The Tower

II

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy … for the time is at hand.

Revelation 1:3

15

EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

Badiyat Al-Sham – Syrian Desert

Northwestern Iraq

Liv woke just as dawn was starting to bleed into the eastern sky. She was lying on the ground next to the grave of the Ghost, her head full of strange symbols and the sky full of fading stars.

She had been dreaming she was back in her old apartment, watering the hundreds of plants that lined the walls. She had grown plants since she was small, squeezed between her father and her brother as they potted and seeded like other kids baked cakes with their moms. It was her dad’s way of spending time with his kids and getting them to help out with his gardening business. He taught them the names of everything, though he also let her make up some to keep her amused. Some of them had stuck. To this day she still called Physillis an orange eyeball tree.

She opened her eyes and the loamy smell of the earth escaped from her dream and drifted across the desert. It took her a few moments to recall where she was as she hung for some blissful heartbeats suspended between the past and the present before she remembered. The apartment was gone, incinerated along with everything in it by someone who had been looking for her. Her father was dead, so was her brother – and Gabriel was gone. It all struck her like a fresh loss, so hard that she just wanted to curl up again, go back to sleep and escape into the bliss of her dream.

Then she heard the noise, like the soft hiss of a huge snake.

Instinctively she rolled away from it, right across the grave, coming to rest so she was staring across the stone at the source of the sound.

Tariq was curled up and sleeping on the ground nearby, his AK47 cradled in his arms, his mouth forming words that escaped as sibilant whispers from his dream.

– Saa’so Ishtar – Saa’so Ishtar –

She watched him twitching in his sleep, whispering the words over and over until the lightening sky woke him too.

‘What is Ishtar?’ She fired the question at him while he was still blinking awake. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands then looked over at her, his forehead creased in a question. ‘You were saying it over and over in your sleep – what is it?’

‘Ishtar is a goddess,’ he said, pushing himself up and automatically checking his rifle for sand, ‘an ancient goddess from the time when all these lands were green. She was the goddess of fertility, and love, and war. It was she who made everything grow and gave names to every living thing.’

Liv remembered her dream and the memory of naming plants by her father’s side. ‘I heard people calling me that – amongst other things.’

Tariq unwrapped the keffiyeh from around his neck, shook it out and carefully laid it on the ground. ‘There is an old tale,’ he said, as well-practised hands removed the magazine from his rifle, ejected a shell from the breach then began taking it to pieces. ‘It is a nomad tale from the ancient times. It tells how Ishtar was tricked by jealous men and made prisoner in the caves of the underworld. She was kept in darkness, away from the sun, to make her weak. Her powers were stolen so that the men who had imprisoned her might live as gods, never ageing and never falling ill. And because of this the lands that had been nourished by her dried up and everything died.’ The top cover of the rifle and the recoil spring were carefully laid in turn on his keffiyeh.

‘But the story also tells that when time reaches the end of its long road Ishtar will escape from the darkness and return again, bringing back the water so the land may be reborn.’ He blew hard into the firing chamber, inspected inside then did the same with the other parts he had removed. ‘And you brought the water, that is why they call you Ishtar.’

Liv laughed. ‘I’m an unemployed, homeless reporter from New Jersey. Does that sound like a goddess to you?’ She stood up and stretched the kinks out of her back. ‘Listen, you said yesterday you could take me anywhere I wanted to go. You think you could take me as far as the Turkish border?’

‘If you wish,’ he said, snicking his rifle together again with impressive speed and smacking the magazine into place. ‘But first, let me show you something.’ He rose from the ground and slung the rifle over his back, heading around the perimeter fence to where the holding pits had been dug. They had been intended to catch the overspill of crude oil from the central well but were now brimming with water. Tariq helped Liv up the side of one of the banks and pointed past the edge of the second pit. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You see it?’

From her elevated position Liv saw how the water had breached the holding pits in several places, creating rivulets that snaked away across the baked earth, carving new channels as they went.

‘The blood is flowing back into the land,’ Tariq said. ‘And see –’ he pointed along the edge of the water ‘– the land is starting to live again.’

All along the banks of the new rivers, green shoots were bristling. ‘See there, we call that Ya’did or skeleton weed. And there, you see those tiny yellow flowers?’

‘Groundsel,’ Liv said. ‘And that is Artemisia, or some other sort of ephemeral grass; and that looks like a tamarisk seedling.’

Tariq turned to her smiling. ‘You see, you know the plants, you can name them all.’

Liv shook her head. ‘Don’t read too much into it. My dad was a horticulturalist and I had no mother so I grew up digging and planting instead of playing with dolls, I got dirt in my blood.’ She followed the lines of the water to where the heat rippled the air. In the distance a column of dust was rising, another illusion to raise her hopes that Gabriel might be returning. She stared at it, waiting for it to melt away like her hopes always did. Only this one didn’t. ‘Someone’s coming,’ she said, hope swelling in her chest.

Tariq looked up and saw it, his chin rising too as if he was sniffing the air. ‘Horses,’ he said, ‘many horses.’

‘Yours?’ Liv gazed at the distant dust as if her eyes were the only things keeping it there, hoping maybe that the riders had gone looking for Gabriel and were now bringing him back.

‘Maybe,’ Tariq said, his hand unconsciously drifting to the shoulder strap of his rifle. ‘We should get back to the compound – I have a bad feeling about this.’

16

By the time Liv and Tariq made it back inside the compound the approaching dust cloud was clearly visible in the sky and everyone had emerged from the silver-sided buildings and gathered by the central pool, all eyes looking in the same direction, waiting for whatever was heading their way to arrive. With everyone gathered together like this, Liv realized how few of them were left. She counted thirteen including her – a mixture of oil workers and a couple of the riders who had stayed along with Tariq.

‘Thirty riders!’ a voice called from halfway up the steps to one of the guard towers. ‘Maybe more.’

‘Ours?’ Tariq called back.

There was a pause as the man reached the top and raised a pair of field glasses to his eyes. ‘No,’ he shouted down, ‘not ours.’

Tariq snapped to attention like a shotgun being closed. ‘Close the gates.’ He barked at a startled-looking rigger still wearing his white work overalls. ‘NOW!’ He watched the rigger scurry off then called back up to the watchtower. ‘How long until they get here?’

‘Five minutes, maybe less. They’re riding pretty hard.’ The man paused again and stared through the field glasses. ‘They have guns.’

Tariq turned to the assembled few. ‘Who knows how to operate the fifty-calibre cannons?’ He was met with silence and a ring of frightened faces. ‘What about rifles – can anyone fire a rifle?’ A couple of drill technicians put their hands up nervously. ‘Good, go and get weapons from the locker in the transport hangar and push some of the vehicles outside to give us cover. We’ll use that as a fallback position and try and keep them at bay using the tower guns if we need to.’

Liv looked on with a sense of detachment. Part of her felt anxious about the approaching men and what their intentions might be, but another, stronger part felt that preparing to meet potential violence with more violence was the wrong move. The land wasn’t even theirs and neither was the water running out of it.

‘Stop!’ she said. ‘This is wrong, this is not how it is supposed to be. We should not fight. We should welcome them.’

Tariq looked at her as if she had gone mad. ‘But they are riding here at speed and they are armed. Their intentions are clear I think.’

‘And what of our intentions – if we meet them with closed gates and pointed guns, what does that say about us?’

‘It says we are strong and we are prepared to defend what is ours.’

‘But this isn’t ours. A few days ago I had never even set foot here and neither had you. And now you are prepared to take men’s lives and risk your own for it? Doesn’t that strike you as insane?’

‘It is the way of things. It has always been the way of things.’

‘But things can change. People can change. Open the gates and put down your guns. Whatever happens is meant to happen. Nothing here is worth fighting for. And nothing here is worth dying for either.’

17

Shepherd drove through the barrier and back into Quantico a little after midnight, just as the storm was finally blowing itself out. Franklin had been on the phone most of the way. He’d called O’Halloran first to give him a pared down headline account of what they’d discovered at Goddard, then spent the rest of the time liaising with the tech guys who had finished processing Kinderman’s office and were now heading back. Shepherd drove squinting through the spray and the darkness, trying to glean what he could from Franklin’s half of the conversations and wondering what would happen when they got back to base.

The van was already parked up by the laboratories when Shepherd pulled up next to it and shut off the engine.

‘Thank you, driver,’ Franklin said. ‘That will be all.’ He slid out of his seat and was already halfway to the entrance before Shepherd managed to fumble his own door open.

‘What do I do now?’ he called after him.

Franklin didn’t look back. ‘I want your report on my desk by 0800. After that you’re free to return to your training.’

Shepherd got a sinking feeling in his guts. He had suffered Franklin’s disdain all the way through the few short hours he’d been on this investigation that he hadn’t wanted to be assigned to in the first place, but now, as it was about to be taken away from him … he desperately wanted to remain part of it.

He took a step forward, aware that Franklin was about to walk through the door. ‘Maybe I should take a look at Dr Kinderman’s hard drive.’ Franklin stopped but didn’t turn round. ‘I can help sort through the data. Sift through the emails and the technical stuff to look for anything unusual. It’s bound to be full of astronomical terms and acronyms that could easily confuse someone unfamiliar with the jargon.’

Franklin grabbed the handle, pulled open the door and stepped through without saying a word.

Shepherd watched it slowly swing shut: closing on his last chance. He was about to turn and walk back to the dorms when Franklin reappeared round the edge of the door. ‘Report on my desk by 0800, Agent Shepherd,’ he said. ‘Until then your time is your own. So if you’d rather spend it staring at a computer screen than getting some shut-eye then maybe there’s hope for you yet.’ Then he shot him the smile and was gone.

18

Liv felt the ground tremble as the riders poured through the open gates and quickly surrounded them on all sides. She kept her eyes fixed on the lead horseman who halted the line with his upheld hand and trotted on alone on his pale horse. He removed his keffiyeh as he approached, revealing a dust-rimed face burnt almost black around the eyes by years in the fierce desert sun.

‘See who is with them,’ Tariq whispered.

Liv scanned the line of riders and saw Malik smiling back at her. It was he who probably brought them here, though for what reason she could only guess at. She stepped forward, opened her arms and smiled. ‘Welcome,’ she said in fluent Arabic that surprised the rider. ‘You must be thirsty after your long ride, your horses too.’

The rider looked down from his lofty position and circled her slowly, scrutinizing her down the curve of his long nose. She could smell the dust and dung of his panting horse, feel the heat radiating from its damp flanks as it was brought to a halt in front of her. The rider turned to his men. ‘I was hoping Ishtar would have more meat on her,’ he said loudly.

The riders erupted in laughter, Malik included.

He turned back, his lined face now split in a smile of his own to reveal an incomplete set of long, broken teeth. ‘You don’t look much like a goddess to me.’

Liv smiled, her eyes flicking to Malik then back to the rider. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything people tell you.’

‘Are you calling me a fool?’

‘No. Why don’t you tell me your name, then I can call you that.’

He leaned forward, his worn saddle creaking beneath his shifting weight. ‘They call me Azra’iel. You know what that means?’

It was an odd quality of her new fluency with language that she often saw images rather than meanings, and felt the words rather than interpreted them. Azra’iel. A picture formed in Liv’s head of huge black wings and she felt fear. ‘It means “Angel of Death”.’

The broken smile returned. ‘Maybe you are a goddess after all.’ His hand passed across strips of bright ribbons on his chest and in a movement too fast to register Liv found herself staring down the barrel of a pistol. ‘Maybe I put a bullet in your brain to find out.’

Before Liv could react Tariq stepped in front of her, shielding her body with his. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It’s the water you want, you do not have to kill to get it.’

‘Do not tell me what I want. No one tells Azra’iel what he wants.’

‘It’s OK,’ Liv said in English, moving from behind him, doing her best to ignore the gun as it swung back to point at her.

‘What are you – American? English?’ the rider said, picking up on the switch in language.

‘American. I’m from New Jersey.’

Azra’iel sat high in his saddle and swept his arm across the desert landscape. ‘This is where I am from. My family has lived on this land for two thousand years. We have seen the great Caliphs come and go, then the Mongols, and then the Turks.’ He jabbed the barrel of his gun at the ribbons on his chest. ‘Saddam Hussein gave me these himself for defending his Republic against the American invaders, but he was an idiot and now he is dead. I was not fighting for him, I was fighting for the land. And now the land belongs to me.’

Liv held his gaze and slowly shook her head. ‘The land does not belong to any man,’ she said. ‘It is we who belong to the land.’

‘You are wrong, goddess. It belongs to any man who will fight for it – this is what my people have learned – and you did not fight.’

‘No. We welcomed you. We invited you to share it, in peace. Isn’t that a better way?’

The jagged smile returned. ‘Better for me.’ He turned away and raised his voice so all could hear. ‘This oasis is ours now. I give you a choice. You can leave or you can die. You have two minutes to fill your canteens. I advise you to take as much as you can. The desert is not as friendly or as welcoming as your goddess.’ He turned his horse and started walking away.

‘We could fall back to the transport shed,’ Tariq whispered. ‘There are guns there. We could make a stand. Or if we make a diversion when we head through the gates I think I might be able to make it to the top of one of the towers and turn the big guns on them.’

‘Then what? Bury the bodies, wait for the next lot of people to show up and kill them too?’

‘What else can we do? We won’t last two days out in the desert without water. Better to fight and maybe die here quickly than slowly out there in the furnace.’

‘Better not to die at all,’ she said.

‘You have something else in mind?’

She swept her hand through the water, her fingers dragging through the cool, wet earth at the bottom, remembering the symbols on the Starmap. ‘No,’ she said, watching the swirls of earth eddying in the clear water, turning it a dusty red. There was something familiar about all this, she had seen something like it in the stone. She tried to concentrate on it and bring it to the front of her mind but it continued to elude her, like something glimpsed at the edge of her vision. ‘If you want to go, then go,’ she said, turning to Tariq. ‘I’m sure you could make it to Al-Hillah on foot before the thirst takes hold.’

‘What about you?’

She glanced up at the gravesite, visible through the line of riders and the chain-link fence. ‘I’m staying here,’ she said, ‘or as close as I can manage without getting shot.’

Her hand passed through the water again, sending larger clouds of red mud spreading in the water as she stood and walked towards the riders.

‘Goodbye, Malik,’ she said, as she passed through the line.

His smile faltered and he made as if to reply but she was already gone, striding towards the open gate and out into the desert without once looking back to see if anyone was following her.

19

The National Cyber Crime Task Force was buried deep in the Maryland bedrock and housed a huge bank of central databases that fed the entire law enforcement network as well as hard drives and backup files relating to hundreds of thousands of cases – everything from simple internet scams and corporate fraud to online paedophile rings and major terrorist networks.

The main machine room was practically deserted by the time Shepherd stepped into its air-conditioned gloom. He had stopped to splash water on his face and grab something to eat after Franklin had failed to make good on his offer to buy him a burger, wolfing down a doughnut and a cup of coffee on his way over. No food or drink was allowed in the cyber crimes labs. A seated figure was silhouetted against three large flatscreen monitors on the far side of the room, his fingers punching code into a keyboard so fast it sounded like tap dancing. He turned at the sound of Shepherd’s approach and smiled a greeting. ‘Agent Franklin said you’d be along.’

Agent Smith was one of the senior instructors in the cyber crimes division. There was a rumour that did the rounds each year that the Agent Smith of the Matrix movies had been based on him and there was certainly more than a passing physical resemblance – same dark hair receding from a widow’s peak, same sharp features on top of a whip-thin frame – but that was as far as the comparison went. The real Agent Smith was just about the friendliest instructor in the building, generous with his time and endlessly patient with those who were never going to pound the cyber beat but needed to understand enough to pass the module anyway.

‘I’ve set you up with a ghost file,’ he said, nodding at the terminal to the right of his.

Shepherd sat at the desk and assessed the data. In cyber crime there are two types of evidence: physical and digital. Physical evidence is the actual hardware itself. Often in the chain of evidence it has to be shown that a suspect has used a certain computer, so fingerprints or even microscopic flakes of skin beneath the keys of keyboards are sought to prove it. Digital evidence is different. Files and directories can be cloned or copied and worked on by several teams of people at once to crunch the data faster. These clones are called ghost files and Shepherd was looking at one now, an exact copy of everything on Dr Kinderman’s hard drive. ‘Find anything yet?’ he asked.

Smith continued to machine gun code into his terminal. ‘The most interesting thing I’ve found so far is nothing.’ He hit a key and folders started opening, rippling down his main screen like a deck of cards, every single one of them empty. ‘Everything you would expect is there up until eight months ago, then there’s nothing at all. No directories, no sub-directories, no caches. Whoever cleaned this out really knew what they were doing.’