Sanctus (18 page)

The roads in the Lost Quarter had first been haphazardly scratched into the earth by handcarts and horses in the early part of the sixth century and were now utterly unequal to the volume, speed and width of modern traffic. As road-widening required demolition, which wasn’t an option here, the town planners had implemented a one-way system so complex it ensnared cars like flies in its unfathomable web.

Driving his ambulance through these medieval streets was something Erdem had nightmares about. His paramedic’s operating manual required him to respond to any callout in the greater metropolitan area within fifteen minutes. It also required him to bring his vehicle back in the same state it went out. Which meant that a trip into this stony warren of paint-scraped walls at anything like the necessary speed to fulfil the first obligation inevitably resulted in a drastic failure to comply with the second.

He watched the cross on the side of the ambulance emerge slowly from the shadow of a stone archway, revealing the rod of Asclepius at its centre entwined with a serpent. He eased up the power and switched his eyes back to the road, trying to make up a little time until the next obstacle forced him back to a timid crawl.

‘How we doing?’ he asked.

‘We’re at fourteen already,’ Kemil replied, checking the watch. ‘Don’t think we’re going to be breaking any records on this one.’

The subject they were heading to was a white male who’d been found unconscious on one of the side streets at the edge of the Lost Quarter. Given the time of day and the man’s location, Erdem figured he was either an OD, or had suffered a gunshot or knife wound. Whoever had called it in hadn’t given much information, just enough to warrant an ambulance callout; all in all the perfect start to a perfect day.

‘Any news from the police?’ Erdem asked.

Kemil checked the radio scanner’s readout for a squad-car number. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Probably still finishing off their coffee and breakfast rolls.’

The squad car was obviously not treating it as an emergency. Unlike the paramedics, they were under no pressure to respond within fifteen minutes – especially at breakfast time.

‘Here we go.’ Erdem eased round a corner and spotted a crumpled pile of clothes on the far side of the shadowy street. There was no sign of a police car. There was no sign of anyone.

‘Seventeen minutes,’ Kemil said, punching a button on the radio that would register their arrival time back at base. ‘Not too bad.’

‘And not a scratch on her,’ Erdem said, bringing the ambulance to a standstill, taking the keys from the ignition and slipping from the driver’s seat in a single practised move.

The man on the pavement was deathly pale and the moment Erdem rolled him into the recovery position he discovered why. His entire upper right leg was wet with blood. He lifted a flap of material in the torn trousers to see how bad the trauma was – and stopped. Instead of a gaping wound he was staring down at the blood-stained gauze of a tightly wrapped and fairly fresh dressing. He was about to turn and holler for Kemil when he felt the cold hard barrel of a gun against the back of his neck.

* * *

Kemil hadn’t even managed to get out of his seat before the bearded man appeared by his open window and pointed the pistol in his face.

‘Call it in,’ he said with an accented voice that sounded English. ‘No assistance required. Tell them the man you found was just drunk.’

Kemil reached blindly for the radio handset, his eyes flicking between the black hole of the muzzle and the steady blue eyes of the man holding it. This was only the second time he’d been ambushed in nearly six years. He knew the thing to do was stay calm and stay helpful, but this guy was
really
unsettling. The last time he’d been ’jacked, the gang wore ski masks and had been so strung out and jittery they were as likely to drop their guns as fire them. This guy was calm, and he wore no mask. All that disguised his appearance were a thick beard growing in patches round ridges of old burn tissue and the red hood of a windcheater pulled low over his long sandy hair.

Kemil’s hand found the radio handset. He picked it up and did as he was told.

Liv stared down at the new photograph.

Another stainless-steel tray lined with a white paper towel, on top of which lay five small brown seeds, each with something scratched on to its shiny surface.

Arkadian slid a third photo across the table.

‘The symbols were scratched on both sides,’ he said. ‘Five seeds, ten symbols – mostly letters, a mixture of upper and lower case.’

He arranged the photographs so one overlapped the other. The letters were now lined up in pairs.

T  a  M  +  k
?
   
s   A   a  l

‘They’re arranged in the same order in both photographs so you can see which marks were scratched on to each seed in case the pairings were deliberate. I can’t see anything in them myself, but perhaps that’s the point. Maybe it’s not supposed to be obvious to anyone. Maybe it was just meant for you.’

Liv looked at the jumble of letters.

‘Mean anything?’

‘Not immediately,’ she said. ‘Can I have that pen back?’

Arkadian reached into his pocket and handed it over.

She took the newspaper, smoothed it flat and copied the symbols into the blank sections of sky surrounding the image of her brother. She saw her own name emerge from the letters and spelled it out, adding the rest of the symbols underneath to maintain the original pairings.

s   a   M  l  ?
a  +  A  k  
T

Was it shorthand telling her SAMUEL had been ATTACKED? It seemed a bit of a stretch. Besides, the seeds had been discovered during his post-mortem, which surely made the warning somewhat redundant.

‘Haven’t you got expert code breakers for this kind of thing?’

‘There’s a cryptology professor at the big university in Gaziantep who helps us from time to time, but I haven’t called him. It seems to me your brother went to extraordinary lengths to make sure this message wasn’t found by the wrong people, so the least I could do was respect that. I honestly think it was intended for you and you’re the only one who’ll be able to make any sense of it.’ Arkadian lowered his voice. ‘No one else knows about these seeds. Just the pathologist who found them, me – and now you. I kept the photographs out of the file. If news of this got out, I’d have every Ruinologist and Sacramental conspiracy theorist offering their take on its meaning. I’m trying to solve this case, not the identity of the Sacrament – although . . .’ He scrutinized the seeds once more.

‘Although what?’ Liv prompted.

‘Although I rather suspect they may well turn out to be the same thing.’

Two floors down, a freckled hand tapped out the user name and password that would grant access to the police database. The screen flashed and a mail account launched, telling him he had seven new messages. Six were departmental memos no one would ever read, the seventh was from someone called GARGOYLE. There was nothing in the subject line. The man glanced nervously over the top of his monitor then clicked it open. It contained just one word.
Green.

He deep deleted the message, removing all trace of it from the network, then opened up a command module. A black box appeared on the screen asking for another user name and password. He entered them both, worming his way deeper into the network and scanning the recently updated files.

GARGOYLE was a relatively simple piece of software he had written himself, which made the job of monitoring the status of any case he wasn’t supposed to be looking at much, much easier. Rather than go through the tedious process of hacking into the central database and manually checking for new updates, he could simply attach the program to the architecture of any file, and whenever it was updated GARGOYLE automatically let him know via email.

He found the file on the dead monk, opened it, and started scrolling through. On page twenty-three he spotted a small block of text the program had highlighted in lime green. It detailed the taking into custody of one Liv Adamsen following her uncorroborated report of an attempted abduction at the airport. She was upstairs in an interview room on the fourth floor. That was Robbery and Homicide. He frowned, not quite sure what all that had to do with the dead monk.

Still . . .

Not his problem.

Both parties had requested that any new additions to the case file be reported to them directly. Who was he to play gatekeeper?

He plugged a flash drive into the USB port on the front of his computer, copied and pasted the details then closed the case file and carefully retraced his steps through the maze of the database, re-locking all his invisible doors as he retreated.

When he was back at the default desktop he opened an innocuous spreadsheet for the benefit of anyone curious enough to glance at his screen, grabbed his coat and phone and headed for the door. He never sent anything from his own terminal, even encrypted. It was too risky and he was too careful. Besides, there was an Internet café around the corner where the baristas were hot and the coffee was better.

Liv spent the next few minutes looking for words in the jumble of letters and writing them down in a list. She got words like SALT, LAST, TASK, MASK – nothing earth-shattering, nothing like ‘GRAIL’ or ‘CROSS’ or any of the other things the Sacrament was rumoured to be; certainly nothing worth dying for.

She tried making a single word from the capitalized letters – MAT – and studied what was left – s a l a k. She looked up at Arkadian. ‘What language do they speak in the Citadel?’

He shrugged. ‘Greek, Latin, Aramaic, English, Hebrew – all the modern languages and lots of the dead ones. There’s supposed to be a massive library in there, full of ancient texts. If your brother had anything to do with that side of things, I suppose the message could be written in any language.’

‘Great.’

‘But I don’t think he’d do that. Why would he send you a message you wouldn’t understand?’

Liv let out a long breath and picked up the photograph of her brother’s body. Her eyes traced the neat lines encircling his shoulders, upper thighs and neck, the T-shaped cross burned deep into the flesh of his left shoulder.

‘Maybe there’s something in these scars,’ she said. ‘Like a map, maybe.’

‘I agree they’re significant, but I think these symbols are more important. He took pains to scratch them on to five tiny seeds, then swallowed them, along with your phone number, and jumped into our jurisdiction so that they would be found during a post-mortem.’

Liv turned her attention back to the newspaper, the picture of Samuel now surrounded by the letters he’d taken such trouble to hide.

‘I want to see him,’ she said.

‘I don’t think that’s wise,’ Arkadian said softly. ‘Your brother fell from a very great height. His injuries were extensive, and we’ve conducted a thorough post-mortem. It would be better for you to wait.’

‘Wait until what? Until he’s been tidied up?’

‘Miss Adamsen, I don’t think you realize what happens to a body during a post-mortem.’

Liv took a deep breath and fixed him with her bright green eyes. ‘After a thorough external examination the coroner makes a Y-shaped incision on the torso, cracks the sternum and removes the heart, the lungs and the liver for further examination. The top of the skull is then detached with a saw and the face is peeled forward to gain access to the brain, which is also removed for examination. Ever been to New Jersey, Inspector?’

Arkadian blinked. ‘No,’ he replied.

‘Last year in Newark we had one hundred and seven homicides – more than two a week. In the last four years I’ve written stories on every aspect of crime, and researched every element of police procedure, including autopsies. I have personally attended more post-mortems than most rookie cops. So I know it’s not going to be pretty, and I know it’s my brother, but I also know I haven’t flown all this way on a maxed-out credit card – which has since been stolen, by the way – just to look at a bunch of photographs. So please,’ she said, turning the photo round and sliding it back across the table, ‘take me to see my brother.’

Arkadian’s eyes flicked between Liv’s face and the image in the photograph. They had the same colouring, the same high cheekbones and widely set eyes. Samuel’s eyes were shut but he knew they were the same intense green.

The buzz of his phone cut through the silence.

‘’Scuse me,’ he said, standing up and walking to the far side of the room.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ an excitable voice babbled in his ear the moment he pressed the answer button. ‘Just when you think a case cannot get any stranger,’ Reis said, ‘the lab results come back!’

‘What you got?’

‘The monk’s cells; they’re –’

A high-pitched siren caused Arkadian to jerk the phone away from his head.

‘
WHAT THE HELL IS THAT
?’ he shouted, holding it as close as he could without bursting an eardrum.

‘
FIRE ALARM!’
Reis shouted back through the banshee wail.
‘I THINK WE’RE BEING EVACUATED. NOT SURE IF IT’S A DRILL. I’LL CALL YOU WHEN IT’S OVER.’

Arkadian glanced at Liv. Locked eyes. Made a decision.

‘
DON’T WORRY
,’ he yelled into the phone, ‘
I’LL COME TO YOU
.’ He smiled and added, as much for Liv’s benefit as for Reis’s, ‘
AND I’LL BE BRINGING A VISITOR
.’

The deafening noise of the propellers increased as a couple of thousand horse power fed into the Double Wasp engine on the right wing, slewing it round until the rear cargo hatch came to rest in line with the warehouse door.

Kathryn watched men in red overalls scamper forward and jam wooden chocks beneath the oversized wheels of the C-123 light cargo plane which they’d picked up for the princely sum of one dollar from the Brazilian Air Force on the understanding that the charity had to make it airworthy and ship it off the military airbase within thirty days or it would be used for target practice. It had been in such a bad state they only just made it, but it had clocked up over twenty thousand flying hours since.

The pitch of the engines fell and the watery mist whipped up by them began to clear as the rear hatch lowered. Kathryn marched across the wet tarmac, followed by Becky the intern and a customs officer who held his cap in place with one hand and a clipboard in the other. Kathryn had brought Becky so she could check everything in the tightly packed cargo hold against the manifest, and so that her eager prettiness would distract the customs officer and the rest of the ground crew while the most precious and unregistered part of the load was discreetly removed.

Kathryn had seen her father many times over the past few years but never in Ruin. It was too dangerous, even after all this time. Instead she always flew to him in Rio or they met somewhere else to spend a bit of time together, discuss the charity’s latest projects, fulminate on whatever injustices were currently being visited upon the planet, and drink good whisky.

She reached the top of the ramp and peered at the large corporate logo stencilled on the thin aluminium skin of the first master pallet. The majority of this particular shipment was high-nitrate fertilizer, a gift from a large petrochemical company to salve its conscience for all the bad it did to the world. Kathryn was always conflicted by accepting such donations, but figured the people who were ultimately going to benefit from them didn’t care about the moral high ground; the only ground that mattered to them was the sort they could grow food on.

In a couple of days this fertilizer would be mingling with the sterile dust surrounding a village in the Sudan –
if
the Sudanese government gave them permission to fly it in, and
if
Gabriel managed to persuade the local warlords not to steal it all and turn it into bombs. He’d been making good progress before she’d called him back home. Now he’d have to start all over again.

Kathryn glanced to her side.

Becky and the customs officer were already checking the serial numbers on the crates. Beyond them she saw two of the three-man crew walk round the wing and head towards the rear of the plane. It required an effort of will not to look directly at them. Instead she waited for them to clear her peripheral vision before turning to make her way back down the loading ramp. ‘I’ll go tell the forklift driver he can come and make a start,’ she called over her shoulder.

‘Thanks,’ the customs officer said, without looking round.

Kathryn headed to the warehouse. It was almost three-quarters full of packing cases and master pallets arranged in evenly spaced lines. Ilker was rearranging some crates containing water-filtration kits. She pointed in the direction of the plane and he flicked her a thumbs-up, spun the forklift and headed for the open door. Kathryn continued down one of the passageways between the crates and into the office at the back of the warehouse.

One of the crewmen was helping himself to coffee from a jug that sat beneath the TV on the far wall. He turned and looked at her, his deeply tanned face already wrinkling into a huge smile. ‘Flight officer Miguel Ramirez at your service,’ he said, tapping the ID badge on his flight suit.

Kathryn leapt across the room, nearly knocking him over in her desperation to give him a hug. Despite her tiredness, her concerns about the present, the traumas of the day just gone, and the weight of history that hung over the ones to follow, she forgot everything for a moment and just held him.

After ninety years in exile, Oscar de la Cruz had come home.

They held each other tightly until Kathryn’s phone chimed in her pocket, breaking the spell. She pulled back, kissed her father on both cheeks then took it from her pocket. Oscar watched her face clench into a frown as she read the email that had been routed to it.

‘Gabriel?’

Kathryn shook her head. ‘The girl. She’s at the police station.’

‘Who’s the source?’

‘Someone inside the Central District building.’

‘Reliable?’

‘Accurate.’

Oscar shook his head. ‘Not the same thing.’

Kathryn shrugged. ‘He delivers when required and the information is always good.’

‘And what information has this source given us in the past?’

‘Police files covering every Church-related investigation in the past three years. We heard about him through a press contact.’

‘So I assume he does not give us this information for the love of our cause?’

‘No. He gives us this information for money.’

She looked down at her phone, re-reading the message, registering the time it had arrived, feeling angry with herself that she hadn’t seen it before. She cleared the screen and pressed a button to speed-dial a number. She wondered if the source had sent her the information before or after the Citadel. It didn’t really matter. By now the people who’d tried to abduct the girl at the airport would undoubtedly have the same information she did and would already be re-grouping.

The dialling sequence ended.

Somewhere in Ruin another phone started to ring.