Keystone (35 page)

The hand on
his shoulder loosened, and Ben re-read the email from Dr Patterson. “We still
have a chance to get her back,” he said.

“How?” George
exclaimed. “She’s in Florida, and I can’t get out of here until tomorrow at the
earliest. And even if I did get there, how am I going to get her out of that
place?”

“We know she’s
with Dr Patterson. And according to his email, he’s going to be here tomorrow
afternoon, at Amarna. And he expects me to help him get in.”

George looked
up. “Of course.” He brought up the email on the main screen. “He probably
doesn’t know about this hidden message, and Gail must have tricked him into
sending it to you. It was one hell of a gamble,” he bit his bottom lip. “She
couldn’t have known that you would have passed it to me. If we hadn’t been
sitting together when you received it, you would probably have never shown the
picture to me at all!”

“True,” Ben
accepted. “But we
were
sitting together,
and we did get the message. We now know where this Patterson guy is going to
be, and when. Even if Gail isn’t with him, we’ll use him to get to her.”

George closed
down the terminal session and turned to his friend. “Ben, we’re not exactly
Batman and Robin, are we? I’m sure he won’t be coming on his own. We’re going
to need some help.”

They looked at
each other for only a handful of seconds before looking towards the main
entrance to the airport in unison.

“Does that
friend of yours owe you any more favours?” George asked.

“That’s
exactly what I was thinking, my friend.”

As they burst
back through the revolving doors they were hit by the mid-afternoon heat
reflecting off the melting tarmac of the road, and they stuck to the shade as
they made their way back towards the Tourism Police. Ben’s friend detached from
a small group and met them halfway. Her Tourism Police uniform was sharply
tucked-in at the waist, accentuating her breasts and hips. A long ponytail of
slightly curled, jet-black hair protruded from the back of her cap, which cast
a shadow across her strong nose and full lips. She was relatively tall, an inch
or so taller than Ben, and George couldn’t help but wonder just how close Ben
had been to her during their military service.

He shook the
thought from his mind as his eyes fell to the machine gun. Slung over her
shoulder, she was holding it close to her left hip with one hand, a finger
curled near the trigger. Not on it, but close enough.

“You’re not
flying, then?” she said in heavily accented English, an ‘I told you so’ look on
her face.

“We decided to
stay in Egypt for a while,” Ben said, matter-of-factly. “Zahra, let me
introduce an old friend of mine: this is George Turner, from England.”

They shook
hands briefly, wondering whether she would have taken her hand off the gun if
she’d been holding it on her right-hand side instead. He decided that she
probably wouldn’t. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said courteously.

“Me too,” she
replied awkwardly. She clearly wasn’t used to being introduced to English
people, her conversational English failing her.

The three of
them stood looking at each other for several moments, before Zahra broke the
silence. “Farid, what are you doing here?” Through politeness, she continued to
test her English. George was surprised to hear Ben’s actual name. He had never
heard anyone call him that, and it took him more than a couple of seconds to
make the association between the name and his friend.
 

Ben replied in
Arabic.

Within less
than a minute, George found himself standing back as the two broke into what
looked like a full-on argument. He tried to pick up on some key words, and
managed to discern ‘Tell el-Amarna’, but that was it; they were simply speaking
far too fast for his basic level of Arabic.

Five minutes
later, they stopped their discussion long enough for Zahra to break into a
perfect white-toothed grin. Turning to George, she shook his hand again.

“Hopefully, I
will see you tomorrow morning, George.” And with that, she turned on her heel
and returned to the group of policemen, who were pretending to ignore them.

Ben looked
sheepishly after her. “She will meet us at Amarna tomorrow at dawn. She’ll
bring some friends, too. She has the weekend off, so it’s a case of extreme
taking-your-work-home.”

“That seemed
easy enough,” George commented. “I thought you were going to bite each other’s
heads off for a minute, but then she’s all smiles!”

“It was more
difficult than you think, my friend,” he replied. “It turns out she didn’t owe
me any favours at all.”

“So why did
she agree to help us?”

“Because I
decided to take a bullet, as they say in American movies. I promised to take
her to one of the most expensive restaurants in Cairo.”

George looked
at Ben in surprise, and then looked at Zahra joking with her colleagues less
than twenty yards away. She glanced over at them casually and smiled.

He wouldn’t
have called it ‘taking a bullet’.

“Is it really
that simple?” George said in disbelief. “You’ve organised our own private
militia in less than five minutes?”

Ben smiled and
got his mobile phone out of his pocket. “Not quite, George. The next step is to
call our friend Kamal and ask for a little favour, which he certainly owes us.
We need his authority to clear the area surrounding Amarna. If things get ugly,
he won’t want Gail Turner showing up anywhere in Egypt, so it’s in his interest
to lend a hand.”

Seth Mallus tapped the screen in
front of him and waited for the video feed from the control room to pop up. Of
all the scenarios they had gone through over the years of planning, this had
not been one of them: one astronaut dead, two disappeared and most likely dead,
and the fourth going stir crazy by herself on the surface of Mars.

He spilled a
couple of tablets into his palm from a small bottle obtained from the bottom
draw of his desk, then reached for a glass of water. Knocking back the pills
with several gulps of the cool liquid, he closed his eyes and clenched his
teeth; his brain was pulsating against the inside of his skull. With every
passing moment his headache worsened, not helped by the flow of bad news that
had come his way in the last few days. At least the pills would help his
headache, but it would be a few minutes at least until they started to kick in.

In the
meantime, he massaged his temples, his eyes still closed, and ran through the
facts.

The Mars
mission had arrived so close to his dream landing site, he couldn’t have
planned it better. The Book of Xynutians had pointed directly to a site on
Mars. In the Book of Xynutians’ own words,
on
the shore of an empty ocean
. There were dozens of places that could have
fit the description, but within days of comparing the illustrations in the book
to satellite photography of the planet, they had found an exact match:
Hellas Basin
.

It was too
accurate to be a fluke. Weeks of cross-referencing had revealed no further
matches, not even a close-second. How the ancient Egyptians had managed to
produce such a drawing was beyond explanation. Barely sixty years ago it would
have been practically impossible. Three and a half
thousand
years ago, it was unimaginable.

And then there
had been his dream. His dreams had always been very vivid, and surreal. But
this one? He could still feel, taste and hear the crater-site on Mars, as it
was in the time of the Xynutians. It wasn’t just a dream. It felt more like a
recollection
. The image had stuck with
him ever since.

Nevertheless,
he had certainly not expected the crew to find the Xynutian remains within days
of arriving, by simply throwing a stone at them. Either the crew were
incredibly lucky, or there were so many remains on Mars that they simply had to
stumble upon one sooner or later. More importantly though, his dream, and the
book, had been bang-on.

No one could
ever find out about their finds, not even NASA, which was where his headache
had come from. Influencing the decision to put the mission on the shore of the
Hellas Basin had been fairly straight forward: enough of the scientific
community thought it would be a good place to land anyway, which reduced the
amount of lobbying needed along NASA’s corridors. Making sure that no one
outside his office knew they had been influenced, and even more importantly,
why
they had been, was infinitely
harder.

It had been
easy enough to control the nanostations on-board the
Clarke
, and the interception of the communication relay with Earth
had been straightforward. DEFCOMM built and maintained the satellites in orbit,
the receiver dishes on Earth, and owned the encryption technology that was used
to hide the signal from the rest of the world. With five hundred and twelve bit
encryption, even an intercepted signal would take over three years to decode
using the fastest supercomputer on the planet, barring the use of quantum
computers, which remained inaccessible in a practical sense. For all intents
and purposes, he was in total control of the Earth’s view of the spaceship.

Their first
mistake, however, had come after introduction of the time-delay. Sooner or
later they would need to be able to edit what was happening to the mission so
that if they did eventually stumble upon alien remains on Mars, those facts
could remain hidden from Earth. The most obvious solution was one that had been
used for decades in reality television: a time lag, which meant that what
people were watching was actually minutes or even hours old, giving the show’s
producers ample time to cut to adverts, bleep out swearwords before the
watershed, or change camera to avoid showing certain things that the censors
would rather the public didn’t see.

Of course on
Earth it would become painfully apparent that something was wrong if anyone
tried to have a real-time conversation, which was why they had waited for
Clarke
to be far enough away to make any
kind of to-and-fro impractical. Earth sent messages out, and the crew replied
when it was convenient to do so, and the time delay would never be noticed.

But on
Clarke
, they had not counted on Su Ning,
her excellent mental arithmetic and, crucially, her clandestine watch that kept
perfect time with Beijing. After she realised the time delay had been
introduced, only eliminating her avoided compromising the entire mission.

Shortly after
the discovery of the Jetty, and the Xynutian settlement, they had switched to
computer generated imagery, to replace almost all external shots on Mars with
faked footage generated by their programmers. Shots outside were easy to
produce, mainly because everything was either mechanical or alien. Anyone
watching would be unable to tell the difference between a fake rock or a real
one, and a spacesuit doesn’t exactly have a personality. But everything inside
the MLP continued to be real footage, edited and modified as little as possible
depending on the topic of the astronaut’s banter.

But then,
disaster.

In the space
of a few hours, the two leading astronauts on the project had disappeared
inside the Xynutian settlement. That had a double effect: firstly, it was now
obvious on all video returning from Mars that Dr Jane Richardson was alone.
Secondly, she had been in a near-hysterical state for hours now, and when she
wasn’t screaming into the cameras, she was sitting down staring into her hands,
or shouting into the microphone at the comms panel in a desperate attempt to
get hold of her fellow astronauts, whose air had long since run out.

None of the
video coming back from Mars could be sent to NASA without him having a lot of
explaining to do. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

So for a while
now, there had been no feed from Mars. NASA had been told there was a technical
problem with one of the satellites in the receiver array. At best, it would buy
them a month before a new satellite or repair crew could be launched, at worst
NASA would demand that video be transmitted via a different satellite. To stop
it coming to that, they had provided a steady stream of synthesised voice clips
from Mars. These had been much easier to produce, due to the interference that
plagued interplanetary communications.

His headache
was starting to subside, and he opened his eyes. Looking at the screen, he
watched Dr Richardson fetch herself a glass of water from the kitchen unit of
the MLP. She was millions of miles away, alone on a dead planet.

He picked up
the phone and dialled a secure line. Almost immediately, there was an answer from
the other end.

“How long till
they reach their target?” he asked.

“Just under an
hour, Sir.”

“Let me know
when you have news.” He hung up abruptly and looked at the video from Mars.

Dr Patterson
and Dr Turner had come up with a hair-brained scheme, in his opinion. But if
the Amarna Library did, miraculously, give them a clue as to how the Xynutian
door mechanism would open, then there may be some hope. If the astronauts
trapped inside had somehow survived, if there was some improbable source of
oxygen inside the ancient settlement, then there was a chance that they could
return to the surface of Mars soon, and they could return to normal video feeds
before NASA decided to intervene.

That was a lot
of ifs, and the odds on the last two were too long for his liking.

From his
perspective, the Mars mission had already fulfilled its primary objective: it
had proven without a doubt that the book from Amarna had been telling the
truth. The Xynutians had indeed existed, hundreds of thousands,
millions
of years before modern humans
had crawled from the dirt and started their long journey to civilisation. This
in turn meant that they must have been wiped out by Aniquilus, which in turn
led to the worst possible conclusion: there was no doubt that mankind was about
to meet the same fate.

Which was what
was making his head hurt. He had come to terms with the Xynutians, and their
advanced civilisation, but what troubled him was Aniquilus. This
thing
that wiped them out just didn’t
make sense. It came from nowhere.

Unless
Aniquilus
was
the Xynutians. And if
that turned out to be true, then humans would become their own Aniquilus.

There would be
one last roll of the dice, one last chance for Mars to reveal more of the
Xynutian’s secrets, how the end came about and what could be done to avoid the
same fate for the humans. That last chance lay in the mission to Amarna, with
Dr Patterson.

And if they don’t succeed?
In his mind,
the Amarna books were clear on one detail: the Xynutians had been erased
because they spread too far, they consumed everything and they failed to fit in
with their environment. Mankind had achieved the same dominance on Earth, and
there was only one way back.

If there was
no good news from Amarna, then there would be no choice but to pass to Plan B,
before it was too late. All the pieces fit together perfectly.

That he had
come across the architect’s script and found the texts from Amarna, both could
be put down to chance. That he was also able to manipulate a manned mission to
Mars, and that half the world’s defence systems were in his control could not.
There was only one person on Earth who had been placed in such a position, or
indeed could have been.

He would therefore
follow his instincts, and the prospect of doing so made his skin tingle in anticipation.

He stroked the
image of Dr Richardson on the screen.

“Am I
Aniquilus?” he whispered.