The Tower

5 (#ulink_0409292f-107c-5c81-aff7-72e93b7caa77)

Shepherd and Franklin drove for the first ten minutes in total silence, the whump of windscreen wipers and hiss of tyres over wet tarmac punctuated only by the rustle of paper as Franklin read through the file. Occasionally he jotted a note in a pocketbook lit by the glow of a small Maglite clamped in his teeth. Shepherd sensed he was unhappy about the situation. That made two of them.

After his performance on Hogan’s Alley the last thing Shepherd wanted was to be heading out into the real world with a loaded gun tucked into his jacket. As promised, Agent Williams, the firearms instructor, had been ready and waiting in the armoury with an oiled SIG 226, which he made Shepherd speed-load from an open box of 9x19 Parabellums while he looked on. Shepherd’s Catholic education had hammered enough Latin into him to know that para bellum meant ‘prepare for war’. He tried to push the thought from his mind as he slotted fifteen shells into the magazine, fumbling two, before smacking it home and looking up into the pained expression on the instructor’s face.

‘Do yourself a favour,’ Williams had said, as Shepherd signed for the gun and the spare shells, ‘try not to put yourself in any situation where you may have to draw this weapon. Just keep it in your holster and come back as quickly as you can to finish your training.’

Shepherd checked the rear-view mirror. Behind him he could see the lights of the grey panel van that had followed them out of the gates at Quantico. It was a tech wagon, loaded with forensics equipment and two Physical Science Technicians ready to process the crime scene his former workplace had now become. They were on I-95, heading north: the bright lights of DC spread across the horizon ahead of them like a luminous stain, lighting up the low cloud that was spilling monsoon-level rain over everything. The weather was slowing them down but at least it would be too late for commuter traffic to be a problem when they eventually hit the capitol. He figured they would be in Maryland in twenty minutes, though he still had no idea why they were heading there.

The Maglite twisted off in the passenger seat and Shepherd heard the creak of the vinyl seat as Franklin turned to him. ‘That little story you span back there,’ he said, ‘your tale of travel to the far corners of the world to find yourself – I just want you to know, I ain’t buying it.’

Shepherd felt heat on his cheeks and was glad it was too dark for Franklin to see. ‘I don’t follow you, sir.’

‘I’ve spent over twenty years talking to people who have done everything from write bad cheques to kidnap children so they could torture them for fun, and you know what every single one of ’em had in common? They all tried to lie to me. Now you may have all your highfalutin’ degrees in astrophysics and rocket science and whatever else, but I got a degree in people and I know when someone is spinning me a line. I can smell it on them, and right now, Agent Shepherd, you stink.’

Shepherd said nothing and kept his eyes on the road.

‘Now I don’t really care all that much why you’re lying or even what it is you’re hiding, what does concern me, however, is having a partner I can’t trust. Having a partner you can’t trust is like having no partner at all, and that’s dangerous, Agent Shepherd, as you just discovered down in that basement. So if at any point you feel like kicking a piece of the truth in my direction – man to man, partner to partner, in the knowledge that, felonies aside, it will go no further – then we’ll get along a whole lot better. In the meantime, operate on the assumption that I’m apt to doubt every single goddam word that comes out of your mouth, understood?’

‘Sir, I promise you …’

Franklin raised his hand and turned his head away. ‘Don’t make it worse by lying to me again. I’m being honest with you, Agent Shepherd, I’m just asking for you to do the same.’

The seat creaked as Franklin turned back to the briefing documents. ‘OK, now I’ve put it out there so you know where we stand you can make yourself useful and explain to me the wisdom behind spending over a billion tax dollars putting a telescope into space that then costs over forty million dollars a year to run.’

Shepherd stared ahead through the spray and considered the question, relieved to be back on safe, familiar ground. He thought about the unimaginable distances the Hubble Space Telescope could penetrate compared to the relatively puny ones achieved by terrestrial instruments. He thought about the light from dead stars it could gather from the pure nothingness of clear space, carrying information all the way back from the beginning of time. But in the end he kept it simple. ‘How many stars can you see tonight?’ he said.

Franklin looked out into the wet, black night as a Big Rig hooned by, going way too fast for the weather and throwing up so much spray you could hardly see the edge of the freeway let alone the sky. ‘OK, fair point, but why not just build a telescope on top of a mountain in Mexico or somewhere the sun always shines. Hell, why not just wait for a clear night, be a lot cheaper.’

‘They did all that. There’s a fifty-metre dish on top of the Sierra Negra volcano in south Mexico that can observe both northern and southern skies. It’s pretty impressive. Trouble is the earth keeps turning, so it can only study a piece of sky for a few hours at a time. A space telescope like Hubble can lock onto a distant object and keep it in its sights for months, years even, while the earth turns beneath it.’

‘And that costs forty million a year?’

‘It’s a very complicated process.’

Franklin grunted. ‘Sounds like a scam to me.’

Shepherd considered letting it go but didn’t want to slip back into the uneasy silence. ‘How good a shot are you?’ he asked.

‘Better than you, Special Agent.’

‘You think you could hit a tin can on the side of the road from a moving car?’

‘Depends how fast the car is going.’

‘Say it’s doing thirty.’

‘Nine times out of ten.’

‘What if the car was doing eighty-five?’

Franklin considered. ‘Maybe three out of ten.’

‘OK, now imagine the car is doing eighty-five thousand miles an hour and the tin can is on the other side of the country, perched on top of the Hollywood sign. Think you could hit it then?’ Franklin didn’t reply. ‘Hubble could. It could lock onto that can and take a picture of it so steady you could read the label. It’s orbiting the earth at around seventeen thousand miles an hour, and the earth is orbiting the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. That’s a total of eighty-four thousand miles an hour and yet Hubble can still fix onto a tiny patch of sky nearly fifteen billion light years away. It’s one of the greatest miracles of modern technology, the pinnacle of man’s achievements in science. That’s why it cost so much and needs all that money to run it.’

‘And all of that is controlled out of Goddard?’

‘Yes.’

Franklin shook his head. ‘Not any more – right now your gold-plated telescope couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo. It’s spinning around up there like a bottle at a frat party. Someone managed to upload a virus that knocked out the guidance system and shut down all communication.’

‘Really? That would be – very difficult.’

‘How difficult?’

‘When I was working at Goddard they had a small systems security scare. One of the ground operating stations for another satellite was left wide open via an email account and some kid hacked into it. He didn’t do any damage but some of the ops systems got infected with internet junk that flowed in through the hole he’d made. It was picked up pretty quick and fixed but it prompted a review of the whole system. How much do you know about government cyber security?’

‘About as much as you know about firing guns.’

‘OK, so all state owned and operated computer operating systems are rated according to the Orange Book scale drawn up by the Department of Defense. This lays out specific security criteria for all government systems ranging from a D grade for non-sensitive, clerical stuff all the way up to beyond A1 for things like the NSA, the FBI and the military systems that launch the nukes. Following the scare at Goddard all the operating systems had to be upgraded to at least an A1. That means the prospect of Hubble’s ground-based operating system being breached by any kind of regular cyber attack is extremely unlikely. It would be like a junkie with a twenty-dollar pistol knocking off Fort Knox. Whoever did this must have known exactly what they were doing.’

‘You think it’s an inside job?’

‘Has to be. We should talk to Dr Kinderman, he’s in charge of Hubble and helped redesign the new system. He’ll be able to give us the names of everyone with the right kind of technical knowledge and any ex-employees who might have an axe to grind.’

‘Good thinking, Agent Shepherd,’ Franklin said, ‘only problem with your otherwise flawless plan of investigation is that Dr Kinderman is AWOL. Right now he is our number one suspect.’

6 (#ulink_2482618a-2bdb-523e-a39c-26d245ee2364)

EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

Badiyat Al-Sham – Syrian Desert

Northwestern Iraq

When Gabriel Mann pointed the horse towards the horizon his only wish was to get as far from the compound as possible before he died.

He headed northwest, into the empty heart of the desert, with the heat of the rising sun on his shoulder and the scent of oranges strong in his nostrils. He tried not to think about all he was leaving behind because it only made it harder for him to go, and that was what he had to do – he had to leave her.

Instead, he tried to focus only on staying alive long enough to be far, far away when the disease took him. He didn’t want to risk infecting others or falling where circling buzzards might draw human scavengers who would steal his clothes and weapons and risk carrying away something far more deadly. He needed to die where no one would ever find him, somewhere the desert sun could dry and purify his flesh and the wind could scatter his dust over the sterile ground where nothing grew and everything perished and was forgotten.

He travelled for nearly four hours before the fever struck. The heat had been building for some time, though it was hard to tell how much of it was coming from the sun and how much from him. He was in the scant shade of a low, dry wadi, keeping the hot wind away from his horse, when his skin started to prickle as if biting insects were suddenly swarming all over him. At the same time a sensation welled up inside him like a feeling of uncontrollable grief. Despite his efforts to put her from his mind he had been thinking about Liv, picturing her face, the green of her eyes and how her hair had spread bright and golden over the pillow the last time he had seen her, sleeping in the sick bay. This sadness of leaving her, fuelled by the fever, now spilled out of him and tears rolled through the dry dust on his cheeks. He raised a shaking hand to wipe his face and it came away bloody.

A blight – the monk from the Citadel had called it – a strong smell of oranges followed by a sudden and violent nosebleed.

It’s over, he thought, with something close to relief. Now I can lie down.

He steered his horse to an overhang that formed a small oasis of shadow amid the blinding white. This was it, the place his whole life had been heading towards, this dark nook that looked like a vertical grave.