The Key (5 page)

Once he had graduated and begun his rise within the Church, Clementi had served God in the best way he knew, by applying his learning and skill to update the Vatican’s revenue streams so that money started flowing in where once it had only flowed out. He knew that economics now ruled the world where faith had once held sway and that, in order to wield the sort of power and influence it had once held, the Church would have to become an economic heavyweight again.

The further Clementi rose, the more influence he had, and he used it to overhaul the outdated financial systems until finally his long service and deft stewardship was rewarded with the appointment to Cardinal Secretary of State and with it the keys to the main prize – the Vatican Bank itself.

His first act as Cardinal Secretary had been to amass all the bank’s various confidential accounts and then personally audit them so he could see the exact state of the Church’s finances. It was a task he didn’t trust anyone else to carry out and it had taken him nearly a year to painstakingly sort the false records from the true and unpick all the subterfuge and false accounting to reveal the full picture. What he had discovered, in a room identical to the one he now stood in, had made him physically sick. Somehow, through systematic corruption and hundreds of years of appalling management, all the vast reserves of money that had been accumulated over the preceding two thousand years had evaporated.

Trillions of dollars – gone.

The Church still held a huge portfolio of property and priceless works of art, but there was no cash – no liquidity. The Church was effectively bankrupt, and, because of centuries of complex deception and false accounting, nobody knew it but him.

Clementi recalled the desolation of that moment, staring into the abyss of what the Church had become and what would surely follow when the truth came to light. If the Church had been a publicly listed company it would have been declared insolvent and broken up by the courts to pay what it could to creditors. But it was not a company, it was God’s ministry on earth, and he could not stand by and allow it to be brought down by the mundane evils of greed and mismanagement. Instead he had relied on the things the Church had always fallen back on in times of need – its independence and its secrecy – and he had kept his discovery hidden.

Left with no choice but to carry on the dishonest practices bequeathed to him by his predecessors, Clementi had concealed the true accounts and set about maintaining the illusion of solvency by constantly moving around what little money there was and making what savings he could while he prayed for a miracle. But he did not despair, for even in the awfulness of his isolation and the great responsibility he alone carried, he could detect God’s hand already working. For had He not bestowed upon Clementi the gifts to understand the complexities of finance and then blessed him with the position of Cardinal Secretary of State?

But the amounts of money lost were too colossal to be recovered by mere economies and financial restructuring. In addition to balancing the books, he needed to find a way to refinance the Church. In the end he found the solution in the most unlikely of places. The key to ensuring the Church’s future, it turned out, was to look to its past – he had found his answer in Ruin.

Almost three years had passed since his moment of revelation, three years of carefully influencing world events by granting audiences and indulgences to presidents and prime ministers in exchange for favours only the Church could bestow. Like some papal legate of old, Clementi had nudged these modern-day Christian kings and emperors into war just so he could gain access to heathen lands the true church had once called its own. And now, just when his audacious scheme was on the verge of completion, it was being threatened by the same ancient and secretive place where the idea had originated.

He thought back to the newspapers on his desk, their headlines predicting the fall of the Citadel and salivating over the prospect of discovering what secrets lay within.

And one of those secrets was his.

If it were to be discovered, everything he had accomplished would be destroyed and the Church would be lost.

A sudden surge of anger welled up inside him and he cursed himself for his human weakness. He had delayed too long over the messy situation surrounding the Citadel. Wrenching open the door, he entered the blank corridor beyond, windowless and unexceptional save for its curved walls that followed the shape of the tower. He would demonstrate to the Group the true strength of his resolve by effectively signing four death warrants in front of them. Then they would see how committed he was; and they would be bound by blood, each to the other.

He burst through the door into the main lobby and stalked across the marble floor, past the ATMs that gave instructions in Latin, towards the steel-framed lift that descended to the vaults in the bedrock of the building.

The lift doors opened as he approached and Schneider jumped when he saw his master bearing down on him with fury in his eyes.

‘Well,’ Clementi said, stepping in and punching the button to take them straight back to the vaults. ‘Which one of our esteemed associates am I about to face?’

‘All of them,’ Schneider said, just as the doors closed and they started to descend. ‘The whole Group is here.’

Baghdad, Central Iraq

Dry dust clung to the evening air of Sadr City market, mixing with the smell of raw meat, ripe fruit and decay. Hyde sat across from the main market in the shade of a covered café, an imported American newspaper lying open on the table in front of him next to the sludgy remains of a small glass of coffee. Two flies were chasing each other round the saucer. In his head he placed a bet on which would take off first. He got it wrong. Story of his life.

He picked up the glass and sipped at the muddy contents, scanning the market from behind his scratched marine-issue Oakleys. He hated the coffee in Iraq. It was boiled and cooled nine times to remove all impurities and rendered almost undrinkable in the process. At least all the boiling meant there’d be no germs in it. Most Iraqis drank it with cream and a ton of sugar to mask the taste. Hyde drank it black to remind him of home, the bitter taste fuelling his hatred of the country he didn’t seem able to escape. Black was also his favourite colour. Whenever life got too complicated and things started getting him down he would find a casino with a roulette table and bet everything he had on black, reducing his troubles to the single spin of a wheel. If he won, he would walk away with enough money to buy some peace of mind, never risking his doubled pot on another spin. If he lost, he literally had nothing left to lose. Either way, he would leave the table changed somehow. He liked the simplicity of that.

He checked his watch. His contact was late so he waved the waiter over and watched him fill a fresh glass with the hated black liquid. He couldn’t just sit with nothing to drink, he felt exposed enough as it was. His six-foot frame and white skin made him stand out, as did the redness of his beard, so he assumed he was being watched, though he couldn’t see anyone. He picked up his paper and pretended to read, all the while surveying the crowd from behind his shades.

Sadr City was in the eastern suburbs. Before the invasion it had been called Saddam City and before that, Revolution. But none of that changed its inherent nature: Sadr City was a slum, quickly and cheaply built at the end of the 1950s to house the urban poor. These days there were even more people here, packed into houses and apartment blocks that had already been crowded when the concrete was still wet on the walls. And the market was where they all came to do their shopping. Right now was the busiest time, with everyone stopping by on the way home from work to buy fresh food, refrigerated through the heat of the day at someone else’s expense. So many civilians crammed into one space made it an operational nightmare.

A few years ago someone had ridden a motorcycle packed with explosives straight through a sloppy evening checkpoint and blown himself up by the main entrance, taking seventy-eight other people with him. By the looks of the rickety buildings, they had simply dragged the bodies away, hosed the blood off the streets and carried on. You could still see craters in the walls where chunks of shrapnel had torn holes. But the thing that made this a suicide bomber’s paradise also made it a preferred meeting place for his ultra-cautious contact: there was no better place to hide than in a crowd.

Hyde was cautious too. He had arrived early and claimed the best seat in the café for surveillance. It offered a one-eighty degree view of the street, with a solid wall behind making it impossible to approach without being seen. He’d bet himself that he could spot his man before he got to him. It was a game he liked to play every time he was sent on this particular detail. The contact was known for his ability to appear and disappear with ease. It was why he’d never been caught, despite the best efforts of several agencies on both sides of the political street. But Hyde had something of a reputation too. Back when he was in 8th Recon he had been the sharpest scout in his platoon. He’d prided himself on never letting anyone creep up on him, though his buddies had constantly tried; they’d even had a name for the game – Hyde and Go Seek. Now he was in civilian life, he had to work harder to keep those skills honed. He’d seen what working for the private companies could do to you; men who had been out of the army just two, three years, their muscle turned to flab, still trading on reputations they’d long since lost. That wasn’t going to happen to him. Get sloppy in a place like this and pretty soon you’d get dead. So he pushed himself, treating every assignment as if it was a hot mission, just in case it turned out to be.

He started another sweep of the market, left to right, comfortable in his tactics. He had just reached the furthest point where the wall blocked his view when the scrape of a chair made him whip his head round.

‘You have the money?’ the Ghost said, settling into the chair on his blind side, his strangled voice barely audible above the noise of the street.

Goddamn – he did it again
.

Hyde folded the newspaper and placed it on the table, trying not to appear rattled. ‘What, no chit-chat? No “Hi, how’s it goin’? How are the wife and kids?”’

The Ghost stared at him, his pale grey eyes cold despite the trapped heat of the day. ‘You don’t have a wife.’

‘And how would you know that?’

‘Nobody in your line of work has a wife – at least not for very long.’

Hyde felt anger catch light inside him. His fists clenched. He’d got the divorce papers from Wanda in the mail six weeks ago, after she’d hacked his Facebook page and found some messages she was not supposed to see. But this guy couldn’t know that. He was just trying to push his buttons with a lucky guess. And it had worked. Right now he wanted to drive his fist straight through the middle of those freaky grey eyes.

The Ghost smiled, as if he was reading Hyde’s thoughts and feeding off his anger. Hyde looked away and reached for his coffee, draining it to the thick gritty dregs before he’d even realized what he was doing. He’d met some hard characters in his time, but this guy was something else. He was taller than the average Iraqi and wiry with it. He also carried about him a sense of danger and physical threat, like a grenade with its pin pulled. The local crew said he was a desert spirit and refused to have anything to do with him. That’s why Hyde always got these gigs. He didn’t believe in spirits, he just did what he was told; old army habits died hard.

‘It’s in the bag under the table,’ he said, staring out at the market crowds rather than engaging with the grey eyes again. ‘Got my boot stamped down on the handle. You give me the package, I lift my foot.’

Something clunked down on the tabletop and a scrap of sacking was pushed towards him.

Hyde shook his head in exaggerated disappointment. ‘Zero points for presentation.’ He flipped open the sacking and examined the object inside. The stone looked incredibly ordinary. It could almost have been one of the chunks of masonry you found lining the streets in piles all over the city. He turned it over and saw the faint marks on its surface, just lines and swirls. ‘Hell of a price to pay for a chunk of old rock,’ he said, wrapping it up and lifting his foot off the bag containing fifty million Iraqi dinars, worth around forty thousand American dollars.

The Ghost stood up, the bag already in his hand. ‘Make the most of it,’ Hyde said, relaxing a little now the money wasn’t his responsibility. ‘Looks like the cash cow’s about to get slaughtered.’

The Ghost hesitated then sat back down. ‘Explain.’

Hyde savoured the look of confusion on his face. Now it was the freak’s turn to be caught out. ‘You really should stay more in touch with the burning issues of the day.’ He slid his newspaper across the table. Above the fold on the front page was a picture of the Citadel of Ruin next to the headline:

WORLD’S OLDEST STRONGHOLD
ABOUT TO FALL?

‘If the holy guys in the mountain aren’t around to drive up prices, guess the bottom will drop right out of the market for bits of old stone.’ Hyde trapped a greasy note under the empty coffee glass and hoisted the bundle of sacking under his arm as he stood to leave. ‘This might be your last big payday my friend.’

‘The Citadel has never given up its secrets,’ the Ghost muttered, opening out the page and staring at the three photographs of the civilian survivors on the bottom of the page.

‘Nothing lasts for ever,’ Hyde said. ‘Just ask my soon-to-be-ex wife.’ Then he turned and walked quickly away, before the freak with the grey eyes had a chance to come back at him.

Hyde felt good as he left the dangerous buzz of the market behind and headed back to his 4x4. For the first time he’d got one over on the Ghost. He wasn’t such a badass after all. He’d looked like he was going to puke when he saw the newspaper. He was just another hustler, trying to make a buck.

He squinted up at the deepening sky. Sun down was in an hour and so was curfew. He needed to get across town and rejoin the rest of his crew at the hotel. They’d be heading out of town again at dawn, returning to the oilfields in the dusty badlands west of the city. He preferred it out there. Less noise. Less people.