The Tower

88

Shepherd parked the Durango in long-term parking and headed for the ticket office.

Charlotte/Douglas International Airport was the usual cavernous barn of a building and was in total chaos when Shepherd stepped through the door. There were long lines snaking away from every ticket desk and the whole building vibrated with noise and stress. A lot of it was coming from the large crowds of people gathered around the TV sets dotted through the waiting lounges and Shepherd felt sick when he saw what was on them.

It was the countdown Shepherd had seen in Douglas’s cabin, the same one that was installed on his own phone, ticking down now on every screen. A caption beneath it read COUNTDOWN TO THE END OF DAYS? A somber news anchor was talking to the camera as a montage of images played out behind him — more riots, more roads clogged with migrating people, more cities dark and burning, and not just here but in major cities all over the world as the slow creep of panic spread. The picture cut to the smoldering wreck of the building at Marshall, then a heavily censored photo of Professor Douglas flashed up, hanging from the wall of his cabin, the word Heretic, highlighted on the wall next to him and a new caption flashed up: WHAT DID THEY SEE?

Shepherd drifted over to one of the ticket desks, avoiding eye contact with all the waiting passengers as he cut in at the head of the line.

What did they see indeed…

“You’ll have to wait in line, sir.” The man behind the counter was rail thin and had the thickest eyebrows Shepherd had ever seen on someone under the age of fifty.

Shepherd flashed his ID. “Government business.”

The skinny guy looked up. The eyebrows underlined the deep furrows in his forehead, reflecting the day he was having. “Okay, let me just deal with this gentleman and I’ll be right with you.”

Shepherd waited while the man collected his boarding pass then wheeled his carry-on bag away into the crowd.

“Now, sir, where do you need to go?”

“I need the first connecting flight to a place called Gaziantep. It’s in southern Turkey.”

The eyebrows shot up and his fingers drummed across the keyboard. “Best I can do is an indirect flight via Istanbul. Good news is, it leaves in just over an hour.”

“Okay, let’s do it.”

“You have travel vouchers?”

Shepherd felt the blood rise to his cheeks. “No. I’ll pay for it on a card.”

Usually federal agents traveling on commercial flights had prepaid tickets or documents that entitled them to fly. “Checking anything into the hold, sir?”

Shepherd shook his head. The eyebrows shot up again in surprise. Shepherd hoped this guy never played poker for money.

The clerk finished tapping. “That will be one thousand two hundred and fifty-eight dollars, sir.”

Something twisted in Shepherd’s stomach as he handed over the card. It was more than he had anticipated and he wasn’t sure if it would exceed his limit. The guy with the eyebrows swiped the card and stared at the ticket machine for what seemed like an eternity before it chattered to life and spat out a receipt. Shepherd retrieved his card.

“Boarding has already started, gate number twenty-two. Have a nice day.”

Shepherd took his passport and boarding pass and moved quickly away from the desk. He shuffled through security, dumping the contents of his pockets into a tray. All he had was a phone, some loose change and a couple of credit cards. He’d had less in his life, but not by much.

He stepped through the metal detector and stuffed everything but the phone back in the pocket of the coat he had borrowed from NASA. He took a deep breath and dialed Franklin’s number.

“Morning.” Franklin sounded as tired as he felt. “You made it to Charlotte?”

“Yeah, kind of. Where are you?”

“Driving home.”

“You seen the news?”

“Yep. Seems the end of the world will be televised after all. You got anything new for me?”

Shepherd ran through everything he had learned in the last few hours. It was cathartic, like a weight gradually lifting off him with every word he spoke. “I’ve left the car in the long-term parking lot,” he said. “Smith’s laptop is in there and so is Williams’s gun.”

“You’re unarmed?”

“I didn’t think they’d let me on an international flight with it, seeing as they’re not even letting people take large bottles of water onboard.”

“What if it’s a trap? What if Kinderman is drawing you out — ever think about that?”

“It’s not just about Kinderman.” He took a deep breath, as if he was about to take a dive off a high board. “I never did tell you about my missing two years.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t—”

“I was homeless.” He let the breath out and imagined it drifting away in the air, carrying his confession with it. “When the NASA funding was cut I ran out of money pretty fast. I dropped out of school, had no place to live, no family, no job. I was pretty depressed about how life had turned out and it dragged me down fast. It’s a downward spiral and the lower you get, the less you care. And no one else cares either. It’s amazing how easy it is to fall through the cracks and end up on the street. Then you become invisible.”

“So what happened to pull you out of it?”

“Melisa happened. You asked me who she was. She was a charity worker, here in the States on some kind of exchange visa. She found me in the stinking basement of a building in Detroit along with an assortment of junkies, winos and meth heads. I was only on the booze, which in some ways is even more pathetic. I wasn’t even a good washout.

“One day I was sleeping off a drunk when this angel appeared asking for Annie. Annie was a runaway teen who worked the streets to fund her habit and keep her pimp happy. She was also eight months’ pregnant. Melisa was part of the women’s health program, training to be a midwife and volunteering in her spare time. Annie had missed her checkup so Melisa had come into that stinking basement just because she was worried about her. That took some guts.

“Anyway, we found Annie unconscious, lying on a stained mattress in one of the smaller rooms in the basement people used sometimes to turn tricks. The reason she had missed her appointment was that she was in labor and had turned to her painkiller of choice. She was totally out of it, the needle still in her arm — and the baby was coming.

“Melisa was incredible. There was no sense of judgment or disgust about what she was doing or where she was, she just got down to the business of bringing that baby into the world. And when it was born, something so small and perfect and new in the middle of all that filth, I felt ashamed.”

He took a deep breath as the memories came fast and painful.

“I was helping her clean the baby when the boyfriend arrived — a mean son-of-a-bitch called Floyd who kept in shape by handing out beatings to the women he ran and anyone else who got in his way. He saw the child and told us to leave. Melisa refused. I don’t know if he was going to kill it and get Annie back on the streets and earning again, or maybe he had a buyer lined up — everything has a street value, even a newborn baby.”

Shepherd stared out at the busy concourse but in his mind he was back in that basement room, filth, food wrappers and empty bottles on the floor and tacked to the wall a fading Apocalypse Now movie poster with a bright orange sun that shone no light into that dark place.

“Melisa refused to move. Floyd pulled a knife. I’d heard he’d been known to slice the face of any girl who crossed him so I reacted, grabbed a bottle from the floor and threw it at him. It caught him on the side of the head, hard enough to knock him back but not enough to stop him. Next thing I know I’m on top of him, knees pinning his arms down, another bottle in my hand. And I just kept hitting him with it. I knew if I let him get up he’d kill me and probably kill Melisa too so I just kept hitting him until he stopped moving. The bottle must have broken at some point and cut his neck. I didn’t even realize it. There was so much blood. It was like someone had turned on a tap.

“I can’t even remember what happened next but somehow Melisa got us all out of there. She took us to the shelter where she worked and cleaned us all up. I was all for turning myself in but she told me not to. She said it was an accident, self-defense, and that I should wait until the police came looking.”

“Let me guess,” Franklin said, “they never did.”

“I guess one less scumbag on the streets doesn’t warrant too much of an investigation. So I stayed at the shelter and started getting myself back together. I kicked the booze, got on the twelve-step program, started running computer training courses and setting up networks and Web sites for the charity, just making myself useful and giving myself an excuse to keep hanging around.

“God knows how but Melisa and I ended up falling in love. I guess we shared this big secret that created an intimacy and things just grew from there. Hell of a first date. We kept it all secret because of her father. He was the doctor who ran the project. He was a strict Muslim and I don’t think he would have taken too kindly to the prospect of having an infidel ex-bum for a prospective son-in-law.

“Anyway, months passed and Melisa’s visa was about to expire, so I asked her to marry me — not because of the visa but because I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anything before or since. We had it all planned, we were going to slip away and just do it. Then a few days before we planned to run away something happened.

“Looking back I should have known something was wrong. Her old man called me into his office late one afternoon, said he had a job for me. There was another homeless organization we worked with way over on the other side of town and their computer network had melted down or something and they needed to fix it urgently. It was late in the day, rush hour, but I went anyway — anything to score points with my prospective father-in-law. When I got to the place the guy there didn’t know anything about it so I turned right around and drove back again.

“By the time I made it back through all the traffic to the shelter the whole street was blocked off. There’d been some kind of incident. Someone had thrown petrol bombs into the place and the whole building had gone up. There were racist slogans painted on the walls too: terrorists, ragheads, that kind of thing — post nine-eleven hate gone crazy. I tried to find Melisa and her father, checked the hospitals and everything, but they were gone.

“At first I thought they must be scared and hiding out somewhere. But when the weeks went by, then months with no word, I thought maybe she’d had second thoughts about me, about living and working in a country that seemed to blindly hate Islam so much.

“I did what I could to find her, but the police weren’t interested. They weren’t missing persons technically and there was something suspicious about the fire. An insurance scam, they called it.”

“So you joined the FBI to see if you could find her yourself?”

“Partly. Though in truth everything I told O’Halloran was also true. I do feel I owe my country a debt for everything it’s done for me.”

He heard Franklin take a deep breath on the other end of the line. “You know sometimes people disappear because they want to. Or they disappear because they’re dead.”

“I don’t think she is.” Through the phone he could hear the white noise of tires in the background. “You asked me a while back what ‘home’ meant to me, well for me it’s not a place, it’s a person, it’s Melisa. She’s where I’m trying to get to and if she was dead I don’t think I’d feel what I’m feeling. Even if she doesn’t love me, even if she never did, I still love her and I just want to know that she’s safe. I just want to know she’s okay.”

Shepherd glanced up at the departure’s board and saw Last Call flashing by his flight number. “Got to go, Agent Franklin, I’ll call you if I find anything useful.”

“Take care, Agent Shepherd. I hope you find what you’re looking for. And if you happen to find Kinderman and the world really is about to get smashed into a million pieces then do me a favor — keep it to yourself. I changed my mind; I’d rather not know.”

89

Gabriel was woken by the sound of a bell clanging mournfully through the darkness. He opened his eyes and counted the strikes, ten in all, though there might have been more before. It had been evening when Dr. Kaplan had started drawing blood. It was dark now, the room lit only by the glow of the monitors he was plugged into.

He stretched out in the bed and found that his arms and legs were still bound tightly to it.

“Hello?” His voice fell away into the silence. It had to be later than ten to be this quiet. They must have taken his blood over to the main lab and left him to his rest, strapped down in his own private prison.

He listened to the sounds of the room: the faint beep of the monitor keeping time with his heartbeat, the whisper of fans keeping circuits cool and the soft bang of a door that sounded both close and also very far away as the echo bounced around inside the warren of the mountain. He looked back over at the window, his one real connection to the outside world, and felt a chill. Someone was there, a monk — standing by the door leading to the bedchamber. It was too dark to see his face, but Gabriel could make out the white surgical mask covering the lower portion of it, and above that, the lenses of a pair of spectacles reflected what light there was in the room, making it seem like the man’s eyes were glowing. The heart monitor bleeped a little faster and Gabriel tried to calm himself by focusing on his breathing and doing what he could to take control of the situation. “Good evening,” he said, as if he had met someone out on a stroll. “You get stuck with the night shift?”

The figure said nothing, staring at him with its luminous eyes. His silent scrutiny, the stealth of his appearance and the fact that he had not answered when he had called out combined to make alarm bells sound in Gabriel’s head. He tensed his arms, testing the bindings. Too tight. He might be able to work his way out of them, given time, but his instincts told him he didn’t have any.

“Are you here to take more blood?” he said, improvising. “They said they’d be back at the next bells…” He breathed out all the way at the end of the sentence, creating space where his inflated chest had been. He moved his right arm, the one nearest the figure, the one he would need to defend himself with if it came to it. It shifted, just a little. He tried to bend his arm, breathing out further, the heart monitor racing again. It shifted a little more, but still not enough. “What’s your name?” he asked, breathing right out at the end of the sentence and trying again to loosen his arm.

“I will not give you power over me by volunteering my name.” The man’s voice was low and filled with malice.

“Suit yourself. My name’s Gabriel.”

“I know what you are.” He moved closer.

Gabriel pressed himself into the bed. He saw something sharp in the man’s hand. He looked around for something to defend himself with if he could get his arm free. The only things within reach were the wires connecting him to the various monitors now registering his growing anxiety.

He tried one last time to free his arm but it was no good. He looked back up at the glowing circles where the eyes should be and did the only thing he could do. He flicked the clip from the end of his finger.

A high-pitched alarm immediately split the silence. “Technically, I just died,” Gabriel said. “People will be running here right now to try and restart my heart.”

The eyes shifted to the door then back to the bed. “Then pray they are quick.” He lunged forward, the metal of the blade flashing in the dark. Gabriel watched it rise up, breathing out as far as possible to create what space he could inside the cocoon of his bindings, then shoved himself violently to one side as it arced down. The movement was enough to jar the bed and shift it a couple of inches so that the blade caught the side of his chest instead of the heart where it was aimed, slicing flesh and glancing off a rib before burying itself in the mattress.

Gabriel felt pain burn in his side, but put it from his mind, staying focused. The stabbing movement had brought the monk’s head close to his own and he seized his chance, spitting full in his face. The monk recoiled, dragging the knife free from the mattress, too shocked to raise it again.

“I carry a mutated form of the infection,” Gabriel shouted at him, his words the only weapons he had, “harmless to me but deadly to others. That’s why they keep me here. You have maybe thirty seconds to wipe it off or you’ll be dead within a day.”

The monk reached up to his face but did not dare to touch it. Beneath the wail of the cardiac alarm the sound of running feet could now be heard. The monk looked at Gabriel one last time then turned and ran from the room, heading back to the bedchamber and the washroom beyond.

Gabriel could feel blood trickling down his side and pooling on the mattress and he wondered if he had any left. The main door flew open and Athanasius rushed in followed by Thomas, Kaplan and a couple of others. “Someone just tried to kill me,” Gabriel said, wincing as bright lights flickered on. “He went in there.”

A loud bang echoed from the bedchamber and Athanasius ran over. “He’s gone into the private stairway,” he said, disappearing after him. “The door’s locked,” he shouted from inside, “he must have a key.” He reappeared and looked down at the blood spreading through Gabriel’s bindings then turned to Father Thomas and uttered a single word with such venom that it sounded like a curse.

“Malachi!”

90

Shepherd was one of the last people at the gate but one of the first on the flight. The guy with the eyebrows had apparently given him priority boarding, another nod to the power of the badge.

He found his seat over the wing and by the window and settled gratefully into it. The sun had struggled into the sky and hung low, just below the clouds, shining straight into his face. He closed his window shade and palmed his phone, figuring he had maybe ten minutes before someone made him turn it off. He had used the time lining up at the gate to try and chase down a number for some local law in Ruin. He was going to ride the Bureau ticket as long as he could, hoping it would take him all the way before he got derailed. Sooner or later he was going to have to answer questions about the MPD searches and why he had held on to and pursued leads rather than share them. There was every chance that this particular flag might go up while he was in the air. Which meant he needed to make contact now while he still had some access and leverage.

He opened the page he had found for the Ruin City Police Department and hit a hot link to dial the main switchboard. A foreign-sounding ring tone purred in his ear then someone answered in a clipped, businesslike tone he understood but in a language he did not.

“You speak English?”

“Little.”

“My name is Joseph Shepherd, I’m a special agent with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. Do you have an international liaison officer I could speak to?”

“Moment please.”

Nondescript music filled his ear as he was put on hold and he watched the rest of the passengers embark. They were all dark skinned and black haired, Turkish people heading back to their country of birth he guessed, answering the call to go home.

“This is Subinspector Kundakçi. How can we help?”

Shepherd told him everything he had learned about Melisa, only stopping short of revealing the real reason he was looking for her. He threw in some details about the missing American journalist Liv Adamsen, hinting that she might be in some way connected. He needed a plausible reason to be calling from an American law enforcement agency to ask about a Turkish national and this was the best he had come up with. He left him his name and number and then hung up just as a stewardess marched toward him, her overmadeup orange face a mask of stern disapproval.

“You need to turn off all electronic devices and have the window shade in the upright position until after takeoff, sir.” She continued down the aisle looking for further infringements of the rules. Shepherd turned his phone off, slid the window shade back up and turned his head away from the direct glare of the sun. He was exhausted, and his nerves were shot after the unbelievable day he’d had. He’d been blown up, crossed six states in various forms of transport, discovered the brutal murder of someone he knew personally and found out that the love of his life was still alive. The flight time to Istanbul was nearly nine hours and he planned to sleep for as much of it as he could.

He closed his eyes and thought of red threads stretching tighter, pulling him toward her. He smiled and settled down in his seat, not daring to tilt it back for fear of incurring the stewardess’s wrath. He was asleep before they turned the engines on. He didn’t see the only other Americans get on the plane and take their seats ten rows in front of him, a man and a woman. She glanced in his direction once before she sat down, briefly registering the man she had last seen through the sights of her sniper scope, then settled in her seat and rested her head on the shoulder of the man, cozying up and getting comfortable for the long flight to Turkey.

91

Athanasius and Father Thomas reached the top of the stairs and stopped, listening to the still darkness of the upper mountain chambers. By the time Athanasius had retrieved torches and the key to the staircase Malachi had a five-minute head start on them.

“He’ll get to the library long before we will,” Thomas said through grabbed breaths, “then he’ll lock the reading room door behind him.”

Athanasius nodded. “We should make for the main entrance, it’s nearer. How quickly do you think you can break in?”

“If we’re not worried about tripping any alarms it will be easy.”

“I think the time for stealth has passed,” Athanasius said, and started to descend.

It took them ten long minutes to snake down the stairs and reach the library. Athanasius leaned against the wall, relishing the cold of the rock as Thomas prised the hand scanner off the wall with his pocketknife, bared two wires and touched them together.

The door slid open with a hiss and a puff of air, showing that the positive pressure within the climate-controlled library was still active. It was designed to keep mold spores and other undesirables out of the air surrounding the priceless collection of texts. It would also be an effective way of slowing the penetration of the airborne infection into the library. Malachi was clearly being selective about exactly which parts of modernity he was turning his back on.

Thomas stepped forward and looked up, bracing himself for the shriek of the intruder alarm. “He must have deactivated the motion sensors,” Thomas said when none came. “That’s why the lights are not working.”

Athanasius moved past him, heading into the main collection. It was a strange experience, moving through the library without the usual glow of a follow light. The sweep of their flashlight beams revealed much more than he had ever seen before. The follow lights usually only allowed one to glimpse isolated parts, so seeing it in its enormous entirety like this, the enormous bookcases filled with every great thought mankind had ever had, made him profoundly sad: it was like finding a whale kept captive in a tank when it was used to having the whole ocean to roam in.

“Reading rooms,” Thomas said, shining his torch over to a set of doors up ahead. Athanasius reached the door to the reading room of the Sancti and twisted the handle. “Locked. Do you think he’s passed through already?”

Something clattered to the floor in the distance, giving them their answer, and they hurried after it. The noises continued as they made their way through the library. It sounded like some great creature was lumbering through the dark, bumping into everything as it made its way. They passed into the next chamber and discovered the cause of the noise. There were books everywhere, swept from the shelves by the armful onto the floor. It was as if a horde of vandals had ransacked the place, pulling everything from the shelves and shredding the pages.

“Why is he doing this?” Thomas surveyed the devastation as they moved through it. “No one loves the library more than Malachi. It makes no sense for him to do this.”

“I don’t think he is in full possession of his senses. I think his world has fallen apart and this is a manifestation of it.”

They rounded a corner and saw light up ahead, coming from inside the Crypto Revelatio.

“Malachi!” Athanasius called out. “We just want to talk.” He switched off his flashlight and inched down the corridor toward the light, the room beyond the arch coming gradually into view. It was in even greater chaos than the rest of the library, with books and piles of paper spilling out of the door into the corridor. “There’s only one way out of there, Malachi. It’s a dead end. If you don’t come out then we will come in.”

“Stay back,” Malachi’s voice boomed from the chamber.

“We’re just here to talk. We want to help you but we need to understand what you read in the Starmap that has made you do this to your beloved library, and try and take a man’s life.”

“That is no man.”

Athanasius glanced over at Thomas, who was inching his way forward along the other side of the tunnel. “For mercy’s sake, Malachi, tell us what you read.”

“It doesn’t matter, it’s too late anyway. You should have let me kill it before it becomes too strong.”

Athanasius reached the edge of the arch and peered into the room. It was a riot of mess, the neat order of the library turned into a scene of chaos with shelves half emptied and the floor crammed with paper and scrolls like the nest of a huge rodent. Malachi sat at the center of it behind a desk piled high with more paper and illuminated by a row of guttering candles.

“Tell me what you read, Malachi. Let us look at it together and perhaps we will see something different in it.”

Malachi looked up, his eyes huge behind the pebbled lenses. “You are wrong,” he said, picking up another candle and holding the wick to the flame of the last one. “You have been wrong all along, wrong about modernizing the Citadel, wrong about allowing civilians inside the mountain.” The wick caught and he turned the candle in his hand until the flame grew brighter. “And wrong about there being only one way out of here.”

He dropped the candle into a pile of paper and it erupted in a whoosh of flame. Athanasius leaped forward to try and stamp it out but Malachi stood up fast, heaving the table over as he did so, tipping the row of candles onto more piles of dry paper to create an instant wall of flame.

Father Thomas looked up at the ceiling, expecting the CO₂ system to activate and smother the fire. But nothing happened. Malachi had deactivated that too. He grabbed Athanasius and heaved him backward. “We need to get out of here.”

“And you are also wrong to think you have stopped me,” Malachi shouted after them from inside the inferno, smoke rising up around him as his cassock started to burn. “There is more than one way to kill a demon.”

92

Athanasius staggered backward from the entrance, disbelieving the horror of what he had just seen. Already the smoke was thick in the air and the fire was spreading from the Crypto Revelatio, igniting pages from spilled books lined up along the corridor in readiness.

“Run!” Thomas shouted.

“But Malachi…”

“Malachi is gone. He cannot be saved, we must do what we can to save the library.” He kicked a pile of books aside, trying to create a firebreak, but there was too much loose paper lying around and the flames caught them instead and sent burning embers floating through the air toward the tinderbox of the next chamber. “Positive air pressure is feeding the fire,” Thomas shouted above the roaring flames. “Our best hope is to get back to the control room and turn the gas extinguishers on before the whole thing goes up.”

They stumbled away from the fire, feeling the heat at their backs and tasting smoke in their mouths. The main entrance was a fifteen-minute walk away, maybe five minutes’ running, but they were both exhausted and Athanasius was also in deep shock from what he had witnessed. He could not get the image of Malachi out of his mind, eyes blazing in victory, ecstasy almost, as he himself started to burn.

He turned a corner and felt cool air wash over him as he ran through the snowdrift of torn pages littering the Bible room. He was coughing from the smoke and could hear the crackle and roar of it behind him. He risked a look back. The flames had not made it into the room. He could see the glow of the fire but it was still contained in the corridor beyond. Maybe they would have a chance to stop it from spreading.

Just as this thought crossed his mind a figure straight from hell burst through the door, arms outstretched and dripping fire as it ran straight at them, covering half the distance before it stumbled and fell, straight into a pile of torn pages and tortured Bibles that blazed instantly into flame. The whole room was burning in seconds, flames sucking ravenously at the air and billowing thick smoke. They were running now, all thoughts of fatigue banished by pure fear. The fire was almost keeping pace with them, leaping from shelf to shelf and room to room, roaring at their heels like a hungry predator with the scent of blood in its nostrils.

They made it to the reading rooms and hammered on the doors, rousing the few black cloaks still resident there. “FIRE!” they both shouted, pounding on the next door. “Run to the exit.”

The black cloaks emerged, sleepy and stunned. A few, feeling protective of their domain, saw the fire and started running toward it. “It’s too late,” Athanasius shouted after them, pointing at Thomas, who was already at the door of the control room. “We’re going to switch the fire extinguishers back on. Just get out and warn the others what has happened here.”

Athanasius followed Thomas into the control room and found him standing in the middle of it staring at the smashed control panels and broken screens. There would be no quick fix of the fire systems; Malachi had seen to that.

Athanasius tugged at Thomas’s arm, dragging him out of the room and over to the entrance. The door to the air lock was still open and a steady flow of air was breezing through it, sucked by the conflagration now feeding on the library. The black cloaks had already gone and the fire was almost at the entrance hall now, its expansion like a slow explosion that was tearing the library apart. Thomas fumbled in the wall cavity where the scanner had been, found the wires he’d stripped earlier and touched them back together just as the smoke reached them and vomited from the door. The wires sparked and the door slid shut, slicing through the smoke and cutting off the noise of the fire.

“Will that hold?” Athanasius asked between gulped breaths.

“Only for a while.” Thomas levered off the cover of the second scanner and worked fast to strip more wires and hot-wire the second circuit. The second door slid shut, cutting off the sound of the fire entirely. Athanasius looked through the glass panels in both doors. The fire had reached the entrance now and was creeping along the desk and casting Halloween orange light over everything. It was like staring into hell.

“We have to get away from here,” Thomas said. “When these doors give way the whole mountain is going to turn into one giant chimney and every corridor will fill with smoke.”

Athanasius remembered the last thing Malachi had said—there is more than one way to kill a demon—this must have been his plan. But he had forgotten about one thing.

“Follow me,” he said, hurrying away down the corridor. “I know where we will be safe.”

The garden was quiet and dark when the first stretcher emerged into the cool night. The trees were all gone, burned along with the bodies, and shadows flickered on the high moonlit walls, picking out the first columns of smoke leaking from the mountain as if the long-ago volcano that had formed the crater had woken again and was starting to boil.

“We should occupy the very middle,” Athanasius said, “in case the heat causes rockfalls.”

More and more stretchers came out of the mountain and began to collect in neat rows in the middle of the garden, like eggs from a broken anthill. Everyone worked in silence, the earnest urgency of their task focusing all effort on saving those who could not hope to save themselves. Only when the last stretcher had been carried out into the cool night air did anyone stop to take stock of their situation and perform a head count. There were only five people missing, Malachi and the four doctors who had chosen to remain in the abbot’s quarters, their contamination suits protecting them against the smoke and their desire to continue their work outweighing any fear they had of the fire.

Athanasius patrolled the rows of beds, struck by how quiet everyone had become. Inside the cathedral cave the sounds of suffering had been like a solid thing, trapped along with everything else. Out here the few moans that escaped the cracked lips of those bound to their beds drifted upward, mingling with the smoke on their way to the heavens. There was a freedom out here in the garden, you could close your eyes and imagine the walls away. He closed his eyes, and did just that, imagining himself far, far away from here, while all around him his world continued to burn.

93

Gaziantep International Airport was crammed with people, noise and heat. Shepherd stepped into it feeling he’d landed on a different planet.

He’d checked his phone in the transfer lounge in Istanbul but the cop he had left a message for still hadn’t called him back. On the short hop to Gaziantep he had slept again, though it had felt like the blink of an eye.

He stood in line now, sweat trickling inside his shirt and jacket from more than just the rising heat. He pulled his phone from his pocket and switched it back on, looking across the heads of the people in front of him at an armed guard standing behind the passport booth, the unfamiliar uniform underlining how far he was outside his jurisdiction. The doors that had so far opened at the flash of his badge would remain firmly shut here. But the ache he felt inside, the one that was pulling him toward Melisa, was so strong it was almost painful. He knew she was here and that this was exactly where he needed to be.

The phone caught a signal and vibrated in his hand. The countdown clock was still running on the screen, the number much smaller than it had been before, and he had one voice message from a blocked number. He called his voice mail and lifted the phone to his ear, his heart beating so loudly he wondered if he would be able to hear anything.

The message was short — a man’s voice, heavily accented but speaking English.

“Hello, my name is Davud Arkadian. I am an inspector with the Ruin police. Your number has been passed to me along with your various inquiries. I have some information for you but it would be better if we talk. Please call me when you get this message.”

He reeled off a phone number and Shepherd fumbled in his jacket for a pen to scrawl the number on his hand, then copied it into the phone, adding the international code for Turkey. The call would be bounced back to the States before coming here again and probably cost him about a hundred bucks a minute. He would worry about that if he was still around to get the bill.

The line moved forward. The ringing tone filled his ear, mingling with the loud beating of his heart. He recognized the inspector’s name from the newspapers they’d found in Kinderman’s house. Arkadian had been shot in the course of investigating the death of the monk and had been involved with the missing Americans he had name-dropped to lend some weight to his request for information about Melisa. It was possible he was about to be tripped up by his own subterfuge and have to listen to a detailed report about someone he had little interest in.

“Allo?”

“Hi. Is that Inspector Arkadian?”

“Yes.”

“This is Agent Shepherd — from the FBI.”

“Oh yes, thanks for calling back. Apologies for the lateness of the hour.”

Shepherd glanced out at the brightening day. “I’m not in the States. I just landed in Turkey.” There was a pause on the line. “You said you had some information,” Shepherd prompted.

“Yes.”

“About whom?”

“About Melisa Erroll mainly.”

Shepherd felt the blood drain from his face and he had to take a deep breath to steady himself. He glanced up and saw the guard frowning in his direction. There was a sign by his head with a picture of a cell phone that had a line through it and something in Turkish that undoubtedly said “No phones.”

“Listen,” Shepherd said, suddenly paranoid that his only lifeline to everything was about to be confiscated. “Can I call you back in a few minutes?”

“Where are you exactly?”

“I’m at Gaziantep airport, I’m just going through passport control.”

“Write this down.”

Arkadian was already reeling off directions and Shepherd scrawled them on his hand beneath the phone number. His eyes flicked between the message and the guard.

“Give these directions to a taxi driver and give my name when you reach the first roadblock,” Arkadian said. “I’ll see you in about forty minutes.”

94

The fire took two days to burn its way through the entire collected works of mankind, and another five before the smoke cleared and it cooled down sufficiently for anyone to venture safely into the part of the mountain where the library had been.

Thomas was the first to step through the remains of the air lock. Both doors were gone entirely and the metal frames that had held them were twisted beyond recognition. He stood in what had once been the entrance, awed by the blackened nothingness the library had become. The black cloaks followed him, one of them breaking down when he saw the devastation.

“See what you can salvage,” Thomas said, “and I will do the same.”

The control room was protected by a steel door that was still warm to the touch when Thomas tried to open it. It had buckled in its frame, jamming it tightly in place, giving him hope that something beyond it may have survived. He found a length of metal on the floor, part of a table, and jammed it into a gap in the side of the ruined door. He leaned back, heaving on the bar until the door shifted with a shriek of tortured metal. He shone his torch through the gap and hope fell away into the darkness beyond.

The fire had gotten in here too. Even though the door had kept the flames out, the air must have still become superheated and ignited everything flammable in the room. Without oxygen it hadn’t burned for long but it had been enough to destroy everything. The control systems and circuitry had all melted and fallen down through the racks, collecting on the floor in bizarre puddles of solidified plastic and wire. He grabbed the sides of the door, leaving finger marks in the soot and wrenched it open, wide enough to step through. Practically his whole life’s work had been contained in this room. It had been the most technologically advanced and sophisticated library preservation system ever devised, but in the end all of it had been undone by a madman with something as simple as a fallen candle.

He took a breath laced with smoke and headed to the far end of the room where another steel door the size of a briefcase was set into the stone. He wiped the soot from the dial protruding from the center so he could read the numbers then carefully dialed in the code to open the safe.

One of Thomas’s initiatives had been to create a digital copy of every single item in the Great Library. It had taken nearly five years to accomplish. The entire collection — millions of books and hundreds of millions of pages — had fit on to just eight removable storage discs and they were kept in this safe. The door he was unlocking was seven inches thick and the rest of the safe was set into solid rock, which should have helped keep the insides cool. Even so, the fire had been so fierce that the drives might still be damaged. But as long as they were still intact he could repair them and effectively rescue the contents of the library from the flames.

He dialed in the final number, twisted the handle and heaved open the door. He stared at the glowing interior, untouched by flame or smoke and looking totally incongruous among the devastation. But it was empty. In truth he had half-expected it. There was only one other person who knew the codes to this safe.

Malachi had been thorough if nothing else.

95

It took Shepherd five attempts and an offer to pay double the fare before he finally found a taxi driver willing to take him to Ruin.

“I go only as far as roadblock,” the driver said, “then you walk.” Shepherd took it, thinking it had to be better than walking from the airport, which seemed his only other option.

He sat in the back of the cab on worn fabric seats, breathing in the chemical scent of vanilla air freshener and watching the unfamiliar countryside and olive trees flit past his window. Ahead of him the Taurus Mountains rose up in a jagged horizon. He tried not to think of what might lie ahead or what he might be about to learn. There could be no turning back now.

The road curved up into foothills, cutting out the sun so it seemed as though they were entering a valley of shadows. They rounded a bend and saw a long line of red brake lights ahead, lighting up the gloom and stretching away to a distant barrier manned by armed soldiers wearing battle fatigues and surgical face masks. The taxi pulled to a stop at the end of the line. There were at least twenty other cars in front of them, a few other taxis but mainly family cars laden with luggage, exactly like the ones Shepherd had seen heading into Charleston.

“Crazy people,” the driver shook his head. “Who comes here?”

“They’re just heading home,” Shepherd said.

The driver shook his head and sucked his teeth.

There was some kind of discussion going on at the barrier with the soldiers who kept shaking their heads, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, their fingers pointing along the lines of their guns, ready to drop to the trigger if things got out of hand.

“I’ll walk from here.” Shepherd handed the driver some notes and got out without waiting for change.

The air outside smelled of cypress sap and wet stone, a huge improvement on the chemical tang of the taxi. Shepherd walked along the edge of the road, his eyes fixed on the barrier ahead. One of the soldiers sensed him coming and turned the black disks of his shaded eyes toward him, twisting his body at the same time so the HK33 slung across his chest was pointing in his direction. Shepherd smiled and raised his hands over his head, one of them holding his badge.

“I’m an American police officer,” he said, arriving at the barrier and stopping short of it. The soldier said nothing. “I’m looking for an Inspector Arkadian. You speak English?”

“No, he doesn’t.” A bear of a man in his early fifties squeezed past the soldiers and peered at Shepherd’s badge through a pair of half-moon, tortoiseshell glasses perched above a surgical mask. He held a hand up in greeting and showed Shepherd his own ID badge identifying himself as Inspector Arkadian. “You’re a little far from home, Special Agent.” He looked up and fixed Shepherd with sharp eyes. “Normally we have a little more warning about international cooperation efforts.”

“I apologize for the suddenness of my appearance.” Shepherd lowered his hands and slipped his badge back in his jacket, his mind flipping through various options of what to say next. The road sat at the bottom of steep walls of drilled rock so that the only way to go any farther was past the roadblock. But he had no authority here and the soldiers didn’t seem to want to let anyone through. “Can we talk somewhere in private?” he said, gambling on this at least getting him on the right side of the barriers.

Arkadian considered for a moment then said something in Turkish and the soldier in front of Shepherd stepped aside to allow him to pass. He stepped through the barrier and heard the clamor of voices double in volume behind him as the other drivers saw what had happened.

“These people,” Arkadian said, nodding back at the line, “more of them arrive each day. They were all born here. They don’t care that the city is still under quarantine, they just want to go home. Especially now that this countdown has appeared on the news.”

“It’s the same all over,” Shepherd said. “Everyone getting ready for the end of the world.”

“Not quite everyone,” Arkadian said, reaching a car and unlocking it. “For some people the world has already ended.”

He didn’t elaborate and Shepherd didn’t pursue it, but as they drove away from the roadblock and down an empty road he could feel the sadness coming off the inspector like something tangible. He selfishly hoped it had nothing to do with the news he was about to hear.

96

The cab pulled up outside the battered building on the outskirts of Gaziantep and Eli stared out at the noisy, busy street. He was in some kind of merchant district with warehouse shops spilling onto the streets and men milling about and haggling energetically and loudly over everything. He showed the driver the piece of paper he had written the address on, convinced they couldn’t possibly be in the right place.

“Is here,” the driver said, pointing at a faded blue door set into the wall. “Is church.”

Eli paid the man and got out, feeling edgy. They’d had to split up at the airport, Carrie following the FBI agent, him heading off to fetch supplies from a local contact Archangel had set them up with. He never liked being away from her, particularly somewhere like this where there were so many triggers for bad memories: the dry heat; the loud conversations in an alien language and Eastern-sounding music blaring from somewhere; the shabby buildings lining dusty streets; the missile minarets of a mosque sticking up above the rooftops. He didn’t like it — not at all — the whole place screamed “hostile.”

He moved over to the door, scoping out the street as he went, automatically looking for sniper positions and ambush points. There were too many to count and the men who had been bartering for goods started to turn their attention to him. Behind him the cab began to move away and he felt a strong urge to run after it, get back in and get the hell out of here. But then Carrie would be disappointed in him and he couldn’t bear to see that sad look in her eyes or know that it was his weakness that had put it there.

He walked over to the door, sweat starting to prickle his scalp, and looked for a name or a sign, anything that might prove he was in the right place. A stack of different doorbells lined the sides of the frame with the names of businesses or individuals he didn’t recognize pinned to each one. The address and instructions Archangel had given him said he was coming to a church, but there was no sign of one here. Panic started to bubble low down in his chest as he realized that, with the taxi now gone, he could be stranded here. He should have made the driver stay until he’d checked it out. Stupid! Carrie would be furious if he came back with nothing. Then he saw it, etched on the plastic case of one of the doorbell buttons, so small anyone would miss it unless they were looking specifically for it — a small cross.

He pressed the button and waited, feeling the eyes of the street upon him. He listened for sounds of movement beyond the thick door but all he heard was the music of the street, sounding strange and unsettling to his ear. He was convinced the volume of the conversations had dropped and that they were now talking about him. He pressed the button again, wondering if the cable that ran out of it and burrowed into the wooden frame like a fat worm was even connected to anything. He felt exposed. Vulnerable. Alone. Sweat beading in his cropped hairline started to run down the sides of his face. He was on the point of turning around and walking away when a loud crack sounded inside the door, making him jump. A gap opened and a round, moonlike face appeared in it. The man was dressed in the traditional long white tunic with a keffiyeh wrapped around his neck. He barely looked at Eli, his restless, bloodshot eyes sizing up the street before opening the door wide enough to let him pass.

Inside, the building was dark and old and smelled of leather and dust. A staircase ran up the center with doors leading off each landing to the various businesses that had been advertised on the bell buttons by the main door.

Eli followed in silence, keeping close to the wheezing, waddling figure of his contact until they reached the very top of the stairs and a plain door that was carefully unlocked with a set of keys kept on a leather thong around the fat man’s neck.

Eli had bowed his head and prayed in some weird churches in his time but this one was in a league all its own. The room was tiny, about the size of a small garage, with a bedroll in one corner and a solitary window crudely taped up with old newspapers to form the sign of the cross. On the floor beneath it votive candles burned on a broad plank of wood set atop a wooden crate, their flames wavering in the disturbed air.

The man closed the door and locked it before leaning toward him and whispering with sour, tobacco breath, “We must be careful, for we are under siege here. The enemy is outside the door. We should pray before we get down to God’s business.”

He dropped to his knees, facing the window, crossing himself before opening his arms wide and holding them up to the ragged, paper-edged cross.

“Lord our Father, bless us and protect us in all that we do in your holy name. And give us the strength to go into battle against the forces of Satan that inhabit your holy lands and help us to defeat those who would seek to destroy you.” He leaned forward as if prostrating himself before the Lord, took hold of the edges of the wooden board and removed it, candles and all, to reveal a neat line of weapons laid out on a blanket beneath it.

Eli reached inside the crate and picked up a Ruger. It looked tiny in his hand but it wasn’t for him. He checked the action and removed the clip. It held only six rounds but that wasn’t necessarily a problem. Carrie was the best shot he had ever seen. For himself he took a Zigana K, a Turkish semiautomatic he had fired before, and a folding hunter’s knife.

“Ammunition?” he asked.

The man turned around in the small space and flipped the bedroll over to show a hatch cut into the floorboards. He lifted the panel out to reveal boxes of ammunition as well as something else Eli had not expected.

“I didn’t ask for a suicide vest,” he said, his eyes fixed on the bundle of explosives and wires as if it was a coiled snake.

The fat man glanced at him. “You are not the only soldier of God who needs a sword,” he said, handing him boxes of shells for the guns he had chosen. “And yours will not be the only battle fought here in the days to come.”

97

Arkadian turned off the road just short of a second roadblock. Beyond it the city of Ruin spread out like a ghost town. There were no people visible, no cars moving down the streets. The only movement was a military truck, crawling along the long, wide boulevard that arrowed its way to the center of the city where the Citadel rose like a spire.

“This is sort of a no-man’s-land,” Arkadian explained, “far enough away from populated areas for the air to be deemed safe by the health authority. We use it as a command center for policing the quarantine. You’re safe here but I still have to ask you to put on one of these.” He leaned into the back of the car and fished a fresh surgical mask from an open carton. Arkadian waited for him to put it on before he opened the door and stepped out.

Shepherd was struck by the sound coming from the other side of the large building they were walking toward — the shrieks and laughter of children playing, their voices tinkling and swooping like birds in the air. “This is one of the kindergartens,” Arkadian explained. “All the children have been evacuated from the city now.” He pushed through the entrance and went inside.

The lobby was choked with posters for mountain hikes and biking and handwritten postcards on bulletin boards offering guided tours of the Old Town. Arkadian walked over to a door in the far wall that opened into an office with a few desks and computer terminals. “Welcome to the police department,” he said, moving to a desk in the corner. “It doesn’t look like much but it’s plugged in to all the relevant databases, all the ones you require, at least.” He pulled a second chair over and gestured for Shepherd to sit then typed in his log-in name and password. Shepherd noticed he was favoring his left hand.

“How’s your arm?” he asked. “I read about what happened.”

“You ever been shot, Agent Shepherd?”

“No.”

“It hurts more than you would imagine and it’s still not properly fixed. The mornings are worst and it aches whenever the weather is about to change.”

The screen flickered and Shepherd caught his breath as a photograph of Melisa appeared.

“Melisa Ana Erroll,” Arkadian said, catching Shepherd’s reaction. “What is your interest in her, exactly?”

“I’d like to talk to her — in relation to an ongoing investigation.”

Arkadian turned in his seat and stared straight at him. “Shall we be honest with each other?” Shepherd shook his head as if he wasn’t sure what he meant. “I’ll start, shall I?” Arkadian offered. “When I got your message I called a few people and ended up speaking to your partner.”

“Franklin?”

“You have another partner?”

Shepherd shrugged. “I’m not sure Franklin would call himself my partner.”

“Well, whoever he is he told me everything, or at least enough so that I know why you’re looking for this woman.” Arkadian removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is never easy and there is never any way to say it except straight. Melisa Erroll fell victim to the blight four months ago when the spread was still in its early stages. She was taken into the Citadel for treatment and apparently died three days later.”

Shepherd couldn’t breathe. Part of him didn’t believe it. He felt the ache inside, stronger now than ever, the red threads still pulsing and twisting.

He looked at the screen in case the photograph wasn’t her. But it was.

He was suddenly aware of everything: his breathing; the way his clothes touched his skin; how his whole body felt awkward in this seat, in this room. He was aware that Arkadian was still talking, and studying him with his knowing eyes, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying. He tried to concentrate until some of his words swam into focus. “Do you need a minute?” He shook his head.

“According to the records her father contracted it first and she looked after him until he was taken into the mountain. Then she fell ill herself.”

Shepherd took a breath and felt his voice vibrating in his head. “Is she — is her body buried somewhere?”

Arkadian shook his head. “All victims of the blight are cremated inside the Citadel.”

Shepherd put his hand to his chest where he still felt the ache. “She can’t be dead,” he said. “I can feel her.”

Arkadian looked at him for a moment, his eyes curious. Then he rose from his chair. “Come with me,” he said, “there’s someone you should meet.”

Shepherd drifted after him like a ghost, down a long corridor with open doors to dormitory-style bedrooms on either side.

“Wait here,” Arkadian said, pointing through one of them to a room filled with triple-decker bunks. Shepherd went in and sat awkwardly on the edge of a bed, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, unable to sit upright in bunks that were built for kids. The sound of children playing rose in volume as Arkadian went outside then faded to silence again as the door shut behind him. The beds were still ruffled from sleep, a different stuffed toy standing guard by each pillow. The one he was sitting on had a rabbit on it. Next to the bed three small suitcases were lined up against the wall, each containing the whole world of an evacuated child.

The door opened again to let the swooping shrieks of happy children flood back into the building. Shepherd looked up to discover a young girl standing in the doorway, her small hands clasped in front of her, her head tilted forward so her dark, wavy hair fell over her face, giving her something to hide behind. Two dark eyes peered out from behind it.

Her mother’s eyes.

Shepherd stared at her, not noticing Arkadian standing behind her until she pressed herself back against his leg. “Hevva, this is Mr. Shepherd.”

“Joseph,” he said, smiling at her to try and put her at ease. “Do you speak English?”

She nodded, a move so tiny he wouldn’t have seen it at all but for the movement of her hair. “Are you real?” she asked.

Shepherd’s smile broadened at the strange question. “As real as you.” He frowned in mock seriousness. “Unless you’re not real; are you real?”

Another tiny nod, this time with the flicker of a smile.

“I knew your mother,” Shepherd said.

“I know,” the girl said, her voice sounding older than her years. She took a step forward, those familiar eyes watching him all the way. She still seemed a little wary of him and he didn’t want her to be. She was a living reminder of the woman he had loved and he just wanted to look at her.

She stopped in front of him, held out her clenched hands and opened them. Inside was a locket, held on a chain around her neck. She slipped it over her head, waves of hair tumbling over her face as the chain pulled free of it. He took it and looked at her, not sure what she meant by giving it to him. Then she reached out and — with tiny, nimble fingers — she opened it.

Tears flowed down Shepherd’s cheeks when he saw what was inside. It was a tiny photo of Melisa, bordered in black, and opposite it — a picture of him.

98

Gabriel continued to improve.

His occasional fits dwindled to nothing and after a few weeks he no longer needed to be strapped to his bed. But as his strength returned, so did his desire to leave the mountain and return to Liv. Dr. Kaplan assured him that, though great progress was being made with his blood work, they still had not found a cure, nor had they ruled out the possibility that Gabriel was an asymptomatic carrier. He still had the virus inside him, it just wasn’t killing him anymore.

Rather than sitting around he made himself useful where he could. He spent a lot of time sifting through the ash and rubble in the Crypto Revelatio, hoping he might find some of the clues they needed to interpret the Starmap. But the fire had been so intense that even the clay tablets had baked to dust and the few stone items that survived offered nothing but more lost languages and further riddles to solve.

He traveled only through the upper stairwells and corridors so he would encounter no one. On his way back he sometimes took a detour to the chapel of the Sacrament with the hideous Tau silent at its center, the front hanging open on its hinges and revealing the spike-lined interior. It was a hideous place, a place where the Sacrament had been held captive for millennia until Liv had finally freed it. And it was for this reason alone that he came here, just to walk the same floor she had walked, and sit on the same floor where she had lain. Once, after sitting there awhile, he had stood and spotted a long strand of blond hair — her hair — floating down through the beam of his torch. He caught it in his hand and now kept it wound around his finger like a ring.

Weeks passed in this way. Months passed.

Then one morning, Gabriel was shaken awake as dawn had just started to lighten the blue and green glass of the peacock window. It was Dr. Kaplan, black rings circling his exhausted eyes. “Come with me,” he said.

Gabriel had not been through the main door since entering on a stretcher almost seven months previously. They turned right outside, heading away from the cathedral cave into a section of the mountain where Gabriel had never been before. The corridors were wider here and well lit with doors set into the stone at regular intervals. One of them opened ahead and a visored face peered out, saw Kaplan and Gabriel and ducked straight back in, closing the door behind him but not before Gabriel caught a glimpse of the complicated laboratory set up in the room.

“In here.” Kaplan stopped outside a door with a circle cut into it and a plastic tube poking out from within. “I think it’s best I give you some context first.” He opened the door and stood back to allow Gabriel to enter.

The room was a smaller version of the abbot’s quarters, with a main reception room and another door set in the far wall. It was filled with so much equipment it made the one he had just seen look like a high school chemistry class. There were banks of sleek, hi-tech-looking microscopes, scanners, computers, centrifuges and a large air-conditioning unit keeping it all cool, the snake of its plastic vent poking out through the hole he had seen in the corridor.

“Very impressive,” Gabriel said, taking it all in.

“The outside world has been very generous,” Kaplan replied, heading over to a large machine with a video monitor set up on a desk next to it. “Anything we ask for gets shipped in the next day. Things move pretty fast when everyone has such an interest in our success.”

He flicked a switch and the monitor glowed into life, showing a hugely magnified image of an uneven sphere with lethal spikes coming out of it. “Meet KV292, more commonly known as the blight or the lamentation — the enemy. Do you know much about viral infections?”

“Only that they hurt.”

“But do you know why?”

“Not exactly.”

“What they do is invade a host and hijack healthy cells then reprogram them to start manufacturing the virus instead.” He hit another key three times and the image stepped in until the tip of one spike filled the screen. It had a small bar across the end, making it look like a tiny, elongated letter T. “Each one of those spikes you can see is topped off with what’s known as a glycoprotein that acts like a sort of key to fool the cell’s defenses into letting the virus pass through its protective membrane. Once inside it releases strands of rogue DNA that find their way to the nucleus and then reprogram it.”

He tapped another key and the picture on the screen changed to a similar-looking ball. “This is also KV292, only we found this one in your blood. See the difference?” The ball in this image was covered with much smaller spikes, making it look like a burr. “Something is happening inside your system that knocks the ends off the spikes so they can’t interact properly with healthy cells. They just float around in your blood where they get covered with antibodies until the white blood cells pick them up and digest them. They never get a chance to reproduce because they can’t get inside your cells. They’ve lost their keys.

“Ever since we isolated you over here in this part of the mountain we’ve been looking for the mechanism that does it. The trouble is, with the hostile virus deactivated in your blood, the reagent that interacted with it no longer has a job to do and so has vanished. We haven’t been able to find a single trace of it.

“Over the past few months we have tried everything to replicate the circumstances of a primary infection. We screened every newly infected patient to find matches for your blood type and then created a cocktail of your blood and theirs to see if this mystery reagent would reappear and go back to work, but it never did. Ultimately we realized the problem lies in the fact that we are always working with samples that are already fully infected. Viral infections and their reagents tend to grow and develop at the same time and at the same rate, the one triggering the other and keeping pace with it so the virus can never get fully established. This happens with things like the common cold where the antibodies start being reproduced as soon as the virus appears. If they didn’t, every cold would develop into a more chronic form such as pneumonia, which is what happens in immunosuppressed people.”

He sat down on the chair in front of the screen, his weariness evident in the way his shoulders slumped inside the contamination suit. “What we need to do is catch someone with your blood type before the virus has fully established itself and then cross-transfuse your blood with theirs. This will hopefully give us two chances of catching the reagent in action: once in your system as the infected blood starts mingling with yours, and again in the other patient as your healthy blood encounters the infection in theirs.

“However, there is a risk. If the mechanism has been completely deactivated in your system then you may end up being reinfected, with little chance of survival. There is also a risk for the other patient. This mutated form of the virus you now carry may be harmless to you but could still be very harmful to others. In trying to find a cure for the blight we may end up killing someone.”

Gabriel took it all in, the polished cleanliness of the room, the clinic quiet, the serious tone in Kaplan’s voice. “I’m assuming by the fact that you woke me up to tell me all this that you have found someone.”

Dr. Kaplan nodded. “The problem has been finding someone with your exact blood type, which unfortunately is particularly rare. You are O negative, which in Turkey is shared by less than five percent of the population. We blood-typed everyone still healthy inside the Citadel and found one match. The reason I woke you is because this person has just exhibited the first signs of the blight.” He rose from his chair and moved across the room toward the door to the bedchamber. “For this to stand any chance at all of working we need to act fast before it fully takes hold.”

He reached the door and opened it.

Beyond was a bedroom, two beds in the center lined up next to each other, an array of tubes and equipment arranged around them. One was empty, the other contained a man, propped up, strapped down and breathing steadily. His eyes flicked over to the door and locked on to Gabriel’s.

“Good morning,” Athanasius said. “Forgive me if I don’t get up.” He smiled but Gabriel could see there was fear beneath it. He moved over to the side of the bed and laid a hand on the monk’s arm. His skin was already starting to burn.

“I admit,” Athanasius said, “I am surprised this hasn’t happened sooner. I was starting to hope that maybe I too had some form of natural resistance. But this morning I awoke for morning prayers and could smell nothing but oranges.” He shuddered and closed his eyes as something started to rise inside him. It reminded Gabriel of when the blight had first taken hold of him in the heat of the Syrian desert. He knew the torments Athanasius was starting to experience, the heat, the itching, the panic. The shaking eased and Athanasius breathed out and opened his eyes again. “I must also admit,” he said in a soft voice that still carried traces of the tremor, “that I am more than a little afraid.”

Gabriel took his hand, just as Athanasius had taken his so many times in the preceding months when their situations had been reversed. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “It’s just a journey. Let’s go on it together.”

99

Shepherd spent the rest of the morning with Hevva, sitting by a fence in the playground like a kid himself, telling her stories about her mother, digging back into his memory for all the details he had held on to for so long. She told him stories too, sketching in glimpses of the woman he’d lost. He was amazed by how grown up Hevva seemed as she told him, in the unvarnished words of a child, how she had gone everywhere with her mother because there was no one else to care for her, and how she had helped with her work, learning to deliver babies while she was little more than a baby herself. Hearing these stories made him both sad and immensely proud. But it also posed a difficult question, one which Hevva’s eerie maturity prompted him to ask.

“Do you know why your mother never tried to contact me?”

Hevva shrugged. “She thought you were dead.”

“Do you know why?”

“Grandpa said you died in a fire.”

Shepherd closed his eyes and nodded. He was transported back to the evening when Melisa’s father had sent him on the fool’s errand across town in the middle of rush hour. He had thought it odd at the time and now he knew why. It had all been a setup to get him out of the way long enough to stage the fire. The fire served as a disguise for their simultaneous disappearance, and as the basis of a wicked lie that would separate his daughter from Shepherd forever. Perhaps Melisa had told him they planned to marry and he had taken desperate measures to ensure that it never happened. The police had said the fire was suspicious, an insurance job gone wrong, and they had been partly right, it was only the motive they’d gotten wrong. Had her father known Melisa was pregnant, he wondered — had she even known at the time? What must her father have shown her to make her believe he was dead? What proof had he fabricated to stop her from looking? If he had gone to such lengths as to burn down a building, he felt sure a fake death certificate would not have been beyond him. Maybe even faked-up news stories coupled with the race-hate angle to scare her away from looking into his evidence too closely.

He felt a small hand on his face and he looked up into the deep, knowing eyes of his daughter. “Don’t cry,” she said, “Mummy still loved you, even though you weren’t there. That’s why she kept your picture.”

Shepherd smiled and placed his hand over hers. Being with this quiet, wise girl made the painful ache that had grown inside him disappear entirely. In her he had found what he was looking for, only not in the form he had expected.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and the world outside started to creep back in. “I’ve got to take this, honey,” he said and he saw her eyes darken as if she knew it was trouble.

“Agent Shepherd,” a familiar voice said the moment he picked up, “it’s Merriweather, the Hubble technician you spoke to at Goddard.” He sounded anxious.

“Oh, hi.”

“You said I should call if anything came up. Well, it has. Hubble has stabilized. It’s in a new traveling orbit that places it in a fixed position in the northern sky.”

“Whereabouts?”

“In Taurus, right between Nath and Zeta Tauri.”

Shepherd frowned — directly between the horns. For the past few hours he had succeeded in pushing the investigation into the furthest recess of his mind, now it all came flooding back. He remembered the words of Kinderman’s cryptic message: I’m just standing on a hill looking to the east for new stars in old friends, as those like us have done since the beginning of time.

And tonight Hubble would show up in the night sky as a new object, the sun shining off its reflectors, making it look like a new star in the constellation of Taurus. Shepherd stood up and waved across the playground at Arkadian. He needed to get to Göbekli Tepe before nightfall to stand a chance of catching up with Dr. Kinderman. With the new star appearing in Taurus tonight, tomorrow Kinderman would probably be gone and he would have no idea where.

“How’s the investigation going?”

“What?” He had forgotten Merriweather was still on the line. “Oh, it’s — moving forward. Listen, Merriweather, that’s been a great help. How are you doing with getting the guidance systems back online?”

“Not so great. We could do with Dr. Kinderman’s help. I hope he’s okay and you find him soon. It’s not the same here without him.”

“Let me call you tomorrow, I may have some good news.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

He hung up and turned to Hevva. “Honey, I have to go somewhere but you need to stay here. But I’ll be back tomorrow, I promise.”

The dark eyes brimmed and her head started to shake. “You won’t come back,” she said. “Mummy didn’t.”

He dropped down so his eyes were level with hers. “It’s not like that,” he said, taking her tiny hand in his. “You’ll be safer here.”

“I don’t want to stay here.”

“But I can’t take you, not yet. There’ll be forms to fill in and tests I probably have to do so they can establish that I’m your father.”

“Problem?” Arkadian had arrived next to them.

“I need to go somewhere and Hevva doesn’t want me to leave.”

“Where do you need to be?”

“An archaeological site about two hours east of here.”

“Göbekli Tepe.”

“You know it?”

“Everybody in Ruin knows it. It’s supposed to be a rival shrine to the Citadel, built by the enemies of the Sancti. Why do you want to go there?”

Shepherd thought about all the things that had brought him here: the recovered data, the link with Taurus, the cryptic message from Kinderman. It was difficult to know where to start. “It’s complicated,” he said.

Arkadian looked down at Hevva and smiled. “Tell you what, why don’t I drive you there, that way we can bring Hevva along and you can explain it all on the way.”

100

Gabriel never left Athanasius’s side. He had promised he would go on this journey with him and, having walked that painful path himself, it was not a promise he could break. When Athanasius was not sedated he raved and howled and strained against his bindings, like every other victim of the blight had, but unlike most he was sometimes lucid, just like Gabriel had been. They would talk in these snatched moments, and Gabriel would lie and tell him how well he was doing and how much the doctors were learning from being able to study him. In truth, they were still searching, racing against the clock to find whatever process was happening inside him before it went one way or another.

Gabriel had been unaffected by the cross-transfusion. Whatever defenses his body had built were too efficient to allow the infection to take hold again. Dr. Kaplan remained in quarantine too, never leaving the room for so much as a minute. He knew he had a very narrow window of opportunity to first identify and then study the reagent as it attacked and defeated the virus, and he didn’t want to waste a moment of that precious time sleeping. He had a cot set up in the corner of the lab for him and the other technicians to use whenever exhaustion overcame them. There were five of them in total, each keeping their own particular brand of vigil: Gabriel, Kaplan, two technicians as dedicated and ever present as he was, and — at the center of it all, burning like a hot sun around which the rest of them revolved — Athanasius.

Whenever the attacks got so severe they had to sedate him, Gabriel slept in the cot too, making sure he was awake again by the time the sedative wore off. Then, one morning, three weeks after the transfusion, Gabriel woke in the cot to discover that Athanasius was already awake. He rose and moved over to the side of the bed, holding the back of his hand to Athanasius’s forehead. “The fever’s gone,” he said, a smile spreading on his face. “You didn’t die.”

Athanasius smiled back. “Apparently not.”

Dr. Kaplan was summoned from the lab where he was doing blood work. He stared at Athanasius from the safety of the door when he first came in. After so many months of failures and death it was as if he had forgotten what success looked like. Athanasius’s recovery was the final piece in the jigsaw. Kaplan and his team had successfully managed to find and isolate the reagent, but had held off from introducing it to other patients until they knew for sure it was going to be effective. They didn’t want patients to have to endure the kind of drawn-out suffering Athanasius was going through if they were just going to die anyway. Better that they die quickly and suffer less than going through that. But now that he was better, everything had changed.

The blight had been conquered. They had found a cure.

And Gabriel could finally make good on his promise and return to Liv.

101

Hevva fell asleep in the back of the car before they’d even made it out of the Taurus foothills and picked up the toll road heading east. Shepherd kept turning around to check on her, her face a perfect miniature of her mother’s, her very existence casting a much darker light on the countdown that was still ticking away on his phone. He told Arkadian everything, finding that once he started, it all came tumbling out until by the time they saw the first sign for Göbekli Tepe, Arkadian knew as much about the investigation as he did.

They turned off the main road and passed through an automatic toll barrier onto a battered track leading away into the parched, undulating countryside. There were no houses here, not even the square, flat-roofed brick blocks that seemed to be the architectural model of choice in this part of the country. There was no sign of anything at all, no greenery, no animals, only the single-track strip of black road leading them straight into the alien landscape ahead. The only reason they knew they were in the right place was the presence of a few road signs, put up for the benefit of tourists, pointing the way to the hill they could just see in the distance with a solitary tree standing sentry at the top of it.

Shepherd stared out of the window, feeling the heat coming through it despite the air-con blasting cold into the cabin. It was hard to imagine that this desolate place, burned dry and littered with broken rocks, had been home to a civilization that predated the Egyptians by seven thousand years: all gone now and forgotten, ground to elemental dust by the passing of time, just like everything else in the universe.

“What if your Dr. Kinderman’s not here?” Arkadian said.

Shepherd looked up at a collection of tents and temporary buildings clinging to the side of the hill. “If he’s not here then it’s the end of the road — for me at least.” He looked in the back where Hevva was sleeping. “What’s that thing people say — all your priorities change the moment you have kids?”

Arkadian shook his head and smiled sadly. “I’m sure it’s true — it never happened to me.”

“Me either, until a couple of hours ago. You married, Inspector?”

Arkadian shook his head. “Not anymore. I lost my wife to the blight around the same time Hevva lost her mother. That changes your priorities too.”

They pulled off the road and bounced up a dust track toward the settlement and came to a parking area big enough to cater to the strange mix of tourists and archaeologists who visited the dig. There was even a trough of straw to feed the camels. Today the area was empty but for a couple of cars so dusty they were almost the same color as the earth.

Arkadian crunched to a stop beside them and waited for the dust cloud they had kicked up to drift away before switching off the engine and stepping out into the heat.

Shepherd unclipped his seat belt and glanced in the back hoping to sneak out and leave Hevva sleeping. A pair of dark eyes stared at him from beneath a shiny fringe of wavy, chocolate-colored hair.

Shepherd smiled at her. “We’re just going to have a look around,” he said. “You stay here. We won’t be long.”

The eyes went wide. “Don’t go,” she said. “You won’t come back.”

“Of course I’ll come back. You’ll just be safer here,” he said, reaching out with a hand to stroke her face.

“If it’s safer here, you stay here too,” she said.

Shepherd couldn’t argue with that logic. “I’ll only be five minutes. Five minutes then I’ll come right back.”

She shook her head and the tears continued to flow. “I don’t want to stay here alone.”

He looked into her imploring eyes, made huge by fear and bright with tears. “Okay,” he said, powerless in the face of an emotional child. “But stay close and keep quiet.”

Hevva stayed so close that Shepherd kept nearly tripping over her as they made their way up the track to the buildings and the tree beyond.

Arkadian glanced sideways at them. “How’s parenthood?” he asked.

“Complicated,” Shepherd said, squeezing Hevva’s tiny hand. “I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I’ve only been a dad for a few hours.”

They reached the edge of the dig site marked out with strings of barbed wire nailed to posts. The hill was only partly excavated, as if something massive had taken a bite out of it, leaving behind the monolithic T-shaped standing stones like lost teeth. They were huge and almost perfectly smooth, their size and finish in marked contrast to the broken, jagged edges of everything else around them. Figures were carved on the surface of the stones, low reliefs of animals and human arms stretching around the stones as if hugging them. A wooden walkway cut right across the top of the site, suspended a few feet above it. He could see tools and buckets lying on the ground at various points, as if everyone had just stopped what they were doing and left. It was eerie, a ghost town, one that had been dead for nearly ten thousand years.

“Guess nobody calls this place home anymore,” Shepherd murmured, imagining the workers responding to the growing tugging sensations inside them, urging them to be elsewhere.

“We have company,” Arkadian said. Shepherd squinted up against the bright sky and saw a slender man standing in the shade of the tree, backlit by the sun. “You think that could be him?”

“Hard to tell,” Shepherd said, instinctively pulling Hevva behind him. “He’s the right build. I should go talk to him.” The tiny hand tightened in his. “It’s okay, sweetheart, you’ll be able to see me the whole way.”

“Take this.” Arkadian pressed something into his hand. Shepherd looked down to discover a gun. “It’s just a precaution.”

“I don’t think that’s—”

“Take it. I don’t care how many Nobel prizes this man has won, he is still a fugitive from the law, which makes him unpredictable.”

The figure beneath the tree moved forward, emerging from the shadow.

“He’s coming down,” Shepherd said, handing the gun back.

“Keep it,” Arkadian said. “I’m too slow and can’t shoot worth a damn since I took a bullet in my arm.”

Shepherd thought about his own less than glowing record as a marksman but slipped it into the back waistband of his trousers anyway, angling himself so his whole body was between the gun and Hevva.

The figure continued to descend the hill, picking his way along a thin gravel path that snaked its way down from the tree: a slender man with silver hair and a Nobel prize for physics on his CV, Dr. Kinderman — fugitive from the law. He reached the upper edge of the dig and did a strange thing — he waved at them.

“He doesn’t look like a man on the edge,” Arkadian muttered.

“He’s spent his life on the edge of the universe,” Shepherd replied. “This probably all feels quite normal to him.”

Dr. Kinderman rounded the rim of the crater and approached them, a warm, friendly smile fixed on his face, like a man just welcoming weekend guests to his house. “You found me,” he said, his voice nasal and high, like the whine of an overgrown, overenthusiastic schoolboy.

“Joseph Shepherd, sir.” Kinderman clasped the offered hand and shook it. “I worked under you briefly on the Explorer mission.”

“Please.” Kinderman held his hands up and screwed his eyes shut as if he was in mild pain. “Call me William, or Will, or Bill even, but don’t call me sir, makes me feel like your father.” He let go of Shepherd’s hand and dropped down to the ground. “And who do we have here?” Kinderman brought his head right down to Hevva’s level. “Are you an FBI agent too?”

Hevva went shy and smiley and buried her face in Shepherd’s side.

Kinderman stood and turned to the dig site. “Magnificent, isn’t it? A temple to the stars, built eight thousand years before the pyramids in Egypt and then deliberately buried to hide it and preserve its secrets. You can’t really see it properly from here, it was designed to be viewed from up there.” He pointed back up at the tree on top of the hill. “Interestingly enough the locals call that the tree of knowledge, always have — even when they didn’t know all this was buried beneath it. Isn’t that fascinating?”

Shepherd felt like a schoolboy on a field trip with one of the better teachers.

“Shall we go inside?” Kinderman gestured to one of the larger field tents. “It’s cooler in there and I have something I want to show you.”

They filed into the tent and through a visitors’ area with information posters on partition walls and a scale model of the dig site on a table in the center of the room. There was a washroom through one door and a kitchen through the other, with a stove and a table positioned beneath a ceiling fan that turned slowly, stirring the air and blowing dust into the shafts of sunlight leaking in through shuttered windows and a back door that had been propped open to let more air in.

“You wouldn’t believe there were about thirty people here a couple of days ago, would you?” Kinderman said, lighting the gas on the stove. “Yesterday there were ten and this morning just me, so I apologize in advance for the mint tea I’m about to make. I don’t really have the art of it, which is a shame as it’s delicious when done properly.” He put a pot of water on to boil and grabbed a bunch of mint from a bowl of water by the sink.

“I can make tea,” Hevva said.

“Are you sure?” Shepherd said, suddenly worried about the stove and boiling water in his first real moment of everyday parental angst.

“Mama showed me how to do it. She showed me how to do lots of things.” Hevva slipped off the bench and headed to the stove without waiting for anyone’s permission and held out her hands for the mint. Kinderman handed it over without a word, then she dragged a chair across to the countertop and started ripping up handfuls of leaves and dropping them into a teapot. Shepherd felt a surge of pride as he watched her, though none of who she was or how she behaved had anything to do with him.

“So,” Kinderman said, moving over to the table containing the model of the dig, “notice anything?” Shepherd looked down at it. It was perfectly to scale and even had a model tree at the top. In this shrunken form it was easier to see the configuration of the standing stones. “They’re constellations,” he said, remembering the Wikipedia entry he had read.

“Exactly, perfect facsimiles.”

Shepherd looked down at the main cluster. “All except this one.” He pointed at the tallest stone, the home stone, which sat between two others representing the tips of the horns of Taurus. “There is no star here, not normally — except tonight there will be, won’t there, Dr. Kinderman?”

Kinderman smiled. “Bravo, Agent Shepherd, you are a worthy adversary, no wonder you found me. And in the tradition of all great quests your triumph entitles you to some answers. What would you like to know?”

In his mind Shepherd cycled through all the things he’d been asking himself ever since O’Halloran had given him the initial brief. He decided to start at the beginning and work forward from there. “The space telescope,” he said, “why did you sabotage it and destroy all the data?”

Kinderman cocked his head to one side in a way that made Shepherd think of a bird. “That’s a bad question, Agent Shepherd. It is built upon two assumptions, both of which are wrong, which therefore renders the question moot.” Shepherd felt like a student again, one who was flunking a test. “First,” Kinderman continued, “you say that I sabotaged Hubble, which implies something destructive when in fact Hubble was not destroyed, it was not even damaged.”

“What about Marshall? That was fairly destructive.”

“Yes it was, but again you are assuming that those two incidents are directly linked and that the architect of one must therefore have had a hand in the other.”

“No, I think you did one and Professor Douglas did the other but that your motives were shared.”

“Well then you are half right. I did reposition Hubble, as I have already said, but I did not destroy James Webb or the cryo unit at Marshall — and neither did Professor Douglas.”

“Then who did?” Arkadian asked.

Kinderman looked at him and shrugged. “The same person who was sending us the death threat letters I should imagine, the one who signs his name Novus Sancti.”

“Cooper.”

Kinderman laughed. “Fulton Cooper! You think someone like him could infiltrate the Marshall Space Center and blow a large part of it up without detection?”

“No, we thought maybe Professor Douglas did after being coerced in some way.”

“You knew the professor, didn’t you, Agent Shepherd?”

“A little — he was my teacher for a summer.”

“Then surely you know he was the sort of person who would rather die than destroy his own facility. His work was his life, he valued nothing higher.”

Shepherd felt like a green shoot shriveling in the blinding brightness of a superior mind. All his thinking had been based on the assumption that Kinderman and Douglas were coconspirators and saboteurs. But with that keystone gone the whole structure of his investigation was now starting to crumble. “But if he didn’t destroy Marshall then why run and hide?”

“Because we both feared for our lives,” Kinderman replied. “And, considering what happened to the poor professor, with very good reason it seems.”

Hevva arrived at the table with a steaming pot of tea. She was struggling with the weight of it and Shepherd reached out to take it from her.

“You should have told someone,” he said, pouring the hot liquid into several small glasses shaped like tulips. “The police could have protected you.”

“Protected us from whom? You just told me you thought our antagonist, the one who calls himself Novus Sancti, was Fulton Cooper. If the FBI cannot identify this person, then how could they possibly protect us from him? Whoever is behind all this has to be someone with a high level of access, someone inside the establishment and well connected, someone with a very clear agenda. The professor and I both realized this. And when we both received the same letter we knew we had to act quickly. My repositioning of Hubble served as a useful diversion, a sop if you like to the blackmailers’ demands to ‘take down the new Tower of Babel,’ it bought us some time. But it also served a practical purpose, one which was outlined right here ten thousand years ago then buried to protect the secrets and those who kept them.”

“The Mala,” Arkadian said.

Kinderman nodded. “The history of the Mala is the history of suppressed truth. At the beginning of human history things took a wrong turn. Truth was imprisoned along with the relic known as the Sacrament. But the Mala knew the history of it, and their enemies, the Sancti, tried to silence them. They established their Church to spread their version of history and declared that anyone who believed anything different from the word of their Bible was a heretic and should be put to death. So the Mala hid and buried their secrets underground until the time predicted when things would swing back the other way and balance would be restored. Over time many were drawn to the Mala, scientists whose findings challenged the Church, philosophers and thinkers who questioned the “truth.” It was an organization that allowed free thinkers to remain free. And it still is. Without their support I would never have been able to flee from America undetected. They are like the French resistance in the Second World War, only on a global scale, providing friendship, support — even a passport under a different name.” He drained his cup of tea and smiled at Hevva. “That, young lady, is delicious tea.”

She smiled shyly, picked up the drained teapot and took it back in the kitchen to top it up with hot water.

“In 1995, excavations started here and the first T-shaped stones were uncovered. The T is the Tau — symbol of the Sacrament, used by the Sancti and the Mala both. The mountains to the west are named for the Tau, and so also is the great constellation of the bull, which the ancients of our tribe saw as sacred, a harbinger of change. The rediscovery of these stones and the messages captured here told us that the time of change was coming. A time we refer to as the end of days. The established Church uses similar terms though they have demonized it as something terrible. But there is nothing to fear from the end of days. For every end also marks a new beginning.”

“Hello?”

The voice took them all by surprise, puncturing the moment and making all heads turn. It was a woman’s voice, American. They heard the faintest of footsteps outside then a tiny woman stepped through the door. She looked at them each in turn, smiling in a way that made her freckled nose wrinkle a little. Then a muffled shriek snapped their heads back around again.

A man was standing in the kitchen.

And he had Hevva.

102

Shepherd saw the man first, then the knife held loosely against his daughter’s throat. Hate boiled up inside him, but also fear. There was something in the man’s eyes, something missing, that told Shepherd he would kill his daughter just as easily as snapping a twig.

“Any weapons, let’s see them, nice and easy,” the woman said in her Sunday school teacher’s voice.

She was by the entrance, covering them with what looked like a toy gun. The man was behind them with a knife. Smart tactics. It made it impossible to look at both of them at the same time and ensured they wouldn’t get caught in their own crossfire. If Shepherd was with a partner they would automatically take one each, but he wasn’t. He was with an astronomer and a cop who had just given him his gun because he couldn’t shoot straight. He felt it now, pressing into the small of his back, hidden by his jacket.

“I don’t have a gun,” he gambled. “They don’t let you take them on international flights.”

The woman pointed her gun at Arkadian. “Nice and slow, mister policeman, take it out by the barrel then slide it over.”

“I don’t have a gun either,” Arkadian replied.

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Not really.” His movement took everyone by surprise. He darted right, drawing the woman’s gun away from the rest of the group as he reached into his jacket.

Shepherd reacted too, only one thought filling his brain as he pulled the gun free from his belt.

A man is holding a knife to my daughter’s throat.

He saw Hevva’s terrified face pass through his sights as they settled center mass on the man. A gunshot boomed behind him but he stayed focused. The man started lifting Hevva up to use her as a shield.

Shepherd adjusted. Squeezed the trigger.

The man jerked backward as the bullet hit him and Hevva dropped to the floor. Every instinct made Shepherd want to run to her but his training stopped him.

A gun had been fired behind him.

He corkscrewed around, dropping down to make himself a smaller target. The woman was in a good two-handed stance, professional and well drilled, her gun turning toward him, no chance of missing at this range and almost ready to fire. He willed his gun around faster, knowing it wasn’t going to happen.

Scalding liquid hit her face and her head jerked away, pulling her aim wide. Shepherd’s gun sight settled on her tiny frame just as she was pulling her gun back toward him. The impact of the bullet threw her backward against the open door, knocking the gun from her hand and out of the door.

He looked across and saw Kinderman holding the empty glass that had contained the mint tea. Arkadian was down, sprawled on the floor and not moving. Shepherd knew he should check to see that the shooter was down and her gun made safe. He should check on Arkadian to see if he was hit. He should do all of these things like he had been taught but instead he turned and sprinted over to Hevva.

She was sitting on the floor, bright blood running through the hand she was holding to her cheek.

She should have stayed in the car.

He should have made her stay in the car.

He fell to the floor beside her and took her face in his hands, feeling the wet warmth of her blood as he checked her over, terrified of what he might find. He almost laughed with relief when he saw that the knife had just nicked her ear.

The knife man was lying on the floor behind her in a spreading pool of his own blood. He was just about breathing but the wound was sucking and foaming. Lung shot. He was drowning in his own blood. A nasty way to go but Shepherd didn’t care. “I never knew dying would feel like this,” the man whispered as he stared up at the ceiling. “I never knew it would hurt so much.” Then the sucking sound stopped and he was still.

Shepherd bundled Hevva into his arms and carried her over to the others.

Kinderman was standing over the woman, holding her gun in his hand as if it might bite him. Shepherd could tell by the way the woman was lying, crooked against the door, that she was dead. Arkadian was still down, blood spreading out beneath him. Shepherd set Hevva down and crouched low to look into Arkadian’s face. His eyes were open and he was still breathing — but only just.

“I didn’t know you had another gun,” Shepherd said.

Arkadian smiled weakly. “I didn’t.”

“Then why…?”

“You needed a diversion,” Arkadian whispered between snatched breaths. “Look after your little girl. Life ceases to have much meaning — when you lose the ones you love.”

Then he closed his eyes and was gone.

103

The first batch of inoculations took place the same day Athanasius woke up. All the infected in the cathedral cave, forty-seven men and women, were given the serum one after the other, almost wiping out the stocks at a stroke.

When every patient had been injected Dr. Kaplan returned to the main lab and took an ampoule of the serum from the fridge. There were just twelve doses left and they were expecting new cases of the infected within the hour.

He copied all the clinical files to a flash drive then hand-wrote a note to his opposite number coordinating the medical effort outside the mountain.

He packed the vial inside a shockproof container and placed everything inside a padded envelope, which he took to the tribute cave himself. He had not been in this part of the mountain for months. The air still smelled of smoke from the fire in the library and reminded him of all the bodies he’d seen burned in the garden.

No more — he promised himself — please, God, no more.

The platform was being prepared when he entered the cave, ready to be lowered to collect the day’s batch of infected. The wooden platform rocked as he walked across to the box reserved for correspondence and placed the envelope in it.

He returned to the cave and watched the platform sink down through the hatch and out into the clear air carrying the first bit of good news to leave the mountain in many months.

104

Shepherd carried Hevva out of the kitchen and into the sunlight. He didn’t want her to remain inside with the freshly slain and the smell of gunpowder in the air.

He sat her down in the shade of an awning and bathed her face, wiping away the worst of the blood then dabbing it clean with wet tissues, all the while talking to her, telling her she was fine and even starting to believe it himself as the blood washed away. Head wounds always bled more than most others. The nick in the ear was all she had suffered, at least physically. She had also witnessed her newfound father shoot two people dead. He didn’t want to think what the long-term effects of all that might be.

He looked into Hevva’s eyes and was about to tell her to sit tight while he went in search of a Band-Aid then thought better of it and scooped her back up into his arms. There was no way he was going to let her out of his sight — not now, probably not ever again.

They found a medical kit in an office and he picked up the whole thing, figuring it would be better to get away from here as fast as possible in case the killers were not alone. Only Kinderman seemed to have vanished.

He spotted him up at the top of the hill, sitting in a chair in the shade of the tree and staring down at something in his lap. Shepherd carried Hevva all the way up, sweating from the effort. “We need to leave,” he said.

“Indeed,” Kinderman replied, his eyes fixed on the screen of a laptop connected by a long wire to a portable satellite uplinker. “But the real question is ‘where?’ Look.”

Shepherd moved around so he could see the screen. “This shows Hubble’s new orbit.” Kinderman pointed at a graphic image of a wire-frame globe with a circle around it. “The other image is a direct feed from Hubble itself. That’s what it’s looking at right now.”

Shepherd leaned against the trunk of the tree for support and stared at the crawling satellite image of the earth. At the moment it was showing desert, lots of brown desert, so barren it could easily have been the surface of some distant, uninhabited planet.

“I told you shifting Hubble out of position had a practical dimension,” Kinderman continued. “Not only will Mala worldwide see it appear in Taurus tonight, it will also lead the way back to the home we all lost. Back to the origin of everything, where everything started and everything will begin again.”

“The Mala star,” Shepherd whispered, remembering Kinderman’s messages to Douglas.

They watched the crawl of brown, Hevva getting heavier in his arms with every passing minute until he had to let her slip to the ground. He was exhausted and hot and a little faint after the adrenaline high of earlier. He was anxious to get away and was about to insist on such when a thin line of green appeared on the screen, getting thicker as the world turned, revealing a large patch of green with tendrils snaking out across the brown earth like the roots of a huge plant.

“There it is,” Kinderman said, with something close to wonder. “Paradise found.” He squinted at the telemetry and wrote down the terrestrial coordinates. “It’s southeast from here, about six hundred miles or so, somewhere in Iraq. Less than a day’s drive if we take turns at the wheel.” He hit a command button and another window popped up containing the same countdown application Shepherd had downloaded from Douglas’s computer, the numbers now much lower. “We should just be able to make it in time.”

His fingers drummed on the keyboard as he copied links to the countdown and to the Hubble feed into a Web site and pressed publish. He turned and smiled up at Shepherd. “Mala.org just went live — the modern way to follow a star. Come on, we need to get going. My jeep is right over there.”

“I need to grab Hevva’s things from the other car.” Shepherd stood upright and felt the world lurch. He reached out to steady himself against the trunk of the tree but missed, grazing his cheek against the bark as he fell to the ground. Something sharp jarred his ribs as he hit the ground. He reached for it with his hand and it came away wet and bloody.

Oh Jesus, he thought as darkness claimed him, damn woman didn’t miss after all.

105

Seven days after the initial inoculations, the first patient recovered.

She was a forty-three-year-old bank clerk, born and raised in Ruin, who seemed more impressed by where she now found herself than by the fact that she had just survived a disease that had wiped out a quarter of the city’s population.

The cathedral cave now contained over three hundred beds, most of which were occupied. Normally the numbers remained steady at around fifty, the new intake being roughly balanced by the death toll: but no one had died since they had begun the inoculations, the daily ritual of removing the bodies to the garden had stopped and the pyre on the firestone that had burned without pause since the very beginning had now gone out.

That same afternoon trucks and personnel drove into the city from the outside world, the first vehicles to have done so for more than half a year. They were laden with stocks of the vaccine, manufactured in readiness at industrial labs in Ankara, and a small army of volunteers who had already been inoculated.

The quarantined quarters were kept in place, to make the vaccinations easier to police and monitor. By evening every living soul in the city of Ruin was lining up, waiting patiently for the salvation they had prayed for, everyone so relieved that deliverance was finally at hand that they failed to notice the creak of ropes as, down the side of the Citadel, the ascension platform began to descend with a lone figure standing in the center of it, watching the world rise to meet him.