it to Charlotte, always assuming they haven’t got worse weather there. But then it’s still about a three-to-four-hour drive to Cherokee on mostly mountain roads. It’s maybe five hours from here but mostly on dead-straight, flat plain roads. Trust me, I know this area pretty well. We’ll be better off driving.’
Franklin steered Shepherd away from the main desk and over to the row of seats by the wall. ‘Tell me why you think Douglas is there.’
‘There was something special about the place. The Professor had history there, real history, why else would he drive all that way when there are plenty of mountains much closer to Huntsville? It had all these photographs of people in frames tacked to the walls, some going way back, including one of the Professor as a kid standing on the porch and squinting into the sunlight as he held a model plane over his head. He must have been about five or six but you could still see the man he would become.’
Franklin looked over at the desk sergeant who was now resolutely ignoring the constantly ringing phone. ‘How we doing with that ride?’ he shouted over.
The sergeant looked at them over the top of his reading glasses. ‘We’re just having a Caddy waxed and polished for you now.’
Franklin turned back to Shepherd. ‘Funny guy. He should be on Comedy Central.’
Shepherd glanced outside at the swirling white. ‘What about the roads – the traffic’s all snarled up already, we saw it coming in.’
‘Exactly. We saw it coming in to town. The roads heading out will be pretty clear. So long as we get a decent car, driving’s going to be our best option. Trust me.’
Shepherd nodded, but for the first time he wasn’t sure whether he did.
Liv sat in the kitchen eating dried fruit and salt crackers she’d found in one of the food lockers. Kyle pulled a stool from beneath a stainless-steel counter top and sat down wearily opposite. ‘You should drink some of this,’ he said, pulling a bottle of water from a thermal box on the floor. ‘It might taste a bit funny because it’s got rehydration salts in it.’ He poured half of the bottle into a glass and slid it over to her. ‘I made up a batch for your friends. Don’t worry, it’s clean. In fact all the water’s clean. I’ve been running tests every hour and the ground water’s flowing pure again. The pressure must have blown away the contaminants, though I’ll still keep checking it. Go ahead – drink.’
Liv drank, forcing herself not to gulp it all down in one, savouring the saltiness on her tongue. ‘So tell me how you ended up here,’ she said, as Kyle poured the rest of the water into a second glass.
‘We were all working way down in the south in Dhi Qar Province as part of a project run by an international aid organization.’
‘Ortus,’ Liv said.
‘That’s right. How did you –’
‘– I recognized the logo on the side of your jeep. I know one of the people who runs it, Gabriel Mann.’
Kyle smiled in a way that suggested he both knew and liked him. ‘You know Gabriel?’
She nodded.
‘Ah, he’s a good bloke. When we first set up the project here he came and helped us out a lot. I heard he was in some kind of trouble with the law.’
‘He was. He is.’
‘Well I hope he’s OK.’
‘So do I … You said you were working down south.’
‘Yeah, way down in the southeast the other side of Baghdad in the Mesopotamian marshlands, or what’s left of them. The people there were pretty badly persecuted by Saddam and his mob after they rebelled against him in ’91. As part of his system of punishment he built huge canals to redirect the Tigris and Euphrates away from the marshes to drive the tribes out. He was pretty successful too. There’s only about ten per cent of them left. Then the war came. As soon as Saddam started losing, the locals blew holes in the dams and dykes and let the water flow back in again. We were sent to help monitor the water quality and manage the restocking of the wetlands with reed beds. There were sixteen of us.’
‘What happened to the others?’
‘Gone.’ He took a drink then carefully placed the glass down on the counter. ‘We’d been working together for six months. It was good work. The people were returning, the reeds were growing, we were even seeing some of the wildlife coming back. The marshes used to be a major staging post for millions of migratory birds until Saddam buggered it all up. Every day more life returned – both man and bird. Then all of a sudden the plug got pulled on us. It had something to do with what happened to Gabriel. Our headquarters are in Ruin and he was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist or something, trying to blow up the Citadel using Ortus resources. The upshot was that all of Ortus’s bank accounts were frozen while the charges were being investigated. Which meant we could no longer pay for anything and weren’t getting paid ourselves.
‘We kept going as long as we could, hoping the money would get unfrozen but pretty soon we started running out of food, fuel, you name it. So we pulled out and headed back towards the border.’ He rolled the water around in the glass, staring at the liquid, deep in thought.
‘So how come you ended up here? Did you get lost?’
‘No, nothing like that.’ He continued to stare at the glass, as if the answer might lie in it somewhere. ‘I’m still not really a hundred per cent sure what happened. We were travelling north, heading for the Turkish border in a four-vehicle convoy, which is the only safe way to travel on these roads. We were making pretty good time, considering all the roadblocks on Highway 8, had made it as far as Al-Hillah and we were getting ready to push on as far as Baghdad when I got a feeling that we were going in the wrong direction. I can’t really explain it. It was like I knew that the maps, the GPS were wrong. I wasn’t alone, Eric and Mike felt it too.
‘The rest of the guys thought we’d gone mad. They told us to shut up and keep driving but we couldn’t do it, none of us could. It was such a strong feeling. For me it was like a magnet pulling at some kind of metal core inside me.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘I’ve always been a bit of a nomad, never really stayed in one place for too long. No matter where I ended up and how good a time I was having there would always come a morning when I’d wake up with an overwhelming urge to be somewhere else. And this was exactly like that, only instead of wanting to head off into the unknown it felt like I was returning somewhere. Like I was coming home.
‘It’s like – for the last six months or so, ever since I’ve been working on the marshes, I’ve been watching the birds: flamingos, pelicans, hooded crows, teals. Some of these guys fly halfway round the world from as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as Africa and India to end up in the exact same place where they hatched. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands probably, and we still don’t really know how they do it. It’s just an instinct in them, a natural urge. Then a few years back the marshes vanished, I mean there was nothing there at all but cracked earth and the odd abandoned boat. But as soon as the water came back, they knew. Somehow they just knew that’s where they needed to be. That’s what it felt like for me. I felt such a strong pull to be here, though I didn’t know what this place was, or even if it was here. I’ve never been here before in my life, but I felt like I was coming home. Explain that.’
Liv shook her head. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘But I felt something like it too.’
Behind her the door