Keystone (30 page)

“Ridiculous,” she muttered as
Henry Patterson sat down beside her in what she had been told was her ‘room’,
but which to her only represented her prison cell. “Absolutely absurd. For a
start, how would the Egyptians have known anything about these people?”

“Xynutians,”
Patterson added helpfully.

“Whatever!
This so-called
intelligent race
with
such advanced technology conveniently leaves no trace at all of its existence.
All we’re left with is a picture book written long after they were wiped out.
Xynutians
indeed! You’ll be telling me
Star Trek is a fly-on-the-wall documentary next!” She shook her head and pushed
his folder of notes back towards his side of the desk.

Pushing the
folder back, he selected one scanned page from the Book of Xynutians. “Look at
the detail, Dr Turner,” he pointed to a vehicle. “Look at the back: it has what
look to be exhaust pipes. Look at the driver: he’s holding a joy stick. How can
the ancient Egyptians have even imagined such things? They must be based on
something!”

“Why? Why must
everything have a meaning? Isn’t it possible they knew about steam power? That
the person who drew this understood what could be done with steam, like the
ancient Greek Hero Engine, and that any vehicle propelled in this way would
need to expel steam? Isn’t it just obvious that in a forward moving vehicle the
exhaust goes at the back, so you can see where you’re going?”

“I agree in
principle, but the Hero engine wouldn’t be invented for another twelve hundred
years after this book was buried deep underground. And in the case of Hero,
it’s thought his invention was simply an object of fascination. This picture
shows actual
vehicles
being
propelled.”

“So the
Egyptians thought differently. And besides, what does it prove? I’ve seen films
where spaceships battle it out using lasers and death rays. If some other
civilisation discover those same films in a hundred thousand years, do they
have to assume we actually
had
that
technology?”

Patterson
sighed. “So you think this is a work of Egyptian science fiction? That the
writer was the Asimov of his time?”

“Maybe!”

“What other
examples of ancient science fiction are you aware of?”

“How the hell
should I know? It’s not exactly my domain!”

He flipped
through the pages until he arrived at a long manuscript. There were no Egyptian
symbols or pictures to be seen. “This story tells of a trip to the Moon, and of
a battle between the king of the Sun and the king of the Moon, involving many
types of creature, including ants thousands of feet long.”

She looked at
the text briefly. “So?”

“It was
written in the second century AD by Lucian, a Syrian philosopher,” he said
dramatically. “You’re right to question the veracity of the Book of Xynutians,
in the same way you would be right to assume that Lucian didn’t really sail to
the Moon. But the difference is that no one takes Lucian seriously, partly
because of his own disclaimer, but also because his story is obviously fake.
The hallmark of ancient fiction is exaggeration. It wasn’t a lion, because
that’s too easy to defeat: it was a lion with wings. Or a woman who turned you
to stone on sight whose hair was actually made of dozens of snakes. It’s not a
trip to the Moon, it’s a trip to the Moon in a sailing ship after a two hundred
mile journey into the sky on the uplift of a tornado. It’s clearly imagination.

“The Book of
Xynutians has no flaws. No over-enthusiasm on the part of the author. It simply
displays a believable advanced civilisation before and after a major cataclysm.
And it only requires you to make one leap of faith.”

“Which is?”

“That somehow,
the ancient Egyptians had an intimate knowledge of something that happened two
hundred and fifty thousand years before their time.”

Gail scoffed.
“That’s one hell of a leap of faith. How do you make it believable?”

“Word of
mouth?”

“Nonsense! If
it was word of mouth, two things would have happened: firstly, the same story
would have made its way all over the world, as populations migrated for tens of
thousands of years before settling down. We’d get a similar legend in Peru,
China, Europe, Siberia, India, Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. Yet I have never
before heard of such a civilisation. Secondly, by the time the story was
written down, it would contain embellishment, bits added by the story tellers
over the years as they add their own twist to make it their own. You would end
up with exactly the kind of exaggerated story you’re telling me this isn’t.”

“Maybe the
Egyptians copied the text from something they found?”

“So they found
something then hid it again? And since then we’ve found nothing? Why?” She
couldn’t feel more negative towards the whole concept.
 

“Then maybe
someone told the story to Nefertiti first-hand.”

Gail was about
to reply when suddenly something clicked in the back of her mind, like the
latch of a door that hadn’t quite been pulled-to properly. A faint but recent
memory started to surface. Within seconds, she was back in the Library in
Amarna, looking at herself talking to the architect. He was pointing to the
plinth. She was back in the dream she had experienced while drugged-up and
strapped-down to her hospital bed.

“Dr Turner?”
It was the first of Patterson’s suggestions she had not refuted immediately,
and he leant forward eagerly.

She remembered
the architect, pointing to the symbol of Aniquilus. He had then pointed to
something behind her when she had asked who ‘Xynutians’ was. She had turned,
and then darkness overcame her. Had she caught a fleeting glimpse of the
Xynutian behind her?

If Nefertiti
recounted the book of Xynutians to the Egyptian scribes, could a Xynutian have
told it to
her
directly?

She shook her
head: she’d already managed to convince herself that she knew the words
‘Xynutian’ and ‘Aniquilus’ from Patterson: somehow he’d probably said the words
while she was in a semi-conscious state, and she’d incorporated them into her
dream.

So the dream
meant nothing. It was simply a dream.

And yet…

She was there
against her own free will, but she was not obliged to let them know what she
was thinking. She’d keep playing along, waiting for her chance. In the
meantime, she needed to have a closer look at the Xynutians.

“Give that
here,” she said angrily, picking up the folder and standing up. “I need peace
and quiet, access to the original text and whatever translations you’ve already
made. And a cup of tea.”

Ben and George stared at Captain
Kamal in stunned silence for what seemed an age, during which time Kamal,
oddly, seemed to relax a little into his chair. Ben was masquerading as Ahmed
Mohammed Nasser, a role he was pulling off perfectly.

“What do you
mean she isn’t dead?” George said, his voice like a whisper.

“You have
given me more trouble than I expected, Mr Turner. However, I only have myself
to blame. I only hope that in some way the truth does set me free.” His eyes
moved left and right, as if checking there was nobody in the room that
shouldn’t be, before leaning forward. “I don’t know everything, but I do know
enough to have not been able to sleep for the past week,” he started.

“I hope you
don’t expect me to feel sorry for you,” George snapped.

“Let me tell
you the facts as I know them,” Kamal tried to calm him down. “Firstly, your
wife was indeed in Professor al-Misri’s office the night of his murder, but
what I did not tell you is that they were not alone. Approximately twenty
minutes after your wife arrived, they were joined by at least two men, and a
fight broke out.

“The Professor
slipped during a struggle and cracked his skull on the corner of his desk. Gail
was alive when she was taken away by the men. Half an hour after this incident,
I was contacted by an agency I had never heard of and informed that Dr Gail
Turner, whom I had also never heard of, had just murdered Professor Mamdouh
al-Misri. I was told to build my case as usual but that the conclusion would be
the one that I told you. Some evidence, such as the CCTV footage, would be
faked to allow me to make that conclusion.

“They left me
a contact mailbox which would allow me to get hold of them indirectly if
required. I didn’t expect to need to do that, but on meeting you I quickly
realised that you would not sit by idly. So I contacted them, and they wrapped
the whole thing up. Dr Turner’s body would be delivered to the morgue ready for
you to identify. Only instead of her dead body, it was your
live
wife; she must have been given some
sort of drug that made her appear dead.”

“Wait a
second,” George interrupted. “They told you all of this? They told you that
Gail didn’t murder the Professor, but was kidnapped instead? They told you that
the body I identified wasn’t actually a
body
?”

 
“No, not at all. They told me that I had to
lead an investigation that would be solved for me, they told me what to say,
but they didn’t say anything about your wife being alive, or about what
happened in Professor al-Misri’s office.”

George
scoffed. “So how do you know all this?”

“Because I
have been investigating crime scenes for many years, Mr Turner, and even though
I was unable to publicly announce my findings in this case, you don’t just turn
off your ability to find evidence, no matter what the price.”

“So you were
bought?”

“Not so much
bought as persuaded. I really had no choice.”

Ben wondered
what kind of leverage it had taken to buy Kamal; family? Promotion? Whatever
the price, it had obviously been eating away at his conscience to the extent
that he was willing to throw that away for the sake of the truth.

“How about my
wife? How do you know she was alive when I identified her?”

Kamal looked
George in the eyes. “How many dead people have you seen, Mr Turner? How many
dead people have you stood next to and touched?” George shook his head. “I have
lost count,” Kamal continued. “Cairo isn’t the most dangerous place on the
planet, but there are many hundreds of murders every year nonetheless, most of
which I investigate, and some of which come with a body. Your wife, Mr Turner,
was not dead. She may have looked still, and pale, and it may have appeared
that she was not breathing, but I only had to look at her for the briefest of
moments to realise that she was as alive as you or I.”

There was a
moment’s silence as they took in what he had just said.

“So where is
she now?”

Kamal dove his
hand into his breast pocket again and fished out his packet of cigarettes. He
placed them purposefully on the small table before standing up and making to
leave.

Ben stepped
forward in protest. “Wait, you can’t leave without telling us where Gail is.”

“You can have
the cigarettes, Mr Turner, I am giving up,” was all he said as he pushed past
them and reached the door. Opening it, he turned back towards them briefly.
“The agency that is behind all of this is not Egyptian, so I would recommend
that you look elsewhere.”

Before they
could object again, the door closed behind him.

George strode
across the room and grabbed the packet of cigarettes. Ripping it apart, he
discarded the foil insides and the single remaining cigarette on the table and
turned the unfolded card over and over in his hands, looking for some sort of
hidden message, before throwing it too onto the table.

“Bastard!” he
exclaimed as he made a run for the door. Throwing it open, he launched himself
out into the corridor and shot towards the lift.

Ben moved
closer to the table and picked up the discarded cigarette. Turning it over in
his hands, he checked the make. “George, wait!” he shouted, but the door had
already swung closed behind him. He made a wet line along the length of the
cigarette with his tongue, before gently peeling it open and emptying the
tobacco onto the table.

There was a knock
on the door. Ben checked his discovery once more and let George in.

“Bastard’s
gone already!” he said.

“He left a
note,” Ben said.

George looked
at him in surprise. “I checked the cigarette packet; there was nothing inside
but a left over cigarette!”

“Not quite. I
looked more closely: why would someone buy a pack of Marlboro and use it to
hold a rollup, unless they were using the rollup to hide something?” With this
he lifted his hand to show George the small sliver of paper that had been
hidden amongst the tobacco. “He left us a note.”

George took
the piece of paper and turned it over in his hands. On it was a word, written
faintly in black pencil:

DEFCOMM

They stared at
each other for almost a minute, digesting the information.

“Why tell us
so much then leave a secret message?” George asked. “And what’s Defcomm?”

“Maybe he
wanted to leave a breadcrumb, in case they got to him before he got to us?” Ben
said as he tapped the strange word into the browser on his phone. He showed the
search results to George. He then asked the single most obvious question:

“What time
does Martín’s flight leave?”

Gail turned the pages slowly,
looking at the symbols one by one and making notes with a pencil in the margin.
She’d been given a copy of the Book of Xynutians, with a promise to see the
original should her initial investigations be encouraging.

She was now on
her tenth page, and was becoming desensitised by the overload of information.
She had seen Xynutians in cars, Xynutians in what appeared to be
mass-transportation systems, and even Xynutians going up and down in lifts
attached to the sides of towering skyscrapers. And then she had seen Xynutians
running, Xynutians on fire, skyscrapers broken and twisted and cars and mass
transportation systems crumpled and destroyed. The drawings were like no other
ancient Egyptian illustrations she had ever seen, though the accompanying text
left no doubt that they were contemporary to the Book of Aniquilus.

She scanned
through the translations that Patterson, or someone from his team, had made.

Aniquilus cast his gaze over the Xynutians,
He eats their pride and ambitions with his swift punishment
.

She shook her
head.
Eats
made no sense at all in
the context of the sentence. Obviously, it hadn’t to the Patterson either, who
had circled the offending hieroglyphs.

Her tablet would
probably tell her what they meant – she knew a lot of Egyptian verbs off the
cuff, but she had become maybe a little too reliant on George’s application
remembering some of the more complex contextual translations for her.

She flicked
through a few more pages before stopping at a picture of a group of Xynutians,
gathered around what she assumed were houses, looking up at the stars in the
sky. Some calculations had been scribbled in pencil below the original
hieroglyphs, along with a post-it note:
Nefertiti’s
return is 3344 years after the writing of the Book of Xynutians. This was in
2007!

She crossed
the date out and scribbled some notes down on her own pad.
Amateurs
, she thought. The ancient Egyptians had followed a three
hundred and sixty-five day calendar. Eventually, Roman rulers in the first
century BC had imposed an earlier Ptolemaic ruling that every fourth year had
to have an extra day, to account for the discrepancy between the solar year and
the traditional Egyptian year.
 

The Book of
Xynutians had been written thirteen centuries before this ruling, and at least
a thousand years before the Ptolemaic kings had first suggested the change.

Therefore, the
calculations in the translation she was looking at were, to the best of her
mental arithmetic, about three years out. The ‘second coming’ of Nefertiti was
scheduled to have occurred in 2004, not 2007.

“The year I
was born,” she said with a wry smile.

She sat back
and looked at the next picture carefully. Aniquilus left a trail of destruction
behind him, and yet there were a handful of Xynutians, standing outside their
homes looking to the stars, according to the translation
waiting for the next coming of Aniquilus
. She scratched her head,
and then suddenly gave a satisfied laugh as she snatched the text up from the
desk. On her desk was a telephone. It allowed her to dial one number:
Patterson’s.

He came in
with a smile a moment later. “Less than an hour into it and you’ve already made
a discovery?”

She nodded at
the paper on her desk. “A few things, I think,” she began. “Some odd
translations here, I need my tablet to verify them, but the text makes no real
sense.”

He agreed.
“But I probably can’t get you access to your equipment. I’ll work on that one.
What else?”

“The dates.
You’re about three years out, because of the leap years,” she said with more
than a hint of triumph.

He looked
surprised and nodded. “Well spotted. I had no idea that the ancient Egyptians
had no leap years.”

“You’re
obviously not an Egyptologist then, are you? Finally,” she pointed to the
picture of the surviving Xynutians, “there’s this.”

He looked at
her, puzzled. “What does this prove?”

“Think about
it: if Aniquilus somehow punished these mythical Xynutians, but left some alive
to pass the message on, then where are they now? Surely such an advanced
civilisation would pick itself back up and thrive again. Even in low numbers
their technology would be enough to help them survive until their numbers were
restored?”

Patterson
contemplated the thought for a moment. “But what if there was nothing left?
What if all the scientists were dead? Would you know how to make an internal
combustion engine, or indeed have the ability to, if no-one was able to
assist?”

“Surely not
everything would have been destroyed?”

“Maybe not,
but who would maintain it all? Once the electricity stops being piped in, or
the chip in your computer dies, or the satellite connecting your phone falls
out of the sky, how useful is the technology then? How long would it be before
a dark age came about, and rival tribes fought among themselves?”

Gail smiled.
“Assuming they even existed, they had to live through that once to get to where
they were. Surely they could do it again? And the human race has been through
its fair share of ‘dark-ages’, and we always bounce back stronger.”

Patterson
rubbed his chin pensively. “You do have a point. There is a hole in the story,
something the book does not say.”

“The book
doesn’t have a preface indicating it’s a work of fiction, but I’m sure that if
we look hard enough it’ll have a ‘Made in Hollywood’ stamp somewhere on it.”

He ignored the
comment. “You need to start looking at this with an aim to helping us, not
trying to prove us wrong. I think that you need to see something else, Dr
Turner.”

Leaving the
room, they walked briskly down the corridor, to a part of the facility that
Gail had not yet been in. On their left were a series of double doors recessed
into the wall. The third set had been left ajar, enough for Gail to glimpse the
inside of a huge hanger. Patterson was several yards beyond the door already,
and she stopped to peer inside.

Before
Patterson backtracked and slammed the door shut in her face she saw an open
space that would have been large enough to comfortably house several
average-sized passenger jets, of the type that would normally take her to
Egypt. Large scaffolds filled three quarters of the space, with rockets or
missiles in various stages of completion in each one. The closest scaffold to
the door held a complete rocket, the tip of which was roughly twenty yards away
and ten above her. From the distance to the floor of the hanger, she fancied
she must have been on the third or fourth floor of the building.

Just as the
door was shut, she saw a gigantic Stars and Stripes on the opposite wall,
flanked by two logos. On its left was the smaller of the two, the familiar logo
of NASA. On its right, several times larger, was a name she had not heard of
before: DEFCOMM. Written in bold white text across a black background, the
O
was the planet Earth, with the USA
dead-centre.

“We’re not
going in there,” Patterson said sternly. He continued down the corridor,
keeping her slightly behind him and to his left so he could still see her in
his peripheral vision.

A few moments
later, they reached a lift. He entered a long sequence of numbers on the keypad
and pressed a button marked B3. She could tell because of the momentary weight
loss that the lift was descending rapidly. She guessed that the B stood for
Basement, so they may have descended six or seven floors, but she was surprised
at how quickly. The doors slid open after less than ten seconds.

All thoughts
of lifts and their mechanisms left her when she saw what the lift doors had
revealed.

“This is the
Agency’s control centre.” Patterson said flatly.

“Are you
working for NASA,” she asked in awe. Before her were spread out dozens of
computer terminals in semi-circles facing a huge screen, like seats of congress
facing the leader of the house. On the big screen was a video-feed of two
people in space suits leaning over a pile of dirt and rocks.

“No, this is
better than NASA, they’re a little behind the times. What we’re seeing here is
the direct feed from the crew of the
Clarke
on the surface of Mars. NASA sees the same picture in seventy-five minutes,
which then gets sent to the other space agencies around the world.”

“Why do you
get to see it earlier?”

He said
nothing in reply, so she made the assumption that whatever the reason was, it
wasn’t legal.

“How can you
intercept such data? Surely someone would find out?”

“Someone
nearly did, but it’s exactly because it’s so unthinkable that it became so
easy. All of the messages sent to and from
Clarke
are sent via a network of secure satellites stationed around Earth. Breaking
through their security model is impossible. Unless you built the satellites in
the first place; then you have an advantage – you can get to all the data
without anyone ever finding out about it. That way they can then censor out
what they don’t want people to see, and make up what they do.”

“Why would you
want to do such a thing?” she asked.

“
They
do it to gain control of
information.”

Gail noted the
correction. Dr Patterson was a mystery to her – he was obviously implicated in
Mallus’ dealings, but was also distancing himself from him. And then there was
the message he had written to her when she had been strapped into her bed.

“Look,
Patterson, I get the fact that there are some dodgy things going on here, I get
the fact that you didn’t want me to be here in the first place, that’s obvious.
But answer me this: why does the Agency need me here? What can I do or offer
that is any different to what is already being done?”

He smiled
gently. “Under these circumstances,
I
didn’t want you here; but while I have a broader understanding of the Book of
Xynutians, you have studied the Book of Aniquilus in infinite detail for ten
years. The Agency believes,
I believe
,”
he corrected himself, “that the book of Aniquilus is a set of rules, without
which you get the Book of Xynutians.”

“Like the Ten
Commandments and Revelations?”

“Not exactly;
the Ten Commandments are Old Testament, and Revelations is New, which in that
respect is like the two books, yes. But Revelations is something that it was
suggested
would
happen regardless at
the end of times. I believe that the Xynutians are an actual example of what
will happen in our worst case scenario. I had difficulty believing the whole
concept, to be honest, until I started looking at the Book of Xynutian pictures
in detail. And now, I don’t doubt a word of it. Because it looks like we’ve
found Xynutian remains on Mars.”

He walked up
to a young man seated in front of a computer terminal and spoke to him quietly
for a few moments. The operator nodded and started tapping commands into the terminal.

“Watch this,”
he said.

Gail watched
as the main screen of the control room split in half. On the right hand side
she could see two astronauts in what looked like a dune buggy, driving through
an arid desert. The pale blue-grey sky looked cold and lifeless. The camera
filming the scene panned steadily as it followed the vehicle and its occupants
from left to right.

The left half
of the display was totally different: the camera was jolting from left to right
as it made its way through a narrow corridor and under a low archway. The route
ahead of it was lit by a torch beam, which brought Gail to the conclusion that
the camera must be mounted somewhere near an astronauts visor. She was seeing
what he or she was seeing. In front of the camera another astronaut emerged
from the darkness holding a shovel. The torch beam bounced off the astronaut’s
visor, but as it changed direction she glimpsed the excited features of a
middle-aged man, his grin taking up half of his face.

“On the right
is what the world sees. A computer generated mission to Mars, perfect in every
conceivable way: Captain Marchenko and Dr Richardson on a routine outing to
drill ice cores from the bed of an ancient frozen river. On the left is what is
actually happening on Mars: Dr Richardson has just entered what they have
called
The Gallery
for the first
time, and Captain Marchenko is coming to greet her.”

She looked at
the two feeds for a moment. “How do I know it’s not the other way round? What
if the reality is the dune buggy, and the faked images are the Xynutian
remains?”

“Why would we
do that?” he asked.

Gail had to
admit that she couldn’t think of a reason.

“But the world
knows that they found the Stickman on Mars. That’s why I went to Egypt in the
first place. Why would the world accept that they would simply return to
drilling ice cores?”

“Because since
you have been with us, the images captured by
Beagle 4
and broadcast so readily to the media have been debunked.
Dismissed as fakes by the scientific community. They were an attempt by the
European Space Agency to cause a sensation, and I believe that attempt is
failing.”

“No help from
you, of course.”

He looked at
her sideways and raised an eyebrow. “Please pay attention to the video. This
was recorded this morning, and should give you all the convincing you need.”

As Gail
watched, Captain Marchenko led Dr Richardson’s helmet camera down the dark
corridor until it stopped abruptly at a dead end. Marchenko pointed eagerly
towards where the dirt-covered floor met the perfectly smooth walls. As Dr
Richardson’s camera refocused, Gail began to pick out familiar shapes, and her
heart sank. Embossed in the wall, at waist-height, was a small procession of humans.
From their clothing it was clear they were Xynutians, but with a difference:
these were not Egyptian caricatures as in the Book of Xynutians, but detailed,
lifelike renditions. They were being marched towards the dead-end of the
corridor, and towering over them, almost squashing them into the dirt-floor,
was the
Stickman
, Aniquilus.