Читать книгу Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, The Tower - Simon Toyne, Simon Toyne - Страница 101

Kutlar could still smell the garlic and sweat coming off the empty seat beside him. He blinked as the van emerged from the tunnel. A silhouetted figure walked down the alley between the car parks towards them.

Kutlar opened the notebook. He stared intently at the hourglass icon, watching the tiny black pixels tumbling inside it, virtual sand showing him how quickly his own time was running out.

Johann reached the van and swapped places with Cornelius as the street map on the screen reconfigured itself. An arrow pointed to the location of Liv’s phone. The hourglass reappeared momentarily then the map widened to show a second arrow, above and to the left of the first – their own position, traced through Cornelius’s signal.

They were close.

Cornelius watched the arrow at the centre of the screen jump a little further up the street. ‘She’s moving.’

Johann turned towards the ring-road.

The next time the screen refreshed itself the second arrow was moving too, circling the first one now, like a buzzard homing in on its prey.

Brother Samuel’s body had been stripped to the waist and arranged with his arms outstretched, echoing the shape that loomed from the altar at the far end of the chapel of the Sacrament. The Abbot cast his eyes across the ruined flesh, glowing bright and waxy against the stone floor, pierced repeatedly by broken bones, held together by rough sutures where the coroner had sliced it apart.

Could these remnants of a man really rise up and fulfil the prophecy?

The Abbot noticed the thin tendril of a blood vine curl around the altar. He followed it into the darkness until he found its root twisting up from one of the wet channels cut into the floor. He wrapped it around his hand and tugged hard until it tore free then stepped over to one of the large hemp-and-tallow torches and held the sinewy plant over the flame. It hissed in the heat, shrivelling away to nothing but blackened fibre and a smear of red sap on the Abbot’s hand.

The torch flame guttered as the door opened behind him. The Abbot turned, rubbing his hand against the rough wool of his cassock where the sap was starting to irritate his skin. Brother Septus, one of the monks who had helped bring Samuel up the mountain, hovered on the threshold.

‘We are ready for you, Brother Abbot,’ he said.

The Abbot nodded and followed him to another room in the upper chambers of the Citadel, one that had lain mostly silent since the time of the Great Inquisitions.

The door closed behind them, sealing Brother Samuel inside with the Sacrament. The candles flickered once again in the displaced air, and their light shimmered gently across his body.

For a moment it seemed as if he was moving.