The Key

12

Police Headquarters, Central District, Ruin

Gabriel Mann was shoved head first through a fire door by the same stocky guard who had cuffed his hands behind his back a few minutes earlier. He was in the cell block beneath the main Ruin police building, a maze of low ceilings, uneven walls, and cramped corridors, cut hundreds of years previously from the bedrock of the city. Strip lighting flickered green against grey-painted walls, giving the impression that he was in the guts of a building that wasn’t feeling too well.

Gabriel wasn’t feeling his best either.

He had just left a meeting with his legal counsel who had outlined the charges against him. They had found three dead bodies in a hangar at the airport — a location the police could definitively place him at; two had been shot with a nine-millimetre pistol — his hands had tested positive for gunshot residue consistent with nine-millimetre loads; he had been caught on camera at the city morgue at the same time as a body had been stolen; and he had assaulted a police inspector with a hypodermic needle loaded with Ketamine. It was this last charge that had undoubtedly ensured his charmless treatment at the hands of the silent sub-inspector. Most of the others would ultimately go away, but it would take time — and that was something he did not have.

He had replayed what he had witnessed in the Citadel over and over in his head, trying to make sense of it. He had no idea why he had been allowed to walk free, carrying the girl out with him, but he knew it was only a temporary escape. Whatever had happened to Liv at the top of the mountain before he had found her, whether she had discovered the Sacrament or not, was immaterial. The Sanctus monks sworn to protect the mountain’s great secret would regroup and take steps to silence her. Liv was in mortal danger, so was his mother, and so was he, and he couldn’t protect anyone while he was locked up in here. Escape was the only option — he just had no idea how he was going to do it.

He’d been checking the building as he’d marched through it, looking for possible means of escape. Every door they’d passed had opened into other cells; some had prisoners inside, most were empty. The interview room had been up a flight of stairs, which meant the cell block was in some kind of sub-basement. The only way in or out was through the automatic gate he’d passed through on his way down.

Gabriel began to slow as he approached his cell but another shove sent him stumbling straight past. He recovered his balance and kept on walking, his mind racing with the implications. He had been kept in solitary so far, which had suited him fine. A new cell could mean new cellmates. Not good.

They continued walking deeper into the maze. Paint bubbled on the walls where salts had seeped through the rock and nobody had bothered to fix it. There were fewer cells here and the ones they passed were all empty. It smelled mustier too. Unused. They reached the end of the corridor and another sharp shove sent Gabriel barrelling through a set of fire doors into a short tunnel chopped cleanly in half by a wall of bars. On the other side was a cell containing a steel toilet with no seat, a narrow bench built into the wall and a man so large he made everything around him seem as if it belonged in a child’s nursery.

‘Hands through the bars,’ the sub-inspector ordered.

The giant took one huge step forward, covering the entire width of the cell, and passed wrists as thick as sprinter’s legs through the bars. His eyes never left Gabriel’s face.

Gabriel was grabbed from behind and slammed sideways into the wall. ‘Make a move and I’ll stick you with the taser, understand?’ The guard’s breath smelled of coffee and cigarettes.

Gabriel nodded and felt the pressure ease as the guard turned his attention to the giant. It had surprised him when the stocky weightlifter of a sub-inspector had come alone to take him to his cell. Now he knew why: one cop meant less witnesses.

He glanced up at the smoke detector and closed-circuit camera bolted to the underside of the ducting that ran the length of the corridor, one of the old kind that produced a fuzzy black-and-white picture but no sound. The feed would be routed to the control room he’d passed on his way through the entrance gate. Another cop was probably watching now, ready to send in backup if anything went down. Except the camera wasn’t pointing at the cell. So no one could see what was happening inside it; and once the sub-inspector had locked the door and walked away, no one would care.

His eyes returned to the hulking figure on the other side of the bars. The giant was staring straight at him with the cold-eyed menace of a cell-block challenge. Gabriel held his gaze, taking him in, knowing now that looking away would spare him nothing. The man’s eyes were set deep in a flat face that was topped off by a surprisingly conservatively cut bowl of blond hair that he might’ve ripped off an insurance salesman to wear as a hat.

Gabriel held the bottomless eyes for another beat then took in the rest of him. He was immense; a caricature of a man sculpted from solid muscle by years of steroids and single-minded aggression. A cotton shirt strained to contain him, sleeves rolled up over meaty forearms. The handcuffs looked small and ridiculous on his thick wrists and, just above them, was something else that set alarm bells ringing in Gabriel’s head. It was the blurry blue image of a jailhouse tattoo. Generally speaking, the larger the tattoo, the more time its owner had spent in prison. This one was huge. But it wasn’t the giant’s evident criminal past, or even his intimidating size, that caused Gabriel the most concern, it was what the tattoo depicted. The huge image — created by pouring ink on his arm and repeatedly sticking a pin into himself until it was fixed there for ever — was a cross. Somewhere in this steroid-fried monster’s dark past he had found the light of God. And now the Church had found him, and clearly sent him on a mission to do their dark work.

Escape was no longer an option, it was a necessity. Once the guard had strolled away down the corridor Gabriel would be on his own, locked in the bowels of the earth, with this God-loving monster — and unless he did something fast, he would never get out of here alive.