The Key (24 page)

Closing the door behind him, Liv twisted the lock until it wouldn’t turn any more before checking out her surroundings. In many ways it wasn’t dissimilar to the hospital room in Ruin. The décor was slightly better and the bed was a double, but other than that it had the same institutional blandness.

Ski had explained to her on the way over that the hotel was used to house key witnesses and jury members during big trials. He had checked her in using a dummy name and false details so that her own name and passport number wouldn’t pop up on any databases. It would keep her off the radar, for a while at least, and that made her feel a little bit safer.

She took her laptop and charger from her bag and plugged them in by the countertop that served as a desk. At one end was a lamp with a mirror on the wall behind it, at the other a flat-screen TV. Liv switched it on and turned to a news channel out of long worn habit. She was about to start unpacking the rest of her things when the news anchor said something that made her head snap to the screen:

‘The first quake occurred last night at eight p.m. local time in the historic Turkish city of Ruin. Though the tremors were not serious, they appeared to set off a chain reaction of other incidents that swept west across Turkey, and south and east into Syria and northern Iraq. Seismologists say this ripple effect has never been recorded before and they have been unable to give an explanation for what may have caused it.’

Liv stared at the map.

Her plane had taken off at precisely eight o’clock.

She recalled the lurch she had felt as the wheels had left the ground, like a cord being snapped inside her, then the lights blinking out below as the plane climbed into the sky. Were these things connected somehow? They couldn’t be. They couldn’t.

‘So far, the only deaths appear to have been at Ruin Hospital. In an official statement, police confirmed that Kathryn Mann – one of the suspects in the recent bombing incident at the Citadel – is among the dead, although it is not known whether this was as a direct result of the earthquake …’

Liv stared at the screen, numb from the news.

‘There are now only three remaining survivors from the Citadel bombing: the monk, whose whereabouts is unknown; Liv Adamsen, who it is believed discharged herself from hospital a few hours before the quake struck; and Gabriel Mann, who escaped from police custody at around the same time.’

Liv felt the blood drain from her face and dry nausea rise up in her throat.

She wondered if he had really escaped, or whether something had happened to him too.

Still in a daze, Liv opened her laptop and Googled Ortus, the foundation where he worked. If anyone could make contact with him or tell her where he currently was, it would be them. She skimmed the homepage, found contact details for the Ruin office and reached for Ski’s phone. Having copied its number on to a scratch pad, she dialled the number for Ortus, wondering how long fifty bucks would last dialling international on a no-contract tariff. A foreign ringtone purred in her ear, then someone answered in Turkish.

‘Hi,’ Liv said, powering through the language barrier, ‘do you speak English?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m trying to get a message to Gabriel Mann.’

A pause. ‘He is not here.’

‘I know, but is there anyone who might be able to contact him? I’m a friend of his, and I need to speak to him very urgently.’

‘He is not here.’

Liv wasn’t surprised at the stonewall reception, but it didn’t make it any less frustrating. ‘Can I leave a message for him, please? Just a message.’

‘What message?’

‘Ask him to call Liv. He’ll understand. And thank you, it’s very urgent.’ She read out her phone number, thanked the woman again, then hung up. There was no way of knowing whether her message would be passed on or simply dropped in the trash.

Frantically she ran through a mental list of the people she had met during her time in Ruin who might know something, but realized with a creeping sense of dread that most of them were now dead. Perhaps Ski was right about her being cursed. The history of the Sacrament was littered with curses and dire prophesies. Liv had been part of one herself. She remembered sitting in the shadow of the Citadel and discussing them with …

Opening another tab in the browser, she Googled ‘Dr Miriam Anata’. In amongst the hits was a link to a website. Liv opened it and a picture filled the screen of the same formidable woman she had last met in the old town of Ruin. There was a contact page with publishers’ details for all her books, a talent agent for public speaking engagements, and an email contact for the author. She clicked on the link and started to write.

Dr Anata,

This is Liv Adamsen. If you know how to contact G then please get him to call me urgently. I am safe and so is this number.

She copied Ski’s cell into the message then sent it.

As she watched it leave the outbox a sense of uselessness and frustration settled on her. She was running out of options and had got precisely nowhere.

Flipping back to the Google results, she trawled through them in search of another number. In an hour or two she could call one of her colleagues at the paper and get them to dig out a home or mobile number for Dr Anata from the database, but she didn’t want to wait that long, nor did she want to get caught up in a conversation with a reporter who would inevitably want details of everything that had happened to her in the last two weeks.

From somewhere down the corridor came the lonely sound of a door slamming, followed by footsteps hurrying away. It occurred to her that she could sit here all day, if she felt like it, until Ski came back to check on her and politely tell her that they needed the room and was there anyone she could stay with? But there was no one. Her family were all dead. Everything she had been was gone.

She wondered how many of this room’s occupants had experienced the same feeling; key witnesses, preparing to burn down their old lives by giving testimony in big trials. Perhaps the room was somehow tainted by too many desolate thoughts of lost histories and uncertain futures. How easy would it be to give up, standing in a room like this with a brick wall for a view?

Unnerved by the dark dead-end route her mind was taking, Liv jolted herself into action. She emptied the remaining contents of her holdall on to the bed and started to fold the clothes, giving order to the few things she still possessed. She placed the history book on the nightstand along with her notebook and found the envelope that had contained the Turkish currency. She was about to drop it in the bin when it occurred to her that the few receipts it contained might hold some clue as to where she had been during her time in Ruin. Inside were a couple of taxi receipts, one for food, and a large piece of folded paper. She opened it up, hoping it might be an itemized hotel bill or something more informative. She was completely unprepared for what it turned out to be.

One whole side was smudged with charcoal where it had been rubbed against a stone relief. And where the charcoal was missing, symbols were revealed: the same symbols she had seen in the book. She turned it over and found a handwritten note:

This will not explain everything, nothing ever could, but it may be a start. I hope, having eased your escape from the mountain, things will change and we can talk of this further in person. But if the Citadel remains closed, as well it might, know you always have a friend here. To contact me, give confession at the public church and ask for Brother Peacock. Any sealed message you pass on will come to me unopened.

Yours

Brother Athanasius

The note jarred a series of fresh memories loose.

She remembered the monk, his smooth head glowing in the dark of the chapel as he led them away through the smoke-filled tunnels of the mountain and down to where the outside world had broken in. He had helped them get away – he was offering help still. She turned the page and stared at the smudged symbols, so strange yet familiar. The main body was in a solid block, but at the bottom they formed the shape of the T. It was the biggest example of the lost language she had seen – bigger than any of those pictured in the book.

As her eyes traced the outlines, the whispering in her head began to rise in volume and her skin started to prickle. She had been out of the hospital far too long now to write these symptoms off as some kind of drug-induced side effect. Whatever was causing them wasn’t chemical; it had to be psychological or something else she wasn’t fully prepared to consider.

Spreading the piece of paper on the desktop, she focused once more on the symbols. Almost immediately the whispering rose again, getting louder the harder she concentrated. It swamped the hiss of traffic from the road outside, filling her head while her skin crawled with tiny pinpricks. Liv rode it out, forcing herself to bear it as if she were holding her hand over a flame.

The whispering took form, becoming a voice in her head, and the symbols before her eyes began to shift, revealing words that explained everything …

Dick watched the hotel from a bus stop across the street, his crumpled businessman persona fitting in perfectly with the early-morning commuters who came and went with the steady stream of buses. The police cruiser had pulled away a while back with only the cop in the driver’s seat. If he was a boyfriend then there wasn’t much romance going on. A quick call to the hotel had established that there was no Liv Adamsen staying there – at least, not officially.

The fact that the cop had managed to check her in under a false name so quickly hinted at an existing system that everybody was familiar with and nobody questioned. Given that the hotel was round the corner from the main courthouse, Dick concluded it must be a safe house. Ordinarily this would be a major problem – safe houses were specifically designed to keep people like him out – but there was no squad car parked outside and probably no guards stationed in the corridors with their eyes sharpened by suspicion and too much coffee. The girl might feel comforted by the illusion of safety this place provided, but that was all it was – an illusion.

Dick liked this kind of calm surveillance, the cool-headed fact-finding before the heat of what was to come. Another bus pulled in and a posse of work zombies shuffled on, leaving him alone in the shelter. It was early enough in the year for it to still be gloomy at this time of the morning and he watched the lights coming on as the guests in the hotel woke up. It didn’t seem to be that full.

His phone chirped in his pocket, telling him he had a new message. He opened it and spotted two words that he usually savoured, but in this case tasted slightly sour.

Si-lence

Im-me-di-ate-ly

He deleted the message and headed for the entrance to the hotel, adopting the bearing of a weary businessman in search of a cheap room.

Once again, any notion of taking his time had been taken from him. Everyone was in such a hurry these days.

Liv grabbed her notebook and frantically transcribed the words running through her head, not trusting her fitful memory to keep hold of it for long. But even as she wrote she found things difficult to pin down or understand, the meanings shifting and slipping away within the whispering. It was as if whatever the symbols were trying to express was too nebulous or slippery to capture in language. When she had finished she collapsed back in her seat and breathed deeply, allowing the whispering to subside until she felt in full possession of herself again. She got up from her chair and stumbled into the bathroom, splashing water on her face before returning to read what she had written.

So they kept
her
weak.

The light of God, sealed up in darkness,

For they dared not release her, for fear of what might follow,

Nor could they kill her, for they knew not how.

And as time passed the men became chained to their own guilt,

And their home became a fortress

Containing the only knowledge of the deed they had done,

Not a mountain sanctified, but a prison cursed.

With Eve still captive,

A holy secret – a Sacrament,

Until the time foretold when her suffering would end

Liv jumped up, knocking the chair over as if she had discovered a snake on the desk. She reread the last three lines, the key words pulsing in her head: Eve … a holy secret … a Sacrament.

Just saying them conjured clear memories of what she had seen in the Citadel. She remembered the Tau and the eyes inside it, green like hers, staring out at her. She remembered the front of the cross levering open, and seeing the frail girl inside with hair like moonlight and a body running with blood, ravaged by pinpricks and terrible wounds. She rubbed her own skin, remembering the prickles of her own recent experience. It was the same. She was the same. But it was not her experience she was remembering.

She looked back down at the notebook and read the rest of the translation:

The one true cross will appear on earth

All will see it in a single moment – all will wonder

The cross will fall

The cross will rise

To unlock the Sacrament

And bring forth a new age

Through its merciful
death

It was the prophecy that Gabriel had explained to her. And now she could see how it had all come true. Her brother had made the sign of the Tau – the one true cross – before he had fallen, and she had risen in his place, flesh of his flesh. She was the cross. She had unlocked the Sacrament.

More memories came. The knife in her hand, the spilt blood, hers and … Eve’s, mingling on the floor. Their spirits joining as their blood flowed. She looked up at the mirror and stared at her eyes. Green eyes – hers, but not hers – like someone else was staring back. She reached out to touch her reflection but the sharp sound of a doorbell made her head whip round. Adrenalin flooded through her. Who could be there this early in the morning? It rang again and she realized her mistake. It was just Ski’s mobile ringing on the bed. She lunged for it, fearful it might stop and jabbed the button to answer it.