The Key (2 page)

The mirage began to take more solid form as they drew closer. It was much bigger than he’d first thought: a square structure, ‘man-made’, two storeys high, probably an abandoned caravanserai serving the camel trains that used to travel through these ancient lands. Its flat clay bricks, baked hard by the same sun almost a thousand years ago, were now crumbling back to their original dust.

Dust thou art
, the Ghost thought as he surveyed the scene,
And unto dust shalt thou return
.

Blast marks became apparent as they drew closer, peppering the outer walls. The damage was recent – evidence of insurgence, or possibly target practice by British or American troops. The Ghost felt his jaw clench in anger and wondered how the invaders would like it if armed Iraqis started blowing lumps out of Stonehenge or Mount Rushmore.

‘There. Stop there.’ The fat man pointed to a small cairn of rocks a few hundred metres short of the main ruin.

The driver steered towards it and crunched to a halt. The Ghost scanned the horizon, saw the shimmer of air rising from hot earth, the gentle movement of palm fronds and in the distance a cloud of dust, possibly a military column on the move, but too far away to be of immediate concern. He opened the car door to the furnace heat and turned to the hostage.

‘Show me,’ he whispered.

The fat man stumbled across the baked terrain, the Ghost and the driver following his exact footsteps to avoid any mines he may try to lure them on to. Three metres short of the pile of rocks the man stopped and pointed to the ground. The Ghost followed the line of his extended arm and saw a faint depression in the earth. ‘Booby traps?’

The fat man stared at him as though he’d insulted his family. ‘Of course,’ he said, holding out his hand for the keys to the truck. He took them and pointed the fob towards the ground. The muted chirp of a lock deactivating sounded somewhere beneath them, then he dropped down, brushing away layers of dust to reveal a hatch secured on one side by a padlock wrapped in a plastic bag. He selected a small key then wrenched open the square trapdoor.

Sunlight streamed down into the bunker. The fat man lowered himself on to a ladder that dropped steeply away into the darkness. The Ghost watched him all the way down from over the barrel of his pistol until he looked up, his one good eye squinting against the brightness. ‘I’m going to get a torch,’ he said, reaching out into the dark.

The Ghost said nothing, just tightened his finger on the trigger in case something else appeared in his hand. A cone of light clicked on in the darkness and shone into the swollen face of the garage owner.

The driver went next while the Ghost did a final sweep of the horizon. The dust cloud was further away now, still heading north towards Baghdad. There were no other signs of life. Satisfied that they were alone, he slid down into the dark earth.

The cave had been cut from rock by ancient hands and stretched away several metres in each direction. Military-style shelving units had been set up along each wall with thick sheets of polythene draped over them to protect their contents from the dust. The Ghost reached over and pulled one aside. The shelf was filled with guns, neatly stacked AK-47 assault rifles mostly, all bearing the scars of combat usage. Underneath them were rows of spam cans with stencilled lettering in Chinese, Russian, and Arabic, each containing 7.62mm rounds.

The Ghost worked his way down the shelves, pulling aside each polythene sheet in turn to discover more weapons, heavy artillery shells, brick-like stacks of dollar bills, bags of dried leaves and white powder, and finally – near the back of the cave on a shelf of its own – he found what he was looking for.

He eased the loose bundle of sacking towards him, feeling the drag of the heavy object inside, then unwrapped it reverently, with the same care he would use to peel dressings from burned flesh. Inside was a flat slate tablet. He tilted it towards the light, revealing faint markings on its surface. He traced their outline with his finger – a letter ‘T’ turned upside down.

The driver glanced over, his gun still on the hostage, his eyes drawn to the sacred object. ‘What does it say?’

The Ghost flipped the sacking back over the stone. ‘It is written in the lost language of the gods,’ he said, picking up the bundle and cradling it as if it were a newborn. ‘Not for us to read, only for us to keep safe.’ He walked up to the fat man and glared into his battered face, his pale eyes unnaturally bright in the dim light. ‘This belongs to the land. It should not be tossed on a shelf with these things. Where did you get it?’

‘I swapped it with a goatherd, for a couple of guns and some ammunition.’

‘Tell me his name and where I might find him.’

‘He was a Bedouin. I don’t know his name. I was doing some business up in Ramadi and he brought it to sell, along with some other bits of junk. He said he found it in the desert. Maybe he did, maybe he stole it. I gave him a good price anyway.’ He looked up with his one good eye. ‘And now you will steal it from me.’

The Ghost weighed this new information. Ramadi was a half-day’s drive north. One of the main centres of resistance during the invasion and occupation, it had been bombed and shelled to rubble, and now had a cursed air hanging over it. It was also home to one of Saddam’s palaces, now stripped clean by looters. The relic could easily have come from there. The late president had been a keen stealer and hoarder of his own country’s treasures. ‘How long ago did you buy it?’

‘About ten days, during the monthly market.’

The Bedouin could be anywhere by now, roaming with his sheep across hundreds of square kilometres of desert. The Ghost held the bundle up for the fat man to see. ‘If you come across anything else like this, you hold on to it and let me know. That way you become my friend – understand? You know I can be a useful friend, and you do not want me as your enemy.’

The man nodded.

The Ghost held his gaze for a moment then replaced the sand goggles.

‘What about the rest of this stuff?’ the driver said.

‘Leave it. There’s no need to take away this man’s livelihood.’ He turned to the ladder and started to climb towards the daylight.

‘Wait!’

The fat man looked at him with confusion, puzzled by his surprising act of charity.

‘The Bedouin herder, he wears a red football cap. I offered to buy it, as a joke, and he became offended. He said it was his most precious possession.’

‘What team?’

‘Manchester United – the red devils.’

Vatican City, Rome

Cardinal Secretary Clementi drew deeply on his cigarette, sucking the soothing smoke into his anxious body as he looked down on the tourists swarming across St Peter’s Square like a plump god despairing of his creation. Several groups stood directly beneath him, their viewpoint alternating between their guidebooks and the window where he stood. He was pretty sure they couldn’t see him, his well-stuffed black cardinal’s surplice helping him to blend into the shadows. They were not looking for him anyway. He took another long draw on his cigarette and watched them realize their mistake then shift their collective gaze to the closed windows of the papal apartments to his left. Smoking inside the building was forbidden, but as Cardinal Secretary of the city-state, Clementi didn’t consider the odd indulgence in his private office an outrageous abuse of position. He generally restricted himself to two a day, but today was different; today he was already on his fifth, and it wasn’t even lunchtime.

He took one last long breath of nicotine-laced air, crushed the cigarette out in the marble ashtray resting on the sill, then turned to face the bad news that was spread across his desk like a slick. As was his preference, the morning papers had been arranged in the same configuration as the countries on a world map – the American broadsheets on the left, the Russian and Australian on the right, and the European ones in the middle. Usually the headlines were all different, each reflecting a national obsession with a local celebrity or political scandal.

Today they were all the same, as they had been for over a week now, each carrying more or less the same picture: the dark, dagger-like mountain fortress known as the Citadel that sat at the very heart of the ancient Turkish city of Ruin.

Ruin was a curiosity in the modern church, a former ancient powerhouse that had become, along with Lourdes and Santiago de Compostela, one of the Catholic Church’s most popular and enduring shrines. Carved out of a vertical mountain by human hands, the Citadel of Ruin was the oldest continually inhabited structure on earth and original centre of the Catholic Church. The first Bible had been written within its mysterious walls, and it was widely believed that the greatest secrets of the early Church were still kept there. Much of the mystery surrounding the place stemmed from its strict tradition of silence. No one but the monks and priests who lived in the Citadel were ever allowed to set foot inside the sacred mountain and, once they had entered, they were never again permitted to set foot outside. Maintenance of the half-carved mountain, with its high battlements and narrow windows, fell exclusively to the inhabitants; and over time the Citadel had developed the half-finished, ramshackle appearance that had given the city its name. But despite its appearance, it was no Ruin. It remained the only fortress in all of history that had never been breached, the only one that had held on to its ancient treasures and secrets.

Then, a little over a week ago, a monk had climbed to the top of the mountain. With TV cameras capturing his every move, he had arranged his limbs to form the sign of the Tau – symbol of the Sacrament, the Citadel’s greatest secret – and thrown himself from the summit.

The reaction to the monk’s violent death had sparked a global wave of anti-Church feeling that had culminated in a direct attack on the Citadel. A series of explosions had ripped through the Turkish night to reveal a tunnel leading into the base of the fortress. And for the first time in history, people had come out of the mountain – ten monks and three civilians, all suffering from varying degrees of injury – and the newspapers had been full of little else since.

Clementi picked up the morning edition of
La Republicca
, one of the more popular Italian newspapers, and read the banner headline:

CITADEL SURVIVORS LATEST

DID THEY DISCOVER THE SECRET OF THE SACRAMENT?

It was the same question all the papers had been asking, using the explosion as a pretext to dredge up every old legend about the Citadel and its most infamous secret. The whole reason the power base had moved to Rome in the fourth century was to distance the Church from its secretive past. Ever since, Ruin had looked after its own affairs and kept its house in order – until now.

Clementi picked up another paper, a British tabloid showing a shining chalice floating above the Citadel with the headline:

CHURCH ON ROAD TO RUIN

‘HOLY GRAIL’ OF SECRETS ABOUT TO BE REVEALED?

Other papers concerned themselves with the more lurid and morbid side of the story. Of the thirteen people who had emerged from the mountain, only five survived, the rest having died from their injuries. There were plenty of pictures: harshly lit shots snatched from over the heads of the paramedics as they stretchered the monks to the waiting ambulances, the flash photography highlighting the green of their cassocks and the red of the blood that ran from the ritualized wounds that criss-crossed their bodies.

The whole thing was a huge PR disaster, making the Church look like a demented, secretive, mediaeval cult: bad enough at the best of times, calamitous right now when Clementi had so many other things on his mind and needed the mountain to hold its secrets tighter than ever.

He sat down heavily at his desk, feeling the weight of the responsibilities he alone carried. As Cardinal Secretary of State, he was de facto prime minister of the Vatican city-state and had far-reaching executive powers over the Church’s interests, both domestic and international. Ordinarily, the executive council in the Citadel would have dealt with the situation in Ruin. Like the Vatican, it was an autonomous state within a state with its own powers and influence, but since the explosion he had heard nothing from the mountain – nothing at all – and it was this silence, rather than the clamour of the world’s press, that he found most disturbing. It meant the current crisis in Ruin was very much his concern.

Reaching over the sea of newsprint, Clementi tapped his keyboard. Already his inbox was bursting with the day’s business, but he ignored it all, clicking instead on a private folder labelled RUIN. A prompt box asked for his password and he carefully typed it in, knowing if he got it wrong the whole computer would lock and it would take at least a day for a technician to unlock it again. An hourglass icon appeared as his server processed the complex encryption software, then another mailbox opened. It was empty – still no word. Leaving the subject line blank, he typed into the body of a new message:

Anything?

He hit
send
and watched it disappear from his screen, then shuffled the newspapers into a neat pile and sorted through some letters that required his signature while he waited for a reply.

The moment the explosion had torn through the Citadel, Clementi had mobilized agents of the Church to closely monitor the situation. He had used Citadel assets to maintain distance from Rome, hoping that the executive council inside the mountain would recover quickly and take over responsibility for the clean-up. In his orderly politician’s mind he saw it as deploying weapons to deal with an oncoming threat. He had never imagined he might be called upon to personally fire them.

Outside he could hear the chatter of the tourists drifting up from the square as they marvelled at the majesty and wonder of the Church, little knowing what turmoil boiled inside it. A sound like a knife striking a wineglass announced the arrival of a message.

Still nothing. There is a rumour that a ninth monk is about to die. What do you want me to do with the others?