The Tower

Liv laughed. ‘I’m an unemployed, homeless reporter from New Jersey. Does that sound like a goddess to you?’ She stood up and stretched the kinks out of her back. ‘Listen, you said yesterday you could take me anywhere I wanted to go. You think you could take me as far as the Turkish border?’

‘If you wish,’ he said, snicking his rifle together again with impressive speed and smacking the magazine into place. ‘But first, let me show you something.’ He rose from the ground and slung the rifle over his back, heading around the perimeter fence to where the holding pits had been dug. They had been intended to catch the overspill of crude oil from the central well but were now brimming with water. Tariq helped Liv up the side of one of the banks and pointed past the edge of the second pit. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You see it?’

From her elevated position Liv saw how the water had breached the holding pits in several places, creating rivulets that snaked away across the baked earth, carving new channels as they went.

‘The blood is flowing back into the land,’ Tariq said. ‘And see –’ he pointed along the edge of the water ‘– the land is starting to live again.’

All along the banks of the new rivers, green shoots were bristling. ‘See there, we call that Ya’did or skeleton weed. And there, you see those tiny yellow flowers?’

‘Groundsel,’ Liv said. ‘And that is Artemisia, or some other sort of ephemeral grass; and that looks like a tamarisk seedling.’

Tariq turned to her smiling. ‘You see, you know the plants, you can name them all.’

Liv shook her head. ‘Don’t read too much into it. My dad was a horticulturalist and I had no mother so I grew up digging and planting instead of playing with dolls, I got dirt in my blood.’ She followed the lines of the water to where the heat rippled the air. In the distance a column of dust was rising, another illusion to raise her hopes that Gabriel might be returning. She stared at it, waiting for it to melt away like her hopes always did. Only this one didn’t. ‘Someone’s coming,’ she said, hope swelling in her chest.

Tariq looked up and saw it, his chin rising too as if he was sniffing the air. ‘Horses,’ he said, ‘many horses.’

‘Yours?’ Liv gazed at the distant dust as if her eyes were the only things keeping it there, hoping maybe that the riders had gone looking for Gabriel and were now bringing him back.

‘Maybe,’ Tariq said, his hand unconsciously drifting to the shoulder strap of his rifle. ‘We should get back to the compound – I have a bad feeling about this.’

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By the time Liv and Tariq made it back inside the compound the approaching dust cloud was clearly visible in the sky and everyone had emerged from the silver-sided buildings and gathered by the central pool, all eyes looking in the same direction, waiting for whatever was heading their way to arrive. With everyone gathered together like this, Liv realized how few of them were left. She counted thirteen including her – a mixture of oil workers and a couple of the riders who had stayed along with Tariq.

‘Thirty riders!’ a voice called from halfway up the steps to one of the guard towers. ‘Maybe more.’

‘Ours?’ Tariq called back.

There was a pause as the man reached the top and raised a pair of field glasses to his eyes. ‘No,’ he shouted down, ‘not ours.’

Tariq snapped to attention like a shotgun being closed. ‘Close the gates.’ He barked at a startled-looking rigger still wearing his white work overalls. ‘NOW!’ He watched the rigger scurry off then called back up to the watchtower. ‘How long until they get here?’

‘Five minutes, maybe less. They’re riding pretty hard.’ The man paused again and stared through the field glasses. ‘They have guns.’

Tariq turned to the assembled few. ‘Who knows how to operate the fifty-calibre cannons?’ He was met with silence and a ring of frightened faces. ‘What about rifles – can anyone fire a rifle?’ A couple of drill technicians put their hands up nervously. ‘Good, go and get weapons from the locker in the transport hangar and push some of the vehicles outside to give us cover. We’ll use that as a fallback position and try and keep them at bay using the tower guns if we need to.’

Liv looked on with a sense of detachment. Part of her felt anxious about the approaching men and what their intentions might be, but another, stronger part felt that preparing to meet potential violence with more violence was the wrong move. The land wasn’t even theirs and neither was the water running out of it.

‘Stop!’ she said. ‘This is wrong, this is not how it is supposed to be. We should not fight. We should welcome them.’

Tariq looked at her as if she had gone mad. ‘But they are riding here at speed and they are armed. Their intentions are clear I think.’

‘And what of our intentions – if we meet them with closed gates and pointed guns, what does that say about us?’

‘It says we are strong and we are prepared to defend what is ours.’

‘But this isn’t ours. A few days ago I had never even set foot here and neither had you. And now you are prepared to take men’s lives and risk your own for it? Doesn’t that strike you as insane?’

‘It is the way of things. It has always been the way of things.’

‘But things can change. People can change. Open the gates and put down your guns. Whatever happens is meant to happen. Nothing here is worth fighting for. And nothing here is worth dying for either.’

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Shepherd drove through the barrier and back into Quantico a little after midnight, just as the storm was finally blowing itself out. Franklin had been on the phone most of the way. He’d called O’Halloran first to give him a pared down headline account of what they’d discovered at Goddard, then spent the rest of the time liaising with the tech guys who had finished processing Kinderman’s office and were now heading back. Shepherd drove squinting through the spray and the darkness, trying to glean what he could from Franklin’s half of the conversations and wondering what would happen when they got back to base.

The van was already parked up by the laboratories when Shepherd pulled up next to it and shut off the engine.

‘Thank you, driver,’ Franklin said. ‘That will be all.’ He slid out of his seat and was already halfway to the entrance before Shepherd managed to fumble his own door open.

‘What do I do now?’ he called after him.

Franklin didn’t look back. ‘I want your report on my desk by 0800. After that you’re free to return to your training.’

Shepherd got a sinking feeling in his guts. He had suffered Franklin’s disdain all the way through the few short hours he’d been on this investigation that he hadn’t wanted to be assigned to in the first place, but now, as it was about to be taken away from him … he desperately wanted to remain part of it.

He took a step forward, aware that Franklin was about to walk through the door. ‘Maybe I should take a look at Dr Kinderman’s hard drive.’ Franklin stopped but didn’t turn round. ‘I can help sort through the data. Sift through the emails and the technical stuff to look for anything unusual. It’s bound to be full of astronomical terms and acronyms that could easily confuse someone unfamiliar with the jargon.’

Franklin grabbed the handle, pulled open the door and stepped through without saying a word.

Shepherd watched it slowly swing shut: closing on his last chance. He was about to turn and walk back to the dorms when Franklin reappeared round the edge of the door. ‘Report on my desk by 0800, Agent Shepherd,’ he said. ‘Until then your time is your own. So if you’d rather spend it staring at a computer screen than getting some shut-eye then maybe there’s hope for you yet.’ Then he shot him the smile and was gone.

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Liv felt the ground tremble as the riders poured through the open gates and quickly surrounded them on all sides. She kept her eyes fixed on the lead horseman who halted the line with his upheld hand and trotted on alone on his pale horse. He removed his keffiyeh as he approached, revealing a dust-rimed face burnt almost black around the eyes by years in the fierce desert sun.

‘See who is with them,’ Tariq whispered.

Liv scanned the line of riders and saw Malik smiling back at her. It was he who probably brought them here, though for what reason she could only guess at. She stepped forward, opened her arms and smiled. ‘Welcome,’ she said in fluent Arabic that surprised the rider. ‘You must be thirsty after your long ride, your horses too.’

The rider looked down from his lofty position and circled her slowly, scrutinizing her down the curve of his long nose. She could smell the dust and dung of his panting horse, feel the heat radiating from its damp flanks as it was brought to a halt in front of her. The rider turned to his men. ‘I was hoping Ishtar would have more meat on her,’ he said loudly.

The riders erupted in laughter, Malik included.

He turned back, his lined face now split in a smile of his own to reveal an incomplete set of long, broken teeth. ‘You don’t look much like a goddess to me.’

Liv smiled, her eyes flicking to Malik then back to the rider. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything people tell you.’

‘Are you calling me a fool?’

‘No. Why don’t you tell me your name, then I can call you that.’

He leaned forward, his worn saddle creaking beneath his shifting weight. ‘They call me Azra’iel. You know what that means?’

It was an odd quality of her new fluency with language that she often saw images rather than meanings, and felt the words rather than interpreted them. Azra’iel. A picture formed in Liv’s head of huge black wings and she felt fear. ‘It means “Angel of Death”.’

The broken smile returned. ‘Maybe you are a goddess after all.’ His hand passed across strips of bright ribbons on his chest and in a movement too fast to register Liv found herself staring down the barrel of a pistol. ‘Maybe I put a bullet in your brain to find out.’