Kardinal (26 page)

THEY drove into the compound and parked next to another 4x4. Lawton switched off the lights. They sat in darkness and in silence for a few moments. Lawton listened to his heartbeat and to the voices in his head, calling from somewhere deep inside him. Calling from somewhere ancient.

He clocked a CCTV camera. Their arrival had probably been noted. It didn’t matter.

He waited a few more seconds. His eye smarted. It watered. He wondered if it might be tears.

“Right,” he said, “let’s go.”

Laxman got behind him and poked the gun in his back. Lawton cupped his hands on the back of his head. The rucksack was slung over his shoulder. Behind them, Ereshkigal lurked. Lawton hoped he could trust her. If Laxman tried anything, Jake was depending on the vampire to protect him. But once they were inside the compound, he wasn’t sure what she would do.

At the main gate, Laxman acknowledged a couple of guards and flashed his ID.

As the barrier was raised, one of the men asked Laxman, “When are we getting out of here boss? When are we getting paid? There’s some weird stuff going on.”

“We’ll be out, soon, Mo,” Laxman said. ”And the cash’ll be in your account, ready for you to lose it all at the tables again, mate.”

The man and his mate laughed. They eyed up Ereshkigal as she, Laxman, and Jake entered the compound.

“Why did you show your ID?” Lawton said. “They’d forgotten your pretty face already?”

“Good practice, Jakey boy.”

Further on, they faced another pair of guards, who welcomed Laxman’s return and said, “You got him, chief.”

“I got him,” said Laxman, once again badging the guard.

Again, they gawped at Ereshkigal.

Lawton was tense. He sweated profusely. His headache was almost unbearable.

He was now also convinced that he was seeing through his false eye, that he could make out shapes and movements.

Once inside the compound, Lawton scoped the area. Lights came from tents and mobile units. Armed mercenaries smoked. Groups of Middle Eastern students lazed around. They were covered in dust and dirt. They looked exhausted.

He saw movement from the corner of his good eye.

Laxman trying it on, raising the gun to pistol whip Lawton across the back of the skull.

Jake wheeled, too quick for the mercenary.

He kicked Laxman in the ribs. The big man grunted and hit the ground, dropping the gun.

Lawton scooped up the weapon.

Laxman groaned. “You’re fucking lucky I’m injured, Lawton, or I would have had you.”

Ereshkigal flashed her teeth.

“Where’s Fuad?” said Lawton.

“Get me up.”

“Get up yourself. Where is he?”

Laxman groaned again. He had injuries to his face and a cracked rib or two, for sure. Lawton took the clip out of his pocket and slid it back into the Makarov.

“He spends most of his time underground now,” said the mercenary, “but his office is down there, on the right.”

Lawton gestured for Laxman to lead the way.

They walked between the pre-fab structures until Laxman pointed at one of the buildings.

They entered.

Maps of modern Hillah, and one of ancient Babylon, were pinned to the wall. Scraps of paper covered in notes, diagrams, and mathematical formulas were strewn across a desk. A photo of George Fuad stood on the shelf amid Bibles, Korans, and other religious texts. The place smelled of booze.

Lawton noticed that Ereshkigal was hissing and spitting.

He looked her in the eye.

He knew what she wanted.

“I’ll give you a head start,” he said.

She glared at him. Hate poured from her eyes. She sensed Nimrod, or maybe thought she did. It would be dangerous to make her hang around.

“Go,” said Lawton. “Go and find him, before I do.”

She shot out of the door.

“Lovely gesture,” said Laxman.

Lawton rifled through a drawer. He found a BlackBerry. He listened to the messages. He glanced at Laxman.

“You might like to hear this.”

As Laxman took the phone, the ground shook. The quake sent files and books tumbling; it made the desk jerk, and chairs fell over.

A growling sound filled the air, like an animal.

Then an alarm blared.

Lawton bolted out of the door.

AALIYAH had been battering at the door of the cell for ages. Dust rained from the ceiling of their cramped little chamber. Everything was shaking, and the earth rumbled menacingly.

Goga said, “Fuad has found Nimrod, and the earth is rebelling.
”

Aaliyah
steadied herself against the wall. But the stone crumbled when she touched it. And cracks started appearing in the rock. The place was disintegrating. It was going to cave in on top of them.

She pressed her face against the
door and screamed for someone to let them out, but no one was listening.

Goga sat on the ground and did nothing. His black clothes and his black hair were coated in dust. He leaned his forehead on the cane. He had given up.

Aaliyah’s blood boiled.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said.

The noise of destruction had grown louder. At first, it had been a grumble, but during the past hour, it had increased in volume. And now it was a roar.

Aaliyah grabbed Goga and shook him. He looked up at her. His eyes were filled with despair.

“Apostol,” she said, using his first name for the first time she could remember. “Apostol, we have to get out of here, or we’ll be buried alive.”

“That is our fate.”

She slapped him across the face. “It’s not my fate,” she yelled. “My fate is to be with Jake.”

Huge eruptions shook the cell. Aaliyah cowered. She lost her footing and fell. The explosions kept coming. Aaliyah was trying to get to her feet. Goga rocked back and forth as the cell quaked.

Screams came from outside their prison. And then gunfire. Automatic gunfire. The crack of a pistol.

Jake
, she thought,
please don’t abandon me. Please don’t let me die here
.

She started to cry.

The thunder claps continued. The room kept shaking and was slowly falling to pieces. The ceiling was caving in. The walls were cracking. Debris fell, chunks of it.

“What
is
that noise?” said Aaliyah, needing to shout now to make herself heard.

“It’s the devil,” said Goga. “It’s the Lord of Irkalla. He’s awake, I tell you. Fuad has resurrected the beast. If he has, we are doomed. Everything is finished.”

The door buckled. The wood creaked. And then it split down the middle, the oak snapping as if it were balsa wood. Part of the wall next to it collapsed.

Aaliyah was covered in rubble, and she screamed. More gunfire erupted from beyond the shattered door. The smell of cordite filled the air. Dust from falling debris billowed into the cell. Shouting and screaming came from outside. And the continued
rat-tat-tat
of shooting.

Was someone firing at
the guards?

They certainly wouldn’t shoot at each other
.

Or maybe they were firing at Nimrod.

The ground lurched.

Aaliyah g
asped.

A crack appeared in the floor near where she lay, and it then spread from one corner of the room to the other, wrenching the cell apart.

She tried to get up.

Another one of those huge blasts shook her.

It threw Goga across the cell. He landed near the door.

Aaliyah struggled to get to her feet.

The crack in the floor widened. The earth opened up.

Terror turned Aaliyah’s insides into ice.

She stared down into the crevice. It was pitch black and endless. A rotten smell laced the atmosphere. Heat scorched her face.

She rolled away from the cleaved earth, but as she did so, one side of the crack rose up, making a horrible grinding noise.

The ground tipped upwards, and Aaliyah felt herself slide. She clawed at the stony ground. She stared, horrified, at Goga. He looked back, wide eyed and open mouthed.

She shouted at him for help.

But Goga was gripping the remains of the door, trying to stop himself from sliding back into the cell and towards the fissure.

Aaliyah kept slipping back.

And she couldn’t stop herself.

She kicked against the earth. Her nails tore as she tried to claw the stony ground for purchase.

But nothing stopped her sliding.

Gravity was powerful.

She yelled out as her legs went over the edge of the abyss, and the darkness below started to pull at her.

Her blood froze as the lower half of her body dangled over the chasm. But she managed to dig her bloodied fingers into the ground, preventing herself from falling.

She cried out in pain but held on for dear life.

The ground tilted again, groaning as it did so. Aaliyah lurched a little deeper into the hole. Her arms ached. Her fingers were shredded. She couldn’t hold on much longer.

Everything juddered violently. She shut her eyes and steeled herself, desperately trying to muster a few last ounces of strength.

But she couldn’t. She was done for. Nothing left to give.

She opened her eyes and screamed.

The door split in two. Goga nearly lost his grip on the doorframe.

The room titled again. Aaliyah slid further into the gorge.

A dark figure materialized from the clouds of dust swirling outside the cell.

And someone called her name, the voice filling her with hope.

She cried out his name.

“Jake!”

But then her mind said,
No, it’s a dream, Jake’s a prisoner in Baghdad – or dead.

“Aaliyah,” he called again.

“Jake! Oh, God, Jake!”

He stepped from the debris, an impossible angel.

“Aaliyah, hold on,” he said and threw himself on the ground, reaching out to her.

She smiled and cried and said his name over and over.

He reached for her. She reached for him. Desperate to feel his skin on her skin, his hand in hers. And their fingers were so close, so close.

Her heart lifted at the inevitability of his touch.

But his touch did not come. Horror came.

Her other hand was too weak to bear her weight.

The darkness wrenched at her. The emptiness pulled her down.

And she plunged into the rift.

Jake’s horrified face shrank above her, a dwindling vision in an ever decreasing circle of light.

But still she thought he would come for her. Still she thought he would be her saviour and rescue her.

As she fell, a voice from the cell, a heavily accented voice, said, “Forget her, you must kill Nimrod.”

She tried to shout at him not to forget her.

But the voice – Goga’s – came again:

“Forget the woman, save the world, forget her, for – ”

But the words died in the darkness that engulfed her, and she fell.

LAXMAN was going to kill Alfred Fuad.

He stormed through the tunnel as dust and debris rained on him. He ignored it. He ignored his men and the Iraqi workers and students as they fled the other way. He had one thing on his mind, and nothing was going to stand in his way.

Slaughter that fucker.

He’d heard the message on the mobile phone. George Fuad telling his brother to kill Laxman and his men. Telling him to use them as bait to draw Nimrod out of his hole. Telling him to sacrifice them.

“Go on, then,” Lawton had said. “I’ll leave you be, if you leave me be.”

Laxman agreed. He didn’t really want to be bothering with Jake Lawton. Not unless he was being paid to sort him out. And since Fuad had no intention of compensating White Light Ops for their work, any obligation Laxman had to protect his lying, cheating employer had been cancelled. And it would be further cancelled when he stuck the barrel of the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun he’d nabbed off the body of a dead soldier up Fuad’s arse and pulled the trigger.

Lawton had been right. You couldn’t trust Alfred Fuad. You couldn’t trust either of the Fuads, or their allies.

Laxman fumed. He was angry with himself for having been stupid. But he’d feel better once he’d skinned Fuad alive.

The earth was shaking. The walls were giving way. The tunnels were falling in on themselves. The ground was tearing and tilting.

As they fled, students and workers fell into the fissures. Their shrieks echoed through the underworld.

Some slipped down a cleft in the ground and held on, screaming for Laxman to help them as he hurtled past. But he ignored them, and eventually they lost their grip. Or the earth’s plates shifted and pressed together, crushing the victims to a pulp, leaving nothing but a hand poking out of the ground.

Laxman was in pain. Lawton had beaten him up pretty well. But he was determined
. He wanted revenge. He and his men had been betrayed, and he would never let that pass.

It was a long way down. It took him a while to make his way into the tunnels
. He’d lost track of time.

The passageway behind him was quickly filling with rubble. But he’
d made a decision that killing Fuad was more important than living. He would think about survival after completing his mission.

Adrenaline had kept him going, but now his leg started to ache.

He hobbled through the raining rubble. It was all falling apart. The noise was thunderous.

Keep going
, he told himself.

He was reaching the base of a slope, now. It was where the tunnel had previously come to a dead end. But they’d been drilling through it over the past few days. Beyond the rubble left by the drill, Laxman saw pillars. Tall, gigantic pillars. A forest of them, spreading out for miles, disappearing into the gloom.

He clambered through the gap in the wall and then froze.

Piles of masonry filled the chamber. And more continued to fall. The pillars shook. A roaring sound deafened Laxman, and his ears hurt. He scanned the vast room of columns, the piles of rubble – and then his eyes locked on a figure.

Crouching next to a mound of masonry, from which spouted a tube of smoke, was Alfred Fuad.

Rage erupted in Laxman.

He bounded towards Fuad.

With Laxman only yards away from his target, he skidded to a halt.

Fuad wheeled to face him. The man’s face was red and wet with sweat. He had been working on a computer, typing away, sending a message, Laxman guessed.

Then a tinny voice came from the laptop.

“Alfred! Alfred, show me again!”

“What the fuck’s going on?” said Laxman.

“He’s here,” said Alfred Fuad. “George, he’s here.”

He was speaking to his brother. “I fucking
am
here,” said Laxman. “You tell your fucking brother that after I torture you to death, I’m coming for him.”

“He’s here,” said Alfred again.

“I told you, I am – ”

Fuad turned to glare at Laxman, his face creased with rage.

“Not you, you shit,” he screamed, “not you,” and then he laughed hysterically.

The pile of rubble spewed fire now – fire and smoke.

Laxman gazed up.

And then in the smoke a figure formed. At first it was vague, just a shape. But it slowly gathered density.

Laxman retreated a few steps.

Fuad shrieked with laughter.

The figure was huge, about fifteen feet tall. It stepped from the fire and the smoke. It flexed its powerful body.

Laxman tried to say something, but no words came from his throat.

And Nimrod glared at him through his red, fiery eyes and saw not a tough, battle-hardened soldier, but a flea in need of crushing.