by Talbot, Luke
Gail made sure the message was as short as possible by deleting a couple of unnecessary words. Satisfied with what she had written, she entered her keyword, and tapped to submit.
Seconds later, the image was ready, her secret message hidden deep inside each individual pixel, undetectable to the human eye and, she hoped, invisible to firewalls. If anyone suspected that there was a hidden message, it wouldn’t take them long to break her code; George had used an algorithm readily available on the Internet, and advanced code-breaking programs could unlock keywords within hours. But that was the beauty of George’s program: no one need ever know they were exchanging messages, because all you ever saw were pictures.
Now all she needed to worry about was how to send it to him. She leant back in her chair and stared into the screen. The network icon advised her that there were access points in range, but they were all encrypted. The irony didn’t escape her.
All the terminals she’d seen in the facility had thumbprint access restriction. No doubt, if they were as security conscious as she believed they should be, the thumbprint scanners would also take a minute sample of tissue to perform a quick DNA analysis. There would probably even be retinal scan software, using the cameras that were embedded into most screens. To back all that up, they might even ask users for a typed password before unlocking the displays, too.
So she wasn’t going to get a connection, and she wasn’t going to be able to log onto someone else’s machine. Despite all the technology she had used to get to this point, it was all going to let her down on the last leg. She had been so caught up in writing the message and hiding it that getting the message to him hadn’t even crossed her mind.
She hit the table in frustration. All I want to do is send a bloody email! As the word entered her mind, she froze. Mail! Tapping the screen quickly, she moved the image file to her memory card and closed the application. She then popped a small flap open and pulled out the thumbnail-sized piece of plastic.
Rummaging through the papers on the desk, she found a few scans inside a brown paper envelope. Removing them, she slipped the tiny drive in and shut the envelope before sliding it into her pocket just as Patterson returned. He was carrying a tray full of cakes, with two mugs of steaming hot coffee. To her relief, he pushed the door open with his rear as he backed into the room, and therefore didn’t see the guilty look on her face as she quickly returned both her hands to the laptop.
“Get anywhere?” he asked, casually.
“No,” she cleared her throat. “Still a couple of stumbling blocks. Coffee will help though, thanks.”
“No problem. I asked the guy in the canteen for coffee ‘Julie Andrews’ and he knew exactly what I was talking about. Seems you’re not so crazy after all!”
“Ha! I think any of you guys calling me crazy when I’ve seen what you’re up to here is a bit out of order.”
He looked at her and took his mug from the tray, sipping it cautiously after a short cooling blow. “I’m sorry you’re caught up in this,” he said sympathetically.
“You should be!” she retorted.
“No, I mean it,” he said, obviously hurt.
It suddenly occurred to her that there was something more than just sympathy in his eyes. She still had a big problem to solve: there weren’t exactly that many mailboxes around the corridors of the facility, and sending a letter to England was not going to be straightforward. She’d need help. And while she wasn’t the kind of person to use someone, Patterson’s inability to be an authority on the Book of Xynutians was the main reason for her being kidnapped.
Here was a weak man, who had clearly taken a shine to her. Why, she had no idea; although only forty-one, she felt old and slightly podgy after too many quiet nights in and too little exercise. And she had been anything but nice to Patterson since she’d first laid eyes on him.
I have to get this message to George, she though as she pushed back the feelings of hate towards herself for what she was about to do and painted what she hoped looked like a completely natural, slightly flirty smile on her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said, ignoring her morals screaming from deep down inside. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. You have been kind to me since I got here.” She reached out and brushed her hand against his forearm briefly, before taking her coffee. She hadn’t been on the dating scene for over fifteen years now, but she knew that just with that gesture, she was already halfway there.
Chapter 59
Jane ran her gloved hands frantically along the edge of the wall, desperately trying to find an opening, a finger-hold, to drag the stone back and get to Danny.
“Shit!” she exclaimed. “I can’t get it open!”
“Keep trying, Jane.” Yves’ voice sounded like he was inside her head, coming through the speakers in her helmet. “I’m going through the footage from his cam immediately before the power surge, to see what happened.”
She grunted a reply, moving her attention from the join in the floor to the sides of the walls. There didn’t seem to be a gap wider than a fraction of a millimetre around the entire wall. If she hadn’t seen it slide down with her own eyes, she would have sworn that it wouldn’t be able to, or at least never had.
A few moments later, Yves’ voice boomed in her ears again.
“OK, Jane. Turn to your left and down a bit. You see the carving of that lizard thing, going along the floor?”
She looked down and saw the strange creature with its bottom jaw curled into a grotesque smile. Fine, pointy teeth covered the inside of the mouth, and a long thin tongue rasped tentatively against the top lip. She shuddered involuntarily. “Yes.”
“The last thing that I got from Danny’s cam was when he reached out and ran his fingers along the head of that thing.”
She was about to do the same when she froze. “So I’d better not touch it, don’t you think?”
There was a pause. “Take the power cell and make your way back here. It’ll take me longer to walk there than it will for you to come and get me in Herbie.”
An hour later, they both stood in front of the alien engravings. At their feet were three power cells and some reserve oxygen, as well as an emergency decompression bubble, which could be inflated in less than ten seconds, and would provide a temporary reprieve from the thin Martian atmosphere if one of their suits failed. It would be damn cold, but it would keep them alive for a while. Yves had a small backpack filled with emergency rations that could be used inside the bubble. He had no idea what state Danny would be in if they found him, so he had catered for as many emergency scenarios as he could think of.
They went through the plan one final time.
“OK, so I touch the wall, and you stand behind me. If what happened to Danny happens to me, use the power cells to recharge, and if that doesn’t work get me into the bubble. OK?”
She nodded and stood back.
Slowly, cautiously, he reached out and brushed his fingers against the stone wall of the corridor.
Nothing happened.
Emboldened, he let them run along the smooth contours of the lizard’s head, taking in every detail, making sure that none of the teeth or veins on its skin were left untouched.
Still, nothing happened.
Using both hands, he poured over the engraving. From head to tail he pushed and rubbed against every line, before moving beyond the lizard and on to the strange alien symbols that he assumed had to be writing. He was standing now, looking up and down for any area he could have missed.
“Well, that obviously wasn’t it,” he said disappointedly. “What do you think?”
There was no reply.
Spinning round, he saw that Jane was laid out on the stone floor, immobile. He rushed to her side and checked her vital signs; she was breathing, and her suit seemed intact. No matter why she had fallen, she must have done so gracefully, without hitting her helmet against the walls. He dragged a power cell towards them and plugged the extension lead into the socket behind her left shoulder.
Very quickly, the lights in her suit returned and he felt the gentle hum as the ventilation system started to move warm air inside. Minutes later, her eyes flickered, then came back to life.
“Can you hear me?” Yves asked.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“How do you feel?”
“Groggy. So it was me, eh?” she looked up at him sheepishly. “Didn’t see that one coming.”
He helped her sit up. “No, me neither. I didn’t even see you fall.”
“I don’t understand, though; surely a loss of power, no matter how it happened, wouldn’t make me or Danny blackout?”
“I think we have to assume, given the circumstances, that whatever took the power from your suit may not be something we can understand just yet,” he said.
“I guess the door didn’t open?”
He shook his head.
She was about to suggest they try again when she noticed the door shift upwards ever so slightly. “Look!” she pointed.
As they watched, the entire wall slipped into the ceiling noiselessly. Where it had once been, a deep groove ran along the floor and the walls, revealing how neatly the door slotted in.
Beyond, the corridor continued for about ten yards before meeting another wall, identical in appearance to the one that had just opened. Along the walls the alien engravings continued, showing people in various poses, all heading towards the far end of the corridor. One of them, a man, was different; he was sitting in a chair which floated above the others, with a long sceptre in his left hand. On the end of the sceptre was the symbol they had seen engraved on the Jetty: the Amarna Stickman.
Yves and Jane crept forwards to take all of this in, and were just about to pass under the door when Jane shouted out. “Wait!”
She ran back to the equipment and dragged the power cells, bubble and spare oxygen pack. He helped her the last few feet, until everything was beyond the doorway. They now stood one on either side of the groove in the corridor.
“The second door must open when this one is closed, like an airlock,” Yves said. The sense of urgency was apparent in his voice, and his eyes.
“Wait, what are we about to do? We don’t know if we’ll ever be able to get back out again.” She shook her head slowly. “We can’t go in there.”
He looked her in the eyes and saw genuine fear. It infected him somewhat and he looked around, as if suddenly realising his own predicament: he was on the wrong side of the door, and it could close at any moment. He’d been caught up in their discovery, so much so that all common sense had gone out of the window.
“OK, you’re right.” He was about to hand the power cells back to her when he saw the wall sliding back down. It closed so fast he didn’t even have time to catch the look of sheer horror on Jane’s face.
“Jane!” he shouted. “Can you hear me?”
There was no response.
He spent the next ten minutes banging on the solid rock door with his fists, shouting at the top of his voice and desperately trying to slide it back up, to no avail.
He was alone.
He slowly came to terms with the fact that he wasn’t going to move the door, and while it was there, none of his radio signals would be getting out. It also occurred to him that a spacesuit was the loneliest place to die.
Turning round, he examined the corridor. His first assessment of the new engravings from a distance had been pretty accurate. A man, which he assumed to be a leader of some sort, sitting on his floating chair with a big Amarna Stickman staff, seemed to be summoning the others towards the end of the corridor, which Yves hoped would turn out to be a door, beyond which he would find Danny.
On the opposite wall, was an altogether more surprising sight: heading in the same direction as the men were dozens and dozens of animals, of many different species. They weren’t quite going in two by two, but Yves easily recognised elephants, giraffes, wolves, lions and several different kinds of birds. The quality of the engravings was exquisite; they looked so realistic he could almost smell them. He scanned the different animals in the procession, picking up on quite a few he had never seen before; a strange dog-like mammal with a long horn on its nose, and what looked like a bear, but with no fur to speak of and very long, pointy ears. Towards the back, the unmistakable form of a bipedal dinosaur, its short arms held close to its chest and mouth open to reveal rows of razor sharp teeth. The respective sizes of the animals he recognized told him the engravings were to scale. This in turn told him that the dinosaur had to be less than two meters tall, although its body was much longer. He realised his mouth was hanging open, and was about to shut it when he saw an even more familiar sight, marching between a lion and a hippopotamus.
The face looked more elongated at the nose and mouth, the slight hunch at the neck, and the squat, solid legs were far shorter in proportion to the rest of the body, causing the arms to hang weirdly close to the ground. But despite these differences, there was without a doubt an early man walking among these animals.
They were all being led deep underground.
Suddenly, the second door opened, sliding into the ceiling effortlessly like the first, and the corridor was bathed in bright light, which picked the engravings out in striking high-contrast relief.
I’m being led underground with them, he thought.
He hesitated briefly, then took a deep breath and put his right foot forwards, into the light.
Chapter 60
Ben pulled his car up at the entrance of the airport in a space reserved for taxis, of which there were, oddly, none. Seconds later, the muzzle of an assault rifle tapped the window and gestured for it to be opened. He obliged indignantly.
George looked on nervously as Ben proceeded to argue with the armed policeman, who turned out not to be alone. A dozen or so more, all in black uniforms and berets, patrolled the entrance to the airport. Two more detached from a small group inside the main door and walked towards Ben’s car.
“Ben?” he tried to get his friend’s attention. “Ben, I think we should use the short-stay parking.”
The policeman peered down into the car and checked George out, giving him the opportunity in turn to read the badge on the man’s uniform; ‘Tourism Police’. He had seen many Tourism Police during his years visiting Egypt; they were generally, in his experience, unkempt, corrupt and out of shape guards with outdated weapons that probably didn’t work. They spent most of their time, as was their duty, ‘protecting’ tourists from terrorists; terrorists who had been absent from Egypt for decades.
Gail in particular had pretty strong views on Tourism Police. Omnipresent at mass tourist attractions and minor sites alike, they sometimes guarded supposedly closed-to-the-public areas, but would lift a metal pole blocking your passage for a discrete baksheesh. Invariably, the metal pole would disappear as soon as they did.
These police were different. Not only because they wore black instead of white, but mainly because they seemed well-armed, organised and impeccably presented. Their uniforms were crisp and well-fitted, in contrast to their cousins in white, who sometimes looked like they’d accidentally put on someone else’s jacket and trousers.
“You have flight now?” the man asked him in broken English.
George shook his head. “No, later on. We’re here to catch a friend before he boards his plane.” He suddenly realised he had gesticulated wildly to illustrate what he meant by board and plane. Saying these words to a member of the Tourism Police outside an airport, it was probably fair to say he didn’t need the sign language, so he hid his hands under his legs quickly, a movement which earned him a nervous twitch of the gun from the soldier and a wide-eyed look from Ben.
After a few choice words from the man, the barrel of the gun was lifted from the window sill and Ben put the car into gear, moving away from the taxi rank, leaving it empty save for the patrolling soldiers. Barely five hundred yards later, they joined a long line of traffic waiting to exit the airport, and came to a standstill.
/> George waited as long as he could before speaking. “What the hell is going on? They didn’t look like Tourism Police?”
Ben looked round the traffic in frustration; there was no other way to downtown Cairo. They were stuck. “Tourism Police don’t have much to do, usually. They used to be everywhere. Before I was born, Egypt had lots of terrorism, religious fanatics, generally people with lots of guns and little sense.” A car joined the queue behind them and beeped. Ben turned in his seat and gesticulated. “I haven’t seen the black uniform ones for a while. We usually get them in and around monuments and mosques or churches, if something happens somewhere else in the world, though they usually wear white. The only place I know that there are always black Tourism Police is on the Sinai Peninsula. It has a border with Israel and is always full of Western and Israeli tourists, so we can never throw too many police at the place to make people feel safe.”
“Why are they here now?”
“All flights have been cancelled, except for those leaving in the next hour. That means Martín will be on his way home now, and we won’t be able to see him. They’re not letting anyone else in the airport. The policeman didn’t say why.” He shrugged and looked at George.
George fished in the pocket of his shorts and got his phone. Picking through his recent calls he singled out Martín’s number and dialled it. They’d hoped to meet in the airport, but traffic had conspired against them. Now, they weren’t even going to be let in.
“Hello?” Martín answered on the first ring. “George?”
“Hi Martín,” he said. “Are you getting on your flight?”
“Already on board, waiting for the doors to close now. It’s crazy here, I don’t know how you’re going to get back to England!”
He briefly wondered the same thing, but it would have to wait. They had more important things to discuss.
“Martín, what the hell is going on?”
“No idea, it only happened in the last half hour or so; the police came in and then suddenly the whole place went into lockdown. We were hurried onto our plane. I’ve tried checking the news but I can’t see anything there.”