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 favored 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 center of the room, taking in its incredible ordinariness. It felt like Kinderman might have just stepped out for a late dinner and would 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 papers 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 mug shot of a handsome man in his early thirties with short dark hair and blue eyes and a pale, blond 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 meager, 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
The crosshairs 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 around ninety degrees to a neighboring 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.