Athanasius and Father Thomas crowded round the only other workstation in the room, tapping messages to each other on a blank document so that Axel and Malachi could not discover what they were discussing. Athanasius finished a summary of his fruitless search in the ossuary ending in the crucial question he hoped Thomas, architect of the library’s database, could now help him with.› Can you access the library inventory immediately following the ossuary renovations and see if anything was added?
Father Thomas nodded, took over the keyboard and started tapping away. First he called up a general diary program and found the exact dates the ossuary had been renovated. It was listed in the general maintenance log over eight years previously. He copied the dates into a search facility on the main cataloguing program and hit return.
Pages of results filled the screen.
Athanasius felt weary just looking at them all. The Citadel was voracious in its acquisition of every publication, research paper or book that had anything remotely to do with the Sacrament. The number of new additions listed, even limiting the search to the weeks immediately following the restorations, ran into thousands. Sorting through them was going to take hours — days, maybe — and the inventory was far from detailed. Athanasius took possession of the keyboard again. › Can you refine the search and look for anything archaeological — specifically anything etched on stone?
Thomas returned to the search window and tapped in a string of codes that meant nothing to Athanasius but clearly made sense to the program. This time only two items came back.
The results were laid out in a grid of four columns with a unique number on the left, a brief description of the item, a column detailing where it came from and a final column showing where it was now.
The first entry was described as a clay tablet written in proto-cuneiform script and incorporating Tau symbols in its design. It had come from Iraq after being acquired on behalf of the Citadel and was now stored in the Babylonian section of the library, along with several thousand similar examples acquired over nearly as many years.
The second item was more of a mystery.
It was described simply as a stone tablet with markings. The column showing where it had come from contained a dash and the final one, indicating where it was now stored had the letters ASV written in it, the number 2, and a date from three years ago. Athanasius assumed it must be more computer jargon, but when he pointed at it Thomas shrugged and shook his head, clearly as baffled as he was. He glanced up at the hunched figure across the room. ‘Brother Malachi,’ he called out. The librarian looked up in shock as if he’d forgotten there was anyone else in the room. ‘I’m running some systems tests on the inventory database and I’ve found an anomaly. Could you take a look at it for me?’
Malachi rose unwillingly from his seat and shuffled towards them. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked, standing as far back as he could, as if fearful he might catch the Lamentation from being near them.
‘This entry seems to have been corrupted in some way. Does it make any sense to you?’
Malachi peered through his thick glasses and huffed. ‘It’s not corrupted,’ he said. ‘The dash means it didn’t come from outside the mountain. It will most likely have been transferred from a different department in the library, so there’s no acquisition information to fill in.’
Thomas nodded. ‘And the destination code?’
‘That means it is no longer here.’ He pointed at the letters ASV. ‘That stands for Archivum Secretum Vaticanum and the date indicates when it was transferred there.’
Athanasius was shocked by the information almost as much as he was by the matter-of-fact way in which it had been delivered. ‘But I thought nothing ever left the mountain.’
‘It is rare, but it does happen. There were four transfers last century, for example — all to the Vatican Secret Archives.’
‘And the number two,’ he asked, pointing at the one part Malachi had not explained, ‘what does that stand for?’
‘It identifies the position of the person who made the request. Only the most senior clerics in the Vatican can authorize the transfer of material from our library and each of them is assigned a number. Number one refers to the Pope and number two is his second in command. This transfer was ordered by the Cardinal Secretary of State, Cardinal Clementi.’
89
Gabriel had done the journey to the border many times before, driving supplies down to the charity’s various projects in Iraq. He told Liv about some of them as they drove — the schools they were building, the wetlands in the south they were re-flooding after Saddam Hussein had drained them to drive out the marsh Arabs who’d lived there for thousands of years. Gabriel talked and Liv listened, stoking the fire of his conversation with the occasional question while she leaned against the hot window and watched the dry, rocky countryside slide past.
The further they got, the more the green vanished and the desert took over. It reflected how she was feeling — as if some vital part of her was disappearing and slowly being replaced by dry dust. At first she tried to convince herself that it was just the residual effects of the sedative; but as the miles wore on and the feeling of emptying out grew stronger she started to think it might be something else. Two days, Gabriel had said; forty-eight hours — and they were going to spend at least half of it travelling, with no guarantees they were even heading in the right direction.
90
Athanasius got up from behind the workstation, stretched the kinks out of his back and made his way across the room to the small door leading to the washroom. Following their conversation with Malachi, he and Father Thomas had scoured the database for any other entries with ASV2 in the requisition line. They discovered Cardinal Secretary Clementi had submitted seven applications in the past three years — almost twice as many as in the whole of the preceding century — starting with the first item, which Athanasius was now convinced was the Starmap. It was the only one that remained unidentified. Of the other six, four were Mesopotamian maps and the remaining two were ancient accounts of travellers who claimed to have discovered the true location of Eden.
As a scholar, Athanasius had come across legends such as these; wild tales of trees that produced magical fruit and underground grottoes filled with vast hoards of gold. He had never seriously considered them to be anything other than allegorical or the fanciful imaginings of ancient storytellers. But, whatever his own thoughts, it was clear that the Cardinal Secretary of State in Rome believed them.
A light flickered on as he stepped into the washroom revealing a row of stone sinks facing a line of stalls. He stepped across to the furthest one and closed the door behind him.
The cubicle was little more than a square stall with a hole cut in the stone floor that led directly to the sewer. To one side was a bucket of water with a wooden cup floating in it that was used as a rudimentary flushing mechanism. There was no lock on the door, so Athanasius leaned against it and took the phone Gabriel had given him from his pocket. It lit up the dim cubicle the moment he touched the screen. He stared down at it, trying to remember the lesson he’d had on how to compose a message. He managed to call up a test message sent from Gabriel, hit the ‘Reply’ option then carefully transcribed a summary of everything he had discovered, working quickly, aware that the longer he was gone the more suspicion it would arouse, then he tapped the send button.
A small box opened up in the middle of the screen: ‘Cannot Send Mail.’
He tried again and got the same message.
Outside, the door opened and someone walked to the sink and started filling it. He slipped the phone in his pocket, mindful of the light it gave off, and poured a cup of water into the hole before opening the door.
Father Thomas was splashing water on to his face when he emerged. Athanasius seized the moment and thrust the phone at him. ‘It’s not working,’ he said, glancing nervously at the door.
