The Tower (44 page)

Shepherd drifted over to one of the ticket desks, avoiding eye contact with all the waiting passengers as he cut in at the head of the queue.

What did they see indeed …

‘You’ll have to wait in line, sir.’ The man behind the counter was rail-thin and had the thickest eyebrows Shepherd had ever seen on someone under the age of fifty.

Shepherd flashed his ID. ‘Government business.’

The skinny guy looked up. The eyebrows underlined the deep furrows in his forehead, reflecting the day he was having. ‘OK, let me just deal with this gentleman and I’ll be right with you.’

Shepherd waited while the man collected his boarding card then wheeled his carry-on away into the crowd.

‘Now, sir, where do you need to go?’

‘I need the first connecting flight to a place called Gaziantep. It’s in southern Turkey.’

The eyebrows shot up and his fingers drummed across the keyboard. ‘Best I can do is an indirect flight via Istanbul. Good news is it leaves in just over an hour.’

‘OK, let’s do it.’

‘You have travel vouchers?’

Shepherd felt the blood rise to his cheeks. ‘No. I’ll pay for it on a card.’

Usually federal agents travelling on commercial flights had pre-paid tickets or documents that entitled them to fly. ‘Checking anything into the hold, sir?’

Shepherd shook his head. The eyebrows shot up again in surprise. Shepherd hoped this guy never played poker for money.

The clerk finished tapping. ‘That will be one thousand two hundred and fifty-eight dollars, sir.’

Something twisted in Shepherd’s stomach as he handed over the card. It was more than he had anticipated and he wasn’t sure if it would exceed his limit. The guy with the eyebrows swiped the card and stared at the ticket machine for what seemed like an eternity before it chattered to life and spat out a receipt. Shepherd retrieved his card.

‘Boarding has already started, gate number twenty-two. Have a nice day.’

Shepherd took his passport and boarding card and moved quickly away from the desk. He shuffled through security, dumping the contents of his pockets into a tray. All he had was a phone, some loose change and a couple of credit cards. He’d had less in his life, but not much.

He stepped through the metal detector and stuffed everything but the phone back in the pocket of the coat he had borrowed from NASA. He took a deep breath and dialled Franklin’s number.

‘Morning.’ Franklin sounded as tired as he felt. ‘You made it to Charlotte?’

‘Yeah, kind of. Where are you?’

‘Driving home.’

‘You seen the news?’

‘Yep. Seems the end of the world will be televised after all. You got anything new for me?’

Shepherd ran through everything he had learned in the last few hours. It was cathartic, like a weight gradually lifting off him with every word he spoke. ‘I’ve left the car in the long-term parking lot,’ he said. ‘Smith’s laptop is in there and so is Williams’s gun.’

‘You’re unarmed?’

‘I didn’t think they’d let me on an international flight with it seeing as they’re not even letting people take large bottles of water on board.’

‘What if it’s a trap? What if Kinderman is drawing you out – ever think about that?’

‘It’s not just about Kinderman.’ He took a deep breath like he was about to take a dive off a high board. ‘I never did tell you about my missing two years.’

‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t –’

‘I was homeless.’ He let the breath out and imagined it drifting away in the air, carrying his confession with it. ‘When the NASA funding was cut I ran out of money pretty fast. I dropped out of school, had no place to live, no family, no job. I was pretty depressed about how life had turned out and it dragged me down fast. It’s a downward spiral and the lower you get, the less you care. And no one else cares either. It’s amazing how easy it is to fall through the cracks and end up on the street. Then you become invisible.’

‘So what happened to pull you out of it?’

‘Melisa happened. You asked me who she was. She was a charity worker, here in the States on some kind of exchange visa. She found me in the stinking basement of a building in Detroit along with an assortment of junkies, winos and meth heads. I was only on the booze, which in some ways is even more pathetic. I wasn’t even a proper washout.

‘One day I was sleeping off a drunk when this angel appeared asking for Annie. Annie was a runaway teen who worked the streets to fund her habit and keep her pimp happy. She was also eight months pregnant. Melisa was part of the women’s health programme, training to be a midwife and volunteering in her spare time. Annie had missed her check-up so Melisa had come into that stinking basement just because she was worried about her. That took some guts.

‘Anyway, we found Annie unconscious, lying on a stained mattress in one of the smaller rooms in the basement people used sometimes to turn tricks. The reason she had missed her appointment was that she was in labour and had turned to her painkiller of choice. She was totally out of it, the needle still in her arm – and the baby was coming.

‘Melisa was incredible. There was no sense of judgement or disgust about what she was doing or where she was, she just got down to the business of bringing that baby into the world. And when it was born, something so small and perfect and new in the middle of all that filth, I felt ashamed.’

He took a deep breath as the memories came fast and painful.

‘I was helping her clean the baby when the boyfriend arrived – a mean son-of-a-bitch called Floyd who kept in shape by handing out beatings to the women he ran and anyone else who got in his way. He saw the child and told us to leave. Melisa refused. I don’t know if he was going to kill it and get Annie back on the streets and earning again, or maybe he had a buyer lined up – everything has a street-value, even a newborn baby.’

Shepherd stared out at the busy concourse but in his mind he was back in that basement room, filth, food wrappers and empty bottles on the floor, a fading Apocalypse Now movie poster tacked to the wall with a bright orange sun that shone no light into that dark place.

‘Melisa refused to move. Floyd pulled a knife. I’d heard he’d been known to slice the face of any girl who crossed him so I reacted, grabbed a bottle from the floor and threw it at him. It caught him on the side of the head, hard enough to knock him back but not enough to stop him. Next thing I know I’m on top of him, knees pinning his arms down, another bottle in my hand. And I just kept hitting him with it. I knew if I let him get up he’d kill me and probably kill Melisa too so I just kept hitting him until he stopped moving. The bottle must have broken at some point and cut his neck. I didn’t even realize. There was so much blood. It was like someone had turned on a tap.

‘I can’t even remember what happened next but somehow Melisa got us all out of there. She took us to the shelter where she worked and cleaned us all up. I was all for turning myself in but she told me not to. She said it was an accident, self-defence, and that I should wait until the police came looking.’

‘Let me guess,’ Franklin said, ‘they never did.’

‘I guess one less scumbag on the streets doesn’t warrant too much of an investigation. So I stayed at the shelter and started getting myself back together. I kicked the booze, got on the twelve-step programme, started running computer training courses and setting up networks and websites for the charity, just making myself useful and giving myself an excuse to keep hanging around.

‘God knows how but Melisa and I ended up falling in love. I guess we shared this big secret that created an intimacy and things just grew from there. Hell of a first date. We kept it all secret because of her father. He was the doctor who ran the project. He was a strict Muslim and I don’t think he would have taken too kindly to the prospect of having an infidel ex-bum for a prospective son-in-law.

‘Anyway, months passed and Melisa’s visa was about to expire so I asked her to marry me – not because of the visa but because I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anything before or since. We had it all planned, we were going to slip away and just do it. Then a few days before we planned to run away something happened.

‘Looking back I should have known something was wrong. Her old man called me into his office late one afternoon, said he had a job for me. There was another homeless organization we worked with way over on the other side of town and their computer network had melted down or something and they needed to fix it urgently. It was late in the day, rush hour, but I went anyway – anything to score points with my prospective father-in-law. When I got to the place the guy there didn’t know anything about it so I turned right around and drove back again.

‘By the time I made it back through all the traffic to the shelter the whole street was blocked off. There’d been some kind of incident. Someone had thrown petrol bombs into the place and the whole building had gone up. There were racist slogans painted on the walls too: Terrorists, Ragheads, that kind of thing – post 9/11 hate gone crazy. I tried to find Melisa and her father, checked the hospitals and everything, but they were gone.

‘At first I thought they must be scared and hiding out somewhere. But when the weeks went by, then months with no word I thought maybe she’d had second thoughts about me, about living and working in a country that seemed to blindly hate Islam so much.

‘I did what I could to find her, but the police weren’t interested. They weren’t technically missing persons and there was something suspicious about the fire. An insurance scam they called it.’

‘So you joined the FBI to see if you could find her yourself?’

‘Partly. Though in truth everything I told O’Halloran was also true. I do feel I owe my country a debt for everything it’s done for me.’

He heard Franklin take a deep breath on the other end of the line. ‘You know sometimes people disappear because they want to. Or they disappear because they’re dead.’

‘I don’t think she is.’ Through the phone he could hear the white noise of tyres in the background. ‘You asked me a while back what “home” meant to me, well for me it’s not a place it’s a person, it’s Melisa. She’s where I’m trying to get to and if she was dead I don’t think I’d feel what I’m feeling. Even if she doesn’t love me, even if she never did, I still love her and I just want to know that she’s safe. I just want to know she’s OK.’

Shepherd glanced up at the Departure Board and saw
Last Call
flashing by his flight number. ‘Got to go, Agent Franklin, I’ll call you if I find anything useful.’

‘Take care, Agent Shepherd. I hope you find what you’re looking for. And if you happen to find Kinderman and the world really is about to get smashed into a million pieces then do me a favour – keep it to yourself. I changed my mind, I’d rather not know.’

Gabriel was woken by the sound of a bell clanging mournfully through the darkness. He opened his eyes and counted the strikes, ten in all, though there might have been more before. It had been evening when Dr Kaplan had started drawing blood. It was dark now, the room lit only by the glow of the monitors he was plugged into.

He stretched out in the bed and found his arms and legs were still bound tightly to it.

‘Hello?’ His voice fell away into the silence. It had to be later than ten to be this quiet. They must have taken his blood over to the main lab and left him to his rest, strapped down in his own private prison.

He listened to the sounds of the room: the faint beep of the monitor keeping time with his heartbeat, the whisper of fans keeping circuits cool and the soft bang of a door that sounded both close and also very far away as the echo bounced around inside the warren of the mountain. He looked back over at the window, his one real connection to the outside world, and felt a chill. Someone was there, a monk – standing by the door leading to the bedchamber. It was too dark to see his face, but Gabriel could make out the white surgical mask covering the lower portion of it, and above that, the lenses of a pair of spectacles reflected what light there was in the room, making it seem like the man’s eyes were glowing. The heart monitor bleeped a little faster and Gabriel tried to calm himself by focusing on his breathing and doing what he could to take control of the situation. ‘Good evening,’ he said, as if he had met someone out on a stroll. ‘You get lumbered with the night shift?’

The figure said nothing, staring at him with its luminous eyes. His silent scrutiny, the stealth of his appearance and the fact that he had not answered when he had called out combined to make alarm bells sound in Gabriel’s head. He tensed his arms, testing the bindings. Too tight. He might be able to work his way out of them, given time, but his instincts told him he didn’t have any.

‘Are you here to take more blood?’ he said, improvising. ‘They said they’d be back at next bells …’ He breathed out all the way at the end of the sentence, creating space where his inflated chest had been. He moved his right arm, the one nearest the figure, the one he would need to defend himself if it came to it. It shifted, just a little. He tried to bend his arm, breathing out further, the heart monitor racing again. It shifted a little more, but still not enough. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, breathing right out at the end of the sentence and trying again to loosen his arm.

‘I will not give you power over me by volunteering my name.’ The man’s voice was low and filled with malice.

‘Suit yourself. My name’s Gabriel.’

‘I know what you are.’ He moved closer.

Gabriel pressed himself into the bed. He saw something sharp in the man’s hand. He looked around for something to defend himself with if he could get his arm free. The only things in reach were the wires connecting him to the various monitors now registering his growing anxiety.

He tried one last time to free his arm but it was no good. He looked back up at the glowing circles where the eyes should be and did the only thing he could do. He flicked the clip from the end of his finger.