Kitabı oku: «The Key»
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
Copyright © Simon Toyne 2012
Simon Toyne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Starmap image © the trustees of The British Museum. All rights reserved.
Map © John Gilkes 2011
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Cover photographs © Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel Images (figure, ceiling); IIC/Axiom/Getty Images (shelving).
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007391622
Ebook Edition ISBN: 9780007460885
Version: 2016-10-14
To Roxy
(you can read it when you’re eleven)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Key Map
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part II
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Part III
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Part IV
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Part V
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Part VI
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Part VII
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
The Tower
About the Author
Also by Simon Toyne
About the Publisher
I
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind … And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues …
King James Bible Acts 2:2–4
1
Al-Hillah, Babil Province, Central Iraq
The desert warrior stared through the sand-scoured window, goggles hiding his eyes, his keffiyeh masking the rest of his face. Everything out there was bleached the colour of bone: the buildings, the rubble – even the people.
He watched a man shuffle along the far side of the street, his own keffiyeh swathed against the dust. There weren’t many passers-by in this part of town, not with the noon sun high in the white sky and the temperature way into the fifties. Even so, they needed to be quick.
From somewhere behind him in the depths of the building came a dull thud and a muffled groan. He watched for any indication the stranger may have heard, but he kept walking, sticking close to the sliver of shade provided by a wall pockmarked by automatic weapon fire and grenade blasts. He watched until the man had melted away in the heat-haze, then turned his attention back to the room.
The office was part of a garage on the outskirts of the city. It smelled of oil and sweat and cheap cigarettes. A framed photograph hung on one wall, its subject appearing to proudly survey the piles of greasy paperwork and engine parts that covered every surface. The room was just about big enough for a desk and a couple of chairs and small enough for the bulky air-conditioning unit to maintain a reasonable temperature. When it was working. Right now it wasn’t. The place was like an oven.
The city had been plagued for months by power cuts, one of the many prices they’d had to pay for liberation. People were already talking about Saddam’s regime like it was the good old days. Sure, people might have disappeared from time to time, but at least the lights stayed on. It amazed him how quickly they forgot. He forgot nothing. He’d been an outlaw in Saddam’s time and had remained one under the current occupation. His allegiance was to the land.
Another grunt of pain snapped him back to the present. He began emptying drawers, opening cupboards, hoping he might quickly find the stone he was looking for and vanish into the desert before the next patrol swung past. But the man who had it clearly knew its value. There was no trace of it here.
He took the photograph off the wall. A thick black Saddam moustache spread across a face made featureless by pudgy prosperity; a white dishdasha strained against the man’s belly as his arms stretched around two shyly grinning young girls who had unfortunately inherited their father’s looks. The three of them were leaning against the white 4x4 now parked on the garage forecourt. He studied it now, heard the tick of the cooling engine, saw the shimmer of hot air above it, and a small but distinctive circle low down in the centre of the blackened glass of the windscreen. He smiled and walked towards it, the photo still in his hand.
The workroom took up most of the rear of the building. It was darker than the office and just as hot. Neon strips hung uselessly from the ceiling and a fan sat in the corner, silent and still. A vivid slash of sunlight from a couple of narrow windows high in the back wall fell across an engine block dangling on chains that seemed far too slender to hold it. Below it, lashed to the workbench with razor wire, the fat man in the photograph was struggling to breathe. He was stripped to the waist, his huge, hairy stomach rising and falling in time with every laboured breath. His nose was bloodied and broken and one of his eyes had swollen shut. Crimson rivulets ran from where the wire touched his sweat-slicked skin.
A man in dusty fatigues stood over him, his face also obscured by keffiyeh and goggles.
‘Where is it?’ he said, slowly raising a tyre iron that was wet with blood.
The fat man said nothing, merely shook his head, his breathing growing more rapid in the anticipation of fresh pain. Snot and blood bubbled from his nostrils into his moustache. He screwed up his one good eye. The tyre iron rose higher.
Then the desert warrior stepped into the room.
The fat man’s face remained clenched in expectation of another blow. When none came he opened his good eye and discovered the second figure standing over him.
‘Your daughters?’ The newcomer held up the photograph. ‘Pretty. Maybe they can tell us where their babba hides things?’
The voice was sandpaper on stone.
The fat man recognized it, and fear glazed his staring eye as the desert warrior slowly unwound his keffiyeh, slipped off the sand goggles, and leaned into the shaft of sunlight, causing his pupils to shrink to black dots in the centre of eyes so pale they appeared almost grey. The fat man registered their distinctive colour and shifted his gaze to the ragged scar encircling the man’s throat.
‘You know who I am?’
He nodded.
‘Say it.’
‘You are Ash’abah. You are … the Ghost.’
‘Then you know why I am here?’
Another nod.
‘So tell me where it is. Or would you prefer me to drop this engine on your skull and drag your daughters over for a new family photo?’
Defiance surged up inside him at the mention of his family. ‘If you kill me you will find nothing,’ he said. ‘Not the thing you seek, and not my daughters. I would rather die than put them in danger’s way.’
The Ghost laid the photograph down on the bench and reached into his pocket for the portable sat-nav he had pulled from the windscreen of the 4x4. He pressed a button and held it out for the man to see. The screen displayed a list of recent destinations. The third one down was the Arabic word for ‘Home’. The Ghost tapped a fingernail lightly on it and the display changed to show a street map of a residential area on the far side of town.
All the fight drained from the fat man’s face in an instant. He took a breath and, in as steady a voice as he could manage, told the Ghost what he needed to hear.
The 4x4 bounced over broken ground alongside one of the numerous canals that criss-crossed the landscape to the east of Al-Hillah. The terrain was a striking mixture of barren desert and patches of dense, tropical greenery. It was known as the Fertile Crescent, part of ancient Mesopotamia – the land between two rivers. Ahead of them a line of lush grass and date palms sketched out the banks of one of them – the Tigris – and the Euphrates lay behind them. Between these ancient boundaries mankind had invented the written word, algebra and the wheel, and many believed it was the original location of the Garden of Eden, but no one had ever found it. Abraham – father of the three great religions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity – had been born here. The Ghost had come into existence here too, birthed by the land he now served as a loyal son.
The truck eased past a palm grove and bounced out into the chalk-white desert, baked to concrete by the relentless sun. The fat man grunted as pain jarred through his bruised flesh. The Ghost ignored him, fixing his gaze on a hazy pile of rubble starting to take shape through the windscreen. It was too soon to say what it was, or even how close. The extreme heat of the desert played tricks with distance and time. Looking out at the bleached horizon he could have been staring at a scene from the Bible: the same broken land and parchment sky, the same smudge of moon melting upon it.
The mirage began to take more solid form as they drew closer. It was much bigger than he’d first thought: a square structure, ‘man-made’, two storeys high, probably an abandoned caravanserai serving the camel trains that used to travel through these ancient lands. Its flat clay bricks, baked hard by the same sun almost a thousand years ago, were now crumbling back to their original dust.
Dust thou art, the Ghost thought as he surveyed the scene, And unto dust shalt thou return.
Blast marks became apparent as they drew closer, peppering the outer walls. The damage was recent – evidence of insurgence, or possibly target practice by British or American troops. The Ghost felt his jaw clench in anger and wondered how the invaders would like it if armed Iraqis started blowing lumps out of Stonehenge or Mount Rushmore.
‘There. Stop there.’ The fat man pointed to a small cairn of rocks a few hundred metres short of the main ruin.
The driver steered towards it and crunched to a halt. The Ghost scanned the horizon, saw the shimmer of air rising from hot earth, the gentle movement of palm fronds and in the distance a cloud of dust, possibly a military column on the move, but too far away to be of immediate concern. He opened the car door to the furnace heat and turned to the hostage.
‘Show me,’ he whispered.
The fat man stumbled across the baked terrain, the Ghost and the driver following his exact footsteps to avoid any mines he may try to lure them on to. Three metres short of the pile of rocks the man stopped and pointed to the ground. The Ghost followed the line of his extended arm and saw a faint depression in the earth. ‘Booby traps?’
The fat man stared at him as though he’d insulted his family. ‘Of course,’ he said, holding out his hand for the keys to the truck. He took them and pointed the fob towards the ground. The muted chirp of a lock deactivating sounded somewhere beneath them, then he dropped down, brushing away layers of dust to reveal a hatch secured on one side by a padlock wrapped in a plastic bag. He selected a small key then wrenched open the square trapdoor.
Sunlight streamed down into the bunker. The fat man lowered himself on to a ladder that dropped steeply away into the darkness. The Ghost watched him all the way down from over the barrel of his pistol until he looked up, his one good eye squinting against the brightness. ‘I’m going to get a torch,’ he said, reaching out into the dark.
The Ghost said nothing, just tightened his finger on the trigger in case something else appeared in his hand. A cone of light clicked on in the darkness and shone into the swollen face of the garage owner.
The driver went next while the Ghost did a final sweep of the horizon. The dust cloud was further away now, still heading north towards Baghdad. There were no other signs of life. Satisfied that they were alone, he slid down into the dark earth.
The cave had been cut from rock by ancient hands and stretched away several metres in each direction. Military-style shelving units had been set up along each wall with thick sheets of polythene draped over them to protect their contents from the dust. The Ghost reached over and pulled one aside. The shelf was filled with guns, neatly stacked AK-47 assault rifles mostly, all bearing the scars of combat usage. Underneath them were rows of spam cans with stencilled lettering in Chinese, Russian, and Arabic, each containing 7.62mm rounds.
The Ghost worked his way down the shelves, pulling aside each polythene sheet in turn to discover more weapons, heavy artillery shells, brick-like stacks of dollar bills, bags of dried leaves and white powder, and finally – near the back of the cave on a shelf of its own – he found what he was looking for.
He eased the loose bundle of sacking towards him, feeling the drag of the heavy object inside, then unwrapped it reverently, with the same care he would use to peel dressings from burned flesh. Inside was a flat slate tablet. He tilted it towards the light, revealing faint markings on its surface. He traced their outline with his finger – a letter ‘T’ turned upside down.
The driver glanced over, his gun still on the hostage, his eyes drawn to the sacred object. ‘What does it say?’
The Ghost flipped the sacking back over the stone. ‘It is written in the lost language of the gods,’ he said, picking up the bundle and cradling it as if it were a newborn. ‘Not for us to read, only for us to keep safe.’ He walked up to the fat man and glared into his battered face, his pale eyes unnaturally bright in the dim light. ‘This belongs to the land. It should not be tossed on a shelf with these things. Where did you get it?’
‘I swapped it with a goatherd, for a couple of guns and some ammunition.’
‘Tell me his name and where I might find him.’
‘He was a Bedouin. I don’t know his name. I was doing some business up in Ramadi and he brought it to sell, along with some other bits of junk. He said he found it in the desert. Maybe he did, maybe he stole it. I gave him a good price anyway.’ He looked up with his one good eye. ‘And now you will steal it from me.’
The Ghost weighed this new information. Ramadi was a half-day’s drive north. One of the main centres of resistance during the invasion and occupation, it had been bombed and shelled to rubble, and now had a cursed air hanging over it. It was also home to one of Saddam’s palaces, now stripped clean by looters. The relic could easily have come from there. The late president had been a keen stealer and hoarder of his own country’s treasures. ‘How long ago did you buy it?’
‘About ten days, during the monthly market.’
The Bedouin could be anywhere by now, roaming with his sheep across hundreds of square kilometres of desert. The Ghost held the bundle up for the fat man to see. ‘If you come across anything else like this, you hold on to it and let me know. That way you become my friend – understand? You know I can be a useful friend, and you do not want me as your enemy.’
The man nodded.
The Ghost held his gaze for a moment then replaced the sand goggles.
‘What about the rest of this stuff?’ the driver said.
‘Leave it. There’s no need to take away this man’s livelihood.’ He turned to the ladder and started to climb towards the daylight.
‘Wait!’
The fat man looked at him with confusion, puzzled by his surprising act of charity.
‘The Bedouin herder, he wears a red football cap. I offered to buy it, as a joke, and he became offended. He said it was his most precious possession.’
‘What team?’
‘Manchester United – the red devils.’
2
Vatican City, Rome
Cardinal Secretary Clementi drew deeply on his cigarette, sucking the soothing smoke into his anxious body as he looked down on the tourists swarming across St Peter’s Square like a plump god despairing of his creation. Several groups stood directly beneath him, their viewpoint alternating between their guidebooks and the window where he stood. He was pretty sure they couldn’t see him, his well-stuffed black cardinal’s surplice helping him to blend into the shadows. They were not looking for him anyway. He took another long draw on his cigarette and watched them realize their mistake then shift their collective gaze to the closed windows of the papal apartments to his left. Smoking inside the building was forbidden, but as Cardinal Secretary of the city-state, Clementi didn’t consider the odd indulgence in his private office an outrageous abuse of position. He generally restricted himself to two a day, but today was different; today he was already on his fifth, and it wasn’t even lunchtime.
He took one last long breath of nicotine-laced air, crushed the cigarette out in the marble ashtray resting on the sill, then turned to face the bad news that was spread across his desk like a slick. As was his preference, the morning papers had been arranged in the same configuration as the countries on a world map – the American broadsheets on the left, the Russian and Australian on the right, and the European ones in the middle. Usually the headlines were all different, each reflecting a national obsession with a local celebrity or political scandal.
Today they were all the same, as they had been for over a week now, each carrying more or less the same picture: the dark, dagger-like mountain fortress known as the Citadel that sat at the very heart of the ancient Turkish city of Ruin.
Ruin was a curiosity in the modern church, a former ancient powerhouse that had become, along with Lourdes and Santiago de Compostela, one of the Catholic Church’s most popular and enduring shrines. Carved out of a vertical mountain by human hands, the Citadel of Ruin was the oldest continually inhabited structure on earth and original centre of the Catholic Church. The first Bible had been written within its mysterious walls, and it was widely believed that the greatest secrets of the early Church were still kept there. Much of the mystery surrounding the place stemmed from its strict tradition of silence. No one but the monks and priests who lived in the Citadel were ever allowed to set foot inside the sacred mountain and, once they had entered, they were never again permitted to set foot outside. Maintenance of the half-carved mountain, with its high battlements and narrow windows, fell exclusively to the inhabitants; and over time the Citadel had developed the half-finished, ramshackle appearance that had given the city its name. But despite its appearance, it was no Ruin. It remained the only fortress in all of history that had never been breached, the only one that had held on to its ancient treasures and secrets.
Then, a little over a week ago, a monk had climbed to the top of the mountain. With TV cameras capturing his every move, he had arranged his limbs to form the sign of the Tau – symbol of the Sacrament, the Citadel’s greatest secret – and thrown himself from the summit.
The reaction to the monk’s violent death had sparked a global wave of anti-Church feeling that had culminated in a direct attack on the Citadel. A series of explosions had ripped through the Turkish night to reveal a tunnel leading into the base of the fortress. And for the first time in history, people had come out of the mountain – ten monks and three civilians, all suffering from varying degrees of injury – and the newspapers had been full of little else since.
Clementi picked up the morning edition of La Republicca, one of the more popular Italian newspapers, and read the banner headline:
CITADEL SURVIVORS LATEST
DID THEY DISCOVER THE SECRET OF THE SACRAMENT?
It was the same question all the papers had been asking, using the explosion as a pretext to dredge up every old legend about the Citadel and its most infamous secret. The whole reason the power base had moved to Rome in the fourth century was to distance the Church from its secretive past. Ever since, Ruin had looked after its own affairs and kept its house in order – until now.
Clementi picked up another paper, a British tabloid showing a shining chalice floating above the Citadel with the headline:
CHURCH ON ROAD TO RUIN
‘HOLY GRAIL’ OF SECRETS ABOUT TO BE REVEALED?
Other papers concerned themselves with the more lurid and morbid side of the story. Of the thirteen people who had emerged from the mountain, only five survived, the rest having died from their injuries. There were plenty of pictures: harshly lit shots snatched from over the heads of the paramedics as they stretchered the monks to the waiting ambulances, the flash photography highlighting the green of their cassocks and the red of the blood that ran from the ritualized wounds that criss-crossed their bodies.
The whole thing was a huge PR disaster, making the Church look like a demented, secretive, mediaeval cult: bad enough at the best of times, calamitous right now when Clementi had so many other things on his mind and needed the mountain to hold its secrets tighter than ever.
He sat down heavily at his desk, feeling the weight of the responsibilities he alone carried. As Cardinal Secretary of State, he was de facto prime minister of the Vatican city-state and had far-reaching executive powers over the Church’s interests, both domestic and international. Ordinarily, the executive council in the Citadel would have dealt with the situation in Ruin. Like the Vatican, it was an autonomous state within a state with its own powers and influence, but since the explosion he had heard nothing from the mountain – nothing at all – and it was this silence, rather than the clamour of the world’s press, that he found most disturbing. It meant the current crisis in Ruin was very much his concern.
Reaching over the sea of newsprint, Clementi tapped his keyboard. Already his inbox was bursting with the day’s business, but he ignored it all, clicking instead on a private folder labelled RUIN. A prompt box asked for his password and he carefully typed it in, knowing if he got it wrong the whole computer would lock and it would take at least a day for a technician to unlock it again. An hourglass icon appeared as his server processed the complex encryption software, then another mailbox opened. It was empty – still no word. Leaving the subject line blank, he typed into the body of a new message:
Anything?
He hit send and watched it disappear from his screen, then shuffled the newspapers into a neat pile and sorted through some letters that required his signature while he waited for a reply.
The moment the explosion had torn through the Citadel, Clementi had mobilized agents of the Church to closely monitor the situation. He had used Citadel assets to maintain distance from Rome, hoping that the executive council inside the mountain would recover quickly and take over responsibility for the clean-up. In his orderly politician’s mind he saw it as deploying weapons to deal with an oncoming threat. He had never imagined he might be called upon to personally fire them.
Outside he could hear the chatter of the tourists drifting up from the square as they marvelled at the majesty and wonder of the Church, little knowing what turmoil boiled inside it. A sound like a knife striking a wineglass announced the arrival of a message.
Still nothing. There is a rumour that a ninth monk is about to die. What do you want me to do with the others?
His hand hovered over the keyboard ready to type a reply. Perhaps the situation was resolving itself. If another monk died there would be just four survivors remaining – but three of these were civilians, not bound by silence and obedience to the mother church. They posed the greatest threat of all.
His eyes crept across to the stack of newspapers on the corner of his desk and saw their photographs staring back at him – two women and one man. Ordinarily the Citadel would have dealt with them swiftly and decisively because of the threat they posed to the long-held secret of the mountain. Clementi, however, was a Roman cleric, more politician than priest, a creature far removed from the trials of direct action. Unlike the Prelate of Ruin, he was not used to signing death warrants.
He rose from his desk and drifted back towards the window, distancing himself from his decision.
There had been signs of life inside the mountain over the past week – candles passing behind some of the high windows, smoke leaking from the chimney vents. They would have to break their silence sooner or later, re-engage with the world and tidy up their own mess. Until then he would be patient and keep his hands clean and his mind focused on the future of the Church and the real dangers that faced it, dangers that had nothing to do with Ruin or the secrets of the past.
He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the window sill, preparing to seal his decision with the sixth of the day, when the sound of shoe-leather on marble rose in the corridor outside. Someone was heading his way, in far too much of a hurry for it to be routine. There was a sharp tap on his door and the pinched features of Bishop Schneider appeared.
‘What?’ Clementi’s question betrayed more irritation than he intended. Schneider was his personal secretary and one of the lean, career bishops who, like a lizard on the rim of a volcano, managed to live dangerously close to the white heat of power without ever seeming to get singed. His efficiency was beyond reproach, yet Clementi found it very hard to warm to him. But today Schneider’s smooth veneer was absent.
‘They’re here,’ he said.
‘Who?’
But there was no need for an answer. Schneider’s expression told him all he needed to know.
Clementi grabbed the cigarettes and thrust them into his pocket. He knew he would probably smoke them all in the next few hours.
3
Ruin, Southern Turkey
The rain drifted down like ragged phantoms from the flat, grey sky, swirling as it caught the fading heat of the dying day. It fell from clouds that had formed high over the Taurus mountains, pulling moisture from the air as they drifted east, past the glacier and towards the foothills where the ancient city of Ruin lay fringed by jagged crags. The sharp peak of the Citadel, rising from the centre of the city, tore at the belly of the clouds, spilling rain that glossed the side of the mountain and cascaded to ground level, where the dry moat stood.
In the old town, tourists struggled up the narrow lanes towards the Citadel, slipping on the cobbles, rustling along in souvenir rain ponchos made from red plastic to resemble monks’ cassocks. Some were merely sightseers, ticking the Citadel off a long list of world monuments, but others were making the trip for more traditional reasons, pilgrims come to offer prayer and tribute in exchange for peace of mind and calmed souls. There had been many more than usual in the last week, prompted by recent events and the strange sequence of natural disasters that had followed: earth tremors in countries that were traditionally stable, tidal waves striking those with no flood defences, weather that was both unpredictable and unseasonal – just like the thick, cold rain that was now falling in this late Turkish spring.
They continued their slippery way upwards, rising into the cloud to be greeted, not by the awe-inspiring sight of the Citadel, but by the ghostly outlines of other disappointed tourists staring into the mist towards the spot where the mountain should be. They drifted through the haze, past the shrine of wilting flowers where the monk had fallen, to a low wall marking the edge of the broad embankment and the end of their journey.
Beyond the wall, long grass moved gently where water once flowed, and there – just visible like a wall of night rising up from the edge of the mist – was the lower part of the mountain. It had the monumental and unnerving presence of a huge ship in a fog bank bearing down on a tiny rowing boat. Most of the tourists quickly headed away, stumbling through the luminous fog in search of shelter in the souvenir shops and cafés that lined the far side of the embankment. But a patient few remained, standing at the low wall, offering up the prayers they had carried with them: prayers for the Church; for the dark mountain and for the silent men who had always dwelt there.
Inside the Citadel, all was quiet.
No one moved through the tunnels. No work was being done. The kitchens were empty and so was the garden that flourished in the crater at the heart of the mountain. Neat piles of rubble and wooden props showed where tunnel repairs had been made, but those who had carried out the work had now moved on. The airlock leading into the great library remained shut, as it had done since the blast knocked out the power and disrupted the climate control and security systems inside. Rumour had it that it would open again soon, though no one knew when.
Elsewhere, there were signs that the mountain was returning to normal. The power was back on in most areas and prayer and study rotas had been posted in all the dormitories. Most significantly, a requiem Mass had been organized to finally lay to rest the bodies of the Prelate and the Abbot, whose deaths had plunged the mountain into a leaderless and unprecedented chaos. Every man in the mountain was heading there now, treading in solemn silence to pay their last respects.
Or almost every man.
High in the mountain, in the restricted upper section where only the Sancti – the green-cloaked guardians of the Sacrament – were permitted to tread, a group of four monks neared the top of the forbidden stairs.
They too walked in silence, trudging up the darkened stairway, each weighed down with the heavy trespass they were undertaking. The ancient law that bound them was clear: anyone venturing here without permission would be executed as an example to those who sought to discover the great secret of the mountain uninvited. But these were not ordinary times, and they were no ordinary monks.
Leading the way was Brother Axel, bristling like a brush, his auburn hair and beard a close match for the red cassock that showed he was a guard. Hard on his heels came the black-cloaked figure of Father Malachi, chief librarian, his stooped figure and thick glasses a legacy of decades spent hunched over books in the great library caves. Next came Father Thomas, implementer of so many of the technological advancements in the library, dressed in the black surplice of a priest. And finally there was Athanasius, wearing the simple brown cassock of the Administrata, his bald head and face unique among the uniformly bearded brethren of the Citadel. Each man was head of their particular guild – except Athanasius who was only acting head in the absence of an abbot. Collectively they had been running the mountain since the explosion had removed the ruling elite from their midst, and collectively they had taken the decision to discover for themselves the great secret they were now custodians of.
They reached the top of the stairs and gathered in the dark of a small vaulted cave, their torches picking out roughly carved walls and several narrow tunnels that led away in different directions.
‘Which way?’ Brother Axel’s voice seemed too big in the narrow confines of the chamber. He had led most of the way, surging up the stairs as though it was something he was born to, but now he seemed as hesitant as the rest of them.
Discovering what lay inside the chapel of the Sacrament was usually the pinnacle of a monk’s life, something that would only happen if they were selected to join the elite ranks of the Sancti. But they were here on nobody’s invitation and this group’s deep-seated fear of learning the forbidden knowledge was both intoxicating and terrifying.
Axel stepped forward, holding out his torch. There were niches cut into the rock walls with solid wax oozing down where candles had once burned. He swept his torch over each tunnel in turn, then pointed to the central one. ‘There’s more wax here. It has been used more than the others; the chapel must be this way.’
He moved forward without waiting for confirmation or agreement, ducking to enter the low tunnel. The group followed, with Athanasius reluctantly bringing up the rear. He knew Axel was right. He had trod this forbidden floor alone just a few days previously and seen the horrors the chapel held. He steeled himself now to witness them again.
The group continued down the tunnel, the light from their torches now picking out rough symbols on the walls of crudely rendered women undergoing various tortures. The further they went, the fainter the images grew, until they faded entirely and the tunnel opened into a larger antechamber.
They huddled together, instinctively keeping close while their torches explored the darkness. There was a small, enclosed fireplace on one wall, like a blacksmith’s forge, dark with soot and dripping ash to the floor, though no fire burned in it now. In front of it stood three circular whetstones, mounted on sturdy wooden frames with treadles to turn the wheels. Beyond them on the back wall a large circular stone with the sign of the Tau carved at its centre had been rolled to one side to reveal an arched doorway.
‘The chapel of the Sacrament,’ Axel said, staring into the darkness beyond the door. For a moment they all stood, tensed and nervous as if expecting a beast to come rushing out of the dark towards them. It was Axel who stepped forward to break the spell, holding his torch in front of him like a talisman against whatever might be waiting there. The light pushed away the dark, first revealing more dead candles inside the door, drowned in puddles of cold wax, then a wall, curving away to the left where the chapel opened out. Then they saw what the sharpening stones were for.
The walls were covered with blades.
Axes, cleavers, swords, daggers – all lined up from floor to ceiling. They reflected the torches, glittering like stars and carrying the light deeper into the chapel to where a shape rose up in the dark, about the same height as a man and as familiar to each of them as their own face. It was the Tau, symbol of the Sacrament, now transformed in front of them into the Sacrament itself.
At first it appeared like darkness solidified, but as Axel took a step forward, light reflected dully on its surface, revealing that it was made of some kind of metal bonded together with rivets. The base was bolted with brackets to the stone floor, where deep channels had been cut, radiating out to the edge of the room where they joined deeper gulleys that disappeared into the dark corners. A withered plant curled around the lower part of the cross, clinging to the sides in dry tendrils.
The group drew closer, drawn by the gravity of the strange object, and saw that the entire front section of the cross was open, hinged at the far end of the cross beam and supported by a chain fixed to the roof of the cave.
Inside the Tau was hollow and filled with hundreds of long needles.
‘Can this be the Sacrament?’ Father Malachi voiced what everyone in the group was thinking.
They had all been brought up on the legends of what the Sacrament might be: the tree of life from the Garden of Eden, the chalice Christ had drunk from as he was dying on the cross, perhaps even the cross itself. But as they stood now, confronted by the reality of this macabre object in a room lined with sharpened blades, Athanasius could sense gaps starting to open up between their unquestioning faith and the thing that stood before them. It was what he had hoped would happen. It was what he needed to happen in order to steer the Citadel away from its dark past and towards a brighter, purer future.
‘This can’t be it,’ Axel said. ‘There must be something else; something in one of the other tunnels.’
‘But this is the main chamber,’ Athanasius replied, ‘and here is the Tau.’ He turned to it, averting his gaze from the interior, where dark memories of the last time he had stood here were snagged on the sharp spikes within.
‘It looks like it may have contained something,’ Malachi said, stepping closer and peering at it through his thick glasses, ‘but without the Sancti here to explain, we may never know what it was or the significance it held.’
‘Yes. It’s a great pity they are no longer here in the mountain,’ Axel turned pointedly to Athanasius. ‘I’m sure we all pray for their rapid return.’
Athanasius ignored the jibe. The Sancti had been evacuated on his orders, a decision he had made in good faith and did not regret. ‘We have coped together,’ he replied, ‘and we shall cope together still. Whatever was here has gone – we have all borne witness to this – now we must move on.’
They stood for a while, staring at the empty cross, each lost in their own private thoughts. It was Malachi who broke the silence. ‘It is written in the earliest chronicles that if the Sacrament is removed from the Citadel, then the Church will fall.’ He turned to face the group, his glasses magnifying the concern in his eyes. ‘I fear what we have discovered here can augur nothing but evil.’
Father Thomas shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. Our old idea of the Citadel may have fallen, in a metaphorical sense, yet it does not follow that there will also be a physical end to everything.’
‘Exactly,’ Athanasius continued. ‘The Citadel was originally created to protect and keep the Sacrament, but it has become so many other things since. And just because the Sacrament is no longer here does not mean the Citadel will cease to prosper or have purpose. One may remove the acorn from the root of a great oak and yet the tree will still flourish. Never forget, we serve God first, not the mountain.’
Axel took a step back and pointed his finger at Thomas and then at Athanasius. ‘This is heresy you speak.’
‘Our very presence here is heresy.’ Athanasius swept his hand toward the empty Tau. ‘But the Sacrament has gone, and so have the Sancti. The old ways no longer bind us. We have a chance to choose new rules to live by.’
‘But first we must choose a new leader.’
Athanasius nodded. ‘On this at least we agree.’
At that moment a noise rose up from the deeper depths of the mountain and echoed within the chapel, the sound of the requiem Mass beginning.
‘We should go and join our brethren,’ Thomas said. ‘And until we have new leadership, I suggest we say nothing of what we have seen here – it will only lead to panic.’ He turned to Malachi. ‘You are not the only one who knows the chronicles.’
Malachi nodded, but his eyes were still magnified with fear. He turned and took a last long look at the empty Tau as the others filed out behind him. ‘If the Sacrament is removed from the Citadel, then the Church will fall, not the mountain,’ he muttered, too quiet for anyone else to hear. Then he quickly left the chapel, afraid to be left there alone.
4
Room 406, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital
Liv Adamsen burst from sleep like a breathless swimmer breaking surface. She gasped for air, her blonde hair plastered across pale, damp skin, her frantic green eyes scanning the room for something real to cling to, something tangible to help drag her away from the horrors of her nightmare. She heard a whispering, as though someone was close by, and cast about for its source.
No one there.
The room was small: a solid door opposite the steel-framed bed she was lying on; an old TV fixed high on a ceiling bracket in the corner; a single window set into a wall whose white paint was yellowing and flaking as if infected. The blind was down, but bright daylight glowed behind it, throwing the sharp outline of bars against the wipe-clean material. She took a deep breath to try to calm herself, and caught the scent of sickness and disinfectant in the air.
Then she remembered.
She was in a hospital – though she didn’t know why, or how she had come to be there.
She took more breaths, long and deep and calming. Her heart still thudded in her chest, the whispering rush continued in her ears, so loud and immediate that she had to stop herself from checking the room again.
Get a grip, she told herself. It’s just blood rushing through your veins. There’s no one here.
The same nightmare seemed to lie in wait for her every time she fell asleep, a dream of whispering blackness, where pain bloomed like red flowers, and a shape loomed, ominous and terrifying – a cross in the shape of a letter ‘T’. And there was something else in the darkness with her, something huge and terrible. She could hear it moving and feel the shaking of the earth as it came towards her, but always, just as it was about to emerge from the black and reveal itself, she would wake in terror.
She lay there for a while, breathing steadily to calm the panic, tripping through a mental list of what she could remember.
My name is Liv Adamsen.
I work for the New Jersey Inquirer.
I was trying to discover what happened to Samuel.
An image of a monk flashed in her mind, standing on top of a dark mountain, forming the sign of a cross with his body even as he tipped forward and fell.
I came here to find out why my brother died.
In the shock of this salvaged memory Liv remembered where she was. She was in Turkey, close to the edge of Europe, in the ancient city of Ruin. And the sign Samuel had made – the Tau – was the sign of the Sacrament, the same shape that now haunted her dreams. Except it wasn’t a dream, it was real. In her blossoming consciousness she knew that she had seen the shape, somewhere in the darkness of the Citadel – she had seen the Sacrament. She focused on the memory, willing it to take sharper form, but it kept shifting, like something at the edge of her vision or a word she could not recall. All she could remember was a feeling of unbearable pain and of … confinement.
She glanced up at the heavy door, noticing the keyhole now and recalling the corridor beyond. She had glimpsed it as the doctors and nurses had come and gone over the past few days.
How many days? Four? Five, maybe.
She had also seen two chairs pushed up against the wall with men sitting on them. The first was a cop, the uniform a dark blue, the badges unfamiliar. The other had also worn a uniform: black shoes, black suit, black shirt, a thin strip of white at the collar. The thought of him, sitting just a few metres from her made the fear rise up again. She knew enough of the bloody history of Ruin to realize the danger she was in. If she had seen the Sacrament and they suspected it then they would try to silence her – like they had silenced her brother. It was how they had maintained their secret for so long. It was a cliché, but it was true – the dead kept their secrets.
And the priest standing vigil outside her door was not there to minister to her troubled soul or pray for her rapid recovery.
He was there to keep her contained.
He was there to ensure her silence.
Room 410
Four doors down the corridor Kathryn Mann lay in the starched prison of her own single bed, her thick black hair curled across the pillow like a darkening storm. She was shivering despite the hospital heat of her room. The doctors had said she was still in shock, a delayed and ongoing reaction to the forces of the explosion she had survived in the confines of the tunnel beneath the Citadel. She had also lost hearing in her right ear and the left one had been severely damaged. The doctors said it may improve, but they were always evasive when she asked how much.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this wretched and helpless. When the monk had appeared on top of the Citadel and made the sign of the Tau with his body she had believed the ancient prophecy was coming true:
The cross will fall
The cross will rise
To unlock the Sacrament
And bring forth a new age
And so it had happened. Liv had entered the Citadel, the Sancti had come out and now they were dying, one by one, the ancient enemy, the keepers of the Sacrament. Even with her damaged ears, Kathryn had heard the clamour of medical teams running in answer to the flat-lining wail of cardiac alarms all around her. After each alarm she would ask the nurse who had died, fearing it might be the girl. But each time it had been another monk, taken from this life to answer for themselves in the next, their deaths a portent of nothing but good. She had been kept apart from Liv so did not know for sure what had happened inside the Citadel, or even if she had discovered the Sacrament, though the steady deaths of the Sancti gave her some hope that she had.
But if this was a victory, it was a hollow one.
Whenever she closed her eyes she saw the body of Oscar de la Cruz – her father – lying broken and bloodied on the cold concrete floor of the airport warehouse. He had spent most of his long life hiding from the Citadel after escaping from within its walls and faking his own death in the trenches of the First World War. But they had still got him in the end. He had saved her life by smothering the grenade, thrown by a dark agent of the Citadel, meant for her and Gabriel.
It was Oscar who had first taught her about the Citadel, its sinister history and the secrets it contained. It was he who had taught her to read the prophetic symbols etched on the stone when she was still a girl, filling her with its meaning – a loving father telling dark stories to his blue-eyed little girl as later she had done with Gabriel, a mother passing the same stories to her son.
And when all this comes to pass – Oscar had always told her, when the ancient wrong has been righted, then I will show you the next step.
She had often wondered what private knowledge his words had hinted at – and now she would never know.
The Sancti had been unseated, but her own family had been destroyed in the process: first her husband; then her father – who next? Gabriel was in prison at the mercy of organizations she had learned not to trust; and she too had seen the priest, keeping steady watch just beyond her door, another agent of the same church that had already taken so much from her.
I will show you the next step – her father had told her. But now he was gone – killed just before his life’s work had finally been realized – and she could see no step that might give her hope, or help save her, or Gabriel or Liv, from the danger they were in.
5
Vatican City, Rome
Clementi swept from his office with as much speed as his large frame could manage.
‘When did they arrive?’ he asked, his black surplice flaring out behind him like ragged wings.
‘About five minutes ago,’ Schneider said, struggling to keep up with his master.
‘And where are they now?’
‘They were escorted down to the boardroom in the vault. I came to fetch you as soon as I heard they were here.’
Clementi hurried past the two Swiss guardsmen, hoping His Holiness would not choose this moment to emerge from his apartment and enquire about Clementi’s undue haste. As Cardinal Secretary of State, he had to work closely with the Pope – both literally and figuratively – discussing policy and getting his signature on important documents. The file in his hand did not contain any papal signatures or seals. His Holiness was not even aware of its contents or intent, something Clementi had worked hard to maintain.
He reached the end of the corridor and quickly barged through the door into the bare emergency stairwell beyond. ‘Do we know which of the Group is present?’
‘No,’ Schneider replied. ‘The guard wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to press him. I felt it better he remain vague on the details.’
Clementi nodded and descended into the gloom, brooding on what might await him at the end of this unscheduled summons.
The Group was a name he had given to the three as a means of turning them into a single entity, a mind trick designed to strike a balance of power in their arrangement: one of him, one of them. But it had not worked. They were far too powerful and distinctive to subsume into a homogenous whole and, try as he might, they remained as individual and formidable as when he had first approached them and laid out his scheme. The Group met as infrequently as possible, and always in secret, such was the delicate nature of their shared enterprise. With the calibre of people involved, arranging any meeting at all was a minor miracle of scheduling and they had not been due to meet again for another month; yet one or more of them was here right now, unannounced and unexpected – and there was only one viable explanation as to why.
‘This has to be about the situation in Ruin,’ Clementi said, arriving at a featureless metal door set into the wall of the first-floor landing.
He placed his doughy hand on a glass panel beside it, his cardinal’s gold ring clinking against the glass, and a pale strip of light swept across his palm, casting pale, shifting shadows across his face that reflected in the polished metal of the door. Clementi looked away. He had always hated his appearance, his moon face with its fringe of curly hair – once blond, now white – making him appear like an oversized cherub. A dull thunk sounded inside the door and he heaved it open, hurrying into the dark and away from the sight of himself.
A narrow tunnel lit up in a flicker of neon as he moved down it, the walls turning from smooth concrete to rough stone as he passed from the Apostolic Palace into the stone foundations of the squat, fifteenth-century tower built next to it. After ten or so steps he reached a second door that opened into a small, windowless room, packed with shelves and crammed with box files.
‘Go on ahead,’ he said. ‘Give my apologies and say I am cutting short another meeting and will be there directly. I will meet you in the lobby so you can brief me as to exactly who is there. I do not wish to enter a meeting of this importance without at least knowing who is present.’
Schneider bowed and slipped away, leaving Clementi alone with his churning thoughts. He listened to his chamberlain’s footsteps receding, his eyes fixed on the crossed keys of the papal seal and the letters IOR that adorned every file in the room. He was in a section of the fortified tower of Niccolo V, built into the eastern wall of the Apostolic Palace, that now served as the headquarters and only branch of one of the world’s most exclusive financial institutions. IOR stood for Istituto per le Opere di Religione – the Institute for Works of Religion – more commonly referred to as the Vatican Bank. It was the most secretive financial institution in the world and the prime cause of Clementi’s present worries.
Set up in 1942 to manage the Church’s huge accumulated wealth and investments, the bank had a little over forty thousand current account holders, no tax liabilities and the sort of unassailable privacy any Swiss bank would be proud of. As such, it had attracted some of the wealthiest and most influential investors in the world; but it had also courted more than its fair share of controversy.
In the 1970s and 80s the Institute had been used by the now disgraced financier Michele Sindona to launder Mafia drug money. After this Roberto Calvi, famously referred to as God’s banker, had been appointed to take a tighter hold of the Church’s vast resources; instead he had used the bank to illegally siphon billions of dollars from another financial institution, leaving the Church with an embarrassing and expensive moral responsibility when it eventually went bust. Calvi had been found dead a few weeks later, his pockets filled with building bricks and bank notes, hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. Much had been made of the ecclesiastical connotations of this location, especially in the light of Calvi’s membership of a masonic lodge known as the ‘Black Friars’, but no one had ever been convicted of his murder. The long shadow cast by these scandals lingered on, and for Clementi the rehabilitation of the Vatican Bank had become a personal obsession. What’s more, he had the perfect background to facilitate it.
As an undergraduate at Oxford he had studied history and economics as well as theology, discerning God’s miracle at work in all three disciplines. In Clementi’s eyes, the power of economics was a force for good, creating wealth so that people could be lifted from the evils of poverty and relieved of their earthly suffering. History had also taught him the perils of economic failure. He had studied the great civilizations of the past, focusing not only on how they had amassed their great wealth but also on how they lost it. Again and again, empires that had been built over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, tipped from prosperity into rapid decline, leaving nothing behind but legends and ruined monuments. His economist’s brain had pondered on what had become of their great wealth. Inevitably some of it passed to conquerors and became the seeds of new empires, but not all. History was littered with accounts of vast treasure stores that had vanished, never to be found again.
Once he had graduated and begun his rise within the Church, Clementi had served God in the best way he knew, by applying his learning and skill to update the Vatican’s revenue streams so that money started flowing in where once it had only flowed out. He knew that economics now ruled the world where faith had once held sway and that, in order to wield the sort of power and influence it had once held, the Church would have to become an economic heavyweight again.
The further Clementi rose, the more influence he had, and he used it to overhaul the outdated financial systems until finally his long service and deft stewardship was rewarded with the appointment to Cardinal Secretary of State and with it the keys to the main prize – the Vatican Bank itself.
His first act as Cardinal Secretary had been to amass all the bank’s various confidential accounts and then personally audit them so he could see the exact state of the Church’s finances. It was a task he didn’t trust anyone else to carry out and it had taken him nearly a year to painstakingly sort the false records from the true and unpick all the subterfuge and false accounting to reveal the full picture. What he had discovered, in a room identical to the one he now stood in, had made him physically sick. Somehow, through systematic corruption and hundreds of years of appalling management, all the vast reserves of money that had been accumulated over the preceding two thousand years had evaporated.
Trillions of dollars – gone.
The Church still held a huge portfolio of property and priceless works of art, but there was no cash – no liquidity. The Church was effectively bankrupt, and, because of centuries of complex deception and false accounting, nobody knew it but him.
Clementi recalled the desolation of that moment, staring into the abyss of what the Church had become and what would surely follow when the truth came to light. If the Church had been a publicly listed company it would have been declared insolvent and broken up by the courts to pay what it could to creditors. But it was not a company, it was God’s ministry on earth, and he could not stand by and allow it to be brought down by the mundane evils of greed and mismanagement. Instead he had relied on the things the Church had always fallen back on in times of need – its independence and its secrecy – and he had kept his discovery hidden.
Left with no choice but to carry on the dishonest practices bequeathed to him by his predecessors, Clementi had concealed the true accounts and set about maintaining the illusion of solvency by constantly moving around what little money there was and making what savings he could while he prayed for a miracle. But he did not despair, for even in the awfulness of his isolation and the great responsibility he alone carried, he could detect God’s hand already working. For had He not bestowed upon Clementi the gifts to understand the complexities of finance and then blessed him with the position of Cardinal Secretary of State?
But the amounts of money lost were too colossal to be recovered by mere economies and financial restructuring. In addition to balancing the books, he needed to find a way to refinance the Church. In the end he found the solution in the most unlikely of places. The key to ensuring the Church’s future, it turned out, was to look to its past – he had found his answer in Ruin.
Almost three years had passed since his moment of revelation, three years of carefully influencing world events by granting audiences and indulgences to presidents and prime ministers in exchange for favours only the Church could bestow. Like some papal legate of old, Clementi had nudged these modern-day Christian kings and emperors into war just so he could gain access to heathen lands the true church had once called its own. And now, just when his audacious scheme was on the verge of completion, it was being threatened by the same ancient and secretive place where the idea had originated.
He thought back to the newspapers on his desk, their headlines predicting the fall of the Citadel and salivating over the prospect of discovering what secrets lay within.
And one of those secrets was his.
If it were to be discovered, everything he had accomplished would be destroyed and the Church would be lost.
A sudden surge of anger welled up inside him and he cursed himself for his human weakness. He had delayed too long over the messy situation surrounding the Citadel. Wrenching open the door, he entered the blank corridor beyond, windowless and unexceptional save for its curved walls that followed the shape of the tower. He would demonstrate to the Group the true strength of his resolve by effectively signing four death warrants in front of them. Then they would see how committed he was; and they would be bound by blood, each to the other.
He burst through the door into the main lobby and stalked across the marble floor, past the ATMs that gave instructions in Latin, towards the steel-framed lift that descended to the vaults in the bedrock of the building.
The lift doors opened as he approached and Schneider jumped when he saw his master bearing down on him with fury in his eyes.
‘Well,’ Clementi said, stepping in and punching the button to take them straight back to the vaults. ‘Which one of our esteemed associates am I about to face?’
‘All of them,’ Schneider said, just as the doors closed and they started to descend. ‘The whole Group is here.’
6
Baghdad, Central Iraq
Dry dust clung to the evening air of Sadr City market, mixing with the smell of raw meat, ripe fruit and decay. Hyde sat across from the main market in the shade of a covered café, an imported American newspaper lying open on the table in front of him next to the sludgy remains of a small glass of coffee. Two flies were chasing each other round the saucer. In his head he placed a bet on which would take off first. He got it wrong. Story of his life.
He picked up the glass and sipped at the muddy contents, scanning the market from behind his scratched marine-issue Oakleys. He hated the coffee in Iraq. It was boiled and cooled nine times to remove all impurities and rendered almost undrinkable in the process. At least all the boiling meant there’d be no germs in it. Most Iraqis drank it with cream and a ton of sugar to mask the taste. Hyde drank it black to remind him of home, the bitter taste fuelling his hatred of the country he didn’t seem able to escape. Black was also his favourite colour. Whenever life got too complicated and things started getting him down he would find a casino with a roulette table and bet everything he had on black, reducing his troubles to the single spin of a wheel. If he won, he would walk away with enough money to buy some peace of mind, never risking his doubled pot on another spin. If he lost, he literally had nothing left to lose. Either way, he would leave the table changed somehow. He liked the simplicity of that.
He checked his watch. His contact was late so he waved the waiter over and watched him fill a fresh glass with the hated black liquid. He couldn’t just sit with nothing to drink, he felt exposed enough as it was. His six-foot frame and white skin made him stand out, as did the redness of his beard, so he assumed he was being watched, though he couldn’t see anyone. He picked up his paper and pretended to read, all the while surveying the crowd from behind his shades.
Sadr City was in the eastern suburbs. Before the invasion it had been called Saddam City and before that, Revolution. But none of that changed its inherent nature: Sadr City was a slum, quickly and cheaply built at the end of the 1950s to house the urban poor. These days there were even more people here, packed into houses and apartment blocks that had already been crowded when the concrete was still wet on the walls. And the market was where they all came to do their shopping. Right now was the busiest time, with everyone stopping by on the way home from work to buy fresh food, refrigerated through the heat of the day at someone else’s expense. So many civilians crammed into one space made it an operational nightmare.
A few years ago someone had ridden a motorcycle packed with explosives straight through a sloppy evening checkpoint and blown himself up by the main entrance, taking seventy-eight other people with him. By the looks of the rickety buildings, they had simply dragged the bodies away, hosed the blood off the streets and carried on. You could still see craters in the walls where chunks of shrapnel had torn holes. But the thing that made this a suicide bomber’s paradise also made it a preferred meeting place for his ultra-cautious contact: there was no better place to hide than in a crowd.
Hyde was cautious too. He had arrived early and claimed the best seat in the café for surveillance. It offered a one-eighty degree view of the street, with a solid wall behind making it impossible to approach without being seen. He’d bet himself that he could spot his man before he got to him. It was a game he liked to play every time he was sent on this particular detail. The contact was known for his ability to appear and disappear with ease. It was why he’d never been caught, despite the best efforts of several agencies on both sides of the political street. But Hyde had something of a reputation too. Back when he was in 8th Recon he had been the sharpest scout in his platoon. He’d prided himself on never letting anyone creep up on him, though his buddies had constantly tried; they’d even had a name for the game – Hyde and Go Seek. Now he was in civilian life, he had to work harder to keep those skills honed. He’d seen what working for the private companies could do to you; men who had been out of the army just two, three years, their muscle turned to flab, still trading on reputations they’d long since lost. That wasn’t going to happen to him. Get sloppy in a place like this and pretty soon you’d get dead. So he pushed himself, treating every assignment as if it was a hot mission, just in case it turned out to be.
He started another sweep of the market, left to right, comfortable in his tactics. He had just reached the furthest point where the wall blocked his view when the scrape of a chair made him whip his head round.
‘You have the money?’ the Ghost said, settling into the chair on his blind side, his strangled voice barely audible above the noise of the street.
Goddamn – he did it again.
Hyde folded the newspaper and placed it on the table, trying not to appear rattled. ‘What, no chit-chat? No “Hi, how’s it goin’? How are the wife and kids?”’
The Ghost stared at him, his pale grey eyes cold despite the trapped heat of the day. ‘You don’t have a wife.’
‘And how would you know that?’
‘Nobody in your line of work has a wife – at least not for very long.’
Hyde felt anger catch light inside him. His fists clenched. He’d got the divorce papers from Wanda in the mail six weeks ago, after she’d hacked his Facebook page and found some messages she was not supposed to see. But this guy couldn’t know that. He was just trying to push his buttons with a lucky guess. And it had worked. Right now he wanted to drive his fist straight through the middle of those freaky grey eyes.
The Ghost smiled, as if he was reading Hyde’s thoughts and feeding off his anger. Hyde looked away and reached for his coffee, draining it to the thick gritty dregs before he’d even realized what he was doing. He’d met some hard characters in his time, but this guy was something else. He was taller than the average Iraqi and wiry with it. He also carried about him a sense of danger and physical threat, like a grenade with its pin pulled. The local crew said he was a desert spirit and refused to have anything to do with him. That’s why Hyde always got these gigs. He didn’t believe in spirits, he just did what he was told; old army habits died hard.
‘It’s in the bag under the table,’ he said, staring out at the market crowds rather than engaging with the grey eyes again. ‘Got my boot stamped down on the handle. You give me the package, I lift my foot.’
Something clunked down on the tabletop and a scrap of sacking was pushed towards him.
Hyde shook his head in exaggerated disappointment. ‘Zero points for presentation.’ He flipped open the sacking and examined the object inside. The stone looked incredibly ordinary. It could almost have been one of the chunks of masonry you found lining the streets in piles all over the city. He turned it over and saw the faint marks on its surface, just lines and swirls. ‘Hell of a price to pay for a chunk of old rock,’ he said, wrapping it up and lifting his foot off the bag containing fifty million Iraqi dinars, worth around forty thousand American dollars.
The Ghost stood up, the bag already in his hand. ‘Make the most of it,’ Hyde said, relaxing a little now the money wasn’t his responsibility. ‘Looks like the cash cow’s about to get slaughtered.’
The Ghost hesitated then sat back down. ‘Explain.’
Hyde savoured the look of confusion on his face. Now it was the freak’s turn to be caught out. ‘You really should stay more in touch with the burning issues of the day.’ He slid his newspaper across the table. Above the fold on the front page was a picture of the Citadel of Ruin next to the headline:
WORLD’S OLDEST STRONGHOLD ABOUT TO FALL?
‘If the holy guys in the mountain aren’t around to drive up prices, guess the bottom will drop right out of the market for bits of old stone.’ Hyde trapped a greasy note under the empty coffee glass and hoisted the bundle of sacking under his arm as he stood to leave. ‘This might be your last big payday my friend.’
‘The Citadel has never given up its secrets,’ the Ghost muttered, opening out the page and staring at the three photographs of the civilian survivors on the bottom of the page.
‘Nothing lasts for ever,’ Hyde said. ‘Just ask my soon-to-be-ex wife.’ Then he turned and walked quickly away, before the freak with the grey eyes had a chance to come back at him.
Hyde felt good as he left the dangerous buzz of the market behind and headed back to his 4x4. For the first time he’d got one over on the Ghost. He wasn’t such a badass after all. He’d looked like he was going to puke when he saw the newspaper. He was just another hustler, trying to make a buck.
He squinted up at the deepening sky. Sun down was in an hour and so was curfew. He needed to get across town and rejoin the rest of his crew at the hotel. They’d be heading out of town again at dawn, returning to the oilfields in the dusty badlands west of the city. He preferred it out there. Less noise. Less people.
He rounded another corner and saw the truck parked in the shade of a row of buildings, the red company logo on the door the only splash of colour in the drab street. Tariq was in the driver’s seat, keeping guard to make sure no one stuck rocks up the exhaust pipe, or booby-trapped it in some way. Vehicles belonging to Western companies were always getting blown up or sabotaged.
Hyde waved to draw his attention. Tariq looked over and froze. Hyde spun away, sensing movement from his left, instinctively reaching for the automatic inside his jacket. He turned his head and found himself staring into a pair of pale grey eyes.
‘You forgot this,’ the Ghost said, draping the newspaper over Hyde’s extended gun. He stepped closer, ignoring the gun pressing into his chest. ‘These people,’ he tapped the photographs on the cover, ‘they may come here, searching for – something. If they come, let me know.’
Hyde glanced down and saw a satellite phone number scrawled beneath the three photographs. His lip curled into a sneer as he prepared to tell the Ghost where to go, but it was too late. He had already gone.
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