The Key (37 page)

‘I see no reason to keep you. The purpose of your quarantine has now been negated by the fresh outbreak. I have recommended a new form of general quarantine within the mountain. From our studies of existing cases we have managed to identify a few early-warning symptoms. Anyone displaying these should be moved immediately to a containment ward. Everyone else should restrict themselves to their main area of work, and general movement throughout the mountain must be forbidden.’

‘And has Brother Dragan sanctioned this?’

Simenon shook his head. ‘Brother Dragan has locked himself in the forbidden stairwell and retired to the chapel of the Sacrament, advising everyone to pray for salvation.’

‘Then who is in charge?’

‘At the moment? Nobody.’

Athanasius’s mind hummed with this new information. He turned to Malachi and Thomas. ‘Then I suggest we three set up an emergency council to help implement Brother Simenon’s suggestions. Between us, we can appeal to our guilds to remain steadfast, and quickly organize the logistics of a lockdown throughout the mountain. We can organize food distribution to the major stairwells, so no one need travel to the refectories, and keep the corridors clear for swift evacuation to the infirmaries in the event of new cases. Only by staying calm can we hope to see our way through this.’

Thomas nodded in agreement and Simenon brightened a little, as if someone had just removed a sack of rubble from his back.

‘And where should we base ourselves?’ Malachi asked. ‘My main area of work is here in the library, and that is about to become a haven for the infected.’

Athanasius nodded as if considering this problem, though in truth he already had the answer. ‘We could set ourselves up in the Abbot’s chambers,’ he said. ‘For one thing, it is vacant, plus there’s room for all three of us and it’s well placed for coordinating efforts throughout the mountain.’

What he didn’t say was that the Abbot’s chambers, situated on the outside of the mountain with one of the few glazed windows in the Citadel, overlooking the modern city below, offered the best chance he was likely to get of picking up a phone signal.

The army tent was air-conditioned, but it was still hot enough inside to make Liv feel light-headed. The soldier led them down a canvas corridor towards a door that shook when he knocked on it.

‘Yes!’ The voice beyond the door sounded busy and officious.

The soldier opened the door and stood aside to let them pass.

Inside was an office with a desk, a military laptop, a phone and some aluminium folding chairs. There was also a lean colonel with a shining, shaved head and skin so black he could have been carved from ebony. He was sitting behind the desk reading an official-looking fax displaying two pictures: one of her and one of Gabriel. Liv’s knees almost buckled at the sight of them.

The soldier stepped forward and placed their passports on the desk. ‘Thank you,’ the colonel said, ‘that will be all.’

Liv heard the door close, and boots marching away. The colonel inspected the passports then finally looked up, fixing on Gabriel and shaking his head with the air of a disappointed parent.

‘You should have stayed in the service,’ he said.

Gabriel nodded, as if agreeing with him. ‘And you should put some pictures up in here. Make it a bit more homely.’

A grin split the colonel’s face and he was on his feet and crushing Gabriel in an embrace before Liv knew what was happening. Gabriel released the colonel from the bear hug and turned to her.

‘Liv Adamsen, meet James Washington. We went through Special Forces training together when he was just a captain and I was a lowly grunt.’

‘And now I’m a colonel in Military Intelligence and you’re a civilian on the run from the law. Where did it all go wrong?’ Washington stepped back behind the desk and handed over the fax. ‘This came in through the wires a couple of hours ago. It’s got a Homeland Security code on it, so you must have made yourself some pretty serious enemies.’

Gabriel skimmed through the fax and handed it to Liv. It was a rehash of the same information she had heard on the news in her New Jersey hotel room. The only new information was about her. It described her as a kidnap victim who needed to be located urgently to continue unspecified medical treatment. There was a number to call if they were spotted or apprehended.

‘Have you checked this number?’ she asked.

‘I ran a router test on it. It’s a dummy exchange that patches calls through to somewhere else. We can’t get a location off it, if that’s what you mean. The key thing is that it wound up on my desk, so whoever’s looking for you knows you’re heading this way.’

Gabriel nodded. ‘Did you have any joy with any of the Iraqi police files?’

Washington nodded. ‘You sure know how to milk a favour.’ He pulled a folder from the top drawer of his desk and handed it over.

Inside were two collated bundles of official documents written in Arabic.

‘They’re copies of Ba’athist intelligence dossiers seized during the liberation of Baghdad. There may be more, but to be honest you didn’t give me much time. It wasn’t easy getting hold of them
and
hopping a lift out here. Next time, you might want to give me more warning.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Gabriel said, flicking through the first sheaf of documents until he found a summary at the back in English.

It was a collection of military and police reports – dated 16 Sept 2000 – detailing investigations into an incident in the desert outside Al-Hillah in Babil Province. An archaeological dig had been attacked by unknown forces, leaving no survivors. A list of twenty names was attached to the report, mostly local but with a few Westerners mixed in. John Mann was top of the list. It confirmed what Gabriel had always believed: the incident had nothing to do with the Iraqi government. But there was new information in the file. At around the time of the incident a military base had picked up intermittent radar contact with an aircraft moving south from the Turkish/Syrian border. Its speed and flight pattern suggested it was a helicopter. The same aircraft had been detected again heading north from the dig site about twenty minutes later, but weather conditions had been poor and contact was lost. The report concluded that it had been a hostile incursion by Turkish forces, though it didn’t speculate for what purpose.

But Gabriel knew.

The helicopter would have been full of agents from the Citadel, sent to retrieve the relics found at the site and leave no witnesses behind.

The second bundle of documents showed that they had botched it.

Someone had survived.

The top sheet was a patient’s admission form for a psychiatric asylum on the outskirts of Baghdad. It was dated two weeks after the initial incident. The patient’s name was Zaid Aziz. He had been found close to death, wandering in the desert, sun-blind and raving, with severe burns to his arms and legs. He told his rescuers that he had survived an attack from a dragon. Further interrogation had identified him as one of the missing workers from the dig near Al-Hillah. His burns tallied with what they had discovered there. Whoever had carried out the atrocity had piled the dead bodies up, doused them with kerosene and set them alight. Aziz also had a bullet wound to his arm and one to the head. His medical notes theorized that he had been knocked out by the head wound and must have appeared dead to whoever had thrown his body in with the rest. The pain of his burning flesh must have brought him round and saved his life. Unfortunately, by the time he was found, the trauma and days of dehydration and fever from the onset of sepsis had affected his mind. The dossier included a collection of interviews by police and psychiatrists conducted over a number of years, but nothing that shed new light on the incident. Aziz remained fixated on the same delusions: a fire-breathing dragon flying out of the night, and a ghost that had risen from the ground and drifted into the desert – something the psychiatrists interpreted as an obscure reference to himself.

Gabriel read through the notes with a growing sense of frustration. This man may have witnessed what happened to his father, but any knowledge of the attack appeared to have leaked from his cracked mind. It also slammed the door on one more avenue of enquiry. He had hoped the file would confirm that Iraqi Republican Guards had carried out the attack at Al-Hillah and shifted the relics to one of Saddam Hussein’s many palaces. If they had, there might have been some chance of recovering them. But all the file had done was confirm what he already knew. Whatever his father had found was now locked inside the Citadel.

‘Look at the date.’ Liv pointed to the top of the last interview sheet. ‘This interview took place less than six months ago.’

Colonel Washington nodded. ‘Yep. He may be crazy as a bug, but he’s clearly as tough as tin. I don’t know if I would have survived twelve years in a Ba’athist mental asylum. Apparently the other inmates are scared of him. A year or so after he was admitted, he burned a man alive in a neighbouring cell. No one’s quite sure how he managed it. The other patients believe he gained some of the powers of the dragon. So no one bothers him – not even the orderlies.’ He checked his watch. ‘Now, I hate to hurry you, but what are your plans for the remainder of your stay in this fair country?’

‘We’re driving down to Al-Hillah.’

‘Are you nuts? Two unescorted Western civilians tooling down Highway 9 in a bright white pickup? Soon as you drop below Mosul you’ll be killed or kidnapped – or both. No, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to accompany me back to Command Centre in Baghdad. There’s a chopper picking me up at fourteen hundred hours and I think I need to take you in for further questioning … before I realize, to my certain embarrassment, that you are not the people we’re looking for and have to let you go. What you do after that is your own business.’

He handed Gabriel a scratchpad and a pencil.

‘Before I return these files, you might want to jot down the address of that loony bin in Baghdad, just in case you’re at a loose end. I’m sure Mr Aziz would be glad of the visit. I can’t imagine he gets many.’

Hyde stepped out of the main building and into the heat of the day.

‘Over there,’ Tariq said, pointing east past the drilling tower.

Squinting into the sun, he saw the dust cloud rising up on the horizon. Sand and dust storms were a constant hazard in the desert. They could spring up out of nothing and turn day to night within seconds. They also did more damage to equipment than bullets or bombs, so he spent more time watching out and defending against them than he did against possible aggressors, saboteurs or kidnappers.

He walked swiftly over to the eastern perimeter and climbed the guard tower. Failure to react quickly to a sandstorm could shut down the whole operation for weeks. If sand got into an engine it would have to be stripped, cleaned and reassembled before it would work again. Guns seized when dust clogged the oil. Electronics shorted as microscopic grains of dust found their way into circuit boards. Even the men could go temporarily blind from tiny particles in the wind scouring away the surface of their eyes. Just another of the many, many reasons why Hyde loathed this country so much.

As soon as he got to the top of the tower he raised his field glasses to study the column of dust. Like a small mountain on the march, it billowed up from the ground as if the earth had started to boil. At the moment it was relatively small and still some way off, but it was definitely heading their way. If it didn’t dissipate or change direction they would have to shut down until it had passed. Shutdowns cost money and time and the only reason he’d taken this job was because they’d offered him a profit share. So far, that equated to half a per cent of nothing.

Hyde glanced at the windsock by the helipad. The wind direction was northwesterly, yet the storm was coming from the east. Perhaps there was a crosswind out there somewhere, which would blow the storm off course before it reached them – or maybe it wasn’t a dust storm at all.

As he squinted through the binoculars, focusing on the leading edge of the column of dust to try to make out some detail, he saw a flash of white, then another. Hyde smiled. He was right. It wasn’t a force of nature at all, it was the Ghost, riding in with an army of horsemen spread out alongside him. The Bedouin always used this formation when riding at speed. It ensured they all breathed clean air and was an effective intimidation tactic, the rising dust cloud amplifying the presence of their approaching force.

He watched them draw closer, the riders visible now to the naked eye, points of white at the leading edge of the dust cloud, like the small, sharp teeth of a huge animal. There were nearly thirty riders, dressed in white dishdashas with their keffiyehs drawn across their faces. It occurred to Hyde that this scene would have changed little in thousands of years: the horses, the men, even the clothes had remained the same throughout history. The only difference was the weapons.

Hyde could hear the thump of hooves now, and something else, chopping its way through the air and getting louder. He turned and, in the blink of an eye, spanned the entire history of desert warfare. A helicopter gunship was skimming low across the ground and heading directly towards them. The guard started swinging his M60 towards it, but Hyde held up his hand and ordered the rest to do the same through his handheld radio. The chopper roared overhead and banked sharply, settling into a hover before dropping down to the helipad on the far side of the compound. The horsemen arrived at the perimeter fence at the same time.

Descending from the guard tower, Hyde made his way over to greet the new arrivals. He could see one of the riders separate from the rest and drift over to the main gate. He waved at the guard to let him in then carried on over to the helicopter.

It was a Bell AH-1W Super Cobra, or what the marines called ‘the world’s deadliest snake’. It was equipped with Hellfire missiles and a nose-mounted chain gun, slaved to the pilot’s helmet. Whatever he was looking at, that was where the bullets would go, ten per second with a sound like the sky being ripped apart. It also had the latest Forward-Looking Infra-Red (FLIR) instruments on board, which could pick up radiation from heat and any number of other sources. Ground troops had learned not to wash their clothes with commercial detergent because the brightening additives effectively made them glow in the dark. The Cobra was a loaner from a local airborne division, courtesy of an earlier request he had made and the impressive political pull of his employers. The side door slid open as he approached and a huge blond guy uncoiled himself from the back seat and stepped out to meet him.