by Simon Toyne
Shepherd looked at Franklin’s chest rather than his eyes.
Maybe he should just tell him. But then he knew so little about Franklin. He had no idea if he would honour his word or just feed anything he told him straight back to personnel and end his career before it even got started. His eyes lit on the ID pinned to Franklin’s jacket, his name written in full beneath a stern photo: Agent Benjamin Franklin.
‘What’s your real name?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Your name. I’m assuming that when you became an agent you got baptized just like I did.’ He looked up and finally met his gaze. ‘Or were your parents very patriotic?’
‘Only people who know my real name are my family and a handful of people I trust.’
Shepherd smiled. ‘Give and take. You say you can’t trust me, but trust is a two-way street, Agent Franklin. How can I trust a man who won’t even tell me his real name?’
The door opened behind Franklin but neither of them turned to look.
‘I got something,’ Ellery said, oblivious of the atmosphere in the room. ‘Best if I show you in my office.’ He pointed back over his shoulder.
‘Be right there,’ Franklin replied, the chair legs scraping as he stood up. ‘After you, Agent Shepherd.’
Shepherd stood and the room shifted a little but not enough to make him sit down again. He grabbed the laptop bag from the floor and his battered coat from behind the door. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You first.’
31
Shepherd walked into Ellery’s office and smiled to himself when he spotted what was hanging on the wall. It was a photograph of the Chief’s younger self, glossy and framed and staring out from beneath the sharp brim of his County cap at a small wooden crucifix hanging on the opposite side of the office. The only other attempt at decoration was a potted cactus on the desk that looked like it was shivering.
‘Take a seat, gentlemen.’ The man the photograph had become was two-finger pecking at a keyboard, his reading glasses forcing his head to tilt back and making him seem old. ‘After what you said about the situation at Goddard I got the guys to run some background and give me the headlines. I got them to pull up the Professor’s email correspondence for the last week, see if there was anything there that might be relevant.’ He turned the monitor round so they could see it. An email program filled the screen with an empty inbox. ‘Somebody, and I’m assuming it was the Professor, wiped everything going back months. I had them check his work files too and it’s the same story.’
‘How many months exactly?’
‘Right the way back to May.’
Eight months.
‘If you hand the hard drives over to us,’ Franklin said, ‘our own tech guys might be able to retrieve some of the lost information.’
Ellery shrugged. ‘Whatever you need: guess this thing is federal now so it’s your call.’
Shepherd felt sorry for him, this worn-down version of the proud young man in the photograph. He’d been so full of piss and vinegar when he’d met them off the plane, now he seemed powerless and defeated in his own office.
‘There’s something else.’ Ellery leaned back in his chair, swiping the reading glasses from his face and reaching for a drawer. He pulled out a thin sheaf of printed paper held together with a clip. ‘That letter you were interested in. I called up the labs, dropped your name and had them put a rush on it.’ He handed the documents to Franklin.
It was a report from the Questioned Documents Unit. The top sheet displayed a unique file number and brief description of the items under scrutiny. The next few pages were filled with various test results: pen identification, video spectral comparisons, thin layer chromatography, Raman spectroscopy, paper tests. The final sheet took all these results and translated them back into something the field agents could use. The results for the letter were peppered with the acronym CS/WU, which stood for Common Sample/Widespread Use, basically meaning the item was too commonplace to be of any use in an investigation. But the results for the postcard were more interesting.
The card is a CS/WU low-grade high-acid paper pulp mass-produced item sold in multiple outlets online. However the thicker card-like material has rendered excellent nib impressions revealing much about the type of pen used.
Cross-referencing the chromatography results shows the sample was written with a fountain pen using something like a 33 Reverse Fine Oblique nib by someone who is either left-handed or fluidly ambidextrous.
The ink is Parker Quink Black Permanent (CS/WU); the pen is also most likely a Parker make, possibly from the 75 range.
Running this sample through the database resulted in 2 hits.
Signature on petition from Operation Fish.
Signature on letter to the Governor of South Carolina objecting to the building of a mosque in Charleston.
In both cases the signatory was the Reverend Fulton Ronald Cooper, head of the Church of Christ’s Salvation, based in Charleston, South Carolina.
‘The TV preacher?’ Shepherd looked up at Franklin. ‘He’s our suspect?’
‘So it would seem.’ Franklin turned to Ellery. ‘Thank you for this Chief, most helpful. Now, if you wouldn’t mind giving us a moment here.’
The effect was crushing. Ellery rose from his chair and left the room without another word, the door banging shut like a coffin lid as he closed it behind him.
‘Couldn’t you maybe go a little easier on him?’
‘You mean old hitch-up-his-pants, “I’m the Sheriff round these here parts” who gave us such a warm welcome? I am going easy on him.’
‘Well go easier.’ Shepherd glanced nervously up at the photo like it was listening. ‘He gives us a lead and you humiliate him by sending him out of his own office to stand in the hall.’
Franklin looked amused. ‘Ah, he deserves it for letting us walk into that exploding building while he stayed back and hid behind his pension. And the reason I sent him out is not because of some badge-related pissing contest, it’s because I need to talk to you in private.’ He turned so he was facing him. ‘How you feeling, Agent Shepherd – any concussion, anything broken?’
‘I’m OK.’ He wondered where this was going.
‘Want to carry on with this investigation? See where it goes? Help your Professor if you can?’
Shepherd tried to read his mood. If anything his tone seemed conspiratorial, which at least hinted at a degree of inclusion. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes I would.’
‘Good.’ Franklin rose and moved behind Ellery’s desk, settling in his empty chair and pulling the desk phone towards him. ‘Let me tell you the facts of life, son.’ He held up the documents from the Questioned Documents lab. ‘Ellery did us a favour by chasing these up because, even though he used my name, I doubt anyone has linked it to this investigation yet. If they had they would already have handed the information to someone in the field office in Charlotte to go apprehend the good Reverend and have a little talk about his penmanship. Do you want that to happen? Of course you don’t want that to happen.
‘But there is another way to play this. The way I see it, by the time we’ve brought another agent up to speed, we might just as well have gone to Charleston ourselves. We can fly there as fast as they can drive it and be first on the scene. So providing you’re not seeing double or deaf in both ears, I say we keep on with this thing and follow this lead.’
‘What about Professor Douglas?’ Shepherd said, sensing a trap. ‘Shouldn’t we head over and check out his home address like we did Kinderman’s?’
‘You think we’ll find him there? Man blows away billions of dollars’ worth of space hardware, you think he’s going to just head home and wait around for a knock on the door?’
‘Probably not, but we might find something.’
Franklin drummed his fingers on the desk, something Shepherd had seen him do in class when he was getting annoyed with a slow candidate. ‘OK, let me put it this way,’ he said, smiling through his evident irritation. ‘Do you think whate
ver we might find there will be more or less useful than talking to the man who sent these cards?’
Shepherd said nothing. He still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t some kind of test designed to make him incriminate himself and give Franklin an excuse to can him from the investigation.
‘Tell you what,’ Franklin smiled and opened his hands like he was closing the deal on a car, ‘why don’t we get Ellery to follow up with the search of Douglas’s home.’ He pointed to the picture on the wall. ‘He has the local connections, he’ll probably do a better job than we would. That way he can claw back some of the self-esteem you think I’ve beaten out of him and it leaves us free to stay on the trail. We got the scent of this thing now, and if Cooper is behind all this, then I want to look him in the eye and know it.’
Shepherd thought it through. The correct protocol for any geographically spread investigation like this was to share any leads on new suspects with the field office nearest to the target to enable swift response and arrests and minimize the chance of the subject getting away. The nearest field office to Charleston was Charlotte and, despite what Franklin said, agents from there would still arrive faster than them because they could fly too if they thought it necessary. He couldn’t work out why Franklin, the seasoned, strictly-by-the-book agent, was suddenly bending the rules and cutting him in on it. It didn’t add up. But he also badly wanted to stay on the investigation. One of his tutors had once told him that when considering any unknown you should always remove emotion from the equation because if you know the answer you’re trying to reach you’ll skew your formula to get there. A chill slid down his spine as he remembered who it was – Professor Douglas.
‘How are you planning on flying to Charleston?’ he said, reaching for the laptop case.
Franklin smiled, picked up the phone and started to dial. ‘Same way we got here,’ he said.
Shepherd took the Questioned Documents results from Franklin and slipped them inside the case. Just this simple task made his battered muscles creak and complain. He thought of the cold hard seats in the hold of the C-130. ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’
32
Assistant Director O’Halloran put the phone down and listened to the yawning silence stretching out beyond his door. All the other section chiefs had gone – some on leave, the rest God only knew where – leaving a long corridor of empty offices and darkened windows. He’d never heard the building so quiet, even at Christmas when everything generally wound down. He could feel the absence of other people like the lack of a coat on a cold day.
He hit a function button on his computer to turn the sound back on from the CNN news feed. Like most people in the intelligence community he was addicted to information and the twenty-four-hour news cycle helped feed his addiction. It was also useful to keep up-to-date on what was being reported, just in case a breaking story compromised an on-going investigation. The Hubble/Marshall story had yet to break. At the moment the lead story was still the freak weather sweeping the nation. He watched for a while, distracted by the novelty of seeing people building snowmen on Miami Beach and New Yorkers in shorts and T-shirts paddling and splashing around in front of the huge Christmas tree outside the Rockefeller Center where the ice rink usually stood. Strange days.
He nudged the sound down a little and turned his attention back to an open file on the screen, condensing everything Agent Franklin had just told him into a few bullet points that he added to the Hubble case notes, highlighting the name Fulton Cooper. The Reverend’s high-profile Christian charity work, particularly in relation to wounded servicemen and women, had turned him into something of a media favourite. He was an outspoken advocate of what he called a ‘new crusade’ which favoured a stronger and more aggressive military, particularly in relation to non-Christian countries. It was a stance that had made him much beloved of the Republican Party, who often brought him in to lend moral weight to various anti-government rallies whenever military spending came under review.
The tone of the newscaster shifted up a little as he introduced the next story and O’Halloran glanced up in response. The summery scenes from New York had been replaced by cold grey images of warships and sailors in black uniforms. A Chinese battle fleet had unexpectedly pulled out from around the disputed Senkaku islands in the East China Sea and headed home. The Japanese were claiming it as a victory but the Chinese, true to form, had so far refused to comment. The news anchor listed other unconfirmed rumours of further large-scale troop and military withdrawals elsewhere in the world, name-checking Syria and Somalia before the picture cut again to footage of the US air force base at Baghram in Afghanistan. O’Halloran leaned forward, feeling the usual tightening in his gut at the mere mention of the place. It looked like someone had kicked an ant’s nest over there was so much swarming movement. Thousands of personnel were pouring out of troop carriers and onto massive C-5 transporter planes that then lumbered into the sky. It looked like the whole US presence was packing up and coming home. O’Halloran frowned. He was usually kept up to speed on stuff like this. He opened another window on his monitor and checked the internal mail, scrolling back through the military dispatches. Nothing. Maybe the news had got it wrong. Or maybe someone higher up had kept him out of the loop because of his personal history.
He picked up the framed photograph from the desk taken two Christmases ago, just before Michael had been posted. His son stood between him and Beth, a solid slab of a boy who towered over them both and looked like he was still in uniform even in his button-down shirt and jeans. Perhaps it was because he was tired, or that Christmas was round the corner and Michael wouldn’t be home for it, but O’Halloran felt tears drip down his cheeks and glanced up at the door, nervous that someone might come in and find the big chief weeping like a sentimental drunk. He removed his glasses and placed them on the desk, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. What the hell did it matter if anyone saw him like this, there was no one here anyway. He’d signed more leave forms over the past few weeks than he had all year and had to deny even more. It was like everyone wanted to go home.
He stared at his wife in the picture, leaning against the boy who dwarfed her: his Beth, smiling and radiant in the midst of the family she had created. He hadn’t seen that look in a long time. It had started to slip the moment Michael shipped out to Afghanistan with his unit and he had seen it melt from her face entirely the day they got the news that he had been killed and was never coming home again. He felt a sudden tug to be with her, to hold her in the silence of the home they had built and where their son had grown up. He could easily grab a quick lunch and be back before anyone missed him.
He closed the files, logged out of the system and grabbed his jacket from over his chair. Just as he made it to the door his desk phone rang but he ignored it. He locked the door and walked away down the corridor, leaving the phone still ringing and getting quieter with every step as he headed back home.
33
The river did not rise again. It settled back down to its previous level and the dam held fast. The only visible difference was the colour of the flowing water and the red residue it had left high on the banks, as though a massacre had taken place along its entire length.
Once they were sure the dam was solid and the danger was over, everyone shuffled back to the pool, exhausted and thirsty. Liv brought up the rear. She imagined what they must look like, trudging across the desert, caked in red mud like a procession of unfinished clay people, chunks of it falling off the exhausted line ahead of her, turning the sun-bleached desert a dusty pink. She reached the place where the land dropped away and saw the pool again, clear and glittering below her. All she wanted was to fall face first into it and drink forever, but as she saw the man at the head of the line draw close to the water’s edge, she realized she could not – none of them could.
‘Stop,’ she called out, breaking into a shambling run. ‘Stop. We must not wash in the pool.’ She could see irritation in the faces that turned to her. ‘We mu
st not drink either, not until we are clean.’
‘We must drink.’ The man at the head of the line wore white driller’s overalls so splattered with red mud he looked like a butcher. He turned away and made for the water.
‘Wait!’ Liv ran to intercept, stepping in front of him to bar his way. ‘What’s your name?’
The man looked furious. ‘I am Kasim Barzani.’
‘Kasim, I need a drink as much as you do, but after all we did to keep the pool clean we must be careful not to contaminate it.’ She pulled at her shirt and a cloud of red dust shook loose and drifted to the ground.
‘It is just mud. What difference will a little bit of mud make?’ Kasim turned to everyone. ‘How do we even know the water is poisoned?’ He turned back to her. ‘How do you know?’
Nods rippled down the line of exhausted faces. Liv could sense the thirst raging inside them. It wouldn’t take much for them to trample her into the dust in their rush to get to the water. She thought about telling them of the symbols on the stone and what she had read there but it sounded crazy even to her as she voiced it in her head. ‘I don’t know if the water is poisoned, not for certain. But if you are so sure it isn’t, then drink some, but not from the pool. Go drink some of the red water on the other side of the dam – then we will see if it is poisoned or not.’
Kasim’s face flushed and Liv instantly regretted losing her temper. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She felt like the sun was boiling the brains in her head. She was too tired for this, and she hadn’t asked these people to follow her into the desert – but that didn’t stop her feeling responsible for them.