The Sacred Scroll

by Anton Gill

  12

  Constantinople, Year of Our Lord 1171

  Thirty years before the Fourth Crusade attacked the great city of Constantinople, affairs in Venice were not going well.

  They were not going well for the Venetians who lived in Constantinople either.

  That was why a fleet had been organized in Venice. A war fleet. The doge, Vitale Michele, had divided the city into six districts, the better to raise the taxes needed to pay for it. But where in hell had it all gone wrong? Vitale Michele wondered. They’d had good relations with Constantinople for years. The emperor of the Byzantine Greeks, Manuel, had been westward-leaning and friendly, even when, in the past, his domain had to put up with crusading armies passing through on their way to Jerusalem.

  Recently, he’d been getting ambitious. He was reducing the privileges of the twenty thousand Venetian businessmen who lived in and around Constantinople and favouring instead their rivals from Amalfi, Genoa and Pisa. And he’d taken a huge chunk of the Dalmatian coast from Hungary. It was worrying.

  The crunch had come early in 1171.

  The fourth day of February, the Feast of St Isidore, was always considered an unlucky day for the world. Tradition had it that on that day babies were born without a conscience – people who had no hearts. In the small hours of St Isidore’s Day that year, families in the Genoan community near the Golden Horn were awakened by a commotion in their streets.

  The Genoans clutched each other in their beds, gathering their children to them. There was thunderous hammering at their gates then the splintering of wood and hinges as doors were staved in. Torn howling from their homes, men, women and children were driven into the streets and hacked down by hooded men, heavily built, much bigger than the average Greek, some on horseback, the majority on foot.

  Fires were started and became ferocious conflagrations as the keen breeze from the north encouraged the flames. By dawn, the Genoan community was no more. Just a few buildings and streets remained intact. Most of the district was reduced to ashes.

  Manuel I Comnenus, fifty years old and a seasoned ruler, stroked his beard thoughtfully. The thing had been unpleasant but necessary, and it had been a complete success. Even his grand vizier, who, he knew, had his own network of spies, was in ignorance of it. The last piece of the mechanism in his plan to crush those upstart Venetians was in place. Rumours about who was responsible for the atrocity were already in circulation. Meanwhile, nothing had been spared to give help and sympathetic succour to those Genoans who’d survived. Genoa would be grateful. They’d be eating out of his hand.

  ‘They say it was the Venetians who did it,’ continued the grand vizier smoothly.

  ‘Well, they’ve gone too far this time,’ replied the emperor.

  The grand vizier watched his master’s face. There were a lot of Venetians in Constantinople, and to move against them might be – unwise.

  Manuel’s face was impassive as he continued: ‘They’ve been getting above themselves for too long. This, we cannot tolerate.’

  ‘What do you intend to do?’

  ‘Listen closely.’

  It took a little time to prepare, but when the Greek blow fell, it fell heavily. On 12 March Manuel’s soldiers moved against all those Venetians who lived within his territories. There was very little destruction this time, and almost no slaughter, but the effect was devastating.

  The following day saw a long caravan of Italians, the few possessions they’d been allowed to keep piled on handcarts or carried in bundles, streaming westward out of the Golden Gate. They had no horses with them, nor donkeys; not even oxen.

  ‘Was it wise to expel them without anything?’ the grand vizier had wondered.

  ‘Certainly! We have to teach these dogs a lesson,’ replied Manuel. ‘They can count themselves lucky we didn’t kill them.’

  ‘But their homes and all that is in them – their ships, their goods, everything?’

  ‘Confiscation is confiscation,’ said the emperor. ‘Besides, you should be pleased. It’ll be a little something to top up your coffers.’

  They were watching the stream of refugees from a tall tower above the Gate. One of Manuel’s concubines fed him sherbet figs as he looked down on the slowly moving column of people. He sucked the sweetmeats idly. He and the grand vizier shared a common thought: most of those straggling along a hundred feet below them would never reach their home town.

  They both knew, too, that Venice would not take such an affront lying down.

  ‘They will come for us,’ said the grand vizier.

  ‘Let them. We’ll be ready for them.’ Manuel Comnenus stroked the hair of the girl who was feeding him. Everything was falling perfectly into place.

  13

  Venice, the Same Year

  ‘They’ve done what?’ snarled Doge Vitale Michele when the news reached him.

  His right-hand man and head of special operations, the hawk-eyed sixty-year-old Enrico Dandolo, spread his hands. ‘We cannot say we did not see this coming. But we were over-confident.’

  ‘It’ll be a disaster for trade. Already the city of Zara has rebelled against us and sided with the Hungarians. And as if losing our principal port on the Dalmatian coast weren’t enough, now we face the enmity of the Greeks.’

  ‘We must seek other routes to the East. Egypt –’

  ‘Too far! Too costly! Anyway, they’re not even Christians, and now that bastard Saladin’s virtually in control down there …’ The doge lapsed into a brooding silence. Saladin. Not a man to trust. Far too ambitious. Far too intelligent. Wouldn’t get him to kowtow to anyone. God, he thought, just when everything was going so well – what was the world coming to?

  ‘Then what do you suggest, Altissima?’ Dandolo’s smooth tones interrupted his chain of thought. He pulled himself together and came to the decision his mind had been leading him to all along. Venice would have to crack the whip. Get these dogs back into line. It was then that Vitale Michele gave orders for a war fleet to be made ready. The Venetians would moan about the extra taxes, but if they could be made to see the long-term benefits, they would acquiesce. He would lead the expedition himself.

  ‘And you’ll come with me,’ Vitale told his aide. Dandolo was a man he preferred to keep under his eye. Another one who was far too ambitious and intelligent for his own good. But the man was also a master spy. He’d have his uses in the East.

  By the autumn, they were ready. The armada sailed out of the lagoon in September but, after a ten-day voyage, anchored well to the south of their goal, at the island of Chios, to prepare themselves for the assault. While there, they had news that Manuel wanted to open negotiations which might – who knows? – lead to some kind of deal being hammered out without the need to fight.

  ‘Don’t listen to him’ was Dandolo’s advice.

  ‘Of course I’ll listen to him,’ the doge snapped back. ‘If we can save ourselves the cost of a war …’

  ‘He’s playing for time.’

  ‘Even if he were, he’d be no match for us. There’s no one in the world who can defeat Venice at sea.’

  Dandolo demurred, and suggested that at least a mission might be useful – a secret mission, of course – to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Christians had been in control of the Holy Land for nearly a hundred years and, small though their resources were, it might be worth getting the kingdom on the side of Venice.

  That made sense to the doge, and Vitale gave his permission, but not without extracting an undertaking from his underling to return, no matter what, the moment he was summoned. Dandolo took three ships and sailed south and east on the very same day the Venetian ambassadors sailed north to meet the Greek leaders at Constantinople. Meanwhile, the Venetian fleet at Chios lay up, and waited.

  14

  Istanbul, the Present

  ‘There’ve been bomb attacks here very recently, and who knows when there will be more?’ Major Haki was saying. ‘But we can find nothing so far to link this case to Islamist terrorists. Afte
r all, there have been bomb attacks all over the world now; most major capitals and towns have experienced something of the kind. But this … this is somehow different.’

  ‘You’re telling me you think the men who followed us, searched the hotel, weren’t terrorists,’ said Graves, kicking herself immediately for being over eager. She remembered what Hudson had told her: too clinical for terrorists.

  ‘Does it look like that to you, Laura?’ said Marlow, impatiently.

  ‘We are not ruling it out,’ said Haki. ‘We are ruling nothing out. But we need to be certain of what we’ve got to go on before we go in that direction. There has been no announcement from any recognized group, no ransom demand, no tapes on YouTube, nothing.’

  ‘So what have you got?’ said Marlow.

  ‘We found the van where they’d left it. Bloodstains, but nothing else. They’d taken their gunman with them – injured or dead – but we’re working on it.’

  They’d already seen the archaeologists’ laboratory at Istanbul University. It was empty – so empty it looked as if it had never been used. Major Haki had left Marlow and Graves to it, and they’d gone over the place with a fine-toothed comb, but there wasn’t a fingerprint, a hair, to indicate that the lab had been in constant use a week earlier. They sent what details they had, together with police photos of Dandolo’s tomb, back to New York, where Lopez was cutting through whatever bureaucracy it took to reach the right people at Yale and Venice universities to extract the findings the archaeologists had sent before their disappearance.

  Now, they were driving to the Pera Palace Hotel in Galata, where Adkins, Taylor and de Montferrat had been staying.

  ‘Don’t expect too much here, either,’ said Haki, as their car pulled up.

  The three rooms were situated side by side along a corridor on the hotel’s third floor. They were large doubles and they had been left exactly as they had been found after the disappearance had been reported.

  They might as well have been serviced by the hotel after guests had left. The only difference was that the courtesy soaps, shampoos and all the paraphernalia placed in hotel bathrooms worldwide had not been replenished. But there were no half-used or discarded plastic bottles, discarded combs or shower-caps to be found either, and all the towels, and the sheets and pillowcases from the beds, had gone.

  ‘Whoever abducted them had a tidy mind,’ said Graves.

  ‘If they were abducted,’ said Marlow, as a new thought struck him.

  ‘Why go to all this trouble otherwise?’

  Marlow said, ‘Why go to all this trouble at all? We know that these people’s findings and their computers and whatever was on them have disappeared into thin air. Either their abductors wanted to make sure the trail would be as cold as it possibly could be, or …’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or this is some kind of red herring.’

  ‘Perhaps they were tidy-minded Martians. For all we’ve got to go on, they might as well have been beamed up in a saucer.’

  Marlow looked at her. ‘Whoever it was, they’ve left someone around to keep an eye on us.’

  ‘Haki’s men are watching our backs.’

  ‘There’s still the visit to our hotel. They thought they were being meticulous there too. But they didn’t get anything.’

  ‘They didn’t get us. They’ll be hanging around until they do.’

  ‘They want to find out what our next move is. And how much we’ve found out. They must have guessed that our friends would have sent work back to their universities. They wanted to frighten us off. Crude tactics. Gangster tactics.’ Marlow thought for a moment. ‘They’re in a win-win situation.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘They’ve covered their tracks perfectly. This looks less and less like a terrorist op. Those people aren’t concerned about leaving footprints in the snow.’

  ‘We don’t know for sure. There’s no fixed MO for these groups.’

  ‘We get what we can here, and go back to base. Fast. We need to find out what Adkins and his friends found, because someone else wants that info badly.’

  ‘Leon should be sending us full breakdowns on the archaeologists’ backgrounds any time now.’

  They were interrupted by Major Haki. ‘If you’ve finished, my friends,’ he said, ‘I’ll send you back to the Operations Centre. Your colleagues in New York have forwarded new information there.’

  ‘Are you coming with us?’

  Haki smiled. ‘I have some small details to settle here before I leave. But I will be only, perhaps, fifteen minutes behind you. And I mean that in terms of Anglo-American time, not Turkish time. In other words, when I say fifteen minutes, I mean fifteen minutes.’

  In the OC, where Haki had set up in a suite of rooms above his office, Marlow watched Graves open her laptop and consult the secure email file.

  ‘The additional background you requested.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Adkins first. There’s a better photo too.’

  She swivelled the computer round. Marlow looked at a fair-haired, brown-eyed man with a dimple in his chin. A lot of information followed which might or might not matter: Adkins was married with one daughter, long-term domestic situation settled but there’d been the odd affair. Democrat. Not hugely ambitious, but had published widely respected papers, particularly in relation to ancient Mesopotamia.

  Marlow picked up on that. ‘Mesopotamia. The cradle of civilization,’ he said thoughtfully. Babylon. The first civilization. The Egyptians, the Romans and the Greeks all learned from it. All modern society, in all its aspects, is just a development of what was established in Mesopotamia many millennia ago. ‘Is there a connection there?’ he said.

  Graves shrugged. ‘Could be. It was where Iraq is now. There was a fertile crescent 8,000 years ago, and out of it came pretty much the first of everything: written language, organized religion, urban society, economics, mathematics, art and architecture, structured warfare and, above all, an understanding of astronomy. Mind you, they used that in order to predict the future. The civilization took thousands of years to develop, and power passed from Assyria to Babylon and back during that time; but its roots were in the truly ancient civilization of Sumer. But Mesopotamia lasted the better part of six thousand years. Towards the end, the Chaldeans, who were great astronomers, were making calculations which are virtually unmatched to this day, despite all the advances and technical developments made since.’

  ‘What’s Adkins’s main field?’

  Graves scrolled through, frowning. ‘Mathematics and astronomy. Here’s a note of one of the papers his reputation’s built on. It’s about a Babylonian, a Chaldean called Kidinnu, who was active around 325BC.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He was one of their greatest astronomers. But the paper focuses on one particular discovery he made. He managed to calculate the duration of the solar year with an error factor of only four minutes and 32.65 seconds.’

  ‘Impressive.’

  ‘He was more accurate than the next-best effort, which was made by a Czech astronomer towards the end of the nineteenth century. He’s barely been improved on, even today.’

  ‘How did Kidinnu do it? Do we know?’

  Graves looked at him. ‘We don’t. But then, we don’t know how the Egyptians illuminated the tunnels inside the pyramids, for example. There’s no sign of soot from burning torches, and yet there must have been a light source for them to work.’

  ‘And Kidinnu had no telescopes.’

  Graves was serious. ‘Yet he managed calculations we can only match with the most powerful radio-telescopes available. The Chaldeans would have been a match for the best astrophysicists of our age. And they lived over two and a half thousand years ago.’

  ‘At the end of a civilization –’

  ‘ – which had already been growing for almost six thousand years.’

  Marlow looked out of the window at the gleaming modern buildings of Istanbul. He was wondering
what an expert on ancient science was doing on a dig concerned with the early Middle Ages. Then he turned back to the computer and scrolled down to the new information on the other two.

  He looked at the photograph of Rick Taylor. It showed a handsome man with grey eyes and a neat beard.

  ‘He’s also married,’ said Graves, looking over his shoulder. ‘Scandinavian stock, a couple of years older than Adkins. Three kids, all from his second marriage.’

  ‘And he isn’t just an archaeologist either, is he?’

  Graves consulted the notes. ‘It’s interesting, Jack.’ It was the first time she’d used his Christian name – involuntarily – and she glanced at him to see its effect, but read nothing in his face.

  She went on. ‘He started in archaeology and anthropology but switched, and it’s an interesting switch. He took his doctorate in astrophysics. He also studied quantum mechanics, looking into the dual particle and wave-like behaviour and interactions of energy and matter.’

  ‘Which tells us what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The effect of energy on matter …’ Marlow looked thoughtful. The ghost of an idea was occurring to him. For the moment he dismissed it as too fantastic. He would come back to it later.

  ‘But, basically, his interests, and many of his papers, concern the physical properties of celestial bodies. He’s also done in-depth research on Copernicus and Galileo,’ Graves went on.

  ‘Much later than our friend Dandolo,’ Marlow pointed out. ‘Copernicus was born sometime around 1470, and Galileo a century later.’

  Graves nodded. ‘But they were involved in the same kind of research and, according to one paper by Taylor there was another guy working on the same theory as theirs – that the earth and the planets orbited the sun – but this guy was one hell of a lot earlier.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘His name was Aristarchus of Samos. He lived around 300BC and he had a theory that the earth and the other planets revolved around the sun, rather than everything revolving around the earth.’