The Sphinx Scrolls
Page 26
To make matters worse, the C-130 Hercules didn’t even have jet engines. Somehow it was going to attempt to get off the ground with propellers. The military policemen who had driven him here to Belize City Airport stood outside the aircraft at the foot of its loading ramp. Baxter handed him a document. It had to be at least fifty pages long, and the typeface was tiny. Matt held it in his cuffed hands and bounced it in the air, as if weighing it would negate the need to read it. He saw his name on the first page; the rest he was happy for his lawyer to précis for him.
‘So is this the extradition treaty?’ Matt asked.
‘Goodness me, no. That’s between governments. They wouldn’t let you see it. These are merely the charges that are being brought against you in the United States.’
‘Jaywalking? Parking next to a fire hydrant?’
‘They merely apply to the incident in Guatemala City. Any criminal activity in Belize has been looked upon as being in relation to your attempt to evade justice and so will be dealt with as associated charges related to the main charge.’
Matt rubbed his arm. It was still sore from the blood test he had undergone as part of a medical examination that morning.
‘Is it normal to have a medical before extradition?’ The shake of Baxter’s head suggested not. ‘I got the works, you know. Fitness, eyesight, body fat, probes into every orifice they could find. And you think that’s not normal?’
‘A medical examination would normally be done to a condemned prisoner shortly before execution.’
‘Reassuring.’ Matt’s fingers fidgeted away the tension. Baxter laughed. ‘Is any of this good, Roland?’
‘There’s a subtext. Be patient. This is highly unusual and it may not be as black and white as it appears.’
‘And is that good?’
‘In your circumstances, anything other than a lengthy spell in prison is good.’
Voices outside the aircraft distracted them. The military policemen stood to attention and saluted. An army officer walked up the ramp, followed by a dozen soldiers in full combat clothes carrying heavy kit bags. Either the US was giving Matt a lift on a flight that was taking some soldiers back home anyway, or they considered him sufficiently dangerous to need half a platoon to keep him under control. The latter idea tickled his vanity. The actions of the officer, however, surprised him.
‘Captain Mountebank?’ asked the officer. His jet black eyebrows seemed to move up and down independently from the rest of his face, a twitch he had long since given up trying to control. He was otherwise a tall, healthy-looking fighting man with a thinning crew-cut and sunburnt ears.
‘Er, kinda. Yeah,’ mumbled Matt.
The officer knelt down and released Matt’s handcuffs.
‘I guess you’ve seen the inside of a few of these babies before,’ he said.
Matt had never been in such an aircraft in his life.
‘I got a lot of guys dying to meet you,’ the officer continued with a smile, pointing at the soldiers gathered around, ducking their heads and shuffling their feet in a quiet orgy of embarrassed hero worship. One of the soldiers was holding a copy of Matt’s book. ‘But first we have to make a deal.’
‘Huh?’
‘I’m Lieutenant Nichols, Special Forces. The United States Government has been hunting you for days, but now that we have you, things have changed a little. We are prepared to drop all charges against you, but we need a signed conditional undertaking from you, which I can witness, that you have not, at any point in time, committed or attempted to commit homicide in any degree against any employee of the United States Government, or any United States citizen, in the United States or any other country of the world, whether or not officially recognised by the United States, and furthermore –’
‘OK, enough. Just give me your goddamned pen and I’ll sign.’
‘Let me finish. There are strict conditions in this document.’
It was only now an olive branch was held out to him that Matt truly understood that within him had been growing an intuitive fear, a deep-rooted terror. The rest of his life had almost been thrown away. The wealth, the apartment in New York, the adoration of his readers, the restaurants, the filming, the travelling – not to mention Ruby. Everything that he cared about could have been switched by an uncaring system for a grey prison cell. There was only one chance to live a full life, he realised. Get it wrong and there was no ‘undo’ button, no ‘control Z’ to make the mistake go away. He had to take the freedom deal, no matter what provisions were attached to it.
‘But I’m outta the frying pan, huh?’ he asked.
‘With regard to any potential prison sentence, yes, but as I explained, the deal is strictly conditional.’
He didn’t care, but he asked anyway. ‘What’s the condition?’
‘That, in return for taking you out of the frying pan, we drop you into the fire.’
* * *
Shaking fingers fumbled to open the emergency kit bag. First aid items, water ration, medicines, tow rope, suncream – all were tossed aside until, finally, he found the tin he was looking for. He held it in his trembling right hand and opened it with a click. He doubted it would have a particularly beneficial effect at this temperature, but he poured it down his throat in any case.
This was a new low for Ratty. Not only was this gin and tonic ready-mixed in the can, it was tepid. No, worse than that, he thought, it was positively warm. Right now he would have killed for some ice cubes. Even ice made from tap water would have brought a smile to his face.
He had sped away in the Toyota after his earlier encounter, not stopping until he had put a couple of miles between himself and Otto with his odd-looking patient. Now he had a chance to settle his nerves and reflect on the surprising success of his martial arts and fitness training. Otto really seemed to have been put in his place by Ratty’s blocking move. A thank you note to his instructor, Mr Thompson, would be a nice touch, he decided.
From the safety of the remote track on which he was now parked he could review his options and consider the words of the patient fellow who seemed adamant that he was looking in the wrong place. What was it he had said? Something about following the correct path. Given the complete absence of any signposts pointing to lost treasure he doubted that finding the correct path was possible, other than by the means with which he had already endeavoured to do so.
The map of the region, on which he had drawn straight lines between the locations described by the stelae, didn’t show any paths in the area. There was nothing close by other than Tikal itself. The direct line methodology had to be correct, for there was no other way he could link the four places. If only he hadn’t taken such a circuitous route to get here. If it hadn’t been for the military presence at the border he could have arrived almost a day earlier. The whole site could have been scanned before Otto’s unwelcome arrival if he had been able to drive straight there. Maybe it could have been done even earlier if the flight across the Atlantic had been more direct, instead of hugging the coastline of North America along an invisible lane in the sky.
An idea was starting to assemble itself in his mind. He swilled down the rest of the gin and tonic and stared at the map, trying to distract his taste buds from the horror they had just experienced. The stelae had been carved more than a thousand years ago. They didn’t have accurate maps then. He crushed the can in his hand and threw it onto the floor behind his seat. Could it be, he found himself wondering, that the chaps who made the stelae intended not to point to the intersection of direct lines between the four places, but to a crossroads? To a point dictated not by two-dimensional maps but by real geography? He looked again at the map. There was a marked absence of any ancient pathways. He tried to imagine how the ancients would have navigated between the four settlements. Was there an obvious route with an unmistakable intersection? The landscape had its ups and downs, and the marshlands to the south would have caused a necessary detour, but there were no clear routes that jumped out at him.
A hand tapped at his door window. Ratty slowly turned to face the tapping sound. He recognised the translucent skin of his stowaway immediately. He opened the window.
‘I seek,’ said the Patient, ‘a second opinion.’
Ratty opened the passenger door, and the Patient climbed in.
‘Perhaps you’d care to give me your name now that the German fellow isn’t around?’ The Patient simply looked at Ratty from his seat. ‘Right-o. Perhaps another subject?’
‘We must drive north from here,’ said the Patient.
The unique accent tickled Ratty. He tried not to snigger at ‘noo-rth’.
‘Ah, yes, the quest. Are you sure you should be coming along? If you’re Doctor Mengele’s patient, perhaps I should take you to a hospital.’
‘No.’
‘Or should one get you back to Doctor Mengele himself?’
‘I consider that relationship to be terminated.’
‘Don’t blame you. He does seem a trifle odd. I’ve heard that even the National Health Service has better doctors than he.’
‘Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.’
‘Quite, quite. He’s something of a Hippocratic oaf, then.’
A sense of humour did not appear to be on the Patient’s radar. He looked blankly ahead and repeated, ‘We must drive north from here.’
‘Look, I don’t want to be rude, but we’ve only just been introduced, I still don’t know your name, and I’m on a rather important archaeological mission that I wasn’t planning to share.’
‘It is all right. I trust you,’ said the Patient.
‘Erm, quite, but the question was really about whether I can trust you.’
‘I have nothing to gain and nothing to lose.’
‘Erm, right. So, the trust thing?’
‘You have already proven to me that I can trust you,’ said the Patient. ‘You protected me from attack.’
Ratty beamed proudly. ‘It was rather splendid.’
‘Actions have consequences. Virtue deserves virtue.’
‘Well, indeed.’
‘It was my intention to lead Doctor Mengele to the item he sought. It is now my intention to lead you there instead.’
‘So you want to go fifty-fifty?’
‘I do not understand,’ replied the Patient.
‘On the treasure. Half each. After my expenses, of course. Just have one or two small debts to clear first.’
‘I seek nothing but truth and knowledge.’
Ratty wasn’t much of a businessman, but this sounded like a fair deal. He reversed back onto the dirt track, looking uneasily in his rear view mirror lest anyone else should pop out of the boot. He pointed the Toyota in the right direction and headed through the trees to where the Patient wanted to go.
‘This patient thing. I hope it’s not contagious, old boy.’
‘I am neither old, nor a boy,’ replied the Patient with an arid logic that seemed to have an obvious Teutonic lineage. ‘And I enjoy perfect health.’
* * *
Despite the low frequency throbbing and droning of the four Rolls Royce turboprop engines, it was the silence that was deafening. No visible reaction had so far appeared upon the face of the man at the centre of everyone’s attention. Nichols and the dozen Special Forces soldiers stared from their seats at Matt, waiting for him to accept the deal upon which they depended. This guy, they decided, was ice cool. A super warrior. Emotionless. Ruthless. They wanted him badly.
The reason for the expressionless exterior was that inside Matt felt numb. He looked cool on the outside because Nichols’s words had chilled him to the core. He ought to have been considering the proposal carefully, but his mind had simply stopped processing information.
Some of the soldiers lost interest and started chatting among themselves. Nichols realised he wasn’t going to get an instant response and relaxed his posture.
‘Think about it,’ said Nichols. ‘Take a few minutes, but not too long. We still have the briefings ahead. You know what these missions are like.’
That was precisely the problem: Matt had no idea what these missions were like. A part of him had always known the deception would one day catch up with him. He’d expected it to come from an investigative journalist, to be played out publicly and with much mocking derision in the press and online. He was prepared for that day. He knew what he would say. He knew how to twist it to make it seem like an academic exercise, a literary experiment, a practical joke. At least the royalties couldn’t be undone. A legion of angry, misled readers couldn’t actually do him any harm. Future sales of the book would fall off a cliff, but that was fine with him. The ride had been fun while it lasted. However the revelation played out, he’d never anticipated that it would necessarily put him in the path of danger. A literary ruse was hardly a crime. A work of fiction purporting to be non-fiction was a work of genius, an artistic accomplishment. Other arts had their cheats too – Matt didn’t think his writing was as misleading as pop stars who have to mime during live gigs.
For his book to put him in this situation, though, was beyond anything his creative mind could have envisaged. It had taken him two years to write, and had been based on an amalgam of experiences that real Special Forces fighting men had written about, topped off with a heavy dollop of his own imagination and dramatic talent. It was showmanship on paper, a terrifying tale of bravery and gallantry. It was David against Goliath, the story of how Matt was dropped behind Iraqi lines alone, with a heavy bag of survival and combat kit, on a mission so secret that even the regular Special Forces didn’t know about it. Or, crucially, about him. He had written about an unknown elite within the United States Army – a group of individuals that never trained together, never met each other and were never integrated into the military infrastructure and hierarchy. He had invented this Stealth Operations Lone Officer class, or SOLO, and he had described it as so Beyond Top Secret that any government or army official would deny its existence. It gave him a mystique that became legendary. Conspiracy theorists wondered if there were thousands of such fighting men living among them. Foreign armies studied the concept, and, he was proud to discover, some of them had even introduced it to their forces. Crucially, the invention of the SOLO class made his claims very tricky to disprove. He had spent the Gulf War travelling the world alone – indeed, solo – so no one could point to his continued presence at home as proof of his deception.
The book had started out as an exercise in writing: how would it work if he wrote a first person account of a secret wartime mission? He had found a literary voice that suited the subject. He had researched all technical and military details meticulously. He had created a book so gripping that the third publisher his agent sent it to signed it up immediately. The first hardback print run was a modest two thousand copies. Publicity relating to its launch was quickly subsumed by other events that dominated the news, and sales failed to rise beyond half of the printed stock. Matt’s little joke looked set to dissolve away, undeserving of a paperback edition, soon to be forgotten.
Then the Bill Clinton incident occurred. The President, relaxing during a vacation, was snapped holding a copy of Matt’s book. Whether he was reading it – and whether he actually liked it – nobody knew, but the photo saved the book. It was propelled into the bestseller charts across the world. A chance photo had changed Matt’s life.
And now an intricate work of fiction had evolved into an alternative history that threatened his future.
* * *
It didn’t feel right to be sharing his vehicle with this stranger. His elastic face constantly switched between wide-eyed wonder and a stoic, knowing look that subtly undermined Ratty’s new-found confidence. The Patient was visibly astounded by the simplest things. Birds and monkeys forced
contortions of the neck as he tried to stare at nature’s passing creations. Roadkill fascinated him, and he insisted on stopping to examine a recently-deceased Baird’s tapir. He prodded it and jumped back, as if confused by the notion that it was no longer alive. He spoke little, but when he did he would randomly come out with the queerest phrases, sometimes in his amusing slant on the English language, other times in classical Greek or Latin. All were perfectly comprehensible to Ratty.
‘Quite the philosopher, aren’t you?’ said Ratty.
‘I know one thing,’ replied the Patient, ‘that I know nothing.’
Hmm. Socrates, thought Ratty. Hardly a denial of philosophical tendencies.
The journey continued slowly over rough forest tracks in the direction dictated by a man with no name who combined the joie de vivre of a puppy with the combined wisdom of all of history’s greatest thinkers. Today was going to be memorable, Ratty decided.
The track merged with a small road, and a signpost indicated that they were heading to the ruins of Tikal. Ratty twigged. Tikal was the crossroads. The junction. The X on the map. The Patient really knew where to look. They were going to find the treasure.
The military road block at the entrance to Tikal suggested otherwise. The Patient showed no emotion or interest in the group of armed men who stood menacingly in front of them. Ratty felt his body erupt in a spray of sweat. He slowed the car to a halt and prepared to explain that he was a lost tourist. A soldier approached the car, but stopped abruptly. He shouted to his colleagues and they quickly formed themselves into a neat line along the roadside. He ran to join them and waved Ratty’s car through. All of the soldiers saluted as the Toyota and its surprised occupants drove past.
If I had tried that at the border I could have avoided a considerable detour, thought Ratty. Having a face that shouted in-bred English aristocracy had its advantages. These chaps knew their place. They recognised a toff and doffed their caps accordingly; that kind of response rather took him back to his childhood. Still, those salutes were unexpected. Nice, but not really necessary.