The Tower (43 page)

You seem to know a lot, Agent Shepherd, and I appreciate your concern.

If you are truly knowledgeable then you will know where to find me. I’m just standing on a hill looking to the east for new stars in old friends, as those like us have done since the beginning of time.

Shepherd stared at the message, trying to make sense of it through the fog of his sleepy brain. He re-read it, his fatigue making him irritable that he was having to deal with this riddle in the middle of the frozen night. Why couldn’t Kinderman just tell him where he was?

Twice he hit reply and started composing a message to that effect, but both times he deleted it, instinctively knowing that he would not get another response. In the end, he slipped the phone back in his pocket and drove the rest of the way to Charlotte thinking it over with the heater on full, sipping black coffee from a Big Gulp he’d bought at a truck stop.

It was almost six in the morning when he hit the outskirts of Charlotte and parked next to a McDonalds, retrieved the Bureau laptop from the passenger footwell and hooked onto the free Wi-Fi that was thankfully still working. From where he sat he could see downtown lying dark before him, the result of a power outage that had sunk half the city into blackness. The only light was coming from a few cars that sketched the lines of unseen streets and a few flickering orange patches where fires burned. It was terrifying how quickly the ordered world had started to unravel. Maybe this would be how it ended, not with some cosmic collision or the wrath of some vengeful god but with society quietly imploding on itself as everyone just headed home and stayed there, all deliveries ending, all crops lying ungathered in fields, the major utilities switching themselves off one by one as no one turned up to work any more. Maybe no one would actually care, or even remember how things used to be.

He opened the laptop to check in on whatever Agent Smith had dredged up in the night and was greeted by the pinging sound that made his heart tumble in his chest and he was rapidly growing to hate. The new search he had put in place for Melisa had come back with two results.

The first hit was her name on an old passenger manifest out of Dulles Airport in Washington. She had flown out of the country eight years ago on a Cyprus-Turkish airliner heading for a place called Gaziantep. He opened a browser and looked it up. The Wikipedia entry told him it was a city in southeast Turkey. He clicked on the map embedded in the article. Just to the northwest of Gaziantep, in the foothills of the Taurus mountains, was another city, marked by a T shaped-cross: Ruin – the place Melisa had listed as her birthplace. She had been going home.

The second result was more recent. It was an application for a temporary work visa dated only a year ago. She had been trying to come back to the States but her application had been denied. He noticed the name on the form was Erroll. Maybe she never married, or maybe had but had kept her name.

He looked at the two results, two more precious pieces of evidence of her continued existence, and felt an almost physical yearning to be with her. He pulled his phone from his pocket. The countdown application was now installed on it and running as his wallpaper. He watched the numbers steadily declining towards zero.

All the time he had lost. How much time left?

Kinderman’s message was still open and he re-read it, hating him now for playing games when so much was at stake. It was like a taunt – ‘If you’re smart enough then come and get me’ – a clever test to find out what he knew. Well, Professor Douglas had been standing on a hill, staring up at the stars and look where that got him. Maybe Kinderman had a similar place and that’s where he was now, drawn there by the homing instinct. But Franklin had run checks on Kinderman’s background and nothing like that had shown up.

… standing on a hill looking to the east for new stars in old friends, as those like us have done since the beginning of time.

What the hell did that mean? It wasn’t enough to go on. He didn’t have time to look up every old observatory in the world and then go and check them out on the off-chance Kinderman might be there when all he really wanted to do was get on a plane and fly to southern Turkey.

He froze as a thought struck him.

He clicked on the ghost icon and scrolled quickly through the document looking for the second lot of CARBON results. There they were:

GOBEKLI TEPE

HOME

There was a link next to the first one and he clicked it open to remind himself what it said.

Göbekli Tepe
Turkish:
[2] (“Potbelly Hill”[3]) is a Neolithic (stone-age) hilltop sanctuary erected at the top of a mountain ridge in the southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. It is the oldest known wholly human-made religious structure and also the oldest observatory, believed to have been constructed by the proto-religious tribe known as the Mala [1][4]

He clicked back to the map still open from earlier and typed
Gobekli Tepe
into the
Get Directions
field.

The map widened a little and marked a route there from Gaziantep. It was just over an hour’s drive east. Ruin was a half hour’s drive northwest. Shepherd closed the laptop and started the engine, his mind made up and his destination set. He could decide which way to go when he got there.

The phone buzzed.

The Novus Sancti rose from his chair and quickly walked out of the building, answering it as he passed through a door and into the chill of the day.

‘Yes?’

‘Archangel is dead.’

Miss Boerman’s voice sounded tense and stretched thin. Behind her he could hear the clamour of people.

‘Where are you?’

‘At the police station. They gave me my phone call so I called you.’

The Sanctus nodded, his mind working through the ramifications of this news, moving the various pieces in play around in his head like he was re-setting a chessboard. ‘Archangel has served the Lord well, and so have you. Say nothing and the Lord will provide for you, both in spirit and of course in the more earthly matter of legal counsel.’

He hung up, uncomfortable about talking on an open line coming from inside a police station. He powered the phone down, prised the back off, removed the SIM card then crushed it under his boot.

Back inside the building he settled behind his desk, his face lit by the glow of a computer screen. He tapped a code to unlock it and an email program opened up. It was an online account operating behind a daisy chain of virtual networks, so anything sent to or from it was totally untraceable. He re-read the message he had been composing, his lips moving slightly as if uttering a silent prayer:

This is a warning.

Attached to this message is a countdown clock, discovered in the files of Dr Kinderman and Professor Douglas, two eminent astronomers who have gone missing.

The world knows something is coming. The armies are refusing to fight, snow falls in deserts and we are all feeling the spirit of God moving through us, sending us back to our homes so we might be ready for His arrival.

Judgement Day is upon us. You still have time but this countdown shows that time is measured in days not weeks. Show Him we still have faith and be ready for what is coming.

Repent and return to God while you still have time.

A friend

Novus Sancti

He checked the addresses against a list he had spent months compiling. It contained direct contacts for every major news outlet across the globe as well as the press offices of most major Western governments. He re-checked the various attachments: the countdown application found on Douglas’s laptop; copies of the latest FBI and police reports regarding the events at Goddard and Marshall so they would take the message seriously. When he was satisfied everything was in order he typed three words into the subject line:

REVELATION OR DEVASTATION?

Then pressed
Send
and watched his message fly.

Liv came to with a start. The citrus smell was stronger now and mixed with something acrid and dry that burned the back of her throat. Someone was standing over her, holding a bottle under her nose and she turned, raising her hand at the same time to bat it away.

‘Hey, take it easy. You’re OK. It’s just smelling salts.’

She blinked and looked back into the gentle eyes of the Italian doctor.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘You passed out.’

Liv tried to get up but he laid a hand on her shoulder and firmly eased her back down. ‘You should stay here for a while, get some rest. I’ve put you on a saline drip to get some fluids into you and there’s some Perfalgan in there too to get your temperature down: you were up at forty degrees – not good. I also took the liberty of stealing a little blood.’ He pointed at a small plaster in the crook of her arm.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Giorgio Giambanco – hell of a mouthful, no? You can call me George if you like. What’s yours?’

‘Liv – Adamsen,’ she added, defaulting to formality in the face of a medical professional.

‘OK, Miss Adamsen, talk me through your fainting episode, was it sudden or did it come on gradually?’

‘It was the heat I think. I started to feel feverish so I headed inside.’

He tilted her head up, checking the glands in her neck with his fingertips. ‘Any nausea?’

‘Yes, a little, and the ground felt like it was moving. I started getting tunnel vision. There was a smell too, like lemons.’

He frowned, checking her blood-pressure readings from a cuff. ‘When did you notice the smell?’

‘When I was still outside, though it was stronger inside the building. In fact I can still smell it.’

He was about to respond when one of the new people stepped into the room and placed a small tray on the countertop. It contained two small vials filled with blood and a piece of paper with various results written on it by hand. The new doctor shot her a smile that was hard to read then was gone. George ripped the Velcro of the pressure cuff from her arm. ‘Sounds like heat exhaustion,’ he said, turning to the blood results and picking up the piece of paper. ‘You need to rehydrate and take it easy. No more demolition work in the midday sun for you.’ He studied the results and frowned. ‘You said you experienced nausea?’ He looked up at her in a way that made her feel vaguely nervous.

‘Yes.’

‘Have you vomited at all?’

She shook her head.

‘And you said you smelt the lemons while you were still outside the building.’

‘Yes, I can still smell them.’

‘And does the smell also make you feel a little sick?’

‘A little.’ She felt panicky. ‘What is it? Am I having a brain haemorrhage or something? I read somewhere that people smell things before having a stroke.’

‘No, no – it’s nothing like that. What you’re smelling is just some disinfectant we brought with us that they’re now using to swab out the canteen. It’s got some lemon scent in it, not much – I can’t really smell it at all. But you smelled it way off when you were still outside the building.’

Liv’s heart continued to race at the prospect of whatever was wrong with her.

‘There are many things that can cause hyperosmia,’ he said in a gentle way that wasn’t helping. ‘That's just a fancy word for an enhanced sense of smell. And your blood tests confirm that the reason for yours is very common.’

Liv relaxed a fraction. At least whatever she had wasn’t exotic and therefore more likely to be treatable. ‘What do I have?’

He smiled and the skin crinkled around his eyes. ‘It’s not so much what you have as what you’re going to have. You’re pregnant, Miss Adamsen. You’re going to have a baby.’

And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?

Daniel 12:8

Shepherd parked the Durango in long-term parking and headed for the ticket office.

Charlotte/Douglas International Airport was the usual cavernous barn of a building and was in total chaos when Shepherd stepped through the door. There were long queues snaking away from every ticket desk and the whole building vibrated with noise and stress. A lot of it was coming from the large crowds of people gathered round the TV sets dotted around the waiting lounges and Shepherd felt sick when he saw what was on them.

It was the countdown Shepherd had seen in Douglas’s cabin, the same one that was installed on his own phone, ticking down now on every screen. A caption beneath it read
COUNTDOWN TO THE END OF DAYS
? A sombre news anchor was talking to camera as a montage of images played out behind him – more riots, more roads clogged with migrating people, more cities dark and burning, and not just here but in major cities all over the world as the slow creep of panic spread. The picture cut to the smouldering wreck of the building at Marshall, then a heavily censored photo of Professor Douglas flashed up, hanging from the wall of his cabin, the word
Heretic
, highlighted on the wall next to him and a new caption flashed up:
WHAT DID THEY SEE
?