She frowned and felt a coldness creep over her. The first line was clear enough because she had lived it: she was the key that had unlocked the Sacrament, carried it out of the Citadel and brought it home to this lost place in the desert. But that was where her understanding ended. The second line suggested something else entirely, something still to come — something ominous that would be heralded by the arrival of a new star. She looked up at the evening sky, still too bright for the first stars to show. All the other prophecies, the ones that had brought her to this place, had outlined the future in ambiguous terms and with various possible outcomes. This one seemed too absolute, a star would appear and that would be it, the end of days — whatever that meant. There had to be something else here, something in the second block of symbols.
She studied them now, strange icons that looked like no language she had ever seen with the lines of different constellations weaving in and out of them: Draco, Taurus, the Plow.
The symbols were crude and simple, but when she concentrated on them the strange facility she had with language, her parting gift from the Sacrament, did not reveal their meaning. Instead, her head filled with impressions of things and feelings, some of them hopeful, some of them disturbing. She considered each symbol individually — a river, an eagle, a skull — trying to link them together into some kind of narrative, like piecing together fragments of an ancient truth she had once known and now forgotten. But though she felt she understood something of what each symbol individually represented, their collective meaning continued to elude her.
She spent a long time studying the symbols, but in the end, the earth turned, the sun set and the symbols faded to darkness before her eyes. And though Liv had not pinned down anything close to a translation, the emotions they had summoned remained. And the overriding thing they had left her with was a sense of foreboding. Whatever was coming, whatever was written on the ancient stone, she could feel its power and she feared it.
10
They arrived at the Goddard Space Flight Center a little after ten, just as the storm got about as bad as it was going to get. Rain gusted into the car as Shepherd cracked a window to flash his pristine ID. The guard handed him two security passes and a visitor’s map and directed him to one of the smaller executive staff parking lots by Building 29, the huge hangarlike structure that sat in the middle of the complex. Shepherd hadn’t been here for almost ten years but as he slid the Crown Vic into gear and hissed through the puddle under the raised barrier, it looked like nothing had changed much at all.
Building 29 rose out of the howling night, a huge white block of a building with two strips of darkened windows on the first and second floors and none at all on the other four. Most of the offices and control centers inside Building 29 didn’t need windows, drawing their views from deep space rather than the Maryland countryside.
Shepherd slowed as he drove past the entrance. There were lights on inside but he couldn’t see anyone. Maybe it was the late hour, or the weather, or the fact that the Christmas holidays were just around the corner — but the whole place seemed deserted. He eased the car around the edge of the building and the headlights lit up a figure wearing a rain slicker, the hood pulled right over his head in a way that made him appear almost monastic. An arm extended from beneath the wet folds and pointed to two empty parking bays with signs in front of them showing they were reserved for senior project directors. Shepherd drew the car to a halt and the figure glided over to Franklin’s side of the car, producing a NASA golfing umbrella and popping it open just as Franklin opened his door.
“Mike Pierce, chief of security,” a voice rumbled from beneath the hood. He held the umbrella up for Franklin as he got out of the car and glanced at Shepherd as he did the same. Shepherd saw the eyes take him in, make a quick decision based on seniority and logistics then turn to usher Franklin away beneath the cover of the umbrella, not bothering to wait for the junior agent. The van that had followed them all the way from Quantico pulled in next to him, sending a wave of cold water arcing onto the back of Shepherd’s legs. He locked the car and splashed across the tarmac after the umbrella. He figured if the techs could find fingerprints on cotton and microscopic traces of DNA in a sterile room, they could probably find their way into a building without his help.
Stepping through the open service door into the clean, white-walled corridors of Building 29 was like jumping through a time portal back to a previous life. Because there were no pictures on the walls and no unnecessary furnishings — to help maintain the sterile conditions required in the “clean rooms” at the heart of the building — everything looked exactly as it had the last time Shepherd had set foot here.
“Mike Pierce.” The hooded man crushed Shepherd’s hand in a wet grip. “We met before?” The eyes studied him from within the frame of a too-large face made bigger by the absence of hair. He looked like a weight lifter gone to fat but who still had some steel at his core and clearly felt a need to prove it whenever he shook another man’s hand.
“I was here for a few months back in spring ’04,” Shepherd said, letting go of Pierce’s hand to prompt him to do the same.
Pierce shrugged out of the rain slicker in a shower of water and draped it over a seat by the door. “I don’t recall any kind of Bureau investigation back then.”
“Don’t be fooled by the lines around the eyes,” Franklin cut in. “Agent Shepherd here is still wet behind the ears as far as Bureau work goes. He’s just here to help walk me through the tricky science parts.”
“I worked on Explorer for a while,” Shepherd explained as a bang behind them announced the arrival of the others heaving various boxes of gear out of the rain and in through the narrow service door.
“Looks like the gang’s all here,” Franklin said. “Lead on, Chief Pierce, tell us what you know.”
“Well, pretty much everything is in the report,” Pierce said, closing the door behind them then swiping a card through a lock to gain entrance to an inner hallway. “At 8:05 this evening the main system network servicing the Hubble Space Telescope was subjected to a sophisticated cyber attack. Merriweather, the technician who was on duty when it happened, is waiting in the control center to go through all the specific details for you.”
“What about Dr. Kinderman?”
“Still no word. I’ve tried contacting him on all his numbers, sent e-mails, even got Merriweather to ping him on Twitter and Facebook. Nothing. His cell phone was found in his office, which appears to have been ransacked.”
“Anyone else been in there since Kinderman went missing?”
“Just myself and the technician who found it.”
“Okay, let’s start there.”
Pierce swiped them through another security door and pointed to an office door halfway down the corridor.
Shepherd had been in Kinderman’s office a few times before, once when he had started working here and again on the day he left. It was something of a tradition at Goddard, being paraded in front of the chief on your way in and out for a chat and a pep talk. He remembered being struck on both occasions by Kinderman’s extraordinary neatness and precision, a memory that jarred heavily with the chaotic mess of files and paperwork now covering most of the floor.
Franklin surveyed it all from the door while he pulled on a pair of blue nitrile gloves he’d produced from his jacket pocket. Shepherd felt hot blood rising up his neck as he realized he’d left his own back in the car.