The Key s-2

by Simon Toyne

  ‘Yes!’ The voice beyond the door sounded busy and officious.

  The soldier opened the door and stood aside to let them pass.

  Inside was an office with a desk, a military laptop, a phone and some aluminium folding chairs. There was also a lean colonel with a shining, shaved head and skin so black he could have been carved from ebony. He was sitting behind the desk reading an official-looking fax displaying two pictures: one of her and one of Gabriel. Liv’s knees almost buckled at the sight of them.

  The soldier stepped forward and placed their passports on the desk. ‘Thank you,’ the colonel said, ‘that will be all.’

  Liv heard the door close, and boots marching away. The colonel inspected the passports then finally looked up, fixing on Gabriel and shaking his head with the air of a disappointed parent.

  ‘You should have stayed in the service,’ he said.

  Gabriel nodded, as if agreeing with him. ‘And you should put some pictures up in here. Make it a bit more homely.’

  A grin split the colonel’s face and he was on his feet and crushing Gabriel in an embrace before Liv knew what was happening. Gabriel released the colonel from the bear hug and turned to her.

  ‘Liv Adamsen, meet James Washington. We went through Special Forces training together when he was just a captain and I was a lowly grunt.’

  ‘And now I’m a colonel in Military Intelligence and you’re a civilian on the run from the law. Where did it all go wrong?’ Washington stepped back behind the desk and handed over the fax. ‘This came in through the wires a couple of hours ago. It’s got a Homeland Security code on it, so you must have made yourself some pretty serious enemies.’

  Gabriel skimmed through the fax and handed it to Liv. It was a rehash of the same information she had heard on the news in her New Jersey hotel room. The only new information was about her. It described her as a kidnap victim who needed to be located urgently to continue unspecified medical treatment. There was a number to call if they were spotted or apprehended.

  ‘Have you checked this number?’ she asked.

  ‘I ran a router test on it. It’s a dummy exchange that patches calls through to somewhere else. We can’t get a location off it, if that’s what you mean. The key thing is that it wound up on my desk, so whoever’s looking for you knows you’re heading this way.’

  Gabriel nodded. ‘Did you have any joy with any of the Iraqi police files?’

  Washington nodded. ‘You sure know how to milk a favour.’ He pulled a folder from the top drawer of his desk and handed it over.

  Inside were two collated bundles of official documents written in Arabic.

  ‘They’re copies of Ba’athist intelligence dossiers seized during the liberation of Baghdad. There may be more, but to be honest you didn’t give me much time. It wasn’t easy getting hold of them and hopping a lift out here. Next time, you might want to give me more warning.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Gabriel said, flicking through the first sheaf of documents until he found a summary at the back in English.

  It was a collection of military and police reports — dated 16 Sept 2000 — detailing investigations into an incident in the desert outside Al-Hillah in Babil Province. An archaeological dig had been attacked by unknown forces, leaving no survivors. A list of twenty names was attached to the report, mostly local but with a few Westerners mixed in. John Mann was top of the list. It confirmed what Gabriel had always believed: the incident had nothing to do with the Iraqi government. But there was new information in the file. At around the time of the incident a military base had picked up intermittent radar contact with an aircraft moving south from the Turkish/Syrian border. Its speed and flight pattern suggested it was a helicopter. The same aircraft had been detected again heading north from the dig site about twenty minutes later, but weather conditions had been poor and contact was lost. The report concluded that it had been a hostile incursion by Turkish forces, though it didn’t speculate for what purpose.

  But Gabriel knew.

  The helicopter would have been full of agents from the Citadel, sent to retrieve the relics found at the site and leave no witnesses behind.

  The second bundle of documents showed that they had botched it.

  Someone had survived.

  The top sheet was a patient’s admission form for a psychiatric asylum on the outskirts of Baghdad. It was dated two weeks after the initial incident. The patient’s name was Zaid Aziz. He had been found close to death, wandering in the desert, sun-blind and raving, with severe burns to his arms and legs. He told his rescuers that he had survived an attack from a dragon. Further interrogation had identified him as one of the missing workers from the dig near Al-Hillah. His burns tallied with what they had discovered there. Whoever had carried out the atrocity had piled the dead bodies up, doused them with kerosene and set them alight. Aziz also had a bullet wound to his arm and one to the head. His medical notes theorized that he had been knocked out by the head wound and must have appeared dead to whoever had thrown his body in with the rest. The pain of his burning flesh must have brought him round and saved his life. Unfortunately, by the time he was found, the trauma and days of dehydration and fever from the onset of sepsis had affected his mind. The dossier included a collection of interviews by police and psychiatrists conducted over a number of years, but nothing that shed new light on the incident. Aziz remained fixated on the same delusions: a fire-breathing dragon flying out of the night, and a ghost that had risen from the ground and drifted into the desert — something the psychiatrists interpreted as an obscure reference to himself.

  Gabriel read through the notes with a growing sense of frustration. This man may have witnessed what happened to his father, but any knowledge of the attack appeared to have leaked from his cracked mind. It also slammed the door on one more avenue of enquiry. He had hoped the file would confirm that Iraqi Republican Guards had carried out the attack at Al-Hillah and shifted the relics to one of Saddam Hussein’s many palaces. If they had, there might have been some chance of recovering them. But all the file had done was confirm what he already knew. Whatever his father had found was now locked inside the Citadel.

  ‘Look at the date.’ Liv pointed to the top of the last interview sheet. ‘This interview took place less than six months ago.’

  Colonel Washington nodded. ‘Yep. He may be crazy as a bug, but he’s clearly as tough as tin. I don’t know if I would have survived twelve years in a Ba’athist mental asylum. Apparently the other inmates are scared of him. A year or so after he was admitted, he burned a man alive in a neighbouring cell. No one’s quite sure how he managed it. The other patients believe he gained some of the powers of the dragon. So no one bothers him — not even the orderlies.’ He checked his watch. ‘Now, I hate to hurry you, but what are your plans for the remainder of your stay in this fair country?’

  ‘We’re driving down to Al-Hillah.’

  ‘Are you nuts? Two unescorted Western civilians tooling down Highway 9 in a bright white pickup? Soon as you drop below Mosul you’ll be killed or kidnapped — or both. No, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to accompany me back to Command Centre in Baghdad. There’s a chopper picking me up at fourteen hundred hours and I think I need to take you in for further questioning… before I realize, to my certain embarrassment, that you are not the people we’re looking for and have to let you go. What you do after that is your own business.’

  He handed Gabriel a scratchpad and a pencil.

  ‘Before I return these files, you might want to jot down the address of that loony bin in Baghdad, just in case you’re at a loose end. I’m sure Mr Aziz would be glad of the visit. I can’t imagine he gets many.’

  94

  Hyde stepped out of the main building and into the heat of the day.

  ‘Over there,’ Tariq said, pointing east past the drilling tower.

  Squinting into the sun, he saw the dust cloud rising up on the horizon. Sand and dust storms were a constant hazard in t
he desert. They could spring up out of nothing and turn day to night within seconds. They also did more damage to equipment than bullets or bombs, so he spent more time watching out and defending against them than he did against possible aggressors, saboteurs or kidnappers.

  He walked swiftly over to the eastern perimeter and climbed the guard tower. Failure to react quickly to a sandstorm could shut down the whole operation for weeks. If sand got into an engine it would have to be stripped, cleaned and reassembled before it would work again. Guns seized when dust clogged the oil. Electronics shorted as microscopic grains of dust found their way into circuit boards. Even the men could go temporarily blind from tiny particles in the wind scouring away the surface of their eyes. Just another of the many, many reasons why Hyde loathed this country so much.

  As soon as he got to the top of the tower he raised his field glasses to study the column of dust. Like a small mountain on the march, it billowed up from the ground as if the earth had started to boil. At the moment it was relatively small and still some way off, but it was definitely heading their way. If it didn’t dissipate or change direction they would have to shut down until it had passed. Shutdowns cost money and time and the only reason he’d taken this job was because they’d offered him a profit share. So far, that equated to half a per cent of nothing.

  Hyde glanced at the windsock by the helipad. The wind direction was northwesterly, yet the storm was coming from the east. Perhaps there was a crosswind out there somewhere, which would blow the storm off course before it reached them — or maybe it wasn’t a dust storm at all.

  As he squinted through the binoculars, focusing on the leading edge of the column of dust to try to make out some detail, he saw a flash of white, then another. Hyde smiled. He was right. It wasn’t a force of nature at all, it was the Ghost, riding in with an army of horsemen spread out alongside him. The Bedouin always used this formation when riding at speed. It ensured they all breathed clean air and was an effective intimidation tactic, the rising dust cloud amplifying the presence of their approaching force.

  He watched them draw closer, the riders visible now to the naked eye, points of white at the leading edge of the dust cloud, like the small, sharp teeth of a huge animal. There were nearly thirty riders, dressed in white dishdashas with their keffiyehs drawn across their faces. It occurred to Hyde that this scene would have changed little in thousands of years: the horses, the men, even the clothes had remained the same throughout history. The only difference was the weapons.

  Hyde could hear the thump of hooves now, and something else, chopping its way through the air and getting louder. He turned and, in the blink of an eye, spanned the entire history of desert warfare. A helicopter gunship was skimming low across the ground and heading directly towards them. The guard started swinging his M60 towards it, but Hyde held up his hand and ordered the rest to do the same through his handheld radio. The chopper roared overhead and banked sharply, settling into a hover before dropping down to the helipad on the far side of the compound. The horsemen arrived at the perimeter fence at the same time.

  Descending from the guard tower, Hyde made his way over to greet the new arrivals. He could see one of the riders separate from the rest and drift over to the main gate. He waved at the guard to let him in then carried on over to the helicopter.

  It was a Bell AH-1W Super Cobra, or what the marines called ‘the world’s deadliest snake’. It was equipped with Hellfire missiles and a nose-mounted chain gun, slaved to the pilot’s helmet. Whatever he was looking at, that was where the bullets would go, ten per second with a sound like the sky being ripped apart. It also had the latest Forward-Looking Infra-Red (FLIR) instruments on board, which could pick up radiation from heat and any number of other sources. Ground troops had learned not to wash their clothes with commercial detergent because the brightening additives effectively made them glow in the dark. The Cobra was a loaner from a local airborne division, courtesy of an earlier request he had made and the impressive political pull of his employers. The side door slid open as he approached and a huge blond guy uncoiled himself from the back seat and stepped out to meet him.

  ‘Name’s Dick,’ the man said, thrusting out his hand and shooting him a cold smile that seemed like a challenge. He was more than a foot taller than Hyde and probably a hundred or so pounds heavier. ‘I’m here to collect the girl and take her back, once she has been re-ac-quired.’

  ‘Hyde,’ he said, grasping the hand and embarking on a short hand-crushing competition that, if he was honest, he lost. The guy was a monster. He was also now in charge.

  The giant let go of Hyde’s hand and looked up just as the rider dropped down from his horse and unwrapped the keffiyeh from his face.

  ‘You expecting an army?’ the Ghost said, nodding at the idling helicopter.

  ‘It’s good to be cautious,’ Hyde said, in no mood for his particular brand of shit today. ‘And it can find a target and kill it before it even knows it’s been spotted.’

  The Ghost looked the machine up and down then turned to Hyde and smiled. ‘It never found me. I suggest I organize my riders into tracking parties. Maybe your whirlybird can cover the eastern section while we cover the desert to the west. Is there anything out there we should know about — anything of yours that might not be marked on the maps?’

  Hyde looked into the pale eyes, knowing from the tone of his question that he already knew the answer. ‘There’re some excavation works left over from test drills about twenty or thirty clicks from here. There’s also a smaller compound further out with temporary huts and security. You’ll know it when you find it. They’ve been instructed to be aggressively defensive. I’ll warn them you’re in the area, but I still wouldn’t get too close.’

  ‘Sounds serious. Maybe you found something valuable out there.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Hyde turned and introduced the giant, partly to change the subject and partly to put the Ghost through the same hand-crushing ordeal he’d just had to endure. He watched the two men shake. The Ghost didn’t flinch. He just stared into the big man’s eyes and pulled him slowly down until his face was level with his. ‘You need to cover up,’ he said, his voice like fingernails on a blackboard. ‘Out here, someone as fair as you can easily get burned.’

  Then he let go of his hand and walked back to his men and his horses.

  95

  Baghdad

  The asylum stood on the southern fringe of the city, isolated at the end of a street. It looked more like a derelict maximum-security jail than a hospital. Razor wire stretched round the squared-off roof of a solid concrete block, a thick coating of dust covered every surface and at first sight it appeared to be deserted. It was only as they drove past that Liv saw people moving in the shadows — wraiths in the dust with watchful eyes.

  Washington had come with them. He said he had business in this part of town, but Gabriel doubted it. Either way, he was glad to have him along. Thanks to Washington’s credentials and stone-faced military demeanour it took them less than ten minutes to gain access to the asylum. Promising he’d be back to pick them up within the hour, he departed for his dubious meeting, leaving them to follow a man in white overalls down bare concrete corridors that smelled of urine, faeces and desperation. An occasional ceiling fan turned lazily above them, just enough to mix up the smells but not enough to cool the air.

  They progressed in silence, the state of the corridors and cells getting steadily worse the deeper they got into the stifling building. It was obvious that Zaid Aziz’s lengthy stay here had not earned him any privileges. As they dropped down another level, what natural light there was disappeared entirely. The only illumination came from a string of low-wattage bulbs that had been switched on by the guard as he reached the bottom of the stairs. The patients down here — if ‘patients’ was the right word — clearly spent most of their time alone in the dark with their madness and their demons. The guard stopped in the middle of the corridor and waved his hand in the direction of the last cell on
the left where the lights didn’t quite reach. ‘Aziz,’ he said, in a way that sounded as if he was spitting. Then he turned and walked away, clearly unwilling to spend any more time down here than he had to. They listened to his boots scuffing away up the steps, leaving them alone with the remnants of men in the dark. The ‘patients’ heard it too and the basement steadily filled with shuffling sounds and filthy chuckles that slid down the darkness towards them. Gabriel turned to Liv, wishing he had not brought her here, but she just smiled and reached out to take his hand.

  Then the corridor erupted in noise.

  For a few seconds they stood there, gripping each other as the roar of voices engulfed them and the bars shook violently the entire length of the corridor. There was a loud crash nearby as a man ran at them from the back of his cell and collided with the upright of his door, gashing his head deeply and sending a spray of blood into the air. Opposite, another man had bunched his pants down to his knees and was thrusting his hips violently against the bars, his penis, covered in sores and scars from previous abuse, waving obscenely as he moaned in pain and pleasure. They didn’t notice the figure behind them uncoil himself from the floor until an inhuman shriek split the gloom, instantly silencing the maniacal din and sending everyone scurrying back to the darkest corner of their cells.

  Gabriel spun towards the sound and discovered a knife-thin man watching him from behind the bars. He was naked from the waist up and the entire right-hand side of his body was covered with thick scars that looked more like scales than skin. They spread down his arm to a claw of a hand, up his neck and over the side of his head, robbing it of hair and tightening the skin so it pulled his face into a permanently quizzical look. And there was a smell coming off him that was very specific and very disturbing, given the man’s history: it was the smell of smoke.