The Tower A Novel (Sanctus)

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Shepherd stepped out of the front door of the townhouse into the teeth of a westerly wind straight off Chesapeake Bay and headed

away along Main Street.

Hogan’s Alley covered ten acres of the Marine Base in Quantico and was built as a microcosm of any-town America with its own

bank, drug store, hotel, gas station – basically all the institutions criminals targeted out in the real world. Normally, the

whole town echoed with radio buzz, shouted orders and the crackle of gunfire from FBI, DEA and other assorted law-enforcement

officers as they learnt the art of urban tactical deployment. Today it was almost deserted, like everywhere else, as the whole

base wound down for the Christmas holidays. Shepherd noticed a stuffed Santa dangling from an upper window of the Coin-Op

Laundromat swinging in the strengthening wind like a hanged man. Someone had shot him in the ass with a paint-round: so much for

the Christmas spirit.

He hunched his shoulders against the chill and looked up at the night sky out of habit. The evening star had already risen in the

west and, as he looked at it, a huge flock of geese streaked across the sky, their loud honks making him pause. The ancients would

have read much into the direction of the birds’ flight and the position of the wandering star in the sky. But Shepherd knew it

was just nature and that the shifting star was actually the planet Venus whose brightness had always been a comfort to him, even

in his most desperate and lonely nights.

He turned the corner just as the streetlights flickered on in response to the creep of night. At the far end of the block, more

light leaked on to the sidewalk from the foyer of The Biograph, named after the movie theatre in Chicago where John Dillinger had

been gunned down in the mid-thirties. The marquee above the entrance advertised Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable and Myrna

Loy, the last movie Dillinger had ever seen. Shepherd reached the unmanned ticket booth and pushed through the door into the space

where the foyer should have been.

The classroom held a hundred students seated in concentric rows around a large screen that could be patched in to a number of

audio-visual teaching aids as well as any of the sixty-two security cameras set up around the town. Right now it was showing the

basement room of the townhouse with Shepherd in the middle of it, frozen in his two-handed stance, his gun pointing at the

crumpled bodies on the floor. A man in a black suit stood before the screen, head to one side as if studying an exhibit in an art

gallery. ‘You see a ghost in there, Shepherd?’ he asked without looking round.

‘No, sir, I was just … it was a high-pressure situation.’

The man turned and gave Shepherd the same hard scrutiny he’d been giving the screen. ‘They’re all high-pressure situations, son

– every one of ’em.’

Special Agent Benjamin Franklin was one of two active field counsellors permanently attached to Shepherd’s class, there to give a

practical dimension to each lesson, answer any questions and tell the new intake how it really was out in the real world. He was

one of those solid, square-jawed types seemingly minted in a different time when men still called women Ma’am and cars were

covered in fins and chrome. His short blond hair was receding and fading to ash above pale blue eyes like chips of ice that

somehow still managed to convey warmth whenever he smiled, which he did now. ‘Might I ask,’ he said, ‘would you fire again,

given the same scenario?’ His Carolina drawl gave his words a slow courtliness.

Shepherd thought back to the blur of action as he’d squeezed the trigger, the suspect in his sights but the wrong person ending

up dead on the floor. ‘No, sir.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘Because … because I hit the hostage.’

Franklin started up the aisle towards him, buttoning the jacket of his suit and flashing an old, steel Timex. ‘Take off your body

armour Shepherd and walk with me a while.’

The night seemed darker after the brightness of the classroom and the wind had picked up. It was blowing leaves down the street

and into Shepherd’s face as he fell into step beside Franklin.

‘’Bout twelve years back,’ Franklin said, peering at the darkening forest ahead as if he could see the lost years among the

trees, ‘I was part of a six-man task force running an investigation into a string of hit-and-run bank jobs across the Ohio–

Indiana state line. In each case a lone, masked gunman stormed into a small out-of-the-way bank, grabbed a hostage – always a

woman – and threatened to shoot her if anyone tripped an alarm. He was smart to a point because the size of the banks meant

security wasn’t top of the line so we didn’t have any decent security camera footage. Also he never got greedy so was always out

and away within a couple of minutes. And he always took the hostage with him, saying if he heard so much as a car alarm he would

kill her.

‘As you can imagine the local press shook up a hornets’ nest of fear about it all but there was also a bigger concern: none of

the hostages were coming forward afterwards. For about a week or so we lived in fear of getting a call from some hunter or dog

walker who had stumbled upon the silenced corpse of one of our unfortunate bank customers. Then he hit another bank, third in a

month, and we got fresh footage.’

Franklin directed Shepherd away from Hogan’s Alley and towards the path through the forest that led to the main building complex

beyond.

‘This is how it went down. Woman walks into the bank, talks to the door guard; gunman comes in and disarms the guard while he’s

distracted, grabs the woman, robbery ensues then perp leaves with a hostage. We could see by comparing the clear images of the new

footage with the fuzzy older stuff we had that it was the same woman every time. Turns out she wasn’t a hostage at all, she was

one of the crew. That’s why no one was coming forward afterwards.

‘We quietly spread the word among the state banks, so when they pulled another job ten days later in Des Moines, a teller tripped

the alarm and the cops got there in plenty of time to pick ’em up. When he was cornered the gunman tried to pull the same hostage

routine, said he was going to kill her if they didn’t give him a car and a free pass. Cops just told him, “Go ’head, shoot her.

” All of which brings us back to your little situation. Tell me what you knew about your suspect from the mission brief?’

Shepherd dug his hands deep in his pockets and tried to focus on something other than how cold he was. ‘The intel said he was on

several international watch lists as a known terror suspect. Believed to be a Jihadist, trained in Afghanistan by Al-Qaeda.’

‘And from your reading and case studies do terrorists and other religiously motivated individuals tend to give themselves up to

officers of an enemy state they believe they are conducting a holy war against?’

‘No.’

‘No they do not.’

The trees parted to reveal the Quantico Hilton rising up in front of them, all square lines, slit windows and concrete. This was

where the labs and active case teams were housed; proper on-going, messy cases with as-yet undiscovered solutions, not the clean

textbook ones Shepherd was being weaned on. It could easily have passed for a small mid-western high-school campus had it not been

for the sound of gunfire crackling out of the forest behind them. The next recruit must have made it to the basement. Shepherd

hoped he or she was doing better than he had. Hearing the shots reminded him of all the paperwork he needed to fill out back at

the briefing room. The forms for discharging your weapon during an exercise were thorough, tedious and in triplicate for very good

reason: it stopped the recruits from getting trigger-happy.

‘Don’t worry about the admin,’ Franklin said, apparently reading his mind. ‘I’ll square it with Agent Williams. You can fill

it in and file it after.’

After what? Shepherd wanted to ask, but Franklin was already halfway towards the glass doors of the main building.

‘Never forget that you are a highly and expensively trained officer, son. In the currency of law enforcement that makes you an

asset to Uncle Sam and a much-valued target to a terrorist. If you don’t take the shot, odds are the bomber will push the button

anyway and there will be three bodies to scrape out of that basement instead of two. The hostage dies either way. And, given the

little story I just told you, how do you know the hostage was even friendly?’ They moved from the frigid night into the

brightness and heat of the executive building. ‘You have to wonder what that woman was doing at dusk in a rat-hole basement with

a known terrorist in the first place. I can understand you being upset that you shot someone who might be innocent, it’s a credit

to you, but don’t lose sleep over it. You made the right choice, Shepherd. Though you do need to work on your marksmanship.’

They passed the honours board that dominated the glass atrium with the name of every top-of-the-class graduate written in gold,

dating right back to 1972 when the doors first opened. Shepherd doubted his name would ever grace it. He was a good few years

older than the average intake, which showed in his fitness scores, and his shooting was clearly letting him down. The things he

really excelled at were not part of the five areas of ability that went towards his final mark; his expertise had not even been

thought of when the FBI first came into being.

The elevator door opened and Franklin stepped inside, waited for Shepherd to join him then pushed button number 6. Shepherd’s

mouth went dry. The sixth floor was where the most senior personnel lived.

‘You cannot have doubts out in the field,’ Franklin said, his soft voice sounding conspiratorial in the confines of the

elevator. ‘Because if you hesitate in a situation like that, you die, or, worse still, your partner does and you end up carrying

it around with you for the rest of your life. They don’t put this sort of thing in any of the manuals but I’m telling you how it

is, for your own sake and for mine – especially if we’re going to be working together.’

The door swished open before Shepherd had time to respond and Franklin headed down the silent corridor, checking his watch as he

passed all the heavy doors belonging to the sub-division chiefs. The corridor was arranged according to rank with the lesser

chiefs nearest the elevator. Franklin swept past them all, heading straight for the door at the very end with Shepherd close

behind, feeling like he was back in high school and had been summoned to the principal’s office. Only here the ‘principal’ was

one rung down from the Director of the FBI, who himself was just one down from the President of the United States of America.

Franklin stopped outside the door, checked his watch one last time then rapped twice above a nameplate spelling out: assistant

director.

In the softened silence of the corridor they sounded like gunshots.

‘Come in,’ a deep voice rumbled from the other side.

Franklin gave him the smile, only this time the warmth wasn’t there and it occurred to Shepherd that maybe he was nervous too.

Then he opened the door and stepped into the room.