by Simon Toyne
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.
69
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 whisp
ering 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.
70
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.
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.
71
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 ar
range 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.