and the big screen on the wall flashed up an updated image from the main reflector feed. It showed the luminous swirl of Cosmos-Aztec6, thirteen point four billion light years away – the furthest system ever observed from Earth.
The processor crunched again, making Merriweather wince, then something happened that he had never seen before. An application auto-loaded on to his desktop, a large window filled with numbers.
‘Virus,’ he said. ‘We have a virus!’
No response. No one there.
The numbers remained on screen for a few seconds then disappeared. Merriweather tapped the keyboard and shook the mouse. He kicked back, rolling his chair away from the desk and across the floor to another workstation. Same thing: frozen screen, frozen keyboard. The processors chattered feverishly as they continued to feed on whatever digital poison had somehow found its way into the pristine system.
The main screen flickered and Merriweather looked up. The image was beginning to shift and disintegrate. Whatever had locked him out was now taking control of the guidance systems. The telescope was moving.
He fumbled for a desk phone, knocking the receiver to the floor, pulling it up by the cord and stabbing a button marked ‘Dr Kinderman – cell phone’. On the screen the image continued to break up as the telescope turned. In his ear the ringing tone began. Somewhere down the hall a Marimba tune rang in synch with it.
Merriweather clamped the phone under his chin and went through every reboot command he could think of to try and unlock the keyboard. Nothing. The ringing tone continued in his ear. He dropped the phone on the desk and launched himself towards the exit.
Outside in the corridor the Marimba was louder. It was coming from Kinderman’s office. He arrived at the door, knocked once out of habit then opened it.
The state of the office came as a complete shock: wrenched-open drawers, papers everywhere, books all over the floor. The cell phone was on the desk. It shimmied a couple of times, vibrating in time to the ring, then stopped. In the silence that followed Merriweather heard the crunch of the pernicious code coming from Kinderman’s terminal. He moved cautiously into the room, wading through drifts of paper, until the monitor came into view. He stopped dead when he saw the message on the screen:
MANKIND MUST LOOK NO FURTHER
Shepherd took a deep breath then let it out slowly, trying not to make a sound as he edged forward down the dark corridor, gun first towards the solitary door. It was open slightly, the splintered timbers around the lock evidence of how many times it had been kicked in over the years. Somewhere above him the Virginia winter wind moaned through broken windows, filling the derelict townhouse with whispering voices. It was two below outside, probably colder in here, but he was sweating beneath his body armour.
He stopped a foot short of the door and leaned against the wall, feeling the flex in the plasterboard and timber frame – not much good for stopping bullets. He hunkered down below eye-level like he’d been taught and slipped his scoping mirror from his belt then past the edge of the doorjamb.
Daylight leaked in through high, narrow windows sketching the outline of a room: another door set into the far wall, a table in the centre spilling over with various items – a man and a woman standing directly behind it.
The skin tightened on Shepherd’s scalp. The man’s eyes, framed by safety goggles, seemed to be staring straight at him. He saw a hand clamp tighter across the face of the terrified woman, held in front of him like a shield, saw the other hand rising up.
He leaped away just as gunfire shattered the cold silence and bullets smacked into the wall where he had been resting. He rolled into a new position further down the corridor and levelled his gun at the door. ‘FBI!’ he shouted. ‘Drop your weapon and come out slowly with your hands on your head. We have the building surrounded.’
Not true.
He was a lone agent following a cold lead that had just gone volcanic.
He heard noises coming from the room, something clattering to the floor then footsteps scuffing away. He moved forward in a crouch, gun just below his line of sight, free hand reaching for a stun grenade on his belt. He pulled the pin and tossed it round the doorframe.
The grenade clattered across the floor, clanged against the metal leg of the table then detonated with a lightning flash that Shepherd saw even behind his closed eyelids. A sharp, percussive boom-shook the wall and he was up and into the room.
No one there. Far door open.
He ran through the white magnesium smoke, performing a quick inventory of the table as he passed: 9-volt batteries, wire cutters, soldering iron, duct tape, vacuum packs of plastique. Bomb-making equipment.
The smart move would be to regroup and call for backup, but the suspect knew he was cornered. He had fired shots and fled, even after Shepherd had identified himself as FBI. He was desperate, and therefore unpredictable.
And he had a hostage.
If Shepherd waited for other units to show, the suspect would probably kill the woman and make a run for it. But right now he was vulnerable, his ears ringing from the pressure wave of the grenade, his eyes useless in the gloom of the basement. Shepherd had the advantage, but it was slight and wouldn’t last for more than the next few seconds. He had to make a choice.
He took a breath and swept his gun arm round the edge of the doorframe, following it into the second room. The suspect was in the far corner, backed up against the wall, the hostage still in front of him and terrified.
Shepherd stood square on, maximizing the cover of his body armour, his gun steady in a good two-hand hold, trying to fix the front sight on what he could see of the suspect’s face. With his peripheral vision he sucked in the detail of the room: a single mattress on the floor; a low table next to it; a movie poster tacked to the wall with a burnt-orange sun and slashed white lettering. His mouth went dry as buried memories rushed out of his past.
The dank smell …
… the same sun on the same poster …
… a room just like this.
He tried to zone it all out, keeping his eyes on the suspect and his mind on the here and now, but the sun kept pulling at him with something like real gravity, dragging him back to that dark, dark place he had done everything he could to forget.
His hand began to tremble. The suspect was shouting but he couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then he saw a hand rise up. Something in it. Some kind of button with a wire trailing down to the belt bomb wound around the hostage’s neck.
Behind them the sun blazed on the wall like an omen of the explosion to come. Shepherd felt weak. He couldn’t hold it together. His whole world condensed to the end of his gun and the suspect’s face came into focus along with the words on the movie poster.
Apocalypse Now
He pulled the trigger.
Adjusted for recoil – everything muscle memory now, drilled in deep from hours on the range – squeezed off another round. Saw an explosion of red beyond his gun-sight. Then he watched in silence as both suspect and hostage fell in crumpled slow motion to the ground.
In the stillness that followed, Shepherd felt everything drain out of him. His eyes drifted back to the molten sun, his hand dropped to his side, the red-handled gun dangling from his curled trigger finger. He didn’t even feel the instructor take it from him, or register the fluorescent lights flickering into life above his head. In his mind he was still back there, staring at the same poster on a different wall – the room where she had found him and they had saved each other.
‘… Shepherd …!’
The