The Key (4 page)

‘But first we must choose a new leader.’

Athanasius nodded. ‘On this at least we agree.’

At that moment a noise rose up from the deeper depths of the mountain and echoed within the chapel, the sound of the requiem Mass beginning.

‘We should go and join our brethren,’ Thomas said. ‘And until we have new leadership, I suggest we say nothing of what we have seen here – it will only lead to panic.’ He turned to Malachi. ‘You are not the only one who knows the chronicles.’

Malachi nodded, but his eyes were still magnified with fear. He turned and took a last long look at the empty Tau as the others filed out behind him. ‘If the Sacrament is removed from the Citadel, then the
Church
will fall, not the mountain,’ he muttered, too quiet for anyone else to hear. Then he quickly left the chapel, afraid to be left there alone.

Room 406, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

Liv Adamsen burst from sleep like a breathless swimmer breaking surface. She gasped for air, her blonde hair plastered across pale, damp skin, her frantic green eyes scanning the room for something real to cling to, something tangible to help drag her away from the horrors of her nightmare. She heard a whispering, as though someone was close by, and cast about for its source.

No one there.

The room was small: a solid door opposite the steel-framed bed she was lying on; an old TV fixed high on a ceiling bracket in the corner; a single window set into a wall whose white paint was yellowing and flaking as if infected. The blind was down, but bright daylight glowed behind it, throwing the sharp outline of bars against the wipe-clean material. She took a deep breath to try to calm herself, and caught the scent of sickness and disinfectant in the air.

Then she remembered.

She was in a hospital – though she didn’t know why, or how she had come to be there.

She took more breaths, long and deep and calming. Her heart still thudded in her chest, the whispering rush continued in her ears, so loud and immediate that she had to stop herself from checking the room again.

Get a grip
, she told herself.
It’s just blood rushing through your veins. There’s no one here
.

The same nightmare seemed to lie in wait for her every time she fell asleep, a dream of whispering blackness, where pain bloomed like red flowers, and a shape loomed, ominous and terrifying – a cross in the shape of a letter ‘T’. And there was something else in the darkness with her, something huge and terrible. She could hear it moving and feel the shaking of the earth as it came towards her, but always, just as it was about to emerge from the black and reveal itself, she would wake in terror.

She lay there for a while, breathing steadily to calm the panic, tripping through a mental list of what she could remember.

My name is Liv Adamsen
.

I work for the
New Jersey Inquirer.

I was trying to discover what happened to Samuel
.

An image of a monk flashed in her mind, standing on top of a dark mountain, forming the sign of a cross with his body even as he tipped forward and fell.

I came here to find out why my brother died
.

In the shock of this salvaged memory Liv remembered where she was. She was in Turkey, close to the edge of Europe, in the ancient city of Ruin. And the sign Samuel had made – the Tau – was the sign of the Sacrament, the same shape that now haunted her dreams. Except it wasn’t a dream, it was real. In her blossoming consciousness she knew that she had seen the shape, somewhere in the darkness of the Citadel – she had seen the Sacrament. She focused on the memory, willing it to take sharper form, but it kept shifting, like something at the edge of her vision or a word she could not recall. All she could remember was a feeling of unbearable pain and of … confinement.

She glanced up at the heavy door, noticing the keyhole now and recalling the corridor beyond. She had glimpsed it as the doctors and nurses had come and gone over the past few days.

How many days? Four? Five, maybe.

She had also seen two chairs pushed up against the wall with men sitting on them. The first was a cop, the uniform a dark blue, the badges unfamiliar. The other had also worn a uniform: black shoes, black suit, black shirt, a thin strip of white at the collar. The thought of him, sitting just a few metres from her made the fear rise up again. She knew enough of the bloody history of Ruin to realize the danger she was in. If she had seen the Sacrament and they suspected it then they would try to silence her – like they had silenced her brother. It was how they had maintained their secret for so long. It was a cliché, but it was true – the dead kept their secrets.

And the priest standing vigil outside her door was not there to minister to her troubled soul or pray for her rapid recovery.

He was there to keep her contained.

He was there to ensure her silence.

Room 410

Four doors down the corridor Kathryn Mann lay in the starched prison of her own single bed, her thick black hair curled across the pillow like a darkening storm. She was shivering despite the hospital heat of her room. The doctors had said she was still in shock, a delayed and ongoing reaction to the forces of the explosion she had survived in the confines of the tunnel beneath the Citadel. She had also lost hearing in her right ear and the left one had been severely damaged. The doctors said it may improve, but they were always evasive when she asked how much.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this wretched and helpless. When the monk had appeared on top of the Citadel and made the sign of the Tau with his body she had believed the ancient prophecy was coming true:

And so it had happened. Liv had entered the Citadel, the Sancti had come out and now they were dying, one by one, the ancient enemy, the keepers of the Sacrament. Even with her damaged ears, Kathryn had heard the clamour of medical teams running in answer to the flat-lining wail of cardiac alarms all around her. After each alarm she would ask the nurse who had died, fearing it might be the girl. But each time it had been another monk, taken from this life to answer for themselves in the next, their deaths a portent of nothing but good. She had been kept apart from Liv so did not know for sure what had happened inside the Citadel, or even if she had discovered the Sacrament, though the steady deaths of the Sancti gave her some hope that she had.

But if this was a victory, it was a hollow one.

Whenever she closed her eyes she saw the body of Oscar de la Cruz – her father – lying broken and bloodied on the cold concrete floor of the airport warehouse. He had spent most of his long life hiding from the Citadel after escaping from within its walls and faking his own death in the trenches of the First World War. But they had still got him in the end. He had saved her life by smothering the grenade, thrown by a dark agent of the Citadel, meant for her and Gabriel.

It was Oscar who had first taught her about the Citadel, its sinister history and the secrets it contained. It was he who had taught her to read the prophetic symbols etched on the stone when she was still a girl, filling her with its meaning – a loving father telling dark stories to his blue-eyed little girl as later she had done with Gabriel, a mother passing the same stories to her son.

And when all this comes to pass
– Oscar had always told her,
when the ancient wrong has been righted, then I will show you the next step
.

She had often wondered what private knowledge his words had hinted at – and now she would never know.

The Sancti had been unseated, but her own family had been destroyed in the process: first her husband; then her father – who next? Gabriel was in prison at the mercy of organizations she had learned not to trust; and she too had seen the priest, keeping steady watch just beyond her door, another agent of the same church that had already taken so much from her.

I will show you the next step
– her father had told her. But now he was gone – killed just before his life’s work had finally been realized – and she could see no step that might give her hope, or help save her, or Gabriel or Liv, from the danger they were in.

Vatican City, Rome

Clementi swept from his office with as much speed as his large frame could manage.

‘When did they arrive?’ he asked, his black surplice flaring out behind him like ragged wings.

‘About five minutes ago,’ Schneider said, struggling to keep up with his master.

‘And where are they now?’

‘They were escorted down to the boardroom in the vault. I came to fetch you as soon as I heard they were here.’

Clementi hurried past the two Swiss guardsmen, hoping His Holiness would not choose this moment to emerge from his apartment and enquire about Clementi’s undue haste. As Cardinal Secretary of State, he had to work closely with the Pope – both literally and figuratively – discussing policy and getting his signature on important documents. The file in his hand did not contain any papal signatures or seals. His Holiness was not even aware of its contents or intent, something Clementi had worked hard to maintain.

He reached the end of the corridor and quickly barged through the door into the bare emergency stairwell beyond. ‘Do we know which of the Group is present?’

‘No,’ Schneider replied. ‘The guard wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to press him. I felt it better he remain vague on the details.’

Clementi nodded and descended into the gloom, brooding on what might await him at the end of this unscheduled summons.

The Group was a name he had given to the three as a means of turning them into a single entity, a mind trick designed to strike a balance of power in their arrangement: one of him, one of them. But it had not worked. They were far too powerful and distinctive to subsume into a homogenous whole and, try as he might, they remained as individual and formidable as when he had first approached them and laid out his scheme. The Group met as infrequently as possible, and always in secret, such was the delicate nature of their shared enterprise. With the calibre of people involved, arranging any meeting at all was a minor miracle of scheduling and they had not been due to meet again for another month; yet one or more of them was here right now, unannounced and unexpected – and there was only one viable explanation as to why.

‘This has to be about the situation in Ruin,’ Clementi said, arriving at a featureless metal door set into the wall of the first-floor landing.

He placed his doughy hand on a glass panel beside it, his cardinal’s gold ring clinking against the glass, and a pale strip of light swept across his palm, casting pale, shifting shadows across his face that reflected in the polished metal of the door. Clementi looked away. He had always hated his appearance, his moon face with its fringe of curly hair – once blond, now white – making him appear like an oversized cherub. A dull
thunk
sounded inside the door and he heaved it open, hurrying into the dark and away from the sight of himself.

A narrow tunnel lit up in a flicker of neon as he moved down it, the walls turning from smooth concrete to rough stone as he passed from the Apostolic Palace into the stone foundations of the squat, fifteenth-century tower built next to it. After ten or so steps he reached a second door that opened into a small, windowless room, packed with shelves and crammed with box files.

‘Go on ahead,’ he said. ‘Give my apologies and say I am cutting short another meeting and will be there directly. I will meet you in the lobby so you can brief me as to exactly who is there. I do not wish to enter a meeting of this importance without at least knowing who is present.’

Schneider bowed and slipped away, leaving Clementi alone with his churning thoughts. He listened to his chamberlain’s footsteps receding, his eyes fixed on the crossed keys of the papal seal and the letters IOR that adorned every file in the room. He was in a section of the fortified tower of Niccolo V, built into the eastern wall of the Apostolic Palace, that now served as the headquarters and only branch of one of the world’s most exclusive financial institutions. IOR stood for Istituto per le Opere di Religione – the Institute for Works of Religion – more commonly referred to as the Vatican Bank. It was the most secretive financial institution in the world and the prime cause of Clementi’s present worries.

Set up in 1942 to manage the Church’s huge accumulated wealth and investments, the bank had a little over forty thousand current account holders, no tax liabilities and the sort of unassailable privacy any Swiss bank would be proud of. As such, it had attracted some of the wealthiest and most influential investors in the world; but it had also courted more than its fair share of controversy.

In the 1970s and 80s the Institute had been used by the now disgraced financier Michele Sindona to launder Mafia drug money. After this Roberto Calvi, famously referred to as God’s banker, had been appointed to take a tighter hold of the Church’s vast resources; instead he had used the bank to illegally siphon billions of dollars from another financial institution, leaving the Church with an embarrassing and expensive moral responsibility when it eventually went bust. Calvi had been found dead a few weeks later, his pockets filled with building bricks and bank notes, hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. Much had been made of the ecclesiastical connotations of this location, especially in the light of Calvi’s membership of a masonic lodge known as the ‘Black Friars’, but no one had ever been convicted of his murder. The long shadow cast by these scandals lingered on, and for Clementi the rehabilitation of the Vatican Bank had become a personal obsession. What’s more, he had the perfect background to facilitate it.

As an undergraduate at Oxford he had studied history and economics as well as theology, discerning God’s miracle at work in all three disciplines. In Clementi’s eyes, the power of economics was a force for good, creating wealth so that people could be lifted from the evils of poverty and relieved of their earthly suffering. History had also taught him the perils of economic failure. He had studied the great civilizations of the past, focusing not only on how they had amassed their great wealth but also on how they lost it. Again and again, empires that had been built over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, tipped from prosperity into rapid decline, leaving nothing behind but legends and ruined monuments. His economist’s brain had pondered on what had become of their great wealth. Inevitably some of it passed to conquerors and became the seeds of new empires, but not all. History was littered with accounts of vast treasure stores that had vanished, never to be found again.