Free The Key by Simon Toyne Page A

mind racing with the implications. He had been kept in solitary so far, which had suited him fine. A new cell could mean new cellmates. Not good.
    They continued walking deeper into the maze. Paint bubbled on the walls where salts had seeped through the rock and nobody had bothered to fix it. There were fewer cells here and the ones they passed were all empty. It smelled mustier too. Unused. They reached the end of the corridor and another sharp shove sent Gabriel barrelling through a set of fire doors into a short tunnel chopped cleanly in half by a wall of bars. On the other side was a cell containing a steel toilet with no seat, a narrow bench built into the wall and a man so large he made everything around him seem as if it belonged in a child’s nursery.
    ‘Hands through the bars,’ the sub-inspector ordered.
    The giant took one huge step forward, covering the entire width of the cell, and passed wrists as thick as sprinter’s legs through the bars. His eyes never left Gabriel’s face.
    Gabriel was grabbed from behind and slammed sideways into the wall. ‘Make a move and I’ll stick you with the taser, understand?’ The guard’s breath smelled of coffee and cigarettes.
    Gabriel nodded and felt the pressure ease as the guard turned his attention to the giant. It had surprised him when the stocky weightlifter of a sub-inspector had come alone to take him to his cell. Now he knew why: one cop meant less witnesses.
    He glanced up at the smoke detector and closed-circuit camera bolted to the underside of the ducting that ran the length of the corridor, one of the old kind that produced a fuzzy black-and-white picture but no sound. The feed would be routed to the control room he’d passed on his way through the entrance gate. Another cop was probably watching now, ready to send in backup if anything went down. Except the camera wasn’t pointing at the cell. So no one could see what was happening inside it; and once the sub-inspector had locked the door and walked away, no one would care.
    His eyes returned to the hulking figure on the other side of the bars. The giant was staring straight at him with the cold-eyed menace of a cell-block challenge. Gabriel held his gaze, taking him in, knowing now that looking away would spare him nothing. The man’s eyes were set deep in a flat face that was topped off by a surprisingly conservatively cut bowl of blond hair that he might’ve ripped off an insurance salesman to wear as a hat.
    Gabriel held the bottomless eyes for another beat then took in the rest of him. He was immense; a caricature of a man sculpted from solid muscle by years of steroids and single-minded aggression. A cotton shirt strained to contain him, sleeves rolled up over meaty forearms. The handcuffs looked small and ridiculous on his thick wrists and, just above them, was something else that set alarm bells ringing in Gabriel’s head. It was the blurry blue image of a jailhouse tattoo. Generally speaking, the larger the tattoo, the more time its owner had spent in prison. This one was huge. But it wasn’t the giant’s evident criminal past, or even his intimidating size, that caused Gabriel the most concern, it was what the tattoo depicted. The huge image – created by pouring ink on his arm and repeatedly sticking a pin into himself until it was fixed there for ever – was a cross. Somewhere in this steroid-fried monster’s dark past he had found the light of God. And now the Church had found him, and clearly sent him on a mission to do their dark work.
    Escape was no longer an option, it was a necessity. Once the guard had strolled away down the corridor Gabriel would be on his own, locked in the bowels of the earth, with this God-loving monster – and unless he did something fast, he would never get out of here alive.

13
    Room 406, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital
    Kathryn Mann stared at the object that had just slipped out of the evidence bag on to the hospital bed.
    Arkadian had not stayed long. The