The Key

99

Liv and Gabriel found the site where John Mann had died just as the moon rose above the horizon and the wind picked up. It was about ten kilometres outside Al-Hillah, past the huge mounds of bricks that were all that remained of the ancient city of Babylon.

An American garrison was stationed there now, camped in the shadow of the once great walls in lines of temporary tents surrounding a section of ground that had once seen the triumphal procession of King Nebuchadnezzar and more recently been bulldozed flat to accommodate squadrons of Apache and Cobra helicopters. The ground crew were busily anchoring the aircraft to the deck with securing cables as they drove by, wrapping the engine cowls with heavy-duty covers against the worsening weather. Gabriel took note but said nothing. It didn’t matter how bad the weather got, they had no choice but to press on.

A few kilometres further along the main road they had found a goat track running north into the desert and followed it until the read-out on the jeep’s sat-nav told Gabriel he had finally arrived at the coordinates where his father’s life had ended. He had memorized them twelve years ago, always knowing that he would end up here one day, often running through them in his head like a mantra or a spell to keep his father’s memory alive.

He switched off the engine and stepped outside, surveying the flattened dish of desert. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. There were no graves to mark the site, no structures remaining to show there had ever been anything here other than rock and dust.

He’d often wondered how he would feel when he eventually got here. He had thought that coming here might make sense of the anger and abandonment he’d felt for most of his adult life. But standing here now he felt nothing. If anything, it served to emphasize how powerless he was against the merciless flow of the universe. His father had died out here and Gabriel had not been there to save him; now he was here with someone else who needed saving and he had no idea how to do that either.

Hearing the sound of the jeep door opening behind him, he turned away so Liv would not see the tears brimming in his eyes. He didn’t want her to show him any pity when he deserved none. He had failed once and was failing again.

But instead of joining him, she walked away, up the bank of the wadi towards a spot on the horizon, her eyes looking up towards the stars.

‘Liv?’ he called out, but she didn’t answer. She kept walking, her gaze fixed on the sky. ‘Liv!’ He moved across the sand and stepped in front of her, grabbing her shoulders to snap her out of her trance.

She blinked and looked at him as if she had just been shaken awake.

‘Where are you going?’

She pointed up at a snaking line of stars hanging low in the sky. ‘The dragon,’ she said. ‘I was following the dragon.’

Gabriel followed the line of her extended arm, recognizing the constellation she was pointing at. She was right — it was Draco, the dragon. The dragon was everywhere, it seemed: in the prophecy, in the madman’s account of how his father was killed — and now even in the sky.

‘Let’s get back to the jeep,’ he said, aware of how cold it was getting and how she was starting to tremble. ‘We can follow the dragon in that. It will be quicker.’

‘That way,’ she said, pointing back up at the sky.

‘Whichever way you want,’ he said, steering her back to the car. He was losing her, he could feel it. Things predicted in the prophecy were coming to pass.

As he helped her into the passenger seat he heard a sound like a bird cheeping in the night. Gabriel climbed back in behind the wheel, slamming the door against the night wind. The noise had been his phone and he checked the caller ID before answering. It was Arkadian.

‘I think I’ve found something,’ he said before Gabriel even had a chance to speak. The detective revealed what he had discovered about the oil operation called Dragonfields, then supplied map coordinates. Gabriel fed the information directly into the sat-nav and set it to calculate a route.

Another dragon, Gabriel thought. Coincidence or destiny?

When the sat-nav finished its calculations, it answered the question for him. An arrow on the screen showed the direction the coordinates lay in, pointing in the exact direction Liv had been walking.

The oil operation was less than thirty kilometres away, somewhere in the wastelands of the Syrian Desert, following the constellation of the Dragon.