The phone lay next to her on the worn bedspread. She could never sleep when she was waiting for new orders. It was a limbo state she had never relaxed into, something that came with command. The grunts could always sleep like babies, but the officers and NCOs were like parents, with all the responsibility and worry that came with that.
Outside, the rain had settled into a steady drumming, like the noise Humvee tires made over a decent blacktop. The only other sound came from an antique TV set bolted high on a wall. When they had first come into the room and switched it on it had been tuned to a porno channel, the unmistakable fake panting making her fumble for a button to cut the sound or change the channel. She hadn’t been quick enough. The screen had briefly flashed pink with the urgency of flesh before she managed to turn it off. Neither of them mentioned what they had seen, though she knew it had chimed with something unspoken in both of them. The TV was now tuned to a local news station, the volume on low, in case anything came up that might be relevant or useful.
She glanced at Eli’s sleeping form, feeling the frustration that, even though they were alone in this seedy motel room with the caved-in mattresses whispering of all the things they denied themselves, their still unfulfilled mission was keeping them apart. She just wanted it to be over so they could get married and finally be together, to face the coming judgment as man and wife, blessed in the eyes of God.
Eli let out a small sound, like a frightened animal. Eight times out of ten he would jolt himself awake, staring around for the horrors that came out to play when he slept. When she’d first met him in the mission hospital outside Kandahar, he couldn’t sleep at all without screaming himself awake, so this was an improvement. He was getting better and it was she who was making him so. If she had enough time she would heal him completely, but she wasn’t sure how much time they had left.
The phone rang and she pounced on it, rising from the bed and moving away to the farthest corner of the room.
“Hello.” She faced the wall and kept her voice low so as not to wake Eli.
“You were right about the people you saw,” Archangel’s voice hummed in the earpiece. “They were FBI.”
Carrie let this sink in. It would make their job harder, but not impossible. They just needed to find Kinderman before the feds did, and Archangel would help with that. She was still in awe of the reach of the network she was only one tiny part of. Archangel had contacts like you wouldn’t believe. She turned and saw Eli, his eyes open now and looking at her with the glassy mix of fear and suspicion he often carried with him from his dreams. She smiled and blew him a silent kiss. “You want us to keep our ear to the ground, see what we can find out?”
“No. I want you to get a few hours’ sleep and then pull out. The Lord has many enemies and the Devil never sleeps. But I have a new target for you, a new sacrifice to make, one just as important as the one that got away.” Carrie leaned forward, anxious to hear what he had to say, a calmness flowing through her like it always did when she finally got a new mission. “How quickly do you think you can get to the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama?”
23
The C-130 bumped and lurched as the wheels lifted from the tarmac of Turner’s Field. Shepherd was strapped tight into a jump seat facing inward in the paratrooper position, the sound of the twin props filling his ears and vibrating through his entire body as they struggled to grab hold of the slippery air.
They were in what was known as a Bubird, part of the Bureau’s varied and colorful fleet of mostly confiscated aircraft. The C-130 was generally used for transport rather than passengers, but this had happened to be the one gassed up and ready to go when Franklin put in the call. It had previously belonged to a Mexican drug cartel, the pilot had cheerfully told Shepherd as they were prepping for takeoff. The Mexicans had obviously stripped the interior to the bare fuselage in order to cram in as much product as possible. So far no one had deemed it necessary to put any of those little comforts back in again — things like soundproofing or heating or padding for the sharp, metal-edged seats that were already cutting off the circulation below his knees. He adjusted his position in a vain attempt to get more comfortable, hugging to his chest the field laptop Agent Smith had given him and wrapping the shoulder strap around his hand for extra security.
They started to bank to starboard, into the weather over the Chesapeake Bay, and the plane shook in protest, dipping and yawing as the wind batted it around like a kid’s toy.
Franklin was strapped into an identical chair directly opposite. He had the visor down on his flight helmet, so Shepherd couldn’t tell whether he was looking at him or not. Shepherd felt pretty sure Franklin would can him from the investigation at the first opportunity and send him straight back to Quantico, exhausted and way behind on his work. At least it was nearly Christmas, so he could catch up over the break when everyone else went home.
Home
He closed his eyes and did his best to zone out of the hellish flight, remembering back to a time when the word home had almost meant something to him. His folks were already old when they had him — a mistake, his aunt had said, but then she said a lot of mean things. They died within months of each other when he was five years old. What little he could still remember of them played out like scratchy fragments of an old newsreeclass="underline" his father, cowed and frail, sitting alone at the dinner table, his weak eyes magnified behind foggy glasses, always fixed on an open book in front of him; his mother, staring out of the kitchen window, a slender cigarette 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 principal 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 math 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 beaten up 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.