The Apocalypse Fire (Ava Curzon Trilogy Book 2)

by Dominic Selwood

  “How does that actually work?” Ferguson pulled up a chair and sat down beside her. “I’ve always wondered about that. If Mary was a virgin and conceived miraculously, then Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s biological father. So even if Joseph had royal blood, he didn’t pass it on to Jesus.”

  “It’s even more confused than that,” Ava acknowledged. “The Bible’s birth story is muddled in other ways, too. For example, the Gospel of Luke says that Joseph had to go south to Bethlehem for the census of Caesar Augustus, which is why Jesus was born there, seventy miles from his home in Nazareth. As it happens, the only known Roman census at that time was the one ordered by the new Roman governor of Syria, named Quirinius, who annexed Judea in AD 6 and ordered a census of all his new lands. The problem is that Roman censuses did not require people to go back to their ancestral homes. What would be the point? The census was an economic snapshot to see how many people lived in each town and village. It helped the Romans plan their tax revenues. If everyone moved around the country to register, the result would be worthless.”

  Ferguson nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “And then there’s the problem with the date. Quirinius’s census was in AD 6. But the Gospel of Luke also says that the census took place during the reign of King Herod the Great – who was the king who tried to have all first-born children killed to remove the threat of Jesus becoming a rival king of the Jews. Now, problematically, Herod died in 4 BC, nine years before the census. So Luke has made a mistake with one of these facts. Jesus cannot have been born before 4 BC and after AD 6.”

  Ferguson pushed his chair back. “If you were alive five hundred years ago, you’d have been ducked in a village pond.”

  “If I was alive five hundred years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to read or write, so it wouldn’t have been an issue,” she smiled, looking back at Rasputin’s cross. “Anyway, coming back to DISEASED ROYAL BLOOD, it’s probably something to do with Jesus’s genealogy, but I’ll need to think about it more. I don’t know about the letters AD and AM. Maybe they’re part of a reference to a date and time? Anno domini and ante meridiem? ESHTNOAC isn’t clear, either.”

  “An anagram?” he suggested.

  She looked at it again, shuffling the letters around in her mind. “It might be a warning to stay away. It spells out, CHASE NOT.”

  “Which would tie in with the skull and crossbones,” Ferguson agreed.

  They both peered at the enigmatic drawing.

  “The outline shape is a Templar cross,” she observed, breaking the silence. “It could be another reference to the Shroud, as for centuries there have been rumours that the Templars brought the Shroud back from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. And there have been other ones that the Shroud image is, in fact, the last Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay. Either way, it’s another potential connection with the Shroud.”

  She sat back and pushed the hair out of her face. “But I think Durov was wrong about the Turin Shroud. I don’t believe Rasputin’s cryptograph has anything to do with it. All of these are just coincidences. Durov is obsessed with the Shroud, and was just seeing what he wanted to see. I’ve got a strong feeling the answer to Rasputin’s cryptograph lies elsewhere.”

  Swinton popped his head out of the door of his office. “Major Ferguson, if you fancy joining the team, I’ve got a little job for you this afternoon?”

  Ferguson shot Ava a glance.

  “You don’t have to stay here for me,” she answered. “I’m going to be reading.”

  “Right,” Swinton concluded, throwing Ferguson a set of keys. “There’s a black Audi outside. Mary – the Vatican lady – is at the Shangri-La Hotel in the Shard, and getting a flight from Heathrow to Rome tonight. I want to know everywhere she goes today, and anyone she talks to. Do not make contact.”

  Ferguson pocketed the keys. “Understood. Apart from dinner for two, obviously.” He smiled, jabbed the button to open the lift, and was gone.

  Swinton went back into his office, and Ava returned to the computer.

  She had a lot of work to do.

  In the top right-hand corner of the screen was a small icon saying ‘LOGGED IN: CURZONA’. She clicked it, and the link brought up her profile page.

  Her name had been filled out, as had her home address and telephone number.

  She raised her eyebrows in surprise: not so much that they had the information – she was aware they knew most things about her – but that they had got it onto the system so quickly.

  Next to the box headed ‘LINE MANAGER’ it said ‘ALAN SWINTON’. She clicked the name, and the computer took her through to his page.

  Disappointingly, there was not much there – just some departmental acronyms and numbers, and his contact details.

  She pulled out her phone, hit the mute button, and took a photo of the entry.

  Navigating back to the main page, she wanted to read more about the Skoptsy and Rasputin – to find out anything she could that might begin to make sense of what was going on.

  Scrolling through the menus, she was pleased to see her profile had been set up with access to a number of classified governmental databases. She navigated to the Foreign Office, and pulled up the section on Eastern Europe. From there, it did not take long to locate the detailed archives on Tsarist Russia, then Communist Russia from 1917–1991.

  She wandered over to the kettle in the corner of the room and made herself a cup of tea.

  She had a long day ahead of her.

  Settling down, she started going through the files one by one, hunting out information about the Skoptsy, Rasputin, and their alien worlds.

  As she flipped between the confidential archives, digitized books, and academic and governmental papers, she began to learn more about the dreadful world of the Skoptsy, and to fill in the gaps in her knowledge of Rasputin’s life.

  She barely noticed as the evening drew in, the windows darkened, and the sound of rain started to drum on the glass.

  When she was done, she went back to the Foreign Office’s archive on Communist Russia, and ran a search for Oleg Antonevich Durov.

  The result came back instantly.

  One file.

  She looked over her shoulder to check Swinton was not watching, and clicked on it.

  The system asked for her personnel number, so she reached for her Ministry of Defence identity card and typed in the long code stamped across the bottom.

  To her relief, Durov’s file opened.

  Most of the material was in Russian. But the English chronology at the start gave the same history Jennings had shared with them, and a number of reports filed by UK personnel in Russia over the years backed up the conclusion that Durov currently moved in the highest Kremlin circles.

  Hearing a noise behind her, Ava toggled onto a different page, before turning to see Swinton standing outside his office, leaning against the glass and watching her.

  “Time to call it a night,” he announced.

  She nodded.

  It had been a long day.

  She quickly logged out of all applications, and signed herself off the computer.

  Swinton wandered across to her. “Leave me your identity card tonight.” He held out his hand. “I’ll have access rights for the building added onto it for you.”

  Ava pulled the card from her pocket. “Sure.” She passed it to him.

  “You might need this.” He handed her a flimsy-looking green umbrella, his eyes moving to the rain-spattered window. “Don’t worry about giving it back. It was an unwanted corporate gift.”

  Ava smiled, and took it gratefully.

  She had somewhere to be.

  Chapter 18

  Bucephalus Gallery

  Old Bond Street

  London

  The United Kingdom

  AVA WALKED OUT of the MI13 building into the rain.

  As consuming as Rasputin’s cryptograph was, she had Museum business she needed to take care of.

  She got on her bike, and he
aded south, savouring the fresh air after spending the day indoors. The feeling of independence she got from the motorbike had never stopped being a thrill. A friend had looked after it while she was in the Middle East, and being reunited with it had been one of the biggest joys of coming home.

  It was a vintage Brough Superior, and she had been captivated by the old make ever since, as a teenager, she had seen one in the Imperial War Museum. The sign beside it said that it had belonged to Lawrence of Arabia, one of her heroes, and she had instantly fallen for its sleek elegance. She had done some research, and discovered that Lawrence had owned eight of them, and would regularly disappear for long rides of seven hundred miles or more around the English countryside.

  Something about the romance of the old motorcycle had gripped her – not least its gleaming exoticism and raw power. Back in the 1930s, each one had been fully customized for its buyer, and sold with a guarantee that it had been tested to a speed of over one hundred miles per hour.

  When she had finally been able to afford a vintage bike, and when a Brough Superior had come on the market, the decision was a foregone conclusion, and it had made her smile ever since. As Lawrence of Arabia had said, the old machine had ‘a touch of blood in it’.

  She crossed Oxford Street, down to Berkeley Square, and was quickly lost among the exclusive designer jewellery shops, tailors, and art dealers of the area around Old Bond Street.

  It was raining heavily when she pulled up outside the particular business she was looking for. Etched into its glass frontage in gold was the name: ‘Bucephalus Gallery’.

  She parked up, then pressed the silent buzzer, and a moment later the security system clicked loudly.

  Pushing open the heavy glass door, she entered an airy whitewashed room furnished with a dark tan leather sofa, a glass table with brochures, and three tall rectangular cream-coloured plinths, each displaying a spot-lit fragment of ancient sculpture.

  She walked over to the nearest one.

  It was a life-size torso of a Greek hoplite. The spotlight above it threw the sculpture’s carved breastplate into sharp relief, highlighting the heavily stylized abdominal muscles and the exquisitely detailed lion’s head crest.

  “It’s spectacular, isn’t it?” The voice came from an elegant blonde-haired woman in her early fifties, who moved across the room and joined Ava beside the torso.

  Ava pointed to a slightly open doorway at the rear of the gallery. “I want to talk to whoever sits in there.”

  “I’d be more than happy to help with—” the woman began.

  “I’d say Roman, second century,” Ava cut her off and nodded at the statue. “Copy of a Greek original. Maybe Athens, school of Pheidias? With the right paperwork, it’s an immensely valuable piece. Without documentation, well, it could be worth as much as a lengthy prison sentence.”

  The assistant’s lips compressed slightly with resignation. She nodded curtly, and led Ava to the office door, which she knocked and opened.

  Inside, the room was busily decorated with prints and sketches of classical art. Two antique upholstered chairs faced a heavy dark wooden desk, behind which sat a man in a smart pale-blue open-necked shirt, the sleeves rolled up above the wrists. He had a prominent brow, and thinning grey hair.

  The room smelled heavily of cigar smoke.

  “Can I help you?” He looked surprised at the interruption. His accent had a trace of South America.

  Ava’s eyes flicked to the stack of business cards in a silver pen holder on the desk:

  JOSÉ RAMOS

  Director

  Bucephalus Gallery

  “That depends.” She pushed the door to behind her, but was careful not to close it. “Do you buy?”

  Ramos shook his head. “Not from the public. I work with select suppliers.” He emphasized the last two words.

  Ava could well believe that.

  When she had been based in Baghdad, her work had focused on the aftermath of the war. Now, back at the British Museum, her department was swamped with a different crisis.

  Law and order had broken down in vast swathes of the Middle East, creating an open season for the systematic looting of the region’s unparalleled archaeological heritage. There had always been money to be made from smuggling antiquities, but lawless armed factions were now cashing in on the anarchy on an unprecedented scale.

  The free-for-all had shocked her deeply.

  She had despaired at the television images of irreplaceable artefacts bring carved up with angle-grinders, and bludgeoned to powder and rubble with jackhammers. And then she had seen with horror the footage of the ultimate desecration of the past, as some of the world’s greatest archaeological sites disappeared in hundred-foot plumes of high explosives and dust.

  Shocked, she had made some enquiries, and quickly learned that the destruction was only half the story. At the same time as the vandalism, artefacts from the destroyed museums and sites were being funnelled onto the black market to fund the wars, and there was a cynical mathematical calculation underpinning the destruction – the fewer artefacts there were in existence, the higher the price for those being sold.

  As her feelings of shock turned to anger, she had decided to do something. She knew that the Metropolitan Police’s Art and Antiquities Unit was on the case, but she was also very aware that it was chronically overstretched. So she had started working on uncovering what she could of the networks behind the illegal imports into London.

  By monitoring the market and keeping her ear close to the ground, she had established that there were several principal routes into the UK. And, after months of painstaking analysis, she was confident that the Bucephalus Gallery was a key coordinator in the illegal trade.

  She looked across at Ramos, doing all she could to conceal her loathing. It was bastards like him who propped up this criminal racket, happy to make dirty money for himself, no matter what the cost to the Middle East’s people or heritage.

  In the van the night before last, when Swinton had offered her the role with MI13, one of the reasons she had jumped at it was his mention of working on operations of her choosing. If she had the resources of MI13 behind her, then a good deal of the work she was now doing by herself would get a lot easier.

  “Mr Ramos, your suppliers are amateurs,” Ava ventured. “For instance, the chryselephantine Nike you sold last week had no papers.” She pulled a photograph of the statuette out of her pocket and dropped it onto the desk in front of him. “We all know what the authorities would think about that, if they found out.”

  It had been sheer luck that the proud purchaser had brought the three-inch ivory and gold statuette to the Museum to have its date verified. Although the man had been cagey about how he got it, he had not been able to stop himself mentioning Old Bond Street.

  Ramos’s expression darkened. “Thank you for your trouble. But I believe you’ve outstayed your welcome.”

  “You know how things are these days,” Ava continued. “All those dreadful images of antiquities being destroyed, while others are sold onto the black market. There’s not much sympathy any more for dealers who do business with the wrong people.”

  Ramos did not flinch.

  “I’m sure you have many suppliers around the world,” she continued. “Italy, Greece, the Aegean, Anatolia, North Africa. That’s all your business. I’m happy for you. I just need you to hook me up with your contacts for Iraq and Syria.”

  Ramos studied Ava closely. “And why, exactly, would I do that?” His tone was mocking.

  “Because I can help them,” Ava injected a breezy confidence into her voice. “Stock. Sourcing. Validating. Papering. All the things that can make their business flow smoothly and stay under the radar.”

  Ramos picked up a partially smoked cigar from the large crystal ashtray in front of him. He lit it with a match, puffing thick clouds of pungent smoke into the air. “So, you think I’d be helping them?” he clarified.

  She nodded, watching the tip of his cigar flare bri
ght orange in successive crackling bursts. “I’m a specialist. I have expertise that would be useful to them.” She leant across his desk and picked up a heavy silver pen, then wrote down on his blotter the number of a pay-as-you-go mobile phone she had bought earlier that week, together with the name ‘Sophie Vosper’.

  She had selected the name a few weeks ago, and set up a LinkedIn page showing Sophie Vosper had graduated from the University of Durham with a Masters in Classics, had worked at a number of the big auction houses in London and New York, and now ran an independent art dealership out of the British Virgin Islands from an address in Tortola. Creating the company had taken forty-eight hours and cost a few hundred pounds. Its register was not public, so no one would see that it had done no business. The cover would not hold up to deep investigation, but it would be good enough for this.

  Ramos sat back in his chair smoking, studying Ava closely. After a few moments he leant forward, spreading both his hands on the desk.

  As he stretched his arms forward, the shirt sleeve on his right arm rode slightly higher, and Ava caught sight of part of a tattoo.

  It was the lower half of a skeleton, wearing a black robe, with a long rope of rosary beads hanging from its belt.

  He noticed she had seen it, and quickly shrugged his shoulder so the shirt sleeve fell lower, covering the tattoo again.

  Ava was surprised he was sensitive about it. But she was even more taken aback by the fact that the feet and legs of the figure had no flesh. They were just bones, treading on roses.

  He leant back again, balancing the cigar on the side of the ashtray. “I don’t know anything about a statuette of Nike,” he declared slowly, waving his hand dismissively over the photograph. “We’ve never had one. In any event, all our artefacts are sold with full provenance and paperwork.” He paused. “Nevertheless, I’d be happy to put in a call to our main Syrian suppliers and pass on your interest. Then it’s up to you.” He paused, glaring solemnly at Ava. “I presume that after doing you this favour, I will never see you again?”