“And does the smell also make you feel a little sick?”
“A little.” She felt panicky. “What is it? Am I having a brain hemorrhage or something? I read somewhere that people smell things before having a stroke.”
“No, no — it’s nothing like that. What you’re smelling is just some disinfectant we brought with us that they’re now using to swab out the canteen. It’s got some lemon scent in it, not much — I can’t really smell it at all. But you smelled it from way off, when you were still outside the building.”
Liv’s heart continued to race at the prospect of whatever was wrong with her.
“There are many things that can cause hyperosmia,” he said in a gentle way that wasn’t helping. “That’s just a fancy word for an enhanced sense of smell. And your blood tests confirm that the reason for yours is very common.”
Liv relaxed a fraction. At least whatever she had wasn’t exotic and therefore more likely to be treatable. “What do I have?”
He smiled and the skin crinkled around his eyes. “It’s not so much what you have as what you’re going to have. You’re pregnant, Miss Adamsen. You’re going to have a baby.”
VI
And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?
88
Shepherd parked the Durango in long-term parking and headed for the ticket office.
Charlotte/Douglas International Airport was the usual cavernous barn of a building and was in total chaos when Shepherd stepped through the door. There were long lines snaking away from every ticket desk and the whole building vibrated with noise and stress. A lot of it was coming from the large crowds of people gathered around the TV sets dotted through the waiting lounges and Shepherd felt sick when he saw what was on them.
It was the countdown Shepherd had seen in Douglas’s cabin, the same one that was installed on his own phone, ticking down now on every screen. A caption beneath it read COUNTDOWN TO THE END OF DAYS? A somber news anchor was talking to the camera as a montage of images played out behind him — more riots, more roads clogged with migrating people, more cities dark and burning, and not just here but in major cities all over the world as the slow creep of panic spread. The picture cut to the smoldering wreck of the building at Marshall, then a heavily censored photo of Professor Douglas flashed up, hanging from the wall of his cabin, the word Heretic, highlighted on the wall next to him and a new caption flashed up: WHAT DID THEY SEE?
Shepherd drifted over to one of the ticket desks, avoiding eye contact with all the waiting passengers as he cut in at the head of the line.
What did they see indeed…
“You’ll have to wait in line, sir.” The man behind the counter was rail thin and had the thickest eyebrows Shepherd had ever seen on someone under the age of fifty.
Shepherd flashed his ID. “Government business.”
The skinny guy looked up. The eyebrows underlined the deep furrows in his forehead, reflecting the day he was having. “Okay, let me just deal with this gentleman and I’ll be right with you.”
Shepherd waited while the man collected his boarding pass then wheeled his carry-on bag away into the crowd.
“Now, sir, where do you need to go?”
“I need the first connecting flight to a place called Gaziantep. It’s in southern Turkey.”
The eyebrows shot up and his fingers drummed across the keyboard. “Best I can do is an indirect flight via Istanbul. Good news is, it leaves in just over an hour.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
“You have travel vouchers?”
Shepherd felt the blood rise to his cheeks. “No. I’ll pay for it on a card.”
Usually federal agents traveling on commercial flights had prepaid tickets or documents that entitled them to fly. “Checking anything into the hold, sir?”
Shepherd shook his head. The eyebrows shot up again in surprise. Shepherd hoped this guy never played poker for money.
The clerk finished tapping. “That will be one thousand two hundred and fifty-eight dollars, sir.”
Something twisted in Shepherd’s stomach as he handed over the card. It was more than he had anticipated and he wasn’t sure if it would exceed his limit. The guy with the eyebrows swiped the card and stared at the ticket machine for what seemed like an eternity before it chattered to life and spat out a receipt. Shepherd retrieved his card.
“Boarding has already started, gate number twenty-two. Have a nice day.”
Shepherd took his passport and boarding pass and moved quickly away from the desk. He shuffled through security, dumping the contents of his pockets into a tray. All he had was a phone, some loose change and a couple of credit cards. He’d had less in his life, but not by much.
He stepped through the metal detector and stuffed everything but the phone back in the pocket of the coat he had borrowed from NASA. He took a deep breath and dialed Franklin’s number.
“Morning.” Franklin sounded as tired as he felt. “You made it to Charlotte?”
“Yeah, kind of. Where are you?”
“Driving home.”
“You seen the news?”
“Yep. Seems the end of the world will be televised after all. You got anything new for me?”
Shepherd ran through everything he had learned in the last few hours. It was cathartic, like a weight gradually lifting off him with every word he spoke. “I’ve left the car in the long-term parking lot,” he said. “Smith’s laptop is in there and so is Williams’s gun.”
“You’re unarmed?”
“I didn’t think they’d let me on an international flight with it, seeing as they’re not even letting people take large bottles of water onboard.”
“What if it’s a trap? What if Kinderman is drawing you out — ever think about that?”
“It’s not just about Kinderman.” He took a deep breath, as if he was about to take a dive off a high board. “I never did tell you about my missing two years.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t—”
“I was homeless.” He let the breath out and imagined it drifting away in the air, carrying his confession with it. “When the NASA funding was cut I ran out of money pretty fast. I dropped out of school, had no place to live, no family, no job. I was pretty depressed about how life had turned out and it dragged me down fast. It’s a downward spiral and the lower you get, the less you care. And no one else cares either. It’s amazing how easy it is to fall through the cracks and end up on the street. Then you become invisible.”
“So what happened to pull you out of it?”
“Melisa happened. You asked me who she was. She was a charity worker, here in the States on some kind of exchange visa. She found me in the stinking basement of a building in Detroit along with an assortment of junkies, winos and meth heads. I was only on the booze, which in some ways is even more pathetic. I wasn’t even a good washout.
“One day I was sleeping off a drunk when this angel appeared asking for Annie. Annie was a runaway teen who worked the streets to fund her habit and keep her pimp happy. She was also eight months’ pregnant. Melisa was part of the women’s health program, training to be a midwife and volunteering in her spare time. Annie had missed her checkup so Melisa had come into that stinking basement just because she was worried about her. That took some guts.
“Anyway, we found Annie unconscious, lying on a stained mattress in one of the smaller rooms in the basement people used sometimes to turn tricks. The reason she had missed her appointment was that she was in labor and had turned to her painkiller of choice. She was totally out of it, the needle still in her arm — and the baby was coming.