“I…” I touched my head. Was I in pain?
“No need to talk. We will take you straight in for a CAT scan, Mrs. Ryan. I saw pictures from a security camera we have in each of our ambulances. I saw the blood, as I am sure you have, so it’s important we get your head scanned, in case you have a fracture. That is why you are here. We have a CAT scanner.”
We were in a low ceilinged room with white walls and a reception area. Doors at the far end were marked in Arabic and English. One of them said TESTS. Another said, ADMINISTRATION.
I tried to lean up. The doctor pushed my shoulder back down.
“Relax, Mrs. Ryan. It’s important we get this done as quickly as possible.” He raised a hand, clicked a finger, spoke fast in Arabic to a nurse who had appeared.
“We will give you a light sedative, Mrs. Ryan. It is important that you do not move inside the scanner.”
I blinked. When was I going to be able to get to a phone?
He held a green plastic clipboard in front of me.
“We need your consent to treat you and to carry out the CAT scan. Please sign here.” He pointed at a row of dots.
I took the form. It was in Arabic and English. They must be used to dealing with foreigners here.
“Where did you study?” I stared at the doctor.
“I spent six years at Imperial College in London.” He smiled back at me. “And I did my clinical placement at St. Bart’s.”
I leaned back, touched my head again. It came back bloody again.
“We will be bandaging you up first, Mrs. Ryan, but we can’t do anything without your signature.”
I looked at him, then at the nurse smiling beside him. I picked the pen from where it was held at the top of the clipboard, read the form, signed it.
I was wheeled into a room with beeping medical equipment. My head wound was cleaned, then bandaged.
After that they wheeled me down another white corridor and into a room with a giant white CAT scan device, a giant donut on its side at the far end of the room. The walls were white tiles. Through a door on one side I could see a control panel.
A nurse with a white face mask came out of the control room. She was wheeling a metal trolley. She leaned down to me.
“You are safe here.” She pulled my sleeve up, tapped at the crook of my elbow, then took a small steel needle from the tray, tested there was no air in it and put it near my elbow.
“Take a deep breath, please, and hold it.”
“What are you injecting me with?”
“A very small dose of anti-anxiety medication.”
She looked at me quizzically.
“Will it put me to sleep?”
“It is not that strong, Mrs. Ryan.”
A minute later everything felt right. I was in the right place. There was no need for me to hurry. I had lots of time.
I saw the white donut moving towards me. Then I was inside it. The voices in the room were gone. There was a clicking. Then a whirring. Then it was over. A face loomed over me.
I felt someone pick up my wrist, hold it. Then I was being wheeled out of the room.
“We are taking you to a ward,” said a voice. The nurse was smiling, leaning towards me, walking alongside.
The ward was empty. It had four beds, no windows, lots of equipment. I was hooked up to a drip, a monitor. I had to sleep.
In my dream I saw Sean. He was holding his hand out to me, pleading with me, soundlessly.
72
Xena’s mouth opened wide. She was in a hall that looked like an underground temple. It had rows of tall pillars with bulging lotus leaf capitals. Each pillar had paintings on it. One row of pillars was all yellow. Another was a faded red. Some had only hieroglyphs on them.
She looked up. Above her head was a round opening in a roof made of rectangular stone slabs, similar to the King’s Chamber, where she had come from. In this case the slabs rested on the tightly packed rows of pillars.
She looked around. She was in the middle of a bowl shaped depression in the floor.
Was this how people to be sacrificed were brought into this hall? Or was it a way out they had been told about?
She looked along the rows of columns. A feeling of awe came over her. The columns extended to the width of a football field. They were all perfectly uniform and about twenty feet tall. The hall was the biggest underground temple she had ever seen, even bigger than what they usually showed in movies.
And at each end of the row of pillars there was a giant statue. At one end it was clearly Isis, wearing a white horned headdress with a gold circle. Her costume was faded gold and red. At the other was a statue of Osiris, his face and hands pale green, a dust flecked gold crook and flail in his hands.
She looked through the gaps between the pillars. A row of gold covered boxes, higher than her, perhaps the size of an SUV, went one way, then the other.
This had to be the fabled Hall of Records. In each of these boxes there would be scrolls lying on shelves. She walked through the row of pillars and went up to one of the boxes. It had hieroglyphs embossed in its gold panels as well as symbols of Isis and Horus.
The front of the giant box had a split down the middle, with an iron rod as a bolt keeping the doors from opening. She touched the rod. It was cold, dusty. She pushed it to the left. The left door swung open with a loud creak, which made her jump and look around, as if she was expecting some guardian to appear from between the pillars.
Inside the box were shelves with papyrus rolls of various sizes stacked up. Many of them had crumbled to dust, but some were still intact. There was a passage down the middle, so you could walk into the box. She held the torch forward. Shadows sprung back, as if angry. Dust mites swam in the air. There was something dark at the back. A sweet smell assaulted her. Then she knew what it meant. It was a giant ant’s nest at the back. A big one.
She closed the door over, gently, then moved to the next box, cracked the front open. The sweet smell that struck her was stronger than in the last golden box. She closed the front again without looking inside. Were the ants eating the papyrus?
She kept walking. Between every box there was a thin pillar with snakes intertwined all the way up. Each was as high as the box. Each had a different hieroglyph at the top.
She moved the torch around constantly, then stopped, swinging it behind her. She thought she’d heard a rustling, far off.
About half way towards the statue of Isis there was a break in the wall of pillars. She moved towards it. There was what looked like an empty pool beyond the pillars here.
She walked towards it. The pool was long and narrow, like one of those underground swimming pools they had in some hotels, where there wasn’t much space. There were marble steps at either end. The bottom of the pool had sand in it. In front of the steps were marble seats at each end. On each corner of the pool there was a pillar with snakes intertwined.
It looked as if it had been an ancient healing pool.
She peered down into it. The wall of the pool was either made of gold or had a sheath of gold covering it, into which were carved hieroglyphs.
That was when she saw the sand moving.
73
I woke feeling half dead. I tried to turn on my side, but my arms and legs were strapped down. I arched my head up. I was in a semi darkened room. The red and white dots from electronic monitoring equipment cast an eerie glow over the bed. I looked at my feet. They hadn’t even taken my shoes off. What kind of a hospital was this? My anxiety rose fast.
I’d been a fool to allow them to sedate me. God only knew how long I’d been out. I shouldn’t have trusted that doctor. I had to get out of here. I pulled at the straps binding me. They weren’t as tight as they could be. They weren’t military grade. They weren’t cable ties either. They were hospital straps, not intended to restrain prisoners.
I worked both arm straps from side to side. There was a half inch of give in them and with some persistent pressure I should be able to get my hands free. I h
ad to act fast. If someone came in and found me in the process of trying to break out, my reward might be another stronger dose of sedative.
That had to be avoided at all costs.
My hands shook as I forced them again and again against the leather. I stopped for a moment, my heart beating fast in my throat, when I thought I heard something in the distance. Then I heard the noise again. It was something creaking in the air conditioning.
Every time I thought my hands might slip out I pushed them hard into the gap, but still they wouldn’t come free. My skin was raw, blistered. But I kept pushing, kept going, ignoring the burning sensation in my wrists.
And suddenly one hand was free.
That was one of my worst moments.
If anyone saw me now, they would know I was awake and trying to break free. I used both hands to push and pull at the other strap. My heart was beating fast. I took long, deep breaths, willing it to slow down. But it wasn’t working.
Then the second strap was free and a minute later my legs were free and I was stepping down onto the tiled floor. I could just about make out a door in the dim light. There was a crack of light under it.
I tried the handle.
It opened. I held it a finger’s width open and peered out into a brightly lit corridor. This was a different part of the building than I’d seen before. It had observation windows along the far wall. The rooms beyond the windows were all in darkness.
The rattle of a trolley sent a shiver through me. I closed the door, slowly. Someone was coming. My mouth was dry. I looked around for a weapon. The rattle from the corridor grew louder. I stepped behind the door, hoping to surprise whoever came in. I prayed it wasn’t some giant of a nurse I could barely scratch. I held my fists up. They were shaking.
74
Xena stepped back. Whatever was under the sand was progressing towards the far end of the pool. Was the sand filled with snakes? She turned, made her way back fast to the main part of the hall.
She reached the statue of Isis a few minutes later. It was bigger than it looked from far off, perhaps fifteen feet high, and made out of red sandstone, like many of the other giant statues in Egypt.
It had a wide base. She sat on it, turned her torch off. She wanted to see if there were any cracks of light, any indication that the hall had an exit to the surface.
But the darkness descended like a cloak. Nothing could be seen in any direction. She switched the torch on again. Shadows all around her jumped back, as if they were alive. The torch light was dimmer than before, but thankfully it still worked. She would have no hope of getting out of this hall in the dark.
She walked around the statue. There were hieroglyphs on its back. She stood on the base and looked at them. A memory came back to her.
The hieroglyphs were the Cannibal Hymn, the Old Kingdom hymn her mothers had taught her in secret, as proof that they were right to teach her to kill. She rubbed her fingers along a central part she remembered by heart, and recited the words out loud.
“Live on the fathers,
feed on the mother’s every part,
so the bull of heaven
rages inside.
Live on the being of every one,
Eat their entrails,
When they come, bodies full of magic,
From the Isle of Flame.”
She stopped. It was enough. She felt an old warmth inside her. To find the hymn here meant the mothers were right. Taking life to feed your desires was the way every ruler operated. Those who denied it were fools.
To become powerful, you only had to do what the hymn said. You had to devour those who stood in your way. It was the secret that gave her the power to do whatever was necessary without ever questioning herself.
She took a few steps to the right, then to the left, looking all around, but there was nothing else to be seen at this end of the hall, so she decided to make her way to the other end and the statue of Osiris.
As she was walking back she turned the torch off a few times, to save the battery. The final time she did this, as the center section of the hall came near and the pool, she thought she saw something moving across the stone floor, something dark and swift.
She stopped, held the torch up and turned on and waited, her legs tense, ready to defend herself or to run.
75
The noise from the corridor passed. I let my breath out, counted to thirty, pulled the door open, slowly. There was nobody in the corridor. I stepped out into it. I had to get out of this place.
My head was still woozy after the sedative, but I didn’t care. I looked one way, then the other. I headed for the end of the corridor, which had a smaller exit door. With luck this would be an emergency exit. As I passed each observation window I looked inside. They had trolley beds at the center of each room. I stopped at the last window.
The trolley bed in this room had white sheets and green blankets on it. They were hanging off the bed, as if someone had been taken from it in a hurry. My throat tightened. Had Asim been right about the experiments Yacoub was doing, but wrong about where he was doing them?
I ran as quietly as possible to the end of the corridor. I had to find out who had been in that room. The door at the end had a plastic sign above it. It had Arabic script and the word Ausfahrt, the German word for “Exit” on it.
I tried the handle. It opened. Beyond was a concrete walled exit staircase. I closed the door slowly behind me. There were no windows to give any indication of what floor I was on, but by looking up through the stairwell I could see two floors above. From what I remembered the building had two floors above ground level. I looked down the stairwell. There were at least three floors below me. Yacoub liked basements. Easier to hide what he was up to.
I headed down. The door on the next floor was the same on the one above. I opened it slowly, just a half an inch, enough to see into the corridor beyond. The corridor had steel cages on each side. It looked like a storage area. Inside the cages there were rows and rows of shelving with barrels on the lower levels, and above them cardboard boxes of all sizes and blue, yellow and red plastic containers that could have held anything.
I closed the door gently. I’d heard what sounded like a radio, tuned to an Egyptian pop music station. There was someone in there, guarding the stores.
I went down another level, cracked the door open on this one too. There was nothing beyond but darkness. I opened the door further, half expecting a shout at any moment, then put my hand along the wall, looking for a light. My head felt light, as if I was in a dream. I breathed deep to stop the trembling in my hand. I’d found the light switch. My finger hovered over it for seconds as I summoned to courage to press it.
A blaze of light lit another storage floor the instant I clicked the switch. I sighed with relief. This floor had steel cages with larger wooden boxes in them. Some were big enough to take a stretcher bed. At the far end was a glass walled office and a double width door.
No shouts rang out, so I assumed the floor was unoccupied. I turned off the light, closed the door, headed down the stairs again.
As I reached the next floor I saw I something different. The door on this floor had a steel padlock on it. I bent down and looked at it. I wouldn’t be getting through this door so easily. I hadn’t anything to even insert in the padlock to try to open it.
Should I go down again?
I looked over the stairwell. There were two floors below me. That was when I heard the alarm. It was ringing from a few floors above.
I headed down the stairs, fast. My legs felt weak. I knew what the alarm meant. At the next landing I tripped. I’d tried to go down too fast. As I lay with my cheek an inch from the concrete I heard a shout. I looked up. A man’s face had appeared two floors above, looking down at me, pointing.
76
Xena waited. Whatever it was that had scuttled across the floor was not making another appearance in the light from the torch.
Who knew how many different creatures lived and died down her
e in the dark? She walked on. The statue of Osiris loomed in front of her. He had a crook and a flail in his crossed arms and on his head there was a tall cap, which reminded her of something you’d see on a patriarch or a pope.
The statue was carved from red sandstone like the statue of Isis and towered above her. It too had a base you could sit on. She walked around it. On its back were the same hieroglyphs as on Isis. The cannibal hymn had clearly been important to whoever took part in ceremonies down here. She got a flashing vision in her mind of priests and priestesses lined up behind the statues, intoning the hymn slowly, with resonance, using the hieroglyphs on the back of the statue as a reminder of the words.
What a sound that would have created.
She walked beyond the statue. Just like at the other end, the wall here was made of three and four foot high slabs of limestone, all darkened with age. She looked at the gaps between them. It was the same as in the King’s Chamber up above, the blocks fitted together neatly, not allowing even air to get through the gaps.
But why did the air here not feel musty, stale? There had to be tunnels to the outside world. Xena followed the wall around the hall, all the way to where the pool was. On the far wall she saw a darker area in the stone.
She hurried towards it. Could this be a way out?
As she reached it she was running, her skin prickling. This was also in the area where that shape had been moving across the floor.
She stopped, stared, as she reached the darker area in the stone wall. If it was an exit, it was unlike one she’d ever seen. It was a large square area of dark stone, with a crack down the center. There was no obvious way through. She went up to the crack in the stone, tried to peer through it, but there was nothing to be seen. She banged the stone hard with her fist in frustration. An echo sounded from the stone.
77
I raced down the stairs. Multiple shouts rang out from above. I didn’t bother to look around. I tried the handle on the next door. It opened. There was a corridor ahead. It was in darkness. I ran into it.
The Cairo Puzzle Page 19
