“Hard to tell,” Shepherd said, instinctively pulling Hevva behind him. “He’s the right build. I should go talk to him.” The tiny hand tightened in his. “It’s okay, sweetheart, you’ll be able to see me the whole way.”
“Take this.” Arkadian pressed something into his hand. Shepherd looked down to discover a gun. “It’s just a precaution.”
“I don’t think that’s—”
“Take it. I don’t care how many Nobel prizes this man has won, he is still a fugitive from the law, which makes him unpredictable.”
The figure beneath the tree moved forward, emerging from the shadow.
“He’s coming down,” Shepherd said, handing the gun back.
“Keep it,” Arkadian said. “I’m too slow and can’t shoot worth a damn since I took a bullet in my arm.”
Shepherd thought about his own less than glowing record as a marksman but slipped it into the back waistband of his trousers anyway, angling himself so his whole body was between the gun and Hevva.
The figure continued to descend the hill, picking his way along a thin gravel path that snaked its way down from the tree: a slender man with silver hair and a Nobel prize for physics on his CV, Dr. Kinderman — fugitive from the law. He reached the upper edge of the dig and did a strange thing — he waved at them.
“He doesn’t look like a man on the edge,” Arkadian muttered.
“He’s spent his life on the edge of the universe,” Shepherd replied. “This probably all feels quite normal to him.”
Dr. Kinderman rounded the rim of the crater and approached them, a warm, friendly smile fixed on his face, like a man just welcoming weekend guests to his house. “You found me,” he said, his voice nasal and high, like the whine of an overgrown, overenthusiastic schoolboy.
“Joseph Shepherd, sir.” Kinderman clasped the offered hand and shook it. “I worked under you briefly on the Explorer mission.”
“Please.” Kinderman held his hands up and screwed his eyes shut as if he was in mild pain. “Call me William, or Will, or Bill even, but don’t call me sir, makes me feel like your father.” He let go of Shepherd’s hand and dropped down to the ground. “And who do we have here?” Kinderman brought his head right down to Hevva’s level. “Are you an FBI agent too?”
Hevva went shy and smiley and buried her face in Shepherd’s side.
Kinderman stood and turned to the dig site. “Magnificent, isn’t it? A temple to the stars, built eight thousand years before the pyramids in Egypt and then deliberately buried to hide it and preserve its secrets. You can’t really see it properly from here, it was designed to be viewed from up there.” He pointed back up at the tree on top of the hill. “Interestingly enough the locals call that the tree of knowledge, always have — even when they didn’t know all this was buried beneath it. Isn’t that fascinating?”
Shepherd felt like a schoolboy on a field trip with one of the better teachers.
“Shall we go inside?” Kinderman gestured to one of the larger field tents. “It’s cooler in there and I have something I want to show you.”
They filed into the tent and through a visitors’ area with information posters on partition walls and a scale model of the dig site on a table in the center of the room. There was a washroom through one door and a kitchen through the other, with a stove and a table positioned beneath a ceiling fan that turned slowly, stirring the air and blowing dust into the shafts of sunlight leaking in through shuttered windows and a back door that had been propped open to let more air in.
“You wouldn’t believe there were about thirty people here a couple of days ago, would you?” Kinderman said, lighting the gas on the stove. “Yesterday there were ten and this morning just me, so I apologize in advance for the mint tea I’m about to make. I don’t really have the art of it, which is a shame as it’s delicious when done properly.” He put a pot of water on to boil and grabbed a bunch of mint from a bowl of water by the sink.
“I can make tea,” Hevva said.
“Are you sure?” Shepherd said, suddenly worried about the stove and boiling water in his first real moment of everyday parental angst.
“Mama showed me how to do it. She showed me how to do lots of things.” Hevva slipped off the bench and headed to the stove without waiting for anyone’s permission and held out her hands for the mint. Kinderman handed it over without a word, then she dragged a chair across to the countertop and started ripping up handfuls of leaves and dropping them into a teapot. Shepherd felt a surge of pride as he watched her, though none of who she was or how she behaved had anything to do with him.
“So,” Kinderman said, moving over to the table containing the model of the dig, “notice anything?” Shepherd looked down at it. It was perfectly to scale and even had a model tree at the top. In this shrunken form it was easier to see the configuration of the standing stones. “They’re constellations,” he said, remembering the Wikipedia entry he had read.
“Exactly, perfect facsimiles.”
Shepherd looked down at the main cluster. “All except this one.” He pointed at the tallest stone, the home stone, which sat between two others representing the tips of the horns of Taurus. “There is no star here, not normally — except tonight there will be, won’t there, Dr. Kinderman?”
Kinderman smiled. “Bravo, Agent Shepherd, you are a worthy adversary, no wonder you found me. And in the tradition of all great quests your triumph entitles you to some answers. What would you like to know?”
In his mind Shepherd cycled through all the things he’d been asking himself ever since O’Halloran had given him the initial brief. He decided to start at the beginning and work forward from there. “The space telescope,” he said, “why did you sabotage it and destroy all the data?”
Kinderman cocked his head to one side in a way that made Shepherd think of a bird. “That’s a bad question, Agent Shepherd. It is built upon two assumptions, both of which are wrong, which therefore renders the question moot.” Shepherd felt like a student again, one who was flunking a test. “First,” Kinderman continued, “you say that I sabotaged Hubble, which implies something destructive when in fact Hubble was not destroyed, it was not even damaged.”
“What about Marshall? That was fairly destructive.”
“Yes it was, but again you are assuming that those two incidents are directly linked and that the architect of one must therefore have had a hand in the other.”
“No, I think you did one and Professor Douglas did the other but that your motives were shared.”
“Well then you are half right. I did reposition Hubble, as I have already said, but I did not destroy James Webb or the cryo unit at Marshall — and neither did Professor Douglas.”
“Then who did?” Arkadian asked.
Kinderman looked at him and shrugged. “The same person who was sending us the death threat letters I should imagine, the one who signs his name Novus Sancti.”
“Cooper.”
Kinderman laughed. “Fulton Cooper! You think someone like him could infiltrate the Marshall Space Center and blow a large part of it up without detection?”
“No, we thought maybe Professor Douglas did after being coerced in some way.”
“You knew the professor, didn’t you, Agent Shepherd?”
“A little — he was my teacher for a summer.”
“Then surely you know he was the sort of person who would rather die than destroy his own facility. His work was his life, he valued nothing higher.”
Shepherd felt like a green shoot shriveling in the blinding brightness of a superior mind. All his thinking had been based on the assumption that Kinderman and Douglas were coconspirators and saboteurs. But with that keystone gone the whole structure of his investigation was now starting to crumble. “But if he didn’t destroy Marshall then why run and hide?”