The Tower

by Simon Toyne

  The second result was more recent. It was an application for a temporary work visa dated only a year ago. She had been trying to come back to the States but her application had been denied. He noticed the name on the form was Erroll. Maybe she never married, or maybe had but had kept her name.

  He looked at the two results, two more precious pieces of evidence of her continued existence, and felt an almost physical yearning to be with her. He pulled his phone from his pocket. The countdown application was now installed on it and running as his wallpaper. He watched the numbers steadily declining towards zero.

  All the time he had lost. How much time left?

  Kinderman’s message was still open and he re-read it, hating him now for playing games when so much was at stake. It was like a taunt – ‘If you’re smart enough then come and get me’ – a clever test to find out what he knew. Well, Professor Douglas had been standing on a hill, staring up at the stars and look where that got him. Maybe Kinderman had a similar place and that’s where he was now, drawn there by the homing instinct. But Franklin had run checks on Kinderman’s background and nothing like that had shown up.

  … standing on a hill looking to the east for new stars in old friends, as those like us have done since the beginning of time.

  What the hell did that mean? It wasn’t enough to go on. He didn’t have time to look up every old observatory in the world and then go and check them out on the off-chance Kinderman might be there when all he really wanted to do was get on a plane and fly to southern Turkey.

  He froze as a thought struck him.

  He clicked on the ghost icon and scrolled quickly through the document looking for the second lot of CARBON results. There they were:

  GOBEKLI TEPE

  HOME

  There was a link next to the first one and he clicked it open to remind himself what it said.

  Göbekli Tepe Turkish: [2] (“Potbelly Hill”[3]) is a Neolithic (stone-age) hilltop sanctuary erected at the top of a mountain ridge in the southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. It is the oldest known wholly human-made religious structure and also the oldest observatory, believed to have been constructed by the proto-religious tribe known as the Mala [1][4]

  He clicked back to the map still open from earlier and typed Gobekli Tepe into the Get Directions field.

  The map widened a little and marked a route there from Gaziantep. It was just over an hour’s drive east. Ruin was a half hour’s drive northwest. Shepherd closed the laptop and started the engine, his mind made up and his destination set. He could decide which way to go when he got there.

  86

  The phone buzzed.

  The Novus Sancti rose from his chair and quickly walked out of the building, answering it as he passed through a door and into the chill of the day.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Archangel is dead.’

  Miss Boerman’s voice sounded tense and stretched thin. Behind her he could hear the clamour of people.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At the police station. They gave me my phone call so I called you.’

  The Sanctus nodded, his mind working through the ramifications of this news, moving the various pieces in play around in his head like he was re-setting a chessboard. ‘Archangel has served the Lord well, and so have you. Say nothing and the Lord will provide for you, both in spirit and of course in the more earthly matter of legal counsel.’

  He hung up, uncomfortable about talking on an open line coming from inside a police station. He powered the phone down, prised the back off, removed the SIM card then crushed it under his boot.

  Back inside the building he settled behind his desk, his face lit by the glow of a computer screen. He tapped a code to unlock it and an email program opened up. It was an online account operating behind a daisy chain of virtual networks, so anything sent to or from it was totally untraceable. He re-read the message he had been composing, his lips moving slightly as if uttering a silent prayer:

  This is a warning.

  Attached to this message is a countdown clock, discovered in the files of Dr Kinderman and Professor Douglas, two eminent astronomers who have gone missing.

  The world knows something is coming. The armies are refusing to fight, snow falls in deserts and we are all feeling the spirit of God moving through us, sending us back to our homes so we might be ready for His arrival.

  Judgement Day is upon us. You still have time but this countdown shows that time is measured in days not weeks. Show Him we still have faith and be ready for what is coming.

  Repent and return to God while you still have time.

  A friend

  Novus Sancti

  He checked the addresses against a list he had spent months compiling. It contained direct contacts for every major news outlet across the globe as well as the press offices of most major Western governments. He re-checked the various attachments: the countdown application found on Douglas’s laptop; copies of the latest FBI and police reports regarding the events at Goddard and Marshall so they would take the message seriously. When he was satisfied everything was in order he typed three words into the subject line:

  REVELATION OR DEVASTATION?

  Then pressed Send and watched his message fly.

  87

  Liv came to with a start. The citrus smell was stronger now and mixed with something acrid and dry that burned the back of her throat. Someone was standing over her, holding a bottle under her nose and she turned, raising her hand at the same time to bat it away.

  ‘Hey, take it easy. You’re OK. It’s just smelling salts.’

  She blinked and looked back into the gentle eyes of the Italian doctor.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘You passed out.’

  Liv tried to get up but he laid a hand on her shoulder and firmly eased her back down. ‘You should stay here for a while, get some rest. I’ve put you on a saline drip to get some fluids into you and there’s some Perfalgan in there too to get your temperature down: you were up at forty degrees – not good. I also took the liberty of stealing a little blood.’ He pointed at a small plaster in the crook of her arm.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Giorgio Giambanco – hell of a mouthful, no? You can call me George if you like. What’s yours?’

  ‘Liv – Adamsen,’ she added, defaulting to formality in the face of a medical professional.

  ‘OK, Miss Adamsen, talk me through your fainting episode, was it sudden or did it come on gradually?’

  ‘It was the heat I think. I started to feel feverish so I headed inside.’

  He tilted her head up, checking the glands in her neck with his fingertips. ‘Any nausea?’

  ‘Yes, a little, and the ground felt like it was moving. I started getting tunnel vision. There was a smell too, like lemons.’

  He frowned, checking her blood-pressure readings from a cuff. ‘When did you notice the smell?’

  ‘When I was still outside, though it was stronger inside the building. In fact I can still smell it.’

  He was about to respond when one of the new people stepped into the room and placed a small tray on the countertop. It contained two small vials filled with blood and a piece of paper with various results written on it by hand. The new doctor shot her a smile that was hard to read then was gone. George ripped the Velcro of the pressure cuff from her arm. ‘Sounds like heat exhaustion,’ he said, turning to the blood results and picking up the piece of paper. ‘You need to rehydrate and take it easy. No more demolition work in the midday sun for you.’ He studied the results and frowned. ‘You said you experienced nausea?’ He looked up at her in a way that made her feel vaguely nervous.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you vomited at all?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘And you said you smelt the lemons while you were still outside the building.’

  ‘Yes, I can still smell them.’

  ‘And does the smell also make you feel a li
ttle sick?’

  ‘A little.’ She felt panicky. ‘What is it? Am I having a brain haemorrhage or something? I read somewhere that people smell things before having a stroke.’

  ‘No, no – it’s nothing like that. What you’re smelling is just some disinfectant we brought with us that they’re now using to swab out the canteen. It’s got some lemon scent in it, not much – I can’t really smell it at all. But you smelled it way off when you were still outside the building.’

  Liv’s heart continued to race at the prospect of whatever was wrong with her.

  ‘There are many things that can cause hyperosmia,’ he said in a gentle way that wasn’t helping. ‘That's just a fancy word for an enhanced sense of smell. And your blood tests confirm that the reason for yours is very common.’

  Liv relaxed a fraction. At least whatever she had wasn’t exotic and therefore more likely to be treatable. ‘What do I have?’

  He smiled and the skin crinkled around his eyes. ‘It’s not so much what you have as what you’re going to have. You’re pregnant, Miss Adamsen. You’re going to have a baby.’

  VI

  And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?

  Daniel 12:8

  88

  Shepherd parked the Durango in long-term parking and headed for the ticket office.

  Charlotte/Douglas International Airport was the usual cavernous barn of a building and was in total chaos when Shepherd stepped through the door. There were long queues snaking away from every ticket desk and the whole building vibrated with noise and stress. A lot of it was coming from the large crowds of people gathered round the TV sets dotted around the waiting lounges and Shepherd felt sick when he saw what was on them.

  It was the countdown Shepherd had seen in Douglas’s cabin, the same one that was installed on his own phone, ticking down now on every screen. A caption beneath it read COUNTDOWN TO THE END OF DAYS? A sombre news anchor was talking to camera as a montage of images played out behind him – more riots, more roads clogged with migrating people, more cities dark and burning, and not just here but in major cities all over the world as the slow creep of panic spread. The picture cut to the smouldering wreck of the building at Marshall, then a heavily censored photo of Professor Douglas flashed up, hanging from the wall of his cabin, the word Heretic, highlighted on the wall next to him and a new caption flashed up: WHAT DID THEY SEE?

  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.’