The Key

68

The fourth floor of the Ruin police building was as busy and chaotic as Arkadian had ever seen it. Raised voices and ringing phones filled the open-plan office and the whole place smelled of stewed coffee and stress. The major problem was looting. In the wake of the earthquake the usual opportunists had stalked through the darkness, sifting through shops and businesses cracked open by the tremors. It was only in the cold light of day, when everyone else stopped rejoicing that they were still alive and turned their attention to more temporal matters, that they discovered they had been robbed. The moment the power had come back on, and the phones with them, the robbery section of the Robbery and Homicide Division had been inundated.

Arkadian sat at his desk in the corner, doing his best to shut out the noise. Today he was one of the few people dealing with a body and not a break-in. Since returning from the hospital and regaining access to the databases, he’d been trying to discover where the dead police officer had come from. He’d found no mention of a Nesim Senturk in the service records from the surrounding districts so had spread his search wider, taking in all departments, anywhere in the country. His computer terminal was now busily crunching through all the data, looking for the needle of one single name in a haystack made up of years of accumulated details.

In the meantime Arkadian had been doing what he could to check up on Liv. A phone call to Yun had confirmed that her flight had landed a few minutes ahead of schedule at 3.05 a.m. local time. Arkadian had then called the security police at Newark International Airport and, after explaining who he was and undergoing a lengthy security check that involved giving out more personal details than he usually gave his bank, they put him through to the main control centre. Here the duty manager confirmed that Liv Adamsen’s passport had been swiped through immigration eleven minutes after her flight landed and that CCTV showed her leaving the main terminal building a minute later and being picked up by a cop in a police cruiser; he even gave him the registration number. A further call to the New Jersey Police Department, and a slightly less stringent security check, and Arkadian had a name: Sergeant William Godlewski, currently off duty, though the desk sergeant promised he’d contact him and get him to call back.

Arkadian smiled for the first time in hours. Liv was OK. She obviously had an American version of himself looking out for her, and that made him feel a whole lot better. Moving down to the next item on his ‘To Do’ list, he punched in an extension number and covered his other ear to shut out the noise of the room.

‘Cell-block security desk.’

‘Suleiyman? It’s Arkadian.’

‘Hey, I thought you was off sick with lead poisoning?’

‘Yeah, well, that didn’t really work out. Half the city’s been robbed, so who can sit at home watching game shows?’

‘Better than the stuff I get to watch all day. How’s the arm?’

‘Hurts. Listen, could you call up the camera feeds around the time of the breakout yesterday so I can come down and take a look?’

‘Er… no, actually I can’t. We only just got the full systems up and running again, and several files are missing.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Everything from yesterday afternoon.’

Arkadian felt his cop’s instincts tingle. ‘Any chance you could restore them?’

‘No. The files haven’t been corrupted — they’re not there. The backup system must have failed.’

‘Has this sort of thing ever happened before?’

‘No — first time.’

‘Any idea what might have caused it?’

Suleiyman exhaled like a builder pricing up a tricky job. ‘Could be lots of things: there was a load of water dumped in the cells when the sprinklers went off, that might have tripped something; the system’s a piece of crap anyway and is always breaking down; plus we just had a major earthquake — take your pick.’

Arkadian suspected it was none of these. It was too convenient and the files that were missing too specific. ‘OK, thanks, Suleiyman. Let me know if they show up.’

‘Will do, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

He replaced the phone and glanced up at the busy room, wondering if whoever had destroyed them was standing here now. A beep drew his attention to the screen. He had a match. The top sheet of a service record filled the screen with a photograph of a slight man in glasses in one corner. He didn’t look anything like the officer Arkadian had seen lying dead on the street. The only things that did match were the name, the badge number, and the fact that both men were dead. The real Sub-Inspector Nesim Senturk had served in the main metropolitan district of the Istanbul police force and been killed in the line of duty over a year ago during a raid on a drug trafficker. Whoever was now lying on the slab in the Ruin city morgue was an impostor, slotted into the guard detail with a genuine name and badge number by someone with access to the police files. Whoever was behind all this was clearly knowledgeable, powerful and well connected.

The desk phone rang, cutting through the din of the room.

‘Arkadian!’ he answered, clamping it to one ear and his hand to the other.

‘Yeah, this is Sergeant Godlewski from the New Jersey PD. I got a message to call about Liv Adamsen.’

Arkadian switched to English. ‘Yes, thanks for getting back so quickly.’

‘Do you know where she’s gone?’

The question threw Arkadian. ‘I thought she was with you?’

‘She was. I dropped her off at a safe hotel a few hours ago, but I just got here to check she was OK and she’s gone. All her stuff’s gone too and the room is a mess.’

Then Ski told him about the pages torn from a Bible and Arkadian felt a coldness creep over him as he realized who had her.