The Tower: Part Three. Simon Toyne

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СКАЧАТЬ pointing out at who knew what, looking like she envied the smoke for being able to drift away and escape. They were aged beyond their years: she from the cigarettes she could never give up, he from a life of worn-down disappointment.

      Shepherd got his brains from his dad who had burned through books as fast as his mother went through Virginia Slims. His father always worked several jobs at once and one of them was always a night-watchman position, so he could do his rounds and then read in solitude and quiet. When his heart gave out, a couple of months after his mother’s lungs had done the same, it was discovered that he had been smart enough to hide some of his income from his wife and stick it in policies in his son’s name. The will made his aunt his guardian and stipulated that all of the money – bar a small lump sum for his aunt – was to be held in trust and used only to pay for his education. Furious perhaps at the sum her brother had managed to save and the relatively small amount left to her, the aunt sent him – the son of her atheist brother – to the strictest religious institution she could find, an overly-fancy boarding school, which took him away from what blood relatives remained and introduced him to a new kind of loneliness.

      There is something particularly cruel about tossing a poor boy into a moneyed environment. They called him ‘The Nigger’, though he was as white as they were – which told you as much about them and their world as it did about him and his situation.

      There had been nothing nurturing about St Matthew the Apostle: no kindly headmaster who saw and encouraged his potential; no tight-knit group of friends looking out for one another and bound together by their otherness. He had been on his own from the moment he stepped through the grand, arched doors.

      He had withdrawn into his studies, the one area where he could take them on: in maths and science in particular it didn’t matter how much money your daddy had, only whether you got the questions right. There was also much less chance of being cornered and beasted in the study rooms because there was – almost always – a tutor present. But for all this misery, there was one good thing that had come out of St Matthew’s. It was here that he had discovered and fallen in love with the stars.

      In the summer he would crawl out onto the flat lead roof of the dormitory building, away from the ‘night patrols’ of his tormentors, and sleep there instead. Lying with his back against the soft metal, still warm from the heat of the sun he would gaze up at the speckled dark, picking out patterns in the distant points of light. Study time from then on had new material to fill it. When the classwork was done he scoured the library for books on astronomy and devoured their contents, putting names to the patterns until he could lie on the cooling roof, look up at the night sky and name it all. That had felt something like home to him: warm and safe and far away from people, taking comfort in objects that were millions of light years away while the trapped heat of the nearest star warmed him in the cold night.

      The true extent of his aunt’s revenge only became apparent when he started looking at colleges. It was then that he discovered the fees at the hateful school she had chosen for him had been so high he had already burned through all the money that should have seen him through college and beyond. This was when he found NASA’s Graduate Program.

      College was the first time he’d encountered a tribe of people who didn’t all seem to hate him. This had felt like home, for a while – though whenever the holidays came around and everyone went back to their real homes he was reminded of how temporary it all was. He started volunteering for every graduate work placement going just to keep himself busy in the quiet times until NASA became a sort of home too, with its womb-like control centres and extended family of obsessives.

      But in truth he had only ever experienced what he imagined home was supposed to feel like just once in his life. And the truly surprising thing was, it turned out not to be a place at all. He pictured her now – Melisa. Meeting her had been like coming home. Only with her had he ever felt able to let his carefully constructed defences down. Only with Melisa could he truly be himself, with no apology and no pretence. She made him feel better as a person than he knew he really was. And then she had gone.

      The C-130 rose up into a cloudbank and the shaking increased as furious turbulence took hold of the tin-can plane. Shepherd’s eyes opened in instinctive alarm. Franklin was smiling straight back at him. The smile broke and his lips moved, the scratchy sound of his voice cutting through the howl of the engines and rumbling through the comms into his head. ‘Anytime you want to share your confession with me, Agent Shepherd, I’ll be more’n happy to listen.’

      Shepherd looked away.

       God damn if he wasn’t a mind-reader too.

      He hugged the laptop tighter as the bucking plane continued to try everything it could to jerk it free. Right now it was the most precious thing in his life, that and the opportunity fate had given him. He had thought it would take months even years before he would get proper access to the vast resource that was the FBI Missing Persons File. So when Agent Smith had handed him the field unit and set him up with a temporary Bureau user ID it was like getting the keys to the kingdom. Every single law enforcement agency worth a damn, domestic and foreign, was linked in on some level to the FBI’s MPD database. In terms of looking for someone who had slipped off the map it was like going from pinning photocopied sheets to a community notice board, to sticking a full-page ad on the front cover of every newspaper in the Western world.

      But he would have to be very careful: usage was strictly monitored. He would have to try and work his way around the monitoring software if he wanted to avoid getting canned from the Bureau before he had barely stepped through the door. And abusing Agency privileges and access was also a felony. But there was another problem. The level of clearance he had been given by Smith was directly linked to the urgency and importance of the investigation he had been assigned to. The moment he was taken off it, all those privileges would be removed. His window of opportunity was very small and closing fast. It might take him years to regain this sort of clearance, by which time Melisa’s trail would be colder still. He felt closer to her now, bouncing around in this cloud, than he had in long months.

      He turned his head to the front of the plane in time to see the nose break through the clouds revealing the stars in the clear night. The turbulence melted away almost instantly and his arms relaxed around the laptop – but only a little.

      He could sense that Franklin was still smiling at him but he did not look in his direction. He might tell him the story of his lost years one day, but not yet. Not until he had learned the ending for himself. Until then, he would do his level best to stay on the investigation for as long as he could. So he closed his eyes and sifted through what he knew, trying to work out the links between a missing Nobel laureate, nearly a year’s worth of lost space data and something that had happened in the city of Ruin eight months earlier.

       24

      EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

       Gabriel slipped across the Orontes River marking the border between Syria and Turkey just after midnight on the fifth day. He had walked his horse for much of the way, resting it during the heat of the days and wary of the dry dust kicked up by galloping hooves. Several times he had spotted patrols in the distance and pulled the horse to the ground, lying beside it until they had passed, shivering despite the desert heat and the fever that rose and fell inside him like lava.

       During the nights he had shivered from real cold as the chill of space settled back on the earth, the crackle and boom of distant battles showing him where the civil war raged so he could steer a course around it. He rode harder then, his way lit only by the stars and his desire to keep going.

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