The Babylon Idol

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Am I going to get frostbite?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Can you wiggle your toes?’

  She wiggled them. ‘Just about.’

  ‘Then we won’t have to chop them off anytime soon.’ He rubbed everything dry with a spare T-shirt, then pulled the socks onto her feet, two pairs apiece. He used a length of duct tape to attach them to each trouser leg, so they couldn’t slip off. ‘Good enough for the Norwegian Army,’ he said. ‘And those blokes know a thing or two about keeping your feet toasty in cold weather.’ He closed up his bag, stood up. Anna peered at her feet, holding them clear of the snow to keep them dry.

  ‘They feel warmer already, but now I can’t walk.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. He reached down to pick her up. ‘Put your arm around my neck.’

  ‘You’re not going to carry me?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do.’ He lifted her off the rock, one arm around her torso and the other under the crook of her knees.

  ‘But we’re in the middle of nowhere. You can’t carry me all that way.’

  He gave her a reassuring smile. ‘You ever been to Wales? There’s a mountain there called Pen Y Fan. In winter it makes this place look like Miami Beach. For SAS training we were expected to march right the way over it in full pack, plus rifle and ammunition. My bergen alone was heavier than you.’

  But that pack had been on his back, held tight to his body by wide webbing straps, the science of weight distribution and ergonomic efficiency all carefully worked out by military minds. Even that kind of load, carried for too long, occasionally proved enough of an endurance test to claim the lives of strong, fit young warriors twenty years or more his junior. Ben knew all that even as he set off with her in his arms, but outwardly he just smiled and acted as though it was nothing.

  After a mile, though, his arm muscles were screaming, his spine was arched backwards to counter the forward drag and his neck felt ready to snap off. He was afraid of stumbling in the snow and dropping her. The big fat flakes were falling even more thickly from the sky, drifting down like feathery moths that clung to his hair and eyelashes, making him blink. The temperature was still dropping. The cold was seeping deeper towards his core. His face was numb. His denim shirt was soaked through to the skin. He was trembling and his teeth were chattering. Which was a good sign. It was when they stopped chattering that you needed to start worrying.

  Just one of the tell-tale signs of hypothermia. Others included headaches, loss of coordination, blurred vision, slurred speech and increasing stupor that eventually led to unconsciousness. After another mile, he was still doing reasonably okay himself but he was worried that Anna was becoming drowsy and unresponsive. ‘Hey,’ he said close to her ear. ‘What was the birth date of Alexander the Great again? Remind me.’

  She mumbled back, ‘Three fifty-six BC.’

  ‘What month?’

  ‘August,’ she answered after a pause.

  ‘Wrong. It was June. What day?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ came the slurred reply. ‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’

  He marched on, trying to keep her talking, but before long she stopped answering and her arm drooped loosely from his neck, putting even more dead weight on his straining biceps. If he didn’t find shelter for them both before the night was out, her core temperature was going to drop to critical point, her organs would begin to shut down, and she was going to freeze and die.

  Then, sometime afterwards, exactly the same thing was going to happen to him. Nobody would find them until the snow melted, sometime next year. Perhaps never at all.

  He marched on, half-blinded, snow in his eyes. Snow in his hair, snow down his neck. The chill gnawing right through him. His feet were two blocks of wood and he could no longer feel his arms. His blood was chugging to a standstill in his veins. He had thought he’d been cold crawling from the Arno River in Florence. He couldn’t take much more of this, but he made himself do it anyway. Step after step. Always a little further. Like the words of the James Elroy Flecker poem that adorned the wall of the SAS chapel at the regimental HQ in Hereford.

  We are the pilgrims, Master; we shall go always a little further:

  It may be beyond that last blue mountain barr’d with snow,

  Across that angry or that glimmering sea.

  The poem had always inspired him, kept him fighting and struggling and driven him to survive even when the odds appeared insurmountable. And that was what it did now.

  And then, through the swirling blizzard, he saw the dark shapes of the buildings up ahead.

  Chapter 40

  The farmhouse was in a whole different order from Ben’s solid stone-built home in France. As he got closer and played his torch beam over it through the falling snow he saw it was little more than a log cabin, long and low, the green paint old and peeling. Its corrugated roof extended outwards all around to make a veranda whose wooden steps had rotted away and were buried under a mound of white. An iron stovepipe chimney jutted from one end of the roof and icicles as long and thick as unicorn horns hung from the rusted guttering. Some of the windows were boarded, others broken.

  Next to the house was a lean-to barn that was in no better state, snow drifted deep against its chained and padlocked doors. Old animal pens stood empty and forlorn nearby. The patch of land around the homestead, maybe a couple of acres, was planted with the corpses of dead trees, gnarled ghosts of what had once been a small apple orchard. Whatever smallholder family had tried to make a go of it here had probably packed up and left not long after the trees had died, and their livelihood with them. It was a sad and gloomy place, but for Ben, it was a miracle haven whose discovery was almost enough for him to start believing in God again.

  Almost.

  Struggling up the broken-down steps onto the porch with Anna in his arms, he kicked open the front door. The smell of dank and decay wafted out of the dark interior. There was no need to call out, ‘Anyone at home?’ Nobody had been at home for years. Inside, he booted the door shut with his heel and lowered Anna gently down to the bare plank floor. She stirred, muttered something incoherent. He shone the torch around him. Life here had been as rustic as it could get. The smallholders obviously hadn’t thought their few sticks of simple furniture worth taking with them when they left. In a corner was a chopping block made from a section of apple tree, with a small pile of kindling and logs and a rusty hatchet next to a spartan old wood burner.

  Shivering violently, he knelt by the wood burner and laid his torch on the floor to give him some light. His hands were so numb that he could hardly get his fingers to work enough to scrape away the damp ashes clogging up the grate. With luck, the stovepipe chimney wouldn’t be packed solid with generations of bird nests.

  Luck was on his side. In a few minutes he had a fire going, a small smoky flame that he carefully built into a crackling blaze. The cast-iron stove soaked up the heat, clicking and ticking as the metal warmed and threw out a glow that began to chase the cold air from the room. He moved Anna close to the spreading warmth.

  ‘What is this place?’ she asked groggily.

  ‘We’ll be safe here for a while,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you out of these wet clothes.’

  Anna was too cold to have many inhibitions. They both stripped to their underwear, huddling and shivering as close to the fire as they could without burning themselves. The smallholders had fixed up a rack for drying clothes from a pulley above the stove. Ben hung their things from it, and soon there were clouds of steam billowing from the soaked material. He joined her on the floor and the two of them sat pressed up close together, feeling the wonderful heat sinking into them and the blood beginning to circulate once more through their half-naked bodies. He wrapped an arm around her bare shoulder and rubbed her back and arms to get the circulation going.

  It was several minutes before Anna’s shivering died away and she was able to talk normally. Ben uncapped his flask and shared a little whisky with her.
She spluttered at the taste of it, but gratefully took a few more sips. The firelight glowed amber on her skin and danced in her eyes. ‘Thank you for looking after me, Ben. I’m sorry I snapped at you before.’

  ‘Sticks and stones,’ he said. ‘Better than bullets and grenades.’

  ‘They won’t find us here, will they?’

  ‘Not unless they’re psychic, and riding on polar bears.’

  ‘Perhaps they are psychic. I can’t understand how else they got to Ercan’s house before us.’

  ‘I’ve been asking myself the same question,’ Ben said. ‘They seemed to know exactly where we were headed, and that’s a little too much of a coincidence. You said that nobody could locate Ercan unless they had his address. Unless I’m missing something, there’s only one place they could have got that. From you.’

  ‘From me?’

  ‘Specifically, from your laptop,’ he said. ‘You left it behind in Greece.’

  ‘Because you told me I couldn’t go back for it.’

  ‘What exactly was on that laptop, Anna?’

  She shrugged. ‘Everything.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘When I’m researching a project I keep a diary of all my thoughts and ideas as it takes shape. My travel plans, everything.’

  ‘Including the names and contact details of the people you were intending to visit?’

  ‘It’s all in my address book.’

  ‘Which is on the laptop too?’

  ‘That’s where people keep them nowadays.’

  ‘Do they? I have a leather book that sits by the phone.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘And the laptop was where?’ he asked.

  ‘It was in my travel bag, along with my clothes and other things. I didn’t try to hide it. Why would I? In any case, Ben, as I told you, the material in the computer is encrypted.’

  ‘There’s encrypted and “encrypted”. How hard would it be to access?’

  She looked flustered from his questioning. ‘I’m not all that expert with computers, and in any case I wasn’t expecting anyone to pry into it. You just have to enter a code to get in. The thing asked for a password of twelve digits or more, so I used “Nebuchadnezzar”. I suppose, if Usberti had hold of it, he might have—’

  ‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘I suppose that too. In which case, he’d have known exactly where in Ankara you were headed.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said.

  He thought for a minute. ‘Among these personal details, did you write down Ercan’s various security passwords and combinations?’

  ‘On the last day I stayed with him, he ran out of provisions and went out shopping. I was terrified I would set off the alarms while he was gone, so I got him to list them all down for me and I copied them down. But only the numbers, not what they were for. I had my own system for remembering what was what. Nobody else could have used them.’

  ‘What matters is that they knew they were dealing with a paranoid nut,’ Ben said. ‘Which is also why they were able to get inside his house so easily. Usberti’s no fool. He would have known the place would be on lockdown and Ercan would never open the door to a bunch of strangers. I’ll bet he used a decoy.’

  ‘What kind of decoy?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be hard to find a nice-looking woman of about the right height and build, dress her up to look stylish, put a long black wig on her, stick some money in her pocket and tell her what to do. A hooker, maybe, happy to earn easy cash for a change. All it took was for her to ring his doorbell and say into the speaker “Ercan, it’s me, Anna, I’ve come to see you,” and his whole security system was worthless. The instant he deactivated the alarm to open the door, the heavies jumped out of the bushes, pushed their way inside and that was it. Then they took him away and waited nearby for us to walk into the trap.’

  Anna looked crestfallen. ‘I can’t believe this is happening. It’s like Theo Kambasis all over again. How could I have known Ercan would be in danger?’

  ‘You couldn’t,’ Ben said. ‘So don’t beat yourself up over it.’ Which was some advice, coming from the man who had spent much of his life plagued by guilt over things he couldn’t control.

  They were silent for a few minutes, listening to the crackle of the fire. Ben tossed on another log.

  ‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘This may sound crazy to you.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘That man back there. The leader. It seems insane, but somehow I felt that I recognised him.’

  ‘Me too,’ Ben admitted, ‘and it’s been bugging me the whole time. I’m certain I’ve never come across him in my life, and yet … it’s as if I’d seen the bastard before.’

  ‘It’s the eyes,’ Anna said shakily, gazing into the flames with a troubled expression, as if she saw something there that haunted her. ‘I can’t ever forget those eyes. They are the same eyes that looked at me that night in France, years ago, when I thought I was going to die.’

  Ben turned to face her. She wasn’t joking. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Bozza,’ she replied, tight-lipped. There was total conviction in her voice.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Ben said. ‘Franco Bozza’s been dead for years. And in any case, he was bigger, taller.’

  ‘Then this man is related to him. His son?’

  ‘Too old for that.’

  ‘Then his brother, perhaps. Is it possible?’

  Ben shook his head grimly. He didn’t want to believe it, but his instinct told him Anna might be right. ‘I don’t like it, but it’s not impossible. It would mean—’

  ‘Ben? What would it mean?’

  ‘First, if you’re right, it would mean this guy has more motivation than whatever cash sum Usberti’s paying him to do a job. He wants revenge for his brother’s death.’

  ‘And he knows you killed him.’

  ‘Or thinks I did. As it happens, the blind woman shot him. Two rounds from an old broom-handle Mauser pistol. The first got him in the throat, the second blew the top of his head off.’

  ‘That sounds like very precise shooting from a blind woman.’

  ‘That’s because she was only pretending to be blind. Had us both fooled.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And secondly,’ Ben said, ‘if you’re right, it means we’re up against someone a lot worse than your regular rent-a-thug. The first Bozza was bad enough, and he was just a plain-vanilla hired assassin, sadist and torturer. Little brother, if that’s who he is, is a tougher prospect. He’s done some army time. Maybe quite a bit of it.’

  ‘You can tell?’

  ‘Like day from night.’

  ‘He was a soldier like you?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘If he’d been a soldier like me, or like any of my guys back in the day, he wouldn’t have confined his assault to the front door. He’d have split his men up and hit the front and back both at once. Then we’d have had a real problem getting out of that house. What that means is that he was never in Special Forces, in anyone’s army. That’s the good news. The bad news is, you take a man with the screwed-up psychopathic genes of a Bozza brother and put him through any kind of serious military training, teach him how to fight with weapons or bare hands, how to endure physical punishment and ignore pain, you’re bound to create some kind of monster. But then, we’ve already had a taster of what he’s like.’

  ‘He won’t stop coming after us, will he?’

  Ben shook his head again. ‘Nope. Not until it’s over. We’ll be seeing him again, for sure.’

  ‘This won’t end well, will it?’

  ‘For someone, it won’t.’

  ‘This is my problem, not yours. If I have to face it alone, I will. You don’t have to stay with me.’

  Ben looked at her, saw the earnestness in her face, and his heart went out to her for her courage. ‘You’re not getting rid of me that easily,’ he said. ‘We’re getting through this together, or not at all. You and me.’

  ‘You, me and Ercan. We have to
save him, too. Before those animals harm him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on Ercan’s chances, if I were you. His only value to the enemy is the information inside his head. How long he lives depends on how long it takes for Usberti’s guys to get it out of him. My guess is, not long.’

  ‘Then we have to get to him first,’ Anna said firmly. ‘The sooner we find Usberti, the sooner we find Ercan, alive. It all boils down to our search for the idol. We’re all in the same race, hunting the same clues. And now I know where the next clue is leading us.’

  Chapter 41

  By now, the glow of the fire had spread through the whole cabin. Ben and Anna’s bodies were warm, the whisky flask was empty and they felt as safe and cosy as two people in their predicament ever could. Ben took their dried-out clothes from the rack over the stove and handed Anna’s down to where she sat on the floor. He kept his eyes discreetly averted as she stood up to dress.

  ‘Such a gentleman,’ she said. ‘You can look now. Oh, it feels so good to be warm again.’

  ‘You were saying you knew where we have to go next. I’d be interested in knowing that myself.’

  She nodded. ‘Thanks to Ercan. At first, when I read the papers from his document safe, I didn’t understand. But then I realised. He figured it out. I told you he was a genius.’

  ‘He must be, considering it now turns out the fragments of the Muranu tablet are of no use after all.’

  ‘The tablet was … what’s the expression? A red sardine.’

  ‘A red herring,’ Ben said.

  ‘That’s exactly what it was. Ercan realised that the pieces were too badly damaged to be decipherable, leaving him with no choice but to abandon them. But he’s as tenacious a scholar as any detective. When you find one avenue of investigation becomes a dead end, you retrace your steps, go back to the starting point and look for another. This time he took a completely different approach, in order to try to trace the movements of the Muranu family after their escape from Babylon. The problem was, no such records existed. Instead, he found the solution buried in the administrative records of the PFA.’