The Tower (46 page)

They made it to the reading rooms and hammered on the doors, rousing the few black cloaks still resident there. ‘FIRE!’ They both shouted, pounding on the next door. ‘Run to the exit.’

The black cloaks emerged sleepy and stunned. A few, feeling protective of their domain, saw the fire and started running towards it. ‘It’s too late,’ Athanasius shouted after them, pointing at Thomas who was already at the door of the control room. ‘We’re going to switch the fire extinguishers back on. Just get out and warn the others what has happened here.’

Athanasius followed Thomas into the control room and found him standing in the middle of it staring at the smashed control panels and broken screens. There would be no quick fix of the fire systems, Malachi had seen to that.

Athanasius tugged at Thomas’s arm, dragging him out of the room and over to the entrance. The door to the airlock was still open and a steady flow of air was breezing through it, sucked by the conflagration now feeding on the library. The black cloaks had already gone and the fire was almost at the entrance hall now, its expansion like a slow explosion that was tearing the library apart. Thomas fumbled in the wall cavity where the scanner had been, found the wires he’d stripped earlier and touched them back together just as the smoke reached them and vomited from the door. The wires sparked and the door slid shut, slicing through the smoke and cutting off the noise of the fire.

‘Will that hold?’ Athanasius asked between gulped breaths.

‘Only for a while.’ Thomas levered off the cover of the second scanner and worked fast to strip more wires and hot-wire the second circuit. The second door slid shut, cutting off the sound of the fire entirely. Athanasius looked through the glass panels in both doors. The fire had reached the entrance now and was creeping along the desk and casting Halloween orange light over everything. It was like staring into hell.

‘We have to get away from here,’ Thomas said. ‘When these doors give way the whole mountain is going to turn into one giant chimney and every corridor will fill with smoke.’

Athanasius remembered the last thing Malachi had said –
there is more than one way to kill a demon
– this must have been his plan. But he had forgotten about one thing.

‘Follow me,’ he said, hurrying away down the corridor. ‘I know where we will be safe.’

The garden was quiet and dark when the first stretcher emerged into the cool night. The trees were all gone, burned along with the bodies, and shadows flickered on the high moonlit walls picking out the first columns of smoke leaking from the mountain as if the long-ago volcano that had formed the crater had woken again and was starting to boil.

‘We should occupy the very middle,’ Athanasius said, ‘in case the heat causes rockfalls.’

More and more stretchers came out of the mountain and began to collect in neat rows in the middle of the garden, like eggs from a broken anthill. Everyone worked in silence, the earnest urgency of their task focusing all effort on saving those who could not hope to save themselves. Only when the last stretcher had been carried out into the cool night air did anyone stop to take stock of their situation and perform a head count. There were only five people missing, Malachi and the four doctors who had chosen to remain in the Abbot’s quarters, their contamination suits protecting them against the smoke and their desire to continue their work outweighing any fear they had of the fire.

Athanasius patrolled the rows of beds, struck by how quiet everyone had become. Inside the cathedral cave the sounds of suffering had been like a solid thing, trapped along with everything else. Out here the few moans that escaped the cracked lips of those bound to their beds drifted upwards, mingling with the smoke on their way to the heavens. There was a freedom out here in the garden, you could close your eyes and imagine the walls away. He closed his eyes, and did just that, imagining himself far, far away from here, while all around him his world continued to burn.

Gaziantep International Airport was crammed with people, noise and heat. Shepherd stepped into it feeling he’d landed on a different planet.

He’d checked his phone in the transfer lounge in Istanbul but the cop he had left a message for still hadn’t called him back. On the short hop to Gaziantep he had slept again, though it had felt like the blink of an eye.

He stood in line now, sweat trickling inside his shirt and jacket from more than just the rising heat. He pulled his phone from his pocket and switched it back on, looking across the heads of the people in front of him at an armed guard standing behind the passport booth, the unfamiliar uniform underlining how far he was outside his jurisdiction. The doors that had so far opened at the flash of his badge would remain firmly shut here. But the ache he felt inside, the one that was pulling him towards Melisa was so strong it was almost painful. He knew she was here and that this was exactly where he needed to be.

The phone caught a signal and vibrated in his hand. The countdown clock was still running on the screen, the number much smaller than it had been before, and he had one voice message from a blocked number. He called voicemail and lifted the phone to his ear, his heart beating so loud he wondered if he would be able to hear anything.

The message was short – a man’s voice, heavily accented but speaking English.

‘
Hello my name is Davud Arkadian. I am an inspector with the Ruin police. Your number has been passed to me along with your various enquiries. I have some information for you but it would be better if we talk. Please call me when you get this message.’

He reeled off a phone number and Shepherd fumbled in his jacket for a pen to scrawl the number on his hand then copied it into the phone adding the international code for Turkey. The call would be bounced back to the States before coming here again and probably cost him about a hundred bucks a minute. He would worry about that if he was still around to get the bill.

The line moved forward. The ringing tone filled his ear, mingling with the loud beating of his heart. He recognized the Inspector’s name from the newspapers they’d found in Kinderman’s house. He’d been shot in the course of investigating the death of the monk and had been involved with the missing Americans he had name-dropped to lend some weight to his request for information about Melisa. It was possible he was about to be tripped up by his own subterfuge and have to listen to a detailed report about someone he had little interest in.

‘Alo?’

‘Hi. Is that Inspector Arkadian?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is Agent Shepherd – from the FBI.’

‘Oh yes, thanks for calling back. Apologies for the lateness of the hour.’

Shepherd glanced out at the brightening day. ‘I’m not in the States. I just landed in Turkey.’ There was a pause on the line. ‘You said you had some information,’ Shepherd prompted.

‘Yes.’

‘About whom?’

‘About Melisa Erroll mainly.’

Shepherd felt the blood drain from his face and he had to take a deep breath to steady himself. He glanced up and saw the guard frowning in his direction. There was a sign by his head with a picture of a cellphone with a line through it and something in Turkish that undoubtedly said ‘No phones.’

‘Listen,’ Shepherd said, suddenly paranoid that his only lifeline to everything was about to be confiscated. ‘Can I call you back in a few minutes?’

‘Where are you exactly?’

‘I’m at Gaziantep Airport, I’m just going through passport control.’

‘Write this down.’

Arkadian was already reeling off directions and Shepherd scrawled them on his hand beneath the phone number. His eyes flicked between the message and the guard.

‘Give these directions to a taxi driver and give my name when you reach the first roadblock,’ Arkadian said. ‘I’ll see you in about forty minutes.’

The fire took two days to burn its way through the entire collected works of mankind, and another five before the smoke cleared and it cooled down sufficiently for anyone to venture safely into the part of the mountain where the library had been.

Thomas was the first to step through the remains of the airlock. Both doors were gone entirely and the metal frames that had held them were twisted beyond recognition. He stood in what had once been the entrance, awed at the blackened nothingness the library had become. The black cloaks followed him, one of them breaking down when he saw the devastation.

‘See what you can salvage,’ Thomas said, ‘and I will do the same.’

The control room was protected by a steel door that was still warm to the touch when Thomas tried to open it. It had buckled in its frame, jamming it tightly in place, giving him hope that something beyond it may have survived. He found a length of metal on the floor, part of a table, and jammed it into a gap in the side of the ruined door. He leaned back, heaving on the bar until the door shifted with a shriek of tortured metal. He shone his torch through the gap and hope fell away into the darkness beyond.

The fire had got in here too. Even though the door had kept the flames out the air must have still become superheated and ignited everything flammable in the room. Without oxygen it hadn’t burned for long but it had been enough to destroy everything. The control systems and circuitry had all melted and fallen down through the racks, collecting on the floor in bizarre puddles of solidified plastic and wire. He grabbed the sides of the door leaving finger marks in the soot and wrenched it open, wide enough to step through. Practically his whole life’s work had been contained in this room. It had been the most technologically advanced and sophisticated library preservation system ever devised but in the end all of it had been undone by a madman with something so simple as a fallen candle.

He took a breath laced with smoke and headed to the far end of the room where another steel door the size of a briefcase was set into the stone. He wiped the soot from the dial protruding from the centre so he could read the numbers then carefully dialled in the code to open the safe.

One of Thomas’s initiatives had been to create a digital copy of every single item in the Great Library. It had taken nearly five years to accomplish. The entire collection – millions of books and hundreds of millions of pages – had fitted onto just eight removable storage disks and they were kept in this safe. The door he was unlocking was fifteen centimetres thick and the rest of the safe was set into solid rock, which should have helped keep the insides cool. Even so, the fire had been so fierce that the drives might still be damaged. But as long as they were still intact he could repair them and effectively rescue the contents of the library from the flames.

He dialled in the final number, twisted the handle and heaved open the door. He stared at the glowing interior, untouched by flame or smoke and looking totally incongruous amongst the devastation. But it was empty. In truth he had half expected it. There was only one other person who knew the codes to this safe.

Malachi had been thorough if nothing else.

It took Shepherd five attempts and an offer to pay double the fare before he finally found a taxi driver willing to take him to Ruin.

‘I only go as far as roadblock,’ the driver said, ‘then you walk.’ Shepherd took it, thinking it had to be better than walking from the airport, which seemed his only other option.

He sat in the back of the cab on worn fabric seats, breathing in the chemical scent of vanilla air-freshener and watching the unfamiliar countryside and olive trees flit past his window. Ahead of him the Taurus Mountains rose up in a jagged horizon. He tried not to think of what might lie ahead or what he might be about to learn. There could be no turning back now.

The road curved up into foothills, cutting out the sun so it seemed as though they were entering a valley of shadows. They rounded a bend and saw a long line of red brake lights ahead, lighting up the gloom and stretching away to a distant barrier manned by armed soldiers wearing battle fatigues and surgical face masks. The taxi pulled to a stop at the end of the line. There were at least twenty other cars in front of them, a few other taxis but mainly family cars laden with luggage, exactly like the ones Shepherd had seen heading into Charleston.

‘Crazy people,’ the driver shook his head. ‘Who comes here?’

‘They’re just heading home,’ Shepherd said.

The driver shook his head and kissed his teeth.

There was some kind of discussion going on at the barrier with the soldiers who kept shaking their heads, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, their fingers pointing along the lines of their guns, ready to drop to the trigger if things got out of hand.

‘I’ll walk from here,’ Shepherd handed the driver some notes and got out without waiting for change.

The air outside smelt of cypress sap and wet stone, a huge improvement on the chemical tang of the taxi. Shepherd walked along the edge of the road, his eyes fixed on the barrier ahead. One of the soldiers sensed him coming and turned the black discs of his shaded eyes towards him, twisting his body at the same time so the HK33 slung across his chest was pointing in his direction. Shepherd smiled and raised his hands over his head, one of them holding his badge.

‘I’m an American police officer,’ he said, arriving at the barrier and stopping short of it. The soldier said nothing. ‘I’m looking for an Inspector Arkadian. You speak English?’

‘No, he doesn’t.’ A bear of a man in his early fifties squeezed past the soldiers and peered at Shepherd’s badge through a pair of half-moon, tortoiseshell glasses perched above surgical mask. He held a hand up in greeting and showed Shepherd his own ID badge identifying himself as Inspector Arkadian. ‘You’re a little far from home, Special Agent.’ He looked up and fixed Shepherd with sharp eyes. ‘Normally we have a little more warning about international cooperation efforts.’