She started to walk back toward the compound, focusing on the nearest building. If she could just get out of the sun she would be fine. She concentrated on her breathing, in through the nose and out through the mouth, placing one foot in front of the other to close the distance to the nearest door. She had made it about halfway when the earth started to shift beneath her feet. She fixed her eyes on the dark rectangle of the door but it seemed to be getting farther away.
She was stumbling now, the ground moving in waves beneath her feet, something close to panic rising inside her. Everything was mixing together, the heat, her exhaustion, the half-glimpsed truths and fragments of ancient warnings that led her to the edge of knowing what was to come without ever revealing what it was. And then there was Gabriel, always Gabriel — gone with hardly a word save for the note she carried with her like a spell.
…Nothing is easy, but leaving you is the
hardest thing I have ever done…
…keep yourself safe — until I find you again…
But when would he return so she could finally rest? Clinging to the memory of him like this was a form of grief.
At last her hand touched the metal skin of the door and the burning heat of it shocked her back to her senses. She caught a whiff of something acrid, citrus, while her head thumped, the blood continued to drain and her mind pulsed through the percussive beat of repeated thoughts:
Gabriel
The Citadel
The symbol for contagion
The arrival of the doctors
The door gave and she almost fell to the floor as it opened. A wave of warm air billowed out, the air-conditioning not yet turned on because everyone was working outside and fuel was too valuable to waste. It carried the same smell of lemons with it, thick and sweet, making her feel nauseous again. She leaned against the wall, sliding forward and along it, using it for support as the ground beneath her continued to shift and roll. She just needed to find a bed and lie down for a while until the world stopped spinning.
Another door opened at the end of the corridor and Eric appeared, leading the doctors on a tour through the building. They looked up at her and she saw concern cloud their faces. Then her knees gave way and she crumpled to the ground. She was unconscious before she hit the floor.
85
Shepherd finally got away from the crime scene shortly after midnight. He headed north along the same road the killers had escaped on and then east toward Charlotte. When he started the drive he was convinced that he was heading to the nearest field office to report in and await new orders, but at the back of his mind he knew there was something else in Charlotte that would offer him a different choice.
Exhaustion hit him hard after a couple of hours. Conditions had been pretty bad most of the way, snow and ice and dark unfamiliar roads. Once he’d dropped down from the higher ground the weather improved, or at least became good enough that he wasn’t scared of getting snowed in, so he pulled into a rest stop and closed his eyes for a few minutes. He awoke with a start when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked the time and realized he’d been asleep for nearly three hours. The car had turned into an icebox with frost on the inside of the windows where moisture from his breath had frozen. He dug his phone from his pocket and discovered he had mail. He opened the app and the temperature dropped a little more. It was from Kinderman.
You seem to know a lot, Agent Shepherd, and I appreciate your concern.
If you are truly knowledgeable then you will know where to find me. I’m just standing on a hill looking to the east for new stars in old friends, as those like us have done since the beginning of time.
Shepherd stared at the message, trying to make sense of it through the fog of his sleepy brain. He reread it, his fatigue making him irritable because he was having to deal with this riddle in the middle of the frozen night. Why couldn’t Kinderman just tell him where he was?
Twice he hit reply and started composing a message to that effect, but both times he deleted it, instinctively knowing that he would not get another response. In the end, he slipped the phone back in his pocket and drove the rest of the way to Charlotte thinking it over with the heater on full, sipping black coffee from a Big Gulp cup he’d bought at a truck stop.
It was almost six in the morning when he hit the outskirts of Charlotte and parked next to a McDonald’s, retrieved the Bureau laptop from the passenger foot well and hooked on to the free WiFi that was thankfully still working. From where he sat he could see downtown lying dark before him, the result of a power outage that had sunk half the city into blackness. The only light was coming from a few cars that sketched the lines of unseen streets and a few flickering orange patches where fires burned. It was terrifying how quickly the ordered world had started to unravel. Maybe this would be how it ended, not with some cosmic collision or the wrath of some vengeful god but with society quietly imploding on itself as everyone just headed home and stayed there, all deliveries ending, all crops lying ungathered in fields, the major utilities switching themselves off one by one as no one turned up to work anymore. Maybe no one would actually care, or even remember how things used to be.
He opened the laptop to check in on whatever Agent Smith had dredged up in the night and was greeted by the pinging sound that made his heart tumble in his chest and that he was rapidly growing to hate. The new search he had put in place for Melisa had come back with two results.
The first hit was her name on an old passenger manifest out of Dulles International Airport in Washington. She had flown out of the country eight years ago on a Cyprus-Turkish airliner heading for a place called Gaziantep. He opened a browser and looked it up. The Wikipedia entry told him it was a city in southeast Turkey. He clicked on the map embedded in the article. Just to the northwest of Gaziantep, in the foothills of the Taurus mountains, was another city, marked by a T-shaped cross: Ruin — the place Melisa had listed as her birthplace. She had been going home.
The second result was more recent. It was an application for a temporary work visa dated only a year ago. She had been trying to come back to the States but her application had been denied. He noticed the name on the form was Erroll. Maybe she never married, or maybe had but had kept her name.
He looked at the two results, two more precious pieces of evidence of her continued existence, and felt an almost physical yearning to be with her. He pulled his phone from his pocket. The countdown application was now installed on it and running as his wallpaper. He watched the numbers steadily declining toward zero.
All the time he had lost. How much time was left?
Kinderman’s message was still open and he reread it, hating him now for playing games when so much was at stake. It was like a taunt—“If you’re smart enough then come and get me”—a clever test to find out what he knew. Well, Professor Douglas had been standing on a hill, staring up at the stars and look where that had gotten him. Maybe Kinderman had a similar place and that’s where he was now, drawn there by the homing instinct. But Franklin had run checks on Kinderman’s background and nothing like that had shown up.