Sanctus and The Key: 2 Bestselling Thrillers. Simon Toyne

She forced herself to focus on it rather than on whoever was behind her.

      Twelve feet now.

      Ten.

      Five.

      Her right foot connected with the firm asphalt of the road and she launched herself towards the box containing the barrier’s mechanism, ducked behind it, fell gratefully back against the cold, wet metal and for the briefest of moments felt safe.

      Then the rain stopped.

      It was so abrupt it seemed almost unnatural. One minute she was enveloped in an almost tropical deluge, the next, the curtain lifted. She heard the gurgle of the gutters along the main road and the gentle sucking of the saturated earth. In the sudden silence her every breath sounded like the rasp of a chainsaw. She strained her ears for other sounds. In her fevered imagination the silence spoke of an enemy nearby, listening for her slightest movement, a gun pointing at the cold earth until a warmer target could be found.

      The terminal building was still too far away, but she could pick out every detail of it now – which meant whoever was looking for her could too. She felt an overwhelming urge to sprint back to the cover of the parked cars, but fought it back.

      Fifteen feet of tarmac was all that separated her from them. And now she noticed that the section where she crouched was lit more brightly than the rest. Elsewhere she could see comforting corridors of shadow where the pools of light didn’t quite overlap. She’d be much harder to spot if she ran along one of those. The nearest was about twenty feet away. Plus fifteen more to the cars. Or she could chance it and run from where she was.

      She closed her eyes and rested her head against the steel upright. Then she launched herself across the narrow stretch of road, keeping her head level with the black-and-yellow barrier.

      Gabriel heard her distant footfalls on the wet tarmac and watched her bolt across the entrance road, change direction as she came to a stretch of shadow, then disappear into the ocean of metal.

      He turned back and scanned the scene of the ambush, checking to see if they were compromised. A few security cameras were sited at the edge of the car park, but all of them were pointing inwards at the vehicles. The same story with the service buildings. No cameras trained on the road. It was safe to assume that none of what had happened in the last few minutes had been recorded.

      He picked up the brass shell casings from the seven rounds he’d fired at the retreating vehicle. Most of them had been on target, but none had stopped the driver from escaping. He dropped the casings into his pocket with a muffled clink and turned his attention to the body.

      49

      Liv nearly wept with relief as she stumbled through the revolving door into the merciful brightness of the terminal building. She limped on, trailing mud and rainwater in her wake, as fearful groups of tourists backed away from her. One of the cops by passport control looked up, alerted by the disturbance. She saw him nudge his partner and nod in her direction. The second recoiled as he locked eyes on the half-mud, half-mad creature heading towards him. He pressed a button on his walkie-talkie and started speaking into it. Both of them dropped their hands to hover near the trigger guards of their automatics.

       Great …

       I make it all this way and now I’m going to be gunned down by these two bozos.

      She dug deep into her scant reserves of strength and raised her trembling hands in the internationally recognized sign for surrender. ‘Please,’ she breathed, sinking to her knees in front of them. ‘Call Inspector Arkadian. Ruin City Homicide. I really need to talk to him.’

      Rodriguez stood at the baggage check and watched the security guard empty the contents of his holdall on to the steel table and start going through it. An alert crackled through the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, but he took no notice of it. The message called for back-up to deal with a woman in need of assistance. Rodriguez turned and looked back over the queue on the other side of the walk-through metal detector. His height gave him a clear view to the main concourse, but he couldn’t see the source of the disturbance.

      ‘Thank you, sir, have a nice flight.’ The guard pushed his canvas holdall to one side and reached for the next bag rattling down the rollers from the X-ray machine.

      Rodriguez stepped aside and quickly repacked the passport he never thought he’d need again, the Bible his mother had died holding, the clothes that hung a little baggy on his slender, six-foot-five-inch frame. The last item he folded carefully, as if it were a flag to lay on a soldier’s coffin. It was a red nylon windcheater with a hood, meaningless to most but symbolically important to him.

      He pulled the drawstring tight and picked up a small leather-bound volume, given to him by the Abbot, chronicling the history of the rides of the Tabula Rasa. He’d written a woman’s name and two addresses inside the cover. The first belonged to the offices of a newspaper in New Jersey. The second was residential.

      He swung the bag over his shoulder and headed for the boarding gate. He didn’t look back. Whatever was going on in the terminal building wasn’t his concern. His mission lay elsewhere.

      III

      For there is nothing hid, except to be made manifest, nor is anything secret, except to come to light.

       Mark 4:22

      50

      Liv stared at the blank, soundproofed walls and the small mirror she knew from experience concealed an observation room. She wondered if anyone was in there now – watching her. She studied her reflection in the toughened glass, her clothes grimy, her hair plastered to her skull. She raised her hand to smooth down her fringe then gave it up as a waste of time.

      To begin with she thought they’d brought her here because interview rooms were the one place in any police station you were still allowed to smoke, but looking at herself now, she wasn’t so sure. Maybe they were just keeping her out of the way because she looked like a crazy woman. She’d felt a little mad as she’d given her statement, describing the sequence of events from her arrival in the terminal building to the moment she’d staggered back after the attempted kidnapping.

      It was as if it had all happened to someone else. Her sense of disconnection had increased when the officer taking her statement had gone outside to fetch her another smoke and returned with a subtly different attitude. His quiet sympathy had been replaced by a cool distance. He’d completed the ritual in near silence, got her to read and sign the document then disappeared without a word, the blinds on the outside of the window preventing her from seeing where.

      There was no handle on the inside of the door. His change of tack and the silent wait in this stark room, with its table and chairs bolted to the floor, conspired to make Liv feel like she had been arrested.

      She picked up the cigarette burning slowly away to nothing in the ashtray and breathed it in. It tasted foreign and unpleasant, but she persevered. Her own crumpled Luckies were still in her holdall in the back of Gabriel’s car, along with her passport, her credit cards, everything except her cell phone. Arkadian was on his way in, apparently. Hopefully he’d be more sympathetic than his colleague. She thought back to her own journey, driving up through the winding road between the dark shapes of mountains, then along bright streets through a city that managed to appear both incredibly old and very modern. She remembered the sights sliding past her exhausted eyes as she stared out of the back of the police car: the familiar logo of Starbucks, and the chrome and glass storefronts of modern banks standing right next to open-fronted shops, carved out of stone, that sold copper goods, and carpets, and souvenirs, as they had done since biblical times.

      She took another drag on the foul-tasting cigarette, screwed up her nose and crushed it out in the ashtray with a picture of the Citadel printed on the bottom. She pushed it to one side and laid her head on her arms. The sound of the air-con hummed at the