скачать книгу бесплатно
So much for that.
Franklin took up a position by the door and gestured for Shepherd to take the other side. ‘Remember this is not a drill, Agent Shepherd. This is the house of a suspected terrorist we are entering and, though I don’t think we’ll find anyone inside, I’d rather be prepared than dead. So nice and slow, just like you were taught and do not move until you are covered.’
Shepherd got in position. Franklin reached forward, turned the handle and threw open the door in a single smooth movement.
Time stretched slow as the door swung wide revealing a yawning darkness beyond. Shepherd tensed, his pupils full wide, watching for movement. Franklin moved forward, gun first, the beam of his Maglite probing the dark in a sweep from left to right. Shepherd followed, keeping close, going right to left until the beam of his torch crossed Franklin’s in the centre of the hallway.
No one there.
They moved quickly and silently through the rest of the house – cover and move, cover and move – until they had satisfied themselves that Dr Kinderman was not here and neither was anyone else. It didn’t take them long. The house was not that big.
Franklin hit the lights and they stood in the middle of the modest living-room-slash-kitchen-slash-dining-room taking in what they had previously only glimpsed by torchlight.
If anything, the inside of Dr Kinderman’s home was even less impressive than the outside. A small oak-floored hallway led away from the front door to three others: a small bathroom, a bedroom, and some wooden stairs leading down to the basement. ‘Tell me, Agent Shepherd,’ Franklin said, ‘you ever seen inside a safe house or a terrorist cell?’
‘No, sir, I have not.’
‘Well, look around, they look exactly like this. Functional, clean, unlived in.’
‘We don’t know that he’s a terrorist.’
‘No, but the evidence is stacking up wouldn’t you say?’ He nodded at the large picture of Christ the Redeemer hanging above the fireplace, arms outstretched and looking down at the sprawling city of Rio de Janeiro. ‘Pierce didn’t think Kinderman was religious.’
‘Maybe he just likes big statues, or Brazil.’
‘Or maybe he found God on the quiet and felt so bad about sticking his telescope up the Almighty’s nose that he switched it off and ran for the hills.’
Shepherd shrugged. ‘I guess anything’s possible.’
‘I guess it is.’ Franklin pointed at the bedroom. ‘Take another look, see what you can find, I’ll check the rest.’
The bedroom was as plain as the rest of the house, the picture hanging over the neat double bed the only clue as to the person who slept there. It showed The Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula, clearly a favourite image for the man who had been responsible for discovering them. Shepherd felt odd standing here, in the private space of one of his heroes. It seemed like an intrusion and his presence implied a degree of complicit agreement in Dr Kinderman’s as yet unproven guilt. He put it from his mind, swapped his gun for the blue Nitrile gloves and got to work.
The wardrobe held lots of white shirts, pressed and cleaned and still in their laundry wrapping, a few suits of the tweedy, academic kind Kinderman favoured and four pairs of identical black, wing-tipped shoes, polished and lined up on newspaper, ready to be stepped into. There was a gap where a fifth pair would fit, presumably the ones Kinderman was now wearing.
The drawers contained more clothes but no answers. There were no new death-threat letters stashed away at the back of the sock drawer, no drugs or guns or dubious pornography or bundles of money or anything else that implied a secret, dangerous life. Everything was neat, tidy and unremarkable. He finished his search and stood for a moment in the centre of the room, taking in its incredible ordinariness. It felt like Kinderman might have just stepped out for a late supper and be coming back soon. Part of him hoped he would, but the chaos of his office at Goddard told a different story. Shepherd flicked off the light and closed the door on his way out.
He found Franklin in the living room, hunkered down by the fireplace. ‘Take a look at this.’ He pointed at a fire basket containing a few logs, some sticks and several old newspapers. ‘Notice anything funny about the papers?’
Shepherd picked one up. It was a copy of the New York Post, a relatively unusual paper to find in Maryland. On the cover was a picture of a man dressed like a monk, standing on top of a dark mountain with his arms outstretched, looking just like the statue in the picture above Kinderman’s fireplace. Shepherd checked the date. The paper was eight months old. The story of the man climbing to the summit of the Citadel in the ancient city of Ruin had been more or less a front-page fixture in the spring. Recently Ruin had been in the papers again, this time because of the sudden outbreak of a viral infection that had resulted in the entire city being quarantined.
He picked up another paper, a copy of USA Today dated a few days after the New York Post and showing a photo of the same mountain, this time with smoke pouring out of a hole in its side, the headline read:
TERROR ATTACK CRACKS
CITADEL WIDE OPEN
The other newspapers were the same, all covering versions of the same story and dated around the same time. Some showed the monk on top of the Citadel, others showed the moment he fell to his death, or pictures of bloodied monks being stretchered out of the mountain following the explosion, their bodies stripped to the waist by paramedics to reveal strange networks of ritualized scars from multiple cuts deep in the skin.
‘Lots of people have old newspapers in their fire baskets,’ Shepherd said, scanning one of the articles to remind himself of the details.
‘Yes, but not normally a collection of different titles all covering the same thing. The Bureau got involved in this in a small way trying to help locate a couple of the terror suspects who were American. One was a female journalist from Jersey, the other an ex-army guy: Liv Adamsen and Gabriel Mann.’
‘They’re mentioned here.’ Shepherd held up one of the papers and showed him a mugshot of a handsome-looking man in his early thirties with short dark hair and blue eyes and a pale, blonde woman with eyes so green they glowed beneath the poor print quality of the paper.
Shepherd picked up the last newspaper. On the cover was a photograph of a plump Cardinal looking imperious in his red and black robes beneath the headline:
CHURCH BANKRUPT:
POPE’S RIGHT-HAND MAN IN SUICIDE SHOCK AT THE VATICAN
He remembered that one too, the biggest scandal to rock the Church in a long time. Something to do with mortgaging all the Church’s treasures and buildings in order to fund some doomed oil venture in Iraq. Some of the more lurid tabloids had even suggested they were drilling for oil where Eden used to be.
‘All from eight months ago,’ Shepherd mused, dropping it in the basket with the rest, ‘the same time the postcards started arriving.’
Franklin stood up and stretched the kinks out of his back as he paced the Spartan living room. ‘So how does any of this link up? Does any of it link up? We’ve got an attack on government property that may or may not be connected to the attacks outlined in these newspapers. We got a missing person who’s our number one suspect. We got a potential religious angle, which could shake out either as Kinderman seeing the light and going rogue, or somebody else putting the frighteners on him to do God’s work for them – maybe even the same guys who were involved in these attacks eight months ago. What else …?’
Shepherd dug his notebook from his pocket. ‘There’s the Tower of Babel references and the death threat written in biblical tones and signed Novus Sancti. We also have the missing data, which also dates back eight months, though that could just be a coincidence.’
Franklin shook his head and wandered into the kitchen. ‘I’m not a great believer in coincidence.’ He stood by the sink with the lights off, staring out into the night. The ambient light from the street picked out a small strip of grass and the line of storm-shaken trees that marked the edge of the property and the beginning of the woods. ‘Maybe we’re massively overcomplicating things. Nine times out of ten it’s about money. Look at this place, it’s not exactly a palace.’
‘But you heard what Pierce said, he was always at work, this is just where he slept.’
‘Maybe, but he wouldn’t be the first smart person in history who dug himself into a deep hole and then got bought by someone offering him a ladder.’
Shepherd thought about it and shook his head. ‘I don’t think it can be money. Dr Kinderman never struck me as the material kind and he won the Nobel Prize nine years ago.’
‘You get paid for that?’
‘You get a cut of how much money the Nobel Foundation made that year. It’s usually something like a million – million and a half. If there’s more than one winner they share it. Dr Kinderman won it on his own.’
Franklin whistled through his teeth. ‘Man, I should have paid more attention in science class. Still I reckon I could easily burn through a million bucks in nine years. Maybe pick up some expensive tastes along the way and get myself in some situations that a blackmailer could get his hooks into.’ Franklin took a last long look at the meagre, anonymous home. ‘Come on, we’re wasting time here. Let’s head back to base, see what the techs have come up with. I might even buy you a burger on the way back – but that still don’t mean I trust you.’
14 (#ulink_e5c49d13-8e78-5a1a-a4d1-a9fe007bf158)
The cross-hairs followed Franklin until he left the kitchen and disappeared from sight. The finger in the nonslip glove relaxed on the trigger and an eye flicked up from the scope.
Carrie Dupree was in the trees, back from the house a little and low enough on the trunk not to be shaken too much by the wind. She had been in position since way before the storm hit, waiting for Dr Kinderman to come home. She watched the lights in the house go out and listened through the surf sound of the wind-tossed branches until she heard the front door bang shut then a car start up and drive away.
She probed the darkness, everything glowing a phosphorescent green in the night-sight. The house remained dark and silent.
Nothing moved.
She felt a slight vibration in the sleeve pocket of her camouflage jacket and swung the rifle round ninety degrees to a neighbouring tree. She could just make out the slim outline of Eli, the hand holding the phone that had sent the alert making a chopping sign across his throat.
Time to pull out.
Exfiltration was fast and practised. She capped the scope and powered it down, slung the rifle crossways over her back then dropped down from her tree. Eli joined her and stood sentry while she broke the rifle down further and bagged it so it could be stashed quickly in the trunk of the car once they made it back to the road, then they headed away through the woods. Occasionally, they came across the stacked branches and litter of a den built by the neighbourhood kids who slunk from their houses and went feral in these woods. There was no one around now, the late hour and weather had seen to that.
They drew close to the edge of the trees and Eli stopped. The dark yard they had passed through earlier was now bright with light spilling from several rooms in the house and a TV was blaring loudly somewhere inside. Too chancy to go back that way and risk being seen.
Eli pointed right and moved off, keeping the boundary lines of the properties in sight as they moved through the trees looking for another way out. They found a quiet house, no lights on, no movement inside, no car in the drive, and no security lights pointing out at the yard ready to light up anything that moved across it. There were no toys or trampolines in this garden, just a lawn surrounded by a wooden fence running all the way round the property. Carrie wondered if it had been put up to keep the neighbourhood kids out. Either way, it wouldn’t stop them.
She went first, springing over the fence and landing in a crouch, her hands feeling the cold, wet earth through her gloves. She heard the creak of the fence and squelch of Eli’s boots as he followed her, crouching down behind her, so near she could feel him. She savoured the delicious closeness, a momentary distraction that made her slow to react.
The dog appeared out of the dark in an explosion of noise and teeth. It launched itself straight at her, a large, angry animal, black as the night, all muscle and rage. She turned and raised her arm to protect her face from the claws and the bite, but the dog did not reach her.
Eli’s boot caught it just behind the head, turning the snarl into a yelp and sending it spinning away. It landed on its side, rolled and scrabbled to get to its feet but Eli was already on it, grabbing its rear legs and heaving it up, flipping it high with an arch of his back then down hard, smashing its head against the ground. Another yelp squeaked from it as the soft earth stunned it but did not knock it out. The dog clawed at the ground again, weaker now, its back legs kicking free from Eli’s grip, desperate to get away from the source of its pain.
Eli stepped forward, his trailing leg whipping through the air, connecting with the dog’s throat in a wet thud that snapped the dog’s head back. This time it did not yelp at all because its windpipe had been crushed. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, bloody and twitching as it fought for breath. Eli moved over it, raising his boot high and bringing it down hard, stamping the life out of it repeatedly in fury until Carrie laid a hand on him, pulling him away and past the house to where the streetlights swayed in the wind.
They vaulted the chain-link gate with the BEWARE OF THE DOG sign on it, keeping in the shadows of the trees until they made it back to the little league baseball park where they’d left the car, well away from the street lights.
Eli got in the passenger seat. Carrie drove, the heater on full, filling the car with dry air and noise, neither of them speaking until they were a couple of miles down the road.
‘You OK, baby?’
Eli didn’t reply.
Carrie let it slide and settled into the roar of the heater and the rumble of the road, worrying about what lay beneath his silence.
She had never seen him kill anything before tonight and there had been something magnificent and terrible about the way he had done it. Eli wasn’t physically imposing, if anything his height made him appear slimmer than he was, but there was something about the way he carried himself, something lean and dangerous, like an old-fashioned razor – and she knew where it came from.
Like all true lovers, part of their intimacy lay in the secrets they shared. Eli had confessed his in the mission military hospital where he’d been released after being locked up for seven months for nearly killing someone. One by one he had detailed, in a quiet expressionless voice, all the people he had killed in his relatively short life. It had started with the kid in Juvie who had tried to touch him somewhere he shouldn’t. He hadn’t expected the skinny, younger boy to fight back and had been caught off guard when he did, slipping on the tiles in the shower block and cracking his head. Eli told her how he had jumped on top of the boy, grabbed his hair and hammered his skull against the tiles until someone else found them and dragged him away. Eli’s tormentor had died in the infirmary two days later.
I just wanted to make sure he stayed down – he told her – but then I couldn’t stop.
This first homicide kept him institutionalized until he got a release into the Army where his country turned his aggression to good use. Carrie had listened as he listed all the people he had killed while in uniform, stroking his head and letting him talk them all out like he was exorcizing demons. Killing was his gift, but also his curse, and she knew his true secret, whispered to her alone in the quiet of a psychiatric cell he’d been sent to after killing a sergeant in a fight over a toothbrush:
I like it – the killing. I like it. It’s the only thing I ever been good at. But killing is a sin, so I must be damned to all hell for liking it so.
She looked across at him now, the muscle in his jaw working in that way it did when something was eating him up inside.
‘Hey baby, it’s OK, honey – you were only looking out for me,’ she told him. ‘Saving someone you love from hurt is a righteous thing to do. And some poor dumb animal don’t have no immortal soul.’
He shook his head. ‘Animal or a man,’ he said, ‘it’s all the same for me.’ He stared ahead, his face lit by the wash of oncoming headlights, his eyes focused on something darker than night.
She wanted to stop the car and hold him, stroke his head, but they needed to get away. Stopping a car by the side of the road in this weather was just inviting some do-gooder or a highway cop to come snooping, and they couldn’t afford to be seen.
‘You want to make the call? Tell Archangel what we saw at the house,’ she said. ‘I’ll look for a motel where we can rest up.’
Eli dug a phone from his pocket, the screen lighting up his face as he searched for the number. He switched it to loudspeaker and the sound of dialling and connecting chirruped in the enclosed space.
Carrie had never been concerned with killing or death the way Eli and many other men like him seemed to be. She had heard all the arguments against the deployment of women in theatres of war and thought most of it was just horseshit. The first time she had watched an Iraqi tank commander’s head snap back after she squeezed the trigger of her M24 she’d felt nothing, nothing at all. Never lost a single moment’s sleep about it neither. And it was the women who gave birth, and then watched their sons and husbands go off to war. Living on when everything you’d loved had been taken away, that was the really tough stuff. Killing was easy.
The ringing tone purred amid the rumble of the road. Someone picked up and Archangel’s voice joined them in the car.
‘Is it done?’
‘No,’ Eli said, ‘he wasn’t there, but someone else was. Cops of some sort I think.’
‘Did they see you?’
‘No.’
There was a pause on the line. ‘He can’t have gone far. Let me see what I can find out. Go somewhere safe and wait for my call, until then God bless and keep you both.’
Then the phone went dead.
II (#ulink_d3bca9d5-545f-5ef1-894c-089ca4a4692c)
Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy … for the time is at hand.
Revelation 1:3
15 (#ulink_a5b34468-993a-5044-9a85-0b571acee63f)
EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER
Badiyat Al-Sham – Syrian Desert
Northwestern Iraq
Liv woke just as dawn was starting to bleed into the eastern sky. She was lying on the ground next to the grave of the Ghost, her head full of strange symbols and the sky full of fading stars.
She had been dreaming she was back in her old apartment, watering the hundreds of plants that lined the walls. She had grown plants since she was small, squeezed between her father and her brother as they potted and seeded like other kids baked cakes with their moms. It was her dad’s way of spending time with his kids and getting them to help out with his gardening business. He taught them the names of everything, though he also let her make up some to keep her amused. Some of them had stuck. To this day she still called Physillis an orange eyeball tree.
She opened her eyes and the loamy smell of the earth escaped from her dream and drifted across the desert. It took her a few moments to recall where she was as she hung for some blissful heartbeats suspended between the past and the present before she remembered. The apartment was gone, incinerated along with everything in it by someone who had been looking for her. Her father was dead, so was her brother – and Gabriel was gone. It all struck her like a fresh loss, so hard that she just wanted to curl up again, go back to sleep and escape into the bliss of her dream.
Then she heard the noise, like the soft hiss of a huge snake.
Instinctively she rolled away from it, right across the grave, coming to rest so she was staring across the stone at the source of the sound.
Tariq was curled up and sleeping on the ground nearby, his AK47 cradled in his arms, his mouth forming words that escaped as sibilant whispers from his dream.
– Saa’so Ishtar – Saa’so Ishtar –
She watched him twitching in his sleep, whispering the words over and over until the lightening sky woke him too.
‘What is Ishtar?’ She fired the question at him while he was still blinking awake. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands then looked over at her, his forehead creased in a question. ‘You were saying it over and over in your sleep – what is it?’
‘Ishtar is a goddess,’ he said, pushing himself up and automatically checking his rifle for sand, ‘an ancient goddess from the time when all these lands were green. She was the goddess of fertility, and love, and war. It was she who made everything grow and gave names to every living thing.’
Liv remembered her dream and the memory of naming plants by her father’s side. ‘I heard people calling me that – amongst other things.’
Tariq unwrapped the keffiyeh from around his neck, shook it out and carefully laid it on the ground. ‘There is an old tale,’ he said, as well-practised hands removed the magazine from his rifle, ejected a shell from the breach then began taking it to pieces. ‘It is a nomad tale from the ancient times. It tells how Ishtar was tricked by jealous men and made prisoner in the caves of the underworld. She was kept in darkness, away from the sun, to make her weak. Her powers were stolen so that the men who had imprisoned her might live as gods, never ageing and never falling ill. And because of this the lands that had been nourished by her dried up and everything died.’ The top cover of the rifle and the recoil spring were carefully laid in turn on his keffiyeh.
‘But the story also tells that when time reaches the end of its long road Ishtar will escape from the darkness and return again, bringing back the water so the land may be reborn.’ He blew hard into the firing chamber, inspected inside then did the same with the other parts he had removed. ‘And you brought the water, that is why they call you Ishtar.’
