The Key

71

Arkadian felt the phone shiver and squinted at the display through the lower half of his glasses. The number was withheld. He stood up from his desk and moved quickly across the crowded room.

‘Hello?’ he said, pushing through the door and starting down the stairs to the exit.

‘It’s Gabriel.’

‘Hey, I was just going to call you,’ Arkadian cut him off before he could say any more. ‘I’m leaving the office right now and my phone’s about to die. Let me give you another number to ring. I’ll be there in five minutes.’ He read out the number of a landline he had written on his hand, then hung up before Gabriel could say anything else.

Gabriel listened to the disconnect tone in his ear, surprised at the brevity of the conversation. Arkadian clearly didn’t want to talk, not on his mobile at least.

Five minutes.

He looked up at the wall of books lining Dr Anata’s study. Maybe Arkadian needed five minutes to set up some kind of super trace. He’d read about new supercomputers, developed by the CIA as a weapon in the war on terror, that could chase down even the most complexly routed calls in seconds. The last thing he needed was to get caught and end up in another prison cell. Dr Anata should have delivered the message by now. Which meant he would have an appointment at the Citadel later that night, and there was no way on earth he could afford to miss it.

He opened the browser on his phone and tapped the number Arkadian had given him into the search window. A page of results appeared and he clicked a couple open. Both listed the number to a public phone in the Basilica Ferrumvia, Ruin’s main train station. He frowned. It seemed an odd choice. Generic public phones were what people used when they wanted to talk anonymously to the police, not the other way round.

Gabriel glanced over to the TV flickering in the corner of the room. The time stamp in the corner of the screen increased by one minute: still four minutes left to decide whether to call back or not.

He had been watching the news channels for most of the day, keeping up to speed on what was happening in between making calls to various contacts and acquaintances in his bid to arrange safe passage to Turkey for Liv. He’d pulled in about every favour he had and she was now booked on a freightliner under a false name and with a false passport. He’d tried to call her to let her know, but she wasn’t answering her phone. Maybe she was asleep. He hoped so. The clock ticked on the wall. On the TV a report about minor damage to several historic buildings ended and another about the deaths at the hospital began. A picture of his mother flashed up and he turned away. He looked at the time on his phone.

Five minutes were up.

He dialled the number.

Arkadian could already hear the phone ringing as he fought through the crowds in the huge glass-and-steel-vaulted expanse of the station building. It stopped just as he reached it. He swore loud enough to turn a few heads then pretended to fish around in his pocket for some change so he could stay by the phone. It rang again almost immediately.

‘I’m here,’ he said.

‘What’s with the new number, you got a better trace on this line?’

‘No trace,’ Arkadian said, catching his breath, ‘quite the opposite. My phone is easier to tap — it’s already set up for it — so I thought I’d go off the radar. That way we can talk in confidence. Listen, I’m very, very sorry about what happened at the hospital.’

Gabriel said nothing.

‘I also checked on all the records relating to your escape from the police cells and you were right: everything’s disappeared — CCTV footage, prisoner admissions logs, everything.’

‘So if there’s no evidence of my escape, I guess no one will be looking for me.’

‘Oh, they’re looking, all right. Only now they have a different reason to find you. They lifted your prints from the hospital. You’re the prime suspect for all three murders.’

Gabriel let this sink in. It had not shown up on the news. The police were obviously keeping a tight lid on it, presumably because they thought he was still around and didn’t want to scare him off.

‘That cop was no cop,’ he said, almost to himself.

‘I know. I checked him out. I’m trying to find out where he came from, but so far I’ve hit a dead end. I don’t know where you are, but you need to keep your head down.’

‘Why are you on my side all of a sudden?’

‘Because you were right; there’s something rotten at the heart of all this. I feel terrible that I didn’t do more to protect your mother. I should have realized the danger to her, to all of you. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

‘What about Liv? The same people are looking for her too.’

Arkadian let out a long breath. ‘I think they may already have found her.’ Then he ran through the conversation he’d had with the New Jersey cop.

‘She’s not dead,’ Gabriel said when he’d finished. ‘If they wanted to kill her, then the cop would have found her body in that hotel room. They’re bringing her here. They must know that she’s carrying the Sacrament, and they want it back.’

He looked at his watch, calculating the time in New Jersey. ‘What time did you speak to this cop?’

‘About twenty minutes ago.’

‘And did he give any indication of how long she might have been missing?’

‘He said he picked her up from the airport then dropped her off at the hotel around four in the morning. He checked up on her again around nine, after she didn’t answer her phone. There’d been a fire alarm at the hotel just after seven. He wanted to see if she was OK, but she had already gone.’

‘The fire alarm was a decoy. That’s when they must have grabbed her.’

‘I think so too. I checked immigration for any record of her passport showing up on outbound flights, but so far there’s nothing.’

‘They won’t take her out under her own name. They’ll ship her through on a charter or a private flight with false papers.’

‘Then we need to intercept her this end.’

Gabriel’s mind raced through the logistics. The two airports that served Ruin processed hundreds of flights a day. The first time Liv had flown into Ruin he had watched one airport and Kathryn the other. Now his mother was dead and if he set foot within half a mile of either airport he would be picked up by the security teams in a flash.

‘Do you have anyone you can trust who could run a stakeout at the airports?’

Arkadian thought of Yun Haldin and his security company. He trusted Yun, but his operation was full of ex-cops and he couldn’t vouch for all of them. ‘Frankly, the way things stand, I don’t trust anyone. And if she comes in as freight anyone running surveillance won’t spot her anyway.’

Gabriel looked up at the TV screen, trying to think through their problem objectively. A reporter was standing by the Citadel, the caption beneath him read: WHERE ARE THE CITADEL SURVIVORS?

Then he realized he was staring at the solution. ‘We don’t need to stake out two airports,’ he said, ‘we just need to stake out the Citadel — that’s where they’ll be bringing her. Let’s say they grabbed her sometime between seven and nine in New Jersey, then we have a two-hour window to work forward from. A direct flight here would take twelve hours. What’s the time difference between Ruin and New Jersey?’

‘Seven hours.’

‘So, say she took off around nine. Add twelve hours — that makes it nine o’clock in the evening in the States. Four o’clock in the morning in Ruin.’

‘The perfect time to bring someone into the Citadel without being seen.’

‘Exactly. All we need to do is stake out the mountain in the small hours and ambush anyone who shows up.’

Gabriel frowned, suddenly realizing the flaw in this plan. He wouldn’t be able to stake out the Citadel tonight, he would hopefully already be inside it. He thought of Arkadian with his arm in a sling, standing vigil on his own. He needed to draft in some help, but knowing who to trust made that risky and difficult.

The picture on the TV cut to the mayor, standing at the base of the mountain behind a podium weighed down with microphones from all the major news networks. Gabriel smiled for the first time since he’d spoken to Liv.

‘I need you to make some calls,’ he said.