by Simon Toyne
Ulvi studied the face, the long wild hair, sparse over parchment skin, the beard fringed around cracked lips, wasted like the rest of him and pulled back over a snarl of broken teeth made brown by bleeding gums. He looked as though he was howling, though thankfully he made no sound above the pant of his scratchy breath. The eyes — and thank God for this — were closed, for they were the things that unsettled Ulvi the most. If they were quick, maybe they could get out of here without waking him.
The nurse had clearly realized this too and was working swiftly. He took a fresh pair of nitrile gloves from a box, slipped them over his hands then swapped a new bag of plasma for the depleted one on the drip line. Next he laid out syringes loaded with Vitamin K and Thrombin to promote coagulation in the blood, as well as scalpels to cut free the pus-soaked dressings wrapped round his strange network of wounds. Then he made a mistake. He tore open a fresh package of dressings a little too eagerly and the sound of it ripped through the heavy silence. The thin, blackened lids instantly moved in response. Ulvi and the nurse watched, each hoping the eyes would settle and the thing would remain asleep. But it did not. The head rolled towards them and the lids parted, revealing the hellish eyes beneath. They were bright red, a result of all the blood vessels having burst and bled into the whites. Ulvi stared at them, transfixed by the sight of his brother monk and the demon thing he had become.
The light hurt.
Everything hurt.
When Dragan had first woken, here in this place, he had thought for a brief moment it must be Heaven; he was no longer inside the dark rooms and hallways of the Citadel, so therefore he must have died. But then pain had overwhelmed him, and he knew he was wrong, for Heaven could not contain agony such as this.
In the first few days, when he had realized where he was, he had waited for death — welcomed it even. He knew, through his agonies, that it had to be close — one way or another. Either his broken body would finally give up, or an agent of the Citadel would come.
The law was clear.
The secrets of the Citadel had to be protected.
And he was a Sanctus — a guardian of the Sacrament. There was no way they could let him remain in the world with what he held in his head. So they would bring him back, or they would send someone to silence him, as well as anyone else he may have spoken to.
But he had said nothing.
Not to the doctors, not to the police, not even to the priest who watched over him constantly, stealing into his room from time to time to whisper fresh news of what was happening outside and in the wider world. He wished the priest would leave him in peace. He didn’t care for any of it. He just wanted to keep his soul pure so he could face his God knowing he had kept his oath and carried the secret to his grave.
And he had heard Death in the corridor, shuffling outside his door, teasing him with his closeness, then slipping away and into other rooms to claim other souls. Although he wanted it, yearned for it, Death left him alone.
So he endured, waiting his turn, which could not — praise God — be long. For despite the transfusions of the blood of others, and the drugs that stopped it from flowing straight out of him again, he could feel the life leaking from him, tickling and dripping in the dark wet places between the dressings and his blighted skin where the nurse dabbed and cleansed.
But now he felt differently.
Now he feared the whisper of death at his door. Earlier, when he had drifted out of agonized sleep from a dream where his body was whole and he was back in the cool tunnels of the mountain, he had discovered a dark figure standing in the room with him. At first he had thought the shadow was death, come to claim him at last. But as his ruined eyes cleared and the figure stepped forward, he saw it was just the priest, delivering fresh news.
Death had come after all, it seemed, but not to him.
You are the last, the priest had whispered. The last…
And as he lay pinned down by this news, he had felt strength flowing back into him along with the realization that death was no longer an option. Now he had to live. He did not know who in authority was left in the Citadel but suspected there was no one. Why else had he been left in the hospital to rot without a word? Why else had he not been silenced earlier, unless there was no one to give the order? If the old elite had been smashed, then he was all that remained. He was the only one who could rebuild it again.
He looked down now as the male nurse peeled away the last sticky dressing to reveal his blackened, wasted body beneath. Seeing it was its own kind of agony; the ruined flesh, scored with his ceremonial scars, badge of his holy orders, red and swollen where blood and fluid leaked from him.
He had borne his suffering, as Job had done, and proved his worthiness for the task that had been reserved for him. He had been spared so he could restore the order once more. But a leader needed to be strong and there was only one place where his wrecked body could recover fully. If he were to live at all.
He had to get back to the Citadel.
II
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
25
Babil Province, Western Iraq
Hyde jammed his arm against the roof of the cab as they bounced over ruts in the road carved by recent floods. They had left the main road twenty clicks back and were now deep in the middle of nowhere. Out here there were no trees, no grass, no wind — nothing at all. Even the scrubby storksbill bushes that somehow managed to cling to the ground everywhere else in Iraq had been burned away by the slowly spreading eastern edge of the Syrian Desert. Whatever had once been here had been ground down by time and heat until it was reduced to just two elements — earth and sky — with a hazy smudge marking the place where the two met, as if the finger of God had been run along it, blurring the line between them.
Ahead of him was what he now called ‘home’, a sprawling collection of earth-coloured tents and prefabricated structures clustered together inside a razor-wire perimeter. Two huge earth movers trundled around inside the compound, kicking up dust as they dug a second storage lagoon even though the first one was still empty. At the centre of it all rose the dark, skeletal drill tower, sharp and slender like the spire of a church built to worship money. It reminded Hyde of the spindle of a roulette wheel and, as at every other low point in his life, here he was again, betting on how that spin of the wheel would end, hoping it would fall on black.
They reached the main gate, passed through the double perimeter and into the shade of the transport hangar. It was better equipped than anything he had ever seen in the army. When he had signed on he had been asked to put together a wish list of vehicles and equipment he might need. Being used to army quartermasters cutting any requisition list in half, he had padded the list, adding plenty of stuff he didn’t really need. But he had got the whole lot. Money appeared to be no object for his new bosses, though with the drill still turning dry, he wasn’t sure where the cash was coming from: not from the ground, that was for sure.
The truck stopped and he opened the door to the trapped heat in the hangar, stretching the kinks out of his back as he passed through a set of double doors designed to keep the heat out of the main building and the air-conditioning in.
The mess hall was half-full, men in desert lights eating dinner after a day on the drill. He knew they were coming off a shift because their bright white work clothes, designed to reflect the worst of the torturous sun, were now uniformly beige. He could feel heat radiating off them as he passed their tables, as if they were bricks that had been in the sun all day.
The air temperature dropped a few more degrees as he left the mess hall and entered the office complex, punching in the code to gain entry to his domain — the security nerve centre. The more important people had desks further down the corridor where the air-con stayed constant and you couldn’t hear the noise from the mess hall, but he liked this just fine. In theor
y, it meant he could be up and outside much quicker if trouble arose — not that he was expecting any. The border with Syria was over seventy clicks away and the nearest town about the same. There were still pockets of fedayeen everywhere — the nationalist freedom fighters trying to kick out the Western invaders — and there were plenty of opportunistic criminals looking to kidnap key workers from the rich Western companies now flourishing in the unsteady peace; but Hyde doubted any of them would try anything here.
Most of his job as head of security had been done before they’d even stuck the first spade in the dirt. He’d deliberately driven all the construction trucks and armoured personnel carriers through the most populated places en route, to demonstrate the fire- and man-power they were taking into the desert. With the tactical capability of the compound an open secret, no one in their right mind would try to engage them — there were far too many softer and more easily accessed targets around.
Inside the control centre a bank of monitors cycled through strategic camera feeds from around the compound. At night the ones on the perimeter switched to heat and infrared frequencies, turning the dust-brown desert a ghostly green. Tariq, one of the locals he’d hired, was sitting in front of them, mesmerized by their unchanging monotony. He didn’t look up.
Hyde collapsed in a seat by his desk, and threw the rolled-up copy of USA Today next to the bundle of sacking. He considered consigning the paper straight to the trash, but dropped it into a desk drawer instead — just in case. Jogging the mouse to wake his terminal, he loaded his email. The firewalls on the system were so good that he never got spam and the only way a message could drop into his inbox was if someone specifically addressed it to him and sent it from an approved IP. Hardly anyone had this configuration so he almost never got messages. He still found himself checking for emails from Wanda, but she hadn’t sent him anything since the divorce papers. There was one message waiting for him, though. It was internal, from Dr Harzan — the big boss of the whole outfit: We’re just back from the desert. Bring the relic to the ops room the moment you return.
Hyde sighed and hauled himself to his feet. He didn’t mind being ordered around — after sixteen years in the service, he was used to it — but it still irked him that he was being dicked about by a civilian. Grabbing the bundle of sacking, he headed out to the corridor.
When they had first interviewed him for the job he had been told one of his duties would involve ancient artefacts. At the time he hadn’t given it much thought. Now he thought about it all the time. He’d figured if you were digging around in the ground, you might come across some old things that might be worth something, but he couldn’t for the life of him work out what buying a bunch of overpriced archaeological relics on the black market had to do with drilling for oil. He’d asked Dr Harzan about it once. Harzan had told him that he wasn’t being paid to think, just to do as he was told and keep quiet. So that’s what Hyde did: he kept quiet about the relics; quiet about the compound and quiet about his strong desire to shove a live grenade up Harzan’s ass and push him off a cliff.
He reached the operations room — at the cooler end of the corridor — knocked on the door and waited for a response. Even though he was security chief he didn’t have a key to this room. The only people allowed inside were Harzan and his two assistants, Blythe and Rothstein, who spent their days out in the empty desert, digging holes in the sand like big, hairy, obnoxious kids and generally causing a massive security headache. Why they couldn’t stay in the nice safe compound like everybody else was beyond him. Everyone referred to them as the three wise men — though not to their faces, as they didn’t have a sense of humour between them. The whole facility was at their disposal, that much had been made crystal clear when he was hired. It was almost like the three wise men and their wild goose chases were more important than the oil they were drilling for. Hyde had peeked at their personnel dossiers once, to try to work out why they were so important. He’d hoped it would shed some light on things, but all it had done was confuse him. He had expected them to be hotshot geologists with long track records of finding oil where no one else had managed it, but all three turned out to be academics with PhDs in things like antiquities, theology and archaeology. He failed to see how any of that was going to scare up the golden goods from the ground. Yet again it seemed he’d bet it all on black, and the ball was going to drop down on red.
The door rattled as it was unlocked and Dr Harzan’s bearded face appeared in a crack in the door, the dark rings around his eyes making him look like a panda.
‘Bring it in,’ he said, opening the door wide enough for Hyde to pass.
He headed on through and stopped by the table in the middle of the room. The other two weren’t here but he could still smell them. They both smoked pipes and the odour clung to the air in the room. It was only the second time he’d been in here since the complex had become operational and it had got a lot messier since he’d last seen it. Scrolls of printout paper and seismic charts were piled up everywhere, spilling on to the floor in some places. A topographical map covered one wall, overlaid with a spider’s web network of pins, Post-it notes and photographs of the night sky with various constellations marked out in chinagraph pencil lines. On the central table, state-of-the-art laptops sat side by side with old coffee cups and more chunks of stone tablet similar to the one he was carrying. They didn’t even let the cleaners in here, that’s why it stank worse than a frat boy’s locker room.
‘Let me see it,’ Dr Harzan said.
Hyde handed the bundle over and watched Harzan unwrap it, eyes gleaming like a junkie unwrapping a rock of crack. His face fell when he saw what was inside.
‘This is not what was promised,’ he said. ‘This piece is far too recent to be of interest.’ He held it up for Hyde to see, as though he was a slow student who’d just flunked a test. ‘It is written in Akkadian not proto-cuneiform and the symbols do not form the Tau.’
‘I was sent to buy a relic,’ Hyde said, keeping the anger from his voice. ‘I bought a relic.’
‘Well, you bought the wrong one. This one is no good.’ He tossed it on to the table as if it were a paperback and turned away. ‘Make yourself useful: one of the drivers was caught stealing petrol and selling it to nomads. He’s in the brig. Go and deal with him — that should be more in line with your skill base. And shut the door on your way out.’
Hyde marched across the baking ground towards the tallest of the guard towers that doubled as a stockade, sweat dripping from his reddened face like his blood was boiling inside him. The Ghost had switched rocks on him and made him look like an idiot. He reached the door to the tower and practically kicked his way through it.
‘Open it,’ he said, nodding at the locked door of the brick cell built into the foundations of the tower. The guard obeyed.
Inside the cell was a twenty-something Iraqi lying on the wooden board that served as a cot.
‘Grab his hand and hold it flat against the bed,’ Hyde ordered. He didn’t want to waste time with this petty thief; he had bigger scores to settle. The guard did what he was told. Hyde pulled his knife from his belt and slammed it between two of the prisoner’s fingers. The man whimpered and stared at the knife with widened eyes.
‘You stole from the company, yes?’
‘No,’ said the terrified man, in what could have been a plea or an answer.
‘You stole from the company,’ Hyde insisted, ‘and thieving cannot be tolerated.’ In a single swift movement he levered the knife down hard like a guillotine, snicking off the man’s little finger with a soft crunch.
The prisoner screamed. Blood leaked from the cut, isolating the severed finger in a spreading crimson lake.
‘Steal again and it’s your hand,’ Hyde said. ‘Try to run and it’s your life.’ He turned to the guard, who looked as shocked as the prisoner. ‘Clean him up and send him back to work.’ Then he was out in the heat and brightness of the compound, wiping his knife against the leg of his fatigues.
The ringtone purred. Nobody picked up.
The Ghost had done it to him again.
26
Al Anbar Province, Western Iraq
Evening was coming, but the heat of the day remained trapped in the fringes of the Syrian Desert. It had been hammered into the rocky ground by the relentless sun and now radiated back up as though the world beneath the crust was molten. It was hard to believe anything could survive out here in this furnace heat and on this lunar landscape, but sparse tufts of grass somehow managed to struggle out of cracks in the earth and buckthorn spread across the gravel in whatever contours offered the tiniest amount of low shade — and the goats ate all of it.