everyone was busy filling their canteens with water. Certainly not enough to feed everyone on a hard, two-day journey.” He looked at the lengthening shadows stretching across the land. “I will go alone, one person alone will need less food. The heat is fading, so I could travel all night and cover a lot of ground. I will take as little as I need and bring back horses and supplies. The water here should last another day.”

Liv shook her head. “If you’re going I’m coming with you.”

“No. You should stay.”

“With Kasim and his barely disguised looks of hate? I don’t think so. Besides, what if something happens to you out there and we’re stuck here, slowly dying of hunger and thirst while we wait for your return?”

“Nothing will happen to me.”

“Not if there’re two of us it won’t. Come on, let’s go check the food supplies and break the happy news.” She turned and walked away before Tariq could argue.

The food had been collected and stored in a large backpack that was kept in the shade of one of the rocks to protect it from the worst of the heat. They had been rationing it, handing out just a handful of dried dates or a small piece of an energy bar every few hours to make it last. Liv wasn’t sure how much was left but figured she and Tariq would need to take the lion’s share to give them the energy they would need for their journey. She scanned the patches of shade beneath the larger boulders looking for Kasim, figuring if anyone was going to object to their plan it would be him. She felt relieved when she couldn’t see him.

She made it to the boulder where their “larder” was kept and reached into the gap beneath it for the pack. She knew something was wrong the moment her hand closed around the shoulder strap and pulled the bag toward her. It was too light. She dragged it out, unsnapped the cover and looked inside. Empty.

She looked around in panic, her exhausted mind knocked sideways by the discovery. The flat stone and pocketknife used for cutting the energy bars was on the ground beside her. She was in the right place — so where was the food? No one had said anything about it running low the last time the rations had been handed out.

Then she stopped dead, remembering the last person who had done it.

It had been Kasim.

Kasim had handed round the last rations about an hour ago.

And now Kasim was missing.

41

Joint Base Charleston served as both a civil and a military airport, hence the blunt utility of its name. It was also shared by different branches of the armed forces and the C-130 pulled to a stop now between the drooping wings of two massive C17 military transports, one painted in army camouflage the other in air force blue.

“Agents Franklin and Shepherd?” Their welcoming committee snapped to attention as they walked down the loading ramp into a freezing wind that was whipping off the river. He was a two-chevron petty officer with a clipboard and a pink, scrubbed-looking face that appeared to be suffering in the cold. Franklin flashed his creds, Shepherd fumbled his from the coat he’d borrowed from Marshall after his had been destroyed by the helium blast, the PO ticked something on his clipboard and gestured toward a waiting Crown Victoria with base markings on the side and its engine running. “Sorry, gentlemen, you just got me. We’re kind of short staffed here. And I can’t hang around or let you have the car either. I can take you off base and into town but that’s about all. Traffic is hellacious today for some reason. You’ll have to find your own way back. I’m real sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, son — we’re grateful for any help.” Franklin showed him Cooper’s address and the PO whistled through his teeth. “Fancy. That’s south of Broad in the old town, where the tourists go and the rich folks live. Like I say, I can take you there but I can’t wait.”

Franklin held up his hands in surrender. “No problem — we can hook up with the local PD once we’re off base and take it from there.”

Franklin moved toward the passenger seat, leaving the back for Shepherd. He didn’t speak again until the car was rolling.

“Your staffing situation got anything to do with that floating traffic jam out in the river?”

“You got that right, sir. We’ve had unauthorized ships arriving here for the past twenty-four hours. The port authority is in meltdown. They’ve drafted us in to help deal with the situation but it seems to be getting worse. We put out a general call twelve hours ago advising all shipping that the port is now embargoed but no one seems to be taking any notice. They just keep on coming.” The PO eased out onto a broad boulevard lined with piles of graying snow. “Did you see the carrier when you came in?”

“Hard to miss it.”

“That’s the USS Ronald Reagan. It’s supposed to be out on patrol in the Atlantic but it showed up here about an hour ago. There’s all hell breaking loose over at command. They’re talking mutiny and all kinds of stuff.”

“Anyone spoken to the captain?”

“If they have, I don’t know about it. What I do know is that none of the ships — military or civilian — have responded to communications. We can track them coming in on radar so we know they’re headed here, but all attempts to contact them and divert them elsewhere have been met with radio silence. It’s like a fleet of ghost ships coming in to anchor.”

“What about the crews, they sick or something?”

“They’re all fine. Everything’s fine. There’s no engine failure or nothing like that. They get here, drop anchor and start disembarking. That’s why we’re short staffed, everyone’s on double duty trying to deal with all the paperwork. By rights all the military personnel should be arrested for dereliction of duty and held in the brig but we haven’t even got the capacity for that. The brig holds around three hundred men and it’s full already. There’re six thousand on the Reagan alone. We also got a cruiser and a destroyer out there and a coupla frigates heading this way. I heard talk they were gonna commandeer Fort Sumter out in the bay and use it as a holding pen, but then the National Park Service got all bent out of shape because it’s a civil war monument and all. You ask me, the whole thing’s a mess. A big crazy mess.” He shook his head.

Shepherd watched the PO’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They were edgy, flicking left and right, fixing on the road then checking the mirrors as if someone might be following them. His fingers tapped on the wheel as he drove, letting on that he was nervous or scared. “Can’t you send some of these ships off to another port, take the pressure off here a little?” he asked.

“Well, that’s the thing, sir — we got Kings Bay and Jacksonville south of here but they’re having the same problem. They got ships showing up there too.”

“Any port in a storm,” Shepherd muttered, looking out of the window at the frozen edges of the city as it started to snow again.

“What’s that, sir?”

“Nothing.”

“I tell you one thing.” The PO’s hands continued to drum anxiously on the wheel. “The one thing all the ships have in common.” He checked the rearview mirror one last time before whispering his secret. “They’re all American. American registered and American crews. And the funny thing is, when we interview the crews, and ask ’em why they put in here, they all keep saying the same thing: ‘We just needed to get home,’ that’s what they’re saying—‘We need to get home.’ ”

Home

That word again, taunting Shepherd with a meaning he had never really known. Outside his window the parking lots and business units of northern Charleston began to disappear as they headed downtown. The PO had been right about the traffic. Lines of cars packed solid with people and possessions, inching forward through the drifting snow. The vast majority of them were from out of state. Shepherd even spotted one with Canadian tags.

Shepherd’s phone buzzed and he checked the caller ID before answering.

“Hello, Merriweather.”

“I just heard about the explosion at Marshall. Is it true?” He sounded about as tired as Shepherd felt.

Shepherd glanced at Franklin before answering. “Unofficially, yes. We’re trying to keep a lid on it at the moment, though, so don’t repeat that to anyone.”

“What about James Webb? Was it badly damaged?”

Shepherd looked out of the window at the frozen city. “It was totally destroyed, or at least all the components in the cryo testing lab were.”

The phone went silent and Shepherd watched the lines of traffic slip by as the PO made good use of his lights and siren to thread his way through it.

“What about Professor Douglas?” Merriweather said. “Is he — was he?”

“He’s fine so far as we know. We haven’t found him yet. He wasn’t at the facility. We’re trying to track him down now. But no one was hurt, which is the only good news. Well, that and the fact that your job probably just got a little more secure. It will probably be cheaper to fix Hubble now than rebuild James Webb, so I guess every storm cloud has a silver lining.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He didn’t sound particularly happy.

Outside, the lines of cars thinned a little as they reached the older part of town with its grander, prettier architecture: Colonial-style mansions, Federal, Georgian — all sliding past behind a veil of snow like ghosts of the city’s history.

“How is Hubble — any change?” Shepherd asked, trying to lift Merriweather’s mood.

“Yes, actually there is.” He brightened a little. “It’s still pointing straight down to earth but at least it hasn’t started losing altitude or something worrying like that. If anything, it appears to be settling into a new orbit.”

“What about Taurus, anything new appearing there?”

“Not that I know of but I’m a bit blind at the moment. I’ll do some asking around with some people I know with telescopes that still work.”

“Thanks, Merriweather. I appreciate it. Try and get some sleep.”

“Ah, sleep is overrated. I can sleep when I’m old.”

Shepherd smiled. “Take care, Merriweather.” He hung up.

The tires rumbled as they hit the old cobbled roads built with discarded ballast stones from British sailing ships when Charleston was part of its expanding empire.

“Take a right over there,” Franklin said, pointing to a turn up ahead, “otherwise you’ll get caught up in the one-way system.”

“You been here before, sir?” the driver said, making the turn.

“Coupla times.”

They were in the heart of the tourist district now and every store served either food or nostalgia. The driver slowed as they passed a mule-drawn carriage with a few brave tourists huddled in the back, heads down against the driving snow, looking back to where the harbor was framed at the end of the long street. You could just see the ships through the snow, clustered together in the same waters where sails once billowed and cannons boomed as the British were driven out.

“Here you go, gentlemen.”

The Crown Vic turned a corner and pulled up to the curb by a classic redbrick Charleston single house with chocolate brown shutters framing tall sash windows. Bright lights burned inside, making the windows glow, and steam rose from a vent in the basement. On the street level two broad steps led up through an arch to an iron gate that served as the front entrance. A Christmas wreath was hanging above a rectangle of polished brass with THE CHURCH OF CHRIST’S SALVATION engraved on it.

“Sorry I got to dump you,” the PO said, like a cabdriver desperate to get rid of his last fare before home. “Just bad timing with all the craziness.”

“Don’t worry about it and thanks for the ride.” They got out of the car and Shepherd felt the cold wrap itself around him as it drove off, the snow swallowing the sound of its engine and leaving them in crystal silence. Franklin pressed a button by the side of the locked gate, but if it made a sound inside the house the snow swallowed that too. “You think we should sing Christmas carols?” he said.

The sound of a bolt cracked through the silence, making Shepherd jump.

Halfway along the side of the house a door opened and a woman stepped out and started making her way toward them. She looked to be about thirty or so, her black hair cut short and matched by a black two-piece trouser suit worn over a gray turtleneck sweater. She didn’t smile as she covered the ten or so feet between them, merely looked at them both, sizing them up, her breath clouding in the cold air. Shepherd noticed she had a slight limp and, as she drew closer, he saw a thin pale scar cutting across her left cheek. She stopped a foot short of the closed gate and regarded them through the bars. “Can I help you, gentlemen?” The scar puckered a little when she spoke.

“Yes, I think you probably can,” Franklin held up his ID. “Is the good reverend at home?”

Her gray eyes flicked to the badge then back again.

“The Reverend Cooper is on air at the moment.”

“That’s okay, we can wait.” Franklin smiled. The woman did not. Neither did she make any move to open the gate.

“What’s your name, miss?”

“Boerman. Caroline Boerman.”

“Well, Miss Caroline from the Carolinas we can wait out here if you’d like.” He kicked his shoe against the wall to clear the snow from it. “But I should tell you I’m a southern boy and the cold makes me awful grouchy.”

A small smile finally cracked the mask of her face, puckering the scar even more but going nowhere near her eyes. “Of course,” she said, unlocking the gate and stepping back to allow them past. “Where are my manners?”

42

The front door of the Church of Christ’s Salvation opened into a warm, high-ceilinged entrance hall running the entire width of the building. It was plainly decorated in white that caught the glare from the tall windows looking out onto the snow-covered street. Three sofas, also white, were arranged in a horseshoe around a low coffee table with leaflets and small booklets on the surface next to a jar filled with multicolored plastic key rings. The only real clue as to what went on in the building was coming from the television fixed above the bare brick fireplace.

Now you have watched me on TV today.

The Reverend Fulton Cooper said, his eyes burning from the screen.

I’ve taken my own step of faith to come in front of the camera and talk to you across America. But now you need to take a step of your own. YOU need to do something for Him.

“Please take a seat,” Miss Caroline said, “the reverend will be with you soon. Can I get you some coffee?”

“That would be fine.” Franklin said, settling into the sofa opposite the TV.

I want you to look out of your window. Do it right now and see what is happening in the world. I know you have terrible floods out there in Texas and in New Mexico. I know you have drought in Illinois and Indiana. These are the signs of His coming.

The reverend moved across the screen to a window and the camera followed, showing the swirling blizzard over the rooftops and the distant ships in the bay.

Here in the holy city of Charleston we have snow where no snow ought to be. Maybe hell has frozen over too, my friends, because Carolina sure has. And so has Florida. And so has Georgia. Is this not evidence that mankind’s sins have sorely displeased the Lord and that His great reckoning is upon us?

The camera swept back to him, eyes still blazing down the lens, challenging the viewer.

You need to make a vow of faith to make your peace with the Lord and you need to make it fast. If you have wandered from the flock then now is the time to return. Be reconciled with your Lord and do it now, for time is running out. The true Church will always welcome you. Call the number on the screen right now. Salvation is waiting.

A graphic of a dove flew across the screen, wiping the reverend from view and dragging an infomercial in on its tail.

Franklin reached forward and fished a key ring from the jar. It had a phone number stamped on it next to a Web site address, the same ones that were now scrolling across the screen beneath images of American soldiers marching on dry foreign soil. The picture changed to a group of wounded servicemen and — women gathering together in a field hospital, some with bandages around their heads, others with limbs missing — all of them praying.

A caption crashed onto the screen:

The door opened behind them and Miss Boerman reappeared. “Reverend Cooper can see you now if you’d like to follow me.”

The first room they passed through was divided into small cubicles, each containing a computer terminal, a phone and an operator. There must have been twenty of them, all fairly young, all talking and tapping, filling the room with the hum of overlapping conversations.

The next room contained two parallel lines of people stuffing envelopes with the same books and key rings they had seen on the coffee table. One was in a wheelchair, another had a prosthetic hand and Shepherd put it all together — the youthful demographic, the discipline and order, even the limp and the scar on Miss Caroline’s face — these must be some of Cooper’s Christian soldiers, rescued from wherever they’d been fighting and now doing the Lord’s work for the Church that had saved them.

They followed Miss Boerman up some narrow stairs and through a heavy door into a different world. Gone were the utility desks and bare brick walls. Everything on the upper floor was plush and expensive. They were in some kind of salon with deep red velvet furniture and wood paneling on the walls that had been painted a soft, expensive, chalky gray. There was a fire in the hearth and split logs were piled neatly to one side of a carved marble surround.

“Let me see if he’s ready,” Miss Boerman said, disappearing through a hidden door in the paneling.

Franklin leaned in to Shepherd, keeping his voice low. “Looks like the good reverend lives above the shop; you know why he does that?” Shepherd shook his head. “Because in the state of South Carolina religious organizations are exempt from property tax. It means he can live in all this luxury, right in the heart of town, without paying a dime to do it.”

He stood back up as Miss Boerman stuck her head around the edge of the hidden door.

“Reverend Cooper will see you now,” she said.

43

By the time the sun dipped low enough to touch the horizon, Liv and Tariq were ready to leave. Following the discovery of Kasim’s theft everyone had decided they should try and get to Al-Hillah as planned, food or no food. They didn’t really have much choice.

They filled as many canteens as they could carry and drank freely from the pool to fully hydrate themselves before the long march ahead. One small consolation of Kasim’s clandestine departure was that he had not been able to take much water, as filling the canteens at the pool would have been too obvious. As a result Liv and Tariq had plenty of spare water containers for their journey. They were heavy but Liv consoled herself with the thought that the more they drank, the lighter they would become.

The two of them set off with the sky still bright but the sun now gone, rising out of the depression in the ground like the dead coming back to life. Tariq led the way, past the dam and along the line of the river back toward the compound. Al-Hillah lay directly beyond. They had talked about taking a wide route to avoid the compound entirely, but with hunger already gnawing at their stomachs and the extra miles this would add to their journey they had decided to risk taking the direct route instead, timing their march so they could creep past it as close as they dared under cover of darkness.

Night fell quickly and so did the temperature. Liv pulled her clothes tight against the creeping cold but could still feel it slowly taking hold of her feet, numbing them as they trudged forward. Ahead of them the compound glowed into life as the battery-powered security lights switched on automatically, using power collected by solar panels during the day. She felt drawn to them, a moth to the light. “They seem brighter tonight,” she said.

“It’s because they’re getting closer,” Tariq whispered, then pressed his finger to his lips. “We should keep quiet. Sound travels farther in the still of a desert night.” It felt good to be moving again and she found the tightness that had tugged at her as she walked away from the compound was lessening again with every step she took back to it.

For the next hour they walked in silence, settling into a steady pace, stopping occasionally to adjust anything on their packs that made a noise. It was in the soft silence of one of these stops that they heard it, a steady, rhythmic sound, rising and falling as the night breezes shifted it around. Liv titled her head toward it and Tariq did the same. Through the whisper of the wind they heard it again, the unmistakable thrum of a diesel engine.

“Generator,” Tariq whispered. “That’s why the lights are so bright. They must have fresh supplies of fuel and have switched on the main perimeter lights. Someone else must be there.”

Liv listened harder, trying to pick out any other sounds of life. She was listening so hard that when the new sound came, close and loud, it made her spin around in alarm. It had come from behind, a haunted, moaning sound from over by the river. The sound came again, rattling and wet and she saw what had made it. It was a man, shuffling up the bank, his breath coming in gasping, laborious moans.

Kasim.

Liv started to back away as his eyes locked on to her, so wide and staring that they seemed to glow in the night. A thick, viscous rope of dark drool leaked from his mouth and he raised an arm to point directly at her, his hand bent into a claw.

SaHeira, he said, his voice ragged and raw.

Witch.

Then he coughed, a fierce racking sound that brought him to his knees and sent him into convulsions. He rolled onto his back, fighting for air. Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he started to spasm. Liv jumped as a hand fell on her shoulder. “Don’t look,” Tariq said, trying to turn her away from the death throes.

Liv shrugged away, her eyes transfixed by Kasim, bucking and twitching on the ground, fighting for his final breath. He gave one last long shudder then was still.

“Look,” Tariq said, pointing past his body, “you were right.”

Kasim’s canteen drifted in the water where he had stopped to drink, driven by thirst and a lack of supplies. Tariq stepped over the body and retrieved his backpack lying on the bank. Inside were the missing rations. “We need to get away from here,” Tariq said, shouldering the bag. “He made too much noise. People will be coming to see what it was.”

Liv turned to the compound glowing brightly in the night, close enough now to pick out details. She could see the spindly structures of the guard towers, the shiny-sided buildings, the drill tower in the center still throwing water high into the air, but no movement, and no people. She started walking toward it, following the line of the widening stream to its source at the center of the compound. She did not want to look upon the agonized death mask of Kasim anymore. But most of all she did not want Tariq to see the tears that had started to run down her cheeks. She wasn’t even sure why she was crying. Maybe it was exhaustion — or guilt. Wherever she went it seemed, people died — and she was weary of death. It seemed to walk alongside her, taking the lives of everyone she touched and driving others away. She couldn’t shake the growing feeling that it was she who was at the heart of all this misery — that she was the cause and the curse.

“What are you doing?” Tariq said, drawing level with her, his voice a low whisper so it would not carry.

“I’m going back,” she said, her eyes fixed on the compound. “And if they shoot me then they’ll be doing me and everyone else a favor. You go on to Al-Hillah if you want. I’m tired of running scared.”

She marched on, feeling relieved more than anything as the tension continued to unwind inside her. The adrenaline of the incident with Kasim burned away, leaving a gnawing sickness in the pit of her empty stomach and her muscles feeling heavy and weak. Ahead of her the compound opened up a little as her perspective shifted. She could see past the main building now into the wide central area where the derrick rose from the main pool of water. There was still no sign of life, no horses, no people. Maybe they had realized the water was poisoned and ridden away.

The compound opened up a little more and she saw two vehicles that hadn’t been there before parked by the main transport hangar: a jeep and a transport truck. It explained the fresh supplies of fuel. She was close enough now to read the registration plates and make out the logo on the side of the truck — a flower with the earth at its center. The heat of hope warmed her exhausted muscles and she broke into a shambling run. It was the symbol of the international aid agency ORTUS — the charity Gabriel worked for. He had said he would come back. He had promised. Maybe he had…

She made it to the gate too exhausted from her sprint even to call out his name. She rattled the gate then found a stone on the ground and started banging it against the steel frame. The anvil clang echoed in the night like a chapel bell and she kept at it, beating the stone against the metal until it splintered in her hands.

A door opened on the side of the transport hangar, framing the silhouette of a man and Liv crumpled to her knees, all her energy spent. The figure hurried out of the door toward her and another followed. She could not make out details of their faces because of the bright lights shining behind them. She watched them draw closer, clinging to the gate to keep herself vaguely upright as hope drained steadily out of her. The way they moved, the slope of their shoulders, other tiny things told her, long before they reached the gate to open it, that neither man was Gabriel.

She let go of the gate and allowed herself to slump down the last few feet to the cold earth. The smell of the earth filled her nostrils as her head made contact with the ground. Then she gave in to the welcome relief of oblivion, closed her eyes and let the darkness take her.

44

The Reverend Fulton Cooper was shorter than Shepherd had expected but he displaced the air like a much larger man. He was standing in the middle of a large room that had been converted into a TV studio, talking to a tall reed of a man clutching a clipboard and wearing headphones. The studio was basic, just three cameras on wheeled tripods with wireless transmitters plugged in the back feeding a signal directly into a large iMac in the corner. Including the laptops the telephone operators were using there was maybe less than twenty thousand dollars’ worth of technology on display. No wonder the reverend could afford to base his church in a million-dollar mansion. He was broadcasting to the world with a miniscule overhead and no taxes to pay.

“Gentlemen.” Cooper finally turned his attention to them, all smiles and open arms. “My apologies for the wait. As you can see I am rather busy, but I am more than happy to be of assistance if I can.” He stayed where he was, inviting them to come to him, establishing the power structure.

Franklin didn’t move. “And we surely appreciate that,” he said. “Is there maybe somewhere more private we could talk?”

Cooper’s smile widened. “I have nothing to hide from any of these people; we can talk about anything right here in this room.”

“All right,” Franklin said. “How’s your catching?”

The smile slipped a little. “I don’t get your meaning?”

“Your catching,” Franklin repeated, then his arm shot forward, sending something arcing through the air. Cooper took a step back, his smooth veneer further ruffled by the unexpected move and swatted the object away with his left hand, sending a plastic key ring skittering across the floor of the studio.

“You’ll never make the team catching like that,” Franklin said, finally taking a step forward. “Did you know only around ten percent of the population are left-handed? Also most people use the same hand to do everything, like throw, catch — write threatening postcards to NASA.”

The smile returned but it didn’t quite make it to Reverend Cooper’s eyes. “Take twenty minutes, everyone,” he announced to the room. “Gregory, can you run infomercials on a loop until I’m finished with these gentlemen?” He turned back to them. “Why don’t we sit down.” He gestured toward two sofas in the middle of the studio arranged around a low table with a laptop on it. “Miss Boerman, if you would be so kind as to bring us a large pot of coffee.”

“Coffee!” Franklin said. “Now there’s an idea.”

They settled in the sofas and sat in silence while the room emptied, Cooper busying himself with his cell phone in a way that suggested whatever was on his phone was far more important and deserving of his attention than they were. Shepherd didn’t mind. It gave him the chance to study him up close; he found him vaguely fascinating. His head seemed too big for his compact body and every facial gesture seemed amplified. He also hummed with a restless energy that combined with his carefully combed silver hair and expensive color-matched suit to make him come across like a high-powered corporate executive or a senator with his eye on higher office.

“If you could switch your phone to silent and leave it on the table while we talk,” Franklin said, “I would appreciate it.”

Cooper looked up.

“This is an informal interview but an important one and I don’t want you to be distracted while we talk.”

Cooper obeyed, reluctantly laying his phone down next to the laptop.

“Mind if I smoke?” Franklin asked, producing his pack of cigarettes.

Cooper’s frown deepened. “I believe smoking inside any public building is illegal.”

Franklin tapped a cigarette out and popped it between his lips, reaching a finger inside the pack to fish out his lighter. “That’s true but I believe the deeds to this house are in your name, which makes it a private residence. A man can do whatever he likes in his own home.”

“I’m afraid I must still insist that you do not smoke.”

Franklin shrugged, returned the cigarette to the pack and laid it on the table next to Cooper’s phone. “Your house, your rules.”

The door closed as the final person left and Shepherd reached into the laptop case to pull out copies of the postcards sent to Kinderman and Douglas.

“Recognize these?” Franklin asked.

The reverend took them and studied them, his eyes struggling to focus, his vanity preventing him from wearing reading glasses. “Of course I recognize them.” He looked up and smiled. “Those are the shining words of Genesis.”

Franklin returned the smile but there was no warmth in it. “Do you recognize the handwriting?”

“Of course I do.”

“And why is that?”

“Because it’s mine.”

Silence stretched out in the empty room. The sofa creaked as Franklin leaned forward. “Care to tell us why you sent them?”

Cooper had opened his mouth to reply but the door opened and Miss Boerman reappeared carrying a tray of coffee. She moved the laptop to one side and placed it on the table, careful to avoid the documents and other items on the table. Cooper waited until she had left. “Do you believe what is written in the Bible, gentlemen? Are you men of faith? Because if you know your Scripture then you will not be blind to the clear signs that judgment day is upon us. I saw that those telescopes were an insult to the Lord, modern-day versions of the Tower of Babel, symbol of man’s pride in seeking to gaze upon the face of God, and I prayed to Him saying, “Lord, I know we have offended you, what would you have me do in your blessed name to make amends?’ ”

“And he told you to send death threats?”

Cooper smiled like a gambler with an ace in the hole. “Death threats? I sent no death threats.”

Shepherd reached into the case and handed over copies of the final letters sent to both Kinderman and Douglas. “Then maybe you can explain these.”

Cooper took them and held them at arm’s length, taking his time to inspect them before handing them back. “If you recall I admitted I did write those cards. But these are letters, and they have been typed not written.”

“So you’re saying you did not send these?”

“I did not.”

Franklin leaned farther forward, his voice dropping in a way that was both conspiratorial and menacing. “Quite a coincidence, though, don’t you think, them both making reference to the exact same thing.”

Cooper chuckled. “I don’t think I am the only one who has read the Bible and paid heed to the teachings of the good book. Let me ask you something, gentlemen. If you were aware that a heinous crime was being committed, would you not seek to prevent it from taking place? Are you not, as law enforcement officers, duty bound to uphold the law? Well, I follow the highest law there is, a law that is second to none. So, yes, I will admit I did send those cards, I saw it as my duty to remind those people of the danger of what they were doing, but I did not threaten anyone, as God is my witness I did not do that. Nor am I responsible for the events that have succeeded in toppling these towers.”

Franklin stiffened. “What events?”

Cooper looked surprised. “Well now, surely you know.”

“Know what?”

Cooper leaned forward and tapped something into the laptop. “I don’t know if you were trying to keep a lid on it but I’m sure you are aware, news travels awful fast these days.” He turned the screen around for them to see. It showed a Twitter feed, new tweets appearing almost every second, all using the same hashtags:

“It appears my prayers have been answered and the good Lord has once again confounded the vain attempts of mankind to know His mystery. Your prompt appearance here and the nature of your questions merely confirms to me that these rumors must be true. They are true, I take it — the Hubble telescope has been disabled and its successor destroyed?”

“Yes,” Shepherd said.

“Well, how about that. Thank you, gentlemen, thank you kindly. You have just given me the theme for the second part of today’s show. Now if you have no further questions I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to take your coffee elsewhere. I am in the middle of a live broadcast here.” He began to rise.

“I have a question,” Shepherd said. “Why didn’t you sign the cards?”

“Because I was quoting the Bible; I would not presume to sign my name after the words of the Lord.”

Shepherd nodded. “Also I’m wondering why the cards all have different postmarks?”

Cooper shrugged. “I travel a lot. I guess I must have posted them wherever I found myself to be.”

“Could we see a copy of your schedule going back to May?”

“For what purpose exactly?”

“It would help us match your whereabouts with the postmarks and confirm your story.”

Cooper hesitated. “I’ll get the office to send you over a copy.” Franklin produced a card and handed it to him. The reverend took it and flipped it over in his soft, manicured hands then fixed the smile back in place and gestured toward the door.

“It’s been a pleasure, gentlemen. I’m sorry I could not be more helpful.”

The gate clanged shut behind them on the snow-covered street. “You think he sent the letter?” Shepherd asked.

Franklin reached into his pocket, pulled out his rumpled packet of Marlboros and tapped out a cigarette. He cupped his hand against the cold and fired up a battered Zippo that looked like it had been rescued from a car wreck, sucked the flame into the cigarette then let out a long stream of smoke. Despite everything they had been through in the last twelve hours or so this was the first time Shepherd had seen him smoke. “If it wasn’t him then he knows who did.” Franklin took another deep draw, the cherry glowing bright and red against the soft, silent white of the street. “I got an instinct for these things. That’s why I wanted to come here and look the man in the eye. That was a nice touch at the end there, by the way, asking him about the cards.”

Shepherd shrugged. “I was just yanking his chain a little.”

“It showed good instincts. Pushing a man’s buttons, knocking him off center, sometimes that’s all it takes to start cracks forming, and the cracks show you where the weaknesses are.”

Shepherd looked out into the street. “Didn’t get us anywhere though, did it?”

Franklin took a final deep pull on his cigarette then dropped it to the ground, crushing it with his shoe. “Not yet.” He studied the building, spotted a gap between the mailbox and the wall and crammed his empty pack of cigarettes into it. “But you can’t just toss in a line and expect to haul out a fish right away. You need to learn a little patience, Agent Shepherd.” He stepped into the snow, heading for the corner.

Shepherd followed, tilting his head down against the weather. “Where we headed now?”

“Police station up on Westside, but we’ll need a ride there. You got your phone handy?” Shepherd pulled it out of his jacket pocket. “Call a cab and get it to pick us up at the Fast and French on Broad Street in twenty minutes.”

“What’s that?”

“The nearest place we can get some goddamn coffee.”

Reverend Cooper watched them leave, following them with his eyes until they disappeared in the snow. Behind him he heard the door to his private office open and he listened to the approaching footsteps. He waited until they were close enough then turned suddenly, shooting out his arm to catch Miss Boerman’s face hard with the back of his hand. She was knocked sideways by the force, crashing against his desk and knocking a phone to the floor as she scrambled to recover. Cooper was already on her, grabbing her throat with one hand and pulling the other back to strike her once more.

“Don’t you EVER do something like that again.”

She closed her eyes but made no move to get away. Cooper’s hand curled into a fist as his rage balled up inside him. He wanted to break her nose and see her spitting teeth through split lips. He wanted to hear the snap of her fingers and her cries of pain. He wanted to…

He stepped away, breathing heavily as he fought to master the demons that used to be the master of him. Now was not the time to let the devil back in.

“Get out,” he said. She stood up, straightening her suit jacket, the red marks of his fingers already rising up on her white cheek. “Tell the studio to be ready to broadcast in five minutes and close the door on your way out.”

He waited until she had gone, then picked the phone up off the floor and dialed a number from memory. Outside in the street the footprints of the FBI agents were already being filled in by the steady fall of snow. If only the men who had made them and the threat they posed were as easy to erase. Then again — maybe they were.

The phone clicked as it connected. Then Carrie’s brittle, little-girl voice answered.

45

Gabriel was one of the last to be evacuated from the Public Church. Arkadian had stood by his bed the whole time, a guardian angel in a space suit, giving a running commentary on what was happening: equipment being packed up and shipped out, patients being transferred from beds to stretchers so they would fit on the ascension platform and be easier to carry through the narrow tunnels once they were inside the mountain. He kept laying his gloved hand on Gabriel’s chest, like a father reassuring his son, finding the one spot where there were no electrodes or tubes coming in or out of him.

And then it was Gabriel’s turn to go.

Arkadian stepped back as four suited orderlies got to work on him. They gave him a shot to settle him and undid the straps that bound him to the bed, clearly in a rush to get this thing over with. Gabriel felt himself slipping into a half slumber.

“You hang in there, okay.” Arkadian’s face appeared over him, his voice muffled by his contamination suit. “I’ll buy you lunch when you come out.”

Gabriel tried to respond, say something flippant and brave like they did in the movies but his mouth was no longer working and his eyes flickered shut.

He felt and heard the clatter of wheels over the flagstoned floor as they moved him, then the air cooling as he neared the door. He forced his eyes open and saw the vaulted ceiling and ecclesiastical paintings slide away above him, to be replaced by night skies and stars. He picked out Draco, the constellation that had led him and Liv to the lost place in the desert, the place where he had last seen her. He wondered if she was still there, waiting for him, looking up at the same stars. As he stared up he spotted something else, a new star, brighter than all the rest, traveling across the sky. He watched it sliding across the night then a beam shot out from it, blinding him, and making his stretcher bearers turn their heads away. It held on them for a few seconds, long enough for the news cameraman in the helicopter to get a good shot, then it moved away, the sound of the rotors chopping the air and sending cold air down onto Gabriel’s burning skin.

They passed through another stone arch onto the embankment and the Citadel came into view, a monumental darkness that blocked out the stars as they drew closer. The hollow bang of wooden boards replaced the scuff of feet on stone as they reached the bridge leading to the ascension platform. The mountain was so close now it blocked out half the sky. Tears leaked from Gabriel’s eyes as they placed him on the platform. Arkadian appeared above him, his mouth forming words that he couldn’t hear, then he disappeared, ushered away by the orderlies.

The sound of wooden battens banging into place echoed through the night as the guardrails on the edge of the platform were put back in place then a bell rang high in the mountain. The ropes securing each corner of the platform creaked, then the platform lurched and lifted off the ground.

Gabriel looked straight up at the night, half filled with stars and half black. He could see the tribute cave high above, dark and wide, like a huge black mouth, growing larger as it sucked them closer. He thought of what he was leaving behind, all the sorrow and regret: his father found and gone, his mother gone too, and the woman he cared most for in the world, the one he felt bound to protect at all costs, abandoned and alone like he was. And all because of this mountain, this hateful mountain.

The ascension platform rose higher, lit from time to time by the searchlight from the hovering news helicopter, then it passed into darkness as it entered the tribute cave and banged to a halt.

The last time Gabriel had been here was in the dead of night, alone, unannounced and armed. Now he was strapped tight to a stretcher, his senses dulled by the sedative, his body wracked with a disease that had robbed him of both strength and freedom. And there were people everywhere.

Two monks loomed over him, their surgical masks looking sinister against their cowled and bearded faces.

“Bring the patients this way,” a voice commanded from somewhere inside the cave. “We have a place prepared.”

The two monks hoisted him up and carried him off the platform, the air closing in on him and the sound deadening as they moved out of the cave and deeper into the mountain.

They began to descend, bumping down narrow corridors. Gabriel could feel his temperature climbing in the trapped, stuffy air and sweat trickled down inside the tight bindings, further torturing his already screaming skin. Something started to disconnect inside him. He had held on for so long, using the focus of getting here to drive him; now that he had finally made it he had nothing left. A small part of his lucid mind registered the relief of it. He took a breath and whispered something, too quiet for anyone else to hear: “Good-bye, Liv.” Then a howl erupted from him as he finally let go and was carried screaming into the heart of the mountain.