eyes for a few minutes. He awoke with a start when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked the time and realized he’d been asleep for nearly three hours. The car had turned into an icebox with frost on the inside of the windows where moisture from his breath had frozen. He dug his phone from his pocket and discovered he had mail. He opened the app and the temperature dropped a little more. It was from Kinderman.
You seem to know a lot, Agent Shepherd, and I appreciate your concern.
If you are truly knowledgeable then you will know where to find me. I’m just standing on a hill looking to the east for new stars in old friends, as those like us have done since the beginning of time.
Shepherd stared at the message, trying to make sense of it through the fog of his sleepy brain. He re-read it, his fatigue making him irritable that he was having to deal with this riddle in the middle of the frozen night. Why couldn’t Kinderman just tell him where he was?
Twice he hit reply and started composing a message to that effect, but both times he deleted it, instinctively knowing that he would not get another response. In the end, he slipped the phone back in his pocket and drove the rest of the way to Charlotte thinking it over with the heater on full, sipping black coffee from a Big Gulp he’d bought at a truck stop.
It was almost six in the morning when he hit the outskirts of Charlotte and parked next to a McDonalds, retrieved the Bureau laptop from the passenger footwell and hooked onto the free Wi-Fi that was thankfully still working. From where he sat he could see downtown lying dark before him, the result of a power outage that had sunk half the city into blackness. The only light was coming from a few cars that sketched the lines of unseen streets and a few flickering orange patches where fires burned. It was terrifying how quickly the ordered world had started to unravel. Maybe this would be how it ended, not with some cosmic collision or the wrath of some vengeful god but with society quietly imploding on itself as everyone just headed home and stayed there, all deliveries ending, all crops lying ungathered in fields, the major utilities switching themselves off one by one as no one turned up to work any more. Maybe no one would actually care, or even remember how things used to be.
He opened the laptop to check in on whatever Agent Smith had dredged up in the night and was greeted by the pinging sound that made his heart tumble in his chest and he was rapidly growing to hate. The new search he had put in place for Melisa had come back with two results.
The first hit was her name on an old passenger manifest out of Dulles Airport in Washington. She had flown out of the country eight years ago on a Cyprus-Turkish airliner heading for a place called Gaziantep. He opened a browser and looked it up. The Wikipedia entry told him it was a city in southeast Turkey. He clicked on the map embedded in the article. Just to the northwest of Gaziantep, in the foothills of the Taurus mountains, was another city, marked by a T shaped-cross: Ruin – the place Melisa had listed as her birthplace. She had been going home.
The second result was more recent. It was an application for a temporary work visa dated only a year ago. She had been trying to come back to the States but her application had been denied. He noticed the name on the form was Erroll. Maybe she never married, or maybe had but had kept her name.
He looked at the two results, two more precious pieces of evidence of her continued existence, and felt an almost physical yearning to be with her. He pulled his phone from his pocket. The countdown application was now installed on it and running as his wallpaper. He watched the numbers steadily declining towards zero.
All the time he had lost. How much time left?
Kinderman’s message was still open and he re-read it, hating him now for playing games when so much was at stake. It was like a taunt – ‘If you’re smart enough then come and get me’ – a clever test to find out what he knew. Well, Professor Douglas had been standing on a hill,