The Key

The human neck has three distinct areas of weakness that can be exploited by a chokehold: the carotid artery, the jugular vein and the windpipe. All three transport oxygen around the body. If one is cut off, for even a short amount of time, it leads to oxygen starvation and a gradual loss of consciousness. If all three are shut down, this happens in seconds.

It took about ten for the guard to go limp.

He sped things up by frantically stabbing the taser into different parts of Gabriel’s body, but all this did was burn up what little oxygen he had left while Gabriel clung on, weathering the electrical storm, switching the tension to whichever arm was stronger during each attack until the guard stopped moving and the taser clattered to the hard floor. Gabriel glanced up at the giant, making sure it hadn’t fallen where he could get hold of it. His face was a mask of eerie calm, his huge hands shackled in front of him as though praying. ‘What’s your plan now?’ he asked in a surprisingly soft tone. ‘What’s your in-ten-tion? Hoping to make bail before he wakes up?’

Gabriel ignored him. He could feel the blood flowing back into his fingers as fast as it would now be returning to the guard’s oxygen-starved brain. He didn’t have long. He grabbed the keys from the guard’s belt, found the small handcuff key and fumbled it into the lock. His hands sprang apart with a mixture of pain and relief. He rubbed some life into wrists that were cut and sore then quickly started stripping the guard.

‘You like boys?’ The soft voice mocked from behind.

Gabriel pulled the guard’s shirt off and fitted it over his own. ‘I like freedom,’ he said, buttoning it up then doing the same with the uniform trousers. They slipped neatly over his prison-issue jeans but were too wide in the waist and too short in the leg. He fixed them low on his hips, stuffed the tail of the shirt into the waistband and cinched the belt tight just as the guard began to stir. Gabriel grabbed him under the shoulders and rolled him over to the cell, being careful to stay out of range of the giant. He scooped the handcuffs off the floor, snapped one end on the guard’s wrist and the other round the bars of the open cell door just as the guard woke up. His eyes rolled down, focused on Gabriel then he lunged forward. Gabriel sprang back and the handcuff caught on the lower cross bar with a loud clang, yanking the guard to a sudden stop. He looked down at what held him, then back up at Gabriel, just in time to take a face-full of pepper spray. A strangled wheeze squeaked from his constricting throat and he fell to the floor, choking and rubbing at his burning eyes with his free hand.

Gabriel stepped away from the cloud of spray and reached into the uniform shirt pocket for the guard’s pack of cigarettes.

‘Those things’ll kill ya,’ the giant said from behind the bars. ‘Car-cin-o-gen-ic.’

Gabriel pulled a disposable lighter out from inside the packet and clamped a cigarette between his lips. ‘Ah, but that which doesn’t kill you,’ he said, flicking the wheel of the lighter to get a flame, ‘just makes you stronger.’

He lit the cigarette, drew on it deeply, then tilted his head towards the ceiling and emptied his lungs at the smoke detector.

15

Officer Lunz jackknifed forward in his chair. He’d been daydreaming about fishing in his favourite pool in the Taurus foothills when the clanging bell had snatched him back to the control room. He scanned the bank of monitors, his heart thumping in his chest, looking for signs of what might have tripped the alarm.

The images were fuzzy at the best of times but with the sprinklers now filling the corridors with a fine spray, they revealed almost nothing. He could hear the muffled sound of banging and roars of complaint from the twenty or so inmates now being soaked in their cells. At least he hoped that was what the noise was about. He wondered how long it would take for the backup guards to get here. The system was always tripping itself, so response times had been getting slower. The cameras had started shorting out too. The whole system needed replacing, but the city didn’t want to pay for it. Maybe the fact that the sprinklers had gone off this time might make them reconsider.

He reached over to silence the alarm then stopped when he saw a dark shape appear on one of the screens. It was a man stumbling through the spray, an arm covering his face. He was in D section, at the far end of the complex. Lunz pushed his glasses up on his nose and leaned into the screen. The figure left one screen and appeared on another, making its steady way towards him.

He glanced over at the closed door of the control room. Beyond it a gate of steel bars stood between him and whoever was now approaching. He unlocked a drawer in the desk, pulled it open and fumbled his holstered gun from inside. He felt its comforting weight in his hand and continued to watch the dark figure moving from screen to screen, drawing ever closer, while he waited for backup to arrive. The other screens remained empty. It obviously wasn’t some kind of breakout. The figure was also dressed in dark clothes which meant he must be a guard. All the inmates were given light olive army surplus T-shirts to wear. He must have got caught in the spray. Lunz checked one last time that the other screens were empty, then rose from his chair and headed out into the corridor, taking his gun with him – just in case.

Outside, the hiss of the water was much louder. He squinted through the bars at the indoor rain until a uniformed figure appeared at the end of the corridor, stumbling towards him through the water haze. The man shouted something, but his voice was muffled by hissing water and the arm clamped across his face.

Lunz felt there was something wrong. He popped the thumb strap and slid his gun clear of the leather holster. ‘You OK?’ he shouted.

The figure continued to bump its way blindly along the wet walls, one hand feeling the way, the other rubbing his face. ‘Pepper spray,’ he shouted. ‘Someone jumped me – grabbed my keys.’

Lunz stared past him towards the closed door at the end of the corridor.

They had his keys.

They’d attacked him with pepper spray.

It wasn’t a false alarm – it was the real deal.

He gulped damp air, trying to clear his head. He pictured arms reaching through the bars of a cell at the far end of the block, fumbling various keys into the outside locks. How long before they found the right one?

The staggering guard stumbled the last few metres of corridor and banged heavily into the gate, doubling over in a spasm of coughs. Even if they were out and already surging along the corridor, he would have time to open the gate, get him out and lock it again. He could do it. But it had to be now. He ducked into the control room, hit a button on the desk and was back out in the corridor as the gate slid open. The guard was still doubled over, coughing and wheezing, both hands on his face rubbing furiously at his burning skin. Lunz grabbed his arm and heaved him backwards as another loud noise rang in the corridor and a voice from behind made him jump.

‘What happened?’

The backup team had arrived.

‘Breakout in D block,’ Lunz said, adrenalin running things now.

The two cops pushed past, guns drawn, but stopped short of where the water was coming down. ‘Switch the sprinklers off, would you!’

Lunz dived back into the control room and hit a button to cut the sprinklers. He picked up the desk phone and punched a number. ‘We got a casualty coming up from the cells,’ he said, watching the two cops tearing along the dripping corridor on the monitors. ‘Guard got a face-full of pepper spray. I’m bringing him up now.’ He put down the phone just as the two guards passed into the main corridor. Still no movement on any of the other screens. Whoever had jumped the guard hadn’t managed to break out of their cell yet. Lunz started to relax a little. He didn’t see the figure rise up behind him or notice the faint smell of pepper until a jet of it squirted into his mouth and wrenched the breath from his lungs.

16

Room 406, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

There were grey smudges on the handle and the side pocket of Liv’s holdall, graphite powder traces of the forensic scrutiny it had been under.

Inside it was like a time capsule from a previous life: clothes, toiletries, pens, notebooks. She tipped everything out on to the bed, shaking her laptop free from where it had sunk to the bottom. It too bore traces of graphite powder and smelled faintly of the glue fumes they used to raise prints. She hit the power key but nothing happened. The police techs had obviously snooped through her hard drive and run the battery down in the process. She had a power cable, but it had a North American plug on the end, no good for Southern Turkish sockets. She turned the bag round and opened the side pocket. To her surprise, her passport was still inside. She took it out and stared at the scuffed blue cover with the Great Seal in the centre and the words United States of America written below. She had never considered herself to be especially nationalistic or sentimental before, but seeing it now made her want to cry. She so desperately wanted to go home.

The next two things she found did little to help her fragile emotional state. The first was a set of keys. She remembered locking the door to her apartment and dropping them into the bag as she dashed for the cab waiting to take her to the airport. The second was a paper wallet with 1-Hour Foto written on the side. Inside was a collection of glossy prints taken on a daytrip to New York. They showed a younger version of herself and a tall, blond man who looked just like her. It was the last time she had seen her brother Samuel alive. She stuffed them back inside the wallet before emotion overcame her and looked at the small piles of her old life spread across the bed, trying to shake their sentimental meanings and see them instead as a kit of parts to help her escape.

She had enough clothes but no cash, and her credit cards had been maxed out buying her plane ticket over here. Then there was the small matter of the priest and the cop keeping guard in the corridor. If she could create a diversion, she could maybe slip from the room while they were distracted. She thought about the medical staff that came by on their regular rounds. Perhaps one of them might help her, though with the ever-present priest in the room she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to subtly broach the subject, let alone communicate some kind of workable plan. The staff had probably all been vetted anyway and told to report any clandestine contact.

She slid out of bed, careful not to tip her belongings on to the floor, and padded over to the window. The sudden brightness behind the worn blind made her squint, but what lay outside was no help. There was a sheer four-storey drop to the cobbled street below and a tantalizing view of a fire escape snaking down the building opposite. There was also the ominous and unsettling sight of the Citadel, rising above the rooftops and darkening the horizon like a watchful sentinel. She returned her attention to the room, taking stock again of everything it contained, weighing up each item for its possible value in helping her get out.

Apart from the TV and the bed there was very little else: a small table with a plastic cup and a jug of water on it; a row of switches above the bed, a plastic sleeve fixed to the wall containing her medical notes. An emergency alarm cord dangled from the ceiling with a red handle on the end, large enough for a flailing hand to grab. Liv considered what would happen if she pulled it. She had heard the response to other alarms in the last few days, voices and footsteps rushing to surrounding rooms. But although the noise and confusion might create enough of a smokescreen to distract the priest for a moment, all the attention would be on her, and it would be almost impossible to speak or pass a note to anyone without being spotted. She had to think of another way.

17

Police Headquarters

The stairwell leading to the cell block echoed with the thundering boots of cops responding to the alarm. Gabriel met them on the way up. Nobody gave him a second glance. They’d all caught the message that a guard had been sprayed in the face, so when they encountered one – struggling to breathe, eyes swollen shut, another guard helping him – they hurried on past to get at the bastards who’d done it.

Gabriel helped the guard along, his arm wrapped round him, his hand out of sight against the wall, pointing the man’s own gun directly at his crotch to keep him quiet. Gabriel’s other hand held a walkie-talkie that he’d grabbed from the control room and into which he maintained a one-sided dialogue to stop anyone striking up a conversation with him and also to cover up a good portion of his face.

They reached the top of the stairs as another pair of cops burst through the fire doors and started heading down. Gabriel slipped through the door after them into a short corridor. Ahead of him, through a square window set into a door, he could see the reception area. He kept the guard moving, jamming the gun harder into his pelvis to remind him it was there.

When they were a few metres short of the door he crooked the walkie-talkie under his chin, snatched the spray canister off his belt and gave the guard another blast full in the face. He slipped the gun under his shirt and into the waistband of his trousers then burst through the door and into a room full of cops.

All heads turned as they entered the hall, drawn by the fresh coughing fit that accompanied their entrance. The two nearest uniforms rushed forward and took hold of the convulsing guard. Gabriel let them take him and spun away towards the exit. ‘I’ve brought him up to the lobby,’ he barked into the walkie-talkie. ‘Where the hell’s that ambulance?’ Then he stepped out of the front door and was free.

He had no idea how long the guard’s seizure would last, but he wouldn’t have long. The cops in the basement must have worked things out by now. The road he was in was thinly populated, but the street ahead was busier. If he could make it to the corner and into the crowds he’d stand a chance. The corner was maybe six metres away. He kept the walkie-talkie clamped to his face and his eyes forward, resisting the urge to run.

He weaved in and out of what foot traffic there was, putting as many bodies between himself and whoever would shortly be following. The ground was wet from the recent downpour though it was no longer raining. It wasn’t much of a break, but he’d take what he could get. It made his clothes, still drenched from the sprinklers, seem slightly less unusual.

He made the corner just as a siren started up behind him. Squinting against the glare of the bright sky, he matched his pace with the evening crowd and dropped the walkie-talkie into a bin. He had to get off the street as soon as possible. A wet cop wasn’t the best disguise for a fugitive.

18

Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

The challenge of working out how to reveal Oscar’s hidden message using the limited resources at her disposal had given Kathryn the greatest feeling of hope and purpose she had experienced in days.

From her fieldwork she knew you needed three basic things to start a fire: fuel, an accelerant and a flame. For fuel she had torn a couple of pages from the middle of her medical notes, not daring to risk taking any from the notebook, then shredded them to make a loose pile on one edge of the window ledge.

For the accelerant she’d had to think laterally. Roughly speaking it could be anything that would intensify a fire. She’d found what she was looking for in the hand sanitizer-gel dispenser by the door, the sort used in all modern hospitals. The label told her this particular brand was 40 per cent alcohol. Alcohol evaporated quickly to leave skin dry and had antiseptic qualities of its own. It was also a very effective accelerant.

She squirted a thick dollop into her hand, scraped it on to the sill then stacked the pile of shredded paper on top of it so it could start absorbing the flammable fumes as they evaporated. The longer she waited, the more saturated the paper would become and the better her chance of lighting it. But she still needed a flame, and for that she needed the sun to come out.

She lay on her bed, staring out of her window at the bright band of sky between the passing rain clouds and the tops of the mountains. The last time she had lit a fire this way had been on the final trip she had taken with John. It had been one of those spur-of-the-moment things arranged, before Gabriel returned to college and John headed off to Iraq on the dig he would never return from.

They had spent the day off-season hiking along the Presidential Range in New Hampshire and got caught in a freak storm. By the time they made it to where they’d parked their hire car they were soaked to the skin, only to discover they had a flat battery. They headed back to a Ranger’s hut they had passed on the path where some weekend walker had used up the firewood and not bothered to restock it. She and Gabriel had collected as many fallen branches as they could, but it was all too wet to light. They hadn’t even noticed John had gone until he stepped into the cabin brandishing one of his socks on the end of a long stick, dripping with diesel from the car’s fuel tank. They had piled the wet sticks on top of the sock and waited for the fumes to permeate the stack, the same way Kathryn was waiting now. Liquid diesel doesn’t burn well, but the ether-infused sticks had burned just fine. They had spent the night there, huddling together, warmed by the fire – the last time they were all together. Kathryn smiled as she recalled it, remembering their closeness and their firelit smiles while the storm raged outside. Then she realized that the warmth was not in her mind, it was on her skin and flooding the room. The sun had come out.

She leapt out of bed and lunged towards the window. Sunlight was filling the street with warm afternoon light. It had dropped below the clouds and would soon fall behind the distant mountains. She needed to move fast.

She fumbled her reading glasses from the top of her head, and held them over the pile of shredded paper, the magnifying lenses focusing a pinpoint of light on to the top of it.

A tiny image of the sun appeared on the paper and she held it as steady as her hand would allow. The bright dot darkened. It started to smoulder. The paper curled into ash around the dot, but it did not light. She moved the glasses, chasing the edge of the blackening paper with the bright dot, focusing the heat on the meagre kindling she had made. A curl of red glowed at the edge as the paper turned to ash but still it did not catch. She cupped her hand round it and blew gently across the top, trying not to disturb the pile or blow away the alcohol fumes trapped inside. She continued to blow, gentle and steady, focusing her attention on the red ember until her lungs were empty. Then, just as her breath was almost exhausted, it finally caught and flame started to devour the ripped-up paper.

She grabbed the diary from the bed and opened it to the centre pages, which she had marked with several more squares of torn paper. She had no idea how long the hidden message might be, but she only had a limited amount of fuel and the flame was burning quickly. She screwed up a square of paper, fed it to the fire, then gently offered up the first blank page to the flame.

The effect was almost instant. The heat darkened the paper wherever acid ink had soaked into it, creating swirls of symbols that steadily filled the page. The body of text, arranged to form the shape of an inverted Tau, was a mirror of the first prophecy she had grown up with and written in the same ancient script. Kathryn’s eyes scanned the Malan symbols, the language of her tribe, translating them in her head as she read:

The Key unlocks the Sacrament

The Sacrament becomes the Key

And all the Earth shalt tremble

The Key must follow the Starmap Home

There to quench the fire of the dragon within the full phase of a moon

Lest the Key shalt perish, the Earth shalt splinter and a blight shalt prosper, marking the end of all days

She read it again, trying to dig meaning from the words. It seemed like a warning, but was too incomplete for her to understand.

There had to be more.

She grabbed another scrap of paper and fed it to the dying flame. The fire was burning faster than she had anticipated and smoke was starting to fill the room. She turned to the next page in the diary and held it over the flame.

More darkened text emerged, much more, but the fire was burning so quickly she didn’t even stop to read it. She knew she was almost out of fuel and the smoke levels in the room were getting dangerously high so she kept moving blank pages over the heat, one after the other, feeding the flames until there were none left and the fire shrank to nothing and died in a final curl of smoke.

Outside she could hear footsteps approaching. In a few moments someone might walk into her room with the priest right behind them. She pulled open the window as far as it would go, scooping up the evidence of the fire and feeding it to the breeze. She left the window open in an effort to dilute the smell of smoke and scrubbed her hands with sanitizing gel while she cast around for somewhere to hide the diary. The room was bare. There were no hiding places. Kathryn lunged towards the bed and hid the diary in the only place she could see and undoubtedly the first place anyone would look. She hid it under the mattress.

19

Father Ulvi ŞimŞek sat in the hospital corridor, his fingers working the string of worry beads he always carried, still brooding about the earlier visit from the police inspector. He had been so dismissive and superior, questioning his presence there as if he were nothing.

If only he knew.

He counted the beads through his fingers, smooth stones made warm by the heat of his hand. There were nineteen on the black cotton string, each one made from a particular type of amber he had chosen because of its dark, reddish colour. Nineteen beads – nineteen lives, each one recalling a face. He counted in his head, his lips moving slightly as he remembered the names and how each had died.

Despite the priest’s clothes, Ulvi’s service to the Church was more specialized. He considered himself a soldier of God, trained by his country but now serving a greater sovereign lord. The beads reminded him of his own past – in the west of Turkey, close to the ancient borders with Greece – and while others of his faith said the Rosary to help purge them of their sins, he used the beads to remind him of where he had come from and what he had done. The dark stains on his soul were too deep to be cleansed in this world. And the world was imperfect. Only God was pristine. So he chose not to pretend that he could better himself here, or atone for what he had done. He was what he was, a darker instrument of the Lord’s bright purpose. And God Himself had made him this way; He alone would judge him when the time came.

Ulvi reached the end of his roll call of remembrance and slipped the bracelet back into his pocket. He heard the clink as it snaked past his mobile phone and down to the ceramic knife beneath it, the blade as sharp as glass but invisible to the metal detector that had swept over him at the start of his shift. Elsewhere in his jacket was a hypodermic syringe with a nylon needle, a small bag of powdered flunitrazepam, and an ampoule of Aconitine poison. He had brought them with him every day since the cops had grown used to him and the routine checks had become sloppy.

He looked over at the policeman, slumped in his chair, his attention dulled and elsewhere. He was still reading the paper, working backwards from the sports pages like he did every day, slipping so far down in his chair that his chin almost touched the buttons of his uniform shirt. He was clearly cut from the same cloth as his boss. Arrogant. Dismissive. Stupid.