The Tower

62

Gabriel drifted in and out of consciousness. At times he raved, howling and bucking against the bindings, at other times he was calm enough to converse with the doctors for minutes at a time, giving them insights into how the infection felt, like a drowning man describing the experience in snatched breaths to someone in a nearby boat before another wave engulfed him and dragged him back under. He fought, he screamed, he scratched and he cried — but he did not die.

Athanasius watched it all from a seat by the bed. He was there at night when the flicker of candles and flambeaux cast ghoulish light across Gabriel’s face, and in the day when the sunlight streamed through the huge rose window, dappling the damned with color. The beds surrounding them emptied and filled, over and over as the tide of sickness ebbed and flowed, and more and more people entered the mountain. First it was those who had rested in quarantine in the Seminary. Then new faces began appearing, steady in number, their brief stay always numbering a day or two at most and always following the same journey: carried in writhing and screaming, carried out silent and still to the center of the mountain and the firestone where the pyre always burned.

Then, on the second day of the fourth week after the Citadel had opened its doors to the sick, Gabriel opened his eyes and they stayed open. It was the middle of the afternoon, after the doctors had finished their rounds and Athanasius was away attending to the organization of what was left of his flock. He lay there, staring up at the soot-blackened stalactites high above him, listening to the drugged moans of the infected and the creak of their bindings as their bodies clenched and twisted all around him. He lay there a long time, bracing himself for the moment when the fever would drag him back down again, as it always had before. But this time it did not.

“Hello,” he called out, his voice raw and unfamiliar. Murmurings rose from the beds surrounding him, the sick roused from their drugged slumber.

“HELLO,” he called again, loud enough to hurt his throat and bring footsteps hurrying. A face appeared above his bed, brow furrowed, eyes ringed with the shadows of deep fatigue. Gabriel didn’t know him but he recognized the contamination suit he was wearing — and he also noticed the loaded syringe.

“No,” he said. “You don’t need to do that. I feel better.”

It was as if the doctor hadn’t heard him, his sleep-starved brain running through the well-worn routines of patient sedation. Gabriel felt the cold alcohol swipe of an antiseptic swab on his arm. He tried to twist away but the bindings held him fast.

“WAKE UP!” he shouted, as much to the doctor as to those surrounding him. “WAKE UP!”

The effect was instant, the faint murmurings erupting into howls as the sleeping sick were shocked into wailing wakefulness. The doctor looked up at the chaos now surrounding him, every patient around him bucking and thrashing against their bindings as they howled in torment. He looked back down at Gabriel, his eyes shining with annoyance at the trouble he’d caused; he held up the syringe and readied the shot.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel growled, his throat raw from his shouting. “I do not need sedating. See to the others first. Their need is clearly greater.”

The doctor hesitated, looked like he was still going to spike him, then a shadow passed over Gabriel’s face and he glanced across to see the smooth-headed figure of a monk standing on the other side of his bed. “It’s okay,” Athanasius said to the doctor, “I shall sit with him. You see to these other poor souls.”

The doctor blinked, as though a spell had been broken, then turned away to start dealing with the others.

Athanasius pulled the stool out from beneath Gabriel’s bed and settled on it. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken and he smelled of wood smoke. Gabriel breathed it in, relishing the smell. It was the first time in a long while he had smelled anything other than the strange and permanent odor of oranges. And there was something else. He was cold and his sweat-soaked bindings felt wet and unpleasant against his skin.

“The fever,” he whispered in realization of what this meant. “It’s gone.”

Athanasius laid a warm hand on Gabriel’s forehead and straightened in his chair. “Thank God,” he said.

Another figure appeared by the bed and held a thermometer in his ear. It beeped and he checked the reading. He reset it and did it again.

“Ninety-eight point six,” he said, the hint of a smile on his weary face. “You’re probably a few points cooler than I am.”

“Dr. Kaplan, allow me to introduce Gabriel Mann,” Athanasius said.

Gabriel nodded a greeting. “I’d shake your hand but someone tied me to this bed.” Kaplan smiled again. “Tell me, did the quarantine work? Has the disease been contained?”

He knew the answer before either of them spoke. He heard it in the pause and saw it in the flick of their eyes as they looked away from him.

“There have been new cases,” the doctor replied, “ones that have originated beyond the line of the original quarantine in the metropolitan districts of the city. We have continued to remove the infected and quarantine those at risk but we have so far been unable to contain it. As of last week a state of martial law has been in place in the greater city of Ruin to try and prevent the further spread of the disease. The army and the police have set up roadblocks on the road leading out of the mountains. No one is allowed in, no one is allowed out. But we have made significant steps since moving here. And you may hold the key to all of our salvation. No one has fought the disease as long as you have, and no one has recovered — until now. But it’s still early days and you may yet relapse.”

He looked up at Athanasius. “We need to move him somewhere isolated.”

“No,” Gabriel said, “I’ll stay here, I don’t need special treatment.”

“You don’t understand,” Kaplan said. “You need to be in isolation, not just for your own comfort but for the safety of others. Your body may have defeated the infection but there is another possibility. Sometimes the body’s natural defenses do not entirely vanquish a hostile agent. Sometimes a kind of truce is arrived at where the disease is kept in check and the symptoms disappear. If this has happened then you may now be an asymptomatic carrier of the disease, immune yourself but deadly to anyone who comes into contact with you. There is also the possibility that the infection has mutated inside you and formed a new strain, one that your body is immune to because it helped create it but one that is every bit as deadly as the first strain — maybe even more so.”

Gabriel stared up at him. He hadn’t given conscious thought to his hopes until now. The one thing that had kept him going throughout his suffering and delirium was the thought of Liv. She was the one he had fought death for. He had left her in the desert in the hope that he carried the disease away with him. He had traveled all the way back to Ruin in the hope that it may not have spread. He had insisted on being taken inside the Citadel where the blight had first come from and then refused to die in the hope that he might finally be reunited with her. Now he was told that he must stay here, isolated even within this place of isolation. There were many words to describe the pain that filled him, but only one that completely summed up the way he felt.

Cursed.

Athanasius read the pain on his face. “I know a place where we can move him,” he said.

63

Following her conversation with Arkadian, Liv scoured every news site and story relating to the contagion in Ruin until the laptop’s battery ran out.

She sat alone for a while in the sweltering heat of the building feeling like she had just experienced a bereavement. She closed her eyes and remembered the last time she and Gabriel had been alone together, sheltering from the dust storm in the cave out in the desert. She had thought then that her life was slipping away, that the Sacrament she carried inside her would die without finding its way back to the home it had lost, and drag her down to death with it. She had clung to him then as if she was clinging to life. She remembered the feel of him, the salty taste of his skin as they had kissed when they had given themselves to the moment and each other in case it turned out to be the only night they ever had.

It was strange that someone she had spent hardly any time with and about whom she knew so little could have such a strong effect on her. There was something about Gabriel that calmed her soul when she was near him and made it ache whenever he was away — like it ached now.

She stood abruptly, angry at the world, the scrape of the chair legs cutting through the silence, and headed out through the dining hall into the bright sunlight. The thought of hard physical work seemed infinitely appealing in the wake of the emotional battering she had just experienced. She grabbed a pick, fell in line and happily took orders from Corporal Williamson, losing herself in work as they dug a pit big enough to bury all those who had drunk the poisoned water.

It took all day and when all the dead lay buried beneath the dry ground, the group collected by the water’s edge to wash and drink and relax. You could see in their easy conversation and open gestures that a new bond had been formed, one forged by hard work and collective endeavor. It was a testament to the human spirit that they had met that morning in a circumstance of mistrust and suspicion, one group inside the compound and one outside, and in less than a day those divisions had been removed entirely. It reminded Liv that, despite all the darkness that had swamped her recently, there was so much goodness in the world, and so much good in people. It made her hopeful that, whatever had been started here, whatever ancient spark had been reignited by the Sacrament’s return, it might just have a chance to succeed and grow into something wonderful and free, the exact opposite of the Citadel, in fact.

Something about this thought struck her and made her pull the folded paper from her pocket and study the symbols anew. Her eyes flicked between the upward arrow symbol for the Citadel on the second line and another on the third that was its exact opposite.

She looked over at the fountain of water in the center of the pool, forming an elongated V in the air. The symbol was the fountain. The symbol was this place.

She looked back at the second and third lines again, searching for other points of comparison.

The moon sign appeared in both, linking them to the same time frame, and the T was there too, encircled in the first line and beside a circle in the other. She looked down at the perimeter fence surrounding the compound below her and understood now why she felt so strongly about not locking the gate. This place was meant to be somewhere the Sacrament was free, outside the circle, not in. It had to welcome everyone and spread as far as the horizon if it needed to. The water had already begun this process, flowing out through the links in the fence and bringing the land back to life.

“Not a fortress but a haven,” she whispered.

“What was that?”

Liv looked up and saw Tariq standing nearby.

“Nothing,” she said, aware that everyone was tired and the plan she had just hatched would keep. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

64

Gabriel was wheeled into the abbot’s private quarters at the head of a procession of equipment and medical personnel. The rooms had been left largely unused since the abbot’s sudden death and the subsequent spread of the blight. Elections had been planned but the disease had ravaged the electorate before they could be held and since then, in a dark twist of irony, the only thing truly running the mountain was the very thing that had derailed the electoral process in the first place.

“This is the main living room and office,” Athanasius said, moving across the large space. “There is also a chamber bed through here that could be turned into a laboratory.” He opened a thick, metal-studded door onto another cave containing a wooden bed, an ottoman and several smaller pieces of furniture. “And in here is a washroom giving you all the running water you should need.”

Gabriel surveyed what he could of the new surroundings from the fixed viewpoint of his bed while everyone else started to unpack. His mattress had been raised at one end to render him upright and the bindings that had held him so tightly and for so long had now been loosened, but not removed. Dr. Kaplan had advised that they stay in place for the time being until they were sure he wasn’t going to suffer a relapse. He wasn’t allowed to walk either, which was fine with Gabriel. He was so weak that even keeping his eyes open was an effort.

He took in the room, this comfortable prison that would be his home for who knew how long. There was a huge fireplace as tall as a man that dominated one wall and a stained-glass window set into the rock, its ancient, hand-blown panes of blue and green glass forming a peacock motif that distorted the world beyond.

“How are you feeling?” Athanasius pulled a chair over and sat down as behind him the room began to be shifted around and dismantled.

“Like a condemned man.”

Athanasius smiled and ran his hand over the smooth dome of his head. “I think we all feel that way to some degree, though I know you have suffered more than most.” He leaned in closer and lowered his voice so only Gabriel could hear. “I sometimes wonder whether all this could have been averted — that if we had just left things as they were, left the Sacrament in place and not challenged the old traditions, all this pain and suffering, all this death would not have come to pass.”

“You really think that?”

“I have considered it. One does what one thinks is right, but sometimes we do the wrong thing for the right reasons.”

Gabriel closed his eyes and let his head fall back on the bed. He had been plagued with similar thoughts. He had lost so much as a result of the sequence of events he had helped set in motion. “Setting the Sacrament free was the only right thing to do,” he said.

“So you are happy with the apparent consequences of our actions?”

He shook his head, “Of course not. I feel personally responsible for every single person who has died from this blight or is still suffering now. I feel guilty that I may have helped spread it beyond these walls by leaving here, guilty that my mother is dead and my father too, but most of all I feel guilty that I abandoned Liv and left her alone in the desert. I was forced to, I was infected. I left her for all the right reasons, but it did not bring me happiness. And despite all of that I would rather never see her again than risk harming her.’

Athanasius nodded. “I just wish, when I see how you have suffered, that I could do more myself.”

“Maybe you can. When I last came here I was searching for something.”

“The Starmap.”

Gabriel nodded. “I thought it was the only thing that could lead us to Eden in order that the Sacrament could finally be returned to its rightful place. But in the end we found it another way — and we discovered the Starmap was already there. It had directions carved into it that used the stars as a guide. But it had something else carved on the reverse, another part of the prophecy.”

“And what did it say?”

“I don’t know. It was written in a language I didn’t recognize. But from what we already know, doesn’t it strike you that everything that has happened was predicted — Brother Samuel climbing to the top of the Citadel and making the sign of the Tau with his body; the release of the Sacrament and its restoration to its original home. It was outlined in a series of prophecies, first in the Heretic Bible and then on the Starmap. When we first started looking for it we only had my grandfather’s notebook to go on and a photograph my father had sent him. But the photograph showed only one side of the stone. When I found it and saw it for myself I realized there was much more on the other side. If we could read it now, in the light of all that has happened, we might discover that all of this was predicted too. We might even learn how it could end or what we might do to influence it. There must be more experts in ancient languages here in the Citadel than anywhere else in the world. If the stone can be deciphered anywhere, it’s here.”

“There are, or at least there were. Many of the scholars have succumbed to the blight, though there are still a few remaining. I myself have studied many of the lost languages. If the text on the stone is written in one I am familiar with then it should be easy to translate. But how could we get to see it?”

Gabriel smiled. “I took photographs and sent copies to a police inspector in Ruin.”

Athanasius sat up in his chair, his eyes alive. “Give me his name and I shall send a message immediately.”

“His name is Arkadian. And if you find me a cell phone I can call him and get him to message us a copy right away.”

Athanasius frowned. “All communications devices are forbidden inside the mountain.”

“So are civilians, and yet here I am. I’m sure one of the medics will have brought a phone along with him.”

Athanasius shook his head. “It was a condition of granting access to the sick that those admitted must abide by the rules of the mountain. Everyone had to surrender their phones before entering. You will not find one in here.”

Gabriel went quiet, his mind thinking his way around the problem.

“What about the phone I gave you when I was last here?”

“It no longer works, the battery is empty and you did not leave a charger — although…” He glanced across the room at a small writing desk positioned beneath the peacock window. He rose and moved toward it, weaving between the medical staff and the stacks of equipment they were setting up. Gabriel watched until his view was blocked by a man in a contamination suit. “You okay?” Dr. Kaplan asked in a bedside voice that instantly made Gabriel feel nervous.

“Just peachy,” he replied, catching a glimpse of Athanasius over the doctor’s shoulder as he opened the desk and retrieved something from inside.

“We’re nearly ready to start the first bank of tests.” Kaplan stepped across and blocked his view again. “Which means we’re going to have to take a little blood, I’m afraid. Normally when someone has been through what you have, I would be very reluctant to take more than a few milliliters at a time to give the white cells time to recover. But the more we take now, the more parallel tests we can run and the quicker we can process the results, so I’m inclined to be slightly more aggressive — if you are willing.”

Gabriel took a deep breath. “Help yourself,” he replied. “I’m not going anywhere, just try not to kill me.”

Kaplan smiled and nodded at a medic who stepped forward and fitted a syringe to the cannula already sticking out of Gabriel’s arm. He twisted the valve and watched dark, wine-colored fluid fill the first of several blood-collection tubes. “This might make you feel a little drowsy,” Kaplan added, “so feel free to close your eyes and rest if you want.”

Gabriel did as he was told and tried to relax.

“What about this, would this work?”

He opened his eyes and saw Athanasius standing over him holding a laptop in his hand with a charger dangling from it. “Maybe. Can you send e-mail from it?”

“No. But I thought maybe this charger could be adapted to work with the phone.” He placed the laptop on the bed, the charger coiled on top of it in a tangle. Gabriel unplugged the lead and examined the jack. It was entirely different from the socket on the bottom of the phone he had left. Next, he opened the laptop. It was a relatively new model and started up quickly, the desktop filling with hardly any icons. He searched the main directory for WiFi hardware and software or anything that could send a message or an e-mail.

Nothing.

Athanasius was right.

He glanced at the battery status and saw it was full, so at least the charger was working. But even if he managed somehow to customize the connectors to fit, the ampage would be too strong and would most likely fry the phone. Then something struck him. He spun the computer around and smiled when he spotted the USB port. “We can use the laptop to charge the phone,” he said, pointing at the square socket. “We can plug in the laptop and then hardwire the phone to the computer through one of these ports. It will act as a transformer and send a weaker trickle charge to the phone’s battery.”

“Can you do it?”

“Yes.” Gabriel leaned back against the pillow. “But I’ll need some tools and both my hands.” He could feel what little energy he had leaking out of him with every drop of blood. “I’ll need some raw wire, something like needle-nosed pliers—” He closed his eyes and instantly regretted it as the room started to spin. “Hey,” he said, glancing over at the medic by the bed who was still diligently taking his blood. “I think you should—”

Heat rose up in him like steam in a geyser, so sudden that it overwhelmed him before he could even finish his sentence. His body started to shake and he felt urgent hands clamp down on him and pin him to the bed.

“Sweet Jesus,” he thought as his eyes rolled back in his head and darkness washed over him. “Not again.”

65

Inspector Arkadian was standing in a parking lot just outside the city limits, supervising the disembarkation of a busload of children when he became aware of eyes upon him. He looked down at a terrified and tearful-looking girl of about eight. He crouched down, bringing his head level with hers, fully aware of how frightening he must seem after all she had already been through, towering over her in the contamination suit that had become his second skin since the outbreak.

“What’s your name?” he asked, brushing her wavy brown hair away from her face with a gloved hand.

“Hevva.”

“Well, Hevva, there’s chocolate and cola inside.” He pointed to the backpackers’ hostel that had been commandeered as a temporary orphanage.

“Are we going to be taken into the mountain to die, like Mummy?” she asked, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

He felt something break inside him. “No. You’ll be safe here — I promise.”

She stared at him for a moment with the clear and searching expression only a child can manage, then slowly turned and rejoined the others.

The quarantine had been swift and had been put in place the moment the first infection occurred outside the Old City walls — a local teacher who had already infected the rest of the teachers in her school and many of the parents by the time her symptoms manifested. Arkadian’s blood had run cold when he first heard this news. Madalina, his wife, worked at a school, not the one that had been infected, but it was still a chilling reminder of how vulnerable everyone was in the face of this thing. Madalina was now in semiquarantine in St. Mark’s church near their house. All public workers who’d had extended contact with other people had been moved to large civic buildings for observation and she had been one of them. But these internal precautions were only part of the overall plan.

The last thing the national and international community wanted was a new killer disease to escape into the wider world. Ruin’s natural isolation, surrounded by the high, unpopulated foothills of the Taurus mountains, made it uniquely suited to be placed in its own self-contained quarantine. The rapid evacuation of the Old Town after the first outbreak had been effective enough to hold back the spread of the disease for the first month, and so the policy was now extended to the city as a whole. There was only one road leading into Ruin and it was now blocked with no access in or out save for the daily food and medical supplies delivered by truck to the outer barrier, and only collected and transported into the city once the trucks had driven away again.

Inside the city there were further divisions. Ruin was naturally split into quarters by four great, straight boulevards that radiated out from the Citadel at the center. Each quarter was now a self-contained borough, with the boulevards between them acting as a no-man’s-land no one was allowed to cross. There had been near riots as people tried to flee one part of the city and relocate in another following a rumor in the first few days of the quarantine that all new cases of the blight were in the Lost Quarter and that the neighboring three boroughs were disease free. The unsteady peace that had eventually been reestablished was now maintained by constant armed patrols. The only movement of any kind had been the transportation of the infected down the empty boulevards toward the Old Town and the Citadel, and the evacuation of children in the other direction.

Arkadian stepped into the hostel and was hit by the sound of activity and children’s voices. There were about a hundred kids here, some of them orphans of the disease, but many of them not. Most parents, once news spread that the young were immune from the disease, had elected to send their children out of the city, preferring that they be away from the newly formed ghettoes where fear and violence bubbled beneath the quiet surface of a city held together by little more than tension and the hope that the work of the doctors inside the Citadel would soon bear fruit.

He saw the girl with the wavy brown hair over by a table. She was clasping a locket around her neck tightly in her hand but now held a bottle in the other with a straw sticking out of it. Behind her a movement caught his attention and he looked up into the grim face of Bulut Gül staring out from behind the visor of his contamination suit, his face set in the grim way he had seen before when he had bad news to impart.

“Did you get the message?” Bulut said, his voice muffled and sounding like it was coming from a long way away.

“What message?”

“You need to get over to St. Mark’s quickly. It’s your wife. It’s Madalina.”

66

Cherokee hadn’t changed much in the nearly twenty years since Shepherd had last driven through it: rows of tacky souvenir shops still sold rugs, stone axes, arrowheads, feather and bead headdresses that owed more to Hollywood than to history. The one big change was the number of motels and fast-food joints that had sprung up along the only road through the middle of town. They spoke of prosperity but of a particular and transient form. The casino had not been open long the last time he was here but its influence had clearly spread wide in the intervening years. The whole town had a soulless quality, of the kind only gambling money could buy. It also seemed deserted; every hotel and motel had vacancy signs outside and the huge parking lot surrounding the glass tower of the main Harrah Casino contained lots of virgin snow and hardly any cars. The homing instinct that was taking hold of the world was not being kind to Cherokee. Clearly there were not many who called this place “home.”

Shepherd parked outside the Tribal Grounds Coffee Shop, drawn by a sign in the window inviting him to COME IN AND ENJOY OUR WORLD-FAMOUS ELK LATTE AND FREE WIFI. He kept the engine running and the heater on, opened up the laptop and hooked on to the Internet. A new window opened, asking for his security clearance codes. He punched them in and the saved search reappeared on the desktop. The processor crunched. The windshield wipers swiped back and forth and a ping rang out as the new search results loaded.

There were seven of them now.

He opened the first and scrolled straight to the PDF file attached to the bottom of the document. He clicked on it, holding his breath as he waited for it to open. A depressing parade of images appeared on the screen, similar to the ones he’d seen before, charting a blighted life then an early death. But it wasn’t her.

He closed the file and moved on, keeping the momentum going before his nerve failed him. The next result opened, a solid block of text cascading down the screen. He found the attached file at the bottom and clicked it open, bracing himself for the photographs.

They were different from the first photos but none the less tragic. A well-scrubbed, bright-eyed woman smiling from a picture that had been taken at a dressy function, the flashbulb capturing a moment of pure happiness and hope. The picture below showed the same face, the eyes now closed and bruised, her clear skin lacerated by the windshield she had passed through after her car had left the road and hit a streetlamp. A brief note beneath the photo read:

The time of her death, the minimal blood alcohol concentration and lack of suspects told the whole story. She was probably just working late, fired by youthful ambition and a desire to one day make partner, and fell asleep at the wheel on her way home, never to wake again.

He closed the window and continued to work his way down the strange roll call of the dead, experiencing the seesawing of emotion between tragedy and relief. He reached the last result and clicked it open. And there she was.

He felt as if someone had punched him in the gut. He couldn’t breathe, his vision swam as eight years of hope evaporated in an instant and tears welled in his eyes. She looked exactly the same as he remembered, more beautiful even, her huge dark eyes staring out from a passport photograph. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and took a shuddering breath. “Oh Jesus.”

The blood drained from his face, and his breathing started to race. He forced himself to calm down, breathe more deeply, more slowly. His eyes darted over the file, trying to take in all the details at once. It was too much. Words and figures tumbled through his mind, disjointed fragments, missing pieces of someone he hadn’t seen in eight years. His brain reengaged and his focus returned. The top document was a visa application. She had applied for an extension to her F-1 student visa around the time she had disappeared. It had been denied. Had this been the reason she had gone, something as mundane as this? It can’t have been, they were going to get married; she wouldn’t have needed a visa if she was married to a U.S. citizen. It had to be something else.

His eyes shifted over the facsimile of her application form. There were details here he had never known. Her date of birth — she was two years older than he had guessed; her middle name — Ana; her place of birth — Ruin, in southern Turkey.

Ruin again.

His eyes flicked back to the photograph, her sharp-cheeked, almond-eyed face framed by long dark silky hair with a kink in it like ripples over dark water. He could see by the side of the file that there was another photograph farther down, just a scroll and a mouse click away.

He thought of all the other final images he’d seen, all tragic in their own way but nothing compared to what this would be. There would be an autopsy report too most likely, depending on how she had died. He wasn’t sure he could face either. But he had to. He had to know.

He clicked on the scroll button to bring up the final photograph.

Shepherd had been so prepared and braced for something else that it took him a few moments to register what he was looking at. It was a picture of Melisa smiling, her personality fully evident here in a way it had not been within the stiff pose of the passport photograph. It was attached to a scanned copy of a medical registration document showing that Melisa Ana Erroll had qualified as a midwife and was licensed to practice for an international aid organization called ORTUS. The document was simply to register the fact in the United States and qualify her for the company insurance.

He clicked on the scroll bar again but there were no more pictures. He switched back to the file and flicked through to the last page where the autopsy report or death certificate would have been. Nothing — just the insurance paperwork that corresponded to the photograph.

He laughed and cried at the same time, a sob of pure relief as he realized what had happened. The MPD search must have finished trawling through the death registers and moved on to the live files linked to the database. And then it had found her.

His Melisa.

Alive.

67

Gabriel woke slowly, as though rising up through thick, warm liquid.

He became aware of the sounds of the room, the blip of the monitors, the chink of glass on glass, the shuffle of booted feet across the stone floor. He lay still for a while, feeling as if he were gradually materializing in the room, atom by atom. He opened his eyes and saw a bluish-green light washing over the arched ceiling of the cave. He turned his head and saw the peacock window, the low evening sun lighting it up from behind.

“Ah, welcome back.” Athanasius moved across his field of vision, blocking the light from the window. Gabriel tried to sit up but found that he could not. “I’m afraid the doctor thought it best to restrain you again, for your own protection. That’s the bad news. The good news is—” He carefully held up the smart phone Gabriel had left him. There were two wires sticking out of the bottom, stripped from the end of a USB cable that wound down to the laptop that was resting on a table by Gabriel’s bed. Athanasius touched the screen of the phone and it lit up.

Gabriel smiled. “You did that?”

“I did.” Another man stepped into view from the end of the bed. He was clean shaven beneath his surgical mask, and wore the dark surplice of a priest.

“This is Father Thomas,” Athanasius explained, “chief architect of all the modern improvements within the mountain and someone who knows more about electronics than I could ever hope to.”

“It was quite simple really,” Thomas said, taking the phone from Athanasius. “Just a question of reverse-engineering the phone and working out which of the contacts in the docking slot connected to the battery. It’s been on charge for almost an hour now.”

“How long have I been out?”

“About three hours,” Athanasius replied. “Dr. Kaplan said it was a natural reaction after what your body’s been through. They got enough blood though, so they’ve been running tests all the while you’ve been asleep.”

“Great. Do you want to loosen my bindings so I can send a message?”

Athanasius and Father Thomas exchanged a look. “I’m afraid Dr. Kaplan advised that you remain restrained, just for the time being. You are obviously still at risk from fits, which might be a danger both to you and others. If you tell me, or rather, Father Thomas, what to do then we can send the message for you.”

Gabriel closed his eyes and felt tears of frustration pricking the backs of them. He hated feeling like this, so powerless and weak.

“Find the menu,” he said, “then scroll through the call log until you find one from an Inspector Arkadian.”

“Got it,” Thomas said.

“Okay, create a new message and then put—” He paused as he considered what to say. So much time had passed since he’d last seen Arkadian at the base of the Citadel, so much had happened it was hard to know where to start.

“Just put ‘Surprise! I’m not dead. I need the photos I sent you of the Starmap. Hope to see you very soon. Gabriel.’” Thomas typed it then read it back. “You have a signal?”

“Yes.”

“Then press send and let’s hope to God he’s got his phone with him.”

68

The phone buzzed in Arkadian’s pocket but he barely noticed it. He was walking fast, the effort of it making him hot inside his contamination suit. St. Mark’s was up ahead, the quarantine signs fixed on the outside of the windows, the suited armed guards outside. The churches were being used as general clearinghouses for the infected in all four quarters. Any new cases were brought here to be transported into the Old Town and ultimately the Citadel but they were mainly being used as isolation areas for the observation of high-risk individuals, people whose jobs had brought them into contact with others — which was why Madalina had been brought here.

He pointed to his badge as he reached the main door and the guard stepped aside. He had prayed on the way over that his sudden summons would prove to be nothing, just a scare or a misunderstanding. But now that he was here he knew it was as bad as he had feared. He could hear the noise already coming from inside the building: the sound of suffering, the howl of the lamentation.

He pulled on the heavy door and the noise spilled out onto the street like a physical thing. It was inhuman, terrifying, and all the more so because he knew his wife was in here somewhere. He looked for her in the crowd of frightened faces that turned his way as he entered but she was not among them. There was a separate area to one side of the altar, a private chapel with a lock on its door. This was where the noise was coming from. He moved through the parting crowd and through the door — and there she was.

She looked like she was sleeping but he knew she would have been sedated. Her skin shone with fever and her eyes moved behind lids that were already showing the first blisters. And she was tied fast to the bed. He could see her hands moving rhythmically, despite her drugged state, her fingernails scratching at the one piece of flesh they could reach.

A doctor turned to him, his eyes dropping to the ID badge affixed to the front of his suit. He stepped back from the bed, realizing who he was, and Arkadian took his place by his wife’s bed. He laid his hand on hers but the mechanical scratching carried on.

“We’re just preparing them for transfer to the Citadel,” the doctor said.

“I can look after her,” he said, “I can take her home.” He had spoken to her only a few hours ago. This couldn’t be happening.

“All new cases have to move to the Citadel,” the doctor said, “you know that.”

Arkadian had had so many of these conversations with husbands, wives, sons and daughters that it was odd being on the other end of one. It all felt wrong. He had always felt great sympathy for the people he’d had to comfort, but now that he had become one of them he realized he hadn’t understood at all how they’d felt. All words about how they would be better cared for in the mountain meant nothing when you were saying good-bye. And that’s what this was. No one had come out of the mountain yet — people only ever went in. And now his wife was about to become one of them.

The next half hour unfolded in a nightmarish blur. First they moved her to one of the ambulances parked outside the church and he sat by her side, holding her hand and talking softly to her as they bumped along the cobbled, serpentine streets of the Old Town and up to the embankment where the ascension platform waited. Usually the relatives had to say their good-byes at the Old Town wall, but a combination of his rank and his calm demeanor convinced the orderlies to let him travel with her right to the foot of the Citadel, where he helped them move her stretchered bed out onto the platform and fix it in place next to the others ready to be hoisted into the mountain. But then his nerve gave out. In the end it took three men to pull him off the platform and they held him fast until the platform had risen up too far for him to reach it.

He sat on the floor and wept as he watched it rise higher, carrying his love away from him while in his pocket the phone continued to buzz. It occurred to him that the messages he had ignored all morning because of the difficulty of extracting the phone from the suit might contain one from her. He slid his finger under the sealed flap in the seam of the suit and unzipped the side opening. His phone was warm from its long confinement and he felt like someone had ripped his heart out when he read the first message.

His wife had slipped into a fever alone while he’d been on the other side of the city. He blinked the tears away to keep his vision from swimming and looked at the other messages. There were no more from her. The infection must have taken hold quickly, as it did with some people. The rest of the messages were from colleagues who had heard the news before he had and were trying to get hold of him. Then he saw the last one, a message from a ghost.

When he had said good-bye to Gabriel he had firmly believed he would see him again. But as the days and then weeks passed by, and the disease continued to spread into the wider city, and the steady flow of the infected continued into the mountain with no sign of anyone coming out, he had finally let go of that hope. He rechecked the message. Whoever had sent it was asking for the picture Gabriel had sent from the desert. Who else would know about that? It had to be him.

Arkadian fumbled with the phone, his hands shaking as he went through his old messages, looking for the picture file from over a month ago. Gabriel was alive, and so was Arkadian’s hope. Because if one person could survive then others could. It meant the infection could be beaten and he might just see his Madalina again.

69

Shepherd felt the rise in the road out of Cherokee, heading north toward the Tennessee border. He was riding high on his discovery that Melisa was alive and buzzing on the coffee he had ordered from the Tribal Grounds Coffee Shop in grateful thanks for the WiFi that had brought him the news. Before leaving he had refined the search, inputting some of the new data and set it searching for recent passport information, visa applications, anything that might point him in the direction of where she was now. He had set it running and driven away, the mission to find Professor Douglas almost an afterthought, something to get out of the way so he could carry on with the real business of following the red threads of his lost love.

The weather had eased slightly, though powdery snow continued to fall from the low cloud that clung to the mountains rising ahead of him. There was maybe an hour of daylight left, possibly less. He knew he should have started this search earlier, but he didn’t regret the time he had taken to check the MPD results. Everything was different now, the rock he had been pushing uphill for the last eight years had finally tipped over the summit and started to roll down the other side. He was ready for anything and his eyes in the rearview mirror glowed and glittered back at him as though he’d just woken from a long, long sleep.

The road was deserted and the thin dusting of snow on the blacktop had few tire marks in it. Shepherd kept his foot steady on the gas pedal, his eyes scanning the way ahead, trying to match what he was seeing with the faded memory of twenty years ago. Franklin had been right: the snow did make everything look different, but he still had a few solid things to go on.

First, there was only one main road that headed north out of Cherokee toward the Tennessee border — Tsali Boulevard, named after a Cherokee prophet. Second, he remembered the road had run alongside a river for several miles before meandering up into the hills, and he could see the white frozen ribbon of the Oconaluftee River out of his passenger window. Finally, he knew Douglas’s cabin had been high up on the side of a ridge, with elevated views all around that had enabled them to see over all the other ridges and peaks, giving them the whole sky to look at. He had studied the topographical maps and located a section of the highway, close to the Tennessee border, that rose to nearly five thousand feet. It was right in the mountains, miles from the nearest town, and he also remembered how dark it had been at the cabin, well away from any sources of light pollution, making it perfect for stargazing. He felt sure, or as sure as he could be, that Douglas’s cabin was somewhere here in this part of the mountains. All he had to do now was find it.

He’d been driving for about ten miles when the road began to rise more steeply. His eyes flicked to the sat nav display in the central stack of the dashboard. He’d found an option in the menu that displayed the car’s height above sea level and he watched it creep steadily up, ten feet at a time, past three thousand feet and still rising. After another mile the river thinned out to little more than a mountain stream, fringed with ice, a steady babble of black water running through the middle on its way down to the main river. There was a break in the trees up ahead and he slowed as he approached it.

A forest track snaked up and away from the main road, the mud rutted and frozen and clogged with snow. A similar track had led up to Professor Douglas’s cabin. It had been rough, like this one, but this was not it. A quick glance at the sat nav confirmed that they were not high enough.

He carried on climbing, one eye on the altimeter as it continued its steady rise, checking each break in the trees and every track that wound its way up the side of the valley. He was edging close to the four thousand feet mark now and he noticed the temperature gauge on the dashboard was dropping. It was a few points below zero outside and the ground was starting to fall away sharply to his right. He eased his foot off the gas and tried to keep the car in the thin tracks of the few other vehicles that had come this way before him.

He rounded a corner and saw something tucked into a rest stop ahead — a car, the first one he’d seen since branching away from the main river and starting his climb. It was a big old station wagon and he slowed almost to a stop as he drew close to it, but there was no sign of the driver. There was a dusting of snow on it, including the hood, suggesting the engine was cold and it had been there a while. He noticed a baby seat in the back, probably just someone with car trouble who must have called a friend to come pick them up. He put his foot on the gas as gently as he could but the wheels still spun a little before they got a grip on the frozen surface.

The road continued to curve upward and the car disappeared behind him, swallowed by the tree line. After a couple of hundred yards the altimeter stopped climbing, hovering steady around the 4,600 feet mark as the road started to level off. He had to be close. He glanced up at the strip of sky visible between the trees. It was darkening fast as the day drew to a close. The temperature was now minus five and still falling. If he didn’t find the track soon he might be forced to head back and try again at first light, provided the weather didn’t worsen in the night and shut down the mountain roads altogether.

The curve of the road became sharper as it hairpinned back on itself, following the contours of the valley. Trees loomed overhead, laden with heavy snow and throwing deep shadows onto the road, making it hard to see very far ahead. Shepherd flicked the headlamps on high beam, which picked out the falling snow and the shallow shadow of another break in the tree line ahead. He drew closer, touching the brakes and feeling the slippery road through the steering wheel. His heart pounded and his hands gripped tightly as he willed it to be the turn he was looking for. He drew level and slumped in his seat as he saw that it was barely a track at all. It ended just a few feet back from the road in a wall of tangled branches.

He checked the altimeter again — still steady at 4,600—then turned his attention to the road again. With the curve it was impossible to see too far ahead. He couldn’t see any more breaks in the trees, but he could see the road starting to fall away. The altimeter dropped by ten feet, confirming that he was beginning to descend. Then something struck him.

He took his foot off the pedal and glanced in the rearview mirror at the track he had just passed. The road here was too narrow and treacherous to try to turn the car around so he braked as carefully as he could to slow the car to a stop. He put on the hand brake and the hazard warning lights then opened the door and stepped out into the cold, leaving the engine running.

The road was more slippery than he had thought, and he skated across it, holding his arms out for balance, heading back to the break in the trees. The wall of branches seemed bigger up close with dense twigs and dry, dead leaves bulking it out, making it seem impenetrable. But whereas the ground and the trees surrounding it were weighed down with snow, the branches had hardly any on them at all and there were drag marks in the snow on either side, showing where they had been pulled across the track. There were footprints too, softened a little by the recent snowfall, but footprints nonetheless — just one person by the look of things, though he couldn’t be sure. They clumped together in groups around the branches then split off and headed up the track, ending at a spot where deep tire marks chewed up the snow and ice and drew two lines straight up toward the summit of the mountain. And there was something else. Something that carried on the breeze sifting down through the rapidly darkening woods triggering a memory of the last time he had been here. It was wood smoke, coming no doubt from the potbellied stove that warmed the cabin and brewed the coffee.

Shepherd smiled. “Hello, Professor,” he murmured under his breath. “Remember me?”

70

Dawn rose fast in the desert, rapidly warming the land and the buildings of the compound.

The soldiers were the first to appear, rising with the sun, their bodies conditioned to early starts by military life. They stretched and scratched as they emerged from the main building, their eyes screwed almost shut against the brightening sky, then abruptly stopped as they saw the swathed figures hunkered down by the water, filling their canteens.

Williamson instinctively held his hand up to halt his men and a crackle of adrenaline passed through each of them as they saw what had prompted it. They were nomadic goat herders, their faces whitened by desert dust and still partly wrapped in keffiyeh. Williamson glanced over to the guard tower where their weapons were stashed and noticed the gate next to it, rolled all the way back, a team of goats drinking from one of the streams in the desert beyond it.

“Who the hell are these guys?” he muttered.

“They arrived about an hour ago.” Liv and Tariq appeared behind him, dragging a crate out of the transport hangar. “They are welcome here,” Liv said, “just as you are.”

“How do we know they can be trusted?”

“I don’t, not fully, any more than I knew you could be trusted. What I do know is they are here because they felt the same pull as you, which means others will undoubtedly be coming here too. We can either choose to meet them with closed gates, suspicion and loaded guns, or welcome them, as we did you.”

Williamson continued to stare at the newcomers. “The way I remember it, the gate was closed when we arrived. Seems pretty sensible to me.”

Liv shot Tariq a look. “That was not my idea. But letting you in was.”

Williamson tipped his head. “Much obliged.”

Others had started to drift out of the compound buildings, roused by the heat and raised voices. Liv had intended to talk to everyone individually, quietly sowing the seeds of her plan rather than risking a public debate that she might well end up losing. Now she had no choice.

“Tell me, what would you have done if we hadn’t let you in? What if we had kept the gate shut, turned the big guns in the guard tower on you and told you to leave, would you have just turned around and gone away, after traveling so far to find this place?” Williamson said nothing. “Or would you have camped out in the desert, sticking close to one of the rivers so you had plenty of water, maybe far enough to be out of range of the cannons but still close enough to watch us and assess our strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps you would have decided eventually that you could take us. You might even have managed it, stormed this fortress in the middle of the night and taken control. Then what? What would you have done with us — killed us, kept us prisoner, banished us to the desert? And what about all the other people who are on their way here now, answering the same call you did, the same one they did?” She pointed to the goat herders who had stopped drinking and were now listening too. “Would you try and keep them out, keep the gate locked and defend this scrap of desert with your last bullet, or until a stronger force arrived and took it from you so the whole thing could start all over again? Would you do that — for a bunch of buildings and a pool of water?”

Williamson continued to stare at her, though she sensed the challenge in his eyes had slipped a little. She shook her head. “This has been the pattern throughout human history: men possessing things, others seeking to take those things away by force. And what good has any of it done? Few things can truly be possessed.” She pointed to one of the holding pits where the water had broken the banks and flowed freely through the links of the perimeter fence. “And some things cannot be contained. And whatever this place is, whatever it represents to the people drawn here, it is not something to be owned or fought over. It is simply something to be shared. A place where people can come together and not be divided or driven apart. A place of safety. A kind of home.”

She moved over to the crate and levered the lid off with her foot to reveal its contents. Williamson and his men gathered around. The nomads by the waterline moved closer too. It was full of tools: crowbars, wire cutters, shovels still coated in dust from the graves they had recently dug. “We should take down the fences,” Liv said. “They have no place here.”

Silence surged back in on the heels of her words but nobody moved. Liv surveyed the line of faces. They were looking at the tools, the fence, each other — but not at her. She was done talking and didn’t know what else she could say.

“Dust cloud!”

The shout snagged everyone’s attention. All heads turned to the horizon. A new column of dust was rising in the east, backlit by the sun now clawing its way up into the white sky. The timing could not have been worse. Liv felt sure that no one would want to start dismantling the perimeter fence with more strangers on the way. They would wait and see who it was first, and then the moment would be lost and she would have to try and persuade them all over again.

A movement to her right caught her eye. Williamson had stepped forward and reached down to pick up the lid of the crate. He fitted it back on top, sealing the tools inside in a wordless, symbolic full stop on the whole argument. Then he did a curious thing; he turned toward the nomads and waved them over. They hesitated at first then slowly responded, walking over to join the main group.

Corporal Williamson smiled a greeting then turned to his fellow soldiers. “Why don’t y’all go find what other tools they got in the transport bay, maybe see if they got a winch back there, or some kind of a towline we can hook up to the truck.” He turned to the nomads, smiled again and ambled to one end of the crate. “Williamson.” He patted his chest with the flat of his hand then pointed back at the man. “What’s your name? Asmuk?”

“Yasin,” the man replied.

Williamson squatted down and grabbed the side handle of the crate. “Wanna help me with this, Yasin?”

Tariq translated the request and the goat herder’s face exploded into a smile. He squatted down, grabbed the other handle and heaved the crate up so enthusiastically Williamson was nearly knocked over. “Whoah there, tiger,” he said, lifting his end and steadying himself until they were carrying the burden equally. “Why don’t we start at the gate,” he said, leading the way. “See if we can’t get that sucker down before the new guys arrive.”

71

The unaccustomed sound of plastic on plastic buzzed through the abbot’s private chambers as the phone shivered and shimmied across the keyboard of the open laptop, drawing all eyes to it. Thomas walked across from the huge fireplace, picked it up and opened the message.

“Well?” Athanasius appeared too, crowding over the phone to try and see what message it had brought. Gabriel lay on the bed, still strapped down. Thomas angled the phone so they could both see the screen as a photograph of the dark stone appeared on it. Another downloaded, this time showing the reverse side.

“The Starmap,” Athanasius whispered, a smile curling the edges of his mouth. The smile faltered. “It’s too small,” he said, moving his head back and forth to try and focus on it.

“Give me a second,” Thomas said, “I thought this might be a problem.”

He opened an application on the laptop then selected a different stripped wire from the doctored USB cable and touched it to a contact point at the base of the phone. After a few seconds the mouse arrow on the laptop screen turned into a spinning wheel and a command box opened asking if he wanted to IMPORT ALL IMAGES?

“Could you hit enter please,” Thomas said, looking up at Athanasius. “My hands are somewhat occupied.”

Athanasius did as he was asked and a progress bar tracked the slow transfer of data from the phone to the laptop. No one breathed or moved, least of all Thomas, who was literally holding it all together. The progress bar vanished and two new icons appeared on the desktop. Thomas let go of the phone, clicked them open and two images of the Starmap appeared on the screen. He enlarged them and arranged them so both were visible next to each other.

“That’s Malan,” Athanasius said, pointing at the image with the block of text forming the inverted shape of the Tau. He translated as he read:

“That’s the second prophecy, the one that led us out into the desert — where the prophecy was fulfilled. Only the last line doesn’t make sense in the light of what actually happened.”

“What did happen?” Athanasius asked, leaning forward and studying the screen.

A jumble of images flashed through Gabriel’s mind. Liv falling to the ground, the flame pouring from the drill tower and turning to steam as the oil turned to water. “We did return the Sacrament within the full phase of the moon. And the fire was quenched. So I can’t understand why the blight still prospers. We need to know what else it says on the stone.”

Athanasius studied the second image, tracing the constellations of Draco, Taurus and the Plow.

“There’s more than one language here,” he said, “and they’re not Malan. This little block of text next to Taurus is some kind of protocuneiform. Perhaps it relates directly to this extra star drawn in the constellation of Taurus, just there, between the bull’s horns. It says something like ‘The Sacrament reaches home, a new star is created and a new king or ruler reigns or rules over the end of days.’”

He scanned the rest of the symbols and ran his hand over his head. “There are pictograms or possibly ideograms here that could be from different sources. They represent concepts and ideas rather than individual words and must be interpreted rather than read. But to understand them properly one would need to know the context and time in which they were written. There is a bird here for example that could be an eagle. In Egyptian hieroglyphs the eagle represents the letter A, but in Aztec it means the sun. So you see how easy it would be to misinterpret this message.”

“We can safely assume the tablet originated in ancient Mesopotamia,” Gabriel suggested. “That’s where we found Eden and that’s where all the other references to the Sacrament point.”

“Indeed, but without knowing exactly what era and in what region it was written I would only be guessing at its meaning. However, there is one person in the Citadel who has spent his life studying pictograms like these. I feel sure he would not only be able to tell us exactly where and when this was made just by looking at it, he would also be able to translate it.” He glanced at Father Thomas and they exchanged a troubled look. “Unfortunately, he is not a man who is likely to want to help us. He’s the chief librarian — Father Malachi.”

72

Dragging the branches away from the track proved much harder than Shepherd had anticipated. The drop in temperature had frozen them to the ground and he had to tug hard to get them free before he could haul them away. On top of this his shoes were made for city streets, not trudging through thick snow, and they gave him little grip or insulation as he slipped and stumbled through the snow, until he was sweating despite the cold.

It took him nearly twenty minutes to create a gap in the tangle of branches wide enough for the Durango to pass through, stopping only once when he heard a knocking sound coming from somewhere above, like someone hammering nails into wood. After a pause it came again, three distant bangs that echoed in the woods before the silence flooded back. By the time he had finished, night had bled into the forest and it had mercifully stopped snowing. The moon had risen too, shining bright behind thinning clouds and casting a silver light over the forest. Shepherd could no longer feel his feet or the ends of his fingers and could almost hear the tinkle of ice forming in the air he breathed out then falling to the ground.

He made it back to the car and whacked the heater on full, stamping his feet and holding his hands in front of the vent, not caring about the pain as his veins opened up and the blood flowed through his flesh again. The readout on the dash said the temperature was now minus eight and he could well believe it. He had intended to defrost himself a little then hike up to the cabin, but the job of clearing the branches had proved how ill-equipped he was to spend much time out in the cold. He also remembered that Douglas’s cabin had been a fair trek up the track, much too far to attempt in his city shoes. He could leave it until tomorrow, maybe get some better boots from somewhere in Cherokee, but who knew what the weather was going to do in the night and whether he’d even be able to get here again. It would also mean going out and dragging the branches back into position so no one would know he had been there. There was a third option, but the ghost of Franklin rose up in his head to repeat the last words he’d said to him:

Just check it out—he’d said—don’t make a move on your own.

But he was here now and had seen the footprints in the snow. What was the harm in a student looking up his old professor?

He waited until he had some feeling back in his feet then slipped the car in gear and slowly reversed back up the road. The tires crunched through a crust of ice as he eased the car off the road and onto the track. Dry branches reached out and raked the side of the vehicle like witches’ fingers as he squeezed through the gap that wasn’t quite as wide as he’d hoped.

Whoever was up in the cabin would be able to hear his engine rumbling its way up the track but there was little he could do about it. To compromise, he cut the lights, plunging himself into a bluish darkness that was still bright enough to drive by and would preserve his night vision, just in case he needed it when he got there.

The tires found a better grip on the broken and frozen ground than they had on the flat, icy road and he bounced and lurched his way up the track and between the trees. After a while he could see a light, high above him, warm and orange like a lantern winking through gaps in the thick woods. As he got higher the trees started to thin out a little until he could see the outline of the log cabin, lights on inside and smoke leaking from the chimney and drifting away in the cold, clear night. He let the car crunch to a stop just short of the end of the track where there was still a little tree cover, then killed the engine. He slipped out of the driver’s seat and closed the door quietly, keeping the car between him and the cabin while he listened to the night and studied the cabin.

It had changed a lot since he’d last been here. There was a woodshed that hadn’t been there before and the basic hunter’s hide on the rocky ledge above the cabin had been extensively modified so it now looked like a second home. A wide pathway had been cut through the trees leading up to it and there was now a proper roof on top with solar panels fixed on either side of a large open hatch, suggesting it was still being used as an observatory. The rope they’d used to scramble up the side of the rock had now been replaced by a solid set of wooden stairs.

He scanned the periphery of trees, trying to work out the best way to approach the cabin. He reached into his jacket. This was the third time he’d held a gun in his hand in less than twenty-four hours. He stepped around the back of the car, his pulse pounding in his ears and sweat prickling beneath his shirt despite the cold. He made his way carefully through the trees, working his way around to the side of the cabin, trying not to make any sound as he headed for the woodshed. It would provide cover between him and the cabin when he stepped out of the trees. There was no reason to believe Douglas would be hostile, but he had blown up several hundred million dollars’ worth of government facility earlier that day, so there was always a chance.

He kept his eyes on the cabin and the observatory, looking and listening for any movement inside. The storm shutters were open on the cabin and the curtains pulled back so he caught glimpses inside, the warm orange glow making him feel even colder. His feet were numb inside the wet thin leather of his shoes. As he picked his way through the tree trunks and low branches, the crunch of snow far too loud in the still of the night, a parked car came into view behind the woodshed, a newer model of the same sort of jeep Douglas had driven all those years ago. Footprints in the snow spread out from it, heading to the woodshed and the cabin. More footsteps went back into the forest. They looked pretty fresh. Whoever was inside had been out here fairly recently, maybe just to get fuel for the fire, or maybe for another reason. He glanced back into the dark of the woods, wondering if he should maybe check things out in that direction first, make sure it was clear and cover his back, seeing as there was no one else out here to cover it for him.

Carrie watched him through the night sight, her eye pressed against the rubber cup to stop the green phosphorescent light leaking out and giving away her position. Even on the lowest magnification he filled her vision, his outline solid and dark against the bright glow coming from the buildings behind him. She could see his face, right in the center of the crosshairs, his eyes scanning the dark, looking straight at her from time to time but always moving on. If he chose to follow the tracks into the woods he would find them easily enough.

Her finger tightened a little on the trigger, ready to squeeze if he took so much as one step forward. A knife would be quieter but he was a trained federal agent and it wasn’t worth the risk of letting him get close enough to use his weapon.

The crosshairs remained steady on the center of his head.

Just one step.

Shepherd scanned the woods, listening through the muffled silence to the crack of ice and the sound of his own breathing. He felt sure he was being watched, but then he always did when he stared into woods at night. There was bound to be all sorts of wildlife checking him out, ready to bolt or take flight the moment he got too close. He shivered at the thought of all the potential eyes upon him. He needed to get out of the cold and into the warm before he got frostbite and his toes started falling off.

Franklin would tell him to head back to the car right now and warm up on his way back to Cherokee — come back again in the morning with some backup. But Franklin wasn’t here. Shepherd turned back toward the cabin. It looked warm in there. He took a deep breath to steady his shivers, then stepped out of the trees toward it.

The sound changed the moment he moved forward, opening out as the baffling effect of the trees was left behind, making him feel very exposed. He made it to the jeep and felt the side panel by the engine with his free hand. Stone cold. He moved around, stopping a foot short of the woodshed wall, his gun held in front of him, always pointing where he was looking. He had to make a choice now, head to the cabin and risk being spotted from the observatory, or check out the observatory first. He studied the tracks in the snow, but there were too many to give him any clues. He made a choice and headed for the porch of the cabin, figuring that walking up the wooden steps to the observatory before he’d checked the cabin would be too dangerous.

The deck creaked as he stepped onto it and made his way over to a window. He wondered, standing here now, if he should knock and give whoever was inside the chance to reveal themselves before he burst in with a gun in his hand. But silence and surprise were just about the only things he had on his side and he wasn’t about to give them up lightly.

He eased his head around the edge of the window frame and took in the room. The stove was lit and loaded with logs, the fire throwing enough shifting orange light into the room to show him that no one was there. He moved over to the door and tried the handle, it creaked, not much but loud enough in the tense silence, then opened.

The trapped warmth of the room was like stepping into a bath. Blood rushed to his face and feeling began to return painfully to his fingers and feet. He moved quickly across the room, keeping low and away from the windows. The bedroom was behind a partition at one end of the cabin, a thin wooden wall defining a space just big enough for a bed.

There was no one here.

He moved over to the back door and looked up at the observatory, the glow from the open roof hatch making it stand out against the night. He should have known Douglas would be stargazing on a clear night like this. He twisted the handle and slowly opened the door then stepped out into the frozen night again.

He moved across the snow between the cabin and the wooden steps leading up to the observatory, feeling both excited and nervous about the imminent reunion with his former mentor. He suddenly felt vaguely ridiculous and ashamed that he had his gun in his hand. Professor Douglas wouldn’t know that his old student was an FBI agent now. His best approach would surely be as a friend and colleague. He reached the foot of the steps and slid the gun back into its holster.

“Professor Douglas?” he called up, his voice a little high and much too loud in the muted silence. “It’s Joseph Shepherd. Remember me? You brought me here once when I was a grad student.” His words echoed back from the surrounding trees then faded away. He listened for a response, a movement.

Nothing.

“I’m going to come up now, okay?” He took a step, making it a heavy one so it could be heard. “I just want to talk.” He continued upward, stamping the snow from his shoes as he went, his eyes fixed on the closed door at the top of the stairway. He could hear something now, low music from inside the shack, and Shepherd smiled as he recognized it. It was from The Planets suite by Holst. The professor had played it that long-ago summer, switching tracks depending on which planet they were observing. The track playing now was the final piece: “Neptune, the Mystic”—slow and mysterious, the tinkling harp and shivering violins a perfect sound track for the frigid night.

He reached the top of the stairs and stepped onto solid stone that was slick with ice. A breeze was blowing the snow from it and singing in the steel cables that anchored the corners of the cabin to the rock. It was on odd place to build a cabin, high and exposed like this, but the rock provided the perfect, solid platform for stargazing. Even ground vibration was hugely magnified by a telescope, so with the windbreak of the cabin and the high elevation and solid base of the rock, Douglas had created the perfect backyard observatory.

Shepherd moved carefully across the stone, the music getting louder with each step and building toward the climax, the eerie voices mixing with the instruments like a spectral choir. It was loud enough to explain why the professor might not have heard him approach.

“Professor.” He rapped a knuckle on the door. “It’s Joseph Shepherd, remember me?”

The ethereal voices were his only response, chilling him along with the cold then melting away as the track ended, leaving him alone with the whisper of the wind and his pounding heart. He leaned in close to the door, listening through it, willing it to open or a familiar voice to invite him in from the other side. He jumped as the music started again, loud and urgent, the ominous stabbing strings of “Mars, the Bringer of War” suggesting that whatever the music was playing on was set to repeat.

Shepherd reached out, twisted the handle and opened the door.

A large telescope dominated the space inside. It was set on a heavy-duty tripod with electric motors hooked to a laptop on a table beside it, the screen displaying the piece of sky it was currently pointing at. A cell phone was plugged into it as well as some small speakers from which The Planets suite was booming out. He took a step inside and the door started swinging shut behind him. Then he saw the figure from the corner of his eye.

He spun around. Douglas was in the shadows, his arms stretching out, his head hanging forward. Shepherd gasped and stumbled backward, reaching for his gun as his eyes adjusted and the shadows took form. Professor Douglas didn’t move. He couldn’t. His hands were pinned to the wooden walls, blood running thick from spikes in his hands and a deep gash in his neck, mouth bound, eyes open and staring at the floor. Shepherd hit the back wall with a sound that recalled the one he had heard from the road — like someone hammering nails into wood. Then he saw the writing scrawled in blood on the wall.

73

Shepherd fumbled for his phone, gun pointing at Douglas, “Mars, the Bringer of War” still booming from the speakers. Eyes wide, his adrenaline-sharpened senses sucked in everything: the curtains of blood from the hands and throat—so much blood—the slash and spatter of the writing on the wall, the slump of Douglas’s body, the way the weight of it pulled grotesquely at the flesh where the spikes had been driven in… steam rising up from the dark pool on the stone floor.

His numbed fingers closed around the phone in his pocket and he raised it to his face, not wanting to risk dropping his sight or the gun. His eyes flicked to the screen, found Franklin’s cell phone number and dialed. He held the phone to his ear, his breathing rapid, eyes scoping out the rest of the cabin from over the top of his gun.

Nothing was disturbed, there had been no struggle. The kill must have been fast and deliberate, efficient even.

He stared at the body, almost disbelieving the violence it spoke of.

The phone connected.

“It’s Shepherd.”

“You find him?”

“He’s dead. Throat cut. Nailed to the wall.”

“Jesus. What’s your situation?”

“Scared shitless.”

“Good. You in cover?”

“Yes. I think it only just happened.”

“Why?”

“The blood. There’s steam coming off it. I saw tracks in the snow. Thought they were his. Tracks leading into the forest. There was a car too. Parked on the road.”

“Did you get the plate?”

“No. I didn’t think it was anything. Just someone broken down.”

“What about make and model?”

“It was a station wagon, nothing fancy, an old Volvo, I think. It had a baby seat in the back.”

“Color?”

“Yellow, white. Hard to tell in the light.”

“Okay, that’s good. Don’t do anything. Stay in cover, do not try and be a hero. Hunker down, sit tight and I’ll send the local cops to you. Keep your phone on so they can follow the locator, okay?”

It clicked in his ear and Franklin was gone before Shepherd could reply.

He felt alone and scared, the loud and ominous strains of “Mars” not helping at all. He was shivering from cold and adrenaline, the open hatch in the roof letting the cold of the night pour in on top of him.

He stared at the body, forcing himself to breathe more steadily and see it through the eyes of a professional assessing a crime scene.

There was something very deliberate about it all. The spikes in the hands were large, not the sort of thing you would find lying around; the killer must have brought them with him.

Shepherd tried to picture him coming here through the snow, nails and a hammer jingling in a bag, knowing he was going to do this.

He was already building a profile. Had to be a man because of the strength required. Douglas wasn’t a big guy but he was big enough. And it looked like his throat had been cut last, while he was already pinned to the wall, the arterial spray and blood flow all centered on his current position. How much strength would you need to do that — nail a struggling guy to a wall? Too much for one person. Two people then, maybe more.

Shepherd squatted low and moved closer, heading for the middle of the floor where the telescope stood. Anyone out there watching would have seen his head pass by the window as he recoiled from his initial sight of Douglas. The thin wooden walls of the shack wouldn’t stop a bullet if one came, so he kept low and out of sight.

The music was frightening and oppressive now and he glanced at the laptop. He wanted to turn it off so he could listen for exterior sounds but knew if it suddenly cut out then anyone out there would know exactly where he was. He should wait for the track to end at least, then it wouldn’t be so obvious.

He searched the laptop screen, looking for the application controlling the music. Most of it was filled with the video feed from the telescope. It was pointing toward the eastern sky, the computer-controlled motors adjusting it imperceptibly, keeping it fixed on a single bright star. Shepherd looked up and followed the line of the telescope. The constellation of Taurus was perfectly framed in the open hatch, showing that the bright star was Aldebaran, right eye of the charging bull.

Thoughts tumbled through Shepherd’s head. The telescope was pointing at exactly the same part of the sky Hubble had been probing before it was turned around and put out of action. He stared at the rectangle of night, half expecting to see something new there, growing larger and brighter as it hurtled toward earth. All he saw was a wisp of cloud and the usual stars twinkling in the black.

He looked back at the screen, Aldebaran burning bright in the center of the video feed. Below it was a small iTunes controller, the scrub bar showing that the track currently playing had almost finished. Shepherd used the knuckle of his little finger on the track pad to drag the arrow over to the play button so as not to leave fingerprints. The final stab of horns and strings bounced off the thin walls then faded away. He clicked the pause button and let out a long breath that sounded loud in the sudden silence.

He quit the application to make sure the music wouldn’t come back on and studied the screen. There was an e-mail inbox with some recent messages, the video feed from the telescope and another window filled with a sequence of changing numbers he assumed must have something to do with the telescope, though it didn’t look like any control program he’d seen before. Normally they displayed a sequence of coordinates, which changed by tiny degrees as the program tracked a designated object. This looked more like a measurement, though one that was getting smaller all the time. The phone buzzed in his hand, and he stabbed the button to silence it.

“Yes?”

“The local sheriff is on his way to you now, name of Brodie. He’s bringing everyone with a gun he can lay his hands on. They’re also going to keep their eyes open for that vehicle. You got anything else?”

“They’re looking for more than one person.”

“Okay, good, you know this how?”

“By the way he was killed. They nailed him to the wall and wrote ‘Heretic’ next to him in his own blood, so I’m guessing the religious angle just got a little more weight to it.”

“Jesus. Listen, Shepherd, I’m sorry about this. You shouldn’t be there on your own. It was… I should have—”

“It’s okay, really. There’s something else. You remember the countdown Merriweather told us about at Goddard? The one he saw on Dr. Kinderman’s computer just before the virus took Hubble out? It’s here too. It’s hooked up to a telescope pointing to the same piece of sky Hubble was exploring. Only the huge number he talked about isn’t so huge anymore. Whatever it is, whatever’s coming — I don’t think we have long to wait.”

74

The heater was on full, filling the station wagon with dry air and noise. Carrie was at the wheel, Eli sitting next to her.

He was quiet and she didn’t like the character of it. Part of her gift was that she could read the stillness in people the same way others could detect a strain in someone’s voice when they were lying. She was used to silence, had known a lot of it when she was growing up, so she could see things in it others could not.

The mission had gone as smoothly as she could have hoped. They had found the target exactly where Archangel said they would. He’d been alone, passive, almost resigned, as if he’d been expecting them. He barely showed surprise when they walked through the door of the observatory and caught him staring up to heaven, looking in vain for God. He was surprised when Eli punched him in the solar plexus to squeeze the air from his lungs though. He was more surprised when she slapped the duct tape on his mouth and Eli drove the first rail spike through his hand.

Make an example—Archangel had said—send a clear message.

Well, they’d certainly done that, though now in the shadow of Eli’s silence, she wished it could have been her who had carried out the kill. She was better at handling the consequences of death than Eli was, though he was much better at dealing it out. He was an artist when it came to that, she had seen it with the dog, with the woman and her sleeping little girl, and now back there in the cabin. It was as if all the self-doubt and awkwardness simply fell off him when he was doing what he did best, what he was born to do — God’s work. She didn’t think she could love him any more than she already did, but watching him like that, so confident and strong, had been awe inspiring, like watching God’s terrible beauty in motion. An avenging angel. An artist.

The car slipped a little on the road and she corrected the steering, easing her foot off the gas. She had been speeding up a little without realizing it, the engine racing in time with her humming heart.

A sign by the side of the road said SPEED LIMIT 25 as they approached a curve. She checked and they were barely doing fifteen. She could feel the tires sliding over the freezing road, the back threatening to drift sideways if she was too heavy on the steering or the brakes. They couldn’t afford any accidents now, not after everything had gone so perfectly; they just needed a clean exfiltration with no drama.

There could be no dogs this time. No sleeping little surprises in the back of a car. No mistakes.

75

Shepherd heard the engines first, growling low and distant through the forest as thick snow tires gnawed at the ground.

He was crouched over Douglas’s computer, using a pen to type his private e-mail address into an e-mail message. As soon as the cops arrived everything in the cabin would become part of a crime scene, something to be tagged and bagged and ultimately shipped back to Quantico for Agent Smith to crack open and explore. Anything useful would be fed back to him through the ghost file — assuming he was still part of the investigation — but he wanted to keep his eye on the countdown and had found the application file that was running it. He had also found something else potentially even more interesting, an e-mail message, sent less than an hour previously from a Hotmail account assigned to Mala210. There was nothing obvious to indicate who Mala210 might be except that Shepherd remembered 210 had been Kinderman’s network address at NASA. The message also got Shepherd’s antennae twitching:

Outside, the engine noise grew louder and the first hint of headlights flickered briefly on the wall above his head.

He finished typing, attached the countdown application to the Hotmail message then pressed send. He watched the activity wheel spin as the computer began slowly transmitting bits of data through the attached phone. The application was a decent-size file so it wasn’t going to be fast. He was sending it to an address linked to his phone so he would be able to check that it had gone through.

He moved over to the window and peered around the edge of the frame. He could see the bounce and wash of headlights angling up through the woods as vehicles made their way up the track, throwing shifting, tortured shadows through the frozen trees. He figured he had maybe a minute before they arrived.

On the screen the wheel was still spinning, the progress bar creeping toward 100 percent. He watched the last piece of the message leave the laptop and his phone shivered in his hand as it arrived. He got to work, quickly erasing the message from the sent log on the computer. It would still be in the hidden memory cache, but it would be a while before Smith found it and he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

He stashed his phone in his pocket and dug out his ID. The last thing he wanted now was for some hyped-up local cop with a heavy trigger finger taking a shot at him. He took one last look at the charnel house of the hut then opened the door and stepped out into the night with his hands raised, just as the headlights bounced to a halt behind his own parked car.

Two figures in heavy parkas emerged from the car, guns drawn and pointing right at him. “FBI,” he called out, holding his badge high above his head. My partner called this in — Agent Franklin. I’m Agent Shepherd. I got a body back here and tracks leading into the woods. Did you intercept the car?”

“We didn’t see no car,” a voice called back.

“Which way did you come?”

“From Cherokee.”

“What’s in the other direction?”

“Tennessee,” the same voice replied. “Gatlinburg’s the first big place you come to.”

“Do they know what’s happened here?”

“Not that I know of, it’s across the state line.”

Different state, not their responsibility — goddamn local cops, no wonder Franklin had no time for them. “Call it in,” Shepherd shouted, moving down the wooden stairs. “Give them the description and tell them to arrest anyone driving a white or yellow station wagon. And tell them to approach with caution. There are at least two suspects and they’re fleeing a murder scene.”

One of the cops ducked back inside the car and got on the radio. The other started walking toward him, gun still out and still pointing in his general direction.

“Walk through the fresh snow,” Shepherd said, pointing at a pristine patch between him and the cop, “that way we’ll know we’re not trampling over any evidence.” The cop complied, veering off from his intended route and trudging through the snow toward him. “And put your damn gun away.”

Shepherd looked away and through the trees to where he imagined the road continued. It was too dark to see much but as he scanned the wall of trees he caught a flash of light, distant and soft, moving along the road toward the border.

76

Carrie eased her speed down even more as the tires continued to slip. They were now crawling along at barely more than ten miles an hour, good for keeping on the road, not so great for getting away. The station wagon was old and heavy and only had two-wheel drive. This was taking too long. The man she had tracked through the trees with her nightscope must have found the body by now and called the cops or be driving back to town to tell them what he’d found.

It would be all over the news by morning, a warning to all of the consequences of sin and blasphemy. The cops would probably play down the nature of the death, keep the bloody details out of the public eye, but it wouldn’t do any good, she had taken some pictures of her own that could be uploaded on to the Internet to make sure it was seen by everyone. Archangel would be pleased with them — which meant they were one step closer to being together, one step closer to driving a car like this of their own, maybe with their own baby seat in the back. She felt both happy and sad at the thought of it. They would be married for sure, but the judgment was coming too soon for them to be able to have a child of their own.

Unless.

Maybe the work they were doing now, these blood sacrifices they were making would be enough to stop it from happening. Maybe God would stay his hand and spare the judgment because he would see there were still those like her and Eli prepared to serve him and honor His name.

“Hey, baby, you want to make the call? Archangel’s gonna be real happy with us.”

Eli remained silent.

“It’s okay, honey,” she said, reading his mood. “I know how you said th’other night, how you wished you didn’t like killing so much, but it’s the Lord’s work you’re doing here, don’t you forget that — and there ain’t never no sin in that.”

Eli took a breath and blew it out, fogging the inside of the windshield. “Dog ain’t got no immortal soul,” he said in the small guarded voice she didn’t like, “but a man do. And so does a little girl and her mom.”

She reached out and placed her hand on his cheek, risking the slippery road and feeling the jaw muscle working beneath his skin. “But if they were all good and righteous people, then their souls will be up in heaven right now. And if not, well, then you done rid the earth of some sinners and you shouldn’t be ashamed of either thing. Why, I reckon you should be proud.”

He turned to her and she risked looking away from the road for just a second. “You always know the right words to say,” he said, digging a phone from his pocket, “you always shine a light through my darkness in a way that no one else ever can.”

The screen lit up his face as he dialed the number and switched the phone to speakerphone. Carrie leaned forward and turned the heater down so she could hear better, her eyes never leaving the road. Ahead of them she could see the glow of headlights sweeping across the night, picking out the trees and getting brighter as a car came toward them. It burst around the curve, full beams blazing, going far too fast for the road conditions.

“Yes?” Cooper’s voice rose out of the phone.

“The professor is dead,” Eli said.

“Where are you now?”

“Driving,” Eli looked up into the glare of the oncoming lights.

“Anyone see you?”

“I don’t think so.”

The headlights were almost upon them now, so bright it looked like the car was in their lane. Carrie eased farther over, slowing almost to a stop as a red pickup flew past them, the snow chains on the tires throwing grit and ice over the side of their car. Carrie blinked away her blindness and saw a sign right in front of them saying WELCOME TO TENNESSEE with two arrows beneath it pointing back to Cherokee and on to Gatlinburg.

“There was someone else there but they didn’t see us,” Carrie said, picking up speed again now that she could see the way ahead. “I left him to find the body. Maybe he saw our car.”

“Will that be a problem?”

There was a left turn ahead and another sign for Clingman’s Dome Road.

“No,” she said, turning onto the road, carefully following the tire tracks they’d made earlier, fighting the car up the gentle incline and around a shallow bend.

“Did you take pictures?”

“Yeah, we got pictures.” Ahead of them, their headlights picked up the back of the black Ford Escape they’d driven all the way from Charleston.

“Good,” Cooper said. “Call me again when you’re clear. I have news. God has smiled on our mission once more.” Carrie eased the station wagon to a halt then cut the engine. “Check your e-mails. I have sent you instructions of where you should go next. I just found out where Dr. Kinderman is.”

77

Neither Athanasius nor Father Thomas had seen Father Malachi since he had opposed their plans to help the infected of Ruin. Since then Malachi had removed himself and the rest of his guild entirely behind locked doors. There were now two distinct societies within the mountain, those fighting the blight and caring for those who had it, and the black cloaks in the library.

They knew they were still there only because the supplies that were delivered weekly to the air lock were always collected, and because whenever one of the black cloaks became infected they were left outside the door, tied to a board to stop them from tearing themselves to pieces, their howls serving as an alarm to bring someone running. Athanasius found this inhuman and un-Christian and it made him furious whenever he thought of it. But now was not the time to pick that particular fight. They were here because they needed Malachi’s help.

He had agreed to talk with them at vespers and the bell rang now, echoing six times through the tunnels of the mountain, showing that the appointed hour had arrived.

“Do you think he’ll come?” Thomas whispered, studying the still darkness of the library through the window of the air lock.

“He’ll come,” Athanasius replied. “I dropped hints in my note that we had acquired a document that may have some bearing on our current plight. There’s no way he could resist taking a look at something like that. However, I’m sure he will first make us wait.”

Athanasius was right. They stood there for nearly ten minutes before a light finally appeared in the distant dark, flickering as it moved toward them.

“There’s something wrong with the lights,” Thomas whispered.

Athanasius peered at the still distant figure and realized he was right. Instead of the usual follow light, Malachi’s journey toward them was illuminated solely by a candle lamp. He held a hand in front to shield it and walked slowly to stop the flame from snuffing out. Thomas and Athanasius watched his steady progress, realizing as he drew nearer that the month of isolation inside the library had not been kind to Malachi. His pale skin, pallid and translucent from a near lifetime spent out of the sun, was flaking around his nose and mouth and his eyes were circled with red as though he had hardly slept.

“Thank you for agreeing to speak with us,” Athanasius said the moment Malachi stopped on the other side of the locked door, huffing and perspiring from his long walk. “Is there some problem with the lighting?”

“No,” Malachi replied. “I have simply turned it off. Those of us who still cling to the sanctity of the old ways have agreed to shun the corrupting influence of modernity, in all its forms.”

Athanasius nodded as if this was a perfectly reasonable response. “And how are things with you and the others of your guild?” he asked, before Thomas could lose his temper.

“We are dying, thank you — slowly but steadily.”

Yes—Athanasius thought—we hear them screaming each time you abandon them, and then burn them for you once they are dead.

“What about you,” Malachi countered, “did your little coup achieve anything? Has the bringing of civilians into the Citadel and trampling on thousands of years of venerated tradition been rewarded with the discovery of a miracle cure?”

“Not yet — but we are making progress.”

Malachi’s eyes brightened. “Really? What sort of progress?”

“One of the infected has been successfully nursed back from the brink of death, a civilian. He seems to have developed a form of natural immunity to the disease. The doctors are now working to try and extract a vaccine from his blood.”

“Really — a vaccine? And is he fully recovered, this — civilian?” He said this last word as he might utter the word snake.

“Not fully recovered; he is improving but still weak. He has been removed to the abbot’s private quarters to rest and allow the doctors to conduct further tests. It is a vital period in their search for a vaccine; they must try to understand the reason for his recovery. At the same time, in our own way, we too are desperately trying to understand the blight better. I mentioned in my note that a certain document has come into our possession, a prophecy that was originally carved on a stone long ago.”

“Yes, do you have it with you?”

“Not exactly. We have a facsimile of it. A detailed photograph showing both sides of the stone.”

Malachi’s eyes grew larger behind the pebbles of his glasses. “Show it to me.”

“I was hoping you might allow us into the library so we can study it together and utilize the huge wealth of resources and reference material to try and decipher its meaning.”

The magnified eyes clouded with suspicion and flitted between the two of them as if he suspected some kind of trap. “Why don’t you give the document to me and I will see what I can make of it? You know I am familiar with all the ancient languages collected here. I have studied them and decoded many. If this stone is written in any of these then I will be able to recognize and translate it without need for further study or research. I might be able to tell you what it says right now — if you show it to me.”

Father Thomas and Athanasius exchanged a glance. They had expected this and, though neither of them liked it, they had little choice but to agree. Time was too pressing.

“If we show it to you, you must share what you see in it.”

“Of course.”

“Whatever it contains affects us all.”

“Indeed.” Malachi was fidgety, the candle shaking in his hand with anticipation.

Thomas opened his jacket where the laptop was secreted. He opened it and held the screen toward Malachi. Cold blue light lit up the librarian’s face, turning it into a grotesque, glowing mask that appeared to float beyond the window in the door, the eyes pecking information from the screen like hungry birds. “It’s Malan,” he said, studying the first image.

“That’s what we thought,” Athanasius replied, sensing Malachi’s deliberate evasion but choosing not to challenge him on it. “What about the second image?”

Malachi’s eyes flitted across the screen but he said nothing. Thomas closed the laptop abruptly, prompting Malachi to look up as though he had been slapped.

“You promised to share your thoughts. If you do not honor your side of the bargain then we will not honor ours.”

“Of course, my apologies, I was just trying to — to get a sense of it. It’s written in two different languages — three if you consider that the constellations might also be telling part of the story.” Athanasius nodded, he had not considered this, but it made sense. The protocuneiform section he had been able to partly understand was linked by a line as well as by meaning to the extra star marked in the constellation of Taurus. “Can you decipher any of it?”

“I’m sure I can — but I will need to see it again and study it a little longer.”

Athanasius paused. Malachi was a slippery, self-interested character at the best of times. “Very well,” he said, “but the moment I think you are holding something back from us, we shut it again and walk away. Understood?”

Malachi nodded and attempted a smile that looked monstrous in the wavering light of his candle. Thomas opened the laptop again and turned it to face the window in the door. Malachi’s eyes crawled over it hungrily. “It’s very old, reminiscent of protoelemaic but not the same. There is a symbol here for the Citadel, also one for death and another that refers to disease or a plague…”

Athanasius glanced at Father Thomas. They had been right. The stone did predict what was happening here. “What else?”

Malachi shook his head. “It is hard to render it into a formal sentence. It is impressionistic rather than narrative.” His eyes continued to scan the symbols. “Maybe if you leave it with me I can cross-reference it with some of the other elemite documents in the library from the same period and arrive at a clearer meaning.”

“No. If we need to use other resource material to decode it then you must let us into the library so we can work on it together.” Malachi didn’t respond, his hungry eyes wide and unblinking as they slipped down the text. He reached the bottom and visibly flinched, as if he had been struck.

“What is it?”

“The man who came back from the dead, did he ride here on a horse? Did he ride out of the wilderness?”

Athanasius recalled conversations he’d had with Gabriel about his long journey back to the Citadel. “Yes.”

“And what is this man’s name?”

Athanasius frowned. “His name is Gabriel. Now tell us what it says on the stone.”

Malachi shook his head. “It’s… I’m not sure… I’ll need to—” He started to back away, eyes wide and fixed on the laptop.

“Tell us what it says.”

He looked up at them, his eyes full of fear. “I need to check some things,” he said, still backing away. “I need to be sure, before I—”

“Malachi!” Thomas closed the laptop, but all it did was release Malachi from the spell of it. He turned and started moving away.

“MALACHI!” Athanasius called after him. But it was too late, he was already gone, almost running into the solid blackness until his flickering candle disappeared entirely.

78

Corporal Williamson and his crew made impressively short work of the gates. They had found some chains and dragged them to their truck outside the fence. The chains were fixed by one end to the tow bar and the other to the main support posts, while everyone else dug away at the foundations with shovels, picks and whatever else they could swing. When Williamson figured they’d dug far enough he fired up the engine and eased it over to where the earth fell away and used gravity and the weight of the truck to rock the posts clean out of the ground. Then they got to work on the rest.

Williamson took command, tasking some of his men to decommission the cannons up in the towers and the rest he split into teams to coordinate the demolition effort. Using a series of interpreters relaying Williamson’s orders they got everybody working together, some digging at the post foundations, others cutting the wire and rolling it into bundles. Liv had been stationed at one of the posts and was snipping away at the ties with an industrial-size set of wire cutters. She felt deep satisfaction at how quickly the different groups had gelled into one unit, everyone working together, everyone suffused with a sense of urgency by the column of dust growing steadily in the east, marking the approach of the newcomers.

“Those soldiers, they’re very good at this,” she remarked to Tariq who was hacking away with a pickaxe at the concrete foot of the post she was working at.

He leaned on the axe handle and wiped the sweat from his face. “They should be,” he said, “they’re USACE — United States Army Corps of Engineers. These guys are used to taking things down and building them up again. It’s what they’re trained for.”

Liv frowned as a thought began to form in her head. “Don’t you think it’s odd that exactly the right people seem to arrive here just when they’re needed? When the water was poisoned some water experts turned up from out of nowhere with all the right equipment to test it. Then these guys show up just when the need to dismantle this place suggests itself.”

“The goat herders too.” Tariq nodded over at the nomads who were now quite happily being ordered about by the soldiers.

“How do they fit in?”

“We have plenty of dried food but hardly anything fresh. In the desert the goat is the best source of fresh milk and meat. Those goats are as important for the sustainability of this place as the water.” He frowned as something occurred to him. “What about Azra’iel and his riders, how do they fit into your theory?”

Liv contemplated this for a moment then shook her head. “They were not drawn here by the call of this place like the rest, they were led here by Malik. They shouldn’t have been here. And they died.”

Tariq turned back to the column of dust in the east, close enough now to make out three white trucks at the base of it, their outlines shimmering and breaking up in the heat haze. “So who is coming now?” he asked, more to himself than anyone else. “What do we need here that we haven’t got already?”

Liv followed his gaze. “Whoever it is, they will be met with a welcome and not a closed gate,” she said.

She continued to watch the shimmering vehicles drawing closer, emerging from the liquid air until they crunched to a halt in a cloud of fine dust. The driver’s door of the lead vehicle opened and a man got out. He was tall and olive skinned, but not Arabic-looking. Gentle eyes surveyed the ring of welcoming faces then looked past them through the ruins of the gate to the compound beyond and the fountain of water. “What is this place?” he asked in accented English that placed him as Italian or maybe Spanish.

Liv stepped forward, fixing a smile on her face “We’re not quite sure what this place is really, we’re kind of making it up as we go along, but there’s plenty of room and plenty of water and you’re very welcome to stay.”

More doors opened and others stepped out into the desert, a mixture of Arabic, European, mature and young, six of them in all, two to a vehicle. Then Liv spotted something on one of their sleeves, a logo that looked familiar but she couldn’t quite place. “What is it that you all do?” she asked.

The driver of the lead vehicle turned his gentle eyes on her and smiled. “We work for Médecins Sans Frontières,” he said. “We’re doctors.”

79

Franklin saw something harden in his wife’s face the moment his phone rang for the second time.

They were sitting in the kitchen — Marie, Sinead and him — the remains of a home-cooked meal on the table, talking like they hadn’t talked together in God knows how long. It was as if all the bad history and all the distance that had formed between them had been swept away by the same force that had pulled them home.

“I got to take this,” he said. Marie nodded, a quick twitch of her chin, then slipped out of her chair, picked up some plates and headed over to the sink. How many times had he seen her do that? Too many. He looked at Sinead, so like her mother, and caught the same disappointment in her eyes — not as hard or as cold as her mother yet, but the seed was there.

He took the phone from his pocket and checked the number.

Shepherd again.

He knew he should turn the damn thing off and go over to Marie, tell her he loved her, that the old days of work first and everything else a poor second were gone. But they weren’t. Not yet.

He pictured Shepherd, exhausted from the day he’d had, standing out there alone in the freezing night with a fresh corpse for company and no one watching his back. “I got to take it,” he repeated, standing and walking from the room, hating himself with every step. He moved into the hallway and snapped the phone to his ear. “Franklin.”

“It’s Shepherd.”

“I know.” He walked toward the front door but changed his mind and sat on the stairs instead. It was too cold outside and he couldn’t face leaving the house.

“The cops are here. They didn’t see the car on their way in and didn’t intercept anyone. I think the killers must be heading north into Tennessee.”

“I’ll make some calls. Spread the net.”

“I already got the local cops to call it through.”

“Well, I’ll fire a rocket down from Quantico too, make sure it sticks.” The loud and angry clink of dishes being rinsed in the sink sounded only a few feet away. He covered his ear with his free hand and felt his mind automatically snick back into the well-worn grooves of a moving investigation. “Okay, this is what’s going to happen. They won’t have the right resources locally to process the scene properly so I’m going to send a team out to you from Charlotte. You need to stay put until they get there, make sure those down-home cops don’t get all excited and contaminate the scene with cigarette butts and good intentions. They’re going to take a while to reach you so you’ll need to take charge until they do. I already put in an urgent search for any of Dr. Kinderman’s previous known addresses and got a hit on two that might be considered ‘home.’ There are armed units heading to both of them now. If Kinderman’s there we’ll get him.”

“Always assuming whoever killed Professor Douglas hasn’t gotten there first.”

“I doubt it. Both addresses are way up north and so far everything has taken place south of Washington. This feels like a very contained operation, one mobile unit and someone controlling them centrally. What’s the cell phone coverage like where you are?”

“I’m on top of a mountain, I’ve got five bars, but I don’t know about the rest of the area — why?”

Franklin stared at his daughter’s snow boots, lined up by the door where she had stepped out of them; one had toppled over. He had a flash of a smaller pair abandoned in exactly the same way maybe fifteen years earlier. He closed his eyes. The memories were too distracting. “You remember our little talk with the good reverend?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“You remember what I did just before we interviewed him?”

There was a pause on the line. Franklin could hear the wind through the trees where Shepherd was. It sounded cold. “You asked him to put his phone down on the table.”

“Then what?”

“You asked if you could smoke.”

“And when he said no I put my cigarettes down on the table next to his phone. There’s a little piece of equipment not covered in class called an Eavesdropper. It’s a new-generation bug that can read and duplicate a SIM card without the need to tamper with a phone. All you have to do is place it close enough to a target unit and leave it there for about a minute so it can pick up the mobile identification number when it checks in with the nearest cell mast. It then mirrors the phone activity and makes voice recordings of any calls. It’s got a four-gigabyte chip built in so it can store around fifty hours of audio. The one drawback is that it only works in close physical proximity to the target phone.”

“Which is why you stashed your pack of cigarettes in that crack in the wall.”

“Exactly. So I’m thinking if there’s good phone reception where you are the killers may already have called in a status update to their controller. You hang tight, Shepherd. I’ll let you know how it shakes out.”

He hung up and hit the zero key to speed-dial Quantico. From the kitchen all he could hear now was silence. He pictured Marie and Sinead sitting at the breakfast bar, listening to him talk in the hallway. It made him feel crummy. But he couldn’t leave Shepherd hanging in the wind. He was the only reason he was here at all. He’d explain that to them, as soon as he finished this call.

The phone connected and Franklin navigated his way through the various departments: authorizing and mobilizing a crime scene detail to hit the road and head to Cherokee; issuing an urgent look out for a yellow or white station wagon with police departments in three states; and ultimately getting patched through to the surveillance control room where, after confirmation of his agent ID number and the investigation code, he was told by the operator that the Eavesdropper unit assigned to him had logged its last call six minutes earlier. Franklin listened to the crackle of the line and the solid silence in his house while the operator sent a code that bounced off a communications satellite in space and beamed a signal back through the snow clouds and down to the Eavesdropper wedged between the mailbox and the outside wall of the Church of Christ’s Salvation in Charleston.

The circuit responded to the code and switched from a receiver to a transmitter, using the cell phone network to send an encoded stream of information back to the operator who then decoded it and fed it straight down the line to Franklin.

Franklin kept his eyes closed as he listened to the last recorded conversation the device had picked up. It was between Cooper and two unidentified voices — a man and a woman. He registered the key phrases in the short exchange:

… The professor is dead… just passed into Tennessee… Yeah, we got pictures…

Then Cooper ended the call with words that hammered the lid shut on his own coffin.

… I just found out where Dr. Kinderman is…

Franklin cut the connection and stared down at his daughter’s empty boots. Whatever hope he had been clinging to that he might still be able to deal with this by phone had just flown. Cooper needed to be taken down quickly and he couldn’t leave it to Charleston’s finest.

He dug around in his pocket, found the card Jackson had given him in the police station and started punching his number into his phone. He hit the dial button and became aware of Marie and Sinead framed in the kitchen door. They were both looking at him, their arms folded across their fronts, each a mirror of the other’s disapproval.

“I’ve got to do this one thing,” he said, holding up his phone, “just this one thing in Charleston then I’ll be back, I promise.” He heard the phone connect and start ringing. By the look on Marie’s face she heard it too.

“It’s always just one more thing,” she said. Then she turned and walked into the kitchen.

Sinead stayed where she was. “Just one thing?” she said.

“Literally this one thing, I promise you, hand on heart.”

She nodded but didn’t smile, then turned and followed her mother into the kitchen as Jackson answered. Franklin clamped the phone to his ear, closing his eyes to shut out all the things he didn’t want to leave. “I need your help,” he said, keeping his voice low. “But first I need to get into Charleston as fast as possible, preferably avoiding the parking lot that is the I-26.”

80

“He asked about me?” Gabriel was propped up in bed looking at Athanasius and Thomas, their faces serious after their strange meeting with Malachi.

“Yes, and his questions appeared to have been prompted by whatever he had just read on the Starmap. He asked if you had ridden to the Citadel out of the wilderness.”

“You think he knows what the symbols mean?”

“Undoubtedly,” Thomas replied. “Malachi knows more about early writing than any other man alive. If there is anything in the library that will help decipher this text then it will already be in his head. He knows exactly what it says.”

“So how do we get him to tell us?”

“We don’t,” Athanasius replied. “Malachi has never been a man who could be swayed. And he hates me. He thinks I have betrayed the brotherhood. There is no way he is going to share what he learned with us. I should have known better than to trust him, but I wasn’t counting on him being so — unhinged.”

“Yes,” Thomas agreed, “there was something desperate about him. He’s not going to help us. I fear he is already lost.”

“So it seems we must take matters into our own hands,” Athanasius said, rubbing his hands together as if, on some level, he was enjoying all this. “If we are going to interpret the rest of the stone we need to gain access to the ancient records. You helped me break into the library once before.”

Thomas smiled. “And that was when the lights were still working, the security protocols were in place, armed guards were on constant patrol and unauthorized access was punishable by death. This should be relatively easy in comparison.”

“Can you do it tonight?”

“I’ll need to hook into the library systems to see what is still running and what has been disabled; I don’t want you walking into a trap or tripping any alarms. The absence of the lights will be a big help, and I don’t suppose they’re availing themselves of the night vision goggles, what with ‘the corrupting influence of modernity,’ which means we can use them. They are kept in the control room by the main entrance.”

“Could we gain access via the reading rooms? We could go via the restricted section to the one used by the Sancti?”

“What’s that?” Gabriel asked.

“The Sanctus monks were kept strictly segregated from the rest of the population to preserve the secrets they kept. However, they still had access to the library at certain times when no one else was there, and they had their own reading room. It’s reached by a staircase from the upper section of the mountain. There are other stairways too, one in the prelate’s quarters, one close to the cathedral cave and one just through there.” He pointed to the door leading to the abbot’s bedchamber. “They enabled the trusted senior members of the mountain to meet with the Sancti and partake in their ceremonies. Since there are no longer any of them left, the stairways and the Sancti’s reading room have been unused.” He looked back at the door leading to the bedchamber. “I have the abbot’s key for that door. But not one for the door leading into the reading room. We’d have to force it.”

Father Thomas shook his head. “We would make far too much noise. It’s a heavy door with a solid lock and the reading rooms where Malachi and the black cloaks are residing is right next door. I’d rather break in using my own systems than bludgeon my way through a door. Once we are inside and have acquired the night vision goggles it should be easy. We can find our way to the ancient texts and read anything we like in total darkness. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll have worked out how to get us in. That should also give everyone time to go to sleep. Shall we say midnight?”

Athanasius nodded. “Between matins and lauds.”

“Can I come with you?” Gabriel said, clearly meaning it.

“You’re not going anywhere.” Dr. Kaplan appeared behind Thomas with something in his hand and a serious expression on his face. “You’re far too weak to do anything other than lie here and rest. However, if you really want to help…”

He opened his hand and Gabriel felt his stomach flip when he saw several empty test tubes lying in his palm. “This is the situation. So far we’ve taken eight hundred mils of your blood, which would take your body about five weeks to fully replace. The plasma gets replaced in a day or two. The blood cells take much longer. In the study of disease it is these cells that give us the most information. They’re the things that have battled the disease and, in your case, won. At the moment your body will only just have started replacing the plasma and your white cell count per liter will still be relatively high. As far as virology and toxicology is concerned this is the good stuff, packed full of all the information we need. It would really speed things up if we could take some more of this rich blood now.”

“How much?”

“Another five hundred mils.”

“And how much would that leave me with?”

“Enough; you’d still have seventy-five to eighty-five percent of your usual amount, which is in the safe zone for a healthy patient. My concern is that the last time we took blood it triggered some kind of mild relapse, though you recovered quickly and seem fine now.” He looked at the ECG monitor connected to Gabriel’s finger by a clip. “Your vital signs are all strong and there’s no obvious reason for concern. But ultimately it’s your decision.”

Gabriel looked at the stained-glass window, the peacock motif hardly visible now as evening darkened the sky behind it. “What the hell,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. But if I do pass out please don’t wake me until morning.” An assistant appeared from nowhere and started to tighten Gabriel’s bindings.

“Just a precaution,” Kaplan said. “In case you do have another fit.”

Gabriel turned to Athanasius. “Good luck,” he said. “And I sincerely hope you have a better night than I’m about to.”

81

Malachi’s candle lit up the words carved into the inside of the upper curve of an archway as he passed through it: CRYPTA REVELATIO—Vault of the Revelation.

Most of the library was organized according to date and origin, with the newest items nearest the entrance. But the contents of the Crypta Revelatio were drawn from every culture, every century and every part of the world. It was a collection with one unique subject in common: all of the texts and references gathered there contained prophetic accounts of the end of the world.

He made his way over to the far side of the vault and held his dying candle to a fresh one until the new wick caught and wavering orange light rippled across a desk entirely buried beneath books and sheets of paper filled with Malachi’s dense handwriting. Collapsing in the seat at his desk, he grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and took up his pen. His hand shook as he wrote, his lips moving as he recalled the symbols he had seen. He had not been able to memorize them all in the short time, but he had seen enough. He drew the symbols from memory, writing his interpretation of each next to it so he could capture as much of it as he could remember: one sign for a rider — a warrior on horseback; one sign for the Citadel, which occurred more than once; and at the very end of the prophecy the symbol of a skull — meaning death or an end — followed by the moon in the sun, representing a day.

End of Days.

He pulled the candle over and his magnified eyes moved behind the lenses of his spectacles, his skittish hands extensions of his tumbling thoughts as they searched through the accumulated mass of doom that spilled across the tabletop and down to the floor, looking for one item in particular. He had read and reread the documents so many times that the terrible imagery and predictions they contained bled into his dreams as he slept here each night in his nest of prophesies.

He found what he was looking for buried beneath the handwritten, original manuscript of the Poetic Edda and a first edition of Les Propheties by Michel de Nostredame. The text was written on papyrus in ancient Greek and bound into a codex with thin strips of leather. Such binding was usually reserved for pristine texts but these pages were filled with crossings out and additions crammed in the borders and between every line.

Malachi turned the pages, his hands touching only the edge of each page in recognition of the great delicacy of the book. It had arrived in the Citadel barely a hundred years after the death of Christ, shortly after it was written on the island of Patmos. Any Christian scholar with a passing knowledge of Greek would have instantly recognized the apocalyptic imagery of dragons and lambs that whispered up from the dry pages. It was the Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine, the last book of the Holy Bible, written in the saint’s own hand.

The first copies of the Bible had been compiled and written in this very library, using the original texts as reference. But not everything had been copied into the official, public version everyone now knew. Under the supervision of the earliest scholars whole books had been omitted in order to help clarify God’s meanings. And anything that alluded too closely to the Citadel or the Sacrament was also omitted so the secrets would remain so. But the complete visions and prophecies of St. John had been preserved in this, the one remaining copy of the original work. Malachi found the page he was looking for and scanned the confusion of crossings out and notes until he found the seventh verse:

The same version was written in every Bible on the face of the earth. But in this codex there was an additional part that had been marked for exclusion by one of the fathers of the Church because of the direct reference to the Citadel.

And he did ride forth from the wilderness

And what had Athanasius — that fool — told him about the man who had cheated death and recovered from the blight? That he had ridden to the Citadel on a horse, and that his name was Gabriel.

What had they done?

The Revelation of St. John the Divine and the prophecy etched on the stone both predicted the end of days — and Athanasius had made it all happen. He had lit the fuse to something that would blow everything apart.

Malachi closed his eyes and tried to think. There had been constellations etched onto the stone too and moon symbols denoting a time frame. Maybe the end was not here yet, maybe it could be avoided. He reread the words of the saint, looking for fresh meaning in them, his eyes drawn to one phrase in particular:

What had Athanasius said about the demon, the one who called itself Gabriel? That it was recovering from the blight, and that they had taken it to the abbot’s private chambers to recover while they conducted their tests and pandered to it, slaves already without even knowing it — the fools. But Athanasius had also said something else — that it was still weak, not fully recovered. And he knew a way to the abbot’s private chambers through the stairways and corridors leading up from the locked reading room of the Sancti. And Malachi had the key. There was yet time to vanquish it, but he would have to strike quickly, before it grew too strong.

82

Franklin drove back into Charleston the same way he’d driven out. He had borrowed Sinead’s car, preferring the indignity of turning up to an arrest in a Hyundai Elantra to the pain and probable rejection of asking Marie if he could borrow her Chevy Malibu.

Jackson met him with two other uniforms as arranged at a gas station twenty miles outside the city limits. They drove back into town the wrong way on the empty lanes of the outbound interstate, lights flashing and sirens blaring in case they met anything coming the other way. The traffic on the inbound lane was as bad as it had been before and they drew envious glances as they blew past from all the people behind wheels, still waiting patiently in line and inching their way back home.

They killed the sirens and lights when they made it downtown and the traffic started to thin again. They weaved through the snow-softened streets and parked around the corner from Cooper’s church where Franklin went through his strategy for the takedown, the layout of the building, the number of people likely to be inside. He even called up a picture of Cooper on his phone to show them. The cops barely looked at it. Everybody knew who Fulton Cooper was.

They checked their weapons and put on body armor vests. Due to some mess up they had brought only three, so Franklin decided to do without. He couldn’t imagine Cooper was going to put up any kind of a fight. They went through it all one last time then split up, the two uniforms heading around the back to cover the rear entrance just in case the good reverend lost his faith in the Lord and decided to make a run for it.

Franklin and Jackson took the front. Franklin yanked hard on the bellpull and heard it ring somewhere inside the building. There were lights on and the most recent update from the Eavesdropper log suggested that Cooper, or his phone at least, had still been in the building as of ten minutes ago. Franklin reached into the gap between the mailbox and the wall to retrieve the crumpled pack of cigarettes with the bug inside.

Snow fell. They waited.

A light came on above them, lifting them from the dark and throwing their shadows out onto the blank whiteness of the road. Miss Boerman appeared in the doorway and regarded them with a look as cold as the ground they stood upon. “Yes?”

“Is the reverend in?” Franklin asked.

“Can’t this — whatever it is — wait until tomorrow?”

“No.” Franklin noticed her shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, a small thing but on her it seemed as though he’d caught her half dressed. Her hand rose to her shirt collar and her face hardened. “I’m afraid he’s unavailable.” The fine scar on her face wrinkled as she spoke. Franklin wondered if it was the reason she never smiled.

“Mind if we come in and see for ourselves?”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“What, you mean like this?”

Jackson held up the signed paperwork he had managed to hustle out of the one judge who was still in town and answering his phone and Franklin enjoyed the surprise that registered on the blank mask of her face. She looked up, still making no further move to unlock the gate.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” Franklin opened his hands in his I’m-being-reasonable-here manner. “You have exactly three seconds to open this gate or I’m going to shoot the lock off and arrest you for obstruction of justice, sound fair?”

He held up three fingers.

Then two.

He reached into his jacket for his gun.

She stepped forward and jabbed a key into the lock, twisting it open and standing aside to let them in.

“Where is he?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, take a guess and make it a good one.”

“He’s probably at prayer, in the chapel.”

“You think so or you know so?”

Her hand went to her collar again. “He’s there.”

“Where is it?”

“In the basement, down the side stairs you went up earlier.”

“Is he alone?”

“Yes.”

“Anyone else in the building I should know about?”

“The church is closed.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No. There’s no one here but Fulton and myself.”

Franklin smiled. “Thank you, miss. You have been most helpful. Why don’t you wait here until we’re done.”

He pushed through the front door and into the warmth of the entrance hall with Jackson following close behind. The phone room was empty and so was the mailroom. They continued through to the narrow stairs and headed down, Franklin’s steps loud on the bare boards, announcing his approach to whoever might be listening in the basement. He reached the bottom and waited for Jackson to join him. “You set?”

A short nod.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

They moved together through the gloom toward a solid wooden door that swung open easily on well-oiled hinges to reveal a small chapel beyond lit by sunlight miraculously pouring through a large stained-glass window. Cooper was on his knees in front of it, head bowed, hands in front of him where they couldn’t be seen.

“Hello, Reverend,” Franklin said, moving to the center of the room. “Sorry to burst in on you like this but I was just dying to introduce you to a friend of mine. Detective Jackson of the Charleston PD, meet the man we’re here to arrest for conspiracy to murder.”

Cooper didn’t move. Franklin glanced over at Jackson. “You want to Mirandize him while he’s saying his good-byes to the Lord?”

Franklin sat down on one of the benches while Jackson read Cooper his rights. He felt suddenly tired from the long and event-filled day. Driving away from Marie and Sinead had taken more out of him than he thought. At least Cooper wasn’t kicking and screaming. He watched the reverend lower his hands and look up at the cross built into the design of the window. “Might I ask on what evidence you are arresting me?”

“You might.” Franklin produced his phone and played the intercepted phone message, Cooper’s voice sounding thin and tinny on the small speaker. He switched it off before it got to the end.

“You really have no idea what all of us are facing here, do you?” Cooper said.

Franklin smiled. “Feel free to enlighten me,” he said wearily, “though you would be advised to keep it short as everything you now say constitutes evidence that can be used against you in a court of law.”

“Whose law — the law of man? The law of governments? What fear I of such flawed and inadequate things?”

“Well now, let’s see, they still have the death penalty in this state, so that’s one thing. Then there’s the lengthy custodial sentence you’ll get either way, where you may well be stuck in a tiny jail cell with a huge, horny dude by the name of Bubba or somesuch, that would certainly put the fear of God into me.”

“There is only one law I answer to, and that is the law of Jesus Christ the Savior, and He is close at hand. He knows who serves Him and who does not. And He will gather the righteous to His side when the time comes.”

The suddenness and speed of Cooper’s movement took Franklin totally by surprise. One moment he was kneeling on the floor, the next he was across the floor and behind the solid wooden lectern. Franklin automatically dropped down, snatching his gun from his shoulder holster and using the bench as cover. Out of his peripheral vision he saw Jackson break right and do the same.

“We know about the rear exit, Cooper, and it’s covered,” Franklin shouted. “There’s no way out of this.”

“That, my friend, is where you are wrong.” Cooper rose from behind the lectern, a gun in his hand, pointing straight at Franklin.

Instincts honed over a lifetime of service flooded Franklin’s brain, producing the slow, hypersensory state that existed in the middle of a live gunfight.

He saw Cooper’s knuckle glow white as it tightened on the trigger.

Vest. He wasn’t wearing a vest.

He heard his own breathing, loud and slow as he took a breath and held it. Felt the recoil jolt his arm, saw the flash of his gun firing, then again, along with the slow, deep boom of both shots as they echoed in the chapel. He watched through the smoke as Cooper spun away and fell, his gun falling from his hand as he hit the stone floor. Franklin was already moving, driven forward by muscle memory, leading with his gun to make sure Cooper was properly down while part of his brain checked for any signs that he had been hit.

Had Cooper gotten off a shot? Hard to tell.

He’d seen agents sprint up flights of stairs with serious wounds they hadn’t even known about because of adrenaline and delayed shock. And he had promised Marie he would come back.

He reached Cooper’s body and assessed him from behind his gun. He was still breathing but only just, his eyes looking up at the window, a pool of blood spreading beneath him too fast to be minor. Both shots had caught him center mass. Major organ damage, possibly arterial too. He could hear the rattle in his breath as his lungs filled with blood. He would drown before he bled out and there was nothing he could do but watch.

Franklin bent down on one knee, placing his hand on Cooper’s shoulder so he knew he was there. “You’ve been hit pretty bad but you’ll be okay,” he lied. “There’s an ambulance on its way. Why don’t you tell me where Kinderman is?”

Cooper opened his mouth, still staring up at the cross. Franklin dropped down lower so he could hear him. Heard the whisper of a voice broken by shallow breaths. “He’s on his way… to hell.”

Footsteps echoed outside as Miss Boerman clattered down the stairs in response to the gunshots. Jackson headed over to intercept her. No point her seeing any of this. Through the noise Franklin became aware that Cooper was saying something else. He leaned down lower, his ear so close he could feel the snatched breaths.

“Thank you…,” Cooper whispered, “for… helping me… leave.” The last word came out as a long sigh that ended in a rattle he had heard too many times before. It was over. Cooper was dead.

Behind him he could hear voices now, Jackson low and calm, Miss Boerman angry and hysterical. He could hear more footsteps too as the other two uniforms also responded to the gunfire.

Too late. Nothing to see.

He moved across to where Cooper’s gun was lying on the stone floor, holstering his own and slipping a pair of nitrile gloves over his hands. He picked up the discarded weapon and instantly knew from the weight and balance of it that it was empty. He checked to make sure — no magazine in the clip, no bullet in the chamber — and realized what Cooper had meant with his dying words. He wouldn’t have been able to face his Lord if he had taken his own life. Suicide was a mortal sin. So he had gotten Franklin to do it for him.

Suicide by cop.

83

Shepherd was standing on the porch of Douglas’s observatory watching the FBI tech team trample all over the local cops when his phone buzzed in his pocket.

“Cooper is dead,” Franklin said the moment he answered.

“Jesus.”

“He pulled a gun, so I had to put him down. He was involved in the hit on Douglas, no question. I’ve got an intercepted phone call of him discussing it and I’m currently standing in his studio looking at some particularly nasty phone images of the professor taken postmortem. They were being edited into a video package that was no doubt going to be the cornerstone of the late reverend’s next sermon: God’s retribution on the blasphemers, behold his mighty wrath — you can imagine.

“Bad news is, these same pictures are already on the Internet, leaked anonymously, and now popping up on all the nuttier religious conspiracy sites presumably so they could hide the source of them for their news piece. We’ll take them down as fast as we can but they’re starting to get picked up by some of the news outlets and spread around on Twitter. We can’t keep this genie in the bottle, which means we have to find Kinderman fast before he really goes to ground or Cooper’s angels of death get to him.”

“I could use the e-mail I found on Douglas’s laptop, tell Kinderman what’s happened here and offer the hand of friendship and protection.”

“The tech guys arrive there yet?”

“Yeah, they’re currently making friends with the local folk.”

“I bet. They’re not going to like you walking all over ‘their’ crime scene but a man’s life is at stake here. Use the laptop and wear gloves. If they complain about it in their report I’ll say I ordered you to do it.”

“Okay. I’ll let you know if he bites. You want me to head back to Charleston after I’m done here?”

There was a silence on the line and somewhere in the background Shepherd could hear Cooper’s voice still ranting away. “You still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.” Franklin sounded distracted. “You should get some rest then drive to Charlotte, it’s nearer than here. I’ll warn them you’re coming.”

“What about you?”

“Call me if you get anything from Kinderman.” The phone clicked before Shepherd could respond, and the line went dead.

By insisting that he needed to use Douglas’s laptop Shepherd succeeded in annoying both the FBI tech guys and the local PD. He ignored their looks and whispers as they worked together to photograph and remove Douglas’s body from the wall while he crouched over the keyboard, figuring at least he’d done his bit to get them cooperating with each other. They were united now in thinking he was an asshole.

He opened Kinderman’s last message by using pens to tap the keys, hit reply and then paused. He would have only one shot at this. Get it wrong and Kinderman would shut down the e-mail account and vanish again. His eyes flicked to the countdown, getting smaller all the time.

He could try and draw him out by pretending he was Douglas but he didn’t know enough about their shared history to do it convincingly. Also, according to Franklin, the pictures of Douglas’s murder were already on the Net and starting to garner press interest. If Dr. Kinderman had seen them then a voice from beyond the grave was hardly likely to win his trust. On the other hand if, he had seen them, fear was a useful tool.

Shepherd tapped on a browser icon and started hunting for the pictures. It didn’t take him long. A couple of clicks away from Cooper’s own Web site he found a page dedicated to the coming revelation. It was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, full of hate and damnation, with a whole section dedicated to what it called “The Great Blasphemy of the New Tower of Babel.” There were pictures of Hubble as well as Kinderman and Douglas, with captions beneath identifying them as the architects of the great offense. There were also headlines and links to various unfolding news stories telling of the sabotage and explosions, then — at the bottom of the screen — Shepherd found a grainy version of the room he was now standing in, a quote from Ezekiel emblazoned beneath it:

The quote was typed in letters the same color as Douglas’s blood. Shepherd imagined someone in a basement, lit by the glow from his screen and the demented fire that burned within him, matching the color from the photograph then hitting the publish button, pleased with his little design flourish. He hoped the FBI would hit him hard when they eventually caught up with him. He copied the link and posted it in the e-mail.

He then found the link on Cooper’s site to the clip of him and Franklin being quizzed about the explosion at Marshall and the sabotage of Hubble. He pasted that in too and started to type:

He reread it and was surprised to discover tears in his eyes. He turned away from everyone and wiped them away. He had been so carried along by the speed of events that he had kept the brutal shock of finding the professor’s body at arm’s length — until now. Writing the message to Dr. Kinderman had opened a window straight into something raw and painful. He hadn’t been looking for the professor for very long, barely more than a day, but there was something ominous about the tragic way this search had ended that made him think about the other one, the one he had been on for eight long years. And it made him afraid.

He copied the message to his own e-mail account so he could monitor any response, then hit send and let out a breath that he hadn’t even known he’d been holding.

“Okay,” he said, “it’s all yours.” And turned to the others just as they were zipping Professor Douglas into a body bag.

84

Liv felt the tickle of sweat running down her back, her neck — everywhere. She had chosen to stay outside and lead by example. It also gave her the chance to think, the quiet monotony of her task helping to clear her mind as she tried to evaluate the significance of the new arrivals.

The doctors were now inside the compound building. Eric was immensely relieved that he was no longer the only medically trained member of the growing desert community. Liv, on the other hand, felt that there was something ominous and unsettling about the sudden arrival of so many doctors. With the last of the victims of the poisoning now dead and buried it suggested that some other medical emergency was about to manifest itself.

The convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles they had arrived in had also contained boxes and boxes of much needed supplies and medical equipment. Most of the existing stock from the sick bay had been used up, so Liv had tried to rationalize this as being the reason they’d been drawn here. But at the core of her finely tuned instincts she knew it could not be as simple as that.

She thought about the circle with a cross through the center — the symbol of disease and destruction. It was positioned between the upward arrow of the mountain and the downward one of here. When she had first studied it she had assumed and hoped it referred to the Citadel. But now she felt the meaning was ambiguous. Its position suggested that whatever disease the symbol represented might either link the two places or separate them in some way.

She leaned against the fence post, grateful for its sturdy support, and felt the weight of everything closing down on her. The blinding light and heat were making her faint and light-headed and she felt a lurch in her stomach as if she’d eaten something bad. She shivered, genuinely cold despite the enveloping heat and the sweat still running off her. Her heart thrummed in her chest, making her vision throb. Maybe she needed to get out of the sun for a bit, have one of Kyle’s rehydration cocktails, and lie down and rest for a while.

She started to walk back toward the compound, focusing on the nearest building. If she could just get out of the sun she would be fine. She concentrated on her breathing, in through the nose and out through the mouth, placing one foot in front of the other to close the distance to the nearest door. She had made it about halfway when the earth started to shift beneath her feet. She fixed her eyes on the dark rectangle of the door but it seemed to be getting farther away.

She was stumbling now, the ground moving in waves beneath her feet, something close to panic rising inside her. Everything was mixing together, the heat, her exhaustion, the half-glimpsed truths and fragments of ancient warnings that led her to the edge of knowing what was to come without ever revealing what it was. And then there was Gabriel, always Gabriel — gone with hardly a word save for the note she carried with her like a spell.

But when would he return so she could finally rest? Clinging to the memory of him like this was a form of grief.

At last her hand touched the metal skin of the door and the burning heat of it shocked her back to her senses. She caught a whiff of something acrid, citrus, while her head thumped, the blood continued to drain and her mind pulsed through the percussive beat of repeated thoughts:

Gabriel

The Citadel

The symbol for contagion

The arrival of the doctors

The door gave and she almost fell to the floor as it opened. A wave of warm air billowed out, the air-conditioning not yet turned on because everyone was working outside and fuel was too valuable to waste. It carried the same smell of lemons with it, thick and sweet, making her feel nauseous again. She leaned against the wall, sliding forward and along it, using it for support as the ground beneath her continued to shift and roll. She just needed to find a bed and lie down for a while until the world stopped spinning.

Another door opened at the end of the corridor and Eric appeared, leading the doctors on a tour through the building. They looked up at her and she saw concern cloud their faces. Then her knees gave way and she crumpled to the ground. She was unconscious before she hit the floor.

85

Shepherd finally got away from the crime scene shortly after midnight. He headed north along the same road the killers had escaped on and then east toward Charlotte. When he started the drive he was convinced that he was heading to the nearest field office to report in and await new orders, but at the back of his mind he knew there was something else in Charlotte that would offer him a different choice.

Exhaustion hit him hard after a couple of hours. Conditions had been pretty bad most of the way, snow and ice and dark unfamiliar roads. Once he’d dropped down from the higher ground the weather improved, or at least became good enough that he wasn’t scared of getting snowed in, so he pulled into a rest stop and closed his eyes for a few minutes. He awoke with a start when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked the time and realized he’d been asleep for nearly three hours. The car had turned into an icebox with frost on the inside of the windows where moisture from his breath had frozen. He dug his phone from his pocket and discovered he had mail. He opened the app and the temperature dropped a little more. It was from Kinderman.

Shepherd stared at the message, trying to make sense of it through the fog of his sleepy brain. He reread it, his fatigue making him irritable because he was having to deal with this riddle in the middle of the frozen night. Why couldn’t Kinderman just tell him where he was?

Twice he hit reply and started composing a message to that effect, but both times he deleted it, instinctively knowing that he would not get another response. In the end, he slipped the phone back in his pocket and drove the rest of the way to Charlotte thinking it over with the heater on full, sipping black coffee from a Big Gulp cup he’d bought at a truck stop.

It was almost six in the morning when he hit the outskirts of Charlotte and parked next to a McDonald’s, retrieved the Bureau laptop from the passenger foot well and hooked on to the free WiFi that was thankfully still working. From where he sat he could see downtown lying dark before him, the result of a power outage that had sunk half the city into blackness. The only light was coming from a few cars that sketched the lines of unseen streets and a few flickering orange patches where fires burned. It was terrifying how quickly the ordered world had started to unravel. Maybe this would be how it ended, not with some cosmic collision or the wrath of some vengeful god but with society quietly imploding on itself as everyone just headed home and stayed there, all deliveries ending, all crops lying ungathered in fields, the major utilities switching themselves off one by one as no one turned up to work anymore. Maybe no one would actually care, or even remember how things used to be.

He opened the laptop to check in on whatever Agent Smith had dredged up in the night and was greeted by the pinging sound that made his heart tumble in his chest and that he was rapidly growing to hate. The new search he had put in place for Melisa had come back with two results.

The first hit was her name on an old passenger manifest out of Dulles International Airport in Washington. She had flown out of the country eight years ago on a Cyprus-Turkish airliner heading for a place called Gaziantep. He opened a browser and looked it up. The Wikipedia entry told him it was a city in southeast Turkey. He clicked on the map embedded in the article. Just to the northwest of Gaziantep, in the foothills of the Taurus mountains, was another city, marked by a T-shaped cross: Ruin — the place Melisa had listed as her birthplace. She had been going home.

The second result was more recent. It was an application for a temporary work visa dated only a year ago. She had been trying to come back to the States but her application had been denied. He noticed the name on the form was Erroll. Maybe she never married, or maybe had but had kept her name.

He looked at the two results, two more precious pieces of evidence of her continued existence, and felt an almost physical yearning to be with her. He pulled his phone from his pocket. The countdown application was now installed on it and running as his wallpaper. He watched the numbers steadily declining toward zero.

All the time he had lost. How much time was left?

Kinderman’s message was still open and he reread it, hating him now for playing games when so much was at stake. It was like a taunt—“If you’re smart enough then come and get me”—a clever test to find out what he knew. Well, Professor Douglas had been standing on a hill, staring up at the stars and look where that had gotten him. Maybe Kinderman had a similar place and that’s where he was now, drawn there by the homing instinct. But Franklin had run checks on Kinderman’s background and nothing like that had shown up.

What the hell did that mean? It wasn’t enough to go on. He didn’t have time to look up every old observatory in the world and then go and check them out on the off chance that Kinderman might be there when all he really wanted to do was get on a plane and fly to southern Turkey.

He froze as a thought struck him.

He clicked on the ghost icon and scrolled quickly through the document looking for the second lot of CARBON results. There they were:

There was a link next to the first one and he clicked it open to remind himself of what it said.

He clicked back to the map still open from earlier and typed Gobekli Tepe into the get directions field.

The map widened a little and marked a route there from Gaziantep. It was just over an hour’s drive east. Ruin was a half hour’s drive northwest. Shepherd closed the laptop and started the engine, his mind made up and his destination set. He could decide which way to go when he got there.

86

The phone buzzed.

The Novus Sancti rose from his chair and quickly walked out of the building, answering it as he passed through a door and into the chill of the day.

“Yes?”

“Archangel is dead.”

Miss Boerman’s voice sounded tense and stretched thin. Behind her he could hear the clamor of people.

“Where are you?”

“At the police station. They gave me my phone call so I called you.”

The Sanctus nodded, his mind working through the ramifications of this news, moving the various pieces in play around in his head as if he was resetting a chessboard. “Archangel has served the Lord well, and so have you. Say nothing and the Lord will provide for you, both in spirit and of course in the more earthly matter of legal counsel.”

He hung up, uncomfortable about talking on an open line coming from inside a police station. He powered the phone down, prised the back off, removed the SIM card then crushed it under his boot.

Back inside the building he settled behind his desk, his face lit by the glow of a computer screen. He tapped a code to unlock it and an e-mail program opened up. It was an online account operating behind a daisy chain of virtual networks, so anything sent to or from it was totally untraceable. He reread the message he had been composing, his lips moving slightly, as if uttering a silent prayer:

He checked the addresses against a list he had spent months compiling. It contained direct contacts for every major news outlet across the globe as well as the press offices of most major Western governments. He rechecked the various attachments: the countdown application found on Douglas’s laptop; copies of the latest FBI and police reports regarding the events at Goddard and Marshall so they would take the message seriously. When he was satisfied everything was in order he typed three words into the subject line:

Then pressed send and watched his message fly.

87

Liv came to with a start. The citrus smell was stronger now and mixed with something acrid and dry that burned the back of her throat. Someone was standing over her, holding a bottle under her nose and she turned, raising her hand at the same time to bat it away.

“Hey, take it easy. You’re okay. It’s just smelling salts.”

She blinked and looked back into the gentle eyes of the Italian doctor.

“What happened?” she asked.

“You passed out.”

Liv tried to get up but he laid a hand on her shoulder and firmly eased her back down. “You should stay here for a while, get some rest. I’ve put you on a saline drip to get some fluids into you and there’s some Perfalgan in there too to get your temperature down: you were up at 104 degrees — not good. I also took the liberty of stealing a little blood.” He pointed at a small Band-Aid in the crook of her arm.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Giorgio Giambanco — hell of a mouthful, no? You can call me George if you like. What’s yours?”

“Liv — Adamsen,” she added, defaulting to formality in the face of a medical professional.

“Okay, Miss Adamsen, talk me through your fainting episode, was it sudden or did it come on gradually?”

“It was the heat I think. I started to feel feverish so I headed inside.”

He tilted her head up, checking the glands in her neck with his fingertips. “Any nausea?”

“Yes, a little, and the ground felt like it was moving. I started getting tunnel vision. There was a smell too, like lemons.”

He frowned, checking her blood-pressure readings from a cuff. “When did you notice the smell?”

“When I was still outside, though it was stronger inside the building. In fact I can still smell it.”

He was about to respond when one of the new people stepped into the room and placed a small tray on the countertop. It contained two small vials filled with blood and a piece of paper with various results written on it by hand. The new doctor shot her a smile that was hard to read then was gone. George ripped the Velcro of the pressure cuff from her arm. “Sounds like heat exhaustion,” he said, turning to the blood results and picking up the piece of paper. “You need to rehydrate and take it easy. No more demolition work in the midday sun for you.” He studied the results and frowned. “You said you experienced nausea?” He looked up at her in a way that made her feel vaguely nervous.

“Yes.”

“Have you vomited at all?”

She shook her head.

“And you said you smelled the lemons while you were still outside the building.”

“Yes, I can still smell them.”

“And does the smell also make you feel a little sick?”

“A little.” She felt panicky. “What is it? Am I having a brain hemorrhage or something? I read somewhere that people smell things before having a stroke.”

“No, no — it’s nothing like that. What you’re smelling is just some disinfectant we brought with us that they’re now using to swab out the canteen. It’s got some lemon scent in it, not much — I can’t really smell it at all. But you smelled it from way off, when you were still outside the building.”

Liv’s heart continued to race at the prospect of whatever was wrong with her.

“There are many things that can cause hyperosmia,” he said in a gentle way that wasn’t helping. “That’s just a fancy word for an enhanced sense of smell. And your blood tests confirm that the reason for yours is very common.”

Liv relaxed a fraction. At least whatever she had wasn’t exotic and therefore more likely to be treatable. “What do I have?”

He smiled and the skin crinkled around his eyes. “It’s not so much what you have as what you’re going to have. You’re pregnant, Miss Adamsen. You’re going to have a baby.”