Chapter 25
The chamber was in semi-darkness. The omnipresent glow, refracted light from innumerable solar ducts, lay over the living space like a luminous fog. Sara stole a last glance along the walkway before entering. Now she had trespassed. She’d better be quick.
Kadesh’s quarters were basic: a table, a rack of clothing, shoes discarded in a corner. There was no concession to decor. Everything was functional. The laptop lay on the table, beside it a box of CDs, a pile of magazines. A pitcher of water. Kadesh allowed no other refreshment within the caverns. Her heart thumped. She could hear her brothers and sisters singing; their voices carried from the chamber of worship. It was habitually a comforting sound, evocative of her childhood, of times when this had been a safe place, the only place to be. In God’s will.
Sara put one foot in front of the other, increasing the distance between her jittering body and the entrance. She was too far inside now to plead a social call. It was intrusion. I can’t believe I’m doing this. As if in a dream she moved forward. The small of her back tingled as she reached the table and slid the computer’s locking clasp open. She pressed the On button and watched the screen flicker into life, fumbled briefly under her robe and produced a 1Gb memory stick, sliding it into the USB slot with shaking fingers. Soft, floating hymnody filled the chamber. Sara prayed that Kadesh’s roving eye would not spot her absence. If he did then she was as good as dead anyway. This was all or nothing. Double or quits.
The machine completed its start-up routine and Sara examined the desktop folders. Military, Comms, BSc Hons, History. She double-clicked, her eyes scanning the file list for significance. There. CIA. She clicked again. Ten, no more, all pdf documents. There wasn’t time to read them all now. Sara opened the remote drive and copied all the folders to her stick. She was in the process of stopping the device when her eye caught another ‘My Documents’ folder. Sara. She swallowed and double-clicked. Another folder. Photographs. Hundreds of them. She scrolled through the file list, randomly opening the jpgs. Herself and Simon outside the University. Simon and some friends, her house – an evening dinner party. Simon in his campus office. Another folder. Childhood. She opened it. Two folders. One, Sara. The other, Dracup. He’s obsessed. . . She opened Dracup. Hundreds of files – all of Simon. Baby pictures, toddler shots, teen photographs. She bit her lip. He knows everything about him, about us. She was concentrating, unaware that the strains of worship had died away, leaving only stillness. And then with a start she realized her danger. She clicked the shutdown option on the main menu, pulled the stick from the USB slot. The laptop went into its closing routine. Windows is shutting down. Sara shuffled her feet in frustration. Come on.
She watched the blue screen flicker then fade to blackness, snapped the lid shut and walked quickly to the door. The passages were filling with her brothers and sisters, talking in small groups of two or three but in hushed whispers, low breathy exchanges, not with the laughter and confident chatter she was used to. She walked quickly away from Kadesh’s quarters then stopped to compose herself, pressed her back against the wall and watched them go by. Sweat ran down her face and the back of her neck. She looked at the pinched, drawn faces passing by, felt their fear. A people who should be happy, ecstatic at the blessings of recent circumstance. But the truth was etched on her face as well, she knew. We are no longer servants of God; we are servants of Kadesh.
In her quarters Sara examined the CIA files. Her machine was illegal and she risked punishment if caught, but she had already crossed a more perilous line. And Simon needed this. She couldn’t bear to consider the impossible goal of being reunited with him. And yet she couldn’t prevent the thoughts creeping in: He’ll never take you back. You betrayed him. She bit her lip hard. I didn’t. I tried to help.
Sara forced her attention back to the files. They had been removed from CIA central archives over a period of time, cleverly, carefully and thoroughly. Whatever else Kadesh was, he was efficient. Sara shivered. It was all here: the links with the Smithsonian Institute who had sponsored the expeditions to Ararat, comprehensive logs detailing the exploration of the great boat and the discovery of the artefact that would eventually lead Theodore Dracup to the home of the Korumak. But for her purposes it was the record of US government intervention in the lives of the geologist and his expedition colleagues that was of paramount importance. They had been – what was the sanitised term? Neutralised. Their minds had been systematically shut down by an experimental drug – a drug that was destined in later generations to become the recreational preference of the hippy movement. Lysergic acid diethylamide. It had been an opportunity to trial the drug and to observe the effects of increased dosage. It was also a convenient way to exercise control. She read a brief excerpt, dated March 1927: