Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, The Tower. Simon Toyne

we wanted to claim him as ours at this point, or whether you would prefer us to remain distant.’

      The Abbot nodded. ‘You did well. Inform the public office to maintain the same courteous degree of cooperation, for now. It may be that the question of Brother Samuel’s body will resolve itself without our interference. Once the authorities have completed the post-mortem and no family members come forward to claim the body, we can step forward and offer to take it as a gesture of compassion. It will show to the world what a loving and caring church we are, one prepared to embrace a poor, wretched soul who sought to end his life in such a lonely and tragic way. It will also bring Brother Samuel back to us without our having to admit kinship.’

      The Abbot stopped and turned, fixing Athanasius with his sharp, grey eyes.

      ‘However, in the light of what you have just read we must also be vigilant. We must leave nothing to chance. If anything unusual is reported, anything at all, then we must be ready to get Brother Samuel’s body back immediately, and by any means necessary.’ He stared at Athanasius from beneath his beetled brows. ‘That way, if some miracle does come to pass and he rises again, he will at least be in our custody. Whatever happens, we cannot let our enemies take possession of his body.’

      ‘As you wish,’ Athanasius replied. ‘But surely if what you have just shown me is the only remaining copy of the book, who else would know of the …’ he hesitated, not quite sure how to describe the ancient words scratched on the sheet of slate. He didn’t want to use the word ‘prophecy’ because that would imply that the words were the will of God, which in itself would be heresy. ‘Who else could know the specifics of the … prediction …?’

      The Abbot nodded approvingly, picking up on his chamberlain’s caution. It confirmed to him that Athanasius was the right man to handle the official side of the situation; he had the political sophistication and the discretion for it. The unofficial side he would handle himself. ‘We cannot simply trust that the destruction of all the books and the people who carried them has also destroyed the words and thoughts they contained,’ he explained. ‘Lies are like weeds. You can grub them up, poison the root, burn them away to nothing – but they always find a way to return. So we must assume that this “prediction”, as you wisely refer to it, will be known in some form to our enemies, and that they will be preparing to act upon it. But do not worry, Brother,’ he said, laying a hand heavy as a bear’s paw on Athanasius’s shoulder. ‘We have withstood far more than this in our long and colourful history. We must simply do now as we have always done: stay one step ahead, pull up the drawbridge and wait for the outside threat to withdraw.’

      ‘And if it does not?’ Athanasius asked.

      The hand tightened on his shoulder. ‘Then we attack it with everything we have.’

      29

      Reis reached across the monk’s body to a point at the top of the sternum, pressed down firmly with a long-handled scalpel and drew the blade smoothly down through the flesh, clear to the pubic bone, carefully following the line of the existing scar. He completed the Y-incision by making two more deep cuts from the top of the one he had just made to the outer edge of each of the monk’s shattered collarbones. Finally he cut away the skin and muscle from the monk’s chest and folded it open, revealing the ruined ribs beneath. At this point he would usually need surgical shears or the Stryker saw to cut through the cage of bone that protected the heart, lungs and other internal organs, but the massive impact of the landing had done most of the work for him. With just a few ligament cuts he managed to gain access to the chest cavity.

      ‘Tap the square for me, would you,’ Reis said, nodding towards the monitor. ‘Got my hands full here.’

      Arkadian looked at the bloody section of ribs Reis was clutching and restarted the recording.

      ‘OK,’ Reis said, the jaunty tone back in his voice, ‘first impressions of the internal organs are that they are surprisingly well preserved, considering the impact. The ribs clearly did their job, even if they were all but destroyed in the process.’

      He laid the ribcage down in a stainless-steel tray then made some well-practised cuts inside the body cavity to detach the larynx, oesophagus and ligaments connecting the major organs to the spinal cord before lifting the entire block out in one piece and transferring them to a wide metal container.

      ‘The liver shows some evidence of haemorrhaging,’ he said, ‘but none of the major organs are particularly pale so he didn’t bleed out. The subject probably died of systemic organ failure following massive trauma, which I’ll confirm once I’ve run the tox and tissue tests.’

      He carried the container to an examination bench by the wall and started taking routine measurements of the liver, heart and lungs, as well as tissue samples from each.

      Arkadian looked up at the TV in the corner and was once again confronted by the eerie sight of the man now lying in pieces in front of him standing proud and very much alive on the summit of the Citadel. It was the footage all the networks were now using. It showed the monk shuffling towards the edge. Glancing down. Tipping forward, then suddenly dropping from view. The camera jerked downwards and zoomed wide as it tried to follow the fall. It tightened back in, losing focus as it found him again and struggled to keep him in frame. It was like watching the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, or the footage of the planes hitting the Twin Towers. There was something momentous about it, and deeply terrible. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. At the last moment the camera lost him again and pulled wide just in time to reveal the base of the mountain and the crowds of people on the embankment recoiling in shock from where the body had hit the ground.

      Arkadian dropped his gaze to the floor. He replayed the sequence in his head over and over, piecing together the glimpsed fragments of the monk’s fall …

      ‘It was deliberate,’ he whispered.

      Reis looked up from the digital scales currently displaying the weight of the dead monk’s liver. ‘Of course it was deliberate.’

      ‘No, I mean the way he fell. Suicide jumps are usually pretty straightforward. Jumpers either flip over backwards, or launch themselves forward and tip over head first.’

      ‘The head’s the heaviest part of the body,’ Reis said. ‘Gravity always pulls it straight down – given a long enough fall.’

      ‘And a fall from the top of the Citadel should be plenty long enough. It’s over a thousand feet high. But our guy stayed flat – all the way down.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘So it was a controlled fall.’

      Arkadian went to the stainless-steel tray holding the cassock. He grabbed a set of tongs and peeled open the stiff material until he found one of the sleeves. ‘Look. Those rips you found at the wrists? They were for his hands. It meant he could pull his robe tight against his body – like a kind of wing.’ He dropped the sleeve and sorted through the grisly folds until he found the other cuts a few inches above the hem. ‘And these were for his feet.’ He dropped the material back down and turned to Reis. ‘That’s why he didn’t fall head-first. He didn’t jump off the mountain – he flew off it.’

      Reis looked across at the broken body under the examination lights. ‘Then I’d say he really needs to work on his landings.’

      Arkadian ignored him, following this new thought. ‘Maybe he thought he could reduce the speed of the fall enough to survive it. Or maybe …’

      He pictured the monk again, his arms stretched out, his body tilted down, his head held steady, as if focusing on something, as if he was …

      ‘Aiming.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I think he was aiming for a specific spot.’

      ‘Why on earth would he do that?’

      It was a good question. Why aim somewhere if you were going to die wherever you landed? But then, death wasn’t his primary