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

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      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 it against a printout from the CCTV footage. The hair had grown out, but it was the same man.

      Arkadian scrolled through it all – background, psych reports, security checks, everything. He was thirty-two, American father, half-Brazilian, half-Turkish mother. Father an archaeologist, mother worked for and later ran Ortus, an international aid charity – so early years spent travelling the world.

      Education a patchwork of interrupted study at a series of international schools then a Harvard scholarship majoring in modern languages and economics. Spoke five languages fluently including English, Turkish and Portuguese, and could get by in Pashto and Dari following his tours of duty in Afghanistan.

      Something in the file caught Arkadian’s eye and he stopped skimming and started reading. At the beginning of his final year at Harvard, something happened that clearly had a seismic effect on young Gabriel. Whilst cataloguing a major new find of ancient texts unearthed in the Iraqi desert near a place called Al-Hillah, Dr John Mann had been killed, along with several colleagues. It caused a major international stir. Saddam Hussein, still dictator in residence at the time, blamed Kurdish rebels. The worldwide community suspected Saddam might have done it and pinned the blame on the Kurds while he looted the priceless treasures for himself. None of the texts were ever seen again.

      It was not clear from the file who Gabriel blamed for his father’s death, but the fact that he dropped out of college and enlisted in the US Army in advance of the impending war in Iraq suggested he may have harboured certain suspicions. He enlisted as a private – though his academic record would have guaranteed him a commission – and passed out of basic training with such high grades he was immediately accepted for Special Airborne training.

      He spent nine months at Fort Campbell on the Kentucky–Tennessee border, learning to fly planes, jump out of them and kill people in an assortment of ways and with a variety of weapons. The file became more opaque as the specifics of his duties became more classified, but he served as a platoon sergeant in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom, and was decorated twice, once for courage under fire and once for his part in a covert hostage rescue operation; he and his platoon had rescued a group of kidnapped aid workers from a Taliban stronghold. He’d left the service four years ago. It didn’t say why.

      There was an additional page tagged to the end of the file detailing his known movements since his discharge. He worked as a security advisor for Ortus, and had travelled extensively to South America, Europe and Africa.

      Arkadian Googled Ortus. Its website homepage displayed an eerily familiar image: the stone monument of a bearded man, arms outstretched – the statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro. Ortus claimed to be the oldest charitable organization on earth, formed in the eleventh century by the dissolution of an ancient order of monks – the Brotherhood of the Mala – whose lineage stretched back into prehistory. They had been forced to renounce their spiritual vows after the church denounced them as heretical. Many had been burned at the stake for their belief that the world was a goddess and the Sun was a god and all life came from their union. Others escaped, regrouped and re-emerged as a secular organization dedicated to continuing the works they had previously undertaken as holy men.

      He scrolled down to their СКАЧАТЬ