Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, The Tower

The girl’s face lit up. ‘Cool.’ With a whip-crack of auburn ponytail she turned and ran down to the kitchen.

Most of the work carried out by the organization was done by volunteers like Becky; people of all ages, giving freely of their time, not because of any religious obligation or national pride, but because they loved the planet they lived on and wanted to do something to look after it. That’s what the charity did: brought water to places that had dried out; planted crops and trees in land that had been blighted by war or poisoned by industry; though this was not how Ortus had started, and it was not the work it had always done.

Her desk phone rang.

‘Ortus. Can I help you?’ she said, as brightly as she could manage.

‘Kathryn,’ Oscar’s warm voice rumbled in her ear. Instantly she felt a little better.

‘Hey, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘I was praying.’

‘Did you hear?’ She didn’t quite know how to frame the question. ‘Did you hear that he … that the monk …’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard.’

She swallowed hard, trying to hold back the emotion.

‘Don’t despair,’ her father said. ‘We should not give up hope.’

‘But how can we not?’ She glanced up at the door and lowered her voice. ‘The prophecy can no longer be fulfilled. How can the cross rise again?’

The crackle of the transatlantic line filled the long pause before her father spoke again.

‘People have come back from the dead,’ he said. ‘Look in the Bible.’

‘The Bible is full of lies. You taught me that.’

‘No, that I did not teach you. I told you of specific and deliberate inaccuracies. There is still much in the official Bible that is true.’

The line went silent again save for the rising hiss of long-distance interference.

She wanted to believe him, she really did; but in her heart she felt that to carry on blindly hoping everything was going to be OK was not much different from closing your eyes and crossing your fingers.

‘Do you really believe the cross will rise again?’

‘It might,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to believe, I admit. But if you’d told me yesterday that a Sanctus would appear from nowhere, climb to the top of the Citadel and make the sign of the Tau, I would have found that equally hard to believe. Yet here we are.’

She couldn’t fault him. She rarely could. It was why she wished he had been around to talk to when the news had first broken. Maybe then she wouldn’t have thought herself into such a melancholic state.

‘So what do you think we should do?’ she asked.

‘We should watch the body. That is the key. It is the cross. And if he does rise again, we need to protect him from those who would do him harm.’

‘The Sancti.’

‘My belief is they will try and reclaim the body as soon as possible, then destroy it to end the prophetic sequence. As a Sanctus he will have no family, therefore no one will step forward to claim him.’

They both lapsed into silence as they contemplated what might happen if this came to pass. Kathryn imagined him lying in a dark, windowless room somewhere inside the Citadel as somehow, miraculously, his broken body began to mend. Then out of the shadows hooded figures started to emerge, green-clad men with daggers drawn and other instruments of torture to hand.

On the other side of the world her father pictured similar images, though his were not drawn from imagination. He had witnessed with his own eyes what the Sancti were capable of.

22

Athanasius had a profound dislike for the great library.

There was something about its trapped, anonymous darkness and labyrinthine chambers he found deeply claustrophobic and sinister. Nevertheless it was there the Abbot had summoned him, so it was there he now made his way.

The library occupied a system of caves about a third of the way up the mountain, chosen by the original architects of the Citadel because they were sufficiently dark and well ventilated to prevent sunlight and damp fading or corrupting the ancient scrolls and manuscripts. As the caves had filled with more and more priceless texts, it was decided that the preservation of such treasures could no longer be left simply to the darkness and a dry breeze, so a schedule of improvements had begun. The library now occupied forty-two chambers of varying sizes, and contained easily the most valuable and unique collection of books anywhere in the world. There was a standing, somewhat bitter joke among international religious scholars and academics that it was the greatest collection of ancient texts no one had ever seen.

Athanasius approached its solitary entrance with his usual feeling of gnawing unease. A cold blue light swept across his palm as the scanner checked and verified his identity before a door slid open, allowing him into an airlock. He stepped inside and heard the door slide shut behind him. His claustrophobia deepened. He knew it would not leave him until he had exited the library. A light blinked above a second scanner, indicating that the airlock was doing whatever it needed to do to ensure no tainted air accompanied him into the hermetically sealed world beyond the final door. He waited. Felt the desiccated air already sucking moisture from the back of his throat. The light stopped blinking. A second door slid open and Athanasius stepped into the library.

The moment he passed through into the darkness, a circle of light grew and enveloped him. It extended just a few feet in every direction and matched his movements exactly, keeping him at its centre as he strode across the reception hall towards the archway leading into the main body of the library. As well as the carefully controlled climate – a constant sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit and thirty-five per cent relative humidity – the lighting was a marvel of modern engineering. It too had been progressively updated over the generations, with guttering candles making way for oil lamps, which in turn made way for electricity. The system of lighting it now utilized was not only the most advanced in the world, it was the only one of its kind. Like most of the recent technological improvements, it had been devised and engineered by one man: Athanasius’s great friend, Father Thomas.

From the moment Father Thomas had entered the Citadel over a decade previously he had been treated differently from the usual intake. Like most of the inhabitants of the mountain, his past was unknown, but whatever he had done in his life outside, it became immediately clear that he was an expert in the preservation of ancient documents and a genius with electronics. In his first year he had been given special authority, by the Prelate himself, to totally overhaul and update the library. It was a task that took him nearly seven years to complete, the first year alone spent purely on experimenting with different light frequencies and studying their effect on various inks and writing surfaces. The lighting system he had then designed and built was brilliant in its simplicity and had been inspired by the very first scholars who’d walked through the library with a single candle illuminating only their immediate surroundings, whilst leaving the rest of the collection in total darkness.

Using a system of movement, pressure and heat sensors, Father Thomas had created an environment in which anyone entering the library was tracked by a central computer that provided a narrow column of light, sufficient to illuminate no more than their immediate surroundings. This light would then follow them throughout the library, constantly pushing away the darkness as they walked through it, without contaminating any area in which they were not working. The system was so sensitive that each monk could be identified by tiny differences in their body temperature and slight fluctuations in air displacement due to their unique size and weight. It meant the computer could not only monitor the movement of each visitor, it also knew who they were and where they went, so acted as an added security measure policing the monks’ usage of the library.

Athanasius left the entrance hall now, following the thin filament of dim guide lamps set into the floor, marking the way through the darkness. Occasionally he came across other scholars flitting around like fireflies, trapped in their personal haloes of light, each one dimmer the further he progressed into the great library.

Father Thomas’s other great innovation had been to zone the library according to age, ink and paper types, and to adjust the lighting in each area to suit their particular properties. So, as Athanasius ventured deeper into the places where increasingly older and more fragile texts were kept, so his own circle of light became gradually more muted and orange. It was as if he were walking backwards through time, experiencing the same conditions that would have illuminated the documents when they had first been written.

Furthest from the entrance was the smallest and darkest chamber of all. The oldest, most delicate and most precious texts were housed here. Scraps of vellum worn thin by time and ancient words scratched lightly on brittle stones. The glow in the forbidden vault, on the very rare occasions it shone at all, was the deep and sombre red of the embers of a dying fire.

Only three people had perpetual right of entry to this room: the Prelate, the Abbot and Father Malachi, the chief librarian. Others could be granted special authority by any of these three to enter the vault, but it happened rarely. If someone entered the space without the correct authorization, either by design or mistake, the lights would remain off and a silent alarm would alert the guard permanently stationed by the entrance who would surge through the dark halls to deal with the intruder.

Punishment for entering the forbidden vault was traditionally harsh, always public, and served as the greatest single deterrent for ever being inclined to do so. In the past transgressors had been brought before the fully assembled college of priests and monks to have their eyes put out, in order to cleanse them of whatever they may have seen; their tongue torn out with red-hot pincers, so they could not repeat anything they had inadvertently learned; and molten lead poured into their ears, to burn away any forbidden words that had been whispered therein.

The offender’s broken body was then expelled from the Citadel as a warning to others of the dangers of disobedience and the pursuit of restricted knowledge. It was from this gruesome ritual that the phrase ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ sprang. There was a fourth, lesser known part of the saying which advised that you should also ‘Do no evil unto others’, a line which seemed somewhat irreconcilable when held up against the history of its origin.

Like everyone in the Citadel, Athanasius had heard the stories of what happened to those who strayed into the forbidden vault, but to his knowledge no one had been subjected to the punishment for hundreds of years. This was partly because the world had turned and such displays of barbarity were no longer tolerated, but mostly because no one dared enter without the requisite authority. He had been inside it only once before, when he had been appointed chamberlain, and had hoped he would never have cause to visit it again.

As he trudged dutifully through the gloom, his eyes fixed on the gossamer-thin filament embedded in the floor, he began to wonder about the purpose of his summons and whether there had been some terrible new discovery. Perhaps Samuel had somehow managed to gain access to the library between his escape and his doomed climb. Or made his way to the forbidden room and stolen or vandalized one of the sacred and irreplaceable texts …

Up ahead the thread of floor lights turned sharply right and disappeared behind the unseen upright of a stone wall. It marked the point where the pathway turned into the final corridor leading to the furthest vault. Whatever the reason the Abbot had summoned him, he would discover it soon enough.

23

‘The victim shows signs of recent laceration and trauma to hands and feet,’ Reis said as he continued his preliminary examination of the body. ‘The cuts are numerous. Deep. Down to the bone in some cases. Also irregular and torn. There are fragments of what look like rock embedded in some of the wounds. I’m removing them and bagging them for analysis.’

He held his hand over the microphone on the headset and turned to Arkadian.

‘He climbed up there before he jumped, didn’t he?’

Arkadian nodded. ‘There’s no ancient lift in there, far as we know.’

Reis turned back and looked at the ravaged hands and feet of the monk, picturing the monumental height of the Citadel in his mind. ‘Tough climb,’ he said quietly, before releasing his hand from the microphone and continuing.