Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  George didn’t want to dwell on it; as far as he was concerned, terrorism was a million miles from his concerns.

  “The reason we wanted to talk, Martín, is that Kamal came to see me in my hotel room,” he started. “He says Gail isn’t dead, but he can’t tell us where she is. She’s been taken by someone.”

  There was a pause. “Sorry, George there must be bad reception. Taken?”

  “Yes, taken,” he shouted into the phone. George remembered the first time he had met Martín, the Spaniard had suggested that Gail had been abducted for her knowledge. That had been just before the call from Kamal, asking him to identify her body. It seemed they had come full circle. “All he gave us was a clue as to where she is.”

  “What was the clue?”

  “DEFCOMM. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “DEFCOMM?” Martín paused for thought. “Are you sure he said DEFCOMM?”

  “I have it written down in front of me.”

  “I’ll need to look it up to know precisely, but DEFCOMM are responsible for an array of satellites owned by the US government. They’re built by many different people. That’s how NASA gets so much funding, by distributing its contracts throughout the States; if all the funding went to one state, then it wouldn’t do opinion polls any good, so by sharing the funding and jobs as much as possible, huge amounts of funding can be passed without having such a negative impact on the government’s popularity.

  “DEFCOMM is more of an umbrella term; no one company is responsible, so it could be any one of three dozen companies in nearly fifty different cities!” Martín said in frustration. “His clue doesn’t really narrow it down enough!”

  “Well, it must give us something!” George urged. “Why would he go to all the trouble of leaving a clue only to give us a dead-end?”

  “To get back at you for punching him in the face?” Ben muttered beside him.

  Martín was silent for a few moments. “Did he say anything else?”

  “No.”

  “George, I have to go, but I’ll look into this as soon as I land. Call and leave a message if you find out more!”

  George closed the phone and looked around.

  Their car had been idling, but Ben now decided to turn the engine off, as had many of the other drivers.

  A strange kind of calm descended on the queue of traffic; the engine noise had mostly gone, even the pointless horn-beeping had reached a relative lull.

  The only pedestrians he could see were carrying guns over their shoulders, with the now familiar black uniform of the Tourism Police. He was about to make a remark about how surreal this was when he heard a loud boom. A fraction of a second later, the car shook from side to side, and somewhere behind them a car alarm was set off.

  A couple of policemen ran across the road in the direction of the noise, holding their guns across their chests.

  “What the -” George began, but he was interrupted by another explosion.

  This time it was on the road they were on, barely two hundred yards ahead of them over a crossroads. A car flipped into the air backwards, landing upside-down on top of the car behind it; blocks of stone and plaster flew into the air and across the road. Their car lurched in the shockwave, and moments later a splattering of small stones and plaster fragments hit their windshield.

  Instinctively, Ben turned the wipers on.

  They looked at each other in disbelief. “What the hell?” George said.

  “Terrorists,” Ben said.

  “What did they blow up?” he said looking towards the building ahead of them, where dust was now billowing out in a huge cloud, obscuring the scene.

  “I have no idea.”

  Around them the road suddenly filled with activity and in the distance, sirens began wailing. People ran from street to building and back again, cars ignored the queues and mounted the curbs. Debris from the blast littered the road and pavements. Ahead, a tongue of flame darted briefly out of the dust cloud.

  Ben checked his mirrors; the car that had stopped behind them had already gone, so he put his car in reverse and retreated back towards the slip road. Turning the car round, he gunned the engine and made for the ring road, back to the airport. As the car hit the dual-carriageway, two more distant explosions reached them, and when the road swooped round in a wide arc to flyover an older district of the city, they glimpsed the scale of the attacks: half a dozen columns of smoke were dotted around the city ahead of them. A couple of helicopters were already circling above, probably filming for the local TV channels.

  He was on the wrong side of the dual carriageway, and he hugged the central reservation as he negotiated the oncoming traffic.

  “Where are we going?” George said through gritted teeth, his hand firmly gripping the foam of his seat.

  “Airport!” Ben said as he dodged a lorry.

  “But they wouldn’t let us in. It was closed!”

  “Different terminal, George. The old one is a little further, but worth trying anyway. The police said there are still flights for the next hour – if Gail’s been taken to America then you won’t get there from Egypt now that bombs are going off! You have to get back to Europe!” Ben turned on the radio and put the volume on high.

  Even in Arabic, George could understand the tone in the reporter’s voice: people were panicking. “What’s he saying?” he asked.

  “Shhh!” Ben listened intently, his head tilted down towards the radio, in spite of the speakers being in the doors. Every now and then he lifted his head to see where he was going, in time to adjust course and speed to avoid crashing.

  “He’s saying that there are reports of six explosions: the United States Embassy, a couple of hotels, a private American expatriate school – that’s the one we just saw – and two Christian churches. Dozens of people, if not hundreds dead.” Ben turned the radio down and concentrated on the road. The central barrier disappeared as the dual carriageway went down to single lanes, and he took the opportunity to join the right side of the road.

  George gave a sigh of relief. “Which hotels?”

  “Not yours. The Hilton and the Sheraton, big tourist places,” he replied.

  “Who did it? Why?” George asked.

  “By the sound of those targets, I’d guess at some fundamentalist group or another.”

  “Fundamentalists? I didn’t think there were any of them left!”

  Ben glanced at George and scoffed. “Just because nothing’s blown up for a while doesn’t mean there aren’t any fundamentalists left. Egypt is on a knife-edge between East and West, Africa and Asia, Islam and Christianity. Growing up here, you learn that close by there’s always someone crazy enough to blow something up.”

  “Add to that the findings on Mars,” George commented, “and a police chief prepared to kidnap Gail, and there’s more crazy here than I think I can take right now.”

  Ben pulled up to the old airport terminal. Predictably the Tourism Police and their guns were there, too; after the explosions they would probably be twitchier and even less friendly.

  They were directed to park the car in front of a policeman, who aimed his gun straight at them.

  “Ben?” George asked, apprehensively.

  “Don’t worry. Just let me do the talking, and we’ll have you on a plane in no time.”

  George’s earlier encounter with the police had taught him that where he put his hands was crucial, so he placed them in plain view on the dashboard. As Ben was guided out of the car by the barrel of an automatic weapon, he thought about how lucky it was he had his passport and luggage with him. They were packed and ready to go to Ben’s anyway – the airport had originally been a detour.

  His door opened and he was escorted to the bonnet of the car, where Ben was already being searched. Two other policemen were going through the car, presumably in search of explosives or some evidence that could link them to the explosions.

  As they did their work, his mind wandered to the mysterious DEFCOMM and Gail. It had been
a horrid week, during which he had lost her forever, and then been given hope from nowhere that she was alive.

  But right now, with Cairo airport closed and an armed police officer frisking him, he felt further away from her than ever before, and his heart sank.

  Chapter 61

  “I’m glad you’re settling in well,” said Dr Patterson. “I was afraid you may have resented me because of your situation. But you can see that I didn’t want you to be brought here under these horrible circumstances, can’t you?”

  Gail smiled across the table. “Sure.” She put her fork down after toying with the chunk of meat on her plate and looked at her guest across the table in her new quarter’s modest dining room-cum-kitchen-cum-living room.

  The fact that she’d been moved so quickly from the sterile ‘cell’ to this almost comfortable apartment worried her; it felt permanent. Ironically, that very feeling made her want to leave more than ever before.

  The apartment was divided into the dining area, single bedroom and shower room. There were no windows and she was, presumably, underground, built into the vast complex of corridors and offices belonging to DEFCOMM.

  “I know you’re one of the good guys, Dr Patterson. Can I call you Henry?”

  Henry grinned and nodded approvingly. “Of course, but only if I can call you Gail?” he added cheekily.

  Gail grinned back. Henry. It would be easy calling him that, she told herself, as she’d gone out with an annoying idiot called Henry many, many years ago.

  The only problem was that Henry was turning out to be far less of an annoying idiot than she had expected.

  “Tell me,” he said. “I’ve read your research on Amarna and Aniquilus. But everything, including of course my research here, has centred around the main texts from the pedestal in the Library. What else have you found?”

  She gave a wry smile. “You haven’t read my research very well, then, have you?” He looked down briefly, as if ashamed at not having known more about her. “The Library contained a vast number of texts, indeed thousands, broken down into four categories,” she continued. “The tablets, mostly made out of clay, we found stacked on most of the lower shelves. Remember the shelves were made of wood, so the bottom ones were probably the best place to put them. We also found that the shelf space was classified quite carefully: the higher the document in the shelf, the more important it appeared to be. The pedestal is clearly the epitome of this.”

  “So the tablets were the least important?”

  “It appears so. Ironically, they’re also the best preserved by a good margin. In a dry environment, the hardened clay doesn’t deteriorate visibly. What they showed, almost exclusively, were purchase ledgers for agricultural produce, such as the trade in livestock and the provision of grain to the royal palace. They were written in a mixture of cuneiform, obviously for international trade, and hieratic hieroglyphs. One tablet was different, in that it had a mixture of full hieroglyphs and hieratic; we believe, I believe, that it was written by the Library’s architect, a sort of ‘I did this’ note, although there is no signature.”

  Henry raised an eyebrow. “I wonder if it could be matched to the story that led us to Amarna in the first place.”

  “You mean your architect’s scroll? Well, you could try, but tablets were written on by pressing a stylus into soft clay, whereas scrolls are written with brushstrokes. In my opinion you could probably trace two tablets back to the same stylus, but it would be impossible to link a scroll to a tablet. You may however be able to link the hieratic, which is highly stylised, to the same author. Your main problem would be getting hold of the tablet in Cairo. I would have been happy to help, but then this all happened.”

  “What other types of text were in the Library?” Henry did his best to ignore her jab.

  “The papyrus scrolls. We were pretty excited to find those, because they’re exceptionally rare. Because papyrus can’t be folded without cracking, it’s generally rolled up. This was the principal medium for storing long texts until the time of the Romans, when parchments were chopped into pages and bound into a codex with a wooden cover. Papyrus is really susceptible to pretty moderate conditions. It doesn’t like damp, because it rots, and it doesn’t like dryness, because it cracks. In fairness, they had nothing better and at the time it was a technological revolution, as papyrus is cheap and easy to use. But for us archaeologists, they couldn’t have made a worse choice. Most surviving papyrus scrolls are from the Roman era, so the Library discovery was remarkable.” She paused to sip some wine. “Your architect scroll is a unique sample. From what I saw, it may be one of the oldest and best preserved. It belongs in a museum.”

  “What of the scrolls in the Library?” he tried to change the subject. Ten years ago he had missed his only opportunity to get the scroll in a museum, and it was too late to go back now.

  She sighed. “We were spoilt. While a lot of the scrolls were evidently ruined, dried to the extent that they disintegrated on contact, most were solid. Solid evidently means they cannot be unravelled by hand. The reason some were better preserved than others probably goes back to the origin of the papyrus reeds themselves, their age, storage prior to entering the Library, possibly even the ink used to write on them. The surviving ones were boxed up pretty much within a day of the Library being accessed, and over the next few years, robotic ‘readers’ at the Museum of Cairo opened them, millimetre by millimetre, until their content could be read. The first to be opened revealed a biography of an inhabitant of Amarna. The everyday account of one family’s life, who they were, what they did, and why they were there. On its own, that one scroll confirmed the main theory behind Amarna: that it was a religious experiment, a new beginning and a departure from the ways of the previous dynasties. What astounded us more than anything was the way you could really sense the excitement in the text. They were living in an age of religious enlightenment, where the Pharaoh was not so removed from his people; a more ‘down to earth’ culture. They really had no idea the experiment wouldn’t work. Since then, half a dozen scrolls have been accessed, all with the same subject matter, but each focusing on a different family.”

  “Why did the experiment fail?”

  She shrugged. “There are many ideas. It probably became economically unviable, there would have been foreign pressure on a shrinking Egyptian military power, a coup driven by supporters of the traditional polytheistic ways could have ousted them, and so on. Tutankhaten, Akhenaten’s son from a marriage with his own sister, Tiye, changed his name to Tutankhamen, becoming the first king to return to the old capital at Thebes and reject the worship of one god, the Aten. He was young and quite unwell, so probably bowed easily under pressures from traditionalists, most notably the priesthood and military leaders.”

  “What do you believe?” he looked at her intently.

  She accepted his offer of a refill and took a gulp of wine. The more she drank, the sweeter it tasted. “I think that someone, Nefertiti to be precise, persuaded her husband, the new King of Egypt, to leave behind Egypt’s militaristic, expansionist ways in favour of a simple life in the country. From what I know now, I believe she did this because she believed that the old ways, if continued, could only lead to destruction and suffering for us all. I think she was a pacifist and a humanist. But in the long run, it failed. Professor al-Misri once compared Amarna to the old Soviet Union, because it looked impressive, but was badly built from poor quality materials, and in the end destined to crumble.

  “But it also has another parallel to the Soviet Union: it couldn’t exist in isolation, and its premise was counter-intuitive to human nature. They were surrounded by other civilizations, all ready to eat away at their weakened state. You have to remember Egypt was a superpower at this time, so it was an attractive target, too. And as if that wasn’t enough, Nefertiti’s utopian ideal was destroyed from within by greed. To be honest, I’m amazed it lasted as long as it did.” She finished talking and emptied her glass. Henry filled it again.

&nbs
p; “Sounds like a good theory.”

  “Hypothesis,” she corrected him.

  “What else was in the Library?”

  “Architectural drawings carved into wooden tablets, some maps, and our famous books. Until the last couple of days, I thought that my Book of Aniquilus was the only surviving Egyptian codex, predating any known Roman effort by more than a thousand years. But now, it has a twin!” She stopped talking for long enough to realise that Henry was looking at her with a smile on his face. She cringed. He was nice enough as a person, but she could see where this was going; the wine, the mood lighting, the meal. His greasy bald head.

  “Indeed. Do you think there’s anything else in the Library, something you might have missed?”

  “Why?” She dragged her eyes away from the top of his head, which was reflecting the spotlight above the table.

  “Because of what’s happening on Mars,” he said. “Two of the crew disappeared behind a door, and we haven’t heard from them since. There’s obviously a link between the two places, and the books don’t mention it. So maybe there’s something in the Library, something architectural? If we found it, it might help us find a way to get them out, or at least find out for ourselves what’s behind the door.”

  Gail thought to herself for a moment. There had been one big puzzle, one that even the Professor had been stumped by. She looked into her wine, as if it would help her decide whether or not she would share this information with Henry.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  He’s not the enemy, she told herself. He just wants to help those poor people on Mars. And he’s always treated you well, hasn’t he? And it’s not a bad thing that he’s obviously attracted to you – if anything you should be flattered. When was the last time George showed this much interest in your work? In you? She held the stem of the glass and moved it round in circles, the centripetal force causing the wine to rise up the sides of the glass. Or was it centrifugal? Either way, I have to get out of here, and this is my chance.