The Key (28 page)

‘When will Brother Peacock receive the message?’ she asked. But there was no answer. Whoever had taken the message had already gone.

The fourth floor of the Ruin police building was as busy and chaotic as Arkadian had ever seen it. Raised voices and ringing phones filled the open-plan office and the whole place smelled of stewed coffee and stress. The major problem was looting. In the wake of the earthquake the usual opportunists had stalked through the darkness, sifting through shops and businesses cracked open by the tremors. It was only in the cold light of day, when everyone else stopped rejoicing that they were still alive and turned their attention to more temporal matters, that they discovered they had been robbed. The moment the power had come back on, and the phones with them, the robbery section of the Robbery and Homicide Division had been inundated.

Arkadian sat at his desk in the corner, doing his best to shut out the noise. Today he was one of the few people dealing with a body and not a break-in. Since returning from the hospital and regaining access to the databases, he’d been trying to discover where the dead police officer had come from. He’d found no mention of a Nesim Senturk in the service records from the surrounding districts so had spread his search wider, taking in all departments, anywhere in the country. His computer terminal was now busily crunching through all the data, looking for the needle of one single name in a haystack made up of years of accumulated details.

In the meantime Arkadian had been doing what he could to check up on Liv. A phone call to Yun had confirmed that her flight had landed a few minutes ahead of schedule at 3.05 a.m. local time. Arkadian had then called the security police at Newark International Airport and, after explaining who he was and undergoing a lengthy security check that involved giving out more personal details than he usually gave his bank, they put him through to the main control centre. Here the duty manager confirmed that Liv Adamsen’s passport had been swiped through immigration eleven minutes after her flight landed and that CCTV showed her leaving the main terminal building a minute later and being picked up by a cop in a police cruiser; he even gave him the registration number. A further call to the New Jersey Police Department, and a slightly less stringent security check, and Arkadian had a name: Sergeant William Godlewski, currently off duty, though the desk sergeant promised he’d contact him and get him to call back.

Arkadian smiled for the first time in hours. Liv was OK. She obviously had an American version of himself looking out for her, and that made him feel a whole lot better. Moving down to the next item on his ‘To Do’ list, he punched in an extension number and covered his other ear to shut out the noise of the room.

‘Cell-block security desk.’

‘Suleiyman? It’s Arkadian.’

‘Hey, I thought you was off sick with lead poisoning?’

‘Yeah, well, that didn’t really work out. Half the city’s been robbed, so who can sit at home watching game shows?’

‘Better than the stuff I get to watch all day. How’s the arm?’

‘Hurts. Listen, could you call up the camera feeds around the time of the breakout yesterday so I can come down and take a look?’

‘Er … no, actually I can’t. We only just got the full systems up and running again, and several files are missing.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Everything from yesterday afternoon.’

Arkadian felt his cop’s instincts tingle. ‘Any chance you could restore them?’

‘No. The files haven’t been corrupted – they’re not there. The backup system must have failed.’

‘Has this sort of thing ever happened before?’

‘No – first time.’

‘Any idea what might have caused it?’

Suleiyman exhaled like a builder pricing up a tricky job. ‘Could be lots of things: there was a load of water dumped in the cells when the sprinklers went off, that might have tripped something; the system’s a piece of crap anyway and is always breaking down; plus we just had a major earthquake – take your pick.’

Arkadian suspected it was none of these. It was too convenient and the files that were missing too specific. ‘OK, thanks, Suleiyman. Let me know if they show up.’

‘Will do, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

He replaced the phone and glanced up at the busy room, wondering if whoever had destroyed them was standing here now. A beep drew his attention to the screen. He had a match. The top sheet of a service record filled the screen with a photograph of a slight man in glasses in one corner. He didn’t look anything like the officer Arkadian had seen lying dead on the street. The only things that did match were the name, the badge number, and the fact that both men were dead. The real Sub-Inspector Nesim Senturk had served in the main metropolitan district of the Istanbul police force and been killed in the line of duty over a year ago during a raid on a drug trafficker. Whoever was now lying on the slab in the Ruin city morgue was an impostor, slotted into the guard detail with a genuine name and badge number by someone with access to the police files. Whoever was behind all this was clearly knowledgeable, powerful and well connected.

The desk phone rang, cutting through the din of the room.

‘Arkadian!’ he answered, clamping it to one ear and his hand to the other.

‘Yeah, this is Sergeant Godlewski from the New Jersey PD. I got a message to call about Liv Adamsen.’

Arkadian switched to English. ‘Yes, thanks for getting back so quickly.’

‘Do you know where she’s gone?’

The question threw Arkadian. ‘I thought she was with you?’

‘She was. I dropped her off at a safe hotel a few hours ago, but I just got here to check she was OK and she’s gone. All her stuff’s gone too and the room is a mess.’

Then Ski told him about the pages torn from a Bible and Arkadian felt a coldness creep over him as he realized who had her.

The modified McDonnell Douglas DC-9 lifted off from Newark International Airport and began its rapid climb into the early-afternoon sky.

On the outside it appeared to be a regular charter flight, the only distinguishing markings being a light blue logo with a white dove on the tail that looked like a scrap of a better day, sliding across the flat, grey sky. Inside, it hardly resembled a plane at all. The seating section had been ripped out and replaced with a double layer of steel cot beds running almost the entire length of the plane. At the back a separate section was kitted out as a fully functioning operating room.

The DC-9 belonged to the White Dove Organization, a global, Church-run charity that flew extreme trauma victims and other civilian cases out of war-torn countries to be treated in state-of-the-art Western facilities. The plane averaged three round-trip flights a week with almost all the patient traffic being inbound. For the outgoing journeys it served as a transport plane, so for this flight all the bunks had been stripped of their mattresses and turned into large shelving racks that were stacked solid with boxes of medical supplies and other equipment.

The solitary patient was at one end, strapped to a lower bunk. Three seatbelts stretched across the knees, waist and chest, and thin arms stretched out either side of the body, mummified in bandages that also crept around the neck and wrapped the head. A gel mask covered the face, indicating that the patient had suffered some kind of severe facial trauma as well as extensive damage to the arms and torso.

The medical carnet detailing the patient’s history was in a zip-lock bag tied to the side of the bed along with a passport that identified her as Annie Lieberman, a missionary from Ohio, who had been brutally raped and mutilated then set on fire and left for dead by rebel soldiers in Guinea, West Africa. The immigration officer who had come on board prior to their departure had checked the documents but hadn’t bothered to unwrap the bandages or lift the mask. Burn victims never looked like their photographs anyway, so there was little point. Her notes said she had been receiving treatment at the Burn Center at Saint Barnabas in New Jersey and was now on her way to undergo genital- and breast-reconstruction surgery in a specialized clinic in Bangkok. He had blanched when he read the details and quickly signed the necessary paperwork to send them on their way.

The plane banked now as it broke through clouds, flooding the interior with slowly moving shafts of light as it levelled off and headed east. Part of the plane’s modifications had been to add extra fuel tanks, giving it a much longer range than the standard factory model, but at seven and a half thousand nautical miles, the flight to Bangkok was still too far in a single hop. Consequently their flight plan included one re-fuelling stop at Gaziantep International Airport in Southern Turkey.

Liv lay in the cot bed, awake but not awake. She was aware of the hum and vibration of the engines. She could feel the pressure of the bindings holding her in place and there was also something on her face, pressing down on her skin. She tried to move her arm to feel what it was, but nothing happened. She tried to open her eyes, but they too remained shut. It was as if the communicating lines between her brain and her body had been severed, robbing her of all movement but leaving her mind alert. A sensory memory surfaced and she started to hyperventilate. She’d known these things before. Claustrophobia. Confinement. Pain. They were things so raw and familiar they felt like part of her. Yet even as she remembered them she knew they were not her memories. They belonged to the thing she now carried inside her, like a dark child she must deliver safely before time ran out for both of them. She remembered the dream of the dragon, and felt its presence nearby, waiting to consume the child, just as the passage in the Book of Revelation had predicted. Then something was lifted from her face and a voice whispered in her ear.

‘Don’t try to talk,’ it said, ‘and don’t try to move: you won’t be able to and it will only cause you distress. You’ve been paralysed by a drug called
Suc-cinyl-cho-line
. But don’t worry, it will start to wear off pretty soon.’

She felt pressure on her eyelids as he placed his thumb and forefinger on them and gently prised them open. Bright light seared into her head and she found herself looking up not at some biblical beast but at the massive silhouette of a man. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Soon have you home again, back where you belong.’

His words sank in and the panic returned. He continued to talk but Liv was no longer listening. All she could hear was the whispering noise rushing through her, drowning everything out like a scream, bringing images of the spike-lined Tau in the chapel of the Sacrament. Her skin prickled painfully at the memory of it and fear burned through her. She remembered the translation of the monk’s note:

So they kept
her
weak.

The light of God, sealed up in darkness,

For they dared not release her, for fear of what might follow,

Nor could they kill her, for they knew not how.

They had kept Eve prisoner since the beginning of time and Liv had set her free, but not for long.

Soon have you home again
, the man had said. They were both being taken to the Citadel to be sealed back up in darkness.

Brother Gardener moved through the cool, dark corridors of the mountain carrying the warmth of his recent work with him. He could smell the woodsmoke from the fire, still feel the heat of it licking his skin.

He had been up since before dawn, organizing his staff into a team of eight, each armed with saws and pruning shears. They had started at one end of the garden and moved through it, combing every tree and cutting as deep as they dared wherever they found the blight. At first it had seemed to be the oldest trees that were the worst affected, but as they progressed through the orchard they began to find signs of it creeping into the leaves and branches of younger specimens too.

Again he had taken it upon himself to organize the pyre on the firestone, studying each sacrificed limb in the hope that one might provide the key to understanding what had struck the garden. It had also given him the excuse to stay focused on something other than the systematic decimation of his beloved garden. Only when the last diseased branch had been dissected and thrown on the flames had he allowed himself to survey the devastation they had wrought. He had worked in the garden for over forty years, knew every plant and shrub. But he no longer recognized the crippled thing it had become. And when the pyre filled the firestone and raged with the heat of a burning fever he still had no clue as to what had brought the plague, nor what might drive it out again. Exhausted and distraught he had turned away, and sought refuge in the mountain where there was one thing left for him to try.

He stumbled along the corridor now, laying his hand on the uneven stone wall to steady himself, hoping he would not encounter anyone before reaching the sanctuary of the private chapels where he planned to pour all his pent-up emotion into a heartfelt plea to God to spare his garden. He reached the steps leading to the hall beneath the cathedral cave and almost lost his footing, so weary were his legs from standing all those hours. He felt like he might be sickening with something. He’d had a nose bleed a few hours back and he couldn’t seem to shift the smell of oranges from his nostrils. At the bottom of the stairs was a short, narrow corridor lined on either side with wooden doors, each with a candle beside it, sitting in the congealed wax of thousands of predecessors. Most of them were lit, indicating that a chapel was occupied, but some were not. He headed to one, lit the cold candle from the sputtering wick of a neighbour, then fixed it in place and entered the room.

The chapel was little more than a cave cut from solid rock. It was lit by the votive candles of previous visitors, which wavered as he settled in front of them on a floor worn smooth by the knees of the faithful.

The heat continued to cling to him, even here in the cold dark heart of the mountain. He felt his skin prickle beneath his cassock as he knelt and gazed up at the small T-shaped cross resting on the altar stone.