The Key (14 page)

‘You stole from the company, yes?’

‘No,’ said the terrified man, in what could have been a plea or an answer.

‘You stole from the company,’ Hyde insisted, ‘and thieving cannot be tolerated.’ In a single swift movement he levered the knife down hard like a guillotine, snicking off the man’s little finger with a soft crunch.

The prisoner screamed. Blood leaked from the cut, isolating the severed finger in a spreading crimson lake.

‘Steal again and it’s your hand,’ Hyde said. ‘Try to run and it’s your life.’ He turned to the guard, who looked as shocked as the prisoner. ‘Clean him up and send him back to work.’ Then he was out in the heat and brightness of the compound, wiping his knife against the leg of his fatigues.

Back in his office he wrenched open his desk drawer and pulled out the copy of
USA Today
. He grabbed his satellite phone from its charging dock and dialled the number written beneath the photographs of the three Citadel survivors. He’d like to do more than just snip a few fingers off the Ghost. He’d like to string him up and torture him slow, like they taught the black ops to do to put fear in the enemy.

The ringtone purred. Nobody picked up.

The Ghost had done it to him again.

Al Anbar Province, Western Iraq

Evening was coming, but the heat of the day remained trapped in the fringes of the Syrian Desert. It had been hammered into the rocky ground by the relentless sun and now radiated back up as though the world beneath the crust was molten. It was hard to believe anything could survive out here in this furnace heat and on this lunar landscape, but sparse tufts of grass somehow managed to struggle out of cracks in the earth and buckthorn spread across the gravel in whatever contours offered the tiniest amount of low shade – and the goats ate all of it.

The Ghost had a large network of men at his disposal, other
fedayeen
united in a common desire to protect the land and its people from the casual violence of dictators and invaders. He had spread word along the numerous goat trails that snaked out into the desert to the west of Ramadi, asking if anyone knew of a man who wore the red cap of an English football team. He wasn’t hard to track down. He was called Ahmar, the Arabic word for ‘Red’.

The Ghost found him crouched by the side of a muddy pool in one of the oases used by the herders, filling a canteen with water, surrounded by his goats. His faded red cap stood out vividly against the jostling backdrop of dusty black and brown wool. He had an AK-47 slung over his back and a Beretta sticking out of a leather belt that tightened the middle of his long white dishdasha.

Ahmar looked up at the sound of approaching hooves, eyes creased against the sun, his face a mass of leathery wrinkles. He could have been anywhere between thirty years old and a hundred.

‘Nice gun,’ the Ghost said, pointing at the Beretta.

The sound of the ruined voice triggered some recognition in the man and his face shifted into something between suspicion and fear. ‘I didn’t steal it,’ he said, his hand drifting to the gun, more to hide it than use it. ‘I traded it.’

The Ghost slipped from his saddle. ‘I know,’ he said, reaching slowly into his saddlebag. He produced a bundle of red material and unwrapped it, revealing the stone covered with symbols in the shape of the Tau. ‘I want to trade too.’ Ahmar hardly heard him, so mesmerized was he by the red cloth the stone had been wrapped in.

He reached out to touch the Manchester United football shirt, then stopped, suddenly fearful of what he might be asked to do in exchange for such a magical item. ‘What you want to trade?’

‘Just information. This stone – where did you find it?’

Ahmar considered the question then smiled broadly, revealing a mouth missing most of the teeth. ‘I show you,’ he said, kicking a goat out of the way.

He smoothed a wet patch of mud flat with his hand and snatched up a reed from the bank. With the point he made a series of fourteen dots to create the outline of what looked like a snake. Like all Bedouin, the goat herder navigated using the stars. The desert was ever-changing and there were no landmarks to steer by, but the stars remained constant. The Ghost steered by them too and recognized the constellation he had drawn. It was Draco, the watchful dragon, so called because it never set in the Northern hemisphere, but to the Bedouin it was known as the snake. Ahmar pointed at the square of four dots representing the head and traced his finger up along the line of its back until he was pointing at the horizon. ‘Follow the snake,’ he said. ‘Keep to the left of the Billy Goat. Three days’ grazing, a day on horseback – that is where I found this stone.’

The Billy Goat was the Bedouin name for Polaris, the North Star. By setting off to the left of it he would be heading northwest, following the sign of the snake deeper into the Syrian Desert. He had enough supplies in his saddlebags for at least a day, three maybe if he rationed himself and spared the horse during the worst of the heat.

Ahmar dropped down to wash the mud from his hand then wiped it dry on his dishdasha and held it out. The Ghost handed over the Manchester United shirt and watched him slip it over his head and rush to the main camp, calling out the names of other herders and holding his arms aloft as though he’d just scored a goal.

The Ghost remounted his horse and turned to the horizon. The sky was darkening to the east and the brightest stars already starting to shine. It would not be long before the western sky darkened too, where Draco lived, pointing the way into the desert, as it had since the beginning of time.

A day’s ride – Ahmar had said.

The Ghost kicked his horse and they moved away from the smell of goats and the shade of the oasis.

With the moon’s help, he might just make it before dawn.

Gaziantep is the larger of the two airports that service the city. Its position to the north places it closer to the Taurus mountains and closer to Ruin, therefore making it the destination of choice for most of the tourist traffic. At least, that was the gist of what the taxi driver had told Liv on their way here. As far as she was concerned, lots of tourists meant lots of flights, and that was all she was interested in.

She managed to buy a one-way last-minute standby ticket to Newark using most of the cash she’d found in the envelope. She used cash because she figured that if she was on some kind of watch-list then a credit-card purchase was more likely to trigger it. The desk clerk had made the booking and taken her money without a flicker of recognition. So far so good. But now she had to go through passport control.

The departure hall was pretty busy, thronged with tourists heading back home after having their souls cleansed. Liv checked out the lines and ended up opting for the longest one, purely because the customs officer at the head of it was grossly fat and looked as though he was about to fall asleep in the trapped, humid heat. She stepped in line and as the queue shuffled forward she watched him going through the motions of checking the passport against every passenger, gravity pulling his doughy face into an expression of perma-boredom. He barely glanced at anyone for longer than a second, so when it was Liv’s turn to step forward she was feeling much calmer.

He opened her passport and glanced at the name of the bearer, checking it against the ticket. Then he looked up, his humourless eyes flicking between the photograph and her. Liv swept the baseball cap from her head and stared back, doing her best to maintain a neutral expression. She could feel his scrutiny crawling over her face, like the feelers of some giant insect. He was taking his time. Studying her. He hadn’t taken this long on anyone else in line. The blood sang in her ears and she was sweating from a combination of stress and poor air-conditioning. His eyes continued to slide over her face, then dropped down to roam over her body. Ordinarily, Liv would have been outraged by this, but now she felt relief. He wasn’t some crack border guard with a hidden agenda and heightened instinct for potential fugitives after all. He was just an ugly, overweight man who liked to stare at girls. So she let him stare, comforting herself with the knowledge that, if asked about her later, he would not remember her face.

After what seemed like several hours he finally snapped her passport shut and placed it on the counter. Liv grabbed it and hurried away, subconsciously fiddling with the top button of her blouse. She joined another line of people shuffling towards the final security check and breathed a little easier. She was nearly home and dry. The queue moved forward, voices pulsed around her, she started to relax. Then a loud crash at the head of the queue set her heart pounding again.

Liv looked up, fearing she would discover the fat customs officer surrounded by security guards and pointing directly at her. Instead she saw a woman dressed in full hijab, her heavily pregnant belly straining against the material of her gown. She had dropped her plastic tray and was scrabbling around on the ground while a man stood over her, shouting down in angry Arabic as she frantically scooped up the spilled items.

Then he hit her, with the back of his hand, as if he was swatting away a fly but deliberate and hard. The woman’s head jerked to one side with the force of it, then she just carried on tidying the spilled items as if the blow had been nothing more or less than she was used to.

Liv didn’t know whether it was the sudden focusing of attention or the outrage she felt at the man’s hostility, but something happened inside her. It was like something giving way deep underground and rushing upwards. She could feel it flowing through her, almost lifting her off her feet as it rose, bringing the whispering with it, filling her head with its sound. It grew louder, roaring through her like steam through rock. Then she heard something else – something solid at the centre.

A word.

KuShiKaam

So stunned was she by this that everything else seemed to slip into slow motion. She watched with detachment as the security guard stepped forward and laid a hand on the arm of the man who had just hit his wife, his face reproving but not angry. The woman on the floor continued to gather the dropped contents and put them back in the tray. In the strangeness of all this, Liv’s anger began to slip, the force of the whispering lessened and the word started to drift away. She snapped to attention, jamming her hand into her bag, burrowing through the jumbled contents in her frantic search for a pen. She feared the word would be lost, carried away down to the dark place in her head where her conscious mind seemingly could not follow. She found a pen and wrote feverishly on her hand in the absence of paper. But even as she did this the pen took on a motion of its own and instead of a phonetic approximation of the word she had heard, she inscribed a series of jagged symbols instead, looking like no language she had ever seen.

She studied what she had written and it shifted in her mind, first to the sound she had heard:

KuShiKaam

then to the meaning at its centre:

The Key

Liv looked up. The woman had now gathered her things and passed through the metal detector to join her husband. The security guards waved them through, ushering things back to normal as quickly as they could. They probably saw incidents like this every day, casual acts of domestic violence fuelled by stress and fatigue. Even so, they had stood by and watched a man hit a pregnant woman and done nothing about it. It made Liv sick to think of it, but there was nothing she could do. Starting a fight with a bunch of sexist pigs wasn’t going to help keep her profile low. Even so the hissing noise in her head would not go away and she felt a surprising and intense violence towards the man who had struck his wife. She wanted to hurt him and humiliate him in front of everyone. She wanted to kill him even, grab a gun from one of the ineffectual guards and shoot him in the head. The intensity of her hatred surprised her. It seemed to feed into the sound in her head until it whistled like a boiling kettle. Her skin tingled too, pricking all over with pins and needles. It frightened her that she felt this way. It was as if there was something dangerous inside her that she didn’t understand and couldn’t control. She looked up and discovered people in the line were staring at her. A woman in front said something but she couldn’t hear what it was through the noise in her head. She dumped her things in a plastic tray and stared in front of her, avoiding further eye contact as the line moved forward. What the hell was happening to her? She seemed to be losing her mind.

She passed through the metal detector and out into the concourse. It was bad enough she couldn’t remember anything, now she was hearing voices too. It annoyed her – Liv Adamsen the razor-sharp reporter, the ultra rationalist, the cynical disbeliever of anything remotely New Agey – that something so ‘out there’ was now happening to her. She didn’t like it and she didn’t want it. She was still convinced she’d been drugged in the hospital and all of this was some hideous side effect that would pass as soon as she got some sleep and a couple of gallons of coffee inside her.

She glanced up at the departure board. Her flight was already boarding but she hesitated. Her instinct whenever anything didn’t add up was to come at the problem from every angle until she had managed to make sense of it. Right now, her rational mind was telling her that the word she had scrawled on her hand must be something her scrambled mind had dredged up, some language she could verify and explain. She scanned the duty-free shops lining the walls of the terminal building and saw what she needed. It was in the opposite direction to her boarding gate. She hoisted her bag on to her shoulder and headed over. She’d have to be quick.