The phone went dead in Arkadian’s ear. He looked at the display. The signal had vanished. He frowned, partly in frustration, partly because of what the dispatcher had just told him. He looked down at the red mess of his shoulder. He needed to get to a hospital, he needed to call his wife too so she didn’t hear about all this second-hand, but all he’d managed to do was report the car stolen. He rose painfully to his feet, holding the phone in front of him as he cast about for a signal. He heard another fit of sobbing echo through the warehouse and realized he was probably not the only one who needed a hospital. He picked his way across the glass-pebbled floor towards the splintered office door and looked out.
The scene that greeted him was a tableau from a renaissance painting of biblical grief. The broken body of the old man lay on the floor shrouded in a thick plastic sheet shining like silk under the soft glow of the overhead lights. Gabriel was kneeling beside him, his arms cradling his mother’s head against his chest. She wept and wrung the material of his jacket with her hand. Gabriel looked up.
‘The car?’ he asked, in a voice stretched thin by grief.
‘They know where it is,’ Arkadian said. ‘All squad cars have a transponder fitted so they can be found quickly if a radio goes down. The dispatcher said this one must be faulty. She said it looked like it was moving in a straight line across the buildings and streets of the old town before it stopped – right in the middle of the Citadel.’
Gabriel closed his eyes. ‘Then we’re too late,’ he said.
‘No,’ came a ragged voice. Kathryn lifted her head and stared straight at Arkadian. ‘The seeds the monk swallowed! You need to make sure they’re safe,’ she said. Arkadian frowned. No one was supposed to know about them. ‘We think they may be the Sacrament,’ Kathryn explained, sensing his confusion.
Arkadian shook his head. ‘But they’re just common apple seeds,’ he said. ‘We tested them.’
A heavy silence hung in the wake of his words. Nobody moved for long seconds. Arkadian watched Gabriel and Kathryn line up this new information with what they already knew. Then Gabriel leaned forward, tenderly kissed his mother on the top of her head and rose to his feet.
‘If it’s not the seeds,’ he said, moving past Arkadian and into the office. ‘Then it’s the girl. She is the key to everything. She always has been. And I’m going to get her back.’ He crunched across the floor, picked up the black canvas bag from the floor and placed it on the nearest desk.
‘Let me handle this,’ Arkadian said, glancing back down at the phone which now showed one bar. He pressed redial to get through to central dispatch. ‘If she’s been kidnapped and taken to the Citadel they can’t just deny it. We can get the commissioner involved, bring political pressure to bear. Force them to cooperate with the investigation.’
‘They’ll deny everything,’ Gabriel said, opening the bag and reaching inside. ‘And it’ll take far too long. The girl will be dead before any politician gets involved. You said the car was still moving when you spoke to the dispatcher. That means she’s only about twenty minutes ahead. We need to get there fast and get her out.’
‘And how are we going to do that?’
Gabriel spun round in a blur of motion and Arkadian felt a bang on his arm, like a slap. ‘We don’t,’ Gabriel said.
Arkadian looked down. Saw a syringe sticking out where Gabriel had hit him. He looked up with shock, staggering backwards as he reached up to try and bat the syringe away. His arm already felt heavy. He hit the wall and felt his legs buckle. Gabriel stepped forward and caught him, controlling his fall all the way to the ground. Arkadian tried to speak but his tongue wouldn’t work.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gabriel said in a voice that sounded liquid and distant.
The last thing he remembered was that the gunshot in his arm didn’t hurt any more.