by R P Nathan
Patrick blinked at me. “Go on. We need to go on.”
“OK.” My voice was shaking now. “OK so let’s see what’s in the circle...”
“How about Agia Napa? That’s about the right distance. Pass that book on Cyprus. The one by your foot.”
I handed it to him and he flicked through the pages.
“There’s a monastery there: ‘Located in the centre of Agia Napa, the monastery was built in the 14th century around a cave where a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary had been discovered many years earlier. The church of the Monastery was originally the cave shrine but was later extended to its present form.’ This is it. It must be.”
“Agia Napa? Is that the same as Ayia Napa?” The thought hit me like a train. “As in the tourist resort? Club Central?”
He turned back a couple of pages and nodded and then looked up at me his eyes wide. “Julius? In Ayia Napa?” We burst into nervous laughter. “I almost feel sorry for him.”
“Yeah. I’ve been there and believe me he won’t know what’s hit him.” But the laughter died on my lips, my feeling of unease returning. I looked again at my watch. “Where is John?”
“You know what…” said Patrick looking around him; and even as he was saying it I saw it too, what I had failed to notice when we’d first entered the room, blinded by the pages on the walls and the full-on weirdness of it all: the open drawers, the clothes on the bed, the wardrobe door wide open and obvious gaps in the items hanging there.
“He’s gone too hasn’t he?”
I heard Patrick’s voice as though from a long way off but the words found echo in my mind. He’s gone too. I nodded. Of course he had. “He’s gone after Julius.” I heard myself speak the words this time and felt chilled by them.
“What will he do when he catches up with him?” asked Patrick. His voice was scared, a small voice.
“Nothing,” I said blinking. “He wouldn’t. He’s just gone to find the cross.”
“Sarah look around you. Look at his room—”
“He’s a nice guy.” I screwed my eyes up against what I could see, against what he was saying. I just wanted to think of the John I’d been hoping to see that evening.
“Sarah listen to me. We’ve got to do something. I’m really worried for Julius. He’s got Loredan and John on his tail now—”
“John wouldn’t do anything. I know him—”
“You don’t know him.”
“I do.” I stared at him. “Coming back on the train. We connected. I understand him.”
“Do you understand this?” His arms were outstretched towards the walls. “Who knows what’s going through his head.”
“Well what can we do about it anyway?”
“There’s only one thing we can do.” His eyes sparkled. “We’ve got to go after them.”
Chapter 39
The night was black and we could see no further than the sweep of the headlights on the road and the gently curving line of cats-eyes caught in its beam. The view ahead hardly changed, a constant flow of grey through our fan of light, the tarmac surface bleached by it, over-exposed and then fading into the distance, the deeper monochrome, an endless hypnotic continuum.
◆◆◆
Half an hour on the internet told us John must be taking an early morning charter flight out of Stansted or Luton. There were a couple of possibilities but either would get him into Larnaca at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. So all that was left was to work out what to do about it.
“This is madness,” I said, my head in my hands. “We can’t just head off to Cyprus. What do we do if we come up against Loredan?”
“We’ll be ready for him this time.”
“How? How? He could have killed us Patrick—”
“It’ll be different this time. And we have to go out there. We need to help them. Both of them. If we help somebody we help ourselves.”
I shook my head at him furiously. “Even if we wanted to go, there are no seats until tomorrow afternoon. At best we’ll be seven or eight hours behind John.”
Patrick shrugged. “If that’s the best we can do then it’s the best we can do.”
“And what about work?”
“Just call in sick,” he said firmly. “There are more important things at stake than work. If anything happens out there and we could have prevented it we’d never forgive ourselves.”
◆◆◆
No sounds but the bumps from hitting the ruts in the road. The headlights brought them out in stark relief, mountain valleys, great scars across our way, but the tyres took them with just a little jolt each time, and the rhythm soothed me, slow struck beats, keeping time with our journey.
◆◆◆
We couldn’t get a flight till six on Tuesday evening. It was a charter packed with holidaymakers heading away for sun and cheap booze. I tried to doze against the backdrop of noise from a stag party in the row of seats behind and the fevered racing of my brain. Patrick, beside me, was poring over the translation of Polidoro’s letter and a map of the Ayia Napa area.
“I think I may have been there,” I said after fifteen minutes of frowning at the incessant clamour around me. “I remember a beach the way Polidoro describes it from a holiday I went on. Years ago with Maya. It had rocks, huge rocks on the sand. It was a few miles from Ayia Napa, round the coast near Protaras.” Patrick gave the map to me and I looked at it a moment, at the pale blue sea washing up against the uniform yellow marking of the beaches. “It’s one of these, I’m sure it is.”
Patrick marked the area with a little pencil cross. “We’ll get a car at the airport and drive straight there.”
“What about getting to a hotel and getting some sleep?”
“We’re already half a day behind John and two days behind Julius. We can’t waste any more time.”
“But it’ll be the middle of the night when we get there.”
“Well they’re not going to dig it up in broad daylight, are they?” His voice was sarcastic but he looked at me anxiously.
I turned away from him not wanting to get dragged down by his worry, ensnared already by my own. I leant my head against the plastic pull-down window blind and closed my eyes. I was almost asleep when I heard the sound of party poppers in the row behind and loud and very raucous laughter.
◆◆◆
“I think it’s this turn-off here,” said Patrick. For once he was not asleep but alert and awake beside me in the passenger seat. Probably more alert than me after the long flight and an hour on the road. I couldn’t believe it when I’d got lumbered with the driving. Patrick had just shrugged at me in the airport. “I never passed my test,” he’d said.
I yawned and slowed down. The headlights illuminated the turn-off.
“Are you sure?”
“I think so. If you’re sure about which beach it is.”
“I’m not sure but...” I’d already started turning the wheel to take the corner. The road became a single lane track after a few hundred metres, the road markings disappearing. I kept the car in second as I picked a careful way round the potholes.
“I think we’re being followed,” Patrick suddenly hissed at me.
I caught my breath; but when I checked my mirrors there was nothing but the empty night behind. “There’s no one there. There hasn’t been anything on the road for the last twenty minutes.”
“I can feel it.”
“Calm down.” I needed to calm down. “Everything will be fine. We’ll get to the beach and no one’ll be there. Julius and John will be having a drink together somewhere. Everything will be fine.” I heard my own words through the night. High-pitched. Thin.
The dirt track petered out after another quarter of a mile at a signpost. We got out of the car and felt the sea before we heard it. The cool breeze hit us, freeing us from the warm night. We picked our way carefully along a stony path. The only torch we had with us was a tiny Maglite so we moved slowly in single file guided by its pencil beam, Patrick in front.
&n
bsp; “We should have waited for daylight.”
“We can’t wait,” he said. “Something’s happening now. I know it is.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. And, by the way, we’re still being followed.”
“Will you stop that.” I shivered and forced myself to look back down the path, peering through the darkness. “There’s nothing there.”
“I can hear them.”
“You can not. There’s no one there—”
“Look!”
I jumped and then, my heart pounding wildly, my eyes followed the beam of his torch. He illuminated a purple motor scooter propped up against some rocks on the side of the path and just beyond it a red hatchback car. And then suddenly, unmistakable in the night, came the sharp crack of a gunshot.
I felt my heart lurch inside me.
Patrick and I exchanged a glance and then we were running headlong down the path towards the rocks. The sea came into view, a dark mass against the dark sky, but mottled with wash and flecked with foam. The path curved round taking us to the top of a flight of wooden steps which led down to the beach. But we didn’t take them. We were transfixed by the scene like a nightmare below us.
A police jeep had been driven onto the sand and its headlights were illuminating a wide sector of beach. To begin with all I could make out were two policemen standing in the light. They were no more than fifty yards away but they had their backs to us, hands raised above their heads, the short sleeves of their sky blue shirts falling down around their shoulders. There was a shout from beyond them, a barked order, and then they stepped forward and to one side and suddenly the full scene was revealed and I screamed in horror as it became clear to me.
Standing in front of the policemen was John and he had a pistol in his hand. He waved it to keep them back. At his feet, lying face up and motionless in the sand, was Julius, a huge red blood stain covering his white T-shirt. Behind them, close to a boulder, a hole had been dug in the sand and on the ground nearby was a discarded pair of shovels.
“Julius!” I made to run down the steps but Patrick held me back.
“No Sarah. You can’t go down there.”
I struggled against him but he was too strong. “Julius!” I called again. The policeman on the beach were looking up at us by now. John had turned as well, the pistol moving with his body until it was pointed straight at me; but I didn’t care.
“How could you do it?” I yelled at him, tears streaming down my face.
He just stared back, the gun still pointed straight at me. The policemen on the sand were shouting too but I couldn’t hear them clearly.
“How could you?”
“We’ve got to get away,” hissed Patrick.
One of the policemen was waving his arms.
“Would you have killed us for the treasure too?”
The other policeman broke suddenly and made a run for the pistol.
John’s eyes were still on me.
I felt Patrick tugging at my sleeve.
I heard the sea.
And then John laughed and pulled the trigger.
I felt an explosion of pain in my head and, after that, nothing.
Part Three
A Richer Dust Concealed
Chapter 40
Summer 2002, London/Cyprus
John
It is from sappheiros, the Greek for blue, that the sapphire gets its name.
Originally it was used to denote any blue gem such as lapis lazuli or aquamarine. But over time it came to refer to a particular stone, corundum, the hard crystallised form of aluminium oxide. Pure corundum is colourless but when impurities of ilmenite appear in the regular structure the crystal takes on a blue colour. But not just any blue. Rather a blue so vivid that the ancient Persians believed it was a sapphire which lit the sky, shining from a jewel so strong that the stone was worn by kings to protect them from harm.
Unlike their cousins, the rubies, sapphires can occasionally grow to great size. The Star of Asia at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington is 330 carats while the Star of India weighs 563. They are both examples of star sapphires where a further impurity, rutile, lends the stone a milky quality and, due to the alignment of its microscopic fibres, reflects incoming light into a star shaped pattern which seems to hover above the surface of the stone. Such sapphires are usually cut and polished into a dome shape, a cabochon, to enhance this effect. This was a cut used in antiquity.
The jewel at the heart of the Most Holy Cross of St Peter and St Paul would have been a cabochon. But although certainly of great size, perhaps over 100 carats, it was not a star sapphire. The stone was unadulterated by rutile and hence free from asterism; its beauty lay in its colour alone.
It was a gem from the East, perhaps from Burma or Kashmir or Sri Lanka. A gem of great size and quality and almost unimaginable value. The 62 carat Rockefeller sapphire was sold in 2001 for over three million dollars. The sapphire of the cross would have been bigger than that and more handsome still. A huge cabochon of extraordinary brilliance, set in a golden cross with historic and intrinsic value of its own.
But to even think of price is beside the point. When Girolamo Polidoro of Verona stared into the stone with the morning sun shining on it, he did not see its value in gold reflected back to him. I am sure of that.
So what did he see when he looked into the jewel, into its crystal heart? What did he see as he surveyed the latticed arrangement of molecules within? Did he see busy electrons shunted from one quantum state to another absorbing all light but blue? Photons penetrating, cascading, colliding, dying? Or did he see something deeper, something beyond the essential atomic arrangement, the crystal structure, the colloidal dispersion; something beyond analysis and reduction?
What did you see, Girolamo? What did you see?
No matter. One day soon I shall see for myself.
Chapter 41
Five years ago my life changed. I’d just started a new post doctoral assignment and had been working late at the university. I came home that evening to an anxious flatmate and two policemen who sat me down before breaking the news that my parents had been killed in a car crash.
There was no mystery to the way they’d died. On the way back from a day out in Oxford they had been driving down the M40, the day clear, no fog, when a lorry driving in the opposite direction had burst through the central reservation. Two other cars were hit before the lorry got to my parents’ old Sierra. It hit them a glancing blow spinning them into the path of a van which struck them head on. That was what killed them, along with the driver of the van who hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt. The drivers and passengers of the first two cars died as well.
Only the lorry driver himself walked away from the scene. He maintained throughout his trial that he had not been asleep at the wheel, that his loss of control was due to oil on the road and, in the end, the jury believed him.
◆◆◆
Why is this of importance? The story itself is not. In the second car hit by the lorry were a mother and father. They were both killed leaving a nine year old daughter who had been spending the day with her Aunt. If there was a story from that afternoon surely it was hers. My loss might not even be objectively considered a tragedy. Not compared with that little girl. Nor with the van driver who left a pregnant wife. Nor with Duncan, dying from throat cancer at the age of twenty-six.
So why do I choose to tell my story?
Because it is my story.
Because my parents might have had a good innings but they were fit and healthy and I loved them and I was not ready for them to die. Mine might have been the minor tragedy on that afternoon, but my life changed as a consequence, and the emotional overspill has coloured me ever since.
◆◆◆
In the days and weeks that followed, my life fell apart. The feelings of loss were so profound and unexpected that everything stopped, for a while even eating and sleeping. I existed in a kind of stasis. Lying in bed with the curtains drawn was all
I could manage and the semi-darkness of the room seemed to sum up the shade that I felt had been cast over my life, the monochrome filter that had been snapped in front of it.
The emptiness stayed with me long after I had roused myself upright; and into this vacuum I allowed to be sucked my life, so that my research foundered and the beauty I had once created in fermions and bosons and super symmetry turned to dust overnight. I sat and watched a dry wind blow my research to nothing around me.
I had to look elsewhere for sustenance and purpose.
I didn’t find it in love.
But after twelve months of drifting I found what I needed to survive: the code.
I viewed it as a challenge, an old fashioned quest, and one I could conduct alone. Something I could pursue without people around, without my needing to interact. Something I could wrestle with whilst ducking the real issues in my life.
And so for hours I would stare at Shaeffer’s notebook, at the carefully hand-transcribed pages of code, seeing patterns where there were none, looking for messages hidden in randomly juxtaposed characters, V E L G A S A G A I I...
It was a labyrinth in which to lose myself but one where the positions of the walls themselves were uncertain, branching passages in the pitch black. I walked amongst them for a couple of years, content just to be there, to be lost; at the heart of me scared at what I should do if I were to ever find my way out.
◆◆◆
I began the way Shaeffer and Patrick had begun, trying Caesar shift and monoalphabetic cipher in turn, before realising like them that it must be polyalphabetic. At this point my immersion became entire and I spent evenings and weekends for weeks and months with reams of paper around me, trying to make sense, trying to make a breakthrough.
But I found I could no longer concentrate the way I had once been able. I was no longer equipped to build the structures in my mind necessary for decipherment, to hold the framework in place long enough for my analytical processes to bear fruit. Instead my mind wandered, far from the work in hand and away to Venice and Cyprus and my parents’ side.