His eyes lit on a PDF file attached to the bottom of the document and his finger clicked on it before his mind had a chance to reconsider. A new window opened containing three sets of mug shots and a head-and-shoulders shot of a woman with her eyes closed, lying on an autopsy table. Despite the somber and tragic image, Shepherd nearly wept with relief.
Whoever this Melisa was, she wasn’t his.
He watched the hourglass icon spin slowly as sophisticated algorithms continued the search.
Don’t find her here among the dead—he thought—not my Melisa.
But the ping rang out again, mocking his silent prayer, just as Franklin burst back into the room carrying two mugs of coffee.
52
“Goddamned reverend pulled a fast one,” Franklin said, slopping the coffee on the metal-topped table in his haste to put the mugs down.
Shepherd was barely listening, his hands working fast, heart pounding as he closed all the windows on the screen. There was no time to check out the new search result with Franklin in the room.
“Cooper filmed our interview and leaked it to CNN. Apparently the world just saw us confirm the attacks on Hubble and James Webb.”
Shepherd looked up, his mind racing ahead, wondering what this would mean for the investigation and for them. It was bad. Really bad. Because of this mistake they would undoubtedly be taken off the case, which meant he stood to lose all the access he had only just started to explore — his lifeline to Melisa. That snake of a reverend had ruined everything. He must have been right on the phone to the news networks the moment they had stepped out of the studio.
He dug into his pocket and fished out the key ring Franklin had thrown at Cooper in the studio as he realized the network news wouldn’t be the only place the interview would be running. He opened a new window and copied in the Web address printed on the key ring.
The home page was as slick and professional as the man it was built to promote. Shepherd found a media section in the drop-down menus and clicked on a link to a live stream of the TV show.
The video buffered fast and Shepherd’s jaw tightened when he saw himself sitting on the couch next to Franklin, like guests on a talk show. The clip had been cut to make it look as though Cooper was interviewing them. It showed the moment when he surprised them with the breaking news stories on Twitter about Hubble and the explosion at Marshall, demanding to know if the stories were true, then a close-up of Shepherd’s face as he said, “Yes.” It cut back to Cooper live in the studio.
Now you have seen how agents of the government came to this house of God to try and silence me and intimidate me, because they know the truth I speak. They would rather you remained blind and in darkness than have your eyes opened to what is coming. For it is their arrogance that has brought these things to pass, it is the towers they have sought to build in the form of these telescopes in space, reaching up to try and glimpse the face of God that has triggered His wrath. And they fear your judgment and your rightful anger if you were to learn of this truth. But the spirit is strong in me. And when they came to silence me I spoke loud with the voice of the Lord, as I speak to you now.
Turn on the news and see the truth of what is happening. See how the world is quaking and readying itself for the time that is told in the great book of Revelation of how the righteous shall be gathered and the sinners shall be cast into the pit of hell. And be in no doubt that the time of His reckoning is close, for the signs are all around.
Franklin’s phone rang and he took the call. On-screen Cooper was walking over to the window again and pointing out at all the ships in the harbor.
See how the great armies of men are trembling before His approach and the great ships of all nations are returning to their ports, as was predicted by St. John.
“Thanks,” Franklin said, ending the conversation.
“That was Ellery. They checked out Douglas’s home. Found nothing — big surprise. So now we have two suspects to chase down.” He drained his coffee, allowing himself a smile as he set his mug back down. “Sounds like Ellery was having the worst day of his life, he’s now got every crazy conspiracy theorist in the country converging on Marshall convinced that the destruction of Hubble and Webb, along with everything else that’s going on, is the first step of some kind of alien invasion.”
Shepherd picked up his coffee and stared at his reflection in it. “Maybe they’re right.”
“Seriously?”
“Why not — I find it as easy to swallow as the idea that Dr. Kinderman and Professor Douglas did it.”
“That’s because you’re letting personal sentiment cloud your judgment. You can’t ignore the evidence.”
“Okay, so let’s look at the evidence, all of it and not just what happened at Marshall and Goddard. What is making all the ships sail home, or snow fall in Miami, or birds fly to their nesting grounds out of season? What’s making so many people get in their cars and start driving?”
“You think it’s aliens?”
“Okay maybe not aliens but something extraterrestrial in the literal sense of the word — something outside the earth. Something that’s affecting everybody. Again, let’s stick to the evidence. We know for a fact that the rhythms of life are directly affected by cosmic phenomena, right? And by that I’m not talking about Capricorn rising and Leo on the cusp or any of that crap, I’m talking birds migrating using the magnetic fields of the earth to navigate and the tides linked directly to the phases of the moon.”
Franklin nodded. “All right, I’m listening. What do you think might be causing it — and please don’t say aliens.”
“Okay, so while I was working at NASA I realized that the things that get reported are only a tiny fraction of what actually gets discovered. NASA is very prickly about its standing in the scientific community and is very careful to keep a lid on anything that might attract the wrong kind of headlines. A few years back, while I was working there, Hubble picked up the trail of some immense gravity wash. It was never reported because no one could work out what had caused it, but one of the theories was that it might have been created by a planet traveling on an erratic, millennia-long orbit that would make it vanish for thousands of years before it swung back to sweep right through our solar system. There are plenty of records of events like it in ancient civilizations, suggesting that people may have witnessed similar flybys thousands of years ago. With the intersection of orbits and the combined gravity pulls of massive celestial objects, a collision would not be out of the question. It would be cataclysmic, the end of everything, the end of days — just like Kinderman wrote in his diary. So perhaps he and Professor Douglas did see something coming, like a meteor or this huge planet the ancient prophets warned us about. And maybe that’s why the whole world has gone nuts.”
“Then why not go public with it?”
Shepherd shook his head. “I don’t know.” He pointed at Cooper, still preaching from the live feed. “And I can’t work out how he fits into all this either.”
“Maybe he doesn’t,” Franklin said. “Perhaps the whole Tower of Babel, hell and damnation thing is just a coincidence, another symptom of whatever’s going on.” He took a breath and blew it out in a long stream. “Okay, confession time. This… what you’re describing, this feeling or whatever it is that’s making people behave strangely — I feel it too.”
“Since when?”