The Tower (12 page)

‘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.’

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 Centre in Huntsville Alabama?’

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 twin props 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.