He leant up against the window and began meticulously removing the rounds from the Curve’s magazine one by one. “So, are you going to tell me?” he asked quietly, focusing on the weapon.
She was watching his movements. They were neat and efficient. Dextrous.
He did not look up, but continued with the magazine.
A wave of fatigue washed over her as the adrenaline of the fight with Durov wore off.
She glanced across at Uri, angered by his air of superiority, and increasingly irritated by the sound of the gun’s metal parts clicking.
As she struggled to understand why Uri was protecting Durov, she was overcome by an urge to stop him fiddling with the gun. He had finished with the magazine, and was now stripping the chassis.
It was driving her mad.
Agitated, she stood up, and walked over to him. She grasped his hand, pressing it around the gun.
He tensed – aggressive – eyeing her coldly.
She held his gaze for a moment, then kissed him hard on the mouth.
Gratifyingly, she could feel him waver.
Taking advantage of his surprise, she slid her hands down his back, under the material of his waistband, and pulled him firmly towards her.
She could sense him calculating whether or not this was a ruse.
Still kissing, she steered him towards the bedroom. Unbuttoning her shirt, she pushed him down onto the bed.
He was excited now, reaching to undo his trousers.
She was gratified to see that he was not always in control. He was not an automaton.
She stepped out of her jeans, and sat astride him, pulling off his t-shirt.
He reached up to undo her bra, but she moved his hand away, then took it off herself.
She looked down at him, stroking her hand across his chest. His body was toned and beautiful, as she knew it would be.
She drank in the sight.
Feeling an urgency now, she allowed him to enter her with no conscious thought, sensing only a wave of satisfaction.
Closing her eyes, she abandoned herself to a blur of unconnected images – abstract clouds of emotion from the last few days. The last few years.
As the intensity built, Uri rolled her over, and she was on her back, looking up at him. He was focused and incessant. He wanted her approval. But she had no interest in giving it.
This was for her.
She wanted the release, and as it came she felt a flood of pleasure wash down through her.
Lying next to him later, she stared blankly at the bars on the window as he got up and went to the kitchen, where she heard him flick on the kettle.
She got dressed, and walked through into the sitting room. He looked at her quizzically, but she did not say anything as she let herself out of the building.
She walked away quickly, and did not look back.
Chapter 50
Jerusalem Helipad
Mount Scopus
Jerusalem
The State of Israel
TO THE EAST of the Old City, Durov looked down at Jerusalem’s helipad disappearing rapidly beneath him.
The view from Mount Scopus was spectacular – even better now that he was swiftly rising above it.
The mountain’s name came from the Greek word skopos – meaning watchman – as for millennia it had been the lookout post for the city’s vigilant sentinels.
But it had been used by enemies, too.
Invaders had climbed the rocky outcrop to survey the ancient capital before launching cataclysmic attacks. The Roman XII Thunderbolt and XV Apollo’s legions had used it as their base to destroy Jerusalem in AD 70, as had the crusaders in 1099. And as recently as 1917, General Allenby had encamped the British army there before smashing four centuries of Ottoman Turkish control.
The helicopter banked west, flying low over the Temple Mount – above the golden cupolas of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque.
Durov turned his attention to the small square of vellum in his hand, and smiled.
It all made sense.
He knew exactly what it meant.
Everything on it was where it should be.
Rasputin had not lied.
The many references Durov had found dotted throughout the mystic’s notebooks had prepared him for this. The only clues he had been waiting for were now in his hand, and they completed the picture.
Clever.
He congratulated himself.
Finally, he had the missing pieces.
Now he knew where he would find the roll, and where to light the pyre.
The helicopter climbed, and he looked down over the receding domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – covering the exact spot where the Theotokos had stood and watched her son’s final victory over death.
She had not intervened, but had let the prophecies take their course.
Now, nearly two thousand years later, everything was set for the next phase of His glory.
The Holy Mother had been right to trust him.
Chapter 51
The Regent’s Park
London
England
The United Kingdom
AVA HAD TAKEN a taxi to Ben Gurion airport, then booked a seat on the first flight back to London.
There had been nothing further for her in Jerusalem.
Durov would be on his way to Moscow, London, or somewhere else.
She had no idea where Ferguson and Mary were. She had texted him to say she had found the icon and was heading home, and figured he would call her when he was ready.
It was early evening by the time she arrived at her flat. She showered and changed, then set out on the Brough, heading up through Piccadilly and Marylebone to Regent’s Park.
Chaining the bike up in the Outer Circle, she walked across into the park, and made for its south-west corner, grateful for the fresh air and solitude after being stuck in an aeroplane.
The boating lake was one of her favourite spots.
She bought a cider from the café, and took it to one of the battered wooden tables and chairs that had been set out on the grass overlooking the lake.
Sitting down, she watched as the boat keeper settled a succession of people into brightly painted rowing boats and pedalos, before pushing them out onto the sparkling evening water.
Standing under the shower earlier, feeling the hot water drain away the tensions of the previous few days, she had found herself wondering what on earth she was doing. So far, there had been three serious attempts on her life – the shooting on her doorstep, the attempt to inject her with something in Paris, and Durov attacking her in the Holy Sepulchre. As she felt herself relaxing in the steam, she had suddenly felt acutely aware that she was not immortal, and wondered whether it was all worth it.
But then she had seen Durov’s face again in her mind’s eye – his insanity radiating from it – and knew that he needed to be stopped. Whatever he was up to, no one was in a better position than her to bring him down, and prevent whatever it was that he was bent on doing.
Looking around the park, she took a gulp of the cold cider, pulled out her smartphone, and opened the image gallery to bring up the photograph of the piece of vellum from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
As the ancient seven-pointed star filled the screen, she fought to repress a sense of failure at having allowed Durov to take the original. He had been one step ahead of her all the way, and now – following Uri’s intervention – he had the prize.
She could not blame Uri completely. She should have been faster to solve Rasputin’s cryptographs. In the Holy Sepulchre, she should have been more careful – more aware of who was nearby. If she had pocketed the fragment and left more quickly, things might have been different.
Instead, Durov now had the manuscript.
She pushed the thoughts away. There was nothing to be done about it. All that mattered now was which one of them would solve the writing on the vellum first.
And she was still in with a chance
of that.
She stared at the mysterious message, conscious that she had never seen anything quite like it before.
If she was going to understand it, the first two priorities were to work out who had written it, and why.
She had been mulling it over on the plane.
The handwriting looked fourteenth-century, but she knew from experience that did not prove anything. There were plenty of good forgers out there who could reproduce dozens of different medieval scripts well enough to fool even the most experienced experts.
On the other hand, she did know that Rasputin had almost certainly seen the cryptic fragment of vellum before 1916, so it was at least a century old. And if someone had spent the time and effort forging it a hundred years ago, then there had to be a reason why.
She tried to look at the question from all sides.
Why, if the vellum had been created by a conman at the turn of the nineteenth century, would it have been placed in an old icon rather than used to generate publicity or money?
Why would a forger have hidden it so securely?
As she worked through the options, it seemed far more likely that the fragment was exactly what it seemed to be – a medieval message, most likely written by a Knight of Saint John.
She took another sip of the cider, enjoying the hit of aromatic apples.
The next question was what the words meant.
Some were more straightforward than others.
APOCALYPSIS was the apocalypse, although it was not clear from the context whether it meant the biblical book of that name, or the final cataclysmic end of the world.
SMYRNE POLYCARPUS was Saint Polycarp, one of the Church’s first bishops. He was a thinker and writer, based in the ancient city of Smyrna – now İzmir in Turkey – where he had been a pillar of the early Church.
PETRUS BARTHOLOMEUS was someone called Peter Bartholomew. The name meant nothing to her.
MONS SECURUS was safe hill.
ECCLESIA ANTIQUA just meant ancient church.
ANTIOCHUS was Antioch, although it was not clear which one. It could mean Antioch-on-the-Orontes, one of the main cities in the Roman Empire, and among the earliest centres of Christianity. It lay in a spur of southern Turkey that stuck down into Syria, about fifty miles west of Aleppo, and was now known as Antakya. The other possibility was the far less important city of Antioch-in-Pisidia, which was in the middle of Turkish Anatolia.
RAIMUNDUS FAIDITUS was a name: Raymond Faiditus or Faidit. Again, it meant nothing to her.
As she surveyed the words, she realized that she had almost nothing to go on.
And from what little she could work out, the list of words and names seemed meaningless.
She glanced up, looking out over the boating lake, and at the scattering of Londoners and visitors enjoying a carefree moment.
It was a lovely mellow summer evening, and in other circumstances she would have been quite happy to take a boat out herself and enjoy the calm sound of the oars and the water washing against the hull.
She often did, but this evening she had work to do.
She looked back at the star diagram.
The only possible connection she could see between the words was that four of them were suggestive of ancient Christianity. The APOCALYPSE was an obsession of the ANCIENT CHURCH. ANTIOCH was an early Christian city. And POLYCARP OF SMYRNA was a famous early Church leader.
But even if the words were connected in that way, it still did not tell her very much.
She took another sip of the cider, and wondered if she needed to approach the puzzle in another way.
It was clear that the author of the text was purposefully playing with the reader. That was plain from the small lines over some of the letters. She had spotted the irregularity immediately.
In medieval Latin, a small macron line above a letter indicated that certain letters were missing. For example, p̄ always meant pre, and q̄ always meant quae. There were other symbols, too, like a big curly apostrophe meant the letters us. There were also some set abbreviations for entire words – like dn̄s meant dominus. So a scribe could simply write:
and the reader would know to expand the words as dominus prefectus, or Lord Prefect.
But she had immediately noticed that this was not how the macrons in the vellum fragment were being used. The words on the vellum were all written out in full, as whole words – with nothing missing – so the macrons were not indicating that anything needed to be added.
They were plainly being used in some other way.
She pulled a scrap of paper and a pen from her pocket, and wrote out each letter of the manuscript that had a macron over it:
YRPEENI
She peered at the seven letters, reshuffling them in her mind to find any anagrams.
There were none in medieval English, but she was not expecting that there would be.
She tried medieval Latin then medieval French, which seemed the most likely languages for a fourteenth-century Knight of Saint John. But she could not see any seven-letter anagrams.
She crossed the word through and tried again, this time ordering the words on the vellum sequentially, placing the one with the macron over the first letter first, the one with the macron over the second letter second, and so on for the rest.
She looked down at the result:
PETRUS BARTHOLOMEUS
ANTIOCHUS
RAIMUNDUS FAIDITUS
SMYRNE POLYCARPUS
ECCLESIA ANTIQUA
MONS SECURUS
APOCALYPSIS
She peered at them, wondering if the words were now in any kind of intelligible order.
She could not see anything obvious.
It was still all meaningless.
She was tired. It had been a long day.
She took another swig of the cider, and stared at the list, allowing her mind to go blank, letting the shapes rearrange themselves in random ways. She slipped her eyes slightly out of focus, watching as the letters become blurred at the edges.
Then suddenly she saw it:
PARSEMA
It was an acrostic, from the initial letter of each word.
She sat bolt upright, alert now.
Most of the Knights of Saint John had been French. And parsema was a French word. It meant ‘he scattered’.
She peered at it, feeling her energy returning.
Who had scattered?
Polycarp? Peter Bartholomew? Raymond Faiditus?
And what exactly had been scattered?
She swirled the cider in the bottle, mesmerized by the clouds of rising bubbles.
Perhaps the remaining words would tell her what had been scattered. But to find that out, she would need to make sense of them first.
Her eyes moved to the seven-pointed star at the centre of the diagram.
Why a star?
Was it a clue to the order of the words?
Starting at the top, she ran her finger along the lines of the star, clockwise, not lifting it from the image. That gave her:
APOCALYPSE
SAFE HILL
RAYMOND FAIDITUS
It did not seem to reveal anything.
She started again at the top, and this time traced the star anticlockwise:
APOCALYPSE
ANCIENT CHURCH
POLYCARP OF SMYRNA
She stopped dead at the realization that the words were in a chronological order.
Saint John had written the APOCALYPSE. He had then sent copies of it to the seven churches of the ANCIENT CHURCH. And one of the bishops who had received it was POLYCARP OF SMYRNA.
So was it John who had scattered the manuscripts of the Apocalypse?
To the seven churches?
She looked back over the list and continued tracing the star pattern anticlockwise with her finger.
The next word it gave was ANTIOCH. But that was not one of the seven churches.
Ava frowned.
She opened the map app on her phone, and pulled up T
urkey.
The ancient journey from Smyrna to Antioch would translate on modern roads to a trip from İzmir to Antakya.
It looked about seven hundred miles.
It was a feasible journey in the ancient world.
Maybe it wasn’t John. Maybe Polycarp took his copy of the Apocalypse to Antioch.
She continued tracing the star anticlockwise to complete the pattern with all the words:
ANTIOCH
PETER BARTHOLOMEW
RAYMOND FAIDITUS
SAFE HILL
An idea was forming in her mind, which was now starting to buzz with possibilities.
She quickly drained the rest of the cider, and stood up to leave. She needed to get home, where she had books that would help.
Her excitement was mounting as she rode hurriedly back to Piccadilly, eager to test her hypothesis.
Once indoors, she headed straight for the study.
If ANTIOCH was followed by PETER BARTHOLOMEW, then she needed to find a connection between the two.
Peter Bartholomew struck her as a medieval European name, and the only medieval connection she knew between Europe and Antioch was the crusades, when western armies fought over the ancient city.
She reached up to the bookshelves and pulled down her battered three-volume history of the crusades.
Turning to the back, she flicked through the index, then started scanning the section headed P.
With a flush of exhilaration, she saw that the name PETER BARTHOLOMEW was listed.
He had been a real person.
Excitedly, she carried the three books through to the sitting room, and settled herself down on the sofa to read.
Half an hour later, she put the books down and stood up.
She had been right.
Two more clues on the vellum fragment were beginning to make sense.
She could tick off ANTIOCH and PETER BARTHOLOMEW, who she now knew was a Provençal pilgrim – the leading character in an extraordinary drama that had taken place in crusader Antioch. The event had involved Peter Bartholomew and the most powerful crusader of his day – Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles.
The Apocalypse Fire (Ava Curzon Trilogy Book 2) Page 27