The Key (35 page)

‘I came to the conclusion that, if this was inspired by the Starmap, then the two would exhibit similar characteristics and principles. Maps are always designed to be uniform and stick to certain rules so that as many people as possible can interpret them. Modern maps, for example, always have north at the top, and the oceans coloured blue. And the one thing about this map that is consistent with every other from the same period is this.’ She pointed at the T in the centre of the circle.

‘It’s always right in the middle and everything else is relative to it. In the past, scholars assumed it was the Tau and must refer to Ruin, because of the city’s long associations with the symbol. But when cuneiform started to be decoded in the nineteenth century they discovered their mistake. The upright actually represents a river and the crosspiece a city, under whose walls that river flowed.’ Dr Anata pointed to a symbol carved into the right-hand side of the crosspiece. ‘Babylon. At one time it was the greatest city on earth and the centre of the civilized world. So naturally the very first map-makers placed it at the centre of everything.’

‘And you think the Starmap will do the same?’

Dr Anata nodded. ‘The route back to Eden will undoubtedly begin where all ancient journeys did, at the site where Babylon once stood.’ She pointed a silver-ringed finger at a spot on the map. ‘Al-Hillah – in the province of Babil, south central Iraq.’

Liv looked across at Gabriel, his face pinched in painful memory as he stared down at the point on the map marking the place where his father had been killed.

‘We should load up the jeep and get going,’ he said, rising from his chair. ‘The border’s a good few hours away. We don’t have much time.’

And the Temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God … and no man was able to enter into the Temple, till the seven plagues of the seven angels were fulfilled.

Revelation 15:8

Vatican City

Clementi put the phone down and tapped his password into the secure server. He had been talking to Harzan for almost an hour, learning first hand everything they had found, and though the news had made him feel elated, he had ended the conversation feeling slightly anxious. It was more urgent than ever that the thorn in his side that had been bothering him since the explosion in the Citadel must be removed. For his grand scheme to be compromised by the inopportune investigations of a few terrorists would be tragic. Pentangeli’s words kept echoing in his head:

… throw everything you have at finding these people, before they stumble on to something that could really do some damage.

During his lengthy conversation with Harzan, a new email had arrived. Clementi opened it now, eager for more good news.

It was a field report, filed by the one remaining active agent. Clementi skimmed through it. The agent confirmed what the news footage had already shown him: the girl had got away. There was no new information as to where she had gone. In the agent’s opinion, the escape effort had been coordinated by the other survivor, Gabriel Mann, and the two of them were now on the run together.

Attached to the report were several photo files showing images of items found in the girl’s luggage; her passport, the ruined Bible, and various pages from her notebook. One of the pages contained a list of place names:

Ethiopia

Assyria

Euphrates

Al-Hillah

Eden????

Clementi stared at the last three names.

They were getting close, much too close for comfort. If they managed to find the compound out in the desert then …

He paused.

Then what? Two people facing down a small, private army. He smiled. Pentangeli had it the wrong way round. Clementi didn’t need to ‘throw everything he had’ at finding these people; they were clearly already on their way to find him, or the sacred spot in the desert at least.

He reached over, picked up the phone and dialled Harzan’s number from memory. There would be no need to send out a search party – all he had to do was set a trap.

Babil Province, Western Iraq

Hyde stared out of his window at the brightening sky. He had already been up since a couple of hours before dawn, organizing the security and construction detail for the new site out in the desert. Outside he could hear the noise of trucks and other vehicles revving up ready to move out. He’d been all set to go with them, but now Dr Harzan had dropped this in his lap.

Sometimes he felt like a raw recruit, being handed all the crappy jobs no one else wanted. At least in the army there had only been one chain of command, so you knew who was above you and therefore which way the shit flowed. He remembered what the Ghost had said when he’d brokered the exchange for the relic.

These people may come here searching for something. If they come, let me know.

At the time he’d thought hell would ice over before he’d ask the Ghost for help. But with the three wise men draining his resources out in the desert, he figured he should swallow his pride and do the pragmatic thing. He would pay the man for his help, establish a power structure of master and servant. It wasn’t his money after all.

He unlocked the lower drawer of his desk, pulled out the newspaper and dialled the number written in the margin. This time the Ghost answered.

‘You have news for me?’

Hyde shook his head, already exhausted by the day. ‘Would a simple “Hello” kill you?’

The Ghost said nothing.

Hyde pinched the space between his eyes, trying to massage away his headache. ‘OK, let’s cut the small talk then. Those people you spoke about, the ones you said would be coming to search for something in the desert? They’re on their way.’

‘How old is this news?’

‘Fresh off the press, as far as I’m aware. I’ve been asked to find them quickly and you said you could help. You remember that?’

The Ghost said nothing.

Hyde continued to work at the spot on his forehead. ‘Listen, if you’re busy—’

‘I can help you,’ the Ghost said, then the phone went dead.

It hadn’t taken much to convert the reading room into a makeshift infirmary. The desks had been moved aside to create space for four beds and the shelves that were normally packed with books were now crammed with boxes of syringes, sterile gloves, masks and strong sedatives. Another shelf was entirely filled with canvas straps, lying in readiness to restrain those who showed symptoms of what everyone was now calling ‘the Lamentation’.

Axel was pacing, fuelled by frustration and fear, settling on his bed only fitfully before starting his circuit of the room again. Athanasius felt sorry for him. As captain of the guards, Axel was clearly feeling the stress and indignity of this incarceration more than the rest of them. He had also seen his life’s ambition snatched away for a second time. He must have thought his elevation to Sanctus was guaranteed with the arrival back in the Citadel of Brother Dragan; then this had happened.

Father Malachi was dealing with the quarantine in a different way. He sat at one of the workstations, his face bathed in the green glow of a terminal screen, zoning everything out so he could disappear into his work. Unbeknown to the outside world, the vast majority of the millions of books and documents in the great library had been digitized and Malachi and his staff had been cataloguing and cross-referencing them for over a year. He therefore had enough to keep him busy for years to come, so long as he remained connected to his beloved library and unaffected by the disease.

Athanasius and Father Thomas crowded round the only other workstation in the room, tapping messages to each other on a blank document so that Axel and Malachi could not discover what they were discussing. Athanasius finished a summary of his fruitless search in the ossuary ending in the crucial question he hoped Thomas, architect of the library’s database, could now help him with.

> Can you access the library inventory immediately following the ossuary renovations and see if anything was added?

Father Thomas nodded, took over the keyboard and started tapping away. First he called up a general diary program and found the exact dates the ossuary had been renovated. It was listed in the general maintenance log over eight years previously. He copied the dates into a search facility on the main cataloguing program and hit return.

Pages of results filled the screen.

Athanasius felt weary just looking at them all. The Citadel was voracious in its acquisition of every publication, research paper or book that had anything remotely to do with the Sacrament. The number of new additions listed, even limiting the search to the weeks immediately following the restorations, ran into thousands. Sorting through them was going to take hours – days, maybe – and the inventory was far from detailed. Athanasius took possession of the keyboard again.

> Can you refine the search and look for anything archaeological – specifically anything etched on stone?

Thomas returned to the search window and tapped in a string of codes that meant nothing to Athanasius but clearly made sense to the program. This time only two items came back.

The results were laid out in a grid of four columns with a unique number on the left, a brief description of the item, a column detailing where it came from and a final column showing where it was now.

The first entry was described as a clay tablet written in proto-cuneiform script and incorporating Tau symbols in its design. It had come from Iraq after being acquired on behalf of the Citadel and was now stored in the Babylonian section of the library, along with several thousand similar examples acquired over nearly as many years.

The second item was more of a mystery.

It was described simply as a stone tablet with markings. The column showing where it had come from contained a dash and the final one, indicating where it was now stored had the letters ASV written in it, the number 2, and a date from three years ago. Athanasius assumed it must be more computer jargon, but when he pointed at it Thomas shrugged and shook his head, clearly as baffled as he was. He glanced up at the hunched figure across the room. ‘Brother Malachi,’ he called out. The librarian looked up in shock as if he’d forgotten there was anyone else in the room. ‘I’m running some systems tests on the inventory database and I’ve found an anomaly. Could you take a look at it for me?’

Malachi rose unwillingly from his seat and shuffled towards them. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked, standing as far back as he could, as if fearful he might catch the Lamentation from being near them.

‘This entry seems to have been corrupted in some way. Does it make any sense to you?’

Malachi peered through his thick glasses and huffed. ‘It’s not corrupted,’ he said. ‘The dash means it didn’t come from outside the mountain. It will most likely have been transferred from a different department in the library, so there’s no acquisition information to fill in.’

Thomas nodded. ‘And the destination code?’

‘That means it is no longer here.’ He pointed at the letters ASV. ‘That stands for
Archivum Secretum Vaticanum
and the date indicates when it was transferred there.’

Athanasius was shocked by the information almost as much as he was by the matter-of-fact way in which it had been delivered. ‘But I thought nothing ever left the mountain.’

‘It is rare, but it does happen. There were four transfers last century, for example – all to the Vatican Secret Archives.’

‘And the number two,’ he asked, pointing at the one part Malachi had not explained, ‘what does that stand for?’

‘It identifies the position of the person who made the request. Only the most senior clerics in the Vatican can authorize the transfer of material from our library and each of them is assigned a number. Number one refers to the Pope and number two is his second in command. This transfer was ordered by the Cardinal Secretary of State, Cardinal Clementi.’

Gabriel had done the journey to the border many times before, driving supplies down to the charity’s various projects in Iraq. He told Liv about some of them as they drove – the schools they were building, the wetlands in the south they were re-flooding after Saddam Hussein had drained them to drive out the marsh Arabs who’d lived there for thousands of years. Gabriel talked and Liv listened, stoking the fire of his conversation with the occasional question while she leaned against the hot window and watched the dry, rocky countryside slide past.

The further they got, the more the green vanished and the desert took over. It reflected how she was feeling – as if some vital part of her was disappearing and slowly being replaced by dry dust. At first she tried to convince herself that it was just the residual effects of the sedative; but as the miles wore on and the feeling of emptying out grew stronger she started to think it might be something else.
Two days
, Gabriel had said; forty-eight hours – and they were going to spend at least half of it travelling, with no guarantees they were even heading in the right direction.

Athanasius got up from behind the workstation, stretched the kinks out of his back and made his way across the room to the small door leading to the washroom. Following their conversation with Malachi, he and Father Thomas had scoured the database for any other entries with ASV2 in the requisition line. They discovered Cardinal Secretary Clementi had submitted
seven
applications in the past three years – almost twice as many as in the whole of the preceding century – starting with the first item, which Athanasius was now convinced was the Starmap. It was the only one that remained unidentified. Of the other six, four were Mesopotamian maps and the remaining two were ancient accounts of travellers who claimed to have discovered the true location of Eden.

As a scholar, Athanasius had come across legends such as these; wild tales of trees that produced magical fruit and underground grottoes filled with vast hoards of gold. He had never seriously considered them to be anything other than allegorical or the fanciful imaginings of ancient storytellers. But, whatever his own thoughts, it was clear that the Cardinal Secretary of State in Rome believed them.