The Tower

46

Brother Athanasius stiffened as the first stretcher appeared out of the darkness and was carried through the door. He was standing in the center of the cathedral cave, the largest chamber in the Citadel and the only one large enough for the entire population of the mountain to congregate in one place — though this had not happened for some time now to minimize contact and help prevent the spread of the lamentation.

The monks walked the stretcher down the central aisle toward the huge window set high into the wall behind the altar. Brother Gardener had walked this same path, dragging the dead branch from the garden and unwittingly spreading the infection among the congregation. It was one of the last times they had all gathered together, one of the last times the mountain had been whole.

He turned and looked at the beds stretching away where the monks who had once stood here to worship now lay suffering and dying.

More people were emerging through the door, carrying stretchers and crates of medical supplies. He locked eyes with one of the newcomers, easily distinguishable from the monks by his anticontamination suit, and walked over holding his hand up in greeting.

“Welcome,” he said, smiling though his mouth was hidden behind a surgical mask, “my name is Brother Athanasius.”

“Dr. Kaplan,” the man replied, raising his own hand to return the noncontact greeting.

Athanasius gestured toward lines of beds filled with the infected. “I have arranged our sick on this side of the aisle. Those you have brought with you can be housed in the empty beds on the other side. Not much of a gap, I grant you, but it seems pointless to try and separate everyone in an enclosed environment such as this. We have certainly had no success in containing it ourselves.”

The doctor surveyed the large space, the beds, the patients, the monks moving around between them, busily guiding the newcomers in. “Is this everyone?” he said, surprise evident in his voice.

“Not quite all, some of our number did not agree with letting outsiders inside the mountain. The traditionalists have locked themselves away in another part of the mountain. What you see here is what remains. There are fifty-seven sick and thirty-two still unaffected. As you can see we are somewhat overwhelmed.”

“How many dead?”

Athanasius took a breath as a rush of faces crowded his mind: friends, colleagues, enemies and rivals all now bundled together into the same anonymous statistic. “One hundred and four.”

Kaplan nodded, mentally adding them to the number he held in his head.

“And what have you observed to be the life expectancy once someone is infected?”

“About forty-eight hours.”

“No longer?”

“Sometimes, but no one has survived more than three days. The Apothecaria — the medical guild of monks within the mountain — kept records of the initial infection and its subsequent spread, which may be of some use, I have them over here.” He walked across the floor, weaving between empty beds steadily filling with bound figures on stretchers. He stopped by a long refectory table that was covered with medical equipment from inside the Citadel, some modern, some crude and homemade, evidence of the severe strain the infection had put on the community’s resources. Athanasius hunted through piles of sheets that had been shredded to serve as bandages and bindings until he found a sheaf of papers and handed them to Dr. Kaplan.

Kaplan looked at the carefully handwritten notes through his plastic visor. “Can I not speak to one of the doctors?” he asked.

“I’m afraid all the medical brothers succumbed to the infection early on. Next to the gardeners they were among the first to contract the disease.”

“Why the gardeners?”

“There is a garden at the heart of the mountain and a blight struck the trees first. The gardeners worked hard to cut it out and the infection seemed to pass to them first and then anyone they had been in extended contact with. The doctors naturally fell into this category and succumbed shortly afterward. Consequently, there is no one left here in the Citadel qualified to do anything other than provide comfort to the dying. The best way we can help now is by assisting you to find a cure. All the data we have is in these notes. This entire chamber is at your disposal, as am I and all my staff.”

Dr. Kaplan nodded, scanning the notes as he listened. “I would like to take blood samples from all of you, sick and healthy. You have been exposed to the disease in confinement and yet have not been infected. There may be something in your blood, some natural immunity, that has protected you. If I can compare samples and isolate whatever might be doing it, I can start working on an antidote.”

“Of course. I will pass word for everyone to present themselves to you as soon as you are set up and ready.”

They stepped back as another stretcher was carried past, the occupant moaning and writhing against his bindings. Athanasius glanced at the contorted face of the patient then looked again when he realized who it was. “How long has this man been ill?” he asked, following the stretcher to an empty bed.

“That’s a good question,” Kaplan replied. “He’s the one variable in this whole equation. He’s the only one so far who has remained lucid, or semilucid. We’re not sure how long he’s been infected, but longer than anyone else certainly. He claims it’s been five days and that he caught it here in the Citadel.”

Athanasius stared down at Gabriel’s tortured sweat-drenched face, hair plastered to his forehead by fever. “He’s telling the truth,” Athanasius said. “He was here, eight days ago, just when the disease first appeared. He could well have been infected then.”

A howl rose from Gabriel as he bucked against his restraints, desperate to free his hands and scratch at his tortured skin. Dr. Kaplan looked down at him, ravaged by the disease and driven half out of his mind by it.

“Then this man may well prove to be the savior of us all.”

47

The Westside Charleston Police Department building sat on the upper shoulder of the old town like an epaulet. It had a nice view of the Ashley River and a baseball diamond over to one side that made it look more like a high school than a police headquarters.

Franklin and Shepherd stepped out of the cab and picked their way along the narrow path that had been cleared in the snow all the way up the two flights of steps to the main entrance. They opened the door and both looked up as the noise hit them. It sounded like every phone in the building was ringing.

“Think we might have caught them at a bad time,” Franklin murmured as they moved toward a solid desk sergeant who was pushing buttons and juggling the phone.

“You here to help or hinder?” the sergeant asked before either of them had even produced their IDs. He was old school and well padded and wore a thick gray mustache that made him look like a walrus in uniform.

“Neither, really,” Franklin said, flopping his creds open. “We’re just a couple of fellow law enforcement agents looking for a port in a storm. We need to borrow an office for a few hours.”

The sergeant shook his head and reached for the phone. “You got the storm bit right.” He punched a button and stood up straight, his shirt buttons straining against the impressive girth of his stomach. “Shit storm is what we got going on here. Only we got a ton of shit and only a couple of shovels to clear it with. Half the force didn’t turn up to work this morning and the other half are having to deal with this.” He nodded at the thick snow falling outside.

The phones continued to ring throughout the building. Someone, somewhere picked one up. “Bryan, we got a couple of Feebies down here dripping snow onto the floor”—he peered at their open IDs through his reading glasses—“Special Agents Shepherd and Franklin.” He squinted at Franklin’s and covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Ben Franklin, that for real?”

Franklin nodded. “You may have seen my picture on a hundred- dollar bill.”

The sergeant shook his head like a disappointed uncle. “You better come quick, Bryan. One of them’s so damn funny I’m in danger of peeing my pants.”

He put the phone down and nodded at a row of chairs. “Sergeant Freeman will be down directly. He’s in charge of the pencils around here, so he’ll fix you up with whatever you need.” The phone rang again. He snatched it up and turned away.

“Well, he’s a character,” Franklin said as they settled in their seats.

“I kind of like it,” Shepherd replied. “Beats the hostility we usually get.”

“An example of which appears to be heading our way.”

Shepherd looked up at a stocky man with thinning brown hair bustling across the entrance hall. He offered his hand, introduced himself then hustled them into the back of the building with a minimum of charm and maximum speed. They passed through a door into an open-plan office empty but for the sound of phones.

“This okay?” he said, pointing to a desk in the corner.

“Not really,” Franklin said with a smile. “Too public. Have you maybe got somewhere a little more private? The case we’re working on is classified.”

“Sure,” Freeman said. Then he smiled and pointed to a row of solid doors with small windows in them set into the back wall. “I got just the thing for you.”

“Cozy,” Franklin said, the moment the door closed on the interview room.

“You kinda asked for it.” Shepherd surveyed the white, anonymous walls. It was soundproofed at least, so they could no longer hear the clamor of ringing phones. The only noise was the hum of the building’s air-conditioning belting out dry heat and making the claustrophobic room even stuffier.

Shepherd stepped over to the metal table in the center of the room and tried to pull the chair out from under it. It was bolted to the floor. The table was bolted down too. He sat down, slid the laptop from the case and fired it up.

“Local law tend to regard us with the same sort of suspicion as criminals, so sticking us in here probably makes sense to them,” Franklin said, doing a circuit of the room and reading the desperate graffiti scratched into the walls. “Freeman is probably spreading word around the building right now that we’re in here. The first tourists should be coming by in the next few minutes to gawp at us through the two-way mirror.” He nodded at the side wall then sat down in the other chair and Shepherd felt a moment’s discomfort as it dawned on him that he had unwittingly sat in the “suspect” seat.

“Anything you want to confess before I start beating on you?” Franklin said, reading his mind.

“I confess that I could do with some more coffee,” Shepherd said, studying the screen and clicking the menu to hook up to the station WiFi.

The sound of phones burst in on them again as the door opened and a weasel-faced cop stepped into the room. “Goddamn,” he said, staring straight at Franklin. “I thought it might be you. What the hell you doing back here? You anything to do with the ships and the mass migration?”

“Hi,” Shepherd said, getting up from his seat and shaking the man’s hand. “Joe Shepherd. You already seem to know Agent Franklin.”

“Dan Jackson,” the man said. “Yeah, I know Franklin from way back.”

“Why don’t you show me where the coffee is,” Franklin said, moving to the door, clearly anxious to get the guy out of the room.

“What do you mean ‘mass migration’?” Shepherd said, butting in.

“I mean everyone seems to have gotten it into their heads to hop in their cars and drive someplace. We got almost solid traffic heading into town. People from all over just packing their cars and heading for the city. We got people leaving too but that’s not so much of a problem. It’s the inbound traffic that’s the headache. It’s blocked up all the main roads into the city and, what with the weather on top, we got a major headache and hardly any manpower to deal with it. I thought maybe that’s why you were here.”

“ ’Fraid not,” Franklin said, grabbing Jackson’s shoulder and easing him toward the door.

“How come you’re so short staffed?” Shepherd asked.

“Beats me, half the squad didn’t show up this morning.”

“And these no-shows,” Shepherd persisted, “are they local guys?”

Jackson considered the question then shook his head. “No. As a matter of fact they’re all out of towners; all the local guys showed up.”

“Listen, Dan,” Franklin cut in, “why don’t you show me where you keep the coffee and I’ll tell you why we’re here.” He turned to Shepherd. “See if Smith has managed to dig anything new out of the Kinderman files. I’ll be right back.” Then he practically pushed Jackson out of the room.

Shepherd stood for a second, staring at the spot where they had both just stood, wondering about Franklin’s strange behavior. Then the screen flickered, drawing his attention and he sat back down, his fingers drumming the keyboard as he typed in the ID and password Agent Smith had given him earlier. A directory loaded up on the screen, different icons representing all the various databases he now had access to. Any new information Smith had found would be archived in the ghost file, listed in the directory under a Pacman ghost icon — something Smith always maintained proved the FBI did have a sense of humor. He dragged the arrow over to it but did not click on it, his eyes drawn to another icon, lower down in the directory, with MPD written beneath it — the Missing Persons Database.

Shepherd had been rehearsing this moment for the past seven years. All he had to do was click on it, type in a name, a few details, then sophisticated algorithms and search spiders would scuttle out across police networks covering more than half the world.

He clicked on the icon and a simple command box opened. It had spaces for key search data: name, DOB, age, height, weight, hair and eye color. His fingers moved over the keyboard, finding keys on their own.

He paused and took several deep breaths. The room smelled of sweat and fear, though that could just as easily be coming from him. The MPD had primarily been designed to locate people fast to rule them out of investigations. Consequently the search engines were programmed to trawl through death registers first. If he got a hit back quickly it would mean her name had been found among the roll call of the dead — and, even after seven years of unanswered questions, he wasn’t sure if he was prepared for that. But there was also something else that made him pause. The misuse of FBI resources for personal ends was pretty high on the list of prosecutable offenses, for obvious reasons, and every search on the MPD was logged and could be checked. Then again, he wasn’t searching for any more sensitive details, like bank accounts or passport activity. Not yet at least. But pressing the button would still be crossing a line. And despite everything that had happened in his life, he still believed in rules and obeying them.

He reread the words he had typed into the search criteria, the barest thumbnail of a human life, and wondered what Melisa would do in his situation. She would probably have instigated a search the moment she got her hands on the laptop. Melisa was passionate and impulsive, a doer.

Love is a verb—she used to say—Love is a doing word.

A single tear slid down his cheek. Then he hit return.

And the search went live.

48

O’Halloran sat in the den of his house, his eyes fixed on the old bulky TV in the corner that had once been the main family set. The American military exodus from Afghanistan was now the lead story, confirmed by several sources and the top of a lengthening list of similar military stand-downs. As well as the Chinese withdrawal from the Senkaku Islands there were now additional reports that the British were also pulling their troops out of Afghanistan, the North Koreans had pulled away from the border with the South, Israeli tanks had done the same from Palestine and government-backed troops in Syria had ceased many of the ongoing assaults on rebel-held cities, leaving artillery batteries deserted. It was as if the overriding imperial and destructive impulse of thousands of years had been cured overnight by a simple, universal human desire to return home.

In his own small way, O’Halloran had felt it too. His desire to come home had been unexpected and almost primal in its intensity. Twice now he had gone out to his car to head over to the office but both times just the thought of putting the car in gear and driving back to Quantico had filled him with such a feeling of panic that he had ended up sitting there, sweating despite the cold, the engine running and his hand resting on the gearshift. Just the few steps down the drive had made him feel as if a rope was wound around his heart, pulling tighter with each step he took. Both times he had ended up turning off the engine, getting out of the car and walking back to the house, the pressure and panic easing with each step until, by the time he crossed the threshold back into the warmth and comfort of his home, it had gone entirely.

His cell phone buzzed, cutting through the low burble of the news. He stiffened in his chair and the springs creaked as he snapped back into professional mode.

“O’Halloran.”

“Sir, it’s Squires. You anywhere near a TV?”

Squires was one of the section chiefs who lived in an office down the hall from his. He was also working from home today, O’Halloran recalled. “I’m watching the news now.”

“You watching CNN?”

“BBC World, you catching all this about troop movements?”

“Yes, but that’s not what I’m calling about, sir. Turn to CNN. You’re going to want to see this.”

O’Halloran plucked the remote from his desk and flicked quickly through the channels. On CNN a reporter was standing next to a chain-link fence and talking directly to the camera. Beyond the fence a field of white snow stretched away to a rocket-launching tower and a building complex surrounded by emergency vehicles. One of the buildings was a mass of twisted metal. The strap line read:

“Guess the lid just came off this one,” Squires said.

O’Halloran took in the story. Normally a news channel breaking a story on one of his ongoing cases would send him into a quiet rage. “It was only a matter of time,” he said, surprising himself as much as Squires with his calm attitude and detached tone. “Better prepare a statement to throw some bones to the press. Confirm everything they already know and give them the Hubble information too if they haven’t got it already. And leak the names of the missing persons. Maybe if Kinderman and Douglas’s pictures are all over the news we might run them down a little faster—”

The picture cut to a shot of Agents Franklin and Shepherd sitting on a sofa in what looked like a daytime chat show.

“Earlier this afternoon,” the reporter said underneath the pictures, “two government agents confirmed rumors that the attack on the Marshall Space Center testing facility was not an isolated event.”

The sound faded up on the clip.

—“They are true, I take it — the Hubble spacecraft has been disabled and its successor, the James Webb telescope, has been destroyed?”

“Yes,” Shepherd confirmed.

“Get to work on that statement and get it out fast,” O’Halloran said to Squires, tuning out from the rest of the report. “Now it’s out there I don’t want it to look like we’re trying to hide anything.”

“What about Franklin and Shepherd? You want me to assign someone new?”

O’Halloran thought about it for a moment. “No, let me talk to them. I want to hear how this happened and right now I doubt we have the men to spare anyway.”

“I’m happy to come in if you want me to, sir,” Squires replied, his voice a little guarded.

“No, it’s okay — you stay home with your family, that’s the best place right now. Call me if you hear anything new.”

O’Halloran put the phone down and listened to the familiar creak of the house he had lived in for over twenty years. He could hear Beth in the kitchen clearing up the lunch things.

Stay at home with your family.

Damn right.

He found Franklin’s phone number and hit the button to dial it.

49

Jackson had been thankfully called away almost as soon as he and Franklin had left the interview room. They’d swapped cards and promised to catch up before Franklin left town but in truth neither of them really meant it. They had never been that close and Franklin didn’t have time to shoot the breeze about “back in the day.” He had more pressing things on his mind and other situations to deal with.

He couldn’t explain the feelings he’d been experiencing for the last few days or the things they were making him do. All he knew for sure was that they were getting stronger, swelling inside him like the slow intake of a deep, deep breath. Over the years he had listened to enough strung-out junkies talk about how it felt to crave a hit and that was the closest he could get to describing what this was like for him. It was an urge that steadily filled his mind and body, slowly pushing everything else aside until he could think of nothing else. It had taken over everything, driving him to do whatever it took to try to satisfy the craving. He blew out a long breath as he stalked through the empty offices, his footfalls on the stained carpet tiles silent beneath the constantly ringing phones.

Not long now.

He found a coffeepot in a kitchen on the second floor. It was sitting on a hot plate with a layer of thick black sludge on the bottom. Bottomless, twenty-four-hour coffeepots were standard issue in any police department, but they usually got continuously topped up by the various shifts. This one had clearly been left to stew overnight and no one had noticed, further evidence of the staffing crisis Jackson had mentioned.

He did his best to scrape the goop from the bottom of the pot then found some fresh coffee in a container in the icebox and some filters in a drawer and set a new pot bubbling. He was just scouting around for some clean mugs when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He answered it without looking to see who it was, expecting that it would probably be Marie giving him a hard time about not being home.

“Franklin!” He jammed the phone into the crook of his neck, continuing his search through the cupboards.

“You mind telling me why you’re making unauthorized statements to the press about your ongoing investigation?” Franklin nearly dropped the phone as he recognized O’Halloran’s voice.

“Sir?”

“I’ve just seen you and Shepherd on CNN chatting to the Reverend Fulton Cooper.”

Franklin flashed back to the empty studio — empty but for the cameras. He heard the phone creak as his hand tightened around it. “He must have taped the interview.”

“You spoke to him in a TV studio?”

“He was—” Franklin closed his eyes and shook his head. He had been stupid. His mind wasn’t on the job the way it usually was since the urge had taken him over. “He was in the middle of a broadcast, sir. We didn’t think it should wait.”

“You get anything out of him?”

“A little.”

“You think he’s our guy?”

“Yes, sir, I think so.”

There was a pause. Franklin stared ahead. A WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE mug mocked him from inside the cupboard.

“Stick with it, Agent Franklin. Keep a tighter lead on Shepherd and get more on Cooper fast so we can turn this thing around and make this little PR stunt blow up in his face.”

“Yessir.”

“And, Franklin?”

“Sir?”

“Keep me directly informed.”

Franklin waited for more, expecting some kind of explanation or further instructions, but all he heard was a soft click as O’Halloran put down the phone and cut the connection.

50

For the second time in a week Liv woke up in the windowless room of the sick bay. She looked across to the other bed. It was empty, the sheets and mattress stripped off. On the wall behind it a row of cupboard doors hung open revealing bare shelves.

She tilted her head toward the door and listened. No sound at all came from the hallways beyond it, not even the generator, which suggested it was daytime. She tried to sit up and felt something snag painfully in her arm. There was a shunt strapped to her forearm, attached by a tube to a clear bag hanging high on a stand by the bed. She had a moment of panic, wondering if it was doing her good or harm.

Footsteps outside.

Her heart rate stepped up a few beats.

There was nowhere to hide and she didn’t have the energy to run. She swallowed drily and watched the door swing open, wishing she’d had the presence of mind to grab something heavy.

“Hey, you’re awake.” The man was blond and tanned and somewhere in his late twenties. He looked more like a surfer than someone intent on doing her harm. He also looked drawn and tired, as though he hadn’t slept for days. “How you feeling — like shit, I bet?”

He spoke English with an Australian accent. He popped a digital thermometer in her mouth and checked her over with the relaxed and practiced eye of someone who had done this a million times before. She could smell coffee and soap.

“Who are you?” she said, the moment the thermometer was removed.

“Name’s Kyle.” He frowned as he studied the readout. “You’re still running a bit of a fever. You should take it easy. Get some more sleep if you can.”

“Don’t drink the water,” she said, voicing the alarm that was clanging in her head.

“The water’s fine,” Kyle replied, checking her drip bag then smoothing down the tape holding the shunt in her arm.

Liv sat up and felt the room shift around her. “No. It’s not, it’s poisoned — I’ve seen men die from drinking it.”

“Me too,” he said, and she understood his tiredness. She swung her legs off the bed and pulled at the tube. “Hey!” Kyle reached out to stop her.

“Show me,” she said, turning away and yanking the tube from her arm.

“You need to—”

She stood, wobbling slightly then headed for the door.

“Okay, okay — wait a second, I’ll show you.” He grabbed the loose tube and turned the valve to stop the contents of the drip bag from emptying onto the floor. “Just let me sort out that shunt so you don’t end up bleeding all over the place.”

Daylight blinded Liv as she stepped through the door into the transport hangar, so bright she had to turn her head away for a few seconds and let her eyes adjust.

The bodies were lying on the far side, against the wall, their arms and legs twisted and frozen in the agonized moment of their death. She drifted over, drawn by the horrible tableau. The sickly smell of death was already hanging over them like a cloud. She moved along the line, checking the faces of the dead. Malik was there, his face covered in filth, his eyes staring and sightless and ringed by hungry flies.

“Where are the horses?”

“We didn’t find any.”

She frowned. The horses had drunk the water too, but that was before she had left — before it had turned bitter. Maybe the animals had known there was something wrong with it, their superior sense of smell saving them from the same fate as their riders and they had run away when the water turned and their masters died. She reached the end of the line. Twenty-two bodies in total. Azra’iel was not among them. “Where are the others?”

“There’s a couple still alive. They’re in the canteen. When we arrived it had been set up as a ward, I guess because they needed more room for all the sick.” Liv nodded. That explained the bare cupboards in the sick bay. “They’re the only two left, though, and to be honest — I reckon they’ll soon be out here too. There’s not a whole heap we can do for them.”

The first thing that hit Liv when she walked into the canteen was the smell. Sweet and putrid and so strong it made her head swim and she had to reach out to steady herself against the wall.

“You should really go and lie down again,” Kyle said. “You’re still too dehydrated to be off the drip.”

“I’ll go in a second,” she said. It felt hot in the room and unbearably stuffy. A long line of refectory tables had been pushed against one wall and haphazardly stacked up to make more room on the floor. It looked like it had been done in a hurry. She imagined the panic that had played out as people started falling sick. The floor was covered with mattresses and sheets, dragged in from the dorms. Some of them had been stripped, though the dark stains of death were soaked into the fabric of the covers. Only two of the beds were still occupied. A man was stooped down by one of them, gently washing brown filth from around the mouth of one of the riders.

“That’s Eric,” Kyle said. “He’s a qualified medic, so he’s been playing nursemaid.” The man turned and nodded a greeting. He was another version of Kyle: tan, lithe, colored string bracelets and leather thongs around his wrist. “Mike’s around here someplace too, but I think he’s outside the fence with your lot.”

Liv turned to him. “Is everyone okay?”

“Oh yeah, they’re all fine. Your man Tariq went out with Mike in the truck and brought them all back. They just needed food and rest — and water of course. They’re all on grave-digging duties now. Can’t have that bunch lying out in the heat much longer.”

A sudden movement brought their attention back to the man on the floor. His whole body had started to shake and heave. He bucked on the bed, struggling to breathe then coughed and more of the brown stuff spluttered from his mouth. Eric held the man’s head as he vomited into a bowl, talking calmly to him the whole time, trying to soothe him. Liv marveled at his dedication.

“You’re right about the water, by the way,” Kyle said, quiet enough that even she could hardly hear him. “When we first arrived and found all the bodies and a few still alive we thought it might be a virus, or maybe even a chemical weapon — related accident — you know, all those WMDs they didn’t find. But the ones who were still alive all said the same thing — they got sick after drinking the water. So I tested it. It’s been part of my job out here, so I had all the right stuff with me. When we first got here there were massive traces of arsenic trioxide in it. Groundwater often contains high levels of this compound but these were off the scale. Probably got washed out of some underground deposit by the pressure of the water. Basically it makes your organs fail, which results in vomiting, diarrhea and fits — just like this poor bastard.”

The man on the floor calmed a little and his lips pulled back in pain, revealing a jagged line of teeth. It was Azra’iel, the angel of death, very close to meeting his namesake. “The land does not belong to anyone,” Liv whispered, “we belong to the land.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.” She turned away. “Where did you come from, Kyle?”

“Melbourne originally.”

“No, I mean how did you come to be here?”

Kyle stared at a spot on the wall, his forehead wrinkled in thought. “That’s a good question.” Fresh movement drew his attention as Azra’iel began to fit again. He leaped forward, grabbing one of his arms and holding him down while Eric tried to get a sedative into him. Liv watched as they fought with him, then — as quickly as it had started — it was over. Azra’iel arched one last time, let out a long rattling sigh and was still.

Kyle looked up at her. “I need to help Eric clean up here. Why don’t you go into the kitchen, get yourself something to eat — if you can stomach it after all this. I’ll come find you when we’re done and try and tell you how we ended up here.”

51

The laptop pinged and Shepherd sat up, his stomach hollow with dread.

It was too soon.

The search had only been running for about a minute, two at the most. It would still be deep in the death registers. He sat perfectly still in the bolted-down chair, not daring to move, as if remaining motionless might stop the world turning and keep her forever alive.

A single search result was showing in a pop-up, just a string of numbers and a suffix locator, BPD — Baltimore Police Department. As far as he knew Melisa had never been to Baltimore, she had no connections there; but then there were lots of things he didn’t know about her, like where she’d been for the last eight years.

He stared at the result.

Could this be it — the end of the road? The end of hope?

It felt hot in the room all of a sudden and sweat trickled down the ridge of his spine. He clicked on the single result and held his breath as it opened in a new window. His eyes scanned the dense text, raw information gleaned from the police report, his mind too wired to take in more than fragments:

She had been dead for over a year

Right age

Black?

Melisa wasn’t black — olive skinned, yes, but not black. She looked more Italian than African. But some cops were pretty binary about these things: anyone who wasn’t white was automatically black — it could still be her. At the bottom of the file there were other case-file numbers, each with a different date, stretching back ten years from the date of death. This person had a rap sheet, which didn’t sound like his Melisa.

His eyes lit on a PDF file attached to the bottom of the document and his finger clicked on it before his mind had a chance to reconsider. A new window opened containing three sets of mug shots and a head-and-shoulders shot of a woman with her eyes closed, lying on an autopsy table. Despite the somber and tragic image, Shepherd nearly wept with relief.

Whoever this Melisa was, she wasn’t his.

He watched the hourglass icon spin slowly as sophisticated algorithms continued the search.

Don’t find her here among the dead—he thought—not my Melisa.

But the ping rang out again, mocking his silent prayer, just as Franklin burst back into the room carrying two mugs of coffee.

52

“Goddamned reverend pulled a fast one,” Franklin said, slopping the coffee on the metal-topped table in his haste to put the mugs down.

Shepherd was barely listening, his hands working fast, heart pounding as he closed all the windows on the screen. There was no time to check out the new search result with Franklin in the room.

“Cooper filmed our interview and leaked it to CNN. Apparently the world just saw us confirm the attacks on Hubble and James Webb.”

Shepherd looked up, his mind racing ahead, wondering what this would mean for the investigation and for them. It was bad. Really bad. Because of this mistake they would undoubtedly be taken off the case, which meant he stood to lose all the access he had only just started to explore — his lifeline to Melisa. That snake of a reverend had ruined everything. He must have been right on the phone to the news networks the moment they had stepped out of the studio.

He dug into his pocket and fished out the key ring Franklin had thrown at Cooper in the studio as he realized the network news wouldn’t be the only place the interview would be running. He opened a new window and copied in the Web address printed on the key ring.

The home page was as slick and professional as the man it was built to promote. Shepherd found a media section in the drop-down menus and clicked on a link to a live stream of the TV show.

The video buffered fast and Shepherd’s jaw tightened when he saw himself sitting on the couch next to Franklin, like guests on a talk show. The clip had been cut to make it look as though Cooper was interviewing them. It showed the moment when he surprised them with the breaking news stories on Twitter about Hubble and the explosion at Marshall, demanding to know if the stories were true, then a close-up of Shepherd’s face as he said, “Yes.” It cut back to Cooper live in the studio.

Now you have seen how agents of the government came to this house of God to try and silence me and intimidate me, because they know the truth I speak. They would rather you remained blind and in darkness than have your eyes opened to what is coming. For it is their arrogance that has brought these things to pass, it is the towers they have sought to build in the form of these telescopes in space, reaching up to try and glimpse the face of God that has triggered His wrath. And they fear your judgment and your rightful anger if you were to learn of this truth. But the spirit is strong in me. And when they came to silence me I spoke loud with the voice of the Lord, as I speak to you now.

Turn on the news and see the truth of what is happening. See how the world is quaking and readying itself for the time that is told in the great book of Revelation of how the righteous shall be gathered and the sinners shall be cast into the pit of hell. And be in no doubt that the time of His reckoning is close, for the signs are all around.

Franklin’s phone rang and he took the call. On-screen Cooper was walking over to the window again and pointing out at all the ships in the harbor.

See how the great armies of men are trembling before His approach and the great ships of all nations are returning to their ports, as was predicted by St. John.

“Thanks,” Franklin said, ending the conversation.

“That was Ellery. They checked out Douglas’s home. Found nothing — big surprise. So now we have two suspects to chase down.” He drained his coffee, allowing himself a smile as he set his mug back down. “Sounds like Ellery was having the worst day of his life, he’s now got every crazy conspiracy theorist in the country converging on Marshall convinced that the destruction of Hubble and Webb, along with everything else that’s going on, is the first step of some kind of alien invasion.”

Shepherd picked up his coffee and stared at his reflection in it. “Maybe they’re right.”

“Seriously?”

“Why not — I find it as easy to swallow as the idea that Dr. Kinderman and Professor Douglas did it.”

“That’s because you’re letting personal sentiment cloud your judgment. You can’t ignore the evidence.”

“Okay, so let’s look at the evidence, all of it and not just what happened at Marshall and Goddard. What is making all the ships sail home, or snow fall in Miami, or birds fly to their nesting grounds out of season? What’s making so many people get in their cars and start driving?”

“You think it’s aliens?”

“Okay maybe not aliens but something extraterrestrial in the literal sense of the word — something outside the earth. Something that’s affecting everybody. Again, let’s stick to the evidence. We know for a fact that the rhythms of life are directly affected by cosmic phenomena, right? And by that I’m not talking about Capricorn rising and Leo on the cusp or any of that crap, I’m talking birds migrating using the magnetic fields of the earth to navigate and the tides linked directly to the phases of the moon.”

Franklin nodded. “All right, I’m listening. What do you think might be causing it — and please don’t say aliens.”

“Okay, so while I was working at NASA I realized that the things that get reported are only a tiny fraction of what actually gets discovered. NASA is very prickly about its standing in the scientific community and is very careful to keep a lid on anything that might attract the wrong kind of headlines. A few years back, while I was working there, Hubble picked up the trail of some immense gravity wash. It was never reported because no one could work out what had caused it, but one of the theories was that it might have been created by a planet traveling on an erratic, millennia-long orbit that would make it vanish for thousands of years before it swung back to sweep right through our solar system. There are plenty of records of events like it in ancient civilizations, suggesting that people may have witnessed similar flybys thousands of years ago. With the intersection of orbits and the combined gravity pulls of massive celestial objects, a collision would not be out of the question. It would be cataclysmic, the end of everything, the end of days — just like Kinderman wrote in his diary. So perhaps he and Professor Douglas did see something coming, like a meteor or this huge planet the ancient prophets warned us about. And maybe that’s why the whole world has gone nuts.”

“Then why not go public with it?”

Shepherd shook his head. “I don’t know.” He pointed at Cooper, still preaching from the live feed. “And I can’t work out how he fits into all this either.”

“Maybe he doesn’t,” Franklin said. “Perhaps the whole Tower of Babel, hell and damnation thing is just a coincidence, another symptom of whatever’s going on.” He took a breath and blew it out in a long stream. “Okay, confession time. This… what you’re describing, this feeling or whatever it is that’s making people behave strangely — I feel it too.”

“Since when?”

“A few months maybe.”

“And getting stronger.”

“Yeah.”

Shepherd nodded. “Like that feeling you get when you’re running late. A sick feeling almost — half physical and half an emotion — like you’re in the wrong place and need to be somewhere else.”

Franklin nodded. “You feel it too.”

“For the last few months and getting stronger.”

“Okay, so just for instance let’s assume everyone is experiencing the same thing, only Cooper comes to the conclusion that it’s all down to God’s impending judgment and decides he’s the man to try and do something about it. So he sends the cards, maybe even sends the letters.”

“Agreed, but it still doesn’t follow that it made Kinderman and Douglas effectively take hammers to several billion dollars’ worth of space hardware.”

The laptop beeped loudly, drawing Franklin’s attention. “What’s that?”

Shepherd felt blood rush to his face and was about to launch into a lie when he realized that the alert had sounded different from the previous ones. It had not come from his MPD search but from the ghost file. He opened it up and found a note from Smith.

“Anything useful?” Franklin asked.

“Maybe.” Shepherd dug out his phone, scrolled to the recent calls list and called a number. It clicked a few times then connected.

“Hubble control center.”

“Merriweather, it’s Shepherd. We found something else. Does Göbekli Tepe ring any bells?”

“How you spelling that?”

Shepherd told him.

“Never heard of it, where’s it come from?”

“We found it on Dr. Kinderman’s hard drive. You don’t think it’s something he might have been studying?”

“If he was, he never mentioned it to me.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Sorry I wasn’t more help. Oh, by the way, after we spoke last time I called a buddy of mine over at Keck in case he’d seen anything weird in Taurus. He said there’s nothing there that shouldn’t be.”

“Okay, thanks, Merriweather.”

“Anytime. How’s the manhunt going?”

“Still hunting.’

“Good luck with that. Anything I can do, I’m here all week.”

“Thanks.” Shepherd hung up. “According to our man on the inside it’s not a star or anything like that.” He leaned forward, his fingers fast-typing GOBEKLI TEPE into Google and hitting return, half expecting no response at all. What he got was almost two hundred thousand hits. The top one was a Wikipedia entry.

“Goddamn,” Franklin said, “another observatory.”

Shepherd clicked on the images option and a selection of thumbnails cascaded down the screen. Most showed an especially large stone monolith capped by a smaller one to form the unmistakable shape of an elongated letter T.

The T

Shepherd checked back through the notes and there it was again on the first list CARBON had found on Kinderman’s drive. He returned to the Google search and clicked one of the images, opening it up large so the carvings on the main column were now visible. There was a snake, a scorpion and a bull on the side of it — constellation signs — but it was the caption beneath that caught Shepherd’s eye.

Home

Shepherd stared at the screen, his eyes flicking between the various open windows — the Home Stone, Cooper silently preaching from the live feed and gesturing out of the window at the flotilla of ships in the harbor, Smith’s last message with the word Home highlighted.

“Home,” Shepherd said. He sat up in his chair as the idea took hold. “That guy who picked us up from the airfield said the sailors were all saying the same thing — that they just needed to get home. So if there is some extraordinary event happening out there in space, some kind of game changer, maybe Dr. Kinderman and Professor Douglas felt it too.”

“But we checked Kinderman’s and Douglas’s homes already.”

“Did we though? If I say home what does it mean to you?”

“Where my family is, I guess.”

“Exactly. Only Kinderman doesn’t have any family and neither does Douglas. So home for them must mean something else. Probably the place where they were born.” Shepherd sat bolt upright in his chair.

“I think I know where Professor Douglas is,” he said.

53

Sergeant Beddoes drummed his gloved fingers on the wheel of the cruiser. He was parked behind a billboard on the verge of the main road into town, waiting for speeding cars, not that he expected any today.

The snow had taken everyone by surprise. They were used to it up here in the mountains, but not like this and not without warning. It had come down so fast that he hadn’t had time to put the snow chains on his car and twice now he’d nearly slid off the road. On top of that the world had gone crazy overnight. He’d been called out to a near riot at the Walmart on the edge of town after people started panic-buying everything in the store. He’d gone in to help break it up and seen people who’d known each other all their lives fighting over bottled water and canned food. He’d had to pull his gun at one point, but at least he hadn’t had to use it. He’d heard stories of full-scale riots in some of the bigger cities, police firing on civilians, law and order breaking down as the gas pumps ran dry and the stores ran out of food because the delivery trucks had stopped rolling. It had made him wonder if Reverend Parkes had been right and that judgment day was just around the corner.

For the last few months the reverend had preached nothing else, telling his small, devoted congregation how a new Tower of Babel had brought it all about and that demons were already walking the earth in the shape of men to cause chaos and inspire sin that they might be damned and claimed by Satan when the time came. He had told them to stockpile food, batteries and water — and he had been right. He had also talked to him in private, telling about the secret army that was in place, Christian soldiers drawn from every walk of life ready to fight the forces of evil when they came.

“We can all fight for the Lord,” the reverend had said, “each of us in our own small way.” And he had told Beddoes how he could help, using his position as a police officer to watch out for the signs and report them to those who would know their significance. Beddoes had nodded and agreed to do whatever the reverend thought he should, though he didn’t quite understand how he could be of much use.

Beddoes reached up and held the crucifix he kept on a chain round his neck along with the St. Christopher his mother had given him when he first qualified as a patrolman. “To keep you safe and bring you home,” she had said. He’d been thinking about home a lot lately, though home wasn’t the same now she had gone. The church filled some of the gap left by her passing, but not all of it. Nothing ever could.

A ping sounded on the dashboard. He looked up to find the LoJack receiver had activated but there was nothing on the road. There was a stolen car in the area, heading north by the looks of it. He grabbed his radio to call the dispatcher then paused. He pulled his glove off with his teeth and fumbled in his pocket for the prayer book the reverend had given him to keep close by, a weapon in the coming war, and flipped to the back. There was an alphanumeric code next to a cell phone number. He compared it to the one on the display and felt his mouth go dry.

They were the same.

He took out his own personal phone and dialed the number written in the prayer book.

Demons in human form—he thought, just as the line connected.

54

“Okay, we’re off the air.”

The Reverend Fulton Cooper held his final gesture of prayer for a few beats then opened his eyes, dropped his hands to his sides and smiled. “Good show, everyone,” he said, casting smiles around the room. The bright studio lights cut out and across the room he saw the pale moon face of Miss Boerman framed by her severe haircut and suit. She was standing by the door, looking straight at him. She nodded when she saw she had caught his attention then turned and slipped back outside.

“Take a break, but don’t go far,” he announced to the room as he moved toward the exit. “The Lord has much work for us yet to do. We’re live again in an hour.”

He passed through the door and felt the relative cool of the outside air on his skin.

“They’re in the chapel,” Miss Boerman said, the thin scar on her cheek puckering when she spoke. The mark of his hand from earlier was no longer visible. She handed him a small plain envelope. He opened it and studied the contents.

“This up to date?” he asked, slipping the note back in the envelope and tucking it into his jacket.

“As of five minutes ago.”

“Everything else set up?”

“Gassed and ready to go.”

“Anyone needs me, tell them I’m at private prayer and not to be disturbed.” He moved past her and headed down the stairs, the leather of his Italian shoes clacking first against the wooden steps, then against flagstones as he arrived in the basement and passed through a solid wooden door in the shape of an arch.

The chapel had been built in the old cellars, making good use of the existing vaulted brickwork and stone floors. It was small, with three rows of wooden pews on either side of a narrow aisle leading to a lectern that stood before a large stained-glass window artificially lit from behind so God’s light could permanently shine through it. Cooper occasionally recorded segments of his shows down here, but he also used it for meetings because it was quiet and out of the way and there was another door hidden behind the altar, a requirement of the fire department regulations that also allowed people to enter the chapel without anyone in the main part of the building knowing they were there.

Eli and Carrie were kneeling at the altar, their backs to him, their heads bowed. Eli jumped as the door banged shut — still fighting his demons. Carrie reached out to him with a gentle, calming hand that had killed eighteen people to Cooper’s sure knowledge. He caught her profile as she turned; the slightly upturned nose that made her seem younger than she actually was and inclined people to underestimate her, just as they did with him, only with her it was often the last mistake they ever made.

“Praise God for watching over you and delivering you safely,” Cooper said, smiling down at them as they turned around. He beckoned them over to the tech desk set up at the back of the room, which they used when they recorded down here. He turned on the monitor and heard the scuff of Eli’s steps approaching, but he didn’t hear Carrie’s. She was the only person he knew who could walk up the two-hundred-year-old main wooden staircase inside the house without making a single sound.

They were showing a rerun of the morning show. After a few minutes the picture cut to a recorded section and Cooper pointed at the two men in suits sitting on the sofa opposite him. “Are these the people you saw in Dr. Kinderman’s house?”

“Yes,” Carrie confirmed.

“They came here asking about all kinds of things but left with nothing. I trust you were careful in your observations of the good doctor’s house?”

“No one saw us,” Eli said, his voice flat and empty as always. “I guarantee it.”

“Good. That’s very good.”

Carrie and Eli exchanged a look. “We seen it on the news,” she said, “about the telescopes. We was thinking, now that the mission you set for us is over, now that those telescopes are no longer—”

“We want to get married,” Eli said. “We want you to marry us. Right now.”

Cooper turned and smiled at them. “And so I shall,” he said. “So I shall.” He moved past them, walking back up the aisle toward the fake sunshine streaming in through the window. He stopped in front of the lectern and stared up at the cross. “We’ve come a long way, the three of us, from that hell in the desert — a long, long way. And our journey is nearly over. But it is not over yet.”

“But the towers have fallen,” Carrie said, her voice small and unsure. “The telescopes…”

Cooper turned to face them. “They may have been destroyed but the wrath of the Lord is still evident for all to see, is it not? He is still greatly angered by the audacity and insult of those who built them. Destroying them was only part of His plan. The architects of the heresy must also be made examples of. For if I destroy the temple of mine enemy yet suffer the priest to live, will not he go forth and build a temple anew?

“The sacred mission I gave to you both will not end until those who fashioned this great sin are made to atone for their actions. Only by making an example of them can we warn others of the dangers of sin.

“Now I know you two love each other with a passion that is strong and pure, and I would not seek to stand between something as beautiful as that. But God sent you to me for a purpose, just as surely as He spoke and told me in that still small voice the service He would have you do in His name.

“Remember how I found you in the desert, broken by the sins you had been made to perform? Now I want you to remember what I said to you back in that field hospital in Iraq, I want you to recall for me the piece of Scripture I gave you to speak of your higher purpose and remind you of who you are.”

Carrie answered in her tiny voice. “ ‘Therefore, take up the full armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.’ ”

Cooper nodded. “Ephesians, chapter six, verse thirteen. And you see now how the evil day that was prophesied is upon us, and that now is the time to stand firm. When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness He prevailed by keeping His mind on His calling, on His mission on earth, and saying, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him alone shalt thou serve.’ ”

He reached out and took their hands and held them in his. “ ‘Him alone shalt thou serve.’ Believe me I would like nothing better, nothing better in this world than to unite you two warriors of God in the blessed union of marriage.” He let go of their hands and took a step back. “But His work is not yet done. And only when it is completed will we be free to pursue our own desires.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the envelope Miss Boerman had given him. “But never forget that you are not alone in your service of the Lord. You will see from this information that there are many others engaged in the good fight, many others who are part of the same brother- and sisterhood who would also see His will be done. Our reach is long, for He sees all.”

Carrie took the envelope and opened the flap with the stiletto of her finger. Inside was a printout showing a section of map with a town in the center called Cherokee. There was also a time, an alphanumeric number, a compass heading and a note saying: approximate distance to target, four miles.

“Some people sympathetic to our cause did me the courtesy of installing LoJack devices to the cars of Dr. Kinderman and Professor Douglas. I figured it might be useful to know where they were in case they managed to evade us. Dr. Kinderman’s car has been in the long-term parking lot of Dulles International Airport since early yesterday evening. I think it’s safe to surmise that he is no longer in the country, but we have others looking into where he may have gone. The signal from Professor Douglas’s car, however, was picked up by a state trooper in Swain County, North Carolina, about half an hour ago.” He pointed at the piece of paper. “That gives you a rough idea of where he is. It’s about a five-hour drive from here on good roads, so it will probably take you a little longer today, the weather being the way it is. If you head off now you should get there before dark.”

He closed his eyes and looked up, one hand on his heart, the other raised in front of him like a benediction. “I pray you, God, watch over these, your servants, along the righteous path so they may do your work, and bring these foul sinners to swift and rightful atonement so that their souls may finally be freed from the burden thou hast given them, amen.”

He opened his eyes and smiled at them both, as though something wonderful had just happened. “You should make a start. Daylight is burning. If you leave the way you came in, Miss Boerman will give you everything you need. We will have more accurate information by the time you get to Cherokee. Remember, we need to send a message to anyone else who would dare to stare upon the face of God. I’m counting on you to send that message, loud and clear. And if anyone tries to stop you in this sacred mission, anyone at all, be they civilian or officer of the law, then they must also be sacrificed in the name of the greater glory.”

55

Shepherd burst from the interview room and headed across the almost empty office with Franklin following close behind. “It was during summer break at the end of the first year of my master’s,” he said, bundling the laptop back in its case as he walked. “I was at Marshall working as a lab monkey in data analysis, cataloging all the new stuff that was pouring in from Hubble. James Webb had just been green lit and Professor Douglas was in charge, though he hadn’t put his team together yet. It was really hot that year and everyone else seemed to be on holiday. Me and a couple of other research students were the only ones doing any work.”

They pushed through a set of double doors out to the main stairway and started heading back down to the reception area. “One Friday a few weeks into our placement Professor Douglas popped his head around the door and told us all to go back to the dorm we were staying in and pack for a two-day trip. We had no idea what he had planned but he was the boss so we did as we were told.

“He picked us up in his old jeep and we headed east. We thought maybe he was taking us to one of the other launch areas but we drove right past them and kept on going. He said it was good to go back to basics every once in a while, remind yourself of what it was all about, and that was what we were going to do: no hi-tech, no computers, just a simple reflector telescope, a few beers and a clear sky.

“We wound up late in the afternoon heading up into the Smoky Mountains just north of Cherokee, North Carolina. He had this log cabin there, way up on a ridge. It looked like it was straight out of a Western: three rooms, potbelly stove, freshwater you had to pump out of a well. It even had a porch with a rocking chair on it. I guess it was just far enough away from anywhere so that the sweep of the modern world kind of passed it by. And because it was miles from anywhere it got so dark that the whole sky lit up at night. You could see more stars there with your naked eye than you could with a good telescope in a light-drenched town or city. He had a telescope set up near the cabin in a hunter’s hide built on a rocky ledge and we spent two days up there, tracking the planets, looking at the stars, talking about Galileo and Copernicus and Kepler, where it all came from and where we thought it was all going. He was fired up about James Webb even then. Talked about how it was going to see right to the edge of the universe, right back to the beginning of time.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs and the desk sergeant looked up wearily.

“We need a car,” Franklin said.

“Sure, no problem,” the walrus replied, wearily picking up his phone and punching a button. “I trust your stay with us has been a pleasant one. Please let me know if you used anything from the minibar. I’ll let you know when your cab is here.”

“I don’t mean a cab. We need to borrow a car. One that’s going to be able to cope with the weather out there.”

Shepherd frowned. “Why do we need a car? I mean, much as I hate to say it, but wouldn’t flying be quicker?”

“I doubt anything will be taking off in this,” Franklin said, pointing outside at the thickening snow. “We might get lucky and make it to Charlotte, always assuming they haven’t got worse weather there. But then it’s still about a three- to four-hour drive to Cherokee on mostly mountain roads. It’s maybe five hours from here but mostly on dead-straight, flat plain roads. Trust me, I know this area pretty well. We’ll be better off driving.”

Franklin steered Shepherd away from the main desk and over to the row of seats by the wall. “Tell me why you think Douglas is there.”

“There was something special about the place. The professor had history there, real history, why else would he drive all that way when there are plenty of mountains much closer to Huntsville? It had all these photographs of people in frames tacked to the walls, some going way back, including one of the professor as a kid standing on the porch and squinting into the sunlight as he held a model plane over his head. He must have been about five or six but you could still see the man he would become.”

Franklin looked over at the desk sergeant who was now resolutely ignoring the constantly ringing phone. “How we doing with that ride?” he shouted over.

The sergeant looked at them over the top of his reading glasses. “We’re just having a Caddy waxed and polished for you now.”

Franklin turned back to Shepherd. “Funny guy. He should be on Comedy Central.”

Shepherd glanced outside at the swirling white. “What about the roads — the traffic’s all snarled up already, we saw it coming in.”

“Exactly. We saw it coming in to town. The roads heading out will be pretty clear. So long as we get a decent car, driving’s going to be our best option. Trust me.”

Shepherd nodded, but for the first time he wasn’t sure whether he did.

56

Liv sat in the kitchen eating dried fruit and salt crackers she’d found in one of the food lockers. Kyle pulled a stool from beneath a stainless-steel countertop and sat down wearily opposite. “You should drink some of this,” he said, pulling a bottle of water from a thermal box on the floor. “It might taste a bit funny because it’s got rehydration salts in it.” He poured half of the bottle into a glass and slid it over to her. “I made up a batch for your friends. Don’t worry, it’s clean. In fact, all the water’s clean. I’ve been running tests every hour and the ground water’s flowing pure again. The pressure must have blown away the contaminants, though I’ll still keep checking it. Go ahead — drink.”

Liv drank, forcing herself not to gulp it all down at once, savoring the saltiness on her tongue. “So tell me how you ended up here,” she said as Kyle poured the rest of the water into a second glass.

“We were all working way down in the south in Dhi Qar province as part of a project run by an international aid organization.”

“ORTUS,” Liv said.

“That’s right. How did you—”

“—I recognized the logo on the side of your jeep. I know one of the people who runs it, Gabriel Mann.”

Kyle smiled in a way that suggested he both knew and liked him. “You know Gabriel?”

She nodded.

“Ah, he’s a good guy. When we first set up the project here he came and helped us out a lot. I heard he was in some kind of trouble with the law.”

“He was. He is.”

“Well, I hope he’s okay.”

“So do I… You said you were working down south.”

“Yeah, way down in the southeast, the other side of Baghdad in the Mesopotamian marshlands, or what’s left of them. The people there were pretty badly persecuted by Saddam and his mob after they rebelled against him in ’91. As part of his system of punishment he built huge canals to redirect the Tigris and Euphrates away from the marshes to drive the tribes out. He was pretty successful too. There’s only about ten percent of them left. Then the war came. As soon as Saddam started losing, the locals blew holes in the dams and dykes and let the water flow back in again. We were sent to help monitor the water quality and manage the restocking of the wetlands with reed beds. There were sixteen of us.”

“What happened to the others?”

“Gone.” He took a drink then carefully placed the glass down on the counter. “We’d been working together for six months. It was good work. The people were returning, the reeds were growing, we were even seeing some of the wildlife coming back. The marshes used to be a major staging post for millions of migratory birds until Saddam buggered it all up. Every day more life returned — both man and bird. Then all of a sudden the plug got pulled on us. It had something to do with what happened to Gabriel. Our headquarters are in Ruin and he was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist or something, trying to blow up the Citadel using ORTUS resources. The upshot was that all of ORTUS’s bank accounts were frozen while the charges were being investigated. Which meant we could no longer pay for anything and weren’t getting paid ourselves.

“We kept going as long as we could, hoping the money would get unfrozen but pretty soon we started running out of food, fuel, you name it. So we pulled out and headed back toward the border.” He rolled the water around in the glass, staring at the liquid, deep in thought.

“So how come you ended up here? Did you get lost?”

“No, nothing like that.’ He continued to stare at the glass, as if the answer might lie in it somewhere. ‘I’m still not really a hundred percent sure what happened. We were traveling north, heading for the Turkish border in a four-vehicle convoy, which is the only safe way to travel on these roads. We were making pretty good time, considering all the roadblocks on Highway 8, had made it as far as Al-Hillah and we were getting ready to push on as far as Baghdad when I got a feeling that we were going in the wrong direction. I can’t really explain it. It was like I knew that the maps, the GPS were wrong. I wasn’t alone, Eric and Mike felt it too.

“The rest of the guys thought we’d gone crazy. They told us to shut up and keep driving but we couldn’t do it, none of us could. It was such a strong feeling. For me it was like a magnet pulling at some kind of metal core inside me.” He looked up and smiled. “I’ve always been a bit of a nomad, never really stayed in one place for too long. No matter where I ended up and how good a time I was having there would always come a morning when I’d wake up with an overwhelming urge to be somewhere else. And this was exactly like that, only instead of wanting to head off into the unknown it felt like I was returning somewhere. Like I was coming home.

“It’s like — for the last six months or so, ever since I’ve been working on the marshes, I’ve been watching the birds: flamingos, pelicans, hooded crows, teals. Some of these guys fly halfway around the world from as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as Africa and India to end up in the exact same place where they hatched. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands probably, and we still don’t really know how they do it. It’s just an instinct in them, a natural urge. Then a few years back the marshes vanished, I mean there was nothing there at all but cracked earth and the odd abandoned boat. But as soon as the water came back, they knew. Somehow they just knew that’s where they needed to be. That’s what it felt like for me. I felt such a strong pull to be here, though I didn’t know what this place was, or even if it was here. I’ve never been here before in my life, but I felt like I was coming home. Explain that.”

Liv shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “But I felt something like it too.”

Behind her the door opened and she smiled when she saw Tariq standing there looking better than she’d seen him for a while. Her smile faded quickly when she saw the look of concern on his face. “What is it?” she asked.

“You better come see for yourself.”

57

Liv saw why Tariq had fetched her the moment she stepped out of the main building. A thick column of dust was rising in the eastern sky, heralding new arrivals.

“Soldiers,” a voice shouted down from the guard tower.

“How many?” Tariq called back.

“Difficult to tell. There’s one Humvee and one truck. The truck could be empty or it could have twenty men inside.”

Tariq looked over beyond the perimeter fence to where a group of workers were hurrying back to the compound. He waited until the last of the grave-digging detail had slipped through then shouted, “Close the gate and man the guns.”

“No,” Liv said. “We’ve been through this. We cannot meet everyone who comes here with suspicion and loaded weapons.”

“We tried it your way last time,” Tariq replied. “First we talk, then we let them in. I cannot risk all our lives again.” Then he walked away before she had time to argue.

The Humvee and the truck pulled to a halt about fifty yards short of the gate and sat there for a while, engines running, shrouded in a cloud of their own dust.

“American,” Tariq said, reading the markings on the side of the vehicles.

Liv was standing next to him, inside the perimeter gate waiting to greet them. “What are they doing?” she asked.

“They are being cautious,” Tariq replied, his eyes never leaving the lead vehicle.

“Can you blame them?” She glanced up at the .50-cal gun in the guard tower, a man standing behind it, poised and ready.

She noticed Tariq’s hand tighten on the grip of the AK-47 slung across his back and wondered for a fleeting moment if he wasn’t spoiling for a fight. This was the problem with letting men do the negotiating. Sooner or later their hormones took over and it usually ended in battle. “HEY,” she shouted at the Humvee, “OVER HERE.” She waved her hands over her head and jumped up and down to get their attention.

“What are you doing?” Tariq looked at her as if she had gone insane.

“You said we should talk first so I’m talking. HEY. I’M AN AMERICAN.” She pulled a keffiyeh from around her neck and started waving it in the air. “USA. HELLO.”

“You can stop now,” Tariq said. “I think they heard you.”

The Humvee started to creep forward along the tracks in the dirt leading to the gate. It was impossible to see who was inside because of the sun on the windshield, a bright slash of light that shimmered as the hard wheels crept over the rough ground.

“Can you do me a favor?” Liv said out of the corner of a fixed smile. “Take your hand off your rifle strap.”

Tariq reluctantly obeyed just as the Humvee crunched to a stop ten feet short of them. The door popped open and a rangy corporal got out. Liv felt Tariq stiffen beside her as he saw the M4 the soldier was cradling in his arms, eyes shielded by the standard-issue Oakleys most of the soldiers seemed to favor. He stood by the vehicle saying nothing. By the slight tilt of his head Liv could tell he was scoping out the guard tower and the .50-cal cannon that had tracked the Hummer all the way to where it now stood.

“Hi,” Liv said, smiling through the tension. “I’m Liv Adamsen. I’m an American. Who are you?”

A hand let go of the M4 and pointed at the name badge stitched to the left breast of his desert fatigues. Liv squinted against the glare coming off the Humvee’s windshield and read the name. “Williamson. You got a first name?”

He nodded. Liv’s smile was starting to hurt now. “Want to give it to me?”

The soldier ignored the question, looking straight past her at the fountain of water shooting up from the spire of the drill in the center of the compound. “What is this place?” His voice was soft, almost childlike, and totally at odds with the hardened image the rest of him radiated.

“It’s…” Liv paused as she realized she did not have a ready word to describe it.

“It’s beautiful,” the soldier whispered, his shaded eyes taking in the lines of the rivers snaking away across the dust. Behind him the truck’s engine fell silent. It rocked on its springs and other men emerged, dropping down one by one to the ground, six of them, all wearing the coffee-stain camouflage of the U.S. military. Liv was reminded of the welcoming committee she and Gabriel had encountered crossing the border from Turkey what seemed like a lifetime ago. Three more uniformed men climbed out of the Humvee. And though they were wearing uniforms and carrying weapons, there was nothing threatening or hostile about them. They just seemed like a bunch of cautious guys edging their way into a party they weren’t sure they were invited to. Tariq must have sensed it too. He raised his hand to the man in the guard tower and the .50-cal cannon swung away as the man stepped back.

“Where you from?” The soft-spoken corporal removed his shades and squinted at Liv with pale blue eyes that looked like they should be peering out at a wheat field from beneath a faded starter cap.

“I’m from New Jersey,” she said. “You?”

He shrugged. “I’m from all over, I guess. Illinois originally, but I wouldn’t exactly call it home.” He looked back at the spout of water shooting up from the ground, like a kid watching fireworks. Then he smiled. “Did you feel it too?”

Liv frowned. “Feel what?”

“The pull to this place. We all felt it. We all volunteered to stay behind when orders to ship out came through — the rest of the men were off like rabbits, they been pining for home for weeks, never seen homesickness like it. But none of us has any real home to go to…” His hand clenched into a fist and tapped on his chest above his heart. “But then we felt the pull to come here. So we came.”

Liv looked up at Tariq. “Why don’t you come on in,” she said.

Tariq glanced down at her then back at the row of soldiers. “How many are you?”

The corporal shrugged. “Just what you see here.”

“The vehicles stay outside the fence,” Tariq said, “and you need to hand over your weapons. We’ll keep them over there, locked in the armory,” he said, pointing to the nearest guard tower. “If you want to leave you can have them back again, no arguments, but no one walks around with a weapon inside the compound, understood?”

The corporal stared hard at Tariq for a few long moments. Asking a soldier to hand over his weapon was like asking him to surrender. “How come you get to keep your AK?” he said.

“I don’t,” he replied. “You lock up your weapons, I lock up mine. Everyone’s the same.”

“But who gets the key?”

Tariq nodded at Liv. “She does.”

The corporal smiled. “Well, in that case it’s a deal breaker. In my experience you can never trust a Jersey girl with something of value.” His face broke into a laugh and she saw the boy in him again. “I’m only kidding.” In a few well-practiced moves he made his M4 safe and held it out to Tariq. “Hey, man, no problem — though you might want to reconsider letting the vehicles in, or the truck leastways.” He turned to it as one of the other men climbed up and raised the canvas siding to reveal that the truck was full of boxes and crates of food. “We just got a reorder in at the same time as all the other guys were shipping out. There’s K rations in there and enough food to feed a battalion for about a month. We thought we’d bring it along, seeing as we had no idea where we were headed. The only thing we don’t got much of is water, but I see you pretty much got that covered.”

Tariq nodded. “Okay,” he said. “You can bring the truck in, but the Hummer stays outside.” The gate clanged like a bell as it was unlocked and then swung open to let the new arrivals inside. They filed in quietly, handing over their weapons to Tariq as if they were just checking in coats at a nightclub and Liv watched them closely, sizing them up. They were foot soldiers, enlisted men who more often than not joined up to escape jail or the crushing boredom of a dead-end life with no job and no prospects. Back home they joined gangs and fought to create the families they’d never really had. In the army they did pretty much the same. They were nomads, homeless, just like the guys from ORTUS. Just like she was.

“Where were you stationed?”

“East of Baghdad,” Williamson said, still staring up at the water fountain.

Liv nodded and walked over to Tariq, who was checking weapons and making them safe.

“It’s spreading,” she said.

“What is?”

“The pull of this place — it’s spreading. The guys from ORTUS felt it yesterday at Al-Hillah, these guys felt it today in Baghdad.” She looked up and scanned the horizon all around, thinking of the whole world that lay beyond it. “We should get ready for more people,” she said. “Lots more.”

58

It was early afternoon by the time Franklin and Shepherd finally eased onto I-26, going northwest into a flurry of fine snow that drifted out of a light fog. The traffic was solid heading into Charleston, a three-lane parking lot, inching its way into the city. The outbound lanes were almost empty.

Franklin drove. Shepherd sat in the passenger seat, studying a series of maps he’d borrowed from the highway patrolman who’d “loaned” them his Dodge Durango with about as much grace as someone handing over a personal credit card, pointing to a mall and saying, “Knock yourself out.” For the first twenty minutes or so the only sound was the rumbling of thick wheels on blacktop, and the occasional rustle of paper as Shepherd unfolded the maps one by one and studied them. They were topographical maps showing the border region between South Carolina and North Carolina, with the Smoky Mountains rising up in the west. His finger traced each winding track, searching for a road he had traveled only once before, nearly twenty years previously.

“Find what you were looking for?” Franklin asked from the driver’s seat.

Shepherd stared out at the whiteness, the road disappearing into the fog within fifty yards either way so that it felt like they were moving but not going anywhere. “Hard to tell from these maps,” he said. “Guess I need to be there and see what looks familiar.”

“You won’t be seeing much if this fog doesn’t lift. The snow will make everything look different too.”

Shepherd wondered if this was all a waste of time. “We could always turn around and head back, follow one of our many other leads,” he said.

Franklin chuckled. “Man, you sure got cynical awful quick — normally takes a couple of years in a field office to wear the shine off a new agent.”

Shepherd said nothing. He kept thinking about the photograph of the dead woman and imagining how he would have felt if it had been his Melisa lying there instead. He could almost feel the pull of the laptop in the footwell behind his seat, taunting him with the knowledge it contained. It was the danger that came with allowing something to become the single pulse of your life: it drove you, gave you focus and purpose, but it could also derail you the moment it was no longer there. Melisa had been the light that lured him out of the darkness. He closed his eyes, and found himself back in the women’s shelter attached to the place where he had washed up. Melisa was doing her thing, helping some poor woman who was not much more than a kid herself deliver a baby. The woman was Chinese and when the baby was finally born, wriggling and mewling into the world, Melisa whispered something to him: “Do you see them?”

She often did that, asked a question that made you ask one back.

“See what?”

“The threads. The Chinese believe that when a baby is born, invisible red threads shoot out and find their way to all the people they will connect with in their life. And no matter how tangled up they get as they grow, those threads never break, so they will always end up finding their way to the people they were destined to meet.”

He imagined those threads now, connecting him to Melisa, twisting through the air and pulsing like veins.

“That thing you said back there,” Franklin’s voice rumbled like the tires, low and serious. “The thing about something heading toward earth, you think that’s a possibility?”

Shepherd opened his eyes and realized he must have been dozing. They were in flat country now, hardly any buildings, hardly any sign of life apart from the odd car heading in the other direction toward Charleston. “Statistically speaking it’s possible.”

“So how come other telescopes haven’t seen it?”

“Hubble can see farther than anything else on earth.”

“Okay, but presumably anything far enough out that only Hubble could see would take millions of years to get here.”

“Not necessarily. There are a lot of theoretical objects in space, physics-defying things that we can imagine but have not been able to find or measure. One of them is known as a dark star. It has huge mass and travels at or near the speed of light. If one of these things was coming straight at us then the light from it would only just outrun the object. We wouldn’t know anything about it beforehand, not until it was about to hit because the object would arrive at almost the same time as the light, like it had just appeared as if from out of nowhere.”

Franklin stared ahead at the road. “Okay, say, for argument’s sake, one of these dark stars is heading our way, would that explain all this stuff that’s going on: the ships, the soldiers, the people heading home?”

“It’s possible. We can see the effect the moon has on the sea, and humans are sixty percent water, our brains are nearer seventy-five percent, so it stands to reason the moon must have some effect on us too.”

“That’s for sure. If you ever work a midnight shift at a hospital or a police precinct during a full moon you’ll know it’s true. Everyone goes nuts.”

“And the moon is only one tiny object. Imagine what effect a massive star would have on us all. We’re all related to each other on an atomic level — you, me, the car, the stars — we’re all made of the same stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the atomic building blocks that make up you and me are the same ones that burn at the heart of stars, and all of it came from the same place. Around fourteen billion years ago the universe was born. It started out as something called the point of singularity, smaller than a subatomic particle, incredibly dense and incredibly hot. Every single thing that is now in the universe exploded out from it and began to cool as it expanded, forming the protons, neutrons and electrons that, over time, became atoms and eventually elements. The first element was hydrogen. Most of the atoms in the human body are hydrogen. These elements then started to coalesce into huge clouds that slowly condensed to form stars and galaxies. Then heavier elements began to be synthesized inside stars and in supernovae when they died. One of these was carbon, the essential building block of all organic life forms. And this process is still happening throughout the still-expanding universe. Things are born. Things get torn apart. And the elements of those dead things become something else. Nothing lasts forever, but nothing ever entirely disappears either. It just becomes something else.”

The sound of the tires rumbled through the silence that followed. Outside, the white, frozen countryside continued to slip by. The interstate was practically empty now. From time to time a building or a sign would loom out of the fog, giving variation to the otherwise flat white landscape, but most of the time they might just as well have been driving along in a huge hamster wheel — always moving but getting nowhere. It was a fair visual representation of the limbo Shepherd was feeling, halfway between something and nothing, with no real concept of either. Maybe the world had already ended and this was purgatory, driving through the fog forever with Franklin at the wheel, never knowing what had happened or whether they could have done anything to stop it.

A ticking sound punctuated the silence as Franklin hit the indicators and started to ease off the highway onto a side road. “Just taking a little shortcut,” he said. “We need some gas and a bite. There’s a town up here.”

Shepherd looked down at the map, following the line of the road they had just taken until it stopped at a dot of a town called St. Matthews. “We could have gotten gas and food on the interstate. This is going out of our way.”

Franklin reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette and popped it between his lips. He stared ahead, his fingers tapping on the wheel, the cigarette hanging unlit in his mouth.

“Sorry,” he said.

Shepherd thought back through all the wrong notes he’d picked up over the last few hours: the way Franklin had ushered the cop who had clearly known him out of the room back at the station; the way he had insisted on driving rather than flying up to Cherokee; even his suggestion to come to Charleston in the first place to interview Cooper rather than hand it over to other agents. “Sorry for what?”

Franklin wound down his window a little then lit the cigarette, blowing smoke out into the cold. “You’ll see,” he said.

59

The soldiers immediately made themselves at home.

As well as the food and fresh fuel supplies — which they off-loaded from the truck with impressive and well-drilled speed — they volunteered to take over the grave-digging detail their arrival had disrupted. They also brought something far more valuable than any of these — they brought a laptop.

All the communications and technology in the compound had either been destroyed or looted, effectively cutting it off from the wider world. So while everyone else was out beyond the perimeter fence Liv traced cables from the dish on the roof of the main building and hot-wired the laptop into the compound’s satellite link.

Like any journalist Liv was a total information junkie and she’d gone cold turkey for days now, so the first thing she did when she fired up the laptop and got online was call up some news sites. She scanned the headlines feeling the buzz of an addict getting a fresh hit. Since her brother had fallen to his death from the summit of the Citadel, Ruin and the story that had unfolded in the wake of his sacrifice had never been far from the news. It was her story too — and also Gabriel’s. She did a news search on Google with GABRIEL in the subject line. Pages of results came back, all several days old and just retelling stories she already knew: his arrest at the hospital for suspected terrorist acts and homicide; his subsequent escape from custody; the manhunt that ensued with her picture and name next to his. After that there was nothing. The only more recent stories relating to Ruin were medical ones concerning an outbreak of what some of the more tabloidy sites were calling “a plague.”

Liv clicked on the top result, her heart racing at the implications of this. She remembered the symbol she had seen on the Starmap, the circle with the cross through it that made her think of disease and suffering. Was this what it predicted — the event that would result in the end of days?

The article opened and she speed-read it, her mind pulling out the facts as her eyes skimmed the words: outbreak centered around the Citadel — eighteen dead, eighty-six in isolation — the whole city of Ruin in quarantine and under police control.

She opened another window and searched for RUIN POLICE. Skype was already installed on the desktop and she opened this too, logging in through her own account that thankfully still had some credit on it. She copied the number of the switchboard into the keypad, adding the international dialing codes for Turkey then hit the key to boost the speakers as the number dialed and started to ring.

It rang for a long time, long enough for her to read another article about how the infected had been transferred from the Public Church into the Citadel itself. There was a link to a news clip but someone answered before she could play it.

“Ruin Police,” a voice said, with chaos sounding in the back-ground.

“Hi,” Liv said in fluent Turkish, “could you connect me to Inspector Arkadian?”

“Name please?”

“Liv Adamsen.”

“One moment.”

The line switched to Muzak and Liv flipped back to the news site, scrolling through another article about the outbreak. It featured apocalyptic photos of empty streets and people standing by the public gate to the Old Town wearing full contamination suits. The Citadel soared up in the background, so terrible and familiar. Seeing it in this context made something click in Liv’s head and she pulled the folded piece of paper from her pocket and smoothed it flat on the desk while the tinny hold tune continued to play. She scanned the symbols again, her eyes settling on the beginning of the second line.

The symbol for disease followed by…

She looked back at the photo on the screen, the man in the contagion suit with the sharp outline of the mountain behind him.

… of course…

The second symbol represented the Citadel, and the disease had started there and was now spreading. The next part of the prophecy was coming to pass.

The Muzak cut out.

“Liv?”

“Arkadian.” More noise in the background, like he was on a street full of children. “Are you okay? I just saw the news about the out-break.”

“It’s chaos here. People are scared. I’m scared. We’re evacuating the children from the city. Where are you?”

She looked out of the window at the distant movement of people working on the hill as they dug the new grave. “Still in the desert,” she said. “We found it.”

“I know. Gabriel told me.”

Liv felt the world shift. “Gabriel! You spoke to him?”

“Yes.” Another pause filled with the babble of children. “Just before he was taken into the Citadel.”

Liv felt like all the air had been sucked from the room.

“He was sick, Liv, he had the virus — but he was not as sick as the others.” She gripped the sides of her chair and reminded herself to breathe. “Most of them go mad when the disease takes them, but not Gabriel. He rode all the way back here because he knew he had it. He didn’t want it to spread. It was Gabriel who insisted the disease be contained inside the Citadel. He wanted to take it back where it came from. He wanted to beat it. And if anyone can do it, it’s him.”

Liv tried to speak but couldn’t. In her ear she could hear Arkadian still speaking but she didn’t hear his words. Her eyes dropped down to the red-stained piece of paper and scanned the second line again, a terrible new meaning emerging from it in the light of Arkadian’s revelation.

Disease

Citadel

A knight on horseback — Gabriel

She remembered the words on the note he had left her, telling her that leaving her was the hardest thing he had ever done. And now she knew why. He must have known he was infected. He’d known that and had still ridden all the way back to the Citadel, just to protect her.

She looked at the remaining symbols on the second line of the prophecy, hoping she might find something hopeful in them, but all she saw was more misery.

She knew what it meant now. The T was her, the circle confinement and the moon and chevron told her how long it would all last.

Nine moons — eight months.

She clicked on the video clip embedded in the news article. It had been filmed from a news helicopter at night so the quality wasn’t great. A bright searchlight picked out a procession of patients strapped to stretchers and being carried to the mountain. She studied the faces, all looking straight up into the sky. Even through the grainy images she could see the masks of pain their faces had become. Tears started to run down her cheeks then the light swung away, settling again on the last stretcher to emerge from the church. She hit the space bar to pause it just as Gabriel looked straight up at the camera. It was as if he was staring straight at her, as if he was saying good-bye. Her love. Her life — being carried away on a stretcher, and into the heart of the hateful mountain.

60

Franklin finished his cigarette and flicked it out of the window. “You ever been married, Shepherd?”

“No.”

“And you don’t have kids, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

They were on the outskirts of the town now, with widely spaced houses emerging from the trees, a general store with lights burning in the windows and a sign outside saying St. Matthews Piggly Wiggly. There was a gas station on the other side of the road, also open for business. Franklin drove past them both, all pretense of getting food and gas now abandoned.

“When you have kids, everything changes. It’s like taking your heart out of your chest and watching it walk around. You’d do anything for them, anything at all. And if you have a daughter”—he said, shaking his head—“well, that’s a whole other ball game. The world suddenly seems ten times more dangerous than it did before, a hundred times, and she is so vulnerable and fragile in it.”

He slowed down and took a right into a one-lane street lined with neat, single-story houses with wooden porches and brick chimneys, their front lawns all blanketed in white.

“So you work your ass off to put a roof over her head, give her a good life, protect her from all the crap that you know is out there, the stuff that you see every day. Everything you do takes on new meaning, every bad guy I ever put away was dedicated in some way to my daughter. I did it for her, to make the world a safer place for her, and for her mother.”

He took another left onto a road lined with bigger houses, some with four-car drives.

“And you try so hard to shut off the darkness you have to deal with but it’s always there, like a stain. So you keep it from your kids by keeping yourself from them, because, in a way, you are the thing you want to protect them from.”

He brought the car to a halt outside a house with a long sloping roof like a ski jump. Franklin fixed his eyes on it and killed the engine.

“Then one day you realize you don’t know who they are anymore, either of them. You’ve spent so long working to give your family a better life that you’re no longer a part of it. You’ve become a stranger in your own home. You can’t talk to them, you can’t understand them, you’re only aware of the distance between you where once there was no gap at all.” He looked away and Shepherd wondered if the tough old bastard was actually crying.

“I’m sorry I dragged you all the way out here,” Franklin said, turning back and looking him square in the eye. “I kind of convinced myself it was all about the investigation, but in the end it looks like it’s all about me.” He nodded at the sideways house. “And you were right about the homing instinct.”

“You don’t have to explain it.”

Franklin turned to him. “You said you didn’t have a home.”

“I don’t, at least not like this. But home means different things to different people.” He took a breath, ready to tell him… about Melisa, about his missing two years, even about how he was using the MPD files to try and find her again. But just then the door of the house opened and a girl of about twenty stepped out.

Cold air flooded in as Franklin got out of the car. Shepherd watched him walk up the drive toward her, as if he was being pulled by an invisible thread. He stopped a few feet short of her and they stared at each other. Then she stepped forward and wrapped her slender arms around his neck and buried her face in his chest. Behind them another woman, an older version of the girl, stepped onto the porch and stared at them for a moment. Then she too came forward, a smile like a sunrise breaking on her face, and Shepherd looked away, feeling uncomfortable about sharing such a private moment even from a distance.

He stared down the street at the other houses. Some were empty and dark, the drives showing the fading tire tracks of cars no longer there. Other houses glowed, their festive decorations lighting up the snow like Christmas cards.

Witnessing the power of the homing instinct and its effect even on someone like Franklin made him realize that the pull to find Melisa and the reckless things it was making him do was simply the same thing working in him.

The rap of a knuckle on his window snapped him back to the present.

Franklin was standing outside the car. Shepherd got out, snow crunching beneath his shoes and cold air on his skin.

“You want to come in, grab some lunch?”

Shepherd looked over at the porch where the two women were standing watching them. “I don’t think so. I’d just be in the way.”

Franklin nodded. “Listen,” he said. “When I drove here I thought… well, I don’t know what I thought, but now I’m here I don’t think I can leave again, not for a while at least.”

“It’s okay, I understand. I’ll go on to Cherokee alone, see if I can find Douglas’s place. It’s probably a waste of time anyway, I only ever went there once.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Franklin said, his brow creasing with the difficulty of what he was doing. “And if you do find him, don’t approach him on your own. Call me first, okay?”

“He’s my old teacher — what’s he going to do, give me a tough assignment?”

“He’s a wanted terrorist who nearly got you killed in an explosion this morning. Don’t forget that.”

“Okay, if I find him I’ll call — I promise. Now get inside that house, Agent Franklin, and spend some time with your family.”

“Ben.”

“What?”

“Name’s Ben, short for Benjamin, it’s not my bureau name, it’s my real one. My old man won a hundred-dollar bill for calling me it when I was born, asshole that he was. He’d probably have called me George if our name had been Washington, just to win a dollar.”

“It’s a fine name, Ben. You wear it well.” Shepherd held out his hand.

And Franklin shook it.

61

Rosie Andrews crunched through the snow toward the ATM. It was out of service, just like all the others. Nothing was working. Everything was falling apart. She felt tears bubbling up through her growing panic. She had about fifteen dollars in her purse, two maxed-out credit cards, a quarter of a tank of gas and at least a three-hour journey ahead of her. The gas would get her maybe fifty miles out of Asheville, about a third of the way down to her mom’s in Atlanta, maybe even less the way her station wagon was loaded up.

From somewhere across the parking lot she heard glass shatter followed by a roar of voices that made the hairs bristle on the back of her neck. She turned and hurried back to where she had left the car, parked behind a Dumpster on the far side of the lot, away from the large angry-looking crowd she had seen outside the big Petro Express when she had driven in. It all added to the sick feeling that had been growing inside her that made her feel something was terribly wrong. The crowd had been arguing with security staff who were allowing only a few people in at a time to control numbers.

There was another crash and the roar got louder.

Sounded like the security guys had lost the argument.

The noise frightened her. It was the sound of violence and chaos and it made her feel small and vulnerable. She just wanted to get some money and get out of here. She just wanted to get home.

She rounded the edge of the Dumpster, fretting in her pocket for her keys, and saw the man leaning down by the side of the car, his face pressed against the rear window. Rosie felt blood singing in her ears and her vision started to tunnel.

“What are you… you get away from there.”

The man looked up but didn’t move — he just kept looking at her in a way she didn’t like.

Another crash of glass behind her. Another roar.

She pulled her hand from her coat and pointed it at him. “You step away from the car, you hear me?”

The man looked down and registered the gun she was holding, but still he didn’t move.

“Is this man bothering you, sweetie?’

The voice made her jump. Rosie’s head jerked around to discover a birdlike woman standing next to her, so small she was almost like a child. She was looking up at her, her blue eyes cold against the snow. In her peripheral vision she saw movement, the man moving forward, using the distraction to close the gap between them.

She stepped backward, slipping on the ice a little but holding the gun steady in a good grip like she’d practiced on the range. She was going to shoot him. If he took one step closer she would fire without hesitation. She had often wondered if she would be able to do it if she found herself in a situation like this but now there was no question in her mind that she could. It was a nature thing. A primal instinct to protect what was yours. She took another step back, opened her mouth to warn the man one last time, then an object banged against her side.

The movement was so fast she didn’t even feel the pain until the blade was sliding back out from between her ribs, so sharp and sudden that it snatched the breath from her mouth as quickly as the man took the gun from her hand.

She felt confused, as if everything was happening to someone else and she was just watching. Warmth spread out from the burning pain in her side and she looked down at the red bloom spreading over the white of her coat.

Blood. Her blood.

The sight of it shocked some sense back into her and she took a ragged breath, ready to scream, but a strong hand clamped over her mouth and dragged her farther back into the shadows behind the Dumpster.

Carrie watched Eli holding the woman tightly, making sure her blood spilled away from him and onto the snow and not his boots. When her body went limp he laid her gently on the ground and patted down her pockets until he found the keys.

“Shame,” he said, standing up and moving over to the car.

“Just bad timing, I guess,” Carrie said, inspecting the blade of her knife and wiping it with a handful of snow.

“I didn’t mean her.” Eli pressed the button on the key fob and the car thunked as the central locking disengaged. He opened the back door and nodded toward the interior. “I meant her.”

The backseat was crammed with boxes of groceries, rolls of bedding and a couple of laundry bags overflowing with baby-girl clothes. The owner of the clothes was wrapped up tightly in a quilted snowsuit and strapped into a kiddie car seat, asleep, a single strand of blond hair escaping from beneath a hand-knitted woolen hat.

Carrie moved over and watched the tiny chest rise and fall, eyes moving beneath the lids as she dreamed her little-girl dreams. Carrie’s hand found Eli’s and she wrapped all of her fingers around one of his but he pulled away, reaching across the tiny sleeping form to pick up a pillow from the pile of bedding. “Look away, honey,” he said, “you don’t need to see this.”

She opened her mouth to speak but then thought better of it. Eli was right. This was no world for a little girl to go through without a mother by her side, she knew that much herself, and this little poppet was sweet and innocent enough to pass straight into heaven, no questions asked. Eli was doing her a favor, a great favor, by doing this thing for her. He was so kind and strong where it really counted, in the heart — and that was why she loved him.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” she said, reaching out to gently tuck the lock of hair back under the woolen hat. Then she kissed Eli on the cheek and turned away.