Keystone (40 page)

Mallus ordered the display off,
and the satellite image of Tell el-Amarna vanished. A virtual aquarium appeared
in its place, making it look like his office was underwater in some tropical
paradise; colourful corals and exotic fish shimmered perfectly under the
sunlight that shone down from the virtual surface above.

He gave
another command and the cityscape that had soothed his thoughts before
Patterson and his men had launched their assault returned.

The assault had
failed.

A plane soared
silently through the evening sky. He’d seen it all before. He almost whispered
at the screen and it switched off completely, blending seamlessly into the
wall.

The assault has failed
, he thought to
himself.

He had no need
to launch Plan B, as it was already in motion. On the contrary, while one word
from him would call off the vans, no such communication was needed to carry on
as planned. Such an act would potentially leave a trail back to him, and for Plan
B to work, what was about to happen had to look like it came from outside the
United States of America.

“Has it ever
really been Plan B?” he mumbled to himself as he shuffled in his seat
nervously. He didn’t think so. Deep down inside, he had wanted to see Plan B in
action and now, while it was being carried out, he felt a surge of excitement.
Another, conflicting part of his mind cried megalomaniac, which he chose to
ignore. “This was always meant to be,” he soothed himself. “The Book of
Xynutians showed me the way, it’s no coincidence that it fell into my lap!” he
started to raise his voice. “What would be the point of me having all of this
if it didn’t have a purpose?”

He stood up
and started pacing around his desk. The search for answers to the ancient
riddles and a possible way of avoiding the wrath of Aniquilus had certainly
been fascinating, but ultimately it had done little more than confirm what he
already knew.

“I
am
Aniquilus,” his face lit up as he
said the words out loud for the first time, as if some internal flood barrier
had finally been breached. Years of pent up emotion started to pour out. “I am
Aniquilus,” he laughed. “I am Aniquilus,” he roared, sweeping his arms over his
desk sending paper and pen and telephone flying. “And I will rain down fire on
this world!”

He barked
orders at the computer and the screen lit up, filling with video feeds and
streams of text.

For him,
secretly having complete control of the country’s defence satellites had more
than one advantage. Not only could you spy on whatever you wanted to, such as a
covert operation in Egypt, you could also make the Department of Defence
see
things that simply weren’t there,
like unauthorised fighter jets entering US airspace, or a build-up of foreign
troops on a disputed border.

You could even
make it look like three nuclear Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles had
launched from deep inside Asia towards densely populated targets within the
United States of America.

And while the
powers that be scrambled to verify and counter the imaginary attack, three very
real unmarked utility vans with nuclear bombs inside them would arrive
unchallenged in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.

And so the
Apocalypse would begin.

He rounded the
desk and made for the door. As he slammed it behind him the lights automatically
shut off, and the screen went dark.

“Wait, no!” Gail exclaimed as Ben
approached one of the ancient wooden shelves inside the Library, intent on
upending it to examine what lay beneath.

He paused
briefly, the time to turn and offer a brief apology; it was more for Gail than
for the archaeological world as a whole. Taking hold of the middle shelf, he
tentatively rocked it from side to side, to get a feel for its weight and
structural integrity. After thousands of years, it was surprisingly solid,
offering little give.

Applying more
force, he managed to obtain a groan from the thick timber. He stepped back and
took in the room as a whole, before turning to the rest of the group.

“What do you
think? If we lean on it together it will budge quite easily.”

“And then
topple into all the other shelves like dominos!” Gail cried. “Thousands of
years perfectly preserved, then destroyed in seconds by us. We have to look for
another way.”

“And die in
here, for the sake of a few bookcases?” Ben said. “I understand how hard this
must be for you, Gail, but if there’s another way out of this place, we have to
find it very soon.”

Patterson
approached the shelves and gave them a quick nudge. “Bear in mind that even if
we do find another way out, the air inside whatever tunnel or room we uncover
may be toxic,” he shook his head soberly. “It’ll quickly mix with the little
air we have left, and we may simply pass out and die within a few minutes.”

There was a
long silence as they digested what he had said. There was no denying the fact
that air trapped for thousands of years wasn’t going to be fresh, and there was
a strong chance that it would be quite toxic. The air inside the Library was
finite, and wouldn’t last them for long if the area it had to fill suddenly
became a lot larger.

Eventually it
was Walker who broke the silence.

“Not wanting
to use up any of your precious air by talking,” he began patronisingly. “But
tipping the bookcases over will make a lot of mess, and it won’t uncover your
hidden door.”

They turned to
him in surprise.

“Oh, and how
would you know?” Patterson said sarcastically.

Walker got to
his feet, waving away their protests and Ben’s raised gun barrel with the back
of his hand. He sauntered over to the circular entrance to the Library.

“You made me
climb through a tunnel carved into solid rock to get in here,” he began. “The
Ancient Egyptians make that?” Gail shook her head. “No, I guessed not. You lot
cut your way in because you couldn’t find the door in the first place. Did you
find any bodies in here?” Gail didn’t need to shake her head, she could already
see where he was going with his argument. “Not even a dead fly. So the entrance
to this damn place remains to be found. But it ain’t just the entrance is it?
It’s the exit too.” He turned on his heel and waved his arms around him.
“Millions of years ago –”

“
Thousands
,” Gail cut in.

“Whatever! It
don’t matter if it was yesterday, personally, I don’t give a damn.
Thousands
of years ago some guy closed
the door on this place for the last time. Are you suggesting,” he pointed at
Ben, “that when he closed it, he somehow managed to build a bookshelf on top of
it?” he flapped his arms and jutted his jaw out at him. “And you can stop
pointing my own gun at me for a start. You think I’m gonna try and stop you
escaping from here? This is my funeral too.”

Ben looked
back at him, but was reluctant to lower the pistol. Somehow, he didn’t believe
Walker was harmless at all, even if they were in the same boat.

“He’s right,
of course,” Gail said matter-of-factly. “If there’s a door, it won’t be under
the shelves. They were stacked with parchments and scrolls when we came in
here. Even if they did somehow slide into place when the Egyptians left, it
would have been difficult not to drop something on the floor.”

“So where is
it then?” Ben said desperately. “There’s nothing else in here! No gaps or
grooves in the wall we can prise open, the only other feature in the whole
place is the plinth.”

They all
looked to where he was pointing. It was the structure that Gail had originally
seen on the x-ray screen all those years ago. It protruded from the floor, its
top tilted with a lip at the bottom edge, in which had sat the books of
Aniquilus and Xynutians. Roughly three feet wide and two feet deep at its base,
it sat in an alcove at one end of the rectangular room, the bookcases lined up
in front of it like pews in a church.

Walker was
already there, inspecting the base of the plinth. Gail joined him, despite
Ben’s best efforts to stop her from going near the man who barely half an hour
earlier wouldn’t have hesitated in shooting them all.

“It’s a
separate stone from the floor,” she told him. “We know that much already.”

He grunted in
reply, then looked up at her. “No drawings of Egyptian things and cats and
shit? I’ve seen all the adventure movies, there’s always some writing somewhere
that someone leans on, then the secret passage opens up; hey sesame.”

“This isn’t a
movie,” she said bitterly. “Yes, there are usually inscriptions inside Egyptian
tombs and monuments, but not in this one. The only recurring symbol is the
stickman – Aniquilus.”

“
Aniqui
who?” Ben asked, surprised at
hearing the name for the first time.

“It’s a long
story,” she said dismissively. “Anyway, there are
no
other hieroglyphs in here. We’ve always focussed our research on
the literature that we found, the contents of the bookcases rather than the
structure itself. I mean, how many times do you check the walls out when you go
to your local library?”

“My local
what
?” Walker joked. He stood up
laboriously and looked at Ben. “If there’s one thing we should try knocking
over, it’s this.”

No one
disagreed, and soon they were pushing with all their might to try and topple it
sideways.

It remained
solidly in place.

They tried
again from the other side, with the same results. After a few minutes, even
Walker conceded that the plinth wasn’t going anywhere.

“Could we lift
it?” Patterson suggested.

“Bit of a
heavy trapdoor isn’t it? How would they have dropped it in place behind them?”
Ben commented.

“Fill the
space underneath with sand and then take the sand away slowly from below,”
Walker said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world. “But then we have
the same problem: how’d the last person get out?”

They stood
looking at the plinth for several long minutes.

“In any case,”
Patterson said finally, “whether it was dropped in behind them or slid across,
I don’t see how they could have done it. It’s too heavy and it would have left
marks all over the floor if it was dragged, and there are no signs of anything
like that.”

Gail sat down
and leant against the back of the alcove, exasperated. Letting her head thud against
the cold stone, she buried her face in her hands and groaned. “What’s the use?
We’ve been down here nearly an hour, and we’re already running out of air. Our
only hope is that someone up there digs us out.”

Ben got up
onto the plinth, so that he was leaning against the book holder, his backside
wedged into the lip that originally stopped the books from falling to the
floor.

Gail gave him
a disapproving look, then shook her head and closed her eyes.

“What?” he
said. “I’m sorry Gail, but we’re going to die down here, the last of my worries
is damaging the –”

“Ben, shut
up!” she said suddenly, sitting bolt upright, her eyes wide open.

“Oh great!
First I’m not allowed to –”

“No seriously,
Ben,
shhh
!” she put her finger to her
lips and everyone listened: somewhere beneath the floor, a rumbling had
started, like the rolling of a bowling ball making its journey down to the
pins.

Then there was
the muffled sound of something clicking into place, followed by silence.

After waiting
a few seconds longer, Gail got to her feet and pressed her ear against the back
wall of the alcove.

“Whatever it
was, it didn’t do much,” she said, disappointed. “When you sat on the plinth
you must have set off the first part of some mechanism, but over the centuries
whatever function it had has probably rotted away.”

They all
returned their attention to the plinth, but despite Walker, Patterson and Ben pressing
down on it together as hard as possible, nothing further happened.

Gail turned
and kicked the wall hard, swearing both out of frustration and pain for having
kicked the stone with soft shoes. As she crouched down to nurse her toes, the
distinctive grating of stone against stone filled the room, and before her eyes
the entire back wall of the alcove slid downwards, revealing a long corridor,
the end of which was so far away the lights in the Library left it in darkness.

The air from
both spaces mixed in a cloud of dust where they stood, causing more than one of
them to cough. But despite their original concerns, the air remained
breathable. Walker took a couple of steps forwards, crossing the threshold of
the corridor by stepping over the half-foot of door still protruding from the
floor.

“How the hell
would that work? That stone is over a foot thick, and must weigh tons,” he
said, amazed.

“You said it
yourself,” Patterson answered. “Put the stone on a load of sand. When the
mechanism is activated, in this case probably a ball or roller of some
description taking a series of pins or plugs with it as it goes, sand pours out
of holes, and the door slides down.”

“But instead
it got stuck and didn’t budge, while the sand poured out underneath it,” Gail
continued. “That kick was all it needed to start falling down. It was a pretty
tight fit!” She was inspecting the gap between the wall and the groove into
which it had been placed.

They all
walked into the passage, with the exception of Gail, who continued to examine
the doorway.

“Wait, this
raises more questions than it answers.”

“Who cares?”
Walker said, striding forwards into the tunnel. “It’s not like we have all the
time in the world, is it?”

“No,
seriously, this is important,” she insisted. “If this door opened from
inside
the Library, then whatever lies
beyond this door must be
further
away
from the original entrance. We’ve found a way to get deeper into the tomb, or
whatever this is, but we haven’t found the original way
into
the Library.” They were all staring at her, even Walker. She
tried to put it as simply as she could: “If we go down there, we’re getting
further away from the outside world.”

Ben broke
first, visibly agitated. “So what do we do, ignore this entrance and keep
looking for another one? And what if we do find the original way in to the
Library, and it actually just takes us back to the stairs that are filled with
rubble? What if that
was
the original
entrance, but we simply didn’t take the time to find the original door?”

“Makes sense
to me,” Walker nodded.

“Oh, and now
you’re the archaeologist are you?” she targeted him vehemently. “A little while
ago you were killing people and threatening to kill us too, but now you want to
go down there like Indiana Jones and find some hidden treasure while we wait to
be rescued, or worse, wait to die?”

Patterson and
Ben took a step away from Walker, as if Gail’s comments had suddenly reminded
them who he was.

“No,” he
replied calmly. “But we’re not getting out through the stairs, and there ain’t
no books to read in this so called
library
of yours, so I thought it’d be best to have a look round and see what else
there was to do. And while I’m at it, if I come across another exit, I’ll let
you use it too,” he said with mock gallantry.

Before she
could say anything, he had turned on his heels and was striding down the
corridor into the gloom. Before he was completely in the dark, they saw him
rummaging in his chest pocket, and a light came on in front of him. As they
watched, the light grew smaller and smaller.

Patterson
coughed. “Well, he has a torch, and we don’t. So I vote we go with him.”

Gail held
back, and Ben looked at her in earnest.

“Gail, I hate
to say it, but he’s right; there’s no reason to stay here, and besides, we
shouldn’t let him out of our sight. He could still be planning something.”

She thought
about this for a moment before conceding. “Alright, but I’m only going with you
because I want to make sure that whatever we find gets treated with respect.
This is now officially an archaeological dig, so I’m in charge.”

They walked
along in silence for a few yards.

“Do you kick
all of your archaeological digs?” Patterson said quietly.

Ben suppressed
a laugh and while Gail pretended to ignore him, the darkness made it much
easier for her to hide a smile.