by Simon Toyne
‘Let me guess,’ Franklin said, ‘they never did.’
‘I guess one less scumbag on the streets doesn’t warrant too much of an investigation. So I stayed at the shelter and started getting myself back together. I kicked the booze, got on the twelve-step programme, started running computer training courses and setting up networks and websites for the charity, just making myself useful and giving myself an excuse to keep hanging around.
‘God knows how but Melisa and I ended up falling in love. I guess we shared this big secret that created an intimacy and things just grew from there. Hell of a first date. We kept it all secret because of her father. He was the doctor who ran the project. He was a strict Muslim and I don’t think he would have taken too kindly to the prospect of having an infidel ex-bum for a prospective son-in-law.
‘Anyway, months passed and Melisa’s visa was about to expire so I asked her to marry me – not because of the visa but because I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anything before or since. We had it all planned, we were going to slip away and just do it. Then a few days before we planned to run away something happened.
‘Looking back I should have known something was wrong. Her old man called me into his office late one afternoon, said he had a job for me. There was another homeless organization we worked with way over on the other side of town and their computer network had melted down or something and they needed to fix it urgently. It was late in the day, rush hour, but I went anyway – anything to score points with my prospective father-in-law. When I got to the place the guy there didn’t know anything about it so I turned right around and drove back again.
‘By the time I made it back through all the traffic to the shelter the whole street was blocked off. There’d been some kind of incident. Someone had thrown petrol bombs into the place and the whole building had gone up. There were racist slogans painted on the walls too: Terrorists, Ragheads, that kind of thing – post 9/11 hate gone crazy. I tried to find Melisa and her father, checked the hospitals and everything, but they were gone.
‘At first I thought they must be scared and hiding out somewhere. But when the weeks went by, then months with no word I thought maybe she’d had second thoughts about me, about living and working in a country that seemed to blindly hate Islam so much.
‘I did what I could to find her, but the police weren’t interested. They weren’t technically missing persons and there was something suspicious about the fire. An insurance scam they called it.’
‘So you joined the FBI to see if you could find her yourself?’
‘Partly. Though in truth everything I told O’Halloran was also true. I do feel I owe my country a debt for everything it’s done for me.’
He heard Franklin take a deep breath on the other end of the line. ‘You know sometimes people disappear because they want to. Or they disappear because they’re dead.’
‘I don’t think she is.’ Through the phone he could hear the white noise of tyres in the background. ‘You asked me a while back what “home” meant to me, well for me it’s not a place it’s a person, it’s Melisa. She’s where I’m trying to get to and if she was dead I don’t think I’d feel what I’m feeling. Even if she doesn’t love me, even if she never did, I still love her and I just want to know that she’s safe. I just want to know she’s OK.’
Shepherd glanced up at the Departure Board and saw Last Call flashing by his flight number. ‘Got to go, Agent Franklin, I’ll call you if I find anything useful.’
‘Take care, Agent Shepherd. I hope you find what you’re looking for. And if you happen to find Kinderman and the world really is about to get smashed into a million pieces then do me a favour – keep it to yourself. I changed my mind, I’d rather not know.’
89
Gabriel was woken by the sound of a bell clanging mournfully through the darkness. He opened his eyes and counted the strikes, ten in all, though there might have been more before. It had been evening when Dr Kaplan had started drawing blood. It was dark now, the room lit only by the glow of the monitors he was plugged into.
He stretched out in the bed and found his arms and legs were still bound tightly to it.
‘Hello?’ His voice fell away into the silence. It had to be later than ten to be this quiet. They must have taken his blood over to the main lab and left him to his rest, strapped down in his own private prison.
He listened to the sounds of the room: the faint beep of the monitor keeping time with his heartbeat, the whisper of fans keeping circuits cool and the soft bang of a door that sounded both close and also very far away as the echo bounced around inside the warren of the mountain. He looked back over at the window, his one real connection to the outside world, and felt a chill. Someone was there, a monk – standing by the door leading to the bedchamber. It was too dark to see his face, but Gabriel could make out the white surgical mask covering the lower portion of it, and above that, the lenses of a pair of spectacles reflected what light there was in the room, making it seem like the man’s eyes were glowing. The heart monitor bleeped a little faster and Gabriel tried to calm himself by focusing on his breathing and doing what he could to take control of the situation. ‘Good evening,’ he said, as if he had met someone out on a stroll. ‘You get lumbered with the night shift?’
The figure said nothing, staring at him with its luminous eyes. His silent scrutiny, the stealth of his appearance and the fact that he had not answered when he had called out combined to make alarm bells sound in Gabriel’s head. He tensed his arms, testing the bindings. Too tight. He might be able to work his way out of them, given time, but his instincts told him he didn’t have any.
‘Are you here to take more blood?’ he said, improvising. ‘They said they’d be back at next bells …’ He breathed out all the way at the end of the sentence, creating space where his inflated chest had been. He moved his right arm, the one nearest the figure, the one he would need to defend himself if it came to it. It shifted, just a little. He tried to bend his arm, breathing out further, the heart monitor racing again. It shifted a little more, but still not enough. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, breathing right out at the end of the sentence and trying again to loosen his arm.
‘I will not give you power over me by volunteering my name.’ The man’s voice was low and filled with malice.
‘Suit yourself. My name’s Gabriel.’
‘I know what you are.’ He moved closer.
Gabriel pressed himself into the bed. He saw something sharp in the man’s hand. He looked around for something to defend himself with if he could get his arm free. The only things in reach were the wires connecting him to the various monitors now registering his growing anxiety.
He tried one last time to free his arm but it was no good. He looked back up at the glowing circles where the eyes should be and did the only thing he could do. He flicked the clip from the end of his finger.
A high-pitched alarm immediately split the silence. ‘Technically, I just died,’ Gabriel said. ‘People will be running here right now to try and restart my heart.’
The eyes shifted to the door then back to the bed. ‘Then pray they are quick.’ He lunged forward, the metal of the blade flashing in the dark. Gabriel watched it rise up, breathing out as far as possible to create what space he could inside the cocoon of his bindings then shoved himself violently to one side as it arced down. The movement was enough to jar the bed and shift it a couple of inches so that the blade caught the side of his chest instead of the heart where it was aimed, slicing flesh and glancing off a rib before burying itself in the mattress.
Gabriel felt pain burn in his side, but put it from his mind, staying focused. The stabbing movement had brought the monk’s head close to his own and he seized his chance, spitting full in his face. The monk recoiled, dragging the knife free from the mattress, too shocked to raise it again.
‘I carry a mutated form of the infection,’ Gabriel shouted at him, his words the only weapons he had, ‘harmless to me but deadly to others. That’s
why they keep me here. You have maybe thirty seconds to wipe it off or you’ll be dead within a day.’
The monk reached up to his face but did not dare to touch it. Beneath the wail of the cardiac alarm the sound of running feet could now be heard. The monk looked at Gabriel one last time then turned and ran from the room, heading back to the bedchamber and the washroom beyond.
Gabriel could feel blood trickling down his side and pooling on the mattress and he wondered if he had any left. The main door flew open and Athanasius rushed in followed by Thomas, Kaplan and a couple of others. ‘Someone just tried to kill me,’ Gabriel said, wincing as bright lights flickered on. ‘He went in there.’
A loud bang echoed from the bedchamber and Athanasius ran over. ‘He’s gone into the private stairway,’ he said, disappearing after him. ‘The door’s locked,’ he shouted from inside, ‘he must have a key.’ He reappeared and looked down at the blood spreading through Gabriel’s bindings then turned to Father Thomas and uttered a single word with such venom that it sounded like a curse.
‘Malachi!’
90
Shepherd was one of the last people at the gate but one of the first on the flight. The guy with the eyebrows had apparently given him priority boarding, another nod to the power of the badge.
He found his seat over the wing and by the window and settled gratefully into it. The sun had struggled into the sky and hung low, just below the clouds, shining straight into his face. He closed his shutter and palmed his phone, figuring he had maybe ten minutes before someone made him turn it off. He had used the time queuing at the gate to try and chase down a number for some local law in Ruin. He was going to ride the Bureau ticket as long as he could, hoping it would take him all the way before he got derailed. Sooner or later he was going to have to answer questions about the MPD searches and why he had held on to and pursued leads rather than share them. There was every chance that this particular flag might go up while he was in the air. Which meant he needed to make contact now while he still had some access and leverage.
He opened the page he had found for the Ruin City Police Department and hit a hotlink to dial the main switchboard. A foreign-sounding ringtone purred in his ear then someone answered in a clipped, businesslike tone he understood but in a language he did not.
‘You speak English?’
‘Little.’
‘My name is Joseph Shepherd, I’m a Special Agent with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. Do you have an international liaison officer I could speak to?’
‘Moment please.’
Non-descript music filled his ear as he was put on hold and he watched the rest of the passengers embark. They were all dark-skinned and black-haired, Turkish people heading back to their country of birth he guessed, answering the call to go home.
‘This is sub-inspector Kundakçi. How can we help?’
Shepherd told him everything he had learned about Melisa, only stopping short of revealing the real reason he was looking for her. He threw in some details about the missing American journalist Liv Adamsen, hinting that she might be in some way connected. He needed a plausible reason to be calling from an American law enforcement agency to ask about a Turkish national and this was the best he had come up with. He left him his name and number and then hung up just as a stewardess marched towards him, her over-made-up orange face a mask of stern disapproval.
‘You need to turn off all electronic devices and have the shutter in the upright position until after take-off, sir.’ She continued down the aisle looking for further infringements of the rules. Shepherd turned his phone off, slid the shutter back up and turned his head away from the direct glare of the sun. He was exhausted, and his nerves were shot after the unbelievable day he’d had. He’d been blown up, crossed six states in various forms of transport, discovered the brutal murder of someone he knew personally and found out that the love of his life was still alive. The flight time to Istanbul was nearly nine hours and he planned to sleep for as much of it as he could.
He closed his eyes and thought of red threads stretching tighter, to pulling him towards her. He smiled and settled down in his seat, not daring to tilt it back for fear of incurring the stewardess’s wrath. He was asleep before they turned the engines on. He didn’t see the only other Americans get on the plane and take their seats ten rows in front of him, a man and a woman. She glanced in his direction once before she sat down, briefly registering the man she had last seen through the sights of her sniper scope, then settled in her seat and rested her head on the shoulder of the man, cosying up and getting comfortable for the long flight to Turkey.
91
Athanasius and Father Thomas reached the top of the stairs and stopped, listening to the still darkness of the upper mountain chambers. By the time Athanasius had retrieved torches and the key to the staircase Malachi had a five-minute head start on them.
‘He’ll get to the library long before we will,’ Thomas said through grabbed breaths, ‘then he’ll lock the reading room door behind him.’
Athanasius nodded. ‘We should make for the main entrance, it’s nearer. How quickly do you think you can break in?’
‘If we’re not worried about tripping any alarms it will be easy.’
‘I think the time for stealth has passed,’ Athanasius said, and started to descend.
It took them ten long minutes to snake down the stairs and reach the library. Athanasius leaned against the wall, relishing the cold of the rock as Thomas prised the hand scanner off the wall with his pocket-knife, bared two wires and touched them together.
The door slid open with a hiss and a puff of air showing that the positive pressure within the climate controlled library was still active. It was designed to keep mould spores and other undesirables out of the air surrounding the priceless collection of texts. It would also be an effective way of slowing the penetration of the airborne infection into the library. Malachi was clearly being selective about exactly which parts of modernity he was turning his back on.
Thomas stepped forward and looked up, bracing himself for the shriek of the intruder alarm. ‘He must have de-activated the motion sensors,’ Thomas said when none came. ‘That’s why the lights are not working.’
Athanasius moved past him heading into the main collection. It was a strange experience, moving through the library without the usual glow of a follow light. The sweep of their torch beams revealed much more than he had ever seen before. The follow lights usually only allowed one to glimpse isolated parts, so seeing it in its vast entirety like this, the vast bookcases filled with every great thought mankind had ever had, made him profoundly sad: it was like finding a whale kept captive in a tank when it was used to having the whole ocean to roam in.
‘Reading rooms,’ Thomas said, shining his torch over to a set of doors up ahead. Athanasius reached the door to the reading room of the Sancti and twisted the handle. ‘Locked. Do you think he’s passed through already?’
Something clattered to the floor in the distance giving them their answer and they hurried after it. The noises continued as they made their way through the library. It sounded like some great creature was lumbering through the dark, bumping into everything as it made its way. They passed into the next chamber and discovered the cause of the noise. There were books everywhere, swept from the shelves by the armful onto the floor. It was like a horde of vandals had ransacked the place, pulling everything from the shelves and shredding the pages.
‘Why is he doing this?’ Thomas surveyed the devastation as they moved through it. ‘No one loves the library more than Malachi. It makes no sense for him to do this.’
‘I don’t think he is in full possession of his senses. I think his world has fallen apart and this is a manifestation of it.’
They rounded a corner and saw light up ahead, coming from inside the Crypto Revelatio.
‘Malachi!’ Athanasius called out. ‘We just want to talk.’ He switched off his torch and inched down the corridor towards
the light, the room beyond the arch coming gradually into view. It was in even greater chaos than the rest of the library with books and piles of paper spilling out of the door into the corridor. ‘There’s only one way out of there, Malachi. It’s a dead-end. If you don’t come out then we will come in.’
‘Stay back,’ Malachi’s voice boomed from the chamber.
‘We’re just here to talk. We want to help you but we need to understand what you read in the Starmap that has made you do this to your beloved library, and try and take a man’s life?’
‘That is no man.’
Athanasius glanced over at Thomas who was inching his way forward along the other side of the tunnel. ‘For mercy’s sake, Malachi, tell us what you read.’
‘It doesn’t matter, it’s too late anyway. You should have let me kill it before it becomes too strong.’
Athanasius reached the edge of the arch and peered into the room. It was a riot of mess, the neat order of the library turned into a scene of chaos with shelves half-emptied and the floor crammed with paper and scrolls like the nest of a huge rodent. Malachi sat at the centre of it behind a desk piled high with more paper and illuminated by a row of guttering candles.
‘Tell me what you read, Malachi. Let us look at it together and perhaps we will see something different in it.’
Malachi looked up, his eyes huge behind the pebble lenses. ‘You are wrong,’ he said, picking up another candle and holding the wick to the flame of the last one. ‘You have been wrong all along: wrong about modernizing the Citadel, wrong about allowing civilians inside the mountain.’ The wick caught and he turned the candle in his hand until the flame grew brighter. ‘And wrong about there being only one way out of here.’
He dropped the candle into a pile of paper and it erupted in a whoosh of flame. Athanasius leaped forward to try and stamp it out but Malachi stood up fast, heaving the table over as he did so, tipping the row of candles onto more piles of dry paper to create an instant wall of flame.