by Will Adams
‘So did you know Nathan well?’ Iain asked him.
‘Not particularly. We only met a few times. But we spoke on the phone a fair bit. I had to report in at least once a month, though much more often if something juicy was going on.’
‘Juicy meaning to do with the Homeric Question, right?’
‘Or the oil thing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Iain. ‘What oil thing?’
‘Oh. I assumed you knew. His family money came from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels fuck up the planet.’ He nodded at the lorry in front of them, spewing exhaust fumes even though it was stuck in the jam with the rest of them. ‘Most people in that business either shrug it off or reject the science. But Nathan had studied geology at Yale. He liked data. He understood models. He knew the climate really was changing. So he set about it in a different way. Specifically, he argued that the planet was naturally susceptible to large swings in temperature, so that the current rise was only a to-be-expected part of an overarching pattern. But if such climate fluctuations are standard, we should find evidence for them in the archaeological record. And we do. The medieval warm period. Various minor ice ages. And then there’s the big one: the Catastrophe itself. The Mediterranean was plunged into hundreds of years of misery, ergo the cause of it must have been extraordinary. A lot of people – including Nathan – believe it involved climate change of some kind, most likely a prolonged heatwave causing droughts and widespread famine. But there was no proof of this, so he set out to find it. That was where we came in, of course. We were right here on the spot and already studying this exact period. So he gave us lots and lots of money for shiny new machines. But it’s a rabbit warren, this kind of thing. You set off down one hole only to pop up another. And pretty soon Nathan got hooked on the Dark Ages themselves. And I do mean hooked. He spent well over a million dollars on it through us alone. Not to mention all the artefacts he bought.’
‘Looking for his Virgil Solution?’
Mike threw him an uneasy glance. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘He wrote you a note to go with his samples. Something about you guys getting closer to your Virgil Solution. Which is what, exactly?’
‘No idea, old chap. No idea at all.’
Iain looked curiously at him. He didn’t look the type to lie. Yet he just had. But he let it go for the moment. ‘So these Dark Ages,’ he asked. ‘What exactly got Nathan so hooked?’
‘Are you being polite? Or are you genuinely interested?’
‘Let’s call it fifty-fifty.’ He nodded at the gridlock ahead. ‘It’s not as if we’re going anywhere for a while.’
‘Fair enough,’ smiled Mike. ‘Okay. Let me start with this: Alexander the Great died on the afternoon of the eleventh of June, 323 BC. That is to say, we know the hour of the day of the year. You may think that’s trivial. But Alexander died while campaigning in a far-distant country. They didn’t have fixed calendars back then. It was all “in the fourth moon of the fifth year of such and such a king …” Every time a new dynasty took over, the whole system was liable to be replaced. Rulers fiddled the records shamelessly, both to glorify themselves and to diminish rivals. Record-keeping was atrocious, and archives and libraries were constantly being destroyed. And the whole region was in constant turmoil. There were endless wars, famines, revolutions, earthquakes, eruptions and the like. Then, to cap it all, came the collapse of the Roman Empire, which precipitated a dark age of its own. Piecing the timeline of that back together is incredibly hard. So surely it’s possible that we’ve missed a day here or there, maybe even a year or two. Some people argue we’ve lost decades. Yet I can assure you with total confidence that we know exactly when Alexander died. How is that possible?’
Iain smiled. ‘I trust that’s a rhetorical question.’
Mike jabbed a finger upwards. ‘The stars, my friend. The stars. Alexander died in Babylon and the Babylonians kept incredibly detailed astronomical records. With modern computers and algorithms, it’s easy to retrocalculate what was happening in the skies there two and a bit thousand years ago, then to test that against their records. And they match perfectly. So we know beyond reasonable doubt when Alexander died. And the Babylonians weren’t the only astronomers. The Greeks and Romans and Egyptians all were too. Their records all confirm our chronology. What’s more, they help us push our knowledge further and further back. There was a battle near the River Halys in eastern Turkey, for example. The two sides called it quits after a solar eclipse made them all think they’d made their gods angry. Retrocalculate solar eclipses for that part of Turkey and you get the twenty-eighth of May, 585 BC. That, unfortunately, is about the earliest specific date everyone agrees on. We can do months and years before then, but not days. When we get back to the Early Iron Age, even years become fuzzy so we move increasingly to ranges: the third quarter of the ninth century, that kind of thing. But once we hit the Dark Ages proper, everything falls apart. We can’t date specific events in the Late Bronze Age with anything like certainty, not even to the nearest hundred years.’
‘Karin told me the other night that the Trojan War took place in 1200 BC,’ said Iain mildly. ‘Are you saying she was wrong?’
‘No, no. Not at all. At least, that’s a very unhelpful way of thinking about it. To give you the short explanation, Karin was using something called the conventional chronology. We all use it, even though we don’t necessarily agree with it, because it makes communication so much easier. Think of it as our collective best guess, if you like. But many of my colleagues think it’s too low, which is to say they think we should push the Late Bronze Age fifty or a hundred years further backwards in time, so that the Trojan War would have taken place in around 1275 BC, say. But others think that it’s too high, and that the Bronze Age should be brought forwards by fifty years or so, placing the Trojan War around 1150.’
‘And that was the short explanation, was it?’ said Iain. ‘It wasn’t so bad. What’s the long one like?’
III
Karin spent the morning on the hotel computer running searches for safety-deposit vaults in the Antioch area. When she came up dry, she turned to variations of SGAMA, the cryptic initials on the tag of Rick’s key, and other such long-shots. Again without success. Her departure time approached. She considered, briefly, switching to a later flight; but in truth she’d run out of ideas. And she was eager to leave too. Antioch had bad associations for her.
A taxi to Hatay Airport. A half-empty plane out across the Anatolian coast and over dazzling deep blue sea, then flying in over the accusatory finger of the Karpas peninsula. From Erkan Airport, she took a taxi south across the border into the Republic of Cyprus. Her passport was checked; she was asked intrusive questions. It made her wonder how Rick had brought across his Stuttgart cash. A significant risk, surely, especially with Nathan not even certain to buy.
Her hotel was on Archbishop Makarios Avenue, at the heart of Nicosia’s modern city. She took the lift up to the top floor. Her room was vast and plush with a whole wall of smoked glass. She slid between doors out onto a spacious balcony with white metal furniture heavy enough to resist strong winds. She enjoyed heights. They made her toes tingle. She leaned over the balcony and looked down at the busy street below, the awnings and polished windows of chic boutiques and jewellers, a florist’s shop and a pair of expensive-looking cafés with glassed-off areas of pavement. But it was none of those that really caught her eye. What really caught her eye was the branch of the Société Genève bank nestled in between them.
The Société Genève, Archbishop Makarios Avenue.
SGAMA.
TWENTY-THREE
I
In quieter times, the Turkish media might have made the scandal surrounding the Minister for Tourism’s villa last them several days. In fact, it lost top billing before noon. And all it took was a holiday snap of two men drinking coffee together at an Antalyan café.
Alaattin Sahin was Chief Prosecutor of Adiyaman Province. More problematically for the government,
he was also the Justice Minister’s first cousin. His companion was a certain Karim Ghazi, a bag-man for the Kurdish separatists with two terrorism-related convictions to his name. And that the photographs were recent was apparent not merely from the men’s appearance but also because the café in question had only been open eighteen months.
Sahin’s immediate response was to deny that he’d been in Antalya at all during the past three years. But an old press release was quickly published, promoting a panel he’d sat on at a conference there the year before. His story switched. Yes, he had been in Antalya that one day. When one sat on as many panels as he did, such things were easy to forget. And yes, he now remembered taking coffee, and how this stranger Ghazi had come to sit at his table, and how they’d exchanged a few inconsequential words. He’d thought nothing of it at the time, but in retrospect it was obviously a crude attempt to discredit him. But that line fell too when footage of the meet was published, showing them talking for over five minutes before Ghazi passed him a fat envelope that he checked and then pocketed. Now came a third story. The man had approached him at the café and had asked for help with a neighbourhood dispute back home. Yes, it had been a backhander, but everyone took backhanders. If you started dismissing people for taking backhanders, Turkey would have no employees left. But it had been too late by then. No one believed a word he said any more.
Journalists gathered outside the Justice Ministry, but no one came down to talk. They contented themselves, therefore, with asking rhetorical questions of their cameras: Did the Justice Minister himself know about these bribes? Was he involved somehow? Were the payments even meant for him? The innuendo finally got beneath his skin. He marched downstairs to address the media directly. After distancing himself from his cousin and announcing his immediate suspension, he dismissed the whispers against himself as self-evidently ridiculous. What, after all, could he possibly have to gain by talking to criminals and terrorists? It was his job to put criminals and terrorists in prison.
Exactly, went the murmurs. And look how well that’s going.
II
A slew of sirens flashing past on the other side of the road signalled that the accident was finally in hand. Engines rumbled back on around them; traffic began squabbling over access to the single lane. With the khamsin still blowing hard, Iain let Mike concentrate on the task in hand. They finally got moving. They passed three cars with crumpled bonnets and rears, then a blue container lorry lying like a beached whale on the verge, and suddenly they were through. The road opened up and Mike quickly shifted through the gears, anxious to make up time despite the continuing sandstorm.
‘The long explanation,’ prompted Iain.
‘Yes.’ Mike gave himself a few moments to think, then said: ‘The Dark Ages affected everywhere in the ancient world; Egypt every bit as much as Greece, Turkey, Israel and the rest. But if we were ever to solve the dating problem, this always looked the best place to start. For one thing, it was relatively out of the way, and so more stable than those other regions. Its climate also meant that its monuments and archives survived well. Most of all, the Egyptians kept the best records, including king lists. So after we’d cracked the language it was comparatively easy for early archaeologists to work out the order of the various dynasties, and how long each Pharaoh reigned for.’
From the fog of sand ahead, the ghostly silhouette of a modern city began slowly to emerge. And then, abruptly, they were upon it. New Cairo was thinly populated at the best of times, but the sandstorm had driven everyone indoors, and right now it looked almost post-apocalyptic.
‘Take New Kingdom Egypt, for example,’ continued Mike, slowing as he approached a junction. ‘It started with a guy called Amosis I and ended nearly five hundred years later with Ramesses XI, which signalled the start of the Dark Ages here. But did those five hundred years run from 1800 BC to 1300 BC or from 1400 BC to 900 BC? No one could say, not for sure. The Dark Ages themselves were too messy for anyone to make sense of, so we desperately needed some astronomical anchor point from the New Kingdom that we could date exactly, like that solar eclipse I mentioned at the Battle of Halys. Then, about a hundred years ago, an ingenious solution called Sothic cycles was proposed. The exact mechanism is quite complex, but – to simplify it outrageously – the Egyptian calendar had 365 days to a year, rather than 365 and a quarter. Their seasons therefore slowly shifted by one day every four years until their summers gradually became their winters, and vice versa; and then, eventually, after fourteen hundred and sixty years, they got back to where they’d started.’
Iain nodded. ‘One Sothic cycle completed.’
Mike flashed him a pleased smile. ‘Exactly. Exactly. Now, a guy called Meyer took it upon himself to trawl through Egyptian inscriptions looking for descriptions of coronations and the like that included some mention of the Sothic cycle. Because if he could work out at what stage of the cycle a specific event took place, then he could retrocalculate the date of that event with some precision. And in fact he found multiple examples, enabling him to come up with the first truly reliable Egyptian chronology. And because the Egyptians had traded with, and corresponded with, and fought wars against all the other great Mediterranean powers, Sothic cycles effectively gave us a framework to date the entire ancient world.’
‘And they placed the Trojan War at 1200 BC?’
‘Exactly. And, of course, things didn’t stop there. We developed scientific techniques like carbon-dating, dendrochronology and ice-core sampling, and they not only more or less endorsed that model, they also allowed us to fine-tune it.’ He allowed himself a wry smile. ‘Our garden was coming up roses.’
‘Ah,’ said Iain. ‘I sense a car crash coming up.’
‘I trust you mean that figuratively and not as a comment on my driving,’ said Mike, peering through the gloom for their turning. ‘But you’re right. A car crash puts it nicely.’
TWENTY-FOUR
I
The Société Genève branch was open-plan and muffled with plush red carpeting, armchairs around the walls for customers to browse lifestyle magazines in English, German and Greek. Three cashiers sat at generously sized desks of lacquered dark wood, while others worked in glass-fronted offices to Karin’s left. But she could see no sign of a safety-deposit vault.
There was a queue of one. Karin doubled it. Two of the cashiers looked young and friendly; the third old and severe. She prayed for one of the former. Naturally she got the latter. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, sitting down. ‘But I was told you have safety-deposit boxes here. Is that right?’
The woman nodded fractionally. ‘For account holders.’
‘May I see?’
‘They are for account holders,’ said the woman. ‘Are you an account holder?’
‘No.’
‘Well then.’
She tried a winning smile. ‘Can’t I have a look? I only want to know if it will be suitable.’
‘It’s a safety-deposit vault. If you need a safety-deposit box, then I imagine it will suit you very well.’
‘What about charges?’ asked Karin. ‘What about terms and conditions?’
With a weary look, the cashier dialled an internal number, spoke briefly in Greek. An office door opened and a portly middle-aged man in a shiny pearl suit emerged. He smiled brightly when he saw Karin, showing unnaturally bright white teeth, then hitched up his trousers and straightened his tie as he came across. ‘You wish to know about our vault, yes?’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should discuss it in my office.’
‘Thank you,’ said Karin. She followed him through. They sat either side of his desk. With a courteous gesture, he invited her to talk. ‘It’s my grandmother,’ she said. ‘She died last week.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘She’d been ill a long time,’ Karin assured him. ‘Anyway, she lived near Limassol down on the coast. She owned lots of beautiful things. Beautiful valuable things. Paintings and porcelain and jewellery and I don’t know what else.’ The fluency of her lies surp
rised her. She was better at this than she would have expected. ‘The thing is, I don’t want to auction it all off. These pieces were a part of her, you know. They hold memories. But I can’t leave them where they are either, because I’m definitely going to put the house up for sale. It’s far too big for me, though I am thinking of maybe moving here myself. Only I have my job and I can’t relocate just like that.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I must sound incoherent.’
‘Not at all,’ he assured her. ‘You want to keep your late grandmother’s most valuable and personal possessions safe while you decide what to do with them. A box in our vault is the obvious answer. Before you make your decision, however, you naturally want to know how much it will cost, what our facilities are like, what the procedure will be.’
‘Yes,’ smiled Karin. ‘That’s it exactly.’
He swivelled a little in his chair, steepled his fingers, looked up at the portrait of a stern-faced Greek Orthodox patriarch on his wall. ‘I can tell you everything you want to know. But I can’t show you, I’m afraid. It will seem strange, I know, but it is our strict policy here that only account holders can visit our vault. We know who they are, you see, because we’ve already run checks on their background. You’ll forgive me, I’m sure, for saying this, but when a stranger comes into our branch from off the street – however charming they may be – we have no way of knowing for certain that they are who they claim to be.’
‘I understand completely,’ said Karin. ‘In fact, I’m reassured to know you take your security so seriously. But I presume I could open an account here? And that I could open a safety-deposit box after that?’
He spread his hands. ‘Of course.’
‘How long would it take? Only I’m due to fly back home the day after tomorrow, and I’d love to have this sorted out first.’