Entangled (29 page)

As Chard and Murgh helped Kimp away, muttering in indignation, the column began to form up for the march back to camp. Bont leaned down, cut the shackles on Ria’s ankles and helped her to her feet. She was stiff and pain gnawed at her side.

‘Can’t you free my wrists as well?’ she complained.

‘You’re still a prisoner,’ he said gruffly.

A terrible question was preying on Ria’s mind but she was afraid of what the answer might be. ‘Where’s Hond?’ she blurted out.

‘He’s being taken back to camp with some of our guys who got injured when we grabbed you. He needs the medicine man.’

‘What about the Uglies?’

Bont gave Ria a weird look: ‘You mean
your
Uglies?’

‘Yes,
my
Uglies. What’s happened to them?’

‘We killed one in the fight. We’re using the other four as stretcher-bearers for Hond and the injured.’ Bont cleared his throat and spat. ‘Uglies! Don’t know how you can stand to be around them. They make me sick.’ He gave a hollow laugh: ‘Anyway, they’re all to be burnt to death in the morning.’

‘I call her the Blue Angel,’ Leoni whispered. She stood up and walked over to the bar where she scrounged several sheets of paper and a marker pen. Returning to the table she sat down again opposite Matt and began to sketch. ‘Here,’ she said after a moment, thrusting the drawing forward, ‘is this what your blue-skinned woman looks like?’

Matt whistled with surprise: ‘That’s her! You’ve met her as well!’

‘I’ve met her more than once. We go back a long way.’

‘So does that mean you think she’s real?’

Leoni dodged the question: ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

Matt shuffled his feet some more under the table: ‘She’s got to be real. Or something so close to real it makes no difference. You’ve seen her. I’ve seen her. She sent me to stop Becky killing you. It would be pretty tough for a hallucination to do all that.’

Leoni remembered something relevant: ‘Dr Bannerman told me other people have seen her too.’

‘Other people on the DMT programme?’

‘Two on the programme. But I think he said the others were also cases of his. I guess people who had near-death experiences. You know he’s an ER doctor, right?’

Matt nodded.

‘That’s how I met him,’ Leoni continued. ‘I overdosed and died and he brought me back. While I was out I had a near-death experience and the Blue Angel was in it …’

‘But this wasn’t the only time you met her?’

‘No. She used to come to me in dreams when I was a kid. And my DMT trip this morning took me right to her.’

Without exactly intending to, Leoni began to pour out her life story to Matt – her abandonment as a newborn babe, her years in the orphanage, her adoption by the Watts family, a period of security and apparent love, and then the brutal rapes by her adoptive father with
her adoptive mother’s collusion – all, it seemed, at the behest of someone or something called Jack. She spoke of her near-death experience and subsequent encounters on ketamine – and finally this morning on DMT – with the Blue Angel. She described the land where everything is known, the bizarre animals and plants of that realm, the two suns hanging in its sky, the sticky green flowers underfoot.

When she paused for a moment, Matt leaned back in his chair, stretched, and put his hands behind his head: ‘Well,’ he said with a smile. ‘I started out worrying you’d think I was insane …’

‘But now it’s the other way round? You think it’s me who’s crazy?’

‘I don’t think you’re crazy at all.’

‘Then wait till you hear this,’ Leoni said. And she went on to speak of the part the Blue Angel had played in showing her Sulpa, and what she’d seen him do, and how she was sure that it was Sulpa, also known as Jack, who had somehow followed her back from the trip and possessed Becky.

At one point Matt stopped her and had her draw examples of the flint knives, axes, and spears tipped with stone and bone points that she’d seen in the hands of thousands of Sulpa’s naked followers. He also asked for a sketch of Sulpa’s strange black sword and whistled when she described its glassy sheen. ‘Has to be obsidian,’ he muttered. ‘Very interesting …’

‘What’s so interesting about obsidian?’

‘It’s a kind of volcanic glass. There’re only a few places on Earth where you can find single pieces big enough to make a weapon like this.’

‘We don’t even know that what I saw happened on Earth.’

‘Oh, I think it did, don’t you? Those were
men
you saw around Sulpa. Those were
human
children he murdered. There was one sun in the sky – right? There were no hybrid animals and trees, like you described in the land where everything is known. There was grass growing on the ground, not green flowers …’

‘That’s all true. It totally felt like I was on Earth. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was
where.
I mean, I watch Discovery Channel, but where do you find a tribe of naked white men performing human sacrifice? I’ve never heard of that.’

‘Maybe
where
isn’t the right question,’ Matt objected. ‘Maybe we should be asking
when
instead.’

Leoni frowned and echoed him: ‘
When?
’

‘Yes. When.’ He drained the last of his water. ‘Maybe what the Blue Angel did when she had you look in that screen was send you back in time.’

‘How could that be possible?’

‘I don’t claim to know. I’m just saying maybe that’s what happened.’

‘But why? What makes you think that?’

Matt pointed to one of the sketches she’d just done for him. ‘Do you know what you’ve drawn here?’ he asked her. It was one of the wooden batons, hooked at the end, that Sulpa’s minions had carried slung across their backs.

‘No idea,’ said Leoni. ‘First time I saw these things was around Sulpa. All his men had them.’

‘They’re called
atlatls.
They were the nuclear weaponry of the Stone Age. Any tribe with this technology gained a huge advantage over their competitors.’

‘Why?’ Leoni examined her sketch again: ‘It doesn’t look useful for anything.’

Matt had a glint in his eye. ‘It’s a weapon for war and for hunting. It works by lengthening the throwing arm of a man with a spear. The extra leverage makes the spear travel faster and further. Look’ – he pointed out the hooklike contraption Leoni had drawn – ‘the butt of the spear notches in here.’ He stood up and demonstrated the throw: ‘A flick of the wrist at the end and you can kill an animal or a man up to eight hundred feet away.’

‘So are you saying because I saw these atl-things that
proves
I went back in time?’

‘No. Not quite. Different cultures and peoples throughout history have independently invented the atlatl. But the one you drew has a very distinctive design. Unmistakable. It turns up in archaeological sites across France and Spain around twenty-four thousand years ago. There’s evidence it was brought from much further east – from the Balkans, in fact.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Leoni asked.

‘I’m taking a couple of courses in prehistoric archaeology at Berkeley. We learned about the Kazgarians last semester. That’s the name we give to the people who brought the atlatl into western Europe – we don’t know what they called themselves.’ Matt leafed through Leoni’s sketches again: ‘You’re a pretty good artist, aren’t you?’

‘I flunked art school,’ she said – all his academic brilliance made her feel small – ‘but I guess I can draw.’

‘Great. So let’s get back to the project, go online and check out the knives and axe heads you drew. That obsidian sword as well. You can tell a lot about when and where stone weapons were made just from how they look.’

In the cab returning to Irvine Leoni asked: ‘You’re English – so how come you’re studying at Berkeley?’

‘I drift around a bit, take courses here and there if they interest me. I wanted to know more about prehistoric archaeology and Berkeley seemed like a good place to do it.’

‘So you’re a sort of perpetual student?’

Matt laughed: ‘Yes. You could say that. “Matthew Aubrey, Perpetual Student.” Quite an accolade.’

Looking at his ragged, patched clothes – despite his posh accent Matt obviously didn’t have two cents to rub together – Leoni speculated that he must have enrolled in the DMT project for the miserly fee Bannerman was paying the volunteers. The cash, plus a month’s free room and board out of term-time, would, she realised, be worth a lot to a guy who bummed around colleges like this.

The cab pulled off onto California Avenue and headed down towards the UC Irvine Research Park. They turned right onto Bison Avenue and saw at once that something ominous was going on at the two-storey block where the DMT project was housed. Half a dozen black Ford Explorers with smoked-glass windows were parked outside and there were tough-looking men with short haircuts and dark suits everywhere.

Leoni quickly leaned forward, quelled the tremor rising in her throat, and told the driver: ‘Go straight ahead to the next junction, and take a left there.’

‘But this is the address you gave me, madam,’ he objected, waving a hand at the research block and slowing almost to a halt.

‘No,’ Leoni insisted, ‘this isn’t the place.’ She sharpened her tone: ‘Straight ahead, please, and left at the junction.’

The driver, a lean elderly Armenian, sighed but put his foot back on the gas. The cab picked up speed and Leoni slumped deeper into her seat as a group of the men outside the research block swivelled towards them.

The taxi driver cast a furtive glance at Leoni in the rear-view mirror as she slumped lower in the back seat and flopped over sideways to avoid being seen. Matt took over the directions. ‘If you could turn left here,’ he told the driver in his imposing British accent, ‘then our building’s third on the left.’ Leoni stayed low in her seat as the car made the turn, but she felt Matt’s hand urging her upright.
‘It’s OK,’
he whispered in her ear.
‘You weren’t seen.’
She looked back over her shoulder. The DMT project was already out of view and no one was following them.

Moments later they came to a halt in front of another of the white-painted two-storey blocks scattered across the green lawns of the research park. Matt paid the driver with some grubby bills extracted from the depths of one of his many pockets, ushered Leoni out, and led her towards the block as the cab pulled away. ‘I don’t feel good about that cabbie,’ he said as they walked. ‘He knew we stopped him dropping us off at the project because of all the heavies outside. They look official, we look like fugitives, so he’s probably trying to decide if he should go right back and report us to them now.’ He paused: ‘Your parents have got to be behind this, right?’

Leoni grimaced: ‘Yes. Count Dracula and his undead bride.’

‘But those men. All those suits. Like a uniform. And I’m pretty sure some of them had guns under their jackets. Maybe FBI or something?’ Matt was peering around. They’d entered a corridor that ran all the way through the block to a rear exit at the far side. He took her hand: ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

They half ran, half walked, to the rear of the block, and once they were in the open again Matt continued to set a fast pace. Across more green lawns, dotted with mature trees, they caught occasional glimpses in the distance of the building housing the DMT project. It was too far away to make out what was happening but they could still see several men standing on guard outside.