CHAPTER 3
The Dead Sea, Jordan
When the archaeologists began to feel ill, they thought they’d probably just had a dodgy round of something from the food truck on the way to the site; they’d been calling it the Food Poisoning Kiosk all month already, though it was the only food for miles around unless you really enjoyed limp salads from a cooler.
But when the electronics failed—phones, microscopes, ground radar, someone’s hearing aids—they called the government.
Safety officials arrived with dosimeters and spectrometers that promptly broke.
The site was evacuated, because if there was a source of radiation severe enough to wreck electronics, it would wreck a human too.
But to everyone’s puzzlement, there was no trace of radiation on anyone’s clothes once they left the site, and no record of nuclear waste being buried anywhere nearby.
Protocol, though, said that no records only meant one thing: illegal dumping. So the government called in the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the IAEA sent Tallis.
That was why she was driving at night down a deserted road, listening furiously to a Teach Yourself Intermediate Arabic download, towards a possibly radioactive dig site on the edge of the Dead Sea.
It was surreal. Really: you went to university and studied classical music, you did wonderfully, you wanted to write film scores, and you felt like it was fate because your mother had named you after a sixteenth-century composer .
. . and then you graduated just in time for an apocalyptic recession and ended up being a nuclear safety inspector.
Then you were in Jordan, where somehow it was still twenty-five degrees Celsius even in December at ten o’clock at night.
Tallis was not a twenty-five-degrees kind of person.
When she got back to the hotel, she was going to rent an industrial freezer and live in it.
That was providing she did not turn into irradiated sludge first.
The bright side was that she was meeting one of the Jordanian inspectors at the site and she already liked him. They’d been emailing; he’d recommended the hotel, booked the hire car for her, and for some reason they were now communicating in haiku. His name was Saloman, but he signed himself Sally.
He had also given her directions to get here. She had followed them so far and all seemed to be well, but she was worried about the last instruction, which said turn left at the suicidal goats.
She slowed down, because in the middle of the road and obviously parked for the night was a herd of smart brown goats. As her car headlights fell across them, some of them gave her long stares of intense, goaty belligerence. She laughed and turned left.
It brought her into view of the Dead Sea. She’d seen it when they had flown over a few hours before, in the last of the light, but seeing it from the ground, so close, was something else.
It was a silvery night, and even well beyond the headlights, everything was clear.
Out on the surface of the lake, island-sized lily pads of salt grew so thick that a careful person could walk right across them.
Just to her left, the ruins of an old gas station had sunk into the ground at a sharp angle, the shadows making the broken pillars of the forecourt into monstrous grasshopper legs.
Chained to one of them was an abandoned motorbike. It was encrusted in salt.
The whole shore was collapsing. Only another twenty yards ahead, the road vanished into a sinkhole. To either side, horizon to horizon, the ground turned from desert scrubland to grey where the salt had saturated the earth.
It was because the lake was shrinking. The river Jordan was long dammed, it was hotter out here now than it had ever been before, the lake was an astonishing thirty-three per cent salt, and the water was just .
. . evaporating. Now, what would once have been the lake bed was a moonscape of salt earth and sinkholes, some a hundred feet deep.
When she saw the official-looking black landrover and some lights, she stopped the car and climbed out.
Her boots crunched in the brine, and straightaway she could taste it in the air: sharp, alien, scratching.
“Hi!” A cheerful-looking man with curly hair straightened up from a tent beside the landrover.
He was lit up by four or five lamps, the kind with real flames and gas canisters, their light winking on the zip of his beaten-up biker jacket.
How was he wearing a jacket? Was he made of asbestos? “Are you Dr Osho?”
“Tallis though. You’re Dr Akhbar?”
“Sally,” he said happily. “Thanks for coming straight from the airport.” He had the easy American English of someone who’d been to an international school. Tallis felt inadequate.
“Are you joking? I know I haiku-grumbled a lot, but this is . . . much more fun than waiting to make coffee for everyone in our depressingly windowless office kitchenette. This place!” It wasn’t politeness-enthusiasm. Despite what they were here for, there was a loveliness to this land.
“How are you? Want to get started? You’re not too tired?”
With a jolt, she realized Sally couldn’t have been thirty yet.
In a deep-down place she tried not to visit, she felt disappointed.
She’d wanted to make friends with the nice man who wrote emails in haiku.
If he was young enough to be her son, though, that was—well, it wasn’t criminal, but she had a special and exacting scorn for the middle-aged men at work who swooned around after interns. She couldn’t be that.
Like always if she felt anything too strongly, or saw lights too bright, or heard a noise too loud, she saw a flicker from the corner of her eye, and when she looked—she’d never managed to train herself not to look—she saw a lion walk past. It wasn’t always a lion; sometimes it was an astronaut or an oddly placed tree, or furniture, or just lights, but there was always something.
She preferred the hallucinations to the medication.
She had gone a little bit mad on the medication.
At least if she saw something unlikely, she knew it was just her occipital lobe coughing.
She was so relieved not to be feeling an intense urge to throw herself in front of a lorry that she was actually quite glad to see an inexplicable lion.
In any case, there was a difference between seeing a real thing and seeing a hallucination.
They looked the same, and the hallucinations weren’t always impossible things, but there was a different aftertaste to the thought.
Seeing them felt more like remembering seeing something than seeing.
In the blissful new calm inside her head now that she wasn’t taking anything, she was finding that she didn’t mind at all.
It was just an interesting thing that her brain liked to do sometimes.
It wasn’t dangerous as long as she noticed it wasn’t real, and sometimes, there was a fun lion.
“Are you all right?” Sally asked, looking worried.
Tallis knew, because she’d filmed herself to see what it looked like for other people, that she went glassy when she was having a seizure.
“I’m fine. Sorry, I have occipital epilepsy.
It’s not dangerous, I won’t collapse, but I just .
. .” See all kinds of fascinating things.
She wouldn’t be saying that to the lovely man with the haiku. “I just zone out a bit.”
“Is it painful?” Sally asked.
“No, no. It’s fine. Ignore me.”
Uniquely among everyone she had ever met, he actually did as she asked. He just shook her hand, then pointed toward the lake. “I’ll show you the site. I’ve got hazmat gear for you.”
The reality of what they were about to do settled over her again.
For all that nobody could find any radioactive contamination on them or in them, the archaeologists were sick.
The site had broken anything electronic within ten minutes.
Whatever was here, it was serious, and they were about to walk into it with no way of knowing what they were being exposed to.
“Twenty-five degrees inside a hazmat suit,” she said, trying to keep her tone brisk. There was no use fretting. “Lovely.”
He flashed her a smile, and between them, an anvil suspended on a string, hung the awareness that they had both volunteered for this so that colleagues with partners and families wouldn’t have to.
The suits were a truly unattractive shade of yellow, and the black masks looked sinister by the light of the camping lamps.
She had been right: it was almost unbearably hot inside the suit.
Usually she would have masking-taped a handheld fan on the inside, but Sally said that the reports weren’t exaggerating: anything electronic crunched to a stop within ten minutes once you were at the dig site.
“But no radiation readings at all?” she asked loudly through the mask. The report had said that, but it was so odd she wanted to check—again—that there hadn’t been some kind of misunderstanding.
“No, nothing,” Sally said as they made their way over the broken ground.
They were skirting deep sinkholes, some so deep she couldn’t see the bottom, some shallow and pale with salt.
“It’s not the equipment. We tried three dosimeters, two different models of scintillator, and eight bubble tests.
Nothing. The hospital hasn’t found anything either.
But the archaeologists do seem to be suffering symptoms in line with mild radiation sickness.
Nausea, metallic taste . . . no burns, so it probably wasn’t anything they were handling, but it’s spooked my ministry enough that they want us to work through the night. ”