He turned a corner and felt cool air wash over him as he ran through the snowdrift of torn pages littering the Bible room. He was coughing from the smoke and could hear the crackle and roar of it behind him. He risked a look back. The flames had not made it into the room. He could see the glow of the fire but it was still contained in the corridor beyond. Maybe they would have a chance to stop it from spreading.
Just as this thought crossed his mind a figure straight from hell burst through the door, arms outstretched and dripping fire as it ran straight at them, covering half the distance before it stumbled and fell, straight into a pile of torn pages and tortured Bibles that blazed instantly into flame. The whole room was burning in seconds, flames sucking ravenously at the air and billowing thick smoke. They were running now, all thoughts of fatigue banished by pure fear. The fire was almost keeping pace with them, leaping from shelf to shelf and room to room, roaring at their heels like a hungry predator with the scent of blood in its nostrils.
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 toward 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 air lock 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 upward, 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.
93
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 toward 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 his voice mail and lifted the phone to his ear, his heart beating so loudly 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 inquiries. 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. Arkadian had 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.