“No. If we need to use other resource material to decode it then you must let us into the library so we can work on it together.” Malachi didn’t respond, his hungry eyes wide and unblinking as they slipped down the text. He reached the bottom and visibly flinched, as if he had been struck.
“What is it?”
“The man who came back from the dead, did he ride here on a horse? Did he ride out of the wilderness?”
Athanasius recalled conversations he’d had with Gabriel about his long journey back to the Citadel. “Yes.”
“And what is this man’s name?”
Athanasius frowned. “His name is Gabriel. Now tell us what it says on the stone.”
Malachi shook his head. “It’s… I’m not sure… I’ll need to—” He started to back away, eyes wide and fixed on the laptop.
“Tell us what it says.”
He looked up at them, his eyes full of fear. “I need to check some things,” he said, still backing away. “I need to be sure, before I—”
“Malachi!” Thomas closed the laptop, but all it did was release Malachi from the spell of it. He turned and started moving away.
“MALACHI!” Athanasius called after him. But it was too late, he was already gone, almost running into the solid blackness until his flickering candle disappeared entirely.
78
Corporal Williamson and his crew made impressively short work of the gates. They had found some chains and dragged them to their truck outside the fence. The chains were fixed by one end to the tow bar and the other to the main support posts, while everyone else dug away at the foundations with shovels, picks and whatever else they could swing. When Williamson figured they’d dug far enough he fired up the engine and eased it over to where the earth fell away and used gravity and the weight of the truck to rock the posts clean out of the ground. Then they got to work on the rest.
Williamson took command, tasking some of his men to decommission the cannons up in the towers and the rest he split into teams to coordinate the demolition effort. Using a series of interpreters relaying Williamson’s orders they got everybody working together, some digging at the post foundations, others cutting the wire and rolling it into bundles. Liv had been stationed at one of the posts and was snipping away at the ties with an industrial-size set of wire cutters. She felt deep satisfaction at how quickly the different groups had gelled into one unit, everyone working together, everyone suffused with a sense of urgency by the column of dust growing steadily in the east, marking the approach of the newcomers.
“Those soldiers, they’re very good at this,” she remarked to Tariq who was hacking away with a pickaxe at the concrete foot of the post she was working at.
He leaned on the axe handle and wiped the sweat from his face. “They should be,” he said, “they’re USACE — United States Army Corps of Engineers. These guys are used to taking things down and building them up again. It’s what they’re trained for.”
Liv frowned as a thought began to form in her head. “Don’t you think it’s odd that exactly the right people seem to arrive here just when they’re needed? When the water was poisoned some water experts turned up from out of nowhere with all the right equipment to test it. Then these guys show up just when the need to dismantle this place suggests itself.”
“The goat herders too.” Tariq nodded over at the nomads who were now quite happily being ordered about by the soldiers.
“How do they fit in?”
“We have plenty of dried food but hardly anything fresh. In the desert the goat is the best source of fresh milk and meat. Those goats are as important for the sustainability of this place as the water.” He frowned as something occurred to him. “What about Azra’iel and his riders, how do they fit into your theory?”
Liv contemplated this for a moment then shook her head. “They were not drawn here by the call of this place like the rest, they were led here by Malik. They shouldn’t have been here. And they died.”
Tariq turned back to the column of dust in the east, close enough now to make out three white trucks at the base of it, their outlines shimmering and breaking up in the heat haze. “So who is coming now?” he asked, more to himself than anyone else. “What do we need here that we haven’t got already?”
Liv followed his gaze. “Whoever it is, they will be met with a welcome and not a closed gate,” she said.
She continued to watch the shimmering vehicles drawing closer, emerging from the liquid air until they crunched to a halt in a cloud of fine dust. The driver’s door of the lead vehicle opened and a man got out. He was tall and olive skinned, but not Arabic-looking. Gentle eyes surveyed the ring of welcoming faces then looked past them through the ruins of the gate to the compound beyond and the fountain of water. “What is this place?” he asked in accented English that placed him as Italian or maybe Spanish.
Liv stepped forward, fixing a smile on her face “We’re not quite sure what this place is really, we’re kind of making it up as we go along, but there’s plenty of room and plenty of water and you’re very welcome to stay.”
More doors opened and others stepped out into the desert, a mixture of Arabic, European, mature and young, six of them in all, two to a vehicle. Then Liv spotted something on one of their sleeves, a logo that looked familiar but she couldn’t quite place. “What is it that you all do?” she asked.
The driver of the lead vehicle turned his gentle eyes on her and smiled. “We work for Médecins Sans Frontières,” he said. “We’re doctors.”
79
Franklin saw something harden in his wife’s face the moment his phone rang for the second time.
They were sitting in the kitchen — Marie, Sinead and him — the remains of a home-cooked meal on the table, talking like they hadn’t talked together in God knows how long. It was as if all the bad history and all the distance that had formed between them had been swept away by the same force that had pulled them home.
“I got to take this,” he said. Marie nodded, a quick twitch of her chin, then slipped out of her chair, picked up some plates and headed over to the sink. How many times had he seen her do that? Too many. He looked at Sinead, so like her mother, and caught the same disappointment in her eyes — not as hard or as cold as her mother yet, but the seed was there.
He took the phone from his pocket and checked the number.
Shepherd again.
He knew he should turn the damn thing off and go over to Marie, tell her he loved her, that the old days of work first and everything else a poor second were gone. But they weren’t. Not yet.
He pictured Shepherd, exhausted from the day he’d had, standing out there alone in the freezing night with a fresh corpse for company and no one watching his back. “I got to take it,” he repeated, standing and walking from the room, hating himself with every step. He moved into the hallway and snapped the phone to his ear. “Franklin.”