useful.’
Shepherd leaned in as words started to appear in the window, gleaned from the raw data. He recognized almost all of them. ‘Ophiuchus is a constellation,’ he said, working 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.
20
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 Shepard 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 hard-wired 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
Shepherd leaned in as words started to appear in the window, gleaned from the raw data. He recognized almost all of them. ‘Ophiuchus is a constellation,’ he said, working 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.
20
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 Shepard 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 hard-wired 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
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