G
George could feel the emotion rising in him as Ben squeezed his shoulder. He put his hand on the screen, touched the words, caressed the initial of her name, and pressed the ‘ILY’ fondly. She isn’t dead, he thought. She hasn’t been dead. His mind raced back to the body identification he had been taken through back in the morgue, when he had punched Captain Kamal. Had it been Gail? Had he been so close to his wife, still breathing imperceptibly, and not known the truth?
He punched the screen, liquid crystals changing colour grotesquely as they gave way under his fist. “I could have stopped him!” he blurted out. “Bastard!”
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.”
Chapter 63
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.