Sanctus (15 page)

The Lockheed Tri-Star yawed and rolled as it slipped through the storm clouds guarding the descent into Gaziantep Airport. Lightning flared in the dimmed interior and the engines moaned as they struggled to grab hold of the slippery air. Liv clutched her guidebook as if it was a bible and looked around at the forty-or-so other passengers. None of them were sleeping either. Some appeared to be praying.

God damn you, Sam
, she thought as the plane lurched again.
Eight years without a word and now you put me through this.

She looked out of her rain-lashed window in time to see another bolt of lightning actually strike the wing. The engines roared in pain. She hoped to God the two incidents weren’t connected and glanced yet again at the ashtray in her armrest, wondering what the penalty was for smoking on a commercial airliner. She was seriously considering it, whatever it was.

She peered once more into the turbulent night, hoping for some respite. As if by divine instruction, the clouds parted to reveal a dark, jagged landscape that twitched restlessly with the near constant flashes of lightning. In the distance she could make out the glow of a large town held in the natural cup of the mountain range like a shallow pool of gold. The rain running off the window made it shimmer like it wasn’t quite solid. In its centre was a spot of darkness with four straight lines of light radiating out from it. It was Ruin, and the darkness at its centre, the Citadel. From her lofty vantage point it looked like a black gemstone set in the centre of a bright cross. Liv fixed on it, remembering everything she’d read about the place and all the blood that had been shed for the sake of the secret it contained.

Then the Lockheed banked unsteadily away, continuing its descent into Gaziantep Airport, and the Citadel slipped back into the night.

Kathryn Mann stood watching the flood of people pour through into the arrivals hall. Following the revelations in the stolen police file she’d figured the girl would come to Ruin as soon as possible to take possession of her brother’s body. She’d felt the same way twelve years ago when her husband had been killed. She still remembered the urgent need to be with him, even though she knew he was dead.

Given the time of the phone interview recorded in the file, a travel agent’s website had indicated that this was the first connecting flight the girl could have caught.

Freed from the customs hall, passengers raced for taxis or waiting relatives, or to be first in the queue to pay for their parking. Two flights had arrived at once, making it difficult to see anyone clearly as they emerged. Kathryn had memorized the girl’s face from the printout but also had a name card as back up. She was about to hold it up when she spotted a man behind the opposite rail, holding up an identical sign. LIV ADAMSEN was printed on it in magic marker.

Kathryn felt her scalp prickle.

She slipped her hand into her coat pocket and curled it round the grip of her pistol, watching him out of the corner of her eye. He could be police. It was possible there had been further contact that she did not yet know about.

He was fairly tall and bulky. A sandy beard covered what looked like scarring on his cheeks. There was something unsettling about the way he surveyed the crowd, like a bear eyeing salmon in a stream. He had an air of authority, and it was this above all that made Kathryn fearful. They wouldn’t send a ranking officer just to pick up a witness, especially not this late at night. He wasn’t police.

A woman emerged from the customs hall and was moving with the crush of people. She had dirty blonde hair that fell forward over her face. She was looking down at a holdall, searching for something. She looked the right height, the right age.

Kathryn glanced across at the man with the sign. He’d seen her too. The girl fished a mobile phone out of her bag and looked up. It wasn’t her. Kathryn’s fingers relaxed and emerged from her pocket. The man continued to stare intently at the girl, watching her drift closer. When she was just a few feet from him he held up his sign, his face breaking into a quizzical grin. She just looked straight through him and carried on past.

The grin vanished and he returned to his surveillance. Kathryn did the same. By the time the last passenger drifted out into the concourse it was clear the girl had not been on this particular flight and Kathryn had learned two other things. Her instincts had been correct; the Sancti had indeed sent people to intercept the girl. And for whatever reason, they had no idea what she looked like.

It was not yet two in the morning when Liv cleared customs and emerged into the high-ceilinged and airy arrivals hall. Expressionist murals and hanging sculptures filled its cavernous space. She recognized some of the more dramatic moments of Ruin’s long and bloody past from her in-flight reading.

The energetic historical figures contrasted starkly with the real people shuffling about below them. There were a few sharp-suited business types, scrutinizing their laptops and BlackBerrys, but not many. Small herds of dead-eyed visitors trundled aimlessly across the marble floors while a couple of bored cops looked on, each with an automatic weapon slung over their shoulder.

Most of the tourist traffic heading to Ruin flew into the larger airport north of Gaziantep as it was closer to the ancient stronghold. Liv hadn’t considered any of this when booking her ticket; she’d just bought the first flight she thought she could catch. According to the guidebook there were still plenty of buses to the ancient city from the old airport, but at this time of the morning she figured she’d probably have to splash out on a cab just as soon as she’d got hold of some local cash.

As she scanned the place for a
bureau de change
she saw the tall, good-looking guy staring straight at her. She glanced past him at first, flustered by his direct gaze, then looked back. He was smiling at her now. She smiled back. Then he held up a card with her name written across it in magic marker.

‘Miss Adamsen?’ he asked, drifting closer.

She nodded, not quite sure what to make of him.

‘Arkadian sent me,’ he explained. His voice was deep. It sounded like it belonged to someone older. There was no trace of an accent in it.

‘American?’ Liv asked.

‘I studied there,’ he said, the smile remaining cool and steady. ‘But don’t be impressed. This is a tourist town, everyone speaks English here.’

She nodded as one mystery was solved, then frowned again as another presented itself.

‘How did you know which plane –?’

‘I didn’t,’ he cut in. ‘I’ve met the last few international flights on the off chance you’d be on one of them.’ He sounded pretty cheerful for a guy who’d been up half the night staking out an airport.

‘First one I could get . . .’ she said, feeling bad he’d been landed such a crappy detail.

‘It’s not a problem.’ He pointed at the crumpled holdall dangling from her hand. ‘That your luggage?’

‘Yeah; but don’t worry, I got it.’ She hoisted it on to her shoulder and began following him across the shiny marble floor.

You sure don’t get this kind of service in Jersey City,
Liv thought as she fixed her eyes on the broad back cutting a swathe through the bovine knots of tourists. His long black trench coat billowed out behind him as he breezed along, giving him an air of dashing chivalry very much in keeping with the murals.

She slipped into a slowly moving revolving door. In the confined space she found herself standing close enough to be enveloped by his scent. Clean, astringent, with hints of leather and citrus and something ancient and comforting – incense maybe. Most of the cops she knew generally considered Old Spice the height of sophistication. She glanced up. He was taller than she’d thought, and handsome in a traditional, tall, dark kind of way – his eyes blue and icy, though his hair wasn’t black, as she had first thought, but very dark brown. He was exactly the sort of man mothers warned their daughters about and fortune-tellers found lurking in crystal balls if you paid them enough.

The revolving door spun them gently into the night and the smell of rain on concrete rinsed through her travel-numbed senses. It was the freshest thing she’d encountered in more than twelve hours, but in the twisted world of the nicotine addict all it did was remind her how much she needed a cigarette. She stopped just outside and opened her bag. ‘Where’re you parked?’

The man turned and watched her fishing through the jumbled contents of her holdall. ‘Right there.’ He nodded towards the short-stay car park across the road.

Liv glanced out into the rain-whipped night. ‘I packed in kind of a hurry,’ she said. ‘Don’t . . . think . . . I’ve got a coat in here.’

The man held up his umbrella but Liv ignored it. She only had eyes for the crumpled pack of Luckies she’d finally managed to find. She tapped one out and plucked it from the packet with her mouth.

‘Bit windy,’ she said, hunching up her shoulders against the cold. ‘Don’t want you to bust your umbrella on my account. Tell you what . . . why don’t you go get the car? I’ll stay here and have one of these, then I won’t get drenched and you won’t have to sue me for passive smoking.’

The man hesitated, looked out at the sheets of rain gusting across the drop-off zone. ‘OK. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.’

She watched him stride away, the wind grabbing the tails of his coat. She cupped her hand around the end of her cigarette, lit up and pulled nicotine and night air deep into her lungs. She breathed out, feeling the tension of the flight begin to melt and float away with the smoke. She stuffed the pack back into her bag, dug around until she found her cell phone and powered it up.

A van swished by in the rain, passing a bus shelter across the way where a security guard appeared to be rousting three young people who’d tried to bed down for the night. They looked like students who’d been partying too hard, or just regular vagrants who spent their life being moved on from one place to the next.

Welcome to Ruin . . .

The phone buzzed in Liv’s hand as it caught a signal. There were three missed calls and two new messages. She was shifting her thumb across the keypad to dial her voicemail when a nondescript Renault saloon pulled up in front of her. The window slid down and the well-dressed cop smiled at her from behind the wheel. He leaned across and popped open the back door.

Liv took a final hungry drag on her cigarette, buried it in the sand-filled ashtray by the revolving door, then grabbed her bag and dashed across the wet sidewalk into the warm, dry comfort of the car.

‘What’s your name?’ she said, pulling the door closed and reaching for the safety belt.

He put the car in gear and fell in line behind the cars and taxis pressing slowly towards the exit signs. ‘Gabriel,’ he said.

‘Like the angel?’

She saw his eyes crinkle in the rear-view mirror. ‘Like the angel.’

She leaned against the door and felt the weariness settle on her like a blanket. She was about to close her eyes when she remembered her messages. She dialled her voicemail and lifted the cell to her ear.

‘Who are you calling?’ the driver asked.

‘Just getting my messages.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘Where we headed exactly?’

‘Ruin,’ he said, steering away from the traffic and down a service road. ‘Where else?’

Then, through the crackle of storm static, her first message started to play.

‘Hello . . . er . . . Miss Adamsen. This is Inspector Arkadian. I just wanted to say again how sorry . . . for your loss . . . e-mailed some photos to a Detective Berringer . . . Newark PD . . .’

Liv pressed the phone hard against her ear as the static rose, swamping parts of the message.

‘He’ll call you in the . . . formally ID the . . . He can deal with everything his end . . . don’t hesitate . . . call me if you have an . . .’

The message ended and her eyes jerked to the man sitting behind the wheel. If Arkadian had sent pictures for her to ID, it meant he didn’t think she was coming. So why would he send someone to collect her? The second message started to play.

‘Hi, my name is Detective Berringer with the Newark City Police Department . . .’

She didn’t wait to hear the rest.

He’d said his name was Gabriel. He’d said he was a cop.

No.

He’d never said he was a cop. He hadn’t shown her his badge when he’d introduced himself. He just said Arkadian sent him and she had assumed the rest.
Stupid
. She’d been suckered by her own exhaustion and by the fact that he was nice-looking and polite. So who the hell was he?

‘Everything OK?’

She looked up and met his eyes in the mirror.

‘Yeah,’ she said, suddenly aware that her face must look a picture of concern. ‘Just work. I hopped the flight here in a bit of a hurry. Didn’t have time to finish off a few things before I left. My boss is real pissed at me.’

His eyes flicked back to the road as a van hissed past in a cloud of spray. A squeal of tyres and the interior flooded with red. The van in front had braked hard. Too hard.

Gabriel followed suit. The Renault’s wheels squealed across the greasy surface of the road. There was a violent jolt as its front bumper smashed into the back of the van. Liv was thrown forward hard against her belt. There was a sharp crack and for the briefest of moments, before the airbags deployed, she thought she’d been shot.

Then everything went into slow motion.

Before the driver’s airbag even started to deflate Gabriel was beating it down, unclasping his seat belt and reaching for the door. He kicked it open as hard as he could, rolling into the rain before it had time to swing shut again. It happened so fast that Liv was still looking at the empty driver’s seat when her own door opened.

She turned, and came face to face with the muzzle of a gun.

‘Out!’ a voice shouted from somewhere behind it.

She looked past the black hole of the barrel at the young man holding it. He wasn’t much more than a boy. Acne scars showed through the fuzz of a sparse blonde beard and rain poured from the peak of a baseball cap pulled low over pale blue eyes.

‘Out!’ he shouted again.

He leaned forward and grabbed her with his free hand just as the glass behind her exploded, showering the interior with tiny, glittering shards. The boy jerked backwards, pirouetting as if someone had yanked hard on a rope attached to his left shoulder. Liv glanced back to see Gabriel framed in the jagged remains of the window.

‘Run!’ he shouted, then in a flash of movement he was swept from view.

Liv whipped her head back and stared through the open door at the pale-eyed boy lying where he had fallen, staring up at the stinging rain. A shower of glass jewels fell to the floor as she fumbled for the release button and her seat belt slid across her body. She splashed past the corpse towards the shadows on the far side of the street. She expected to hear the crack of a gunshot behind her at any moment and feel the thump of a bullet punching her in the back and spinning her to the ground.

She made it to the sidewalk and skidded across it to a verge of low bushes and grass. Given two years’ growth and kind winters the wiry shrubs might have offered some sort of cover, but in their current state they served as little more than obstacles. She zigzagged between them, slithering over ground so saturated it was like running on ice. She shortened her stride. Risked a glance behind her.

Visibility was practically zero through the thick curtain of rain. She could just make out the outline of the car and the van in front of it, but nothing else. Something whacked into her, throwing her violently backwards. She lay there for a few moments, blinking up into the rain as the coldness of the earth seeped into her body. For the second time in as many minutes she thought she’d been shot, then she became aware of a shape in front of her, stretched across the darkness like a huge spider web. She followed its faint outline until she saw something thin and sturdy jutting up from the ground. A post. She’d run smack into a chain-link fence.

She risked another glance in the direction of the two cars and saw her cell glowing on the ground near her head, thrown from her grasp when she’d fallen. She grabbed it, terrified that its meagre light might act as a beacon for whoever might be stalking her. She smothered the display with her hand, pressed hard on the off button. From her new position she could no longer see the car or the van. It made her feel better – but only for a second.

A shot rang out, followed by the sound of an engine starting up and the tortured shriek of tyres on tarmac. She heard the whine of bullets against metal from somewhere down the street and a window blowing out. The fleeing vehicle powered round a bend and was gone.

She looked back up towards the road. Saw nothing but the yellow haze of the streetlights. She imagined someone standing beyond the shallow ridge, gun in hand, scanning the darkness. Looking for her. But who was it? One of the guys who’d ambushed them, or Gabriel? All she wanted was to lie perfectly still, not run, not draw attention to herself. But when she had bolted from the car she’d headed straight to the first bit of cover she’d seen. She hadn’t even run at an angle. She was lying in the first place whoever was up there would look. She had to move.

She looked to her right, in the direction they’d been driving. A row of service buildings marked a junction. Storage units, most likely. Full of luggage or freight, and maybe even people working night shifts – just a few hundred yards away from her. In the other direction the glow of the airport terminal highlighted the under-side of the low cloud. She had no idea how far away it was, but it was a lot further than the service buildings. She listened out for someone approaching. Heard the hiss of the rain. Her own rapid breathing. Nothing else.

She took three quick breaths, scrambled to her feet, and ran. The logical thing was to head for the nearest units and try and raise the alarm, so she went the other way. Back to the warm, brightly lit concourse, and the crowds of tourists staring blankly up at the departure boards, and the two cops with the semi-automatic weapons slung from their shoulders.

She crouched low, keeping the fence to her right, hoping to God that whoever was up there was looking in the opposite direction. A sudden flash of lightning split the night, burning an image on Liv’s retina of everything that lay in her path: the gate in the chain link fence about sixty feet in front of her, row upon row of parked cars beyond it. If she could just make it amongst the serried ranks of bullet-stopping family saloons and weekend runabouts, she might be safe.

Thunder rumbled overhead. The gate was now just forty feet away and the verge to her left started to flatten out as it dropped level with the entrance road. She was losing what little cover she had on that side, but there was nothing she could do about it.

The black-and-yellow stripes of an automatic barrier stretched across the opening in the fence. She forced herself to focus on it rather than on whoever was behind her.

Twelve feet now.

Ten.

Five.

Her right foot connected with the firm asphalt of the road and she launched herself towards the box containing the barrier’s mechanism, ducked behind it, fell gratefully back against the cold, wet metal and for the briefest of moments felt safe.

Then the rain stopped.

It was so abrupt it seemed almost unnatural. One minute she was enveloped in an almost tropical deluge, the next, the curtain lifted. She heard the gurgle of the gutters along the main road and the gentle sucking of the saturated earth. In the sudden silence her every breath sounded like the rasp of a chainsaw. She strained her ears for other sounds. In her fevered imagination the silence spoke of an enemy nearby, listening for her slightest movement, a gun pointing at the cold earth until a warmer target could be found.

The terminal building was still too far away, but she could pick out every detail of it now – which meant whoever was looking for her could too. She felt an overwhelming urge to sprint back to the cover of the parked cars, but fought it back.

Fifteen feet of tarmac was all that separated her from them. And now she noticed that the section where she crouched was lit more brightly than the rest. Elsewhere she could see comforting corridors of shadow where the pools of light didn’t quite overlap. She’d be much harder to spot if she ran along one of those. The nearest was about twenty feet away. Plus fifteen more to the cars. Or she could chance it and run from where she was.

She closed her eyes and rested her head against the steel upright. Then she launched herself across the narrow stretch of road, keeping her head level with the black-and-yellow barrier.

Gabriel heard her distant footfalls on the wet tarmac and watched her bolt across the entrance road, change direction as she came to a stretch of shadow, then disappear into the ocean of metal.

He turned back and scanned the scene of the ambush, checking to see if they were compromised. A few security cameras were sited at the edge of the car park, but all of them were pointing inwards at the vehicles. The same story with the service buildings. No cameras trained on the road. It was safe to assume that none of what had happened in the last few minutes had been recorded.

He picked up the brass shell casings from the seven rounds he’d fired at the retreating vehicle. Most of them had been on target, but none had stopped the driver from escaping. He dropped the casings into his pocket with a muffled clink and turned his attention to the body.