Текст книги "Sandstorm"
Автор книги: James Rollins
Жанр:
Триллеры
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 31 страниц)
Annotation
Lady Kara Kensington's family paid a high price in money and blood to found the gallery that now lies in ruins. And her search for answers is about to lead Kara and her friend Safia al-Maaz, the gallery's brilliant and beautiful curator, into a world they never dreamed actually existed. For new evidence exposed by the tragedy suggests that Ubar, a lost city buried beneath the Arabian desert, is more than mere legend … and that something astonishing is waiting there. Two extraordinary women and their guide, the international adventurer Omaha Dunn, are not the only ones being drawn to the desert. Former U.S. Navy SEAL Painter Crowe, a covert government operative and head of an elite counterespionage team, is hunting down a dangerous turncoat, Crowe's onetime partner, to retrieve the vital information she has stolen. And the trail is pointing him toward Ubar.
JAMES ROLLINS
To Katherine, Adrienne, and RJ, the next generation
Part One
1
NOVEMBER 14, 01:33 A.M.
01:53 A.M.
02:13 A.M. GMT (09:13 P.M. EST)
SIGMA.
2
02:38 P.M. GMT
4:20 P.M.
08:02 A.M. EST
3
8:05 P.M.
01:54 P.M. EST
09:48 P.M. GMT
4
12:05 A.M. GMT
5
Part Two
6
11:42 A.M.
12:04 P.M.
12:13 P.M.
12:45 P.M.
12:53 P.M.
7
6:48 P.M.
8:02 P.M.
8:18 P.M.
8
09:12 P.M.
09:22 P.M.
10:28 P.M.
11:35 P.M.
11:48 P.M.
MIDNIGHT
9
1:38 A.M.
1:42 A.M.
1:55 A.M.
1:58 A.M.
2:02 A.M.
10
2:10 A.M.
2:12 A.M.
2:22 A.M.
2:45 A.M.
3:47 A.M.
Part Three
11
1:01 P.M.
1:32 P.M.
2:13 P.M.
12
3:42 P.M.
4:42 P.M.
4:45 P.M.
5:10 P.M.
5:32 P.M.
13
6:40 P.M.
7:05 P.M.
7:43 P.M.
8:05 P.M.
14
8:18 P.M.
8:32 P.M.
8:34 P.M.
8:35 P.M.
8:36 P.M.
8:39 P.M.
8:40 P.M.
8:44 P.M.
8:47 P.M.
15
1:02 A.M.
1:32 A.M.
1:55 A.M.
2:32 A.M.
3:12 A.M.
3:28 P.M.
3:33 A.M.
Part Four
16
7:14 A.M.
7:33 A.M.
8:02 A.M.
8:22 A.M.
17
9:32 A.M.
9:45 A.M.
9:53 A.M.
10:18 A.M.
10:22 A.M.
10:25 A.M.
10:47 A.M.
18
11:12 A.M.
11:13 A.M.
11:15 A.M.
11:21 A.M.
11:23 A.M.
11:44 A.M.
11:52 A.M.
Part Five
19
12:32 P.M.
12:42 A.M.
12:45 P.M.
1:52 A.M.
2:04 P.M.
2:06 P.M.
20
4:04 P.M.
4:25 P.M.
4:42 P.M.
4:45 P.M.
4:52 P.M.
5:00 P.M.
5:05 P.M.
21
5:45 P.M.
6:05 P.M.
6:10 P.M.
6:12 P.M.
6:15 P.M.
6:16 P.M.
6:17 P.M.
6:19 P.M.
6:22 P.M.
22
7:07 P.M.
7:09 P.M.
7:22 P.M.
7:35 P.M.
7:43 P.M.
8:07 P.M.
Epilogue
DIRECTOR SEAN MCKNIGHT.
Be there…
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by James Rollins
JAMES ROLLINS
SANDSTORM
To Katherine, Adrienne, and RJ, the next generation
DEPT. OF DEFENSE CODE:
ALPHA42-PCR
SIGMA FORCE
Part One
Thunderstorm
1
Fire and Rain
NOVEMBER 14, 01:33 A.M.
THE BRITISH MUSEUM
LONDON, ENGLAND
HARRY MASTERSON would be dead in thirteen minutes.
If he had known this, he would’ve smoked his last cigarette down to the filter. Instead he stamped out the fag after only three drags and waved the cloud from around his face. If he was caught smoking outside the guards’ break room, he would be shit-canned by that bastard Fleming, head of museum security. Harry was already on probation for coming in two hours late for his shift last week.
Harry swore under his breath and pocketed the stubbed cigarette. He’d finish it at his next break…that is, if they got a break this night.
Thunder echoed through the masonry walls. The winter storm had struck just after midnight, opening with a riotous volley of hail, followed by a deluge that threatened to wash London into the Thames. Lightning danced across the skies in forked displays from one horizon to another. According to the weatherman on the Beeb, it was one of the fiercest electrical storms in over a decade. Half the city had been blacked out, overwhelmed by a spectacular lightning barrage.
And as fortune would have it for Harry, it was his half of the city that went dark, including the British Museum on Great Russell Street. Though they had backup generators, the entire security team had been summoned for additional protection of the museum’s property. They would be arriving in the next half hour. But Harry, assigned to the night shift, was already on duty when the regular lights went out. And though the video surveillance cameras were still operational on the emergency grid, he and the shift were ordered by Fleming to proceed with an immediate security sweep of the museum’s two and a half miles of halls.
That meant splitting up.
Harry picked up his electric torch and aimed it down the hall. He hated doing rounds at night, when the museum was lost in gloom. The only illumination came from the streetlamps outside the windows. But now, with the blackout, even those lamps had been extinguished. The museum had darkened to macabre shadows broken by pools of crimson from the low-voltage security lamps.
Harry had needed a few hits of nicotine to steel his nerve, but he could put off his duty no longer. Being the low man on the night shift’s pecking order, he had been assigned to run the halls of the north wing, the farthest point from their underground security nest. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t take a shortcut. Turning his back on the long hall ahead, he crossed to the door leading into the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court.
This central two-acre court was surrounded by the four wings of the British Museum. At its heart rose the great copper-domed Round Reading Room, one of the world’s finest libraries. Overhead, the entire two-acre courtyard had been enclosed by a gigantic Foster and Partners-designed geodesic roof, creating Europe’s largest covered square.
Using his passkey, Harry ducked into the cavernous space. Like the museum proper, the court was lost to darkness. Rain pattered against the glass roof far overhead. Still, Harry’s footsteps echoed across the open space. Another lance of lightning shattered across the sky. The roof, divided into a thousand triangular panes, lit up for a blinding moment. Then darkness drowned back over the museum, drumming down with the rain.
Thunder followed, felt deep in the chest. The roof rattled, too. Harry ducked a bit, fearing the entire structure would come crashing down.
With his electric torch pointed forward, he crossed the court, heading for the north wing. He rounded past the central Reading Room. Lightning flashed again, brightening the place for a handful of heartbeats. Giant statues, lost to the darkness, appeared as if from nowhere. The Lion of Cnidos reared beside the massive head of an Easter Island statue. Then darkness swallowed the guardians away as the lightning died out.
Harry felt a chill and pebbling of gooseflesh.
His pace hurried. He swore under his breath with each step, “Bleeding buggered pieces of crap…” His litany helped calm him.
He reached the doors to the north wing and ducked inside, greeted by the familiar mix of mustiness and ammonia. He was grateful to have solid walls around him again. He played his torch down the long hall. Nothing seemed amiss, but he was required to check each of the wing’s galleries. He did a fast calculation. If he hurried, he could complete his circuit with enough time for another fast smoke. With the promise of a nicotine fix luring him, he set off down the hall, the beam of his torch preceding him.
The north wing had become host to the museum’s anniversary show-case, an ethnographical collection portraying a complete picture of human achievement down the ages, spanning all cultures. Like the Egyptian gallery with its mummies and sarcophagi. He continued hurriedly, ticking off the various cultural galleries: Celtic, Byzantine, Russian, Chinese. Each suite of rooms was locked down by a security gate. With the loss of power, the gates had dropped automatically.
At last, the hall’s end came into sight.
Most of the galleries’ collections were only temporarily housed here, transferred from the Museum of Mankind for the anniversary celebration. But the end gallery had always been here, for as far back as Harry could recall. It housed the museum’s Arabian display, a priceless collection of antiquity from across the Arabian Peninsula. The gallery had been commissioned and paid for by one family, a family grown rich by its oil ventures in that region. The donations to keep such a gallery in permanent residence at the British Museum was said to top five million pounds per annum.
One had to respect that sort of dedication.
Or not.
With a snort at such a foolish waste of good money, Harry splayed his torch’s spot across the engraved brass plate above the doorway:THE KENSINGTON GALLERY Also known as “The Bitch’s Attic.”
While Harry had never encountered Lady Kensington, from the talk among the employees, it was clear that any slight to her gallery-dust on a cabinet, a display card with a smudge on it, a piece of antiquity not properly positioned-was met with the severest reprimand. The gallery was her personal pet project, and none withstood her wrath. Jobs were lost in her wake, claiming even a former director.
It was this concern that kept Harry a few moments longer at his post outside the gallery’s security gate. He swept his torch around the entrance room with more than casual thoroughness. Yet again, all was in order.
As he turned away, withdrawing his torch, movement drew his eye.
He froze, torch pointing at the floor.
Deep within the Kensington Gallery, in one of the farther rooms, a bluish glow wandered slowly, shifting shadows with its passage.
Another torch…someone was in the gallery…
Harry felt his heart pounding in his throat. A break-in. He fell against the neighboring wall. His fingers scrambled for his radio. Through the walls, thunder reverberated, sonorous and deep.
He thumbed his radio. “I have a possible intruder here in the north wing. Please advise.”
He waited for his shift leader to respond. Gene Johnson might be a wanker, but he was also a former RAF officer. He knew his shit.
The man’s voice answered his call, but dropouts ate most of his words, interference from the electrical storm. “ …possible…are you sure?…hold until…are the gates secure?”
Harry stared back at the lowered security gates. Of course he should have checked to see if they had been breeched. Each gallery had only one entrance into the hall. The only other way into the sealed rooms was through one of the high windows, but they were wired against breakage or intrusion. And though the storm had knocked out main power, the backup generators kept the security grid online. No alarms had been raised at central command.
Harry imagined Johnson was already switching cameras, running through this wing, bearing down on the Kensington Gallery. He risked a glance into the five-room suite. The glow persisted deep in the gallery. Its passage seemed aimless, casual, not the determined sweep of a thief. He did a quick check on the security gate. Its electronic lock glowed green. It had not been breached.
He stared back at the glow. Maybe it was just the passing of some car’s headlights through the gallery’s windows.
Johnson’s voice over his radio, cutting in and out, startled him. “Not picking up anything on the vid…Camera five is out. Stay put…others on the way.” Any remaining words disappeared into the ether, fritzed by the electrical storm.
Harry stood by the gate. Other guards were coming as backup. What if it wasn’t an intruder? What if it was just the sweep of headlights? He was already on thin ice with Fleming. All he needed was to be made a fool of.
He took a chance and raised his torch. “You there!” he yelled. He thought to sound commanding, but it came out more of a shrill whine.
Still, there was no change in the wandering pattern of the light. It seemed to be heading even deeper into the gallery-not in panicked retreat, just a meandering slow pace. No thief could have that much ice in his veins.
Harry crossed to the gate’s electronic lock and used his passkey to open it. The magnetic seals released. He pulled the gate high enough to crawl under and entered the first room. Straightening, he lifted his torch again. He refused to be embarrassed by his momentary panic. He should’ve investigated further before raising the alarm.
But the damage was done. The best he could do was save a bit of face by clearing up the mystery himself.
He called out again, just in case. “Security! Don’t move!”
His shout had no effect. The glow continued its steady but meandering pace into the gallery.
He glanced back out the gate to the hall. The others would be here in under a minute. “Bugger it,” he mumbled under his breath. He hurried into the gallery, pursuing the light, determined to root out its cause before the others arrived.
With hardly a glance, he passed treasures of timeless significance and priceless value: glass cabinets displaying clay tablets from Assyrian king Ashurbanipal; hulking statues of sandstone dating back to pre-Persian times; swords and weapons from every age; Phoenician ivories depicting ancient kings and queens; even a first printing of The Arabian Nights, under its original title, The Oriental Moralist.
Harry swept forward through the rooms, slipping from one dynasty to another-from the times of the Crusades to the birth of Christ, from the glories of Alexander the Great to the ages of King Solomon and Queen Sheba.
At last, he reached the farthest room, one of the largest. It contained objects more of interest to a naturalist, all from the region: rare stones and jewels, fossilized remains, Neolithic tools.
The source of the glow became clear. Near the center of the domed chamber, a half-meter globe of blue light floated lazily across the room. It shimmered, and its surface seemed to run with a flame of prismatic blue oil.
As Harry watched, the globe sailed through a glass cabinet as if it were made of air. He stood stunned. A sulfurous smell reached his nostrils, issuing forth from the ball of cerulean light.
The globe rolled over one of the crimson-glowing security lamps, shorting it out with a sizzling pop. The noise startled Harry back a step. The same fate must have been dealt to camera five in the room behind him. He glanced to the camera in this room. A red light glowed above it. Still working.
As if noting his attention, Johnson came back on his radio. For some reason, there was no static. “Harry, maybe you’d better get out of there!”
He remained transfixed, half out of fear, half out of wonder. Besides, the phenomenon was floating away from him, toward the darkened corner of the room.
The globe’s glow illuminated a lump of metal within a glass cube. It was a chunk of red iron as large as a calf, a kneeling calf. The display card described it as a camel. Such a resemblance was dodgy at best, but Harry understood the supposed depiction. The item had been discovered in the desert.
The glow hovered over the iron camel.
Harry backed a cautious step and raised his radio. “Christ!”
The shimmering ball of light fell through the glass and landed upon the camel. Its glow winked out as quickly as a snuffed candle.
The sudden darkness blinded Harry for a breath. He lifted his torch. The iron camel still rested within its glass cube, undisturbed. “It’s gone…”
“Are you safe?”
“Yeah. What the hell was that?”
Johnson answered, awe in his voice, “A sodding lightning ball, I think! I heard stories from mates aboard warplanes as they flew through thunderclaps. Storm must have spit it out. But bloody hell if that wasn’t brilliant!”
It’s not brilliant anymore, Harry thought with a sigh, and shook his head. Whatever the hell it was, it at least saved him from an embarrassing ribbing from his fellow guards.
He lowered his torch. But as the light fell away, the iron camel continued to glow in the darkness. A deep ruddy color.
“What the hell now?” Harry mumbled, and grabbed his radio. A severe static shock bit his fingers. Swearing, he shook it off. He raised his radio. “Something’s odd. I don’t think-”
The glow in the iron flared brighter. Harry fell back. The iron flowed across the camel’s surface, melting as if exposed to a wash of acid rain. He was not the only one to note the change.
The radio barked in his hand: “Harry, get out of there!”
He didn’t argue. He swung around but was too late.
The glass enclosure exploded outward. Stabbing spears pierced his left side. A jagged shard sliced clear through his cheek. But he barely felt the cuts as a wave of blast-furnace heat struck him, searing, burning away all the oxygen.
A scream lay upon his lips, never to be aired.
The next explosion ripped Harry from his feet and threw his body clear across the gallery. But only flaming bones hit the security gate, melting themselves into the steel grating.
01:53 A.M.
SAFIA AL-MAAZ awoke in a dead panic. Sirens rang from all directions. Flashes of red emergency lights strobed the bedroom walls. Terror gripped her in a vise. She could not breathe; cold sweat pebbled her brow, squeezed from her tightening skin. Clawed fingers clutched the bedsheets to her throat. Unable to blink, she was trapped for a moment between the past and the present.
Sirens blaring, blasts echoing in the distance…and closer still, screams of the wounded, the dying, her own voice adding to the chorus of pain and shock…
Bullhorns boomed from the streets below her flat. “Clear out for the engines! Everyone pull back!”
English…not Arabic, not Hebrew…
A low rumble rolled past her apartment building and off into the distance.
The voices of the emergency crews drew her back to her bed, back to the present. She was in London, not Tel Aviv. A long strangled breath escaped her. Tears rose to her eyes. She wiped them with shaky fingers.
Panic attack.
She sat wrapped in her comforter for several more breaths. She still felt like crying. It was always this way, she told herself, but the words didn’t help. She gathered the woolen comforter around her shoulders, eyes closed, heart hammering in her ears. She practiced the breathing and calming exercises taught to her by her therapist. Inhale for two counts, out for four. She let the tension flow away with each breath. Her cold skin slowly warmed.
Something heavy landed on her bed. A small sound accompanied it. Like a squeaky hinge.
She reached out a hand, met by a purring welcome. “Come here, Billie,” she whispered to the overweight black Persian.
Billie leaned into her palm and rubbed the underside of his chin across Safia’s fingers, then simply collapsed across her thighs as if the invisible strings supporting the cat had been sliced. The sirens must have disturbed him from his usual nighttime haunting of her flat.
The low purr continued on Safia’s lap, a contented sound.
This, more than her breathing exercises, relaxed the taut muscles of her shoulders. Only then did she notice the wary hunch in her back, as if fearing a blow that never came. She forced her posture straight, stretching her neck.
The sirens and commotion continued half a block from her building. She needed to stand, find out what was happening. Anything simply to be moving. Panic had transmuted into nervous energy.
She shifted her legs, careful to slide Billie onto the comforter. The purring halted for a moment, then resumed when it was clear he was not being evicted. Billie had been born in the streets of London, alley feral, a wild fluff of matted fur and spit. Safia had found the kitten sprawled and bloodied on the flat’s stoop with a broken leg, covered in oil, hit by a car. Despite her help, he had bitten her in the fleshy meat of her thumb. Friends had told her to take the kitten to the animal shelter, but Safia knew such a place was no better than an orphanage. So instead, she had scooped him up in a pillow linen and transported him to the local veterinary clinic.
It would have been easy to step over him that evening, but she had once been as abandoned and alone as the kitten. Someone had taken her in at the time, too. And like Billie, she had been domesticated-but neither ended up completely tamed, preferring the wild places and rooting through lost corners of the world.
But all that had ended with one explosion on a bright spring day.
All my fault… Crying and screams again filled her head, merging with the sirens of the moment.
Breathing too hard, Safia reached to the bedside lamp, a small Tiffany replica depicting stained-glass dragonflies. She flicked the lamp’s switch a few more times, but the lamp remained dark. Electricity was out. The storm must have knocked down a power line.
Maybe that was all the commotion.
Let it be something that simple.
She swung out of bed, barefoot, but in a warm flannel nightshirt that reached her knees. She crossed to the window and twisted the blinds to peer through to the street below. Her flat was on the fourth floor.
Below, the usually quiet and dignified street of iron lamps and wide sidewalks had become a surreal battlefield. Fire engines and police cars jammed the avenue. Smoke billowed despite the rain, but at least the fierce storm had faded to the usual London weep. With the streetlamps darkened, the only illumination came from the flashers atop the emergency vehicles. Yet, down the block, a deeper crimson glow flickered through the smoke and dark.
Fire.
Safia’s heart thudded harder, her breath choked-not from old terrors, but from newborn fears for the present. The museum! She yanked the blinds’ cords, ripping them up, and fumbled with the lock to the window. She pushed the sash open and bent out into the rain. She barely noted the icy drops.
The British Museum was only a short walk from her flat. She gaped at the sight. The northeast corner of the museum had crumbled to a fiery ruin. Flames flickered from shattered upper windows while smoke belched out in thick gouts. Men, cowled in rebreathing masks, dragged hoses. Jets of water sailed high. Ladders rose into the air from the back of engines.
Still, worst of all, a gaping hole smoked on the second floor of the northeast corner. Rubble and blackened blocks of cement lay strewn out into the street. She must not have heard the explosion or just attributed it to the storm’s thunder. But this was no lightning strike.
More likely a bomb blast…a terrorist attack. Not again…
She felt her knees grow weak. The north wing…her wing. She knew the smoking hole led into the gallery at the end. All her work, a lifetime of research, the collection, a thousand antiquities from her homeland. It was too much to fathom. Disbelief made the sight even more unreal, a bad dream from which she would awake at any moment.
She fell back into the security and sanity of her room. She turned her back on the shouts and flashing lights. In the darkness, stained-glass dragonflies bloomed to life. She stared, unable to comprehend the sight for a moment, then it dawned. The power was back on.
At that moment, the phone on her nightstand rang, startling her.
Billie raised his head from the comforter, ears pricked at the jangling.
Safia hurried to the phone and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
The voice was stern, professional. “Dr. al-Maaz?”
“Y-yes?”
“This is Captain Hogan. There’s been an accident at the museum.”
“Accident?” Whatever had happened was more than just an accident.
“Yes, the museum’s director has requested I call you into the briefing. Can you join us in the next hour?”
“Yes, Captain. I’ll be there immediately.”
“Fine. Your name will be left at the security blockade.” The phone clicked as the captain hung up.
Safia stared around her bedroom. Billie thumped his tail in clear feline irritation at the night’s constant interruptions. “I won’t be gone long,” she mumbled, unsure if she spoke the truth.
Sirens continued to wail outside her window.
The panic that had woken her refused to fade away completely. Her worldview, the security of her position in the staid halls of a museum, had been shaken. Four years ago, she had fled a world where women strapped pipe bombs to their chests. She had fled to the safety and or-derliness of academic life, abandoning fieldwork for paperwork, dropping picks and shovels for computers and spreadsheets. She had dug herself a little niche in the museum, one where she felt safe. She had made a home here.
But still disaster had found her.
Her hands trembled. She had to grip one in the other to fight another attack. She fancied nothing more than to crawl back into bed and pull the comforter over her head.
Billie stared at her, eyes reflecting the lamplight.
“I’ll be fine. Everything’s okay,” Safia said quietly, more to herself than to the cat.
Neither was convinced.
02:13 A.M. GMT (09:13 P.M. EST)
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
THOMAS HARDEY hated to be disturbed while he worked on the New York Times crossword puzzle. It was his Sunday-night ritual, which also included a neat snifter of forty-year-old Scotch and a fine cigar. A fire crackled in the fireplace.
He leaned back in his leather wingback chair and stared at the half-filled puzzle, punching the nub on his Montblanc ballpoint pen.
He crinkled a brow at 19 down, a five-letter word. “19. The sum of all men.”
As he pondered the answer, the phone rang on his desk. He sighed and pushed his reading glasses from the tip of his nose up to the line of his receding hairline. It was probably just one of his daughter’s friends calling to discuss how her weekend date had fared.
As he leaned over, he saw the fifth line was blinking, his personal line. Only three people had that number: the president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and his second-in-command at the National Security Agency.
He placed the folded newspaper on his lap and tapped the line’s red button. With that single touch, a shifting algorithmic code would scramble any communication.
He lifted the receiver. “Hardey here.”
“Director.”
He sat straighter, wary. He did not recognize the other’s voice. And he knew the voices of the three people who had his private number as well as he knew his own family’s. “Who is this?”
“Tony Rector. I’m sorry for disturbing you at this late hour.”
Thomas shuffled his mental Rolodex. Vice Admiral Anthony Rector. He connected the name to five letters: DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The department oversaw the research-and-development arm of the Department of Defense. They had a motto: Be there first. When it came to technological advances, the United States could not come in second place.
Ever.
A tingling sense of dread grew. “How may I help you, Admiral?”
“There’s been an explosion at the British Museum in London.” He went on to explain the situation in great detail. Thomas checked his watch. Less than forty-five minutes had passed since the blast. He was impressed by the ability of Rector’s organization to gather so much intelligence in such a short time.
Once the admiral finished, Thomas asked the most obvious question. “And DARPA’s interest in this blast?”
Rector answered him.
Thomas felt the room go ten degrees cooler. “Are you sure?”
“I already have a team in place to pursue that very question. But I’m going to need the cooperation of British MI5…or better yet…”
The alternative hung in the air, unspoken even over a scrambled line.
Thomas now understood the clandestine call. MI5 was Britain’s equivalent of his own organization. Rector wanted him to throw up a smoke screen so a DARPA team could whisk in and out before anyone else suspected the discovery. And that included the British intelligence agency.
“I understand,” Thomas finally answered. Be there first. He prayed they could live up to this mission. “Do you have a team ready?”
“They’ll be ready by morning.”
From the lack of further elaboration, Thomas knew who would be handling this. He drew a Greek symbol on the margin of his newspaper.
“I’ll clear the way for them,” he said to the phone.
“Very good.” The line went dead.
Thomas settled the phone to the cradle, already planning what must be done. He would have to work quickly. He stared down at the unfinished crossword puzzle: 19 down.
A five-letter word for the sum of all men.
How appropriate.
He picked up a pen and filled in the answer in block letters.
SIGMA.
02:22 A.M. GMT
LONDON, ENGLAND
SAFIA STOOD before the barricade, a yellow-and-black A-frame. She kept her arms folded, anxious, cold. Smoke filled the air. What had happened? Behind the barricade, a policeman held her wallet in his hand and compared her photo to the woman who stood before him.
She knew he was having a hard time matching the two. In hand, her museum identification card portrayed a studious thirty-year-old woman of coffee-and-cream complexion, ebony hair tied back in an efficient braid, green eyes hidden behind black reading glasses. In contrast, before the young guard stood a soaking, bedraggled woman, hair loosely plastered in long swaths to her face. Her eyes felt lost and confused, focused beyond the barriers, beyond the frenzy of emergency personnel and equipment.
News crews dotted the landscape, haloed by the spots from their cameras. A few television trucks stood parked half up on the sidewalks. She also spotted two British military vehicles among the emergency crews, along with personnel bearing rifles.
The possibility of a terrorist attack could not be dismissed. She had heard such rumblings among the crowd and from a reporter she had to sidestep to reach the barricade. And not a few cast suspicious glances in her direction, the lone Arab on the street. She’d had firsthand experience with terrorism, but not in the manner these folks suspected. And maybe she was even misinterpreting the reactions around her. A form of paranoia, what was termed hyperanxiety, was a common sequela to a panic attack.
Safia continued through the crowd, breathing deeply, focusing on her purpose here. She regretted forgetting her umbrella. She had left her flat immediately after getting the call, delaying only long enough to pull on a pair of khaki slacks and a white floral blouse. She had donned a knee-length Burberry coat, but in her hurry, the matching umbrella had been left in its stand by the door. Only when she reached the first floor of her building and rushed into the rain did she realize her mistake. Anxiety kept her from climbing back up to the fourth floor to retrieve it.
She had to know what had happened at the museum. She’d spent the past decade building the collection, and the past four years running her research projects out of the museum. How much had been ruined? What could be salvaged?
