The Key (42 page)

Gabriel nodded. ‘Attacking it would be suicide. But we need to get inside the perimeter and as close to that hole as possible.’ He turned to his father. ‘I think we need to give ourselves up.’

The guard had only just received the message about the missing fugitives when he spotted two horses walking towards him out of the desert. He could see a white man and woman on one of them and the other rider looked Arabic. He was waving his keffiyeh above his head in a sign of surrender.

The guard got straight back on the radio and hailed Major Hyde.

‘They’re here, boss,’ he said. ‘Riding out of the desert with their hands in the air.’

He listened to his instructions then waved at the sentry on the gate. ‘Let them through,’ he said. ‘Take their weapons and hold them until I get there.’

John Mann had loosely tied Liv and Gabriel’s hands behind their backs and taken off Liv’s shoes so she was barefoot. All she had to do was step off the horse and on to the ground to fulfil the prophecy.

The guards came to meet them, relieving them of their weapons before leading them in through the gates and into the main compound. Work lights glared all around the large hole, turning the ground daylight bright, but whatever was in the hole was below ground level and not visible from where they were standing.

From somewhere out in the desert, the angry chop of helicopter blades started to build. One of the guards signalled for them to dismount. Gabriel slipped from the saddle and held his arms up to help Liv down.

She fell into Gabriel’s embrace and he began to lower her, the point of her bare foot moving towards the earth like an arrow. She could feel the coolness of the night radiating off the ground, then she touched it and her foot settled on the dust.

Nothing happened.

Her other foot joined it. The night remained unaltered. As did everything in it.

The chopper noise grew louder and the guard pointed to a patch of bare ground by one of the temporary huts. They moved across the compound, passing close to the edge of the excavation site. When they were almost upon it John Mann looked down and realized his mistake and the enormity of its consequences. This was not the right place. The thing that had been uncovered, buried in the desert, was not some ancient treasure stored by the great potentates of history, nor was it evidence of a primordial forest, it was the wreckage of the Sikorsky Sea Dragon. A side section had been cut open so it now resembled a disembowelled beast. White-overalled workmen congregated around it like fat maggots, removing relics from the smashed crates inside. As John gazed down at his ruined past, the man in charge looked up and their eyes met. It was the same man he had watched through the binoculars when they had first found the helicopter. Only this time he was closer and he recognized him.

‘Harzan.’

The man smiled and rose up the side of the pit to join them. ‘John Mann,’ he said. ‘I have often wondered if the Ghost might be you. You are a hard man to kill, it seems.’

John nodded at the white-overalled people down in the pit. ‘Do these people know how well you treat your co-workers?’

Harzan smiled. ‘These people do not seek to use the past to threaten the Church’s future.’

‘Neither did any of my men, but you killed them anyway.’

Harzan shrugged. ‘Oh, come, come, you know as well as I do that history is full of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some make a positive habit of it.’ He looked at Gabriel. ‘Your son looks just like you. It’s a pity he takes after you in other ways too. Enjoy your time together. Father-and-son time is so important, don’t you think? No matter how brief.’

Hyde spotted the Ghost as the Cobra descended to the compound. He was sorely tempted to open up with the chain gun just to see him ripped to bloody pieces, but he doubted he would be able to persuade the military pilot to oblige. He had to return the girl alive anyway and the gun was a bit too lively to risk it. Besides, he didn’t want to take out Dr. Harzan – not until he’d been paid, at least.

The skids touched down and the guards hustled the prisoners over. Hyde would take particular pleasure in killing the Ghost. For so long he’d had the impression that the insurgent looked down on him. He wondered if he would feel the same way after he had dropped him in the middle of the Syrian Desert and shot him in both legs. Gabriel he would merely shoot in the head: he felt no animosity towards him, he was just a job.

The three prisoners arrived at the chopper and were bundled inside by two guards who kept their sidearms trained on them. Hyde gave the pilot the thumbs up and they lifted off. The Cobra would take them back to the main compound then return to base. The rest of the journey would be made in the company chopper and, as the pilot was on the payroll, he would be a lot less squeamish about the unscheduled stops Hyde planned to make. He would fly to Turkey via the most inhospitable, godforsaken piece of desert he could find and make sure, once and for all, that the Ghost finally lived up to his name.

Liv was fading fast by the time the helicopter tipped forward and started racing east towards the main compound. It frightened her how quickly it had come upon her. She’d felt fine in the cave and on horseback. Now it was as if someone had pulled a plug out and her life force was rapidly draining from her. She raised her eyes to Gabriel, sitting opposite her in the cramped cabin. The expression on his face told her she must look as bad as she felt.

Through the window behind him she could see the sky beginning to lighten and the thin sliver of moon fading away, just as she was. When the sun rose, both of them would be gone, she felt sure of it. She was resigned to her fate. It gave her some small comfort to think that at least she would not make it as far as Ruin and be locked back in a cycle of torture and pain, imprisoned in the darkness of the mountain.

She could feel the thing she carried, curled up and still in the pit of her stomach, its dead weight pulling her down the way a star collapses to create a black hole that sucks everything into it including light. Maybe that’s what would happen to her. Maybe that was what the end of days meant.

Below her the dusty desolation of the desert stretched away, and a memory surfaced that she knew was not hers. It was of the world when it was young and the land beneath her, green and fertile – and she walked free upon it. There had been a man there too and she looked up at him now and felt the warmth of his being and his strong arm around her. And he was here still, smiling down at her now: Gabriel.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but the helicopter was too loud for her to hear.

She shook her head and the vision of him dissolved in tears. There was nothing to forgive. She knew he understood the pain of separation and she was going to make him feel it again soon. She had loved him too late and for too short a time, but her destiny was not hers to choose.

The helicopter banked and began its descent to the desert floor. Through the window the sky and the earth tilted like a preview of the end of the world.

Then she saw it, squatting on the desert floor, its long black neck stretching out from a body of spines and plate with fire coming out of its mouth.

It was the dragon of her nightmares: the dragon of the prophecy and the Book of Revelation – waiting to devour her and the Sacrament inside her – and they were dropping down towards it.

Hyde had seen it too out of the pilot’s window, burning in the desert before them like an early sunrise.

Goddamn
, he thought,
they did it
.

He called ahead on the radio and managed to get hold of the operations manager. The man’s excitement was clear, even through the emotion-stripping narrow band of the military frequency.

‘We punched through a layer of capping stone,’ he said, ‘and there it was. It’s huge. We’re well-testing it now, that’s why there’s all the gas burn off. So far the figures are off the scale. It’s high grade, sweet crude and there’s an ocean of it down there. I’ve never seen anything like it. We drilled a world record depth of hole and found a world record amount of oil at the bottom of it!’

Hyde took it all in, imagining his profit share and all the things he could do with it. He’d love to head back to Austin and drive by his old house in some ridiculous car so Wanda would realize she’d given up on him right before the slot machine paid out. He’d bet it all on black and it had paid off: not on the spin of a roulette wheel, but on the turn of a drill.

They circled the compound, avoiding the thermals created by the burn-off, then started to drop to the helipad. The moment the skids touched down, Hyde was out of his seat and moving to the side door to start the transfer of the prisoners. He wanted to get this done as quickly as possible so that he could start concentrating on spending his money.

Liv was paralysed with fear. Through the window she could see the beast, huge and demonic. The door of the helicopter was yanked open and she felt its heat and heard its roar. It was calling for her, wanting her.

‘Out!’ a man with a gun shouted. John Mann went first and Gabriel followed. Liv stayed where she was, rooted by fear. Gabriel turned to look at her. He was framed in the doorway in exactly the same way as he had been in her dream – moments before the flames had engulfed him. In her delirium this memory seemed real and she leapt forward to save him from the dragon, hitting him in the chest and knocking him backwards. She was outside now, sprawled across Gabriel and the concrete floor. She could feel the heat on her back and imagined the beast watching her, drawing the breath that would flow out as flame and engulf them both. She didn’t mind for herself, her life was already over, but Gabriel deserved to live.

She rolled away from him, scrabbling across the concrete to draw the fire down on herself alone and spare Gabriel from it. Pushing herself to her feet, she turned to face the beast, staggering backwards in an instinctive desire to get away. Her foot reached the edge of the concrete, stepped backwards on to the dry desert then everything became fluid and slow.

All sound cut out.

Except one.

The whispering.

Rising inside her.

The solid thing that she carried within her began to uncoil and grow. It became heavier as it expanded, pulling her to the earth. The ground felt alive wherever she touched it. She was on her knees now, sagging with the colossal weight of the thing she carried. The whispering was all around her, rushing through her like a hurricane or a river choked with spring ice-melt. Wherever she touched the ground she could feel it flow, passing through her into the earth and giving her relief from the pain of its containment. She fell forward, spreading herself out so that every part of her touched the dust. The effect was immediate. It was like a dam bursting inside her. She felt it pouring out of her and into the ground. And as it flooded out, she heard something else, a low rumbling rising up to meet it. Then the ground began to tremble.

At first she thought it might be the beast, shaking the ground as it walked. She turned to look at it towering over her, the flame still pouring from its open mouth. There was a sign fixed to its tall neck, a logo showing an oil derrick rising above a red line of earth. To Liv’s terrified eyes it looked like an upside-down Tau. An alarm sounded high on the platform in a high-pitched shriek and the nightmare vision from her dream was complete.

She waited for the flames, knowing they were next, as beneath her the rumbling continued to build.

From deep inside the beast there came a tortured groan, like metal being twisted out of shape. As the noise grew, the fire sputtered and coughed until it flickered out entirely and a cloud of steam hissed from the vent where the flames had roared. Then the steam was gone too, smothered by water that shot from the vent under pressure so great it arced over the compound and split into an atomized spray that fell to the earth like rain.

In the holding lagoons, the thick black lake of oil that had already been collected began to bubble, and the rank, decayed deposits of long-ago forests clarified into something pure. Even the helicopter, idling on the hardpan, stuttered and seized as the fuel in its tanks turned to water.

Liv looked up at the spray spewing from the dragon’s mouth, remembering the lines from the prophecy:

She had done it.

As quickly as it had overwhelmed her, the whispering left, sinking away, returning to the home it had once known; and Liv fell with it, on to the dust of the desert, and everything went black.

In all the confusion and chaos, the soldiers were no longer watching the prisoners. Some were staring up at the rig as their profit shares washed away. Others looked out into the desert at the approaching dust cloud, kicked up by the remnants of the victorious riders whose horses, unaffected by the miracle of fuel turning to water, had won the battle with Hyde’s mechanized forces.

Gabriel scrambled over to Liv and checked the pulse in her neck. It was very weak. He picked her up and ran towards the nearest building, hoping a compound this large would have a proper medical facility.

Hyde caught the movement out of the corner of his eye. He was still in shock, trying to work out what the hell had just happened. One moment he’d been imagining the life he had always dreamed of, the next he was standing in the rain as poor as ever. He didn’t understand it, but he knew it had something to do with the man and the woman who were running away from him. And he hated them for it.

He stepped across to the helicopter, pulled his M4 from behind his seat and sighted along the barrel, aiming for the broad back of the retreating man. He tracked his movement, settling on a point where the bullet would pass straight through him and maybe take the girl out too.

His finger tightened. He pulled the trigger. The Ghost appeared in front of him – silent and unannounced as always – and took the bullet instead.