The Tower: Part Three

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Part III

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Part IV

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

About the Author

Also by Simon Toyne

Copyright

About the Publisher

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.

He had withdrawn into his studies, the one area where he could take them on: in maths and science in particular it didn’t matter how much money your daddy had, only whether you got the questions right. There was also much less chance of being cornered and beasted in the study rooms because there was – almost always – a tutor present. But for all this misery, there was one good thing that had come out of St Matthew’s. It was here that he had discovered and fallen in love with the stars.

In the summer he would crawl out onto the flat lead roof of the dormitory building, away from the ‘night patrols’ of his tormentors, and sleep there instead. Lying with his back against the soft metal, still warm from the heat of the sun he would gaze up at the speckled dark, picking out patterns in the distant points of light. Study time from then on had new material to fill it. When the classwork was done he scoured the library for books on astronomy and devoured their contents, putting names to the patterns until he could lie on the cooling roof, look up at the night sky and name it all. That had felt something like home to him: warm and safe and far away from people, taking comfort in objects that were millions of light years away while the trapped heat of the nearest star warmed him in the cold night.

The true extent of his aunt’s revenge only became apparent when he started looking at colleges. It was then that he discovered the fees at the hateful school she had chosen for him had been so high he had already burned through all the money that should have seen him through college and beyond. This was when he found NASA’s Graduate Program.

College was the first time he’d encountered a tribe of people who didn’t all seem to hate him. This had felt like home, for a while – though whenever the holidays came around and everyone went back to their real homes he was reminded of how temporary it all was. He started volunteering for every graduate work placement going just to keep himself busy in the quiet times until NASA became a sort of home too, with its womb-like control centres and extended family of obsessives.

But in truth he had only ever experienced what he imagined home was supposed to feel like just once in his life. And the truly surprising thing was, it turned out not to be a place at all. He pictured her now – Melisa. Meeting her had been like coming home. Only with her had he ever felt able to let his carefully constructed defences down. Only with Melisa could he truly be himself, with no apology and no pretence. She made him feel better as a person than he knew he really was. And then she had gone.

The C-130 rose up into a cloudbank and the shaking increased as furious turbulence took hold of the tin-can plane. Shepherd’s eyes opened in instinctive alarm. Franklin was smiling straight back at him. The smile broke and his lips moved, the scratchy sound of his voice cutting through the howl of the engines and rumbling through the comms into his head. ‘Anytime you want to share your confession with me, Agent Shepherd, I’ll be more’n happy to listen.’

Shepherd looked away.

God damn if he wasn’t a mind-reader too.

He hugged the laptop tighter as the bucking plane continued to try everything it could to jerk it free. Right now it was the most precious thing in his life, that and the opportunity fate had given him. He had thought it would take months even years before he would get proper access to the vast resource that was the FBI Missing Persons File. So when Agent Smith had handed him the field unit and set him up with a temporary Bureau user ID it was like getting the keys to the kingdom. Every single law enforcement agency worth a damn, domestic and foreign, was linked in on some level to the FBI’s MPD database. In terms of looking for someone who had slipped off the map it was like going from pinning photocopied sheets to a community notice board, to sticking a full-page ad on the front cover of every newspaper in the Western world.

But he would have to be very careful: usage was strictly monitored. He would have to try and work his way around the monitoring software if he wanted to avoid getting canned from the Bureau before he had barely stepped through the door. And abusing Agency privileges and access was also a felony. But there was another problem. The level of clearance he had been given by Smith was directly linked to the urgency and importance of the investigation he had been assigned to. The moment he was taken off it, all those privileges would be removed. His window of opportunity was very small and closing fast. It might take him years to regain this sort of clearance, by which time Melisa’s trail would be colder still. He felt closer to her now, bouncing around in this cloud, than he had in long months.

He turned his head to the front of the plane in time to see the nose break through the clouds revealing the stars in the clear night. The turbulence melted away almost instantly and his arms relaxed around the laptop – but only a little.

He could sense that Franklin was still smiling at him but he did not look in his direction. He might tell him the story of his lost years one day, but not yet. Not until he had learned the ending for himself. Until then, he would do his level best to stay on the investigation for as long as he could. So he closed his eyes and sifted through what he knew, trying to work out the links between a missing Nobel laureate, nearly a year’s worth of lost space data and something that had happened in the city of Ruin eight months earlier.

24

EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

Gabriel slipped across the Orontes River marking the border between Syria and Turkey just after midnight on the fifth day. He had walked his horse for much of the way, resting it during the heat of the days and wary of the dry dust kicked up by galloping hooves. Several times he had spotted patrols in the distance and pulled the horse to the ground, lying beside it until they had passed, shivering despite the desert heat and the fever that rose and fell inside him like lava.

During the nights he had shivered from real cold as the chill of space settled back on the earth, the crackle and boom of distant battles showing him where the civil war raged so he could steer a course around it. He rode harder then, his way lit only by the stars and his desire to keep going.

At the height of his fever, rocked almost unconscious by the movement of his horse across the vast desert, he had imagined his father riding with him, pointing out the spots of long-ago battles and bringing forth the ghosts of those that had died here. Ottoman sultans, Persian caliphates, Roman emperors, Alexander the Great, they had all fought for a land no man could ever really own. St Paul had walked here too, converting to Christianity on the long road to Damascus, moving away from the very place Gabriel was trying so hard to get to.

By the time he reached the river marking the end of Syria and the beginning of Turkey, he was half dead from the disease that consumed him from within and half frozen from cold. He found a spot between two checkpoints and slipped into the dark night river, clinging to the swimming horse as if he were crossing the Styx and the horse was the only thing stopping him from drifting away into the underworld.

Not yet – he told himself and held on tighter – just a few more hours, then death could have him.

He rose with the horse, throwing his body over it so it lifted him clear of the river, then lay across its back, dripping and shivering, letting the horse drink for a long while before finally spurring it forward one last time.

The civil war had brought battalions of troops to the border, so he moved slowly at first, picking his way carefully past the military posts, before galloping the last seventy kilometres along the long dusty tracks that ran for miles through the olive and pistachio groves.

He entered the city of Ruin as dawn was lightening the sky and the city was beginning to stir. Ahead of him he could see the Citadel rising sheer and black at the centre of the city, so high the summit was lit by sunlight that had yet to rise above the rim of the surrounding mountains.

He kept to the centre of the great wide boulevard running straight to the heart of the city and away from the early risers who stared mutely at this lone horseman moving past the cars and souvenir shops. He knew the Old Town, locked each night behind its portcullises and seven-metre-thick walls, would be preparing to let the first tourists of the day inside. As soon as the sun peeped above the mountains and bathed the Old Town with light the gates would open and he would charge straight at them, relying on his appearance and the flying hooves to scatter the tourists. He would then ride to the top of the hill and ring the ascension bell at the Tribute dock, demanding that they pull him up and into the mountain. The monk Athanasius would know why he was there. They had to let him in. Just a few more minutes and his journey would be over.

He reached the end of the boulevard and cut across Suleiman Park towards the main public gate. It was the widest of all the entrances and would, he hoped, allow people to get out of his way when he charged at them. He didn’t want to hurt anyone and certainly didn’t want to touch anyone and risk passing on the fever that burned inside him.

He passed under the final tree, the foliage parting to reveal the Old Town wall. Then he saw them, two ghosts standing sentinel in shrouds of white. In his delirium he thought they must be visions of death, waiting to claim him, but as his horse carried him closer he saw that they were real.

The skull-like eyes of one turned to him then motioned to the other.

He heard the rustle of their sterile suits as they moved towards him, saw the HazMat chevrons and quarantine sign behind them, and realized – as exhaustion and defeat finally dragged him from his horse – that he was too late. The disease he had carried out of the Citadel, and travelled so far to bring back again, had already spread.

25

The transport plane dropped below the cloud barely two hundred feet above a field of whiteness so bright Shepherd had to squint to make out Redstone Army airfield with the space centre beyond stretching all the way to the horizon.

‘Pilot, you sure this is Alabama and not Alaska?’ Franklin’s voice crackled through the drone of the engines.

‘They got weather like this all over the South,’ the pilot replied, ‘biggest dump since records began. Christmassy though, ain’t it? If it’s nice weather you wanted we should have flown north. Apparently they got a heat wave in Chicago. World’s gone crazy.’

‘End of days,’ Franklin muttered loud enough for Shepherd to hear. ‘Maybe Kinderman was on to something.’

The tyres squealed against the frozen tarmac as they touched down on the cleared runway and the smell of scorched rubber seeped into the hold, making Shepherd feel slightly sick. He hadn’t slept all night, had barely eaten anything and the flight had been so bumpy he felt like he’d been beaten up.

‘You think NASA might stand us a little breakfast?’ Franklin asked, demonstrating again his uncanny knack of sniffing out a raw nerve and tweaking it.

‘I can take you to the canteen,’ Shepherd said, breathing in freezing air that smelt of rubber and trying hard not to think about the greasy piles of bacon and hash browns laid on each morning for the seven thousand space centre personnel.

Franklin smiled. ‘In that case I’m actually glad I brought you along.’

The plane jerked to a stop with the same lack of grace as the rest of the flight and freezing air flooded the hold as the rear-loading ramp began to lower.

Outside, a Ford Explorer was waiting for them, its engine running and sending thick clouds of exhaust fumes past the NASA logo on the side. A man in a dark blue parka with a security badge stitched on the sleeve got out of the passenger door and stood with his hands crossed in front of him. He was a carbon copy of the Security Chief at Goddard: same solid weightlifter’s build; same flat face; Shepherd bet he had the same neat office with a picture of his youthful self on the wall.

‘Dave Ellery,’ the man said, extending his hand to Franklin who led the way down the ramp. ‘I’m Chief of Security here.’ He wore gloves against the cold and didn’t bother taking them off when he shook hands. Not friendly at all. It was a territorial thing stemming from the fact that the FBI had cross-state jurisdiction and could take over an investigation if they decided to. No one likes meeting a bigger fish, especially in law enforcement. Ellery gestured to the rear doors and got back into the front passenger seat without saying another word.

The inside of the basic Explorer was like five-star luxury after the plane. It was super-heated, the seats were padded and Shepherd felt an ache in his fingers and toes as blood started working its way back into them.

‘You fellas sure picked a day for it,’ Ellery said, staring out from behind black shades at the white landscape.

‘From what I heard they done hijacked your weather and shipped it off to Chicago,’ Franklin said, subtly upping his southern accent to match Ellery’s. It was a technique they taught at Quantico called subject mirroring that implied kinship and helped promote trust, though Shepherd suspected it might be somewhat lost on the frosty Security Chief, who had probably done the same course anyway.

‘I didn’t mean just the weather,’ Ellery said without elaborating.

‘Bad day already?’

‘I’ll say. I’m running short-staffed and we’ve had to evacuate one of the research facilities because of a helium leak. You can’t mess with that stuff. Had to shut the entire building down.’ He removed a box file from an attaché case by his feet and handed it to Franklin in the back seat. ‘I dug out those documents you asked for.’

The word THREATS was written on the file in thick marker pen. Franklin opened it and slid out twelve clear plastic folders, each containing correspondence from a different month. January contained a one-page note typed on an old-fashioned typewriter that said:

Dear NASA,

Quit wasting tax dollars shooting junk up into space. The army needs equipment bad. Spend money on that you assholes or I will personally shoot the man pushing the launch button. I am deadly serious.

A Patriot

‘’Course that’s just the physical stuff,’ Ellery said. ‘We get ten times as much mail over the internet. I can show you that in my office if you want.’

Franklin sorted through the plastic folders until he found one marked May, the month Dr Kinderman had received his first card.

‘Is it true what I heard, Hubble got knocked offline?’ Ellery asked.

‘That’s classified information. And whatever you heard we would ’preciate you keeping it under your hat, sir. You know how rumours can get in the way of an investigation.’ Franklin’s accent was travelling down through Georgia and getting further south all the time.

He handed January through April to Shepherd and popped the fastener on May, carefully sliding out the contents to keep them in order. May had clearly been a bumper month for the crazies. Top of the pile was an almost illiterate letter written in crayon with some photos of astronauts stuck to it with their faces burned out by a cigarette. Below that was a photo of the Challenger shuttle exploding, with a future date and I WILL MAKE THIS HAPPEN AGEN written on it. The next item was a postcard with a Renaissance painting of the Tower of Babel on the front. Franklin showed it to Shepherd then flipped it over. On the back, in a familiar neat hand was written:

“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name.”

‘You get any more like this?’ Franklin held up the card and Ellery’s head swivelled round to see it.

‘One a month since May, reg’lar as clockwork.’

‘Was the Professor bothered by them?’

‘Not especially.’

‘But he did see them?’

‘Sure, they were addressed to him.’

‘Did you mention them to Chief Pierce over at Goddard?’

Ellery snorted. ‘Why would I do that? Chief Pierce has his own fair share of nut-jobs to deal with I’m damn sure he don’t need any of mine.’

Franklin handed the remaining files to Shepherd leaving himself with December. ‘Did you get another one this month?’

‘No. Matter of fact we did not.’

Franklin popped the fastener. ‘Don’t tell me, you got a letter instead, one that was typed but similar in tone.’

Ellery paused. ‘How did you know that?’

Franklin didn’t answer. He had already found the twin of the A5 manila envelope that had been sent to Kinderman. It was in its own plastic folder next to the letter it had contained. Franklin held it out so Shepherd could read it. It was identical to the first one except for one small detail.

‘Least he didn’t call this one a Sodomite,’ Franklin said so only Shepherd could hear. ‘You follow this up?’ he asked Ellery.

‘Of course. We take threats seriously here, no matter how strange, vague or misguided they may appear. I sent the original up to Langley, that one there is just a copy. I sent one of the postcards too.’

‘They find anything?’

‘Who knows? These things don’t rank too high on the “hurry up” scale. Anything more important comes along – which is just about everything – stuff like this gets bumped to the bottom of the pile. Here we are, gentlemen.’

Shepherd looked up as the Explorer eased off the main road and approached the front of a mirrored building that reflected the sky making it seem like it was hardly there. Beyond it in the distance the launch towers rose above various research facility buildings that sprawled across the campus. One of them had a small crowd of people outside it wearing white, clean-room suits and was surrounded by parked emergency vehicles, their lights turning slowly.