The Tower (11 page)

Smith continued to machine gun code into his terminal. ‘The most interesting thing I’ve found so far is nothing.’ He hit a key and folders started opening, rippling down his main screen like a deck of cards, every single one of them empty. ‘Everything you would expect is there up until eight months ago, then there’s nothing at all. No directories, no sub-directories, no caches. Whoever cleaned this out really knew what they were doing.’

Shepherd had been hanging on to the hope that Smith would find something in Dr Kinderman’s personal files, an email, or a virus that had originated elsewhere with a pathway that might give them a new lead. But the efficiency and skill with which the drive had been forensically wiped just threw more suspicion on Kinderman. ‘You want me to start checking through the older data, see what I can find?’

‘You can if you want but I think it will be a waste of time. Anyone this thorough is unlikely to have left anything behind – I’m pretty sure anything incriminating on the drives would have been in the chunk of data that’s now missing. I was just about to run it through CARBON, see what that throws up.’ He hit
Return
and a progress bar popped up on the screen, then he sat back with a small grin on his face that had ‘
ask me
’ written all over it.

‘What’s CARBON?’ Shepherd obliged.

‘
That
is something very confidential that I can only divulge to you now you are a serving Special Agent. But what I am about to tell you does not get mentioned in the classroom, understood?’ Shepherd nodded.

‘Back in the typewriter days, before photocopiers even, the only way you could get an exact copy of a typed document was to sandwich carbon paper between two blank sheets. The force of the typewriter letters striking the top sheet would leave a carbon trace on the bottom one, producing a copy. This application does a similar thing. It records keystrokes, only the user doesn’t know anything about it. In fact very few people do.

‘After 9/11, when homeland security became the number one priority and the usual concerns for civil rights and privacy went out of the window, the US Government cut a very high-level deal with all the major computer chip manufacturers. Not sure if you know this but 99% of all the world’s microchips are made in South Korea. So you can imagine, having the American government in your corner when you’ve got North Korea as a neighbour must have been a powerful persuader in the discussions. Anyway the deal was simple. All they had to do in exchange for Uncle Sam’s undying gratitude and future unspecified favours was to modify their product a little. Ever since then, each new chip produced has an extra partition of memory built into it that doesn’t show up on any directory and can only be accessed by certain approved law enforcement agencies with the right software.’ He pointed at the progress bar on the screen as it closed in on 100%. ‘CARBON. Basically, they created the ultimate in Spyware. Normal virus protection doesn’t even see it because it’s not code, it’s built right into the hardware.’

The progress bar disappeared and a document opened, crammed solid with words and numbers. ‘The data is pretty raw,’ he said, his fingers resuming their tap routine, ‘and because of the covert nature of the technology the memory cache is relatively small to keep it hidden so it has to constantly dump old data to keep recording new stuff, just like media disks on security cameras. Usually it holds about a week’s worth of activity. I’m just going to run a filter to split the data out a little and pick out any hot or unusual high-frequency words.’ He executed a new command and another window popped open. ‘This is where you can make yourself useful.’

Shepherd leaned in as words started to appear in the window, gleaned from the raw data. He recognized almost all of them. ‘Ophiuchus is a constellation,’ he said, working his way down the growing list. ‘Andromeda is a galaxy and all those long numbers beginning with PGC are from the Principal Galaxy Catalogue. Red-Shift is an astronomical term for what happens to distant light …’

They continued in this way for several minutes, Smith highlighted everything Shepherd recognized until they reached the bottom of the list and Smith hit
Delete
to get rid of all the isolated words. There were now just two remaining:

MALA
T

Shepherd fished a notebook from his pocket and flipped back through the entries he had made at Goddard. There was the T again in the last entry Dr Kinderman had made in his diary:

T

end of days.

A thought struck him, something about the T and what it might mean in relation to Hubble. He found the contact numbers he had taken down and dialled one, checking the time as he waited for it to connect. The line clicked a few times before a ring tone cut in. Shepherd held his breath as he waited for someone to answer.

Two floors above Shepherd, Franklin sat in a small office, door closed, his face illuminated by a different computer screen.

During his more than twenty years’ service in the bureau he had learned a lot about himself. He knew he wasn’t the most instinctive of investigators, didn’t have the genius he had seen in some to ask exactly the right question at exactly the right time and had never been the one in a midnight incident room to make the single connection that pulled everything together. But he was dogged and he knew people. He could tap them like a tuning fork and listen to the sound they made. He always knew when the note was wrong and right now, with Shepherd, it was screeching like nails on a blackboard.

On the screen in front of him were Shepherd’s Bureau application forms and resumé. He had been scouring them for the last twenty minutes, cross-checking the missing two years against social security records, credit-scoring agencies, anything that might give him a steer on where Shepard was and what he had been doing. So far the only small discrepancy he had found was on the standard Questionnaire for National Security Positions. There was a new addition to the form, a declaration of faith, added by a Republican government riding high on the wave of post 9/11 hysteria. The Democrats had fought it, citing it as a dangerous erosion of the Constitution and its separation of religion and state, but the Republicans maintained that it would help identify Muslim candidates whose background and cultural knowledge could prove insightful in the war on terror. The bill had just squeaked through, but only after a compromise had been agreed that the new section should be optional and no candidate could be penalized for not filling it in. Shepherd had exercised that option and left his blank.

This in itself was unremarkable, but in Franklin’s experience the only people who chose not to fill in the faith section were atheists. Shepherd’s resumé showed he had spent several years at a hardcore Catholic boarding school and yet he hadn’t ticked the box declaring himself to be Catholic. It was a small point but it added to Franklin’s distrust of him. There was something hard-wired into his DNA that could not allow himself to entirely trust anyone who did not, in one way or another, have a healthy fear of God. It was one of the central tenets of the Irish, whispered down to him on whisky breath by his father and uncles when they were swaying with patriotism for a country none of them had ever set foot in: never trust a man who does not have God in his heart, and never trust a man who will not take a drink with you.

He sat back in his chair, reaching for his phone.

Thinking about his da’ had tugged at something inside him. Maybe it was Christmas and the usual guilt that came with that. It was too late to call so he scrolled down the contacts list to the entry for Marie and opened up a blank text:

Something’s come up. Got to work tomorrow so wont be able to make it home. Will call when I know when I can get away. Say sorry to Sinead for me.

He pressed
Send
and watched the message go. It was odd that he still thought of the house as home even though he didn’t live there any more.

He closed all the files, shut down the terminal and was pulling his jacket off the back of the chair when his phone buzzed. Marie had got straight back to him.

What about saying sorry to me?

Franklin read the words and felt the ache inside him twist a little more. She was right of course but he’d got tired of apologizing to her a long time ago. He slipped his jacket on and headed for the nearest exit, swapping the phone for a crumpled packet of Marlboro. Another bad habit he had been trying for a long time to quit.

‘Hubble Flight Team.’

The line was noisy and Shepherd covered his other ear so he could hear better. ‘Merriweather?’

‘Speaking.’

‘It’s Agent Shepherd. Where are you?’

‘I’m at Goddard. I’ve stepped out for some air and patched my calls through to my cell in case anyone needed me, how can I help?’

‘Before the attack you said Hubble was exploring a piece of thin space in the constellation of Taurus.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What do you use as shorthand for Taurus?’

There was a pause. ‘If I was writing it down I’d use the astrological sign, a circle with two horns.’

‘Not the letter T?’

‘No.’

‘What if you were typing it?’

‘If I was typing it I would put in the whole word, or maybe just the first few letters and then predictive text would do the rest.’

Shepherd wrote T and TAURUS in his notebook and added a large question mark after them. ‘What about MALA?’ he spelled it.

‘Nothing, sorry. What are these in relation to?’

‘They showed up in some raw data we recovered from Dr Kinderman’s computer. It’s probably nothing but we have to check.’ Shepherd wrote MALA in his notebook and added a question mark after that too. ‘Thanks, Merriweather. Sorry to have bothered you.’

‘No problem. Listen, if you find anything else let me know, I’m as eager to get to the bottom of this as anyone …’

‘I’m sure you are.’

‘… and you can always get me on this number. I’ll keep it patched through to my cell and leave it switched on just in case, though I’m planning on sleeping at my desk until either Hubble comes back online or someone forces me out of here at gunpoint.’

Shepherd smiled. ‘I’m sure of that too. You take care, Merriweather. We’ll sort this thing out, one way or another.’ He put the phone down just as the door opened on the far side of the room and footsteps approached.

‘Found anything?’ Franklin’s voice boomed across the empty space.

No
– Shepherd thought.

‘Yes,’ Smith said, cheerful as ever. ‘We recovered some CARBON data, and Agent Shepherd has been helping me sort through it.’

‘Good for Agent Shepherd – anything useful?’

Shepherd looked down at his notes. ‘We found a couple of unusual words. I think the T might refer to Taurus but I have no idea what MALA means.’

‘Interesting.’ Franklin leaned forward in a wash of coffee and cigarette smoke. ‘Watch and learn, rookie.’ He clicked on Google and typed MALA into the search window, hit
Return
and pages of results popped up. ‘Sometimes the simple, direct route gets the best results.’ He clicked on the top hit and a Wikipedia page opened up.

Mala: [
mala
] Name given to several historical anti-establishment groups and more recently a clandestine anti-religious terror organization.

Shepherd turned to Franklin who was smiling his trademark smile. ‘If you’d paid a little more attention you would have seen the Mala mentioned more than once in those old newspapers we found back in Kinderman’s pad. I told you the Bureau got involved. They were the terrorist group blamed for the attacks on the Citadel in Ruin.’

Shepherd turned back and continued to read.

The Mala are one of two pre-historic tribes of men whose combined history underpins the emergence of modern civilization and religion. The other tribe – the Yahweh – were victorious in a struggle to possess and control a powerful ancient relic known as the Sacrament, which is believed by many to still exist inside the Citadel fortress in the southern Turkish city of Ruin, where it has been kept and protected since pre-history by the spiritual heirs of the Yahweh, a brotherhood of monks known as the Sancti.

Shepherd bristled at this last word. ‘The letter sent to Kinderman was signed
Novus Sancti
.’

Franklin nodded. ‘Looks like the religious angle is starting to fly. Read on.’

The Mala, having lost the Sacrament, were branded as heretics by the emerging Church and driven into hiding where they became synonymous with other anti-Church organizations such as the Illuminati. Because of the secretive nature of the Mala, little is known about them but many famous scientific figures are believed to have been members. These include Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei and many others, particularly in the field of astronomy, who often suffered persecution because their theories and discoveries challenged the teachings of the church. The church, in turn, continues to portray the Mala as terrorists, Satanists and worshippers of the occult.

Shepherd sat back in his chair. ‘The letter also called Kinderman a member of the occult tribe.’

‘Which would explain why Kinderman was targeted by religious freaks, though not why he would sabotage Hubble.’ Franklin turned to Smith. ‘Can you dig anything else out from Kinderman’s drive? Maybe the context of these words will give us something to go on.’

Smith hammered in more commands, so hard that Shepherd wondered how many keyboards he went through a year. He hit
Return
and the program went to work.

Shepherd looked down at the question marks in his notebook, feeling that his usefulness to the investigation was slipping away. He was already thinking of the report he would have to write before dawn and getting through the next day of classes having had no sleep.

‘Looks like he was talking to someone,’ Franklin said.

Shepherd looked up and read the new messages.

408 Finished calculating co-ordinates for the
Mala
star, will send separately for you to check

408 Not much time left. May be needing our friends in
Mala
sooner than I thought.