The Sphinx Scrolls

by Stewart Ferris

  ‘You are testing the government cars? But you are from England. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a sort of expert in car type things, don’t you know,’ he blabbered.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Right. My name. Yes. I, er, the name’s, er, James. James May,’ he bluffed, vaguely recalling a television programme he had once seen on the subject of car testing.

  The gasps of admiration were drowned by the squeak of the gates being opened. Ratty gave the men an appreciative wave and drove away from the palace. Reinforcing his ruse with a leisurely pace and a notable lack of skill at the controls, he headed northeast to earn his place in history.

  * * *

  The medical session in the treatment room adjacent to Orlando’s grandiose office was taking longer than Otto would have preferred, but he could not allow himself to take any shortcuts. Orlando was in a relaxed and triumphant mood, enjoying the personal attention to every aspect of his physiology.

  ‘The archaeologist seems a troublesome character,’ said Otto, withdrawing the final needle from Orlando’s forearm.

  ‘Ruby Towers? I have her under control.’

  ‘I took her to my house on the pretence of needing her expert opinion on the other half of the artefact,’ continued Otto, dabbing the spot of blood on Orlando’s skin with an alcohol pad. ‘Now I am not so sure we need her. She is too headstrong.’

  ‘You know how much we need her, Otto. She will be useful. And I have her lover in the cells. When she sees him on the scaffold tomorrow she will offer no further resistance.’

  ‘His body will be an excellent specimen for my research,’ said Otto. ‘But you know I need at least one other fresh corpse. There are too many gaps in my knowledge of the procedure. I can only perfect it by trial and error.’

  ‘I have that in hand,’ assured Orlando. ‘You will receive two bodies tomorrow.’

  By the time the President excused himself from the medical room almost an hour had passed. The ritual cleaning session that normally gave the Doctor so much pleasure could not be postponed or abandoned – Otto would not conceive of leaving his surgical items behind without preparing for their next use, but the knowledge that he had an English aristocrat waiting for him upstairs added pressure that sucked the joy from the obsessively intricate process.

  Eventually the repetitive tasks were complete. He walked up the stairs two at a time and rapped determinedly on the bedroom door where he had left His Lordship. Without waiting for an answer, he threw the door open to precisely ninety degrees.

  Lord Ballashiels had vanished. It was an act of cowardice and disrespect, unbecoming of a gentleman, and it grated against Otto’s monochrome values. And there was now something of greater concern: if His Lordship had managed to find the room where the Mayan relics were stored, it was possible that he could have stolen both parts of the artefact. Otto marched, breathless, to the relics room, loathing the lack of flexibility in his personality that had prevented him from accelerating or postponing his treatment session with Orlando and, as a result, had jeopardised his life’s work.

  The door was closed, however, and there was no sign of forced entry. His guest hadn’t broken in. Both parts of the artefact must be safe. Otto fumbled in his jacket pocket for his key. It was gone. There was no point in searching his other pockets, because only one of them was assigned for keys. He tried the handle and the door swung open. His horror at finding the room unprotected almost made him forget to measure the angle at which he had opened the door.

  A second later his fears were assuaged by the sight of the two stelae, side by side on the table. And what was that next to them? He picked up the battered Victorian diary. Could it really be Bilbo’s? Did he really have in his hand the information that would unlock the secrets of the stele? He flicked through the pages, finding references to his ancestor and sketches of the stele. This was it. This was the diary his agents had failed to find when they ransacked His Lordship’s hotel room. But why would the aristocrat leave it here and disappear into the night?

  Lord Ballashiels no longer mattered. The drunken handwriting in a foreign style would take him a little while to decipher, but he began immediately the process of examining the diary, looking for the information he was convinced was contained there.

  * * *

  With the goal of finding a vacant bedroom fixed in her mind, Ruby forced her weakening body up the stairs. Walking descended into crawling. Crawling became dragging. It took all of her residual energy to make it to the upper floor. Helpless as a day-old kitten, she tentatively leaned against a half-open door and was tempted to cry with relief when it swung open to reveal a large, almost opulent – if somewhat dusty – apartment. Most importantly, it was empty. With guts sore even to the lightest touch, Ruby finally fell headlong onto a large mattress. Now alone, she allowed herself a groan, and, as the horror and terror of the last couple of days swept over her in this oasis of calm and quiet, she began to sob, each convulsion threatening to rip her fragile abdomen.

  Lying back on the comfortable sheets, she felt as if she’d been run over by a ten-ton truck. If only she could give in to the demands of her wrecked body: just sleep for a couple of days. She was dizzy and faint. The slightest movement left her breathless. She lay stretched out on the bed, wincing from the pain of the food poisoning. Although she was too exhausted even to be aware of the fact, she was dangerously close to passing out.

  There was something she had to do. Something vital. Her whole body hurt. She closed her eyes hoping to blot out the discomfort. A great task lay ahead of her. Very soon. In the basement.

  It was Matt. She had to save his life. It would involve getting up off the bed, walking downstairs, unlocking the door and letting him out. It was that easy, so easy. She imagined herself getting off the bed and starting the journey to Matt’s cell, picturing each step in detail. The steps grew softer and softer until she could no longer feel them under her feet. It didn’t seem odd to her that the building should be subtly melting around her. Her imaginary rescue operation was running entirely satisfactorily, her worries evaporating as fast as the walls as she finally fell unconscious.

  Wednesday 21st November 2012

  A toucan in the palace garden squawked, but its scratchy song could not penetrate Ruby’s brain. It took the scream of a dying man to shock her eyes into opening. She felt rough, as if her internal organs had been bruised, but she was immensely satisfied with herself. She had a vivid recollection of unlocking the cells during the night, and of bribing the guards at the front gate to let her and Matt out of the palace. They had walked straight to the American Embassy where the Ambassador had given them coffee and Hershey’s chocolate, and had then put on his Mickey Mouse hat and started line dancing. It had all seemed such harmless fun at the time. Even the escape from the palace had seemed like a game.

  Piece of cake this rescuing business, she thought.

  The intense daylight pouring in from the window flooded her senses. The window was unfamiliar. The bed equally strange. And what was that sound that had woken her? She scanned her memory. The palace. Matt in danger. It had to be the middle of the night. She had fallen asleep and now it was time to rescue Matt. The light from the window must be from an artificial source.

  Her watch, however, told her otherwise. Eleven.

  Instantly it hit her. No ... this can’t have happened. It just can’t. She’d slept not only through the time to rescue Matt, but also his appointment with the gallows. It was because of her that he’d died. She forced herself to confront the stark truth over and over: Matt is dead. It was all her fault. Still weak, she fell off the bed and found herself stomping around in her agony of spirit. What would Matt have thought of her in his final minutes? She could never live with such tormenting guilt.

  No, there had to be some mistake. She walked to the window and looked outside for reassurance. The light was unbearable today. The smog over the city had been increasing in translucency every hour as one by one the building and
car fires either were brought under control or had simply burned themselves out. There were hundreds of people in the garden. All of the palace staff appeared to be out there this morning, but the celebratory mood of the night before was replaced with a sombre sense of repression, of enforced respect.

  One feature in the garden appeared to be the focus of this mood. It was a man, hanging by the neck from the scaffold.

  Ruby threw herself back onto the bed in despair. A sharp object stabbed her hip. She had fallen onto something unforgiving. She grabbed at her side, realising that the large bunch of keys pressing deep into her flesh was to blame. She grabbed them.

  There, in the centre of the ring, was the key that Pedro had used to enter what was otherwise an impregnable underground cell. And what was it he had said, slurring drunkenly before he fell off his seat? Something important.

  She recalled their conversation in the bar the previous night: ‘We no have spare’. These keys were vital. Pedro was highly irresponsible in handing them over to her. He must have drunk so much that he was utterly beyond making any sensible decisions. Yet the door to the cell must have been opened in order to get the prisoners out for hanging. A steel door, inches thick, with a lock mechanism as heavy as a bank vault, could not have been opened with a mere handyman’s toolkit.

  She returned to the window, heart thudding. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust. When her focus landed upon the scaffold she could make out that the figure swaying like a broken doll at the end of the rope was wearing a baggy soldier’s uniform. Otto stood behind him, checking for a pulse while soldiers hacked at the rope to allow his pathetic limp body to drop free from the noose. As they carried him away, Otto at his side, she was finally able to make out the face of Pedro, frozen in time in an expression of fear and confusion. She gripped the keys in her hand and ran towards the cells, clinging to the hope that Matt could still be alive.

  * * *

  Soldiers placed Pedro’s body respectfully upon a table in Otto’s treatment room. They nodded to the Doctor and left, unconcerned that he then deliberately locked himself in. Studying Bilbo’s diary throughout the night had left Otto exhausted, but the opportunity to experiment upon Pedro was a gift to his research project which he could not refuse.

  What had he ascertained from the diary? He pondered this as he simultaneously examined the condition of the young man’s body laid out before him. His opinion of his ancestor’s great rival had sunk to a new low. This Bilbo character was mischievous, irresponsible, generally unworthy of respect. Quite how this bumbling alcoholic had managed to keep Karl Mengele from achieving the highest archaeological prize was beyond him. The information in the diary was presented in a chaotic manner that grated painfully with Otto’s ingrained sense of order. There was a great deal of useless tittle-tattle wrapped around the important passages. Personal stories of sordid liaisons with tribeswomen were not his idea of edifying prose.

  Pedro seemed to cough as the Doctor manoeuvred his torso to remove the hidden harness beneath his shirt to which the noose had been discreetly attached and which had prevented his neck from breaking. The Doctor connected a heart monitor and straightened Pedro’s limp arms to make them precisely parallel to his body.

  There were two sections of the diary, he recalled, that shone through the haze. One revealed the name of the village that was closest to the place where the stelae had been found – the two halves of the artefact were separated by less than a mile when they were discovered. Bilbo and Karl had been treading on each other’s toes the whole time during their searches. The other revelation concerned the way in which the stelae were said to be aligned. Of the twelve positions, only one could lead to the correct interpretation of the glyphs. The other eleven positions cleverly gave coherent, meaningful readings in every respect, except that they were wrong. Follow any one of those clues and you would end up miles from the true location.

  It had, of course, occurred to the Doctor that he could send a search party to investigate each of the disparate locations now that they could all be interpreted. Mechanical excavators would make short work of each site, and he would have results within a week. Such an all guns blazing approach did not suit his style, however. There was an elegant problem to be solved, and it needed an elegant solution.

  He inserted a tube into each of Pedro’s carotid arteries and began diluting the blood with cell preservatives. He left the room to enquire whether another execution was imminent. He had been promised two bodies today, after all.

  Pedro’s pulse slowly began to drop, eventually flat-lining for lengthy periods between beeps until it ceased altogether.

  * * *

  ‘What the hell were you playing at?’ Matt’s veins were dilated and his eyes were dull and hard, boring into her like a bull’s before it charges. His head was still spinning from the din of the futile sledgehammer battering on the steel door of his cell. When he spoke he had to cover his tender ears to shield himself from his own noise. Ruby quickly forced the dented door open wider to let him out, conscious that soldiers could return at any moment.

  When Matt had squeezed moodily and ungratefully past her, she paused with one hand on the door and the other on the key. Then she looked at the Guatemalan prisoner who stood calmly by the far wall and couldn’t help but hold the door open for him too.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ protested the temporarily deaf Matt, talking loudly. ‘Somethin’s odd with this guy.’

  ‘I can’t just leave him there!’

  ‘Huh? You were happy enough to leave me there yesterday!’

  The Guatemalan ignored them both and slowly walked out of the cell. Matt marched up the stairs, hands on ears, not caring when his elbow banged into Ruby’s head.

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you bust me out of there when you had the chance? We could have gotten out of the country by now. This nightmare could have been history.’

  ‘Shut up, Matt. Not now! I’m giving up a hell of a lot to save your arse. And I think they killed the guard who gave me the keys. Hurry.’

  ‘My cell mate said he broke into the palace through a tunnel that leads into the President’s office. Said he was part of the team who dug it as an escape route for the previous President. You know, if the shit hit the fan. There’s a swimming pool or something at the end of it.’

  ‘I know the way,’ said Ruby, feeling somewhat heroic and useful. This was almost enjoyable.

  At ground level there was still no sign of anyone. The ghoulish attraction of a public execution had proved irresistible. The Guatemalan prisoner ambled along behind them, seemingly unhurried. Matt hoped they could lose him. His silence and slowness were freaking him out.

  ‘How come they didn’t lock you up too?’ Matt’s attempt at a whisper came out at normal voice level.

  ‘Turns out I’ve been working for them all along,’ Ruby replied directly into his ear as they walked briskly down a hallway. ‘My job offer was never from UNESCO. The President and his cronies just pretended to be from the United Nations to get me out here. They were going to send me back to Tikal today. They wanted me to work on the big sarcophagus that you contaminated.’

  ‘They tricked you? Goddamnit!’ Matt stopped walking and waved his arms in exasperation that Ruby had been deceived like that.

  ‘I also found out it was the Guatemalans who robbed the Sphinx from under our noses.’

  ‘Assholes!’ he shouted, waving his arms again with more pointless gestures.

  ‘Keep moving and stay quiet, Matt. Act normal.’ She paused and thought more carefully about her choice of words. ‘No, not normal. Act quietly. Behave like you never lived in Manhattan.’

  He winked at her.

  ‘You really know the way to this tunnel? If we don’t find it, I’m screwed.’

  ‘Matt, no one’s looking for you yet. And I kind of work here so no one’s going to challenge me. You can find that tunnel and walk away from this.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I hav
e to stay.’

  ‘Huh?’

  A soldier entered the corridor ahead, walking in the same direction without spotting them.

  ‘Orlando thinks the world is going to end,’ Ruby whispered. ‘I want to know why.’

  But Matt had divided his attention between her and the soldier in front.

  ‘Look, if we get split up and you don’t make it out of here, I’m coming back for you, Rubes,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t even be here! I’ll be in Tikal,’ she replied. ‘Were you even listening?’

  ‘Hey!’ shouted the Guatemalan prisoner. The soldier turned round. ‘Over here! I’m ready for execution now!’

  Ah. That would be the crazy one, thought Ruby as she saw Matt break into a sprint. The soldier opted for the easy target and grabbed the shoulder of the unresisting Guatemalan, quick-marching him to the gallows. Matt turned a corner, out of Ruby’s line of sight. As the seconds passed she was starting to believe he could still make it when a forlorn-looking Matt reappeared, dragged along by four soldiers. Perhaps he would now demonstrate the legendary hand-to-hand combat skills about which he had boasted in his book. He was twisting and bucking like a fish on a line, but there was no sign of any martial arts prowess and the soldiers were able to maintain their grip.

  Ruby ran her hands through her hair, smartening herself as best she could. It was all down to her, again.

  ‘Hey, guys!’ she called to the four soldiers as they puffed their way past. ‘It’s OK, you can let him go. President Orlando has ordered his release.’ She hoped her Spanish accent sounded formal and authoritative, because her demeanour certainly wasn’t.

  Four pairs of distrustful eyes glared at her, but no one stopped or spoke.

  ‘Just leave him with me,’ she continued, now trying to sound forceful. ‘I don’t want any discussion about this. Let him go. Now.’ When they continued dragging Matt towards his demise, she added hopelessly, ‘I’ll sort out the paperwork. It’s all on my shoulders.’