He searched the laptop screen, looking for the application controlling the music. Most of it was filled with the video feed from the telescope. It was pointing toward the eastern sky, the computer-controlled motors adjusting it imperceptibly, keeping it fixed on a single bright star. Shepherd looked up and followed the line of the telescope. The constellation of Taurus was perfectly framed in the open hatch, showing that the bright star was Aldebaran, right eye of the charging bull.
Thoughts tumbled through Shepherd’s head. The telescope was pointing at exactly the same part of the sky Hubble had been probing before it was turned around and put out of action. He stared at the rectangle of night, half expecting to see something new there, growing larger and brighter as it hurtled toward earth. All he saw was a wisp of cloud and the usual stars twinkling in the black.
He looked back at the screen, Aldebaran burning bright in the center of the video feed. Below it was a small iTunes controller, the scrub bar showing that the track currently playing had almost finished. Shepherd used the knuckle of his little finger on the track pad to drag the arrow over to the play button so as not to leave fingerprints. The final stab of horns and strings bounced off the thin walls then faded away. He clicked the pause button and let out a long breath that sounded loud in the sudden silence.
He quit the application to make sure the music wouldn’t come back on and studied the screen. There was an e-mail inbox with some recent messages, the video feed from the telescope and another window filled with a sequence of changing numbers he assumed must have something to do with the telescope, though it didn’t look like any control program he’d seen before. Normally they displayed a sequence of coordinates, which changed by tiny degrees as the program tracked a designated object. This looked more like a measurement, though one that was getting smaller all the time. The phone buzzed in his hand, and he stabbed the button to silence it.
“Yes?”
“The local sheriff is on his way to you now, name of Brodie. He’s bringing everyone with a gun he can lay his hands on. They’re also going to keep their eyes open for that vehicle. You got anything else?”
“They’re looking for more than one person.”
“Okay, good, you know this how?”
“By the way he was killed. They nailed him to the wall and wrote ‘Heretic’ next to him in his own blood, so I’m guessing the religious angle just got a little more weight to it.”
“Jesus. Listen, Shepherd, I’m sorry about this. You shouldn’t be there on your own. It was… I should have—”
“It’s okay, really. There’s something else. You remember the countdown Merriweather told us about at Goddard? The one he saw on Dr. Kinderman’s computer just before the virus took Hubble out? It’s here too. It’s hooked up to a telescope pointing to the same piece of sky Hubble was exploring. Only the huge number he talked about isn’t so huge anymore. Whatever it is, whatever’s coming — I don’t think we have long to wait.”
74
The heater was on full, filling the station wagon with dry air and noise. Carrie was at the wheel, Eli sitting next to her.
He was quiet and she didn’t like the character of it. Part of her gift was that she could read the stillness in people the same way others could detect a strain in someone’s voice when they were lying. She was used to silence, had known a lot of it when she was growing up, so she could see things in it others could not.
The mission had gone as smoothly as she could have hoped. They had found the target exactly where Archangel said they would. He’d been alone, passive, almost resigned, as if he’d been expecting them. He barely showed surprise when they walked through the door of the observatory and caught him staring up to heaven, looking in vain for God. He was surprised when Eli punched him in the solar plexus to squeeze the air from his lungs though. He was more surprised when she slapped the duct tape on his mouth and Eli drove the first rail spike through his hand.
Make an example—Archangel had said—send a clear message.
Well, they’d certainly done that, though now in the shadow of Eli’s silence, she wished it could have been her who had carried out the kill. She was better at handling the consequences of death than Eli was, though he was much better at dealing it out. He was an artist when it came to that, she had seen it with the dog, with the woman and her sleeping little girl, and now back there in the cabin. It was as if all the self-doubt and awkwardness simply fell off him when he was doing what he did best, what he was born to do — God’s work. She didn’t think she could love him any more than she already did, but watching him like that, so confident and strong, had been awe inspiring, like watching God’s terrible beauty in motion. An avenging angel. An artist.
The car slipped a little on the road and she corrected the steering, easing her foot off the gas. She had been speeding up a little without realizing it, the engine racing in time with her humming heart.
A sign by the side of the road said SPEED LIMIT 25 as they approached a curve. She checked and they were barely doing fifteen. She could feel the tires sliding over the freezing road, the back threatening to drift sideways if she was too heavy on the steering or the brakes. They couldn’t afford any accidents now, not after everything had gone so perfectly; they just needed a clean exfiltration with no drama.
There could be no dogs this time. No sleeping little surprises in the back of a car. No mistakes.
75
Shepherd heard the engines first, growling low and distant through the forest as thick snow tires gnawed at the ground.
He was crouched over Douglas’s computer, using a pen to type his private e-mail address into an e-mail message. As soon as the cops arrived everything in the cabin would become part of a crime scene, something to be tagged and bagged and ultimately shipped back to Quantico for Agent Smith to crack open and explore. Anything useful would be fed back to him through the ghost file — assuming he was still part of the investigation — but he wanted to keep his eye on the countdown and had found the application file that was running it. He had also found something else potentially even more interesting, an e-mail message, sent less than an hour previously from a Hotmail account assigned to Mala210. There was nothing obvious to indicate who Mala210 might be except that Shepherd remembered 210 had been Kinderman’s network address at NASA. The message also got Shepherd’s antennae twitching:
The Mala star is almost in position. See you very soon.
Outside, the engine noise grew louder and the first hint of headlights flickered briefly on the wall above his head.
He finished typing, attached the countdown application to the Hotmail message then pressed send. He watched the activity wheel spin as the computer began slowly transmitting bits of data through the attached phone. The application was a decent-size file so it wasn’t going to be fast. He was sending it to an address linked to his phone so he would be able to check that it had gone through.
He moved over to the window and peered around the edge of the frame. He could see the bounce and wash of headlights angling up through the woods as vehicles made their way up the track, throwing shifting, tortured shadows through the frozen trees. He figured he had maybe a minute before they arrived.
On the screen the wheel was still spinning, the progress bar creeping toward 100 percent. He watched the last piece of the message leave the laptop and his phone shivered in his hand as it arrived. He got to work, quickly erasing the message from the sent log on the computer. It would still be in the hidden memory cache, but it would be a while before Smith found it and he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.