by Simon Toyne
Gabriel felt the phone vibrate in his pocket and checked the caller ID.
‘Mother.’
‘Where are you?’ Kathryn said.
‘Following the body snatchers. They took the monk back to the Citadel. Now two of them are in some kind of dive on the edge of the Lost Quarter. The other one’s minding their van.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘No idea, but I thought I should stick with them. I figure the girl’s safe enough — so long as she’s with Arkadian.’
‘That’s just it,’ Kathryn said. ‘She’s not safe. She’s not safe at all.’
Kutlar sat in the backroom of the junk-filled shop. Cornelius was to his left. Another man sat opposite, behind a desk cluttered with the guts of computers and mobile phones. Zilli was the ‘go to’ guy for under-the-counter technology. His chair squeaked every time he fed a bundle of money from a red plastic box into his counting machine. Long black hair spilled from a baseball cap advertising a tractor firm that no longer existed. Kutlar knew it hid a bald spot that no one was supposed to notice.
Zilli’s Hawaiian shirt was the brightest thing in what looked like any junk-and-repair joint in any down-at-heel neighbourhood, but also served as a front for everything from fencing stolen property to running guns, drugs and sometimes even people. It was Zilli who had recommended the Bitch Clinic to Kutlar as a good place for gunshot wounds.
Zilli watched the last of the notes clatter through the counter with the same gimlet gaze as an addict cooking up a shot. Then he reached under the desk, his eyes never leaving Cornelius. A small fan whirred in the silence, cooling the motherboard of an eviscerated computer.
Kutlar felt pain lance through his leg as Zilli pulled something dull and metallic into view and pointed it at Cornelius. Cornelius didn’t flinch.
‘Pleasure doing business,’ Zilli said, his face cracking into a lopsided smile that revealed surprisingly perfect teeth. ‘Any friend of Kutlar. .’
He pushed the stacks of cash to one side, placed what looked like an electronic notebook in the centre of the desk and folded it open. The screen flashed into life, showing a map of the world with a blank column to its right beneath two search windows.
‘Chinese technology,’ Zilli said, as though he was selling them a watch. ‘Hacks seamlessly into any telecom network in the world. Just tap in a number and it’ll give you chapter and verse on all calls in and out: time, duration, even billing details and registered addresses.’
Cornelius regarded Zilli impassively for a moment then took out a piece of paper that had been tucked inside the Abbot’s envelope. There were two names and numbers on it. Liv’s was the first. He copied it into the search box and hit return. An hourglass icon appeared on the screen and the app started trawling for a match. After a few seconds a new number appeared in the column below the search window.
‘It’s found the network,’ Zilli said. ‘That’s the only call logged in or out in the last twelve hours. Twelve is the default setting. You can change it in the preference menu, if you want, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You just wind up with every pizza delivery outfit on the planet and all sorts of other shit. But here — watch this. .’
He parked the cursor over the new number. A dialog box popped up next to it listing a voicemail service. It also gave a postal address in Palo Alto, California.
‘That’ll be the service provider. If the number had belonged to a person, you’d now know where they live.’
Cornelius continued to watch it chattering through the mobile phone networks trying to lock on to Liv’s phone. Kutlar glanced at Zilli, willing him to look in his direction. But he didn’t. He just kept looking at the screen. A new dialog box finally appeared: NUMBER NOT DETECTED.
Cornelius looked at Zilli.
‘OK. . now the thing is. .’ Zilli’s chair screeched as he sat back. ‘It only works when the device you’re looking for is switched on. Mobiles send a signal every few minutes to check in with the nearest phone mast. No power, no signal, no trace. Type in a number you know is active. You’ll see what I mean.’
The pain in Kutlar’s leg flared again as the fan moved up a gear.
Cornelius typed his own number into the second search window and hit return. Zilli folded his hands behind his head, tilting the brim of his cap low over his eyes. His face was a mask.
It took about ten seconds. The map which filled the main window was becoming more detailed, zooming in like a camera freefalling from space directly to the centre of Ruin. It slowed as the outline of buildings began to appear then stopped abruptly over a latticework of streets. An arrow pointed halfway along one called Trinity.
‘See!’ Zilli said, confident enough of the technology not to check the screen. ‘It has sat-nav capabilities too; it can triangulate an active signal to within five feet. It can also trace two numbers at a time and show you how far apart they are. Means you can track someone else’s phone relative to your own and the software will plot you a route straight to it. You just need them to switch their mobile on.’
Cornelius snapped the notebook shut. ‘Thank you for your help.’
‘Any time.’
Cornelius glanced at Kutlar, who got up and limped gratefully out of the door. Cornelius turned and followed him.
‘You need to take your lunchbox?’ Zilli called after him, nodding at the red plastic container on the desk.
‘Keep it,’ Cornelius said, without looking back.
Chapter 75
Liv stood under the fierce jet of the shower and turned it up as hot as she could bear. The pain was good. It felt cleansing. She watched the water turn from grey to clear as it sluiced off her body and spiralled down the drain, carrying away the grime of the night.
She ran her hand down her side, finding her cruciform scar, tracing its outline with the tips of her fingers, favouring the part of her that had once been physically connected to her brother. Her hand continued up her side and down her arm to where a cross-hatch of smaller scars corrugated her skin, scores of thin lines scratched during a childhood troubled by the lack of a mother and a sense she was a stranger in her own family.
The pain she felt now under the scalding water brought back the hot bite of the razor, which had focused her teenage mind somewhere other than the numbing chaos of her emotions. If only her father had told her back then what she had discovered for herself on that shady porch in Paradise, West Virginia. She understood now that when he had looked at her with sadness in his eyes it was not through disappointment in her. It was because he saw the woman whose name she carried. He saw the love he had lost.
The hot water continued to beat down and her thoughts drifted now to her own losses: her mother, then her father, now her brother. She turned the tap all the way over until scalding rods of water drilled into her flesh and carried away the tears that leaked from her eyes. Feeling pain was better than feeling nothing at all.
Sub-Inspector Sulleiman Mantus paced the hallway. He had too much nervous energy to sit. But it was a good feeling: the sort an athlete feels in the middle of a game; the sort a hunter enjoys when he’s closing on his quarry.
Tipping the press off about the theft from the morgue was just the tip of the iceberg. He knew how these things worked. The division would try and play it down, because whichever way you looked at it they came out of it stinking worse than a jailhouse toilet; and the more they tried to lock it down, the more desperate the press would be for information. No one paid better than journos, and this story was front-page international and syndicated, so he was now pulling down big payments from a major news network as well as both original parties, neither of whose interest in the case appeared to be waning.
He glanced up the hallway. A couple of uniforms were standing by the doors, bitching about something or other. He could hear the murmur of their conversation but couldn’t make out what they were saying. He took out his phone, scrolled through the menu and dialled a number. ‘I have something you might be interested in,’ he said.
Chapter 76
Cornelius stood by the van watching Kutlar move painfully down the street towards him. If he got much worse they might have to reconsider his usefulness. Johann sat in the driver’s seat talking to the informant on the phone. He wrote down an address then hung up.
‘The girl’s here,’ he said.
Cornelius took the slip of paper and looked back down the street. Kutlar was the only one among them who had seen her, but he had his own image in his mind, and had done ever since the Abbot had outlined their mission. He stroked the puckered skin on his cheek where his beard wouldn’t grow, remembering a street on the outskirts of Kabul and the plaintive figure in the blue burkha holding out the bundle of rags that could have been a child, slowing their vehicle just long enough for the rocket propelled grenade to lock on to it.
It was good to picture your enemy.
It helped you focus.
So to him the girl was the woman who had helped wipe out his whole platoon, the destroyer of the only family he had ever known — until the Church embraced him. He imagined her threatening this new family and it gave him strength and purpose. This time he would stop her.
Johann slipped from behind the wheel and went to the rear of the van as Kutlar finally limped to a standstill beside them.
‘Get in,’ Cornelius said.
Kutlar did as he was told, like a dog blindly obeying the master who beat him.
Johann re-appeared in his red windcheater and walked past without a word, heading in the direction Kutlar had just come from.
Cornelius climbed into the driver’s seat and handed the address to Kutlar. ‘Take us there,’ he said.
Kutlar felt the vibrations tear through his ruined leg as the van bumped over cheap municipal tarmac poured straight on to the ancient cobbles. He considered the pills in his pocket, but knew he couldn’t afford to take one. They killed the pain sure enough, but they also made him feel like everything was fine, and he couldn’t afford to feel that way.
Not if he wanted to live.
Johann didn’t look up as the van drove past. He continued round the corner and down towards Zilli’s place. As he drew closer he took out his mobile phone with his right hand and dropped his left into the windcheater and closed it around the stock of his Glock.
Zilli was standing on a chair behind the counter, slotting a red plastic box on to a high shelf between an empty disk spindle and an old Sega Megadrive.
‘D’you unlock these things?’ Johann held up his phone.
Zilli turned and squinted at it.
‘Sure.’ He stepped down. ‘What you got there — BlackBerry?’
Johann nodded.
‘Nice piece.’ He tapped the keyboard of a PC that despite its ancient appearance could hack into any phone known to man.
He pressed the menu button and realized too late that it was already unlocked.
Chapter 77
The roasted aromas of the coffee maker in the corner of the office did little to mask the odour of the morgue. Arkadian sat behind Reis’s hopelessly cluttered desk as a large PDF file downloaded on the computer screen. Outside, the clink and buzz of the path labs signalled a return to something approaching normality.
The file was being sent from the records department of US Homeland Security in response to the fingerprint they had lifted from the plastic sheet. They’d got a positive hit in less than a minute. Arkadian couldn’t quite believe it. Sure, all they had to do in any TV cop drama was run some prints through the computer and within seconds they had a name, address and recent photo of the perp looking like a whack-job; it was a standing joke in any precinct. But in the real world fingerprints were hardly ever used to identify suspects; they were part of the detailed chain of evidence that bound a suspect to a crime after they had been caught by other, more time-consuming means. Most prints were simply not on record for comparison.
The file finished downloading and Arkadian clicked on the icon. As the first page filled the screen he realized why they’d caught a match so quickly. It was a military service file. Men and women in the armed forces were routinely fingerprinted. It helped identify them in the event of their death in the line of duty. Until recently, most nations had been very protective indeed of their ex-service personnel files — but that was before 9/11. Now it seemed they were available to any friendly nation who came asking.
Arkadian scrolled past the cover page and started to read.
The file detailed the complete military service history of Sergeant Gabriel de la Cruz Mann (retired), formerly of the 5th US Special Forces Group. A photograph showed a uniformed man with a severe white-walled buzz cut and penetrating pale blue eyes. Arkadian checked it against a printout from the CCTV footage. The hair had grown out, but it was the same man.
Arkadian scrolled through it all — background, psych reports, security checks, everything. He was thirty-two, American father, half-Brazilian, half-Turkish mother. Father an archaeologist, mother worked for and later ran Ortus, an international aid charity — so early years spent travelling the world.
Education a patchwork of interrupted study at a series of international schools then a Harvard scholarship majoring in modern languages and economics. Spoke five languages fluently including English, Turkish and Portuguese, and could get by in Pashto and Dari following his tours of duty in Afghanistan.
Something in the file caught Arkadian’s eye and he stopped skimming and started reading. At the beginning of his final year at Harvard, something happened that clearly had a seismic effect on young Gabriel. Whilst cataloguing a major new find of ancient texts unearthed in the Iraqi desert near a place called Al-Hillah, Dr John Mann had been killed, along with several colleagues. It caused a major international stir. Saddam Hussein, still dictator in residence at the time, blamed Kurdish rebels. The worldwide community suspected Saddam might have done it and pinned the blame on the Kurds while he looted the priceless treasures for himself. None of the texts were ever seen again.
It was not clear from the file who Gabriel blamed for his father’s death, but the fact that he dropped out of college and enlisted in the US Army in advance of the impending war in Iraq suggested he may have harboured certain suspicions. He enlisted as a private — though his academic record would have guaranteed him a commission — and passed out of basic training with such high grades he was immediately accepted for Special Airborne training.
He spent nine months at Fort Campbell on the Kentucky- Tennessee border, learning to fly planes, jump out of them and kill people in an assortment of ways and with a variety of weapons. The file became more opaque as the specifics of his duties became more classified, but he served as a platoon sergeant in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom, and was decorated twice, once for courage under fire and once for his part in a covert hostage rescue operation; he and his platoon had rescued a group of kidnapped aid workers from a Taliban stronghold. He’d left the service four years ago. It didn’t say why.
There was an additional page tagged to the end of the file detailing his known movements since his discharge. He worked as a security advisor for Ortus, and had travelled extensively to South America, Europe and Africa.
Arkadian Googled Ortus. Its website homepage displayed an eerily familiar image: the stone monument of a bearded man, arms outstretched — the statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janiero. Ortus claimed to be the oldest charitable organization on earth, formed in the eleventh century by the dissolution of an ancient order of monks — the Brotherhood of the Mala — whose lineage stretched back into prehistory. They had been forced to renounce their spiritual vows after the church denounced them as heretical. Many had been burned at the stake for their belief that the world was a goddess and the Sun was a god and all life came from their union. Others escaped, regrouped and re-emerged as a secular organization dedicated to continuing the works they had previously undertaken as holy men.
He scrolled down to their ongoing projects, the ones Gabriel de la Cruz
Mann would have been involved with. There was a major project in Brazil protecting large tracts of rainforest from illegal loggers and gold prospectors, another in the Sudan replanting fields laid waste by the civil war, and another in Iraq restoring natural marshlands drained by systematic industrial land grabs and years of war.
Arkadian could only imagine what being a security advisor in these places entailed. Protecting unarmed volunteers from guerrillas and bandits while they tried to bring food and water to the world’s poorest regions; trying to bring law to places where there was none. Whoever this guy was, he was clearly a saint — which made his presence in the morgue that morning all the more baffling.
He clicked back to the home page and selected the ‘Contact Us’ link. The first address on the list was in Rio de Janeiro. That explained the statue. There were others in New York, Rome, Jakarta and one in Ruin — Exegesis Street in the Garden District, just east of the police building.
He wrote it on the back of the grainy printout of Gabriel’s face from the CCTV footage, folded it in half and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
Chapter 78
Alone in the white-tiled changing room, Liv blotted her reddened skin with the thin, scratchy towel. She could hear someone doing laps in the pool beyond the shower block.
The small pile of white and blue gym clothes the Sub-Inspector had given her positively sparkled next to her old blouse and jeans. She slipped into the tracksuit bottoms and pulled the white T-shirt over her head. ‘POLIS’ was printed on the front and back in large black letters. She went through her pockets, transferred the few dollars and change and wiped the mud-caked phone clean. She jogged the on button and the screen flashed on. It shivered gently in her hand; a new text message. She didn’t recognize the number.
She opened it and felt the chill return.
DO NOT TRUST THE POLICE