gun first, the beam of his Maglite probing the dark in a sweep from left to right. Shepherd followed, keeping close, going right to left until the beam of his torch crossed Franklin’s in the centre of the hallway.
No one there.
They moved quickly and silently through the rest of the house – cover and move, cover and move – until they had satisfied themselves that Dr Kinderman was not here and neither was anyone else. It didn’t take them long. The house was not that big.
Franklin hit the lights and they stood in the middle of the modest living-room-slash-kitchen-slash-dining-room taking in what they had previously only glimpsed by torchlight.
If anything, the inside of Dr Kinderman’s home was even less impressive than the outside. A small oak-floored hallway led away from the front door to three others: a small bathroom, a bedroom, and some wooden stairs leading down to the basement. ‘Tell me, Agent Shepherd,’ Franklin said, ‘you ever seen inside a safe house or a terrorist cell?’
‘No, sir, I have not.’
‘Well, look around, they look exactly like this. Functional, clean, unlived in.’
‘We don’t know that he’s a terrorist.’
‘No, but the evidence is stacking up wouldn’t you say?’ He nodded at the large picture of Christ the Redeemer hanging above the fireplace, arms outstretched and looking down at the sprawling city of Rio de Janeiro. ‘Pierce didn’t think Kinderman was religious.’
‘Maybe he just likes big statues, or Brazil.’
‘Or maybe he found God on the quiet and felt so bad about sticking his telescope up the Almighty’s nose that he switched it off and ran for the hills.’
Shepherd shrugged. ‘I guess anything’s possible.’
‘I guess it is.’ Franklin pointed at the bedroom. ‘Take another look, see what you can find, I’ll check the rest.’
The bedroom was as plain as the rest of the house, the picture hanging over the neat double bed the only clue as to the person who slept there. It showed The Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula, clearly a favourite image for the man who had been responsible for discovering them. Shepherd felt odd standing here, in the private space of one of his heroes. It seemed like an intrusion and his presence implied a degree of complicit agreement in Dr Kinderman’s as yet unproven guilt. He put it from his mind, swapped his gun for the blue Nitrile gloves and got to work.
The wardrobe held lots of white shirts, pressed and cleaned and still in their laundry wrapping, a few suits of the tweedy, academic kind Kinderman favoured and four pairs of identical black, wing-tipped shoes, polished and lined up on newspaper, ready to be stepped into. There was a gap where a fifth pair would fit, presumably the ones Kinderman was now wearing.
The drawers contained more clothes but no answers. There were no new death-threat letters stashed away at the back of the sock drawer, no drugs or guns or dubious pornography or bundles of money or anything else that implied a secret, dangerous life. Everything was neat, tidy and unremarkable. He finished his search and stood for a moment in the centre of the room, taking in its incredible ordinariness. It felt like Kinderman might have just stepped out for a late supper and be coming back soon. Part of him hoped he would, but the chaos of his office at Goddard told a different story. Shepherd flicked off the light and closed the door on his way out.
He found Franklin in the living room, hunkered down by the fireplace. ‘Take a look at this.’ He pointed at a fire basket containing a few logs, some sticks and several old newspapers. ‘Notice anything funny about the papers?’
Shepherd picked one up. It was a copy of the New York Post, a relatively unusual paper to find in Maryland. On the cover was a picture of a man dressed like a monk, standing on top of a dark mountain with his arms outstretched, looking just like the statue in the picture above Kinderman’s fireplace. Shepherd checked the date. The paper was eight months old. The story of the man climbing to the summit of the Citadel in the ancient city of Ruin had been more or less a front-page fixture in the spring. Recently Ruin had been in the papers again, this time because of the sudden outbreak of a viral infection that had resulted in the entire city being quarantined.
He picked up another paper, a copy of USA Today dated a few days after the New York Post and showing a photo of the same mountain, this time with smoke pouring out of a hole in its side, the headline read:
TERROR ATTACK CRACKS
CITADEL WIDE OPEN
The other newspapers were the same, all covering versions of the same story and dated around the same time. Some showed the monk on top of the Citadel, others showed the moment he fell to his death, or pictures of bloodied monks being stretchered out of the mountain following the explosion, their bodies stripped to the waist by paramedics to reveal strange networks of ritualized scars from multiple cuts deep in the skin.
‘Lots of people have old newspapers in their fire baskets,’ Shepherd said, scanning one of the articles to remind himself of the details.
‘Yes, but not normally a collection of different titles all covering the same thing. The Bureau got involved in this in a small way trying to help locate a couple of the terror suspects who were American. One was a female journalist from Jersey, the other an ex-army guy: Liv Adamsen and Gabriel Mann.’
‘They’re mentioned here.’ Shepherd held up one of the papers and showed him a mugshot of a handsome-looking man in his early thirties with short dark hair and blue eyes and a pale, blonde woman with eyes so green they glowed beneath the poor print quality of the paper.
Shepherd picked up the last newspaper. On the cover was a photograph of a plump Cardinal looking imperious in his red and black robes beneath the headline:
CHURCH BANKRUPT:
POPE’S RIGHT-HAND MAN IN SUICIDE SHOCK AT THE VATICAN
He remembered that one too, the biggest scandal to rock the Church in a long time. Something to do with mortgaging all the Church’s treasures and buildings in order to fund some doomed oil venture in Iraq. Some of the more lurid tabloids had even suggested they were drilling for oil where Eden used to be.
‘All from eight months ago,’ Shepherd mused, dropping it in the basket with the rest, ‘the same time the postcards started arriving.’
Franklin stood up and stretched the kinks out of his back as he paced the Spartan living room. ‘So how does any of this link up? Does any of it link up? We’ve got an attack on government property that may or may not be connected to the attacks outlined in these newspapers. We got a missing person who’s our number one suspect. We got a potential religious angle, which could shake out either as Kinderman seeing the light and going rogue, or somebody else putting the frighteners on him to do God’s work for them – maybe even the same guys who were involved in these attacks eight months ago. What else …?’
Shepherd dug his notebook from his pocket. ‘There’s the Tower of Babel references and the death threat written in biblical tones and signed Novus Sancti. We also have the missing data, which also dates back eight months, though that could just be a coincidence.’
Franklin shook his head and wandered into the kitchen. ‘I’m not a great believer in coincidence.’ He stood by the sink with the lights
