impossible to speak or pass a note to anyone without being spotted. She had to think of another way.
17
Police Headquarters
The stairwell leading to the cell block echoed with the thundering boots of cops responding to the alarm. Gabriel met them on the way up. Nobody gave him a second glance. They’d all caught the message that a guard had been sprayed in the face, so when they encountered one — struggling to breathe, eyes swollen shut, another guard helping him — they hurried on past to get at the bastards who’d done it.
Gabriel helped the guard along, his arm wrapped round him, his hand out of sight against the wall, pointing the man’s own gun directly at his crotch to keep him quiet. Gabriel’s other hand held a walkie-talkie that he’d grabbed from the control room and into which he maintained a one-sided dialogue to stop anyone striking up a conversation with him and also to cover up a good portion of his face.
They reached the top of the stairs as another pair of cops burst through the fire doors and started heading down. Gabriel slipped through the door after them into a short corridor. Ahead of him, through a square window set into a door, he could see the reception area. He kept the guard moving, jamming the gun harder into his pelvis to remind him it was there.
When they were a few metres short of the door he crooked the walkie-talkie under his chin, snatched the spray canister off his belt and gave the guard another blast full in the face. He slipped the gun under his shirt and into the waistband of his trousers then burst through the door and into a room full of cops.
All heads turned as they entered the hall, drawn by the fresh coughing fit that accompanied their entrance. The two nearest uniforms rushed forward and took hold of the convulsing guard. Gabriel let them take him and spun away towards the exit. ‘I’ve brought him up to the lobby,’ he barked into the walkie-talkie. ‘Where the hell’s that ambulance?’ Then he stepped out of the front door and was free.
He had no idea how long the guard’s seizure would last, but he wouldn’t have long. The cops in the basement must have worked things out by now. The road he was in was thinly populated, but the street ahead was busier. If he could make it to the corner and into the crowds he’d stand a chance. The corner was maybe six metres away. He kept the walkie-talkie clamped to his face and his eyes forward, resisting the urge to run.
He weaved in and out of what foot traffic there was, putting as many bodies between himself and whoever would shortly be following. The ground was wet from the recent downpour though it was no longer raining. It wasn’t much of a break, but he’d take what he could get. It made his clothes, still drenched from the sprinklers, seem slightly less unusual.
He made the corner just as a siren started up behind him. Squinting against the glare of the bright sky, he matched his pace with the evening crowd and dropped the walkie-talkie into a bin. He had to get off the street as soon as possible. A wet cop wasn’t the best disguise for a fugitive.
18
Davlat Hastenesi Hospital
The challenge of working out how to reveal Oscar’s hidden message using the limited resources at her disposal had given Kathryn the greatest feeling of hope and purpose she had experienced in days.
From her fieldwork she knew you needed three basic things to start a fire: fuel, an accelerant and a flame. For fuel she had torn a couple of pages from the middle of her medical notes, not daring to risk taking any from the notebook, then shredded them to make a loose pile on one edge of the window ledge.
For the accelerant she’d had to think laterally. Roughly speaking it could be anything that would intensify a fire. She’d found what she was looking for in the hand sanitizer-gel dispenser by the door, the sort used in all modern hospitals. The label told her this particular brand was 40 per cent alcohol. Alcohol evaporated quickly to leave skin dry and had antiseptic qualities of its own. It was also a very effective accelerant.
She squirted a thick dollop into her hand, scraped it on to the sill then stacked the pile of shredded paper on top of it so it could start absorbing the flammable fumes as they evaporated. The longer she waited, the more saturated the paper would become and the better her chance of lighting it. But she still needed a flame, and for that she needed the sun to come out.
She lay on her bed, staring out of her window at the bright band of sky between the passing rain clouds and the tops of the mountains. The last time she had lit a fire this way had been on the final trip she had taken with John. It had been one of those spur-of-the-moment things arranged, before Gabriel returned to college and John headed off to Iraq on the dig he would never return from.
They had spent the day off-season hiking along the Presidential Range in New Hampshire and got caught in a freak storm. By the time they made it to where they’d parked their hire car they were soaked to the skin, only to discover they had a flat battery. They headed back to a Ranger’s hut they had passed on the path where some weekend walker had used up the firewood and not bothered to restock it. She and Gabriel had collected as many fallen branches as they could, but it was all too wet to light. They hadn’t even noticed John had gone until he stepped into the cabin brandishing one of his socks on the end of a long stick, dripping with diesel from the car’s fuel tank. They had piled the wet sticks on top of the sock and waited for the fumes to permeate the stack, the same way Kathryn was waiting now. Liquid diesel doesn’t burn well, but the ether-infused sticks had burned just fine. They had spent the night there, huddling together, warmed by the fire — the last time they were all together. Kathryn smiled as she recalled it, remembering their closeness and their firelit smiles while the storm raged outside. Then she realized that the warmth was not in her mind, it was on her skin and flooding the room. The sun had come out.
She leapt out of bed and lunged towards the window. Sunlight was filling the street with warm afternoon light. It had dropped below the clouds and would soon fall behind the distant mountains. She needed to move fast.
She fumbled her reading glasses from the top of her head, and held them over the pile of shredded paper, the magnifying lenses focusing a pinpoint of light on to the top of it.
A tiny image of the sun appeared on the paper and she held it as steady as her hand would allow. The bright dot darkened. It started to smoulder. The paper curled into ash around the dot, but it did not light. She moved the glasses, chasing the edge of the blackening paper with the bright dot, focusing the heat on the meagre kindling she had made. A curl of red glowed at the edge as the paper turned to ash but still it did not catch. She cupped her hand round it and blew gently across the top, trying not to disturb the pile or blow away the alcohol fumes trapped inside. She continued to blow, gentle and steady, focusing her attention on the red ember until her lungs were empty. Then, just as her breath was almost exhausted, it finally caught and flame started to devour the ripped-up paper.
She grabbed the diary from the bed and opened it to the centre pages, which she had marked with several more squares of torn paper. She had no idea how long the hidden message might be, but she only had a limited amount of fuel and the flame was burning quickly. She screwed up a square of paper, fed it to the fire, then gently offered up the first blank page to the flame.
The effect was almost instant. The heat darkened the paper wherever acid ink had soaked into it, creating swirls of symbols that steadily filled the page. The body of text, arranged to form the shape of an inverted Tau, was a mirror of the first prophecy she had grown up with and written in the same ancient script. Kathryn’s eyes scanned the Malan symbols, the language of her tribe, translating them in her head as she read:
The Key unlocks the Sacrament
The Sacrament becomes the Key
And all the Earth shalt tremble
The Key must follow the Starmap Home
There to quench the fire of the dragon within the full phase of a moon
Lest the Key shalt perish, the Earth shalt splinter and a blight shalt prosper, marking the end of all days
