The Tower (34 page)

‘Can you do it?’

‘Yes.’ Gabriel leaned back against the pillow. ‘But I’ll need some tools and both my hands.’ He could feel what little energy he had leaking out of him with every drop of blood. ‘I’ll need some raw wire, something like needle-nosed pliers –’ He closed his eyes and instantly regretted it as the room started to spin. ‘Hey,’ he said, glancing over at the medic by the bed who was still diligently taking his blood. ‘I think you should …’

Heat rose up in him like steam in a geyser, so sudden that it overwhelmed him before he could even finish his sentence. His body started to shake and he felt urgent hands clamp down on him and pin him to the bed.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ he thought as his eyes rolled back in his head and darkness washed over him. ‘Not again.’

Inspector Arkadian was standing in a car park just outside the city limits, supervising the disembarkation of a busload of children when he became aware of eyes upon him. He looked down at a terrified and tearful-looking girl of about eight. He crouched down, bringing his head level with hers, fully aware of how frightening he must seem after all she had already been through, towering over her in the contamination suit that had become his second skin since the outbreak.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, brushing her wavy brown hair away from her face with a gloved hand.

‘Hevva.’

‘Well, Hevva, there’s chocolate and cola inside.’ He pointed to the backpackers’ hostel that had been commandeered as a temporary orphanage.

‘Are we going to be taken into the mountain to die, like Mummy?’ she asked, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

He felt something break inside him. ‘No. You’ll be safe here – I promise.’

She stared at him for a moment with the clear and searching expression only a child can manage, then slowly turned and rejoined the others.

The quarantine had been swift and had been put in place the moment the first infection occurred outside the Old City walls – a local teacher who had already infected the rest of the teachers in her school and many of the parents by the time her symptoms manifested. Arkadian’s blood had run cold when he first heard this news. Madalina, his wife, worked at a school, not the one that had been infected, but it was still a chilling reminder of how vulnerable everyone was in the face of this thing. Madalina was now in semi-quarantine in St Mark’s church near their house. All public workers who’d had extended contact with other people had been moved to large civic buildings for observation and she had been one of them. But these internal precautions were only part of the overall plan.

The last thing the national and international community wanted was a new killer disease to escape into the wider world. Ruin’s natural isolation, surrounded by the high, unpopulated foothills of the Taurus mountains, made it uniquely suited to be placed in its own self-contained quarantine. The rapid evacuation of the Old Town after the first outbreak had been effective enough to hold back the spread of the disease for the first month and so the policy was now extended to the city as a whole. There was only one road leading into Ruin and it was now blocked with no access in or out save for the daily food and medical supplies delivered by truck to the outer barrier, and only collected and transported into the city once the trucks had driven away again.

Inside the city there were further divisions. Ruin was naturally split into quarters by four great, straight boulevards that radiated out from the Citadel at the centre. Each quarter was now a self-contained borough, with the boulevards between them acting as a no-man’s-land no one was allowed to cross. There had been near riots as people tried to flee one part of the city and relocate in another following a rumour in the first few days of the quarantine that all new cases of the blight were in the Lost Quarter and that the neighbouring three boroughs were disease free. The unsteady peace that had eventually been re-established was now maintained by constant armed patrols. The only movement of any kind had been the transportation of the infected down the empty boulevards towards the Old Town and the Citadel, and the evacuation of children in the other direction.

Arkadian stepped into the hostel and was hit by the sound of activity and children’s voices. There were about a hundred kids here, some of them orphans of the disease, but many of them not. Most parents, once news spread that the young were immune from the disease, had elected to send their children out of the city, preferring that they were away from the newly formed ghettoes where fear and violence bubbled beneath the quiet surface of a city held together by little more than tension and hope that the work of the doctors inside the Citadel would soon bear fruit.

He saw the girl with the wavy brown hair over by a table. She was clasping a locket round her neck tightly in her hand but now held a bottle in the other with a straw sticking out of it. Behind her a movement caught his attention and he looked up into the grim face of Bulut Gül staring out from behind the visor of his contamination suit, his face set in the grim way he had seen before when he had bad news to impart.

‘Did you get the message?’ Bulut said, his voice muffled and sounding like it was coming from a long way away.

‘What message?’

‘You need to get over to St Mark’s quickly. It’s your wife. It’s Madalina.’

Cherokee hadn’t changed much in the near twenty years since Shepherd had last driven through it: rows of tacky souvenir shops still sold rugs, stone axes, arrowheads, feather and bead head-dresses that owed more to Hollywood than to history. The one big change was the number of motels and fast-food joints that had sprung up along the only road through the middle of town. They spoke of prosperity but of a particular and transient form. The casino had not been open long the last time he was here but its influence had clearly spread wide in the intervening years. The whole town had a soulless quality, of the kind only gambling money could buy. It also seemed deserted, every hotel and motel had vacancy signs outside and the huge parking lot surrounding the glass tower of the main Harrah Casino contained lots of virgin snow and hardly any cars. The homing instinct that was taking hold of the world was clearly not being kind to Cherokee. Clearly there were not many that called this place ‘home’.

Shepherd parked up outside the Tribal Grounds Coffee Shop, drawn by a sign in the window inviting him to
‘Come in and enjoy our world famous Elk latte and free wi-fi’
. He kept the engine running and the heater on, opened up the laptop and hooked on to the internet. A new window opened, asking for his security clearance codes. He punched them in and the saved search reappeared on the desk top. The processor crunched. The windscreen wipers swiped back and forth and a ping rang out as the new search results loaded.

There were seven of them now.

He opened the first and scrolled straight to the PDF file attached to the bottom of the document. He clicked on it, holding his breath as he waited for it to open. A depressing parade of images appeared on the screen, similar to the ones he’d seen before, charting a blighted life then an early death. But it wasn’t her.

He closed the file and moved on, keeping the momentum going before his nerve failed him. The next result opened, a solid block of text cascading down the screen. He found the attached file at the bottom and clicked it open, bracing himself for the photographs.

They were different to the first photos but none the less tragic. A well-scrubbed, bright-eyed woman smiling from a picture that had been taken at a dressy function, the flashbulb capturing a moment of pure happiness and hope. The picture below showed the same face, the eyes now closed and bruised, her clear skin lacerated by the windshield she had passed through after her car had left the road and hit a streetlamp. A brief note beneath the photo read:

Melisa Erroll – Junior attorney at law

Fatal RTA. 02.34 Feb 16th.

BAC negligible. No suspects sought.

The time of her death, the minimal Blood Alcohol Concentration and lack of suspects told the whole story. She was probably just working late, fired by youthful ambition and a desire to one day make partner, and fell asleep at the wheel on her way home, never to wake again.

He closed the window and continued to work his way down the strange roll call of the dead, experiencing the see-sawing of emotion between tragedy and relief. He reached the last result and clicked it open. And there she was.

He felt like someone had punched him in the gut. He couldn’t breathe, his vision swam as eight years of hope evaporated in an instant and tears welled in his eyes. She looked exactly the same as he remembered, more beautiful even, her huge dark eyes staring out from a passport photograph. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and took a shuddering breath. ‘Oh Jesus.’

The blood drained from his face, and his breathing started to race. He forced himself to calm down, breathe more deeply, more slowly. His eyes darted over the file, trying to take in all the details at once. It was too much. Words and figures tumbled through his mind, disjointed fragments, missing pieces of someone he hadn’t seen in eight years. His brain re-engaged and his focus returned. The top document was a visa application. She had applied for an extension to her F-1 student visa around the time she had disappeared. It had been denied. Had this been the reason she had gone, something as mundane as this? It can’t have been, they were going to get married; she wouldn’t have needed a visa if she was married to a US citizen. It had to be something else.

His eyes shifted over the facsimile of her application form. There were details here he had never known. Her date of birth – she was two years older than he had guessed; her middle name – Ana; her place of birth – Ruin, in southern Turkey.

Ruin again.

His eyes flicked back to the photograph, her sharp-cheeked, almond-eyed face framed by long dark silky hair with a kink in it like ripples over dark water. He could see by the side of the file that there was another photograph further down, just a scroll and mouse click away.

He thought of all the other final images he’d seen, all tragic in their own way but nothing compared to what this would be. There would be an autopsy report too most likely, depending on how she had died. He wasn’t sure he could face either. But he had to. He had to know.

He clicked on the scroll button to bring up the final photograph.

Shepherd had been so prepared and braced for something else that it took him a few moments to register what he was looking at. It was a picture of Melisa smiling, her personality fully evident here in a way it had not been within the stiff pose of the passport photograph. It was attached to a scanned copy of a medical registration document showing that Melisa Ana Erroll had qualified as a midwife and was licensed to practice for an international aid organization called Ortus. The document was simply to register the fact in the United States and qualify her for the company insurance.

He clicked on the scroll bar again but there were no more pictures. He switched back to the file and flicked through to the last page where the autopsy report or death certificate would have been. Nothing – just the insurance paperwork that corresponded with the photograph.

He laughed and cried at the same time, a sob of pure relief as he realized what had happened. The MPD search must have finished trawling through the death registers and moved on to the live files linked to the database. And then it had found her.

His Melisa.

Alive.

Gabriel woke slowly as though rising up through thick, warm liquid.

He became aware of the sounds of the room, the blip of the monitors, the chink of glass on glass, the shuffle of booted feet across the stone floor. He lay still for a while, feeling he was gradually materializing in the room, atom by atom. He opened his eyes and saw a bluish green light washing over the arched ceiling of the cave. He turned his head and saw the peacock window, the low evening sun lighting it up from behind.

‘Ah, welcome back.’ Athanasius moved across his field of vision, blocking the light from the window. Gabriel tried to sit up but found that he could not. ‘I’m afraid the doctor thought it best to restrain you again, for your own protection. That’s the bad news. The good news is –’ He carefully held up the smartphone Gabriel had left him. There were two wires sticking out of the bottom, stripped from the end of a USB cable that wound down to the laptop which was resting on a table by Gabriel’s bed. Athanasius touched the screen of the phone and it lit up.

Gabriel smiled. ‘You did that?’

‘I did.’ Another man stepped into view from the end of the bed. He was clean-shaven beneath his surgical mask, and wore the dark surplice of a priest.

‘This is Father Thomas,’ Athanasius explained, ‘chief architect of all the modern improvements within the mountain and someone who knows more about electronics than I could ever hope to.’

‘It was quite simple really,’ Thomas said, taking the phone from Athanasius. ‘Just a question of reverse engineering the phone and working out which of the contacts in the docking slot connected to the battery. It’s been on charge for almost an hour now.’

‘How long have I been out?’

‘About three hours,’ Athanasius replied. ‘Dr Kaplan said it was a natural reaction after what your body’s been through. They got enough blood though, so they’ve been running tests all the while you’ve been asleep.’

‘Great. Do you want to loosen my bindings so I can send a message?’

Athanasius and Father Thomas exchanged a look. ‘I’m afraid Dr Kaplan advised that you remain restrained, just for the time being. You are obviously still at risk from fits, which might be a danger both to you and others. If you tell me, or rather Father Thomas what to do then we can send the message for you.’