his way down the growing list. ‘Andromeda is a galaxy and all those long numbers beginning with PGC are from the Principal Galaxy Catalogue. Red-Shift is an astronomical term for what happens to distant light …’
They continued in this way for several minutes, Smith highlighted everything Shepherd recognized until they reached the bottom of the list and Smith hit Delete to get rid of all the isolated words. There were now just two remaining:
MALA
T
Shepherd fished a notebook from his pocket and flipped back through the entries he had made at Goddard. There was the T again in the last entry Dr Kinderman had made in his diary:
T
end of days.
A thought struck him, something about the T and what it might mean in relation to Hubble. He found the contact numbers he had taken down and dialled one, checking the time as he waited for it to connect. The line clicked a few times before a ring tone cut in. Shepherd held his breath as he waited for someone to answer.
Two floors above Shepherd, Franklin sat in a small office, door closed, his face illuminated by a different computer screen.
During his more than twenty years’ service in the bureau he had learned a lot about himself. He knew he wasn’t the most instinctive of investigators, didn’t have the genius he had seen in some to ask exactly the right question at exactly the right time and had never been the one in a midnight incident room to make the single connection that pulled everything together. But he was dogged and he knew people. He could tap them like a tuning fork and listen to the sound they made. He always knew when the note was wrong and right now, with Shepherd, it was screeching like nails on a blackboard.
On the screen in front of him were Shepherd’s Bureau application forms and resumé. He had been scouring them for the last twenty minutes, cross-checking the missing two years against social security records, credit-scoring agencies, anything that might give him a steer on where Shepherd was and what he had been doing. So far the only small discrepancy he had found was on the standard Questionnaire for National Security Positions. There was a new addition to the form, a declaration of faith, added by a Republican government riding high on the wave of post 9/11 hysteria. The Democrats had fought it, citing it as a dangerous erosion of the Constitution and its separation of religion and state, but the Republicans maintained that it would help identify Muslim candidates whose background and cultural knowledge could prove insightful in the war on terror. The bill had just squeaked through, but only after a compromise had been agreed that the new section should be optional and no candidate could be penalized for not filling it in. Shepherd had exercised that option and left his blank.
This in itself was unremarkable, but in Franklin’s experience the only people who chose not to fill in the faith section were atheists. Shepherd’s resumé showed he had spent several years at a hardcore Catholic boarding school and yet he hadn’t ticked the box declaring himself to be Catholic. It was a small point but it added to Franklin’s distrust of him. There was something hardwired into his DNA that could not allow himself to entirely trust anyone who did not, in one way or another, have a healthy fear of God. It was one of the central tenets of the Irish, whispered down to him on whisky breath by his father and uncles when they were swaying with patriotism for a country none of them had ever set foot in: never trust a man who does not have God in his heart, and never trust a man who will not take a drink with you.
He sat back in his chair, reaching for his phone.
Thinking about his da’ had tugged at something inside him. Maybe it was Christmas and the usual guilt that came with that. It was too late to call so he scrolled down the contacts list to the entry for Marie and opened up a blank text:
Something’s come up. Got to work tomorrow so wont be able to make it home. Will call when I know when I can get away. Say sorry to Sinead for me.
He pressed Send and watched the message go. It was odd that he still thought of the house as home even though he didn’t live there any more.
He closed all the files, shut down the terminal and was pulling his jacket off the back of the chair when his phone buzzed. Marie had got straight back to him.
What about saying sorry to me?
Franklin read the words and felt the ache inside him twist a little more. She was right of course but he’d got tired of apologizing to her a long time ago. He slipped his jacket on and headed for the nearest exit, swapping the phone for a crumpled packet of Marlboro. Another bad habit he had been trying for a long time to quit.
‘Hubble Flight Team.’
The line was noisy and Shepherd covered his other ear so he could hear better. ‘Merriweather?’
‘Speaking.’
‘It’s Agent Shepherd. Where are you?’
‘I’m at Goddard. I’ve stepped out for some air and patched my calls through to my cell in case anyone needed me, how can I help?’
‘Before the attack you said Hubble was exploring a piece of thin space in the constellation of Taurus.’
‘That’s right.’
‘What do you use as shorthand for Taurus?’
There was a pause. ‘If I was writing it down I’d use the astrological sign, a circle with two horns.’
‘Not the letter T?’
‘No.’
‘What if you were typing it?’
‘If I was typing it I would put in the whole word, or maybe just the first few letters and then predictive text would do the rest.’
Shepherd wrote T and TAURUS in his notebook and added a large question mark after them. ‘What about MALA?’ he spelled it.
‘Nothing, sorry. What are these in relation to?’
‘They showed up in some raw data we recovered from Dr Kinderman’s computer. It’s probably nothing but we have to check.’ Shepherd wrote MALA in his notebook and added a question mark after that too. ‘Thanks, Merriweather. Sorry to have bothered you.’
‘No problem. Listen, if you find anything else let me know, I’m as eager to get to the bottom of this as anyone …’
‘I’m sure you are.’
‘… and you can always get me on this number. I’ll keep it patched through to my cell and leave it switched on just in case, though I’m planning on sleeping at my desk until either Hubble comes back online or someone forces me out of here at gunpoint.’
Shepherd smiled. ‘I’m sure of that too. You take care, Merriweather. We’ll sort this thing out, one way or another.’ He put the phone down just as the door opened on the far side of the room and footsteps approached.
‘Found anything?’ Franklin’s voice boomed across the empty space.
No – Shepherd thought.
‘Yes,’ Smith said, cheerful as ever. ‘We recovered some CARBON data, and Agent Shepherd has been helping me sort through it.’
‘Good for Agent Shepherd – anything useful?’
Shepherd looked down at his notes. ‘We found a couple of unusual words. I think the T might refer to Taurus but I have no idea what MALA means.’
‘Interesting.’ Franklin leaned forward in a wash of coffee and cigarette smoke. ‘Watch and learn, rookie.’ He clicked on Google and typed MALA into the search window,