by Simon Toyne
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:
BREAKING NEWS – Suspected Terrorist
Attack on NASA Facility.
‘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.
49
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.
50
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 he
r 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.’
The man on the floor calmed a little and his lips pulled back in pain revealing a jagged line of teeth. It was Azra’iel, the angel of death, very close to meeting his namesake. ‘The land does not belong to anyone,’ Liv whispered, ‘we belong to the land.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing.’ She turned away. ‘Where did you come from, Kyle?’
‘Melbourne originally.’
‘No, I mean how did you come to be here?’
Kyle stared at a spot on the wall, his forehead wrinkled in thought. ‘That’s a good question.’ Fresh movement drew his attention as Azra’iel began to fit again. He leapt forward, grabbing one of his arms and holding him down while Eric tried to get a sedative into him. Liv watched as they fought with him, then – as quickly as it had started – it was over. Azra’iel arched one last time, let out a long rattling sigh and was still.
Kyle looked up at her. ‘I need to help Eric clean up here. Why don’t you go into the kitchen, get yourself something to eat – if you can stomach it after all this. I’ll come find you when we’re done and try and tell you how we ended up here.’
51
The laptop pinged and Shepherd sat up, his stomach hollow with dread.
It was too soon.
The search had only been running for about a minute, two at most. It would still be deep in the death registers. He sat perfectly still in the bolted-down chair, not daring to move, as if remaining motionless might stop the world turning and keep her forever alive.
A single search result was showing in a pop-up, just a string of numbers and a suffix locator, BPD – Baltimore Police Department. As far as he knew Melisa had never been to Baltimore, she had no connections there: but then there were lots of things he didn’t know about her, like where she’d been for the last eight years.
He stared at the result.
Could this be it – the end of the road? The end of hope?
It felt hot in the room all of a sudden and sweat trickled down the ridge of his spine. He clicked on the single result and held his breath as it opened in a new window. His eyes scanned the dense text, raw information gleaned from the police report, his mind too wired to take in more than fragments:
… DOD: 12th August 2011 …
She had been dead for over a year
… thirty-six years old …
Right age
… gunshot wound … black female …
Black?
Melisa wasn’t black – olive-skinned, yes, but not black. She looked more Italian than African. But some cops were pretty binary about these things: anyone who wasn’t white was automatically black – it could still be her. At the bottom of the file there were other case-file numbers, each with a different date stretching back ten years from the date of death. This person had a rap sheet, which didn’t sound like his Melisa.
His eyes lit on a PDF file attached to the bottom of the document and his finger clicked on it before his mind had a chance to reconsider. A new window opened containing three sets of mug shots and a head-and-shoulders shot of a woman with her eyes closed, lying on an autopsy table. Despite the sombre and tragic image Shepher
d nearly wept with relief.
Whoever this Melisa, was she wasn’t his.
He watched the hourglass icon spin slowly as sophisticated algorithms continued the search.
Don’t find her here among the dead – he thought – not my Melisa.
But the ping rang out again, mocking his silent prayer, just as Franklin burst back into the room carrying two mugs of coffee.
52
‘God damned Reverend pulled a fast one,’ Franklin said, slopping the coffee on the metal-topped table in his haste to put the mugs down.
Shepherd was barely listening, his hands working fast, heart pounding as he closed all the windows on the screen. There was no time to check out the new search result with Franklin in the room.
‘Cooper filmed our interview and leaked it to CNN. Apparently the world just saw us confirm the attacks on Hubble and James Webb.’
Shepherd looked up, his mind racing ahead, wondering what this would mean for the investigation and for them. It was bad. Really bad. Because of this mistake they would undoubtedly be taken off the case, which meant he stood to lose all the access he had only just started to explore – his lifeline to Melisa. That snake of a reverend had ruined everything. He must have been straight on the phone to the news networks the moment they had stepped out of the studio.
He dug into his pocket and fished out the key ring Franklin had thrown at Cooper in the studio as he realized the network news wouldn’t be the only place the interview would be running. He opened a new window and copied in the web address printed on the key ring.
The homepage was as slick and professional as the man it was built to promote. Shepherd found a media section in the drop-down menus and clicked on a link to a live stream of the TV show.
The video buffered fast and Shepherd’s jaw tightened when he saw himself sitting on the couch next to Franklin, like guests on a talk show. The clip had been cut to make it look as though Cooper was interviewing them. It showed the moment when he surprised them about the breaking news stories on Twitter about Hubble and the explosion at Marshall, demanding to know if the stories were true, then a close up of Shepherd’s face as he said ‘Yes’. It cut back to Cooper live in the studio.