Sanctus (23 page)

Cornelius stood by the van watching Kutlar move painfully down the street towards him. If he got much worse they might have to reconsider his usefulness. Johann sat in the driver’s seat talking to the informant on the phone. He wrote down an address then hung up.

‘The girl’s here,’ he said.

Cornelius took the slip of paper and looked back down the street. Kutlar was the only one among them who had seen her, but he had his own image in his mind, and had done ever since the Abbot had outlined their mission. He stroked the puckered skin on his cheek where his beard wouldn’t grow, remembering a street on the outskirts of Kabul and the plaintive figure in the blue burkha holding out the bundle of rags that could have been a child, slowing their vehicle just long enough for the rocket propelled grenade to lock on to it.

It was good to picture your enemy.

It helped you focus.

So to him the girl was the woman who had helped wipe out his whole platoon, the destroyer of the only family he had ever known – until the Church embraced him. He imagined her threatening this new family and it gave him strength and purpose. This time he would stop her.

Johann slipped from behind the wheel and went to the rear of the van as Kutlar finally limped to a standstill beside them.

‘Get in,’ Cornelius said.

Kutlar did as he was told, like a dog blindly obeying the master who beat him.

Johann re-appeared in his red windcheater and walked past without a word, heading in the direction Kutlar had just come from.

Cornelius climbed into the driver’s seat and handed the address to Kutlar. ‘Take us there,’ he said.

Kutlar felt the vibrations tear through his ruined leg as the van bumped over cheap municipal tarmac poured straight on to the ancient cobbles. He considered the pills in his pocket, but knew he couldn’t afford to take one. They killed the pain sure enough, but they also made him feel like everything was fine, and he couldn’t afford to feel that way.

Not if he wanted to live.

Johann didn’t look up as the van drove past. He continued round the corner and down towards Zilli’s place. As he drew closer he took out his mobile phone with his right hand and dropped his left into the windcheater and closed it around the stock of his Glock.

Zilli was standing on a chair behind the counter, slotting a red plastic box on to a high shelf between an empty disk spindle and an old Sega Megadrive.

‘D’you unlock these things?’ Johann held up his phone.

Zilli turned and squinted at it.

‘Sure.’ He stepped down. ‘What you got there – BlackBerry?’

Johann nodded.

‘Nice piece.’ He tapped the keyboard of a PC that despite its ancient appearance could hack into any phone known to man.

He pressed the menu button and realized too late that it was already unlocked.

The roasted aromas of the coffee maker in the corner of the office did little to mask the odour of the morgue. Arkadian sat behind Reis’s hopelessly cluttered desk as a large PDF file downloaded on the computer screen. Outside, the clink and buzz of the path labs signalled a return to something approaching normality.

The file was being sent from the records department of US Homeland Security in response to the fingerprint they had lifted from the plastic sheet. They’d got a positive hit in less than a minute. Arkadian couldn’t quite believe it. Sure, all they had to do in any TV cop drama was run some prints through the computer and within seconds they had a name, address and recent photo of the perp looking like a whack-job; it was a standing joke in any precinct. But in the real world fingerprints were hardly ever used to identify suspects; they were part of the detailed chain of evidence that bound a suspect to a crime
after
they had been caught by other, more time-consuming means. Most prints were simply not on record for comparison.

The file finished downloading and Arkadian clicked on the icon. As the first page filled the screen he realized why they’d caught a match so quickly. It was a military service file. Men and women in the armed forces were routinely fingerprinted. It helped identify them in the event of their death in the line of duty. Until recently, most nations had been very protective indeed of their ex-service personnel files – but that was before 9/11. Now it seemed they were available to any friendly nation who came asking.

Arkadian scrolled past the cover page and started to read.

The file detailed the complete military service history of Sergeant Gabriel de la Cruz Mann (retired), formerly of the 5th US Special Forces Group. A photograph showed a uniformed man with a severe white-walled buzz cut and penetrating pale blue eyes. Arkadian checked it against a printout from the CCTV footage. The hair had grown out, but it was the same man.

Arkadian scrolled through it all – background, psych reports, security checks, everything. He was thirty-two, American father, half-Brazilian, half-Turkish mother. Father an archaeologist, mother worked for and later ran Ortus, an international aid charity – so early years spent travelling the world.

Education a patchwork of interrupted study at a series of international schools then a Harvard scholarship majoring in modern languages and economics. Spoke five languages fluently including English, Turkish and Portuguese, and could get by in Pashto and Dari following his tours of duty in Afghanistan.

Something in the file caught Arkadian’s eye and he stopped skimming and started reading. At the beginning of his final year at Harvard, something happened that clearly had a seismic effect on young Gabriel. Whilst cataloguing a major new find of ancient texts unearthed in the Iraqi desert near a place called Al-Hillah, Dr John Mann had been killed, along with several colleagues. It caused a major international stir. Saddam Hussein, still dictator in residence at the time, blamed Kurdish rebels. The worldwide community suspected Saddam might have done it and pinned the blame on the Kurds while he looted the priceless treasures for himself. None of the texts were ever seen again.

It was not clear from the file who Gabriel blamed for his father’s death, but the fact that he dropped out of college and enlisted in the US Army in advance of the impending war in Iraq suggested he may have harboured certain suspicions. He enlisted as a private – though his academic record would have guaranteed him a commission – and passed out of basic training with such high grades he was immediately accepted for Special Airborne training.

He spent nine months at Fort Campbell on the Kentucky– Tennessee border, learning to fly planes, jump out of them and kill people in an assortment of ways and with a variety of weapons. The file became more opaque as the specifics of his duties became more classified, but he served as a platoon sergeant in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom, and was decorated twice, once for courage under fire and once for his part in a covert hostage rescue operation; he and his platoon had rescued a group of kidnapped aid workers from a Taliban stronghold. He’d left the service four years ago. It didn’t say why.

There was an additional page tagged to the end of the file detailing his known movements since his discharge. He worked as a security advisor for Ortus, and had travelled extensively to South America, Europe and Africa.

Arkadian Googled Ortus. Its website homepage displayed an eerily familiar image: the stone monument of a bearded man, arms outstretched – the statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janiero. Ortus claimed to be the oldest charitable organization on earth, formed in the eleventh century by the dissolution of an ancient order of monks – the Brotherhood of the Mala – whose lineage stretched back into prehistory. They had been forced to renounce their spiritual vows after the church denounced them as heretical. Many had been burned at the stake for their belief that the world was a goddess and the Sun was a god and all life came from their union. Others escaped, regrouped and re-emerged as a secular organization dedicated to continuing the works they had previously undertaken as holy men.

He scrolled down to their ongoing projects, the ones Gabriel de la Cruz Mann would have been involved with. There was a major project in Brazil protecting large tracts of rainforest from illegal loggers and gold prospectors, another in the Sudan replanting fields laid waste by the civil war, and another in Iraq restoring natural marshlands drained by systematic industrial land grabs and years of war.

Arkadian could only imagine what being a security advisor in these places entailed. Protecting unarmed volunteers from guerrillas and bandits while they tried to bring food and water to the world’s poorest regions; trying to bring law to places where there was none. Whoever this guy was, he was clearly a saint – which made his presence in the morgue that morning all the more baffling.

He clicked back to the home page and selected the ‘Contact Us’ link. The first address on the list was in Rio de Janeiro. That explained the statue. There were others in New York, Rome, Jakarta and one in Ruin – Exegesis Street in the Garden District, just east of the police building.

He wrote it on the back of the grainy printout of Gabriel’s face from the CCTV footage, folded it in half and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

Alone in the white-tiled changing room, Liv blotted her reddened skin with the thin, scratchy towel. She could hear someone doing laps in the pool beyond the shower block.

The small pile of white and blue gym clothes the Sub-Inspector had given her positively sparkled next to her old blouse and jeans. She slipped into the tracksuit bottoms and pulled the white T-shirt over her head. ‘POLIS’ was printed on the front and back in large black letters. She went through her pockets, transferred the few dollars and change and wiped the mud-caked phone clean. She jogged the on button and the screen flashed on. It shivered gently in her hand; a new text message. She didn’t recognize the number.

She opened it and felt the chill return.

DO NOT TRUST THE POLICE

The capitals couldn’t have been more emphatic.

CALL ME AND I’LL EXPLAIN

She thought of the warning she had received last night, before the crash and the gunfire.

Liv stood stock still. She could hear the trickle of shower water, the splash of whoever was in the pool and the hum of air conditioning overhead, but nothing else. No approaching footsteps. No muffled conversations in the corridor. But she suddenly had the feeling that someone was in the room with her, standing behind the wall that divided the changing area from the main door, listening to her movements.

She slipped the phone in her pocket and pulled on a pair of white gym socks.

I think it’s best that you stay under our protection . . .

Arkadian had said that before packing her off with her chaperone.

Police protection. Her brother hadn’t benefited too well from it, had he?

She laced her grubby trainers over the pristine socks. The dark blue sweat-top swamped her slender frame. It too had POLICE emblazoned across it. She glanced once more towards the door then scooped up her ink-stained newspaper and headed in the other direction, past the still-dripping showers towards the pool.

The air in the pool enclosure was warm and damp and scraped the back of Liv’s throat with chlorine fingers as she made her way around its edge towards the fire exit. A slash of morning sunlight had somehow found its way through the crush of surrounding buildings and sparkled on the surface of the pale blue water.

Liv pushed down on the horizontal locking bar. A high-pitched siren echoed through the building. She pushed it closed behind her, killing the alarm as suddenly as it had started. The swimmer didn’t look up, just carried on doing steady lengths, sending glittering reflections across the white painted walls.

Sulley was on the phone to a news producer. The warning only sounded for a few seconds but it snapped him to attention.

‘Listen,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll have to call you back.’

He approached the entrance to the ladies’ locker room, the soles of his shoes squeaking against the shiny vinyl floor.
Women. Jesus.
She’d been in there for a lifetime. He listened for the sound of the shower. Heard nothing. Knocked gently.

‘Miss Adamsen?’ He pushed the door open far enough to poke his head through.

No reply. There was a partition just inside, so he couldn’t see a thing.

‘Miss Adamsen?’ A little louder this time. ‘You OK in there?’ Still nothing.

He peered around the corner. Apart from a small pile of dirty clothes and a wet towel, the place was empty. Sulley felt a hot flush rising under his shirt, turning his pale flesh pink.
‘Miss Adamsen?’

He looked left. All four toilet cubicle doors were wide open.

He whipped back round to the showers.

Empty.

Moving on through, he found himself in the brightly lit chemical fug of the pool area. He squinted at the swimmer, hoping it was her; saw the short black hair and police issue swimsuit he hadn’t given her, knew it was not. He spotted the fire exit and felt his throat go dry. He jogged towards it. The moment he pushed it open and the alarm sounded he realized what had happened.

Outside, the street was teeming in both directions; people in suits, tourists in casual leisurewear. He searched amongst them for a dark blue, police-issue sweat-top. He saw nothing. The door swung shut behind him and the alarm stopped shrieking. His phone started vibrating in his hand and he glanced down at it, anxious in case it was Arkadian calling for an update. The number was withheld.

‘Hello?’

A white transit pulled up beside him.

‘Hello,’ the driver replied.

Liv threaded her way through the crowds. She had no idea where she was heading but knew she had to stay out of sight and put as much distance between herself and the district building as possible while she got her head together. She pulled the hood of her new sweat-top over her wet hair and fell in step with a group of women, staying close enough for it to look like she was with them. At this time of day most people on the streets were tourists. Her clothes would have stood out a mile bobbing along in a river of suits and she hadn’t seen many blonde locals.

Street sellers energetically offered their wares to the passing trade, mostly ethnic copper trinkets and rolled-up rugs, and ahead of her a newsstand rose up in the middle of the pavement, parting the flow of people like an island in a stream. Liv glanced at the front pages as she drifted past; every one carried a picture of her brother. She felt the emotion rise up inside her again, but not grief now – more anger. There were too many question marks surrounding his death to waste any more time trying to solve word puzzles. She felt partly responsible for setting her brother on his tragic course, but something else had driven him to take his own life, and she owed it to him to find out what.

She looked up and saw the Citadel soaring above the bobbing heads of the tourists, everyone moving slowly towards it, pulled by its gravity like leaves towards a whirlpool. She felt drawn too, for entirely different reasons, but for now it would have to wait. It cost twenty lira to enter the old town, she’d read it in the guidebook, and at the moment all she had was a few dollars to her name.

She took her cell phone from her pocket, opened her last text message and punched call-back.

The van eased its way down the street. Sulley sat by the door, next to the guy who was sweating like it was mid-summer. The big guy with the patchy beard drove. All three watched the street in silence.

Sulley hadn’t wanted to get in with them. Selling information was one thing, being directly involved in what was obviously going to be a kidnapping was way off the scale. He couldn’t be doing this. It was criminal, for God’s sake. It was jeopardizing everything. But the big man with the melted face had been insistent. And because Sulley didn’t want to stand outside the district building having a lengthy conversation, he’d got in.

He looked out of the window scanning the crowds for a flash of the girl’s blonde hair or the white lettering on the dark blue sweat-top, hoping he wouldn’t see either. Back at the station he’d catch heat for losing her, but that kind of heat he could handle. It would be a whole lot better than finding her with these guys.

‘Got her!’ The sweaty guy in the middle of the bench seat angled the screen of the finder towards the driver. He studied it for a beat then looked ahead to where the road curved left and a wide paved area stretched beyond a barrier of concrete bollards; a no-car zone where the antiquated buildings had been hollowed out and turned into chain stores. It was packed with people. ‘She’s in there,’ he said.

Sulley scanned the area as the van drew nearer. Saw a group of tourists walking away from them. One was wearing a dark blue sweat-top. The crowd parted slightly just before they disappeared behind a newsstand and he glimpsed POLICE printed on the back of it. The driver saw it too. ‘We’ll drive round to the other end, where it rejoins the road.’ He stopped by the kerb. ‘Go get her.’

Sulley felt a cold panic rise up inside him.

‘You lost her in the first place,’ the driver said. ‘She’s less likely to run from you.’

Sulley opened and closed his mouth like a fish as his eyes flicked between the driver’s cold blue gaze and the puckered burn scar on his cheek. He wasn’t the kind of guy you could argue with, so he didn’t try. He opened the door, slipped out on to the pavement, and headed to where he’d last seen the girl.