The Tower A Novel (Sanctus)

102





Shepherd saw the man first, then the knife held loosely against his daughter’s throat. Hate boiled up inside him, but also fear.

There was something in the man’s eyes, something missing, that told Shepherd he would kill his daughter just as easily as

snapping a twig.

‘Any weapons, let’s see them, nice and easy,’ the woman said in her Sunday-school teacher’s voice.

She was by the entrance, covering them with what looked like a toy gun. The man was behind them with a knife. Smart tactics. It

made it impossible to look at both of them at the same time and ensured they wouldn’t get caught in their own crossfire. If

Shepherd was with a partner they would automatically take one each, but he wasn’t. He was with an astronomer and a cop who had

just given him his gun because he couldn’t shoot straight. He felt it now, pressing into the small of his back, hidden by his

jacket.

‘I don’t have a gun,’ he gambled. ‘They don’t let you take them on international flights.’

The woman pointed her gun at Arkadian. ‘Nice and slow, mister police man, take it out by the barrel then slide it over.’

‘I don’t have a gun either,’ Arkadian replied.

‘You expect me to believe that?’

‘Not really.’ His movement took everyone by surprise. He darted right, drawing the woman’s gun away from the rest of the group

as he reached into his jacket.

Shepherd reacted too, only one thought filling his brain as he pulled the gun free from his belt.

A man is holding a knife to my daughter’s throat.

He saw Hevva’s terrified face pass through his sights as they settled centre mass of the man. A gunshot boomed behind him but he

stayed focused. The man started lifting Hevva up to use her as a shield.

Shepherd adjusted. Squeezed the trigger.

The man jerked backwards as the bullet hit him and Hevva dropped to the floor. Every instinct made Shepherd want to run to her but

his training stopped him.

A gun had been fired behind him.

He corkscrewed round, dropping down to make himself a smaller target. The woman was in a good two-handed stance, professional and

well-drilled, her gun turning towards him, no chance of missing at this range and almost ready to fire. He willed his gun round

faster, knowing it wasn’t going to happen.

Scalding liquid hit her face and her head jerked away, pulling her aim wide. Shepherd’s gun-sight settled on her tiny frame just

as she was pulling her gun back towards him. The impact of the bullet threw her backwards against the open door, knocking the gun

from her hand and out of the door.

He looked across and saw Kinderman holding the empty glass that had contained the mint tea. Arkadian was down, sprawled on the

floor and not moving. Shepherd knew he should check the shooter was down and her gun made safe. He should check on Arkadian to see

if he was hit. He should do all of these things like he had been taught but instead he turned and sprinted over to Hevva.

She was sitting on the floor, bright blood running through the hand she was holding to her cheek.

She should have stayed in the car.

He should have made her stay in the car.

He fell to the floor beside her and took her face in his hands, feeling the wet warmth of her blood as he checked her over,

terrified of what he might find. He almost laughed with relief when he saw that the knife had just nicked her ear.

The knife-man was lying on the floor behind her in a spreading pool of his own blood. He was just about breathing but the wound

was sucking and foaming. Lung shot. He was drowning in his own blood. A nasty way to go but Shepherd didn’t care. ‘I never knew

dying would feel like this,’ the man whispered as he stared up at the ceiling. ‘I never knew it would hurt so much.’ Then the

sucking sound stopped and he was still.

Shepherd bundled Hevva into his arms and carried her over to the others.

Kinderman was standing over the woman, holding her gun in his hand like it might bite him. Shepherd could tell by the way the

woman was lying, crooked against the door, that she was dead. Arkadian was still down, blood spreading out beneath him. Shepherd

set Hevva down and crouched low to look into Arkadian’s face. His eyes were open and he was still breathing – but only just.

‘I didn’t know you had another gun,’ Shepherd said.

Arkadian smiled weakly. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Then why …?’

‘You needed a diversion,’ Arkadian whispered between snatched breaths. ‘Look after your little girl. Life ceases to have much

meaning – when you lose the ones you love.’

Then he closed his eyes and was gone.





103





The first batch of inoculations took place the same day Athanasius woke up. All the infected in the cathedral cave, forty-seven

men and women, were given the serum one after the other, almost wiping out the stocks at a stroke.

When every patient had been injected Dr Kaplan returned to the main lab and took an ampoule of the serum from the fridge. There

were just twelve doses left and they were expecting new cases of the infected within the hour.

He copied all the clinical files to a flash drive then hand-wrote a note to his opposite number coordinating the medical effort

outside the mountain.

Ekram,

The serum contained in this vial has been successful in curing one patient so far but we are conducting further trials on all

remaining patients. I pray it is successful – we all pray it is. I leave it to you and the politicians to decide how much of it

should be produced and when but my advice would be to make as much of it as you can right away. We can always destroy it if these

trials fail, but we cannot suddenly conjure it out of nothing if they succeed.

All the details of its makeup are contained in the enclosed drive.

Yours, Ahmet Kaplan

He packed the vial inside a shockproof container and placed everything inside a padded envelope, which he took to the tribute cave

himself. He had not been in this part of the mountain for months. The air still smelt of smoke from the fire in the library and

reminded him of all the bodies he’d seen burned in the garden.

No more – he promised himself – Please God, no more.

The platform was being prepared when he entered the cave, ready to be lowered to collect the day’s batch of infected. The wooden

platform rocked as he walked across to the box reserved for correspondence and placed the envelope in it.

He returned to the cave and watched the platform sink down through the hatch and out into the clear air carrying the first bit of

good news to leave the mountain in many months.





104





Shepherd carried Hevva out of the kitchen and into the sunlight. He didn’t want her to remain inside with the freshly slain and

the smell of gunpowder in the air.

He sat her down in the shade of an awning and bathed her face, wiping away the worst of the blood then dabbing it clean with wet

tissues, all the while talking to her, telling her she was fine and even starting to believe it himself as the blood washed away.

Head wounds always bled more than most. The nick in the ear was all she had suffered, at least physically. She had also witnessed

her new-found father shoot two people dead. He didn’t want to think what the long-term effects of all that might be.

He looked into Hevva’s eyes and was about to tell her to sit tight while he went in search of a sticking plaster then thought

better of it and scooped her back up into his arms. There was no way he was going to let her out of his sight – not now, probably

not ever again.

They found a medical kit in an office and he picked up the whole thing, figuring it would be better to get away from here as fast

as possible in case the killers were not alone. Only Kinderman seemed to have vanished.

He spotted him up at the top of the hill, sitting in a chair in the shade of the tree and staring down at something in his lap.

Shepherd carried Hevva all the way up, sweating from the effort. ‘We need to leave,’ he said.

‘Indeed,’ Kinderman replied, his eyes fixed on the screen of a laptop connected by a long wire to a portable satellite up-

linker. ‘But the real question is “where?” Look.’

Shepherd moved round so he could see the screen. ‘This shows Hubble’s new orbit,’ Kinderman pointed at a graphic image of a

wireframe globe with a circle round it. ‘The other image is a direct feed from Hubble itself. That’s what it’s looking at right

now.’

Shepherd leaned against the trunk of the tree for support and stared at the crawling satellite image of the Earth. At the moment

it was showing desert, lots of brown desert, so barren it could easily have been the surface of some distant, uninhabited planet.

‘I told you shifting Hubble out of position had a practical dimension,’ Kinderman continued. ‘Not only will Mala worldwide see

it appear in Taurus tonight, it will also lead the way back to the home we all lost. Back to the origin of everything, where

everything started and everything will begin again.’

‘The Mala Star,’ Shepherd whispered, remembering Kinderman’s messages to Douglas.

They watched the crawl of brown, Hevva getting heavier in his arms with every passing minute until he had to let her slip to the

ground. He was exhausted and hot and a little faint after the adrenalin high of earlier. He was anxious to get away and was about

to insist as much when a thin line of green appeared on the screen, getting thicker as the world turned revealing a large patch of

green with tendrils snaking out across the brown earth like the roots of a huge plant.

‘There it is,’ Kinderman said, with something close to wonder. ‘Paradise found.’ He squinted at the telemetry and wrote down

the terrestrial coordinates. ‘It’s southeast from here, about a thousand kilometres or so, somewhere in Iraq. Less than a day’s

drive if we take turns at the wheel.’ He hit a command button and another window popped up containing the same countdown

application Shepherd had downloaded from Douglas’s computer, the numbers now much lower. ‘We should just be able to make it in

time.’

His fingers drummed on the keyboard as he copied links to the countdown and to the Hubble feed into a website and pressed Publish.

He turned and smiled up at Shepherd. ‘Mala.org just went live – the modern way to follow a star. Come on, we need to get going.

My jeep is right over there.’

‘I need to grab Hevva’s things from the other car.’ Shepherd stood upright and felt the world lurch. He reached out to steady

himself against the trunk of the tree but missed, grazing his cheek against the bark as he fell to the ground. Something sharp

jarred his ribs as he hit the ground. He reached for it with his hand and it came away wet and bloody.

Oh Jesus, he thought as darkness claimed him, damn woman didn’t miss after all.





105





Seven days after the initial inoculations, the first patient recovered.

She was a forty-three-year-old bank clerk, born and raised in Ruin, who seemed more impressed by where she now found herself than

by the fact that she had just survived a disease that had wiped out a quarter of the city’s population.

The cathedral cave now contained over three hundred beds, most of which were occupied. Normally the numbers remained steady at

around fifty, the new intake being roughly balanced by the death toll: but no one had died since they had begun the inoculations,

the daily ritual of removing the bodies to the garden had stopped and the pyre on the firestone that had burned without pause

since the very beginning had now gone out.

That same afternoon trucks and personnel drove into the city from the outside world, the first vehicles to have done so for more

than half a year. They were laden with stocks of the vaccine, manufactured in readiness at industrial labs in Ankara, and a small

army of volunteers who had already been inoculated.

The quarantined quarters were kept in place, to make the vaccinations easier to police and monitor. By evening every living soul

in the city of Ruin was lining up, waiting patiently for the salvation they had prayed for, everyone so relieved that deliverance

was finally at hand that they failed to notice the creak of ropes as, down the side of the Citadel, the ascension platform began

to descend with a lone figure standing in the centre of it, watching the world rise to meet him.