A couple of lamps had been left alight. The fire had burnt down, however, leaving the room chilly and imperfectly lit. It took Ethan’s eyes several moments to adjust to the low lighting. He reached for a light switch near the door, but could not find one. As he recalled, the old study had never been fully lit.
With his dark-accustomed eyes, he scoured the room. And he saw what Senhora Salgueiro had seen, saw what had come close to driving her insane. Hardened as he was to sights of criminal horror and gross domestic violence, nothing in his experience had prepared him for the sight that now met his eyes.
To the right of the curtained window ran a long row of bookcases, divided into narrow sections by a series of fluted oak pillars. To these pillars had been nailed the body of Ethan’s grandfather. The Nobel laureate’s throat had been sliced right across the windpipe, and his hands had been lifted above shoulder level, where they had been fixed to two pillars with small knives. These must have been rammed home with force, for they held his body hard in place. Ethan could make out signs of blood on other parts of his torso, suggesting that he had been stabbed several times before receiving the coup de grâce. Blood soaked the carpet all around him.
Chips Chippendale had been despatched in a different manner. His killer had decapitated him before suspending his body from cords attached to two wall lights, then set his head at his feet. The eyes had been removed and placed on a china plate that sat next to the head. A pool of blood had gushed from the severed torso, and now lay congealed and frozen in the light from a desk lamp.
It was Christmas morning, and Ethan fancied he heard in the heavens a sound of vast, harrowing wings. Not the wings of angels, nor the pinions of cherubim or seraphim, but the coarse leather wings of demons. He shook his head, knowing he heard nothing in truth but the rush of vital blood as it coursed dizzy through his brain.
Taking a deep breath that seared his lungs with the cold morning air, he went to the study door and opened it a fraction. He slipped through the opening, shutting the door firmly behind him, and turned to face the expectant crowd of relatives that had assembled in the corridor outside.
PART ONE
‘The hidden city of Wardabaha is white like a dove, and on its gate is carved a bird. Take in your hand the key in the beak of the bird, then open the door of the city. Enter, and there you will find great riches, also the king and queen sleeping in their castle. Do not approach them, but take the treasure.’
1
The Shifting Sands
The sandstorm came in from the south shortly after noon. It had been preceded by the hot wind the local Arabs called a qibli, a searing, all-engulfing torment that seemed to blow straight from the deepest pits of hell, burning and suffocating everything it came in contact with. They had sat out qiblis before now, wasted days during which all you could do was endure, grit your teeth, swear, sweat, and lie as still as possible in temperatures as high as 118°F.
They’d been struggling through this particular qibli for the second day when Corporal Skinner had cut loose with a string of profanities enough to scorch even this overheated air.
‘I do not fucking believe this’ were the first intelligible words he uttered. He’d said them so often, so many times before, that no one paid him the slightest bit of notice.
‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘I think you should sit up and take a gander.’
Lt Usherwood groaned and crawled out from the low camouflage canvas under which they’d been taking shelter.
‘Sorry, sir. Went for a pee, sir. Thought you should see this.’
‘What’s up?’ the commander asked, his tired voice little more than a drawl.
Skinner just pointed. On the southern horizon, the light of midday was giving way to darkness, as black clouds roiled and tumbled across the desert sand. Gerald Usherwood snatched up his long-distance glasses and trained them on the clouds. Not clouds at all, of course, but huge billows of sand that stretched across the horizon from east to west, driven by a high wind that was picking up speed with every second it raced towards them.
‘Get everyone back on board,’ the lieutenant ordered. ‘It’ll be on us in minutes.’
‘We’re not too far from the RP, skipper. Should we try to head back while we can? Supplies are running short, and this could go on for days.’
Usherwood shook his head.
‘There’s too much risk of losing our way in this. We won’t be able to take our bearings at night, and I don’t trust the sun compass in a storm. There’ll be time enough to head for the RP once this blows over. Hurry and get some canteens into the cabs.’
The rallying point for the two-vehicle patrol was just over one hundred miles away, at Rebiana. They’d gone out from base at Kufra Oasis as a full patrol of six Chevvys, but the two trucks under Lt Usherwood’s command had carried on further west, deep into the Rebiana Sand Sea, on a search for wells. The others had gone north to Taiserbo, where there was talk of German forward units reconnoitring behind British lines.
Something big was coming up. It had been all the talk in Cairo two weeks earlier, and there was a buzz at Kufra, the western HQ for the Long Range Desert Group which had been taken from the Italians just over a year before.
The word was that Rommel planned a push on the Gazala line along the coast. The trouble for anyone trying to hold that line was simple: you could fix one end on the sea and defend it there against all comers, but down south it ran into open desert all the way down to deepest Africa. Jerry could slip down below your defences and twist round to spike you in the rear. R Patrol was probing for lightweight German manoeuvres, while Usherwood’s Sandboys were trying to open a path further west than anyone had tried before.
They were looking for wells and hunting an oasis, a lost paradise called Ain Suleiman: Solomon’s Spring. This secret place had long been the stuff of legend. The Bedouin said it had once provided the water for the magical city of Wardabaha, built in the sands by King Solomon, the source of all magic in Arab tradition. According to some blue-veiled Tuareg of the Fezzan, it still existed and was inhabited by a tribe of their brethren, a branch of the Kel Ajjer of Ghat. But no modern explorer had set eyes on the place. It was on no map, save for a map of the mind, where it floated, now here, now there. At the Royal Geographical Society, men in sober suits made fun of Ain Suleiman and its hidden city of magic.
But Gerald Usherwood had believed in it. He’d learnt enough Tamasheq to speak with the Tuareg in their own tongue, something the men in Lowther Lodge were incapable of doing, and he had come to trust them. Ain Suleiman was there, they said, but no one knew the way. It was in the worst part of the sands, they said, it was unreachable by camel, it was probably silted up by now. He knew they were hiding something, and guessed they knew their way there well enough but thought it wise to avoid entanglements with the Italians or Germans or British. If they were hiding something, he reckoned that meant there was something to hide.
They had barely put their sand goggles over their eyes when the storm struck. One moment the sky was bright blue, the next they found themselves in a thick haze that dropped visibility down to around twenty feet.