THE TOWER: PART THREE
SIMON TOYNE

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.

‘Is that where the helium leak happened?’ Franklin asked.

‘Yup, that’s the cryo lab – biggest vacuum testing facility in the world. They got a test room there where they can suck every molecule of air right out of it and freeze it down to space temperatures. We use it to test all the expensive hardware before it gets launched, make sure it won’t break up in space.’

Something tightened in the pit of Shepherd’s empty stomach. ‘What are you testing in there now?’

‘Mirrors.’

‘What for?’

‘Same thing we’ve been testing all year – James Webb.’

Franklin jerked forward in his seat. ‘Driver, you need to take us over there right now.’

‘Now wait a second.’ Ellery swivelled round. ‘This is my facility. You can’t just come here and start ordering people …’

‘Yes I can,’ Franklin cut him off. ‘That’s exactly what I can do. Start driving, son.’

The driver obeyed, throwing the wheel hard over and sending the Explorer into a sharp U-turn. Ellery opened and closed his mouth like a landed fish but said nothing. Ahead of them the cryo lab swung back into view, leaking thick clouds of helium vapour like the whole place was ready to blow.

‘When did the leak happen?’

‘The alarm went off ’bout a half hour ago.’

‘And had you spoken to Professor Douglas by then?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Had you told him we were coming?’

‘No. I’d spoken to him but I didn’t say what it was about.’

‘What did you say exactly?’

‘I said some people had been asking for him, but I didn’t say who.’

‘And when was this?’

‘Just as soon as I got off the phone to you.’

Franklin shook his head. ‘Driver, you need to get us over there as fast as you can.’ The Explorer lurched, pushing everyone back in their seats as the driver floored the accelerator.

‘What the hell is this about anyway?’ Ellery growled, trying to claw back a bit of authority.

‘Those mirrors you’ve been testing, are they expensive by any chance, difficult to replace if they got broken?’

‘They cost about fifteen million dollars apiece. They’re precision-engineered and coated in gold. We got six of them in the chamber at the moment.’

‘Really? Well there’s a very real chance that right now, while everyone else is standing around outside, Professor Douglas is inside using his car keys to scratch his name on them.’

26

The speeding Explorer crunched to a stop just short of the building, sending the crowd of bunny-suited lab techs scattering. Franklin was out of the door before it had even stopped. Shepherd had clipped his safety belt on out of habit and was now cursing as he fumbled to release it. He opened the door and ran round the car, the freezing air like razors in his lungs.

Franklin stood to the side of the main entrance, listening. Shepherd noticed he was holding his gun. He undid the buttons on his coat and reached for his own, falling in line behind Franklin and standing slightly away from the wall like he’d been taught. Franklin turned and beckoned Ellery over.

It all felt so familiar to Shepherd from his recent intensive training that he had to remind himself this was not a simulation and the bullets in his gun would not fire paint. Also, the man they were looking for with drawn guns was his old professor, a man he respected more than pretty much any of the long procession of people who had lined up to cram knowledge into his head. Professor Douglas, with his sharp, kind eyes and his boy-scout enthusiasm. Professor Douglas who was a vegetarian because he couldn’t bear the thought of a living thing having to die on his behalf. Professor Douglas – suspected terrorist, wanted by the FBI.

Ellery joined them in a rustle of goose-down parka, his eyes darting around. Nervous. ‘Tell me about the building,’ Franklin said, keeping his eyes on the door. ‘Where are the exits?’

‘There’s this one and a fire exit out back.’

‘You need to get someone round there to cover it. What about inside? Tell me about the layout?’

‘The layout is kind of tricky.’

‘Then you’ll have to come with me. I don’t want to get lost in there. Shepherd, you cover the rear exit.’

‘We’re going inside?’ Ellery looked like he was going to pass out.

‘I can guide us,’ Shepherd said. ‘I worked in this building for a while. There’s a door leading away from the lobby to a changing room. From there you pass through a scrubbing station and an airlock to get to the central chamber. The coolants are fed into it from storage silos on the far side of the building. They come in through deep underground pipes to aid the insulation. If there’s a leak then it will probably be in the main chamber.’ He looked at Ellery for confirmation. He badly wanted to go inside and be there when Franklin confronted Douglas, for the Professor’s sake as much as anything.

Ellery nodded, all his earlier bravado now gone. ‘That’s about the size of things. You’ll need access codes for the doors but they’ll all be the same because the system is in evac mode. It’s star, four zeros then the hash key.’

Franklin nodded. ‘OK. You go organize your men to cover the exits. We’ll go in the front and try and flush him out.’

Ellery nodded and hurried away. Shepherd watched him go, taking in the crowd beyond him – the emergency vehicles, the shivering people – his senses made sharp by adrenalin and fear. In the distance he noticed that the trees were heavy with snow and what looked like black fruit. A car door slammed and the fruit took flight, rising in the air like a column of living black smoke, thousands of migratory birds flying out of season and resting on trees that had never known snow. Nature turned on its head.

End of days.

‘Ready?’ Franklin said.

No – Shepherd thought. ‘Yep,’ he said, turning back to the entrance and raising his gun.

‘Good, ’cause you’re on point.’ He stepped around and behind Shepherd so the front of his body was tight to his back – nuts to butts. ‘Cover and move,’ he murmured, ‘just like in Hogan’s Alley.’

Except the bullets are real – Shepherd thought. The bullets are real.

Then he stepped forward and opened the door.

27

Shepherd went in low, sweeping the entrance lobby from left to right while Franklin stayed high and swept in the opposite direction. It was exactly as he remembered it, a row of five chairs stretched along the far wall below a huge picture of the space shuttle, a water cooler in the left corner with a waste bin next to it half full of paper cups, a heavy door to the right with a thick window built in at head height and HazMat and Radiation symbols below it. Nothing else.

He stepped forward and moved across the foyer, heading for the door and repeating the training mantra over and over in his head: Check and move, check and move.

Franklin stayed close enough to make them a single entity with two sets of eyes and two guns.

Star, four zeros then the hash key. Through the door. It swung shut behind them with the suck of rubber seals, cutting off all sounds from outside. In the quietness they heard something new, a low, steady hiss as though a huge snake was waiting for them somewhere inside the building.

Shepherd stepped to the side of the door – gun in front, heart pounding – and scoped as much of the room beyond as he could through the small window. The gowning room was all white tiles, bright lights and shelves full of rolled-up suits and gloves. There were some full suits hanging like ghosts on the wall, which made his finger tighten on the trigger.

He glanced up at Franklin who had taken a position on the other side of the door. Nodded once. Reached out with his left hand and punched the code into the door. The lock clicked. Franklin twisted the handle. Shepherd pushed it open from the hinge and followed it low, just as before, left to right, corner to centre, while Franklin stayed high and swept the opposite way. A movement made Shepherd’s gun twitch round. One of the hanging suits had moved. He blew out a long breath realizing it was only the air from the opening door that had shifted it.

The hissing sound was louder now. It was coming from beyond the air shower that led into the main chamber.

They moved towards it, their shoes catching on the sticky mats there to pull impurities from the soles of lab boots before they entered the high-pressure air shower that would blast off the rest. Shepherd stopped as he reached the clear screen that marked the entrance. ‘Let’s go,’ Franklin said, joining him by the door and seeing there was nothing inside.

‘We should be suited up before going in there.’

‘Really?’ Franklin turned and opened the door.

‘Wait!’ Shepherd ducked in after him just as a tornado of wind rushed at them from all sides sounding like a thousand hand dryers going off at once. Franklin ducked and crabbed over to the far door, leading with his gun as if the noise was some kind of attack. The racket lasted for ten seconds then cut out. Franklin turned back to Shepherd. ‘What were you saying?’

‘Never mind.’

The window in the final door revealed little of the large chamber beyond. The entire upper part of the room was hidden behind a thick wall of white vapour, like someone had captured a cloud and was storing it here. ‘Helium,’ Shepherd whispered.

‘Poisonous?’

He shook his head. ‘There’s a danger of oxygen starvation if you inhale too much. Other than that it just makes your voice sound funny. It’s the same stuff you get in party balloons. Biggest risk is frostbite and cold burns. It boils at minus four hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit and in the pipes it will be liquid, so even colder. The Professor won’t be in there if it’s a liquid spill. Not unless he’s dead. No one can survive long in cold like that.’

Franklin smiled and stepped behind him. ‘You first.’

Shepherd looked again through the window at the gas cloud and took a breath. He felt the grip of the gun pressing into his palm as he held it tight in one hand and punched the code into the door with the other. The lock clicked, he pulled it open and stepped inside.

It was beyond freezing inside the room and the hissing was sinister and loud. Above him the underside of the cloud shifted as the opening door stirred the air, making it look like something was moving inside it.

He swept the room the same way as before. The vapour in the air reduced visibility but he could make out the lower third of the circular door to the vault in the centre of the room. This was where the hardware was tested and where the leak would most likely be coming from. He moved toward it, keeping low and well below the freezing cloud. It had been cold outside in the freak winter weather but nothing compared to this. His breath was frosting the moment it passed his lips. He glanced up at the thick cloud above his head, formed by the lighter than air helium filling the chamber top down like smoke. There was something wrong about it being there. He dredged his mind for what he knew about the facility. Fragments came back to him, bits of technical information about how it worked – then it hit him.

Laminar flow.

He looked back up at the cloud. The room kept itself clean using laminar flow, air blown constantly in parallel streams from top to bottom to sweep particles down to the filters in the floor. But the cloud was not being blown downwards. It just sat there, filling the upper part of the room with freezing vapour. He remembered how it had shifted when he had opened the door. There was no airflow in the room at all. Maybe it had been damaged by the leak. Maybe not.

He spotted something else that was wrong. In the clinical environment of the clean room, nothing should be out of place, everything had to be stowed away and locked down to prevent dangerous and potentially costly accidents: but there was a laptop lying on the floor over by the vault door. He moved closer to it, squinting through the thick air to get a better look. Shifting hardware in and out of the cryo unit was incredibly precise. Even a scrubbed glove could leave contaminants on a component, so it was all done by computer-controlled robotic lifting arms. The laptop was hardwired into the control panel of one of these. The arm was extended, the gripping claw disappearing into the dense cloud above his head. Shepherd took a step towards it, moving sideways to bring the screen of the laptop into view. There was a number on it, two zeroes followed by a one and an eight. As Shepherd watched, the eight turned to a seven. Then a six. Then a five.

Countdown.

He darted forward, grabbing one of the high-pressure hoses used to clean components and pointed it up at the cloud, pulling the trigger at the spot where the top of the arm had to be. The hiss of air joined the shushing sibilance of the room as the cloud parted above him, just long enough for him to see what the arm was holding.

He dropped the hose and span round, grabbing Franklin by the arm. ‘GET OUT!’

In his mind he was already sprinting back to the entrance, dragging Franklin with him, but the world had gone into slow motion.

How long left before the counter hit zero? Not long enough and he dared not turn to look. Say ten seconds at most. Ten seconds to get as far away as possible.

Something tugged on his arm, holding him back. He looked back and into Franklin’s face, confused and angry. ‘RUN!’ he screamed, pulling him towards the door. No time to explain. No time for anything.

He counted every step, imagining each one corresponding to the countdown on the laptop.

… nine …

… eight …

Until now, Shepherd had not been fully committed to the idea that his old Professor was in here somewhere, sabotaging key components of Hubble’s successor.

… seven …

… six …

But everything was so deliberate and planned. He made it to the door and yanked it open, heaving Franklin through and charging after him.

… five …

… four …

The roar of the air shower kicked in and for a second he thought he’d got his timings wrong. He carried on running, straight through the second door with Franklin right next to him.

… three …

… two …

So clever.

Evacuate the building so no one gets hurt … flood the upper part of the chamber with freezing gas … lift a reserve tank of coolant into it with the arm so the gas keeps it cool … until the countdown tells it to drop the tank onto the hard, relatively warm floor …

… One …

In front of him, Franklin was halfway through the final door and Shepherd threw himself forward, bundling him out of the scrubbing station and down onto the floor of the entrance lobby.

Down.

Stay down. Helium is lighter than air. Helium rises.

… Zero …

Shepherd heard a muffled crump then the percussive wave of the explosion ripped through the building, turning the world into torn metal and broken glass.

And then darkness.

III

What man is there that hath built a new house, and hath not dedicated it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle

Deuteronomy 20:5

28

EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

Old Town, City of Ruin

Southeastern Turkey

Gabriel died shortly after noon on the same day he rode into Ruin.

A man in a HazMat suit appeared over him, his visor fogging with hurried breath, drawn by the cardio alarm.

‘Over here!’ His voice was muffled by the hermetic suit, lost amid the wail of the alarm and the howls of other patients. ‘HERE!’ He reached out a gloved hand and placed it on Gabriel’s chest, pumping hard on the breastbone to massage the still heart beneath it, cursing the fact that his other hand was strapped tight to his chest by a sling.

Another suited figure looked up from another bed and started to walk over, any urgency blunted by the now commonplace nature of death. It was the third time a cardiac alarm had sounded that day and, with so many infected and suffering so hideously, it was hard not to see the release of death as something of a blessing.

‘Do something,’ the man at the bed said, still pumping rhythmically on Gabriel’s chest with his one good hand.

The new arrival glanced at the monitor, the heartbeat flat-lining. He looked down at the still form, bound to the bed. ‘He’s gone,’ he said, flicking a switch to silence the alarm.

The man at Gabriel’s side looked up, anger lighting his face, his breath fogging his visor as he spoke. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Dr Kaplan, I’m the senior physician in charge, why do you ask?’

‘Because I want to spell it right when I write up the charge of medical homicide by neglect.’

The doctor’s eyes dropped to the ID displayed in the clear pocket on the front of the man’s suit and read the name: Chief Inspector Davud Arkadian, Ruin City Police. Pushing Arkadian’s hand away he moved up to the bed and continued the CPR on Gabriel’s body. His bulky helmet turned back towards the other doctors. ‘Over here,’ he shouted, loud enough to be heard above the din. ‘Make it fast and bring the crash unit with you.’

Gabriel felt like he was floating upwards, flying in a bright sky. Below him he could see fields and rivers rushing past, flitting between clouds that grew thicker the higher he flew. He felt weightless, peaceful – free.

Through the clouds he saw the land fall away and the vast mirror of the ocean stretch out. Huge flocks of birds flew past him, all heading in the same direction towards land. Even at this great height he could see other things moving across the water below. They left lines behind them, long straight, white wakes like scratches on the surface of the sea. Ships. Thousands of them, all heading back to land, the lines of their wakes slowly converging the closer they got to port.

He continued to rise, as if some force was pulling him up to the bright sun that warmed and welcomed him. No. Not the sun, more vast somehow and indistinct. It continued to grow the closer he got, bigger even than the ocean below though he could not see the edge of it. Moving towards it required no effort, it was as easy as falling. But there was something about the ships and the birds that plucked at something inside him. They were all going in a different direction to him, and it made him feel uneasy. He felt like he should be going the same way too, back to the land, away from the soothing sun that filled the sky.

He tilted himself downwards, his head pointing back towards the earth and swept his arms through the air, pulling himself down and away from the light. The steady rise stopped, just a little, then started again, pulling him up like he was a cork bobbing in water. He fixed on a spot of dry land far below him, reached out with his arms again and pulled forward, kicking hard with both legs.

‘Clear!’

Two of the three HazMat suits stepped back from the bed. The third held the defibrillator paddles to the smears of conductive gel on Gabriel’s chest and pressed the twin fire buttons.

Gabriel arched upwards, his bound hands twitching into claws at his sides.

Dr Kaplan stepped forward, checking the ECG monitor and resuming CPR. The line on the screen jumped then settled back to nothing. ‘Nearly had him. Give him another milligram of epinephrine and get ready to try again.’

The second suit fumbled a syringe into the cannula fitted to Gabriel’s arm, the urgency and his gloved hands combining to make this simple task ten times more difficult. He emptied the plunger and sent a milligram of adrenaline into Gabriel’s veins. Inside his inert body the peripheral vascular system responded, constricting to send a shunt of blood to his core, thereby raising his blood pressure. The doctor placed the syringe on a stand and pressed a button on the defibrillator unit to prime it again.

‘Charging,’ he called out. The insectile whine of building electricity cut through the air.

Dr Kaplan continued to pump Gabriel’s heart with his interlaced hands, forcing blood through veins while Arkadian made himself useful as best he could with his usable arm. He stayed by Gabriel’s head squeezing the bag valve mask fixed to his face, sending a steady pulse of oxygen to his immobile lungs. He watched the line on the screen flicker but stay flat, the heart still not beating on its own. The second doctor got ready with the paddles, placing one high and one low with the heart in between.

‘Clear!’

Gabriel arched. On the screen the ECG jumped.

They moved back to their positions, three people working together to carry on functions that were normally automatic, keeping him alive by hand while the ECG continued to dance but refused to settle.

‘We can’t keep on with this indefinitely,’ Dr Kaplan said between pumps. ‘CPR and artificial respiration only go so far in keeping a patient viable. His brain is already being starved of oxygen. Any longer than a few minutes and it becomes increasingly pointless.’

‘Then you’d better get a move on,’ Arkadian said.

Kaplan nodded. ‘OK spike him up with another mil of epinephrine. Let’s go again.’

Arkadian focused on the bag in his hand, squeezing and releasing it steadily at the same pace Gabriel would breathe if he could. ‘Come on,’ he whispered, dipping his head down level with Gabriel’s ear. ‘Don’t go out like this. Not like this.’

Gabriel could see the land beneath him getting closer but the effort to reach it was exhausting. Occasionally a gust of wind would help him out, blowing him downward in a sudden surge, but it never lasted long and the upward force would start to pull on him again, working on his mind too, telling him to give up, let go, relax and float away.

The land was also taking form and he continued to focus on it, using it as a hook to pull him down, fixing on a patch of green in the middle of a vast, dry desert. He continued to kick and pull with his arms, swimming in the air like he was trying to get to the bottom of a crystal-clear lake.

He could see more now, trees and rivers and a lake at the centre of the green, reflecting the bright sun behind him. And there was something else, a person, a woman, standing by the edge of the pool and looking around as though she had lost something. She was calling out but he was still too high to hear her. He could feel weariness flooding his whole body and again the voice from above told him to just let go. Then another gust of wind pushed him down, halving the distance so he could finally see who it was and hear what she was calling.

‘Gabriel!’ Liv hollered into the same wind that had pushed him close to her. ‘Where have you gone? Why have you left me here?’

Gabriel kicked harder, the sound of her voice and the sight of her pulling at him now with far more strength than the light in the sky. ‘I’m here,’ he called out. ‘My love, I’m here. I’m coming for you. I’m coming back.’

Then he kicked once more and something seemed to snap. The lights went out and he was suddenly falling through darkness, down to the earth that he could no longer see, and down to the woman he could no longer hear.

‘Heartbeat steady at eight nine, BP 100 over 80.’ Kaplan stood back watching the proof on the heart monitor that it had taken over the job he had been doing for the last five minutes.

Arkadian continued to pump the air bag, too scared to stop in case it was the only thing keeping Gabriel bound to this earth. ‘You can stop that now,’ Kaplan said, ‘he’s breathing on his own.’

Arkadian stepped back, suddenly aware that he was drenched in sweat inside his spacesuit. ‘Congratulations, Doctor,’ he said, managing a smile, ‘you just saved a good man’s life.’

The doctor looked down at the figure on the bed. The infected and blistered skin already starting to sheen again with sweat as the fever came back to life too. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But for how long?’

29

The heat hammered a headache into Liv before she had even made it out of sight of the compound. She was following the line of one of the larger streams that flowed out from the holding pits, tracing it through the contours of the land. She did not stoop to drink from it despite her thirst. She knew the riders would be watching and she did not want to give them the satisfaction. She felt uneasy walking away, though she knew she had no option: each footstep seemed heavier than the last, like her whole body was rebelling against leaving this place. It was as though her heart was physically bound to it and each step made the bond tighter as it tried to pull her back.

After nearly two hours’ walking, the land started to fall away and she came across a shallow depression in the ground where the water had pooled. She stopped still the moment she saw it and sank slowly to the ground.

An eagle stood on the far bank of the pool, dipping its curved beak into the water, sending gentle ripples across the surface while its powerful talons gripped the wet, red earth like soft flesh. It saw her, held her gaze with its huge amber eyes. She sensed no fear in it, or surprise at her presence, it just stared at her, so intently that she felt it must see right through her. Then the crunch of a foot on dry earth behind her made the bird take flight in an explosion of feathers and water droplets.

Liv spun round and saw Tariq standing over her, his eyes following the bird upward as it rose into the sky. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you followed me.’

He looked down at her and smiled. ‘We all followed you,’ he replied, and stepped aside to let the rest of the refugees file past. Liv watched in silence as they walked down to the water one by one. She felt like crying.

Since Gabriel had gone she had been almost overwhelmed by feelings of loneliness. It gave her hope to see these strangers now, people who had chosen to follow her into the unknown rather than seek their own salvation. There was something happening here – bigger than her, bigger than any one person – and she knew they must feel it, as she felt it, or else why would they be here?

‘This is a good omen,’ Tariq said, looking up at the eagle. She followed his gaze to where the outspread wings gyred high above them, forming the shape of a T in the sky. She’d seen this before.

She grabbed the folded piece of paper from her pocket and opened it to reveal the rubbing of the Starmap, her eyes focusing on the first line of symbols.

The river

An eagle

A T-shaped cross

Her eyes slid across the remaining symbols and her heart thumped in her chest.

‘Stop,’ she called out. ‘Don’t drink it, don’t drink the water.’ Faces turned to her and she could see questions and doubt in their eyes.

She focused her mind on the symbols that followed the T.

The river again, a man kneeling next to it, his head hanging down and dripping, then the skull – symbol of death.

Liv looked back along the stream towards the distant compound, now just a shimmering smudge in the distance. For most of its length it ran clear, but even as she watched she could see a change. Far in the distance a current was swelling and surging down the stream towards her. It stirred up the mud as it went, turning the water the reddish colour of the earth – the colour of blood.

How long before it reached here? Ten minutes? Five maybe. Then the water in the pool would be spoiled too. Unless. She looked at the land, the way the river split, half of it flowing down into the pool.

‘We must dam the stream into the pool,’ she called out.

She moved quickly without waiting for a response, heading back to where the water split in two. Most of the flow was coming towards her, down a shallow, two-metre wide stream that was feeding the pool. She picked up one of the boulders that littered the broken ground and stumbled forward, the weight of the rock dragging her down. She reached the fork and the boulder splashed into the water, sinking almost without trace beneath the surface despite the shallowness of the stream. The water continued to flow around it unimpeded. She cast around for another rock and scrambled over to a large, brittle stone that fell apart as soon as she tried to pick it up. She grabbed the two largest chunks and hauled them back to the stream, dropping them next to the first one. Again they sank with barely a trace – and so did her spirits. She was already exhausted; she couldn’t possibly dam the stream on her own. It was hopeless.

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