Keystone (42 page)

“This is all
very well,” Walker broke the silence that followed her monologue, “and we’re
all learning a lot about history and all that, but this ain’t getting us out of
here.”

Gail shone the
torch around as Ben and Patterson reluctantly agreed that they should focus on
looking for a way out. The small room under the staircase was completely bare
save for the statues.

“There’s
nothing in there,” he continued impatiently. “Give me the torch and let’s look
around this place.” He made a grab for it but she twisted away just before his
fingers closed around the black metal shaft.

“Wait!” she
exclaimed. She looked down at the statue, and drew a line in the air with the
beam of the torch, to the blank featureless wall where Nefertiti and Akhenaten
had been staring for over three thousand years.

Except it
wasn’t just a wall. Thin strips of wooden beading ran along the walls, floor
and ceiling, almost invisible at first glance and in the poor lighting. She
walked to the end of the room and carefully placed her hand against the wall.
Instead of the hard coolness of stone, she encountered the soft-warm touch of
finely woven cloth. She could feel the hardness of the surface it hid.

“A fake wall!”
Patterson gasped.

Walker strode
to Gail’s side and placed his palms on the material. Looking up and down at the
beading holding it in place, he slowly curled his fingers inwards, letting his
nails run along the weave, testing its strength.

“You can’t
just rip it down,” Gail protested, reading his mind.

The look he
gave her stopped any further complaints, and he dug his fingers into the cloth,
taking the few millimetres of slack up and ripping downwards. After several
long rips, the entire wall was uncovered, and the remains of the cloth lay
scattered at his feet.

Still
recovering from the initial shock of Walker’s lack of respect, Gail moved the
torchlight from side to side on the now uncovered wall; it was crammed with
inscriptions and drawings from the book of Xynutians; Xynutian cities with
flying vehicles and towering buildings followed by the chaos and destruction of
the wrath of Aniquilus. There was no need here to understand the Xynutian
language. This was the story of the destruction of a civilisation, a story that
had survived the millennia to warn the ancient Egyptians, who stood here in
humility before it.

On top of the
engravings, it’s four legs and two arms covering the width of the walls and its
round head rising above the ruins of the Xynutian world, the Stickman of
Amarna, the symbol that Gail had chased the meaning of for a decade.
Aniquilus
stood before them.

Seeing it like
this, the final pieces of her jigsaw were starting to fall into place.

Akhenaten and
Nefertiti, laid bare, abandoning the old gods, were accepting the higher power
of Aniquilus, who it was shown had destroyed a more advanced civilisation than
their own. But how would they break with thousands of years of tradition and
present the truth of Aniquilus to the Egyptian people? By taking Aniquilus and
linking it with the old god Aten, the sun disk with outstretched rays touching
the people below, and then moving the capital of Egypt to Amarna, away from
Thebes and Memphis, away from the old way of life.

And then,
finally, by renouncing their own pharaonic link with divinity, by showing that
they were mere mortals, and that they would all face the judgement of
Aniquilus, from the people who worked the fields right up to the kings and
queens.

Gail fell to
her knees.

“So this is
it,” she whispered. “This is what it was all about. I saw it in the books, I
saw the finds on Mars. But this,” she nodded to the statues facing Aniquilus,
“is what
this
is all about.”

Patterson
resisted the urge to say ‘I told you so’, and patted her shoulder. But he could
little understand what this meant to Gail. After so many years of studying the
texts from the Library, without the missing pieces of the puzzle, to finally
see everything in context so clearly was at the same time immensely exciting
and unbelievably demoralising.

“Before I saw
the Book of Xynutians this week, I only had ideas. Now, I have the actual
truth,” she said, deflated. Up until now she had been denying the evidence fed
to her by Patterson and Mallus, but now there could be no mistaking the message
in the small room under the staircase.

Suddenly, the
torch switched itself off; a heartbeat later it came back on again. The
momentary darkness made everyone jump.

Walker seized
the torch and inspected it. “There’s enough battery left for another eight hours,”
he claimed, after checking the charge. But no sooner had he finished his
sentence than they were again plunged into darkness for good.

“Shit!” he
exclaimed among the cries of the others.

In the
pandemonium, Gail had a vivid recollection of her dream when she was kidnapped,
of being helplessly stuck in the darkness. She felt a tingle down her spine, as
if the lack of light had taken all warmth from the air.

After what
seemed like an age, but what could in reality barely have been a few minutes, a
thin blade of blinding white light appeared at the bottom of the wall. Within
seconds the wall had disappeared into the ceiling, and they were shielding
their eyes as they tried to see what had been revealed.

Gail, still on
her knees where she’d been facing the Xynutian engravings, squinted into the
light. At first all she could make out was a straight corridor, the light
coming from strips along the ceiling and walls. As her eyes became more
comfortable, the strips split up into single points, and she saw that the
corridor was illuminated with thousands of small dots of very bright white
light, like the solitary LED at the top of the stairs. They led down the
corridor, deeper underground; to a dead end that she guessed must also be a
door.

Walker
recovered first, and strode into the corridor towards it. Ben hesitated, pistol
in hand, on the threshold. Gail looked up at Patterson.

“Henry, this
is all very familiar,” she said slowly, thinking of the astronauts trapped
behind the door on Mars.

He nodded and
started walking into the corridor. “It is, and I know what you’re thinking, but
we don’t really have a choice: the air in here is turning stale and the flashlight
has gone out.”

As he said it,
she became all too aware of the acrid taste on her tongue from the low quality
air they’d all been sharing. The hall they had entered was massive, but she
knew that its oxygen content had been poor to start with.

“Feels fresher
in here,” Walker said with an approving nod. “Just need to work out how this
other door opens, but we’ve been doing well so far,” he joked.

Gail paused
for a moment as she got to her feet. George was somewhere behind her,
above
her, and yet ahead and further
down was the only possible route. The lack of torch and dwindling air supply
made further exploration or even retreat impossible.

It was the
only way forwards, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was
something very final about going down the corridor. Nonetheless, she accepted
Ben’s outstretched hand and joined him and Patterson inside. She was barely a
few steps down the corridor, moving towards Walker, when she thought to look
back at Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

What she saw
terrified her.

The white
light from the corridor had picked out the polished stone of their eyes. But
instead of reflecting in the black of obsidian and blue of Lapis Lazuli,
Akhenaten and Nefertiti were fixing her with blood-red eyes. Their peaceful
smiles took on a whole new sinister dimension, and as Gail stared incredulously
at their evil gaze, the door that led back to the Hall, back to the Library and
back to George, slid closed, leaving them trapped in the corridor.

During the mid-1980s, more than
seventy thousand nuclear weapons existed in stockpiles maintained by the
Americans and Russians. It is often quoted that the yield of those nuclear
weapons was sufficient to destroy the world several times over, but that is
poor imagery to help describe how such a cataclysmic event would take place.

In reality, a
mere fraction of those nuclear arsenals would ever be deployed. After the first
few hundred ICBMs had landed on foreign soil, there would be precious few
people left alive who could even launch the remainder, and even fewer of whom
would want to.

In 1991, the
Cold War ended; on both sides of the border, no one had ever truly wanted to
use the weapons they had created. The understood devastation of nuclear
holocaust, the indiscriminate killing of millions of innocent people and the
no-win situation that would arise from its aftermath ultimately spelled the end
of the stand-off between East and West.

Nonetheless,
in the post-Cold War era nuclear disarmament was both slow and unenthusiastic.
The Russians, reeling from their own economic implosion, were unable to
maintain their existing weapons, let alone decommission them. For its part, the
West was particularly loath to take a large proportion of its nuclear arsenal
off hair-trigger alert. Despite numerous attempts to pass resolutions through
the United Nations, the United States of America, France and the United Kingdom
persistently voted against the action.

This meant
that several decades after the end of the Cold War, the old West maintained an
arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons pointed at targets in the East that
could effectively be launched in less than five minutes.

Then, on 28
^th
July 2015, the Islamic Republic of Iran announced to the world that it had
officially joined the elite club of nations in possession of nuclear weapons.

The
announcement came not via the state media, nor from the network of foreign
intelligence agents and informants who risked their lives on a daily basis to
provide up-to-date reports on the country’s machinations, although the very
existence of such networks did mean that few were surprised when the announcement
finally came.

Instead, it came
from the vaporisation of fifty square miles of desert and arid shrub-land in
the South Khorasan region of the country, less than a hundred miles from
Afghanistan. It was confirmed by satellite imagery, but such technology was not
needed for the majority Kurdish population along the Afghan border, who saw the
mushroom cloud hit the Earth’s stratosphere around about the same time the
ground started to shake.

The show of
strength caused international relations in the already volatile region to heat
up considerably; particularly damaging was the face-off that ensued between
Iran and its pro-West neighbours Pakistan and Afghanistan, with many skirmishes
along Iran’s heavily fortified border causing tensions to rise dramatically
within the UN.

India was
critical of the militant stance taken by Pakistan in particular, and terrorist
activity in the two countries increased. The governments blamed each other, but
nonetheless decided to increase investment in their own already substantial
nuclear deterrents.

While
Pyongyang sent congratulations to Tehran, Moscow urged prudence on behalf of
the world’s largest nuclear power. Israel was up in arms, stepping up air
patrols and angering Iraq and Iran for infringing airspace with spy drones.

The
announcement meant it was now theoretically possible, although practically less
so, to travel by land from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal or even the
East China Sea without once having to set foot in a country that did not
possess or have access to nuclear weapons.

The United
States of America quietly slowed down existing disarmament programs, continuing
to decommission warheads and delivery systems (that would in any case have
belonged in museums) while installing ever more effective systems to support
the warheads that would remain active.

At the same
time, the President issued a stark warning to Tehran: “Nuclear Proliferation
will not be tolerated,” he said with his hands firmly rooted to the podium at a
press conference. “In cooperation with our international partners, the United
States of America will strive to uphold the values that saw the end of the Cold
War; the end of the nuclear arms race.”

In Tehran,
they could read between the lines:
Welcome
to the club.

In 2045, nuclear
weapons were still a deterrent; one that earned the owner greater respect, and
made it far less likely you would ever be attacked. Everyone understood the
destructive power of the technology and where it could lead the world.

And it would
still take a complete maniac to actually use them.

The white
utility vehicle turned left into a side alley connecting Franklin Street and
White Street, a block away from Broadway, and came to a stop. The enticing
smell from the Lafayette Grill kitchens made the driver’s mouth fill with
saliva, but there was no time to pop in for a bite to eat. He’d have to grab a
McDonald’s or a Burger King on his way out of New York by train.

He couldn’t
remember which would be available at Penn Station, probably both. He would have
half an hour or so before he hopped on the train to DC to make up his mind, as
long as he could hail a cab and they didn’t get stuck in traffic.

Having already
changed out of his overalls and into jeans and a shirt, he shouldered his gym
bag and locked the doors. He also checked thoroughly for parking restrictions,
and peered into the windscreen of another car parked on the same street to
check for parking permits. He’d stopped where he’d planned to, of course, but
he didn’t want to leave anything to chance. That’s why he’d been chosen for
this job; not just that he understood the importance of getting it right, more
importantly the consequences of getting it wrong. He also knew there were no
surveillance cameras in this street, and the narrow alley made it very unlikely
that any decent satellite imagery would be obtainable.

A police van
drove slowly along White Street as he emerged into the sunlight. He carried on
walking nonchalantly, ignoring the look from the officer riding shotgun. It was
a long time since he’d been in New York, but it was pretty much like any big
city in America: mind your own business, and everything’ll be just fine.

He jumped in a
yellow cab and pointed up Broadway. “Penn Station, please.”

The driver
grunted in reply and they seamlessly joined the lunchtime traffic.

Fifteen
minutes later, he was sitting on a bench in the station, enjoying an early
lunch of Triple Whopper, large fries and Coke. The slices of tomato slid out
from under the bun as he tried to hold the burger together, biting small chunks
from around the edges to get it somewhere near a manageable size. It was a pain
to eat and surely a sorry substitute for the Lafayette Grill, but he made a
promise to himself to get some proper food as soon as he got back to Florida.

Ketchup and
juice dripping down his fingers, he finally popped the last morsel in his mouth
and washed it down with a mouthful of Coke. He left most of the fries and
cleaned himself up, chucking the ball of rubbish into a nearby waste basket.
Grabbing the still three-quarters-full Coke, he strode across the platform and
boarded the train.

A few minutes
later, he was watching the station slip away.

He flipped
open his cell phone and called the voicemail box hosted in an anonymous
business park somewhere in a nameless warehouse in Central America. After one
ring, the auto-attendant picked up and asked him in a sweet southern accent how
he wished her to direct his call. He input his six digit pin and snapped the
phone shut.

Closing his
eyes he bid a silent, eternal farewell to the City of New York.
So nice they named it twice
, he thought.
He settled down into his seat and opened his eyes, curious to see the city rush
past.

He was more of
a country man, and he wouldn’t be missing it. He wouldn’t be missing it at all.

Seth Mallus
put the handset down and smiled quietly. The third device was in place.

Los Angeles,
Chicago and New York had all been planted within ten minutes of each other. A
perfectly coordinated attack, despite Los Angeles being over fifteen hundred
miles further to drive than the other two, they had managed to leave at the
same time and arrive at the same time.

He applauded
the drivers’ organisational skills, as the finer points of their journeys had
been left to them. They had strict instructions to arrive and be out of the
cities by a certain time, but other than that no communication could be traced
back to DEFCOMM in Florida.

It was vital
that when the bombs went off, nothing could cause the authorities to look
inside their own borders for the perpetrators. For a start the fissionable
material could only be traced back to the ex-Soviet block, namely Georgia. And
of course, compromised defence systems would ensure that military advisors
thought the threat was external, but there was always a chance a meddling FBI
agent or rogue cop could sniff a rat.

The last thing
he wanted was to be assigned his own personal Hollywood Action Hero.