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.’
‘I was sent to buy a relic,’ Hyde said, keeping the anger from his voice. ‘I bought a relic.’
‘Well, you bought the wrong one. This one is no good.’ He tossed it on to the table as if it were a paperback and turned away. ‘Make yourself useful: one of the drivers was caught stealing petrol and selling it to nomads. He’s in the brig. Go and deal with him — that should be more in line with your skill base. And shut the door on your way out.’
Hyde marched across the baking ground towards the tallest of the guard towers that doubled as a stockade, sweat dripping from his reddened face like his blood was boiling inside him. The Ghost had switched rocks on him and made him look like an idiot. He reached the door to the tower and practically kicked his way through it.
‘Open it,’ he said, nodding at the locked door of the brick cell built into the foundations of the tower. The guard obeyed.
Inside the cell was a twenty-something Iraqi lying on the wooden board that served as a cot.
‘Grab his hand and hold it flat against the bed,’ Hyde ordered. He didn’t want to waste time with this petty thief; he had bigger scores to settle. The guard did what he was told. Hyde pulled his knife from his belt and slammed it between two of the prisoner’s fingers. The man whimpered and stared at the knife with widened eyes.
‘You stole from the company, yes?’
‘No,’ said the terrified man, in what could have been a plea or an answer.
‘You stole from the company,’ Hyde insisted, ‘and thieving cannot be tolerated.’ In a single swift movement he levered the knife down hard like a guillotine, snicking off the man’s little finger with a soft crunch.
The prisoner screamed. Blood leaked from the cut, isolating the severed finger in a spreading crimson lake.
‘Steal again and it’s your hand,’ Hyde said. ‘Try to run and it’s your life.’ He turned to the guard, who looked as shocked as the prisoner. ‘Clean him up and send him back to work.’ Then he was out in the heat and brightness of the compound, wiping his knife against the leg of his fatigues.
Back in his office he wrenched open his desk drawer and pulled out the copy of USA Today. He grabbed his satellite phone from its charging dock and dialled the number written beneath the photographs of the three Citadel survivors. He’d like to do more than just snip a few fingers off the Ghost. He’d like to string him up and torture him slow, like they taught the black ops to do to put fear in the enemy.
The ringtone purred. Nobody picked up.
The Ghost had done it to him again.
26
Al Anbar Province, Western Iraq
