The Tower A Novel (Sanctus)

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Shepherd walked into Ellery’s office and smiled to himself when he spotted what was hanging on the wall. It was a photograph of

the Chief’s younger self, glossy and framed and staring out from beneath the sharp brim of his County cap at a small wooden

crucifix hanging on the opposite side of the office. The only other attempt at decoration was a potted cactus on the desk that

looked like it was shivering.

‘Take a seat, gentlemen.’ The man the photograph had become was two-finger pecking at a keyboard, his reading glasses forcing

his head to tilt back and making him seem old. ‘After what you said about the situation at Goddard I got the guys to run some

background and give me the headlines. I got them to pull up the Professor’s email correspondence for the last week, see if there

was anything there that might be relevant.’ He turned the monitor round so they could see it. An email program filled the screen

with an empty inbox. ‘Somebody, and I’m assuming it was the Professor, wiped everything going back months. I had them check his

work files too and it’s the same story.’

‘How many months exactly?’

‘Right the way back to May.’

Eight months.

‘If you hand the hard drives over to us,’ Franklin said, ‘our own tech guys might be able to retrieve some of the lost

information.’

Ellery shrugged. ‘Whatever you need: guess this thing is federal now so it’s your call.’

Shepherd felt sorry for him, this worn-down version of the proud young man in the photograph. He’d been so full of piss and

vinegar when he’d met them off the plane, now he seemed powerless and defeated in his own office.

‘There’s something else.’ Ellery leaned back in his chair, swiping the reading glasses from his face and reaching for a drawer.

He pulled out a thin sheaf of printed paper held together with a clip. ‘That letter you were interested in. I called up the labs,

dropped your name and had them put a rush on it.’ He handed the documents to Franklin.

It was a report from the Questioned Documents Unit. The top sheet displayed a unique file number and brief description of the

items under scrutiny. The next few pages were filled with various test results: pen identification, video spectral comparisons,

thin layer chromatography, Raman spectroscopy, paper tests. The final sheet took all these results and translated them back into

something the field agents could use. The results for the letter were peppered with the acronym CS/WU, which stood for Common

Sample/Widespread Use, basically meaning the item was too commonplace to be of any use in an investigation. But the results for

the postcard were more interesting.

The card is a CS/WU low-grade high-acid paper pulp mass-produced item sold in multiple outlets online. However the thicker card-

like material has rendered excellent nib impressions revealing much about the type of pen used.

Cross-referencing the chromatography results shows the sample was written with a fountain pen using something like a 33 Reverse

Fine Oblique nib by someone who is either left-handed or fluidly ambidextrous.

The ink is Parker Quink Black Permanent (CS/WU); the pen is also most likely a Parker make, possibly from the 75 range.

Running this sample through the database resulted in 2 hits.

Signature on petition from Operation Fish.

Signature on letter to the Governor of South Carolina objecting to the building of a mosque in Charleston.

In both cases the signatory was the Reverend Fulton Ronald Cooper, head of the Church of Christ’s Salvation, based in Charleston,

South Carolina.

‘The TV preacher?’ Shepherd looked up at Franklin. ‘He’s our suspect?’

‘So it would seem.’ Franklin turned to Ellery. ‘Thank you for this Chief, most helpful. Now, if you wouldn’t mind giving us a

moment here.’

The effect was crushing. Ellery rose from his chair and left the room without another word, the door banging shut like a coffin

lid as he closed it behind him.

‘Couldn’t you maybe go a little easier on him?’

‘You mean old hitch-up-his-pants, “I’m the Sheriff round these here parts” who gave us such a warm welcome? I am going easy on

him.’

‘Well go easier.’ Shepherd glanced nervously up at the photo like it was listening. ‘He gives us a lead and you humiliate him

by sending him out of his own office to stand in the hall.’

Franklin looked amused. ‘Ah, he deserves it for letting us walk into that exploding building while he stayed back and hid behind

his pension. And the reason I sent him out is not because of some badge-related pissing contest, it’s because I need to talk to

you in private.’ He turned so he was facing him. ‘How you feeling, Agent Shepherd – any concussion, anything broken?’

‘I’m OK.’ He wondered where this was going.

‘Want to carry on with this investigation? See where it goes? Help your Professor if you can?’

Shepherd tried to read his mood. If anything his tone seemed conspiratorial, which at least hinted at a degree of inclusion.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes I would.’

‘Good.’ Franklin rose and moved behind Ellery’s desk, settling in his empty chair and pulling the desk phone towards him. ‘Let

me tell you the facts of life, son.’ He held up the documents from the Questioned Documents lab. ‘Ellery did us a favour by

chasing these up because, even though he used my name, I doubt anyone has linked it to this investigation yet. If they had they

would already have handed the information to someone in the field office in Charlotte to go apprehend the good Reverend and have a

little talk about his penmanship. Do you want that to happen? Of course you don’t want that to happen.

‘But there is another way to play this. The way I see it, by the time we’ve brought another agent up to speed, we might just as

well have gone to Charleston ourselves. We can fly there as fast as they can drive it and be first on the scene. So providing you

’re not seeing double or deaf in both ears, I say we keep on with this thing and follow this lead.’

‘What about Professor Douglas?’ Shepherd said, sensing a trap. ‘Shouldn’t we head over and check out his home address like we

did Kinderman’s?’

‘You think we’ll find him there? Man blows away billions of dollars’ worth of space hardware, you think he’s going to just

head home and wait around for a knock on the door?’

‘Probably not, but we might find something.’

Franklin drummed his fingers on the desk, something Shepherd had seen him do in class when he was getting annoyed with a slow

candidate. ‘OK, let me put it this way,’ he said, smiling through his evident irritation. ‘Do you think whatever we might find

there will be more or less useful than talking to the man who sent these cards?’

Shepherd said nothing. He still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t some kind of test designed to make him incriminate himself

and give Franklin an excuse to can him from the investigation.

‘Tell you what,’ Franklin smiled and opened his hands like he was closing the deal on a car, ‘why don’t we get Ellery to

follow up with the search of Douglas’s home.’ He pointed to the picture on the wall. ‘He has the local connections, he’ll

probably do a better job than we would. That way he can claw back some of the self-esteem you think I’ve beaten out of him and it

leaves us free to stay on the trail. We got the scent of this thing now, and if Cooper is behind all this, then I want to look him

in the eye and know it.’

Shepherd thought it through. The correct protocol for any geographically spread investigation like this was to share any leads on

new suspects with the field office nearest to the target to enable swift response and arrests and minimize the chance of the

subject getting away. The nearest field office to Charleston was Charlotte and, despite what Franklin said, agents from there

would still arrive faster than them because they could fly too if they thought it necessary. He couldn’t work out why Franklin,

the seasoned, strictly-by-the-book agent, was suddenly bending the rules and cutting him in on it. It didn’t add up. But he also

badly wanted to stay on the investigation. One of his tutors had once told him that when considering any unknown you should always

remove emotion from the equation because if you know the answer you’re trying to reach you’ll skew your formula to get there. A

chill slid down his spine as he remembered who it was – Professor Douglas.

‘How are you planning on flying to Charleston?’ he said, reaching for the laptop case.

Franklin smiled, picked up the phone and started to dial. ‘Same way we got here,’ he said.

Shepherd took the Questioned Documents results from Franklin and slipped them inside the case. Just this simple task made his

battered muscles creak and complain. He thought of the cold hard seats in the hold of the C-130. ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’