The Tower
Shepherd had been hanging on to the hope that Smith would find something in Dr Kinderman’s personal files, an email, or a virus that had originated elsewhere with a pathway that might give them a new lead. But the efficiency and skill with which the drive had been forensically wiped just threw more suspicion on Kinderman. ‘You want me to start checking through the older data, see what I can find?’
‘You can if you want but I think it will be a waste of time. Anyone this thorough is unlikely to have left anything behind – I’m pretty sure anything incriminating on the drives would have been in the chunk of data that’s now missing. I was just about to run it through CARBON, see what that throws up.’ He hit Return and a progress bar popped up on the screen, then he sat back with a small grin on his face that had ‘ask me’ written all over it.
‘What’s CARBON?’ Shepherd obliged.
‘That is something very confidential that I can only divulge to you now you are a serving Special Agent. But what I am about to tell you does not get mentioned in the classroom, understood?’ Shepherd nodded.
‘Back in the typewriter days, before photocopiers even, the only way you could get an exact copy of a typed document was to sandwich carbon paper between two blank sheets. The force of the typewriter letters striking the top sheet would leave a carbon trace on the bottom one, producing a copy. This application does a similar thing. It records keystrokes, only the user doesn’t know anything about it. In fact very few people do.
‘After 9/11, when homeland security became the number one priority and the usual concerns for civil rights and privacy went out of the window, the US Government cut a very high-level deal with all the major computer chip manufacturers. Not sure if you know this but 99% of all the world’s microchips are made in South Korea. So you can imagine, having the American government in your corner when you’ve got North Korea as a neighbour must have been a powerful persuader in the discussions. Anyway the deal was simple. All they had to do in exchange for Uncle Sam’s undying gratitude and future unspecified favours was to modify their product a little. Ever since then, each new chip produced has an extra partition of memory built into it that doesn’t show up on any directory and can only be accessed by certain approved law enforcement agencies with the right software.’ He pointed at the progress bar on the screen as it closed in on 100%. ‘CARBON. Basically, they created the ultimate in Spyware. Normal virus protection doesn’t even see it because it’s not code, it’s built right into the hardware.’
The progress bar disappeared and a document opened, crammed solid with words and numbers. ‘The data is pretty raw,’ he said, his fingers resuming their tap routine, ‘and because of the covert nature of the technology the memory cache is relatively small to keep it hidden so it has to constantly dump old data to keep recording new stuff, just like media disks on security cameras. Usually it holds about a week’s worth of activity. I’m just going to run a filter to split the data out a little and pick out any hot or unusual high-frequency words.’ He executed a new command and another window popped open. ‘This is where you can make yourself useful.’
Shepherd leaned in as words started to appear in the window, gleaned from the raw data. He recognized almost all of them. ‘Ophiuchus is a constellation,’ he said, working his way down the growing list. ‘Andromeda is a galaxy and all those long numbers beginning with PGC are from the Principal Galaxy Catalogue. Red-Shift is an astronomical term for what happens to distant light …’
They continued in this way for several minutes, Smith highlighted everything Shepherd recognized until they reached the bottom of the list and Smith hit Delete to get rid of all the isolated words. There were now just two remaining:
MALA
T
Shepherd fished a notebook from his pocket and flipped back through the entries he had made at Goddard. There was the T again in the last entry Dr Kinderman had made in his diary:
T
end of days.
A thought struck him, something about the T and what it might mean in relation to Hubble. He found the contact numbers he had taken down and dialled one, checking the time as he waited for it to connect. The line clicked a few times before a ring tone cut in. Shepherd held his breath as he waited for someone to answer.
20
Two floors above Shepherd, Franklin sat in a small office, door closed, his face illuminated by a different computer screen.
During his more than twenty years’ service in the bureau he had learned a lot about himself. He knew he wasn’t the most instinctive of investigators, didn’t have the genius he had seen in some to ask exactly the right question at exactly the right time and had never been the one in a midnight incident room to make the single connection that pulled everything together. But he was dogged and he knew people. He could tap them like a tuning fork and listen to the sound they made. He always knew when the note was wrong and right now, with Shepherd, it was screeching like nails on a blackboard.
On the screen in front of him were Shepherd’s Bureau application forms and resumé. He had been scouring them for the last twenty minutes, cross-checking the missing two years against social security records, credit-scoring agencies, anything that might give him a steer on where Shepherd was and what he had been doing. So far the only small discrepancy he had found was on the standard Questionnaire for National Security Positions. There was a new addition to the form, a declaration of faith, added by a Republican government riding high on the wave of post 9/11 hysteria. The Democrats had fought it, citing it as a dangerous erosion of the Constitution and its separation of religion and state, but the Republicans maintained that it would help identify Muslim candidates whose background and cultural knowledge could prove insightful in the war on terror. The bill had just squeaked through, but only after a compromise had been agreed that the new section should be optional and no candidate could be penalized for not filling it in. Shepherd had exercised that option and left his blank.
This in itself was unremarkable, but in Franklin’s experience the only people who chose not to fill in the faith section were atheists. Shepherd’s resumé showed he had spent several years at a hardcore Catholic boarding school and yet he hadn’t ticked the box declaring himself to be Catholic. It was a small point but it added to Franklin’s distrust of him. There was something hardwired into his DNA that could not allow himself to entirely trust anyone who did not, in one way or another, have a healthy fear of God. It was one of the central tenets of the Irish, whispered down to him on whisky breath by his father and uncles when they were swaying with patriotism for a country none of them had ever set foot in: never trust a man who does not have God in his heart, and never trust a man who will not take a drink with you.
He sat back in his chair, reaching for his phone.
Thinking about his da’ had tugged at something inside him. Maybe it was Christmas and the usual guilt that came with that. It was too late to call so he scrolled down the contacts list to the entry for Marie and opened up a blank text:
Something’s come up. Got to work tomorrow so wont be able to make it home. Will call when I know when I can get away. Say sorry to Sinead for me.
He pressed Send and watched the message go. It was odd that he still thought of the house as home even though he didn’t live there any more.
He closed all the files, shut down the terminal and was pulling his jacket off the back of the chair when his phone buzzed. Marie had got straight back to him.
What about saying sorry to me?
Franklin read the words and felt the ache inside him twist a little more. She was right of course but he’d got tired of apologizing to her a long time ago. He slipped his jacket on and headed for the nearest exit, swapping the phone for a crumpled packet of Marlboro. Another bad habit he had been trying for a long time to quit.
21
‘Hubble Flight Team.’
The line was noisy and Shepherd covered his other ear so he could hear better. ‘Merriweather?’
‘Speaking.’
‘It’s Agent Shepherd. Where are you?’
‘I’m at Goddard. I’ve stepped out for some air and patched my calls through to my cell in case anyone needed me, how can I help?’
‘Before the attack you said Hubble was exploring a piece of thin space in the constellation of Taurus.’
‘That’s right.’
‘What do you use as shorthand for Taurus?’
There was a pause. ‘If I was writing it down I’d use the astrological sign, a circle with two horns.’
‘Not the letter T?’
‘No.’
‘What if you were typing it?’
‘If I was typing it I would put in the whole word, or maybe just the first few letters and then predictive text would do the rest.’
Shepherd wrote T and TAURUS in his notebook and added a large question mark after them. ‘What about MALA?’ he spelled it.
‘Nothing, sorry. What are these in relation to?’
‘They showed up in some raw data we recovered from Dr Kinderman’s computer. It’s probably nothing but we have to check.’ Shepherd wrote MALA in his notebook and added a question mark after that too. ‘Thanks, Merriweather. Sorry to have bothered you.’
‘No problem. Listen, if you find anything else let me know, I’m as eager to get to the bottom of this as anyone …’
‘I’m sure you are.’
‘… and you can always get me on this number. I’ll keep it patched through to my cell and leave it switched on just in case, though I’m planning on sleeping at my desk until either Hubble comes back online or someone forces me out of here at gunpoint.’
Shepherd smiled. ‘I’m sure of that too. You take care, Merriweather. We’ll sort this thing out, one way or another.’ He put the phone down just as the door opened on the far side of the room and footsteps approached.
‘Found anything?’ Franklin’s voice boomed across the empty space.
No – Shepherd thought.
‘Yes,’ Smith said, cheerful as ever. ‘We recovered some CARBON data, and Agent Shepherd has been helping me sort through it.’
‘Good for Agent Shepherd – anything useful?’
Shepherd looked down at his notes. ‘We found a couple of unusual words. I think the T might refer to Taurus but I have no idea what MALA means.’
‘Interesting.’ Franklin leaned forward in a wash of coffee and cigarette smoke. ‘Watch and learn, rookie.’ He clicked on Google and typed MALA into the search window, hit Return and pages of results popped up. ‘Sometimes the simple, direct route gets the best results.’ He clicked on the top hit and a Wikipedia page opened up.
Mala: [mala] Name given to several historical anti-establishment groups and more recently a clandestine anti-religious terror organization.
Shepherd turned to Franklin who was smiling his trademark smile. ‘If you’d paid a little more attention you would have seen the Mala mentioned more than once in those old newspapers we found back in Kinderman’s pad. I told you the Bureau got involved. They were the terrorist group blamed for the attacks on the Citadel in Ruin.’
Shepherd turned back and continued to read.
The Mala are one of two pre-historic tribes of men whose combined history underpins the emergence of modern civilization and religion. The other tribe – the Yahweh – were victorious in a struggle to possess and control a powerful ancient relic known as the Sacrament, which is believed by many to still exist inside the Citadel fortress in the southern Turkish city of Ruin, where it has been kept and protected since pre-history by the spiritual heirs of the Yahweh, a brotherhood of monks known as the Sancti.
Shepherd bristled at this last word. ‘The letter sent to Kinderman was signed Novus Sancti.’
Franklin nodded. ‘Looks like the religious angle is starting to fly. Read on.’
The Mala, having lost the Sacrament, were branded as heretics by the emerging Church and driven into hiding where they became synonymous with other anti-Church organizations such as the Illuminati. Because of the secretive nature of the Mala, little is known about them but many famous scientific figures are believed to have been members. These include Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei and many others, particularly in the field of astronomy, who often suffered persecution because their theories and discoveries challenged the teachings of the Church. The Church, in turn, continues to portray the Mala as terrorists, Satanists and worshippers of the occult.
Shepherd sat back in his chair. ‘The letter also called Kinderman a member of the occult tribe.’
‘Which would explain why Kinderman was targeted by religious freaks, though not why he would sabotage Hubble.’ Franklin turned to Smith. ‘Can you dig anything else out from Kinderman’s drive? Maybe the context of these words will give us something to go on.’
Smith hammered in more commands, so hard that Shepherd wondered how many keyboards he went through a year. He hit Return and the program went to work.
Shepherd looked down at the question marks in his notebook, feeling that his usefulness to the investigation was slipping away. He was already thinking of the report he would have to write before dawn and getting through the next day of classes having had no sleep.
‘Looks like he was talking to someone,’ Franklin said.
Shepherd looked up and read the new messages.
408 Finished calculating co-ordinates for the Mala star, will send separately for you to check
408 Not much time left. May be needing our friends in Mala sooner than I thought.
‘It’s network mail,’ Shepherd said, recognizing the repeated number as a directory code. ‘It’s an encrypted, stripped down version of email they use to share data between different departments and facilities. He was talking to someone else at NASA.’ He grabbed the desk phone, hit redial and put it on speakerphone so everyone could hear. This time it barely rang before being picked up.
‘Hubble Flight Team.’
‘Merriweather, Shepherd again. Do you have a network mail directory handy?’
There was a pause punctuated by the muffled rattle of a keyboard. ‘Yeah, I got it.’
‘Could you tell me who has the directory code 408?’
Three muffled taps then a louder one. ‘That’s Professor Douglas.’
Shepherd felt the ground fall away beneath him. ‘Joseph Douglas?’
‘Who else.’
‘OK, thanks.’
‘You need anything else?’
Franklin leaned over. ‘This is Agent Franklin. Please do not mention this conversation to anyone. Not even Chief Pierce, understood?’
‘You got it.’ Franklin disconnected before Merriweather could say anything else, picked up the handset and dialled the number for transport. ‘Looks like I’ll be heading back to Goddard with an arrest warrant.’
‘Professor Douglas isn’t at Goddard,’ Shepherd said, ‘he’s at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. That’s where they’re testing all the components of the James Webb Telescope prior to launch. Professor Douglas is in charge of the whole project.’
Franklin’s face went dark as he registered the implications. ‘This is Franklin,’ he barked down the phone at whoever answered. ‘I need a ride, soon as humanly possible, to fly me as close to Huntsville, Alabama as possible.’ He covered the mouthpiece. ‘Make yourself useful Shepherd, find me the name of whoever is head of security at Marshall and get him on the phone.’
‘You should take me with you.’
Franklin looked genuinely amused. ‘Really? And why’s that?’
‘Because I know Professor Douglas,’ Shepherd replied, sensing that the door closing on his part of the investigation might just be starting to open again. ‘I used to be his student.’
22
Carrie perched on the edge of one of the sunken motel beds watching Eli sleeping on the other. There wasn’t much to the room: a bulky air-con unit built into the window; a fifties-style table with cuss words carved into it and two mismatched chairs swamped beneath their drying cammo jackets. They were pushed up against the solitary wall heater, steaming slightly and filling the trapped, mildewed air in the room with the fresh, wet smell of the forest.
The phone lay next to her on the worn counterpane. She could never sleep when she was waiting on new orders. It was a limbo state she had never relaxed into, something which came with command. The grunts could always sleep like babies, but the officers and NCOs were like parents, with all the responsibility and worry that came with that.
Outside the rain had settled into a steady drumming, like the noise Humvee tyres made over a decent blacktop. The only other sound came from an antique TV set bolted high on a wall. When they had first come into the room and switched it on it had been tuned to a porno channel, the unmistakable fake panting making her fumble for a button to cut the sound or change the channel. She hadn’t been quick enough. The screen had briefly flashed pink with the urgency of flesh before she managed to turn it off. Neither of them mentioned what they had seen, though she knew it had chimed with something unspoken in both of them. The TV was now tuned to a local news station with the volume low, in case anything came up that might be relevant or useful.
She glanced at Eli’s sleeping form, feeling the frustration that, even though they were alone in this seedy motel room with the caved-in mattresses whispering of all the things they denied themselves, their still unfulfilled mission was keeping them apart. She just wanted it to be over so they could get married and finally be together, to face the coming judgement as man and wife, blessed in the eyes of God.
Eli let out a small sound, like a frightened animal. Eight times out of ten he would jolt himself awake, staring around for the horrors that came out to play when he slept. When she’d first met him in the mission hospital outside Kandahar, he couldn’t sleep at all without screaming himself awake so this was an improvement. He was getting better and it was she who was making him so. If she had enough time she would heal him completely, but she wasn’t sure how much time they had left.
The phone rang and she pounced on it, rising from the bed and moving away to the furthest corner of the room.
‘Hello.’ She faced the wall and kept her voice low so as not to wake Eli.
‘You were right about the people you saw,’ Archangel’s voice hummed in the earpiece. ‘They were FBI.’
Carrie let this sink in. It would make their job harder, but not impossible. They just needed to find Kinderman before the Feds did, and Archangel would help with that. She was still in awe of the reach of the network she was only one tiny part of. Archangel had contacts like you wouldn’t believe. She turned and saw Eli, his eyes open now and looking at her with the glassy mix of fear and suspicion he often carried with him from his dreams. She smiled and blew him a silent kiss. ‘You want us to keep our ear to the ground, see what we can find out?’
‘No. I want you to get a few hours’ sleep and then pull out. The Lord has many enemies and the Devil never sleeps. But I have a new target for you, a new sacrifice to make, one just as important as the one that got away.’ Carrie leaned forward, anxious to hear what he had to say, a calmness flowing through her like it always did when she finally got a new mission. ‘How quickly do you think you can get to the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville Alabama?’
23
The C-130 bumped and lurched as the wheels lifted from the tarmac of Turner’s Field. Shepherd was strapped tight into a jump seat facing inward in the paratrooper position, the sound of the four turboprops filling his ears and vibrating through his entire body as they struggled to grab hold of the slippery air.
They were in what was known as a Bubird, part of the Bureau’s varied and colourful fleet of mostly confiscated aircraft. The C-130 was generally used for transport rather than passengers, but this had happened to be the one gassed up and ready to go when Franklin put in the call. It had previously belonged to a Mexican drug cartel, the pilot had cheerfully told Shepherd as they were prepping for take-off. The Mexicans had obviously stripped the interior to the bare fuselage in order to cram in as much product as possible. So far no one had deemed it necessary to put any of those little comforts back in again – things like sound-proofing or heating or padding for the sharp, metal-edged seats that were already cutting off the circulation below his knees. He adjusted his position in a vain attempt to get more comfortable, hugging to his chest the field laptop Agent Smith had given him and wrapping the shoulder strap round his hand for extra security.
They started to bank to starboard, into the weather over Chesapeake Bay, and the plane shook in protest, dipping and yawing as the wind batted it around like a kid’s toy.
Franklin was strapped into an identical chair directly opposite. He had the visor down on his flight helmet, so Shepherd couldn’t tell whether he was looking at him or not. Shepherd felt pretty sure Franklin would can him from the investigation at the first opportunity and send him straight back to Quantico, exhausted and way behind on his work. At least it was nearly Christmas, so he could catch up over the break when everyone else went home.
Home
He closed his eyes and did his best to zone out the hellish flight, remembering back to a time when the word home had almost meant something to him. His folks were already old when they had him – a mistake, his aunt had said, but then she said a lot of mean things. They died within months of each other when he was five years old. What little he could still remember of them played out like scratchy fragments of old newsreel: his father, cowed and frail, sitting alone at the dinner table, his weak eyes magnified behind foggy glasses, always fixed on an open book in front of him; his mother, staring out of the kitchen window, a slender cigarette pointing out at who knew what, looking like she envied the smoke for being able to drift away and escape. They were aged beyond their years: she from the cigarettes she could never give up, he from a life of worn-down disappointment.
Shepherd got his brains from his dad who had burned through books as fast as his mother went through Virginia Slims. His father always worked several jobs at once and one of them was always a night-watchman position, so he could do his rounds and then read in solitude and quiet. When his heart gave out, a couple of months after his mother’s lungs had done the same, it was discovered that he had been smart enough to hide some of his income from his wife and stick it in policies in his son’s name. The will made his aunt his guardian and stipulated that all of the money – bar a small lump sum for his aunt – was to be held in trust and used only to pay for his education. Furious perhaps at the sum her brother had managed to save and the relatively small amount left to her, the aunt sent him – the son of her atheist brother – to the strictest religious institution she could find, an overly-fancy boarding school, which took him away from what blood relatives remained and introduced him to a new kind of loneliness.
There is something particularly cruel about tossing a poor boy into a moneyed environment. They called him ‘The Nigger’, though he was as white as they were – which told you as much about them and their world as it did about him and his situation.
There had been nothing nurturing about St Matthew the Apostle: no kindly headmaster who saw and encouraged his potential; no tight-knit group of friends looking out for one another and bound together by their otherness. He had been on his own from the moment he stepped through the grand, arched doors.