Keystone (27 page)

Dr Patterson entered the
Administrator’s office, leaving the door wide open behind him.

“She’s been unconscious
for almost twenty-four hours now,” he said angrily. “What did your man
Walker
give her?” He stood boldly in
front of the desk with his legs uncharacteristically apart. Realising this, he
shuffled his left leg slightly closer to the other and regained some of his
more reserved self.

Seth Mallus
turned round in his chair to face him. “Nothing that will harm her, Henry.
Simply a facilitator for sleep.” He stood up and walked to the video wall
dressed as a window. Reaching behind a blind to the left-hand side of it, he
switched it off. “She was very reluctant to go with Walker, aggressive even.
The drug was to protect her, more than anything else.” He ushered Patterson out
into the corridor, and then followed him. “Which is also why she has been
restrained,” he continued.

“To stop her
hurting anyone?” Patterson asked bitterly.

“You are
cynical. To stop her hurting
herself
,
” he corrected.

Still walking
along the same corridor, they arrived at a long window on their left. Patterson
stopped and gestured to the small room beyond the glass.

“Is
this
really necessary?”

In the middle
of the small room was a single hospital bed in which Gail lay, fast asleep.
Nonetheless, thick restraints wrapped round her body and limbs and held her to
the mattress. Set into the headrest of the bed was a small computer screen, on
which a line made its way from left to right, jerking rhythmically to the woman’s
pulse. Apart from this and a small bedside table, the room was bare and
sterile.

Mallus nodded
slowly. “You seem genuinely upset. And yet Dr Gail Turner was brought here on
your request.”

“I did not
request her specifically, and I wouldn’t have requested anyone had I realised
it would have been against their free will!” he retorted.

“I think that
you may be forgetting yourself, Doctor,” Mallus warned sternly. “Dr Turner will
be awake within the hour, sometime after which I will arrange for her to join
you in your office.” He didn’t leave much room for argument, but just as
Patterson was about to reply, he continued, more softly. “We would not normally
have gone through this process, as you can see for yourself from the perfectly
normal way in which I recruited you. However I know you understand that the
situation, despite our best efforts, was beyond our control.”

Patterson said
nothing, but dipped his chin almost imperceptibly.

“Good,” he
said. “Because together, and with her help, we
have
to find out what Aniquilus is.”

Gail awoke, opening her eyes
slowly, tentatively, like a child who dare not peek at what was under the
Christmas tree for fear that it may all disappear without warning.

Please, not another dream
.

The past few
hours, days, maybe even weeks, had been the strangest of her life,
notwithstanding the fantasy of youth, where as a small person barely four feet
high you could walk in a land of giants, dragons and adventure every day.
 

What the hell?
The fact that she was even
thinking of dragons and giants raised fears that she was again dreaming, and
that she had not woken up after all. Widening her eyes she let the bright white
light of her surroundings flood her pupils, which shrank to the size of pin
heads as a result. She forced her eyelids to stay open against their will for
as long as possible, until eventually they snapped shut and opened again, less
wide this time, like the shutter of a high-speed camera.

Instead of
bright-white light, she saw a bright-white wall directly in front of her.

“Hello!” she
shouted. Immediately, the pressure in her inner ears reported back to her the
fact that she was lying on her back. The wall in front of her had to be the
ceiling.
This is good
, she thought.
The fact that she heard herself perfectly, and understood what she was saying,
had to be good. The fact that her sight and ears were now working together as a
team, giving her balance and a sense of direction, was even better.
I am awake
. Within milliseconds of this
realisation, Gail decided to get up and see where she was.

She struggled
with her arms and legs, even wriggling her whole body, for several minutes
before admitting defeat. She tried to lift her head but couldn’t. Peering along
her nose and over her outstretched body, she understood why: thick belts were
wrapped around her. She counted at least ten, tightly hugging her body and
limbs which underneath were covered by a thin white sheet. Beyond her two
wriggling feet, she could see the end of the bed, white-painted metal, with
what looked like a flip-chart attached to it.
 
Apart from that, her field of vision was clear – the room seemed empty.
To her right, she could just see the top of a door and a window frame, but it
was either night time or it was an internal window, because the only light she
could see came from two long strips in the ceiling.

Gail had never
stayed in hospital herself, but knew exactly what a hospital bed looked like.
From what she saw at the foot of the bed, this was definitely one of those. The
last time she had seen one had been when she had visited a friend after an
operation. The doctors had said that they had got to her appendix just in time,
and that another day without surgery may have been fatal. She could still
remember the big grin on her face as they had told her she would have to take
two weeks off school.

But her friend
hadn’t been strapped to her bed. Simply thinking about her restriction made her
develop an itch in the small of her back. Shortly after that, the back of her
left knee started tickling, followed quickly by the sole of her right foot.

Within a
minute, she was in mental anguish, writhing within her restraints, trying in
vain to rub some cover or strap against the numerous itches that seemed to have
attacked from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
 
Arching her back, she pushed her chest
tightly against the straps. Lifting herself half an inch from the mattress
behind her, she involuntarily let out a long, pained moan. It was quickly
followed by a more verbal complaint.

Then, she
started screaming her head off; putting to full use the only part of her that
had not been restrained.

All of a
sudden she heard the door to her right open.
 
A man in a white coat entered and stood at the end of the bed. She
looked at him and abruptly stopped screaming, although she consciously kept a
few choice words at the ready.

“You’re
awake,” he said, matter-of-factly, as if his job was to go into rooms and make
comments on such things.

She hadn’t
expected him to say that, and had to make a few quick changes to her pre-chosen
expletives. Nonetheless, her reply brought a touch of pink to the pale white
cheeks of the young man.

“It’s good to
see that you are feeling better, Dr Turner,” he replied, ignoring her verbal
assault. “You certainly
look
much better
than yesterday.”

American
, she thought to herself.
Or possibly Canadian
? She widened the
scope, not confident enough in her ability to distinguish between the accents
of the two countries. He unclipped the flip-chart from the bottom of the bed
and looked beyond her towards the bed’s headrest. She tried to tilt her head
back to see what he was looking at, but gave up quickly, deciding it was
probably some kind of medical monitoring equipment.

“I’ll let the
kitchen know you’re able to eat again.” He turned and walked towards the door,
taking the chart with him.

“Wait!” she
exploded, following him with her eyes. “Wait!” It was painful to look down and
to the right without being able to move her head, but she forced herself. “How
long have I been here? Where am I?”

He stopped and
went to the side of the bed. He was now looking down on her face. It was a more
comfortable position for her eyes, but with his head silhouetted against the
bright light from the ceiling, she felt far less at ease. She was suddenly much
more aware of her own helplessness and vulnerability.

“Where am I?”
she asked again, this time less defiantly.

He smiled
widely, displaying almost all of his perfectly straight, peroxide-white teeth.
“You’re not in Kansas anymore,” he grinned, as if sharing a private joke with
her.

What the hell was that supposed to mean?
She’d never been to Kansas before anyway, so did he mean to say that since
meeting with the Professor she’d been there,
too
? And where did that leave her now?

The man saw
the confusion on her face and frowned briefly. “You’re like Dorothy, see?” He
could see she didn’t. “Yellow brick road? Toto? The Munchkins?” After each
question he paused eagerly, as if they all held the key to his secret code.
“Aw, Jesus,” he rolled his eyes. “Have you never seen the Wizard of Oz?”

How could she
shake her head with it strapped down? Instead she curled her bottom lip out
slightly – which she managed to accompany with a half shrug despite the
restraints.

“Really old
movie, before World War II,” he offered.

“
Before
World War II? You expect me to
know quotes from a film that’s over a hundred years old?” she laughed bitterly.
“Where am I?” she snapped.

His grin
faded. “You’re in Florida. Flo-ri-da.” He broke the word down into syllables
slowly, as if her not knowing the Wizard of Oz made it likely that she wouldn’t
know what
that
was, either. “In the
US.”

Again he
turned and left, but no matter how much she shouted, this time he didn’t come
back. Instead, the door closed behind him and she found herself alone.

She was still
strapped to the bed, and she was supposedly in Florida, and not Egypt. But no
matter how strange or unlikely all that seemed she now knew for sure that she
wasn’t dreaming anymore.

Now she
remembered what the Professor had told her in his office in Cairo:
Dr Henry Patterson
. And she also
remembered where that Patterson worked:
near
Tampa, Florida
. This could only mean that Patterson knew that the Professor
had told her, or was going to tell her, the truth about the Amarna books, and
was now seeking to ‘buy’ her silence as well; by abducting her and strapping
her to a bed! She gritted her teeth and pulled against her restraints with
added passion.

Gail couldn’t
wait to meet Dr Henry Patterson.

Cairo buzzed and hummed liked a
beehive. Cars streamed constantly through the wide avenues, motorcycles flying
between them, weaving their ways this way and that with effortless skill. On
the pavements pedestrians swarmed, busy with their daily chores, idle gossip
and sightseeing. The tourists were easy to tell apart from the locals, and as
George made his way calmly across the road with the hundred or so people he had
been waiting with for the little green man, he liked to think that he looked
more like one of the locals.

For one thing,
he didn’t have a camera grafted to his hand; most of what was worth
photographing in Cairo was already on his computer. And for another, he wasn’t
wearing insanely conspicuous khaki shorts, shirt and sandals. He shook his head
in amusement at the group of visitors in front of him; probably their thinking
had been that to visit Egypt, land of the pharaohs, you had to dress like an
explorer. To him it was even funnier because that was exactly what the Spaniard
Martín had been wearing, and it was exactly what he had been wearing on his
first visit to the country, all those years ago. In Egypt, it stood out like a
Hawaiian shirt at a wedding.

After crossing
the road, he took a left turn and headed down a narrow alley, away from the
main flow of the tourist crowd which was probably heading towards the walled
compound of Old Cairo.

“
Assif!
” he said as he brushed past a man
on a bicycle. George had managed to memorise a few words of Arabic, which he
found added to his casual jeans and t-shirt in distancing him from the
tourists.
 
He was still unmistakably
foreign – his pale skin soon went lobster-red in the sun.

He turned a
corner and stopped in front of a small metal gate. He hovered his index finger
over the column of buzzers. None were marked, and he suddenly realised that he
couldn’t for the life of him remember which one he’d pressed on his last visit,
a couple of years earlier: too much had happened since then. Each of the ten
floors had two buttons, a total of eighteen flats, as the first floor was for
maintenance and storage. He finally pressed the left button of the seventh
floor; he knew it was at least a couple from the top; seven sounded about
right.
 
After a short pause, a man’s
voice came from the small speaker. George didn’t understand any of it.

“
Ma esmouk Ben?
” he said tentatively. He
didn’t know how to say
Is that Ben
,
and
what is your name Ben
was the
closest he could come up with.

The reply came
thick and fast.
Obviously not, then
,
he thought pressing the next one down after a garbled apology.

“
Ma esmouk Ben?”
he repeated his question
as the second person answered.

“
La!”

“
Hal tatakallum Inglesi
?” he stumbled
around the sentence. That was it, pretty much the end of his Arabic phrases: it
was always suitable to end with
Do you
speak English
. There was a shout from the speaker and the man laughed.

“Siix tooo,
not waan; tooo,” came the heavily accented reply.

“
Shukran
!”
Six-2
, he thought. Even if he’d remembered that, without labels on
the buttons it wouldn’t have helped him: he had no idea, in a country that
spoke Arabic, if 2 would have been the button on the left, or on the right.

He pressed the
only other button on the sixth row.
 

“Ben!” he
exclaimed with relief as the familiar voice answered.

“Ha! George,
yes it’s me! Come up!” Ben sounded ecstatic, and quickly buzzed him through the
iron gate.

George
remembered that the last time he had visited, the lift had been out of order;
Gail and he had stood in it with the door open for a couple of minutes before
one of Ben’s neighbours had walked past, laughing. This time, however, it
seemed to be working, and the door slid closed silently. The lift’s soft female
voice said something in Arabic as he pressed for the sixth floor.

At their first
meeting ten years earlier, Ben and George had immediately clicked. His sense of
humour matched George’s perfectly, and whilst there were a few years between
them, they shared similar hobbies, namely sport, television and computers.
Archaeology, it had turned out, wasn’t one of Ben’s strong points anyway.

Over the
years, they had seen each other dozens of times. Ben even visited them in
England and worked for a year in London, during which time his English had been
perfected, which was more than George could say about his Arabic.

But this time
was very different; George had never been to see Ben in Cairo
without
Gail
.

When the lift
door opened again, he was met by Ben’s familiar grin and wide open arms.

“George!” he
exclaimed. “It’s been a long time!”

“A year or two,”
George agreed. Instead of a hug, Ben clasped George’s outstretched hand,
shaking it vigorously while at the same time gripping his shoulder. No matter
how good friends they were, it always took George a moment to adjust to his
enthusiasm.

“Sorry I
missed your calls,” he said, leading him towards the door of his flat. “How are
things? Did you just get here?”

George
hesitated. As soon as he’d been told to go back to his hotel by Captain Kamal
of the Cairo police, he had tried to call Ben. Unfortunately, there had been no
response on the landline, and either Ben had changed his mobile number or it
was turned off in a drawer somewhere.

Since then, he
had tried once more, the previous evening, again with no success. It had been
on his third attempt, leaving the café that morning, that Ben had picked up. In
the briefest of conversations, they had agreed to meet at Ben’s flat later that
morning.

“Actually, I
landed on Tuesday.”

Ben stopped in
his tracks. “
I
landed? Have you been
married that long that you forgot your beautiful wife at home, George?” Ben was
grinning, but his eyes betrayed genuine concern. “Where is Gail?”

George had
honestly thought that they would have at least made it inside Ben’s home before
the question came out. As it was, despite several days adjusting to Gail’s
death, he hadn’t fully prepared himself for telling someone face-to-face about
it. Telling his parents via the videophone had been hard enough, but somehow
this was different. His bottom lip started to quiver and he fought to control
it.

 
“George, what’s wrong?” he asked, the long
pause too much for him. Before waiting for an answer, he pushed the door to his
flat open and ushered his friend through. Closing the door behind them, he took
George to the living-room and sat him on a long, black-leather sofa before
repeating his question.

In front of
the sofa, a large flat-screen television showed four different feeds
simultaneously. Ben reached for the remote and turned the screen off.

Apart from the
noise of Cairo, which still managed to filter through the closed windows, and
the low hum of the air conditioning unit, silence descended on the room.
“George, what’s wrong?” Ben asked again.

“Gail came
here on Monday,” he began. It wouldn’t be so hard if he just told the story as
it was; simply a series of facts. “She came to visit the Professor, because of
the finding of the Stickman on Mars.” Ben’s eyes lit up at this. He was going
to interrupt when George asked: “I take it you know about the Professor?”

“How could I
not,” he gestured towards the television. “Apparently he was murdered by some
petty thief on Monday. I kind of assumed that was why you came: to pay your
respects.” He lifted his head suddenly. “And Gail? If she went to see him on
Monday, was she hurt, too? Is she alright?”

The emotional
nosedive that George had been in since seeing Gail’s body three days earlier
had pretty much levelled out. From having been told that his wife was missing,
to being confronted by the unwelcome news that she was dead, and then being
informed by the police that not only was she the only suspect in the murder of
the Professor but that her motive was the theft of a few books, he thought he
had reached the end of the week with fairly thick skin. He had even managed to
discuss funeral arrangements with Captain Kamal as if the punch in the face had
never happened, and had looked into transporting Gail’s urn on his return
flight. But now he realised that he had not yet fully opened up to anyone; the
only person in whom he could normally confide was now gone, and he was a
widower.
 

She was dead.

He was as low
as he could get. Meeting face to face with a common friend, someone he had met
with Gail and who had only known them as a couple, made it painfully obvious
that a large part of him was missing. And now he had to tell this friend that Gail
was dead, and that according to the police, she murdered the Professor, another
common, if not so close, friend. He looked at Ben and tried to speak, but his
lips and throat were too dry for the words to slide out, so instead he croaked.

As if reading
his mind, Ben got up and returned seconds later with a glass of ice-cold water.
He sat down again sombrely. “She was there, wasn’t she?” he asked. “She was
with the Professor?”

George gulped
down a mouthful of the water and nodded. It was easier like this, he thought
briefly; easier for Ben to guess than for him to say the words.

“Was she hurt
also?”

He nodded
again.

“Is she
alright?”

He shook his
head slowly; tears welled up in his eyes. He’d shed so many over the last few
days; quiet, private tears. But now they were building up in front of Ben, he
tried to fight the urge to cry.

This was no
easier than just coming out with it. So he told Ben everything. He told him
about Gail’s cold body in the morgue, about how he’d punched a captain of
Cairo’s police force on the chin, and about the alleged theft of books from the
Professor’s office. He told him about the Amarna stickman on Mars, about how it
had upset Gail, and how the Professor had asked her to come to Cairo as soon as
possible to discuss it.

And he told
him about Martín Antunez, the Spanish ESA employee who had been trying to get
hold of Gail on Monday, and who on Wednesday had met George in Cairo and had
been with him ever since. He even mentioned Martín’s short-lived abduction
theory. He finished repeating himself, going over in disbelief his
identification of Gail’s body, and how he had punched Captain Kamal in the
head.

When he’d
finished he felt drained, his soul empty like a reservoir after the breaking of
a dam. He’d let his tears come out in floods, without holding back, for the
first time since Gail’s death. He could easily have felt quite foolish at his
emotional outbreak. Instead, he simply didn’t care; what had to come out had
come out, and he sat limply on the sofa.

Ben sat
rigidly next to him, stunned by the barrage of unwelcome news. After a while,
George blew his nose with a tissue from a box that Ben had passed to him
sub-consciously during his outburst. As if waking him from his trance, Ben
looked up with a look not just of sadness but also bewilderment.

George looked
at his friend as he finished wiping his nose.

“What?” he
asked, querying Ben’s puzzled look.

“George. I am
devastated by this news, but I’m also confused. This policeman said Gail
murdered the Professor?”

George hesitated.
“Yes.”

Ben raised
both eyebrows and looked to his feet. “I cannot believe that the Gail I know
would kill anyone, let alone the Professor, to steal a few books, no matter how
valuable.” He shook his head slowly. “There is more to this story, George, I am
sure of it.”

George didn’t
know what to make of Ben’s reaction. What had he expected? Tears, screams,
breaking down and beating the floor with his fists? He didn’t know, but he was
sure it wasn’t this. “What are you trying to say?” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry, I
know this isn’t what you need to hear,” Ben said. “But there are parts of your
story that don’t add up. Firstly, was Gail so upset by the news of the Amarna
stickman that she was concerned about your financial security?” George shook
his head. “And assuming that she was worried about money, and
did
steal the books, why would she then
run across town with them under her arm, aimlessly? Why didn’t she get a Taxi?
There are hundreds of Taxis on those streets.”

“Because she
panicked?” George suggested.

“How
spontaneous is Gail?” Ben asked. He almost corrected the tense of the verb, but
quickly dismissed the thought.

George
shrugged. “Sometimes, very. That’s why we got to Egypt in the first place.”

“But only
after she’d been thinking about what to do for her dissertation for several
months!” Ben countered. “The Gail I know is very deliberate.”

At this,
George had to agree.

“Let’s ignore
the Professor’s murder. I am certain Gail would not do that. Let’s also ignore
the theft. I can’t see a reason for it, nor any capability in Gail to go
through with something like that. The last part is her running from the Museum,
and ending up in a canal, having run
away
from the airport. Imagine for some crazy reason she can’t find a taxi. She gets
lost. The navigation on her phone is broken. Don’t you think she might have
called you?”

“Yes,” he
admitted. He remembered checking his phone on Tuesday morning, and there had
been no missed calls. He had been having a bit of a get together with some
friends on Monday evening, but he hadn’t drunk much; he would have realised if
the phone had rung. “She didn’t try to call me at all after meeting the Professor.”