Текст книги "Keystone"

Автор книги: Luke Talbot

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

She breathed out in relief and swallowed the warm red wine, before returning what she hoped was an amused shrug. Internally, her mind raced as she thought of the complex chain of events that would still have to occur for her escape to be successful: getting the picture to Henry without it being scanned for encrypted messages, Henry sending the email to Ben, Ben reading the email and having the presence of mind to send it to George, George having the common sense to work out what the hell it all meant, and then being there in Amarna at the drop of a hat, armed with hopefully more than just a laptop and a pencil, to rescue her from Henry, Seth Mallus, and however many henchmen they decided to bring with them to protect their investment.

Henry looked across the table at her, the grin still painted on his face. His eyes rested for a fraction of a second too long over her shoulder at the door of her bedroom, which she had forgotten to close on her way back with the pencil and notebook.

Bugger, she thought, coming back to the here-and-now with a thud. Before all of those things could happen, before the picture, the email, the unlikely common sense of her husband and the improbable rescue in Egypt, before all of that came one little thing: making a man wait for the second date.

Suddenly, in comparison, the rescue in Egypt seemed like a walk in the park.

Chapter 62

George had never seen such a surreal change in behaviour. Once the police had finished fully searching the car, and both himself and Ben, they lowered their guns and all broke out in smiles. Ben was shaking the hand of a policewoman, the only female in uniform he could see in front of the airport, who pointed to a row of parked cars behind a now-raised barrier.

Looking to his right, he saw the steady line of airport traffic diverted from the drop-off point, people inside their cars looking over at them and the tantalizingly-close entrance to the terminal. It was a miracle they were still alive, and had not been shot on sight.

While Ben parked the car, George was escorted to the entrance. They met at the revolving doors, and Ben gave him a wink before saying goodbye to the woman.

“We go way back,” he explained with a laugh. “We did our military service together!” They entered the door and followed it round until they were spat out into the air-conditioned foyer of the airport.

George shook his head. “It didn’t look like you went way back before they’d checked us out a bit, though. Doesn’t she trust you?”

“I haven’t seen her for years, and today is a special day,” Ben explained. “We got on well for the short time I was in the army, we keep in touch every now and then.”

“Did she just do us a massive favour, by letting us in?”

“Yes and no.” Ben looked up at the departures board. “I said we had to get you home, she said the only way was to swim, I said there must be a plane, she said go and check it out for yourself.”

George looked at him, then up at the departures. Everything was cancelled, with the exception of an Iberia flight to Madrid, which was boarding: it was the last flight out of Cairo.

“I can get that plane,” he said pointing at the departures list. “Then it’s easy to get to America!” He started running towards the ticket office, followed closely by Ben.

“I think I’ve changed my mind, George,” he shouted as his friend shot off. “I mean, are you sure you want to get on a plane today?”

Groups of tourists with luggage strewn around them stared as they ran past.

“Sure, why not?” George shouted back.

“Well, because…” Ben hesitated. There were words you just didn’t say in airports. “Because of the things that are happening out there.”

“You said so yourself: I need to get to the US somehow, and that isn’t going to happen if I stay here.”

He reached the Iberia ticket desk. Slamming his passport on the desk, he took a few moments to catch his breath before asking for a ticket to Madrid.

Behind the desk, the two clerks looked at each other and shook their heads in unison.

“I’m sorry, sir. There are no seats left. I can sell you a ticket for Monday; we expect full service to resume by the morning but understandably we have a backlog of passengers so all seats for the next two days are already taken. In the meantime, you will have to return to your hotel, or stay in the terminal.” She pointed to some seats behind him.

He looked around, and realised that all the seats were taken. There were even people sitting on the floor, some sitting on their luggage, and quite a few leaning against the walls. Almost all of them had looked over at George and Ben, and were now returning to their own little worlds with smiles on their faces, as if to say idiots, don’t they think we would have tried that if there had been any seats left?

Seeing the mass of people that filled the terminal, George suddenly came back to reality. “OK,” he turned to Ben. “Looks like your policewoman-buddy was right. Do you think it’s safe to go back to your place?”

“Probably,” he ventured.

“First, I need a drink, though.”

They found a café in the far corner of the terminal building, nestled between a shop and the outer wall of the airport. It was a small, discreet little outlet, quite some distance from the usual hubbub of Departures and Arrivals. But today was proving to be exceptional in many ways, and it took him ten minutes to get to the front of the queue and order their drinks. He chose a couple of cakes, too, and several minutes later they had settled on a large rectangular flower pot set into the marble floor on which they could sit and contemplate their next move.

“God, I am starving,” George said as he munched his way through both of the chocolate muffins he had bought.

Ben was flicking through messages on his phone, sipping the unfamiliarly-sized ‘Grande Cappuccino’ or whatever it was, when he suddenly gave a confused grunt.

“No way,” he said.

George didn’t reply, as his mouth was full of chocolate and coffee at the same time. Not wanting to talk with his mouth so grotesquely full, he started chewing faster to offer a reply, but Ben passed him his phone to look at instead.

On screen was an email in English.

Dear Mr Limam,

 

I understand that you are responsible for archaeological expeditions to the ancient Library of Akhetaten at Tell el-Amarna.

While most research to date has focussed on the texts that were found there, my main area of interest lies in the Library itself. I am particularly interested in the attached inscriptions, and would like to correlate this with the physical evidence on-site.

I would like to be able to access the Library to see some of the evidence first-hand with some special equipment I have developed. I have been led to believe that you may be able to help me with this, without having to go through all of the ‘red-tape’ of a full excavation. My equipment is extremely experimental, and my fear is that authorisation will not be forthcoming.

It is vital that I am able to present some findings to my sponsors at the end of next week; as you will appreciate, my continued research depends on this.

I will be arriving in Amarna on Saturday afternoon; while I know that this is very short notice, I would be very grateful to you if you can make the necessary arrangements.

Naturally, I will ensure you are more than compensated for any costs you may have in setting this up.

Yours Sincerely

 

Dr Henry Patterson

Harvard University

Department of Anthropology

 

George looked up from the phone. Having swallowed his muffin and coffee, he asked Ben. “Do you really do this sort of thing?”

Ben shook his head. “I haven’t been near Amarna for years, since just after the dig, in fact. I wouldn’t know how to get this guy in there to save my life!”

He took the phone back and clicked on the picture attached to the email. Studying it carefully for a few moments, he turned to George and raised an eyebrow. “And he sent a load of hieroglyphs, too.”

George glanced over and shrugged. “He’s clearly full of crap. I bet he sent this to everyone who ever went to Amarna. It may even be from the police, trying to trap you.” He thought for a second. “Come to think of it, it’s probably from that bastard Kamal, trying to get some leverage on you so that you won’t talk and spill the beans on him for what he did. He didn’t expect you to be there today, so he’s probably desperately trying to cover his tracks now.”

Ben shook his head slowly as he looked at the ancient writing. “Kamal doesn’t know who I am, George. And it seems like a pretty roundabout way of doing things. I’m sure Kamal could just silence me if he wanted to. I mean, I’m just a little guy in a big city, and accidents happen. Besides, if he was looking to cover his tracks, the last thing he would have done is to tell us there had been a cover up, and on top of that leave a clue to help find your wife.” He zoomed out on the screen and looked at all of the hieroglyphs at once, then re-read the letter from Dr Henry Patterson.

“That is very strange.”

“What?” George asked.

“I’m a bit out of touch with my ancient Egyptian, but that text, I am certain, is not from the Library. Firstly, it refers to the god Amun, and Ipet-Isut.”

“Ipet-Isut?”

“The great temple complex at Karnak,” Ben explained. “And secondly, it occurs to me now that there are no engravings inside the Library, save for the cartouche of Nefertiti and the Stickman.”

George thought for a second then raised an eyebrow. “You’re right, come to think of it!”

“So what is this idiot Dr Patterson from America on about? Contacting the wrong person with the wrong hieroglyphs!”

They stared at the screen in silence for almost a minute, before George’s eyes opened wide. “Could it be?” he said under his breath.

“Could it be what?”

“Forward me that email,” George said, standing up.

Ben was about to ask why but he had already gone, striding towards a couple of Internet terminals.

 “Come on,” he said over his shoulder.

Ben jumped up and followed him, bringing his coffee with him.

By the time he reached his friend, the Englishman had already paid for an open session with his credit card, and was connecting to a remote computer through the Internet browser. Seconds later, a boot screen appeared, followed shortly by a whirling logo and a welcome dialogue, asking George to enter his password.

“Is that your home PC?” Ben asked, obviously impressed by the speed with which George used all the shortcuts on the keyboard and touchscreen. “Wow. You’re quick.”

George grinned. “I have to use this stuff every day; anything that makes it quicker has to be good. Plus, it looks cool,” he added with a wink. “Did you send me the picture?”

Ben obliged, forwarding the email from his mobile phone.

Seconds later, George had extracted the image and opened it. “A little app I wrote for Gail; the secret to all her translation skills,” he commented, tapping the side of his nose.

Ben had seen enough movies and TV shows to know that tapping the side of your nose implied that they were now sharing a secret; in Egypt, however, it usually meant ‘trust me’. The smile also suggested George was probably joking, and that there was no real secret to be shared.

He tapped the screen and a small input dialogue appeared. In it, he entered his usual password, and an error popped up: ‘incorrect keyword!’ He entered all the passwords he’d used in the past, in his secret messages with Gail, each time with the same error. He cast his mind back as far as possible, to their first days together. Memorable places, anniversaries, places, people.

“Jesus, Gail, what’s the keyword?” he growled in exasperation. In response to Ben’s quizzed expression, he explained. “I built a little cryptographic function into this app when I wrote it,” he said. “Just a fun little tool to send each other hidden messages. It’s called steganography. You can hide pretty much whatever you want in an image, as long as the ratios are correct.”

Ben looked at the picture again. “And you think this is one of those?”

“It has to be. Have you ever been sent hieroglyphs by anyone?”

“No,” Ben admitted.

“Then why now? Why would anyone send you hieroglyphs now? It has to be Gail trying to get a message to us, using this Dr Patterson and you as proxies to get hold of me.” He hit the enter key and slammed the keyboard when the same error popped on the screen for the twentieth time.

“Why do you need a password?”

“It’s called a keyword, and I need it to decrypt the message. Without it all I have is a series of zeros and ones in no particular order. I wouldn’t know where to start. The keyword is set when the original message is encrypted. It would be a word that Gail would have chosen.”

“What have you tried?”

“Everything. Birthday’s, our pet names for each other, parents, hometown, university friends, pets, favourite TV shows, films, towns, and I even tried Amarna, just in case.”

“I probably would have chosen Amarna first,” Ben commented. He thought for a moment. “Have you tried ‘Mars’?”

George keyed the four letters in and hit enter. The error popped up. “Yes, I have.”

Ben thought for a few more moments then asked George for the keyboard. When he was in front of the keys, he took a second or two to find the letters on the unfamiliar layout, and then hit enter.

After a longer delay, a popup informed them that the decryption had succeeded.

George looked at Ben in wonder. “What did you type?”

“Nefertiti.”

George slapped his forehead for not thinking of it. It had to be an archaeologist thing, he told himself. Taking control of the computer screen once more, he tapped the popup to open the secret message.

They both read in silence.

 

Being held by DEFCOMM, Florida. Dr Henry Patterson. Help. No chance of release. Sorry.

ILY.

G

George could feel the emotion rising in him as Ben squeezed his shoulder. He put his hand on the screen, touched the words, caressed the initial of her name, and pressed the ‘ILY’ fondly. She isn’t dead, he thought. She hasn’t been dead. His mind raced back to the body identification he had been taken through back in the morgue, when he had punched Captain Kamal. Had it been Gail? Had he been so close to his wife, still breathing imperceptibly, and not known the truth?

He punched the screen, liquid crystals changing colour grotesquely as they gave way under his fist. “I could have stopped him!” he blurted out. “Bastard!”

The hand on his shoulder loosened, and Ben re-read the email from Dr Patterson. “We still have a chance to get her back,” he said.

“How?” George exclaimed. “She’s in Florida, and I can’t get out of here until tomorrow at the earliest. And even if I did get there, how am I going to get her out of that place?”

“We know she’s with Dr Patterson. And according to his email, he’s going to be here tomorrow afternoon, at Amarna. And he expects me to help him get in.”

George looked up. “Of course.” He brought up the email on the main screen. “He probably doesn’t know about this hidden message, and Gail must have tricked him into sending it to you. It was one hell of a gamble,” he bit his bottom lip. “She couldn’t have known that you would have passed it to me. If we hadn’t been sitting together when you received it, you would probably have never shown the picture to me at all!”

“True,” Ben accepted. “But we were sitting together, and we did get the message. We now know where this Patterson guy is going to be, and when. Even if Gail isn’t with him, we’ll use him to get to her.”

George closed down the terminal session and turned to his friend. “Ben, we’re not exactly Batman and Robin, are we? I’m sure he won’t be coming on his own. We’re going to need some help.”

They looked at each other for only a handful of seconds before looking towards the main entrance to the airport in unison.

“Does that friend of yours owe you any more favours?” George asked.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, my friend.”

As they burst back through the revolving doors they were hit by the mid-afternoon heat reflecting off the melting tarmac of the road, and they stuck to the shade as they made their way back towards the Tourism Police. Ben’s friend detached from a small group and met them halfway. Her Tourism Police uniform was sharply tucked-in at the waist, accentuating her breasts and hips. A long ponytail of slightly curled, jet-black hair protruded from the back of her cap, which cast a shadow across her strong nose and full lips. She was relatively tall, an inch or so taller than Ben, and George couldn’t help but wonder just how close Ben had been to her during their military service.

He shook the thought from his mind as his eyes fell to the machine gun. Slung over her shoulder, she was holding it close to her left hip with one hand, a finger curled near the trigger. Not on it, but close enough.

“You’re not flying, then?” she said in heavily accented English, an ‘I told you so’ look on her face.

“We decided to stay in Egypt for a while,” Ben said, matter-of-factly. “Zahra, let me introduce an old friend of mine: this is George Turner, from England.”

They shook hands briefly, wondering whether she would have taken her hand off the gun if she’d been holding it on her right-hand side instead. He decided that she probably wouldn’t. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said courteously.

“Me too,” she replied awkwardly. She clearly wasn’t used to being introduced to English people, her conversational English failing her.

The three of them stood looking at each other for several moments, before Zahra broke the silence. “Farid, what are you doing here?” Through politeness, she continued to test her English. George was surprised to hear Ben’s actual name. He had never heard anyone call him that, and it took him more than a couple of seconds to make the association between the name and his friend.

Ben replied in Arabic.

Within less than a minute, George found himself standing back as the two broke into what looked like a full-on argument. He tried to pick up on some key words, and managed to discern ‘Tell el-Amarna’, but that was it; they were simply speaking far too fast for his basic level of Arabic.

Five minutes later, they stopped their discussion long enough for Zahra to break into a perfect white-toothed grin. Turning to George, she shook his hand again.

“Hopefully, I will see you tomorrow morning, George.” And with that, she turned on her heel and returned to the group of policemen, who were pretending to ignore them.

Ben looked sheepishly after her. “She will meet us at Amarna tomorrow at dawn. She’ll bring some friends, too. She has the weekend off, so it’s a case of extreme taking-your-work-home.”

“That seemed easy enough,” George commented. “I thought you were going to bite each other’s heads off for a minute, but then she’s all smiles!”

“It was more difficult than you think, my friend,” he replied. “It turns out she didn’t owe me any favours at all.”

“So why did she agree to help us?”

“Because I decided to take a bullet, as they say in American movies. I promised to take her to one of the most expensive restaurants in Cairo.”

George looked at Ben in surprise, and then looked at Zahra joking with her colleagues less than twenty yards away. She glanced over at them casually and smiled.

He wouldn’t have called it ‘taking a bullet’.

“Is it really that simple?” George said in disbelief. “You’ve organised our own private militia in less than five minutes?”

Ben smiled and got his mobile phone out of his pocket. “Not quite, George. The next step is to call our friend Kamal and ask for a little favour, which he certainly owes us. We need his authority to clear the area surrounding Amarna. If things get ugly, he won’t want Gail Turner showing up anywhere in Egypt, so it’s in his interest to lend a hand.”

Chapter 63

Seth Mallus tapped the screen in front of him and waited for the video feed from the control room to pop up. Of all the scenarios they had gone through over the years of planning, this had not been one of them: one astronaut dead, two disappeared and most likely dead, and the fourth going stir crazy by herself on the surface of Mars.

He spilled a couple of tablets into his palm from a small bottle obtained from the bottom draw of his desk, then reached for a glass of water. Knocking back the pills with several gulps of the cool liquid, he closed his eyes and clenched his teeth; his brain was pulsating against the inside of his skull. With every passing moment his headache worsened, not helped by the flow of bad news that had come his way in the last few days. At least the pills would help his headache, but it would be a few minutes at least until they started to kick in.

In the meantime, he massaged his temples, his eyes still closed, and ran through the facts.

The Mars mission had arrived so close to his dream landing site, he couldn’t have planned it better. The Book of Xynutians had pointed directly to a site on Mars. In the Book of Xynutians’ own words, on the shore of an empty ocean. There were dozens of places that could have fit the description, but within days of comparing the illustrations in the book to satellite photography of the planet, they had found an exact match: Hellas Basin.

It was too accurate to be a fluke. Weeks of cross-referencing had revealed no further matches, not even a close-second. How the ancient Egyptians had managed to produce such a drawing was beyond explanation. Barely sixty years ago it would have been practically impossible. Three and a half thousand years ago, it was unimaginable.

And then there had been his dream. His dreams had always been very vivid, and surreal. But this one? He could still feel, taste and hear the crater-site on Mars, as it was in the time of the Xynutians. It wasn’t just a dream. It felt more like a recollection. The image had stuck with him ever since.

Nevertheless, he had certainly not expected the crew to find the Xynutian remains within days of arriving, by simply throwing a stone at them. Either the crew were incredibly lucky, or there were so many remains on Mars that they simply had to stumble upon one sooner or later. More importantly though, his dream, and the book, had been bang-on.

No one could ever find out about their finds, not even NASA, which was where his headache had come from. Influencing the decision to put the mission on the shore of the Hellas Basin had been fairly straight forward: enough of the scientific community thought it would be a good place to land anyway, which reduced the amount of lobbying needed along NASA’s corridors. Making sure that no one outside his office knew they had been influenced, and even more importantly, why they had been, was infinitely harder.

It had been easy enough to control the nanostations on-board the Clarke, and the interception of the communication relay with Earth had been straightforward. DEFCOMM built and maintained the satellites in orbit, the receiver dishes on Earth, and owned the encryption technology that was used to hide the signal from the rest of the world. With five hundred and twelve bit encryption, even an intercepted signal would take over three years to decode using the fastest supercomputer on the planet, barring the use of quantum computers, which remained inaccessible in a practical sense. For all intents and purposes, he was in total control of the Earth’s view of the spaceship.

Their first mistake, however, had come after introduction of the time-delay. Sooner or later they would need to be able to edit what was happening to the mission so that if they did eventually stumble upon alien remains on Mars, those facts could remain hidden from Earth. The most obvious solution was one that had been used for decades in reality television: a time lag, which meant that what people were watching was actually minutes or even hours old, giving the show’s producers ample time to cut to adverts, bleep out swearwords before the watershed, or change camera to avoid showing certain things that the censors would rather the public didn’t see.

Of course on Earth it would become painfully apparent that something was wrong if anyone tried to have a real-time conversation, which was why they had waited for Clarke to be far enough away to make any kind of to-and-fro impractical. Earth sent messages out, and the crew replied when it was convenient to do so, and the time delay would never be noticed.

But on Clarke, they had not counted on Su Ning, her excellent mental arithmetic and, crucially, her clandestine watch that kept perfect time with Beijing. After she realised the time delay had been introduced, only eliminating her avoided compromising the entire mission.

Shortly after the discovery of the Jetty, and the Xynutian settlement, they had switched to computer generated imagery, to replace almost all external shots on Mars with faked footage generated by their programmers. Shots outside were easy to produce, mainly because everything was either mechanical or alien. Anyone watching would be unable to tell the difference between a fake rock or a real one, and a spacesuit doesn’t exactly have a personality. But everything inside the MLP continued to be real footage, edited and modified as little as possible depending on the topic of the astronaut’s banter.

But then, disaster.

In the space of a few hours, the two leading astronauts on the project had disappeared inside the Xynutian settlement. That had a double effect: firstly, it was now obvious on all video returning from Mars that Dr Jane Richardson was alone. Secondly, she had been in a near-hysterical state for hours now, and when she wasn’t screaming into the cameras, she was sitting down staring into her hands, or shouting into the microphone at the comms panel in a desperate attempt to get hold of her fellow astronauts, whose air had long since run out.

None of the video coming back from Mars could be sent to NASA without him having a lot of explaining to do. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

So for a while now, there had been no feed from Mars. NASA had been told there was a technical problem with one of the satellites in the receiver array. At best, it would buy them a month before a new satellite or repair crew could be launched, at worst NASA would demand that video be transmitted via a different satellite. To stop it coming to that, they had provided a steady stream of synthesised voice clips from Mars. These had been much easier to produce, due to the interference that plagued interplanetary communications.

His headache was starting to subside, and he opened his eyes. Looking at the screen, he watched Dr Richardson fetch herself a glass of water from the kitchen unit of the MLP. She was millions of miles away, alone on a dead planet.

He picked up the phone and dialled a secure line. Almost immediately, there was an answer from the other end.

“How long till they reach their target?” he asked.

“Just under an hour, Sir.”

“Let me know when you have news.” He hung up abruptly and looked at the video from Mars.

Dr Patterson and Dr Turner had come up with a hair-brained scheme, in his opinion. But if the Amarna Library did, miraculously, give them a clue as to how the Xynutian door mechanism would open, then there may be some hope. If the astronauts trapped inside had somehow survived, if there was some improbable source of oxygen inside the ancient settlement, then there was a chance that they could return to the surface of Mars soon, and they could return to normal video feeds before NASA decided to intervene.

That was a lot of ifs, and the odds on the last two were too long for his liking.

From his perspective, the Mars mission had already fulfilled its primary objective: it had proven without a doubt that the book from Amarna had been telling the truth. The Xynutians had indeed existed, hundreds of thousands, millions of years before modern humans had crawled from the dirt and started their long journey to civilisation. This in turn meant that they must have been wiped out by Aniquilus, which in turn led to the worst possible conclusion: there was no doubt that mankind was about to meet the same fate.

Which was what was making his head hurt. He had come to terms with the Xynutians, and their advanced civilisation, but what troubled him was Aniquilus. This thing that wiped them out just didn’t make sense. It came from nowhere.

Unless Aniquilus was the Xynutians. And if that turned out to be true, then humans would become their own Aniquilus.

There would be one last roll of the dice, one last chance for Mars to reveal more of the Xynutian’s secrets, how the end came about and what could be done to avoid the same fate for the humans. That last chance lay in the mission to Amarna, with Dr Patterson.

And if they don’t succeed? In his mind, the Amarna books were clear on one detail: the Xynutians had been erased because they spread too far, they consumed everything and they failed to fit in with their environment. Mankind had achieved the same dominance on Earth, and there was only one way back.

If there was no good news from Amarna, then there would be no choice but to pass to Plan B, before it was too late. All the pieces fit together perfectly.

That he had come across the architect’s script and found the texts from Amarna, both could be put down to chance. That he was also able to manipulate a manned mission to Mars, and that half the world’s defence systems were in his control could not. There was only one person on Earth who had been placed in such a position, or indeed could have been.

He would therefore follow his instincts, and the prospect of doing so made his skin tingle in anticipation.

He stroked the image of Dr Richardson on the screen.

“Am I Aniquilus?” he whispered.