Keystone (32 page)

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.

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 out-dated 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.”

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.