The Demons of King Solomon
Page 20
What the heck are you doing here? Lizzie asked herself. You’re not Lara Croft and you’re not Indiana Jones.
Her burly and enigmatic companion seemed to think otherwise.
Over the last several months Mahip Singh had shared a lot of things with Lizzie. Some of them were the secrets of the Library of the Ten Gurus and the strange, important work they did; but that was far from all he shared. The grueling self-defense classes had been only the beginning of what he called her ‘field training.’ She’d been on plenty of digs, including many in remote places, but never before had she been required to learn about surveillance, firearms, subterfuge, sabotage, counter-terrorism, anti-terrorism, and covert intelligence gathering. It was surreal. Actually it was even more surreal to her than having found the treasure of the Knights Templars or becoming rich and famous. That, bizarre as it was, made some kind of sense. This did not.
The thought that Singh wanted her to believe in magic and demons and all of that kind of thing was bad enough. Bringing her halfway around the world to a site of ancient ruins where terrorists—very real terrorists—were operating was beyond scary. She kept thinking of ‘terrorism,’ deconstructing the word down to its root. Terror.
Until now that word had always been an abstract concept for her. Something she saw on TV or read about online.
Now she lay next to Singh, looking through binoculars for actual terrorists.
Lizzie did not see anything at first, but did not say so. She was naturally detail-oriented, possibly even detail-obsessed; something that was a definite benefit in her scholarly career but quite a bit less useful in relationships. Nitpicking is a double-edged sword.
Now, though, she read the landscape and recorded all of the details in her mind. Seeing everything, evaluating it, categorizing and cataloging it within easy mental reach. Her mind worked like a pattern search software program when she let it cruise, and when it was in gear the orderliness of it helped control the panic that bubbled in her chest.
Her process was this: she looked at the whole scene first and froze it in her mind like a high-definition picture, with all of the relevant details in place. That flash image was the unsolved puzzle. The minaret, the ruins, the rocks, the shrubs, the angles and planes, the distances between objects, the incidental elements—birds, trash, leaves—and the position of shadows. The recording and evaluation of all of that was done in a moment. Half a moment. Locked into her nearly eidetic memory.
Then she began analyzing the scene to look for anomalies.
If there was no one here, then any anomalies would be past-tense and would appear as such. A footprint half-filled in by drifting sands; the withered remains of a date, eaten and discarded by some animal. She saw some of that.
But then, through the powerful lenses of the binoculars, she began seeing things that spoke to a more immediate presence. That shot fresh adrenaline into her bloodstream, and she had to battle the ‘flight’ instinct.
Be calm, she told herself, reciting a litany a therapist had taught her long ago. Be calm. Observe. Understand. Know. You are safe in the details.
The details.
She forced her lungs to breathe slowly and deeply, nudging herself toward a meditative state. She swallowed to keep her throat moist. She ignored the panic.
There were footprints in the sand. They were fresh, and there were a lot of them. Boots, she noted. Singh had showed her many pictures of shoe patterns so she could distinguish the different tread patterns used by official military and groups like ISIL. From what she could see of the impressions she was nearly certain they were ISIL footprints.
She frowned. One of the shadows was wrong.
There was a geometry to everything, and given the angle of the sun, the shape the minaret made was improbably thick and misshapen. The shadow it threw onto the sand was distorted because something jutted out near the base. Lizzie did some quick calculations and estimated that the source of that protrusion had to be more than three feet from the ground. It was a rounded bulge.
“There’s a car down there,” she said. “Hidden behind the minaret.”
“Yes,” agreed Singh.
“And footprints.”
“Yes,” he said again. He drew his sidearm, a Sig Sauer P320, and quietly screwed a Trinity sound suppressor into the barrel. Lizzie watched him do it with a peculiar mix of emotions. There was the common awe of handguns most people had who were unfamiliar with them. There was an atavistic dread of their potential that was bred into her by upbringing and education. There was an ugly fascination brewing in the lizard part of her human brain. And there was fear, because of what was implied by Singh’s actions. For months she had trained and discussed and been part of role-playing scenarios. This was different. This was real.
She reached for her own gun, but Singh touched her arm and shook her head. “Not yet. You’ll know when.”
They watched the scene for another few minutes and just when Lizzie began doubting her judgment about the car, a man appeared. He wore desert khakis and the kind of boots that matched the footprints she’d seen. He wore a black balaclava, but it was pushed up onto his forehead and sweat glistened on his bearded face. An automatic rifle—an AK-47—was slung from his shoulder, but he held onto the strap and did not have his hands in position to use the weapon.
“Idiot,” murmured Singh as he rose to a kneeling position, took aim in a two-handed shooting grip, and fired two quick shots. Lizzie almost—almost—tried to stop him because the distance was—according to everything Singh had taught her—too great for a reliable kill shot with a handgun.
The soldier crumbled to the ground.
Before she could say anything, Singh was over the edge of the rise and running quickly down the hill. He took a lot of short steps so as to keep his gun steady, and the barrel and his eyes moved as one, sweeping the landscape to look for other targets.
“Jesus Christ,” breathed Lizzie.
And then she, too, was running.
The soldier lay in the shade at the base of the minaret. There were two neat holes, one in the center of his chest and the other just above his right eye. The accuracy was impressive, but the sight of a man lying there, blood and brains splashed across the hard-packed sand, made Lizzie stagger to a stop. She whirled and vomited onto the ground.
Dizziness swept through her and she fumbled for the wall to keep from falling. Singh did not offer to help. He stood apart, watching her.
“God…” she gasped.
“It is for God that some hard things need to be done.”
“God’s a fucking monster.”
Singh gave her a small, cold smile. “God is the greatest killer in the universe. We are all amateurs.”
It startled her, but Singh patted her arm.
“Don’t make the mistake of confusing piety with pacifism or purity of purpose with peacefulness of approach. Come on.”
He turned and raised his weapon again, assuming Lizzie would follow. She did, though she still did not draw her weapon. The cold efficiency with which Singh had shot the ISIL soldier rattled her even more than she thought it might. He showed no outward sign that the taking of a human life mattered to him at all. She’d read about that kind of thing, but it chilled her to the bone to see it in practice. And she hoped with all her might that no matter what happened, she would never become so hardened, so cold. So inhuman.
The minaret had a very large base and behind it they found a small truck draped with a camouflage tarp. It was empty, but there were weapons and ammunition, and plenty of tools. There was also a duffel bag that, when Singh opened it, he recoiled as if it was full of hissing snakes. It wasn’t. It was worse. The bag was packed with explosives. Mostly C4 in quarter kilo bars. Scores of them, along with wires and detonators. Lizzie looked from the explosives to the tall tower.
“Please tell me we’re not about to die right now,” said Lizzie in a tiny voice.
Singh laughed, but it wasn’t a convincing one. And not at all comforting.
“We can’t let them,” said Lizzie. “Can we hide the explosives?”
The Sikh considered, then shook his head. “No. The ground here is too hard for digging and there’s too much of this stuff.”
“What about the detonators?”
He grinned his approval and scooped the pencil-shaped detonators out of the bag and shoved them into his pocket. As an afterthought he took two bars of C4 as well.
They continued circling the minaret and found that the small door stood ajar but only led to an inner staircase that spiraled upward to the top of the tower. The floor was solid and unhelpful. So they retreated and spent a nervous five minutes studying the footprints on the ground. The patches of loose sand were infrequent and the hardpan took no useful prints. As Singh prowled the area, looking for some kind of hidden doorway or tunnel entrance, Lizzie stood still and re-read the scene, looking for anomalies.
Looking, and finding them.
“No,” she said, nodding firmly and setting off in the direction of a dense clump of shrubs. Singh paused in his work, a frown of confusion on his face.
“What…?” he began, but then he saw it, too, and his frown transformed into a wolfish grin. “Excellent, Dr. Corbett.”
The shrubs all through the ruins had endured the same brutal weather conditions, including a harsh and unrelenting westerly breeze. The wind was so regular that it had twisted everything from grass to trees into crones leaning away from the sandy gusts. The weather side of everything was dusty and pitted. The exception was one clump of brush that faced the wrong way. Singh clearly had not noticed it when he surveyed the landscape, but it was the kind of detail that Lizzie could not overlook.
They closed on the spot and as they did the story unfolded. There was a ring of churned dirt and sand around the roots of the shrubs, and when Singh holstered his gun and pulled up on the tough, wiry arms of the shrubbery, the whole circular section trembled. It was too heavy for him to move by himself, and even with Lizzie’s help it was a bitch of a job. The hidden door was actually a kind of circular tub filled with dirt and covered in sand. The distant ancestors of that shrubbery had been planted there and allowed to grow so that it hid the tub.
Lizzie felt an odd flush of excitement whip through her. She was proud of having found something that Dr. Singh had not seen, even though it meant that now they were able to climb down into a hole filled with ISIL killers and maybe something worse.
I’m insane, she told herself, but on consideration changed that. The world is insane.
That felt more accurate.
Being accurate about that was not much of a comfort. No, not at all.
13
The Minaret of Jam
Twenty Minutes Ago
Beneath the tub was a stairway that was very steep and very awkward, built almost like a ladder but made of stone. Each step was badly worn, as if thousands of feet had climbed down into the shadows.
Singh leaned down into the hole and listened, then nodded. “I’ll go first. Wait and watch. When it’s clear, I’ll signal you. Make no sound. Once you’re down, let me lead. Keep your pistol holstered.”
“You afraid I’ll accidentally let off a shot?”
“I’m afraid you’ll accidentally shoot me in the back.”
“Hey!” she said, but it was a reasonable concern. She was an okay shot, but not a good one. As Singh positioned himself to begin his descent she touched his arm. “You’ve never really told me much about what’s down there. All you’ve ever said was that it was possibly an early work that might have influenced the Clavicular Salomonis Regis.”
When Singh had mentioned that book to Lizzie back in Toronto her response had been an eye-roll and an ‘Oh, please.’ The book in question was a notorious book of spells that supposedly were used by King Solomon to bind demons to his service and use their powers to build the Temple of Jerusalem. Also known as the Lesser Key of Solomon, the book was written in the mid-seventeenth century and based on older works that were regarded as equally apocryphal. Lizzie had mentioned the book in her second textbook on the language of spells, which Singh admitted was one of the reasons he had contacted her.
The thought that a copy of the Clavicula Salomonis Regis was here intrigued her, she had to admit that to herself, if not to Singh. But it was still only a book. She was concerned with preserving it and any other artifacts and—to her enduring surprise—willing to risk her life to do so. She wondered what the press and her newfound legion of fans would think about that. It was a very Indiana Jones/Lara Croft thing to do, except she had no whip, no reliable combat skills, and she didn’t have Lara Croft’s gravity-defying bust line. Ah well.
It made her wonder what her publicist, literary agent, and the dons at her university would think if she vanished without a trace. When she’d gone off with Singh, she had sent a bunch of emails about being overwhelmed with all the celebrity and needing to take some time to catch her breath. She’d touched in now and then via cell phone and Skype, stretching out her absence into a necessary retreat for health reasons and ending the calls with no allowance for them to complain. She’d even stopped carrying that cell phone—preferring to leave it in her room at the Library of the Ten Gurus and use in its place a nondescript burner phone provided by Singh. All of that had been to keep her involvement with the Sikh and his organization a secret, but it could also guarantee that she might vanish as completely and inexplicably as Amelia Earhart.
“And,” she said to Singh, “you actually think the ISIL freaks are going to try and do what? Summon a demon? That’s what you really think?”
“In essence,” he said. “Yes.”
Lizzie shook her head, but couldn’t help but smile. “Honestly, I don’t know which one of us is crazier. You, for believing that, or me for coming out here with a lunatic.”
“Oh, you, without doubt,” he said. And with that he flashed her a brilliant smile that was even brighter than the sun and climbed down into the blackness.
She watched him go, watched as the darkness claimed him. For a moment he was completely gone, but then she leaned down so that her eyes could adjust to the gloom. She saw him, a vague shape.
“Elizabeth Corbett,” she told herself, “you are out of your goddamn mind.”
She climbed down into the darkness and the fractured land seemed to swallow her whole.
14
The Red Library of Firozkoh
Ten Minutes Ago
They moved like ghosts through the shadows.
The stairway down had been only the first part of a much longer journey. A deeper journey. The first level was a simple access corridor that was cluttered with debris through which a path had been forged, most likely by tomb raiders or the ISIL team. They had put a lot of work into it and it was clear to Lizzie that they never would have bothered unless they were sure there was something of value to find.
They had no need of a flashlight now because a bunch of small kerosene lanterns had been placed at intervals along the passageway. The uppermost hallway was empty, which was less comforting than Lizzie expected.
They found a second staircase and descended that, and they were forty feet along a second passageway when a soldier stepped out from a niche.
“Abdul,” said the man as he emerged from the niche, his rifle in his hands. “Hal hdha ‘ant?”
Is that you?
“No,” said Singh and shot him twice. Heart and head, just as before. Lizzie recalled him describing that technique. A double-tap. One shot in center mass to stop the opponent and possibly damage heart and spine; the other to kill with a bullet to the brain. The guard puddled down with barely a sound. Singh stopped and listened. The hall was silent. He removed the magazine from his gun and replaced it with a new one, then dug four bullets from a pocket and replenished the magazine he had used before slipping it into its slot on
the shoulder holster he wore.
He turned and studied her briefly, perhaps waiting for some kind of comment or reproof. She merely nodded. He sighed, returned the nod, and they went on. Lizzie walked around the corpse, which lay across the path. It would have been easier to step over it, but now old superstitious fears were rising unbidden and unwelcome in her mind. Old taboos about stepping over the dead.
You’re being silly, she tried to tell herself, but her inner voice sounded false, and another part of her whipped back a reply, There’s nothing silly about this, you dumb bitch. People are dying. And I’m going to probably be one of them.
She touched the gun that was snugged into its holster and it offered no comfort at all.
Singh moved ahead and she followed. Along that corridor, down more steps, more halls, deeper and deeper into the earth. The stifling heat of outside did not pursue them and instead it grew colder with every step. The clay and dirt packed between massive slabs of sandstone seemed to radiate a biting cold. At first she was aware of it only from a purely sensory level, but after a minute or two her mind seemed to shift into a different kind of perception and a thought came unbidden and unwelcome into her head.
It knows we’re here.
She missed the next step and stumbled, and had to slap her hand against the wall for balance. Singh whirled round, pistol coming up, but she waved him off.
“I tripped,” she lied.
He studied her with narrowed eyes for a long moment, then glanced around at the shadowy walls. The infrequent lanterns made those shadows caper like goblins and for once even the big Sikh’s calm seemed to come loose from its moorings. He shivered and licked his lips.
“Be careful,” he said quietly, allowing Lizzie to take that any way she wanted.