Athanasius frowned. ‘All communications devices are forbidden inside the mountain.’
‘So are civilians, and yet here I am. I’m sure one of the medics will have brought a phone along with them.’
Athanasius shook his head. ‘It was a condition of granting access to the sick that those admitted must abide by the rules of the mountain. Everyone had to surrender their phones before entering. You will not find one in here.’
Gabriel went quiet, his mind thinking his way around the problem.
‘What about the phone I gave you when I was last here?’
‘It no longer works, the battery is empty and you did not leave a charger – although …’ He glanced across the room at a small writing desk positioned beneath the peacock window. He rose and moved towards it, weaving between the medical staff and the stacks of equipment they were setting up. Gabriel watched until his view was blocked by a man in a contamination suit. ‘You OK?’ Dr Kaplan asked in a bedside voice that instantly made Gabriel feel nervous.
‘Just peachy,’ he replied, catching a glimpse of Athanasius over the doctor’s shoulder as he opened the desk and retrieved something from inside.
‘We’re nearly ready to start the first bank of tests.’ Kaplan stepped across and blocked his view again. ‘Which means we’re going to have to take a little blood, I’m afraid. Normally when someone has been through what you have, I would be very reluctant to take more than a few millilitres at a time to give the white cells time to recover. But the more we take now, the more parallel tests we can run and the quicker we can process the results, so I’m inclined to be slightly more aggressive – if you are willing.’
Gabriel took a deep breath. ‘Help yourself,’ he replied. ‘I’m not going anywhere, just try not to kill me.’
Kaplan smiled and nodded at a medic who stepped forward and fitted a syringe to the cannula already sticking out of Gabriel’s arm. He twisted the valve and watched dark, wine-coloured fluid fill the first of several blood-collection tubes. ‘This might make you feel a little drowsy,’ Kaplan added, ‘so feel free to close your eyes and rest if you want.’
Gabriel did as he was told and tried to relax.
‘What about this, would this work?’
He opened his eyes and saw Athanasius standing over him holding a laptop in his hand with a charger dangling from it. ‘Maybe. Can you send email from it?’
‘No. But I thought maybe this charger could be adapted to work with the phone.’ He placed the laptop on the bed, the charger coiled on top of it in a tangle. Gabriel unplugged the lead and examined the jack. It was entirely different from the socket on the bottom of the phone he had left. Next, he opened the laptop. It was a relatively new model and started up quickly, the desktop filling with hardly any icons. He searched the main directory for wi-fi hardware and software or anything that could send a message or an email.
Nothing.
Athanasius was right.
He glanced at the battery status and saw it was full, so at least the charger was working. But even if he managed somehow to customize the connectors to fit, the ampage would be too strong and would most likely fry the phone. Then something struck him. He span the computer round and smiled when he spotted the USB port. ‘We can use the laptop to charge the phone,’ he said, pointing at the square socket. ‘We can plug in the laptop and then hardwire the phone to the computer through one of these ports. It will act as a transformer and send a weaker trickle charge to the phone’s battery.’
‘Can you do it?’
‘Yes.’ Gabriel leaned back against the pillow. ‘But I’ll need some tools and both my hands.’ He could feel what little energy he had leaking out of him with every drop of blood. ‘I’ll need some raw wire, something like needle-nosed pliers –’ He closed his eyes and instantly regretted it as the room started to spin. ‘Hey,’ he said, glancing over at the medic by the bed who was still diligently taking his blood. ‘I think you should …’
Heat rose up in him like steam in a geyser, so sudden that it overwhelmed him before he could even finish his sentence. His body started to shake and he felt urgent hands clamp down on him and pin him to the bed.
‘Sweet Jesus,’ he thought as his eyes rolled back in his head and darkness washed over him. ‘Not again.’
Inspector Arkadian was standing in a car park just outside the city limits, supervising the disembarkation of a busload of children when he became aware of eyes upon him. He looked down at a terrified and tearful-looking girl of about eight. He crouched down, bringing his head level with hers, fully aware of how frightening he must seem after all she had already been through, towering over her in the contamination suit that had become his second skin since the outbreak.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked, brushing her wavy brown hair away from her face with a gloved hand.
‘Hevva.’
‘Well, Hevva, there’s chocolate and cola inside.’ He pointed to the backpackers’ hostel that had been commandeered as a temporary orphanage.
‘Are we going to be taken into the mountain to die, like Mummy?’ she asked, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
He felt something break inside him. ‘No. You’ll be safe here – I promise.’
She stared at him for a moment with the clear and searching expression only a child can manage, then slowly turned and rejoined the others.
The quarantine had been swift and had been put in place the moment the first infection occurred outside the Old City walls – a local teacher who had already infected the rest of the teachers in her school and many of the parents by the time her symptoms manifested. Arkadian’s blood had run cold when he first heard this news. Madalina, his wife, worked at a school, not the one that had been infected, but it was still a chilling reminder of how vulnerable everyone was in the face of this thing. Madalina was now in semi-quarantine in St Mark’s church near their house. All public workers who’d had extended contact with other people had been moved to large civic buildings for observation and she had been one of them. But these internal precautions were only part of the overall plan.
The last thing the national and international community wanted was a new killer disease to escape into the wider world. Ruin’s natural isolation, surrounded by the high, unpopulated foothills of the Taurus mountains, made it uniquely suited to be placed in its own self-contained quarantine. The rapid evacuation of the Old Town after the first outbreak had been effective enough to hold back the spread of the disease for the first month and so the policy was now extended to the city as a whole. There was only one road leading into Ruin and it was now
