Except that the sphinxes currently making a mess of the flapping ends of my coat as I pelted down the long corridor that was the spine of the museum’s research wing were a long way removed from being extinct. Too bloody far for my liking anyway.
I gained precious seconds by suddenly darting sideways down a side corridor. So intent on chasing me were the sphinxes that they continued on in a straight line for a moment or two before my change of direction registered and the flock of chittering animals wheeled around after me again. The corridor I found myself in, I realised too late, was a dead end, terminating in a rapidly approaching door whose glass window stated that it belonged to the Dean of Ornithoptrohistory, whatever the hell that was. In a feat of brilliant gymnastics, I went down on my knees as I slid through the door, reaching around to grab the handle and slam the door shut behind me, holding on tight to brace it against the impact of the chasing sphinxes.
The door didn’t even shudder, though. The window with the dean’s long title painted on it shattered as the little bodies hurtled through it as though it wasn’t even there. The sphinxes weren’t equipped with air brakes, so whilst they re-orientated themselves after streaming into the room, I was able to scramble to my feet, reopen the door and run back down the corridor. The shrieks of the angered sphinxes rose in volume as they took up the chase again. Just as I was about to reach the main corridor again, Miranda stepped out and held up her hands, shouting, “Get down!”
I certainly didn’t need any extra convincing since I was running out of energy and the beasts were right behind me, displaying no signs of slowing down at all. I went down onto my knees again for the second time in less than a minute as a stream of flame lit out above my head. I caught a glimpse of a cigarette lighter and perfume bottle combination. The flock of sphinxes split as the beasts dived to each side to avoid the makeshift flamethrower. A couple weren’t quick enough and got a face full of sweet-smelling fire. They squealed and made crazy circles to the floor, trailing smoke like some sort of mad dying spitfires.
I tried the handle of the door nearest to us, one that didn’t have a glass window, and it opened. “In here,” I said and crawled through. As Miranda followed me, one of the quicker sphinxes that had recovered from the fiery attack dived at her. With a squeal, she fired off her aerosol flamethrower and ducked as the sphinx flapped madly past her into the room beyond. Since one sphinx on fire was still better odds than a whole flock of pissed off sphinxes, she followed me inside the room and I shut the door just as a dozen or more airborne bodies thumped into it.
The burning sphinx was racing around the room, which turned out to be some sort of laboratory work room, mad with pain and therefore completely unpredictable. It also didn’t seem to care about the threat of further fire in its pain. There were a lot of fragile things in the room and I wasn’t sure how many of them were flammable or how flammable they were. I grabbed a beaker and filled it with water from the nearest sink. As the burning creature swept alarming close to Miranda again, I tossed the beaker’s contents at it and hit it full on.
The sphinx tumbled out of the air and sprawled helplessly on the floor. Mewling in pain and panic at its sudden vulnerability, it tried to flap its wings, to get itself into the air again, but the soaked membranes refused to co-operate, weighing it down, and making it flop about in an ungainly manner. I took the largest, heaviest piece of equipment I could find and slammed it down onto the creature’s head. It stopped moving immediately.
Miranda and I sat on the floor, slumped breathlessly staring at the slowly crisping embers of the dead creature until we were able to catch our breath.
“What the hell are they?” she asked finally, crawling across the floor to get a better look at it.
“Careful,” I warned, since playing possum isn’t the sole preserve of the possum. She immediately pulled back a bit.
“What is it?”
“Sphinx,” I told her.
“What? It doesn’t look anything like…”
“Misinformation,” I interrupted, not wanting to go through that explanation just then. “Can I take that lighter? I didn’t think you smoked.”
She handed it over. “I don’t, but Professor Houseman does.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Not good. She took them full in the face and they’ve made a hell of a mess of her,” she turned at kicked the immobile body with enough force that it tore off at the neck from the crushed head that was still pinned under the lab device and slid messily across the tiled floor. I felt the same way, but for different reasons now that I was being given a moment to think.
“Good work with the flamethrower by the way,” I told her, pulling a couple of chairs towards the middle of the room. The door shook suddenly under a heavy impact as the sphinxes took up their attack again. The sound of small, but deadly-sharp claws scratching away at the door’s surface came through quite clearly. At least the door was real wood, this being the ancient British Museum. A wood-effect chipboard thing wouldn’t have lasted a minute. This door might make a full five. “Nice improvisation.”
Miranda looked forlornly at the perfume bottle in her hand, “This perfume is a hundred and fifty quid a bottle.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her, climbing onto the chairs, “I have a credit card that can buy you a case of the stuff.”
“What are you doing?”
“Taking care of our little friends out there.”
Despite the fact that the little bastards were eating their way through a solid wooden door so that they could do the same to us and had already probably taken away my hottest lead, or at least delayed getting anything useful from that lead for quite a while, by savaging the professor I didn’t want to kill the sphinxes. For one thing, they were supposed to be extinct so killing them off might make them so all over again and a whole generation of zoologists would be understandably pissed off at me. More importantly on a personal level, they might represent some sort of clue or lead that could be followed up on. They were, after all, just animals doing what animals did and after being locked up in the small confines of the professor’s filing cabinet drawer I would probably have been just as pissed off.
I flicked the lighter and the flame caught immediately. No cheap plastic thing for the professor, it was a finely wrought device whose golden colour suggested that it might have some historical value that I really couldn’t care less about. Waving it under the heat detector, I had only to wait for a second before the alarm started to sound stridently and the sprinklers kicked into action. With all the precious artefacts in the place that were susceptible to fire and water, the museum had to be kitted out with a state of the art fire suppression system. No doubt throughout the building anything that could be damaged by water was sliding automatically into waterproof containers in the display stands. At least I hoped they were otherwise I was going to be responsible for more acts of archaeological vandalism than just about anyone in history.
The angry chittering of the sphinxes turned to high pitched cries of alarm and then to piteous wailing, accompanied by the thumps of small, furry bodies hitting the floor. The scraping and splintering of wood stopped altogether.
Scouting around, we located a pair of very heavy cloth gloves and a large, lockable steel box. I carefully opened the door, but the sphinxes had all been taken by surprise by the sudden downpour and were lying on the flooded floor trying to pull against the weight of their waterlogged wings. I gingerly picked them up one by one, grabbing them by the back of the neck in order to keep my fingers as far away from their claws and teeth as possible, but their soaked state had taken all of the fight out of them. They were, after all, a form of cat with all the hatred of water that comes from that origin. I wasn’t too gentle about how I got them into the box, preferring speed over conservation, not least because the water sprinklers were showing signs of easing off as the water supply ran down. It would take the wing membranes hours to dry out, but there was nothing to be gained by taking chances. There was
another reason why I wanted to get the creatures safe as quickly as possible.
“How did you leave Houseman?” I demanded as I threw another writhing body on the squirming pile.
“Don’t worry, I got her back into her chair and stopped what I could of the bleeding. She’s not going to drown on the floor,” Miranda picked up on my concern straight away.
As soon as the sphinxes were made safe, I threw away the gloves and waded back down the main corridor towards the professor’s office. I had long since passed the point of being uncomfortably wet and moved into the territory of being terminally soggy. I was now dripping from everywhere it was possible to drip from. My clothes hung heavily on me, weighing me down and the water, which wasn’t draining away through the exit doors as fast as it was raining down from the ceiling outlets, was almost ankle deep, slowing down progress even more. Just as I was reaching out for the handle to the door, the sprinklers gave a couple of wet gasps and then stopped. The hiss of the water gave way to a shocking silence that was only heightened by the dripping from any number of surfaces as water drained from them onto the marbled floor.
Houseman was slumped over in her chair and I was pretty sure what I would find even before I searched for the pulse at her badly-savaged neck. There was none. The surface of her desk was awash with water that was slowly finding its way around the piles of paperwork and into the pool below, staining it red in the process. In one outstretched hand she clutched a pen.
“She was trying to write something?” Miranda said sadly.
I looked down at the waterlogged paper beneath her unmoving hand and my heart missed a beat. Houseman, tough old broad that she had been, had been writing as she slowly expired and what she had been writing was the translation of the ring’s inscription. At least that’s what I hoped it was. The sodden paper contained hieroglyphs and words in something that approximated rows and columns. They didn’t make any sense on their own, but that wasn’t what they were supposed to do.
“She was making the translation even as she died,” I told Miranda. “She was quite a woman. I would have liked to know her a bit better I think.”
I took the phone out of my pocket and dialled the office to make the ‘Splashdown’ call. The operator at the other end resisted the urge to say ‘what, again?’, but I was fairly sure that Director Grayson would be a lot less self-restraining when we got around to discussing the situation. Whilst we waited for the clean up crew (I had also ordered the fire brigade to take care of the flooding which still seemed unwilling to drain away anywhere, some specialist handlers for the sphinxes and a lot of dry towels) I took a picture of the soaked paper and forwarded it to the cryptography section before the thing could deteriorate any more.
“Is it me or do we seem to be getting wet a lot in this investigation?” Miranda asked idly. “Is it always like this?”
“Never let it be said that I don’t know how to show a girl a good time,” I replied.
“I’m not sure that ‘good’ is the right word,” she rested her head on my shoulder with a squelch. “Interesting yes, but good…?”
“Swimming, wildlife, strip clubs and airships.” I quipped, “What more could you ask for?”
It was a few hours before we could finally leave the museum. The splashdown team arrived with their usual speed and the cover story of a fire in one of the smaller laboratories due to a faulty gas tap was already over all the 24 hour news channels. None of the reports carried word of Professor Houseman’s death or of the heavy steel box containing a couple of dozen supposedly extinct flying monsters. There are some things that the general public don’t want to know about whilst eating their supper or drinking their evening cocoa because of the screaming nightmares it would engender.
A specialist team from London Zoo, also on retainer to the Agency, arrived to take away the sphinxes. One of them, refusing to listen to what I told him, insisted on looking inside before taking them away and lost three fingers before he could get the top closed once more. The bones were recovered so the healers at the hospital would probably be able to regrow the flesh back around them in time, but that didn’t help with the shock and the pain. It taught him a good lesson about listening to others (and me in particular), though.
“I need anything that you can give on these things as soon as you get it,” I told his assistant who immediately assumed control of the team and didn’t seem at all fazed by the loss of her boss. “Origin, where they’ve been kept, how they even exist at all. Anything.”
I was just on the point of taking Miranda back to the train station and home when there was a low rhythmic thumping and the squat black shape of a helicopter raced around the end of the building, flying so low that the blades were almost taking the heads off the gargoyles. The downwash certainly took the hats off the heads of a few people as they hastily exited the area. With no pomp or circumstance at all, the helicopter dropped onto the grassed area outside the west wing, knocking the bins over and scattering the detritus of a day’s visitors across the lawn.
“Someone’s in a hurry,” Miranda commented.
“And I’m going to guess that it’s us,” I said with a tired fatalism.
The second airman jumped down from the helicopter and ran towards us, crouched down under the rotors that showed no signs of slowing down to a stop. Even idling they were moving fast enough to take the head off an elephant, had there been an elephant nearby who was stupid enough to stick its head into the wrong place.
“Agent Ward!” the man shouted over the noise of the chopper, “I have orders to get you back to Oxford.”
“I thought you might,” I nodded and we accompanied him back through the buffeting downwash in an uncomfortable crouched run. He showed us into seats in the back and helped us to snap the restraining harness into place and put the headphones on. Even before he sat down, the rotors had increased their pace and the helicopter leaped up into the air, wheeling around towards Oxford and clearing the roof of the museum by far too few inches for my liking.
As the tall buildings of the city centre gave way to the sprawling housing estates of the suburbs and then to the fields of Buckinghamshire, I dropped my head back against the seat’s headrest and closed my eyes.
“Are you OK?” Miranda’s voice came through the headphones with concerned intonation intact.
“I just need to think,” I told her simply, not wanting to get into a conversation at that point.
“You’re upset aren’t you,” she didn’t seem to take the hint. “About Houseman’s death I mean.”
I nodded instead of replying and this time she did get the message since the link between the headsets remained quiet. The rotors above us were anything but quiet, but I was able to tune out their background noise.
She was right, Houseman’s death had disturbed me, but not in the way that she was probably thinking. Yes, I had liked the professor almost instantly and she had been the kind of lively talker who would have been huge fun to be around in a social context, but it wasn’t the pointless waste of her life that bothered me at present. The fact that she had died at all was what nagged at me. An Egyptology professor couldn’t possibly have many enemies that were willing to go so far as to murder her. There might be a disgruntled student or two who hadn’t gotten the grade that they thought they deserved or some peddler in stolen artefacts that she had exposed as a fraud at a stretch, but neither of these were likely to be serious enough to be considered a death threat.
And then there was the manner of her death. Murder by sphinx wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that some would-be honour student with a grudge might be able to think up let alone actually manage. The maintenance of a colony of sphinxes undetected for all this time in secret was unthinkable and that meant that they had been created by either magical means or through some sort of genetic cloning technique. Either way that meant the people who carried out the killing had serious resources behind them. This in turn meant that they were likely to be the people that I was after. And if the pro
fessor had been killed because of what she was going to add to the investigation then that meant that someone out there had known that we were coming to see her and why.
Someone inside the Agency was helping them.
It was a conclusion that was as inescapable as it was disturbing, but the evidence was incontrovertible. Forensic evidence had been tampered with and the rings had been removed from the effects of both Cynthia Traske and Geoffrey Helliman whilst those effects were in Agency hands. The loss of one might have been an accident, but the loss of both could only be a deliberate act. Traske had been warned by someone that my interest in him was increasing and had done a runner before I could get there to confront him a second time. And now someone had known that we were coming to get help from Professor Houseman and had seen to it that she could not give us that help. Or so they had hoped. Someone inside the Agency was working against the Agency.
I sat bolt upright as I realised that I had taken it on faith that this helicopter belonged to the Agency and had been sent to pick us up. The pace of the investigation had quickened to the point where that was quite likely, but I had not checked. I relaxed a little when I looked out the windows and picked out the landmarks of Henley-On-Thames passing beneath us. The pilot wasn’t wasting time on gaining height as the vehicle raced above the landscape barely high enough to avoid the trees and the electricity pylons. If we were being kidnapped then we were being kidnapped in the right direction.
As I watched the little villages of south Oxfordshire flash past below us, I thought some more about Houseman’s death. That it was as a result of our presence was no longer a doubt in my mind and so I thought about the logistics of it. The time delay between Grayson suggesting that we consult her and her untimely death was short, only a few hours at most. In that time whoever had killed her had taken possession of the sphinxes, gained access to the museum and planted them in her office.
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 18