‘It’s an amazing archaeological artefact. Some kind of ancient – I dunno what it’s called. Made of gold. It was big. Real big.’
‘Look, I know those forms suck. There’re some fast track papers in my office. They come pre-approved by me. Two minutes and you’ll be done. Colin will run upstairs and get some for you.’ He signalled to his bodyguard. Colin did not look impressed by the proposal.
‘Sir, I must remain with you,’ he grunted, more out of hurt pride than out of concern for his boss’s safety.
‘I’m with a US citizen in a US embassy with a hundred guards around the perimeter. I’ll be fine. Go get the papers. Second draw down on the left.’
With exaggerated reluctance, Colin sprinted up the stairs, out of sight. A movement outside of the window caught Matt’s eye. The embassy guards appeared to be running towards something, mouthing words that Matt couldn’t hear through the thick walls and bullet-proof glazing. There was a flash of light, surreal in its silence and detached beauty. Then another flash, this time brighter.
The spray of glass fragments came from nowhere, as if the air in the embassy had simply crystallised. Instantly the noise from the aftermath of the explosion outside whooshed into the building, accompanied by the zip of bullets spraying from beyond the railings.
‘Aarrgh! Shit!’ shouted the Ambassador, clutching his arm. Blood gulped out from between his fingers and he fell heavily onto the ground, groaning. Matt threw himself onto the floor.
‘Get down, sir!’ shouted Ms Lavelle to the Ambassador through her microphone before running out of her reception booth via a rear security door, but he was in shock and sat still, exposed there in the lobby, his baby blue eyes staring glassily at nothing.
Another bullet caught the Ambassador full in the chest. He keeled over. Colin the security guard ran back into the lobby and stared at the Ambassador who was now gurgling horribly, blood pouring from his mouth. He was choking on it.
‘Shit, what’d you do?’ he asked Matt.
‘Zip. I just dove on the floor.’
‘Who the hell are you anyways?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Help me get this man into a back room.’
‘You’re kidding me, man! You set this up. You’re under arrest. You have the right ...’
The Ambassador started convulsing.
Conspiracy to murder a high-ranking government official, such as an ambassador, would be a capital offence in some states, thought Matt. And if he were tried in Guatemala he wouldn’t stand a chance anyway.
The convulsing stopped. The breathing stopped with it. With the security guard now pinned under the dead weight of a fresh corpse, it seemed an appropriate moment for Matt to bid farewell.
‘Getting help,’ he lied, darting outside and slipping away amid the black smoke and confusion.
Thursday 22nd November 2012
The blackness of the old hangar was instantly dispelled by a clunk. The fulgent light of four steaming super-troupers now held the monstrous gold artefact in their luciferous grip. Patches of umbra and penumbra criss-crossed the plain concrete floor as if it were a chequered Masonic mosaic. Around the walls of the hangar had been assembled steel racks of tools, testing equipment, a coffee machine and a rusty filing cabinet. One corner of the building had been screened off to form a separate bedroom and shower area for its sole nocturnal occupant.
‘Impressive,’ said Ruby, bitterly. ‘Almost up to professional standards.’ She no longer cared whether her tongue would get her into trouble. Matt’s execution had undermined everything. Nothing seemed important any more. And her contempt for anyone and anything connected with Orlando was obvious.
Lorenzo looked pleased with himself, as if his conscience had been purged of impurities. He obviously hadn’t shot anyone for a few days, thought Ruby.
‘Some things come from my new office at the capital, so careful please. You will be finish before I return from my next assignment, so I no miss it.’
‘We also fixed the plumbing and cleaned the toilets, now that we are to have a woman working here,’ added Paulo, perfectly sincere but sounding almost as if he were deliberately winding her up.
‘It just goes to show what two tiny minds can achieve,’ she grumbled, turning away from them.
Ignoring her, Paulo produced a typed sheet of paper from his pocket.
‘We considered getting in welders and odd-job men for the heavy work, but for security reasons we decided to limit it to expert scientists. Tomorrow you’ll get a metallurgist, a pathologist, an atomic scientist and a jet propulsion expert.’
‘A what and a what?’ Ruby’s disinterest in the proceedings was suddenly halted by these unexpected descriptions. She assumed she had either misheard or that Paulo’s normally impeccable English had failed him.
When he didn’t bother to repeat the list, she let it drop, assuming a basic mistranslation. Meanwhile she needed to take her mind off Matt. Emotions were overwhelming her and no one was giving her space to grieve. She climbed up one of the ladders to look at the artefact. The large indentation at the rear was still plugged with mud. Nothing had been tampered with since Matt had disturbed the bones.
Again, that image of him in a noose. She couldn’t shake it.
‘The cleaning equipment is in the kitchen area, Ruby,’ said Paulo as she came back down the ladder, even though he could see she wasn’t paying attention. ‘You can draw up a roster if you’re not prepared to do it all yourself.’
‘Food, anyone?’ asked Lorenzo. ‘The kitchen is no much to look at, but we can make soup or some nacho dips. Whatever you want.’
The men opened some nachos and a jar of spicy dip. Ruby had no appetite.
Someone else was in the hangar. Behind the glare of the spotlights Ruby could just make out the shape of a man holding a small box in front of him. As her eyes adjusted to the gloomy end of the hangar she recognised Otto, staring intently at a digital display on the box he was holding. The LCD readout cast a Mephistophelian glow into the deep lines of his face. He nodded to himself and exited the building.
Moments later President Orlando entered the hangar, closely flanked by Otto and his glowing gadget. Paulo and Lorenzo stood up respectfully, while Ruby deliberately ignored the President’s arrival.
‘Don’t get up, Ruby,’ said Orlando, sarcastically. ‘I’ll join you.’
The President indicated that they should be seated, pulling up a chair for himself next to Ruby. Paulo offered the President the bowl of nachos, but Orlando declined with a wave and Otto stepped forward with a sachet of pills which Orlando swallowed without water. Otto then walked slowly around the artefact, holding up his gadget close to the gold surface while the others talked.
‘The television address went well,’ Orlando said. ‘I got the highest ratings in Guatemala since the second moon landing in July nineteen sixty-nine.’
‘You mean the first,’ grunted Ruby, sounding like an annoyed teenager. ‘July sixty-nine was Apollo Eleven. And don’t you have a nation to oppress?’
Orlando ignored her, almost as if she were the ignorant one. ‘The country is stabilising rapidly. I have direct control of the urgent matters that are crucial for the country and for the world. Administration of local affairs would distract from what matters, so I have good men in place to do that work for me. As I have here, of course.’
‘I’m a woman,’ Ruby growled.
‘Indeed you are. It is the service of good men and women such as you that leaves me free to come here to the key projects.’
‘I’m not free, though, am I?’
‘Come now, Ruby, you know you’re not going anywhere. It makes no difference whether I put a guard on you or not, just as it makes no difference whether the United Nations signs your pay cheques or whether I do.’
‘So far no one has signed any pay cheques.’
Orlando’s joviality tensed into a glare that would have chilled the heart of most people who knew him, but Ruby had tested her boundaries with him before. He had en
dured from her a degree of verbal ribbing that would have put others in jail. When his face broke into a smile, she began to sense something inside Orlando: a weakness, a need. It was buried beneath his arrogance and his power and his beauty. If she hadn’t despised him so strongly, she would have been intrigued.
‘I have a timetable for this project,’ Orlando announced. ‘I need results fast. The dismantling of the artefact will take two days, and the analysis and recording of the component parts will take a further three days. Is that understood?’
Ruby’s jaw fell.
‘Two days? Three days? What is this? Not that I give a shit any more, but you must know that’s impossible. Ridiculous. You can’t expect ... Look, come on, think about it. Apart from anything else, that kind of schedule would totally undermine scientific integrity.’
‘You will not allow that to happen. Your team must work efficiently. I have other work for them when they are finished here.’
‘What about me? Will you let me go when I finish this or do you have a gallows waiting for me?’
‘You misunderstand. The next week is just the beginning. You cannot imagine what plans I have for you after that. The world is on the verge of finding out what I already know. Much will be different soon. You’ve joined the winning side. Be excited, Ruby. Be very excited.’
‘After you murdered Matt? Why on earth would I be excited by anything you say?’
Orlando leaned closer and put his arm loosely around her, for once seemingly unconcerned about his expensive tailoring, and for once she was too despondent to shrug off this invasion of her personal space.
‘Ruby,’ he whispered, ‘I have told you before and I will tell you again. Yesterday’s execution was not the end for the soul of this man. I said he would find that there is life after the noose. I think he may have found it sooner than we anticipated. You have to trust me.’
Now she squirmed out of his arm. This was worse than the comforting words of a toothy vicar and she wanted none of it.
‘I want to go, Orlando. I can’t do this any longer.’
‘Don’t be tempted to leave my employment, Ruby. It will not be possible to watch over you every minute of the day, but you must understand that if you should be tempted to abandon my second favourite archaeological project, you will be found. What then happens to you depends on how much I feel I need you.’
‘Second favourite?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘You said this thing was your second favourite archaeological project.’
‘Indeed.’
‘May I enquire as to what is your favourite, then?’ Her professional curiosity was returning. ‘Could there possibly be anything even more amazing than a golden artefact with bodies inside that could date from an antediluvian era?’
‘My favourite,’ he began, ‘was another of your projects. The Sphinx. You did an excellent job in Egypt. I want to assure you that the work you carried out has been of great benefit to my nation and, subsequently, to the world.’
The stolen scrolls. The significance of the theft had faded in her mind amid the trauma of witnessing Matt’s execution. Not only did Orlando possess them, he must have translated them.
‘Can you tell me what they said?’ she asked, bypassing her instinct to release a torrent of verbal abuse in his direction.
Otto cleared his throat loudly. Orlando stood up and followed the Doctor out of the hangar without a word.
* * *
When Paulo and Lorenzo had also gone, Ruby walked in endless circles within the hangar, remembering the good times with Matt as well as the bad times. She had to admit that the bad times probably outnumbered the good ones, but all of the memories were now precious to her. Their clumsy first kiss in a tunnel within the Great Pyramid of Giza. Their first argument, moments later, about which was the way to the exit. Could such a strong personality as Matt really cease to exist? It was so much to take in. Pressure began to build around her eyes. Her head started to ache. Finally, she took advantage of her solitude and let the tears flow. She screamed and cursed at Orlando’s callous personality. She tried to convince herself that Matt was dead because of bad luck and circumstances beyond her control – she couldn’t take the blame. Grieving was hard enough without adding guilt on top.
Between bouts of sobbing, she came to a decision. Given that her options were minimal and that she needed to busy herself with a project to take her mind off Matt, she decided to take on the challenge of the next few days with all of the skills and professionalism at her disposal. Yes, technically it was colluding with the enemy, but like Alec Guinness’s crazy colonel in The Bridge on the River Kwai, she felt that collusion was best for her morale during this difficult time.
When the tears eventually dried, she cleaned her face and wiped her eyes. There was a long and lonely night ahead. She might as well prepare the artefact for the next day. As she rubbed some of the bodywork clean, she could feel no seams or joins, no panels or rivets, just an endless monocoque shell. A thing of incomparable beauty.
Hours later, with the majority of the object now clean enough to work on – with the exception of the massive mud plug at the rear, which would need shovels and wheelbarrows to clear out – she went back to the kitchen and tipped away the rest of the nachos. With a yawn, she decided her day was done. There was, however, time for one more peek at the bones before she switched off the lights. She climbed the ladder, lifted the hatch and stared inside.
There appeared to be two bodies, roughly side by side. Many of the bones seemed broken, some obviously recently from when Matt lay on them, but mostly the breaks dated from the moment the people had died. Fragments of clear broken glass lay among them, and flaps of fabric still clung to the metal sides of the compartment.
If this was a sarcophagus, thought Ruby, surely there must be more bodies. This compartment took up less than five per cent of the whole artefact. Maybe there were another ten or twenty similar compartments somewhere inside. Other sets of bones would still be undisturbed, minimising the significance of the damage already caused. It had to be a mausoleum.
As Ruby leaned over to close the hatch, something caught her attention. On the same side of the compartment as the access ladder on which she was leaning, shielded from view until she’d stretched across, there was a protrusion of tarnished metal sticking out of a square panel.
Just like a small switch.
Ruby closed the hatch and climbed down, her head buzzing with possibilities that her education had trained her to believe impossible.
Friday 23rd November 2012
Michel Lecour walked boldly into the hangar soon after sunrise, catching Ruby by surprise as she clumsily made coffee after a fitful sleep. He introduced himself as a scientist from the European Space Agency. He sprouted expensively styled black hair, and his skin glowed with a healthy Mediterranean hue. His classic jungle suit was made from thin beige cloth and he wore his porous shirt open a couple of buttons. Given that he had been travelling for most of the previous twenty hours, his elegance was impressive. As she prepared to shake his hand, the somewhat diminutive Gallic boffin turned on the charm, making twinkling eye contact as he lifted her hand to his lips.
‘Enchanté. This is a nice place you have here,’ he said. Ruby was disconcerted to find herself smirking, possibly even simpering, but while she wrestled with her image, annoyingly Michel’s attention had already wandered. His eye snapped to the reason for his presence: an outrageous hunk of battered gold; an ancient, impossibly heavy artefact skulking menacingly in the centre of the hangar.
He almost skipped over to it, looking up with reverence and exclaiming, ‘Mon Dieu! I cannot believe it! This is the best example I have ever seen.’
Ruby missed this as she was adding more water to the kettle.
‘Coffee?’
‘Of course,’ he replied.
She extracted a second cup from the cupboard.
‘What’s your speciality?’ she asked.
‘Propulsion
systems.’
Ruby looked at him, searching for indications of irony. He smiled pleasantly, but sincerely. So she had found herself on an archaeological project teamed up with a rocket man. Oh well, she figured, he wouldn’t be any use scientifically, but at least he was pleasant to look at.
As if to emphasise the pointlessness of his presence there, she responded, ‘That’s a bit modern for me. My expertise goes in the other direction, to the past.’
‘Mine too,’ said Michel, pulling up a stool and sitting in a position from where he could take in the whole artefact. Before she could question him further there were voices outside the hangar – Lorenzo and Paulo, talking excitedly in Spanish. Behind them walked three other men, all conversing in French.
‘Ruby!’ called Paulo when he spotted her. ‘Good morning. You had a pleasant night?’
‘I’m a prisoner who’s just seen her boyfriend killed by an undemocratic régime, the same bunch of crooks who are also to blame for the theft of the scrolls I found in the Sphinx. How do you think I slept?’
Their hosts’ smiles barely flickering, Paulo and Lorenzo hastily showed the three Frenchmen inside, where Michel was waiting for them.
‘OK,’ said Lorenzo, ‘we no have much time. Ruby, I see you’ve met Michel. He is propulsion expert. We also have Professor Lantier from University of Marseille. He is world expert in metallurgy.’
‘Call me Jean,’ he said, shaking Ruby formally by the hand. ‘I’m the one they call on to test for stress fractures when things break catastrophically. And, well, this is a fine wreck you have here.’
Lantier was the oldest of all the scientists present, old enough for this assignment to be his last before retirement. He was almost completely bald, except for a thin wisp of white fluff that wrapped around the back of his head. The top of his cranium must have gained its deep suntan after he had lost his hair, but had more recently become unhealthily blotchy. His features seemed kind and trustworthy.
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 14