The Gilgamesh Conspiracy (34 page)

‘Good, by the time you arrive, this should have all been resolved. Now perhaps you could tell me where you dropped her off, and what she had with her in the way of money, equipment, anything at all in fact.’

The sunlight flooding into the room woke Gerry up. She quickly dressed and then looked around the garage. She rummaged through a tool set and found some pliers, four screwdrivers of different types and sizes, a pair of tin snips and a utility knife which she added to a large shoulder bag in which she had already packed some clothes before leaving the house via the broken door. She walked back to a row of local shops and restaurants, found a telephone booth and bought a Diet Coke from a nearby shop and asked for change for the telephone. She searched for the major hotels in the directory, called the first on the list and asked to be put through to reception. ‘Hello is that where the conference is taking place please?’ Gerry asked.

‘I’m sorry you have the wrong hotel, we have no conferences booked if you like I can look up…’

Without waiting for the man to finish she hung up and then dialled the next on the list and asked the same question, this time with the response she had been hoping for.

‘Do you mean the American Orthodontics Society?’ The woman on the reception asked. ‘Are you attending madam?’

‘Yes I am,’ said Gerry. ‘This is Doctor Eve Adams. I’m running a bit late, can you tell me what time they’re starting?’

‘Well let me look at their schedule. Breakfast at 9am, meeting at 10am and the first speaker is scheduled to begin at 10.30am.’

‘That’s fine, thank you very much,’ Gerry said and hung up. She walked along the street to a secluded spot and cut a strip of metal from the empty Coke can and bent it double so she had a strip about one centimetre by six. Then she returned to the café and telephoned a local taxi company whose business card was taped to the wall and asked to be picked up.

Gerry walked into the hotel store and bought a copy of the Economist and a roll of adhesive tape. She wandered around the reception area taking careful note of the surroundings and then settled down in the Starbucks concession with a double tall latte and began to read her magazine. 

When the American Orthodontics Society broke up for lunch Gerry rose from her seat and surreptitiously inspected the participants wearing their distinctive conference name cards. Helen Mendoza was several inches shorter than she was, but otherwise her hair and facial resemblance was fairly good. Gerry followed her into the elevator with a crowd of other delegates and followed her along the corridor and noted her room number. Then she walked to a service trolley and took the room maid’s clipboard and walked back to Helen Mendoza’s room and knocked on the door. She stood back and smiled at the door spy glass with the clipboard prominent.  After a moment the door opened.

‘Good afternoon Doctor Mendoza, I would be grateful if you could just check that your minibar has been serviced for me?’

‘Oh…ah…ok. But I haven’t had anything from the minibar.’

‘If you could just check the security tag has been renewed please.’

As Helen Mendoza walked back into her room Gerry taped her metal strip over the door catch aperture.

‘Yes its fine,’ said the orthodontist straightening up and turning to look at her.

‘Thank you very much, doctor. I hope you have a pleasant stay and a good conference.’

Gerry replaced the clipboard and rode the elevator back down to reception and ordered another coffee. A few minutes later Helen Mendoza emerged from an elevator and walked into the conference lunch room. Gerry hastened back up to her room, pushed open the door and removed the metal strip. She searched through the woman’s luggage until she found a passport, driving licence, Visa and Amex cards, cash to the value of five hundred dollars and another seven hundred in traveller’s cheques.

She went into the bathroom, relieved herself of some of the coffee and looked in the mirror. ‘Good afternoon, my name’s Helen Mendoza,’ she said in her best American accent. ‘I need some dental work carried out.’

The dentist had been all sympathy as Helen Mendoza described how she had lost a tooth in a car accident two years ago and how she had been hit in the face playing tennis last week and now her cap had fallen off. ‘My travel insurance company and my dental health insurance people are fighting over who is going to pick up the tab,’ she had explained, ‘so I was wondering if you could just fix me up with a temporary crown.’

Gerry left the dentist two hundred and twenty four dollars worse off but with a full set of front teeth, or at least a suitable imitation. Then she went to a bank and took out three thousand dollars courtesy of Helen Mendoza’s passport, driving licence and credit cards. Next she paid a visit to the shops, bought a wheelie bag and some more suitable clothes and a laptop computer, thence to the International Airport where she found the British Airways ticket desk.

‘Hello, I need a ticket for today’s flight back to London, please.’

‘I’m sorry madam; this evening’s flight is full. We’ve got space on tomorrow’s in club and world traveller. Would you like me to book you for that?’ the agent asked her.

Gerry pursed her lips and suppressed a string of oaths. She dared not wait in case Helen Mendoza reported a stolen passport and Gerry was arrested before she could leave the island. She looked around and saw an Air Canada desk where the agent was being harangued by some apparently discontented customers. She walked over and eavesdropped that the much delayed flight to Toronto would be leaving in ninety minutes. She waited with as much patience as she could for thirty seconds but then ignoring discontented objections from the complaining passengers she barged her way to the front. ‘Do you have any seats left on that Toronto flight?’ she asked with her best smile.

‘Actually we do. You’d like a ticket?’ said the man gratified that he had one customer he did not have to placate over the delayed departure.

‘Yes I would thanks,’ said Gerry, relieved.

The flight proved to be fairly empty of passengers; presumably they had been re-routed by the airline on to earlier flights. Gerry wondered if she should have tried to bargain for a discounted ticket, but at least she had the comfort of a row of three seats to herself. After take-off she accepted a cup of coffee from the cabin crew, sat back in her seat and closed her eyes.

‘May I sit here for a moment?’ a man murmured to her. She sighed inwardly and opened her eyes then she started violently in her seat and slopped her coffee over the table top. She spent a half second wondering if she should be prepared to fight for her life or stop the coffee from pouring on to her legs, but then realised that he would probably not attempt to kill her on board the aircraft, and she was absolutely certain he would never have given her any warning.

‘I’ll go and get a cloth,’ said Richard Cornwall.

Cornwall returned a minute later carrying a damp cloth and a fresh cup of coffee for her. He watched in silence as she mopped her table and her legs. Then he took the cloth and handed her the coffee and sat beside her.

‘We thought you’d drowned until you started using the internet aboard that yacht,’ he said.

‘I’ve no idea who you mean by ‘we’. If you knew I was taking this flight then presumably you could have stopped me before I boarded.’

‘I wanted you to get away from there before Samms and Parker found you.’

‘Ok, so how did you track me down?’

‘Not my ingenuity, I have to admit. I had a message from Daniel Hall, who said that you had survived and were on a yacht destination Bermuda.’

‘How the hell did he know that?’ Gerry asked.

‘I assume a bit of a cock-up,’ Cornwall suggested. ‘He must have logged onto the web-site and read the reports. They must have forgotten to deny him access. You know what it’s like; sometimes people can take all the necessary precautions except the most obvious ones.’

‘Like me trying to log on from Steven’s yacht and showing that I was still alive?’

‘Yeah…pretty silly of you Gerry.’

‘Well maybe, but I’ve been in prison for the last few years trying to keep a grip on my sanity, not keeping up to date with tracking and surveillance, data monitoring and…’

‘Ok, point taken!’ said Cornwall alarmed by a note of hysteria. ‘Of course you’ve had a godawful experience. Sorry.’ 

‘And how do I know you haven’t arranged for me to be arrested on arrival in Toronto?’ she went on.

‘I could have had you arrested in Bermuda, still officially a piece of UK territory,’ said Cornwall. ‘Why would I let you go to Canada?’

‘Alright…fair point.’

‘You really are a ruthless bitch; you haven’t expressed any concern about Steven Morris at all! What do you think would have happened to him with your friends Samms and Parker waiting for him in Bermuda?’

‘Oh…is he alright?’

‘Fortunately I arranged for him to be taken into protective custody when he arrived and he told me something about your adventure. Now he’s off to Florida in his yacht. In the meantime I have put out some disinformation that you intend to travel to Egypt where you can live out of sight until...’ He broke off when he realised that tears were trickling down Gerry’s cheeks and she was ineffectually wiping them away with the back of her hand.

‘Bloody hell, you really have gone soft!’ he scoffed, but then felt ashamed. ‘I’m sorry; it must have been utter hell alone on that life raft for all that time.’

‘You think?’

‘Now officially I have no idea you’re still alive,’ Cornwall continued. ‘I’m meant to be on holiday in Barbados; my wife is still in the hotel in Bermuda. I hope she’s not enjoying herself too much without me.’ He glanced over at Gerry who was staring at the seat in front of her in some miserable world of her own. He sighed. ‘Look; you should trust me. We should pool whatever we know about this whole bizarre mess and we should work together.’

Gerry gazed out of the window, but drew little comfort from the vista of layers of white cloud topped by the deepening blue of the evening sky. ‘Who was responsible for putting me in prison Richard? And why was I brought out? Did you really think I would be a useful asset?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I thought you’d be a bloody pain in the arse. Fielding insisted. He wanted you to go to Guantanamo Bay. Ali Hamsin demanded to speak to you, but I don’t know what about.’

Gerry stared at him. ‘I find that rather hard to believe. Are you telling me you don’t know about operation Gilgamesh?’

‘I’ve been trying to find out, but it was buried years ago!’

‘I know, but Hamsin didn’t tell me where exactly,’ Gerry said.

‘What do you mean where exactly?’ Cornwall demanded. ‘It was an abandoned operation, but sensitive so all references were deleted, expunged from the records.’

‘But Ali Hamsin told me he had the documents. He knows where they were buried…literally!’

‘What… in the ground?’

‘Yes!’

‘Shit! No wonder there’s all this crap going on. There must be some really embarrassing stuff.’

‘Yes but as Hamsin didn’t tell me anything useful, they must have decided to just get rid of us both.’

‘There’s a report already written stating that you were responsible for that aircraft crash, and that everyone on board was killed,’ said Cornwall.

‘How could they possibly know that?’

‘They didn’t, but when the aircraft disappeared and then you turned up alive, they made the assumption. Then when Dan Hall disappeared from sight they reckoned that he must have had something to do with helping you.’

‘I guess that’s not too far from the truth.’ Gerry stared at the seat back. ‘If only I had shot the bastards straightaway. I could probably have flown that plane back to Bermuda and landed it myself! But why did Dan run off? He could have brazened it out?’

‘My guess is that he has some romantic notion of carrying out his own investigation into the Gilgamesh affair.’

‘But he knows I’m alive?’

‘Yes he sent me a message saying that you were expected in Bermuda.’

Gerry frowned. ‘How could he have known that?’

‘As I said, apparently he still has access to the confidential website,’ Cornwall replied. ‘So what happened on board the aircraft? In fact you’d better tell me everything that happened from the time you left Farnborough airport. After all we’re together in this aircraft for another two and a half hours.’

Gerry was coming to the end of her story as the aircraft began its descent towards Toronto.

Cornwall was silent for a moment, wondering if she would elaborate on her days alone in the raft but just then the Captain announced that the aircraft would land in ten minutes. ‘But didn’t Ali Hamsin tell you about Gilgamesh before he died?’

‘Ali didn’t tell me what was in the Gilgamesh document; he told me how to find it.’

‘Bloody hell! So are you going to tell me?’

‘Why should I trust you?’ she asked.

‘Because you can’t keep going on your own and because I’ll tell you how to find Dan Hall. Also if I wanted to, I could easily have arranged for you to be picked up at Toronto, rather than boarding the flight to talk to you.’