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

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      42

      The Lockheed Tri-Star shuddered as the Cypress Turkish Airlines flight took off from London Stansted en route to the furthest edge of Europe. The moment the wheels left the tarmac the wind took over and the aircraft lurched as if unseen hands were trying to tear it apart and fling it back down to the ground.

      It was a large plane, which was comforting; but it was also old, which was not. It still had aluminium flip-top ashtrays in the armrests that rattled as the plane wrestled its way upwards. Liv eyed them now, imagining a time when she could have calmed her nerves the old-fashioned way. Instead she tore the top off a packet of pickled ginger, the remains of an overpriced sushi takeaway she’d grabbed during her stop-over, and popped a sliver under her tongue. Ginger was good for stress and helped reduce travel sickness. She folded the top of the packet and squirrelled it away for the journey. She had a feeling this flight would test its reputation to the hilt.

      She chewed the ginger slowly and glanced around at her fellow passengers. The cabin was only half-full; it was a particularly unsociable time of night. The old Lockheed lurched again as a fresh gust shoved it sideways. She could see the port wing from her window. It appeared to be flapping, albeit stiffly. She forced herself to look away.

      She had hoped to get some sleep during this final leg of her journey, but there was absolutely no chance of that while crash anxiety continued to light up her nerve endings. She pulled out the other purchase she’d made during her stop-over – a travel guide to Turkey.

      She flipped to the index. There was a whole chapter devoted to Ruin and a map reference. She turned to the map first. Like most people, she only had the vaguest idea where Ruin was. The ancient city, and the Citadel in particular, were like the pyramids in Egypt: everyone knew what they looked like, but few could pinpoint them in an atlas.

      A triple-page fold-out showed Turkey, stretching like a bridge between mainland Europe and Arabia, hemmed in top and bottom by the Black Sea and Mediterranean respectively. The grid reference drew her to the right-hand side of the map, close to the border where Europe rubbed shoulders with the biblical lands of the Middle East.

      She spotted two airport symbols to the north and south of the city of Gaziantep – where she was due to land in around four hours – but she couldn’t see Ruin. She checked the reference and looked again. It was only after a few minutes’ close scrutiny in the gloom of the cabin that she found it – west of the uppermost airport, where the Eastern Taurus mountains started to rise, right in the fold of the page and almost totally obscured by the straight black line of the grid. It struck Liv as bitterly apt that her brother should choose to hide away in such a place; somewhere so well known yet so obscure, nestling enigmatically in the crease of a map.

      She flicked through the book until she found the chapter on Ruin and started to read, sucking up facts about the place she was heading to, logging and arranging them in her journalist’s mind until they started to form a picture of the city where her brother had lived and died. It was a major religious centre; that made sense, given what Samuel had said to her the last time she’d seen him. It was also the world’s oldest place of pilgrimage, owing to the health-giving properties of the waters that bubbled plentifully from the ground, ice melt from the mountains that surrounded it. That made sense also. She could imagine him working as a mountain-guide, hiding under a borrowed name somewhere well off the beaten track while he sought the peace he’d set out to find.

      I want to be closer to God. That’s what he’d said.

      She’d often wondered at these words in the silence that followed his disappearance, torturing herself with the darkest possibilities of their meaning. But somehow she’d known, even as that silence stretched into years, that he was alive. She’d still believed it even when the letter from the US Bureau of Vital Records had told her otherwise. And now she was following the path he had trodden, to find out about the life he had led there. She was hoping the Inspector would be able to point her to where he’d lived and maybe some of the people who’d known him. Maybe they could give her some answers, and fill in the blanks that echoed in her mind.

      She turned the page and stared at a photograph of the old town clustered at the base of the soaring mountain. The caption beneath identified it as The most visited place of antiquity in the world and supposed repository of a powerful, ancient relic known as The Sacrament.

      On the page opposite was a brief chronicle of the Citadel, expanding on its incredible age and outlining its constant presence throughout human history. Liv had assumed the Citadel was a Christian shrine, but the text revealed that it had only aligned itself with Christianity in the fourth century following the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion. Prior to that it had been independent of any organized religion, though it had exerted a huge influence in almost every ancient belief system: the Babylonians had considered it the first and greatest Ziggurat; the Ancient Greeks worshipped it as the home of the gods and renamed it Olympus; even the Egyptians held it as sacred, the Pharoahs journeying across the sea to the Hittite empire to visit the mountain. It was even believed by some that the great pyramids of Giza were attempts to recreate the mountain in the hope that the magical properties of the Citadel could be reproduced in Egypt.

      Once the Citadel had made its political move to endorse Christianity, the operational centre of the Church moved to Rome to enjoy the full protection of the newly created Holy Roman Empire. The Citadel, however, remained the power behind the throne, issuing its edicts and dogma through Rome now, as well as a new version of everything through the publication of an authorized bible. Any dissent from this official view was seen as heresy and was crushed, first by the might of the Roman army and subsequently by any king and emperor trying to curry favour with the Church and, by extension, with God.

      Liv scanned the blood-soaked details, disturbed as much by the riot of exclamation marks and adverbs as anything they described. She didn’t care about the brutal history of the place, or what secrets it was meant to contain; she only cared about her brother, and what in this ancient city had driven him to his death.

      The plane shuddered and a soft bong caused Liv to look up. The fasten seat belt sign had been turned on again. The no smoking sign stayed resolutely on. It taunted her through the rest of the flight as the night got darker and the storm grew steadily worse.