The Coptic Museum, Cairo
During the whole process of decoding the ingredients for the solutions, attention had fallen away from Michael. He had been brutalized by Marcianus’s men prior to Emily’s regaining consciousness, and on her waking, his torment had been increased. But then, once she had begun to comply, he had been left alone, ignored and abandoned to suffer in ignominy. It was Emily’s skills, not his, that they required. Michael was a broken man – crushed, defeated, used for a necessary purpose and no longer of significance.
It was a blind assumption that Michael realized was his only advantage.
Rather than protest, he employed the darkness and the distracted interest of Marcianus and his men to conceal the movements of his remaining good hand. The up side to the severity of his earlier beating had been that his attackers had not bound him as securely as his wife: his legs, thoroughly pummelled, had not been tied down, and his arms were fastened to the chair only at the wrists. The presumption that he was too wounded to escape would have likely been correct, had they not threatened his wife before his very eyes.
Quietly, patiently, he writhed his uninjured hand back and forth in its rope restraint. With each motion, the knot gave slightly – only a fraction of a millimetre, but persistence was something Michael was ready to offer. The long work of decoding, Marcianus’s phone calls and the teams’ preparations, these took time. Throughout, with gentle, consistent regularity, Michael loosened his bond.
At last he pulled his hand free and began using it to loosen the bond over his left wrist. Fierce darts of pain shot through his torso with every tug and pull, his fractured bones scissoring through flesh and nerves as he worked, but his determination did not wane.
By the time Marcianus used his phone the second time and made contact with his chief partner in Chicago, Michael was free. And one thing was clear: the man had to be stopped.
Waiting for Marcianus’s gaze to be lowered, consumed in terminating his call and returning the phone to his pocket, Michael found his moment. The chemist was absorbed in applying his potions to a new page, his partners huddled around him, their gaze singularly on the task to hand. The translator’s head was down, his mind concentrated on his charge. There would not be a better opportunity.
Mustering every ounce of his strength, Michael stood up from the chair and thrust himself forward in a single motion. His sole aim was the waistline of the translator, where a small pistol was held in an unclasped holster. Slamming his body into the other man’s to stop his fall, knocking the wind out of him in the process, Michael played the element of surprise and grabbed the gun with his good hand. It took him less than a second to locate the chemist, halfway down the table, and fire two rounds, one into each of his legs. Extending the arc of his arm, he swung the gun towards Marcianus.
‘Don’t move!’ he commanded, his breath rough, the pain from his injured arm shooting throughout his body, his battered legs throbbing beneath him. He nodded towards the chemist, now buckled on the floor. ‘Hitting his legs wasn’t an accident. Next time, I aim higher.’
It hadn’t been an accident, but it had been damned lucky. He hated guns, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t use one.
Marcianus gaped at the sudden intrusion. All around him, his men froze.
‘You,’ Michael ordered, waving the gun at another of the men, ‘release my wife.’ There was a brief hesitation, but the man capitulated. Emily glanced up to Michael, relief and gratitude in her eyes. His own were bloodshot and swollen, but satisfied. ‘Take his gun,’ he ordered when she was finally free. Emily complied, and an instant later she and Michael both held the team at gunpoint. He tried to reach his free arm up to touch her, to give her face a consoling touch; but the pain of the wounds was too great. She reached out to him instead.
It was then that Michael heard the bustle in the darkness to his left. Spinning towards the sound, Michael caught sight only of Marcianus’s back as the group’s leader moved away into the shadows. The sounds of crumpling paper highlighted the possession he grabbed as he fled: the translation of the Liberation Incantation that his men had produced, together with the torn-out pages of the codex that had revealed it.
‘Stop!’ Michael shouted, aiming his gun. He had never killed another man, but he found himself acting without hesitation. Bell had proven what he was capable of, and what he was planning to do. Michael squeezed the trigger tightly, firing two shots into the darkness. The suppressor softened the noise, but the bursts of light from the muzzle lit up the dark room like a strobe light.
Neither shot found its mark. Marcianus disappeared from sight.
‘Go after him!’ Emily cried. ‘He’s taken the codex!’
Michael limped to follow Marcianus, fighting against the pain, but as he reached the door into the main corridor two facts simultaneously flashed into his mind: he had not seen which way the man had run after leaving the room, which meant he would be following blind in the darkness; and no matter how adept she might be with a firearm, eight-to-one against were not odds he was willing to risk leaving Emily alone with. Marcianus’s team were likely as desperate as he was, and there were more guns in the room than just the two they had confiscated. He couldn’t leave Emily to face the remaining men by herself.
He turned back, returning his gun to a general sweep over Marcianus’s team.
‘Mikey, what are you doing? You have to stop him!’
He stepped up to Emily’s side. ‘He’s gone, Em.’ She stared wildly into his eyes, incredulous. But Michael could only repeat the truth.
‘Marcianus is gone.’