Max & Olivia Box Set

by Mark A Biggs

  ‘How will we get about?’ questioned Olivia, trying not to antagonise Stephen further. ‘We are thinking of taking a road trip to Scotland to keep out of your hair.’

  ‘On public transport like everybody else your age. If you need a car, my driver can take you, even if that means Scotland. It’s a nice modern Jaguar, so you can sit in the back and pretend you’re the Queen for all that I care. You are not driving yourselves. Period.’ The moment he stopped ranting, Stephen regretted using their age against them. He softened his tone, trying to lighten the mood with a little humour. ‘I’m pleased you are both OK. Did you know, Olivia, if you were to wear a set of pearls, you could pass for the Queen? You will enjoy my Jag,’ he grinned. ‘Very suited to Lady Olivia Suzanne Elizabeth Huggins. That was the name, wasn’t it? The one you used on your last passport?’

  Stephen’s mellowing had its intended effect and Olivia smiled as she said, ‘That was only last year, but it all seems a lifetime ago now. We apologise, Stephen, for dragging you out on a Sunday morning. Perhaps, we could test out the back seat of your Jaguar with a ride back to our hotel.’

  * * *

  Whether alone in their hotel room, seated in a quiet coffee shop, or strolling through the streets of London, Max and Olivia discussed and refined the plan, which they would eventually present to Stephen. But time, for them, was passing slowly. They had not been invited to join their team at Porton Down, and their weekly team meetings were no longer taking place. Max felt left out and frustrated. Not doing something seemed a betrayal of Penny. Olivia suggested a short holiday in Scotland to help pass the time but being offered a car and driver was one thing, but using it was another matter entirely. Instead they set themselves a daily exercise regime, taking walks, extending them each day. Mainly, they concentrated on flying under the radar, until Max suggested honing their spying skills. Tentatively, he said to Olivia, ‘You have us doing physical exercise to keep us fit but what are we doing to maintain our stealth skills, the tradecraft and other abilities we’ll need to free Penny?’

  Olivia responded hesitantly, ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Nothing illegal. Well, it would be if we were to follow through. The trick is to stop just short, then, if we get caught, we’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘My love, aren’t you the one who said we must push ourselves to keep doing things that are just outside our comfort zone? To keep on challenging ourselves because if we don’t, the world will close in around us?’

  ‘That is a very liberal interpretation of my words but go on.’

  ‘Keeping the receipt of course, we buy an item that is not available in another store. We smuggle that item, the one we now own, into the store and put it on the shelf, as if it’s for sale. An article of clothing or a nice hat, for example. We go out, have a cup of coffee before going back inside and stealing it. We can practise passing it to each other without being seen, a bit like the “cup and cone” con. The one that ends up with the item has to remove it from the shop without being stopped. The genius of the plan, my dear Olivia, is, if stopped by store security, that it’s not a theft because we own the item, having the receipt to prove it. What could possibly go wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. If we were to be arrested for shop stealing, Stephen would be unimpressed. We mustn’t put Penny’s rescue at risk.’

  ‘This is for Penny and besides, it won’t be stealing; it’s only pretending, and there’s no crime in that. If we’re compromised, we leave our own item in the store. Consider it a gift. You have to admit, doing this, has to be better than all this waiting around. There’s a limit to how many cups of coffee a person can drink. In the best of circumstances, my bladder is only good for an hour, and with coffee a diuretic, I must know every bathroom there is in central London.’

  Olivia smiled before saying, ‘It’s not the coffee Max. Reluctantly, and I do mean, very reluctantly, I can see the sense in your suggestion. Once only, to see how we go and I choose what we “Pretend Steal”.’

  ‘Gender neutral?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  Olivia settled for a bottle of Chanel No 5-perfume because she knew their target store, Marks and Spencer’s, was unlikely to stock it. Her plan came to an abrupt end when she noticed that expensive perfumes were kept in cabinets, making it impossible to plant the bottle. If she put it on a shelf, along with some of the shop’s less expensive brands, any woman worth her salt would spot it; the chances of it being there when they returned to steal it were nil. She considered Max’s suggestion of a hat, but dismissed it as being too bulky, as was a dress, or a man’s shirt. In the end, Olivia settled on a bra, because she could buy a designer brand not available at Marks and Spencer’s, and because it could be scrunched up and concealed in a pocket. ‘It’s something relatively easy to steal and a good introduction to shoplifting,’ she said to Max. To accommodate his disquiet, not wishing to linger in women’s lingerie, Olivia agreed to be the first protagonist. Like something from their cold war spy days, they would pretend they’d taken a top-secret document, passed between agents. Max decided upon a folded newspaper in which he could hide the bra. They would secretly swap the bra between themselves a couple of times before Max would put it in his pocket and walk out the store. As a precaution he would hold the receipt for the purchase of the designer bra.

  Covent Garden’s Marks and Spencer’s was quite near to where they were staying, so it seemed an ideal target. They settled on a Thursday evening with its late-night shopping, assuming the place would be bustling with people.

  Olivia, wearing a plain green tweed suit and carrying a small black handbag, hung the designer bra on a clothes hanger in the underwear section of the store at 5.45 pm precisely. Satisfied with her work, she left the shop and then, as planned, returned 30 minutes later. Max dressed in what he jokingly called his classic spy outfit, a beige knee-length overcoat, fedora black, soft, wide brim hat, and carrying a Derby handled dress cane, followed her in two minutes later.

  Seeing Olivia loitering near the front entrance, he signalled her by touching the brow of his hat with his right index finger. With a nondescript nod of her head, she acknowledged that the game had begun and made her way to women’s lingerie. The bright red bra was where it had been left. To avoid suspicion, she decided to behave as a shopper and inspected the underwear hanging either side of it. She took the items in turn from the rack, studying them, before hanging them up again. Next, she took the red bra, examined it and, appearing satisfied, casually walked away with it. Before she had gone far, she stopped and returned to the rack and added one of the other bras she had been inspecting to her collection. Now holding both in her left hand, she moved away again. Seeing Max, Olivia discreetly removed the red bra from its hanger and transferred it to her right hand. This was the cue to Max. Olivia was now going to position herself just out of his sight, at the end of an aisle. The moment she saw him, as he began to walk in front of her, she would step out, turn and they would bump head-on into each other.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Madam,’ said Max, as they hit. Brushing together, she released the bra from her hand and he took hold of it. While they were still entwined and their actions shielded from view, he slipped the piece of lingerie in between the folded newspaper that he was carrying. Unlike Olivia, because he was still using a walking stick, the transition was not as seamless as he’d hoped. After apologising again, Max walked away. Olivia, meanwhile, continued to look about the shop. After a couple of minutes, she returned to the Lingerie department to replace the bra and the spare hanger she was carrying. With her hands now free, she set off again to find Max, all the while scanning to see if they were being watched. She studied him for three minutes and, confident that he wasn’t being followed, gave another indistinguishable tilt of her head. It was the signal for another handover. This time, the plan was for him to sit on a chair. When he stood up, he would leave his newspaper, concealing the bra inside behind. Olivia would then seat herse
lf in the same chair, picking up the paper. The changeover worked like clockwork but, having sat down, Olivia took the opportunity to have a few minute’s rest. A short time later, she stood, moving away with the booty in tow. The next transition was to be the final before Max left the store. This time, they met at the food hall. Olivia, holding the newspaper in her right hand, would brush past Max, who would take it from her. The exchange went smoothly, and even a skilled observer would have struggled to see the baton change hands. Now all that remained was for Max to put the bra into his pocket and walk out.

  A store security officer stopped Max before he left the building. When he complained to the young lady in the interview room, she explained that, whatever he said didn’t matter, as his behaviour, watched with interest on the CCTV, indicated his intention to steal. She told Max that Olivia was being held in the room next door. When Max started laughing, the lady security officer stared at him, worried about his mental health. Perhaps, he had dementia?

  ‘Do you need a Doctor?’ she asked.

  ‘No, just a shrink,’ he replied in jest.

  ‘Why are you stealing women’s lingerie? Is it for your wife? Excuse me for saying, but the bra isn’t of the type worn by a woman of your wife’s age.’

  ‘What are you suggesting about my beautiful wife?’ Max replied indignantly before laughing again and stood, unfastening his belt as he spoke, said, ‘Would you like to see the sexy boxers I have on?’ Max had expected the young lady to have become flustered, but she didn’t. Instead, she said calmly, ‘You have made your point and I apologise for being ageist. Now, sit down.’

  Max did as he was told. After a few seconds of silence, he said in a serious tone, ‘We didn’t steal the bra. Look!’ Max took the receipt from his pocket and handed it to the lady. Despite this and then pointing out that the brand of lingerie found on them wasn’t available at Marks and Spenser’s, the police were still called. While waiting, they allowed Max and Olivia to sit together but they didn’t speak. The look on Olivia’s face prevented Max from utter a single word. When the Police arrived, they groaned, disheartened to recognise one of the officers, the same policeman who’d attended at their traffic accident. Any hope that he’d forgotten the incident was quickly dispelled when he said, ‘Snogging and now shoplifting? What is the world coming to?’

  It seemed that Stephen was ignorant of the “lingerie affair”, and if he knew, he said nothing. Subsequently, while waiting to be summoned by MI6, they did as Olivia had always wanted, kept a low profile. Eventually, the day of the briefing arrived.

  The team met at the secret location below St Ermin’s at 9.00am for a test run of the briefing they would present to Stephen in the afternoon. ‘Interesting,’ was Jana’s only comment when Max and Olivia explained how the diversion would work. Despite his hesitance, the Professor would report on the progress of locating the concealed entrance to the vaults.

  After lunch, when Stephen arrived, the whiteboard at the front of the room was decorated with Greek, Latin, Roman and English biblical text.

  et spiramentum Dei omnipotentis, qui fecit omnia et scrutinat absconsa in absconsis: et thesauros absconditos harenarum:

  Προφήτης Ἔσδρας, ἀποκρύπτειν, ἀπόκρυφος:

  Οι πέντε βασιλιάδες έχουν βρεθεί, κρυμμένοι στο σπήλαιο του Makkedah:

  On the projector screen, it was complemented by the extract from Hans Kammler’s diary.

  From the moment Stephen saw the scrawls of illegible text, he felt that the briefing would go badly. If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with bullshit, he thought.

  The Professor coughed nervously, preparing for his presentation. ‘Welcome, Stephen and my fellow team members. As you all know, based on Hans Kammler’s diary entry, we have been searching for references to Esdras, or Ezra, as it is in Latin, from the images and footage that we have from inside of the Abbey. I am not a religious scholar, so I have been consulting with two other academics, one an expert in the Old Testament and the other the New. My role was to write the algorithms that would search using the guidance we were given.’ He pointed to the words written on the whiteboard. ‘Ezra is cited as Προφήτης Ἔσδρας (Apocalypse of Ezra) in Greek.’ He coughed nervously again. ‘Unfortunately, the computer, with the material we gave it, found no reference to Ezra written in either Greek, Roman or Latin. As far as we can tell, there are no statues, sculptures, stained glass windows, or mosaics inside the Abbey that have any reference to Esdras. We extended our search seek a link to the Apocrypha itself. The word comes from the Greek adjective for obscure (ἀπόκρυφος), and the verb, (ἀποκρύπτειν), to hide away. Again, we came up empty-handed.

  ‘Max and my fellow Professors kindly put together a list of notable biblical references to hidden places.’ The Professor pushed the button on the electronic whiteboard. The screen he had been viewing vanished, replaced by one displaying a list of Bible verses:

  Deut 33:19 refers to “the hidden treasures of the sands.”

  Josh 10:17, “The five kings have been found, hidden in the cave at Makkedah.”

  Job 28:11, “The sources of the rivers they probe; hidden things they bring to light.”

  Job 28:21, “It is hidden from the eyes of all the living and concealed from the birds of the air.”

  Isaiah 45:3, “I will give you the treasures of darkness, and riches hidden in secret places.”

  Pointing to the whiteboard, he said, ‘These were just some of the biblical scriptures that we sought. Additionally, there were Matthew 13:44, Mark 4:22, Ephesians 3:9, and Revelation 2:17, I could go on. We examined the text accompanying biblical verses that we could see on display at the Abbey. This proved equally fruitless, the possibilities overwhelming. I’m afraid, unless we have a legitimate clue, a starting place, the task is impossible. We all believed that the diary would give us the answer. Only Max believes it, the rest of us are no longer sure that is the solution.’

  ‘Irritably, Stephen said. ‘Professor are you telling me that, after four months, you are still no closer to finding the entrance?’

  ‘We have started again, this time in Hebrew,’ said the Professor, explaining their research direction but Stephen interrupted before the Professor could continue.

  ‘I’m not interested in your Hebrew, Latin, Greek or even Mandarin for that matter. Let me make this very clear: you will find the entry to the vaults by next week, when Bronwyn arrives. I expect something better than “we came up empty-handed”. The British Government has gone out on a limb, and you wouldn’t want us to be embarrassed, would you?’

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly empty-handed,’ responded the Professor, starting to explain how ancient biblical texts were written in Hebrew. ‘In hindsight, we should have started in that language.’ As the Professor spoke, Stephen continued to badger him. Max, becoming tired of the game being played, focussed his attention on the translated diary, which was being displayed on the overhead projector.

  Geological formations along alignment unstable. Poor quarts rock mass and fine sand – frequent cave-ins. Focus efforts Linz – stable earth. 1662

  Dinner with Maria Himmelfahrt – 2 Ezra

  ‘I wonder,’ said Max, causing the Professor and Stephen to pause, ‘We may have been asking the wrong question.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Stephen, interested.

  ‘If the Monks know where the entrance is, and that secret has been passed down throughout the ages, why do they need a cryptic clue?’

  ‘We know that,’ grumbled the Professor. ‘Kammler would have followed the tunnel back to the Abbey. The reference, 2 Ezra 16:62 … “and the spirit of Almighty God, who surely made all things and searches out hidden things in hidden places” is what he saw near the entry to the vault. It was a guide for him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As a sign, I suppose?’

  ‘But the monks didn’t need a sign?’

  ‘So, the text is a
coincidence. What difference does it make, we still can’t find it?’

  ‘What’s your point?’ interjected Stephen.

  ‘My point is, have you tried just looking for the date – 1662 or MDCLXII?’

  ‘Not on its own,’ admitted the Professor sheepishly.

  ‘How long will that take?’ questioned Stephen.

  The Professor hesitated, then said, ‘By next week.’

  ‘Thank you, Professor,’ said Stephen. ‘You will search for the date before expanding to Hebrew.’ A bit late, thought the Professor.

  ‘Max and Olivia, I want to hear your plan.’

  The Professor sat down as Olivia, who was to give the presentation, told Stephen that she had no overheads or power points slides and would speak from where she was seated. Olivia explained how a river cruise ship would be booked for the team: she, the Professor, Jana, Inspector Axel, Claudia and Max. They’d travel from Budapest to Amsterdam, stopping at Melk Abbey. She had ditched the idea of splitting the team across two boats. While taking a tour of the Abbey, she’d create a diversion, allowing the Professor to disable the security system while Lucia forced entry and retrieved the Bible, that she would hide in the Abbey chapel, returning later that evening to collect it. They’d need to disable the ship, keeping it at Melk overnight. Next morning, they’d simply sail away. ‘Now,’ said Olivia, ‘let me detail the diversion and how we intend to link the security system shut down to the diversion, not a break-in.’ Olivia had their attention as, for the next ten minutes she outlined their plan. As she spoke, she noticed Stephen fidgeting and wondered whether he shared her optimism, so it was with trepidation that she finished and said, ‘Questions?’