The Tower

13

Shepherd drove. Franklin stared ahead, facing down the stormy night and saying nothing.

Since voicing his suspicions about Shepherd’s missing two years he had barely spoken to him at all. Shepherd guessed he was sore at him for butting in on his interrogation of Merriweather too. The silence had become an almost tangible thing between them, taking on presence and weight.

When he had applied to the FBI he had counted on the gap in his record not being a problem. He had not been arrested or done anything in those missing years to put him on any of the databases they checked when screening new candidates. As far as the standard computer searches were concerned he was clean. But Franklin was a duty-hardened agent with instincts honed by years of dealing with people in all their broken forms. He’d sniffed out the shadows in his story immediately. But trust worked both ways and he didn’t know nearly enough about Franklin to risk telling him the truth.

Ahead – Turn left.

The flat voice from the sat nav punctured the silence. Shepherd reached out and tapped the screen, broadening the scale of the map until the Space Center appeared directly North of them. Proximity to Goddard had obviously been way up on Dr Kinderman’s wish list and the usual status symbols of cars and big grand houses didn’t really matter to him. As Pierce had suggested, you could probably cut through the woods and walk to Presley Park faster than Shepherd had just driven it.

Turn right in twenty metres, then you will have reached your destination.

Shepherd turned into a narrower road and headlamps swept across a row of evenly spaced houses, slightly smaller than those on the main drag.

‘There!’ Franklin pointed at a one-storey, brick-built rambler set back a little from the road. Shepherd pulled into the empty drive next to it and cut the engine.

The Kinderman residence was entirely unassuming. There was a small patch of grass in front, a tree planted in the centre and neat borders filled with utility plants that would pretty much look after themselves. There was nothing modern about it, no additions, no carport or garage. It still had the original steel and glass porch over the front door. Behind the low building a wall of tall trees surged and flowed in the wind. There were no lights on inside.

‘Let’s see if the good doctor is home.’ Franklin popped open his door and stepped into the rain. Shepherd killed the headlights and followed.

The distance from the car to the house was barely ten metres but Shepherd was more or less soaked by the time he made it to the porch. Franklin was already leaning on the doorbell, listening to its chimes echoing inside the house through the loud drumming of rain on the glass overhead. He pressed it again and they listened out, standing uncomfortably close in the slender shelter of the porch as they waited for movement inside or a light to come on behind the pebbled glass surrounding the front door.

‘Nobody home,’ Franklin said after a suitable wait. ‘Watch the street.’

He dropped down, stuck his Maglite between his teeth and started probing the lock with a pick he had taken from his pocket.

‘Shouldn’t we get a warrant first?’

‘And wake up some poor old judge on a night like this?’ The lock clicked and Franklin stood up. ‘If we find anything we’ll get a warrant, then we can find it all over again: no harm no foul.’ He swapped the pick for his gun and held the Maglite in a fist-grip so the beam shone where the barrel was pointing. Shepherd automatically did the same, months of simulations on Hogan’s Alley kicking in as adrenalin and muscle memory took over and the words of Agent Williams whispered in his head: try not to put yourself in any situation where you may have to draw this weapon.

So much for that.

Franklin took up a position by the door and gestured for Shepherd to take the other side. ‘Remember this is not a drill, Agent Shepherd. This is the house of a suspected terrorist we are entering and, though I don’t think we’ll find anyone inside, I’d rather be prepared than dead. So nice and slow, just like you were taught and do not move until you are covered.’

Shepherd got in position. Franklin reached forward, turned the handle and threw open the door in a single smooth movement.

Time stretched slow as the door swung wide revealing a yawning darkness beyond. Shepherd tensed, his pupils full wide, watching for movement. Franklin moved forward, gun first, the beam of his Maglite probing the dark in a sweep from left to right. Shepherd followed, keeping close, going right to left until the beam of his torch crossed Franklin’s in the centre of the hallway.

No one there.

They moved quickly and silently through the rest of the house – cover and move, cover and move – until they had satisfied themselves that Dr Kinderman was not here and neither was anyone else. It didn’t take them long. The house was not that big.

Franklin hit the lights and they stood in the middle of the modest living-room-slash-kitchen-slash-dining-room taking in what they had previously only glimpsed by torchlight.

If anything, the inside of Dr Kinderman’s home was even less impressive than the outside. A small oak-floored hallway led away from the front door to three others: a small bathroom, a bedroom, and some wooden stairs leading down to the basement. ‘Tell me, Agent Shepherd,’ Franklin said, ‘you ever seen inside a safe house or a terrorist cell?’

‘No, sir, I have not.’

‘Well, look around, they look exactly like this. Functional, clean, unlived in.’

‘We don’t know that he’s a terrorist.’

‘No, but the evidence is stacking up wouldn’t you say?’ He nodded at the large picture of Christ the Redeemer hanging above the fireplace, arms outstretched and looking down at the sprawling city of Rio de Janeiro. ‘Pierce didn’t think Kinderman was religious.’

‘Maybe he just likes big statues, or Brazil.’

‘Or maybe he found God on the quiet and felt so bad about sticking his telescope up the Almighty’s nose that he switched it off and ran for the hills.’

Shepherd shrugged. ‘I guess anything’s possible.’

‘I guess it is.’ Franklin pointed at the bedroom. ‘Take another look, see what you can find, I’ll check the rest.’

The bedroom was as plain as the rest of the house, the picture hanging over the neat double bed the only clue as to the person who slept there. It showed The Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula, clearly a favourite image for the man who had been responsible for discovering them. Shepherd felt odd standing here, in the private space of one of his heroes. It seemed like an intrusion and his presence implied a degree of complicit agreement in Dr Kinderman’s as yet unproven guilt. He put it from his mind, swapped his gun for the blue Nitrile gloves and got to work.

The wardrobe held lots of white shirts, pressed and cleaned and still in their laundry wrapping, a few suits of the tweedy, academic kind Kinderman favoured and four pairs of identical black, wing-tipped shoes, polished and lined up on newspaper, ready to be stepped into. There was a gap where a fifth pair would fit, presumably the ones Kinderman was now wearing.

The drawers contained more clothes but no answers. There were no new death-threat letters stashed away at the back of the sock drawer, no drugs or guns or dubious pornography or bundles of money or anything else that implied a secret, dangerous life. Everything was neat, tidy and unremarkable. He finished his search and stood for a moment in the centre of the room, taking in its incredible ordinariness. It felt like Kinderman might have just stepped out for a late supper and be coming back soon. Part of him hoped he would, but the chaos of his office at Goddard told a different story. Shepherd flicked off the light and closed the door on his way out.

He found Franklin in the living room, hunkered down by the fireplace. ‘Take a look at this.’ He pointed at a fire basket containing a few logs, some sticks and several old newspapers. ‘Notice anything funny about the papers?’

Shepherd picked one up. It was a copy of the New York Post, a relatively unusual paper to find in Maryland. On the cover was a picture of a man dressed like a monk, standing on top of a dark mountain with his arms outstretched, looking just like the statue in the picture above Kinderman’s fireplace. Shepherd checked the date. The paper was eight months old. The story of the man climbing to the summit of the Citadel in the ancient city of Ruin had been more or less a front-page fixture in the spring. Recently Ruin had been in the papers again, this time because of the sudden outbreak of a viral infection that had resulted in the entire city being quarantined.

He picked up another paper, a copy of USA Today dated a few days after the New York Post and showing a photo of the same mountain, this time with smoke pouring out of a hole in its side, the headline read:

TERROR ATTACK CRACKS

CITADEL WIDE OPEN

The other newspapers were the same, all covering versions of the same story and dated around the same time. Some showed the monk on top of the Citadel, others showed the moment he fell to his death, or pictures of bloodied monks being stretchered out of the mountain following the explosion, their bodies stripped to the waist by paramedics to reveal strange networks of ritualized scars from multiple cuts deep in the skin.

‘Lots of people have old newspapers in their fire baskets,’ Shepherd said, scanning one of the articles to remind himself of the details.

‘Yes, but not normally a collection of different titles all covering the same thing. The Bureau got involved in this in a small way trying to help locate a couple of the terror suspects who were American. One was a female journalist from Jersey, the other an ex-army guy: Liv Adamsen and Gabriel Mann.’

‘They’re mentioned here.’ Shepherd held up one of the papers and showed him a mugshot of a handsome-looking man in his early thirties with short dark hair and blue eyes and a pale, blonde woman with eyes so green they glowed beneath the poor print quality of the paper.

Shepherd picked up the last newspaper. On the cover was a photograph of a plump Cardinal looking imperious in his red and black robes beneath the headline:

CHURCH BANKRUPT:

POPE’S RIGHT-HAND MAN IN SUICIDE SHOCK AT THE VATICAN

He remembered that one too, the biggest scandal to rock the Church in a long time. Something to do with mortgaging all the Church’s treasures and buildings in order to fund some doomed oil venture in Iraq. Some of the more lurid tabloids had even suggested they were drilling for oil where Eden used to be.

‘All from eight months ago,’ Shepherd mused, dropping it in the basket with the rest, ‘the same time the postcards started arriving.’

Franklin stood up and stretched the kinks out of his back as he paced the Spartan living room. ‘So how does any of this link up? Does any of it link up? We’ve got an attack on government property that may or may not be connected to the attacks outlined in these newspapers. We got a missing person who’s our number one suspect. We got a potential religious angle, which could shake out either as Kinderman seeing the light and going rogue, or somebody else putting the frighteners on him to do God’s work for them – maybe even the same guys who were involved in these attacks eight months ago. What else …?’

Shepherd dug his notebook from his pocket. ‘There’s the Tower of Babel references and the death threat written in biblical tones and signed Novus Sancti. We also have the missing data, which also dates back eight months, though that could just be a coincidence.’

Franklin shook his head and wandered into the kitchen. ‘I’m not a great believer in coincidence.’ He stood by the sink with the lights off, staring out into the night. The ambient light from the street picked out a small strip of grass and the line of storm-shaken trees that marked the edge of the property and the beginning of the woods. ‘Maybe we’re massively overcomplicating things. Nine times out of ten it’s about money. Look at this place, it’s not exactly a palace.’

‘But you heard what Pierce said, he was always at work, this is just where he slept.’

‘Maybe, but he wouldn’t be the first smart person in history who dug himself into a deep hole and then got bought by someone offering him a ladder.’

Shepherd thought about it and shook his head. ‘I don’t think it can be money. Dr Kinderman never struck me as the material kind and he won the Nobel Prize nine years ago.’

‘You get paid for that?’

‘You get a cut of how much money the Nobel Foundation made that year. It’s usually something like a million – million and a half. If there’s more than one winner they share it. Dr Kinderman won it on his own.’

Franklin whistled through his teeth. ‘Man, I should have paid more attention in science class. Still I reckon I could easily burn through a million bucks in nine years. Maybe pick up some expensive tastes along the way and get myself in some situations that a blackmailer could get his hooks into.’ Franklin took a last long look at the meagre, anonymous home. ‘Come on, we’re wasting time here. Let’s head back to base, see what the techs have come up with. I might even buy you a burger on the way back – but that still don’t mean I trust you.’

14

The cross-hairs followed Franklin until he left the kitchen and disappeared from sight. The finger in the nonslip glove relaxed on the trigger and an eye flicked up from the scope.

Carrie Dupree was in the trees, back from the house a little and low enough on the trunk not to be shaken too much by the wind. She had been in position since way before the storm hit, waiting for Dr Kinderman to come home. She watched the lights in the house go out and listened through the surf sound of the wind-tossed branches until she heard the front door bang shut then a car start up and drive away.

She probed the darkness, everything glowing a phosphorescent green in the night-sight. The house remained dark and silent.

Nothing moved.

She felt a slight vibration in the sleeve pocket of her camouflage jacket and swung the rifle round ninety degrees to a neighbouring tree. She could just make out the slim outline of Eli, the hand holding the phone that had sent the alert making a chopping sign across his throat.

Time to pull out.

Exfiltration was fast and practised. She capped the scope and powered it down, slung the rifle crossways over her back then dropped down from her tree. Eli joined her and stood sentry while she broke the rifle down further and bagged it so it could be stashed quickly in the trunk of the car once they made it back to the road, then they headed away through the woods. Occasionally, they came across the stacked branches and litter of a den built by the neighbourhood kids who slunk from their houses and went feral in these woods. There was no one around now, the late hour and weather had seen to that.

They drew close to the edge of the trees and Eli stopped. The dark yard they had passed through earlier was now bright with light spilling from several rooms in the house and a TV was blaring loudly somewhere inside. Too chancy to go back that way and risk being seen.

Eli pointed right and moved off, keeping the boundary lines of the properties in sight as they moved through the trees looking for another way out. They found a quiet house, no lights on, no movement inside, no car in the drive, and no security lights pointing out at the yard ready to light up anything that moved across it. There were no toys or trampolines in this garden, just a lawn surrounded by a wooden fence running all the way round the property. Carrie wondered if it had been put up to keep the neighbourhood kids out. Either way, it wouldn’t stop them.

She went first, springing over the fence and landing in a crouch, her hands feeling the cold, wet earth through her gloves. She heard the creak of the fence and squelch of Eli’s boots as he followed her, crouching down behind her, so near she could feel him. She savoured the delicious closeness, a momentary distraction that made her slow to react.

The dog appeared out of the dark in an explosion of noise and teeth. It launched itself straight at her, a large, angry animal, black as the night, all muscle and rage. She turned and raised her arm to protect her face from the claws and the bite, but the dog did not reach her.

Eli’s boot caught it just behind the head, turning the snarl into a yelp and sending it spinning away. It landed on its side, rolled and scrabbled to get to its feet but Eli was already on it, grabbing its rear legs and heaving it up, flipping it high with an arch of his back then down hard, smashing its head against the ground. Another yelp squeaked from it as the soft earth stunned it but did not knock it out. The dog clawed at the ground again, weaker now, its back legs kicking free from Eli’s grip, desperate to get away from the source of its pain.

Eli stepped forward, his trailing leg whipping through the air, connecting with the dog’s throat in a wet thud that snapped the dog’s head back. This time it did not yelp at all because its windpipe had been crushed. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, bloody and twitching as it fought for breath. Eli moved over it, raising his boot high and bringing it down hard, stamping the life out of it repeatedly in fury until Carrie laid a hand on him, pulling him away and past the house to where the streetlights swayed in the wind.

They vaulted the chain-link gate with the BEWARE OF THE DOG sign on it, keeping in the shadows of the trees until they made it back to the little league baseball park where they’d left the car, well away from the street lights.

Eli got in the passenger seat. Carrie drove, the heater on full, filling the car with dry air and noise, neither of them speaking until they were a couple of miles down the road.

‘You OK, baby?’

Eli didn’t reply.

Carrie let it slide and settled into the roar of the heater and the rumble of the road, worrying about what lay beneath his silence.

She had never seen him kill anything before tonight and there had been something magnificent and terrible about the way he had done it. Eli wasn’t physically imposing, if anything his height made him appear slimmer than he was, but there was something about the way he carried himself, something lean and dangerous, like an old-fashioned razor – and she knew where it came from.

Like all true lovers, part of their intimacy lay in the secrets they shared. Eli had confessed his in the mission military hospital where he’d been released after being locked up for seven months for nearly killing someone. One by one he had detailed, in a quiet expressionless voice, all the people he had killed in his relatively short life. It had started with the kid in Juvie who had tried to touch him somewhere he shouldn’t. He hadn’t expected the skinny, younger boy to fight back and had been caught off guard when he did, slipping on the tiles in the shower block and cracking his head. Eli told her how he had jumped on top of the boy, grabbed his hair and hammered his skull against the tiles until someone else found them and dragged him away. Eli’s tormentor had died in the infirmary two days later.

I just wanted to make sure he stayed down – he told her – but then I couldn’t stop.

This first homicide kept him institutionalized until he got a release into the Army where his country turned his aggression to good use. Carrie had listened as he listed all the people he had killed while in uniform, stroking his head and letting him talk them all out like he was exorcizing demons. Killing was his gift, but also his curse, and she knew his true secret, whispered to her alone in the quiet of a psychiatric cell he’d been sent to after killing a sergeant in a fight over a toothbrush: