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

‘OK,’ she said, satisfied that she wasn’t about to be kidnapped again. ‘Let’s go, Sulley.’ She swept the newspaper from the table and followed him out.

The reception area was humming as they made their way through it. Two uniformed officers were standing guard by the entrance, checking everyone in and out. Beyond them, Liv saw a news crew, lights on, camera rolling, the reporter standing with her back to the building as she taped her report; or maybe it was live. Liv drifted behind the Sub-Inspector into a hushed hallway leading to the rear of the building. Another uniformed officer stood by a pair of overlapping plastic doors. He nodded as they approached.

‘After you …’ Sulley stood aside.

The plastic buckled slightly before delivering Liv into what she momentarily mistook for the blinding sunshine.

Then a woman shouted: ‘Are you connected with the disappearance of the monk?’

Liv spun round to head back into the safety of the building but the Sub-Inspector grabbed her arm and hustled her towards an unmarked police car a little way down the alley. She dropped her head so her hair fell over her face.

‘Are you under arrest?’ the reporter yelled.

A flashgun exploded to her right and a man’s voice joined the questioning.

‘What is your connection with the missing man?’

‘Was the theft an inside job?’

The Sub-Inspector pulled open the rear door of the car, pushed Liv firmly into the back seat and slammed it behind her.

Liv glanced up just as the interior flooded with light from a camera pressed against the window. She wrenched her head away.

The car bounced on its springs as Sulley dropped into the driver’s seat.

‘Sorry about that.’ He caught her eye in the rear-view mirror as he fired up the engine. ‘It’s amazing how quickly the press catch on to these things.’

He popped the handbrake and eased away from the pack. The last thing Liv saw as she glanced out of the rear window was the dead-eyed stare of a camera lens looking right back at her.

72

Kathryn Mann pointed to a spot on the dusty concrete floor of the warehouse and the forklift pirouetted gracefully and lowered one of the master pallets from the C-123 right on to it. She was trying to arrange things so that the next shipment due out, an agricultural supplies drop to one of their projects in Uganda, didn’t end up buried somewhere in the stack. Each master pallet had a thin aluminium skin round it and was the size of two large refrigerators. It was like a massive three-dimensional puzzle, but it beat sitting in the office watching the news with Oscar and waiting for Gabriel to call.

The truck eased its forks from beneath the pallet and peeled back out to the transport plane. Most of the fertilizer would be flying straight back out again in a few days, with a bit of luck.

A loud rapping caused Kathryn to look up. Through the narrow avenue of crates she could see Oscar standing at the window, gesturing for her to come over. His expression was grim.

Kathryn handed Becky her list. ‘Could you make sure these ones stay at the front?’

‘Look,’ Oscar said, the moment she walked into the office. He pointed the remote at the TV on the wall and edged up the volume.

‘The investigation into the death of the monk,’ the newsreader announced in a tone usually reserved for massacres and declarations of war, ‘has taken a turn for the macabre this morning. Sources close to the investigation believe that his body has disappeared from the city morgue …’

The picture cut to an unsteady image of a bedraggled woman being led to a car.

‘Are you connected with the disappearance of the monk?’ the reporter’s voice shouted. ‘Are you under arrest?’

The woman looked up briefly, staring directly into the lens before dropping her head and disappearing behind a curtain of dirty-looking hair.

‘That must be the girl,’ Oscar said.

But Kathryn didn’t hear him. She was transfixed by the sight of the plainclothes police officer at Liv’s side. She watched him bundle her roughly into the back seat. Saw the camera tilt up towards his face. Saw him hold up his freckled hand to push it away.

Then he got in the car and drove her away.

73

Athanasius was in a daze as he walked to the private chapel for prayers. He was still sweating from the exertion of dragging each inert body through the complex series of tunnels leading to the medieval caverns in the eastern section. He was back in the main part of the Citadel now, but the ordeal still clung to him, along with the faint chemical tang of the body-bags. No matter how hard he had scrubbed his hands in the rainwater sinks of the laundry, he couldn’t seem to get rid of that smell.

The old dungeons held potent reminders of the church’s violent past: rusted shackles and fearsome-looking pincers the colour of dried blood. He’d known the Citadel’s history, of course, the crusades and persecutions of more brutal times when a strong belief in God and the teachings of the Church had been forged through fear; but he’d thought those times were gone. Now the spectre of that violent past was clawing at the present, like the smell of ancient death that had risen from the oubliette as he’d tipped the bodies into it, one by one. When he heard the brittle crack of them landing on a bed of forgotten bones, he felt something break inside him, too, as if his actions and his beliefs had been pulled so far apart they had finally snapped. As he shivered alone in the cold mountain, the two phrases he’d glimpsed in the Heretic Bible shone in his mind like fresh truths through the darkness.

He paused outside the private chapel, afraid to enter because of the shame he carried with him. He rubbed his hand distractedly over his scalp and smelt again the antiseptic taint of the body-bag on his sleeve.

He needed to pray. What other hope did he have? He took a deep breath and ducked through the entrance.

The chapel was lit by small votive candles flickering around the T-shaped cross on the far wall. There were no seats, only mats and thin cushions to protect bony old knees from the stone floor. He hadn’t noticed a candle burning outside the chapel, but as he entered now he saw it already contained a worshipper. He nearly wept in relief when he saw who it was.

‘Dear brother …’ Father Thomas stood and put an arm around the trembling figure of his friend. ‘What troubles you so?’

Athanasius took deep breaths, fighting to regain control of himself. It took a few minutes before his heart rate and breathing steadied. He glanced back at the doorway, then into the concerned face of his friend. In his mind, Athanasius debated whether to confide in him or tell him nothing, for his own safety. It was like standing at the edge of a precipice, knowing that if he stepped forward he could never step back.

He looked deeply into his friend’s eyes, clouded with curiosity and concern, and started to talk. He told him about the visit to the forbidden vault, about the Heretic Bible and the chilling phrases he had glimpsed as the Abbot leafed through it. He told him about the Prophecy the book contained, and then confessed to the terrible task he had just performed. He told him everything.

When he finished, the two men sat in silence for a long time. Athanasius knew that what he had just shared had endangered them both. Father Thomas looked up. Glanced quickly at the door. Leaned in closer. ‘What were the phrases you saw in the forbidden book?’ His voice barely rose above a whisper.

Athanasius felt a wave of relief sweep through him. ‘The first was “The light of God, sealed up in darkness”,’ he whispered. ‘The second: “Not a mountain sanctified, but a prison cursed.”’

He leaned back as Thomas’s intelligent eyes flitted back and forth across the darkened room in time with the fevered workings of his mind.

‘I have, increasingly of late, felt there was something … wrong … about this place …’ He picked his words carefully. ‘All this accumulated learning, the product of mankind’s finest minds, hidden away in the darkness of the library, illuminating nobody. I undertook my work here for the protection of knowledge, for its preservation, not for its imprisonment.

‘When I’d finished my improvements to the library, and seen how well they worked, I petitioned the Prelate to publish the blueprints so that other great libraries could benefit from the systems we now use here. He refused. He said books, and the knowledge they contain, are dangerous weapons in the hands of the unenlightened. He said if they faded and crumbled to dust in the libraries beyond these walls, so much the better.’ He looked up at Athanasius, his face registering the private pain and disappointment he had kept buried until now. ‘It appears I have built a system that benefits no one but those who seek to imprison that most divine of gifts – knowledge.’

‘“The light of God, sealed up in darkness,”’ Athanasius quoted softly.

‘“Not a mountain sanctified, but a prison cursed,”’ Father Thomas replied.

They lapsed into silence again.

‘It is both frustrating and ironic,’ Athanasius said at length, ‘that your ingenious security system prevents us from discovering what else that forbidden book contains.’ He dropped his gaze to the flickering flame of a votive candle.

Father Thomas watched him for a moment then drew breath. ‘There may be a way,’ he said, his eyes now shining with conviction. ‘We must wait until after Vespers, when most of the brethren are dining or retiring to the dormitories; when the library is at its quietest.’

74

Gabriel felt the phone vibrate in his pocket and checked the caller ID.

‘Mother.’