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

‘I’m a police officer,’ he called into the darkness, wielding the words like a talisman.

The sudden closeness of the voice by his left ear made him whimper with surprise.

‘You have the colouring of a betrayer,’ it said. ‘For was not Judas a redhead?’

Sulley swivelled his eyes left. He could see nothing but dark walls and flickering light.

‘You are in a garrotting chair,’ the voice continued, deep and steady, rumbling out of the darkness close by. ‘One of the chief weapons used to stamp out the cancer of heresy during the Inquisition. It has a purity to it I’m sure you’ll appreciate. There is a broad metal screw positioned in the headrest just below your skull. If I twist it one way …’ Sulley felt the spike drill back into his neck and gasped in agony ‘… the screw tightens and you will feel pain. If I turn it the other way …’ the skewering pressure subsided once more ‘… you will feel relief. So,’ the voice said, moving in closer. ‘Which is it to be?’

‘What do you want?’ Sulley asked the darkness. ‘I can give you money. Is that what you want?’

‘All I want is your loyalty,’ mumbled the reply. ‘And some information. Please know that bringing you here is not a pleasure but a necessity, brought about by your own actions. We asked for your loyalty. You chose not to give it. You betrayed the Church – and that is a sin.’ The voice moved closer until he could feel the air that carried it whisper across his ear. ‘Would you like to confess your sins now?’

Sulley’s mind hummed with a mixture of pain and indecision. Should he admit he had sold information to others or deny it? If he denied it, he might be hurt until he admitted it anyway. He didn’t want the pain to come back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quickly. ‘I made a mistake. If that’s a sin … then – please, forgive me.’

‘Raise your right hand,’ the voice commanded.

He lifted it as high as he could before the restraint snapped it to a halt.

‘That chain is called the mea culpa,’ the dark voice said. ‘It enabled the heretic to sign his confession at the end of his inquisition. Mea culpa means “my fault”. Admitting fault is the first step toward forgiveness. Do you know what the second step is?’

‘No,’ he squeaked, his voice stretched tight between peaks of fear and pain.

‘Atonement. You must perform a righteous act to make amends for your sin.’

Sulley took a few shallow breaths, trying to calm the panic that threatened to overwhelm him, but he understood a deal when it was being offered.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

98

Arkadian flipped his badge as he reached the reception desk.

‘I’m looking for Gabriel Mann,’ he said with a reassuring smile. ‘Does he work here?’

‘Oh,’ the receptionist gasped, glancing at the badge then back at him with the flustered, guilty reaction of the truly innocent. ‘Yes. Well … not usually, no. I mean, he’s usually away somewhere or other, but he does work for the charity. Let me find out for you.’

She tapped an extension number into the desk phone and spoke in a low voice. Behind her an elegant wooden staircase curled upwards and brought down sounds of the upstairs offices. The receptionist punched a key and looked over at him.

‘He’s in the Sudan,’ she said. ‘He’s not expected back for a month at least.’ Arkadian nodded, thinking about the fingerprint that had placed him in the city morgue not two hours previously. ‘I can try and get a number for him, if you like,’ she suggested. ‘There’s probably a line into the base camp, or maybe a satellite phone. I was trying to get hold of his mother to see if she’d spoken to him. She runs the charity,’ she explained.

‘Do you have her number?’ Arkadian asked. ‘Or any idea when she might be back?’

‘Of course,’ the woman said, taking a pen and copying a number on to a notepad from a directory sheet in front of her. ‘Here’s her mobile number. I expected her back from the airport by now. I can get her to call you …’

‘No, it’s OK,’ he said, taking the piece of paper and looking at the name and number written on it. ‘I’ll give her a call. Which airport will she be coming in from?’

‘City. It’s where all our air freight comes in.’

Arkadian nodded and smiled. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said. Then he turned and headed out through the heavy glass doors and into the street where the police car was parked and waiting for him.

99

The Abbot watched the Informer’s trembling hand drift across the laptop, the short chain clinking as he typed in a sequence of remote access codes. The Internet connection through the phone was slow and it took a long few minutes before he finally managed to open the monk’s case file.

‘I’m in,’ he announced to the darkness, sweat dripping from the end of his nose despite the stony chill of the cave.

‘Has anything been added?’ the Abbot replied, leaning closer to the screen.

The chain stretched and coiled again as the freckled hand tapped in a few more codes to open up an email account, then scrolled through an in-box and opened a message sent by GARGOYLE that comprised of just one word: ‘Red’.

‘Look out for anything highlighted in red,’ the Informer explained in a wavering voice. ‘That’s the new stuff.’

He deleted the mail message, opened the monk’s case file and started scrolling through it. The Abbot watched pages flash across the screen, each filled with details of things no one outside the Citadel should ever have seen. It made him sick to think of all the eager eyes that had crawled over these pages, greedily picking at the morsels they contained like ants on a bone. A band of red splashed across the page throwing a crimson light over the faces turned toward it. The freckled hand went still. The Abbot started to read. It was a brief transcription of Liv’s conversation with Arkadian relating the strange account of her birth and why she had a different name and birth date to her brother. The Abbot read through it, nodding to himself. It solved the mystery of why no sister had been discovered in the background checks when Samuel had first entered the Citadel.

‘Continue,’ he said.

The red text rolled away and for long minutes only white pages flitted across the screen as the Informer scrolled through the entire file. It was only at the very end, in the pathology section, that the red text returned and cast its bloody glow back into the cave.

The new section was in two parts. The first was a note recording how a sample of the monk’s liver cells had been flagged as contaminated on the grounds that the cells appeared to be regenerating. The Abbot wondered if this was evidence that Brother Samuel was re-animating, as the prophecy had predicted, or just the latent effects of his close exposure to the Sacrament. As he read the second red section, however, he was seized with a new interpretation and his blood quickened. It was a brief note from a Dr Reis detailing the results of comparative DNA samples taken from the fallen monk and the girl.

The Abbot stared at the red screen, his mind singing with the pathologist’s findings and deductions. They were the same. Not only did Brother Samuel have a sister, she was his identical twin.

This one piece of information made sense of everything. The prophecy was right. Samuel had indeed been the cross. But he had fallen, and now the girl had risen in his place: flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. The same.

She was the cross now.

She was the instrument that would kill the Sacrament and rid the world of its heresy. She was the key to everything.

‘Destroy the file,’ he said. ‘Copy it to the laptop then wipe it from the police database.’

The Informer paused, clearly reluctant to perform such an obvious act of vandalism. The Abbot laid a hand lightly on the tightening screw sending a tremor through the spike and into his spine. It was enough to send the chain ratcheting back across the arm of the chair as he frantically obeyed, attaching a virus to the original file in the police database that would destroy the contents, the directory, then itself.