He still had to find a way out.
This really is a cool office, he told himself again. Worthy of a rock star. Or a king. Or a president.
Finally, everything clicked. Something the Guatemalan prisoner had said. A tunnel. A swimming pool. The tunnel entrance was here in this room. He staggered around the edges of the pool, looking for a trap door in the floor. Solid marble tiling held his weight everywhere. He checked the walls and opened cupboards. He crawled under the desk looking for a hidden switch that might make the wall roll back.
Nothing. The surfaces of this room were fixed. There was no secret passageway. That damn Guatemalan was a bullshitter, and now Matt was screwed.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. Matt could hear a key turning in a lock. It wasn’t the door to the President’s office, it was the adjoining medical room; the Doctor was returning. It was too late to close the door between the rooms. Matt had nowhere to hide. That left him the option of fighting and, feeling as bad as he did, that was not an option at all. Overwhelmed by panic, he dipped quietly into the deep end of the pool and sank beneath the surface.
Immersion eased his pains and freed his mind. He looked up and saw streaks of red, like an oil slick. The blood that had seeped onto his shoulders when he pulled out the tubes from his neck was now staining the crystal waters. It was like an arrow pointing right at him. He saw a blurred figure moving around the edge of the pool. He had been spotted. A few more seconds and he’d have to surface and face execution all over again. Perhaps he should try to drown himself, denying his enemies the satisfaction of a kill. He wasn’t a quitter, though. So long as his heart was beating, there was still hope.
He looked behind him and saw for the first time the overhang and the submerged recess, like a tiled cave. Above him an arm reached into the water, attempting to grab him. Without thinking, he swam into the cave. He breathed out the last of the air in his lungs, still heading into the unlit recess. Soon he’d need to inhale, and that meant returning to the evil doctor, but he took another stroke into the blackness. That was it. He was done. He couldn’t even make it back to the open part of the pool. His lungs were almost bursting with the instinct to inhale, and it took all of his strength to resist that force.
So he was going to drown. After all he’d been through, playing the role of the hero one last time, he was going to end it here. He relaxed his arms and floated upwards, briefly wondering whether his publishers would exploit his demise with a new release of his book and feeling disappointed that he would never get to write that thriller about the coma guy. Any moment he expected to hit the roof and become wedged there until the life had been flushed from him.
There was no impact. He floundered, instinctively righting himself, cringing at the thought of the agony he would briefly endure the moment his lungs sucked in water instead of air.
But the agony did not come. In near total darkness he felt his head break the surface of the water. He felt air on his face. He opened his mouth and breathed in. It tasted stale, but it was beautiful. He splashed around in search of the sides. The chamber was small and low, and there appeared to be a ledge in front of him. He clambered out of the water and crawled forward on what felt like dry tiles. He could see nothing at all, but the echo of his exhausted breathing sounded like this was a tight space. Without room to stand up, he continued to crawl, and as the sound of softly sloshing water receded behind him, he knew he’d found the tunnel. Once more he dared to contemplate the possibility that he might yet make it out of this country in one piece.
The water sloshed again, far behind him, echoing endlessly along the tiles. Only this time the sound was of angry water, brutally and hurriedly disturbed. Someone was already on his trail. He broke into the equivalent of a brisk trot on his hands and knees, blindly trusting that the passage would continue straight and that he wouldn’t slam into an unseen wall. Behind his own animal-like panting he could hear the breathing of another. The trot became a sprint. Was it one person or two? He strained to hear, but the clatter of his bones against the floor had become a dominant white noise, suppressing the sounds of whoever was pursuing him.
Trusting that his kneecaps wouldn’t shatter, he kept up the relentless pace. Without visual clues there was no sense of distance. He could be a hundred yards from the President’s office, or he could be a mile away by now. There was no way to tell.
Then shadows – fast-moving, elongated limbs – projected onto the walls and the floor, moving with him, in front of him, around him. The shapes were distended, monstrous, spider-like. They terrified him, but he didn’t stop. These, he quickly deduced, were his own shadows. Someone behind him had switched on a torch, and that could only be to his advantage because now he would be able to see when he reached the end of the passage.
There was a new sound now, piercing the envelope of white noise that surrounded him. It was a voice. Matt didn’t care what it was saying, and the reverb effect rendered it incomprehensible in any case, like an announcement on a loud speaker in a railroad station. Another voice bounced off the walls. There were two pursuers. He tucked his head down low and maintained his speed.
The texture beneath his hands and knees suddenly changed. The tiles gave way to wooden planks, which in turn reduced the aura of noise surrounding him. More importantly, he realised he was at the end. Everything now depended upon whether or not there was a locked door in front of him.
There was no door. The tunnel merely stopped. Ahead was a wall of brick. To the sides was more brickwork. Behind, the light, the voices and the thud-thud of stressed knees grew stronger. Matt reached up. It was the only remaining option. He felt the texture of bare wood. He pushed. The wood moved. He pushed harder and a trap door opened fully. He jumped up through it, and slammed it closed again, throwing the whole weight of his body down on top of it.
Only then did it occur to him to look around. He was in a kitchen – small, nondescript, old-fashioned. A square table stood in the centre with four wooden chairs. An oven. A fridge.
He leapt up, grabbed the fridge and dragged it over to the trap door, noticing without curiosity that it wasn’t plugged into the wall. He took hold of one of the chairs and pulled it towards the fridge, intending to make a stockpile of awkward and heavy items to obstruct the enemies below him, but with the chair came the table and the other three seats – all were screwed together. No matter. He placed them next to the fridge.
The trap door was pulsating. Someone was making a valiant effort to open it from below, but with the weight of a major household appliance above them, Matt was confident it would be some time before they gained entry. He scanned the kitchen for other items that would add to the weight on the door. A kettle. If he filled it with water, that would help. He tried to pick up the kettle, but it was glued in place. He had another idea. If he ran the faucets in the sink and let it overflow, the floor would start to flood, and it would all drain down upon the heads of the guys in the tunnel.
He spun the taps. Nothing came out. What kind of kitchen was this? He looked closely at the loaf of bread on the counter. It was made of plastic. Had he ended up in some kind of museum? Pretty dull museum, he thought, opening the door to the hallway. There were paintings screwed to the walls and a vase containing plastic flowers was glued to the little table upon which it sat. He was in a fake house, he realised, set up as a cover for the emergency escape route of the President. It had been made to look as bland as possible in order to disguise the significance of the tunnel beneath its floor.
He unbolted the front door and pulled it open. Outside was a modest suburban street – a mix of small houses, a few apartment blocks and a bar. In all the fantasies he had dared to dream during his brief captivity, he had never expected freedom to be as simple as stepping out into a street. But it wouldn’t be like that at all, he knew. This country was hostile territory. Ruby was still in the hands of the bad guys, fooled into their clutches and now working as a slave, no doubt at gunpoint. He’d seen through her brave fa
çade. He knew she was trying to be calm – almost indifferent – about her kidnap for his sake. This wasn’t over. He needed to get her out of there, but he needed help, had to find someone he could trust.
He ran to the bar.
‘Hey, buddy, can you help me?’ he asked the bar owner. ‘Need to get to the US Embassy. You have a computer I can use?’
The man said nothing, but went into a back office for a couple of minutes before returning with a printed Google map for Matt to follow.
It was less than a mile across the city. Matt could walk it in a few minutes. He thanked the man and left the bar, counting down the footsteps to safety.
The bar owner locked his doors as soon as Matt had left and picked up his telephone.
* * *
Otto had no desire to wait for news of Matt’s recapture. The soldiers who had swum into the submerged tunnel entrance in pursuit of the American were armed with handguns sealed inside zipped plastic bags – whatever was left of the prisoner would be of no use to him. He put away his embalming fluids, tidied the mess created by Matt in the treatment room and completed the mummification of the Guatemalan prisoner’s body. He had no particular interest in the preservation of the deceased prisoner per se, but this was no ordinary mummification technique and he needed subjects upon which to practise. If he had followed the procedures correctly, the mummification was, in theory at least, reversible. Cryogenic freezing without ice. An afterlife without death. He had first attempted it at short notice, many years before, and that mummified body, now in its fourth decade of stasis, was the most important to him. He couldn’t risk making an error in the reanimation process. That was what prisoners were for.
Right now, it was time to return to his villa. He needed to keep a close eye on the effects of the sinkhole. The trip from the palace to his home took just twenty minutes in the armoured Mercedes, although aligning the wheels perfectly with the kerb filled an additional five. Otto opened the door to his basement as soon as he arrived. The first step felt deeper than usual. Otto descended a little further and then looked back at the crack that had formed in the stonework as a result of the disturbance in the ground. He had made this journey beneath his villa daily since the sinkhole disaster, but this was the first time the height of the step had been noticeably different. He would just have to take his chances and hope that the ground had stabilised. At least the government coup had drawn public attention away from the brickwork that had been revealed many storeys below his villa. People were more concerned with rebuilding their lives and their livelihoods than with investigating a subterranean wall that shouldn’t have been there.
The villa’s basement was a large space, but there was no furniture, no comforts of home. Tiny slits of windows near the ceiling allowed opaque street light to filter through to the bare stone floor. Otto walked behind the stone steps and unlocked a plain door. Another flight of stairs led down to a room beneath the basement. This second underground level possessed no windows. The concrete floor, ceiling and walls, and rusty air conditioning ducts, suggested this place had once been a nuclear bunker. Metal shelves were stacked with fresh food and medical supplies, some of which Otto selected and placed neatly in his shoulder bag.
He then unlocked a steel door and descended a third flight of stairs and then a fourth. The passage was tight and oppressive, like some ancient pharaoh’s pyramid interior. Otto felt no discomfort here. He had dug these underground tunnels and rooms for his father in the late sixties and early seventies before moving to Frankfurt to study medicine. Since his return, he had made this descent thousands of times.
The cracks, however, were new. Never before had he noticed so many fractures in the walls. Only wide enough for a sheet of paper, they were disconcerting nevertheless, and their irregular patterns caused him immense discomfort.
So much that was of value to Otto was stored down here. It represented not only his life’s work but also that of the great dynasty of which he was a part. Here were the only things that mattered to him, physical objects that defined him as a person, everything he had inherited: research papers, blood samples, slides, a unique ancient Greek text, photographs and mementoes.
And part of the living experiment itself: a human subject, his sole patient besides Orlando, kept in subterranean isolation for more than four decades.
* * *
At the US Embassy, Matt was having an unfamiliar degree of trouble with the woman behind the bullet-proof screen. She was giving him nothing to work with. The shield thrown up by her lack of personality was tougher than the shield of glass provided by her government to protect her; she displayed no cracks into which Matt could squeeze some charm to make her open up and start being helpful. Trouble was, he wasn’t exactly a Prince Charming lookalike right now.
She repeatedly thrust a neat pile of forms and a pen through the gap beneath the glass towards Matt, and without pausing he repeatedly pushed them back at her. This continued for some time. Occasionally she returned to tapping on her computer keyboard, as if dismissing him from her mind. It was curiously insulting.
Now she looked up and murmured in a tight voice into her microphone, ‘You have to fill in these forms. The top one is for your lost passport.’
Her voice was appropriately robot-like by the time it emerged, distorted and compressed, through the speaker on Matt’s side of the glass. Briefly, he conceded to the necessity of excessive bureaucracy and scribbled his name, then thought better of it and abandoned the form.
‘I know. I’m not interested.’
‘The next one is for your lost tickets.’
‘You’ve already told me. I don’t care.’
‘The pink one will enable you to get cash wired from home.’
‘I just need to speak with the Ambassador.’
‘The blue one at the bottom needs to be filled in before I can consider you for an appointment.’ As she said this, her top-to-toe sweep of Matt’s dishevelled, damp and grungy appearance made it clear such an appointment was somewhat unlikely.
‘I know. And I’m telling you to stick these forms up your ass and tell the Ambassador I’m here.’
‘You can fill them in over there.’
‘No. Listen to me. My name is Matt Mountebank. I am an American citizen. You’ve probably read my book. I have just escaped from the new President of this country. He tried to kill me. And I think they tailed me here. I’m sure I saw a car following me. So I ain’t leaving, honey. The President also kidnapped my girlfriend. I need to inform the US Government of what is happening here.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘What? Oh, great.’
‘And you can start by filling in these forms.’
‘Right. Give me those. I’m tearing them up. I don’t want to see them again. Which door do I go through?’ Matt scattered bits of form onto the floor.
‘This is getting you nowhere, sir. Why don’t you sit down? There’s a coffee machine right there. In any case the Ambassador is not in the building.’
Matt flung himself into a chair. The woman began sorting through the day’s mail, but every few moments she looked warily across in Matt’s direction. He made sure he flashed the widest smile whenever she looked his way.
About half an hour later the reinforced entrance swung open to admit a tall middle-aged man in a suave suit, flanked by his bodyguard. The wealthy-looking man was old-school American – clean-cut, cropped hair, obviously ex-military. A dependable, reliable, incorruptible authority figure.
Judging by the dragon’s face, this was someone she respected. Before the woman could say a word, Matt was on his feet, hand out assertively and saying, ‘Good day, sir. My name’s Matt Mountebank. I’m in trouble and seriously need your help.’
The man pumped his hand firmly with what felt suspiciously like a Masonic handshake. He looked Matt squarely in the eye with just the right amount of wariness yet concern, saying, ‘Charles McDermott. US Ambassador to Guatemala. How can I be of assistance today?’
&nbs
p; ‘I want to report a kidnapping.’
‘I see,’ McDermott said calmly, gesturing to Matt to sit down with him. The woman had the grace to look ever so slightly humiliated by this turn of events. ‘Of a US citizen?’
‘Well, no. It’s my girlfriend. Well, kinda girlfriend. It’s been rocky, if you know what I mean? Anyhow, she’s a Brit.’
‘That’s really something for the British Embassy. Or the local police.’
‘The guy who kidnapped her is the new President.’
‘Do you have any identification?’
‘They took it off me when they tried to kill me.’
‘In that case there are a number of forms to be filled in before we can check who you are and the validity of your claim.’
The Ambassador had barely got the words out of his mouth before Matt was on his feet, losing it rapidly. McDermott flinched and stood up.
‘More bullshit, bullshit. I’m Matt Mountebank. Are you guys listening to me? Don’t you recognise me? Even the goddamn Guatemalans know who I am. Listen, a woman has been kidnapped –’
‘Now, Mister Mountebank. You listen. You may be telling the truth. You may be here about a very serious matter. But frankly I’m not in the habit of taking seriously everything some wild-eyed bum says right off the bat. Now if you’ll just calm down and co-operate, we can get the show on the road. If I decide there is a show to be gotten on the road, that is. First off, though, please fill in the forms Ms Lavelle will get for you.’
Matt tried to block his way, but the Ambassador’s bodyguard stepped quickly between them. Matt figured that any minute this man would disappear into his office and forget all about him, and he’d be stuck in a tedious battle of wills with Ms Lavelle for all eternity.
‘Look, there’s much more at stake here,’ Matt blurted, trying a different tack. ‘Apart from the kidnapping, the new President is behind that theft from the Sphinx. And he’s stolen a huge Mayan thing.’
McDermott looked at him coldly. Matt was not getting through. Within seconds he might get his security thug to throw him out. Matt went on, speaking fast, aware that time was running out.
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 13