The Key

88

It hadn’t taken much to convert the reading room into a makeshift infirmary. The desks had been moved aside to create space for four beds and the shelves that were normally packed with books were now crammed with boxes of syringes, sterile gloves, masks and strong sedatives. Another shelf was entirely filled with canvas straps, lying in readiness to restrain those who showed symptoms of what everyone was now calling ‘the Lamentation’.

Axel was pacing, fuelled by frustration and fear, settling on his bed only fitfully before starting his circuit of the room again. Athanasius felt sorry for him. As captain of the guards, Axel was clearly feeling the stress and indignity of this incarceration more than the rest of them. He had also seen his life’s ambition snatched away for a second time. He must have thought his elevation to Sanctus was guaranteed with the arrival back in the Citadel of Brother Dragan; then this had happened.

Father Malachi was dealing with the quarantine in a different way. He sat at one of the workstations, his face bathed in the green glow of a terminal screen, zoning everything out so he could disappear into his work. Unbeknown to the outside world, the vast majority of the millions of books and documents in the great library had been digitized and Malachi and his staff had been cataloguing and cross-referencing them for over a year. He therefore had enough to keep him busy for years to come, so long as he remained connected to his beloved library and unaffected by the disease.

Athanasius and Father Thomas crowded round the only other workstation in the room, tapping messages to each other on a blank document so that Axel and Malachi could not discover what they were discussing. Athanasius finished a summary of his fruitless search in the ossuary ending in the crucial question he hoped Thomas, architect of the library’s database, could now help him with.› Can you access the library inventory immediately following the ossuary renovations and see if anything was added?

Father Thomas nodded, took over the keyboard and started tapping away. First he called up a general diary program and found the exact dates the ossuary had been renovated. It was listed in the general maintenance log over eight years previously. He copied the dates into a search facility on the main cataloguing program and hit return.

Pages of results filled the screen.

Athanasius felt weary just looking at them all. The Citadel was voracious in its acquisition of every publication, research paper or book that had anything remotely to do with the Sacrament. The number of new additions listed, even limiting the search to the weeks immediately following the restorations, ran into thousands. Sorting through them was going to take hours — days, maybe — and the inventory was far from detailed. Athanasius took possession of the keyboard again. › Can you refine the search and look for anything archaeological — specifically anything etched on stone?

Thomas returned to the search window and tapped in a string of codes that meant nothing to Athanasius but clearly made sense to the program. This time only two items came back.

The results were laid out in a grid of four columns with a unique number on the left, a brief description of the item, a column detailing where it came from and a final column showing where it was now.

The first entry was described as a clay tablet written in proto-cuneiform script and incorporating Tau symbols in its design. It had come from Iraq after being acquired on behalf of the Citadel and was now stored in the Babylonian section of the library, along with several thousand similar examples acquired over nearly as many years.

The second item was more of a mystery.

It was described simply as a stone tablet with markings. The column showing where it had come from contained a dash and the final one, indicating where it was now stored had the letters ASV written in it, the number 2, and a date from three years ago. Athanasius assumed it must be more computer jargon, but when he pointed at it Thomas shrugged and shook his head, clearly as baffled as he was. He glanced up at the hunched figure across the room. ‘Brother Malachi,’ he called out. The librarian looked up in shock as if he’d forgotten there was anyone else in the room. ‘I’m running some systems tests on the inventory database and I’ve found an anomaly. Could you take a look at it for me?’

Malachi rose unwillingly from his seat and shuffled towards them. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked, standing as far back as he could, as if fearful he might catch the Lamentation from being near them.

‘This entry seems to have been corrupted in some way. Does it make any sense to you?’

Malachi peered through his thick glasses and huffed. ‘It’s not corrupted,’ he said. ‘The dash means it didn’t come from outside the mountain. It will most likely have been transferred from a different department in the library, so there’s no acquisition information to fill in.’

Thomas nodded. ‘And the destination code?’

‘That means it is no longer here.’ He pointed at the letters ASV. ‘That stands for Archivum Secretum Vaticanum and the date indicates when it was transferred there.’

Athanasius was shocked by the information almost as much as he was by the matter-of-fact way in which it had been delivered. ‘But I thought nothing ever left the mountain.’

‘It is rare, but it does happen. There were four transfers last century, for example — all to the Vatican Secret Archives.’

‘And the number two,’ he asked, pointing at the one part Malachi had not explained, ‘what does that stand for?’

‘It identifies the position of the person who made the request. Only the most senior clerics in the Vatican can authorize the transfer of material from our library and each of them is assigned a number. Number one refers to the Pope and number two is his second in command. This transfer was ordered by the Cardinal Secretary of State, Cardinal Clementi.’