The Key

23

Ortus Offices, Garden District, Ruin

Ajda Demir squinted out of the fourth-floor window at the bright evening, holding her hand up against the reflected glare from the wet streets. The movement reflected in the glass, drawing her attention to the transparent version of herself hovering like a spectre in front of her. The story of the past week was written on her face: dark circles under her eyes, her forehead creased with worry, silver hair escaping from the usually immaculate confines of her scraped-back bun. She reached up and carefully smoothed it down, as if this small act could somehow return everything to order.

Turning from the ghost of herself, she surveyed the chaos that had been brought into her ordered world. The room she was in resembled a small classroom, with strip lights overhead and desks in lines that usually housed a mixture of fundraisers and aid workers who quietly ran one of the charity’s larger projects based in central Sudan. Following the explosion at the Citadel, however, all that had stopped. Ortus accounts had been frozen worldwide pending a full enquiry into why the head of the charity had taken a truckful of fertilizer, donated in good faith by a large, well-respected conglomerate, and used it to try to blow up the world’s oldest and most sacred monastery. For the past week a team of investigators had been camped out here, checking through the company accounts and records, searching for proof that the charity was a cover for a church-hating terrorist organization. They had found nothing, of course, but it didn’t matter. The PR fallout had been immense. As well as fielding press calls and fending off reporters, Ajda had been busy compiling a steadily growing list of the various companies and funding bodies who were severing their ties with the charity. The towering heap of boxes before her, all of which needed re-sorting and filing away, was a physical manifestation of the huge mess the organization was now in.

But it wasn’t the extra work that was making her soul heavy. It was the invisible cost, the unquantifiable ripples that this mess had caused. Through gaps in the piles of boxes she could see photos and maps pinned to the blank walls showing the projects that had been obscured by this investigation: a water sanitation and filtration system in the Sudan; a partially built new school in Sierra Leone; freshly ploughed fields in Somalia that had previously been sown with nothing but landmines. The people in these countries were the real victims. They wouldn’t understand why their shattered lives were no longer being rebuilt.

Ajda felt the pressure of the day weighing upon her and listened out for thunder, hoping it might roll down from the mountains to clear the air. Instead she heard something that made her eyes widen and her skin go cold. It was the creak of a foot on a floorboard — there was someone in the building with her.

She listened for further noises, hoping for the call of a familiar voice or the sound of a conversation. But there was nothing. Everyone had gone for the day. She had locked the front door herself after the last person had left.

It came again: the creak of a floorboard, followed by a soft click.

It had come from somewhere above her, where no one was supposed to be. The first four floors of the building were taken up by offices. The fifth was the private apartment of Kathryn Mann, whose family had once owned the whole building. These days she ran Ortus and ‘lived above the shop’, as she put it. But she was not in her flat, she was in hospital.

Another sound.

Softer now, like a drawer being opened.

Ajda stole across the floor on light feet, using the noises from above as cover for her own movement. She reached the door to the stairwell and looked up at the fifth-floor landing.

One of the skylights was open.

The faint noises of activity continued to float down from above, too careful to be innocent, too loud to be ignored. Ajda crept up the stairs, keeping to the wall where the stair treads were firmer and less likely to creak. The door to the apartment was open. Beyond it a light was on. She paused for a second, uncertain what to do next. The sound of a filing cabinet ratcheting open overrode her fear. Whoever it was, they were going through private files, and that she wouldn’t stand for. She strode up the final few stairs and crossed the landing to the door.

Inside the flat a uniformed cop was on his knees by a filing cabinet.

‘Can I help you?’ Ajda said, in a tone clearly meant to convey the exact opposite.

The cop removed something from beneath the drawer then stood up and turned round.

‘Hello, Ajda,’ Gabriel said, walking across to the large floor-to-ceiling bookcase.

Ajda had to fight back an uncharacteristic urge to rush over and hug him. ‘I… I thought you were in jail,’ she said.

‘I was.’ He squatted down, reaching for a black calfskin-bound copy of Jane Eyre on a lower shelf. ‘And now I’m not.’

He pressed the spine of the book and the whole lower quarter of the bookshelf sprang open with a soft click. Ajda thought she’d known every inch of the office, but she had not been aware of the false panel and the cupboard concealed behind it.

A loud hammering from the ground floor made them both spin round.

‘That’ll be for me,’ Gabriel said, unplugging a fax machine and lifting it out of the cupboard. ‘Please don’t answer it.’

The hammering continued in the sort of aggressive and persistent way that meant either police or debt collectors were outside the door. Ajda realized what must have happened and immediately felt fearful. Gabriel and his mother were good people. She’d worked with them both for long enough to know that much. A week ago she would have felt compelled to go and let the police in if they’d come calling. But after watching them trash her offices and trample underfoot the good names of those who worked there, she had changed her opinion. They could hammer until their fists bled: she would not let them in.

Gabriel laid the fax machine on the floor and turned it over. On the back were sockets for the phone line and power cable as well as a keyhole. Gabriel took a small key from the envelope he had found under the drawer, twisted it in the lock and lifted the top of the unit off. Inside, the electronics and working parts of a real fax machine had been squashed into about a third of the area. The rest was filled with stacks of different coloured passports and plastic bags containing bundles of currency in various denominations. Ajda saw dollars and euros as well as Turkish lira, Sudanese pounds and what looked like Iraqi dinars. There was also a thick stack of credit cards. ‘What is all this?’ she asked, her ordered world crumbling a little further.

Gabriel pocketed three of the passports and all of the cash. ‘A lot of my work out in the field is under the radar,’ he explained, quickly sorting through the credit cards. ‘Many of the most needy people in the world are governed by the most corrupt. If we played by the rules, we’d never get anywhere, and the weakest people wouldn’t stand a chance. I’m afraid I have to bend the rules from time to time in order to get things done.’

The hammering started up again downstairs, joined now by the sound of the reception phone ringing.

‘I don’t expect you to do anything you’re not comfortable with,’ Gabriel said, taking her gently by her shoulders. ‘And if you want to go down and let them in, that’s OK. None of this is your fight. But my mother’s in danger and I want to help her, and you could help me.’

The hammering stopped as abruptly as it had started and the phone stopped ringing. Ajda looked up into Gabriel’s earnest eyes and smiled.

‘What would you like me to do?’