Her hand was already closing around the nearest heavy object on the side table next to her. It was a miniature bronze bust of some historical figure.
“It’s her,” Lunev snarled, his eyes widening in surprise. “The one who took it.”
Ava saw Durov’s face collapse into a mask of rage.
Without waiting a second longer, she hurled the metal bust with all her strength at Lunev’s head, before spinning and sprinting out of the door, pulling it tightly shut behind her.
Running faster than she knew she could, she held out her arm as she passed the long hall table, swiping the lamp and vases off it, spraying them onto the floor behind her.
The obstacles would not detain Durov and Lunev for long, but every second counted.
Arriving at the front door, she hit the golden light switches with the heel of her palm, plunging the hallway into darkness. At the same time, her other hand was on the door’s heavy latch, tearing it open.
Her heart was pounding so loudly it all but drowned out the bellowing voices of Durov and Lunev, who were roaring out of the sitting room behind her.
She was already running down the mansion’s wide steps, scanning the road ahead frantically for any cover.
With rising panic, she saw there was nothing close.
A little way further up the street, on the left, a darkened taxi was parked with the driver’s ‘FOR HIRE’ light unilluminated.
It would have to do.
She prayed she would make it.
She increased her speed, feeling her balance going, destabilized by the unexpected burst of panic and danger. She willed her legs to carry her to the cab, where she could dive behind it, out of range.
She was aware of pounding footsteps getting closer behind her as the scene rushed by in a blur and she drew level with the car.
She barely had time to register that the taxi’s engine was running, when its rear passenger door opened and a hand reached out, grabbing her upper arm in an iron grip, dragging her with unexpected strength towards the cab’s dark interior.
She clenched her teeth and pulled away for all she was worth, wincing from the pain in her shoulder as she tried to wrench herself free.
A suppressed gunshot behind her swamped her body with more adrenaline, giving her an extra boost of strength as she saw the taxi door buckle around the bullet’s entry hole.
The grip on her arm tightened and pulled her again with immense force. This time there was nothing she could do, and she flew crashing into the interior of the cab.
Then she remembered.
The other two bodyguards.
She was feeling sick.
She had not seen them enter the house.
Maybe they were waiting in the cab to take Durov to his next meeting?
The taxi was already accelerating as the hand released its hold on her, and she was able to sit up and look into her captor’s face.
“Disappointing first date, was it?” Ferguson asked.
Chapter 14
Kensington Palace Gardens
Holland Park
London W8
The United Kingdom
DUROV FELT CALM as he walked back up the steps of his house and through the front door.
The Holy Mother had sent him a test – like the Lord did with Job and Jeremiah – and he would not fail her.
The path was clear now.
He felt no anger.
The woman’s intervention meant nothing. The Holy Mother had led the woman to him for a reason – so he could take care of her, before she became a problem.
It was the Mother’s will.
But first he had to help Lunev. He had to show him how the all-holy Panagia could forgive those who failed her.
He stooped to pick up a foot-long column of cut crystal, which had broken off from a table lamp when the woman had swiped it off the hall table onto the floor.
Quickening his pace along the corridor, he drew level with Lunev, and the soldier barely had a moment to register that all was not well.
Durov swung hard, relishing the sensation as the weighty shaft of lead glass connected with the back of Lunev’s head.
The Spetsnaz major dropped heavily to the floor, his legs folding under him instantly.
Durov put down the glass club and grabbed Lunev’s left arm, dragging him along the hallway, through the open door of the icon room, and into the centre, where he laid him on his back.
He looked down with a smile at the soldier’s bearded face, the gash on his forehead still bleeding from where the Quinault woman – if that was even her real name – had hit him with the bronze bust.
The candlelight flickered over the soldier’s prone form, and Durov felt himself filling with the Spirit.
“Failure, Dmitri, is an abomination in the eyes of the Holy Mother,” he admonished quietly. “It is a terrible sin. There can be forgiveness. But first there must be contrition – an act of sacrifice: a sign of sorrow and submission to her love.”
He locked his eyes on Lunev’s unconscious face. “I failed, once, and the Holy Mother took something very precious from me. But she gave me a far more special gift in return – an intimate covenant.”
He paused, breathing in the scent of the wax – the sensual smell of divine light.
When he spoke again, it was quieter, more reverential. “The gift of sight is sacred. When Samson had fallen from the path, the Lord spared him, and only allowed the Philistines to put out his eyes, for He loved him well. Centuries later, in memory, the emperors of Byzantium offered the same grace to their enemies, only blinding those they could have executed in a noble display of charity and compassion.”
He leant lower over Lunev, whose eyelids and lips were beginning to twitch as consciousness returned.
“The Holy Mother is going to take your eyes, Dmitri. Afterwards, when you see clearly with the eyes of your heart, you will know that it was her grace that brought you this holy gift of forgiveness. And, one day, when you have sinned no more, she may restore your sight, just as the Lord did to the blind man of Jerusalem.”
Durov’s voice dropped even lower. “She will decide when you are ready, and when you are failing her no more.”
As Lunev’s eyes fluttered open, Durov sat astride his chest, noting the distant look of incomprehension in the soldier’s bleary eyes.
Durov laid his large powerful hands over the face beneath him, and his strong thumbs quickly found their quarry.
With a smile of benign compassion, he began his sacred work.
As the blood, aqueous, and vitreous humours spurted from the eye sockets and down Lunev’s face, Durov heard the screams coming from under him. But he was focused on the calm holy images of Jesus around him – the Blessed Mother’s most sacred treasure – and his heart swelled in gratitude at saving another soul.
DAY THREE
Chapter 15
Marylebone
London W1
The United Kingdom
AVA SAW SWINTON first, hurrying out of the main doors of BBC Broadcasting House.
“He doesn’t look very happy,” Ferguson muttered.
Ava had pulled her bike off the road, and parked it beside the ‘candle snuffer’ church in Langham Place – a local landmark thanks to its two column-circled drums topped off by a long sharp spire.
Swinton had told her and Ferguson to meet him there so he could introduce them to someone.
Ava watched as Swinton crossed the road quickly and drew level with them.
“I thought I was very clear that we would handle Durov.” He looked drawn. His tone was abrupt.
“The opportunity just sort of came up,” Ava answered honestly. “He invited me to his house.”
Swinton glowered at her. “You shouldn’t have been at the embassy in the first place.” He rubbed a hand across his jaw.
“Let’s not mess around if we’re going to get to the bottom of why Durov took the Shroud,” Ava countered. “Last night I found out more about what he’s up to than you
r Moscow political desk would’ve learnt in a week of shuffling papers.”
She paused to let the point sink in. “We now know that he’s obsessed with images of Jesus, he believes the Turin Shroud contains some kind of clue, that Lunev and the team in Turin and Nuremberg are closely connected to him, and that he takes all of this seriously enough to have tried to kill me, in the open, in a London street.”
He glared at her.
She changed the subject, onto what was foremost in her mind. “Did you manage to get anything from the photographs I texted you of the notebook on Durov’s desk?”
He shook his head, and hailed a passing taxi. “They’re still working on it. Follow me,” he announced, getting into the cab and closing its door hard.
Ava climbed onto her bike, and Ferguson got on behind her. She pulled away, and joined the cab in the traffic, following it west into London’s medical district.
It was an area of elegant four-storey townhouses that had been home to the country’s most exclusive medical practices for over a century.
The cab turned into Harley Street, where it stopped outside a grey stone building.
Despite knowing the street well, Ava had not noticed the particular house before. She could now see that it was decidedly eccentric, mixing square and circular elements in striking ways, and sporting a riot of small carvings on the stonework – lions, beads, wreaths. It was an extraordinary jumble, yet it blended effortlessly into the hotchpotch of houses lining both sides of the wide old street. Her eyes travelled up the building, and behind the balustrade crowning the fourth floor she caught just a hint of a concealed fifth storey with a range of communication dishes on top.
She parked up, and joined Swinton on the building’s steps, where he flipped open the lid of what she had assumed to be an old electrical junction box, and peered into a hi-tech retinal scanner.
After a moment, the elegant art nouveau door clicked open.
Intrigued, Ava followed him inside.
Instead of the usual smart reception desk under a large panel listing the names of the building’s doctors and dentists, there were merely two glass timed-delay security pods of the sort she was familiar with from MI6’s building at Vauxhall Cross.
Swinton indicated for her and Ferguson to take one each, while he entered a code in a keypad between them. He followed, then led them along a nondescript hallway and into a lift.
When its doors opened two floors down, Ava was surprised to see a modern operations room, significantly larger than the building she had entered above ground.
The walls were lined with screens of varying sizes stretching from waist-height up to the low ceiling. On them, she could see live feeds coming from a wide range of locations. The main panel in the middle was showing the interior of a Middle Eastern café. From the Arabic on the signs by the counter, Ava guessed it was Egypt.
Operators wearing a mixture of military and civilian clothing – most with headsets – were sitting at computers and other electronic equipment set into consoles and desks built into the lower sections of wall.
It was all bathed in a cool blue light, and looked more like the control room of a warship than the usual drab committee rooms she was used to in governmental buildings.
It was a far cry from the earliest days of British intelligence, in 1909, when MI5 and MI6 were set up together in a simple office in Victoria Street, Westminster. Then the teams had been able to work in daylight, long before they discovered that Russian eavesdroppers were monitoring conversations by firing laser beams at closed windows to listen in by analysing the micro-vibrations in the glass.
“Did you find out anything about Mary?” Ava asked Ferguson quietly as they followed Swinton.
“Like, what’s a nice girl like her doing at the Vatican?” he asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me. You two seemed to be getting on very well.”
Ferguson looked pleased with himself.
“Over here.” Swinton ushered them towards an inch-thick sheet of glass protruding horizontally from the far wall under a panel of recording equipment.
A tall man in a suit emerged from a lift on the other side of the room, and headed across the floor towards them.
Ava guessed he was in his late fifties. He looked like he might have been a sportsman when younger. There was still some black left in his hair, and the neat coloured handkerchief tucked into his suit’s outer breast pocket gave him an old-fashioned look.
He nodded an affable greeting to Swinton, before introducing himself to Ava and Ferguson.
“Mark Jennings,” he announced, with a confident and deep voice that sounded as if he had enjoyed several decades of port and cigars. “So, you’re interested in Durov?”
“Sir Mark was with the Diplomatic Service,” Swinton explained.
“US mainly,” Jennings clarified. “Looking after the special relationship, and all that.”
“Then he was British ambassador to Russia. And now he’s one of our most helpful Foreign Office friends.” Swinton looked at him expectantly. “He’s been doing some digging into Durov for us.”
Jennings took a credit-card sized piece of silver metal from his jacket pocket, and slipped it into an unobtrusive slot in the top surface of the glass table. “Well, you’ll be very aware that he’s not a pleasant man.”
Ava had already come firmly to that conclusion.
“There are two things you need to know about Durov,” he continued. “He’s a religious fanatic, and he’s extremely well connected in the Kremlin.”
The screen filled with the image of an official-looking Russian document. It had two columns of printed and hand-written information. Near the top, Ava made out the words: ‘Олег Антонович Дуров’. Oleg Antonevich Durov.
“Birth certificate,” Jennings continued. “Born in Communist Russia, 1970. It was a happy twenty-first birthday for him when the USSR collapsed.”
Jennings touched the screen, and the birth certificate dissolved, to be replaced by a map overlaid with gridlines. “Home was a small village in Oryol Oblast.” The grid zoomed into a spot halfway between Moscow and Kiev. “In the middle, you could say, of nowhere.”
He tapped the image, which melted into a vista of forests and lakes. “And that’s a very important part of his story.”
He looked up at Ava. “Have you ever heard of the Skoptsy?”
She shook her head.
Swinton and Ferguson looked equally blank.
“The dazzling lights of Moscow and Saint Petersburg often make us forget that Russia still has thousands of villages where life remains an unforgiving struggle to live off the land. In a country so vast, it should come as no surprise that there are still pockets where peasant life hasn’t changed for centuries – where timeless rhythms of life go hand in hand with old ways.”
“Pagan beliefs?” Ferguson asked.
“That’s certainly part of it.” Jennings paused. “But the Orthodox Church has been there for over a thousand years so, at least on the surface, the country people are nominally Christian.”
“Syncretists,” Ava clarified. “Like Louisiana Voodoo or Caribbean Santería, mixing pagan beliefs and Christianity.”
Jennings nodded. “Out in the countryside, the ancient Slavic beliefs have persisted for millennia.”
The image on the screen changed to a statue of a bearded man wearing a conical crown and holding a Russian cross. “Vladimir the Great of Kiev brought Christianity to Russia in 988. The peasants embraced the new religion, but in their own way. They viewed it as an addition to their traditional beliefs, not a replacement. It’s called dvoyeveriy, double faith.”
“Common in many cultures,” Ava nodded. “Especially when Christianity was replacing an existing religion that was very deep-rooted.”
“But this is a bit different,” Jennings continued. “A lot of their Slavic country beliefs were fertility-based.”
Ava had heard something about Russian cults linked to celebrations of the sensua
l.
“The Skoptsy were first heard of in the late 1700s,” he continued. “They brewed up a powerful mix of Slavic and Christian dogmas and, in the process, decided that the greatest sins – the biggest barriers to the afterlife – were sexual urges.”
“So what did they do?” Swinton asked.
“You’re not going to like this,” Jennings replied, tapping the screen again.
The photograph of Vladimir the Great disappeared, to be replaced by an old black-and-white image of a man and woman. Their unsmiling faces were staring suspiciously at the camera, but what was making Ava feel nauseous was what had been done to their bodies. Where their genitals should have been, and where the woman once had breasts, there were only deep scars. They had all been surgically removed – and not especially skilfully.
“Something to do with the forbidden fruit being stuck onto Adam and Eve’s bodies after they were expelled from the Garden of Eden,” Jennings continued. “That’s what they think testicles and breasts are. Cutting them off makes them innocent again.”
“Jesus,” Ferguson whispered.
Ava went cold. “And what’s Durov got to do with the Skoptsy? Don’t tell me they still do this?”
Jennings swiped back to the map he had brought up earlier. “The Skoptsy originated in Durov’s home region, around Oryol. As a child, he was deeply spiritual, and although by the 1970s the number of Skoptsy had dropped to only a few thousand, the young Durov became obsessed with their traditions.
“To get him away from the influence of the Skoptsy, his parents handed him over to an Orthodox monastery down south, near Kursk. The monks found the boy to be a handful, but they also recognized his spiritual gifts, as well as his strong piety, and his way with people. They thought hard about his future, and eventually settled on a course of action. When he was old enough, they passed him from the novitiate to the first monastic degree of Rassophore. He tried to settle into the quiet routines of monastic life, but suffered some sort of relapse, and again became obsessed with the Skoptsy. One day the abbot entered Durov’s cell to find him lying on a blood-drenched bed after performing the Skoptsy ritual on himself.”
The Apocalypse Fire (Ava Curzon Trilogy Book 2) Page 10