It sounded like they were clutching at straws, but Denison’s eyes lit up as he finally understood what she was driving at. “A secret room.”
“It is the only explanation. Something that neither Mussolini’s experts, nor the modern keepers of the old ways, even thought to look for.”
“Okay, so if we believe this: where do we look?”
Lili made a sweeping gesture, as though to say everywhere, then turned her attention back to the circular receptacle containing the spears.
Frost turned on his own light and began scrutinizing the dais, not sure exactly what he was looking for. The outer ring had been decorated with carvings, each corresponding to one of the wedge-shaped sections. “You said there were twelve of these priests—”
“The Salii.”
“Is that important? The number twelve?”
“Twelve has always been an important number,” Denison offered. “Especially in religion. There were twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus chose twelve apostles. There are twelve signs of the zodiac.”
“And for the Romans? Did it have a special significance?” Frost pressed.
Lili nodded. “It’s possible. The Romans borrowed many of their religious ideas from other cultures. The Etruscans, for instance, established twelve major cities. The major Greek gods numbered twelve, and many of the Roman deities are patterned after the Greek pantheon. And as Tony said, there are twelve signs of the zodiac, which were also known to the Romans. When he became the dictator of Rome, Julius Caesar created a new calendar—it is the basis of the calendar we use today—dividing the year into twelve months. So yes, it’s safe to assume twelve was significant.”
Frost pushed at one of the carved sections, working the surface with his fingers. He found a soft spot and pressed a little harder and the crust around it crumbled, revealing a small hole about five centimetres in diameter. He worked a finger into the hole and felt some resistance. “Tony, hand me one of those spears.”
Denison passed over the ancient relic, and Frost forced the butt-end into the hole he’d been working on. He experimented with it, first twisting the shaft in its socket like a key in a lock, and then pushed against it as though trying to wind a capstan.
Nothing happened.
But suddenly Lili was excited.
She pushed Frost aside, tugging the spear free. “You’re right. You must be. We need to find the hole that corresponds with March.”
Frost peered at the decorative carvings again, but saw nothing that resembled any sort of calendar symbols he’d ever seen, never mind letters or numbers.
Lili gazed at the centre stone for a moment. “Climb up there,” she pointed to where the statue of Mars would have been.
Frost did as he was told, but he had no way of knowing how the missing statue would have originally been oriented. Lili seemed to. She directed him to turn to his right and then continued adjusting his position inch by inch until she was satisfied he was facing the same direction the statue would have been seventeen hundred years ago. “There. Don’t move.”
She circled around behind him and inserted the end of the spear into a hole that was at Frost’s eight o’clock. As the shaft slid into the recess, there was a distinctive click. Frost heard it. They all did. He glanced over his shoulder and immediately saw the significance of what she had done. The spear jutted out from the circle in a perfect representation of the symbol of Mars. The sign of man.
Lili bent over the spear and began to push.
A grinding noise filled the chamber as the outer ring of the stone receptacle began to move. Denison rushed to Lili’s side, and working together, they rotated the stone circle until the spear was pointing directly ahead of Frost.
He didn’t move.
Something was happening.
He didn’t want to break the magic, whatever it was.
As soon as the spear tip reached that position, there was a second sharp click, and the pedestal beneath Frost’s feet began to vibrate.
Before he could even think about jumping down to safety there was another sound: stones scraping and slamming together.
The centre circle, where he stood, and the outer perimeter of the pedestal didn’t move, but the interior of the repository abruptly fell away into darkness.
14 Low Country for Old Men
The Netherlands—0245 Local (0145 UTC)
KONSTANTIN KHAVIN PARKED his hired car in a layby and got out, slamming the door behind him.
The night air, chilly from a sea breeze blowing across the lowlands, was cutting. The bite helped him shrug off the fatigue from the long train ride and subsequent drive through the flat Dutch countryside. To the south, he could make out the glow of The Hague-Rotterdam conurbation. The city was distant enough that he could see the most of the landscape before him by starlight alone. He savoured the wind against his face a moment longer, then turned his back on it. From now until the end of it, he was task orientated. And the task was David Habersham.
He was less than two klicks from the front gate to Habersham’s manor, but the property itself lay on the far side of the highway. Lethe’s digging had tapped into the satellite feed and revealed there was no fence around the estate, and no evidence of security measures in place, which seemed odd for a man at the centre of an elaborate web of conspiracy theories and plots around the Crown. He had to assume the house itself was guarded.
Habersham was a powerful man, not rich beyond dreams of avarice—a multi-millionaire, but not a billionaire—not Howard Hughes hiding behind impenetrable layers of security.
Or so Lethe thought; Konstantin wasn’t so sure.
Walking a mile in Habersham’s shoes, even with the loner mentality, if he’d been part of a terrorist conspiracy intent on fundamentally altering the world, he’d take every precaution guarding the approaches to his residence. Never think your enemy is an idiot or weaker than you. Never think he wouldn’t do at least what you’d do, and at best would be three steps ahead of you as he’d had forever to make contingencies.
With the aid of a Night Optics D-300 night vision monocular held to his eye by an uncomfortably jerry-rigged headband, he covered the ground quickly—moving through the tall grass as confidently as if it was bright daylight.
He scanned the area for motion sensors, security cameras, any kind of hidden surveillance equipment. He stopped every few feet and listened with his eyes closed, straining to catch any sounds that didn’t belong—anything out of the ordinary—anything that might herald the approach of a patrol. Silence. Ordinary night sounds.
Twenty-seven minutes after slamming the car door, he got his first glimpse of Habersham’s house through a stand of Scots pine trees.
The house was a squat, single-story building with a gently sloping roof, built in the traditional colonial Dutch style. It was an utterly unremarkable place—not the home of a millionaire—save for the fact that at the north corner it joined to the towering structure of an old-fashioned windmill, like something straight out of Cervantes, with enormous vanes turning slowly in the faint breeze.
Habersham had made his fortune from alternative energy production so maybe the windmill was more than just an elaborate lawn ornament?
Despite the late hour, several of the windows in the house were lit from within.
He couldn’t see any other signs of activity.
It took another hour’s painstaking surveillance to satisfy the big Russian that there were no guards, no dogs, no cameras or sensors around the structure, and that didn’t make him happy, but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. He broke from cover and crossed to the house, ducking behind the ponderous vanes of the windmill as they turned.
The mill’s rustic appearance was a façade.
Up close, Konstantin could see that the vanes were metal not wood—something lightweight and durable—and covered with a synthetic fabric. The axle around which the whole mechanism rotated was also of metal, and where it disappeared into the supporting structure there was a metal gear box
with traces of machine oil and grease seeping out around the spindle. The mill’s windows were double-paned insulated glass set into vinyl frames, impossible to open from the outside, but the touch that was most at odds with the antiquated look of the mill was the door, which was equipped with a very modern push button electronic lock.
Konstantin remained absolutely motionless for several minutes to see if his approach had triggered any sensors on the lock box, or if he had been observed from the house itself, then took a closer look at the door.
The lock was a relatively unsophisticated affair, sporting a well-worn ten-digit keypad, nothing more elaborate than the kind of thing that would have been used to secure an office door in a shared building. It wouldn’t take any particular skill to rig a fix for someone comfortable with electronic security. Konstantin was more of a hands-on old school kind of burglar though. He liked to listen to the movement of the tumblers in the locks, catch the subtle shift in sound as they dropped into place. There was an art to it. This modern stuff lacked sophistication. It was crass. It took the fun out of the game. You didn’t need skill, you just needed a box of tricks. He wasn’t averse to cheating.
But what it did mean was that getting into Habersham’s house was going to be more difficult than breaking into Denison’s flat had been.
He had come prepared.
He took a handheld electric circuit detector from the tool bag he’d brought along, and swept it around the doorframe. The lock registered immediately. There was no indication of other active circuits. The door wasn’t alarmed.
He backed away from the door and tried to peer through the windows, but couldn’t see anything inside because they were covered by heavy opaque curtains. That gave him pause. With the night vision scope making a motion sensor would have been easy; now he was going to have to go in blind. He didn’t like that. If there was an alarm system he’d have thirty-to-sixty seconds to disable it before everything went to hell.
He really hated technology.
The lock on the door was operated by an electromagnet; when the correct code was entered, the circuit would supply power to the magnet and pull back the bolt, permitting entry. Like most electronic security measures, the lock worked on the principle of a passive circuit. In order to make it work, you had to turn it on. Cutting power to the lock would merely leave the bolt in its locked position.
Konstantin didn’t have the code, but he had something almost as good.
He delved into his bag of tricks again and took out a battery-operated degaussing gun. The handheld unit was nothing more than a very powerful electromagnet itself, used for erasing data from magnetic tape and computer disks. It was somewhere between old school tech and the ultra-modern security breaker, and remarkably useful for a variety of not-so legal applications.
He placed the degaussing magnet next to the doorknob and flipped the switch.
There was a metallic click from inside as the device grabbed hold of the spring-loaded bolt, magnetic attraction pulling it from the latch plate.
Konstantin sucked in a breath and then eased the door open.
It was as easy as that.
Inside the mill, all was quiet.
There was no warning tone of an active alarm system. No escalating cry of intruder, intruder to drown out his thoughts in panic and wake the dead. A sweep of the interior, one eye closed, so the night vision monocle was the only image his brain had to process, didn’t reveal anything either. No blinking indicator lights from concealed motion detectors or CCTV.
Something else stopped him in his tracks.
The interior room looked nothing at all like an old Dutch mill. There was no millstone grinding away patiently, no evidence at all in fact that the building served any sort of utilitarian purpose relating to the massive turbines outside. The room was sparsely furnished: the only actual furniture was a single folding chair, positioned in the centre of the room.
Directly in front of the chair was a camera tripod.
Right behind it, adorning the entire rear wall, was an enormous flag.
This didn’t feel right.
He felt liked he’d stepped onto the set of a terrorist video circa 2001. He could imagine a man, face obscured by a scarf, leaning forward to lay claim to countless atrocities. He scanned the room. He couldn’t determine the colour of the flag—it looked pure white in his night vision, but was probably some hue of red—he had no difficultly making out the distinctive double-headed black eagle in the centre of the banner, positioned above a diagonal cross formed by the silhouette of a scimitar and what was unmistakably a Kalashnikov assault rifle. The eagle was a common device in Eastern Europe, but it was the crossed weapons...along with the chair and the camera...that spoke volumes to the Russian.
This is a very bad place.
Something flashed at the edges of the monochrome display. Konstantin swivelled the monocular away. The light had come from outside. He moved quickly into the room and pulled the door shut behind him.
He paused in the darkness, just breathing, listening, and then opened the door a crack looking to identify the source of the illumination.
To his unaided eyes the spot of light was a barely visible pinprick of light across nearly a kilometre of open terrain. As he continued to watch, the light divided—like a pair of blazing eyes—drawing ominously closer: a vehicle approaching the house at speed.
He was about to have a visitor.
A white Volkswagen Eurovan emerged from the gloom and pulled to a stop in front the main house, thirty metres from where the Russian watched. As the driver and passenger got out, an older man emerged from the house to greet them. Konstantin recognised him from Lethe’s dossier: David Habersham.
The driver of the van was dressed in black military fatigues, replete with a rolled up watch cap and a tactical vest. Konstantin noted the holstered pistol, and the compact Heckler & Koch MP-5 machine pistol slung from one shoulder.
The passenger was less remarkable.
He was of an age with Habersham, and had a thatch of silver-grey hair and a brush bottle moustache. Light spilled out from the main house in a long rectangle across the driver. The man stepped into it, moving forward to greet Habersham. He wore a professorial tweed jacket, chinos, and rather nice shoes. There was no indication that he was armed; his jacket fell naturally as he pumped Habersham’s hand.
Behind them, the driver slid open the van side door, revealing another uniformed man.
Habersham spoke first, his voice high with surprise and concern. It carried easily to where the Russian hid. “Where are the rest of your men? Was there a problem?”
“No problems.” The man’s accent was maddeningly familiar, but Konstantin couldn’t place it. “Not here, at least. The operation went exactly as planned. The problem was elsewhere. My horseman needed some assistance.”
“The sword?”
“It was not where we thought it would be, but the horseman is confident that it will be found. I sent the rest of my team to Rome to aide in its recovery. They should already be on the ground.” The man clapped Habersham on the shoulder. “It is good to have a private jet, no?”
Habersham did not sound quite so sanguine. “Using the jet might arouse suspicion.”
“No one will suspect anything. The trail will lead exactly where we wish it to.”
Habersham shook his head slightly, doubting, obviously less than thrilled with the turn of events, and then approached the van.
He peered inside the rear cargo area.
After a moment, he drew back and addressed the H&K guy. “Put him in the mill.”
Khavin’s heart thudded in his chest.
He pulled the door shut quietly and retreated into the now totally dark interior.
He scanned the room again with the monocular. This time he made two doors against the back wall. One of them had a keyhole in the doorknob, the other did not.
Well that simplifies things.
Khavin went to the latter door and twisted the doorknob. Beyon
d was a stairwell—a utilitarian construct of steel and concrete—that ascended to the upper reaches of the mill. He went in, closing the door softly behind him.
He didn’t go up.
Instead, he stayed there, his ear pressed to the door, trying to hear what was happening in the room he’d just left. If he was right about the room—about the chair and the flag and the camera—they wouldn’t be going any further.
He waited. Time slowed.
After a long silence, Khavin heard the sharp beep of the exterior lock disengaging and a thump as someone threw the door wide open. There was a shuffling of feet and grunts of exertion, the drag of a chair leg on the stone floor, and then the room was quiet again.
Konstantin waited.
He listened, straining to catch the faintest whisper or creak of a floorboard, ready to exfiltrate via the stairs if any noises suggested he was about to be made.
Nothing.
And still he waited.
And still nothing.
Having completed their task, Habersham’s men must have exited the mill.
Konstantin turned the latch and eased the door open a crack.
The room remained dark and still.
He pushed the door open another inch. It was enough to see the chair in the centre of the room.
It was occupied by a man, dressed in what looked like pyjamas.
He sat slumped in the chair, his arms bound behind his back, his head covered by a sack of dark cloth.
Habersham had taken a hostage.
Konstantin waited a moment longer to make sure that there wasn’t a guard lurking in the darkness...
Of course, there’s not. A guard would turn on the lights.
...and then stole forward into the room.
The prisoner sat alone, unmoving and unaware of the Russian’s presence. Konstantin continued to study the man through his night vision monocular, weighing up his options.
His original intention had been to gain access to Habersham’s house, gather intel on the Four Evangelists and their plans. He still had no idea what their over-arching scheme entailed, but now he knew it involved this hostage, and that presented him with a dilemma: continue with his original plan and risk learning the truth only after it was too late to avert? Or take definitive action—pre-emptive action—here and now, without knowing what was really going on?
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