The Tower (35 page)

Gabriel closed his eyes and felt tears of frustration pricking the backs of them. He hated feeling like this, so powerless and weak.

‘Find the menu,’ he said, ‘then scroll through the call log until you find one from an Inspector Arkadian.’

‘Got it,’ Thomas said.

‘OK, create a new message and then put –’ he paused as he considered what to say. So much time had passed since he’d last seen Arkadian at the base of the Citadel, so much had happened it was hard to know where to start.

‘Just put “Surprise! I’m not dead. I need the photos I sent you of the Starmap. Hope to see you very soon. Gabriel.”’ Thomas typed it then read it back. ‘You have a signal?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then press “Send” and let’s hope to God he’s got his phone with him.’

The phone buzzed in Arkadian’s pocket but he barely noticed it. He was walking fast, the effort of it making him hot inside his contamination suit. St Mark’s was up ahead, the quarantine signs fixed on the outside of the windows, the suited armed guards outside. The churches were being used as general clearing-houses for the infected in all four quarters. Any new cases were brought here to be transported into the Old Town and ultimately the Citadel but they were mainly being used as isolation areas for the observation of high-risk individuals, people whose jobs had brought them into contact with others – which is why Madalina had been brought here.

He pointed to his badge as he reached the main door and the guard stepped aside. He had prayed on the way over that his sudden summons would prove to be nothing, just a scare or a misunderstanding. But now he was here he knew it was as bad as he had feared. He could hear the noise already coming from inside the building: the sound of suffering, the howl of the Lamentation.

He pulled on the heavy door and the noise spilled out onto the street like a physical thing. It was inhuman, terrifying, and all the more so because he knew his wife was in here somewhere. He looked for her in the crowd of frightened faces that turned his way as he entered but she was not among them. There was a separate area to one side of the altar, a private chapel with a lock on its door. This was where the noise was coming from. He moved through the parting crowd and through the door – and there she was.

She looked like she was sleeping but he knew she would have been sedated. Her skin shone with fever and her eyes moved behind lids that were already showing the first blisters. And she was tied fast to the bed. He could see her hands moving rhythmically, despite her drugged state, her fingernails scratching at the one piece of flesh they could reach.

A doctor turned to him, his eyes dropping to the ID badge fixed to the front of his suit. He stepped back from the bed, realizing who he was, and Arkadian took his place by his wife’s bed. He laid his hand on hers but the mechanical scratching carried on.

‘We’re just preparing them for transfer to the Citadel,’ the doctor said.

‘I can look after her,’ he said, ‘I can take her home.’ He had spoken to her only a few hours ago. This couldn’t be happening.

‘All new cases have to move to the Citadel,’ the doctor said, ‘you know that.’

Arkadian had had so many of these conversations with husbands, wives, sons and daughters that it was odd being on the other end of one. It all felt wrong. He had always felt great sympathy for the people he’d had to comfort but now he had become one of them he realized he hadn’t understood how they’d felt at all. All words about how they would be better cared for in the mountain meant nothing when you were saying goodbye. And that’s what this was. No one had come out of the mountain yet – people only ever went in. And now his wife was about to become one of them.

The next half an hour unfolded in a nightmarish blur. First they moved her to one of the ambulances parked outside the church and he sat by her side, holding her hand and talking softly to her as they bumped along the cobbled, serpentine streets of the Old Town and up to the embankment where the ascension platform waited. Usually the relatives had to say their goodbyes at the Old Town wall but a combination of his rank and his calm demeanour convinced the orderlies to let him travel with her right to the foot of the Citadel where he helped them move her stretchered bed out onto the platform and fix it in place next to the others ready to be hoisted into the mountain. But then his nerve gave out. In the end it took three men to pull him off the platform and they held him fast until the platform had risen up too far for him to reach it.

He sat on the floor and wept as he watched it rise higher, carrying his love away from him while in his pocket the phone continued to buzz. It occurred to him that all the messages he had ignored all morning because of the difficulty of extracting the phone from the suit might contain one from her. He slid his finger under the sealed flap in the seam of the suit and unzipped the side opening. His phone was warm from its long confinement and he felt like someone had ripped his heart out when he read the first message.

Come back. I can smell oranges. I’m scared. Mx

His wife had slipped into a fever alone while he’d been on the other side of the city. He blinked the tears away to stop his vision swimming and looked at the other messages. There were no more from her. The infection must have taken hold quickly, as it did with some people. The rest of the messages were from colleagues who had heard the news before he had and were trying to get hold of him. Then he saw the last one, a message from a ghost.

When he had said goodbye to Gabriel he had firmly believed he would see him again. But as the days and then weeks passed by, and the disease continued to spread into the wider city, and the steady flow of the infected continued into the mountain with no sign of anyone coming out, he had finally let go of that hope. He re-checked the message. Whoever had sent it was asking for the picture Gabriel had sent from the desert. Who else would know about that? It had to be him.

Arkadian fumbled with the phone, his hands shaking as he went through his old messages, looking for the picture file from over a month ago. Gabriel was alive, and so was Arkadian’s hope. Because if one person could survive then others could. It meant the infection could be beaten and he might just see his Madalina again.

Shepherd felt the rise in the road out of Cherokee, heading north towards the Tennessee border. He was riding high on his discovery that Melisa was alive and buzzing on the coffee he had ordered from the Tribal Grounds Coffee Shop in grateful thanks for the wi-fi that had brought him the news. Before leaving he had refined the search, inputting some of the new data and set it searching for recent passport information, visa applications, anything that might point him in the direction of where she was now. He had set it running and driven away, the mission to find Professor Douglas almost an afterthought something to get out of the way so he could carry on with the real business of following the red threads of his lost love.

The weather had eased slightly, though powdery snow continued to fall from the low cloud that clung to the mountains rising ahead of him. There was maybe an hour of daylight left, possibly less. He knew he should have started this search earlier, but he didn’t regret the time he had taken to check the MPD results. Everything was different now, the rock he had been pushing up hill for the last eight years had finally tipped over the summit and started to roll down the other side. He was ready for anything and his eyes in the rear-view mirror glowed and glittered back at him as though he’d just woken from a long, long sleep.

The road was deserted and the thin dusting of snow on the blacktop had few tyre marks in it. Shepherd kept his foot steady on the gas pedal, his eyes scanning the way ahead, trying to match what he was seeing with the faded memory of twenty years ago. Franklin had been right: the snow did make everything look different, but he still had a few solid things to go on.

First, there was only one main road that headed north out of Cherokee towards the Tennessee border – Tsali Boulevard, named after a Cherokee prophet. Second, he remembered the road had run alongside a river for several miles before meandering up into the hills, and he could see the white frozen ribbon of the Oconaluftee River out of his passenger window. Finally, he knew Douglas’s cabin had been high up on the side of a ridge, with elevated views all around that had enabled them to see over all the other ridges and peaks, giving them the whole sky to look at. He had studied the topographical maps and located a section of the highway, close to the Tennessee border, that rose to nearly five thousand feet. It was right in the mountains, miles from the nearest town, and he also remembered how dark it had been at the cabin, well away from any sources of light pollution, making it perfect for stargazing. He felt sure, or as sure as he could be, that Douglas’s cabin was somewhere here in this part of the mountains. All he had to do now was find it.

He’d been driving for about ten miles when the road began to rise more steeply. His eyes flicked to the sat nav display in the central stack of the dashboard. He’d found an option in the menu that displayed the car’s height above sea level and he watched it creep steadily up, ten feet at a time, past three thousand feet and still rising. After another mile the river thinned out to little more than a mountain stream, fringed with ice, a steady babble of black water running through the middle on its way down to the main river. There was a break in the trees up ahead and he slowed as he approached it.

A forest track snaked up and away from the main road, the mud rutted and frozen and clogged with snow. A similar track had led up to Professor Douglas’s cabin. It had been rough, like this one, but this was not it. A quick glance at the Sat-Nav confirmed that they were not high enough.

He carried on climbing, one eye on the altimeter as it continued its steady rise, checking each break in the trees and every track that wound its way up the side of the valley. He was edging close to the four thousand feet mark now and he noticed the temperature gauge on the dashboard was dropping. It was a few points below zero outside and the ground was starting to fall away sharply to his right. He eased his foot off the gas and tried to keep the car in the thin tracks of the few other vehicles that had come this way before him.

He rounded a corner and saw something tucked into a rest stop ahead – a car, the first one he’d seen since branching away from the main river and starting his climb. It was a big old station wagon and he slowed almost to a stop as he drew close to it, but there was no sign of the driver. There was a dusting of snow on it, including the hood, suggesting the engine was cold and it had been there a while. He noticed a baby seat in the back, probably just someone with car trouble who must have called a friend to come pick them up. He put his foot on the gas as gently as he could but the wheels still spun a little before they got a grip on the frozen surface.

The road continued to curve upwards and the car disappeared behind him, swallowed by the treeline. After a couple of hundred metres the altimeter stopped climbing, hovering steady around the 4,600 feet mark as the road started to level off. He had to be close. He glanced up at the strip of sky visible between the trees. It was darkening fast as the day drew to a close. The temperature was now minus five and still falling. If he didn’t find the track soon he might be forced to head back and try again at first light, provided the weather didn’t worsen in the night and shut down the mountain roads all together.

The curve of the road became sharper as it hairpinned back on itself, following the contours of the valley. Trees loomed overhead, laden with heavy snow and throwing deep shadows onto the road, making it hard to see very far ahead. Shepherd flicked the headlamps on full beam, which picked out the falling snow and the shallow shadow of another break in the treeline ahead. He drew closer, touching the brakes and feeling the slippery road through the steering wheel. His heart pounded and his hands gripped tight as he willed it to be the turning he was looking for. He drew level and slumped in his seat as he saw that it was barely a track at all. It ended just a few feet back from the road in a wall of tangled branches.

He checked the altimeter again – still steady at 4,600 – then turned his attention to the road again. With the curve it was impossible to see too far ahead. He couldn’t see any more breaks in the trees, but he could see the road starting to fall away. The altimeter dropped by ten feet, confirming he was beginning to descend. Then something struck him.

He took his foot off the pedal and glanced in the rear-view mirror at the track he had just passed. The road here was too narrow and treacherous to try to turn the car round so he braked as carefully as he could to slow the car to a stop. He put on the handbrake and the hazard warning lights then opened the door and stepped out into the cold, leaving the engine running.

The road was more slippery than he had thought, and he skated across it, holding his arms out for balance, heading back to the break in the trees. The wall of branches seemed bigger up close with dense twigs and dry, dead leaves bulking it out, making it seem impenetrable. But whereas the ground and the trees surrounding it were weighed down with snow, the branches had hardly any on them at all and there were drag marks in the snow either side showing where they had been pulled across the track. There were footprints too, softened a little by the recent snowfall, but footprints nonetheless – just one person by the looks of things, though he couldn’t be sure. They clumped together in groups around the branches then split off and headed up the track, ending at a spot where deep tyre marks chewed up the snow and ice and drew two lines straight up towards the summit of the mountain. And there was something else. Something that carried on the breeze sifting down through the rapidly darkening woods triggering a memory of the last time he had been here. It was wood smoke, coming no doubt from the potbellied stove that warmed the cabin and brewed the coffee.