“Please,” he said, closing his eyes against the headache brightness and holding his hand up against the noise. “Could someone tell me what happened to Agent Franklin.”
“Nothing.” Shepherd opened his eyes at the familiar voice and looked past the white coats who were now checking his blood pressure and other vital signs. Franklin was leaning against the doorjamb, hands deep in his pockets, the smile back in place as if nothing had happened. “Well, I got blown up — there is that — but apart from that I’m pretty good. Better than you leastways, but then you did take more of the blast than me.” He turned to the medical personnel. “Now if you gentlemen are sure he ain’t gonna die in the next few minutes, might I trouble you to leave us in private for a moment or two?”
Shepherd watched the medics leave and close the door. What was left of his coat was hanging on the back. It looked like cattle had stampeded over it. The laptop case was propped against the wall next to it, untouched because he had left it behind in the Explorer. Franklin sat down by the bed. “Looks like you saved my life back there. Guess I owe you a drink.”
Shepherd swallowed, his mouth still parched from the dry air he’d breathed for so long in the cryo chamber. “I don’t drink.” He swallowed again, missing the look of mild disapproval that flitted across Franklin’s face. “What about Douglas?”
Franklin shook his head. “Missing. If he was anywhere in the facility then he’s dead for sure, but we haven’t found anything yet. The explosion tore everything to pieces. Place looks more like some kind of modern sculpture now than a building. My feeling is he wasn’t in there.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice low. Shepherd could hardly hear it through the whine in his ears. “That thing you saw on the computer before you dragged me out of there, I caught a glimpse of it myself, looked like some kind of countdown.”
Shepherd nodded. “I think it was primed to make the loading arm drop the helium tank once everyone was clear of the building. Was there a fire?”
“No, just an almighty bang.”
Shepherd remembered the crump and the cold, solid wave sweeping over them. “It was a pressure bomb. Helium doesn’t burn. It’s inert. It’s one of the reasons they like using it as a coolant in facilities like this — much less dangerous. But if it’s cooled to liquid form and you heat it up quickly, it expands in an explosive manner.”
He looked down at his battered body stretching away on the bed. At least he was in one piece. They were very lucky, considering. “I’m guessing the Webb telescope mirrors that were in the testing chamber…”
“Destroyed,” Franklin said and nodded. “I doubt you could find a piece big enough to comb your hair with.”
Shepherd closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “They killed James Webb,” he said out loud, as though mourning a friend.
“What?”
“The project, it’s dead. They won’t restart it again after this. The only reason it had managed to keep going for so long was because of existing commitments to the manufacturers. It was already billions over budget.” Something occurred to him and he sat up in bed, steadying himself as vertigo swam through his head. “We should issue warnings to all the major ground telescopes — the VLA in New Mexico, the Keck II in Hawaii; and not just here but globally. If there’s some kind of ‘end of days’ cult at work here, targeting anything that’s staring at the sky, then it won’t be restricted to space telescopes or confined to the U.S.”
“Cool your jets, rocket man, already been done. There’s a high-level alert out on all international security networks with copies of the postcards and details of the two attacks. All potential targets have been advised to beef up their security and report to us if they have received similar threats.”
Shepherd swung his legs off the bed and down to the floor. He still felt dizzy but it was getting better. “What about telescopes under construction? There’s a big one out in Arizona somewhere. I think the Europeans just started one somewhere in Chile. They could be targets too.”
“The alert went out to all national and private observatories, both operational and under construction. I may not have all your fancy degrees, Shepherd, but I’m not an idiot. Oh, by the way — who’s Melisa?” Shepherd felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “You were talking while you were out. Kept saying that name over and over, like you were calling for her, like maybe she was lost. She got something to do with your missing two years?”
Shepherd looked at Franklin’s chest rather than his eyes.
Maybe he should just tell him. But then he knew so little about Franklin. He had no idea if he would honor his word or just feed anything he told him straight back to personnel and end his career before it even got started. His eyes lit on the ID pinned to Franklin’s jacket, his name written in full beneath a stern photo: AGENT BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.
“What’s your real name?” he asked.
“What?”
“Your name. I’m assuming that when you became an agent you got baptized just like I did.” He looked up and finally met his gaze. “Or were your parents very patriotic?”
“Only people who know my real name are my family and a handful of people I trust.”
Shepherd smiled. “Give and take. You say you can’t trust me, but trust is a two-way street, Agent Franklin. How can I trust a man who won’t even tell me his real name?”
The door opened behind Franklin but neither of them turned to look.
“I got something,” Ellery said, oblivious of the atmosphere in the room. “Best if I show you in my office.” He pointed back over his shoulder.
“Be right there,” Franklin replied, the chair legs scraping as he stood up. “After you, Agent Shepherd.”
Shepherd stood and the room shifted a little but not enough to make him sit down again. He grabbed the laptop bag from the floor and his battered coat from behind the door. “No,” he said. “You first.”
31
Shepherd walked into Ellery’s office and smiled to himself when he spotted what was hanging on the wall. It was a photograph of the chief’s younger self, glossy and framed and staring out from beneath the sharp brim of his county cap at a small wooden crucifix hanging on the opposite side of the office. The only other attempt at decoration was a potted cactus on the desk that looked like it was shivering.
“Take a seat, gentlemen.” The man the photograph had become was two-finger pecking at a keyboard, his reading glasses forcing his head to tilt back and making him seem old. “After what you said about the situation at Goddard I got the guys to run some background and give me the headlines. I got them to pull up the professor’s e-mail correspondence for the last week, see if there was anything there that might be relevant.” He turned the monitor around so they could see it. An e-mail program filled the screen with an empty inbox. “Somebody, and I’m assuming it was the professor, wiped everything, going back months. I had them check his work files too and it’s the same story.”
“How many months exactly?”
“All the way back to May.”
Eight months.
“If you hand the hard drives over to us,” Franklin said, “our own tech guys might be able to retrieve some of the lost information.”
Ellery shrugged. “Whatever you need; guess this thing is federal now, so it’s your call.”
Shepherd felt sorry for him, this worn-down version of the proud young man in the photograph. He’d been so full of piss and vinegar when he’d met them off the plane, now he seemed powerless and defeated in his own office.