The Key (39 page)

‘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.

Arkadian sat in a busy Internet café 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
éminence 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 cliché, 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.

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.

An American garrison was stationed there now, camped in the shadow of the once great walls in lines of temporary tents surrounding a section of ground that had once seen the triumphal procession of King Nebuchadnezzar and more recently been bulldozed flat to accommodate squadrons of Apache and Cobra helicopters. The ground crew were busily anchoring the aircraft to the deck with securing cables as they drove by, wrapping the engine cowls with heavy-duty covers against the worsening weather. Gabriel took note but said nothing. It didn’t matter how bad the weather got, they had no choice but to press on.

A few kilometres further along the main road they had found a goat track running north into the desert and followed it until the read-out on the jeep’s sat-nav told Gabriel he had finally arrived at the coordinates where his father’s life had ended. He had memorized them twelve years ago, always knowing that he would end up here one day, often running through them in his head like a mantra or a spell to keep his father’s memory alive.

He switched off the engine and stepped outside, surveying the flattened dish of desert. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. There were no graves to mark the site, no structures remaining to show there had ever been anything here other than rock and dust.

He’d often wondered how he would feel when he eventually got here. He had thought that coming here might make sense of the anger and abandonment he’d felt for most of his adult life. But standing here now he felt nothing. If anything, it served to emphasize how powerless he was against the merciless flow of the universe. His father had died out here and Gabriel had not been there to save him; now he was here with someone else who needed saving and he had no idea how to do that either.

Hearing the sound of the jeep door opening behind him, he turned away so Liv would not see the tears brimming in his eyes. He didn’t want her to show him any pity when he deserved none. He had failed once and was failing again.

But instead of joining him, she walked away, up the bank of the wadi towards a spot on the horizon, her eyes looking up towards the stars.

‘Liv?’ he called out, but she didn’t answer. She kept walking, her gaze fixed on the sky. ‘Liv!’ He moved across the sand and stepped in front of her, grabbing her shoulders to snap her out of her trance.

She blinked and looked at him as if she had just been shaken awake.

‘Where are you going?’

She pointed up at a snaking line of stars hanging low in the sky. ‘The dragon,’ she said. ‘I was following the dragon.’

Gabriel followed the line of her extended arm, recognizing the constellation she was pointing at. She was right – it was Draco, the dragon. The dragon was everywhere, it seemed: in the prophecy, in the madman’s account of how his father was killed – and now even in the sky.

‘Let’s get back to the jeep,’ he said, aware of how cold it was getting and how she was starting to tremble. ‘We can follow the dragon in that. It will be quicker.’

‘That way,’ she said, pointing back up at the sky.

‘Whichever way you want,’ he said, steering her back to the car. He was losing her, he could feel it. Things predicted in the prophecy were coming to pass.

As he helped her into the passenger seat he heard a sound like a bird cheeping in the night. Gabriel climbed back in behind the wheel, slamming the door against the night wind. The noise had been his phone and he checked the caller ID before answering. It was Arkadian.

‘I think I’ve found something,’ he said before Gabriel even had a chance to speak. The detective revealed what he had discovered about the oil operation called Dragonfields, then supplied map coordinates. Gabriel fed the information directly into the sat-nav and set it to calculate a route.

Another dragon
,
Gabriel thought.
Coincidence or destiny?

When the sat-nav finished its calculations, it answered the question for him. An arrow on the screen showed the direction the coordinates lay in, pointing in the exact direction Liv had been walking.

The oil operation was less than thirty kilometres away, somewhere in the wastelands of the Syrian Desert, following the constellation of the Dragon.

Athanasius had always hated the dark. When he had given his life to God and first entered the Citadel it had never occurred to him that he was also consigning himself to a life of darkness. The tunnels had been vastly improved during his time there, with electric lighting now used throughout most of the mountain, but the forbidden upper sections he now stumbled through had changed little in hundreds of years. In his haste to get here he had not brought a torch and was having to use the glow from the phone screen to guide him. It struck him as apt in many ways that the bright photograph of the prophecy was lighting his path towards the one man trying to thwart it.