Liv stared down at the new photograph.
Another stainless-steel tray lined with a white paper towel, on top of which lay five small brown seeds, each with something scratched on to its shiny surface.
Arkadian slid a third photo across the table.
‘The symbols were scratched on both sides,’ he said. ‘Five seeds, ten symbols — mostly letters, a mixture of upper and lower case.’
He arranged the photographs so one overlapped the other. The letters were now lined up in pairs.
T a M + k
? s A a l
‘They’re arranged in the same order in both photographs so you can see which marks were scratched on to each seed in case the pairings were deliberate. I can’t see anything in them myself, but perhaps that’s the point. Maybe it’s not supposed to be obvious to anyone. Maybe it was just meant for you.’
Liv looked at the jumble of letters.
‘Mean anything?’
‘Not immediately,’ she said. ‘Can I have that pen back?’
Arkadian reached into his pocket and handed it over.
She took the newspaper, smoothed it flat and copied the symbols into the blank sections of sky surrounding the image of her brother. She saw her own name emerge from the letters and spelled it out, adding the rest of the symbols underneath to maintain the original pairings.
s a M l?
a + A k T
Was it shorthand telling her SAMUEL had been ATTACKED? It seemed a bit of a stretch. Besides, the seeds had been discovered during his post-mortem, which surely made the warning somewhat redundant.
‘Haven’t you got expert code breakers for this kind of thing?’
‘There’s a cryptology professor at the big university in Gaziantep who helps us from time to time, but I haven’t called him. It seems to me your brother went to extraordinary lengths to make sure this message wasn’t found by the wrong people, so the least I could do was respect that. I honestly think it was intended for you and you’re the only one who’ll be able to make any sense of it.’ Arkadian lowered his voice. ‘No one else knows about these seeds. Just the pathologist who found them, me — and now you. I kept the photographs out of the file. If news of this got out, I’d have every Ruinologist and Sacramental conspiracy theorist offering their take on its meaning. I’m trying to solve this case, not the identity of the Sacrament — although. .’ He scrutinized the seeds once more.
‘Although what?’ Liv prompted.
‘Although I rather suspect they may well turn out to be the same thing.’
Chapter 58
Two floors down, a freckled hand tapped out the user name and password that would grant access to the police database. The screen flashed and a mail account launched, telling him he had seven new messages. Six were departmental memos no one would ever read, the seventh was from someone called GARGOYLE. There was nothing in the subject line. The man glanced nervously over the top of his monitor then clicked it open. It contained just one word.
He deep deleted the message, removing all trace of it from the network, then opened up a command module. A black box appeared on the screen asking for another user name and password. He entered them both, worming his way deeper into the network and scanning the recently updated files.
GARGOYLE was a relatively simple piece of software he had written himself, which made the job of monitoring the status of any case he wasn’t supposed to be looking at much, much easier. Rather than go through the tedious process of hacking into the central database and manually checking for new updates, he could simply attach the program to the architecture of any file, and whenever it was updated GARGOYLE automatically let him know via email.
He found the file on the dead monk, opened it, and started scrolling through. On page twenty-three he spotted a small block of text the program had highlighted in lime green. It detailed the taking into custody of one Liv Adamsen following her uncorroborated report of an attempted abduction at the airport. She was upstairs in an interview room on the fourth floor. That was Robbery and Homicide. He frowned, not quite sure what all that had to do with the dead monk.
Still. .
Not his problem.
Both parties had requested that any new additions to the case file be reported to them directly. Who was he to play gatekeeper?
He plugged a flash drive into the USB port on the front of his computer, copied and pasted the details then closed the case file and carefully retraced his steps through the maze of the database, re-locking all his invisible doors as he retreated.
When he was back at the default desktop he opened an innocuous spreadsheet for the benefit of anyone curious enough to glance at his screen, grabbed his coat and phone and headed for the door. He never sent anything from his own terminal, even encrypted. It was too risky and he was too careful. Besides, there was an Internet cafe around the corner where the baristas were hot and the coffee was better.
Chapter 59
Liv spent the next few minutes looking for words in the jumble of letters and writing them down in a list. She got words like SALT, LAST, TASK, MASK — nothing earth-shattering, nothing like ‘GRAIL’ or ‘CROSS’ or any of the other things the Sacrament was rumoured to be; certainly nothing worth dying for.
She tried making a single word from the capitalized letters — MAT — and studied what was left — s a l a k. She looked up at Arkadian. ‘What language do they speak in the Citadel?’
He shrugged. ‘Greek, Latin, Aramaic, English, Hebrew — all the modern languages and lots of the dead ones. There’s supposed to be a massive library in there, full of ancient texts. If your brother had anything to do with that side of things, I suppose the message could be written in any language.’
‘Great.’
‘But I don’t think he’d do that. Why would he send you a message you wouldn’t understand?’
Liv let out a long breath and picked up the photograph of her brother’s body. Her eyes traced the neat lines encircling his shoulders, upper thighs and neck, the T-shaped cross burned deep into the flesh of his left shoulder.
‘Maybe there’s something in these scars,’ she said. ‘Like a map, maybe.’
‘I agree they’re significant, but I think these symbols are more important. He took pains to scratch them on to five tiny seeds, then swallowed them, along with your phone number, and jumped into our jurisdiction so that they would be found during a post-mortem.’
Liv turned her attention back to the newspaper, the picture of Samuel now surrounded by the letters he’d taken such trouble to hide.
‘I want to see him,’ she said.
‘I don’t think that’s wise,’ Arkadian said softly. ‘Your brother fell from a very great height. His injuries were extensive, and we’ve conducted a thorough post-mortem. It would be better for you to wait.’
‘Wait until what? Until he’s been tidied up?’
‘Miss Adamsen, I don’t think you realize what happens to a body during a post-mortem.’
Liv took a deep breath and fixed him with her bright green eyes. ‘After a thorough external examination the coroner makes a Y-shaped incision on the torso, cracks the sternum and removes the heart, the lungs and the liver
