slowing them down but at least it would be too late for commuter traffic to be a problem when they eventually hit the capitol. He figured they would be in Maryland in twenty minutes, though he still had no idea why they were heading there.
The Maglite twisted off in the passenger seat and Shepherd heard the creak of the vinyl seat as Franklin turned to him. ‘That little story you span back there,’ he said, ‘your tale of travel to the far corners of the world to find yourself – I just want you to know, I ain’t buying it.’
Shepherd felt heat on his cheeks and was glad it was too dark for Franklin to see. ‘I don’t follow you, sir.’
‘I’ve spent over twenty years talking to people who have done everything from write bad cheques to kidnap children so they could torture them for fun, and you know what every single one of ’em had in common? They all tried to lie to me. Now you may have all your highfalutin’ degrees in astrophysics and rocket science and whatever else, but I got a degree in people and I know when someone is spinning me a line. I can smell it on them, and right now, Agent Shepherd, you stink.’
Shepherd said nothing and kept his eyes on the road.
‘Now I don’t really care all that much why you’re lying or even what it is you’re hiding, what does concern me, however, is having a partner I can’t trust. Having a partner you can’t trust is like having no partner at all, and that’s dangerous, Agent Shepherd, as you just discovered down in that basement. So if at any point you feel like kicking a piece of the truth in my direction – man to man, partner to partner, in the knowledge that, felonies aside, it will go no further – then we’ll get along a whole lot better. In the meantime, operate on the assumption that I’m apt to doubt every single goddam word that comes out of your mouth, understood?’
‘Sir, I promise you …’
Franklin raised his hand and turned his head away. ‘Don’t make it worse by lying to me again. I’m being honest with you, Agent Shepherd, I’m just asking for you to do the same.’
The seat creaked as Franklin turned back to the briefing documents. ‘OK, now I’ve put it out there so you know where we stand you can make yourself useful and explain to me the wisdom behind spending over a billion tax dollars putting a telescope into space that then costs over forty million dollars a year to run.’
Shepherd stared ahead through the spray and considered the question, relieved to be back on safe, familiar ground. He thought about the unimaginable distances the Hubble Space Telescope could penetrate compared to the relatively puny ones achieved by terrestrial instruments. He thought about the light from dead stars it could gather from the pure nothingness of clear space, carrying information all the way back from the beginning of time. But in the end he kept it simple. ‘How many stars can you see tonight?’ he said.
Franklin looked out into the wet, black night as a Big Rig hooned by, going way too fast for the weather and throwing up so much spray you could hardly see the edge of the freeway let alone the sky. ‘OK, fair point, but why not just build a telescope on top of a mountain in Mexico or somewhere the sun always shines. Hell, why not just wait for a clear night, be a lot cheaper.’
‘They did all that. There’s a fifty-metre dish on top of the Sierra Negra volcano in south Mexico that can observe both northern and southern skies. It’s pretty impressive. Trouble is the earth keeps turning, so it can only study a piece of sky for a few hours at a time. A space telescope like Hubble can lock onto a distant object and keep it in its sights for months, years even, while the earth turns beneath it.’
‘And that costs forty million a year?’
‘It’s a very complicated process.’
Franklin grunted. ‘Sounds like a scam to me.’
Shepherd considered letting it go but didn’t want to slip back into the uneasy silence. ‘How good a shot are you?’ he asked.
‘Better than you, Special Agent.’
‘You think you could hit a tin can on the side of the road from a moving car?’