The Key (41 page)

Gabriel and Liv lay side by side on the floor of the cave, their hands entwined, their arms touching, their heads so close they could hear each other breathing. It was so profoundly dark that it was easy to imagine they were far away from everything, floating in space, disconnected. It was such a seductive thought that neither of them moved or spoke for a long time, holding on for as long as possible before the real world burst back in.

Gabriel was up and moving the moment he heard the sound.

It had come from the direction of the cave entrance. Something solid banging against the side of the car, only lightly, but hard enough that the sound had travelled into the cave. It could have been a rock falling from the roof, but Gabriel’s instinct told him otherwise. He found his discarded jacket in the darkness and pulled out the gun Washington had lent him – a Glock 9 with a seventeen-round clip. He dropped to a crouch and edged back to the entrance, gun first.

The punch caught him squarely in the stomach, so fast and hard it was as if he had been hit with a shovel. He tried to react, but his body was already caving in on itself through lack of oxygen. An elbow crashed down on his forearm, knocking the gun from his grip.

Then a lamp flickered on.

‘Hello again,’ Dick said, slipping the night-vision goggles from his head. ‘Remember me?’

Gabriel tried to move but was paralysed with pain from the brutal punch. He looked back over at Liv. Another man was standing over her, dressed in the loose desert clothes of a nomad, his sand goggles and keffiyeh
covering his face and making him seem more alien than human. He had an AK-47 slung over his back and a pistol in his hand pointing directly at Liv. Gabriel held his hand out towards her but a huge foot caught him under the ribs and kicked him on to his back so he was staring up at the grinning giant, now holding the Glock that he had dropped.

‘No more escapes,’ the giant said. The gun looked vaguely ridiculous in his huge hand, like a toy. Gabriel watched the oversized thumb stroking the side of the gun and realized he was about to die.

There is no safety on a Glock
– he thought, bizarrely grateful for his executioner’s mistake as it gave him a half-second more of precious life. He looked back over at Liv one last time and smiled.

Then a gunshot boomed in the confines of the cave.

Hyde heard the gunshot echoing down the channel of the dry river and away across the desert. Some of the horses nickered at the sound then fell silent. He listened for any more sounds, other gunshots that would suggest the ambush had gone wrong or was being met with armed resistance. There was nothing, just the whisper of the dying wind.

He felt slightly deflated. The single gunshot meant Gabriel Mann was dead and the girl had been captured. It was over before it had even begun. He started up his engine and eased the truck forward into the wadi, no longer worried about the possibility of an ambush. All he wanted to do now was pick up the girl and get back to the compound.

Dick wavered where he stood, his right eye a mass of broken blood vessels from where the bullet had entered his temple and blown apart everything behind it. He stood like that for a moment, as if an invisible thread held him suspended from the ceiling, then he started to fall. Gabriel rolled away just before he hit the ground. Over by Liv, the
fedai
was still pointing his pistol at the spot where Dick had stood. He tucked it into his holster and held out his hand to help Liv up. ‘Quickly,’ he said. ‘We must go quickly before the others come.’ His voice scraped across the air –
like stones being rubbed together
.

Gabriel moved to get up, swept Washington’s Glock from the giant’s dead hand and pointed it at the Ghost. ‘Get away from her.’

The strange insect eyes of the sand goggles angled down towards the gun. ‘You have to trust me.’ That voice again.

‘Like John Mann trusted you?’

The Ghost shook his head slowly. ‘Whatever you think happened. Whatever you think I did. You are wrong.’

‘Tell me then. Tell me what happened. And if I believe any of it I might not shoot you where you stand.’

The Ghost looked over at the tunnel leading to the cave entrance. ‘We really should hurry.’

Another gunshot boomed in the cave and shards of rock pattered down from the spot above the Ghost’s head where the bullet had hit. ‘Next one’s your leg,’ Gabriel hissed through his teeth. ‘Tell me what happened.’

The Ghost nodded and in his eerie voice he started to talk.

‘I was in the main chamber when the helicopter came. We had unearthed part of the lost library of Ashurbanipal, looted and hidden when Babylon fell. It was filled with treasures – the Mirror Prophecy was only part of it. There were accounts dating back to creation and books of spells passed down from when the gods walked the earth.

‘We tried to keep our discovery a secret, knowing the danger if the Citadel found out, but there was a spy in the camp. Soldiers came dressed as Iraqi army but they looked wrong; they had no proper markings on their uniforms and the helicopter they flew in on was Russian – a huge Sikorsky gunship.’

Gabriel remembered the strange testimony of Zaid Aziz. He was familiar with these huge helicopters from his time in Afghanistan, left over from the Russian occupation. Everyone referred to them as Sea Dragons.

‘They rounded everyone up, accused us of spying and made us pack all the relics into crates. They had guns and numbers so we did what they said. But once everything had been loaded into the helicopter they started shooting anyway. We heard the slaughter down in the main dig chamber, but by then they had already tied our hands behind our backs and were discussing what they were going to do to us. In the end they strung us up by our necks from one of the ceiling beams and rolled grenades in after us. The explosion actually saved my life. It released the rope from around my neck, though not before it had done this to my voice.

‘When I came to, I was in darkness. I dug my way out to discover that everyone was dead. I salvaged what I could, including the camera containing the picture I sent to your grandfather. I was searching for water, but they’d taken it all. If I hadn’t been found by desert scavengers, drawn by the smoke, I would have died. They looked after me and tended to my wounds. The woman who nursed me called me the Ghost because I had been dead and she had brought me back to life.’

‘So why, if the Citadel sent men to kill you, have you been selling relics to them for years?’

‘It suited me to keep them close and let them think I was their friend. It allowed me to stay in the desert and keep looking for what had been lost. I only ever sold them things that were not useful.’

Gabriel shook his head and levelled the gun at the Ghost’s head. ‘I don’t believe you. I think you are working for them now, just as you were back then.’

‘No,’ the Ghost began to unwrap the keffiyeh from his face. ‘The Citadel is my enemy, and always has been. And I did not betray your father, nor did I cause his death.’ He removed the sand goggles from his face to reveal that he was telling the truth. The Ghost could not have betrayed Gabriel’s father – the Ghost
was
Gabriel’s father.

Gabriel stared. Shocked. Disbelieving.

‘I’m sorry,’ John Mann said, his shattered voice stretched thin with emotion. ‘The Citadel killed us all to keep what we’d discovered a secret. They thought I was dead. If I’d returned home they would have come again, and this time they would have killed Kathryn and you, just in case. But as long as they believed the knowledge had died with me, you were safe: I stayed dead so that you might live.’

Gabriel shook his head and felt the old anger rising up. ‘But we could have stayed together and hidden away as a family.’

‘And what kind of life would that have been? Always looking over our shoulders, always wary of talking to anyone in case we gave something away?’

‘Better than a life of not knowing. You were alive all this time and we never even knew. My mother died – did you know that?’

John Mann nodded. ‘You cannot imagine the pain I have felt at not spending my life with Kathryn. But it was only my love for her that kept me away. One day I hope you will understand this.’

Outside, muffled gunfire rattled the night.

‘Now we really need to get going. We have only a few hours left before dawn and it’ll take us at least forty minutes to get there.’

‘Get where?’

‘You’ve read the Mirror Prophecy. You know what’s at stake. We need to get you to the ancient site of Eden before the sun rises. And I think I know where it is.’

At the sound of automatic gunfire Hyde stamped on the brake to bring the armoured personnel carrier to a slithering stop.

‘Form a perimeter,’ he shouted, throwing himself from the cab.

Another volley crackled in the night, this time from a different source. The sides of the wadi reflected sound so it was hard to tell where the shots had come from. Behind him the men poured from the back of the carrier and started fanning out, circling the parked vehicle and moving up the dry banks. More sporadic fire rippled across the desert from a couple of new sources. It had the distinctive rattle of the AK-47, favoured weapon of the local insurgents. It was coming from everywhere.

Hyde made it to the top of the bank and surveyed the desert over the top of his M4. His night scope made the barren landscape glow green. He spotted the incandescent flash of gunfire about a hundred metres from his position. It was one of the Ghost’s men, looping around in circles and shooting into the sky.

‘It’s the Bedouin,’ he shouted to his men. ‘They’re drawing our fire. Stay here and engage them.’

He threw himself down the bank of the wadi, signalling for a couple of men to follow and took off on foot down the riverbed just as bursts of M4 fire started to respond to the AK rounds. He followed the hoofprints in the dust until he spotted the back end of a white jeep sticking out of a cave up ahead.

Hyde approached the cave in a low crouch, leading with the barrel of his rifle. He ducked his head round the edge of the cave, scoping inside with his night-sight.

‘Stay here,’ he whispered. ‘Make sure I’m the only one who comes out.’

He crept forward, quartering the darkness with his night vision, making sure nothing was ahead of him. He was happier going in alone. An enclosed and possibly hostile environment was the worst place to be with people you didn’t know and didn’t trust.

He found Dick’s body sprawled massively on the floor of a small chamber, a single bullet hole in his temple, his eyes open and reflecting green in the infrared beam of Hyde’s night scope. He scanned the space and found a footprint in the dust, heading deeper into the cave. He moved towards it, then stopped. There was something too perfect about it, too deliberate. He thought back to where he’d left the two soldiers and realized his mistake. Dick and the Ghost had ridden there. But when he’d arrived there had been no horses.

John Mann led the way with Gabriel and Liv sharing the bigger horse. They had followed the line of the wadi for a few hundred metres then cut across to another dry riverbed that sliced through the land in a different direction. Behind them the sound of gunfire rapidly melted away until all they could hear was the night air rushing past their ears and the thud of hooves on the dust.

Liv clung on to Gabriel partly just to feel him close but also to give him comfort. The revelation in the cave had been so sudden and shocking, she couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him. She was glad it had happened though. She hated the thought that, if she did die, Gabriel would be alone in the world with all his family gone. Now he had someone, and she was glad for that.

She looked up and saw the snaking line of Draco pointing to where the moon hung low, only the merest impression of it remaining in the lightening sky.

Not long now
, she thought
. One way or another, not long now.

‘It’s me,’ Hyde called out as he neared the cave entrance. ‘Don’t shoot.’

He scrambled up the side of the wadi, scoping the landscape with his night-sight. There was still too much dust hanging in the air to see very far and the dust kicked up by a couple of horses would be a lot less than a vehicle. They had at least a fifteen-minute head start, but couldn’t have gone too far. He slid back down the bank and ducked into the cab of the personnel carrier. The radio squawked as he plucked it from the dashboard.

‘Base, this is Point One, do you read?’

‘Copy that.’

‘We have need of immediate air assistance for a search and discover. Get that Cobra airborne and tell it to turn on every instrument on the dash. I want it to light up this desert like a Christmas tree.’

They had almost reached the dig site when they heard the sound of chopper blades in the distance. They had been riding hard for the last ten or so kilometres, putting distance between themselves and the armed force that was now stepping up the search for them.

When they got within a couple of hundred metres John Mann reined in his horse and slipped from the saddle. Gabriel did the same, following him up a low berm to get a better view.

The compound had beefed up its security considerably in the twenty-four hours since John Mann had last seen it. It now resembled a mini version of the main one: same double perimeter wire, same guard positions, same guards leaning on the same heavy-duty automatic weapons.

‘And how do you know this is the right place?’

‘They’ve been digging all over this area of desert for weeks and this is the first spot they’ve got really excited about. Just look at the security.’

Gabriel was doing exactly that. He realized trying to muscle their way in was out of the question.

‘If I create a diversion, you could possibly get closer,’ John said. ‘We’re only looking for a general location, not a specific spot. I’ve spent the last twelve years reading everything ever written or discovered on the legends of Eden. I told you I sold the useless relics to the Citadel and kept the best pieces for myself. The Sacrament will be reunited with the earth the moment the flesh of the host makes contact with the hallowed dust of home. Getting her close might be good enough. It’s probably our only chance.’