The Key s-2

by Simon Toyne

  ‘Zaid Aziz,’ Gabriel said, putting his hand to his heart and bowing his head in deference. ‘My name is-’

  ‘John!’ the figure exclaimed with something close to wonder. His mouth twisted into a smile that became a snarl where his burns began. ‘John Mann.’ He stepped into the light, his right eye white and sightless, the left restlessly darting over Gabriel’s face.

  Gabriel took the scrutiny, feeling the steady pressure of Liv’s hand like a lifeline to sanity.

  ‘But I saw you die.’ Aziz’s voice was rusty from lack of use, and the ruined muscles around his mouth made his English sound strangely formal.

  ‘I did die,’ Gabriel said, playing along in order that he might utilize the bond of trust his father would have formed. ‘Now I’ve come back and I’m looking for the people who did this to us. I want to pay them back.’

  The man’s face curled into another smile-snarl. Then his expression became guarded and he stepped closer to the bars. ‘Then you must kill the dragon,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ Gabriel replied. ‘Tell me about the dragon.’

  Aziz flinched and cowered on the floor, his white eye staring up as if seeing again the last thing it had witnessed. ‘We heard it first, you remember? A roar in the desert, then the wings beating.’

  ‘What did it look like?’

  Aziz stamped his foot and glared at him. ‘You SAW it!’ he said, with the fury of a man who’d been telling the same story for twelve years to disbelieving ears. ‘Don’t you say it wasn’t there. The others are fools, but you were there. You saw it.’ The anger burned in his face then softened as confusion crept in. He reached up with the claw of his right hand and rubbed a raw knuckle against the molten flesh over his sightless eye. ‘No,’ he said, remembering more. ‘You were down in the dig when the dragon came. You were in the library cave.’

  ‘Tell me about the library — what did we find there?’

  ‘So much treasure we found. You should remember.’ He tapped his head. ‘I remember. I remember everything. Sometimes they try to steal my memories with kicks and fists. Sometimes they try to steal them with the electric. But I keep them still. And I remember.’

  ‘Tell me what you remember. Did the dragon kill everyone?’

  Aziz shook his head. ‘It was not the dragon that brought death. It was the white devils, born of its belly. They brought the fire and the fury. They laid us low and burnt everything. Tents. Vehicles. People. It was one of our own who betrayed us. I hid from the dragon and saw him showing the other devils where to look. He was the one who took them to the cave where you were. He was the one who killed you.’

  ‘Did you see who it was?’

  ‘He was a white devil, like them.’

  ‘A Westerner?’

  Aziz shook his head. ‘A ghost. They were all ghosts. Only ghosts can ride a dragon. The ghost went inside the cave, brought out boxes and fed them to the dragon, stealing the treasure we had found. Then the earth shook and the cave was gone. You never came out. A white devil saw me and struck me down.’ His hand rose again to the side of his head. ‘The fire woke me when the dragon was gone. The sand made the fire go away. The desert saved me, see — ’ He held out his arm. Grit was embedded beneath the skin. ‘I am part of the land now and the land is part of me. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

  ‘And after you put out the fire, what did you do then?’

  Aziz shook his head. ‘Everyone was dead. Everything was burning. I was afraid the fire might touch me again. I feared the dragon’s return, so I ran. I ran into the desert. But the dragon knows I live still. It wants to finish me — I can feel it.’ He stepped forward and gripped the bars. ‘Find the dragon, John Mann. Kill it for me so I can be free of this place. Only you can tame the dragon now — for you are a ghost too.’

  96

  Athanasius sat in the Abbot’s private washroom, his back to the door, his face illuminated by the glow from the phone. Outside he could hear Father Thomas engaging Malachi loudly in a conversation designed to draw his attention while Athanasius slipped away.

  He opened the message and pressed send. This time there was no error alert. Even so, he watched it until the screen went black then tapped it again to make sure. The screensaver was back in place, showing the photograph of the Mirror Prophecy. Ever since Gabriel had first shown it to him in the darkness of the ossuary he had been thinking about the possible meaning of the last few lines.

  The Key must follow the Starmap Home

  There to quench the fire of the dragon within the full phase of a moon

  Lest the Key shalt perish, the Earth shalt splinter and a blight shalt prosper, marking the end of all days

  A blight.

  It was what Brother Gardener had called the disease when it first appeared in the garden; and now something was stalking through the corridors of the mountain and striking people down. And the earthquake that had shaken the mountain: was that not the earth starting to splinter?

  It all suggested the prophecy was true, which meant the best way to stop the spread of the disease was to help the girl find her way home to Eden. And yet Brother Dragan believed only the restoration of the Sacrament to its place inside the chapel would cure the mountain. He was trying to bring her back here. Maybe he was the dragon mentioned in the prophecy and the fire of his zealous beliefs the thing that needed quenching. He needed to talk to him. Maybe if he could just show him the Mirror Prophecy he could convince him of its wisdom.

  Father Thomas was still arguing with Malachi when Athanasius burst from the washroom and virtually sprinted across the room to the Abbot’s desk.

  ‘We need to talk to Dragan,’ Athanasius said, pulling open the upper drawer where the old Abbot kept the key to the forbidden stairs. ‘I think I know how we can cure the Lamentation.’

  The Abbot was one of only two monks in the Citadel permitted to pass both in the upper, restricted section of the mountain reserved for the Sancti, and the lower parts where the general populace lived. The only other monk granted these privileges was the Prelate. Dragan had ventured up to the forbidden section through the Prelate’s staircase; Athanasius now intended to do the same using the Abbot’s. He grabbed the key and headed to the bedchamber.

  A large wooden bed filled most of the space, draped with thick fabrics to keep the occupant warm. The only other thing in the room was a vast tapestry with the sign of the Tau embroidered upon it in green thread. Athanasius pulled it aside to reveal a door hidden in the wall.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Malachi called after him. ‘You are not permitted to go through that door.’

  Athanasius turned on him, all the frustration and stress of the last few weeks spewing out in his answer. ‘What difference does it make? You’ve seen for yourself there’s nothing there. Whatever secret we have pinned our past to, it’s gone. We would be fools to fix our future to it as well. Brother Dragan is clinging to a dream, and it’s a dangerous one that might kill us all.’ He twisted the key in the lock and stepped through the door. ‘I must find him and persuade him that, for all our sakes, he needs to let go.’

  Malachi moved to try to stop him but Athanasius was too quick. He slammed the door behind him and locked it so no one could follow or try to stop him.

  97

  Washington was waiting for them when they emerged from the dingy hell of the asylum. They got into the cooled interior of the 4x4 — Gabriel in the front, Liv in the back — and drove away without saying a word.

  ‘That bad, huh?’ Washington said after a few kilometres of silence.

  Gabriel shook his head, still trying to process the bizarre story he had just heard. ‘I don’t know, he seemed pretty lucid to me. I think he was telling the truth, or something he believed to be true. He said a dragon destroyed the camp and a ghost killed my father. I’m sure these must be abstract or metaphorical terms for something else, but his burns are real enough, and his experience was clearly traumatic enough to splinter his mind.’

  Washington went quie
t. ‘Did he say “a ghost” killed your father, or “the Ghost”?’

  Gabriel stared out of the window at the bleached streets as he tried to recall.

  ‘It was “a ghost”,’ Liv answered.

  Washington frowned. ‘There’s an insurgent — not a major league threat, so he’s low down on the priority list — but he’s caused us some problems in the past. He’s known as Ash’abah — “the Ghost”.’

  ‘Is he still around?’

  ‘Oh yeah. He’s been around for ever. He’s a proper old-school fedai, fighting anyone who comes along for the freedom of his land. Apparently he was a pain in the ass for the former regime too, so you’ve got to give him some credit. A lot of the locals see him as a kind of Robin Hood figure, which has made it hard for us to gather any useful intelligence on him or find out where his base is. All the most successful insurgents tend to live out in the desert. Most reports of the Ghost’s activities come from south of here, in Babil Province.’

  ‘Around Al-Hillah.’

  ‘Exactly. The other thing worth mentioning is that he deals in ancient relics, selling them on the black market for premium prices. But he only ever sells to well-funded Christian organizations and occasionally to museums. Some people think this is because he is actually a Christian himself with roots stretching back to biblical times before Islam pushed the Christians out.’

  ‘Any idea where we might find him?’

  Washington shrugged. ‘Not really. They don’t call him “the Ghost” for nothing. The locals seem to view him with a mixture of fear and respect. Many of them think he actually is a ghost. He’s supposed to have this big scar on his neck and a strange way of talking, like stones being rubbed together. If he was the one who sold out your old man, I would advise you to proceed with caution. He’s pretty serious people out here — very well connected — and you’re just a stranger in a strange land with no clue about how you’re going to get to where you want to be. Fortunately for you — ’ he pulled over and pointed to a jeep parked on the forecourt of a battered-looking garage — ‘it turns out that you too have friends with influence. I booked it through one of the dummy corporations we use. It’s handy, being involved in covert work; they’re a lot less particular about expenses. It’s in your name, or at least the name in that phony passport you’re travelling with. Consider it a belated leaving present from Uncle Sam for all your hard work and early starts.’

  Gabriel turned to him with a look.

  ‘Don’t you even think about giving me some weak-assed civilian hug, Mann. I know you’ve been out for a while, but that’s still no excuse for going soft.’

  Liv leaned forward from the back seat and kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Washington smiled. ‘Now from you I’ll take it all day long.’ He turned to Gabriel, the sternness back in his face: ‘But you disappoint me, soldier, you really do.’

  Less than ten minutes later they were pulling out on to the dusty blacktop and heading south towards the edge of the city. They’d had to sign a whole bunch of disclaimers against explosives or small arms damage, but other than that it had been just like renting any car. Washington had sent them off like a nervous father, giving them his desert survival pack, his service automatic, a spare clip and a lecture on never travelling first thing in the morning when the roads had been freshly mined.

  Gabriel drove through the outskirts of Baghdad, glancing nervously out of his window at the first hints of dusk darkening the sky to the east. They drove in silence, both knowing they were heading into a hostile desert with only the sketchiest of ideas of what they were looking for. They were going to a place where ghosts and dragons roamed, and they both knew that the coming night was all the time they had left.

  When dawn came it would all be over — one way or another.

  98

  Arkadian sat in a busy Internet cafe on the great Eastern Boulevard. Following the email he’d received from inside the Citadel, he had bought two hours of terminal time on a cheap, anonymous computer and got to work. It was rapidly becoming clear that the Vatican Secret Archives were not called ‘secret’ for nothing. You couldn’t just call up a web page and browse the contents. You couldn’t gain any kind of access at all without first going through a lengthy and prohibitively complex process of presenting your credentials and requesting a specific text, which would then be considered by a panel of bishops who only met once a month, and then — maybe — you might be allowed an hour in a reading room to study the document before it disappeared back into the dry darkness of the archives. He’d had to borrow an academic research ID from a lecturer friend of his at the University of Ruin just to access the website at all. From this he had at least ascertained that there was a whole section on ancient maps in the archive, but there was no information on any of them. Athanasius’s message had given him exact transfer dates of the documents but without any detail there was no way of cross-referencing them. In frustration he typed Imago Astrum into the search box and hit return. He was immediately locked out of the site and further attempts to re-access it were blocked.

  Next he looked into the man who had requested the transfer. If he could find something on him that he could use as leverage, he might be able to get him to reveal what the relics he had requisitioned were or what their significance was.

  He had heard of Cardinal Clementi before and recognized him the moment he saw his picture in a news item; a fat, white-haired man in cardinal’s robes shaking hands with the Chancellor of Germany. He was described in the article as a force for reform in the Church, the eminence grise behind the recently elected Pope. Several more articles said pretty much the same thing. They painted a picture of a man on a mission to place the Church back at the centre of world events. Judging by the calibre of politician he was pictured with, it looked as though he was succeeding: there he was, all pink flesh and smiles, shaking hands with the Prime Minister of England, the President of France, the President of the United States. The political commentators all agreed that his easy acceptance at global power tables was down to one thing: money. After decades of mismanagement and scandal, Cardinal Clementi had apparently restored the finances of the Church almost overnight. And it was this, more than anything else, that set Arkadian’s detective instincts bristling.

  After almost twenty years wading through the darker waters of the human condition, Arkadian had learned that money was pretty much the root of all evil. Crimes of passion certainly happened, but not nearly as much as TV shows and crime fiction would have you believe. His experience had taught him that if you wanted to catch a criminal then, nine times out of ten, you had to follow the money: it was a cliche, but only because it was true.

  He checked the dates when the relic was requisitioned against the news stories. All the ones charting the improvement in the Church’s financial standing came after the transfer. Prior to this there was hardly a mention of the Cardinal in the news, and all economic reports relating to the Church were dire. Something significant had happened to change the game, and it had happened astonishingly quickly.

  Arkadian logged on to the secure Interpol site and keyed in a series of codes to gain access to the companies directory. It contained details of every registered business across Europe along with their tax returns and names of the directors. One of the main problems in running a lucrative but illegal business was how to spend the vast amounts of money being made without drawing attention to it. The most popular method of laundering money was to run it through the books of a legitimate business, which was why Interpol had set up this database.

  Arkadian typed ‘Clementi’ into the search box. Hundreds of matches came back.

  Because of his position and the Church’s extensive investment portfolio he was personally linked to companies all over the world. Arkadian set to work sifting through them, looking for anything that might generate the sort of money that could refloat an organization as huge as the Catholic Church. If the legends were true and the relic was
indeed a map showing the way to vast buried hoards of treasure, then the most obvious way to hide its discovery would be a gold-mining operation. Ancient treasure would be hard to turn into cash but pretending you’d struck gold and melting that treasure down into bullion would solve the problem instantly. A gold mine would also provide the perfect cover for the purchase of mineral rights as well as all the equipment to dig things out of the ground and smelt it. Only there was no gold mine.

  He started cross-checking each company’s tax returns for anything that looked profitable enough to explain the Church’s sudden change of fortunes. Again there was nothing. After over an hour of searching, the only company he had highlighted as a potential candidate was an oil exploration company.

  On paper it was wrong. It was running at a huge loss and was drilling in an area that had been tested before and come up dry. But, of all the companies listed, it was the only one that might legitimately dig around to see what it could find, and — most crucially — it was in the right place. The registered head office of Dragonfields SPA was in Vatican City, but they had office space in Baghdad and a compound operating under licence in the Syrian Desert. The licence gave co-ordinates marking out the broad patch of wilderness that was now theirs for the plundering.

  He clicked on Google Earth, input the co-ordinates and within a minute found himself staring down on a brown patch of nothingness. He zoomed out until he picked up a road then scrolled eastwards along it until he finally found a sprawling grid of buildings the same colour as the earth. The image settled and Arkadian almost punched the air when the name of the other place popped up on the map. It was Al-Hillah.

  99

  Liv and Gabriel found the site where John Mann had died just as the moon rose above the horizon and the wind picked up. It was about ten kilometres outside Al-Hillah, past the huge mounds of bricks that were all that remained of the ancient city of Babylon.