Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, The Tower - Simon Toyne

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you for your help.’

      ‘Any time.’

      Cornelius glanced at Kutlar, who got up and limped gratefully out of the door. Cornelius turned and followed him.

      ‘You need to take your lunchbox?’ Zilli called after him, nodding at the red plastic container on the desk.

      ‘Keep it,’ Cornelius said, without looking back.

      75

      Liv stood under the fierce jet of the shower and turned it up as hot as she could bear. The pain was good. It felt cleansing. She watched the water turn from grey to clear as it sluiced off her body and spiralled down the drain, carrying away the grime of the night.

      She ran her hand down her side, finding her cruciform scar, tracing its outline with the tips of her fingers, favouring the part of her that had once been physically connected to her brother. Her hand continued up her side and down her arm to where a cross-hatch of smaller scars corrugated her skin, scores of thin lines scratched during a childhood troubled by the lack of a mother and a sense she was a stranger in her own family.

      The pain she felt now under the scalding water brought back the hot bite of the razor, which had focused her teenage mind somewhere other than the numbing chaos of her emotions. If only her father had told her back then what she had discovered for herself on that shady porch in Paradise, West Virginia. She understood now that when he had looked at her with sadness in his eyes it was not through disappointment in her. It was because he saw the woman whose name she carried. He saw the love he had lost.

      The hot water continued to beat down and her thoughts drifted now to her own losses: her mother, then her father, now her brother. She turned the tap all the way over until scalding rods of water drilled into her flesh and carried away the tears that leaked from her eyes. Feeling pain was better than feeling nothing at all.

      Sub-Inspector Sulleiman Mantus paced the hallway. He had too much nervous energy to sit. But it was a good feeling: the sort an athlete feels in the middle of a game; the sort a hunter enjoys when he’s closing on his quarry.

      Tipping the press off about the theft from the morgue was just the tip of the iceberg. He knew how these things worked. The division would try and play it down, because whichever way you looked at it they came out of it stinking worse than a jailhouse toilet; and the more they tried to lock it down, the more desperate the press would be for information. No one paid better than journos, and this story was front-page international and syndicated, so he was now pulling down big payments from a major news network as well as both original parties, neither of whose interest in the case appeared to be waning.

      He glanced up the hallway. A couple of uniforms were standing by the doors, bitching about something or other. He could hear the murmur of their conversation but couldn’t make out what they were saying. He took out his phone, scrolled through the menu and dialled a number. ‘I have something you might be interested in,’ he said.

      76

      Cornelius stood by the van watching Kutlar move painfully down the street towards him. If he got much worse they might have to reconsider his usefulness. Johann sat in the driver’s seat talking to the informant on the phone. He wrote down an address then hung up.

      ‘The girl’s here,’ he said.

      Cornelius took the slip of paper and looked back down the street. Kutlar was the only one among them who had seen her, but he had his own image in his mind, and had done ever since the Abbot had outlined their mission. He stroked the puckered skin on his cheek where his beard wouldn’t grow, remembering a street on the outskirts of Kabul and the plaintive figure in the blue burkha holding out the bundle of rags that could have been a child, slowing their vehicle just long enough for the rocket propelled grenade to lock on to it.

      It was good to picture your enemy.

      It helped you focus.

      So to him the girl was the woman who had helped wipe out his whole platoon, the destroyer of the only family he had ever known – until the Church embraced him. He imagined her threatening this new family and it gave him strength and purpose. This time he would stop her.

      Johann slipped from behind the wheel and went to the rear of the van as Kutlar finally limped to a standstill beside them.

      ‘Get in,’ Cornelius said.

      Kutlar did as he was told, like a dog blindly obeying the master who beat him.

      Johann reappeared in his red windcheater and walked past without a word, heading in the direction Kutlar had just come from.

      Cornelius climbed into the driver’s seat and handed the address to Kutlar. ‘Take us there,’ he said.

      Kutlar felt the vibrations tear through his ruined leg as the van bumped over cheap municipal tarmac poured straight on to the ancient cobbles. He considered the pills in his pocket, but knew he couldn’t afford to take one. They killed the pain sure enough, but they also made him feel like everything was fine, and he couldn’t afford to feel that way.

      Not if he wanted to live.

      Johann didn’t look up as the van drove past. He continued round the corner and down towards Zilli’s place. As he drew closer he took out his mobile phone with his right hand and dropped his left into the windcheater and closed it around the stock of his Glock.

      Zilli was standing on a chair behind the counter, slotting a red plastic box on to a high shelf between an empty disk spindle and an old Sega Megadrive.

      ‘D’you unlock these things?’ Johann held up his phone.

      Zilli turned and squinted at it.

      ‘Sure.’ He stepped down. ‘What you got there – BlackBerry?’

      Johann nodded.

      ‘Nice piece.’ He tapped the keyboard of a PC that despite its ancient appearance could hack into any phone known to man.

      He pressed the menu button and realized too late that it was already unlocked.

      77

      The roasted aromas of the coffee maker in the corner of the office did little to mask the odour of the morgue. Arkadian sat behind Reis’s hopelessly cluttered desk as a large PDF file downloaded on the computer screen. Outside, the clink and buzz of the path labs signalled a return to something approaching normality.

      The file was being sent from the records department of US Homeland Security in response to the fingerprint they had lifted from the plastic sheet. They’d got a positive hit in less than a minute. Arkadian couldn’t quite believe it. Sure, all they had to do in any TV cop drama was run some prints through the computer and within seconds they had a name, address and recent photo of the perp looking like a whack-job; it was a standing joke in any precinct. But in the real world fingerprints were hardly ever used to identify suspects; they were part of the detailed chain of evidence that bound a suspect to a crime after they had been caught by other, more time-consuming means. Most prints were simply not on record for comparison.

      The file finished downloading and Arkadian clicked on the icon. As the first page filled the screen he realized why they’d caught a match so quickly. It was a military service file. Men and women in the armed forces were routinely fingerprinted. It helped identify them in the event of their death in the line of duty. Until recently, most nations had been very protective indeed of their ex-service personnel files – but that was before 9/11. Now it seemed they were available to any friendly nation who came asking.

      Arkadian scrolled past the cover page and started to read.

      The file detailed the complete military service history of Sergeant Gabriel de la Cruz Mann (retired), formerly of the 5th US Special Forces Group. A photograph showed a uniformed man with a severe white-walled buzz cut and penetrating pale blue eyes. Arkadian checked

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