Dick Roosevelt put up his hands again — his ‘you got me’ gesture seemed particularly appropriate. Roosevelt caught Helen’s eye — no point continuing until they had the journalists’ attention again.
Helen agreed, suspecting she had been right about press conferences — they were for losers after all. She asked one of her journalist friends what the breaking story was, and was shown the message which had just come through:
‘Department of Homeland Security announces it is impounding the personal computers of all members of congress and their staff. Indecent images have been found on at least fourteen machines…’
Dick Roosevelt saw it too, then quickly whipped out his phone and dialled one of his contacts. ‘Get Susan, the Homeland Security woman who used to work for my father,’ he commanded. ‘Tell her to find out what the hell is going on.’
Fifty-Four
Myles had always been curious about religion but never attracted to any particular one. He loved the thought of an afterlife. He longed for a place beyond the world as explained by science. He always wished for a fundamental reason to do things, and hoped religion might be able to deliver.
There is no afterlife.
But he had always been disappointed. Religions might offer comfort, but that was all. To Myles, it was all just empty calories. Why believe in a religion for a spiritual world when you could just believe in a spiritual world anyway?
There can be no afterlife.
And did God, or a spiritual world, or an afterlife, make sense? Could they ever? Since death was by definition the end of life, ‘life after death’ was a contradiction. If there was such a thing, it couldn’t be his life which was continuing.
There is no such thing as an afterlife.
And yet Myles sensed something. Not with his eyes: they were blurry. Not with his ears: they were recoiling. He had even lost his sense of gravity: he no longer knew which way was up. But somehow he was still aware.
Myles foundered. Where was he? Not heaven. Not hell…
Vaguely he became aware of voices. Laughing voices. Male voices.
No holy book described where he was now.
He found his lungs straining, and reflexively pulled back his head. He gasped for air, then tried to spit dirt from his mouth. He was alive.
Myles’ eyes began showing him the bank of dirt. He was where he had been before he had been shot.
Someone grabbed at one of his legs. He felt his arms being pulled taut. He was being tied up.
He understood the laughing voices now: Juma and his acolytes were prostrate in hysterics. A mock execution. The bullet had missed. Deliberately.
Myles bent over to see his wrists being bound with cheap wire. The Somali man who was doing it looked up at Myles, still intrigued by the Englishman’s reaction. The man opened his mouth, revealing gums covered in half-chewed qat.
Only as his ankles were tied did Myles feel he was back in the real world again — half happy to have survived, half terrified by the knowledge that the mock execution might be repeated at any time, perhaps next time for real. He was completely at Juma’s mercy.
Juma slung his weapon on his shoulder, moving his gun as if it completed his display of marksmanship. ‘It’s all right — you’re still alive,’ hissed Juma. ‘For now.’
Juma’s men laughed again. Myles refused to react.
Myles’ height meant it took all three of the Somalis to carry him out from the dirt and back into the Toyota Corolla. They didn’t offer him a seat this time. Instead, they just lifted his body onto the metal floor of the pick-up and pushed him forward until they could shut the flap at the back. Juma’s men climbed in, glaring down at their prey.
One of them kicked him and sniggered, as if he were a plaything. Again Myles refused to react. Then the vibrations of the vehicle’s engine started again, and the pick-up started rolling.
Unable to see in any direction other than straight up, Myles didn’t know where they were going. From the position of the sun in the sky, he guessed they were travelling north or north-west. But it didn’t really matter. It was all desert round here. He was just being driven even further away from any sort of habitation. Even less chance of escape than before…
As the vehicle bumped and rocked on the uneven desert terrain, Myles was jostled around on the floor of the pick-up. He tried to test his bindings, disguising each movement as an unavoidable jolt from the journey. Both his wrists and ankles were very tightly secured. No way to loosen them.
The butt of an AK-47 was just inches from his head. He considered trying to grab it and use it somehow, but it was hopeless. Myles couldn’t even get to his feet. It was no way to escape.
The journey lasted about half an hour, although the timing was hard to tell. The Somali gang men passed drinking water amongst themselves several times — water Myles desperately wanted for himself — before the vehicle stopped and the ignition ceased.
Someone bent down to cut the binding on Myles’ ankles. His legs were released. Myles didn’t know whether to thank the man or kick him, but he quickly realised the three Somalis guarding him weren’t interested in him anymore. They seemed to be looking around. It was as if they had found some scenery in the desert. Myles could only imagine.
They followed the same routine as for the mock execution: Juma out, the back flap down, and everybody else out too, with Myles being dragged off last of all.
But this time they were definitely somewhere. This wasn’t just a random spot of desert. This was an abandoned town. An old Roman town.
Myles had read about these: there were several of them throughout modern-day Syria and Iraq, most of them well preserved by the dry desert climate. Settlements like the one he was in now had been created by the ancient empire and thrived for several hundred years. Then they had been left — either when the ground was lost to the Persians in the eastern wars between 200AD and 350AD, or when the Roman Empire itself collapsed in the century which followed. They had been abandoned ever since.
Myles squinted as he looked around: fallen columns and carved stones lay everywhere. The Toyota Corolla had parked on the remnants of an old Roman road. He was not far from a circle of stone benches, a mini-amphitheatre where ‘games’ had kept people entertained almost two thousand years ago.
Suddenly Myles recognised where he was: it was where Placidia had filmed her second video — the video she had shown him earlier, which explained how the Roman Empire had died.
As he blinked in amazement at his surroundings — a response which made Juma lean back with a grin — he turned to see the one modern structure in the whole area. It was a tent, just like the one over the excavation site in Istanbul.
Juma saw Myles had noticed it. The pirate leader made a gesture to someone. Myles didn’t know who.
Then the tent flap opened from the inside, and an old man was forced to march outside, into the light and heat of the desert afternoon.
Myles and the old man stood staring at each other. Like Myles, the man’s wrists were bound. The man had not shaved, and his sunken cheeks suggested he had not been given the food and water a 69-year-old needed to remain healthy in the desert heat.
As the man walked up to Myles, lifting his face in defiance of Juma and ignoring the Somalis who stood around with their guns, Myles greeted him with respect. ‘It’s good to see you, Senator,’ he said.
The Senator nodded and clenched his jaw against the desert heat. Although the man had been weakened by his captivity, Myles could tell Sam Roosevelt had lost none of his will.