The Apocalypse Fire (Ava Curzon Trilogy Book 2)

by Dominic Selwood

  Ava was feeling lightheaded.

  She could not believe she had been rifling through his study the previous evening.

  “The monks cared for him while he convalesced, but once his body had healed, the abbot ruled he had no place in their community, and the monks turfed him out. For a while he was seen hanging around the area begging, but then he disappeared. Several years later, he reappeared in Moscow, where he had found a new life – as a successful but ruthless businessman, and also as a spiritual adviser to a number of senior Kremlin officials.”

  “Riches through friends in high places?” Swinton asked.

  Jennings punched up a series of photographs, showing Durov at a range of gatherings in the company of a number of very recognizable senior Russian political and industrial figures.

  “His friends certainly helped with contracts and privileges. But by all accounts he’s highly astute and ruthless in his own right.”

  An image of Durov stepping out of a limousine by the Kremlin faded, and the screen went black.

  “So what does he believe?” Ava asked. “What spiritual advice does he give?”

  Jennings shook his head. “We don’t know. These days the Kremlin is a hotbed of religious intrigue, but Durov is altogether more radical than most of the staid Moscow clerics.”

  Ava was lost in thought.

  What did government officials want with someone like Durov?

  “We do know, however,” Jennings continued, “that he’s the guide and guru of a modern international group of the Skoptsy. His core supporters are in Russia, but he has votaries all over the world.”

  “And do they still, you know…” Ferguson’s voice trailed off.

  Jennings looked grim-faced. “From what we hear, Durov insists on it. Under his personal supervision, every adult – male and female – is fully mutilated with the Great Seal.”

  Ava shuddered.

  “His followers are deeply faithful to him. As you can imagine, not many leave the group after enduring such a ceremony.”

  “That’s not a religious movement,” Ava murmured. “It’s depraved.”

  “Let me know if I can be any further help,” Jennings concluded. “Although the best advice I can give is to stay well away from Durov. He lives in a different world to the rest of us, and it’s not a pleasant one.”

  Swinton ejected the silver disk from the reader and handed it back to Jennings, who pocketed it, wished them all good day, and headed for the bank of lifts.

  When he had gone, Ava glanced across at Swinton, who was staring into the middle distance, pre-occupied.

  He seemed miles away.

  “That’s all we need.” Ferguson was tapping a finger softly on the glass. “As if being a trigger-happy Kremlinite wasn’t enough, Durov’s also a religious nutjob.”

  Swinton’s phone pinged in his pocket. He pulled it out and swiped open the message, scrolling through it.

  “Well,” he glanced up at Ava. “It seems we’ve got a result on the photographs you took last night. The handwriting is an exact match for…” His voice trailed off.

  Ava looked at him expectantly.

  He looked at her, then back down at his phone. “It says here that the handwriting appears to be a match for the Russian monk, Grigory Rasputin – healer and adviser to the last ruling Romanovs of Russia.”

  Ava’s heart started to beat faster.

  So she had been right.

  It was almost too extraordinary to be true.

  Rasputin had left a notebook that no one had ever heard of.

  And now Durov had it.

  “There’s more,” Swinton continued. “The experts say that given Rasputin’s highly idiosyncratic handwriting style – as he only learned to write later in life – they have compared it with all other known examples of his writing, and are unanimous that it’s genuine.”

  Ava had not wanted to allow herself time to speculate about what-ifs. But now that she had the confirmation, the mental barriers she had erected disappeared, and her mind kicked fully into gear.

  Two Russians: Rasputin and Durov.

  Both country people.

  Both monks.

  Both close to the levers of power.

  Swinton tapped on his phone, and the SMS he was reading appeared on the large glass screen.

  “They’ve translated the writing,” he continued.

  Ava looked down at the image, which was glowing white on a smoky black background.

  Swinton tapped an icon on the side of the screen and a printout emerged from behind him.

  “What on earth does all that mean?” Ferguson asked, peering down at it.

  “It means,” Ava answered slowly, “that whatever Durov is into, I’m betting it goes way, way beyond the Turin Shroud.”

  Chapter 16

  The West Wing

  The White House

  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

  Washington DC

  The United States of America

  IN HIS PRIVATE office, Richard Easton looked down at the list of dates, times, and grid references.

  Apart from the traditional Bouillotte lamp on his desk, the piece of white paper was the only object on the shiny mahogany, and it had his full attention.

  The volume of information passing through the White House on any given day was immense. And, in his position, he had access to almost all of it. No one questioned what he wanted it for. He had served five administrations. As a senior figure in the National Security Council it was his job to know things, and to pass them on up to the Executive Office of the President.

  In strict intelligence terms, the paper in front of him was not that singular.

  It was a list of scheduled airstrikes by the Russian Air Force stationed at Khmeimim airbase in Syria.

  The targets were, as expected, moderate Syrian opposition groups who might one day form a government. It was not new news to anyone – especially not those on the ground who felt the Tupolev TU-160s thundering overhead – that Russia was muscularly assisting the existing governmental regime.

  Easton had no idea whether the document came from good old-fashioned human intelligence sources, or whether it had been picked up or hacked by one of the US government’s many signals capabilities. Either way, the most important thing was that the sensitive combat data had been coming into the White House for over a month, and it had always proved accurate.

  In the ordinary course of events, there was no problem with him having this category of information. He had the highest security clearance possible, as well as an unblemished record of thirty-two years’ service to the US government.

  In any event, he was always careful. He had not signed for the document, but had taken it from his Chief of Staff’s office earlier, hidden in a folder of other materials. He was in and out of there all the time, and he would soon put it back again. The CCTV footage of him in the corridors carrying folders was commonplace and meaningless.

  He looked down at the dates and grid references embedded in the paragraphs of military jargon.

  It was a shame the US government could never really use intelligence data like this. Any deployment of it militarily would immediately disclose to the Russians that the US had it.

  Still, the information could be very valuable in other ways.

  Like for the current plan.

  He received his orders in a number of ways.

  On this occasion it had been via his ten-year-old first generation Kindle.

  He and the contact he knew only as ‘489’ shared log-on details for the anonymous Amazon account that the Kindle was synced to. Using a VPN routed into Washington, 489 had sideloaded Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s War and Peace to the account, then highlighted individual words in the correct sequential order to spell out a message. Once Easton had opened the ebook, read the message, and highlighted the words ‘The End’, 489 deleted the book from the Amazon account.

  Easton’s Kindle was so old that it contained no on-board memory capable of being analysed if it
was ever seized.

  In a month’s time, Easton would destroy the Kindle, and 489 would delete the Amazon account. They would then move on to a different system for communicating.

  Easton turned back to the sheet in front of him. If he was ever caught, it would mean a lifetime in a Federal facility. But he brushed the idea aside. It was not going to happen. He knew the system far too well to make rookie errors.

  He pulled out a cheap plastic digital camera he had picked up for cash that morning from a street seller. It was a basic point-and-shoot, without the hundreds of filtering options becoming so popular on higher-end models, but at sixteen megapixels, it would do everything he needed.

  Slipping in an unused SD card, he focused through the viewfinder down onto the piece of paper, and took three shots of it from different heights and angles. After checking they had all come out, he shut the camera off and popped out the SD card, slipping it into the knot of his tie.

  He would stop off at an internet café on his way home – one he knew did not have internal camera surveillance – and upload the photographs into the Drafts folder of an anonymous webmail account.

  A short while later, in Moscow, the Russian would log into the same account, and print off the photographs.

  No one would be any the wiser.

  The Russian would then do what needed to be done. He would be able to doctor the document suitably, find someone with an Israeli passport, set up the meet, and make it happen.

  Easton smiled.

  When he got home, he’d run his car over the flimsy camera and SD card, then dump the bits in different trash bins around town at the weekend.

  There would be zero trail back to him.

  There never was.

  Chapter 17

  Harley Street

  Marylebone

  London W1

  The United Kingdom

  AVA’S MIND WAS buzzing as Swinton clicked off his phone and the glass screen cleared.

  Religious cults had always been her father’s speciality. He had created a dedicated section at MI6 specifically focused on the dangers they posed when they turned political.

  In the last few years, it seemed it was now becoming her speciality, too.

  She would have loved to talk this case through with him. She was sure he would have excellent ideas on what might link the Turin Shroud, the Skoptsy, and Rasputin.

  But that conversation was never going to happen. He had been killed years ago – On Her Majesty’s Service – and she was on her own with her questions.

  She pushed thoughts of her father out of her mind, and went back to what Jennings had been saying about the Skoptsy.

  She was still in shock at what the photograph of the man and woman had shown.

  How could people do that to themselves?

  Or to others?

  She could not imagine what sort of torturous ideology could lead people to mutilate themselves that severely.

  As an archaeologist with expertise in the Middle East, she was well aware that male circumcision had been common in ancient Egypt, Arabia, and the wider Middle East thousands of years before Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had made it a religious rite. Female circumcision also dated back to ancient Egypt, before becoming common across large swathes of Africa, and eventually further afield – even being adopted by European and American surgeons in the 1800s as a treatment for women’s sexual ‘hysteria’.

  But the Skoptsy’s uniform removal of their entire external sexual organs was in a league all of its own. From what Jennings had been saying, it sounded like it was tied up with a bizarre cocktail of ancient fertility rites and a fundamentalist interpretation of Christian sin and salvation.

  She shuddered.

  It was as if the Skoptsy believed that their god had made human bodies with such irredeemable design flaws they had to perfect themselves with workmen’s knives – running a very real risk of death from shock, bleeding, and infection, not to mention a lifetime of disfigurement and medical complications.

  It was monstrous.

  And Durov was one of its chief advocates.

  “Let me show you to your desk,” Swinton announced, interrupting Ava’s thoughts.

  She pulled herself back to the present, and followed him across the floor and back into the lift. He pressed the button for the fifth floor, and the polished cabin started to rise silently.

  When the doors slid open, they revealed an airy open-plan space, with a pair of four-person workstations in the middle of the floor, and two offices behind glass walls down the side.

  “If MI13 is off the radar and does covert work for the other intelligence agencies,” she asked, “who pays for all this?” She pointed around the room.

  “We’ve gone back to our roots.” Swinton smiled. “The MI sections were originally part of the War Office. MI13 was the Special Operations wing. That’s why we chose the Ministry of Defence as home. When you think about the budget for aircraft carriers, submarines, tanks, heavy bombers, and the rest of it, our tiny cost gets swallowed up – just another obscure civilian-military research and development partnership. We work hard not to be noticed, and the expense disappears when the headline numbers get rounded for the bean counters.”

  Ava moved into the centre of the room, where a flat screen television suspended from the ceiling was showing a news story about an oil spill from a Saudi tanker in the Arabian Gulf.

  She looked at the images with dismay, reading the captions announcing that a Saudi tanker heading for the US had developed a fatal fault and was now haemorrhaging millions of tonnes of crude oil into the Gulf.

  She looked away. It was only going to make her angry.

  How did these things still happen?

  The ecological disaster would be immense. The clean-up operation would take years. The toll on marine life would be catastrophic.

  “Here are your log-on credentials,” Swinton announced, handing Ava a small piece of white card. “You can use any of the desks. As I said, there’s always space for you here.”

  His expression suddenly turned graver. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding, our Russia desk will handle Durov. You stay away from him. I need you to work on the cryptograph in Rasputin’s book, and how it might connect to the Turin Shroud. But you steer clear of Durov. Are we clear?”

  Ava glanced quickly at Ferguson.

  This did not feel right.

  Was she being shut out of the case?

  “I could help,” she suggested, trying to sound casual. “I got close to Durov last night. Very close—”

  Swinton interrupted her. “Don’t do it again. I’m sorry. That’s the way it is. Now, let me know if you need anything.”

  She nodded, and he turned and let himself into one of the glass offices, where he sat down at the desk and flicked on his computer.

  “What on earth was that about?” Ferguson asked, stepping over to Ava. “Touchy, isn’t he?”

  She sat down in the nearest chair and peered into the middle distance.

  Her vague feelings of unease about Swinton were beginning to coalesce into something more solid.

  Was he protecting something?

  Or someone?

  She flicked on the computer in front of her, and was greeted by a screen with the letters ‘MI13’ above a large globe. Superimposed onto it were two snakes entwined and facing each other around a winged staff.

  Very fitting.

  The motto in a ring around the globe read: Ars armis validior.

  Ava smiled to herself.

  Craft is stronger than weaponry.

  She was beginning to like MI13.

  “That’s the symbol of the US Army Medical Corps.” Ferguson frowned, tapping the snakes. “What’s it got to do with MI13?”

  “It’s a caduceus.” Ava nodded. “Lots of US hospitals use it, too. But it’s an error. Two snakes around a winged staff is the symbol of the god Hermes – an emblem of peace and balance. Hermes used the caduceus to send the wakeful to sleep, and to awa
ken the sleeping. It’s got nothing to do with medicine. Doctors should be using the sign of Asclepius, who was a Greek healer god. His sign is just one snake wound around a plain staff. The mix up comes from an English printer in the 1800s. He specialized in medical books, but his printer’s mark was the caduceus – so people came to use it as a medical symbol. The two are now irretrievably muddled.”

  “They should put it on a plaque outside the door,” Ferguson grinned. “It fits right in around here in Harley Street.”

  Ava turned back to the computer and entered the login details Swinton had given her.

  Laying the printout of the translated Rasputin cross on the desk, she pulled up a blank document on the computer and quickly typed in the phrases:

  DISEASED ROYAL BLOOD

  ANASTASIS

  CITY OF SAINT PETER

  AD

  AM

  ESHTNOAC

  “Do you know what any of it means?” Ferguson asked. “This stuff is usually right up your street.”

  She peered at the letters. “Well, I’m guessing it’s what got Durov thinking about the Turin Shroud.”

  “Go on.” Ferguson glanced at the sheet.

  “ANASTASIS is Greek for resurrection. According to the Bible, the burial cloth or cloths that Jesus was wrapped in were found in the tomb after he was resurrected. Many people believe that the Turin Shroud was one of those cloths. The cross and skull would also tie in with the idea of Jesus’s death.”

  Ferguson nodded. “What about CITY OF SAINT PETER?”

  She peered at the cryptograph. “Believers say that the Shroud is proof of the Church’s claims about Jesus. Peter was the first pope. So you could say that Rome – and by extension its religion built around Jesus – is the city of Saint Peter.”

  “And DISEASED ROYAL BLOOD?” Ferguson was looking pensive.

  Ava paused before answering, not entirely sure what to make of the line. “According to the Bible, Jesus was of royal blood. The Gospel of Matthew starts with his family tree, showing Joseph’s descent from King David and King Solomon. And the Gospel of Luke has the story of Mary and Joseph going south to Bethlehem for the census, because that was the royal town of King David and therefore Joseph’s ancestral home.”