The Key (29 page)

His trees. His garden. Consumed by disease and then by flame, like a soul cursed by God. And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

He felt the emotion he had been bottling all day rising, expanding as it came until it exploded out of him in the form of a sob so raw it hurt his throat. He screwed his eyes closed and clasped his hands together, trying to focus his emotion into the prayer he wanted to offer up, but the sobs continued to wrack his body. He wrapped his arms tightly round his body, trying physically to get a hold of himself. He could still smell the smoke clinging to him and feel the heat of his body through his clothes. As he rocked himself back and forth on the hard floor, he buried his mouth in his shoulder to stifle the sobs so that no one in the neighbouring chapels would hear him.

The prickle of sweat beneath his robes started to itch and he rubbed at it through the fabric. Tears leaked from his eyes and dripped down his cheeks, but no matter how hard he cried nor how deeply he sobbed the desolation did not dissipate; instead it built inside him, expanding until he felt it might break him apart from within. As the pain of it grew, and the itching became unbearable, a sound emerged from his throat, a howl of lament so chilling and raw that he knew it would bring others.

He turned to the door in anticipation, wiping the wetness from his cheeks with the back of his hand as he tried to control himself. But the howl continued, louder and more desperate the more he tried to contain it. It was then that he noticed the wetness on his hand was dark in colour and his cassock was similarly stained wherever he had been scratching. In panic he tore at his clothes, shredding the front to reveal that the tickle of moisture he had felt was not sweat but a rash of boils that had erupted all over his skin. Wherever he had scratched they had burst and now wept a dark brown liquid. The urge to continue scratching was overwhelming. It was as if every atom of his body was itching and the only way to salve it was to scratch it all away.

He started tearing at his skin, the thick nails of work-hardened hands peeling away strips of flesh and bursting more of the pustules. The relief was immediate, far outweighing the pain that came with it. It was bliss. It was torture.

He heard the door open and looked up into the shocked face of a brother monk who visibly recoiled from the thing kneeling and rocking before him, its hands tearing frantically at pustulant flesh, its mouth a hollow from which the awful lament continued to wail, the eyes staring and desolate, weeping brown fluid instead of tears.

Arkadian felt the phone shiver and squinted at the display through the lower half of his glasses. The number was withheld. He stood up from his desk and moved quickly across the crowded room.

‘Hello?’ he said, pushing through the door and starting down the stairs to the exit.

‘It’s Gabriel.’

‘Hey, I was just going to call you,’ Arkadian cut him off before he could say any more. ‘I’m leaving the office right now and my phone’s about to die. Let me give you another number to ring. I’ll be there in five minutes.’ He read out the number of a landline he had written on his hand, then hung up before Gabriel could say anything else.

Gabriel listened to the disconnect tone in his ear, surprised at the brevity of the conversation. Arkadian clearly didn’t want to talk, not on his mobile at least.

Five minutes.

He looked up at the wall of books lining Dr Anata’s study. Maybe Arkadian needed five minutes to set up some kind of super trace. He’d read about new supercomputers, developed by the CIA as a weapon in the war on terror, that could chase down even the most complexly routed calls in seconds. The last thing he needed was to get caught and end up in another prison cell. Dr Anata should have delivered the message by now. Which meant he would have an appointment at the Citadel later that night, and there was no way on earth he could afford to miss it.

He opened the browser on his phone and tapped the number Arkadian had given him into the search window. A page of results appeared and he clicked a couple open. Both listed the number to a public phone in the Basilica Ferrumvia, Ruin’s main train station. He frowned. It seemed an odd choice. Generic public phones were what people used when they wanted to talk anonymously to the police, not the other way round.

Gabriel glanced over to the TV flickering in the corner of the room. The time stamp in the corner of the screen increased by one minute: still four minutes left to decide whether to call back or not.

He had been watching the news channels for most of the day, keeping up to speed on what was happening in between making calls to various contacts and acquaintances in his bid to arrange safe passage to Turkey for Liv. He’d pulled in about every favour he had and she was now booked on a freightliner under a false name and with a false passport. He’d tried to call her to let her know, but she wasn’t answering her phone. Maybe she was asleep. He hoped so. The clock ticked on the wall. On the TV a report about minor damage to several historic buildings ended and another about the deaths at the hospital began. A picture of his mother flashed up and he turned away. He looked at the time on his phone.

Five minutes were up.

He dialled the number.

Arkadian could already hear the phone ringing as he fought through the crowds in the huge glass-and-steel-vaulted expanse of the station building. It stopped just as he reached it. He swore loud enough to turn a few heads then pretended to fish around in his pocket for some change so he could stay by the phone. It rang again almost immediately.

‘I’m here,’ he said.

‘What’s with the new number, you got a better trace on this line?’

‘No trace,’ Arkadian said, catching his breath, ‘quite the opposite. My phone is easier to tap – it’s already set up for it – so I thought I’d go off the radar. That way we can talk in confidence. Listen, I’m very, very sorry about what happened at the hospital.’

Gabriel said nothing.

‘I also checked on all the records relating to your escape from the police cells and you were right: everything’s disappeared – CCTV footage, prisoner admissions logs, everything.’

‘So if there’s no evidence of my escape, I guess no one will be looking for me.’

‘Oh, they’re looking, all right. Only now they have a different reason to find you. They lifted your prints from the hospital. You’re the prime suspect for all three murders.’

Gabriel let this sink in. It had not shown up on the news. The police were obviously keeping a tight lid on it, presumably because they thought he was still around and didn’t want to scare him off.

‘That cop was no cop,’ he said, almost to himself.

‘I know. I checked him out. I’m trying to find out where he came from, but so far I’ve hit a dead end. I don’t know where you are, but you need to keep your head down.’

‘Why are you on my side all of a sudden?’

‘Because you were right; there’s something rotten at the heart of all this. I feel terrible that I didn’t do more to protect your mother. I should have realized the danger to her, to all of you. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

‘What about Liv? The same people are looking for her too.’

Arkadian let out a long breath. ‘I think they may already have found her.’ Then he ran through the conversation he’d had with the New Jersey cop.

‘She’s not dead,’ Gabriel said when he’d finished. ‘If they wanted to kill her, then the cop would have found her body in that hotel room. They’re bringing her here. They must know that she’s carrying the Sacrament, and they want it back.’

He looked at his watch, calculating the time in New Jersey. ‘What time did you speak to this cop?’

‘About twenty minutes ago.’

‘And did he give any indication of how long she might have been missing?’

‘He said he picked her up from the airport then dropped her off at the hotel around four in the morning. He checked up on her again around nine, after she didn’t answer her phone. There’d been a fire alarm at the hotel just after seven. He wanted to see if she was OK, but she had already gone.’

‘The fire alarm was a decoy. That’s when they must have grabbed her.’

‘I think so too. I checked immigration for any record of her passport showing up on outbound flights, but so far there’s nothing.’

‘They won’t take her out under her own name. They’ll ship her through on a charter or a private flight with false papers.’

‘Then we need to intercept her this end.’

Gabriel’s mind raced through the logistics. The two airports that served Ruin processed hundreds of flights a day. The first time Liv had flown into Ruin he had watched one airport and Kathryn the other. Now his mother was dead and if he set foot within half a mile of either airport he would be picked up by the security teams in a flash.

‘Do you have anyone you can trust who could run a stakeout at the airports?’

Arkadian thought of Yun Haldin and his security company. He trusted Yun, but his operation was full of ex-cops and he couldn’t vouch for all of them. ‘Frankly, the way things stand, I don’t trust anyone. And if she comes in as freight anyone running surveillance won’t spot her anyway.’

Gabriel looked up at the TV screen, trying to think through their problem objectively. A reporter was standing by the Citadel, the caption beneath him read: WHERE ARE THE CITADEL SURVIVORS?

Then he realized he was staring at the solution. ‘We don’t need to stake out two airports,’ he said, ‘we just need to stake out the Citadel – that’s where they’ll be bringing her. Let’s say they grabbed her sometime between seven and nine in New Jersey, then we have a two-hour window to work forward from. A direct flight here would take twelve hours. What’s the time difference between Ruin and New Jersey?’

‘Seven hours.’

‘So, say she took off around nine. Add twelve hours – that makes it nine o’clock in the evening in the States. Four o’clock in the morning in Ruin.’

‘The perfect time to bring someone into the Citadel without being seen.’

‘Exactly. All we need to do is stake out the mountain in the small hours and ambush anyone who shows up.’

Gabriel frowned, suddenly realizing the flaw in this plan. He wouldn’t be able to stake out the Citadel tonight, he would hopefully already be inside it. He thought of Arkadian with his arm in a sling, standing vigil on his own. He needed to draft in some help, but knowing who to trust made that risky and difficult.

The picture on the TV cut to the mayor, standing at the base of the mountain behind a podium weighed down with microphones from all the major news networks. Gabriel smiled for the first time since he’d spoken to Liv.

‘I need you to make some calls,’ he said.

News of Brother Gardener’s breakdown swept through the Citadel, spreading like the virus everybody feared it might be. Rumours ignited in the refectories and deflected thoughts away from prayer and study, plucking at existing tensions and reawakening fears that, now the Sacrament had deserted the mountain, a biblical plague was about to descend upon them all.

Athanasius was in the Abbot’s study when he heard of it. Ever since the explosion he had spent several hours there every day, trying to stay on top of the numerous communiqués, press clippings and memos that kept the Citadel informed of what was going on in the wider world outside. Lately they had made for gloomy reading.

He threw most of the cuttings away, balling them up as soon as he had read them and dropping them into a basket by his side that served the large fire that had stood cold since the old Abbot’s death. He only came here for privacy. The basket was almost full and he made a mental note to tell the cooks to come and help themselves, as they always needed kindling for the refectory fires. He screwed up the last clipping and was about to rise and venture back into the mountain when a light tap on the door announced the arrival of today’s dispatches.

The monk who brought them was Brother Osgood, a slight, nervy, rodenty monk who had only recently been promoted out of the grey cloaks of the novitiate to the brown cloaks of the Administrata. He crossed the room in silence, the muscles in his jaw tight with tension, and laid the stack of documents, bound with a single dark green ribbon, on the desk. Athanasius spotted the letter on top. It was handwritten and addressed to ‘Brother Peacock’. He reached for it instinctively, eager to see what it contained, but stopped himself as he realized Osgood was still hovering.

‘Something the matter?’

‘Brother Gardener has been taken ill,’ Osgood replied, one hand scratching the back of the other. ‘Some say it is a form of plague that attacks the skin. He has been taken to the infirmary.’

‘Thank you. I will go and see him when I have finished here.’

Osgood nodded but made no move to leave. He cleared his throat and stared down at his clasped hands. ‘Do you think it could be? Plague, I mean. Only, with the blight in the garden and what happened to the Sancti, people are beginning to wonder.’

‘What are they beginning to wonder?’

‘They’re beginning to wonder if we have displeased God in some way and are now being punished for it.’

Athanasius thought back to all that he had witnessed high in the chapel at the top of the mountain. ‘Maybe we have.’ He looked up and saw fear flit across Osgood’s face. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Brother Gardener is exhausted and deeply distressed about the blight. I’m sure whatever ails him has more to do with that than with God’s displeasure. And I’m sure it isn’t catching.’ He nodded at Osgood’s fingers, still nervously scratching. ‘When others talk of fleas, one is apt to scratch. Go back to your duties and do not let gossip and rumour drive away your good sense. Here –’ he nodded at the basket full of discarded paper – ‘take this to the kitchen and give it to the hearth master. Never forget that today’s news soon becomes tomorrow’s firelighters.’

Osgood smiled, picked up the basket and hurried from the room. The moment the door closed, Athanasius grabbed the envelope and ripped it open, moving across to the fireplace as he read the contents. Then he screwed it up, dropped it in the cold grate and set light to it, watching as the flame turned the dangerous words to ashes in the grate, before brushing them to dust with his hand.