The Key - Simon Toyne

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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.

      13

       Room 410, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

      Kathryn Mann stared at the object that had just slipped out of the evidence bag on to the hospital bed.

      Arkadian had not stayed long. The memory of the last time they had met had hung too heavy over both of them, so he had made his peace offering and left.

      ‘We found it among your father’s things,’ he had told her. ‘There’s a message for you in there. I thought you should see it.’

      Inside the evidence bag she had found a book, bound in leather with a thong wrapped round a button on the cover to keep it closed. Just seeing it had misted her eyes. It was the same old-fashioned make of journal her father had always used. She reached to the bedside table to retrieve her reading glasses then carefully unwound the thong to loosen the cover and found the note written across the middle two pages in her father’s neat hand:

       My dearest Kathryn,

       My love and light. I believe my work is over now and my return to Ruin will be for good this time. I hope I am wrong, but suspect I am not. No matter. I have lived long and you have filled those years with warmth and joy. If I do live, I will keep my promise and show you the next step, as I always said I would. If not, then you must discover it for yourself and decide whether to forgive me.

       Know only that what I kept from you I did for your sake, and for the safety of my grandson.

       Kiss Gabriel for me, and light a candle to my name so I may talk to you still.

       All my love, for now and always,

       Oscar de la Cruz

      Every other page was empty. She reread his note, looking to see if she had missed something, but it remained as opaque as the first time she had read it. What had he kept from her? She had always thought they shared everything, that there were no secrets between them; only now, in death, had she discovered this was not so.

      She remembered how, even when she was a small child, he had shared confidences with her, explaining that they were different from other people, that they were descendants of the Mala, the oldest tribe on earth, usurped by another who had sought to destroy them and bury the knowledge they kept. He had shown her their secret symbols, taught her the Mala language and revealed the mission they shared to restore rightful order to the world. But he had kept something from her so important that he had felt compelled to confess it from beyond the grave. Maybe she hadn’t known him as well as she’d thought.

      Even the note contained something that jarred with her memory of him. He had always been so particular about words, insisting on precision because they carried the most precious cargo of all – meaning. And yet here was a mistake: he had not asked her to light a candle ‘in’ his name, but ‘to’ it.

      Then she realized.

      It wasn’t a mistake at all.

      When she was a girl he had also taught her how their ancestors had kept their secrets. One method was to record messages on paper using lemon juice instead of ink. When the juice dried it was invisible, but the acids affected the paper so that a flame held against it would darken these sections first and reveal the hidden words on the page. When Oscar had written that he wanted her to light a candle ‘to’ his name so he might talk to her still, he had meant precisely that.

      There was another message in the space beneath his signature. All she needed to read it was a flame.

      14

       Police Headquarters, Ruin

      Gabriel’s body flooded with adrenalin as his mind ran through possible scenarios. If he ended up alone in the cell with the giant he would die. He had to do something in the next few seconds, before the guard locked him in. He glanced up at the low ceiling of the cell block, less than a foot above his head at the highest point. Not much room for manoeuvre. Fortunately the guard was short, which gave him a few extra inches, but he was also built like an Olympic weightlifter – and he was armed. As well as a taser he had a riot baton and a can of pepper spray clipped to his belt. At least he didn’t have a gun.

      A loud clang echoed in the cramped space as the guard unlocked the gate to the cell. Gabriel stepped slightly away from the wall, his back to the guard, the weight on the balls of his feet and his knees bending slightly to give him a light, central balance.

      ‘One thousand lira if you put me in another cell,’ he said.

      There was a snort from behind. ‘What you going to do, write me a cheque?’

      Gabriel shook his head. ‘Cash. Right now.’

      He was banking on the cop being an old-school turnkey who wouldn’t baulk at boosting his salary with a bit of freelancing. Cash was a drug to a dirty cop and like any junkie he wouldn’t care where it came from so long as he got a fix.

      ‘Where you going to get a thousand lira?’

      ‘My lawyer just slipped it to me. It’s in my right pocket. Take me to another cell and it’s yours.’

      There was a pause. Gabriel could almost hear the cogs of the man’s brain working.

      He felt something press into the small of his back. ‘Move and you get tasered, straight in your spine. And if that pocket comes up empty, I’m going to keep my finger on the button ’til you piss yourself, understand?’

      Gabriel nodded. ‘What about my new cell?’

      ‘We talk about that later.’

      Gabriel sank a little lower to the ground, focusing on a spot on the wall where the uneven surface jutted slightly. He felt the guard’s hand frisking the outside of his pocket, then slip inside to extract what was in fact a business card his lawyer had given him.

      As part of his military training, Gabriel had undergone several sessions of ‘torture accustomization’, which included being tasered to see how it affected him. Size or fitness didn’t seem to have any bearing. Some of the bigger guys dropped like sacks of potatoes, while others recovered almost immediately. He’d been somewhere in the middle; not totally incapacitated, but pretty close, so he knew if he got this wrong he wouldn’t get a second chance. A zap to the spine would disrupt his whole nervous system and by the time he recovered he would be locked in the cell with the blond gorilla.

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