The Key (34 page)

The footage steadied again and showed the lid being removed. The camera framed up the sleeping form of the girl curled inside then panned away and tilted up showing the Citadel behind it. It was as damning as it could possibly be.

‘Shortly after this footage was taken the girl was taken away under police escort to Ruin City Hospital – only she never got there. She’s disappeared. Again. I know you said you were “handling” this,’ Clementi couldn’t miss the mocking quote marks around the word, ‘so could you mind telling me where she is now?’

Clementi thought about lying, making up some story about how she was under surveillance and would be silenced within the hour, but he had made so many of those promises in the last few days that he couldn’t bring himself to say it. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

There was a long exhale on the line before Pentangeli spoke again. ‘I don’t know why you’re having such difficulty sorting this mess out. Don’t forget, if this whole thing goes belly up, you’re the one who’ll suffer most. Beyond lending you money, we have no evident connection to this whole business. And one way or another we will get our money back, whether it’s in cash or commodities. Hell, the site of St Patrick’s in downtown Manhattan has got to be worth a quarter of a billion in real estate terms. So if I were you, I would throw everything you have at finding these people, before they stumble on to something that could really do some damage. Between us, we own most of the news and TV stations in the world, but we don’t own them all. Don’t count on the story being spiked if you screw up again. It’s time you got your house in order, Cardinal. Let me know when it’s done.’

Liv was aware of sounds and movement breaking through the soft cocoon of her drugged sleep. They were different from before, no longer the drone of a jet engine but something quieter. She could hear the crunch of tyres and feel the gentle movement of a vehicle travelling slowly over an uneven surface. The crunching slowed then stopped. She heard a door open and felt the springs rock as someone got in with her. It was still dark outside, she could sense it even though her eyes remained shut. She could smell the night creeping in through the open door and hear night noises woven into it: the dry rasp of crickets; the click of cooling earth.

Whoever had got in was standing close now, looking down at her. She imagined the huge blond man preparing another shot to keep her locked inside her own body. She thought of springing up and running into the night, but knew her body was too limp to obey. She braced herself for the bite of the needle. Then he spoke.

‘Liv?’

Her eyes struggled open and she tried to focus. The figure looming over her was backlit by the bright interior light, but she knew who it was.

Gabriel smiled as her eyes rolled open and, in her mind, she smiled back and reached up to touch his face, but in reality her arm remained flat against the mattress and her face remained a mask. Whatever chemical prison she was in, she wasn’t free of it yet. And even as she savoured this moment, memories of the nightmare returned. The last time she had woken from a dream and discovered him there he had been consumed with flame. His image began to liquefy as tears welled up in her eyes but she blinked them away and kept her eyes open. She wanted to look at him for as long as possible, even if he was an illusion.

He reached down and wiped away a tear with his thumb, then leaned over to kiss her. Only when she felt his lips touch hers and the warmth of his breath on her skin did she know that it
was
real. He was there.

Keep yourself safe
,
he had told her the last time she had seen him,
until I find you
.

And, though she had dramatically failed to keep her half of that bargain, he had somehow kept his.

‘You’re safe,’ he whispered, and the words felt like a spell that unlocked her from some dark enchantment. ‘Try to sleep now. We’ll talk more when you’ve rested.’

Then he took her hand and held it, staying by her side until her eyes closed again and she slipped back into the security of sleep.

Vatican City

Clementi swallowed drily, his eyes fixed on the darkness of his office, staring at nothing. He had promised to call Pentangeli back once he’d checked in with his field operatives and found out what was happening. The latest report lay open on his desk, filed from the airport in New Jersey. He had dialled the contact number on the cover sheet, but no one was answering. There was a bump next door and the scrape of a chair across the floor. His Holiness was awake, undoubtedly roused by the sound of the phone ringing.

Clementi put the phone down and flicked on the desk lamp, revealing the spill of newspapers across the office floor where he’d knocked them over in his hurry on the way in. He dropped to his knees and started tidying them up in case the Pope decided to pay an unscheduled visit. If asked, he would say it was something to do with the global financial market; His Holiness always glazed over when he started talking about money – therein lay a large part of the Church’s problems.

As he placed the last newspaper back on his desk his eyes snagged on the front page. It showed two photographs, one of Liv Adamsen and one of Gabriel Mann. Above them was the banner headline: MISSING – PRESUMED MURDERED?

An overwhelming wave of pure hatred consumed him. How could these people, these nobodies, be causing him such trouble?

He looked back up at the computer monitor to check the time and spotted the unopened email from earlier. It had been sent by Dr Harzan, the operations manager at the desert compound. He had skipped over it because of the ringing phone and the pressing urgency of the other email in the inbox. He opened it now and read its short but wonderful contents. It was miraculous, like a ray of sun shining through storm clouds, or the answer to a long-held prayer.

We found it – and it’s far, far bigger than any of us dared hope.

Clementi read and reread the note, all the stress of the last weeks – years even – melting away in the warm glow of those few simple words.

They had found it, buried in the desert of northern Iraq, hidden throughout history, only to be found again by him, for the greater glory of God.

It was light when Liv woke.

She’d had the dream again while she slept, only this time it had been different. The Tau had stood, not in some featureless darkness, but in the middle of an empty desert at night, a fingernail moon hanging low in a sky full of stars. It had been a dream shot through with anxiety and dread, although nothing had happened. She had just sat, staring up at the dwindling moon as it sank towards the horizon, slowly disappearing in a drift of sand until, moments before it and she disappeared entirely, she woke up.

She was lying in the lower bunk of a row of three in a wooden dormitory room that reminded her of summer camps she had gone to when she was a kid. It had the same smell of wood and dust and sunshine. There was also coffee brewing somewhere and her stomach growled in response. She tried to sit up and, to her utter relief, her body obeyed. The drug she had been given was losing its grip on her, but she still had the cottonmouth dryness of the recently sedated.

Easing herself out of bed, she slowly got to her feet, testing her balance and feeling the stiffness in her muscles. The room shifted a little as she rose and she had to cling to the steel frame of the bed until it steadied again. She could hear the pulse in her head and feel the dark threat of a headache lurking behind her eyes. Ordinarily she would have popped an Advil and got back into bed, but the smell of the coffee lured her on. She needed the caffeine and the rehydration: but most of all she wanted to see Gabriel again.

She found him in the next room, sitting at a table opposite Dr Anata and Arkadian. They were all hunched over a fold-out map pinned flat by a leather-bound book and a laptop wired to a phone. Gabriel rose from his chair and walked over to her, hesitant and slightly nervous, as if he didn’t quite know what he should do. Liv solved the problem for him by collapsing against him and squeezing him hard. He was wearing a pullover that felt soft against her cheek and held the same cedarwood and citrus smell of him that she remembered from before. She pulled back and looked up into his face. ‘Just checking you’re real,’ she said, her voice raspy from lack of use. ‘You’ve been popping up in my dreams – and not in a good way.’

Gabriel smiled. ‘I’m real,’ he said. He pulled a chair out for her and sat back down. ‘You want some breakfast?’ He said this as if they were on a weekend away with friends and she had slept in with a hangover.

Plates of bread and apples, and pots of honey and butter were set out on the table, and her stomach growled at the sight. It would all have been quite pleasant if the circumstances had been different. Gabriel poured coffee from a jug and stirred in a big spoonful of honey. She drank the sweet liquid, savouring the way it scalded the back of her throat and hit her empty stomach with the combined force of caffeine and sugar.

She looked down at the map on the table. It showed the eastern edge of Turkey and the brown expanse of Syria, Jordan and Iraq. ‘So where are we going?’ she asked.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

‘We’re not entirely sure,’ Gabriel admitted. ‘I … didn’t find the Starmap. Someone else had got there first. The monk who helped me get inside the mountain, Athanasius, is going to check the archives and try to find out what happened to it.’

Even though Gabriel’s words had mortal implications for her, Liv could hear the pain of disappointment in his voice and wanted only to reach out and tell him it was OK. ‘So we wait,’ she said brightly, trying to make it sound as if this was the best they could have hoped for.

Another awkward silence stretched across the table. Dr Anata broke it.

‘We haven’t got time to wait,’ she said. ‘I’ve been going through some research papers on ancient maps and other documents that I thought might point us in the right direction.’ Her voice was low and measured in a way that disturbed Liv deeply. ‘I discovered something, a couple of things actually: one that may be of use and one that – is less helpful.’

In her former life as a crime reporter, Liv had done a feature on what the police called ‘Death Notices’, the most hated part of any homicide detective’s job. It referred to the visits they had to make to victims’ families in order to break the painful news that someone they loved was never coming home again. In the course of her research, she had studied the specific changes in body language and the careful cadence of the voice as it shaped itself to deliver this most unwelcome of all news. Liv recognized those telltale signs now in Dr Anata.

‘We’d been working on the assumption that the countdown started when you released the Sacrament. But having read up on ancient systems of measuring time, I realize we were wrong.’ Dr Anata picked up the leather-bound book from the table and turned to the middle pages. ‘The Mirror Prophecy says you must follow the Starmap Home
within
the phase of the moon. So far we have applied our modern, fluid notions of time to this, and treated it as a relative measurement. For us, a specific period of time can start whenever we choose because we have clocks to measure it by. But the ancients only had the fixed rhythms of nature, so time for them was always expressed as an absolute. Therefore the phrase
“Within the phase of a moon”
does not refer to a twenty-eight-day period that started when you released the Sacrament. It refers to the fixed period of celestial time during which all of these events must happen.’

Liv realized now why Dr Anata’s tone and behaviour had been so horribly familiar. Like those detectives she had followed to unsuspecting doors, Dr Anata had been carrying the burden of death with her. Only this time it wasn’t news of some victim in the morgue, it was the prognosis for her survival.

‘How long have I got?’

‘The current phase of the moon ends tomorrow night,’ Gabriel said, his voice tight and controlled. ‘We have two days to find the ancient site of Eden or the Sacrament will die inside you, you will die with it, and God alone knows what will happen to the rest of us.’

Liv looked out through a dusty window to a uniform line of trees stretching away from the shack. Blossom drifted down from them like snow and above them, low on the horizon, she could see the partial moon, curling like a fingernail in the lightening sky.

‘You said you’d found two things,’ she said, watching it melt away, as it had in her dream, which now made a terrible kind of sense.

Dr Anata reached over and turned the laptop round so Liv could see it. ‘I found this,’ she said.

On the screen was a browser window with a picture of a cracked clay tablet.

‘This is the
Imago Mundi
, the oldest known map in the world, and part of the permanent collection of Babylonian artefacts in the British Museum.
Imago Mundi
literally means “map of the earth”, and many – myself included – believe it was inspired by the Starmap.’

Liv leaned forward and studied the photograph. A section at the top of the tablet was crammed with strange symbols and below that were two perfect circles – one inside the other – containing another symbol that Liv recognized immediately as the Tau.