The Tower (40 page)

Franklin saw something harden in his wife’s face the moment his phone rang for the second time.

They were sitting in the kitchen – Marie, Sinead and him – the remains of a home-cooked meal on the table, talking like they hadn’t talked together in God knows how long. It was as if all the bad history and all the distance that had formed between them had been swept away by the same force that had pulled them home.

‘I got to take this,’ he said. Marie nodded, a quick twitch of her chin, then slipped out of her chair, picked up some plates and headed over to the sink. How many times had he seen her do that? Too many. He looked at Sinead, so like her mother, and caught the same disappointment in her eyes – not as hard or as cold as her mother yet, but the seed was there.

He took the phone from his pocket and checked the number.

Shepherd again.

He knew he should turn the damn thing off and go over to Marie, tell her he loved her, that the old days of work first and everything else a poor second were gone. But they weren’t. Not yet.

He pictured Shepherd, exhausted from the day he’d had, standing out there alone in the freezing night with a fresh corpse for company and no one watching his back. ‘I got to take it,’ he repeated standing and walking from the room, hating himself with every step. He moved into the hallway and snapped the phone to his ear. ‘Franklin.’

‘It’s Shepherd.’

‘I know.’ He walked towards the front door but changed his mind and sat on the stairs instead. It was too cold outside and he couldn’t face leaving the house.

‘The cops are here. They didn’t see the car on their way in and didn’t intercept anyone. I think the killers must be heading north into Tennessee.’

‘I’ll make some calls. Spread the net.’

‘I already got the local cops to call it through.’

‘Well I’ll fire a rocket down from Quantico too, make sure it sticks.’ The loud and angry chink of dishes being rinsed in the sink sounded only a few feet away. He covered his ear with his free hand and felt his mind automatically snick back into the well-worn grooves of a moving investigation. ‘OK, this is what’s going to happen. They won’t have the right resources locally to process the scene properly so I’m going to send a team out to you from Charlotte. You need to stay put until they get there, make sure those down home cops don’t get all excited and contaminate the scene with cigarette butts and good intentions. They’re going to take a while to reach you so you’ll need to take charge until they do. I already put in an urgent search for any of Dr Kinderman’s previous known addresses and got a hit on two that might be considered “home”. There are armed units heading to both of them now. If Kinderman’s there we’ll get him.’

‘Always assuming whoever killed Professor Douglas hasn’t got there first.’

‘I doubt it. Both addresses are way up north and so far everything has taken place south of Washington. This feels like a very contained operation, one mobile unit and someone controlling them centrally. What’s the cell phone coverage like where you are?’

‘I’m on top of a mountain, I got five bars, but I don’t know about the rest of the area – why?’

Franklin stared at his daughter’s snow boots, lined up by the door where she had stepped out of them; one had toppled over. He had a flash of a smaller pair abandoned in exactly the same way maybe fifteen years earlier. He closed his eyes. The memories were too distracting. ‘You remember our little talk with the good Reverend?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

‘You remember what I did just before we interviewed him?’

There was a pause on the line. Franklin could hear the wind through the trees where Shepherd was. It sounded cold. ‘You asked him to put his phone down on the table.’

‘Then what?’

‘You asked if you could smoke.’

‘And when he said “no” I put my cigarettes down on the table next to his phone. There’s a little piece of kit not covered in class called an Eavesdropper. It’s a new-generation bug that can read and duplicate a SIM card without the need to tamper with a phone. All you have to do is place it close enough to a target unit and leave it there for about a minute so it can pick up the Mobile Identification Number when it checks in with the nearest cell mast. It then mirrors the phone activity and makes voice recordings of any calls. It’s got a four gigabyte chip built in so it can store around fifty hours of audio. The one drawback is that it only works in close physical proximity to the target phone.’

‘Which is why you stashed your pack of cigarettes in that crack in the wall.’

‘Exactly. So I’m thinking if there’s good phone reception where you are the killers may already have called in a status update to their controller. You hang tight, Shepherd. I’ll let you know how it shakes out.’

He hung up and hit the zero key to speed-dial Quantico. From the kitchen all he could hear now was silence. He pictured Marie and Sinead sitting at the breakfast bar, listening to him talk in the hallway. It made him feel crummy. But he couldn’t leave Shepherd hanging in the wind. He was the only reason he was here at all. He’d explain that to them, as soon as he finished this call.

The phone connected and Franklin navigated his way through the various departments: authorizing and mobilizing a crime- scene detail to hit the road and head to Cherokee; issuing an urgent look out for a yellow or white station wagon with police departments in three states; and ultimately getting patched through to the surveillance control room where, after confirmation of his agent ID number and the investigation code, he was told by the operator that the Eavesdropper unit assigned to him had logged its last call six minutes earlier. Franklin listened to the crackle of the line and the solid silence in his house while the operator sent a code that bounced off a communications satellite in space and beamed a signal back through the snow clouds and down to the Eavesdropper wedged between the mailbox and the outside wall of the Church of Christ’s Salvation in Charleston.

The circuit responded to the code and switched from a receiver to a transmitter, using the cellphone network to send an encoded stream of information back to the operator who then decoded it and fed it straight down the line to Franklin.

Franklin kept his eyes closed as he listened to the last recorded conversation the device had picked up. It was between Cooper and two unidentified voices – a man and a woman. He registered the key phrases in the short exchange:

… The Professor is dead … just passed into Tennessee … Yeah, we got pictures …

Then Cooper ended the call with words that hammered the lid shut on his own coffin.

… I just found out where Dr Kinderman is …

Franklin cut the connection and stared down at his daughter’s empty boots. Whatever hope he had been clinging to that he might still be able to deal with this by phone had just flown. Cooper needed to be taken down quickly and he couldn’t leave it to Charleston’s finest.

He dug around in his pocket, found the card Jackson had given him in the police station and started punching his number into his phone. He hit the dial button and became aware of Marie and Sinead framed in the kitchen door. They were both looking at him, their arms folded across their fronts, each a mirror of the other’s disapproval.

‘I’ve got to do this one thing,’ he said, holding up his phone, ‘just this one thing in Charleston then I’ll be back, I promise.’ He heard the phone connect and start ringing. By the look on Marie’s face she heard it too.

‘It’s always just one more thing,’ she said. Then she turned and walked into the kitchen.

Sinead stayed where she was. ‘Just one thing?’ she said.

‘Literally this one thing, I promise you hand on heart.’

She nodded but didn’t smile, then turned and followed her mother into the kitchen as Jackson answered. Franklin clamped the phone to his ear, closing his eyes to shut out all the things he didn’t want to leave. ‘I need your help,’ he said keeping his voice low. ‘But first I need to get into Charleston as fast as possible, preferably avoiding the parking lot that is the I-26.’

‘He asked about me?’ Gabriel was propped up in bed looking at Athanasius and Thomas, their faces serious after their strange meeting with Malachi.

‘Yes, and his questions appeared to have been prompted by whatever he had just read on the Starmap. He asked if you had ridden to the Citadel out of the wilderness.’

‘You think he knows what the symbols mean?’

‘Undoubtedly,’ Thomas replied. ‘Malachi knows more about early writing than any man alive. If there is anything in the library that will help decipher this text then it will already be in his head. He knows exactly what it says.’

‘So how do we get him to tell us?’

‘We don’t,’ Athanasius replied. ‘Malachi has never been a man who could be swayed. And he hates me. He thinks I have betrayed the brotherhood. There is no way he is going to share what he learned with us. I should have known better than to trust him, but I wasn’t counting on him being so – unhinged.’

‘Yes,’ Thomas agreed, ‘there was something desperate about him. He’s not going to help us. I fear he is already lost.’

‘So it seems we must take matters into our own hands,’ Athanasius said, rubbing his hands together as if, on some level, he was enjoying all this. ‘If we are going to interpret the rest of the stone we need to gain access to the ancient records. You helped me break into the library once before.’

Thomas smiled. ‘And that was when the lights were still working, the security protocols were in place, armed guards were on constant patrol and unauthorized access was punishable by death. This should be relatively easy in comparison.’

‘Can you do it tonight?’

‘I’ll need to hook into the library systems to see what is still running and what has been disabled, I don’t want you walking into a trap or tripping any alarms. The absence of the lights will be a big help, and I don’t suppose they’re availing themselves of the night-vision goggles, what with “the corrupting influence of modernity”, which means we can use them. They are kept in the control room by the main entrance.’

‘Could we gain access via the reading rooms? We could go via the restricted section to the one used by the Sancti?’

‘What’s that?’ Gabriel asked.

‘The Sanctus monks were kept strictly segregated from the rest of the population to preserve the secrets they kept. However they still had access to the library at certain times when no one else was there, and they had their own reading room. It’s reached by a staircase from the upper section of the mountain. There are other stairways too, one in the prelate’s quarters, one close to the cathedral cave and one just through there.’ He pointed to the door leading to the Abbot’s bed chamber. ‘They enabled the trusted senior members of the mountain to meet with the Sancti and partake in their ceremonies. Since there are no longer any of them left, the stairways and Sancti’s reading room have been unused.’ He looked back at the door leading to the bedchamber. ‘I have the Abbot’s key for that door. But not one for the door leading into the reading room. We’d have to force it.’

Father Thomas shook his head. ‘We would make far too much noise. It’s a heavy door with a solid lock and the reading rooms where Malachi and the black cloaks are residing is right next door. I’d rather break in using my own systems than bludgeon my way through a door. Once we are inside and have acquired the night-vision goggles it should be easy. We can find our way to the ancient texts and read anything we like in total darkness. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll have worked out how to get us in. That should also give everyone time to go to sleep. Shall we say midnight?’

Athanasius nodded. ‘Between Matins and Lauds.’

‘Can I come with you?’ Gabriel said, clearly meaning it.

‘You’re not going anywhere.’ Dr Kaplan appeared behind Thomas with something in his hand and a serious expression on his face. ‘You’re far too weak to do anything other than lie here and rest. However, if you really want to help …’

He opened his hand and Gabriel felt his stomach flip when he saw several empty test tubes lying in his palm. ‘This is the situation. So far we’ve taken eight hundred mils of your blood which would take your body about five weeks to fully replace. The plasma gets replaced in a day or two. The blood cells take much longer. In the study of disease it is these cells that give us the most information. They’re the things that have battled the disease and, in your case, won. At the moment your body will only just have started replacing the plasma and your white cell count per litre will still be relatively high. As far as virology and toxicology is concerned this is the good stuff, packed full of all the information we need. It would really speed things up if we could take some more of this rich blood now.’

‘How much?’

‘Another five hundred mils.’

‘And how much would that leave me with?’

‘Enough, you’d still have seventy-five to eighty-five per cent of your usual amount, which is in the safe zone for a healthy patient. My concern is that the last time we took blood it triggered some kind of mild relapse, though you recovered quickly and seem fine now.’ He looked at the ECG monitor connected to Gabriel’s finger by a clip. ‘Your vital signs are all strong and there’s no obvious reason for concern. But ultimately it’s your decision.’

Gabriel looked at the stained-glass window, the peacock motif hardly visible now as evening darkened the sky behind it. ‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. But if I do pass out please don’t wake me until morning.’ An assistant appeared from nowhere and started to tighten Gabriel’s bindings.

‘Just a precaution,’ Kaplan said. ‘In case you do have another fit.’

Gabriel turned to Athanasius. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘And I sincerely hope you have a better night than I’m about to.’

Malachi’s candle
lit up the words carved into the inside of the upper curve of an archway as he passed through it: CRYPTA REVELATIO – Vault of the Revelation.