The Khufu Equation by Rail Sharifov Read Free Book Online Page B

it up, pushed it beneath his belt, covered it with the shirt and left the room. He checked himself at the mirror in the corridor. He checked from various angles, but the revolver wasn't visible.
     
    Three minutes later, he drove out the garage in an old four-door Buick. The meeting was to take place in nine minutes. Giordano knew the drive would take just five minutes, no more. So, he'd have four minutes to check the gun again and prepare for any unexpected turn of events. Two minutes passed, and he was on the road near the Mont Fleuri cemetery. On the large bas-relief at the entrance were carved hundreds of Seychelles names.

    The moon was surprisingly bright that night. It shone a piercing cold light, casting into relief the crucifixes on the graves. A sense of foreboding enveloped Giordano. Suddenly, he imagined that one of crosses would become his that very night; that the moon, with its impersonal blue hue, would soon stroke his overgrown sepulchral mound with light only fitting for a petty criminal.
     
    Giordano gave a shiver and pressed the accelerator toward the floor. There was a gentle slope down from the cemetery, and after three hundred meters there was the country's main hospital. A complex of three-story hospital buildings was ringed by lovely gardens. Here grew the only bearing coconut palms on the island, other than those in the botanical park. They had been transplanted to Mae Valley from the island of Praslin. The luxurious trees, with their clusters of gigantic pods, bent down toward the rooftops. The hospital garden looked like a mysterious interlacing of bushes, lianas and epiphytes under the full moon.

    The theatre of shadows was coming alive, Giordano thought, and the sight was almost magnetic to him. It belonged to some bow-legged fairytale troll, grinning with rotten teeth in a most sinister way. Venturing in, he half-expected to find corpses littered about, the holes of thousands of worms littering their twisted limbs. He might find a serpentine creature, gleaming in fish scales, furiously scouring through the upturned earth. But these were only shadows, drawn forth into the imagination of Giordano Crufo, a man soon to be a fugitive . . . if he could survive this night.
     
    The light in the hospital windows was almost entirely extinguished, except for two or three windows on the second floor. Thus the doctors on duty were not asleep. Giordano looked at the lighted windows again and found, to his horror, that the light was the color of dried blood. He even was able to feel its taste in the mouth. It was sweet, like marzipan, but overpoweringly so. However, by no means was this the finale. The delusion melted away, and from the windows, into the darkness of the garden, floated the heavy, bluish, sparkling cloud. Giordano's hands started to tremble. His right foot jammed on the accelerator, and the car rocketed forward. He was unprepared for the power that resided in that big-block eight-cylinder, and almost immediately the torque of it put him in the wrong lane. In the headlights, straight ahead, was the grille of a nine-ton lorry. Thus it seemed that the last second of Giordano's time in the Seychelles would transition to eternity. He saw the gleaming, chrome-plated wheels of the lorry spin and turn; he saw the chromed aluminum bars of the front radiator as they crashed into the interior of the Buick; and he could--with that last blood-spluttering gasp of breath--see those poisonously green, shining eyes.

    Not a fraction of a second could be spared. He swerved to the side and, after an impossibly long blind date in Hell, the two vehicles continued on, each in its own direction.
     
    Giordano eased on the brake, coasted to the side of the road and then stopped. He closed his eyes and sat for a while, motionless. His nerves were shot. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before, with those hallucinations. He would have to see a doctor as soon as he was away from the Seychelles. Otherwise,