by Simon Toyne
The man’s hand dropped to his side. For a moment he looked as though he was about to say something but he just spat on the ground again and hurried off towards the American convoy.
‘That’s Malik,’ Tariq said, his eyes fixed on the man. ‘He was in charge of transport here until the fuel turned to water and killed all his engines. He thinks you are responsible.’ They watched Malik join a line waiting to board one of the troop carriers. ‘He’s leaving, along with all the others who now think this place is cursed.’
A marine stepped up to the waiting men and ushered them into the vehicle then hit the switch to seal the rear hatch behind them, ready to move out.
‘I can take you anywhere you want to go,’ Tariq said, ‘or you can stay here a while, for there is much work to be done, is there not?’
The din of revving diesel engines rumbled through the air as Liv considered his strange question. She stepped from the cover of the building as the convoy started to pull out, figuring she could still sprint after them if she chose to, but instead she just stood there, watching the dust cloud drift away until the sound of the engines faded to nothing.
She turned and looked at the people who had stayed. Most of them were riders but there were a few compound staff too, their white overalls singling them out. They gathered around her now, all faces turned towards her. She could feel the expectation coming off them like heat. ‘What do they want?’ Liv whispered.
‘They want to know what they should do next.’
She laughed. ‘And who put me in charge?’
The ring of faces smiled back at her, reflecting her good humour. It was as if the soldiers had taken all the anger away with them, leaving just a few relics of the violence behind – some bullet holes in the skin of the buildings, the rust-coloured patches of earth. ‘What happened to the dead?’ she asked.
‘We put them in a refrigeration truck to keep the flies away,’ Tariq replied, ‘though with no fuel, the cooler isn’t running.’
Liv nodded. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘then that’s what we do first – we bury the dead.’
8
Gabriel had no idea how long he had been lying in the shade of the dry wadi when the sound of engines drifted down to him on the wind.
Instinctively he rolled onto his front, adrenalin flooding through him despite his raging fever and the well-drilled operational part of his brain taking over.
He couldn’t be spotted now, not with the blight burning inside him.
He grabbed the trailing reins of his horse to keep it close and listened out, trying to locate the sound. The hot wind moved it around making it hard to pinpoint, which was a good sign. It meant it must still be some way off.
He used the reins to haul himself to his knees then moved the horse into the sliver of shade, stroking its flanks to calm it and tethering it to a rock. He forced himself up the side of the bank, choking down on the sobs that still battled to burst from him, the scratch of the dry earth blissful against his screaming skin. He reached the top and listened again.
The sound was closer now, coming from the west.
The itch crawled over him like fire ants and he rode the waves of it, clamping his arms to his sides to stop his hands from clawing at the prickling skin. When the itch subsided a little he tipped his head on one side to keep his profile low and slowly raised his eye above the line of the bank.
Two white, flat-bed pick-ups were kicking up dust as they bounced across the desert a couple of hundred metres to his left. Their windows were smoked black and the 50-calibre guns mounted on their backs were manned by soldiers wearing red-and-white-checked keffiyeh around their faces. They were Syrian Army – border patrol.
He slid back down the bank, shaking with the effort of just staying silent. All he wanted to do was lie down and rest and never get up again. But he couldn’t. The patrol had changed everything.
He could backtrack, move away from the border to reduce the risk of being found by the patrols; but that didn’t mean he would be hidden from the people they were seeking. He could try and find one of the alluvial caves that honeycombed the desert and crawl deep underground into a tomb of his own making; that would deal with the buzzards at least. But it wouldn’t account for the human traffic. Other people would seek the same shelter, hiding from the heat and the men with guns. And he could not risk being found.
He lay there for a long while, shaking from the fever, as the inevitability of what he must do grew in his mind. There was only one place he could go, one place on earth where the blight would pose no threat.
He waited a long time, until he was sure the patrol had gone, then led the horse along the gulley, keeping low, looking for better cover. The sun was at its full height now and burned mercilessly into his agonized skin. After a few hundred feet that felt like miles he found a partial cave scooped out of the softer rock, big enough for him and his horse, and fell into the stifling shade, clenching his whole body against the blazing itch. He waited out the worst of the day, preparing himself for the journey he must make. Somehow, he had to evade capture and the company of others and find his way back to where the blight had first started and where he knew it already prospered.
He had to get back to the Citadel. He had to go back to Ruin.
9
Liv chose a spot a good distance outside the perimeter fence and led by example, working by hand now the earthmovers were no use, breaking through rock and dirt baked hard as brick. It felt good to disappear into mindless work after all that had happened to her. Her previous life seemed like an abstract collection of memories now, something she could as easily have read in a book, not experienced herself. It was hard to imagine herself as that person now, the career journalist, subway-surfing through the morning rush hour with a skinny latte in one hand and a smartphone in the other, on her way to yet another assignment, another deadline, flicking through the IKEA catalogue and the Sunday supplements at the weekend. It was an existence she had spent a lifetime building, only to have fate dismantle it in a matter of days.
They finished digging the graves as the afternoon sun was dipping low in the sky and carefully placed the bodies in the bottom of the hole, enemy next to enemy, united in death – all but one. While most of the men had been busy with the communal grave, some of the riders had dug another a little way off and it was to this that they now carried the body of their leader, the one they called Ash’abah – the Ghost. They laid him to rest, said their silent prayers.
After the graves were filled, most of the riders left too, taking their horses and melting away into the desert.
Liv stayed by the grave of the Ghost. She had known him for less than a day and yet in that short time he had taken considerable risks on her behalf and ultimately laid down his life to protect her and Gabriel. She looked down at the mound of dirt and felt a rush of terror at the oblivion of it all. She looked around for something to mark the grave, anything that might signify that someone noble and important had died here. The larger grave was marked by a pile of broken rocks taken from the ground during the digging but she wanted something more distinct for the Ghost, something that had clearly been put there by man, not nature. She tried to think what Gabriel would do and when she re read his note she had her answer.
‘You OK?’ The voice surprised her and she turned to find Tariq close by, his AK47 assault rifle resting across his crossed legs.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Come with me. I might need your help.’
The Operations Room had been looted since the last time she’d been there. The large topographical map still filled the back wall but all the smaller maps and anything else portable or valuable enough to take had gone. The solid block of carved black granite where she had found Gabriel’s note lay where she had left it, half-buried in discarded paperwork and scrolls of seismic data printouts. Liv swept them aside, revealing the carved letter T in the centre of the stone with smaller symbols surrounding it: the dots outlining the constellation of Draco; a symbol of a tree; a simple human figure. Someone had
taken a rubbing of both sides of the stone and she was momentarily distracted by it, picking up the curl of paper and staring at the dense symbols lifted from the other side of the stone. There was something in them, something calling to her like a distant voice. She folded the sheet, slipped it into her pocket and grabbed hold of the chipped edges of the stone, hauling it across the table with arms that were already exhausted after an afternoon of hard digging.
‘Let me,’ Tariq said, taking it from her and hugging it to his chest.
‘Thanks,’ Liv said, ‘follow me.’
The Starmap thumped down onto the Ghost’s grave, the weight of it pressing into the loose earth, the carved T-shaped cross standing out in the centre of the stone. It seemed appropriate somehow, marking his grave with the Tau, a religious symbol from before the great religions had even been born. There would be no mistaking the significance of this grave now, or the importance of the person who rested here.
‘I need to go and see to the horses,’ Tariq said. ‘You should come inside the compound, it’s getting dark and it’s not safe for you out here.’
‘I’m fine. I’ll just be a minute.’
Tariq nodded and drifted away, leaving Liv alone by the grave.
She stared down at the stone. Most of the text was on the other side of it, but she reached into her pocket and pulled out the rubbings she had found in the comms room, her eyes seeking the sheet containing the symbols that were now hidden.
The text was written in two languages. One was the lost language she had been able to understand when she was carrying the Sacrament. She concentrated on the symbols and discovered that, even though the Sacrament had left her now, she could still understand it:
The Sacrament comes home and The Key looks to heaven
A new star is born with a new king on Earth to bring order to the end of days
She frowned and felt a coldness creep over her. The first line was clear enough because she had lived it: she was the key that had unlocked the Sacrament, carried it out of the Citadel and brought it home to this lost place in the desert. But that was where her understanding ended. The second line suggested something else entirely, something still to come – something ominous that would be heralded by the arrival of a new star. She looked up at the evening sky, still too bright for the first stars to show. All the other prophecies, the ones that had brought her to this place, had outlined the future in ambiguous terms and with various possible outcomes. This one seemed too absolute, a star would appear and that would be it, the end of days – whatever that meant. There had to be something else here, something in the second block of symbols.
She studied them now, strange icons that looked like no language she had ever seen with the lines of different constellations weaving in and out of them: Draco, Taurus, the Plough.
The symbols were crude and simple but when she concentrated on them the strange facility she had with language, her parting gift from the Sacrament, did not reveal their meaning. Instead, her head filled with impressions of things and feelings, some of them hopeful, some of them disturbing. She considered each symbol individually – a river, an eagle, a skull – trying to link them together into some kind of narrative, like piecing together fragments of an ancient truth she had once known and now forgotten. But though she felt she understood something of what each symbol individually represented, their collective meaning continued to elude her.
She spent a long time studying the symbols, but in the end, the earth turned, the sun set and the symbols faded to darkness before her eyes. And though Liv had not pinned down anything close to a translation, the emotions they had summoned remained. And the overriding thing they had left her with was a sense of foreboding. Whatever was coming, whatever was written on the ancient stone, she could feel its power and she feared it.
10
They arrived at the Goddard Space Flight Center a little after ten, just as the storm got about as bad as it was going to get. Rain gusted into the car as Shepherd cracked a window to flash his pristine ID. The guard handed him two security passes and a visitor’s map and directed him to one of the smaller executive staff parking lots by Building 29, the huge hangar-like structure that sat in the middle of the complex. Shepherd hadn’t been here for almost ten years but as he slid the Crown Vic into gear and hissed through the puddle under the raised barrier, it looked like nothing had changed much at all.
Building 29 rose out of the howling night, a huge white block of a building with two strips of darkened windows on the ground and first floors and none at all on the other four. Most of the offices and control centres inside Building 29 didn’t need windows, drawing their views from deep space rather than the Maryland countryside.
Shepherd slowed as he drove past the entrance. There were lights on inside but he couldn’t see anyone. Maybe it was the late hour, or the weather, or the fact that the Christmas holidays were just around the corner – but the whole place seemed deserted. He eased the car round the edge of the building and the headlights lit up a figure wearing a rain slicker, the hood pulled right over his head in a way that made him appear almost monastic. An arm extended from beneath the wet folds and pointed to two empty parking bays with signs in front of them showing they were reserved for senior project directors. Shepherd drew the car to a halt and the figure glided over to Franklin’s side of the car, producing a NASA golfing umbrella and popping it open just as Franklin opened his door.
‘Mike Pierce, Chief of Security,’ a voice rumbled from beneath the hood. He held the umbrella up for Franklin as he got out of the car and glanced at Shepherd as he did the same. Shepherd saw the eyes take him in, make a quick decision based on seniority and logistics then turn to usher Franklin away beneath the cover of the umbrella, not bothering to wait for the junior agent. The van that had followed them all the way from Quantico pulled in next to him, sending a wave of cold water arcing onto the back of Shepherd’s legs. He locked the car and splashed across the tarmac after the umbrella. He figured if the techs could find fingerprints on cotton and microscopic traces of DNA in a sterile room, they could probably find their way into a building without his help.
Stepping through the open service door into the clean, white-walled corridors of Building 29 was like jumping through a time-portal back to a previous life. Because there were no pictures on the walls and no unnecessary furnishings – to help maintain the sterile conditions required in the ‘clean rooms’ at the heart of the building – everything looked exactly as it had the last time Shepherd had set foot here.
‘Mike Pierce.’ The hooded man crushed Shepherd’s hand in a wet grip. ‘We met before?’ The eyes studied him from within the frame of a too-large face made bigger by the absence of hair. He looked like a weightlifter gone to fat but who still had some steel at his core and clearly felt a need to prove it whenever he shook another man’s hand.
‘I was here for a few months back in spring ’04,’ Shepherd said, letting go of Pierce’s hand to prompt him to do the same.
Pierce shrugged out of the rain slicker in a shower of water and draped it over a seat by the door. ‘I don’t recall any kind of Bureau investigation back then.’
‘Don’t be fooled by the lines around the eyes,’ Franklin cut in. ‘Agent Shepherd here is still wet behind the ears as far as Bureau work goes. He’s just here to help walk me through the tricky science parts.’
‘I worked on Explorer for a while,’ Shepherd explained as a bang behind them announced the arrival of the others heaving various boxes of gear out of the rain and in through the narrow service door.
‘Looks like the gang’s all here,’ Franklin said. ‘Lead on, Chief Pierce: tell us what you know.’
‘Well pretty much everything is in the report,’ Pierce said, closing the door behind them then swiping a card through a lock to gain entrance to an inner hallway. ‘At 20.05 this evening the main system network servicing the Hubble Space Telescope was subjected to a sophisticated cyber attack. Merriweather, the technician who was on
duty when it happened, is waiting in the control centre to go through all the specific details for you.’
‘What about Dr Kinderman?’
‘Still no word. I’ve tried contacting him on all his numbers, sent emails, even got Merriweather to ping him on Twitter and Facebook. Nothing. His cell phone was found in his office, which appears to have been ransacked.’
‘Anyone else been in there since Kinderman went missing?’
‘Just myself and the technician who found it.’
‘OK, let’s start there.’
Pierce swiped them through another security door and pointed to an office door halfway down the corridor.
Shepherd had been in Kinderman’s office a few times before, once when he had started working here and again on the day he left. It was something of a tradition at Goddard, being paraded in front of the chief on your way in and out for a chat and a pep talk. He remembered being struck on both occasions by Kinderman’s extraordinary neatness and precision, a memory that jarred heavily with the chaotic mess of files and paperwork now covering most of the floor.
Franklin surveyed it all from the door while he pulled on a pair of blue Nitrile gloves he’d produced from his jacket pocket. Shepherd felt hot blood rising up his neck as he realized he’d left his own back in the car.
Franklin stepped into the office and made his way through snowdrifts of paperwork towards the centre of the room. He stood for a moment, turning slowly, taking it all in: the neat, uncluttered desk; the crooked photos on the wall of various presidents standing next to the same neatly-pressed man; the same man shaking hands with the King of Sweden as he received the Nobel Prize for his work in measuring the rate of universal expansion. In the world of astrophysics Dr Kinderman was the closest thing you could get to a rock star and Shepherd was finding it very hard to think of him as a suspect.
He felt something soft and cold press against the back of his hand and looked down to discover a pair of fresh gloves held low so Franklin wouldn’t see them. He smiled his thanks at the PST who had come to his rescue and quickly pulled them on just as Franklin finished his silent appraisal of the room and looked up. ‘OK boys,’ he said, ‘get to work.’