“It’s Shepherd.”
“I know.” He walked toward the front door but changed his mind and sat on the stairs instead. It was too cold outside and he couldn’t face leaving the house.
“The cops are here. They didn’t see the car on their way in and didn’t intercept anyone. I think the killers must be heading north into Tennessee.”
“I’ll make some calls. Spread the net.”
“I already got the local cops to call it through.”
“Well, I’ll fire a rocket down from Quantico too, make sure it sticks.” The loud and angry clink of dishes being rinsed in the sink sounded only a few feet away. He covered his ear with his free hand and felt his mind automatically snick back into the well-worn grooves of a moving investigation. “Okay, this is what’s going to happen. They won’t have the right resources locally to process the scene properly so I’m going to send a team out to you from Charlotte. You need to stay put until they get there, make sure those down-home cops don’t get all excited and contaminate the scene with cigarette butts and good intentions. They’re going to take a while to reach you so you’ll need to take charge until they do. I already put in an urgent search for any of Dr. Kinderman’s previous known addresses and got a hit on two that might be considered ‘home.’ There are armed units heading to both of them now. If Kinderman’s there we’ll get him.”
“Always assuming whoever killed Professor Douglas hasn’t gotten there first.”
“I doubt it. Both addresses are way up north and so far everything has taken place south of Washington. This feels like a very contained operation, one mobile unit and someone controlling them centrally. What’s the cell phone coverage like where you are?”
“I’m on top of a mountain, I’ve got five bars, but I don’t know about the rest of the area — why?”
Franklin stared at his daughter’s snow boots, lined up by the door where she had stepped out of them; one had toppled over. He had a flash of a smaller pair abandoned in exactly the same way maybe fifteen years earlier. He closed his eyes. The memories were too distracting. “You remember our little talk with the good reverend?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“You remember what I did just before we interviewed him?”
There was a pause on the line. Franklin could hear the wind through the trees where Shepherd was. It sounded cold. “You asked him to put his phone down on the table.”
“Then what?”
“You asked if you could smoke.”
“And when he said no I put my cigarettes down on the table next to his phone. There’s a little piece of equipment not covered in class called an Eavesdropper. It’s a new-generation bug that can read and duplicate a SIM card without the need to tamper with a phone. All you have to do is place it close enough to a target unit and leave it there for about a minute so it can pick up the mobile identification number when it checks in with the nearest cell mast. It then mirrors the phone activity and makes voice recordings of any calls. It’s got a four-gigabyte chip built in so it can store around fifty hours of audio. The one drawback is that it only works in close physical proximity to the target phone.”
“Which is why you stashed your pack of cigarettes in that crack in the wall.”
“Exactly. So I’m thinking if there’s good phone reception where you are the killers may already have called in a status update to their controller. You hang tight, Shepherd. I’ll let you know how it shakes out.”
He hung up and hit the zero key to speed-dial Quantico. From the kitchen all he could hear now was silence. He pictured Marie and Sinead sitting at the breakfast bar, listening to him talk in the hallway. It made him feel crummy. But he couldn’t leave Shepherd hanging in the wind. He was the only reason he was here at all. He’d explain that to them, as soon as he finished this call.
The phone connected and Franklin navigated his way through the various departments: authorizing and mobilizing a crime scene detail to hit the road and head to Cherokee; issuing an urgent look out for a yellow or white station wagon with police departments in three states; and ultimately getting patched through to the surveillance control room where, after confirmation of his agent ID number and the investigation code, he was told by the operator that the Eavesdropper unit assigned to him had logged its last call six minutes earlier. Franklin listened to the crackle of the line and the solid silence in his house while the operator sent a code that bounced off a communications satellite in space and beamed a signal back through the snow clouds and down to the Eavesdropper wedged between the mailbox and the outside wall of the Church of Christ’s Salvation in Charleston.
The circuit responded to the code and switched from a receiver to a transmitter, using the cell phone network to send an encoded stream of information back to the operator who then decoded it and fed it straight down the line to Franklin.
Franklin kept his eyes closed as he listened to the last recorded conversation the device had picked up. It was between Cooper and two unidentified voices — a man and a woman. He registered the key phrases in the short exchange:
… The professor is dead… just passed into Tennessee… Yeah, we got pictures…
Then Cooper ended the call with words that hammered the lid shut on his own coffin.
… I just found out where Dr. Kinderman is…
Franklin cut the connection and stared down at his daughter’s empty boots. Whatever hope he had been clinging to that he might still be able to deal with this by phone had just flown. Cooper needed to be taken down quickly and he couldn’t leave it to Charleston’s finest.
He dug around in his pocket, found the card Jackson had given him in the police station and started punching his number into his phone. He hit the dial button and became aware of Marie and Sinead framed in the kitchen door. They were both looking at him, their arms folded across their fronts, each a mirror of the other’s disapproval.
“I’ve got to do this one thing,” he said, holding up his phone, “just this one thing in Charleston then I’ll be back, I promise.” He heard the phone connect and start ringing. By the look on Marie’s face she heard it too.
“It’s always just one more thing,” she said. Then she turned and walked into the kitchen.
Sinead stayed where she was. “Just one thing?” she said.
“Literally this one thing, I promise you, hand on heart.”
She nodded but didn’t smile, then turned and followed her mother into the kitchen as Jackson answered. Franklin clamped the phone to his ear, closing his eyes to shut out all the things he didn’t want to leave. “I need your help,” he said, keeping his voice low. “But first I need to get into Charleston as fast as possible, preferably avoiding the parking lot that is the I-26.”
80
“He asked about me?” Gabriel was propped up in bed looking at Athanasius and Thomas, their faces serious after their strange meeting with Malachi.
“Yes, and his questions appeared to have been prompted by whatever he had just read on the Starmap. He asked if you had ridden to the Citadel out of the wilderness.”
“You think he knows what the symbols mean?”
“Undoubtedly,” Thomas replied. “Malachi knows more about early writing than any other man alive. If there is anything in the library that will help decipher this text then it will already be in his head. He knows exactly what it says.”
“So how do we get him to tell us?”