The Key

4

Room 406, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

Liv Adamsen burst from sleep like a breathless swimmer breaking surface. She gasped for air, her blonde hair plastered across pale, damp skin, her frantic green eyes scanning the room for something real to cling to, something tangible to help drag her away from the horrors of her nightmare. She heard a whispering, as though someone was close by, and cast about for its source.

No one there.

The room was small: a solid door opposite the steel-framed bed she was lying on; an old TV fixed high on a ceiling bracket in the corner; a single window set into a wall whose white paint was yellowing and flaking as if infected. The blind was down, but bright daylight glowed behind it, throwing the sharp outline of bars against the wipe-clean material. She took a deep breath to try to calm herself, and caught the scent of sickness and disinfectant in the air.

Then she remembered.

She was in a hospital – though she didn’t know why, or how she had come to be there.

She took more breaths, long and deep and calming. Her heart still thudded in her chest, the whispering rush continued in her ears, so loud and immediate that she had to stop herself from checking the room again.

Get a grip, she told herself. It’s just blood rushing through your veins. There’s no one here.

The same nightmare seemed to lie in wait for her every time she fell asleep, a dream of whispering blackness, where pain bloomed like red flowers, and a shape loomed, ominous and terrifying – a cross in the shape of a letter ‘T’. And there was something else in the darkness with her, something huge and terrible. She could hear it moving and feel the shaking of the earth as it came towards her, but always, just as it was about to emerge from the black and reveal itself, she would wake in terror.

She lay there for a while, breathing steadily to calm the panic, tripping through a mental list of what she could remember.

My name is Liv Adamsen.

I work for the New Jersey Inquirer.

I was trying to discover what happened to Samuel.

An image of a monk flashed in her mind, standing on top of a dark mountain, forming the sign of a cross with his body even as he tipped forward and fell.

I came here to find out why my brother died.

In the shock of this salvaged memory Liv remembered where she was. She was in Turkey, close to the edge of Europe, in the ancient city of Ruin. And the sign Samuel had made – the Tau – was the sign of the Sacrament, the same shape that now haunted her dreams. Except it wasn’t a dream, it was real. In her blossoming consciousness she knew that she had seen the shape, somewhere in the darkness of the Citadel – she had seen the Sacrament. She focused on the memory, willing it to take sharper form, but it kept shifting, like something at the edge of her vision or a word she could not recall. All she could remember was a feeling of unbearable pain and of … confinement.

She glanced up at the heavy door, noticing the keyhole now and recalling the corridor beyond. She had glimpsed it as the doctors and nurses had come and gone over the past few days.

How many days? Four? Five, maybe.

She had also seen two chairs pushed up against the wall with men sitting on them. The first was a cop, the uniform a dark blue, the badges unfamiliar. The other had also worn a uniform: black shoes, black suit, black shirt, a thin strip of white at the collar. The thought of him, sitting just a few metres from her made the fear rise up again. She knew enough of the bloody history of Ruin to realize the danger she was in. If she had seen the Sacrament and they suspected it then they would try to silence her – like they had silenced her brother. It was how they had maintained their secret for so long. It was a cliché, but it was true – the dead kept their secrets.

And the priest standing vigil outside her door was not there to minister to her troubled soul or pray for her rapid recovery.

He was there to keep her contained.

He was there to ensure her silence.

Room 410

Four doors down the corridor Kathryn Mann lay in the starched prison of her own single bed, her thick black hair curled across the pillow like a darkening storm. She was shivering despite the hospital heat of her room. The doctors had said she was still in shock, a delayed and ongoing reaction to the forces of the explosion she had survived in the confines of the tunnel beneath the Citadel. She had also lost hearing in her right ear and the left one had been severely damaged. The doctors said it may improve, but they were always evasive when she asked how much.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this wretched and helpless. When the monk had appeared on top of the Citadel and made the sign of the Tau with his body she had believed the ancient prophecy was coming true:

The cross will fall

The cross will rise

To unlock the Sacrament

And bring forth a new age

And so it had happened. Liv had entered the Citadel, the Sancti had come out and now they were dying, one by one, the ancient enemy, the keepers of the Sacrament. Even with her damaged ears, Kathryn had heard the clamour of medical teams running in answer to the flat-lining wail of cardiac alarms all around her. After each alarm she would ask the nurse who had died, fearing it might be the girl. But each time it had been another monk, taken from this life to answer for themselves in the next, their deaths a portent of nothing but good. She had been kept apart from Liv so did not know for sure what had happened inside the Citadel, or even if she had discovered the Sacrament, though the steady deaths of the Sancti gave her some hope that she had.

But if this was a victory, it was a hollow one.

Whenever she closed her eyes she saw the body of Oscar de la Cruz – her father – lying broken and bloodied on the cold concrete floor of the airport warehouse. He had spent most of his long life hiding from the Citadel after escaping from within its walls and faking his own death in the trenches of the First World War. But they had still got him in the end. He had saved her life by smothering the grenade, thrown by a dark agent of the Citadel, meant for her and Gabriel.

It was Oscar who had first taught her about the Citadel, its sinister history and the secrets it contained. It was he who had taught her to read the prophetic symbols etched on the stone when she was still a girl, filling her with its meaning – a loving father telling dark stories to his blue-eyed little girl as later she had done with Gabriel, a mother passing the same stories to her son.

And when all this comes to pass – Oscar had always told her, when the ancient wrong has been righted, then I will show you the next step.

She had often wondered what private knowledge his words had hinted at – and now she would never know.

The Sancti had been unseated, but her own family had been destroyed in the process: first her husband; then her father – who next? Gabriel was in prison at the mercy of organizations she had learned not to trust; and she too had seen the priest, keeping steady watch just beyond her door, another agent of the same church that had already taken so much from her.

I will show you the next step – her father had told her. But now he was gone – killed just before his life’s work had finally been realized – and she could see no step that might give her hope, or help save her, or Gabriel or Liv, from the danger they were in.

5

Vatican City, Rome

Clementi swept from his office with as much speed as his large frame could manage.

‘When did they arrive?’ he asked, his black surplice flaring out behind him like ragged wings.

‘About five minutes ago,’ Schneider said, struggling to keep up with his master.

‘And where are they now?’

‘They were escorted down to the boardroom in the vault. I came to fetch you as soon as I heard they were here.’

Clementi hurried past the two Swiss guardsmen, hoping His Holiness would not choose this moment to emerge from his apartment and enquire about Clementi’s undue haste. As Cardinal Secretary of State, he had to work closely with the Pope – both literally and figuratively – discussing policy and getting his signature on important documents. The file in his hand did not contain any papal signatures or seals. His Holiness was not even aware of its contents or intent, something Clementi had worked hard to maintain.

He reached the end of the corridor and quickly barged through the door into the bare emergency stairwell beyond. ‘Do we know which of the Group is present?’

‘No,’ Schneider replied. ‘The guard wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to press him. I felt it better he remain vague on the details.’

Clementi nodded and descended into the gloom, brooding on what might await him at the end of this unscheduled summons.

The Group was a name he had given to the three as a means of turning them into a single entity, a mind trick designed to strike a balance of power in their arrangement: one of him, one of them. But it had not worked. They were far too powerful and distinctive to subsume into a homogenous whole and, try as he might, they remained as individual and formidable as when he had first approached them and laid out his scheme. The Group met as infrequently as possible, and always in secret, such was the delicate nature of their shared enterprise. With the calibre of people involved, arranging any meeting at all was a minor miracle of scheduling and they had not been due to meet again for another month; yet one or more of them was here right now, unannounced and unexpected – and there was only one viable explanation as to why.