The Tower (30 page)

‘Hi,’ Liv said, smiling through the tension. ‘I’m Liv Adamsen. I’m an American. Who are you?’

A hand let go of the M-4 and pointed at the name badge stitched to the left breast of his desert fatigues. Liv squinted against the glare coming off the Humvee’s windscreen and read the name. ‘Williamson. You got a first name?’

He nodded. Liv’s smile was starting to hurt now. ‘Want to give it to me?’

The soldier ignored the question, looking straight past her at the fountain of water shooting up from the spire of the drill in the centre of the compound. ‘What is this place?’ His voice was soft, almost childlike and totally at odds with the hardened image the rest of him radiated.

‘It’s …’ Liv paused as she realized she did not have a ready word to describe it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ the soldier whispered, his shaded eyes taking in the lines of the rivers snaking away across the dust. Behind him the truck’s engine fell silent. It rocked on its springs and other men emerged, dropping down one by one to the ground, six of them, all wearing the coffee-stain camouflage of the US military. Liv was reminded of the welcoming committee she and Gabriel had encountered crossing the border from Turkey what seemed like a lifetime ago. Three more uniformed men climbed out of the Humvee. And though they were wearing uniforms and carrying weapons, there was nothing threatening or hostile about them. They just seemed like a bunch of cautious guys edging their way into a party they weren’t sure they were invited to. Tariq must have sensed it too. He raised his hand to the man in the guard tower and the .50-cal cannon swung away as the man stepped back.

‘Where you from?’ The soft-spoken corporal removed his shades and squinted at Liv with pale blue eyes that looked like they should be peering out at a wheat field from beneath a faded starter cap.

‘I’m from New Jersey,’ she said. ‘You?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m from all over, I guess. Illinois originally but I wouldn’t exactly call it home.’ He looked back at the spout of water shooting up from the ground, like a kid watching a firework. Then he smiled. ‘Did you feel it too?’

Liv frowned. ‘Feel what?’

‘The pull to this place. We all felt it. We all volunteered to stay behind when orders to ship out came through – the rest of the men were off like rabbits, they been pining for home for weeks, never seen homesickness like it. But none of us have any real homes to go to …’ His hand clenched into a fist and tapped on his chest above his heart. ‘But then we felt the pull to come here. So we came.’

Liv looked up at Tariq. ‘Why don’t you come on in,’ she said.

Tariq glanced down at her then back at the row of soldiers. ‘How many are you?’

The Corporal shrugged. ‘Just what you see here.’

‘The vehicles stay outside the fence,’ Tariq said, ‘and you need to hand over your weapons. We’ll keep them over there, locked in the armoury,’ he pointed to the nearest guard tower. ‘If you want to leave you can have them back again, no arguments, but no one walks around with a weapon inside the compound, understood?’

The Corporal stared hard at Tariq for a few long moments. Asking a soldier to hand over his weapon was like asking him to surrender. ‘How come you get to keep your AK?’ he said.

‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘You lock up your weapons, I lock up mine. Everyone’s the same.’

‘But who gets the key?’

Tariq nodded at Liv. ‘She does.’

The Corporal smiled. ‘Well in that case it’s a deal breaker. In my experience you can never trust a Jersey girl with something of value.’ His face broke into a laugh and she saw the boy in him again. ‘I’m only kidding.’ In a few well-practised moves he made his M-4 safe and held it out to Tariq. ‘Hey man, no problem – your house, your rules, though you might want to reconsider letting the vehicles in, or the truck leastways.’ He turned to it as one of the other men climbed up and raised the canvas siding to reveal the truck was full of boxes and crates of food. ‘We just got a re-order in at the same time as all the other guys were shipping out. There’s K-rations in there and enough food to feed a battalion for about a month. We thought we’d bring it along, seeing as we had no idea where we were headed. The only thing we don’t got much of is water, but I see you pretty much got that covered.’

Tariq nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘You can bring the truck in, but the Hummer stays outside.’ The gate clanged like a bell as it was unlocked and then swung open to let the new arrivals inside. They filed in quietly, handing over their weapons to Tariq as if they were just checking in coats at a nightclub and Liv watched them closely, sizing them up. They were foot soldiers, enlisted men who more often than not joined up to escape jail or the crushing boredom of a dead-end life with no job and no prospects. Back home they joined gangs and fought to create the families they’d never really had. In the army they did pretty much the same. They were nomads, homeless, just like the guys from Ortus. Just like she was.

‘Where were you stationed?’

‘East of Baghdad,’ Williamson said, still staring up at the water fountain.

Liv nodded and walked over to Tariq who was checking weapons and making them safe.

‘It’s spreading,’ she said.

‘What is?’

‘The pull of this place – it’s spreading. The guys from Ortus felt it yesterday at Al-Hillah, these guys felt it today in Baghdad.’ She looked up and scanned the horizon all around, thinking of the whole world that lay beyond it. ‘We should get ready for more people,’ she said. ‘Lots more.’

It was early afternoon by the time Franklin and Shepherd finally eased onto the I-26 going northwest into a flurry of fine snow that drifted out of a light fog. The traffic was solid heading into Charleston, a three-lane parking lot, inching its way into the city. The outbound lanes were almost empty.

Franklin drove. Shepherd sat in the passenger seat, studying a series of maps he’d borrowed from the highway patrolman who’d ‘loaned’ them his Dodge Durango with about as much grace as someone handing over a personal credit card, pointing to a mall and saying ‘Knock yourself out’. For the first twenty minutes or so the only sound was the rumbling of thick wheels on blacktop, and the occasional rustle of paper as Shepherd unfolded the maps one by one and studied them. They were topographical maps showing the border region between South Carolina and North Carolina, with the Smoky Mountains rising up in the west. His finger traced each winding track, searching for a road he had only travelled once before, nearly twenty years previously.

‘Find what you were looking for?’ Franklin asked from the driver’s seat.

Shepherd stared out at the whiteness, the road disappearing into the fog within fifty metres either way so that it felt like they were moving but not going anywhere. ‘Hard to tell from these maps,’ he said. ‘Guess I need to be there and see what looks familiar.’

‘You won’t be seeing much if this fog doesn’t lift. The snow will make everything look different too.’

Shepherd wondered if this was all a waste of time. ‘We could always turn around and head back, follow one of our many other leads,’ he said.

Franklin chuckled. ‘Man you sure got cynical awful quick – normally takes a couple of years in a field office to wear the shine off a new agent.’

Shepherd said nothing. He kept thinking about the photograph of the dead woman and imagining how he would have felt if it had been his Melisa lying there instead. He could almost feel the pull of the laptop in the footwell behind his seat, taunting him with the knowledge it contained. It was the danger that came with allowing something to become the single pulse of your life: it drove you, gave you focus and purpose, but it could also derail you the moment it was no longer there. Melisa had been the light that lured him out of the darkness. He closed his eyes, and found himself back in the women’s shelter attached to the place he had washed up. Melisa was doing her thing, helping some poor woman who was not much more than a kid herself deliver a baby. The woman was Chinese and when the baby was finally born, wriggling and mewling into the world, Melisa whispered something to him: ‘Do you see them?’

She often did that: asked a question that made you ask one back.

‘See what?’

‘The threads. The Chinese believe that when a baby is born, invisible red threads shoot out and find their way to all the people they will connect with in their life. And no matter how tangled up they get as they grow, those threads never break so they will always end up finding their way to the people they were destined to meet.’

He imagined those threads now, connecting him to Melisa, twisting through the air and pulsing like veins.

‘That thing you said back there,’ Franklin’s voice rumbled like the tyres, low and serious, ‘the thing about something heading towards Earth, you think that’s a possibility?’

Shepherd opened his eyes and realized he must have been dozing. They were in flat country now, hardly any buildings, hardly any sign of life apart from the odd car heading in the other direction towards Charleston. ‘Statistically speaking it’s possible.’

‘So how come other telescopes haven’t seen it?’

‘Hubble can see further than anything on earth.’

‘OK, but presumably anything far enough out that only Hubble could see would take millions of years to get here.’

‘Not necessarily. There are a lot of theoretical objects in space, physics-defying things that we can imagine but have not been able to find or measure. One of them is known as a Dark Star. It has huge mass and travels at or near the speed of light. If one of these things was coming straight at us then the light from it would only just outrun the object. We wouldn’t know anything about it beforehand, not until it was about to hit because the object would arrive at almost the same time as the light, like it had just appeared out of nowhere.’

Franklin stared ahead at the road. ‘OK, say, for argument’s sake, one of these Dark Stars is heading our way, would that explain all this stuff that’s going on: the ships, the soldiers, the people heading home?’

‘It’s possible. We can see the effect the moon has on the sea and humans are sixty per cent water, our brains are nearer seventy-five per cent, so it stands to reason the moon must have some effect on us too.’

‘That’s for sure. If you ever work a midnight shift at a hospital or a police precinct during a full moon you’ll know it’s true. Everyone goes nuts.’

‘And the moon is only one tiny object. Imagine what effect a massive star would have on us all. We’re all related to each other on an atomic level – you, me the car, the stars – we’re all made of the same stuff.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean the atomic building blocks that make up you and me are the same ones that burn at the heart of stars, and all of it came from the same place. Around fourteen billion years ago the universe was born. It started out as something called the point of singularity, smaller than a sub-atomic particle, incredibly dense and incredibly hot. Every single thing that is now in the universe exploded out from it and began to cool as it expanded, forming the protons, neutrons and electrons that, over time, became atoms and eventually elements. The first element was hydrogen. Most of the atoms in the human body are hydrogen. These elements then started to coalesce into huge clouds that slowly condensed to form stars and galaxies. Then heavier elements began to be synthesized inside stars and in supernovae when they died. One of these was carbon, the essential building block of all organic life forms. And this process is still happening throughout the still-expanding universe. Things are born. Things get torn apart. And the elements of those dead things become something else. Nothing lasts for ever, but nothing ever entirely disappears either. It just becomes something else.’

The sound of the tyres rumbled through the silence that followed. Outside the white, frozen countryside continued to slip by. The Interstate was practically empty now. From time to time a building or sign would loom out of the fog giving variation to the otherwise flat white landscape, but most of the time they might just as well have been driving along in a huge hamster wheel – always moving but getting nowhere. It was a fair visual representation of the limbo Shepherd was feeling, halfway between something and nothing, with no real concept of either. Maybe the world had already ended and this was purgatory, driving through the fog for ever with Franklin at the wheel, never knowing what had happened or whether they could have done anything to stop it.

A ticking sound punctuated the silence as Franklin hit the indicators and started to ease off the highway onto a side road. ‘Just taking a little shortcut,’ he said. ‘We need some gas and a bite. There’s a town up here.’

Shepherd looked down at the map, following the line of the road they had just taken until it stopped at a dot of a town called St Matthews. ‘We could have got gas and food on the Interstate. This is going out of our way.’

Franklin reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette and popped it between his lips. He stared ahead, his fingers tapping on the wheel, the cigarette hanging unlit in his mouth.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Shepherd thought back through all the wrong notes he’d picked up over the last few hours: the way Franklin had ushered the cop who had clearly known him out of the room back at the station; the way he had insisted on driving rather than flying up to Cherokee; even his suggestion to come to Charleston in the first place to interview Cooper rather than hand it over to other agents. ‘Sorry for what?’

Franklin wound down his window a little then lit the cigarette, blowing smoke out into the cold. ‘You’ll see,’ he said.

The soldiers immediately made themselves at home.

As well as the food and fresh fuel supplies – which they offloaded from the lorry with impressive and well-drilled speed – they volunteered to take over the grave-digging detail their arrival had disrupted. They also brought something far more valuable than any of these – they brought a laptop.