Building 29 rose out of the howling night, a huge white block of a building with two strips of darkened windows on the ground and first floors and none at all on the other four. Most of the offices and control centres inside Building 29 didn’t need windows, drawing their views from deep space rather than the Maryland countryside.
Shepherd slowed as he drove past the entrance. There were lights on inside but he couldn’t see anyone. Maybe it was the late hour, or the weather, or the fact that the Christmas holidays were just around the corner – but the whole place seemed deserted. He eased the car round the edge of the building and the headlights lit up a figure wearing a rain slicker, the hood pulled right over his head in a way that made him appear almost monastic. An arm extended from beneath the wet folds and pointed to two empty parking bays with signs in front of them showing they were reserved for senior project directors. Shepherd drew the car to a halt and the figure glided over to Franklin’s side of the car, producing a NASA golfing umbrella and popping it open just as Franklin opened his door.
‘Mike Pierce, Chief of Security,’ a voice rumbled from beneath the hood. He held the umbrella up for Franklin as he got out of the car and glanced at Shepherd as he did the same. Shepherd saw the eyes take him in, make a quick decision based on seniority and logistics then turn to usher Franklin away beneath the cover of the umbrella, not bothering to wait for the junior agent. The van that had followed them all the way from Quantico pulled in next to him, sending a wave of cold water arcing onto the back of Shepherd’s legs. He locked the car and splashed across the tarmac after the umbrella. He figured if the techs could find fingerprints on cotton and microscopic traces of DNA in a sterile room, they could probably find their way into a building without his help.
Stepping through the open service door into the clean, white-walled corridors of Building 29 was like jumping through a time-portal back to a previous life. Because there were no pictures on the walls and no unnecessary furnishings – to help maintain the sterile conditions required in the ‘clean rooms’ at the heart of the building – everything looked exactly as it had the last time Shepherd had set foot here.
‘Mike Pierce.’ The hooded man crushed Shepherd’s hand in a wet grip. ‘We met before?’ The eyes studied him from within the frame of a too-large face made bigger by the absence of hair. He looked like a weightlifter gone to fat but who still had some steel at his core and clearly felt a need to prove it whenever he shook another man’s hand.
‘I was here for a few months back in spring ’04,’ Shepherd said, letting go of Pierce’s hand to prompt him to do the same.
Pierce shrugged out of the rain slicker in a shower of water and draped it over a seat by the door. ‘I don’t recall any kind of Bureau investigation back then.’
‘Don’t be fooled by the lines around the eyes,’ Franklin cut in. ‘Agent Shepherd here is still wet behind the ears as far as Bureau work goes. He’s just here to help walk me through the tricky science parts.’
‘I worked on Explorer for a while,’ Shepherd explained as a bang behind them announced the arrival of the others heaving various boxes of gear out of the rain and in through the narrow service door.
‘Looks like the gang’s all here,’ Franklin said. ‘Lead on, Chief Pierce: tell us what you know.’
‘Well pretty much everything is in the report,’ Pierce said, closing the door behind them then swiping a card through a lock to gain entrance to an inner hallway. ‘At 20.05 this evening the main system network servicing the Hubble Space Telescope was subjected to a sophisticated cyber attack. Merriweather, the technician who was on duty when it happened, is waiting in the control centre to go through all the specific details for you.’
‘What about Dr Kinderman?’
‘Still no word. I’ve tried contacting him on all his numbers, sent emails, even got Merriweather to ping him on Twitter and Facebook. Nothing. His cell phone was found in his office, which appears to have been ransacked.’
‘Anyone else been in there since Kinderman went missing?’
‘Just myself and the technician who found it.’
‘OK, let’s start there.’
Pierce swiped them through another security door and pointed to an office door halfway down the corridor.
Shepherd had been in Kinderman’s office a few times before, once when he had started working here and again on the day he left. It was something of a tradition at Goddard, being paraded in front of the chief on your way in and out for a chat and a pep talk. He remembered being struck on both occasions by Kinderman’s extraordinary neatness and precision, a memory that jarred heavily with the chaotic mess of files and paperwork now covering most of the floor.
Franklin surveyed it all from the door while he pulled on a pair of blue Nitrile gloves he’d produced from his jacket pocket. Shepherd felt hot blood rising up his neck as he realized he’d left his own back in the car.
Franklin stepped into the office and made his way through snowdrifts of paperwork towards the centre of the room. He stood for a moment, turning slowly, taking it all in: the neat, uncluttered desk; the crooked photos on the wall of various presidents standing next to the same neatly-pressed man; the same man shaking hands with the King of Sweden as he received the Nobel Prize for his work in measuring the rate of universal expansion. In the world of astrophysics Dr Kinderman was the closest thing you could get to a rock star and Shepherd was finding it very hard to think of him as a suspect.
He felt something soft and cold press against the back of his hand and looked down to discover a pair of fresh gloves held low so Franklin wouldn’t see them. He smiled his thanks at the PST who had come to his rescue and quickly pulled them on just as Franklin finished his silent appraisal of the room and looked up. ‘OK boys,’ he said, ‘get to work.’
The two techs swooped into the room, one shaking open various-sized evidence bags, the other scoping every surface with a high-end camera that took both stills and video. Franklin joined Shepherd and Pierce back in the corridor. ‘Looks like someone left in a hell of a hurry.’
Pierce nodded. ‘When I first saw it I thought it was a break-in.’
‘You still think so?’
He shook his head. ‘Not when I saw that.’ He pointed to a small book lying open next to the terminal keyboard. It was photographed and handed out to Franklin. It was a standard appointments diary, a double page to a week, every blank space crammed with small, precise handwriting. ‘I was trying to find out where Dr Kinderman might be, but as you can see it wasn’t much help.’
Franklin flicked through the pages until he arrived at the current week where the writing just stopped. The last entry was in today’s date:
T
end of days
The rest of the diary was blank, as if nothing was going to happen ever again.
Franklin looked up. ‘You said no one has been in this room apart from you and the person who found it like this.’
‘That’s right, just me and Merriweather.’
Franklin handed the diary over to one of the techs for processing. ‘Why don’t we go and say hello to Merriweather.’
The Space Telescope Operations Control Centre was roughly half the size of a tennis court and smelt of warm circuitry and ozone. There were no windows in the room and therefore no daylight. The only illumination came from the occasional desk lamp and the combined glow of a few dozen flat-screen monitors facing a larger central screen. All of them were displaying the same message:
MANKIND MUST LOOK NO FURTHER
A man stood as they entered, his clothes and horn-rimmed glasses making him look like he had beamed in from the fifties.
‘Merriweather, these are Special Agents Franklin and Shepherd from the FBI.’
They shook hands. Franklin nodded at the big screen. ‘That the same message you found on Kinderman’s computer?’
‘Yes, sir –’ He cleared his throat and stared up at the screen rather than anyone in particular. ‘Well, I mean it was part of the program that did it – I think. Or rather – this message was the last thing that uploaded and now it’s everywhere and we can’t take it down. The whole system’s locked.’
‘Any idea what it might refer to?’
Merriweather blew out a breath and raised his eyebrows. ‘Hubble’s a telescope, all it does is look at stuff – it could refer to anything.’
‘It’s not looking at anything any more though is it?’
Merriweather shook his head and Shepherd felt for him. He knew how attached people got to the projects they were working on, how they often became the most meaningful relationships you had. Hubble had just been attacked, possibly put out of action for months, and Franklin was talking about it like someone had dented a car.
‘Talk us through the sequence,’ Shepherd said, trying to steer the conversation back to the investigation. ‘What was the first physical manifestation of the virus?’
‘It hit the guidance system first. That was when I knew it was serious and went looking for Dr Kinderman. I found his office in a mess and this message on the screen. Actually no, first there was a command box with what looked like a decaying googolplex in it,
then
the message popped up.’
‘Tell me about the googolplex.’
‘Wait a second,’ Franklin jumped in, ‘would you mind translating for those of us who flunked Physics.’
‘A googolplex is a mathematical term for a particularly long number,’ Shepherd said, his eyes staying on Merriweather. ‘It’s where we get the word “Google” from. All those zeros you get when a search comes back refer to the googolplex. And the fact that it was decaying simply means it was getting smaller.’
Franklin nodded. ‘OK, got it.’ He turned to Merriweather again. ‘So a big number flashed up on the screen followed by this message?’
‘Yes, sir. I think the googolplex was probably something to do with the initialization of the malware and I just happened to be there to see it.’
‘And you were alone in the control room when all this happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that standard practice?’
‘No. I mean usually there are at least … everyone else was at the party.’ He looked at Pierce for support.
‘Merriweather volunteered to man the graveyard shift,’ Pierce said. ‘I checked on the staff rota. He was the only one here.’
‘Mighty public spirited of you, staying back here to watch the store while everyone else gets to go off and party. Not so great that that’s when the store got knocked off though, huh?’ Franklin stared hard at Merriweather for a long few seconds then smiled in the way Shepherd was fast getting used to. ‘Don’t worry, son. I reckon you’re too smart to hang yourself out to dry by throwing a spanner in the works on your own watch. Tell me about Dr Kinderman, when was the last time you saw him?’
Shepherd recognized the interview method Franklin was using. He was moving the questions around, rapidly changing topic and tone to give the subject no time to think and shake away any subterfuge they might be clinging to. It was a technique you used on someone you thought might be lying.
‘He was still in his office at around five thirty. I walked past on my way to get a snack before everyone else left.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘No. He was at his desk, working.’
‘Did he seem anxious to you?’
‘Not that I could tell.’
‘Did you notice him acting strangely at all in the past few days?’
Merriweather shrugged. ‘I can’t really say. Dr Kinderman doesn’t exactly conform to conventional notions of behaviour.’
Franklin took a deep breath and seemed to double in size. ‘Listen, son, you can either choose to help us or you can choose to be obstructive, and one of those options is a Federal offence and comes with jail time. Just answer the question.’
Merriweather’s face went blank, like a shutter had just come down and Shepherd realized Franklin had taken a seriously wrong turn. Threats wouldn’t work with someone like Merriweather. His loyalty to the project would be fierce and would far outweigh any personal agenda or self-regard. NASA was like a religion, and the faithful did not abandon their beliefs just because someone threatened them.
‘Listen,’ Shepherd said, cutting across Franklin to try and rescue the situation. ‘I know what you’re thinking: there’s no way Dr Kinderman would do this, am I right?’ Merriweather looked at him blankly, the shutters still down. Shepherd was aware of Franklin glaring at him, furious that he had broken rank and taken over the questioning. ‘I know exactly what you mean about him being unconventional. I crunched some data here on one of the last Explorer missions, remember that?’
Merriweather nodded. ‘They shut it down a while back.’ His voice sounded hollow, like he was talking about someone who had died. In that moment Shepherd knew exactly where all his nervousness was coming from and it wasn’t guilt: it was fear for what would happen next. ‘Tell me what happens if you can’t re-establish contact with Hubble?’
Merriweather looked up, locking eyes with Shepherd for the first time. ‘The only way to reboot it would be to manually restore the system.’
‘So you’d have to launch a mission. Someone would have to physically go into orbit to fix it?’
Merriweather nodded.
‘And is that likely?’
Merriweather took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because of James Webb.’
‘Anyone mind telling me who the hell James Webb is and what he’s got to do with any of this?’ Franklin said, directing the question to the room.
Merriweather took off his glasses and rubbed at the indentations they’d left on the bridge of his nose. ‘James Webb was the architect of the Apollo programme, the one who put a man on the moon. But in this case it’s not a
who
it’s a
what
.’ He sank down at the laptop he’d been working on and typed something. The screen filled with an image of what looked like a wide flat coffin with a golden satellite array on top like a sail. ‘Say hello to Hubble’s successor, the James Webb telescope. It’s bigger, will have a much higher orbit and will see much, much further. They’re building it right now. My guess is if we can’t fix Hubble from down here then they won’t bother fixing it at all. They’ll just shut us down and wait for James Webb to come online.’