The Tower

by Simon Toyne

‘Not fully recovered, he is improving but still weak. He has been removed to the Abbot’s private quarters to rest and allow the doctors to conduct further tests. It is a vital period in their search for a vaccine, they must try to understand the reason for his recovery. At the same time, in our own way, we too are desperately trying to understand the blight better. I mentioned in my note that a certain document has come into our possession, a prophecy that was originally carved on a stone long ago.’

  ‘Yes, do you have it with you?’

  ‘Not exactly. We have a facsimile of it. A detailed photograph showing both sides of the stone.’

  Malachi’s eyes grew larger behind the pebbles of his glasses. ‘Show it to me.’

  ‘I was hoping you might allow us into the library, so we can study it together and utilize the huge wealth of resources and reference material to try and decipher its meaning.’

  The magnified eyes clouded with suspicion and flitted between the two of them as if he suspected some kind of trap. ‘Why don’t you give the document to me and I will see what I can make of it? You know I am familiar with all the ancient languages collected here. I have studied them and decoded many. If this stone is written in any of these then I will be able to recognize and translate it without need for further study or research. I might be able to tell you what it says right now – if you show it to me.’

  Father Thomas and Athanasius exchanged a glance. They had expected this and, though neither of them liked it, they had little choice but to agree. Time was too pressing.

  ‘If we show it to you, you must share what you see in it.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Whatever it contains affects us all.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Malachi was fidgety, the candle shaking in his hand with anticipation.

  Thomas opened his jacket where the laptop was secreted. He opened it and held the screen towards Malachi. Cold blue light lit up the librarian’s face, turning it into a grotesque, glowing mask that appeared to float beyond the window in the door, the eyes pecking information from the screen like hungry birds. ‘It’s Malan,’ he said, studying the first image.

  ‘That’s what we thought,’ Athanasius replied, sensing Malachi’s deliberate evasion but choosing not to challenge him on it. ‘What about the second image?’

  Malachi’s eyes flitted across the screen but he said nothing. Thomas closed the laptop abruptly, prompting Malachi to look up as though he had been slapped.

  ‘You promised to share your thoughts. If you do not honour your side of the bargain then we will not honour ours.’

  ‘Of course, my apologies, I was just trying to – to get a sense of it. It’s written in two different languages – three if you consider the constellations might also be telling part of the story.’ Athanasius nodded, he had not considered this, but it made sense. The proto-cuneiform section he had been able to partly understand was linked by a line as well as by meaning to the extra star marked in the constellation of Taurus. ‘Can you decipher any of it?’

  ‘I’m sure I can – but I will need to see it again and study it a little longer.’

  Athanasius paused. Malachi was a slippery, self-interested character at the best of times. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘but the moment I think you are holding something back from us, we shut it again and walk away. Understood?’

  Malachi nodded and attempted a smile that looked monstrous in the wavering light of his candle. Thomas opened the laptop again and turned it to face the window in the door. Malachi’s eyes crawled over it hungrily. ‘It’s very old, reminiscent of proto-elemaic but not the same. There is a symbol here for the Citadel, also one for death and another that refers to disease or a plague …’

  Athanasius glanced at Father Thomas. They had been right. The stone did predict what was happening here. ‘What else?’

  Malachi shook his head. ‘It is hard to render it into a formal sentence. It is impressionistic rather than narrative.’ His eyes continued to scan the symbols. ‘Maybe if you leave it with me I can cross reference it with some of the other elemite documents in the library from the same period and arrive at a clearer meaning.’

  ‘No. If we need to use other resource material to decode it then you must let us into the library so we can work on it together.’ Malachi didn’t respond, his hungry eyes wide and unblinking as they slipped down the text. He reached the bottom and visibly flinched as if he had been struck.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The man who came back from the dead, did he ride here on a horse? Did he ride out of the wilderness?’

  Athanasius recalled conversations he’d had with Gabriel about his long journey back to the Citadel. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what is this man’s name?’

  Athanasius frowned. ‘His name is Gabriel. Now tell us what it says on the stone.’

  Malachi shook his head. ‘It’s … I’m not sure … I’ll need to –’ He started to back away, eyes wide and fixed on the laptop.

  ‘Tell us what it says.’

  He looked up at them, his eyes full of fear. ‘I need to check some things,’ he said, still backing away. ‘I need to be sure, before I –’

  ‘Malachi!’ Thomas closed the laptop, but all it did was release Malachi from the spell of it. He turned and started moving away.

  ‘MALACHI!’ Athanasius called after him. But it was too late, he was already gone, almost running into the solid blackness until his flickering candle disappeared entirely.

  78

  Corporal Williamson and his crew made impressively short work of the gates. They had found some chains and dragged them to their truck outside the fence. The chains were fixed by one end to the tow bar and the other to the main support posts while everyone else dug away at the foundations with shovels, picks and whatever else they could swing. When Williamson figured they’d dug far enough he fired up the engine and eased it over to where the earth fell away and used gravity and the weight of the truck to rock the posts clean out of the ground. Then they got to work on the rest.

  Williamson took command, tasking some of his men to decommission the cannons up in the towers and the rest he split into teams to coordinate the demolition effort. Using a series of interpreters relaying Williamson’s orders they got everybody working together, some digging at the post foundations, others cutting the wire and rolling it into bundles. Liv had been stationed at one of the posts and was snipping away at the ties with an industrial-sized set of wire cutters. She felt deep satisfaction at how quickly the different groups had gelled into one unit, everyone working together, everyone suffused with a sense of urgency by the column of dust growing steadily in the east, marking the approach of the newcomers.

  ‘Those soldiers, they’re very good at this,’ she remarked to Tariq who was hacking away with a pickaxe at the concrete foot of the post she was working at.

  He leaned on the axe handle and wiped the sweat from his face. ‘They should be,’ he said, ‘they’re USACE – United States Army Corps of Engineers. These guys are used to taking things down and building them up again. It’s what they’re trained for.’

  Liv frowned as a thought began to form in her head. ‘Don’t you think it’s odd that exactly the right people seem to arrive here just when they’re needed? When the water was poisoned some water experts turned up out of nowhere with all the right equipment to test it. Then these guys show up just when the need to dismantle this place suggests itself.’

  ‘The goat herders too,’ Tariq nodded over at the nomads who were now quite happily being ordered about by the soldiers.

  ‘How do they fit in?’

  ‘We have plenty of dried food but hardly anything fresh. In the desert the goat is the best source of fresh milk and meat. Those goats are as important for the sustainability of this place as the water.’ He frowned as something occurred to him. ‘What about Azra’iel and his riders, how do they fit into your theory?’

  Liv contemplated this for a moment then shook her head. ‘They were not drawn here by the c
all of this place like the rest, they were led here by Malik. They shouldn’t have been here. And they died.’

  Tariq turned back to the column of dust in the east, close enough now to make out three white trucks at the base of it, their outlines shimmering and breaking up in the heat haze. ‘So who is coming now?’ he asked, more to himself than anyone else. ‘What do we need here that we haven’t got already?’

  Liv followed his gaze. ‘Whoever it is they will be met with a welcome and not a closed gate,’ she said.

  She continued to watch the shimmering vehicles drawing closer, emerging from the liquid air until they crunched to a halt in a cloud of fine dust. The driver’s door of the lead vehicle opened and a man got out. He was tall and olive-skinned, but not Arabic looking. Gentle eyes surveyed the ring of welcoming faces then looked past them through the ruins of the gate to the compound beyond and the fountain of water. ‘What is this place?’ he asked in accented English that placed him as Italian or maybe Spanish.

  Liv stepped forward, fixing a smile on her face ‘We’re not quite sure what this place is really, we’re kind of making it up as we go along, but there’s plenty of room and plenty of water and you’re very welcome to stay.’

  More doors opened and others stepped out into the desert, a mixture of Arabic, European, mature and young, six of them in all, two to a vehicle. Then Liv spotted something on one of their sleeves, a logo that looked familiar but she couldn’t quite place. ‘What is it that you all do?’ she asked.

  The driver of the lead vehicle turned his gentle eyes on her and smiled. ‘We work for Médecins Sans Frontières,’ he said. ‘We’re doctors.’

  79

  Franklin saw something harden in his wife’s face the moment his phone rang for the second time.

  They were sitting in the kitchen – Marie, Sinead and him – the remains of a home-cooked meal on the table, talking like they hadn’t talked together in God knows how long. It was as if all the bad history and all the distance that had formed between them had been swept away by the same force that had pulled them home.

  ‘I got to take this,’ he said. Marie nodded, a quick twitch of her chin, then slipped out of her chair, picked up some plates and headed over to the sink. How many times had he seen her do that? Too many. He looked at Sinead, so like her mother, and caught the same disappointment in her eyes – not as hard or as cold as her mother yet, but the seed was there.

  He took the phone from his pocket and checked the number.

  Shepherd again.

  He knew he should turn the damn thing off and go over to Marie, tell her he loved her, that the old days of work first and everything else a poor second were gone. But they weren’t. Not yet.

  He pictured Shepherd, exhausted from the day he’d had, standing out there alone in the freezing night with a fresh corpse for company and no one watching his back. ‘I got to take it,’ he repeated standing and walking from the room, hating himself with every step. He moved into the hallway and snapped the phone to his ear. ‘Franklin.’

  ‘It’s Shepherd.’

  ‘I know.’ He walked towards the front door but changed his mind and sat on the stairs instead. It was too cold outside and he couldn’t face leaving the house.

  ‘The cops are here. They didn’t see the car on their way in and didn’t intercept anyone. I think the killers must be heading north into Tennessee.’

  ‘I’ll make some calls. Spread the net.’

  ‘I already got the local cops to call it through.’

  ‘Well I’ll fire a rocket down from Quantico too, make sure it sticks.’ The loud and angry chink of dishes being rinsed in the sink sounded only a few feet away. He covered his ear with his free hand and felt his mind automatically snick back into the well-worn grooves of a moving investigation. ‘OK, this is what’s going to happen. They won’t have the right resources locally to process the scene properly so I’m going to send a team out to you from Charlotte. You need to stay put until they get there, make sure those down home cops don’t get all excited and contaminate the scene with cigarette butts and good intentions. They’re going to take a while to reach you so you’ll need to take charge until they do. I already put in an urgent search for any of Dr Kinderman’s previous known addresses and got a hit on two that might be considered “home”. There are armed units heading to both of them now. If Kinderman’s there we’ll get him.’

  ‘Always assuming whoever killed Professor Douglas hasn’t got there first.’

  ‘I doubt it. Both addresses are way up north and so far everything has taken place south of Washington. This feels like a very contained operation, one mobile unit and someone controlling them centrally. What’s the cell phone coverage like where you are?’

  ‘I’m on top of a mountain, I got five bars, but I don’t know about the rest of the area – why?’

  Franklin stared at his daughter’s snow boots, lined up by the door where she had stepped out of them; one had toppled over. He had a flash of a smaller pair abandoned in exactly the same way maybe fifteen years earlier. He closed his eyes. The memories were too distracting. ‘You remember our little talk with the good Reverend?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘You remember what I did just before we interviewed him?’

  There was a pause on the line. Franklin could hear the wind through the trees where Shepherd was. It sounded cold. ‘You asked him to put his phone down on the table.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘You asked if you could smoke.’

  ‘And when he said “no” I put my cigarettes down on the table next to his phone. There’s a little piece of kit not covered in class called an Eavesdropper. It’s a new-generation bug that can read and duplicate a SIM card without the need to tamper with a phone. All you have to do is place it close enough to a target unit and leave it there for about a minute so it can pick up the Mobile Identification Number when it checks in with the nearest cell mast. It then mirrors the phone activity and makes voice recordings of any calls. It’s got a four gigabyte chip built in so it can store around fifty hours of audio. The one drawback is that it only works in close physical proximity to the target phone.’

  ‘Which is why you stashed your pack of cigarettes in that crack in the wall.’

  ‘Exactly. So I’m thinking if there’s good phone reception where you are the killers may already have called in a status update to their controller. You hang tight, Shepherd. I’ll let you know how it shakes out.’

  He hung up and hit the zero key to speed-dial Quantico. From the kitchen all he could hear now was silence. He pictured Marie and Sinead sitting at the breakfast bar, listening to him talk in the hallway. It made him feel crummy. But he couldn’t leave Shepherd hanging in the wind. He was the only reason he was here at all. He’d explain that to them, as soon as he finished this call.

  The phone connected and Franklin navigated his way through the various departments: authorizing and mobilizing a crime- scene detail to hit the road and head to Cherokee; issuing an urgent look out for a yellow or white station wagon with police departments in three states; and ultimately getting patched through to the surveillance control room where, after confirmation of his agent ID number and the investigation code, he was told by the operator that the Eavesdropper unit assigned to him had logged its last call six minutes earlier. Franklin listened to the crackle of the line and the solid silence in his house while the operator sent a code that bounced off a communications satellite in space and beamed a signal back through the snow clouds and down to the Eavesdropper wedged between the mailbox and the outside wall of the Church of Christ’s Salvation in Charleston.

  The circuit responded to the code and switched from a receiver to a transmitter, using the cellphone network to send an encoded stream of information back to the operator who then decoded it and fed it straight down the line to Franklin.

  Franklin kept his eyes closed as he listened to the last recorded conversation the device had picked up. It was between Coo
per and two unidentified voices – a man and a woman. He registered the key phrases in the short exchange:

  … The Professor is dead … just passed into Tennessee … Yeah, we got pictures …

  Then Cooper ended the call with words that hammered the lid shut on his own coffin.

  … I just found out where Dr Kinderman is …

  Franklin cut the connection and stared down at his daughter’s empty boots. Whatever hope he had been clinging to that he might still be able to deal with this by phone had just flown. Cooper needed to be taken down quickly and he couldn’t leave it to Charleston’s finest.

  He dug around in his pocket, found the card Jackson had given him in the police station and started punching his number into his phone. He hit the dial button and became aware of Marie and Sinead framed in the kitchen door. They were both looking at him, their arms folded across their fronts, each a mirror of the other’s disapproval.

  ‘I’ve got to do this one thing,’ he said, holding up his phone, ‘just this one thing in Charleston then I’ll be back, I promise.’ He heard the phone connect and start ringing. By the look on Marie’s face she heard it too.

  ‘It’s always just one more thing,’ she said. Then she turned and walked into the kitchen.

  Sinead stayed where she was. ‘Just one thing?’ she said.

  ‘Literally this one thing, I promise you hand on heart.’

  She nodded but didn’t smile, then turned and followed her mother into the kitchen as Jackson answered. Franklin clamped the phone to his ear, closing his eyes to shut out all the things he didn’t want to leave. ‘I need your help,’ he said keeping his voice low. ‘But first I need to get into Charleston as fast as possible, preferably avoiding the parking lot that is the I-26.’

  80

  ‘He asked about me?’ Gabriel was propped up in bed looking at Athanasius and Thomas, their faces serious after their strange meeting with Malachi.

  ‘Yes, and his questions appeared to have been prompted by whatever he had just read on the Starmap. He asked if you had ridden to the Citadel out of the wilderness.’