The Tower (42 page)

Had Cooper got off a shot? Hard to tell.

He’d seen agents sprint up flights of stairs with serious wounds they hadn’t even known about because of adrenalin and delayed shock. And he had promised Marie he would come back.

He reached Cooper’s body and assessed him from behind his gun. He was still breathing but only just, his eyes looking up at the window, a pool of blood spreading beneath him too fast to be minor. Both shots had caught him centre mass. Major organ damage, possibly arterial too. He could hear the rattle in his breath as his lungs filled with blood. He would drown before he bled out and there was nothing he could do but watch.

Franklin bent down on one knee, placing his hand on Cooper’s shoulder so he knew he was there. ‘You’ve been hit pretty bad but you’ll be OK,’ he lied. ‘There’s an ambulance on its way. Why don’t you tell me where Kinderman is?’

Cooper opened his mouth, still staring up at the cross. Franklin dropped down lower so he could hear him. Heard the whisper of a voice broken by shallow breaths. ‘He’s on his way … to hell.’

Footsteps echoed outside as Miss Boerman clattered down the stairs in response to the gunshots. Jackson headed over to intercept her. No point her seeing any of this. Through the noise Franklin became aware that Cooper was saying something else. He leaned down lower, his ear so close he could feel the snatched breaths.

‘Thank you …’ Cooper whispered, ‘for … helping me … leave.’ The last word came out as a long sigh that ended in a rattle he had heard too many times before. It was over. Cooper was dead.

Behind him he could hear voices now, Jackson low and calm, Miss Boerman angry and hysterical. He could hear more footsteps too as the other two uniforms also responded to the gunfire.

Too late. Nothing to see.

He moved across to where Cooper’s gun was lying on the stone floor, holstering his own and slipping a pair of Nitrile gloves over his hands. He picked up the discarded weapon and instantly knew from the weight and balance of it that it was empty. He checked to make sure – no magazine in the clip, no bullet in the chamber – and realized what Cooper had meant with his dying words. He wouldn’t have been able to face his Lord if he had taken his own life. Suicide was a mortal sin. So he had got Franklin to do it for him.

Suicide by cop.

Shepherd was standing on the porch of Douglas’s observatory watching the FBI tech team trample all over the local cops when his phone buzzed in his pocket.

‘Cooper is dead,’ Franklin said the moment he answered.

‘Jesus.’

‘He pulled a gun so I had to put him down. He was involved in the hit on Douglas, no question. I’ve got an intercepted phone call of him discussing it and I’m currently standing in his studio looking at some particularly nasty phone images of the professor taken post-mortem. They were being edited into a video package that was no doubt going to be the cornerstone of the late Reverend’s next sermon: God’s retribution on the blasphemers, behold his mighty wrath – you can imagine.

‘Bad news is these same pictures are already on the internet, leaked anonymously, and now popping up on all the nuttier religious conspiracy sites presumably so they could hide the source of them for their news piece. We’ll take them down as fast as we can but they’re starting to get picked up by some of the news outlets and spread around on Twitter. We can’t keep this genie in the bottle, which means we have to find Kinderman fast before he really goes to ground or Cooper’s angels of death get to him.’

‘I could use the email I found on Douglas’s laptop, tell Kinderman what’s happened here and offer the hand of friendship and protection.’

‘The tech guys arrive there yet?’

‘Yeah, they’re currently making friends with the local folk.’

‘I bet. They’re not going to like you walking all over “their” crime scene but a man’s life is at stake here. Use the laptop and wear gloves. If they complain about it in their report I’ll say I ordered you to do it.’

‘OK. I’ll let you know if he bites. You want me to head back to Charleston after I’m done here?’

There was a silence on the line and somewhere in the background Shepherd could hear Cooper’s voice still ranting away. ‘You still there?’

‘Yeah, I’m here,’ Franklin sounded distracted. ‘You should get some rest then drive to Charlotte, it’s nearer than here. I’ll warn them you’re coming.’

‘What about you?’

‘Call me if you get anything from Kinderman.’ The phone clicked before Shepherd could respond and the line went dead.

By insisting that he needed to use Douglas’s laptop Shepherd succeeded in annoying both the FBI tech guys and the local PD. He ignored their looks and whispers as they worked together to photograph and remove Douglas’s body from the wall while he crouched over the keyboard, figuring at least he’d done his bit to get them co-operating with each other. They were united now in thinking he was an asshole.

He opened Kinderman’s last message using pens to tap the keys, hit
Reply
and then paused. He would only have one shot at this. Get it wrong and Kinderman would shut down the email account and vanish again. His eyes flicked to the countdown, getting smaller all the time.

He could try and draw him out by pretending he was Douglas but he didn’t know enough about their shared history to do it convincingly. Also, according to Franklin, the pictures of Douglas’s murder were already on the net and starting to garner press interest. If Dr Kinderman had already seen them then a voice from beyond the grave was hardly likely to win his trust. On the other hand if he had seen them, fear was a useful tool.

Shepherd tapped on a browser icon and started hunting for the pictures. It didn’t take him long. A couple of clicks away from Cooper’s own website he found a page dedicated to the coming revelation. It was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, full of hate and damnation, with a whole section dedicated to what it called ‘The Great Blasphemy of the New Tower of Babel’. There were pictures of Hubble as well as Kinderman and Douglas with captions beneath identifying them as the architects of the great offence. There were also headlines and links to various unfolding news stories telling of the sabotage and explosions, then – at the bottom of the screen – Shepherd found a grainy version of the room he was now standing in, a quote from Ezekiel emblazoned beneath it:

The quote was typed in letters the same colour as Douglas’s blood. Shepherd imagined someone in a basement, lit by the glow from his screen and the demented fire that burned within him, matching the colour from the photograph then hitting the
Publish
button, pleased with his little design flourish. He hoped the FBI would hit him hard when they eventually caught up with him. He copied the link and posted it in the email.

He then found the link on Cooper’s site to the clip of him and Franklin being quizzed about the explosion at Marshall and the sabotage of Hubble. He pasted that in too and started to type:

Dr Kinderman,

I hope this is you. If so, my apologies for contacting you in this way. I am a former student of Professor Douglas now working for the FBI. I’m very sorry to inform you that the professor is dead – murdered – and that your life is also in danger. The same people who tracked him down to his mountain lodge are now looking for you. We know you received the same warnings as he did and that you both saw something in the missing data from Hubble. Let me help you, either in my capacity as a Federal agent or as an old friend of the Professor’s. Either way, I want to help. Please let me.

Yours,

Joseph Shepherd

He re-read it and was surprised to discover tears in his eyes. He turned away from everyone and wiped them away. He had been so carried along by the speed of events that he had kept the brutal shock of finding the professor’s body at arm’s length – until now. Writing the message to Dr Kinderman had opened a window straight into something raw and painful. He hadn’t been looking for the professor for very long, barely more than a day, but there was something ominous about the tragic way this search had ended that made him think about the other one, the one he had been on for eight long years. And it made him afraid.

He copied the message to his own email account so he could monitor any response, then hit
Send
and let out a breath that he hadn’t even known he’d been holding.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘it’s all yours.’ And turned to the others just as they were zipping Professor Douglas into a body bag.

Liv felt the tickle of sweat running down her back, her neck – everywhere. She had chosen to stay outside and lead by example. It also gave her the chance to think, the quiet monotony of her task helping to clear her mind as she tried to evaluate the significance of the new arrivals.

The doctors were now inside the compound building. Eric was immensely relieved that he was no longer the only medically trained member of the growing desert community. Liv, on the other hand, felt that there was something ominous and unsettling about the sudden arrival of so many doctors. With the last of the victims of the poisoning now dead and buried it suggested that some other medical emergency was about to manifest itself.

The convoy of 4x4s they had arrived in had also contained boxes and boxes of much-needed supplies and medical equipment. Most of the existing stock from the sick bay had been used up so Liv had tried to rationalize this as being the reason they’d been drawn here. But at the core of her finely tuned instincts she knew it could not be as simple as that.

She thought about the circle with a cross through the centre – the symbol of disease and destruction. It was positioned between the upward arrow of the mountain and the downward one of here. When she had first studied it she had assumed and hoped it referred to the Citadel. But now she felt the meaning was ambiguous. Its position suggested that whatever disease the symbol represented might either link the two places or separate them in some way.

She leaned against the fence post, grateful for its sturdy support, and felt the weight of everything closing down on her. The blinding light and heat were making her faint and light-headed and she felt a lurch in her stomach like she’d eaten something bad. She shivered, genuinely cold despite the enveloping heat and the sweat still running off her. Her heart thrummed in her chest making her vision throb. Maybe she needed to get out of the sun for a bit, have one of Kyle’s re-hydration cocktails, and lie down and rest for a while.

She started to walk back towards the compound, focusing on the nearest building. If she could just get out of the sun she would be fine. She concentrated on her breathing, in through the nose and out through the mouth, placing one foot in front of the other to close the distance to the nearest door. She had made it about half way when the earth started to shift beneath her feet. She fixed her eyes on the dark rectangle of the door but it seemed to be getting further away.

She was stumbling now, the ground moving in waves beneath her feet, something close to panic rising inside her. Everything was mixing together, the heat, her exhaustion, the half-glimpsed truths and fragments of ancient warnings that led her to the edge of knowing what was to come without ever revealing what it was. And then there was Gabriel, always Gabriel – gone with hardly a word save for the note she carried with her like a spell.

But when would he return so she could finally rest? Clinging to the memory of him like this, was a form of grief.

At last her hand touched the metal skin of the door and the burning heat of it shocked her back to her senses. She caught a whiff of something acrid, citrus, while her head thumped, the blood continued to drain and her mind pulsed through the percussive beat of repeated thoughts:

Gabriel

The Citadel

The symbol for Contagion

The arrival of the doctors

The door gave and she almost fell to the floor as it opened. A wave of warm air billowed out, the air-conditioning not yet turned on because everyone was working outside and fuel was too valuable to waste. It carried the same smell of lemons with it, thick and sweet, making her feel nauseous again. She leaned against the wall, sliding forward and along it, using it for support as the ground beneath her continued to shift and roll. She just needed to find a bed and lie down for a while until the world stopped spinning.

Another door opened at the end of the corridor and Eric appeared, leading the doctors on a tour through the building. They looked up at her and she saw concern cloud their faces. Then her knees gave way and she crumpled to the ground. She was unconscious before she hit the floor.

Shepherd finally got away from the crime scene shortly after midnight. He headed north along the same road the killers had escaped on and then east towards Charlotte. When he started the drive he was convinced that he was heading to the nearest field office to report in and await new orders, but at the back of his mind he knew there was something else in Charlotte that would offer him a different choice.

Exhaustion hit him hard after a couple of hours. Conditions had been pretty bad most of the way, snow and ice and dark unfamiliar roads. Once he’d dropped down from the higher ground the weather improved, or at least became good enough that he wasn’t scared of getting snowed in, he pulled into a rest stop and closed his eyes for a few minutes. He awoke with a start when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked the time and realized he’d been asleep for nearly three hours. The car had turned into an icebox with frost on the inside of the windows where moisture from his breath had frozen. He dug his phone from his pocket and discovered he had mail. He opened the app and the temperature dropped a little more. It was from Kinderman.