by Simon Toyne
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.
27
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 for
ward 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.
28
Gabriel glanced at the iPhone, the display bright in the dimness of the bar. He was in the mezzanine of the Sahnesi, the former theatre and opera house built for the European aristocracy who started arriving in Ruin en masse in the eighteenth century after it became a destination on the Grand Tour. These days it was a popular cinema and bar complex, and it had free Wi-Fi, which was the reason Gabriel had come here.
He pressed the browser icon on the screen and tapped HOSPITAL RUIN into the search window. Ajda had bought the phone from a secondhand tech store in the Lost Quarter specializing in all the stuff boosted from tourists. It had been expensive, but it came with a SIM card that could not be traced and gave him all the processing power of a laptop. The search came back with a phone number for the main reception which he dialled.
‘Davlat Hastenesi Hospital.’
‘Yes, I have some flowers to send to a couple of patients and am trying to find their room numbers.’
‘Do you have the names?’
‘The first is Mrs Kathryn Mann, the second, Liv Adamsen.’
He heard the tapping of fingers on a keyboard. ‘Mrs Mann is being kept in room 410 in the secure psychiatric building. Miss Adamsen is in room 406 of the same building — no, wait a second. Actually Miss Adamsen was discharged today.’
‘When?’
‘It doesn’t say. Only that her room is now vacant.’
‘Did she have any visitors?’
There was a pause. ‘What has this got to do with delivering flowers?’
‘They have already been sent. I’m just checking to see if they got to her before she left.’
More tapping.
‘The only thing on the system is a police visit this afternoon.’
‘Thank you.’
Gabriel hung up, his mind racing with the implications of this new information. He switched back to the browser and typed RUIN POLICE FORCE into the search window. There was a hot-linked phone number under the first entry. He tapped it and returned the phone to his ear.
‘Ruin Police Division.’
‘Hello, could you please put me through to Inspector Arkadian in Homicide.’
‘Inspector Arkadian is on leave at present.’
‘Then could you patch me through to his mobile phone?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. Is there another member of the Homicide team who could help you?’
‘No. I need to speak to Inspector Arkadian specifically. It’s extremely urgent.’ He cast around for anything that would give him some leverage. ‘Tell him Gabriel Mann wants to talk. I escaped from police custody earlier today and I want to give myself up — but I’m only prepared to do it to him, and only if he calls me back within the next five minutes.’
29
The airport bookshop was filled with all the usual things catering for the average bored airline traveller. Liv made her way to a shelf of phrasebooks by the checkout desk and scanned the titles, picking out any with an unusual alphabet. She wanted to prove to herself that the word she had heard in her head was merely an echo of something she must have picked out in amongst the babble of voices. If she could just find out what language it was in then she could board her flight without worrying the whole way home that she was hearing voices and going nuts. By the time she reached the bottom shelf she had eight books in her hand. She opened the first, an Arabic phrasebook, and turned to the K section, looking for the word ‘key’. She found it and compared the translation to the symbols on her hand. It wasn’t even close. She did the same with the other seven books, working her way through Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese. None of them matched.
Dammit.
She jammed the books back and turned to go then stopped as something caught her eye on the next shelf. It was a book with a picture of a tablet on its cover with faint markings on its surface. They were not the same as the symbols Liv had written on her hand, but they were close. She took it down and opened it, only to discover that it was not a phrasebook — it was a history book. The inside flap provided a second shock. The photograph on the cover was of a five-thousand-year-old Sumerian tablet inscribed with a long-dead language. So she couldn’t have overheard it in the departure hall. She flipped through the book in search of pictures of other ancient texts. She was about to give up and dash for the plane when she found something. It was a photograph of a carved stone cylinder with a hole through its centre. Beneath it was a broad strip of wet clay the cylinder had been rolled across, leaving a square o
f text behind made up of lines and triangles.
They looked exactly like the symbols on Liv’s hand.
The caption identified it as a cylinder seal, an ancient method of reproducing messages. By inserting a rod or stick through the centre it could be rolled over wet earth or clay to reveal the writing inscribed on its surface. Often these were spells, laid on the edges of fields to bring forth bounty. The message on this particular seal, however, was unknown. It was written in a form of script known archaeologically as ‘proto-cuneiform’ or more poetically as ‘the lost language of the gods’ because of its great age and because its meaning had been forgotten in time.
Great, Liv thought, now I’m hearing voices in a language that hasn’t been spoken in nearly six thousand years; so much for putting my mind at rest.
A tannoy announcement cut through the muzak calling for last passengers for Cyprus Turkish Airline flight TK 7121 to Newark.
She was out of time. She ran to the checkout, pulling the last of her Turkish lira from her pocket to pay for the book. She’d read it on the plane — always assuming she would still make it.
30
Brother Gardener threw another broken branch on to the fire and picked up the last, hoping this one might reveal something the others had not.
Following the earlier meeting he had organized a team of gardeners to scour the grounds and collect all fallen branches and leaves while there was still some light left in the day to see by. He knew from bitter experience that the only way to stop the spread of blight was to act fast and burn it out.
As each diseased branch was brought to him he had carefully dismantled it, like a pathologist examining a corpse, looking for clues that might reveal the cause of the contagion. He had found nothing. There was no fungus residue, no burrowing insects or weevils nor any of the other parasites that plagued a garden and spread disease such as this. He had never seen anything like it before. It seemed more like a dry rot than anything else, but he had never known it take hold so quickly in living wood. It was as if the life had just left it — the sap turned to poison, the wood to dry pulp.
