The Tower A Novel (Sanctus)

55





Shepherd burst from the interview room and headed across the almost empty office with Franklin following close behind. ‘It was

during summer break at the end of the first year of my master's,’ he said, bundling the laptop back in its case as he walked. ‘I

was at Marshall working as a lab monkey in data analysis, cataloguing all the new stuff that was pouring in from Hubble. James

Webb had just been green lit and Professor Douglas was in charge, though he hadn’t put his team together yet. It was really hot

that year and everyone else seemed to be on holiday. Me and a couple of other research students were the only ones doing any work.

’

They pushed through a set of double doors out to the main stairway and started heading back down to the reception area. ‘One

Friday a few weeks into our placement Professor Douglas popped his head round the door and told us all to go back to the dorm we

were staying in and pack for a two-day trip. We had no idea what he had planned but he was the boss so we did as we were told.

‘He picked us up in his old jeep and we headed east. We thought maybe he was taking us to one of the other launch areas but we

drove right past them and kept on going. He said it was good to go back to basics every once in a while, remind yourself what it

was all about, and that was what we were going to do: no hi-tech, no computers, just a simple reflector telescope, a few beers and

a clear sky.

‘We wound up late in the afternoon heading up into the Smoky Mountains just north of Cherokee, North Carolina. He had this log

cabin there, way up on a ridge. It looked like it was straight out of a Western: three rooms, potbelly stove, fresh water you had

to pump out of a well. It even had a porch with a rocking chair on it. I guess it was just far enough away from anywhere so that

the sweep of the modern world kind of passed it by. And because it was miles from anywhere it got so dark that the whole sky lit

up at night. You could see more stars there with your naked eye than you could with a good telescope in a light-drenched town or a

city. He had a telescope set up near the cabin in a hunter’s hide built on a rocky ledge and we spent two days up there, tracking

the planets, looking at the stars, talking about Galileo and Copernicus and Kepler, where it all came from and where we thought it

was all going. He was fired up about James Webb even then. Talked about how it was going to see right to the edge of the universe,

right back to the beginning of time.’

They reached the bottom of the stairs and the desk sergeant looked up wearily.

‘We need a car,’ Franklin said.

‘Sure, no problem,’ the walrus replied, wearily picking up his phone and punching a button. ‘I trust your stay with us has been

a pleasant one. Please let me know if you used anything from the mini-bar. I’ll let you know when your cab is here.’

‘I don’t mean a cab. We need to borrow a car. One that’s going to be able to cope with the weather out there.’

Shepherd frowned. ‘Why do we need a car? I mean, much as I hate to say it, but wouldn’t flying be quicker?’

‘I doubt anything will be taking off in this,’ Franklin said, pointing outside at the thickening snow. ‘We might get lucky and

make it to Charlotte, always assuming they haven’t got worse weather there. But then it’s still about a three-to-four-hour drive

to Cherokee on mostly mountain roads. It’s maybe five hours from here but mostly on dead-straight, flat plain roads. Trust me, I

know this area pretty well. We’ll be better off driving.’

Franklin steered Shepherd away from the main desk and over to the row of seats by the wall. ‘Tell me why you think Douglas is

there.’

‘There was something special about the place. The professor had history there, real history, why else would he drive all that way

when there are plenty of mountains much closer to Huntsville? It had all these photographs of people in frames tacked to the

walls, some going way back, including one of the Professor as a kid standing on the porch and squinting into the sunlight as he

held a model plane over his head. He must have been about five or six but you could still see the man he would become.’

Franklin looked over at the desk sergeant who was now resolutely ignoring the constantly ringing phone. ‘How we doing with that

ride?’ he shouted over.

The sergeant looked at them over the top of his reading glasses. ‘We’re just having a Caddy waxed and polished for you now.’

Franklin turned back to Shepherd. ‘Funny guy. He should be on Comedy Central.’

Shepherd glanced outside at the swirling white. ‘What about the roads – the traffic’s all snarled up already, we saw it coming

in.’

‘Exactly. We saw it coming in to town. The roads heading out will be pretty clear. So long as we get a decent car, driving’s

going to be our best option. Trust me.’

Shepherd nodded, but for the first time he wasn’t sure whether he did.





56





Liv sat in the kitchen eating dried fruit and salt crackers she’d found in one of the food lockers. Kyle pulled a stool from

beneath a stainless- steel counter top and sat down wearily opposite. ‘You should drink some of this,’ he said, pulling a bottle

of water from a thermal box on the floor. ‘It might taste a bit funny because it’s got rehydration salts in it.’ He poured half

of the bottle into a glass and slid it over to her. ‘I made up a batch for your friends. Don’t worry, it’s clean. In fact all

the water’s clean. I’ve been running tests every hour and the ground water’s flowing pure again. The pressure must have blown

away the contaminants, though I’ll still keep checking it. Go ahead – drink.’

Liv drank, forcing herself not to gulp it all down in one, savouring the saltiness on her tongue. ‘So tell me how you ended up

here,’ she said, as Kyle poured the rest of the water into a second glass.

‘We were all working way down in the south in Dhi Qar Province as part of a project run by an international aid organization.’

‘Ortus,’ Liv said.

‘That’s right. How did you –’

‘– I recognized the logo on the side of your jeep. I know one of the people who runs it, Gabriel Mann.’

Kyle smiled in a way that suggested he both knew and liked him. ‘You know Gabriel?’

She nodded.

‘Ah, he’s a good bloke. When we first set up the project here he came and helped us out a lot. I heard he was in some kind of

trouble with the law.’

‘He was. He is.’

‘Well I hope he’s OK.’

‘So do I … You said you were working down south.’

‘Yeah, way down in the southeast the other side of Baghdad in the Mesopotamian marshlands, or what’s left of them. The people

there were pretty badly persecuted by Saddam and his mob after they rebelled against him in ’91. As part of his system of

punishment he built huge canals to redirect the Tigris and Euphrates away from the marshes to drive the tribes out. He was pretty

successful too. There’s only about ten per cent of them left. Then the war came. As soon as Saddam started losing, the locals

blew holes in the dams and dykes and let the water flow back in again. We were sent to help monitor the water quality and manage

the restocking of the wetlands with reed beds. There were sixteen of us.’

‘What happened to the others?’

‘Gone.’ He took a drink then carefully placed the glass down on the counter. ‘We’d been working together for six months. It

was good work. The people were returning, the reeds were growing, we were even seeing some of the wildlife coming back. The

marshes used to be a major staging post for millions of migratory birds until Saddam buggered it all up. Every day more life

returned – both man and bird. Then all of a sudden the plug got pulled on us. It had something to do with what happened to

Gabriel. Our headquarters are in Ruin and he was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist or something, trying to blow up the

Citadel using Ortus resources. The upshot was that all of Ortus’s bank accounts were frozen while the charges were being

investigated. Which meant we could no longer pay for anything and weren’t getting paid ourselves.

‘We kept going as long as we could, hoping the money would get unfrozen but pretty soon we started running out of food, fuel, you

name it. So we pulled out and headed back towards the border.’ He rolled the water around in the glass, staring at the liquid,

deep in thought.

‘So how come you ended up here? Did you get lost?’

‘No, nothing like that.’ He continued to stare at the glass, as if the answer might lie in it somewhere. ‘I’m still not really

a hundred per cent sure what happened. We were travelling north, heading for the Turkish border in a four-vehicle convoy, which is

the only safe way to travel on these roads. We were making pretty good time, considering all the roadblocks on Highway 8, had made

it as far as Al-Hillah and we were getting ready to push on as far as Baghdad when I got a feeling that we were going in the wrong

direction. I can’t really explain it. It was like I knew that the maps, the GPS were wrong. I wasn’t alone, Eric and Mike felt

it too.

‘The rest of the guys thought we’d gone mad. They told us to shut up and keep driving but we couldn’t do it, none of us could.

It was such a strong feeling. For me it was like a magnet pulling at some kind of metal core inside me.’ He looked up and smiled.

‘I’ve always been a bit of a nomad, never really stayed in one place for too long. No matter where I ended up and how good a

time I was having there would always come a morning when I’d wake up with an overwhelming urge to be somewhere else. And this was

exactly like that, only instead of wanting to head off into the unknown it felt like I was returning somewhere. Like I was coming

home.

‘It’s like – for the last six months or so, ever since I’ve been working on the marshes, I’ve been watching the birds:

flamingos, pelicans, hooded crows, teals. Some of these guys fly halfway round the world from as far north as the Arctic Circle

and as far south as Africa and India to end up in the exact same place where they hatched. They’ve been doing it for thousands of

years, hundreds of thousands probably, and we still don’t really know how they do it. It’s just an instinct in them, a natural

urge. Then a few years back the marshes vanished, I mean there was nothing there at all but cracked earth and the odd abandoned

boat. But as soon as the water came back, they knew. Somehow they just knew that’s where they needed to be. That’s what it felt

like for me. I felt such a strong pull to be here, though I didn’t know what this place was, or even if it was here. I’ve never

been here before in my life, but I felt like I was coming home. Explain that.’

Liv shook her head. ‘I can’t,’ she said. But I felt something like it too.’

Behind her the door opened and she smiled when she saw Tariq standing there looking better than she’d seen him for a while. Her

smile faded quickly when she saw the look of concern on his face. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘You better come see for yourself.’





57





Liv saw why Tariq had fetched her the moment she stepped out of the main building. A thick column of dust was rising in the

eastern sky heralding new arrivals.

‘Soldiers,’ a voice shouted down from the guard tower.

‘How many?’ Tariq called back.

‘Difficult to tell. There’s one Humvee and one truck. The truck could be empty or it could have twenty men inside.’

Tariq looked over beyond the perimeter fence to where a group of workers were hurrying back to the compound. He waited until the

last of the grave-digging detail had slipped through then shouted, ‘Close the gate and man the guns.’

‘No,’ Liv said. ‘We’ve been through this. We cannot meet everyone who comes here with suspicion and loaded weapons.’

‘We tried it your way last time,’ Tariq replied. ‘First we talk, then we let them in. I cannot risk all our lives again.’ Then

he walked away before she had time to argue.

The Humvee and the truck pulled to a halt about fifty metres short of the gate and sat there for a while, engines running,

shrouded in a cloud of their own dust.

‘American,’ Tariq said, reading the markings on the side of the vehicles.

Liv was standing next to him, inside the perimeter gate waiting to greet them. ‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

‘They are being cautious,’ Tariq replied, his eyes never leaving the lead vehicle.

‘Can you blame them.’ She glanced up at the .50-cal gun in the guard tower, a man standing behind it, poised and ready.

She noticed Tariq’s hand tighten on the grip of the AK47 slung across his back and wondered for a fleeting moment if he wasn’t

spoiling for a fight. This was the problem with letting men do the negotiating. Sooner or later their hormones took over and it

usually ended in battle. ‘HEY,’ she shouted at the Humvee, ‘OVER HERE.’ She waved her hands over her head and jumped up and

down to get their attention.

‘What are you doing?’ Tariq looked at her as if she had gone insane.

‘You said we should talk first so I’m talking. HEY. I’M AN AMERICAN.’ She pulled a keffiyeh from round her neck and started

waving it in the air. ‘USA. HELLO.’

‘You can stop now,’ Tariq said. ‘I think they heard you.’

The Humvee started to creep forward along the tracks in the dirt leading to the gate. It was impossible to see who was inside

because of the sun on the windscreen, a bright slash of light that shimmered as the hard wheels crept over the rough ground.

‘Can you do me a favour?’ Liv said out of the corner of a fixed smile, ‘take your hand off your rifle strap.’

Tariq reluctantly obeyed just as the Humvee crunched to a stop ten feet short of them. The door popped open and a rangy corporal

got out. Liv felt Tariq stiffen beside her as he saw the M-4 the soldier was cradling in his arms, eyes shielded by the standard-

issue Oakleys most of the soldiers seemed to favour. He stood by the vehicle saying nothing. By the slight tilt of his head Liv

could tell he was scoping out the guard tower and the .50-cal cannon that had tracked the Hummer all the way to where it now

stood.

‘Hi,’ Liv said, smiling through the tension. ‘I’m Liv Adamsen. I’m an American. Who are you?’

A hand let go of the M-4 and pointed at the name badge stitched to the left breast of his desert fatigues. Liv squinted against

the glare coming off the Humvee’s windscreen and read the name. ‘Williamson. You got a first name?’

He nodded. Liv’s smile was starting to hurt now. ‘Want to give it to me?’

The soldier ignored the question, looking straight past her at the fountain of water shooting up from the spire of the drill in

the centre of the compound. ‘What is this place?’ His voice was soft, almost childlike and totally at odds with the hardened

image the rest of him radiated.

‘It’s …’ Liv paused as she realized she did not have a ready word to describe it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ the soldier whispered, his shaded eyes taking in the lines of the rivers snaking away across the dust. Behind

him the truck’s engine fell silent. It rocked on its springs and other men emerged, dropping down one by one to the ground, six

of them, all wearing the coffee-stain camouflage of the US military. Liv was reminded of the welcoming committee she and Gabriel

had encountered crossing the border from Turkey what seemed like a lifetime ago. Three more uniformed men climbed out of the

Humvee. And though they were wearing uniforms and carrying weapons, there was nothing threatening or hostile about them. They just

seemed like a bunch of cautious guys edging their way into a party they weren’t sure they were invited to. Tariq must have sensed

it too. He raised his hand to the man in the guard tower and the .50-cal cannon swung away as the man stepped back.

‘Where you from?’ The soft-spoken corporal removed his shades and squinted at Liv with pale blue eyes that looked like they

should be peering out at a wheat field from beneath a faded starter cap.

‘I’m from New Jersey,’ she said. ‘You?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m from all over, I guess. Illinois originally but I wouldn’t exactly call it home.’ He looked back at the

spout of water shooting up from the ground, like a kid watching a firework. Then he smiled. ‘Did you feel it too?’

Liv frowned. ‘Feel what?’

‘The pull to this place. We all felt it. We all volunteered to stay behind when orders to ship out came through – the rest of

the men were off like rabbits, they been pining for home for weeks, never seen homesickness like it. But none of us have any real

homes to go to …’ His hand clenched into a fist and tapped on his chest above his heart. ‘But then we felt the pull to come

here. So we came.’

Liv looked up at Tariq. ‘Why don’t you come on in,’ she said.

Tariq glanced down at her then back at the row of soldiers. ‘How many are you?’

The Corporal shrugged. ‘Just what you see here.’

‘The vehicles stay outside the fence,’ Tariq said, ‘and you need to hand over your weapons. We’ll keep them over there, locked

in the armoury,’ he pointed to the nearest guard tower. ‘If you want to leave you can have them back again, no arguments, but no

one walks around with a weapon inside the compound, understood?’

The Corporal stared hard at Tariq for a few long moments. Asking a soldier to hand over his weapon was like asking him to

surrender. ‘How come you get to keep your AK?’ he said.

‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘You lock up your weapons, I lock up mine. Everyone’s the same.’

‘But who gets the key?’

Tariq nodded at Liv. ‘She does.’

The Corporal smiled. ‘Well in that case it’s a deal breaker. In my experience you can never trust a Jersey girl with something

of value.’ His face broke into a laugh and she saw the boy in him again. ‘I’m only kidding.’ In a few well-practised moves he

made his M-4 safe and held it out to Tariq. ‘Hey man, no problem – your house, your rules, though you might want to reconsider

letting the vehicles in, or the truck leastways.’ He turned to it as one of the other men climbed up and raised the canvas siding

to reveal the truck was full of boxes and crates of food. ‘We just got a re-order in at the same time as all the other guys were

shipping out. There’s K-rations in there and enough food to feed a battalion for about a month. We thought we’d bring it along,

seeing as we had no idea where we were headed. The only thing we don’t got much of is water, but I see you pretty much got that

covered.’

Tariq nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘You can bring the truck in, but the Hummer stays outside.’ The gate clanged like a bell as it

was unlocked and then swung open to let the new arrivals inside. They filed in quietly, handing over their weapons to Tariq as if

they were just checking in coats at a nightclub and Liv watched them closely, sizing them up. They were foot soldiers, enlisted

men who more often than not joined up to escape jail or the crushing boredom of a dead-end life with no job and no prospects. Back

home they joined gangs and fought to create the families they’d never really had. In the army they did pretty much the same. They

were nomads, homeless, just like the guys from Ortus. Just like she was.

‘Where were you stationed?’

‘East of Baghdad,’ Williamson said, still staring up at the water fountain.

Liv nodded and walked over to Tariq who was checking weapons and making them safe.

‘It’s spreading,’ she said.

‘What is?’

‘The pull of this place – it’s spreading. The guys from Ortus felt it yesterday at Al-Hillah, these guys felt it today in

Baghdad.’ She looked up and scanned the horizon all around, thinking of the whole world that lay beyond it. ‘We should get ready

for more people,’ she said. ‘Lots more.’





58





It was early afternoon by the time Franklin and Shepherd finally eased onto the I-26 going northwest into a flurry of fine snow

that drifted out of a light fog. The traffic was solid heading into Charleston, a three-lane parking lot, inching its way into the

city. The outbound lanes were almost empty.

Franklin drove. Shepherd sat in the passenger seat, studying a series of maps he’d borrowed from the highway patrolman who’d

‘loaned’ them his Dodge Durango with about as much grace as someone handing over a personal credit card, pointing to a mall and

saying ‘Knock yourself out’. For the first twenty minutes or so the only sound was the rumbling of thick wheels on blacktop, and

the occasional rustle of paper as Shepherd unfolded the maps one by one and studied them. They were topographical maps showing the

border region between South Carolina and North Carolina, with the Smoky Mountains rising up in the west. His finger traced each

winding track, searching for a road he had only travelled once before, nearly twenty years previously.

‘Find what you were looking for?’ Franklin asked from the driver’s seat.

Shepherd stared out at the whiteness, the road disappearing into the fog within fifty metres either way so that it felt like they

were moving but not going anywhere. ‘Hard to tell from these maps,’ he said. ‘Guess I need to be there and see what looks

familiar.’

‘You won’t be seeing much if this fog doesn’t lift. The snow will make everything look different too.’

Shepherd wondered if this was all a waste of time. ‘We could always turn around and head back, follow one of our many other

leads,’ he said.

Franklin chuckled. ‘Man you sure got cynical awful quick – normally takes a couple of years in a field office to wear the shine

off a new agent.’

Shepherd said nothing. He kept thinking about the photograph of the dead woman and imagining how he would have felt if it had been

his Melisa lying there instead. He could almost feel the pull of the laptop in the footwell behind his seat, taunting him with the

knowledge it contained. It was the danger that came with allowing something to become the single pulse of your life: it drove you,

gave you focus and purpose, but it could also derail you the moment it was no longer there. Melisa had been the light that lured

him out of the darkness. He closed his eyes, and found himself back in the women’s shelter attached to the place he had washed

up. Melisa was doing her thing, helping some poor woman who was not much more than a kid herself deliver a baby. The woman was

Chinese and when the baby was finally born, wriggling and mewling into the world, Melisa whispered something to him: ‘Do you see

them?’

She often did that: asked a question that made you ask one back.

‘See what?’

‘The threads. The Chinese believe that when a baby is born, invisible red threads shoot out and find their way to all the people

they will connect with in their life. And no matter how tangled up they get as they grow, those threads never break so they will

always end up finding their way to the people they were destined to meet.’

He imagined those threads now, connecting him to Melisa, twisting through the air and pulsing like veins.

‘That thing you said back there,’ Franklin’s voice rumbled like the tyres, low and serious, ‘the thing about something heading

towards Earth, you think that’s a possibility?’

Shepherd opened his eyes and realized he must have been dozing. They were in flat country now, hardly any buildings, hardly any

sign of life apart from the odd car heading in the other direction towards Charleston. ‘Statistically speaking it’s possible.’

‘So how come other telescopes haven’t seen it?’

‘Hubble can see further than anything on earth.’

‘OK, but presumably anything far enough out that only Hubble could see would take millions of years to get here.’

‘Not necessarily. There are a lot of theoretical objects in space, physics-defying things that we can imagine but have not been

able to find or measure. One of them is known as a Dark Star. It has huge mass and travels at or near the speed of light. If one

of these things was coming straight at us then the light from it would only just outrun the object. We wouldn’t know anything

about it beforehand, not until it was about to hit because the object would arrive at almost the same time as the light, like it

had just appeared out of nowhere.’

Franklin stared ahead at the road. ‘OK, say, for argument’s sake, one of these Dark Stars is heading our way, would that explain

all this stuff that’s going on: the ships, the soldiers, the people heading home?’

‘It’s possible. We can see the effect the moon has on the sea and humans are sixty per cent water, our brains are nearer

seventy-five per cent, so it stands to reason the moon must have some effect on us too.’

‘That’s for sure. If you ever work a midnight shift at a hospital or a police precinct during a full moon you’ll know it’s

true. Everyone goes nuts.’

‘And the moon is only one tiny object. Imagine what effect a massive star would have on us all. We’re all related to each other

on an atomic level – you, me the car, the stars – we’re all made of the same stuff.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean the atomic building blocks that make up you and me are the same ones that burn at the heart of stars, and all of it came

from the same place. Around fourteen billion years ago the universe was born. It started out as something called the point of

singularity, smaller than a sub-atomic particle, incredibly dense and incredibly hot. Every single thing that is now in the

universe exploded out from it and began to cool as it expanded, forming the protons, neutrons and electrons that, over time,

became atoms and eventually elements. The first element was hydrogen. Most of the atoms in the human body are hydrogen. These

elements then started to coalesce into huge clouds that slowly condensed to form stars and galaxies. Then heavier elements began

to be synthesized inside stars and in supernovae when they died. One of these was carbon, the essential building block of all

organic life forms. And this process is still happening throughout the still-expanding universe. Things are born. Things get torn

apart. And the elements of those dead things become something else. Nothing lasts for ever, but nothing ever entirely disappears

either. It just becomes something else.’

The sound of the tyres rumbled through the silence that followed. Outside the white, frozen countryside continued to slip by. The

Interstate was practically empty now. From time to time a building or sign would loom out of the fog giving variation to the

otherwise flat white landscape, but most of the time they might just as well have been driving along in a huge hamster wheel –

always moving but getting nowhere. It was a fair visual representation of the limbo Shepherd was feeling, halfway between

something and nothing, with no real concept of either. Maybe the world had already ended and this was purgatory, driving through

the fog for ever with Franklin at the wheel, never knowing what had happened or whether they could have done anything to stop it.

A ticking sound punctuated the silence as Franklin hit the indicators and started to ease off the highway onto a side road. ‘Just

taking a little shortcut,’ he said. ‘We need some gas and a bite. There’s a town up here.’

Shepherd looked down at the map, following the line of the road they had just taken until it stopped at a dot of a town called St

Matthews. ‘We could have got gas and food on the Interstate. This is going out of our way.’

Franklin reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette and popped it between his lips. He stared ahead, his fingers tapping on the

wheel, the cigarette hanging unlit in his mouth.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Shepherd thought back through all the wrong notes he’d picked up over the last few hours: the way Franklin had ushered the cop

who had clearly known him out of the room back at the station; the way he had insisted on driving rather than flying up to

Cherokee; even his suggestion to come to Charleston in the first place to interview Cooper rather than hand it over to other

agents. ‘Sorry for what?’

Franklin wound down his window a little then lit the cigarette, blowing smoke out into the cold. ‘You’ll see,’ he said.