Simon Toyne - The Key

They reached the main gate, passed through the double perimeter and into the shade of the transport hangar. It was better equipped than anything he had ever seen in the army. When he had signed on he had been asked to put together a wish list of vehicles and equipment he might need. Being used to army quartermasters cutting any requisition list in half, he had padded the list, adding plenty of stuff he didn’t really need. But he had got the whole lot. Money appeared to be no object for his new bosses, though with the drill still turning dry, he wasn’t sure where the cash was coming from: not from the ground, that was for sure.

The truck stopped and he opened the door to the trapped heat in the hangar, stretching the kinks out of his back as he passed through a set of double doors designed to keep the heat out of the main building and the air-conditioning in.

The mess hall was half-full, men in desert lights eating dinner after a day on the drill. He knew they were coming off a shift because their bright white work clothes, designed to reflect the worst of the torturous sun, were now uniformly beige. He could feel heat radiating off them as he passed their tables, as if they were bricks that had been in the sun all day.

The air temperature dropped a few more degrees as he left the mess hall and entered the office complex, punching in the code to gain entry to his domain — the security nerve centre. The more important people had desks further down the corridor where the air-con stayed constant and you couldn’t hear the noise from the mess hall, but he liked this just fine. In theory, it meant he could be up and outside much quicker if trouble arose — not that he was expecting any. The border with Syria was over seventy clicks away and the nearest town about the same. There were still pockets of fedayeen everywhere — the nationalist freedom fighters trying to kick out the Western invaders — and there were plenty of opportunistic criminals looking to kidnap key workers from the rich Western companies now flourishing in the unsteady peace; but Hyde doubted any of them would try anything here.

Most of his job as head of security had been done before they’d even stuck the first spade in the dirt. He’d deliberately driven all the construction trucks and armoured personnel carriers through the most populated places en route, to demonstrate the fire- and man-power they were taking into the desert. With the tactical capability of the compound an open secret, no one in their right mind would try to engage them — there were far too many softer and more easily accessed targets around.

Inside the control centre a bank of monitors cycled through strategic camera feeds from around the compound. At night the ones on the perimeter switched to heat and infrared frequencies, turning the dust-brown desert a ghostly green. Tariq, one of the locals he’d hired, was sitting in front of them, mesmerized by their unchanging monotony. He didn’t look up.

Hyde collapsed in a seat by his desk, and threw the rolled-up copy of USA Today next to the bundle of sacking. He considered consigning the paper straight to the trash, but dropped it into a desk drawer instead — just in case. Jogging the mouse to wake his terminal, he loaded his email. The firewalls on the system were so good that he never got spam and the only way a message could drop into his inbox was if someone specifically addressed it to him and sent it from an approved IP. Hardly anyone had this configuration so he almost never got messages. He still found himself checking for emails from Wanda, but she hadn’t sent him anything since the divorce papers. There was one message waiting for him, though. It was internal, from Dr Harzan — the big boss of the whole outfit: We’re just back from the desert. Bring the relic to the ops room the moment you return.

Hyde sighed and hauled himself to his feet. He didn’t mind being ordered around — after sixteen years in the service, he was used to it — but it still irked him that he was being dicked about by a civilian. Grabbing the bundle of sacking, he headed out to the corridor.

When they had first interviewed him for the job he had been told one of his duties would involve ancient artefacts. At the time he hadn’t given it much thought. Now he thought about it all the time. He’d figured if you were digging around in the ground, you might come across some old things that might be worth something, but he couldn’t for the life of him work out what buying a bunch of overpriced archaeological relics on the black market had to do with drilling for oil. He’d asked Dr Harzan about it once. Harzan had told him that he wasn’t being paid to think, just to do as he was told and keep quiet. So that’s what Hyde did: he kept quiet about the relics; quiet about the compound and quiet about his strong desire to shove a live grenade up Harzan’s ass and push him off a cliff.

He reached the operations room — at the cooler end of the corridor — knocked on the door and waited for a response. Even though he was security chief he didn’t have a key to this room. The only people allowed inside were Harzan and his two assistants, Blythe and Rothstein, who spent their days out in the empty desert, digging holes in the sand like big, hairy, obnoxious kids and generally causing a massive security headache. Why they couldn’t stay in the nice safe compound like everybody else was beyond him. Everyone referred to them as the three wise men — though not to their faces, as they didn’t have a sense of humour between them. The whole facility was at their disposal, that much had been made crystal clear when he was hired. It was almost like the three wise men and their wild goose chases were more important than the oil they were drilling for. Hyde had peeked at their personnel dossiers once, to try to work out why they were so important. He’d hoped it would shed some light on things, but all it had done was confuse him. He had expected them to be hotshot geologists with long track records of finding oil where no one else had managed it, but all three turned out to be academics with PhDs in things like antiquities, theology and archaeology. He failed to see how any of that was going to scare up the golden goods from the ground. Yet again it seemed he’d bet it all on black, and the ball was going to drop down on red.

The door rattled as it was unlocked and Dr Harzan’s bearded face appeared in a crack in the door, the dark rings around his eyes making him look like a panda.

‘Bring it in,’ he said, opening the door wide enough for Hyde to pass.

He headed on through and stopped by the table in the middle of the room. The other two weren’t here but he could still smell them. They both smoked pipes and the odour clung to the air in the room. It was only the second time he’d been in here since the complex had become operational and it had got a lot messier since he’d last seen it. Scrolls of printout paper and seismic charts were piled up everywhere, spilling on to the floor in some places. A topographical map covered one wall, overlaid with a spider’s web network of pins, Post-it notes and photographs of the night sky with various constellations marked out in chinagraph pencil lines. On the central table, state-of-the-art laptops sat side by side with old coffee cups and more chunks of stone tablet similar to the one he was carrying. They didn’t even let the cleaners in here, that’s why it stank worse than a frat boy’s locker room.

‘Let me see it,’ Dr Harzan said.

Hyde handed the bundle over and watched Harzan unwrap it, eyes gleaming like a junkie unwrapping a rock of crack. His face fell when he saw what was inside.

‘This is not what was promised,’ he said. ‘This piece is far too recent to be of interest.’ He held it up for Hyde to see, as though he was a slow student who’d just flunked a test. ‘It is written in Akkadian not proto-cuneiform and the symbols do not form the Tau.’