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

Central so you can get a shower and a change of clothes. I’ll catch up with you later, OK?’

      Liv looked down at her mud-encrusted outfit.

      ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But if you’re using this as an excuse to sideline me, then I’m going to walk straight back out and call a press conference.’

      ‘Be my guest,’ he said. ‘Just stay away from the windows. I don’t want to see your face on the news.’

      Neither do I, Liv thought as she inspected her grimy blouse. She pulled a dirt-roughened lock of hair down from her fringe and glanced over at the window, trying to catch her own faint reflection in the glass. Instead her eyes were drawn back to the thin, dark mountain soaring into the clear blue sky.

      70

      Athanasius had been summoned into his master’s office shortly after Matins and asked to accompany him on a task – ‘for the sake of the brotherhood,’ the Abbot had said. ‘A task that you must not discuss with anyone.’

      So here they were, picking their way down a narrow, rubble-strewn stairway, the way ahead lit only by the burning torch in his hand. Occasionally they passed other narrow and mysterious passageways.

      They had been walking steadily downwards for almost five minutes when Athanasius saw a dim glow up ahead. It came from inside an arched doorway that looked newer and more sculpted than its forgotten surroundings. He followed the Abbot into a small cave where two monks stood silently, each carrying a torch of their own. Both wore the green robes of the Sancti.

      Athanasius averted his eyes and noticed another door sunk into the wall, this one made of heavy steel. A thin slot sat to one side of it, similar to the hi-tech locks that guarded the entrance to the great library. The Abbot nodded a silent greeting to the Sancti, reached into his sleeve and removed a magnetic card. There was a muffled clunk. The Abbot pushed the door wide and the three of them passed through. Athanasius stood alone for a moment, then followed.

      The chamber was slightly smaller than the one they had just come from and the air inside seemed warmer, thickened by a fine dust that caught the orange glow of the flambeau. It had an identical steel door built into the far wall, in front of which lay three cocoons of heavy-duty plastic. Athanasius knew immediately what they must contain.

      One of the Sancti unzipped the closest far enough for a head to emerge. A thin trickle of blood ran from a small hole in his temple to his hairline. Athanasius didn’t recognize him, nor the second body. But he knew the third. He looked upon the face of his dead friend and had to reach for the wall to steady himself.

      ‘The cross has returned to the Citadel,’ the Abbot said softly as he too looked down upon the battered face of Brother Samuel.

      For a moment all four stared at him, then, as if on a prearranged command, he was zipped back into the bag and the Sancti carried him away. He waited for them to return for the other two bodies. But they did not.

      ‘These unfortunates must be disposed of,’ the Abbot said. ‘I am sorry to have to leave this task to you – I know you will find it distasteful – but I have matters of great importance to attend to, your brothers may not walk in the lower section of the Citadel, and you are the only person I can trust …’

      He made no move to explain who the men were, or why they were now lying dead on the floor of this forgotten cave.

      ‘Take them to the deserted section in the eastern chambers,’ he said. ‘Drop them in one of the old oubliettes. Their bodies will be forgotten, but their souls will be at peace.’ He paused at the entrance and rubbed his hands together, as if washing them. ‘The door will close automatically in five minutes,’ he said. ‘Make sure you are clear of this room by then.’

      Athanasius listened to his footsteps recede into the darkness.

       The cross has returned to the Citadel …

      Athanasius recalled the words of the Heretic Bible:

       The cross will fall

       The cross will rise

      He wondered what they had in mind for the defiled remains of his friend. He’d be taken to the chapel of the Sacrament, no doubt; why else would Sancti have come to fetch him?

      But to think he might rise again …

      It was the logic of a madman.

      He glanced down at the remaining bags, two anonymous corpses in a silent crypt, and wondered what lives they had woken up to that morning and who might now be wondering anxiously at their silence. A wife? A lover? A child?

      He dropped to his haunches and said a silent prayer over each as he zipped them gently back into their plastic shrouds. Then he dragged each of them into the antechamber, fearful that the door might click shut at any moment, and turn the dusty chamber into his own tomb.

      71

      Liv sat in the staff room of the city morgue, looking at the picture of her brother and conjuring images from her past. Relating her family history to Arkadian had been like shining a light into it. She remembered now how she had sat Samuel down in her dorm-room and excitedly told him all the things she’d found out on her trip to Paradise, West Virginia.

      She pictured him perching on the edge of the narrow bed, his face, already clouded with pain and sadness, paling to ash as she told him the details of how they had both come into the world. For her it had explained all the unanswered questions about identity that had tormented her throughout her childhood and teens. She had hoped that sharing it would bring him peace also. But her attempt to cool his smouldering self-hatred had only thrown fuel on to it. He already blamed himself for the death of their father. Now she had handed him a reason to blame himself for their mother’s too.

      He had shambled away like a ghost.

      He didn’t speak to her for months afterwards. All her calls went unanswered. She even left messages at his therapist’s office, until she discovered he’d stopped going and started fervent visits to church instead.

      The last time she had seen him was in New York. He had called up out of the blue, sounding happy and vital, just like his old self. He told her he was going on a journey and wanted to see her before he left.

      They met at Grand Central Station and spent the day hanging out and doing tourist stuff. He told her he’d realized some things that had given him a new focus. He said that when someone dies so someone else can live, then that someone has been spared for a reason. They had a higher purpose; the journey he was about to begin was his way of divining what that purpose was.

      She’d assumed the journey would entail climbing a bunch of scary-assed mountains, but he told her that wasn’t the way to get closer to God. He didn’t elaborate and she didn’t ask him to. She’d just been glad he seemed to have found an exciting new direction. She didn’t for one moment think, as she waved him off at the airport, that she would never see him alive again.

      Liv blinked back the tears and looked up at the Citadel, standing like a sliver of night against the spring sky. She felt now the pain her brother must have felt back then. She had never blamed herself for her father’s death or her mother’s, but she blamed herself for Samuel’s. No matter what Arkadian thought, it was her desire for self-knowledge that had led to her discovering the truth about their birth, and it was her thoughtless revelation of it to Samuel that led to his fall from the top of that bloody mountain.

      The sound of the door clicking open snapped her back to the present. She rubbed at the wetness around her eyes and turned to see a bulky plainclothes cop with a round, pasty face and thinning hair the colour of brick. His eyes peered at her from the softness of his face and his hands rested on his hips, opening his jacket slightly to reveal a hint of shoulder holster, and a set of handcuffs clipped to his belt. His shirt strained to contain his belly and a badge rested on it, suspended from a cord around his neck.