Simon Toyne - The Key

The Ghost nodded and in his eerie voice he started to talk.

‘I was in the main chamber when the helicopter came. We had unearthed part of the lost library of Ashurbanipal, looted and hidden when Babylon fell. It was filled with treasures — the Mirror Prophecy was only part of it. There were accounts dating back to creation and books of spells passed down from when the gods walked the earth.

‘We tried to keep our discovery a secret, knowing the danger if the Citadel found out, but there was a spy in the camp. Soldiers came dressed as Iraqi army but they looked wrong; they had no proper markings on their uniforms and the helicopter they flew in on was Russian — a huge Sikorsky gunship.’

Gabriel remembered the strange testimony of Zaid Aziz. He was familiar with these huge helicopters from his time in Afghanistan, left over from the Russian occupation. Everyone referred to them as Sea Dragons.

‘They rounded everyone up, accused us of spying and made us pack all the relics into crates. They had guns and numbers so we did what they said. But once everything had been loaded into the helicopter they started shooting anyway. We heard the slaughter down in the main dig chamber, but by then they had already tied our hands behind our backs and were discussing what they were going to do to us. In the end they strung us up by our necks from one of the ceiling beams and rolled grenades in after us. The explosion actually saved my life. It released the rope from around my neck, though not before it had done this to my voice.

‘When I came to, I was in darkness. I dug my way out to discover that everyone was dead. I salvaged what I could, including the camera containing the picture I sent to your grandfather. I was searching for water, but they’d taken it all. If I hadn’t been found by desert scavengers, drawn by the smoke, I would have died. They looked after me and tended to my wounds. The woman who nursed me called me the Ghost because I had been dead and she had brought me back to life.’

‘So why, if the Citadel sent men to kill you, have you been selling relics to them for years?’

‘It suited me to keep them close and let them think I was their friend. It allowed me to stay in the desert and keep looking for what had been lost. I only ever sold them things that were not useful.’

Gabriel shook his head and levelled the gun at the Ghost’s head. ‘I don’t believe you. I think you are working for them now, just as you were back then.’

‘No,’ the Ghost began to unwrap the keffiyeh from his face. ‘The Citadel is my enemy, and always has been. And I did not betray your father, nor did I cause his death.’ He removed the sand goggles from his face to reveal that he was telling the truth. The Ghost could not have betrayed Gabriel’s father — the Ghost was Gabriel’s father.

Gabriel stared. Shocked. Disbelieving.

‘I’m sorry,’ John Mann said, his shattered voice stretched thin with emotion. ‘The Citadel killed us all to keep what we’d discovered a secret. They thought I was dead. If I’d returned home they would have come again, and this time they would have killed Kathryn and you, just in case. But as long as they believed the knowledge had died with me, you were safe: I stayed dead so that you might live.’

Gabriel shook his head and felt the old anger rising up. ‘But we could have stayed together and hidden away as a family.’

‘And what kind of life would that have been? Always looking over our shoulders, always wary of talking to anyone in case we gave something away?’

‘Better than a life of not knowing. You were alive all this time and we never even knew. My mother died — did you know that?’

John Mann nodded. ‘You cannot imagine the pain I have felt at not spending my life with Kathryn. But it was only my love for her that kept me away. One day I hope you will understand this.’

Outside, muffled gunfire rattled the night.

‘Now we really need to get going. We have only a few hours left before dawn and it’ll take us at least forty minutes to get there.’

‘Get where?’

‘You’ve read the Mirror Prophecy. You know what’s at stake. We need to get you to the ancient site of Eden before the sun rises. And I think I know where it is.’

At the sound of automatic gunfire Hyde stamped on the brake to bring the armoured personnel carrier to a slithering stop.

‘Form a perimeter,’ he shouted, throwing himself from the cab.

Another volley crackled in the night, this time from a different source. The sides of the wadi reflected sound so it was hard to tell where the shots had come from. Behind him the men poured from the back of the carrier and started fanning out, circling the parked vehicle and moving up the dry banks. More sporadic fire rippled across the desert from a couple of new sources. It had the distinctive rattle of the AK-47, favoured weapon of the local insurgents. It was coming from everywhere.

Hyde made it to the top of the bank and surveyed the desert over the top of his M4. His night scope made the barren landscape glow green. He spotted the incandescent flash of gunfire about a hundred metres from his position. It was one of the Ghost’s men, looping around in circles and shooting into the sky.

‘It’s the Bedouin,’ he shouted to his men. ‘They’re drawing our fire. Stay here and engage them.’

He threw himself down the bank of the wadi, signalling for a couple of men to follow and took off on foot down the riverbed just as bursts of M4 fire started to respond to the AK rounds. He followed the hoofprints in the dust until he spotted the back end of a white jeep sticking out of a cave up ahead.

Hyde approached the cave in a low crouch, leading with the barrel of his rifle. He ducked his head round the edge of the cave, scoping inside with his night-sight.

‘Stay here,’ he whispered. ‘Make sure I’m the only one who comes out.’

He crept forward, quartering the darkness with his night vision, making sure nothing was ahead of him. He was happier going in alone. An enclosed and possibly hostile environment was the worst place to be with people you didn’t know and didn’t trust.

He found Dick’s body sprawled massively on the floor of a small chamber, a single bullet hole in his temple, his eyes open and reflecting green in the infrared beam of Hyde’s night scope. He scanned the space and found a footprint in the dust, heading deeper into the cave. He moved towards it, then stopped. There was something too perfect about it, too deliberate. He thought back to where he’d left the two soldiers and realized his mistake. Dick and the Ghost had ridden there. But when he’d arrived there had been no horses.

John Mann led the way with Gabriel and Liv sharing the bigger horse. They had followed the line of the wadi for a few hundred metres then cut across to another dry riverbed that sliced through the land in a different direction. Behind them the sound of gunfire rapidly melted away until all they could hear was the night air rushing past their ears and the thud of hooves on the dust.

Liv clung on to Gabriel partly just to feel him close but also to give him comfort. The revelation in the cave had been so sudden and shocking, she couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him. She was glad it had happened though. She hated the thought that, if she did die, Gabriel would be alone in the world with all his family gone. Now he had someone, and she was glad for that.

She looked up and saw the snaking line of Draco pointing to where the moon hung low, only the merest impression of it remaining in the lightening sky.

Not long now, she thought. One way or another, not long now.

‘It’s me,’ Hyde called out as he neared the cave entrance. ‘Don’t shoot.’