The Sacred Scroll

by Anton Gill

  ‘You think it still contains the tablet?’

  ‘We can’t assume that it doesn’t. We need to locate it fast, before another Dandolo does.’

  Marlow thought again about the Yale experts’ failure to translate Adhemar’s ‘scroll’.‘Any further input from Dr de Montferrat?’ Graves asked, just a trace of acid in her voice. ‘You haven’t mentioned her recently.’

  Something flashed across Marlow’s eyes before he answered. ‘No progress. The new psychologist is good. Dr Shukman. She seems hopeful. But we’ve been there before.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘Get started on this code right away. I’ll be back to check progress after I’ve staved off Dick Hudson.’

  ‘On to us again?’

  ‘Fire down my neck.’

  Graves tapped the papers in front of her. ‘I’m on it.’

  Marlow left her and, still troubled, made his way down to the street. But, once there, the direction he took wasn’t the one which led to INTERSEC.

  86

  Berlin, the Present

  It was just after dawn, but the newspapers were already neatly laid out on Adler’s office desk, all the main European ones. He’d already seen the ones from Russia, India and China online.

  Translations into German were appended wherever necessary. The papers from the US and South America would come later. And of course the news had already been slotted into the regular newscasts on his websites, and TV and radio stations worldwide.

  He picked up the first paper, a copy of Die Welt so crisp he almost imagined the wretched Frau Müller ironed the things for him.

  He thought about her briefly. Despite all her efforts, she really was getting too old and scrawny to be good for his company’s image. He’d have to remember to fire her.

  He read the headline on the first page of the business section with satisfaction:

  MAXTEL OUSTS RIVALS IN KEY NICHES IN RUSSIAN, INDIAN AND CHINESE MEDIA AND ONLINE SECTORS. EYES FIXED ON BRAZIL AND IRAN.

  The investment had paid off. The creditors were off his case. They weren’t yet paid, and Adler knew his back would still be against the wall until they were, but it was time he threw his hat into the ring. It would send a warning to those who needed one, who needed to recognize this for what it was – a declaration of war.

  Its downside was that he was gambling with chips he didn’t yet have: everything depended on getting the one thing he needed to place him in full control.

  India wasn’t hard. China and Russia would be tough to bring to heel. But there were powerful billionaire oligarchs in all three countries now, not just in Russia; not to mention the politicians and the hardened criminals.

  But he’d start with the oligarchs.

  China was paramount, with its economic stranglehold on the West.

  Adler squared his shoulders at the prospect. He was optimistic. He was confident that those who’d benefited from MAXPHIL’s investment in the cultural and academic world would show their gratitude by coming up with a translation of the key part of the document, which Trotter and Sparkes had lifted from the Swedish girl, within the twenty-four hours he’d given them. These days, universities were more and more dependent on private charitable trusts for funding. They’d hate it if that money were withdrawn.

  Adler was pleased that Annika Lundquist had left such a clear ethernet trail when she attempted to make contact with INTERSEC. His people hadn’t been able to ascertain precisely with whom, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that the information had arrived in time for him to intercept her material, and the material looked promising. His people had assured him that she’d been able to pass nothing on, and he could trust his people. They knew what would happen if he found they had let him down.

  But they’d done well already. The Latin part of the document was enough to be getting on with. So, there was a box, and the box contained the tablet, and the box was at least nine hundred years old. He was sure, now, that his rivals didn’t have it, so the trail in that direction was cold.

  Adler shrugged to himself. No matter. There were other directions to take. And he’d been getting ever more favourable reports from New York.

  It was simply a question of waiting for the prey to enter the trap. And that wouldn’t take long now.

  87

  New York City, the Present

  Marlow woke in the middle of the night.

  He was back at his own apartment. He had left Su-Lin late the previous evening.

  They had made love with their usual hunger; but when it was over, something prompted him not to stay till morning. She’d been disappointed, had sulked a little after she had tried, and failed, to pull him back to her bed.

  ‘It’s your safety I have in mind. I don’t want to leave you.’

  ‘Then don’t. I’m safe with you.’

  ‘The more I visit you here, the higher the risk. Someone always notices in the end.’

  ‘Then let’s move – take me somewhere else. I can’t be without you.’

  But there was something cornered in his mind. Something he found it difficult to deny. He knew he couldn’t hold it off for ever. His professionalism, everything he stood for, told him that. But he couldn’t accept it.

  At first, when he woke, he thought he was back in the Paris flat, but then the more familiar, reassuring surroundings asserted themselves. This was the real thing. This was home, as far as he had anywhere he could call home.

  He got up and struggled to remember what it was that had awakened him.

  But this was work. Nothing to do with his other misgivings, he knew that. Something to do with what he should be concentrating on. It turned on a question he’d overlooked, or which hadn’t seemed important at the time.

  He showered and dressed abstractedly, and was going through the motions of making coffee when it came to him. He looked at the clock on the oven. Four a.m. It would be 10 a.m. in Istanbul.

  He hesitated between email and calling, but he needed to talk, to describe, and get an immediate response. The blue phone, the safe line, was in his living-room, concealed in a compartment built into the bookshelves. He made for it, dialled a number, and waited as he listened to the series of clicks which preceded his connection to INTERSEC’s switchboard.

  ‘Marlow,’ he said when he was through. ‘Section 15. Ultra-secure.’

  Another moment while his voice pattern was verified.

  ‘How may I help you?’ said the preppy voice at the other end.

  ‘Detective Major Haki, Istanbul.’

  More clicks, then a profound silence. Seconds later, the ring tone. Three times, then the phone at the other end was picked up. A moment’s further silence for the security check at the Turkish end. Then Haki’s voice, genial as ever: ‘Hello, Jack.’

  ‘I want you to do something for me, Cemil.’

  ‘I rather gathered this wasn’t a social call. What time must it be where you are?’

  ‘The gloves. The gloves you found at the dig. The ones your Forensics said were a hundred years old.’

  ‘Yes. I remember them. They’re still in our lab.’

  ‘I want you to get them back to Forensics. Urgently. I want them to go to work on the gloves. Anything they can pick up. Traces on them, DNA –’

  ‘That’d be a very long shot.’

  ‘Never mind. Mineral traces, anything they might have touched, where they might have come from.’

  ‘I’ll get them to try. After a century, it’ll put them on their mettle to find anything at all.’

  ‘Get them to work fast.’

  ‘Front of the queue. Now.’

  Marlow, all thought of sleep shaken from him, went down to the basement to collect his car.

  Room 55 was deserted, the desks and tables clear. Lopez hadn’t left anything for prying eyes to see, but there was a message on Marlow’s terminal:

  There aren’t many iron boxes the right size and period left in the world today. Iron rusts and rots with time, unless
it is kept in optimum conditions. Those that are left fetch high prices on the market. One located in the British Museum, London, another was bought by the Getty Foundation three years ago. There’s a third in the Hermitage, and a fourth in a private collection in Lausanne, which I’ve been able to access. The fifth is in Le Clos Lucé at Amboise, in France. The problem is that all have provenances which seem watertight, completely reliable, and none has anything which fits in with what we’re looking for.

  The dealers are a little more promising. One example in particular, which was bought from an unknown vendor by Lightoller and Steeples of Madison Avenue in 1946 and resold by them at auction a year or so later. I’ve yet to trace what happened to it, but although L&S closed down in 1960, some of their transactions may still be on record at the Internal Revenue Service. Unlikely they’ve been transferred to the IRS computer centre in Maryland, so they may still exist in the vaults in Washington. Report on this follows.

  There was a space, before Lopez’s narrative continued, the time showing five hours later than his first entry.

  Found it. IRS very helpful and there were fully descriptive invoices still on file for several items. This is ours: Iron box, 10 centimetres by eight, five centimetres deep, locked, key missing. Box had never been opened. Finely chased, decorated and inscribed. Probably French origin, date estimated: last quarter of eleventh century. L&S made a good profit on it, by the look of things. Their payment for it recorded but no trace of what happened to it or who might have picked it up. Was to have been drawn on Morgan’s in New York, so will follow up. No other information. Investigation ongoing. Will send copy of original documentation soonest.

  Marlow closed the message and dragged it to a safe file. It would auto-delete in twenty-four hours if he didn’t countermand.

  Marlow scented blood, but scenting it was a long way from tasting it.

  88

  Haki’s return call came in the early evening.

  ‘That was fast.’

  ‘We’re up to date here,’ said Haki. ‘CIA funded. They like to keep us chaps on the front line well equipped.’

  Marlow didn’t smile. If Turkey ceased to be a secular state, the West would have to brace itself. Fleetingly, he thought of the Ottoman empire. How the Turkish emperors had once held sway as far west as the gates of Vienna. That had been in the seventeenth century. A floodtide which Dandolo’s action in Constantinople, four hundred years earlier than that, had unleashed.

  ‘What have you got for me?’

  ‘Verbal or shall I send?’

  ‘Verbal.’

  ‘Gist then. Full technical to Section 15, immediate.’

  ‘That’d be good.’

  ‘OK.’ Haki paused briefly, and over the line Marlow heard paper crackle. ‘Here it is,’ Haki went on. ‘The gloves were made in Germany, possibly Austro-Hungary, before 1914, but they’re not much older than that. Very little material on them, after all this time, but there are traces of sand, and earth, of course – and what could be baked clay, a minute quantity, on the right and left thumb and index fingertips. There are also traces of what could be rust – red iron oxide – but they’re microscopic particles, and we’ll have to do further tests. Our people found them on the palms and the inner parts of the fingers and thumbs of both gloves.’

  ‘DNA?’ said Marlow.

  ‘As I said, that’ll be a long shot. But we’re working on it.’

  ‘Thank you. Anything else you get, send to me fast,’ said Marlow.

  ‘Flying-carpet treatment, dear boy.’

  Haki was as good as his word, Marlow thought, when, two hours later, another call came from Istanbul – past midnight by then in the Turkish city.

  But it wasn’t Haki’s voice on the line. It was a voice he didn’t recognize. Urgent, bordering on panic.

  ‘This is Colonel Demir. You won’t be getting that full report you requested soon. There’s been a bomb. Al-Qaeda, we think, but that’s just first indications.’

  Marlow went cold. ‘Where?’

  ‘Car on Defter Emini. Just outside Forensics. Massive explosion.’

  ‘Casualties?’

  ‘Three fatalities. Major Haki’s one of them. God knows how they found the location. And why they picked that target. We’ll keep you updated. But terrorists, for sure.’

  Marlow, his throat dry, hung up.

  He wasn’t so sure.

  89

  Constantinople, Year of Our Lord 1204

  Geoffrey de Villehardouin listened while his secretary ran over what he had dictated. He wondered how much he should leave in his final, official account. Much had happened. He wanted Doge Dandolo to be happy with what he had written:

  After the victory, and the coronation of Emperor Baldwin which followed soon afterwards, came the division of the spoils.

  The foul weather which had followed the victory had passed. The ships were no longer battened down, though the camp, where the foot-soldiers still lived, was a mire. But in the city, still wrapped in the remains of its magnificence, despite its rape, the mood was buoyant. Boniface, grim at first at not having been offered the crown, had emerged radiant after a meeting with the doge, and even suggested that he himself should place the imperial cope on Baldwin’s shoulders – the crown, and the orb and sceptre, were to be presented by Dandolo.

  There were now two armies in the city. Boniface’s, stationed to the south-west by the Golden Gate, was busy with its preparations for departure for Greece, where a kingdom lay open for the taking. Baldwin’s was occupied with repairing the fortifications they themselves had broken down, and entrenching themselves in readiness for imposing dominion over their leader’s new empire.

  Pockets of Greek resistance within and around the city had been mercilessly crushed. The main enemy leadership had withdrawn, to Bulgaria, Hungary and Nicea.

  His secretary stopped reading and Geoffrey sat back, satisfied. But there was much that Geoffrey did not know.

  The Venetians had awaited a break in the weather with impatience. They needed to overhaul the fleet.

  Dandolo felt the sun on his face, and smiled. Work on the great, secret ocean-going warships would continue now. The secret ships, whose existence was veiled to the eyes of all but a few.

  All thought of Jerusalem was forgotten. There were other things to think about now.

  Hundreds of works of art had been melted down by the Crusaders and turned into coin to pay the Venetians the balance which was owed, and Leporo was busy, rescuing what remained, supervising their packing and transfer to the transport ships which would return to Venice with them.

  ‘The religious trophies will provide us with a special glory,’ he reported to Dandolo, on a day when the sun had finally banished the last of the clouds.

  ‘Good,’ replied the doge, his mind elsewhere. There was no further need to use the power of the tablet on Leporo. He was already caught in the snare of his own greed. Dandolo was sure of that.

  Leporo’s value to him had diminished. Dandolo was thinking now of his conversations with Frid about the great voyage to the country far across the great sea to the west. The land there was wide, and open, and fertile. There would be riches beyond the imaginings of Europe. And God would grant him the time to harvest them.

  Time. He peered at his hands. He could barely see them, and not at all unless he moved them. In five years, less, those hands would no longer exist. They would be dust. He would have gone. He would have gone.

  The remains of a man, turned to dust, weigh no more than a new-born baby. Time.

  ‘Abbot Martin has been collecting in St Pantokrator. And his monks have been busy in the Greek monasteries and churches beyond the city walls.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Dandolo said.

  ‘Barely any need to threaten,’ Leporo went on, needing his master’s approval and hating himself for that need. ‘Abbot Martin looks the part – a fellow prelate. The Archimandrite Nicanor at Pantokrator filled sacks for him. There is a reliquary with the very finger Doubting
Thomas thrust into the wound of Christ. There is still blood on it.’

  ‘Have it all shipped. Present the finger to the Vatican, with my humble respects. It will please the idiot who sits on the throne there.’

  ‘Cardinal Peter is already sending favourable messages ahead.’

  ‘I am glad of it.’

  Leporo watched Dandolo. The doge was at the window of an opulent room in the Palace of Boucoleon, gazing out across the harbour below, where his great ships were anchored. Only the eyes of the seamen who worked on them, and the eyes of Frid, were not clouded by the power of the tablet. Dandolo had seen to that. Only they could see the true magnificence of those ships. The secret was safe from the others, including Leporo.

  But Leporo’s mind was not on the ships. His own eyes roved Dandolo’s office, once a stately conference chamber of the old regime. His eyes wandered keenly over the surfaces of richly carved tables, rested on the handles of drawers and chests, on the dusty wall-hangings and draped silks and brocades still lying where they had fallen in the attacks.

  He was taking advantage of the rare absence of Frid. Frid was at the harbour. Frid would have noticed, might even have guessed what he was looking for. Inwardly, Leporo cursed the Viking for the hundredth time, as his mind cast about for a way of bringing him down.

  He could see no clue, and he didn’t dare start a search. But he had to make his move before Dandolo sent him back to Venice with the booty. Or before the old man died.

  The old man? Leporo was getting old himself. His own time was running out.

  He knew Dandolo sometimes left the tablet locked in its box, in a secret drawer, though never for long. It was like a drug to him, though it seemed to Leporo that the doge was afraid it was drawing too much of his own remaining strength, his own will.