The Tower (7 page)

‘And you’ll most likely be out of a job?’ Shepherd said, knowing exactly how painful that felt.

Merriweather nodded.

‘Is that why you think Dr Kinderman couldn’t be involved,’ Franklin said, picking up the line of questioning, ‘because he wouldn’t sabotage his own project and betray his colleagues?’

Merriweather shrugged. ‘Why would he do it? Why turn his back on his life’s work, all of our work? It doesn’t make any sense.’

Franklin pulled out a chair and sat next to Merriweather, bringing his eye level down to his. ‘People do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, son.’ His tone had softened considerably. ‘But if Dr Kinderman was coerced in some way, if someone put him in a situation that forced his hand in this then we can help him. If he’s in danger we can bring him to safety. So anything you can give us, anything at all that might help us understand what has happened here will be a great benefit. And you won’t be being disloyal, you’ll be doing him a favour.’

Shepherd had to hand it to the old bastard. He might have pitched it wrong at the start of the interview but he was playing it pitch-perfect now.

Merriweather balanced his glasses back on his nose and ran his thumb along the line of his lower lip. ‘OK,’ he said, punching a new command into the laptop. The image of the James Webb telescope was replaced with streams of code. ‘I’ve been trying to pin down the virus ever since it was uploaded but whoever designed it knew what they were doing and covered their tracks unbelievably well. The only way I can see anyone getting a program big enough to do what it did past the network security would be by junk streaming it.’

Franklin glanced at Shepherd, one eyebrow raised in a question mark. ‘Junk streaming is when you attach tiny bits of code to genuine traffic. They’re too small to be picked up by the firewalls so they pass through it and then activate and clump together when they’re on the other side. It’s a bit like sending component parts of a bomb onto a plane one piece at a time then building it on board. But in the same way, if one piece doesn’t get through or gets corrupted in transit then the whole thing won’t work.’

Merriweather continued to tap commands into the keyboard. ‘But uploading the virus is only part of the story,’ he said. ‘What it then managed to do was very sophisticated and precise. It didn’t just knock out the comms and send Hubble spinning off into space. It actually reprogrammed the guidance systems causing the onboard rockets to fire and carefully move Hubble out of position.’

‘Dangerously so?’

Merriweather glanced up at him. ‘Sir?’

‘I mean has it been effectively weaponized? Is it currently hurtling towards Manhattan or Washington?’

‘No, no – nothing like that.’ He turned back to the laptop, finished his sequence of commands and hit
Return
.

High on the wall next to the main screen four rows of red LED numbers flickered into life.

‘See that top figure – 569, that shows the telescope’s current altitude in kilometres. As long as the number doesn’t start getting smaller there’s no danger of Hubble crashing back to Earth. So far it hasn’t changed. The next two readings are the relative long and latitudinal positions and the fact that they are changing shows that Hubble is drifting, but in a very controlled way. But it’s the last reading that’s the most interesting and seems most relevant to the message. That shows us where Hubble is pointing. Before the attack it was in the 270-degree range, locked onto a piece of thin space in the constellation of Taurus. But now it’s shifted round to dead zero where it’s remained ever since. Zero degrees is the home position. It means Hubble is now pointing directly at Earth.’

Shepherd glanced at the message shining out from every screen – MANKIND MUST LOOK NO FURTHER – its meaning more resonant and emphatic now the instrument of man’s furthest gaze had been turned inward.

‘You think this could be some kind of cover up?’ Franklin asked. ‘Maybe Hubble saw something out there and Kinderman didn’t want anyone else to know about it, so he put up this warning and turned the telescope around so no one else could see it?’

‘Maybe. Hubble’s not like a conventional telescope where you look through an eye-piece and see stars, it builds up images from the data it collects. People like me work on specific batches of gathered information and just see a tiny part of the puzzle. Dr Kinderman’s the only one who gets to see the whole picture.’

Franklin turned to Pierce. ‘Any chance we can take a look at the archives?’

‘No,’ Merriweather replied, hunching over the laptop and rattling in new commands. ‘After the crash I initialized a system check to isolate any infected files. That’s when I discovered this.’

A new directory opened listing dates running back for weeks. Merriweather clicked today’s date and a new window opened.

It was empty.

He clicked another, then another, working his way back through the week, each file as empty as the one before. ‘All the recent data has been wiped. I checked the backups too. There’s no trace of anything Hubble has been looking at for the last eight months. It’s all gone.’

Franklin nodded. ‘So maybe Kinderman did see something – the only question is what?’

Shepherd’s eyes flicked between the telemetry and the biblical message shining out of the screens. ‘You said Hubble was investigating a piece of thin space before the attack.’

‘In Taurus, yes.’

‘Were you looking for something specific?’

‘Not that I was aware of, I was just looking at edge radiation – Heaven data.’

Franklin turned to Shepherd. ‘Could you kindly translate?’

‘Sorry. The known Universe was created by a single event, the so-called Big Bang, which happened around fourteen billion years ago. Since then everything has been constantly expanding outwards. Thin space is where the edge of the Universe is closest to Earth. Beyond it lies whatever was there before everything else came into being. Some think this is where God resides.’ He frowned as a new thought struck him.

‘When the Hubble project was launched wasn’t there a lot of noise and protests from various religious groups?’

‘Yes,’ Pierce answered. He stepped forward out of the shadows and into the light. ‘I’d just started working here, had to run through protest lines to get to work sometimes: people waving doom and judgement placards in your face, calling it all a heresy, daring to gaze so far into heaven.’ He stared hard at the message on the screen, his mind ticking behind his eyes. ‘I didn’t really connect all that with this until just now, but –’

He snapped to attention. ‘Come with me gentlemen, there’s something I need to show you.’

Cold neon tubes
tinked
into life in the visitors’ centre as Pierce held the door and Franklin and Shepherd hustled in out of the weather. It was a big, rectangular space large enough to accommodate the busloads of school kids who came here every day to look at the old rockets and dream of riding them to the moon. Shepherd had been one of them once.

‘In here, gentlemen,’ Pierce said, shrugging out of his rain slicker and punching a code into a door next to the ticket desk.

His office had none of the romance of the public areas. There were no pictures on the walls of man’s extraordinary exploration in here, no forming galaxies or wonders of creation, just a framed photograph of Pierce in his State Trooper days wearing a dress uniform and looking a little more lean and a lot more mean than he did now. A coffee pot sat in the corner. The heating plate was turned off but the smell of burnt coffee still filled the room with a smoky aroma that twisted Shepherd’s gut. He hadn’t had time to eat before leaving Quantico and they hadn’t stopped anywhere on the way. Franklin didn’t seem to need food.

Pierce fitted a small key into a large filing cabinet and heaved open the bottom drawer. ‘We get crank mail here all the time, mostly reports of UFO sightings and/or conspiracy theorists and moon-landing deniers who think Hubble is NASA’s latest hoax and all the images are done in Photoshop. Most of it comes in as email but we still get some the old-fashioned way.’ He lifted a well-stuffed hanging divider out of the drawer and started sorting through it. ‘This past year it’s gone nuts. I don’t know if it’s all this weird weather we’re having, or the business in Rome that knocked the Church on its ass or what it is but something sure got the doom and damnation crowd all worked up. ’Bout eight months ago we started getting these.’ He took a clear plastic wallet out of the divider and handed it to Franklin. It was full of postcards, all variations on the same theme – old-master style paintings showing a monumental tower under construction. ‘They’re all pictures of the Tower of Babel. We got the first one in May, then a new one on the first day of every month since. We date stamp everything when it comes in so you can see what order they arrived.’

Franklin snapped his Nitrile gloves back on and carefully tipped the cards out onto the desktop. He picked one up, stared at the strange painting for a second, one stone coil inside another corkscrewing up into the clouds, then flipped it over to read the handwritten message on the back:

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower,

which the children had builded.

The words transported Shepherd straight back to the oak-panelled horror of his school where his Latin master had started each term by reading the same passage from a well-thumbed leather Bible. ‘The quote is from Genesis,’ he said, ‘the Tower of Babel story.’

‘Yep, and they were all sent directly to Dr Kinderman,’ Pierce added. ‘The postmarks are from all over but the writing looks to me like it’s the same person. I didn’t know what to make of them when they first started coming in but we keep everything on file, just in case. Each month there was a different quote, always from Genesis and always referring to the Tower of Babel. Then last month we got this.’ He pulled a single brown envelope from the file and handed it to Franklin. It too was addressed to Dr Kinderman only this time with a printed label. Franklin shook out a single sheet of folded paper and opened it to reveal a typed note:

Franklin looked up at Pierce. ‘You report this to State PD?’

He nodded. ‘Fancy language aside it’s still a serious threat. There’s a crime reference number in the file.’

‘Novus Sancti,’ Franklin muttered. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

‘It’s Latin,’ Shepherd said, ‘it means “new holy” but by the context I would say it’s being used here as a name.’

Franklin turned back to Pierce. ‘Did the State-ies follow this up at all?’

‘They registered the complaint, told Dr Kinderman to be extra vigilant, asked me to keep them updated on any new developments.’

‘That’ll be a “No” then.’

Pierce bristled. ‘There were over four hundred murders in this state last year; they’ve barely got the manpower to investigate those, let alone divert resources to every crazy with an axe to grind.’

Franklin pointed to the fourth line. ‘What does that mean –
Sodomite and member of the occult tribe
– are they saying he’s a devil worshipper?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Shepherd replied. ‘“Occult” actually just means “hidden” or “secret”. It could just as easily mean he’s a freemason.’

‘What about “
Sodomite
”?’

Pierce cleared his throat. ‘Well that’s a reference to … Dr Kinderman was – I mean I don’t think he is now, but in the past he had …’

‘Dr Kinderman is gay,’ Shepherd cut in to put Pierce out of his misery. ‘It’s no big secret, it’s mentioned in his Wikipedia entry. When he was a student he apparently had a brief fling with some guy who outed him when his star began to rise. There was a mild bit of tabloid interest at the time but it didn’t fly very far. Dr Kinderman just made a statement confirming it and saying something like we all do foolish things when young. He also stated that for the past twenty years his only committed relationship has been with his work.’

‘That true, do you think?’ Franklin addressed the question to Pierce.

‘Who can say? What Dr Kinderman did in his own time is nothing to do with me. He certainly spent a whole lot of time here. He was always around – he practically lived here.’

‘Did he seem particularly concerned or surprised when this letter arrived?’

‘Like Merriweather said, Dr Kinderman wasn’t what you would call the conventional type. He didn’t seem scared or anything like that. He listened to what the State Trooper had to say about being careful then got straight back to work.’

‘What about religion – is Kinderman a man of faith?’

‘No, at least not that that I’m aware of.’

‘And how many other people are working on this project?’

‘About forty or so.’

‘Yet they only targeted him.’

‘Dr Kinderman is the most high-profile and generally these kinds of stunts are for publicity, which is exactly why we try and play them down.’

Franklin nodded. ‘We’re going to take these away with us and run them through our labs, see if the paper or the ink talk to us at all. The guys in Kinderman’s office are also going to have to remove his hard drive so we can go through it and see if there’s anything there. Any security codes you know of that will make it easier for us to gain access would be much appreciated.’

‘Of course.’

‘You said Dr Kinderman spent most of his time here. Does he have an apartment on site?’