“A few months maybe.”
“And getting stronger.”
“Yeah.”
Shepherd nodded. “Like that feeling you get when you’re running late. A sick feeling almost — half physical and half an emotion — like you’re in the wrong place and need to be somewhere else.”
Franklin nodded. “You feel it too.”
“For the last few months and getting stronger.”
“Okay, so just for instance let’s assume everyone is experiencing the same thing, only Cooper comes to the conclusion that it’s all down to God’s impending judgment and decides he’s the man to try and do something about it. So he sends the cards, maybe even sends the letters.”
“Agreed, but it still doesn’t follow that it made Kinderman and Douglas effectively take hammers to several billion dollars’ worth of space hardware.”
The laptop beeped loudly, drawing Franklin’s attention. “What’s that?”
Shepherd felt blood rush to his face and was about to launch into a lie when he realized that the alert had sounded different from the previous ones. It had not come from his MPD search but from the ghost file. He opened it up and found a note from Smith.
Managed to recover a few more bits of data. Two terms pop up a few times: Göbekli Tepe and Home. Let me know if it’s astronomy jargon or not. Smith
“Anything useful?” Franklin asked.
“Maybe.” Shepherd dug out his phone, scrolled to the recent calls list and called a number. It clicked a few times then connected.
“Hubble control center.”
“Merriweather, it’s Shepherd. We found something else. Does Göbekli Tepe ring any bells?”
“How you spelling that?”
Shepherd told him.
“Never heard of it, where’s it come from?”
“We found it on Dr. Kinderman’s hard drive. You don’t think it’s something he might have been studying?”
“If he was, he never mentioned it to me.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Sorry I wasn’t more help. Oh, by the way, after we spoke last time I called a buddy of mine over at Keck in case he’d seen anything weird in Taurus. He said there’s nothing there that shouldn’t be.”
“Okay, thanks, Merriweather.”
“Anytime. How’s the manhunt going?”
“Still hunting.’
“Good luck with that. Anything I can do, I’m here all week.”
“Thanks.” Shepherd hung up. “According to our man on the inside it’s not a star or anything like that.” He leaned forward, his fingers fast-typing GOBEKLI TEPE into Google and hitting return, half expecting no response at all. What he got was almost two hundred thousand hits. The top one was a Wikipedia entry.
Göbekli Tepe Turkish: [
][2] (‘Potbelly’ or ‘Home Hill’ [3]) is a Neolithic (Stone Age) hilltop sanctuary erected at the top of a mountain ridge in the southeastern Anatolia region of Turkey. It is the oldest known wholly human-made religious structure and also the oldest observatory, believed to have been constructed by the proto-religious tribe known as the Mala [4] c. 11,000 years ago — predating its more famous British counterpart Stonehenge by around 8,000 years.
“Goddamn,” Franklin said, “another observatory.”
The site contains 20 round structures that were deliberately buried sometime in the 8th century BCE. Four have so far been excavated. Each has a diameter of between 10 and 30 meters (30 and 100 ft) and is made up of massive limestone pillars arranged in the exact shape of certain constellations.
Shepherd clicked on the images option and a selection of thumbnails cascaded down the screen. Most showed an especially large stone monolith capped by a smaller one to form the unmistakable shape of an elongated letter T.
The T
Shepherd checked back through the notes and there it was again on the first list CARBON had found on Kinderman’s drive. He returned to the Google search and clicked one of the images, opening it up large so the carvings on the main column were now visible. There was a snake, a scorpion and a bull on the side of it — constellation signs — but it was the caption beneath that caught Shepherd’s eye.
The main pillar, or Home Stone, is the largest monolith and also the only one that does not correspond to an existing star.
Home
Shepherd stared at the screen, his eyes flicking between the various open windows — the Home Stone, Cooper silently preaching from the live feed and gesturing out of the window at the flotilla of ships in the harbor, Smith’s last message with the word Home highlighted.
“Home,” Shepherd said. He sat up in his chair as the idea took hold. “That guy who picked us up from the airfield said the sailors were all saying the same thing — that they just needed to get home. So if there is some extraordinary event happening out there in space, some kind of game changer, maybe Dr. Kinderman and Professor Douglas felt it too.”
“But we checked Kinderman’s and Douglas’s homes already.”
“Did we though? If I say home what does it mean to you?”
“Where my family is, I guess.”
“Exactly. Only Kinderman doesn’t have any family and neither does Douglas. So home for them must mean something else. Probably the place where they were born.” Shepherd sat bolt upright in his chair.
“I think I know where Professor Douglas is,” he said.
53
Sergeant Beddoes drummed his gloved fingers on the wheel of the cruiser. He was parked behind a billboard on the verge of the main road into town, waiting for speeding cars, not that he expected any today.
The snow had taken everyone by surprise. They were used to it up here in the mountains, but not like this and not without warning. It had come down so fast that he hadn’t had time to put the snow chains on his car and twice now he’d nearly slid off the road. On top of that the world had gone crazy overnight. He’d been called out to a near riot at the Walmart on the edge of town after people started panic-buying everything in the store. He’d gone in to help break it up and seen people who’d known each other all their lives fighting over bottled water and canned food. He’d had to pull his gun at one point, but at least he hadn’t had to use it. He’d heard stories of full-scale riots in some of the bigger cities, police firing on civilians, law and order breaking down as the gas pumps ran dry and the stores ran out of food because the delivery trucks had stopped rolling. It had made him wonder if Reverend Parkes had been right and that judgment day was just around the corner.
For the last few months the reverend had preached nothing else, telling his small, devoted congregation how a new Tower of Babel had brought it all about and that demons were already walking the earth in the shape of men to cause chaos and inspire sin that they might be damned and claimed by Satan when the time came. He had told them to stockpile food, batteries and water — and he had been right. He had also talked to him in private, telling about the secret army that was in place, Christian soldiers drawn from every walk of life ready to fight the forces of evil when they came.
“We can all fight for the Lord,” the reverend had said, “each of us in our own small way.” And he had told Beddoes how he could help, using his position as a police officer to watch out for the signs and report them to those who would know their significance. Beddoes had nodded and agreed to do whatever the reverend thought he should, though he didn’t quite understand how he could be of much use.
Beddoes reached up and held the crucifix he kept on a chain round his neck along with the St. Christopher his mother had given him when he first qualified as a patrolman. “To keep you safe and bring you home,” she had said. He’d been thinking about home a lot lately, though home wasn’t the same now she had gone. The church filled some of the gap left by her passing, but not all of it. Nothing ever could.