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

Liv followed her gaze, remembering the map in her guidebook and the mountain range that curled around the city and stretched across the country like a spine. ‘The Taurus mountains,’ she said, the first syllable now heavy with new meaning.

Dr Anata nodded. ‘In order for you to properly understand the importance of the Tau, and what it means to this place, you need to know a little history.’ She leaned forward, steepling her long, silver-ringed fingers above the pristine white of the paper tablecloth. ‘The first records of human life in this region describe a struggle between two warring tribes, each seeking dominance over the land. One was called the Yahweh. They lived in caves halfway up a mountain, and were believed to protect a sacred relic that gave them great power. Even in those prehistoric times other tribes revered, or at least feared them so much that they made pilgrimages to the mountain, bringing offerings of food and livestock to the gods they believed lived here.

‘In time a town grew up, prospering from the pilgrims who came to the mountain to give offerings and partake of the miraculous waters that flowed from the ground and was said to bestow good health and long life on all who drank them. A public church emerged to look after the temporal interests of the Citadel, and to preach the word of God passed down from the mountain in written form. In these scriptures the name of God was written as YHWH, which translates as Jehovah or Yahweh – the same name as their tribe. It described how the world was made and how men came to populate it. Anyone who questioned this official version was branded a heretic and hunted down by ruthless warrior-priests riding under a banner bearing the symbol of the Citadel’s divine authority.’ She pointed at the sign of the T. ‘The Tau. The one true cross. The symbol of the relic that had first given them power over others. The symbol of the Sacrament.’

Cornelius stopped just short of the great stone archway leading into the public square and flipped open the notebook to check the signal. His arrow had moved closer, but the girl’s pointed to the same spot.

He glanced back down the steep street towards Kutlar. He was about twenty feet behind, struggling stiff-legged up the hill, the front of his shirt wet with sweat, each halting step the same rhythmical cousin of the one that preceded it: the bad leg slowly swinging forward, landing gently on the ground, the good leg hopping quickly forward to put as little weight on it as possible.

Cornelius planned to shoot him with the silenced gun in his pocket once he’d identified the girl, then prop him on one of the benches lining the embankment. It would hopefully shock the girl into obedience so she would walk down the hill on her own, though he also had a syringe full of Haldol in his pocket if necessary. He watched Kutlar’s metronomic progression towards him. Waited until he had almost caught up, then glanced back down at the screen. The girl still hadn’t moved. He closed the notebook, tucked it into his pocket and headed into the shadow of the arch.

93

Liv looked at the T-symbol – the Tau. She’d read a lot about the Sacrament on the flight over, never dreaming it would somehow be connected to her brother’s death.

‘The fact your brother had this mark on his arm means he had knowledge of the Sacrament,’ the Ruinologist continued. ‘He may have been trying to share it.’

Liv remembered what Arkadian had said: Solve the mystery of the Sacrament, solve the mystery of Samuel’s death. She looked up at Dr Anata. ‘You must have come to your own conclusions about what the Sacrament might be,’ she said.

The Ruinologist shook her head. ‘Whenever I feel I’m about to grasp it, it always eludes me. I can tell you what it isn’t. It’s not the cross of Christ, as some people believe. Compared to the religious order inside that mountain, Christ is a relative newcomer. So it isn’t His crown of thorns either, or the spear that pierced His side, or the Holy Grail He drank from. These are all myths perpetuated by the Citadel over the years as diversions to obscure the Sacrament’s true identity.’

‘Then how do we know there’s anything there at all?’ Liv said. ‘If no one’s ever seen it.’

‘You can’t build the world’s biggest religion on just a rumour.’

‘Can’t you? Think about it. You’ve got these two prehistoric tribes fighting it out. To get the upper hand, one holes up in this mountain and claims it’s got some divine weapon. Maybe there’s a drought or an eclipse and they claim they did it. People start believing they have power and treat the tribe like gods. They like it, so they keep up the bluff. So long as no one finds out there’s nothing there, the bluff still works. Wind forward thousands of years and people still believe it, only now a massive religion has been built on it.’ She thought of Samuel walking away from her. Telling her he wanted to get closer to God. ‘And if my brother found that out, discovered after everything he’d been through that the one thing keeping him going, his faith, was actually built on – nothing …’

Miriam saw the tears in Liv’s eyes. ‘But there is something there,’ she said. ‘Something with power.’ She picked up her bottle of water and looked at the picture on the label. ‘Let me ask you this …’ She poured water into her glass and her silver rings clinked against the bottle. ‘What do you want from life? What do we all want? We want health, happiness, a long life, right? Same now as it ever was. The most ancient of our ancestors, the ones who first made fire and sharpened sticks to protect themselves against the wild beasts, they wanted exactly the same things: and the mountain existed even then, and so did the holy men within it. And those simple tribesfolk, who just wanted to live a little bit longer and not get sick, they worshipped those people, not because of some clever rumour, but because the people in the mountain lived a long, long time, and disease did not touch them. Tell me, when you think of God, what image comes to mind?’

Liv shrugged. ‘A man with a long white beard.’

‘Where do you think that image comes from?’ She turned the bottle round and pointed to the picture of the Citadel on the label. ‘The earliest man looked up at this mountain and saw occasional glimpses of the gods who lived there; men with long hair and long white beards. Old, old men in a time when you were lucky to live past thirty.

‘This water is exported all over the world, has been since Roman times when the emperors first found out about it. You think they shipped it all the way back to Rome ’cause it tasted nice? They wanted what every man has always wanted, and kings more than most: they wanted more life. Even today a person can expect to live on average seven years longer in Ruin than in any other major capital city and people still come here in their thousands and get cured of all sorts of things. These things are not rumour. These things are fact. Still think there’s nothing there?’

Liv dropped her eyes down to the ashtray. Her ten-year nicotine addiction did seem to have vanished since arriving in Ruin. Miriam was right, there had to be something there. Samuel would not have dragged her into all this if there was no point to it; and he wouldn’t have scratched those letters on the seeds unless they pointed to something. The question was, what?

She turned to the page in her notebook where she’d copied the letters. Looked at them again. And like the sun breaking through clouds, she recognized something new in them.

94

Cornelius stood in the glare of the afternoon sun surveying the heaving throngs of coach parties and other tourists that flooded the wide embankment: people posing for pictures; people congregating around tour guides; people just staring up at the Citadel, lost in their own thoughts. There were plenty of young women; any one of them could be the girl. He stroked the puckered skin on his cheek, picturing his enemy. As he’d laid in the hospital, recovering from the skin grafts in a blur of morphine, he’d thought about her often. He kept seeing her stepping out from nowhere, holding out the bundle of rags, her body shrouded in a burkha that hid all but her eyes and her hands. Sometimes it was a parcel of newspaper she held, like the parcel his mother had wrapped him in before leaving him by the orphanage door and walking in front of an express train to Liverpool. He’d never known her face either. But he didn’t need to know their faces to know what they were. Betrayers all.

Behind him, Kutlar’s ragged breathing and halting footsteps announced his arrival like a leper shuffling from a cave. Cornelius slipped his hand into his pocket and curled it round the grip of his Glock.

‘Which one is she?’ he said.

Liv stared at the letters she had copied from the seeds in their original pairings:

T a M + k

? s A a l

Then compared them to the card she had found in amongst the flowers:

T

MALA

MARTYR

She took her pen and wrote the word ‘Mala’ in her notebook, crossing out the letters to see what she was left with.

Assuming the ‘T’ was the Tau, it left just three letters – s, k and A, and two symbols – ‘+’ and ‘?’. She stared at them, wrote down one final word and the last two symbols, then read what she had written.

T + ?

Ask Mala

The positioning of the underlined symbols made it look right. So did the capital letters at the beginning of each word. Was this the message her brother had sent her? It made some sense. The T was the Tau, the symbol of the Sacrament, and the plus sign could be a cross. The question mark symbolized the mystery of its identity, leaving the remaining two words reading like an instruction – ‘Ask Mala’. She looked up at the Ruinologist.

‘Who are the Mala?’ she asked.

Miriam looked up from the notebook where she had read the words as Liv had written them. ‘I told you that, in the beginning, there were two tribes of men,’ she said. ‘One of them was the Yahweh, the men of the mountain. The other was the outcast tribe who believed the Yahweh had stolen the Sacrament and, by imprisoning it, had usurped the natural order of things. They believed the Sacrament should be discovered and set free – this tribe were called the Mala. They were persecuted by the Yahweh, their people hunted and killed for the beliefs they held. But they kept their faith alive and a secret church grew, even in the shadow of the mountain’s ascendancy. By the time the Yahweh did their deal with the Romans to ‘rebrand’ state religion, they had bled their poisonous hate of the tribe into the language – in Latin ‘mala’ means ‘evils’. But even though the Citadel demonized these people, and burned their chapels and confiscated and destroyed their sacred texts, they could not destroy their spirit.’

Liv felt her skin tighten. ‘Do they still exist?’ she asked.

Miriam opened her mouth to answer but her eyes shifted suddenly upwards. Liv twisted round, saw a large man appear behind her, silhouetted against the bright sky. Her eyes adjusted to the glare and his features began to take form within the darkness of his outline, eyes first – pale, and blue, and staring straight into Liv’s. A nervous tremor fluttered in her chest as she realized who it was.

‘Yes,’ Gabriel said. ‘Yes, we do.’

95

From where Kutlar stood he could see the whole of the embankment curling around the base of the mountain to a row of stone buildings in the distance promising all kinds of spa treatments to heal and revive.

‘She’s not here,’ he said.

Cornelius let go of the gun in his pocket. Kutlar was stalling, he was sure of it. He opened the notebook and looked at the wire-frame map of the embankment. The two arrows almost overlapped at the centre, pointing directly to where they now stood. ‘She is here,’ he said, removing his phone from his pocket and quickly copying in Liv’s number from the search box.

He stepped forward and pressed the call button, dropping the phone down so he could listen for the sound of a phone ringing. He walked closer to the shrine, filtering out the murmur of the crowd, and heard something in front of him.

He cocked his head to one side and his eyes caught a tiny movement as the sound came again. It was down on the ground, in amongst the flowers, buzzing like a large trapped bee. Cornelius squatted down and shoved his hand into the soft petals. His hand closed around the hard plastic case of a phone. It vibrated once more as he pulled it out, leaving a crater in the surface of the flowers. From his own phone he heard a robotic voice asking him to leave a message. He cut the call and scrolled through the menu of Liv’s phone, checking the call logs, the address book, the text messages. They were all empty.

Someone had reset the phone and abandoned it.

Miriam watched the bearded man walk quickly away from the shrine. She saw him stop by the far wall, talk to another man, and look down at something that appeared to be a small laptop. Gabriel was right. They had been tracking the girl’s phone signal.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her own phone. She headed off, towards the row of health spas and away from the men with the laptop. She switched her phone off, thought about dropping it into one of the bins that lined the moat wall, but slipped it back into her pocket and decided to leave town for a few days instead. She could always get rid of it later – depending on how things panned out. At least the girl was safe now. That was the main thing.