Arachnosaur. Richard Jeffries

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СКАЧАТЬ assistants. In fact, that drunk who bothered you in the bar was one of them.”

      That had not exactly put Key’s mind at ease. Every few minutes, while Gonzales had filed flight plans and garnered permissions, he offered other reasons why the mechanic should not get involved.

      Finally, Gonzales had simply turned on Key with a solemn expression. “Look,” he said. “I just watched a guy I know go boom. If he went boom, that means anybody can go boom. So, should I just hang around here or should I take you where you need to go to try stop it from happening again?”

      And, according to Gonzales, where they needed to go was Muscat. If they had any chance of cornering anyone from the Study Committee, it would be there.

      Key couldn’t argue with that, so he had finally shut up and let Gonzales get on with it. Two hours later they were slipping into the edge of Muscat as much as it was possible to do in a country with less than two dozen registered private jets. But, in the interim, Key was informed via text that the Marine hazmat team had locked down Ayman’s Emporium, if not what was left of Ayman himself.

      Key was half expecting Logan to rip his ear off, but also half expecting what actually happened—a calm, subsequent, text requesting that he keep the Captain informed. Key looked around at the overgrown field and sandy runway, feeling a little exposed.

      “You ever get the feeling you’re being watched?” he muttered.

      “Don’t worry, Corporal,” Gonzales assured him, misunderstanding the comment. “They know me here. They’ll take good care of CJ.”

      Daniels leaned over and mock-whispered in Key’s ear. “That’s his plane’s name. He names everything.”

      Already several young men in greasy coveralls, who looked like locals, were walking around the aircraft as if they had done it many times before. Gonzales said something to one of them in Arabic, which sent the man scurrying off.

      “So, what now, Corporal?” Gonzales inquired as Key continued to survey the area.

      “We need a base of operations,” Key reminded him.

      “Already done,” Gonzales promised. “I arranged it from the cockpit. It’s my usual hangout. I wasn’t sure you wanted to go there first, though.”

      Key felt relieved, and not for the first time, that he had finally allowed Gonzales to volunteer for the team. “Good guess,” he started, but was then distracted by Daniels giving off a loud moan.

      “You have got to be kidding me!”

      Key turned as a white Toyota Yaris came driving up beside them, and the young man who had scurried away emerged from behind the wheel. He and Gonzales had a rapid conversation.

      “He says it’s clean, the air conditioning works, and he checked the engine himself,” Gonzales told Daniels with only the slightest hint of a smirk. “He wants to know what the problem is.”

      “As if you didn’t know,” Daniels complained. “Was that the smallest car you could find? Why not a Yugo?”

      “Don’t worry, don’t worry.” Gonzales laughed. “He will take you to where we’re staying in his own Jeep.”

      Key put a hand on Daniels’s shoulder. “Didn’t think you wanted to go scouring the hospitals with me anyway.”

      “That’s what you’re going to do?” the sergeant asked, wincing with anticipated boredom.

      “Yeah. And schools. Anyplace we can find out if anybody else”—he looked at Gonzales—“went boom.”

      “Hospitals and schools?” Daniels echoed. “You think you’re going to find out anything there?”

      “Got to start someplace,” Key told him. “And got to start fast.”

      Daniels shook his head curtly. “Let me bring our stuff, whatever’s left of it, to the hotel, then I’ll bring my own prodigious intellect to the problem.”

      Key had known the sergeant too long to get unduly worried by that statement. Even so, he felt impelled to give Daniels a disclaimer. “Okay, but keep in mind that even with Captain Logan’s influence, we don’t have much pull here.”

      “And,” Gonzales added, “keep in mind that, according to Arabic laws, women may not be in a room alone with a man who is not a relative.”

      Daniels shook his head. “Oh, ye of little faith.”

      Gonzales laughed. “Oh, we of much faith in knowing what you do. And, by the way, it’s not a hotel.”

      “Okay, okay,” Daniels said as he waved them away like annoying gnats. “Go off on your wild goose chase, and let the grown-ups get the goods for you.”

      Key waited until Daniels had gone off with the young scurrying man before getting into the passenger seat of the Yaris.

      “You think Morty’ll be okay around here?” Key solemnly asked Gonzales, who was in the driver’s seat.

      “I was just going to ask you the same thing,” Gonzales answered, half-jokingly. “Let me tell you something. When Sultan Qaboos took over in 1970, he decided to make Oman accessible to non-Muslims and Westerners—in order that we might ‘appreciate the beauty of Islam.’ If Morty was anyplace else in the region, we’d probably find him in pieces being eaten by camels when we got back. But here? They don’t even allow corporal punishment in the schools anymore. He’ll be fine.”

      “There’s a ‘but,’” Key observed.

      Gonzales sighed a little. “He’ll be fine—probably.”

      Key nodded in hopeful agreement as Gonzales started the Yaris’s one-point-five liter, four-cylinder engine.

      “Where to, Corporal?”

      “Call me Joe,” Key finally suggested. “And take me someplace I can find a translator who won’t spook the locals, and an expert on communicable diseases.” Key looked at the mechanic apologetically. “Preferably both. And step on it.”

      Chapter 9

      Key didn’t know whether it was his increasing exhaustion and desperation, or simply the seemingly bottomless, concerned eyes of a new player, an assistant professor, that suddenly turned him very, very honest. Whatever it was, Key felt certain that time was running out. And not just for him.

      He didn’t think he was just being an alarmist here. That wasn’t his nature. But how many times in human history had something unanticipated, like fleas on rodents, caused something unexpected, like the Black Death, that killed around 200 million human beings and came perilously close to wiping us out?

      Probably more than I’m aware of, Key thought, wondering how many extinctions had taken a poke at the dinosaurs before their clock was punched by an asteroid.

      Gonzales had been driving him all over the capital in search of what he had asked for, a universal translator as well as an expert in communicable diseases. They had used up most of the eight hours they had gained by flying here going from hospital to hospital. Muscat had at least five dozen of them, and almost nine СКАЧАТЬ