Sanctus

in around four hours — but she couldn’t see Ruin. She checked the reference and looked again. It was only after a few minutes’ close scrutiny in the gloom of the cabin that she found it — west of the uppermost airport, where the Eastern Taurus mountains started to rise, right in the fold of the page and almost totally obscured by the straight black line of the grid. It struck Liv as bitterly apt that her brother should choose to hide away in such a place; somewhere so well known yet so obscure, nestling enigmatically in the crease of a map.

She flicked through the book until she found the chapter on Ruin and started to read, sucking up facts about the place she was heading to, logging and arranging them in her journalist’s mind until they started to form a picture of the city where her brother had lived and died. It was a major religious centre; that made sense, given what Samuel had said to her the last time she’d seen him. It was also the world’s oldest place of pilgrimage, owing to the health-giving properties of the waters that bubbled plentifully from the ground, ice melt from the mountains that surrounded it. That made sense also. She could imagine him working as a mountain-guide, hiding under a borrowed name somewhere well off the beaten track while he sought the peace he’d set out to find.

I want to be closer to God. That’s what he’d said.

She’d often wondered at these words in the silence that followed his disappearance, torturing herself with the darkest possibilities of their meaning. But somehow she’d known, even as that silence stretched into years, that he was alive. She’d still believed it even when the letter from the US Bureau of Vital Records had told her otherwise. And now she was following the path he had trodden, to find out about the life he had led there. She was hoping the Inspector would be able to point her to where he’d lived and maybe some of the people who’d known him. Maybe they could give her some answers, and fill in the blanks that echoed in her mind.

She turned the page and stared at a photograph of the old town clustered at the base of the soaring mountain. The caption beneath identified it as The most visited place of antiquity in the world and supposed repository of a powerful, ancient relic known as The Sacrament.

On the page opposite was a brief chronicle of the Citadel, expanding on its incredible age and outlining its constant presence throughout human history. Liv had assumed the Citadel was a Christian shrine, but the text revealed that it had only aligned itself with Christianity in the fourth century following the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion. Prior to that it had been independent of any organized religion, though it had exerted a huge influence in almost every ancient belief system: the Babylonians had considered it the first and greatest Ziggurat; the Ancient Greeks worshipped it as the home of the gods and renamed it Olympus; even the Egyptians held it as sacred, the Pharoahs journeying across the sea to the Hittite empire to visit the mountain. It was even believed by some that the great pyramids of Giza were attempts to recreate the mountain in the hope that the magical properties of the Citadel could be reproduced in Egypt.

Once the Citadel had made its political move to endorse Christianity, the operational centre of the Church moved to Rome to enjoy the full protection of the newly created Holy Roman Empire. The Citadel, however, remained the power behind the throne, issuing its edicts and dogma through Rome now, as well as a new version of everything through the publication of an authorized bible. Any dissent from this official view was seen as heresy and was crushed, first by the might of the Roman army and subsequently by any king and emperor trying to curry favour with the Church and, by extension, with God.

Liv scanned the blood-soaked details, disturbed as much by the riot of exclamation marks and adverbs as anything they described. She didn’t care about the brutal history of the place, or what secrets it was meant to contain; she only cared about her brother, and what in this ancient city had driven him to his death.

The plane shuddered and a soft bong caused Liv to look up. The fasten seat belt sign had been turned on again. The no smoking sign stayed resolutely on. It taunted her through the rest of the flight as the night got darker and the storm grew steadily worse.

Chapter 43

The devotional day within the Citadel was divided into twelve different offices, the most important being the four nocturnes. They took place each night when it was believed the absence of God’s light allowed the forces of evil to prosper. It was a theory any police officer, in any major city in the world, would agree with: dark deeds are almost always done under cover of night.

The first of the nocturnes was Vespers, a formal service held in the one place large enough for the entire population of the Citadel to witness the dying of another day — the great cathedral cave in the eastern section of the mountain. The first eight rows were filled with the black cassocks of the spiritual guilds — the priests and librarians who spent their lives in the darkness of the great library. Behind them sat a thin white line of Apothecaria, then twenty rows of brown cassocks, the material guilds — masons, carpenters, and other skilled technicians whose job it was to constantly monitor and maintain the physical well-being of the Citadel.

The russet cassocks of the guards slashed across the body of the congregation, separating the higher guilds at the front from the numerous grey cloaks at the back; the administrative monks who did everything from cooking and cleaning to providing manual labour for the other guilds.

Above the multi-coloured congregation, in their own elevated gallery, sat the green-clad brethren of the Sancti — thirteen in all, including the Abbot, though today there were only eleven. The Abbot was not among them, and neither was Brother Gruber.

When the sun had dipped past the three great casements behind the altar, the large rose window flanked by two triangles representing God’s all-seeing eye, everybody filed out for their last meal in the refectory before retiring to the dormitories.

All, that is, but three men dressed in the red cassocks of the Carmina.

A sandy-haired monk with a flat, impassive face and the build of a middleweight boxer headed across the echoing space towards a door directly below the Sanctus balcony. The other two followed. No one said a word.

Cornelius’s record as an officer in the British Army had singled him out to the Abbot as the group’s natural leader, so he had passed a note to him on the way into Vespers, containing the two other names, instructions and a map. Cornelius glanced at the map as he passed out of the cathedral cave, turning left as instructed and proceeding down the narrow, less trodden tunnels towards the abandoned section of the mountain.

Dusk deepened in the tangled sprawl of the old city. The last of the tourists were ushered from the old town by polite stewards and portcullises clanked emphatically into place, sealing it for the night. To the west, in the section known as the Lost Quarter, the shadows began to take human form as the nightly traffic in flesh resumed its furtive trade.

To the east, Kathryn Mann sat in her living room waiting for her printer to complete its task. She now regretted having programmed it for the highest quality image as she watched it appear line by steady line. The TV news reported large groups of people having gathered in silent tribute to the man they did not yet know as Brother Samuel in America, Europe, Africa, Australia, even China, where public demonstrations, particularly of a religious nature, were not undertaken lightly. A woman interviewed outside the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City was asked why she felt so strongly about the monk’s death.

‘Because we need faith, you know?’ Her voice was taut with emotion. ‘Because we need to know the Church cares for us — and is lookin’ out for us. If one of their own is driven to this, and the Church don’t even say nuthin’ about it. . well, where does that leave us. .?’

People on every continent were saying more or less the same. The monk’s lonely death had clearly touched them. His mountain-top vigil seemed to symbolize their own sense of isolation, and the silence that followed, evidence of a Church that did not care; a Church that had lost its compassion.

Maybe change is happening, she thought as she finally removed the sheet of paper from the printer and stared at the photograph of Liv Adamsen lifted from the police file.

Perhaps the prophecy is coming true after all.

She turned off the TV and grabbed a couple of apples on her way out. The airport was a thirty-minute drive away. She had no idea how long she’d have to wait there.