The Power of Five Oblivion

Richard. It has been a long vigil and often I have thought to myself that it was a hopeless one. You have no idea how glad I am to see you now.”
    “So what’s happening in Cairo? How come there’s a war going on? Who were the soldiers at the pyramids? And there was a shape-changer with them…!”
    “Ah yes. The shape-changer. It is very rare to see one, although we know they help the government forces. The Old Ones do not like to show themselves. They prefer to work behind the scenes.
    “Much has occurred in ten years, my friend, and none of it has been good. In fact, when I look at what has happened to the world, I wonder if the Old Ones have not used their powers, playing with the fabric of time. Look at what they have done to you! You are gone for ten days but ten years have passed. Well, so it is for the world. It seems sometimes as if we flicker from crisis to crisis, that a year becomes a week, a week no more than a minute. How else can so many bad things happen in so short a space of time? The volcano that erupted in Japan. The tsunami that hit the coast of Australia. The plague in China. The earthquake in the west coast of America. The total failure of the crops and the famine that followed. Famine in the United States? Would you ever have believed it?”
    “What about London?”
    “Not all the catastrophes have been the work of nature, Richard. After the banking system collapsed, there were riots all over Europe. Much of my own city, Paris, was set ablaze. For London, it was a terrorist bomb. A nuclear bomb. Nine of them, in fact, each one destroying a major city in the United Kingdom on the same day.”
    Richard felt sick. So few words adding up to so much death. He simply couldn’t take in the enormity of what the Frenchman was saying. What he was being told was insane. He had been away for ten days, not ten years, and it was as if he was hearing the history of ten centuries.
    The Old Ones had made it happen. That was why they were here.
    “I will not tire you with the rest of it – not all at once,” Rémy said. “You only need to know the situation here. A military government has taken over Egypt. The same has happened in many places in the Middle East. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces here is led by a man called Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad and he is utterly ruthless. He owes his power purely to the fact that he is supported by the Old Ones and he does everything that he is told. Citizens here are routinely kidnapped, tortured and killed. Everyone lives in fear.
    “There is, however, a resistance movement. It has been partly funded by the Nexus. We have been supplying them with food, arms and ammunition, much of it flown into Dubai and then carried here, a thousand kilometres across the desert. In return, they have been helping us watch over the pyramid. Government forces were waiting for you when you emerged this morning. The rebels then attacked them and brought you here.”
    “Here…?”
    “A rebel hospital and training centre. It is one of many. I will not say you are safe here because nowhere in the Middle East is safe. But they are operating on Scarlett even now and if it is at all possible for her to be saved, they will save her.”
    Richard was feeling exhausted. His mouth was dry. “I think I would like to have something to drink after all,” he said.
    “I will arrange it. We have a room here for you. We will get you fresh clothes and perhaps you need to have a sleep.”
    “And you’ll tell me about Scarlett?”
    “As soon as there is news, of course.”
    Albert Rémy stood up and went to the door. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you returned,” he said.
    Richard nodded. “Yeah,” he muttered. “It’s great to be back.”
    Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad sat behind his desk on the second floor of the Abdeen Palace, a huge building in the eastern part of the city. Once it had been the headquarters of the President of Egypt and it was only right that he should have taken it over. Everything about the room was out of proportion. The white marble floor seemed to stretch for ever. The windows looking out over Qasr el-Nil Street were triple-height. The potted plants were the size of small trees. Even the desk dwarfed the man who occupied it.
    Akkad was exactly sixty years old. He was an ordinary-looking man, quite short and almost completely bald with just a few wisps of grey hair around his ears. His skin was dark, his eyes very brown. It would be easy