The Tower A Novel (Sanctus)

13





Shepherd drove. Franklin stared ahead, facing down the stormy night and saying nothing.

Since voicing his suspicions about Shepherd’s missing two years he had barely spoken to him at all. Shepherd guessed he was sore

at him for butting in on his interrogation of Merriweather too. The silence had become an almost tangible thing between them,

taking on presence and weight.

When he had applied to the FBI he had counted on the gap in his record not being a problem. He had not been arrested or done

anything in those missing years to put him on any of the databases they checked when screening new candidates. As far as the

standard computer searches were concerned he was clean. But Franklin was a duty-hardened agent with instincts honed by years of

dealing with people in all their broken forms. He’d sniffed out the shadows in his story immediately. But trust worked both ways

and he didn’t know nearly enough about Franklin to risk telling him the truth.

Ahead – Turn left.

The flat voice from the sat nav punctured the silence. Shepherd reached out and tapped the screen, broadening the scale of the map

until the Space Center appeared directly North of them. Proximity to Goddard had obviously been way up on Dr Kinderman’s wish

list and the usual status symbols of cars and big grand houses didn’t really matter to him. As Pierce had suggested, you could

probably cut through the woods and walk to Presley Park faster than Shepherd had just driven it.

Turn right in twenty metres, then you will have reached your destination.

Shepherd turned into a narrower road and headlamps swept across a row of evenly spaced houses, slightly smaller than those on the

main drag.

‘There!’ Franklin pointed at a one-storey, brick-built rambler set back a little from the road. Shepherd pulled into the empty

drive next to it and cut the engine.

The Kinderman residence was entirely unassuming. There was a small patch of grass in front, a tree planted in the centre and neat

borders filled with utility plants that would pretty much look after themselves. There was nothing modern about it, no additions,

no carport or garage. It still had the original steel and glass porch over the front door. Behind the low building a wall of tall

trees surged and flowed in the wind. There were no lights on inside.

‘Let’s see if the good doctor is home.’ Franklin popped open his door and stepped into the rain. Shepherd killed the headlights

and followed.

The distance from the car to the house was barely ten metres but Shepherd was more or less soaked by the time he made it to the

porch. Franklin was already leaning on the doorbell, listening to its chimes echoing inside the house through the loud drumming of

rain on the glass overhead. He pressed it again and they listened out, standing uncomfortably close in the slender shelter of the

porch as they waited for movement inside or a light to come on behind the pebbled glass surrounding the front door.

‘Nobody home,’ Franklin said after a suitable wait. ‘Watch the street.’

He dropped down, stuck his Maglite between his teeth and started probing the lock with a pick he had taken from his pocket.

‘Shouldn’t we get a warrant first?’

‘And wake up some poor old judge on a night like this?’ The lock clicked and Franklin stood up. ‘If we find anything we’ll get

a warrant, then we can find it all over again: no harm no foul.’ He swapped the pick for his gun and held the Maglite in a fist-

grip so the beam shone where the barrel was pointing. Shepherd automatically did the same, months of simulations on Hogan’s Alley

kicking in as adrenalin and muscle memory took over and the words of Agent Williams whispered in his head: try not to put yourself

in any situation where you may have to draw this weapon.

So much for that.

Franklin took up a position by the door and gestured for Shepherd to take the other side. ‘Remember this is not a drill, Agent

Shepherd. This is the house of a suspected terrorist we are entering and, though I don’t think we’ll find anyone inside, I’d

rather be prepared than dead. So nice and slow, just like you were taught and do not move until you are covered.’

Shepherd got in position. Franklin reached forward, turned the handle and threw open the door in a single smooth movement.

Time stretched slow as the door swung wide revealing a yawning darkness beyond. Shepherd tensed, his pupils full wide, watching

for movement. Franklin moved forward, gun first, the beam of his Maglite probing the dark in a sweep from left to right. Shepherd

followed, keeping close, going right to left until the beam of his torch crossed Franklin’s in the centre of the hallway.

No one there.

They moved quickly and silently through the rest of the house – cover and move, cover and move – until they had satisfied

themselves that Dr Kinderman was not here and neither was anyone else. It didn’t take them long. The house was not that big.

Franklin hit the lights and they stood in the middle of the modest living-room-slash-kitchen-slash-dining-room taking in what they

had previously only glimpsed by torchlight.

If anything, the inside of Dr Kinderman’s home was even less impressive than the outside. A small oak-floored hallway led away

from the front door to three others: a small bathroom, a bedroom, and some wooden stairs leading down to the basement. ‘Tell me,

Agent Shepherd,’ Franklin said, ‘you ever seen inside a safe house or a terrorist cell?’

‘No, sir, I have not.’

‘Well, look around, they look exactly like this. Functional, clean, unlived in.’

‘We don’t know that he’s a terrorist.’

‘No, but the evidence is stacking up wouldn’t you say?’ He nodded at the large picture of Christ the Redeemer hanging above the

fireplace, arms outstretched and looking down at the sprawling city of Rio de Janeiro. ‘Pierce didn’t think Kinderman was

religious.’

‘Maybe he just likes big statues, or Brazil.’

‘Or maybe he found God on the quiet and felt so bad about sticking his telescope up the Almighty’s nose that he switched it off

and ran for the hills.’

Shepherd shrugged. ‘I guess anything’s possible.’

‘I guess it is.’ Franklin pointed at the bedroom. ‘Take another look, see what you can find, I’ll check the rest.’

The bedroom was as plain as the rest of the house, the picture hanging over the neat double bed the only clue as to the person who

slept there. It showed The Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula, clearly a favourite image for the man who had been

responsible for discovering them. Shepherd felt odd standing here, in the private space of one of his heroes. It seemed like an

intrusion and his presence implied a degree of complicit agreement in Dr Kinderman’s as yet unproven guilt. He put it from his

mind, swapped his gun for the blue Nitrile gloves and got to work.

The wardrobe held lots of white shirts, pressed and cleaned and still in their laundry wrapping, a few suits of the tweedy,

academic kind Kinderman favoured and four pairs of identical black, wing-tipped shoes, polished and lined up on newspaper, ready

to be stepped into. There was a gap where a fifth pair would fit, presumably the ones Kinderman was now wearing.

The drawers contained more clothes but no answers. There were no new death-threat letters stashed away at the back of the sock

drawer, no drugs or guns or dubious pornography or bundles of money or anything else that implied a secret, dangerous life.

Everything was neat, tidy and unremarkable. He finished his search and stood for a moment in the centre of the room, taking in its

incredible ordinariness. It felt like Kinderman might have just stepped out for a late supper and be coming back soon. Part of him

hoped he would, but the chaos of his office at Goddard told a different story. Shepherd flicked off the light and closed the door

on his way out.

He found Franklin in the living room, hunkered down by the fireplace. ‘Take a look at this.’ He pointed at a fire basket

containing a few logs, some sticks and several old newspapers. ‘Notice anything funny about the papers?’

Shepherd picked one up. It was a copy of the New York Post, a relatively unusual paper to find in Maryland. On the cover was a

picture of a man dressed like a monk, standing on top of a dark mountain with his arms outstretched, looking just like the statue

in the picture above Kinderman’s fireplace. Shepherd checked the date. The paper was eight months old. The story of the man

climbing to the summit of the Citadel in the ancient city of Ruin had been more or less a front-page fixture in the spring.

Recently Ruin had been in the papers again, this time because of the sudden outbreak of a viral infection that had resulted in the

entire city being quarantined.

He picked up another paper, a copy of USA Today dated a few days after the New York Post and showing a photo of the same mountain,

this time with smoke pouring out of a hole in its side, the headline read:

TERROR ATTACK CRACKS

CITADEL WIDE OPEN

The other newspapers were the same, all covering versions of the same story and dated around the same time. Some showed the monk

on top of the Citadel, others showed the moment he fell to his death, or pictures of bloodied monks being stretchered out of the

mountain following the explosion, their bodies stripped to the waist by paramedics to reveal strange networks of ritualized scars

from multiple cuts deep in the skin.

‘Lots of people have old newspapers in their fire baskets,’ Shepherd said, scanning one of the articles to remind himself of the

details.

‘Yes, but not normally a collection of different titles all covering the same thing. The Bureau got involved in this in a small

way trying to help locate a couple of the terror suspects who were American. One was a female journalist from Jersey, the other an

ex-army guy: Liv Adamsen and Gabriel Mann.’

‘They’re mentioned here.’ Shepherd held up one of the papers and showed him a mugshot of a handsome-looking man in his early

thirties with short dark hair and blue eyes and a pale, blonde woman with eyes so green they glowed beneath the poor print quality

of the paper.

Shepherd picked up the last newspaper. On the cover was a photograph of a plump Cardinal looking imperious in his red and black

robes beneath the headline:

CHURCH BANKRUPT:

POPE’S RIGHT-HAND MAN IN SUICIDE

SHOCK AT THE VATICAN

He remembered that one too, the biggest scandal to rock the Church in a long time. Something to do with mortgaging all the Church

’s treasures and buildings in order to fund some doomed oil venture in Iraq. Some of the more lurid tabloids had even suggested

they were drilling for oil where Eden used to be.

‘All from eight months ago,’ Shepherd mused, dropping it in the basket with the rest, ‘the same time the postcards started

arriving.’

Franklin stood up and stretched the kinks out of his back as he paced the Spartan living room. ‘So how does any of this link up?

Does any of it link up? We’ve got an attack on government property that may or may not be connected to the attacks outlined in

these newspapers. We got a missing person who’s our number one suspect. We got a potential religious angle, which could shake out

either as Kinderman seeing the light and going rogue, or somebody else putting the frighteners on him to do God’s work for them

– maybe even the same guys who were involved in these attacks eight months ago. What else …?’

Shepherd dug his notebook from his pocket. ‘There’s the Tower of Babel references and the death threat written in biblical tones

and signed Novus Sancti. We also have the missing data, which also dates back eight months, though that could just be a

coincidence.’

Franklin shook his head and wandered into the kitchen. ‘I’m not a great believer in coincidence.’ He stood by the sink with the

lights off, staring out into the night. The ambient light from the street picked out a small strip of grass and the line of storm

-shaken trees that marked the edge of the property and the beginning of the woods. ‘Maybe we’re massively overcomplicating

things. Nine times out of ten it’s about money. Look at this place, it’s not exactly a palace.’

‘But you heard what Pierce said, he was always at work, this is just where he slept.’

‘Maybe, but he wouldn’t be the first smart person in history who dug himself into a deep hole and then got bought by someone

offering him a ladder.’

Shepherd thought about it and shook his head. ‘I don’t think it can be money. Dr Kinderman never struck me as the material kind

and he won the Nobel Prize nine years ago.’

‘You get paid for that?’

‘You get a cut of how much money the Nobel Foundation made that year. It’s usually something like a million – million and a

half. If there’s more than one winner they share it. Dr Kinderman won it on his own.’

Franklin whistled through his teeth. ‘Man, I should have paid more attention in science class. Still I reckon I could easily burn

through a million bucks in nine years. Maybe pick up some expensive tastes along the way and get myself in some situations that a

blackmailer could get his hooks into.’ Franklin took a last long look at the meagre, anonymous home. ‘Come on, we’re wasting

time here. Let’s head back to base, see what the techs have come up with. I might even buy you a burger on the way back – but

that still don’t mean I trust you.’