by Simon Toyne
“Good-bye, Miss Eldridge,” Solomon whispered, then he turned and continued walking.
When he reached the city limits, he stopped and stared back at the town. It seemed peaceful at this distance, the spire rising high above everything else. He pulled the folded Bible page from his pocket and reread the handwritten contract. Had Jack Cassidy really done a deal with a demon in exchange for the church and the town he was looking at, or did he just think he had, this contract no more than the brain-fevered imaginings of a man driven mad by heat and thirst and religion?
There was a way to test it, his teeming mind had provided it back in the church, and he reached into his pocket now for the book of matches he had taken from beside the candles. He took out a match, struck a flame, and held it to the paper’s edge. The flame curled around it then caught.
Solomon gasped as hot pain bloomed in his arm. He dropped the burning page to the ground and pulled off his jacket and shirt. Someone at the hospital had fixed a new dressing to his arm and he ripped this off too and stared at the skin beneath. A new mark was beginning to form and he bit down hard against the pain of its coming. It was another I, lining up exactly with the first and as it formed, a new word rose in his mind.
Magellan.
He said it aloud, repeating it over and over until the burning sensation began to ease. He looked back down at the ground where the last piece of the burning page curled into ash. The contract had been real. It had been real and he had just broken it. And the James Coronado he had come here to save had not been Holly’s husband after all, or even her unborn son, it had been the original James Coronado—Jack Cassidy.
He stared at the mark on his arm, a II now where the I had been. A new name in his mind too.
Magellan.
Solomon turned the word over and facts sparkled around it like raindrops.
Ferdinand Magellan. Sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer. Often cited as the first person to circumnavigate the globe. Except he died before he completed the journey.
Was this to be Solomon’s fate too, to circle the earth in search of something only to die before he achieved it? His mind continued to shimmer with information.
Magellan—the name of an unmanned spacecraft that had mapped the surface of Venus.
Magellan Straits—notoriously dangerous sea route between South America and Tierra del Fuego.
Perhaps Magellan was a place he had to travel to, or someone else he had to save—or maybe it was nothing at all.
Solomon buttoned his shirt and put the jacket back on, catching his name again, stitched in gold thread into the label:
Ce costume a été fait au trésor pour M. Solomon Creed—This suit was made to treasure for Mr. Solomon Creed—Fabriqué 13, Rue Obscure, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn.
Maybe France was where he should go, to find the rest of his suit and the man who had measured him for it, someone who might remember him.
He slipped his arms into the sleeves and turned the collar up to protect his neck from the strengthening sun, then turned and started walking away from Redemption and toward—who knew what? He didn’t expect to find easy answers, but he hoped the journey would be interesting and for now he savored this brief moment of peace, with the sun on his back and the wind on his face.
Just the road.
And him walking along it.
EPILOGUE
THE COMPUTER PINGED GENTLY, CUTTING THROUGH THE HUM OF AIR-conditioning and the gentle tap of fingers on keyboards.
Harris looked up, his heart pattering a little faster inside the long-sleeved shirt he wore to hide the tattoos on his arms despite the heat outside. In the quiet world of forensic biology, the sound he had just heard was the equivalent of the stadium roar that followed a touchdown or a home run.
They had a match.
He opened the documents the search engine had returned. Studied them. Frowned.
He glanced over at his boss sitting in the corner of the room, her large glasses reflecting the screen she was glaring at, making her eyes appear as if they had turned into minimonitors. He was only a month into his placement and the main thing he had learned so far was that Dr. Gillian (hard G) did not like being disturbed. She liked her people to think for themselves. She liked people who took responsibility for their shit, and she did not like people who wasted her time getting her to check their homework and rubber-stamp things that should be beneath her radar and were definitely below her pay grade.
“Why have a bunch of dogs and bark myself?” she said—a lot.
Dr. Gillian was old school and borderline abusive, but Harris also knew that the only reason this position had come up at all was because of those things, and entry-level criminalist positions did not come up that often.
He glanced back at his screen and checked everything again, comparing the smudgy columns of PCR data from one lab sheet against those of another. It was a match, no question, an exact, no-room-for-error, bang-on match.
Except it couldn’t be.
He checked the dates on the two samples. The first was five years old, the second had been submitted two days ago. That in itself wasn’t surprising. Sometimes matches came from samples that had been collected decades apart. Since the lab had moved to the new building on Miracle Mile, it had started processing more cold cases, digging back through evidence gathered way before the technology existed to pin crimes to the people who had done them. Their systems were linked to a wide network of other databases—CODIS, the FBI’s DNA database, Interpol’s DNA Gateway, and several international foundations who kept and studied DNA samples for academic purposes. The five-year-old sample had come from one of these, and this was what told him something was wrong.
He checked the PDF files that had come with the sample, trying to spot what might have gone wrong. They had a match, but it couldn’t be. There was no way. He knew that what he was looking at must be wrong but he couldn’t figure out how. It had to be a mistake, and, most important, it was not his mistake, it was somebody else’s.
“Dr. Gillian . . .” He cleared his throat to try to make it sound less whiny. “Would you mind taking a look at this, please?”
The other two criminalists in the room looked up from their terminals, exchanged a glance, then got right back to their work again.
Dr. Gillian’s bright reflected eyes fixed on him for what seemed like an age. “You want me to get out of my chair and come to you?”
“Well, er . . . I guess I could forward you the files, but I have them open here and lined up, so it’ll be quicker if . . .”
She stood abruptly, sending her chair wheeling away behind her to a mark on the wall showing where chair and wall had met many times before.
“This better be worth the trip, Mr. Harris,” she said, striding across the floor to his desk. “You better have a positive ID for Jack the Ripper or something, because anything less and I’m going to be most displeased.”
She came to a halt behind his chair and he pictured her windshield glasses reflecting his screens now.
He studied his monitors, seeing it all again and suddenly less certain now of what he had and what it might mean. Perhaps it was his mistake after all and he was about to be made to look like a dick in front of the whole office.
The silence stretched.
A hand reached down, took control of the mouse, and started scrolling through the documents, checking the same things Harris had checked. “Well, that can’t be right.” Harris breathed out. “You sure these files haven’t got mixed up?”
“I checked them both; they’re genuine.”
“They can’t be.” She clicked on the lab submission form for the older sample and Harris reread it, knowing Dr. Gillian was doing the same. It was different from the standardized police forensics forms with lots of extra narrative detail and photographs showing the site the sample had been taken from. It had been filled in by a Dr. Brendan Furst, lead archeologist on the excavation of a burial site in Turkey known locally as Melek Mezar. They had found some remain
s including hair from which the DNA sample had been extracted. Carbon 14 tests had dated the remains as belonging to a man who had lived around four thousand years earlier. The other sample suggested the same man had been walking around a town in Arizona two days earlier—a man called Solomon Creed.
Dr. Gillian clicked on this now, then pointed at the screen. “There’s your answer. Look at where this came from and who filed it.”
Harris did as he was told. It had been filed by a Garth Morgan, police chief of the town of Redemption. The town name rang a bell. “Isn’t that the guy who was in bed with the cartels?”
“Yep. Dirty cop,” Gillian said, as if she was cursing. “Wound up dead and did us all a favor. What’s the case number?”
Harris hovered the mouse arrow over the number and a pop-up window appeared with a few headlines written inside. “It’s related to that plane crash,” he said.
“Then it’s a mistake,” Gillian said. “I’m certainly not going to bother anyone with a match to a four-thousand-year-old corpse on a sample submitted by a dirty cop. Junk it. Good catch.”
She moved away and Harris stared back at the screen, relieved that he hadn’t been reamed out in front of his colleagues for asking a dumb question. He closed all the files, unlinked the match alert, then opened a new search window and typed “Melek Mezar” into it.
The top hit was a Wikipedia entry showing a photograph of a town that could have been lifted straight from the Bible. The buildings seemed to rise from the ground in square blocks, with small black windows cut into them, everything the same color, like pale dust. Another photograph showed what appeared to be a cave, the flash of the camera throwing light into the darkness and picking out the outlines of bones half-buried in the ground.
The article mentioned Dr. Furst, the archeologist who had submitted the DNA sample taken from the body pictured in the photograph. He had spent years searching for the lost tomb, believed to be the final resting place of some powerful, Messianic prophet who had lived a full two thousand years before Christ. Harris skim-read the section detailing the legend of the prophet, a shining man who had walked out of a fire and possessed deep and sacred powers, including the power to heal and the gift of prophesy. Many at the time thought he was a god, but Dr. Furst had discovered that he wasn’t. The DNA proved that he was only a man, despite the name the prophet had given the town in death. Melek Mezar is Turkish for “Tomb of the Angel.” Harris smiled when he read that and filed it away in his mind to tell his girlfriend later. She believed in all that shit—angels, demons, vampires. She’d love it if he told her he’d processed some angel DNA in the lab. He closed the Wikipedia page and went back to work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IT’S BECOME A BIT OF A TRADITION OF MINE TO COMPARE THE WRITING AND publication of each book to throwing a large party. This particular bash has been a particularly long time in the planning and there are, therefore, an army of people behind the scenes who have helped plan the playlist and the menu and all those other things that make a party go with a swing and become something that, hopefully, people will come to, enjoy, and leave feeling happy or at least satisfied—and maybe even a little tipsy.
As often seems to be the way with my books this one started with a lunch at The Cumberland Arms, around the corner from my agent’s office, where the holy trinity of Alice Saunders, Mark Lucas, and Peta Nightingale listened to my vague outlining of various potential stories, including one about a pale man who appears shoeless on a desert road at which they unanimously said “That sounds great. Write that one.” Alice deserves special mention here. She plucked my first book from the slush pile five years ago and has had to suffer my infuriatingly imprecise working process and constant blind optimism ever since. This book was particularly hard to write, for various reasons, and she never lost her patience or temper—at least not to my face—and managed to hold it together when I finally delivered a manuscript that was sixty thousand words too long, three months late, and needed another four months work—and a 60 percent rewrite—to turn it into the thing you currently hold in your hands. I am very lucky to have her, though I’m pretty sure she would be much better off without me.
Equally patient and supportive, as usual, have been everyone at HarperCollins—both in the U.K. and the U.S. There are whole teams of very bright, very clever, and very hardworking people in both camps who design the covers, write the copy, supervise the edits, and make sure each book is as good as it can possibly be. These people do not earn vast fortunes and could undoubtedly earn far more doing almost anything else. But they work in publishing because they love books and love their jobs and we are all the richer because of it. Heading up these teams are the twin capos of Julia Wisdom in the U.K. and David Highfill in the U.S., who have edited more books than I will ever write and bring all of that experience to the table each time we work together. I say “work,” but in truth it often feels more like fun, or it does to me at least.
I also owe a huge debt to everyone at ILA—my always enthusiastic and very hardworking international rights agents. It is they who invite the rest of the world to each new party, and they also know how to throw one of their own, as they did recently on the event of their 50th anniversary—a real party, not a figurative one.
Other names I want to throw into my huge “Thank You” hat—the people who have variously helped, inspired, or supported me in different ways through the course of writing this (and all the other books)—are Kate Stephenson, Lucy Dauman, Adam Humphrey, Kate Elton, Sarah Benton, Jaime Frost, Hannah Gamon, Emad Akhtar, Tanya Brennand-Roper, Tavia Kowalchuk, Kaitlyn Kennedy, Kaitlin Harri, Danielle Emrich, Chloe Moffett, Daniel Palmer, Andrea St. Amand, Mark Rubinstein, Mark Billingham, Peter James, Paul Christopher, Brad Meltzer, Steve Berry, Greg Iles, Andrew Pyper, M.J. Rose, Lee Child, Liz Berry, Kimberley Howe and all at ITW, Kate at Wet Dark and Wild, Jackie at Raven Crime Reads, Miles at Milo’s Rambles, Matt at Reader Dad, Robin at Parmenion Books, Cristina-Maria Mitrea, Tracy Fenton at THE Book Club, Cheryl Dalton of (Secret World) Book Club, Mike Stotter, Barry Forshaw, Chris Simmons, Jake Kerridge, Shannon and John Raab at Suspense Magazine, Pam Stack at Authors on the Air, and all the other reviewers, authors, and bloggers who have said lovely things about my previous books and helped bring them to a wider audience.
To all you readers and Amazon reviewers and Tweeters and Facebook posters I thank you too. Writing a novel is a lonely business and the daily lift of new followers or likes or kind messages or nice reviews are like chinks of sunlight in the steady gloom. If you ever wonder whether you should contact an author, any author, to tell them you enjoyed their book the answer is always “Yes.” We all write for you, and without the readers, the bridge of story falls down. So please say “hi”—I always say “hi” back.
A special thank you must go to Staff Sergeant Taron Maddux of the Bisbee PD who kindly walked me through local Arizona town law—though I eventually built my own town and wrote my own rule book. In the light of that it must also be very clearly said that none of the police officers featured in this book are based on him or his colleagues and that the town of Redemption bears only a passing resemblance to Bisbee and is, in truth, based largely on other Arizona places and my own imagination. Also I want to thank Tania and Lou and all the staff at Cafe Marmalade in Brighton—where I work most days—for not seeming to mind that I can make a single cup of coffee last for three hours.
Closer to home I owe a massive thanks to my sister Becky Toyne, who did a first pass edit and had to constantly jiggle her schedule and ultimately work unsociable hours due to my chronic lateness (note to reader: she’s a proper professional book editor, not just a relative with a red pen). Also a nod to my three children, Roxy, Stan, and Betsy, who are just hilarious and brilliant and remind me that the stuff going on in my head is actually less important than the stuff going on around me. And finally, and always most importantly, to my wife Kathryn for making sure the children didn’t die and the house didn’t burn down while I disappeared i
nto my head for long months. Only the partners of other authors know what a weird thing it is to live with someone who conjures fables for a living: I would often gladly get away from myself if I could, and the fact that she actually can but chooses not to is nothing short of miraculous, and I am, and forever shall be, lovingly grateful.
Simon Toyne
Brighton
8th April, 2015
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SIMON TOYNE is the bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, and The Tower. A writer, director, and producer in British television for twenty years, he worked on several award-winning shows, one of which won a BAFTA. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages and published in more than fifty countries. He lives with his wife and family in England and the south of France, where he is at work on his second Solomon Creed novel.
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ALSO BY SIMON TOYNE
The Tower
The Key
Sanctus
CREDITS
Cover design by Amanda Kain
Cover photographs: © by James Orndorf / Arcangel Images (desert road); © Reilika Landen / Arcangel Images (man)
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
