‘The plumbing is a bit basic up here, for obvious reasons.’
‘Paulo, couldn’t you get anything else for me? I could be up here for weeks.’ Ruby swung round and round, taking in her situation.
‘Weeks? I don’t think so. The world only has days left.’
‘And what about these handcuffs? Come on, Paulo, give me a break.’
‘I really hate to do this to you, Ruby,’ he said, unlocking her handcuffs. ‘I have to follow my orders, no matter how much I disagree.’
‘Oh no, you’re not serious, are you?’
He began to lock them around Ruby’s ankles. Where her wrists had been loose in the cuffs, her ankles were a tight fit.
‘Are these your orders? Ouch! That hurts. Spineless arsehole!’ She tried to slap him hard on the side of his face, but he merely caught her weakened hand in one of his bear-like ones.
‘I really am so sorry about all this, Ruby. I did offer to put you in the standard sleeping quarters, but the President insisted I put you up here in this manner. After your previous escape he felt this was essential. I’m sorry, Ruby, but you really make things hard for yourself.’
‘Bullshit. You’re a coward, Paulo. Why the ankles?’
‘There is no door. There are no locks. You are free to move around the top of the pyramid, but with your ankles tied there is no way you could safely negotiate the steps. They are too steep and you would never make it. Please do not even try. There are soldiers below who have been ordered to look out for any escape attempt. When you are needed by the President, someone will bring you down.’
‘Can I at least have something to read, Paulo?’
‘Look, I know it’s not going to be easy for you up here. Just try to sleep a lot. Get plenty of rest, and enjoy the view. You’re seeing Guatemala as the Mayans saw it from up here.’
He started making his way down the treacherous steps.
‘Paulo,’ she called after him, ‘the only Mayans who saw the view from up here were the sacrificial victims just before they died.’
Wednesday 5th December 2012
The flickering fluorescent light caused demonic shadows to flash across the grid of faces staring at her, and the mediaeval weaponry hanging on the panelled walls behind them did nothing to lessen the sinister tone. Monika straightened her hair and tapped her microphone and checked her watch. She tidied the white tablecloth that draped across her knees and cascaded down to the stone floor. She placed her two pens on the table and made sure they were perfectly parallel. Anything to avoid eye contact. She sensed passions in the room. The journalists wanted blood. She was determined not to let them pick up the scent.
Two of the other panellists had joined her and were settling in to their chairs and sipping water, but there was one seat that remained conspicuously empty. Rocco must be planning some kind of stunt – a dramatic, headline-grabbing late arrival. She knew it had been a mistake to invite him to take part in the mini-conference. He’d been acting with a degree of eccentricity that surpassed his usual weirdness these past few days, refusing to comment on his search for her father, but disappearing for hours at a time, holding private Skype conversations from the meeting room, printing downloaded medical research papers about sexual studies on their office inkjet and shielding them from her view. She didn’t need this kind of distraction. Facing the press in the function room of this castle was stressful enough for Monika without worrying about Rocco.
One of her colleagues started proceedings by introducing them, explaining their roles at ESA and apologising for Rocco’s unexplained absence. Then the first question hit them.
‘How much notice will you give us if an asteroid is going to kill us all?’
Monika sighed. She knew this kind of questioning was unavoidable. Her team was viewed by cranks as being at the front line of the defence of the planet from the celestial attack that would inevitably occur at the end of the Mayan calendar. She had hoped to inject a little science and common sense into the media reports, but as the questioning continued, her hopes faded. Then, half way into her negative response to an idiotic question about whether the space shuttle could be brought out of retirement to launch terminally ill mining engineers on a one-way mission to land on a comet and blow it up, just like in a movie, she felt something grab her leg beneath the table. Her kick resulted in a muffled yelp, followed by a hand tapping at her thigh. She finished her belittling answer and referred the next question to a fellow panellist.
A face appeared below the tablecloth. It was worried. It was mouthing something. It was Rocco. She pretended to drop one of her pens and bent down to pick it up.
‘I found him,’ whispered Rocco. ‘Your father. I didn’t want to believe it, but I’ve been double-checking my research and I’m sure.’
She put her hand across his face and shoved him back beneath the table. He seemed to settle for a minute, but then a hand emerged and placed a piece of paper on her lap. She flicked the hand away and picked up the note.
A name was written on the paper. It meant nothing to her. Gerhard. She knew no one of that name.
When the press started filing out of the room, Rocco crawled out from beneath the table and ushered Monika to a quiet corner where no one would overhear them. He looked drawn, weighed down by sleepless bags beneath his eyes. He was also anxious. Monika wondered what fresh paranoia had incapacitated him today.
‘His name’s Gerhard,’ he panted, as if revealing something of devastating profundity. Monika looked at him expressionlessly.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘You wrote it down for me.’
‘But that wasn’t his real name,’ continued Rocco. ‘He was hiding something. He studied medicine in the seventies. With your mother. There was a research project. Physiological responses during sexual activity. Your mother took part in it nine months before you were born. She is recorded as being partnered for the experiment with Gerhard. Therefore, he is your father. I have a copy of the research paper.’
‘I was the result of an experiment? No wonder you were reluctant to tell me.’
‘No, that’s not it. Experiment, one-night stand, what’s the difference? It doesn’t matter. I had to find out who this Gerhard really was. I followed his trail. I’m so sorry, Monika. It is not a happy result.’
A thin scattering of altocumulus boiled into fireballs of amber and canary yellow high above the Tikal National Park. Ratty checked the time: it was almost six. The sun was rising quickly, creating a spectacular dance of colour and energy that threw sepia light over the sacred site. He hadn’t waited for daylight, however. He was a one-man custodian of Greenwich Mean Time and had been up for hours, configuring his archaeological scanning equipment and taking care to ensure that the quality of his morning shave was not compromised by his enthusiasm to begin his work.
He could see now that the site had not been disturbed since his last visit, and felt pride at the success of the ingenious deception that had sent that frightful Otto chap scurrying to the wrong end of the country with his Teutonic tongue slobbering over a mouth-watering red herring. Ratty picked up a ball of twine and stretched it between all of the trees in the vicinity, creating a tangram in which each segment could be scanned individually. Nothing would be missed, and the scans would not overlap unnecessarily. He tied the final knot, then stepped over the string to get back to the car and load himself up with the ground-penetrating radar. With the kit strapped to his body Ghostbusters-style, he felt dynamic, invincible, unstoppable.
He switched on the viewing goggles and placed them over his eyes. Instantly the soil beneath his feet vanished, replaced by a gratin dauphinoise of geological strata in a rainbow of colours. It was disorienting, like stepping out onto a glass floor. He slowly scanned left, then right, then stepped backwards.
The twine flicked around his legs as the pressure of his body stretched and snapped its tiny fibres, but not before the destabilising encounter had sent him tumbling backwards onto unfeasibly expensive equipment. He whipped off the gogg
les and shifted his body weight to relieve the pressure on the scanner. Fortunately, the high price of the radar was justified by its robust construction, and no damage had been done. He put everything down and rummaged in the car for a knife with which to slash the network of string. Segmentation of a site was good archaeological practice, he reasoned, but not when working alone.
He set up the equipment again, and looked around himself before committing to a wholly digitised view of the world. He swept the radar unit smoothly over the ground, keeping to slow and gentle movements in order to give the machine a chance to process and display the data in real time. The whole area appeared to be natural sediments interspersed with stones, beneath which was a layer of bedrock. He moved forward, sweeping the scanner left and then right.
And then he stopped. The first archaeological discovery of the day glared at him in an intense pink glow in his virtual reality goggles: the bones of a foot, unmistakable because they all seemed to be intact. Five sets of phalanges ran directly to the metatarsals and on to the cuneiform bones. Ratty passed the scanner back over them and adjusted the focus. They were perfect, immaculate. To be showing clearly at this setting they had to be close to the surface. That meant they could have been buried recently. A shallow grave. He shivered.
Then he blinked.
No, he told himself. That was impossible. It had to be a trick of the video display unit. What he was seeing could not happen.
The phalanges were moving.
* * *
Considering her enforced elevation and the quantity of construction and destruction taking place around her, there was frustratingly little for Ruby to look at. The girdle of ceiba and mahogany trees that encased the Great Plaza reached almost as high as her platform atop the pyramid, and the people walking fifteen storeys below her looked like toy soldiers. The sounds that penetrated the forest barrier were a cause of unceasing despair to Ruby. There was once a time when even the Guatemalan dictators had acknowledged the significance of Tikal and its surrounding biosphere, and it had been preserved responsibly – even through civil wars and bloody revolutions – but not now.
She had long given up hope that Matt would show up and whisk her to safety. The more she thought about his timidity in Egypt and the ease with which Guatemalans had been able to overpower him on more than one occasion, the more she began to question his legend. Soldiers rarely made good writers, and good writers were rarely any use in a fight. Matt wasn’t a great writer, but he was competent – good, even – and she had yet to see him initiate any kind of combat or self-defence. Had he lied to her? Was he a fraud? Had he made a fool of her and of his readers? She found the idea intensely irritating.
Annoyance turned to boredom. Boredom finally turned to sleep. Dreams filled her mind, scenes that were epic in their scale and terrifying to witness. Hot deserts swarmed with legions of sick and dying people, remnants of an ancient race coming together, with their failing strength, to build something. They toiled in long lines, united and dedicated, squeezing every drop of power from muscles weakened by a poisoned and polluted air. Some dropped to the ground as they laboured, and others unquestioningly took their place. The project was larger than any individual, more important than the final days of their abbreviated lives. They were creating something eternal, finding a way to connect to a future they would never see. She viewed these awesome sights as if detached, floating above the passionate slaving, the insect-like single-minded devotion of the masses, and then sank in among these strange people, absorbed in their long forgotten nightmare.
* * *
The bones were curling, rippling up and down like a wave. Ratty switched the radar unit to recording mode and tried to stand completely still in case he was accidentally scanning his own foot. The phalanges continued to move with eerie regularity. It was time to fetch the shovel.
He removed his video goggles and blinked in the bright morning light.
‘Good morning, Lord Ballashiels.’
Ratty blinked some more. Standing immediately in front of him was his least favourite German. The expression of displeasure that Ratty saw etched into the man’s face looked deep enough to have been carved with a knife.
‘Gosh,’ stumbled Ratty, unravelling himself from his equipment and placing it on the ground. ‘Almost stuck a spade through your tootsies. Awfully –’
‘Lord Ballashiels,’ interrupted the German through teeth that refused to separate, ‘your presence here was to be expected, though I have to confess that it gives me no satisfaction.’
Ratty looked over Otto’s shoulder at a man standing quietly behind him, dressed in clean blue overalls of the type that world leaders tended to don in times of national crisis in order to look like they were getting their hands dirty.
‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced, old fellow.’
The Patient keenly took a step forward, but Otto held an arm out to prevent him from assuming a place at his side.
‘It is merely a patient of mine,’ said Otto.
‘Jolly nice to meet you,’ burbled Ratty. ‘Sorry, didn’t quite catch your name, old chap.’
‘It is of no importance,’ declared Otto before the Patient had time to consider a response.
Ratty looked at the Patient’s face. The shape of the mouth suggested that he considered the opposite of Otto’s statement to be true. Even with the edges of his mouth turned down, it had no effect on the rest of his face, which seemed blessed with infinite suppleness. The Patient’s skin had an alien-like translucency that glistened with a combination of protective sun cream and a child-like radiance. Ratty thought his features seemed vaguely familiar, but was unable to place them.
‘One can’t exactly call you “the Patient”,’ he said, chuckling nervously. ‘Would you care for a nickname? One has plenty to spare.’
‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ said the Patient in a soft virgin voice with an accent that seemed to belong to everywhere and nowhere. Otto nodded as if agreeing with the words, but the Patient’s eyes hinted at an undertone of irony.
‘Yes, quite. Romes and Jules, two-two. Jolly good. Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, er, mister Chap. Good Lord, is that the time?’
‘That which you both seek is not to be found here,’ stated the Patient flatly.
‘Quiet,’ barked Otto. ‘Lord Ballashiels was just leaving, weren’t you?’
‘Yes. Got to, er, see a fellow about a coatimundi.’
‘Goodbye, Lord Ballashiels,’ said Otto. He said it as an order.
Ratty turned towards his car, then paused and turned around again.
‘Sorry, Mister Patient, did you say something about this place?’
‘No! It did not. Now go, Your Lordship.’
The Patient stepped forward, now level with an irate Otto.
‘There is nothing to be found here,’ said the Patient.
‘Lord Ballashiels and myself have both studied the stelae, the glyphs, the legends and the maps and we have come to the same conclusion that this is the location protected by the ancients. You know nothing of our research. We have been logical and meticulous.’
The Patient smiled. The desperate rivalry between his two companions was no concern of his. The fact that their quest had been instigated by their ancestors and to some extent symbolised an historic enmity between two nations was irrelevant. The Patient possessed a profoundly inquisitive mind, however, and was growing impatient to visit the true location described by the stelae.
The frustrating shortcomings of both Otto’s and Ratty’s methodologies caused him to blurt out, ‘To find that which you seek you must follow the correct path.’
Otto and Ratty glanced at each other in shared confusion. Otto silently counted to ten on lips trembling with fury as he sought to cope with a level of impertinence to which he was unaccustomed. It seemed that the closer he came to fulfilling his life’s work, the more obstacles life threw at him. Years of diligent progress in contr
olled conditions had given way to the storm of challenges within which he now floundered. In recent weeks he had frequently found himself behaving in a less than chivalrous manner, and it appalled him. The blow that he now sent in the direction of the Patient’s cheek flew cleanly through his principles, smashed apart the history of care and devotion he had lavished upon this being, and left him with a heart full of sadness. There was no impact – Ratty’s recent exposure to the martial arts ensured that his training could override any limitations caused by his innate cowardice. An aristocratic hand clamped around Otto’s wrist in an instant, pulling back the punch before it had a chance to connect with the Patient’s face.
Otto’s eyes filled with tears as Ratty released his grip. Submission to base animal instincts and a tendency towards primitive violence reminded Otto of his mortality and underlined his imperfections as a human. He stepped away from the Patient as if to prevent a repeat attack from a fist that he could not control.
The Patient stood passively on the spot, serenely taking in the proceedings. Ratty took a step backwards, away from the two men, and picked up his scanning gear.
‘I think I’ll bash off now. Starting to get awfully hot in these woods. Doctor Mengele, I will bid you farewell. Mister Patient, I heartily suggest you seek a second opinion.’
‘I do not understand,’ said the Patient.
‘Find yourself a new doctor chappy,’ said Ratty, scurrying back to the car with his ground-penetrating radar kit in his arms.
* * *
The lengthy – possibly indefinite – prison sentence that would soon be Matt’s fate, according to the opinion of his lawyer, was still preferable to taking his chances in the winged warehouse in which he now stood. The space was vast. It was much too large to take to the air. Amid the exposed metal alloy ribs of the fuselage Matt felt like Jonah in the whale, isolated from the world in a cavernous hell.
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 25