The Key by Simon Toyne

as grey as the ash that dripped from his cigarette. Lord Maybury, the English media baron, was ten years younger, with unnaturally dark hair hinting at a degree of vanity and fear of getting old, and the sort of slightly shabby suit only centuries of good breeding could get away with. Pentangeli was the youngest at sixty-two. He was a third generation Italian-American who, despite the bespoke Armani suit and grooming, still carried a certain menace about him, something he had inherited from the grandfather who had arrived penniless from Calabria and fought his way to a fortune in the land of the free. Pentangeli was the only one of the Group who was a practising Catholic and, as usual, it was he who acted as their initial spokesperson.
    ‘Do we have a problem, Father?’ he asked, sliding a newspaper across the table. It was
USA Today
. On its cover were the familiar images of the Citadel and the three civilians, along with the question being whispered around the world:
    DO THEY KNOW THE SECRETS
OF THE CITADEL?
    ‘No,’ Clementi said, ‘there is no problem. It is unfortunate that this has happened now, but—’
    ‘Unfortunate!’ Maybury jumped in, his smooth privately schooled accent making every word sound condescending. ‘Since time immemorial the Citadel has guarded its secrets. Only now, when one of its biggest directly affects our joint investment, does it start to look leaky. I would call that rather more than unfortunate.’
    ‘No secrets have been revealed,’ Clementi said, keeping his voice low and calm. ‘This is merely the result of a few misguided terrorists making a token attack on the Church. I can assure you, from the moment they were brought from the mountain, the survivors have been isolated and monitored. Ruin is a city that owes its very existence to the Church. We have far-reaching influence there. They are being held in an old secure psychiatric wing in the main city hospital. A priest and a police guard have been watching them round the clock to prevent the press or anyone else getting close. All police interviews, all consultations with lawyers, all medical discussions with the patients have been recorded and passed to me. I can assure you that not one of them has shown any indication that they learned anything compromising to us during their time inside the Citadel.’
    ‘Not yet,’ Pentangeli said, flipping open his briefcase to retrieve a document with CIA stamped across the cover. ‘You’re not the only one with friends in high places.’ He slid it across the table for Clementi to read.
    It was the transcript of a confidential interview between a patient known as Liv Adamsen and a Dr Yusef Kaya, chief clinical psychiatrist at Davlat Hastenesi Hospital, Ruin. The final paragraph had been outlined in yellow highlighter.
    … The patient displays classic symptoms of post-traumatic amnesia, possibly caused by a severe physical or psychological trauma. However, the patient is strong physically and her mind is otherwise lucid and unimpaired, so with time and therapy she should be able to fully recover her lost memories and return to continuous recall.
    ‘She’s a ticking time bomb,’ Xiang said, in precise, smoke-tinged English. ‘For myself I do not care whether this Sacrament is revealed to the world or not. Frankly, I think it is a myth – I am an atheist, as you know. What does concern me is that, if the Citadel cannot keep this, its biggest secret, might it prove unequal to the task of keeping ours?’
    ‘And she’s not the only concern,’ Pentangeli added, pulling another document stamped
CONFIDENTIAL
from his case.
    ‘Subject one: Kathryn Mann, forty-eight years old, half-Brazilian, half-Turkish, head of a global humanitarian aid charity with offices all over the world, including Ruin. Widow of Dr John Mann, US-born archaeologist and scholar, killed twelve years ago on a dig in Iraq along with the rest of his team after they reportedly discovered something in the desert