Simon Toyne - The Key

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.

Hearing the shot, Gabriel looked over his shoulder and saw his father fall forward, knocking Hyde to the ground.

All the scenarios from his youth when he’d imagined what he would have done to save him flashed through his head. In the end it had been his father who had saved him.

He saw Hyde roll his father’s inert body off him and bring the weapon back to bear. Then a blur of movement flashed across him as a rider galloped straight through Hyde, the horse kicking the gun away as it fired, trampling him beneath its hooves.

Gabriel didn’t wait to see if he got up again. He kept on running, straight through the doors of the nearest building, carrying Liv to safety.

Inside, the building was deserted. The only sounds came from the great arc of water pattering down on the roof and the hum of air-conditioning.

Gabriel found the sick bay at the end of a long corridor and kicked the door open. Gently he set Liv on an examination table, feeling her neck for any improvement in her pulse. It was steady but still low. Her eyes rolled open but failed to focus. Her mouth formed words that were barely whispers. ‘Did we make it?’

‘I think so. Just hold on.’

The words of the prophecy prickled in his mind:… within the full phase of a moon, Lest the Key shalt perish.

He opened a cupboard-full of dressings and sterile gloves. Gabriel was field-trained in combat first aid, which was mostly about pain relief and stopping blood loss, neither of which applied in this situation. The next cupboard was locked. Obviously where they kept the good stuff. He raised his leg to kick it open just as the door opened behind him.

Gabriel spun round ready to fight and saw a medic standing in the door.

‘Help her,’ he said, grabbing the man’s elbow and steering him towards Liv.

The man slipped immediately into doctor mode, checking pulse, temperature and reflex response in the same time it would have taken Gabriel to find and unwrap a Band-Aid.

‘She’s dehydrated and appears to be suffering from shock,’ the medic said. ‘Nothing serious. I’ll put her on a drip and keep her mildly sedated.’

Gabriel nodded. More footsteps outside in the corridor, heading their way. He palmed a scalpel from an instrument tray and tensed his muscles ready to fight. His father was still out there, probably bleeding out from the bullet wound. He needed to get back to him.

The door to the sick bay opened and he saw he was too late: the same rider who had trampled Hyde to the ground was now carrying his father’s body in his arms. Gabriel felt a twist of guilt: it should have been him, not this stranger.

The rider laid John Mann down on the second examination table and stepped aside as the medic took over. He cut away the blood-soaked shirt clinging to his chest and revealed a neat bullet hole that sucked and bubbled each time he breathed. This was the sort of injury Gabriel was more familiar with. The sucking meant the bullet had punctured the lung. It would gradually be filling with blood, effectively drowning and suffocating him. The colour was draining from Mann’s face, and his lips were already turning blue. The medic grabbed an oxygen mask and held it over his gasping mouth. Gabriel stepped forward and took over, leaving the medic free to clean the wound and prepare an occlusive patch to try to re-inflate the lung. He leaned in low over his father’s face, saw the eyes flicker open and focus on him.

‘I’m sorry, my son,’ John Mann said. ‘One day you will understand. One day I hope you will forgive me.’

The grey eyes closed and the wheezing stopped. Gabriel looked at the chest wound — no longer sucking air, no longer moving at all. The medic grabbed the oxygen mask and held it tightly over his face with one hand while the other clamped down on the wound. The chest inflated and air hissed from around his hand, but when he took it away it sank again and all the air rushed out. The lungs had stopped working. He was gone.

The rider who had brought him in turned to Gabriel. ‘ Ab? ’ he asked.

Gabriel nodded. ‘Yes. He was my father.’

‘He was good man.’

‘Yes,’ Gabriel replied. ‘Yes, he was.’ He looked across at Liv. She was still unconscious, but there was colour in her cheeks and she was breathing deeply. He moved to her bedside and kissed her forehead. Her skin was cool and her breath warm on his face. He turned to the rider, pointing at the AK-47 slung across his back. ‘Could I borrow that?’

The rider handed it over without question.

‘Thanks. Stay here and watch over them — both of them. I’ll be right back.’

As it turned out, the rifle wasn’t necessary.

Outside in the compound all resistance had been abandoned. Everyone was too distracted by the miracle they had witnessed to do anything other than marvel at it. They were gathered in circles, standing around the fountain of water gushing from the oil well. To the east, the sun had begun to peep over the rim of the earth and was filling the air with rainbows.

Hyde was staring too, but he saw nothing. He was lying on his back with both eyes open, the left one bloodshot and dilated below the deep dent in his skull where the horse’s hoof had caught him. Gabriel looked down at him and felt nothing. He had always wanted to find the man who had killed his father, and imagined the pure righteous rage that would fuel his vengeance. Now that he had found him, he felt empty. His father was not the man he had imagined him to be — and neither was his end. He had grieved for him too long on a false assumption and now death had come for real there was nothing left to give — nothing except forgiveness.

He took Hyde’s M4, slung it over his shoulder then gazed at the surreal desert scene playing out around him, the water rising up from deep in the ground and falling back down as rain. This dry scrap of desert, marked by a map that kings and emperors had waged wars to possess.

The last piece of the puzzle.

It didn’t take him long to find the locked door of the operations room. He stood back, fired a short burst into the lock from the M4 then kicked the door open and stepped inside.

There was a large topographical map of the area pinned to the wall with various markers showing all the dig sites and a table in the centre covered with seismic charts and old fragments of ancient tablets. There were also copies of the same Iraqi military intelligence documents Washington had shown him. But none of this was what he was looking for.

The Starmap lay in a drawer of its own, nestled in a solid block of foam rubber cut to fit its irregular shape. It was black granite, cracked and chipped at the edges, but the symbols on it were still solid and clear. Dr Anata had been right. At the centre of it was the same T shape he had seen on the Imago Mundi from the British Museum. The central reference point was the same: the ancient city of Babylon near modern day Al-Hillah. Everything else was relative to it. He studied the markings, recognizing the dots that outlined the constellation of Draco. They pointed the way to a simple cluster of symbols denoting where the garden stood: a tree, some markings he assumed must relate to distance, and a simple stick figure of a human.