The Apocalypse Fire (Ava Curzon Trilogy Book 2)

by Dominic Selwood

  Swinton almost certainly had access to all border information. He could have found her details on the manifests from the Eurostar. But then so could anyone from the right departments of the Kremlin. Or Mossad.

  About the only people who probably had no official idea of her movements were Ramos and his Mexican friends, but they could easily have tailed her there, or seen her board the Eurostar and got onto their associates in Paris. Their operation was certainly international.

  She took another mouthful of the hot drink.

  Her senses were firing on all cylinders now. “Did you get a look at him?” She looked up at Ferguson. “English? Russian? Mexican?” She had not managed to get a clear view of his face. Maybe Ferguson had noticed something.

  He shook his head. “Just his back.” His voice dropped. “He could’ve been anyone. Very professional, though. CCTV won’t have picked up his face, or the needle.”

  Her phone buzzed.

  “Ava?” It was Swinton.

  She froze for a moment.

  What on earth did he want?

  “Yes,” she answered after a pause.

  “Your pass is ready,” he announced. “It’s had all the necessary access rights put onto it.”

  She had forgotten about her pass.

  “I’ve left it at reception at HQ for you to collect.”

  Was he checking up on her?

  To see if she was still alive?

  “Thanks,” she answered carefully.

  “Anyway, what do you make of the second cryptograph from Rasputin’s notebooks?” he continued. “Have you had any thoughts yet?”

  She frowned.

  He had not asked for progress reports before.

  “I’ve got a few ideas,” she answered cautiously. “I just need a bit longer to knock them into shape.”

  “Okay.” He paused. “Keep in touch.”

  The line went dead.

  Ava put the phone slowly back down onto the table, lost in thought.

  What was that all about?

  Ferguson was stirring the inch of cream sitting at the top of his cup into the coffee. “I can’t believe that just happened down there. I should’ve—”

  “You’re not my minder,” Ava cut off his sentence. “We established that a long time ago.”

  As she said the words, Ferguson flinched, and she immediately regretted them. “I mean, I don’t expect any favours,” she added. “I know what kind of people we’re dealing with. If I drop the ball, it’s my fault.”

  “I’m not talking about favours,” Ferguson countered. “I wasn’t paying attention back there. I should’ve been alert.”

  “You got me out of there.” Ava smiled, finishing the last mouthful of her coffee, savouring the mix of heat, sugar, and bitterness. “Thanks.”

  She put a ten Euro note down onto the table. “Drink up. We need to get to Professor Hamidou’s flat. We can walk from here. It’ll take a bit longer, but I’ve gone right off the Métro.”

  Chapter 28

  Private aircraft

  Latvian airspace

  THE GULFSTREAM V sliced through the night, forty-five thousand feet above the earth’s surface.

  Inside its luxurious darkened cabin, Durov was sitting on a plump cream leather sofa, his eyes closed in concentration.

  He had tuned out the noise of the twin Rolls Royce engines, and was aware only of the hiss of the compressed air circulating in the cabin.

  It was almost time.

  He just needed the sign.

  The last few weeks had given him immense strength.

  And hope.

  The Rasputin notebooks he had been sent were filled with wisdom, and he was sure he now understood what the wandering mystic had been at pains to record.

  He breathed deeply.

  He was on the right track, and the Holy Mother was with him.

  His success was clearly predestined.

  The sender of the notebooks had not identified himself, nor explained the purpose of the gift. There had simply been a slip of paper with the hand-written number ‘489’ on it. Nothing else.

  It was no matter.

  The Holy Mother moved in purposeful ways.

  And he was sure that her hand was in this.

  Her breath filled his lungs.

  Inspiration.

  It was what the word meant. In-spirare, to blow into. The All-Holy suffusing him with wisdom.

  He looked out of the small window at the night sky, and down onto the lights of Riga.

  He thought of all the souls wandering about their meaningless lives, wrapped in confusion.

  They were lost.

  But he knew the ultimate truth – the secret to all life’s mysteries.

  The only way to be sure of redemption was to embrace the ultimate self-sacrifice of death.

  The time was at hand. The proof was everywhere. International tensions were running high. Fear was increasing. Instability was spreading.

  The Holy Mother had not deceived him.

  These were her works, for all who had eyes to see.

  And he was her instrument.

  When he gave the word, the Skoptsy would be ready.

  Even the children.

  He was their saviour, and they loved him for it.

  They loved him so much, they would follow him into eternal glory.

  All he needed was the sign.

  Chapter 29

  Rue Myrha

  La Goutte d’Or

  18e arrondissement

  Paris

  The Republic of France

  ONCE BEYOND THE Gare du Nord, Ava and Ferguson were into the Goutte d’Or – the Drop of Gold. It was a simmering slice of Africa in the heart of northern Paris, filled with a bustling population from the Maghreb and the sub-Sahara.

  The famous outdoor markets of spices and fabrics – or drugs and weapons, if you knew where to look – had long since closed for the night, and the streets were now the fiefdoms of gangs of drifting youths.

  As Ava and Ferguson passed, a group of men was loitering beside a burnt-out car, the pungent sweet smell of marijuana hanging heavily in the air.

  “Nice neighbourhood,” Ferguson muttered as they eased past them, pushing further north into the quartier.

  “It’s fine.” Ava dug her hands into her pockets. “Unless we’re unlucky, no one’s going to bother us. They’ve got enough of their own problems.”

  She had memorized the simple map of the area while on the Eurostar. As they headed further from the centre and into the more residential zones, the streets became quieter. Eventually they turned left into the Rue Myrha, making their way unobtrusively down the narrow road, keeping to the shadows of the buildings.

  Ava was grateful for her black jeans and battered black corduroy jacket, which blended perfectly into the darkness.

  Two thirds of the way down, she stopped and tucked herself into an unlit concrete doorway. “That’s it,” she announced softly, nodding at a building on the other side of the road. “Fifty-two.”

  It was a tired-looking beige four-storey apartment block. Inside, she could see a dimly illuminated staircase behind a wide strip of grimy glass bricks running the full height of the building.

  They waited for five minutes, scanning the area, but the street was deserted, and no cars passed.

  Approaching the front door, Ava pulled her British Museum identity card from her pocket, and readied herself to explain to Professor Hamidou exactly what she was doing there.

  She reached out to the intercom panel, looking for his flat number, but to her surprise the dull steel unit had only one button. Peering more closely, she saw the single word Concièrge faintly visible under it.

  She pressed it, and a moment later the lock buzzed loudly.

  Ferguson pushed the scruffy black door, and it swung open to reveal a bare concrete lobby, whose only feature was a wall-mounted unit of scuffed metal mailboxes.

  Ava walked over to them, and gently lifted the postal flap for the one marked
‘App 304’.

  She peered inside, and her heart sank as she counted the six envelopes nestling there.

  This was not good.

  If Professor Hamidou got as little postal mail as she did these days, it looked like he had not been home for a while.

  She followed Ferguson in silence to the stairs, and climbed quickly up to the third floor.

  Emerging from the stairwell, she could see ahead of her into a long bare corridor with six doors on either side – the whole space dimly illuminated by the streetlights shining through the partially obscured glass bricks of the stairwell. Ferguson ignored the timer light switch by his shoulder, and moved swiftly down the hallway, stopping outside number 304.

  Ava joined him a moment later. He held up his hand for her to be silent, and pointed to the left of the lock, where the door met the frame.

  There was a gap.

  Her stomach tightened.

  The door was open.

  She listened carefully, but could hear nothing from inside.

  Glancing at Ferguson, she pushed gently on the door, which swung open, revealing fresh damage to the jamb where the lock had been forced, splintering the wood.

  “Christ,” Ferguson muttered, as the light from the hallway spilled into the room. Together with the glow coming through the slats in the windows’ shutters, it was enough to see the full extent of the interior clearly.

  The flat was a large bedsit. There was a table under the window, a bed along the right wall, and a small kitchenette area facing it on the left, next to which a door opened into a small tiled shower room.

  “I guess the last visitors didn’t like the coffee and dates,” Ferguson murmured, following her inside and closing the door behind them. “Don’t touch the lights.”

  The flat had once been comfortably furnished and decorated, with a distinctly Maghrebi feel. The carpets were vibrant. There was an upholstered North African divan. And beside it was an attractive pair of intricately carved hexagonal side tables with long-spouted silver tea and coffee pots beside them.

  But it was not a scene of oriental comfort.

  All the furniture lay upturned and smashed. The contents of the cupboards and drawers were scattered across the floor. The side lamps had been knocked over and broken. Hundreds of the books on the shelves lining the four walls had been pulled from their places and lay strewn about, many of them with their covers ripped off. Even the bed had been overturned, and the mattress and linen slashed.

  “We can safely assume it wasn’t the DGSI.” Ferguson peered into the washroom. “Not exactly a covert search.”

  Ava gazed around, feeling a wave of anger surge through her. “Either they didn’t care,” she stooped to pick up a quarter-bound book that had caught her eye, “or they knew Professor Hamidou wasn’t coming back.”

  She turned the book over in her hand.

  It was a close-printed hardback, in English. She guessed from the look of the print that it was probably from the mid-1700s. The frontispiece was beautifully engraved, with an archway, ornamental foliage, and flamboyant type. The title read: Ecclesia Anglica Veterior Exspoliata: A Gazetteer of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, 1536–1541.

  “Isn’t Tudor religion a bit modern for his tastes?” Ferguson was peering over her shoulder.

  She thumbed through the fragile pages.

  There was no reason why Professor Hamidou should not have wide interests. But the ransack of the monasteries in the mid-1500s did seem slightly unlikely reading material for an Algerian scholar of the ancient Middle East.

  She scanned the scattered papers and books lying around the floor by the upturned table. As her eyes continued to sweep the room, she suddenly saw a movement.

  It was an old-fashioned telephone answering machine, and its red light was slowly flashing.

  “Over here,” she called to Ferguson, bending down and pressing the Play button.

  Almost immediately, the room filled with a mechanical female voice. “Vous avez un message,” it announced, before emitting a long beep, then continuing. “Aujourd’hui, à treize heures trente-quatre.”

  Ava and Ferguson exchanged looks.

  The message had been left today, at 1:34pm.

  “Allô, Monsieur le professeur?” It was a woman’s voice. Formal. Strained. “C’est Isabelle à l’appareil. Ça fait trois jours que vous n’êtes pas à la faculté.” There was a pause. “Il y avait des gens ici pour vous. Ça avait l’air urgent. On aurait dit des musulmans conservateurs, avec des barbes, de longues chemises noires, et des bouchons de prière. Est-ce que tout va bien, monsieur le professeur?”

  The machine clicked.

  “Did you get that?” Ava turned to Ferguson.

  He shook his head.

  “Isabelle from the university. She asked if everything was okay. Said Professor Hamidou hadn’t been in for three days. Said some strict Muslims had been looking for him. Beards. Long black shirts. Prayer caps.”

  The machine beeped again. There were no other messages.

  “Sounds like mujahideen uniform.” Ferguson bent down to look through a pile of papers on the floor. “Friends of his?”

  She shook her head. “Not his style at all.” She pressed the Erase button. “He’s Christian.”

  “Do you think what they were looking for is still here?” Ferguson was carefully examining the reverse of a large print of the Roman remains at Timgad. It had been pulled off the wall, and torn from its frame, leaving a mess of old Arabic newspaper and mounting card exposed.

  “I don’t know.” She was looking round with more urgency. “We can’t stay here much longer.”

  She stepped carefully over the mounds of books and personal effects, and moved over to the window.

  The louvres of the shutters were half-open, and as she passed, she distinctly saw the unmistakeable flare of a lighter flame across the street in the doorway she and Ferguson had been standing in.

  Her heart missed a beat.

  “We’re being watched.” She turned quickly to survey the room. “There may be someone on their way up already.”

  At least this time she would be ready.

  “We need to be out of here,” she announced, stepping over a pile of books and away from the window.

  It did not matter who it was outside – the people from her house the previous evening, the men from the Métro station, or even the group who had done this to Professor Hamidou’s flat. Whoever it was, she assumed they were hostile.

  “Let’s look at this from another angle.” He straightened up. “If you had to hide something in here, where would you put it?”

  She stared around the room.

  It was small, with minimal furniture. There were not many options.

  “Everyone avoids other people’s loos, don’t they?” She walked over to the washroom. Ferguson followed.

  Inside, there was just a lavatory and a small ceramic shower tray and hose attachment. It was gloomy in the cramped room, but she could clearly see it was largely empty, with nothing on the walls apart from a small mirror and a narrow shelf, and nothing on the floor except a mess of broken toiletries and a scrunched up mat.

  Ferguson pulled the plastic lid off the lavatory’s tank.

  There was nothing in it except water and pipes.

  Ava stamped down hard on the floor, starting at one end and moving to the other. As she expected, it was solid concrete.

  There was nothing there.

  “Whatever it was, it looks like they found it,” Ferguson concluded.

  Ava turned to leave, but as she did, something caught her eye.

  “Pass me that knife,” she indicated a heavy bread knife on the kitchen counter.

  Ferguson handed it to her, and she knelt down by the lavatory, reaching for the small wooden housing she had just spotted, where the porcelain waste pipe disappeared into the wall.

  Feeling with her fingers in the dark behind the bowl, she found a small gap between the wood and the wall.

  Jamming
the knife deep into the crack, she pulled the handle back hard, using it as a jemmy. After a second tug, the wooden case came away in her hands.

  “Well, I’ll be…” Ferguson was staring at Ava as she lifted out a small clear ziplock bag that had been sitting on the pipe, concealed by the nondescript small wooden casing.

  She undid the plastic zip of the clear bag, and pulled out a waterproof pouch. Opening it, she found a smaller one inside.

  It weighed next to nothing.

  Ferguson was standing by her as she undid the Velcro and unrolled the bag’s closure.

  Putting her hand inside the pocket, she was surprised to feel the familiar texture of old paper.

  She pulled it out, and gazed down at a small rectangle of folded parchment. It was a light leathery colour, and about the length of a packet of cigarettes.

  Written on it, in a bold italic handwriting, were three words:

  The ancient writing was arresting enough. But what drew her eyes more urgently was the large dark red seal next to the name, with sprays of frayed and faded yellowing silk sticking out from under it.

  She turned it over, a sense of excitement mounting.

  The underside of the folded parchment was blank, apart from an identical seal over another frayed layer of threads.

  “What on earth is that?” Ferguson peered at the arrangement of wax and threads.

  “Anti-tamper device,” she replied. “You wind silk around the folded letter,” she pointed to the fine strands of blue, “then you stamp a wax seal over the threads on either side. Anyone who wants to open the letter has to cut the silk, which leaves the frayed ends embedded into the seal.”

  “So the reader knows if it’s been opened.” Ferguson nodded.

  “Exactly.” Ava turned it over again to look at the name. “The only thing is, nobody’s sealed letters like this for a very long time.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Just how long, exactly.”

  She peered at the seal and handwriting more closely. “I’d say this letter’s about five hundred years old.”

  He exhaled sharply and stared at her. “So it really could be, then?”

  “Could be what?”

  “A letter to Thomas Wriothesley,” he answered. “Well, open it.”