The God Complex: A Thriller

by Murray Mcdonald

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It means we’re getting closer!”

  “Closer to what?” asked the Senator, stretching his arms as he joined them from his slumber.

  “To the truth,” said Cash. “Of what’s really going on.”

  “Very good,” the Senator said without a hint of interest. “You’re not going to be long here, I hope. I’d like to be in Geneva before the party starts.”

  “Thirty minutes is all I need,” said Sophie.

  “Rigs?” asked Cash.

  “That should be fine,” he said loading an HK416 and after checking it was ready, tossing it to Cash.

  “Expecting trouble?” asked the Senator.

  Cash smiled. “We are trouble.”

  Chapter 57

  The Senator had arranged for a helicopter to take them to the pyramids. He had no intention of suffering through Cairo’s traffic chaos, especially as he had no intention of staying behind without them.

  “You’re coming too?” asked Cash in surprise when they exited the plane.

  “You’re supposed to be keeping me safe, aren’t you?”

  “We’re in the middle of an international airport though.”

  “We were in the most secret military installation on the planet last night.”

  “After you,” said Cash stepping aside to let him into the waiting chopper.

  “Let’s go,” said Cash, closing the door behind him.

  “My God,” said Sophie when the pyramids came into view. “They are truly magnificent. Majestic…”

  “Big,” Cash commented.

  Rigs pointed downwards, motioning for Cash to look. The area was closed off. A barrier had been erected restricting access to the pyramids. A throng of tourists were pushing towards the guards at the entrance but they weren’t budging. The site was closed.

  “Sophie, any ideas?” asked Cash.

  “Nope. I checked the website before we left and there was no mention of it being closed.”

  “Keep circling for now thanks,” Cash advised the chopper pilot.

  Sophie logged onto the website again. A message had been added in the last hour: ‘Closed for structural issues’.

  Cash was watching a procession of trucks drive through the gates much to the consternation of the tourists who had probably spent hours in traffic getting to the closed site.

  “That looks like scaffolding! Surely not?”

  “It says it could be closed for up to three weeks. An overnight tremor has caused damage that requires—”

  “I thought you said it was built to withstand earthquakes?” Cash cut in.

  “It was but I suppose if it were big enough—”

  “Not to knock over a wooden shed that a gust of wind would destroy?” Cash pointed to a number of wooden slums they were circling over, their walls and roofs balancing treacherously.

  “Land next to the big one,” instructed the Senator, bored of the debating. “I’ll keep the guards busy while you get what you need.”

  ***

  The Pyramids at Giza had been identified as the number one site by Anya Noble and as such had two Sicarii allocated to it. They had arrived for the opening of the plateau while the final eight foot high solid metal fence was being erected. They both looked for a way in but the fencing had not been erected by the local workforce. A highly professional job had closed off the entire plateau overnight. Only one gate led in and out of the site and the guards stood resolute. Nobody was getting in and no discussion was being entered into.

  For days, they had waited, circling the site, the images of the targets burned indelibly into their minds. They felt the trucks before they could see or hear them, the ground vibrating under the mass convoy that was approaching. If the trucks could get in so could they, thought Joel, the elder of the two Sicarii and leader of the order. Whatever the targets wanted, it was on the other side of the fence and hence where they needed to be. He signaled to Ethan, his young protégé, to follow.

  Joel jogged back and as predicted, the trucks began to queue too. The guards were far too important to allow the trucks to just pass them. His first plan was to climb into the back and simply hitch a ride but he found it impossible, the rear of the trucks were sealed, their doors padlocked and security tagged.

  Joel looked down at the gate some hundred yards ahead. Guards with mirrors were checking underneath, not for people, but for explosives, an aftermath of previous tourist attacks at the site. He watched intently while he and Ethan milled around casually as though not sure what to do with their day. They were checking the undercarriage and the security tags closely.

  Joel signaled to Ethan and disappeared in between two trucks, looking up at the helicopter that was circling overhead.

  ***

  The Senator had his most officious face on when the first guard approached the landing chopper.

  “Check your paperwork before bothering me,” he boomed, leaving the guard who only understood a few words of English clueless as to who or why they were there. The Senator’s voice was commanding enough that the guard thought better of challenging him himself. He scurried off to his superior.

  “Does anyone know the military chief these days?” Senator Noble asked quietly.

  “I know the President is—”

  “A patsy. The real power here nowadays is the military. If I throw that name about we’ll be fine for a couple of hours.”

  Sophie looked it up, moving out of the way of the trucks that were beginning to flood the area.

  “You can’t be here!” a guard barked. It was the original guard, back now with his superior who spoke better English.

  “I’d suggest you ditch that tone, son,” said the Senator, not waiting for Sophie’s search results. He waved them off to do their thing. “My colleagues are here at the request of your military commander in chief, and I suggest you pay them and me the respect we are due.”

  “Field Marshall Sobhi?”

  If the guy were clever, he’d have given a false name, but Senator Noble was a political grandmaster, he knew how to play a person.

  “I’ll give him a call, you can tell him why you’re delaying us.”

  The two guards scurried away before the Senator could reach for the cell phone he didn’t even have.

  Sophie moved towards the entrance, looking up at the pyramid. Cash stood beside her, marveling at the scale, while Rigs signaled he was going around the back. The grandeur of the monument passed him by. He had something he wanted to check.

  Sophie grabbed the printout of the measurements she needed. They were all precisely detailed by the professor’s research. She needed to get to the queen’s chamber and with the site closed, she was going to have it to herself. With the schematic in her hand, she worked her way along the robber’s entrance, a tunnel dug through the pyramid which linked to the descending passage of the original entrance.

  “Up there is where the original entrance was,” she pointed behind them as they joined the main passage. “Twenty tons, and swung open with little effort from the inside but undetectable from the outside, such was the precision with which it was made.”

  “One question?” asked Cash.

  “What?”

  “Why build something so amazing and then have this tiny little entranceway?” He was bent over, his six feet two inches not ideal for a passageway that was exactly half his height.

  “We’re here,” she said. She couldn’t answer him; it really didn’t make a lot of sense. “We go up here, this is the ascending passage.”

  “Genius,” said Cash. The passage began to ascend, though its height remained the same.

  They took a turn that led them along a level section before entering the Queen’s Chamber. “Nearly there,” Sophie said. “That wasn’t too bad.”

  “If you’re not claustrophobic, it’s fine,” said Cash, standing to his full height within what was still a fairly small space. “What’s this, eighteen by eighteen?”

  “About that
, yes.” Cash spotted the printout she had laid down. “That’s full of measurements, right?”

  “Not to the preciseness that I need though,” Sophie said, setting up a laser that measured angles to six decimal places. “Also, not all the measurements your father suggests are needed.”

  Cash looked again. He couldn’t see an angle that hadn’t been measured on the sheet. A noise caught his attention from back down the passageway.

  ***

  Joel had noted that the guards were not at all interested in the drivers, only whether they had a bomb underneath and that their cargo remained untouched. Approaching from the passenger side, he and Ethan had made short work of two of the drivers, gaining entry to the cabs and knocking them out before stuffing their unconscious bodies in the ample passenger foot wells before covering them. Not that it mattered. When they approached, they handed down the paperwork that the guards would check and waited while they checked the undercarriage and that the tags were secure and matched the paperwork. A wave later and they drove the trucks into the plateau, following the convoy towards the great pyramid.

  Joel spotted the helicopter sitting only fifty yards from the entrance, and what looked like a heated discussion. An older man was arguing with the guards. His back was to Joel but he did recognize a man who was walking towards the pyramid entrance with a woman. He also recognized the man who was walking away from them towards the other side of the pyramid.

  Their targets! He edged his truck forward and got out. A guard came towards him, shouting at him in Egyptian. Joel waited until he was close enough and obscured from the rest of the site by his and Ethan’s truck before pouncing like a cobra. His right hand flashed into the man’s neck and sent him crumpling to the ground. A second strike to the back of the neck rendered him unconscious. Joel only killed when he had to, or was paid to. With Ethan’s help, he stuffed the guard into the cab, out of sight.

  “I’ll take the two in the pyramid, you take the one on the outside and see if you can get an ID on the older guy.”

  Ethan was gone before he was finished speaking, always eager to please. Joel was more deliberate in his actions and made sure his entry to the pyramid went unnoticed.

  He travelled through the passage, constantly stopping to hear where his targets were. A couple of conversations gave little away. The tight corridors only allowed you to understand whether people were ahead of you or behind you. When he approached the first turn, there were no sounds from either direction and he guessed wrong, continuing down into the subterranean chamber, an unfinished chamber deep beneath the pyramid.

  He turned and headed back up, turning into the ascending passages and was rewarded by voices off in the distance.

  ***

  Rigs had found the area where the overhead image from the previous day had been focused. It was the same area that had been in the professor’s notes. Something had caught his eye, a difference in the two images, both of exactly the same section of the East face of the pyramid. Rigs had an ability to recall great detail from any image he had seen. The two images that should have matched didn’t quite and he wanted to see why not. Unfortunately, the area that differed was near the top of the pyramid. He worked his way up, pulling himself from level to level. It wasn’t easy, especially when the sun began to reach its midday heat.

  He heard a grunt and looked back. A man had stumbled behind him. Rigs hadn’t even heard him following him. Rigs had kept an eye out for guards for the first hundred feet of the climb and after that he figured he could relax. They wouldn’t shoot him and they wouldn’t catch him before he got to where he wanted to go. The man behind him had closed to fifty feet without Rigs noticing and if he hadn’t slipped in his haste to catch him, Rigs would never have known he was there.

  Rigs looked back at the chopper. His HK416 was sitting on the back seat. With the site closed, it seemed surplus to requirements. He patted his belt. His Mission MPK-T1 knife was his only weapon. He looked back at the man who was coming towards him. The man knew he had given his position away and had doubled his speed. Rigs looked ahead. His anomaly sat just thirty feet away, ten levels of blocks. He doubled his speed and raced forward. If he was going to have to fight, he didn’t want to have to climb any further.

  “Stop!’ shouted the man, with a faint Middle Eastern accent.

  Rigs carried on, reaching the point in the image that hadn’t matched. The stone in question was slightly askew from one image to the other. He pushed at it, it didn’t budge. He pushed at the others around it, they didn’t move either. He looked at the stone beneath his feet. A scrape was clear where the stone in question had been moved. He withdrew his knife and scraped an X into the stone.

  “What are you doing?” asked the man, now within ten feet.

  “Marking the spot where you die,” said Rigs.

  The man laughed, but Rigs continued to carve. There were less than two feet on each of the ledges and an almost four hundred foot fall behind them.

  “Why would you want to kill me?” asked the man who was now on the same ledge.

  “Why else would you want to follow me?’ asked Rigs, finishing his X. “Now if you just come closer.”

  The man withdrew his own knife. Ethan would have preferred a gun but the terrorist attacks in previous years had meant there was no chance they could get into the area with anything more than a well-concealed knife. He slashed out at Rigs.

  Rigs deflected the slash and tried to kick the man’s knee but he was too quick. He dropped and tried to swipe Rigs’ legs away. Rigs saw it coming and jumped back, his back leg teetering on the ledge’s edge. The man lunged forward.

  Rigs let his body go with its balance and dropped to the lower ledge, barely avoiding the man’s blade.

  Rigs slashed out at the man’s ankles, the man had seen it coming and was already jumping back and down to Rigs’ lower ledge.

  “You’re very good,” said the man.

  “Your pals thought so too when I slashed their throats last night,” said Rigs.

  The man tilted his head, giving away his interest.

  “One was Katya. Shame, damn good looking woman as well,” smiled Rigs.

  The man lunged wildly, fury in his eyes.

  Rigs caught his wrist and snapped it back. The man’s knife plunged below. Rigs spun him round, and keeping his back to the structure, held the man on the edge of the ledge with his knife pressing against his throat.

  “Who are you?”

  The man remained silent.

  “I’m not going to ask again,” he said dragging the razor sharp blade gently across the man’s neck.

  “I can’t tell you,” said the man defiantly.

  Rigs relaxed his grip and slashed at the man twice, leaving him in a bloody mess on the ledge. He had to get to Cash and Sophie. He bounded down the ledges, trying to keep his speed up while not overdoing it. If he mistimed it and fell, it would be worse than a straight three hundred foot fall, his body would bounce off ledge after ledge leaving a crumpled corpse at the bottom.

  ***

  Cash heard the sound of scraping from the corridor behind them. He waved for Sophie to remain still and quiet. He listened. The sound was getting nearer. Like Rigs, he wished he had had taken his HK416 and had nothing other than his knife. His choice was simple: wait and face them in the chamber with Sophie, where she would only get in the way and be able to be used against him, or go on the offensive. He’d always been a quarterback kind of guy. Offense was his game.

  He struggled back into the small tunnel and slid as silently as he could along the level surface. The scuffling noises were getting closer. He reached the ascending passage and could see a man coming up towards him from below. The ascending passage continued upwards, most importantly away from Sophie. Cash entered the passage and pushed on higher, drawing the man away from Sophie, and up towards the Grand Gallery. It was the first place that actually looked like it belonged in the pyramid, thought Cash when he entered. More importantly for that moment, he had s
pace to move in.

  “Are you going to let me out of here?”

  “Depends. Why are you here?” said Cash. He stood with his knife ready to strike as soon as the man exited the crouched passageway into the gallery.

  “I could always turn back and visit the chamber below,” he offered.

  “You’d never make it.”

  “You’d bet her life on that?”

  Cash stepped back allowing the man to enter the gallery.

  “Cash Harris?” asked the man.

  “You have me at a disadvantage,” said Cash, stepping back and preparing to strike.

  “Joel. It’s a shame we meet in such circumstances,” he said.

  “Was it your guys we dealt with in Machu Picchu?” asked Cash.

  “Dear God no, they’re the reason we’re here,” he said scornfully. “Amateurs.”

  Joel flashed his knife at Cash as he had prepared to strike. Joel had sensed his move.

  “Any particular reason you want to kill us?”

  Joel shook his head. “Money, I’m afraid. I’ve no idea why they want you dead, they just do.”

  Cash feigned a move. Joel bought it and flashed his knife as previously. Cash reacted, drawing blood from Joel’s forearm.

  “Very good,” said Joel, rushing towards Cash and catching him with a punch as Cash avoided his blade.

  Cash reeled backwards. It was a solid punch that, had his life not been on the line, may otherwise have floored him. He shook it off.

  Joel pounced again. Cash was ready for him. Avoiding the blade and the punch, he ducked and swung out his leg catching Joel and sending him crashing back down the gallery towards the entrance. Cash rushed forward but Joel bounced up ready to strike again, stopping Cash in his tracks.

  Joel feinted left but struck from the right. Cash had his measure, catching the blade arm, falling to the floor and bringing it down with him. A ledge that ran the full length either side of the gallery was the perfect pivot point to aim for. He pushed Joel’s body towards the ledge, while he himself aimed for the three-foot-wide gulley that ran down the middle of the gallery. He caught Joel’s elbow on the ledge and fell into the three-foot gulley, powering his full weight and force into bringing the bottom half of Joel’s arm with him. Joel’s arm bent horribly at the elbow until a loud snap echoed up the thirty foot height of the gallery’s ceiling and its full one hundred fifty foot length. Joel tried to stifle his scream but barely managed. His arm dangled helplessly while his body struggled not to go into shock.