The Tower (26 page)

In his own small way, O’Halloran had felt it too. His desire to come home had been unexpected and almost primal in its intensity. Twice now he had gone out to his car to head over to the office but both times just the thought of putting the car in gear and driving back to Quantico had filled him with such a feeling of panic that he had ended up sitting there, sweating despite the cold, the engine running and his hand resting on the gearshift. Just the few steps down the drive had made him feel as if a rope was wound around his heart, pulling tighter with each step he took. Both times he had ended up turning off the engine, getting out of the car and walking back to the house, the pressure and panic easing with each step until, by the time he crossed the threshold back into the warmth and comfort of his home, it had gone entirely.

His cellphone buzzed, cutting through the low burble of the news. He stiffened in his chair and the springs creaked as he snapped back into professional mode.

‘O’Halloran.’

‘Sir, it’s Squires. You anywhere near a TV?’

Squires was one of the section chiefs who lived in an office down the hall from his. He was also working from home today, O’Halloran recalled. ‘I’m watching the news now.’

‘You watching CNN?’

‘BBC World, you catching all this about troop movements?’

‘Yes, but that’s not what I’m calling about, sir. Turn to CNN. You’re going to want to see this.’

O’Halloran plucked the remote from his desk and flicked quickly through the channels. On CNN a reporter was standing next to a chain-link fence talking directly to camera. Beyond the fence a field of white snow stretched away to a rocket-launching tower and a building complex surrounded by emergency vehicles. One of the buildings was a mass of twisted metal. The strap line read:

‘Guess the lid just came off this one,’ Squires said.

O’Halloran took in the story. Normally a news channel breaking a story on one of his on-going cases would send him into a quiet rage. ‘It was only a matter of time,’ he said, surprising himself as much as Squires with his calm attitude and detached tone. ‘Better prepare a statement to throw some bones to the press. Confirm everything they already know and give them the Hubble information too if they haven’t got it already. And leak the names of the missing persons. Maybe if Kinderman and Douglas’s pictures are all over the news we might run them down a little faster –’

The picture cut to a shot of Agents Franklin and Shepherd sitting on a sofa in what looked like a daytime chat show.

‘
Earlier this afternoon
,’ the reporter said underneath the pictures, ‘
two government agents confirmed rumours that the attack on the Marshall Space Center testing facility was not an isolated event.
’

The sound faded up on the clip.

‘– They are true I take it – the Hubble spacecraft has been disabled and its successor the James Webb telescope has been destroyed?’

‘
Yes
,’ Shepherd confirmed.

‘Get to work on that statement and get it out fast,’ O’Halloran said to Squires, tuning out from the rest of the report. ‘Now it’s out there I don’t want it to look like we’re trying to hide anything.’

‘What about Franklin and Shepherd? You want me to assign someone new?’

O’Halloran thought about it for a moment. ‘No, let me talk to them. I want to hear how this happened and right now I doubt we have the men to spare anyway.’

‘I’m happy to come in if you want me to, sir,’ Squires replied, his voice a little guarded.

‘No, it’s OK – you stay home with your family, that’s the best place right now. Call me if you hear anything new.’

O’Halloran put the phone down and listened to the familiar creak of the house he had lived in for over twenty years. He could hear Beth in the kitchen clearing up the lunch things.

Stay at home with your family.

Damn right.

He found Franklin’s phone number and hit the button to dial it.

Jackson had been thankfully called away almost as soon as he and Franklin had left the interview room. They’d swapped cards and promised to catch up before Franklin left town but in truth neither of them really meant it. They had never been that close and Franklin didn’t have time to shoot the breeze about ‘back in the day’. He had more pressing things on his mind and other situations to deal with.

He couldn’t explain the feelings he’d been experiencing for the last few days or the things they were making him do. All he knew for sure was that they were getting stronger, swelling inside him like the slow intake of a deep, deep breath. Over the years he had listened to enough strung-out junkies talk about how it felt to crave a hit and that was the closest he could get to describing what this was like for him. It was an urge that steadily filled his mind and body, slowly pushing everything else aside until he could think of nothing else. It had taken over everything, driving him to do whatever it took to try to satisfy the craving. He blew out a long breath as he stalked through the empty offices, his footfalls on the stained carpet tiles silent beneath the constantly ringing phones.

Not long now.

He found a coffee pot in a kitchen on the second floor. It was sitting on a hotplate with a layer of thick black sludge on the bottom. Bottomless, twenty-four-hour coffee pots were standard issue in any police department but they usually got continuously topped up by the various shifts. This one had clearly been left to stew overnight and no one had noticed, further evidence of the staffing crisis Jackson had mentioned.

He did his best to scrape the gloop from the bottom of the pot then found some fresh coffee in a container in the icebox and some filters in a drawer and set a new pot bubbling. He was just scouting around for some clean mugs when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He answered it without looking to see who it was, expecting that it would probably be Marie giving him a hard time about not being home.

‘Franklin!’ He jammed the phone into the crook of his neck, continuing his search through the cupboards.

‘You mind telling me why you’re making unauthorized statements to the press about your on-going investigation?’ Franklin nearly dropped the phone as he recognized O’Halloran’s voice.

‘Sir?’

‘I’ve just seen you and Shepherd on CNN chatting to the Reverend Fulton Cooper.’

Franklin flashed back to the empty studio – empty but for the cameras. He heard the phone creak as his hand tightened round it. ‘He must have taped the interview.’

‘You spoke to him in a TV studio?’

‘He was –’ Franklin closed his eyes and shook his head. He had been stupid. His mind wasn’t on the job the way it usually was since the urge had taken him over. ‘He was in the middle of a broadcast, sir. We didn’t think it should wait.’

‘You get anything out of him?’

‘A little.’

‘You think he’s our guy?’

‘Yes sir, I think so.’

There was a pause. Franklin stared ahead. A
World’s Greatest Detective
mug mocked him from inside the cupboard.

‘Stick with it, Agent Franklin. Keep a tighter lead on Shepherd and get more on Cooper fast so we can turn this thing around and make this little PR stunt blow up in his face.’

‘Yessir.’

‘And Franklin?’

‘Sir?’

‘Keep me directly informed.’

Franklin waited for more, expecting some kind of explanation or further instructions, but all he heard was a soft click as O’Halloran put down the phone and cut the connection.

For the second time in a week Liv woke up in the windowless room of the sick bay. She looked across to the other bed. It was empty, the sheets and mattress stripped off. On the wall behind it a row of cupboard doors hung open revealing bare shelves.

She tilted her head towards the door and listened. No sound at all came from the hallways beyond it, not even the generator, which suggested it was daytime. She tried to sit up and felt something snag painfully in her arm. There was a shunt strapped to her forearm attached by a tube to a clear bag hanging high on a stand by the bed. She had a moment of panic, wondering if it was doing her good or harm.

Footsteps outside.

Her heart rate stepped up a few beats.

There was nowhere to hide and she didn’t have the energy to run. She swallowed drily and watched the door swing open, wishing she’d had the presence of mind to grab something heavy.

‘Hey, you’re awake.’ The man was blond and tanned and somewhere in his late twenties. He looked more like a surfer than someone intent on doing her harm. He also looked drawn and tired, as though he hadn’t slept for days. ‘How you feeling – like shit I bet?’

He spoke English with an Australian accent. He popped a digital thermometer in her mouth and checked her over with the relaxed and practised eye of someone who had done this a million times before. She could smell coffee and soap.

‘Who are you?’ she said, the moment the thermometer was removed.

‘Name’s Kyle.’ He frowned as he studied the read-out. ‘You’re still running a bit of a fever. You should take it easy. Get some more sleep if you can.’

‘Don’t drink the water,’ she said, voicing the alarm that was clanging in her head.

‘The water’s fine,’ Kyle replied, checking her drip bag then smoothing down the plaster holding the shunt in her arm.

Liv sat up and felt the room shift around her. ‘No. It’s not, it’s poisoned – I’ve seen men die from drinking it.’

‘Me too,’ he said, and she understood his tiredness. She swung her legs off the bed and pulled at the tube. ‘Hey!’ Kyle reached out to stop her.

‘Show me,’ she said, turning away and yanking the tube from her arm.

‘You need to –’

She stood, wobbling slightly then headed for the door.

‘OK, OK – wait a second, I’ll show you.’ He grabbed the loose tube and turned the valve to stop the contents of the drip bag emptying onto the floor. ‘Just let me sort out that shunt so you don’t end up bleeding all over the place.’

Daylight blinded Liv as she stepped through the door into the transport hangar, so bright she had to turn her head away for a few seconds and let her eyes adjust.

The bodies were lying on the far side against the wall, their arms and legs twisted and frozen in the agonized moment of their death. She drifted over, drawn by the horrible tableau. The sickly smell of death was already hanging over them like a cloud. She moved along the line, checking the faces of the dead. Malik was there, his face covered in filth, his eyes staring and sightless and ringed by hungry flies.

‘Where are the horses?’

‘We didn’t find any.’

She frowned. The horses had drunk the water too, but that was before she had left – before it had turned bitter. Maybe the animals had known there was something wrong with it, their superior sense of smell saving them from a similar fate to their riders and they had run away when the water turned and their masters died. She reached the end of the line. Twenty-two bodies in total. Azra’iel was not among them. ‘Where are the others?’

‘There’s a couple still alive. They’re in the canteen. When we arrived it had been set up as a ward, I guess because they needed more room for all the sick.’ Liv nodded. That explained the bare cupboards in the sick bay. ‘They’re the only two left, though, and to be honest – I reckon they’ll soon be out here too. There’s not a whole heap we can do for them.’

The first thing that hit Liv when she walked into the canteen was the smell. Sweet and putrid and so strong it made her head swim and she had to reach out to steady herself against the wall.

‘You should really go and lie down again,’ Kyle said. ‘You’re still too dehydrated to be off the drip.’

‘I’ll go in a second,’ she said. It felt hot in the room and unbearably stuffy. A long line of refectory tables had been pushed against one wall and haphazardly stacked up to make more room on the floor. It looked like it had been done in a hurry. She imagined the panic that had played out as people started falling sick. The floor was covered with mattresses and sheets, dragged in from the dorms. Some of them had been stripped, though the dark stains of death were soaked into the fabric of the covers. Only two of the beds were still occupied. A man was stooped down by one of them, gently washing brown filth from around the mouth of one of the riders.

‘That’s Eric,’ Kyle said. ‘He’s a qualified medic so he’s been playing nursemaid.’ The man turned and nodded a greeting. He was another version of Kyle: tanned, lithe, coloured string bracelets and leather thongs round his wrist. ‘Mike’s around here someplace too, but I think he’s outside the fence with your lot.’

Liv turned to him. ‘Is everyone OK?’

‘Oh yeah, they’re all fine. Your man Tariq went out with Mike in the truck and brought them all back. They just needed food and rest – and water of course. They’re all on grave-digging duties now. Can’t have that lot lying out in the heat much longer.’

A sudden movement brought both their attentions back to the man on the floor. His whole body had started to shake and heave. He bucked on the bed, struggling to breathe then coughed and more of the brown stuff spluttered from his mouth. Eric held the man’s head as he vomited in a bowl, talking calmly to him the whole time, trying to soothe him. Liv marvelled at his dedication.

‘You’re right about the water, by the way,’ Kyle said, quiet enough that even she could hardly hear him. ‘When we first arrived and found all the bodies and a few still alive we thought it might be a virus, or maybe even a chemical weapon-related accident – you know, all those WMDs they didn’t find. But the ones who were still alive all said the same thing – they got sick after drinking the water. So I tested it. It’s been part of my job out here so I had all the right kit with me. When we first got here there were massive traces of arsenic trioxide in it. Ground water often contains high levels of this compound but these were off the scale. Probably got washed out of some underground deposit by the pressure of the water. Basically it makes your organs fail which results in vomiting, diarrhoea and fits – just like this poor bastard.’