The Gilgamesh Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Fleming

‘Neil Samms is coming in a few minutes. He’s got the local police with him. You won’t get past.’

  ‘Oh…right. You mean they’re going to set up a road block? Where? Where the camp trail join’s the main road?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it.’

  ‘Are you sure? I’ll cut your dick off if you’re lying to me.’

  ‘No I’m not lying!’

  ‘Alright then. I’m going to cut the rope from your hands.’

  He felt the vibration as the ropes as she sawed through the rope and reluctantly he inspected his hand. He was amazed to discover that although his fingers had deep gashes and were dripping blood his hand remained intact. Relief was mixed up with fury. ‘You fucking bitch! I’ll kill you!’

  She took out her gun and aimed between his eyes. ‘That sounded like a serious threat,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, wait Gerry!’ Hall called out urgently. ‘Don’t do it…you’re better than he is.’

  She glanced towards him, back at Parker and then she replaced the gun in her pocket. She turned towards the old hippy. ‘Can we buy your motorbike off you?’

  ‘Hey, it’s not worth that much. Say I’ll trade it for that white Chevy of yours if you like.’

  ‘That’s not mine. It’s a rental,’ Gerry explained.

  ‘Aw they won’t miss it for a while. I’ll trade it for another bike.’

  ‘That’s illegal.’

  The old man stared at her. ‘That coming from you, you’ve gotta be kidding me right. Hey, can I keep the guy’s rifle?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ she replied.

  Neil Samms nodded in approval at the senior Police officer. The cars were arranged so that the Winnebago would be unable to drive out the camp site and all the patrolmen were armed with rifles and clearly knew how to use them. Where was the Englishman? He said he would meet them here. He took out his cell phone. ‘Vince, hi. Sorry it’s taken a while but we’re in position. Where are you now?’

  ‘He’s tied to the RV,’ said a female voice from the phone with a distinctive English accent. ‘When you cut the ropes, or open the doors, the bomb explodes.’

  ‘What in tarnation…?’ said the sergeant standing beside Samms, nudging his elbow and offering him a pair of binoculars. Samms peered through them and in the distance saw a Winnebago with a man spread-eagled across the front. He was standing precariously on the front fender to which his legs were tied and his arms were secured by ropes that lead through the front cab windows. He recognised the anguished face of Vince Parker.

  ‘Godammit, there’s no bomb, they haven’t had time!’ Samms insisted.

  ‘Whoa there,’ said the police officer, grabbing his arm. ‘We’re not taking any chances, after the way you described those fugitives. We’ll wait for a bomb disposal team before we go forwards.’

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ bellowed Samms.

  Despite any number of dangerous activities she had undertaken in her professional life, Gerry considered riding pillion to Dan Hall on the Harley Davidson at high speed through the forest trails as one of her riskier moves. At her insistence Dan was wearing the old man’s crash helmet to protect his face from the branches while she clung on to his back and kept her head down as best she could. Eventually they found the main road which lead from Grand Teton into Yellowstone Park, but as they headed up the road Gerry heard a helicopter.

  ‘They could be looking for us; maybe we should turn off the road until it gets dark,’ Dan shouted.

  The helicopter pulled up and disappeared over the tree tops. ‘Maybe just a routine patrol…oh shit!’

  Nearly at ground level the helicopter came round a bend in the road and they saw bright flashes and heard the noise of a machine gun through the roar of the engine and the beat of the rotor. Dan turned the bike off the road and headed for a gap in the trees. A small ditch caught the front wheel but he managed to wrestle the heavy bike upright. The ground under the tall pine trees was uneven and laced with roots but he managed to keep up a speed of about twenty miles per hour as he zigzagged between the trees. Gerry glanced back and saw two men climb out of the helicopter armed with hunting rifles. A few moments later she heard four shots fired in quick succession but heard no sound of the bullets’ passage. They crested the top of a rise and Dan guided the bike down the slope. Gerry heard the sound of the helicopter now passing overhead and wondered if they had infra-red scanners on board. ‘Stop a minute!’ she yelled to Dan.

  He brought the bike to a halt under a tree and turned off the engine. ‘Why what’s wrong?’

  ‘They’ve much less chance of seeing us if we keep still,’ she explained. Then he too heard the chopper and they stared up as it flew aimlessly back and forth for a few minutes before finally banking away and disappearing from sight, the noise of its rotors fading away.

  ‘We’d better stick to the woods until nightfall,’ Dan suggested. He started the bike and they rode down the hill. ‘Do you know which way we’re heading?’ Gerry asked.

  ‘I’m keeping the sun behind my left shoulder as much as possible,’ he said, ‘then…’. The bike suddenly lurched down into a hole and slewed sideways. Gerry tumbled clear and rolled over until her back thudded against a tree trunk driving the air from her lungs and for a moment she struggled to catch her breath. She turned round when she heard Dan gasping with pain and saw him struggling to lift the motor bike from on top of his trapped leg. She jumped to her feet and managed to tug it upright for long enough for him to scramble clear.

  ‘Ok how bad is it?’ she asked kneeling beside him.

  Slowly and carefully he twisted his foot around, gasped and lay back on the ground breathing deeply. ‘Not broken, I don’t think. I’ll take my boot off and take a peek.’

  ‘Better not,’ said Gerry. ‘If it swells up you might not get it back on. Here, let me have a look.’ She carefully moved his ankle joint through a full range of movement and then pressed against the ligaments. He gasped a little as she pressed on his outer ankle bone.

  ‘It’s definitely not broken, nor even badly sprained. I think you’ve just bruised the outside of the joint badly. You might even have cracked the bone a little. I’ll ride the bike now.’

  ‘No chance; look at the front.’ The front tyre had burst and slewed off the wheel.

  ‘Oh crap,’ said Gerry. ‘Well to coin a phrase, on your feet soldier!’ She smiled and held out a hand and he carefully stood up and took a few careful paces. ‘Hey that’s not too bad. How are you though?’

  ‘My back hurts where I hit the tree. The rucksack absorbed most of the impact.’

  ‘The bottles did anyway. Water’s dripping out.’

  She took off the pack and extracted two split plastic bottles. She suddenly shivered at the memory of being trapped on the life raft with nothing but a couple of water bottles and she began to tremble violently and she suddenly grabbed hold of Dan and clung on to him in desperate fear. Then to her intense embarrassment she suddenly started to weep uncontrollably.

  ‘Hey, we’re alright,’ he said soothingly and gave her a hug, inadvertently pressing on her bruised back.

  ‘Ow, you clumsy ox!’ She writhed and pushed him away. He looked at her with an expression of bewilderment, which quickly gave way to resentment. Damn it! Time to soothe his bruised male ego.

  ‘I’m sorry Dan; my back’s hurt more badly than I thought. Maybe you could take a look at it.’ She quickly took off her jacket and handed it to him and then tugged her shirt over her head. She stood in front of him for a moment in her bra before turning round. A moment later he felt his fingers gently touching her back. ‘You’ve a big bruise over your ribs; try taking some deep breaths to check nothing’s broken.’

  She had already done that but still she turned to face him and took huge breaths that lifted her breasts and she saw him glance down quickly and then take care to look her in the eyes.

  ‘How does that feel?’

  ‘I’m ok.’ She pulled her shirt on and when he held out her jacket she stepped forward and ki
ssed him quickly on the cheek. ‘Come on; let’s get back to the road. We need a ride. I think we should drive up to Billings in Montana, and then continue up to Saskatchewan. We’ll need a good off-roader; we don’t want to use a border crossing point.’

  Dan looked at her, somewhat resentful of her assumption of command. Suddenly she grinned at him. ‘It’ll be like old times,’ she said.

  His mind swept back years to the two of them crossing the border into Fujairah. ‘Yuh, sounds like a plan,’ he smiled and shrugged. ‘Well I expect all the crossing points will be closed to us, so we’ve no choice.’ He paused. ‘But I guess my passport’s going to ring alarm bells even across the border, so how are we going to get a flight out of Canada?’

  ‘We’ll make contact with my boss Cornwall,’ Gerry replied. ‘He can send a UK passport for you by FedEx or something, and then we’ll get back to London. After that we’ll make our way to Baghdad and find this Gilgamesh document.’

  ‘Hell, Gerry, you’re making it sound easy,’ Dan protested.

  ‘It’s straightforward,’ Gerry replied, ‘but it might not be easy. First of all we need a car.’

  ‘My guess is that they’ll head north to the Canadian border sir,’ Neil Samms said to General Robert Bruckner.

  ‘Your guess?’ Bruckner sneered.

  ‘My analysis, sir. We found their motor bike abandoned in the woods. The front tyre split.’

  ‘I would agree with that,’ said Jasper White. He turned round and stared at Samms for a moment who tried to avoid looking grateful. ‘Tate knows that you can order a full ports and airports in the States, but you can’t do the same in Canada. What we need to do is try and work out their intentions and plan to pick them up wherever they’re heading.’

  ‘Ok Jasper, so we nearly had the two of them,’ said Bruckner. ‘Now let’s see if you can find them for us again. Where’s Parker?’

  ‘He’s at the hospital, having his fingers stitched up.’

  ‘Bloody idiot. Is he ok?’

  ‘His little finger’s not working; damaged tendon, but otherwise he’s good to go.’

  ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder, triggered by the motorcycle crash,’ Gerry said to herself in self-analysis of her emotional outburst in the forest as she sat in the passenger seat while Dan drove towards Billings in Montana.

  After walking slowly down to the roadside she had flagged down a four door pick-up. The owners had willingly stopped and given them a ride to the nearest big camp site when they explained that one of their trail bikes had broken down and as they were only single seaters they had decided to leave them hidden in the woods and get a ride. After saying goodbye to the couple they had begun to search for a suitable vehicle and found an unlocked GMC Sierra in which the owners had carelessly left the key ill-concealed on top of the sun visor.

  Sharing the driving had enabled them to cover the eight hundred odd miles to Saskatoon, capital of the province of Saskatchewan, in twenty hours. After crossing the border they had abandoned the Sierra in the town of Swift Current and continued their journey in an old Toyota Corolla stolen from the airport car park. On the outskirts of the city they checked into one of the chain hotels used by the less well financed business travellers adjacent to a shopping mall.

  ‘Not too put too fine a point on it, we could both do with a shower and some new clothes,’ Gerry declared when they were alone in the hotel elevator. ‘We’d better go shopping.’

  ‘Have you got any cash?’ Dan asked. ‘I’ve got about seven hundred dollars left.’

  ‘I’ve got about a thousand,’ said Gerry. ‘I suggest we each buy a cheap wheelie bag, the size that they let you take on as hand baggage and a pre-paid cell phone. There’s a laundromat in the hotel basement, so we can wash what we’re wearing. Shall we meet in the lobby in half an hour?’

  ‘Are you sure your guy Cornwall will come through with the passports and more money?’ Dan asked.

  ‘Well if he doesn’t, then we’re screwed,’ Gerry replied. ‘That reminds me, first thing tomorrow morning I need to go downtown to the main post office and lease a post office box.’

  Two hours later the two of them were sitting in the food court eating variations on the theme of diced chicken in oriental sauce with vegetables, rice and noodles. They had promised each other during the car journey that they would go to a decent restaurant, but having spent a fair proportion of their funds on the essentials, they decided that some economy was needed.

  ‘Right, I’m going back to get some sleep,’ Gerry announced after they had finished. ‘The prospect of a comfortable bed is too enticing to be put off any longer. I’m going to leave early tomorrow and set up that post office box.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, if you like,’ Dan suggested.

  ‘Ok, I’ll see you down at the lobby at 7.00am tomorrow then.’

  Back at the hotel Gerry set the clock radio alarm to 6.30am and then sat at the desk with her new cell phone and called Richard Cornwall.

  ‘Hello, it is I,’ she announced.

  ‘Are you safe?’

  ‘Yes but we need to move on as soon as possible. Tomorrow I’ll send you a post office box number for the main office, Saskatoon. Can you send passports for the boy and cash? We need to buy airline tickets.’

  ‘Yes, I can do that, but listen; I feel so far out on a limb I can hear creaking and cracking; don’t let me down, Gerry.’

  ‘I owe you Richard, and I won’t forget.’

  Gerry broke off the call and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She knew that her feeling of safety was based on the flimsiest grounds; even now her enemies might be surrounding the hotel and tomorrow morning they might be dead or in custody. She stood up and stared out of the window at the darkening skies. She turned on the television, flicked through the channels for a couple of minutes and switched it off. Then she lay down on the bed, but despite her fatigue she stared up at the ceiling and her mind wandered back and forth over the events of the last three weeks.

  She got up again. Maybe there was an exercise room with a treadmill where she could run herself to exhaustion. She picked up the house telephone and called reception.

  ‘I’m sorry ma’am, but our exercise room is closed for renovation. I can give you a pass for the hotel a mile up the road, if you like.’

  ‘No that’s alright. I’ve just remembered I don’t have any kit.’

  Gerry put the phone back and spotted her dirty clothes tossed on to the armchair. She picked them up and took the elevator down to the basement laundry room and found Dan leaning over a machine jiggling a handful of quarters and reading the instructions on the lid. Gerry hesitated in the doorway, wondering whether to stay or scarper back to her room before he saw her, but he spun round.

  ‘Hi Gerry, come to do your laundry? Sorry silly question, else you wouldn’t be down here.’

  ‘That was my plan,’ she acknowledged, ‘but I’ve just realised I don’t have any coins.’

  ‘No problem, I haven’t started mine yet, so add yours.’ He lifted the machine lid. Gerry placed her clothes in the machine and he set it going.

  ‘It’ll take forty-five minutes, according to the blurb,’ he said. Do you want to go and get a drink while we wait?’

  ‘Er… I’d rather just go for a walk, if you don’t mind.’ She hesitated. ‘I need to talk to you about one or two things.’

  ‘Ok then. Hey I thought you were going straight to sleep.’

  ‘I thought I would, but I started turning over things in my mind. I’ll tell you when we’re outside.’

  ‘Ok.’

  They took the stairs to the lobby and found that a sudden rain shower and arriving guests were hurrying through the revolving doors, cursing the weather.

  ‘We could go to my room,’ Gerry suggested. ‘There’s some coffee or we could raid the minibar.’

  ‘Ok, that’s fine,’ Dan replied.

  ‘So what’s on your mind, Gerry?’ Dan asked, slumping into armchair while Gerry sat on the swivel cha
ir by the desk.

  ‘Well amongst other things…you are a bit,’ she finished lamely.

  He stared at her with a sombre expression. ‘Because I said I loved you back then, you mean.’

  ‘But I’m totally screwed up,’ she exclaimed. ‘I tell everyone I have a daughter, but the truth is I gave her up for adoption at birth. True my mother suddenly died and I didn’t feel I was the right sort of person to bring up a child. I’ve been assessed as mentally unstable by a prison psychiatrist. When I was alone in that raft, shit scared, I took a good long hard look at myself and I don’t like it much.’

  Dan stared at her for a minute while she wiped tears away with her fingers.

  ‘I knew all that Gerry. I’ve seen the report on you, but I’m stupid enough to think I know you better than those people. Could you stand up a moment?’ he asked, getting to his feet.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘So I can kiss you.’

  Gerry gazed at him in wonder and then stood up uncertainly but Dan grabbed her around the waist with one arm and then gently place a hand behind her head and without the need for any more encouragement she kissed him hungrily and then with sudden desperation she pressed close against him. Suddenly he was pulling away and reaching towards his mouth and at the same time Gerry felt the sensations in her lips had altered. She darted her tongue forward.

  ‘My tooth’s fallen out,’ she wailed, just as he held out the whitish lump on the palm of his hand. ‘It’s a temporary crown,’ she explained. ‘Maybe I can get it cemented back in tomorrow.’ He handed it to her with a grin.

  ‘It’s not funny!’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that you’re trying to talk whilst keeping your lips over your teeth; go on…show me.’ She forced a smile revealing the gap in her teeth.

  ‘One day perhaps you can tell me how that happened, but for now why don’t you put that somewhere safe and we’ll try that kiss again. Gerry stared at him for a moment.

  ‘Do you think you still love me then, Dan Hall?’ she asked. He looked back at her seriously, no trace of the grin.