The Tower A Novel (Sanctus)

98





Gabriel continued to improve.

His occasional fits dwindled to nothing and after a few weeks he no longer needed to be strapped to his bed. But as his strength

returned, so did his desire to leave the mountain and return to Liv. Dr Kaplan assured him that, though great progress was being

made with his blood work, they still had not found a cure, nor had they ruled out the possibility that Gabriel was an asymptomatic

carrier. He still had the virus inside him, it just wasn’t killing him any more.

Rather than sitting around he made himself useful where he could. He spent a lot of time sifting through the ash and rubble in the

Crypto Revelatio, hoping he might find some of the clues they needed to interpret the Starmap. But the fire had been so intense

that even the clay tablets had baked to dust and the few stone items that survived offered nothing but more lost languages and

further riddles to solve.

He travelled only through the upper stairwells and corridors so he would encounter no one. On his way back he sometimes took a

detour to the chapel of the Sacrament with the hideous Tau silent at its centre, the front hanging open on its hinges revealing

the spike-lined interior. It was a hideous place, a place where the Sacrament had been held captive for millennia until Liv had

finally freed it. And it was for this reason alone that he came here, just to walk the same floor she had walked, and sit on the

same floor where she had lain. Once, after sitting there a while, he had stood and spotted a long strand of blonde hair – her

hair – floating down through the beam of his torch. He caught it in his hand and now kept it wound round his finger like a ring.

Weeks passed in this way. Months passed.

Then one morning, Gabriel was shaken awake as dawn had just started to lighten the blue and green glass of the peacock window. It

was Dr Kaplan, black rings circling his exhausted eyes. ‘Come with me,’ he said.

Gabriel had not been through the main door since entering on a stretcher almost seven months previously. They turned right

outside, heading away from the cathedral cave into a section of the mountain Gabriel had never been before. The corridors were

wider here and well lit with doors set into the stone at regular intervals. One of them opened ahead and a visored face peered

out, saw Kaplan and Gabriel and ducked straight back in, closing the door behind him but not before Gabriel caught a glimpse of

the complicated laboratory set up in the room.

‘In here.’ Kaplan stopped outside a door with a circle cut into it and a plastic tube poking out from within. ‘I think it’s

best I give you some context first.’ He opened the door and stood back to allow Gabriel to enter.

The room was a smaller version of the Abbot’s quarters with a main reception room and another door set in the far wall. It was

filled with so much equipment it made the one he had just seen look like a high-school chemistry class. There were banks of sleek,

hi-tech-looking microscopes, scanners, computers, centrifuges and a large air-conditioning unit keeping it all cool, the snake of

its plastic vent poking out through the hole he had seen in the corridor.

‘Very impressive,’ Gabriel said, taking it all in.

‘The outside world has been very generous,’ Kaplan replied, heading over to a large machine with a video monitor set up on a

desk next to it. ‘Anything we ask for gets shipped in the next day. Things move pretty fast when everyone has such an interest in

our success.’

He flicked a switch and the monitor glowed into life showing a hugely magnified image of an uneven sphere with lethal spikes

coming out of it. ‘Meet KV292, more commonly known as the Blight or the Lamentation – the enemy. Do you know much about viral

infections?’

‘Only that they hurt.’

‘But do you know why?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘What they do is invade a host and hijack healthy cells then reprogramme them to start manufacturing the virus instead.’ He hit

another key three times and the image stepped in until the tip of one spike filled the screen. It had a small bar across the end,

making it look like a tiny, elongated letter T. ‘Each one of those spikes you can see is topped off with what’s known as a

glyco-protein that acts like a sort of key to fool the cell’s defences into letting the virus pass through its protective

membrane. Once inside it releases strands of rogue DNA that find their way to the nucleus and then reprogramme it.’

He tapped another key and the picture on the screen changed to a similar-looking ball. ‘This is also KV292, only we found this

one in your blood. See the difference?’ The ball in this image was covered with much smaller spikes making it look like a burr.

‘Something is happening inside your system that knocks the ends off the spikes so they can’t interact properly with healthy

cells. They just float around in your blood where they get covered with antibodies until the white blood cells pick them up and

digest them. They never get a chance to reproduce because they can’t get inside your cells. They’ve lost their keys.

‘Ever since we isolated you over here in this part of the mountain we’ve been looking for the mechanism that does it. The

trouble is, with the hostile virus deactivated in your blood, the reagent that interacted with it no longer has a job to do and so

has vanished. We haven’t been able to find a single trace of it.

‘Over the past few months we have tried everything to replicate the circumstances of a primary infection. We screened every newly

infected patient to find matches for your blood-type and then created a cocktail of your blood and theirs to see if this mystery

reagent would reappear and go back to work, but it never did. Ultimately we realized the problem lies in the fact that we are

always working with samples that are already fully infected. Viral infections and their reagents tend to grow and develop at the

same time and at the same rate, the one triggering the other and keeping pace with it so the virus can never get fully

established. This happens with things like the common cold where the antibodies start being reproduced as soon as the virus

appears. If it didn’t every cold would develop into a more chronic form such as pneumonia, which is what happens in immuno-

suppressed people.’

He sat down on the chair in front of the screen, his weariness evident in the way his shoulders slumped inside the contamination

suit. ‘What we need to do is catch someone with your blood type before the virus has fully established itself and then cross-

transfuse your blood with theirs. This will hopefully give us two chances of catching the reagent in action: once in your system

as the infected blood starts mingling with yours, and again in the other patient as your healthy blood encounters the infection in

theirs.

‘However, there is a risk. If the mechanism has been completely deactivated in your system then you may end up being re-infected,

with little chance of survival. There is also a risk for the other patient. This mutated form of the virus you now carry may be

harmless to you but could still be very harmful to others. In trying to find a cure for the blight we may end up killing someone.

’

Gabriel took it all in, the polished cleanliness of the room, the clinic quiet, the serious tone in Kaplan’s voice. ‘I’m

assuming by the fact that you woke me up to tell me all this that you have found someone.’

Dr Kaplan nodded. ‘The problem has been finding someone with your exact blood type, which unfortunately is particularly rare. You

are O negative, which in Turkey is shared by less than five per cent of the population. We blood-typed everyone still healthy

inside the Citadel and found one match. The reason I woke you is because this person has just exhibited the first signs of the

blight.’ He rose from his chair and moved across the room towards the door to the bed chamber. ‘For this to stand any chance at

all of working we need to act fast before it fully takes hold.’

He reached the door and opened it.

Beyond was a bedroom, two beds in the centre lined up next to each other, an array of tubes and equipment arranged around them.

One was empty, the other contained a man, propped up, strapped down and breathing steadily. His eyes flicked over to the door and

locked onto Gabriel’s.

‘Good morning,’ Athanasius said. ‘Forgive me if I don’t get up.’ He smiled but Gabriel could see there was fear beneath it.

He moved over to the side of the bed and laid a hand on the monk’s arm. His skin was already starting to burn.

‘I admit,’ Athanasius said, ‘I am surprised this hasn’t happened sooner. I was starting to hope that maybe I too had some form

of natural resistance. But this morning I awoke for morning prayers and could smell nothing but oranges.’ He shuddered and closed

his eyes as something started to rise inside him. It reminded Gabriel of when the blight had first taken hold of him in the heat

of the Syrian desert. He knew the torments Athanasius was starting to experience, the heat, the itching, the panic. The shaking

eased and Athanasius breathed out and opened his eyes again. ‘I must also admit,’ he said in a soft voice that still carried

traces of the tremor, ‘that I am more than a little afraid.’

Gabriel took his hand, just as Athanasius had taken his so many times in the preceding months when their situations had been

reversed. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘It’s just a journey. Let’s go on it together.’





99





Shepherd spent the rest of the morning with Hevva, sitting by a fence in the playground like a kid himself, telling her stories

about her mother, digging back into his memory for all the details he had held on to for so long. She told him stories too,

sketching in glimpses of the woman he’d lost. He was amazed at how grown up Hevva seemed as she told him, in the unvarnished

words of a child, how she had gone everywhere with her mother because there was no one else to care for her, and how she had

helped with her work, learning to deliver babies while she was little more than a baby herself. Hearing these stories made him

both sad and immensely proud. But it also posed a difficult question, one which Hevva’s eerie maturity prompted him to ask.

‘Do you know why your mother never tried to contact me?’

Hevva shrugged. ‘She thought you were dead.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘Grandpa said you died in a fire.’

Shepherd closed his eyes and nodded. He was transported back to the evening when Melisa’s father had sent him on the fool’s

errand across town in the middle of rush hour. He had thought it odd at the time and now he knew why. It had all been a set- up to

get him out of the way long enough to stage the fire. The fire served as a disguise for their simultaneous disappearance, and as

the basis of a wicked lie that would separate his daughter from Shepherd for ever. Perhaps Melisa had told him they planned to

marry and he had taken desperate measures to ensure that never happened. The police had said the fire was suspicious, an insurance

job gone wrong and they had been partly right, it was only the motive they’d got wrong. Had her father known Melisa was pregnant,

he wondered – had she even known at the time? What must her father have shown her to make her believe he was dead? What proof had

he fabricated to stop her from looking? If he had gone to such lengths as to burn down a building, he felt sure a fake death

certificate would not have been beyond him. Maybe even faked-up news stories coupled with the race- hate angle to scare her away

from looking into his evidence too closely.

He felt a small hand on his face and he looked up into the deep knowing eyes of his daughter. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said, ‘Mummy

still loved you, even though you weren’t there. That’s why she kept your picture.’

Shepherd smiled and placed his hand over hers. Being with this quiet, wise girl made the painful ache that had grown inside him

disappear entirely. In her he had found what he was looking for, only not in the form he had expected.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and the world outside started to creep back in. ‘I got to take this, honey,’ he said and he saw

her eyes darken as if she knew it was trouble.

‘Agent Shepherd,’ a familiar voice said the moment he picked up, ‘it’s Merriweather, the Hubble technician you spoke to at

Goddard.’ He sounded anxious.

‘Oh, hi.’

‘You said I should call if anything came up. Well it has. Hubble has stabilized. It’s in a new travelling orbit that places it

in a fixed position in the northern sky.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘In Taurus, right between Nath and Zeta Tauri.’

Shepherd frowned – directly between the horns. For the past few hours he had succeeded in pushing the investigation into the

furthest recess of his mind: now it all came flooding back. He remembered the words of Kinderman’s cryptic message: I’m just

standing on a hill looking to the east for new stars in old friends, as those like us have done since the beginning of time.

And tonight Hubble would show up in the night sky as a new object, the sun shining off its reflectors, making it look like a new

star in the constellation of Taurus. Shepherd stood up and waved across the playground at Arkadian. He needed to get to Göbekli

Tepe before nightfall to stand a chance of catching up with Dr Kinderman. With the new star appearing in Taurus tonight, tomorrow

Kinderman would probably be gone and he would have no idea where.

‘How’s the investigation going?’

‘What?’ He had forgotten Merriweather was still on the line. ‘Oh it’s – moving forward. Listen, Merriweather, that’s been a

great help. How you doing with getting the guidance systems back online?’

‘Not so great. We could do with Dr Kinderman’s help. I hope he’s OK and you find him soon. It’s not the same here without him.

’

‘Let me call you tomorrow, I may have some good news.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’

He hung up and turned to Hevva. ‘Honey, I have to go somewhere but you need to stay here. But I’ll be back tomorrow, I promise.

’

The dark eyes brimmed and her head started to shake. ‘You won’t come back,’ she said. ‘Mummy didn’t.’

He dropped down so his eyes were level with hers. ‘It’s not like that,’ he said, taking her tiny hand in his. ‘You’ll be

safer here.’

‘I don’t want to stay here.’

‘But I can’t take you, not yet. There’ll be forms to fill in and tests I probably have to do so they can establish that I’m

your father.’

‘Problem?’ Arkadian had arrived next to them.

‘I need to go somewhere and Hevva doesn’t want me to leave.’

‘Where do you need to be?’

‘An archaeological site about two hours east of here.’

‘Göbekli Tepe.’

‘You know it?’

‘Everybody in Ruin knows it. It’s supposed to be a rival shrine to the Citadel, built by the enemies of the Sancti. Why do you

want to go there?’

Shepherd thought about all the things that had brought him here: the recovered data, the link with Taurus, the cryptic message

from Kinderman. It was difficult to know where to start. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.

Arkadian looked down at Hevva and smiled. ‘Tell you what, why don’t I drive you there, that way we can bring Hevva along and you

can explain it all on the way.’





100





Gabriel never left Athanasius’s side. He had promised he would go on this journey with him and, having walked that painful path

himself, it was not a promise he could break. When Athanasius was not sedated he raved and howled and strained against his

bindings, like every other victim of the blight had done, but unlike most he was sometimes lucid, just like Gabriel had been. They

would talk in these snatched moments, and Gabriel would lie and tell him how well he was doing and how much the doctors were

learning from being able to study him. In truth, they were still searching, racing against the clock to find whatever process was

happening inside him before it went one way or another.

Gabriel had been unaffected by the cross-transfusion. Whatever defences his body had built were too efficient to allow the

infection to take hold again. Dr Kaplan remained in quarantine too, never leaving the room for so much as a minute. He knew he had

a very narrow window of opportunity to first identify and then study the reagent as it attacked and defeated the virus, and he

didn’t want to waste a moment of that precious time sleeping. He had a cot set up in the corner of the lab for him and the other

technicians to use whenever exhaustion overcame them. There were five of them in total, each keeping their own particular brand of

vigil: Gabriel, Kaplan, two technicians as dedicated and ever-present as he was, and – at the centre of it all, burning like a

hot sun around which the rest of them revolved – Athanasius.

Whenever the attacks got so severe they had to sedate him, Gabriel slept in the cot too, making sure he was awake again by the

time the sedative wore off. Then, one morning, three weeks after the transfusion, Gabriel woke in the cot to discover Athanasius

was already awake. He rose and moved over to the side of the bed, holding the back of his hand to Athanasius’s forehead. ‘The

fever’s gone,’ he said, a smile spreading on his face. ‘You didn’t die.’

Athanasius smiled back. ‘Apparently not.’

Dr Kaplan was summoned from the lab where he was doing blood work. He stared at Athanasius from the safety of the door when he

first came in. After so many months of failures and death it was like he had forgotten what success looked like. Athanasius’s

recovery was the final piece in the jigsaw. Kaplan and his team had successfully managed to find and isolate the reagent, but had

held off from introducing it to other patients until they knew for sure it was going to be effective. They didn’t want patients

to have to endure the kind of drawn-out suffering Athanasius was going through if they were just going to die anyway. Better that

they die quickly and suffer less than going through that. But now he was better, everything had changed.

The Blight had been conquered. They had found a cure.

And Gabriel could finally make good on his promise and return to Liv.





101





Hevva fell asleep in the back of the car before they’d even made it out of the Taurus foothills and picked up the toll road

heading east. Shepherd kept turning round to check on her, her face a perfect miniature of her mother’s, her very existence

casting a much darker light on the countdown that was still ticking away on his phone. He told Arkadian everything, finding that

once he started it all came tumbling out until by the time they saw the first sign for Göbekli Tepe, Arkadian knew as much about

the investigation as he did.

They turned off the main road and passed through an automatic toll barrier onto a battered track leading away into the parched,

undulating countryside. There were no houses here, not even the square, flat-roofed brick blocks that seemed to be the

architectural model of choice in this part of the country. There was no sign of anything at all, no greenery, no animals, only the

single-track strip of black road leading them straight into the alien landscape ahead. The only reason they knew they were in the

right place was the presence of a few road signs, put up for the benefit of tourists, pointing the way to the hill they could just

see in the distance with a solitary tree standing sentry at the top of it.

Shepherd stared out of the window, feeling the heat coming through it despite the air-con blasting cold into the cabin. It was

hard to imagine that this desolate place, burned dry and littered with broken rocks, had been home to a civilization that pre-

dated the Egyptians by seven thousand years: all gone now and forgotten, ground to elemental dust by the passing of time, just

like everything else in the universe.

‘What if your Dr Kinderman’s not here?’ Arkadian said.

Shepherd looked up at a collection of tents and temporary buildings clinging to the side of the hill. ‘If he’s not here then it

’s the end of the road – for me at least.’ He looked in the back where Hevva was sleeping. ‘What’s that thing people say –

all your priorities change the moment you have kids?’

Arkadian shook his head and smiled sadly. ‘I’m sure it’s true – it never happened to me.’

‘Me either, until a couple of hours ago. You married, Inspector?’

Arkadian shook his head. ‘Not any more. I lost my wife to the blight around the same time Hevva lost her mother. That changes

your priorities too.’

They pulled off the road and bounced up a dust track towards the settlement and came to a parking area big enough to cater for the

strange mix of tourists and archaeologists that visited the dig. There was even a trough of straw to feed the camels. Today the

area was empty but for a couple of cars so dusty they were almost the same colour as the earth.

Arkadian crunched to a stop beside them and waited for the dust cloud they had kicked up to drift away before switching off the

engine and stepping out into the heat.

Shepherd unclipped his seat belt and glanced in the back hoping to sneak out and leave Hevva sleeping. A pair of dark eyes stared

at him from beneath a shiny fringe of wavy, chocolate hair.

Shepherd smiled at her. ‘We’re just going to have a look around,’ he said. ‘You stay here. We won’t be long.’

The eyes went wide. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘You won’t come back.’

‘Of course I’ll come back. You’ll just be safer here,’ he said, reaching out with a hand to stroke her face.

‘If it’s safer here, you stay here too,’ she said.

Shepherd couldn’t argue with that logic. ‘I’ll only be five minutes. Five minutes then I’ll come right back.’

She shook her head and the tears continued to flow. ‘I don’t want to stay here alone.’

He looked into her imploring eyes, made huge by fear and bright with tears. ‘OK,’ he said, powerless in the face of an emotional

child. ‘But stay close and keep quiet.’

Hevva stayed so close that Shepherd kept nearly tripping over her as they made their way up the track to the buildings and the

tree beyond.

Arkadian glanced sideways at them. ‘How’s parenthood?’ he asked.

‘Complicated,’ Shepherd said, squeezing Hevva’s tiny hand. ‘I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I’ve only been a dad for a few

hours.’

They reached the edge of the dig site marked out with strings of barbed wire nailed to posts. The hill was only partly excavated,

like something massive had taken a bite out of it leaving behind the monolithic T-shaped standing stones like lost teeth. They

were huge and almost perfectly smooth, their size and finish in marked contrast to the broken jagged edges of everything else

around them. Figures were carved on the surface of the stones, low reliefs of animals and human arms stretching round the stones

as if hugging them. A wooden walkway cut right across the top of the site, suspended a few feet above it. He could see tools and

buckets lying on the ground at various points, as if everyone had just stopped what they were doing and left. It was eerie, a

ghost town, one that had been dead for nearly ten thousand years.

‘Guess nobody calls this place home any more,’ Shepherd murmured, imagining the workers responding to the growing tugging

sensations inside them, urging them to be elsewhere.

‘We have company,’ Arkadian said. Shepherd squinted up against the bright sky and saw a slender man standing in the shade of the

tree, backlit by the sun. ‘You think that could be him?’

‘Hard to tell,’ Shepherd said, instinctively pulling Hevva behind him. ‘He’s the right build. I should go talk to him.’ The

tiny hand tightened in his. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart, you’ll be able to see me the whole way.’

‘Take this,’ Arkadian pressed something into his hand. Shepherd looked down to discover a gun. ‘It’s just a precaution.’

‘I don’t think that’s …’

‘Take it. I don’t care how many Nobel prizes this man has won, he is still a fugitive from the law, which makes him

unpredictable.’

The figure beneath the tree moved forward, emerging from the shadow.

‘He’s coming down,’ Shepherd said, handing the gun back.

‘Keep it,’ Arkadian said. ‘I’m too slow and can’t shoot worth a damn since I took a bullet in my arm.’

Shepherd thought about his own less than glowing record as a marksman but slipped it into the back waistband of his trousers

anyway, angling himself so his whole body was between the gun and Hevva.

The figure continued to descend the hill, picking his way down a thin gravel path that snaked its way down from the tree: a

slender man with silver hair and a Nobel prize for physics on his CV, Dr Kinderman – fugitive from the law. He reached the upper

edge of the dig and did a strange thing – he waved at them.

‘He doesn’t look like a man on the edge,’ Arkadian muttered.

‘He’s spent his life on the edge of the universe,’ Shepherd replied. ‘This probably all feels quite normal to him.’

Dr Kinderman rounded the rim of the crater and approached them, a warm, friendly smile fixed to his face, like a man just

welcoming weekend guests to his house. ‘You found me,’ he said, his voice nasal and high, like the whine of an overgrown, over-

enthusiastic schoolboy.

‘Joseph Shepherd, sir.’ Kinderman clasped the offered hand and shook it. ‘I worked under you briefly on the Explorer mission.’

‘Please.’ Kinderman held his hands up and screwed his eyes shut like he was in mild pain. ‘Call me William, or Will, or Bill

even, but don’t call me “sir”, makes me feel like your father.’ He let go of Shepherd’s hand and dropped down to the ground.

‘And who do we have here?’ Kinderman brought his head right down to Hevva’s level. ‘Are you an FBI agent too?’

Hevva went shy and smiley and buried her face in Shepherd’s side.

Kinderman stood and turned to the dig site. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it? A temple to the stars, built eight thousand years before the

pyramids in Egypt and then deliberately buried to hide it and preserve its secrets. You can’t really see it properly from here,

it was designed to be viewed from up there.’ He pointed back up at the tree on top of the hill. ‘Interestingly enough the locals

call that the tree of knowledge, always have done – even when they didn’t know all this was buried beneath it. Isn’t that

fascinating?’

Shepherd felt like a schoolboy on a field trip with one of the better teachers.

‘Shall we go inside?’ Kinderman gestured to one of the larger field tents. ‘It’s cooler in there and I have something I want

to show you.’

They filed into the tent and through a visitor’s area with information posters on partition walls and a scale model of the dig

site on a table in the centre of the room. There was a washroom through one door and a kitchen through the other with a stove and

a table positioned beneath a ceiling fan that turned slowly, stirring the air and blowing dust into the shafts of sunlight leaking

in through shuttered windows and a back door that had been propped open to let more air in.

‘You wouldn’t believe there were about thirty people here a couple of days ago, would you?’ Kinderman said, lighting the gas on

the stove. ‘Yesterday there were ten and this morning just me, so I apologize in advance for the mint tea I’m about to make. I

don’t really have the art of it, which is a shame as it’s delicious when done properly.’ He put a pot of water on to boil and

grabbed a bunch of mint from a bowl of water by the sink.

‘I can make tea,’ Hevva said.

‘Are you sure?’ Shepherd said, suddenly worried about the stove and boiling water in his first real moment of everyday parental

angst.

‘Mama showed me how to do it. She showed me how to do lots of things.’ Hevva slipped off the bench and headed to the stove

without waiting for anyone’s permission and held out her hands for the mint. Kinderman handed it over without a word, then she

dragged a chair across to the countertop and started ripping up handfuls of leaves and dropping them into a teapot. Shepherd felt

a surge of pride as he watched her, though none of who she was or how she behaved was anything to do with him.

‘So,’ Kinderman said, moving over to the table containing the model of the dig, ‘notice anything?’ Shepherd looked down at it.

It was perfectly to scale and even had a model tree at the top. In this shrunken form it was easier to see the configuration of

the standing stones. ‘They’re constellations,’ he said, remembering the Wikipedia entry he had read.

‘Exactly, perfect facsimiles.’

Shepherd looked down at the main cluster. ‘All except this one,’ he pointed at the tallest stone, the home stone, which sat

between two others representing the tips of the horns of Taurus. ‘There is no star here, not normally – except tonight there

will be, won’t there, Dr Kinderman?’

Kinderman smiled. ‘Bravo, Agent Shepherd, you are a worthy adversary, no wonder you found me. And in the tradition of all great

quests your triumph entitles you to some answers. What would you like to know?’

In his mind Shepherd cycled through all the things he’d been asking himself ever since O’Halloran had given him the initial

brief. He decided to start at the beginning and work forward from there. ‘The space telescope,’ he said, ‘why did you sabotage

it and destroy all the data?’

Kinderman cocked his head to one side in a way that made Shepherd think of a bird. ‘That’s a bad question, Agent Shepherd. It is

built upon two assumptions, both of which are wrong, which therefore renders the question moot.’ Shepherd felt like a student

again, one who was flunking a test. ‘Firstly,’ Kinderman continued, ‘you say that I sabotaged Hubble, which implies something

destructive when in fact Hubble was not destroyed, it was not even damaged.’

‘What about Marshall? That was fairly destructive.’

‘Yes it was, but again you are assuming that those two incidents are directly linked and that the architect of one must therefore

have had a hand in the other.’

‘No, I think you did one and Professor Douglas did the other but that your motives were shared.’

‘Well then you are half right. I did reposition Hubble, as I have already said, but I did not destroy James Webb or the cryo unit

at Marshall – and neither did Professor Douglas.’

‘Then who did?’ Arkadian asked.

Kinderman looked at him and shrugged. ‘The same person who was sending us the death threat letters I should imagine, the one who

signs his name Novus Sancti.’

‘Cooper.’

Kinderman laughed. ‘Fulton Cooper! You think someone like him could infiltrate the Marshall Space Center and blow a large part of

it up without detection?’

‘No, we thought maybe Professor Douglas did after being coerced in some way.’

‘You knew the Professor didn’t you Agent Shepherd?’

‘A little – he was my tutor for a summer.’

‘Then surely you know he was the sort of person who would rather die than destroy his own facility. His work was his life, he

valued nothing higher.’

Shepherd felt like a green shoot shrivelling in the blinding brightness of a superior mind. All his thinking had been based on the

assumption that Kinderman and Douglas were co-conspirators and saboteurs. But with that keystone gone the whole structure of his

investigation was now starting to crumble. ‘But if he didn’t destroy Marshall then why run and hide?’

‘Because we both feared for our lives,’ Kinderman replied. ‘And, considering what happened to the poor Professor, with very

good reason it seems.’

Hevva arrived at the table with a steaming pot of tea. She was struggling with the weight of it and Shepherd reached out to take

it from her.

‘You should have told someone,’ he said, pouring the hot liquid into several small glasses shaped like tulips. ‘The police

could have protected you.’

‘Protected us from whom? You just told me you thought our antagonist, the one who calls himself Novus Sancti, was Fulton Cooper.

If the FBI cannot identify this person, then how could they possibly protect us from him? Whoever is behind all this has to be

someone with a high level of access, someone inside the establishment and well connected, someone with a very clear agenda. The

Professor and I both realized this. And when we both received the same letter we knew we had to act quickly. My repositioning of

Hubble served as a useful diversion, a sop if you like to the blackmailers’ demands to “take down the new Tower of Babel”, it

bought us some time. But it also served a practical purpose, one which was outlined right here ten thousand years ago then buried

to protect the secrets and those who kept them.’

‘The Mala,’ Arkadian said.

Kinderman nodded. ‘The history of the Mala is the history of suppressed truth. At the beginning of human history things took a

wrong turn. Truth was imprisoned along with the relic known as the Sacrament. But the Mala knew the history of it and their

enemies, the Sancti, tried to silence them. They established their Church to spread their version of history and declared that

anyone who believed anything different from the word of their Bible was a heretic and should be put to death. So the Mala hid and

buried their secrets underground until the time predicted when things would swing back the other way and balance would be

restored. Over time many were drawn to the Mala, scientists whose findings challenged the Church, philosophers and thinkers who

questioned the “truth”. It was an organization that allowed free thinkers to remain free. And it still is. Without their support

I would never have been able to flee from America undetected. They are like the French resistance in the Second World War, only on

a global scale, providing friendship, support – even a passport under a different name.’ He drained his cup of tea and smiled at

Hevva. ‘That, young lady, is delicious tea.’

She smiled shyly, picked up the drained teapot and took it back in the kitchen to top it up with hot water.

‘In 1995, excavations started here and the first T-shaped stones were uncovered. The T is the Tau – symbol of the Sacrament,

used by the Sancti and the Mala both. The mountains to the west are named for the Tau, and so also is the great constellation of

the bull, which the ancients of our tribe saw as sacred, a harbinger of change. The rediscovery of these stones and the messages

captured here told us that the time of change was coming. A time we refer to as the end of days. The established Church uses

similar terms though they have demonized it as something terrible. But there is nothing to fear from the end of days. For every

end also marks a new beginning.’

‘Hello!?’

The voice took them all by surprise, puncturing the moment and making all heads turn. It was a woman’s voice, American. They

heard the faintest of footsteps outside then a tiny woman stepped through the door. She looked at them each in turn, smiling in a

way that made her freckled nose wrinkle a little. Then a muffled shriek snapped their heads back round again.

A man was standing in the kitchen.

And he had Hevva.