Jake arrived at the door to Gareth’s office, knocked, and went in to be met by Gareth’s assistant, Janet.
‘He’s ready for you,’ said Janet, and she ushered Jake smartly over to an inner office. Gareth was sitting behind his huge desk, empty except for a few papers, on which he was scribbling some annotations. He looked up as Jake arrived, and the inner door closed behind Janet.
Gareth gave an unhappy sigh.
‘What are we going to do with you, Jake?’ he asked in a tone that showed his deep disappointment.
Jake said nothing, just waited for the dressing-down he knew was coming, and got ready to bark back.
‘I thought we had an agreement,’ continued Gareth. ‘That you and Ms Graham would forget about the secret library of Malichea.’
‘No,’ Jake corrected him. ‘Our agreement was that we wouldn’t search for any more of the books.’
Gareth regarded Jake with his standard bland expression, but Jake could see the steel in his eyes, and now that same icy hardness entered Gareth’s voice as he said flatly: ‘Don’t mess with me, Jake. We could have put your girlfriend on trial for murder, but we didn’t, because we wanted to give both of you a chance at a fresh start.’
‘Her in New Zealand and me over here, and not allowed to meet, is hardly how I would describe a fresh start.’
‘Separately, Jake. It has to be separately,’ said Gareth. ‘We both know why.’
‘Yes, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me, anyway.’
‘To remind you.’ Now it was Gareth’s turn to do the correcting. ‘Apart, on opposite sides of the planet, you’re not a danger. When you get together, insane ideas seem to take on some kind of reality for you both.’
‘All we wanted to do was put the library into the public domain. Let the people know about the texts. What they contain. How they can help people.’
Gareth shook his head, wearing his more-in-sadness-than-in-anger expression again.
‘They won’t help people, Jake. Not the kind of people you’re talking about. The only people who will benefit are gangsters, warmongers, terrorists, patents lawyers.’ He shook his head sorrowfully again. ‘I thought you’d accepted that. But obviously, you haven’t.’
‘You shut down our Skype call yesterday,’ said Jake, doing his best to control his anger.
Gareth shook his head.
‘An automatic safeguard in the system shut it down,’ he said. ‘Obviously, we then got an alert to tell us what had happened, and a playback of your conversation.’
‘We didn’t mention the word Malichea,’ said Jake. ‘Or anything about the books.’
Gareth looked down at a print-out on his desk. Looking at it upside down, Jake saw that it appeared to be a script. He assumed it was the transcript of his and Lauren’s Skype call.
‘You said: “I went for a stroll at a place called Firle Beacon”,’ read Gareth.
‘Well, I did,’ said Jake, annoyed. ‘So what? That’s what you do when you talk to friends, you tell them what you’ve been up to. Things you’ve done. Interesting places you’ve been. I thought it might cheer Lauren up, remind her of England.’
Gareth didn’t bother to look up. He took a sheet of paper from a small pile at one side of his desk, and read aloud: ‘Firle Beacon, West Firle, East Sussex. Said to be the burial place of a giant.’ He looked up at Jake. ‘In other words, one of the list of places that is said to be sacred, cursed or haunted. According to your very own Ms Graham, the very place that one of the Malichea texts might have been hidden.’
‘I wasn’t looking for any of the books,’ defended Jake. He was lying, of course. And he could tell that Gareth knew it.
‘Jake, I would have thought you would have been aware of it by now, the number of times you have been cut off when talking to Ms Graham; but in case you haven’t yet worked it out: in addition to the security system being programmed with the name Malichea, and every other possible permutation that may be used to describe either the Order of Malichea, or the library, or the abbots or monks of the Order, it also contains every place in the British Isles that fits with the definition of sacred, cursed or haunted. It is also programmed with the list of the author and name of every suspected title believed to have been hidden by the Order. Any of those words can trigger the cut-off of any Skype conversation, email, or phone call, and a report will then be automatically generated and delivered to me.’ He looked Jake directly in the eyes. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Jake?’
Yes, thought Jake. If you even think we might be talking about the secret library, we’ll get cut off. And as he and Lauren had discovered that their letters were also being opened and read, and censored, the powers-that-be were making absolutely sure that Jake and Lauren would never again be able to even hint at mentioning the forbidden books.