The Key

98

Arkadian sat in a busy Internet cafe on the great Eastern Boulevard. Following the email he’d received from inside the Citadel, he had bought two hours of terminal time on a cheap, anonymous computer and got to work. It was rapidly becoming clear that the Vatican Secret Archives were not called ‘secret’ for nothing. You couldn’t just call up a web page and browse the contents. You couldn’t gain any kind of access at all without first going through a lengthy and prohibitively complex process of presenting your credentials and requesting a specific text, which would then be considered by a panel of bishops who only met once a month, and then — maybe — you might be allowed an hour in a reading room to study the document before it disappeared back into the dry darkness of the archives. He’d had to borrow an academic research ID from a lecturer friend of his at the University of Ruin just to access the website at all. From this he had at least ascertained that there was a whole section on ancient maps in the archive, but there was no information on any of them. Athanasius’s message had given him exact transfer dates of the documents but without any detail there was no way of cross-referencing them. In frustration he typed Imago Astrum into the search box and hit return. He was immediately locked out of the site and further attempts to re-access it were blocked.

Next he looked into the man who had requested the transfer. If he could find something on him that he could use as leverage, he might be able to get him to reveal what the relics he had requisitioned were or what their significance was.

He had heard of Cardinal Clementi before and recognized him the moment he saw his picture in a news item; a fat, white-haired man in cardinal’s robes shaking hands with the Chancellor of Germany. He was described in the article as a force for reform in the Church, the eminence grise behind the recently elected Pope. Several more articles said pretty much the same thing. They painted a picture of a man on a mission to place the Church back at the centre of world events. Judging by the calibre of politician he was pictured with, it looked as though he was succeeding: there he was, all pink flesh and smiles, shaking hands with the Prime Minister of England, the President of France, the President of the United States. The political commentators all agreed that his easy acceptance at global power tables was down to one thing: money. After decades of mismanagement and scandal, Cardinal Clementi had apparently restored the finances of the Church almost overnight. And it was this, more than anything else, that set Arkadian’s detective instincts bristling.

After almost twenty years wading through the darker waters of the human condition, Arkadian had learned that money was pretty much the root of all evil. Crimes of passion certainly happened, but not nearly as much as TV shows and crime fiction would have you believe. His experience had taught him that if you wanted to catch a criminal then, nine times out of ten, you had to follow the money: it was a cliche, but only because it was true.

He checked the dates when the relic was requisitioned against the news stories. All the ones charting the improvement in the Church’s financial standing came after the transfer. Prior to this there was hardly a mention of the Cardinal in the news, and all economic reports relating to the Church were dire. Something significant had happened to change the game, and it had happened astonishingly quickly.

Arkadian logged on to the secure Interpol site and keyed in a series of codes to gain access to the companies directory. It contained details of every registered business across Europe along with their tax returns and names of the directors. One of the main problems in running a lucrative but illegal business was how to spend the vast amounts of money being made without drawing attention to it. The most popular method of laundering money was to run it through the books of a legitimate business, which was why Interpol had set up this database.

Arkadian typed ‘Clementi’ into the search box. Hundreds of matches came back.

Because of his position and the Church’s extensive investment portfolio he was personally linked to companies all over the world. Arkadian set to work sifting through them, looking for anything that might generate the sort of money that could refloat an organization as huge as the Catholic Church. If the legends were true and the relic was indeed a map showing the way to vast buried hoards of treasure, then the most obvious way to hide its discovery would be a gold-mining operation. Ancient treasure would be hard to turn into cash but pretending you’d struck gold and melting that treasure down into bullion would solve the problem instantly. A gold mine would also provide the perfect cover for the purchase of mineral rights as well as all the equipment to dig things out of the ground and smelt it. Only there was no gold mine.

He started cross-checking each company’s tax returns for anything that looked profitable enough to explain the Church’s sudden change of fortunes. Again there was nothing. After over an hour of searching, the only company he had highlighted as a potential candidate was an oil exploration company.

On paper it was wrong. It was running at a huge loss and was drilling in an area that had been tested before and come up dry. But, of all the companies listed, it was the only one that might legitimately dig around to see what it could find, and — most crucially — it was in the right place. The registered head office of Dragonfields SPA was in Vatican City, but they had office space in Baghdad and a compound operating under licence in the Syrian Desert. The licence gave co-ordinates marking out the broad patch of wilderness that was now theirs for the plundering.

He clicked on Google Earth, input the co-ordinates and within a minute found himself staring down on a brown patch of nothingness. He zoomed out until he picked up a road then scrolled eastwards along it until he finally found a sprawling grid of buildings the same colour as the earth. The image settled and Arkadian almost punched the air when the name of the other place popped up on the map. It was Al-Hillah.