The Sacred Scroll

by Anton Gill

  ‘But Jerusalem itself?’ Marlow pursued. ‘Say, just before the Fourth Crusade?’

  ‘It was a Christian city. There was a Christian king,’ she said.

  Duff looked at Marlow and nodded his approval. It was good to keep her on home ground.

  ‘Go on,’ said Marlow.

  ‘Until it fell to the Saracens under Saladin in 1187. Saladin took over most of the country, except the coastal cities.’ She looked at both of them, uncertainly. ‘All this I remember. Shall I go on?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marlow.

  ‘The fall of the city shocked the Christian world,’ she said. ‘And a Crusade was launched to recapture it, two years later. That was the Third Crusade. The most famous.’ She looked at Marlow. ‘The one which had Richard the Lionheart as one of its leaders.’

  ‘What happened to the Christians in Jerusalem when Saladin took over?’

  ‘Those who could fled to the safety of the cities on the coast. Some were sold into slavery. But there were no atrocities. Saladin was not that kind of man. Unlike your King Richard.’

  ‘Were there … Knights Templar among them?’

  ‘You are good at history!’ she cried, smiling at Marlow, who smiled back. ‘Yes. There was an important banking and trade centre, along with the military barracks. The Templars took over the Al-Aqsa mosque as their headquarters. They moved their operations to Acre when Saladin got too close to Jerusalem.’

  ‘And what happened to the Crusade?’

  ‘It dragged on until 1192. But its leaders fell out, and they never retook Jerusalem. There was a truce in the end. The Christians kept a coastal strip as their kingdom. Saladin allowed unarmed Christian pilgrims to visit the Holy City unmolested. The Templars stayed on, protecting the pilgrims, taking care of their money and property, as they had always done, since they were first founded in 1119. But by the time we are talking of, they weren’t really warriors any more – they were bankers.’

  Duff sat back in his chair, sipping his tea. He looked at Marlow sympathetically. It was going well, as far as he was concerned. Marlow was impatient for him to leave.

  ‘Tell me – before Saladin invaded – when there was still a Kingdom of Jerusalem throughout the Holy Land – when the Templars still had their HQ in the Al-Aqsa mosque complex – might Dandolo have been there?’

  Su-Lin looked puzzled.

  ‘He was in Constantinople in about 1170, wasn’t he?’ Marlow prompted.

  Su-Lin looked thoughtful. ‘He might have been,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I don’t know.’

  That sounded odd to Marlow. ‘Might you have gone to Jerusalem to find out?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ She was beginning to show signs of distress again.

  ‘Did you learn all this when you were doing your doctorate, or was it later, when you got your MAXPHIL grant for the Dandolo Project?’

  Though she tried to cover it, she baulked at the mention of MAXPHIL. Didn’t look like an act, either. ‘What –?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about? You’re confusing me.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Marlow replied quickly. ‘I’ve seen Dandolo’s tomb,’ he went on, changing tack. ‘Fascinating.’

  Her eyes brightened again. ‘Isn’t it?’ Then she looked troubled again. ‘But the dig is over now.’

  ‘Not necessarily. If we find your friends safe and well.’

  ‘What can have happened to them?’

  Marlow hesitated, cast a glance at Duff, who nodded encouragement. ‘We’ll find them,’ he assured her, wondering if they would. People stayed missing for years. He tried not to think about that.

  Duff coughed politely. ‘I think at this stage I’ll leave you to it,’ he said, more to his patient than Marlow.

  Su-Lin nodded. The doctor rose, looking at his watch. ‘Another half-an-hour,’ he said to Marlow. ‘I’ll come back then.’

  They fell silent after Duff had gone, looking at each other. Marlow broke it by saying, ‘Can you tell me what you found in the tomb yet? Can you remember?’

  He leaned forward in his chair, leaned close.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she answered at last. ‘Quite clearly.’ She reeled off a long list of artefacts, almost by rote. But there was no mention of a medieval box, or a Babylonian tablet. Or a key.

  ‘That’s all I can tell you,’ she concluded. ‘I may have missed some things out.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting a comprehensive list,’ he lied. He considered telling her that he had one, just to challenge her, to show her his question had been a test, a trap; but he didn’t.

  She had leaned forward too. Her eyes were candid. He could smell the scent she was wearing – a clean, fresh smell. He recalled that a bottle of L’Eau d’Issy had been on the list of things she’d asked INTERSEC to buy her.

  She’d clearly remembered her own preferred scent.

  Marlow hadn’t forgotten Graves’s request. The face so close to his was clear and confident. ‘There’s something else I need to ask you,’ he said, straightening up.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘About your name.’

  She gave an embarassed smile. ‘It’s an awful mixture, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m thinking about your family name.’

  Was there, fleetingly, something in her eyes? But she was ready for the question. ‘You’re thinking of the connection with Marquess Boniface,’ she said.

  ‘Is he an ancestor?’

  She laughed in a relaxed way that irritated Marlow. ‘I don’t think we go back quite that far,’ she said. ‘Even my mother, who was a great snob, could only trace her ancestors to 1800. I don’t think my father bothered. He was too busy making money.’

  ‘But it’s quite a coincidence.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Rick and Brad used to tease me about it.’ Her face clouded again. ‘I’d give anything see them again, Jack. Safe. Anything.’ She looked at him. ‘I want to help in every way I can.’

  Marlow was taken aback at the vehemence with which she spoke. She had even leaned forward and held his knee. Now, as if coming to her senses, she withdrew her hand, slowly.

  ‘But it must have crossed your mind that there might be a connection between your father’s family and Boniface,’ Marlow went on. ‘Your business is research. Didn’t you look into it?’

  ‘Oh yes. As soon as I learned about the Marquess!’ She laughed. Her laugh was like windbells. ‘I got as far as 1900. But it was harder to find a trace, before that. What was left of his line petered out over a century ago. And my father was born in 1949.’

  Marlow remembered what Graves had said about Boniface’s family tree. This corroborated it. But he hadn’t time to chase chimeras now.

  He hesitated, remembering how distressed the subject had made her. ‘Can you remember nothing about what happened?’

  The clouds appeared again in an instant. ‘I have tried!’

  ‘What’s the last thing you do remember?’

  ‘If you knew how hard I have tried to remember!’ The intensity returned to her voice. Marlow contained his impatience, and sat silently, as she composed herself.

  ‘We have got to find them! Only you can help us!’

  ‘Oh God!’ she complained suddenly, sitting upright. ‘All this. Why did it have to happen?’ She darted a look of fire at him. ‘And you – who are you? Why are you keeping me here? Does anyone else know where I am?’ She burst into tears – immediate, uncontrolled floods of tears, as if all the tension that had built up in her since she had reclaimed her memory needed to break out. ‘This awful place – I can’t go out – it’s like a prison! I can scarcely even see the sky. Please! I want to go home. They will be missing me.’

  ‘Who will? Where’s home?’ he said brutally.

  She gave him a bitter look then turned her face to the window.

  Marlow followed her gaze out at the sullen, concrete-grey Parisian heavens. The room had grown dark as yet another downpour threatened. He found himself reaching across to comfort her, but she shook him away.

  He wonde
red if he should call Ben Duff back, but that would conclude this interview. He didn’t want that. He sat and waited for the bad moment to pass.

  He had another fifteen minutes. At the end of that time, he had got no further. But he had made a decision.

  Precisely half an hour after he had left, Duff returned, and immediately registered the tension between his patient and his employer.

  ‘She’s made a remarkable recovery, hasn’t she?’ said Duff guardedly, when he and Marlow were alone together in the corridor outside.

  ‘Truly remarkable,’ Marlow replied, his thoughts elsewhere.

  60

  During the next three days Marlow saw little of anyone except Su-Lin and, after the first morning, Duff, pressured by Marlow, reduced his presence to the first few minutes of each interview. He was never further away, however, than his office and, every time he took his leave, he reminded Su-Lin that she had only to press the button that connected to a buzzer in his office and he would intervene.

  This procedure annoyed Marlow, but it put a rein on his impatience, with the result that he was able to restrain himself whenever he came close to pressing his subject too hard. And the result of that was that he got more out of her than he might have done otherwise.

  It was a question of gaining each other’s trust. Marlow allayed her fears and suspicions, and told her as much as she needed to know about his organization.

  She was convinced that she was in the hands of INTERPOL, and Marlow showed her fake documents to back this up.

  ‘We have to keep your location secret, or your abductors might try to recapture you,’ he explained.

  That made sense to Su-Lin.

  He was certain that her motivation – to get to the bottom of whatever had happened to her colleagues and find them before they came to any further harm – was sincere.

  ‘But can’t I go out at all?’

  ‘It’s too risky.’

  ‘Just for a while – to get some air? I know I’d be safe with you.’

  ‘We have to concentrate on where Brad and Rick might have been taken. The slightest memory. The longer it takes, the greater the danger.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Let’s get on.’

  She took his hand and smiled.

  But the information she gave stayed incomplete, and was surrendered only reluctantly by Su-Lin’s mind.

  ‘It’s natural,’ Duff explained to Marlow. ‘The mind’s protecting itself by blocking out the major trauma which has placed her in her present situation.’

  That made sense, frustrating though it was. The more Marlow tried to bring her back to the subject, and however obliquely, the stress it caused forced him to back off.

  ‘When did it happen?’ he asked her.

  ‘At night, I think, or late evening. We were just finishing at the lab.’

  ‘How did they get in?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you see them?’

  She hesitated. ‘Not really. There were five or six of them. All men. Maybe one woman, but I couldn’t tell. One minute we were alone, discussing the day’s work; the next –’

  ‘How were they dressed? Do you remember that?’

  ‘No! … Maybe, dark clothes. All dressed the same, I think. They had guns, knives. They tied us up. I think they hit Rick and Brad first, to knock them out.’

  ‘Did you scream? Call for help?’

  ‘It all happened too fast. I may have done. But after they tied me up, they hit me, too. I must have lost consciousness. After that, I …’ Her voice trailed off mournfully.

  Marlow felt what was dangerously like compassion. But he’d got no more out of her than those sparse details. Nor did she remember how she might have escaped, or how she had ended up in Jerusalem.

  At first. But some traces of memory surfaced as their talks progressed.

  ‘They kept us somewhere – dark. There was a concrete floor. I don’t remember any windows.’

  ‘Were you tied?’

  ‘Our hands, yes – at the front, so we could eat when we were given food. Our legs, no.’ She looked at him with sudden clarity. ‘They kept us in blindfolds most of the time. They didn’t speak to us.’

  This was a breakthrough. He pursued it. ‘Anything else? It sounds like an impossible place to escape from.’

  She thought hard. ‘There was a window in the bathroom. They let us go there. A narrow window.’

  Marlow looked at her slim figure. She was as slightly built as a girl. He let the thought develop in his own mind: her captors might not have considered that she would have been able to slip through such a window. But with her hands tied?

  ‘Did you escape through that window, do you think?’

  ‘It was high in the wall.’

  ‘Could you have?’

  ‘I don’t know! I can’t remember!’ She looked at him pathetically. A lost look. He changed tack.

  ‘Tell me about the dig.’

  She was on surer ground here, and talked more freely, though Marlow noticed the look of sadness that crossed her face every time the names of Adkins and Taylor came up. But he kept her to the details and the facts concerning the artefacts they had discovered. There were still big gaps in her memory. No matter how deviously he tried to trick her into revealing something she might not want to reveal, she always looked blank when it came to any information about a box or a clay tablet.

  The box and the tablet would have stood out a mile, if Adkins’s team had found them. Marlow came to the conclusion that the archaeologists hadn’t discovered either, though he thought he could detect a look of disappointment buried in her eyes when the objects came up in his questioning.

  But he resisted hammering the point. No need to panic her. No need, either, to make her too aware of their importance.

  He wondered if either of the other two had found the artefacts and concealed them from his colleagues. Always at the back of his mind was the discovery that all three of them had specialist qualifications, beyond the field of archaeology. But any attempt to trip Su-Lin up over whom they might have been working for, apart from Venice and Yale universities, met with failure.

  ‘Do you remember finding a key?’ he asked, coming back to the subject on the third day, as he had on the preceding two.

  ‘You’ve asked me about that. No.’

  ‘It was small, iron, medieval, with an inscription on the shank.’

  She shook her head.

  On that third day, he decided to show her the photographs of the key. She took them, looked at them with keen interest, and handed them back. ‘No. I would like to know what the inscription means. Is it Aramaic?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, I’m just a humble policeman.’

  Suddenly, she looked at him hard, and took his hands again. Her own little hands disappeared into his.

  ‘Please help me,’ she said. ‘I feel so alone.’

  61

  At the end of the third day, Marlow called a meeting with Graves, Lopez joining them via the secure link from New York. It was 6 p.m. there, midnight in Paris.

  Marlow read a digest of the notes from his interviews with Su-Lin, and a resumé of Duff’s findings. He added the information he had on the lack of a family connection between Su-Lin and Marquess Boniface.

  ‘Even if there were,’ he added, ‘it’d be of no more than sentimental value, after eight hundred years.’ He added, aiming this at Graves, ‘Maybe we should check out her mother’s side. Perhaps our subject goes back to Shi-Huangdi.’

  Graves ignored him. They sat close together, side by side, their knees almost touching.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ asked Lopez from the screen on the glass tabletop.

  ‘We can’t keep her cooped up indefinitely,’ said Marlow, taking out a file and rummaging through an untidy sheaf of papers.

  ‘You say the photos of the key meant nothing to her?’ said Lopez.

  ‘Yes,’ Marlow replied.

  ‘But she must know about it. We know the
archaeologists took those photos,’ Graves snapped.

  ‘I don’t think so. Duff bears me out.’

  Graves looked scornful. ‘She remembered one hell of a lot of other stuff.’

  ‘But not everything.’

  ‘You’d have thought the key would stand out,’ said Lopez. ‘As far as we know, it’s the only significant thing they took.’

  ‘Her memory still isn’t perfect.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s just selective,’ said Graves.

  ‘She doesn’t believe they were working for anyone other than the universities,’ Marlow told them.

  ‘Perhaps she didn’t know,’ said Lopez. ‘It’s still possible that one of the others was – or both of them.’

  Marlow sat back. ‘We’ve got working theories but no facts.’

  ‘There’s the fact that I was kidnapped and almost killed,’ said Graves.

  ‘But who’s behind it? Who knows – beside us – what the hell that clay tablet has written on it and what it has the power to do?’ said Lopez.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, how many people do you imagine know about this thing? It’s been buried, a secret, for centuries,’ Graves snapped back.

  ‘Except for whoever owned those gloves,’ replied Marlow. ‘The ones Haki found.’

  ‘But if they found out a hundred years ago what the tablet could do, don’t you imagine there’d be some evidence of its use, somewhere in the world, during the twentieth century?’ asked Lopez.

  ‘Two world wars to choose from,’ Marlow said. ‘A ton of other smaller ones. Stalin’s Russia. Vietnam. Year Zero in Kampuchea. Al-Qaeda. Take your pick.’

  The other two were silent.

  ‘I’ve made a decision,’ Marlow continued. ‘About Su-Lin.’

  The others looked at him expectantly.

  He turned to Graves. ‘We can’t keep her here for ever. So I’m recruiting her.’

  Her reaction was immediate. ‘What?’

  ‘Limited informational access, of course. And she thinks we’re INTERPOL.’

  Graves remained unconvinced, but Lopez looked thoughtful.