by Alex Scarrow
He lifted his hand slowly. ‘You may regret the truth you are about to discover.’
She sighed. ‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we?’
She turned to Sal. ‘Will you take Adam and Mr Cabot outside?’
Sal glanced at the support unit. ‘What about Becks?’
‘She’s staying.’
A flash of resentment seemed to cross Sal’s face. She looked like she wanted to say something. Maddy could guess what she was thinking.
You’re trusting a robot over me?
But Sal merely nodded, beckoned both men to follow her towards the shutter door. She cranked the shutter doorway up until it was high enough for them to duck under into the night.
Maddy could hear their disgruntled murmuring as they walked together down to the muddy shingle of the river to watch the fishing boats in the harbour opposite.
‘Becks,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m going to open a locked partition on your hard drive.’
Maddy trawled her own mind for those three words. And then realized they were there in her head, ready and waiting.
‘Right, listen to me: iPad – Caveman – Breakfast.’
Becks’s eyes lost their focus for a moment. Then almost immediately, her body posture changed, reset. No longer the acquired modest stance of a noble lady, instead she stood legs planted, hands by her side, like a marine on parade. Then she smiled faintly. ‘Acknowledged. The locked partition is now accessible.’
‘Good.’ She looked down at the wooden box on the end of the table and carefully lifted the hinged lid. Inside she saw the roll of parchment and the wooden tip of its spindle. She felt her heart quicken, her breath catch.
‘This is the Holy Grail,’ she found herself almost whispering as she lifted it carefully out and rested it on the table. ‘Do you understand how to decode it?’
Becks nodded. ‘Of course. I have access to the rest of the data on my hard drive.’ Her left eyebrow cocked. ‘Jay-zus, I’m not stupid.’
Maddy laughed. No need to guess who she’d been spending too much time with.
Carefully she turned the scroll’s spindle and gently pulled the brittle parchment down the table, until finally, almost long enough to overhang the end, it was entirely unravelled.
Just like the Treyarch, there were margin illuminations down both sides, but this time much less elaborate. Simple crosses: the cross-swipe of a nib in dark ink, there to mark the beginnings and endings of different, meaningless passages.
She spotted what looked like sections of Latin – at least, she recognized letters from the Latin alphabet. She looked again at the margin markings: crosses, every now and then on both sides. She reached across the table for the template they’d cut from the Treyarch and lined up the top right corner of it with the first cross in the right-hand margin.
The top left-hand corner of their grille lined up with a cross on the left margin, but it was several inches too short for the bottom corners to line up with the next margin crosses. She looked down at the hundreds of squares cut in the parchment, seeing the slanted strokes of the Grail writing through the windows. One or two letters seemed to line up, to be perfectly framed, but the majority of windows showed letters half in, half out.
‘Not here, then,’ said Maddy.
Becks’s eyes ran systematically down the cross markings in the left margin. She stepped slowly down the length of the kitchen table, comparing measurements by eye.
‘It should be placed here,’ she said finally, pointing towards two crosses. ‘The gap between these is precisely twenty-seven inches. The grille is also twenty-seven inches in length.’ Becks quickly examined the next cross marker down the left margin. ‘This is also spaced by twenty-seven inches.’
Maddy stepped down her side of the table with the grille in hand and carefully lined up the top right and top left-hand corners. She spread her hand across the parchment, holding down the corners at the bottom that desperately wanted to curl up again.
Oh my God.
‘It lines up,’ she said quietly. She looked across the grille, and found herself holding her breath. Every small rectangular cut-out in their grille perfectly framed a single letter. She lifted the grille away, looked again at the Grail document and saw endless spidery lines of handwriting – none of the letters seeming to stand out, none asking for specific attention, and all of it unintelligible. She rested the grille back down again, carefully lining the corners up once more.
You ready to know, Maddy? Ready to find out what Pandora is supposed to mean?
The question frightened her. No – she wasn’t ready. She knew the story of Pandora’s Box. The young woman, Pandora, who wanted to know the secrets within a box – perhaps little different to the one sitting open on the end of their table – but, once the box was opened, all manner of evil spilled out that she could never put back inside again.
There’s a reason this code word is Pandora, right?
Maybe it was something that would be harmful to know? Something that could hurt her? Destroy her – hurt the others? She looked at Becks, who watched her silently, waiting for instructions.
‘I … I’m not sure I want to read this,’ said Maddy.
‘Why?’
‘I’m scared.’
Becks looked confused. ‘It is just data … knowledge. All information is tactically useful.’
‘Well, I’m not so sure. Sometimes knowing something isn’t so good. You know?’
Becks said nothing.
‘Look … I …’
God, I wish Foster was here. Or even Liam, she decided. After all, they were one and the same, weren’t they? No. Not the same. Foster was Liam but with a lifetime of knowledge, a lifetime of experience. One day, Liam was going to become that old man. But he wasn’t there yet. She could imagine Liam standing here, impatiently fidgeting with frustration while she dithered like this.
‘I want you to read it,’ she said finally. ‘Decode the whole thing.’
Becks nodded.
‘When you’re done, I want you to come and get me and I’ll password-lock your hard drive again. Understood?’
‘Yes, of course, Maddy.’
‘And when you come for me, Becks … do NOT tell me anything about the message. Is that perfectly clear? I don’t … I don’t want to know yet.’
‘This is perfectly clear.’
Maddy sighed. Whatever message was on this table would be safe on Becks’s hard-drive mind for now. She decided she needed Foster’s advice before she opened that mind. Better still, she could bring Becks with her to the park, find Foster sitting beside that hotdog stand and feeding the pigeons. Then they could both listen to it together.
That was it. She realized she didn’t want the burden of knowledge to be sitting on her shoulders alone. She’d already done enough of that.
‘You know what to do?’
Becks nodded.
‘I’ll be outside, then, with the others.’
CHAPTER 77
1194, Nottingham
Oh, Jeeezz … this is it. This is it.
Liam felt bile roll up his throat as his stomach did its best to jettison the last meal he’d had. He spat it out along with the mouthful of grit he’d breathed in.
‘They are coming,’ said Bob, standing beside him. He had a shield strapped tightly to the stump of his upper left arm. He flexed it. It functioned almost as well as if he’d had a whole arm to use. He flourished the long blade of a broadsword in his right hand as he took several steps up the mound of loose rubble and fallen stone, into the swirling eddies of dust.
Liam could hear the excited roar of Richard’s army, racing heavily across the arrow-strewn ground outside towards the breached wall. It sounded like a locomotive coming down a track: the jangle of hundreds of harnesses swinging, the clatter of chain mail; men jogging as best they could under their bodyweight again in armour.
The inexperienced men of Nottingham’s garrison standing either side of him looked anxio
usly at Liam. Young boys, old men who’d done little more than drill with wooden swords.
Come on. Don’t chicken out on me now, he commanded his quivering legs.
Liam raised his heavy blade above his head. ‘FORWARD!’
He picked his way up jagged boulders of shattered and sharp-edged flint, to join Bob standing at the very top of the recently formed mound of masonry, and in that moment the roiling dust finally blew aside.
Before them, closing the distance of several dozen yards of already flattened arid grass, the front rank of Richard’s army thundered towards them, a sea of different colours – the coats of arms and livery of a dozen or more noble families. A juddering line of sunburnt and bearded faces split uniformly by mouths open, stretched wide and roaring as the arid tufted ground between them narrowed all too quickly.
Here’s all that history Foster promised you’d get to see, Liam. Right up close.
He braced his shield arm in front of him and looked to his right. Bob standing protectively beside him, a three-foot-wide immovable wall of chain mail and muscle.
‘Bob … I’m scared,’ he muttered, hoping his voice carried no further than his support unit.
‘Remain close,’ rumbled Bob. He looked down at Liam, his round tufted coconut head lost inside a coif of chain mail, grey eyes and thick-bridged nose lost in the shadow of his helmet.
‘Remain close to me, and you will be fine, Liam O’Connor.’
The front rank was clambering up the clattering mound of masonry, arrows from civilian archers posted on the walls either side of the breach finding targets amid the solid mass of men.
Liam had time enough to draw in one last ragged puff of air before he felt the terrific jarring impact of something against the edge of his shield, the vibration running painfully up his arm and almost knocking the breath from him. He instinctively ducked his head below the crinkled rim of his shield, and blindly swung his sword downwards. It bounced with a heavy ring off something.
To his left, one of his men, one of his recruited garrison, a man perhaps only five years older, grinned at him, showing no more than a handful of yellowing teeth framed by a blond beard. He swung his sword down on to the man in front of him, its edge biting the curve between shoulder and neck. Dark blood arced into the air as he yanked his sword free.
Liam felt his shield suddenly lurch downwards. He saw the fingers of a hand clad in a thick leather glove on the rim, yanking it roughly down and outward. Caught unawares, Liam found his left hand losing its grip on the shield’s handle.
Jay-zus, no!
His shield clattered on to the rubble at his feet and he had only the briefest moment to register the florid, hot face of the man in front of him. A face he was never going to forget. He was sure, as long as he lived … this man was destined to live on in his nightmares.
Liam’s response was ungainly and entirely reflexive, a lunge of desperate panic now that his shield had been ripped away and he felt naked and exposed, despite his thick leather quilted underlay and the heavy mail on top of it.
In the terrible slow-motion of heightened awareness, he saw the heavy blade of his sword swing down and bite deep into the side of the man’s neck.
Time seemed to slow down to almost a complete stop, as their eyes met. The mercenary’s cornflower blue, wide with surprise – slowly realizing that the blade lodged in his neck signalled the moment his life had come to an end.
The noise of battle going on around them seemed to be a hundred miles away. All Liam could hear was the roaring of blood through his veins, the hammer thump of his heart, the sound of his panting breath in his ears … and this man before him, now spitting dark gouts of crimson from his mouth and gurgling something – a defiant curse, a last prayer?
Liam found himself mouthing I’m so sorry to him, as if the dying man would actually understand, might even forgive him.
Then the moment was gone: slow-motion back to normal speed, Liam’s ears once again filled with the sound of grunts and cries, scraping and battering clang of metal on metal. The man with cornflower-blue eyes grabbed a firm hold of the blade with both hands, as if he was attempting to pull it out of him. But his strength was fast bleeding out, and Liam watched …
the man I just killed
… slowly collapse to his knees in front of him, then fall backwards, disappearing amid the churning quagmire of struggling bodies, taking Liam’s sword with him.
Liam found himself empty-handed as another thickset and red-faced man, sweating under forty pounds of mail armour, took his place. Liam cursed as the man grinned at his good fortune and pulled back to skewer him on the tip of his halberd.
Liam’s face screwed up with anticipation, his arms held out in front of him in a vain attempt to fend off the point. But then, all of sudden he felt himself being lifted off the ground by the scruff of his mail vest and tossed backwards down the clattering pile of rubble towards the marketplace.
He cracked the side of his head on the sharp rim of a jagged piece of masonry.
It left him stunned, his ears ringing. He watched dark shapes stepping over him, clambering up the slope to join the press of men in the breach; further above, the darting flicker of arrows heading into and out of the city; and high up in the rich blue sky a pair of swallows chasing each other in slow playful circles, oblivious to the carnage beneath them.
A face full of bristles and a mouth containing a solitary tooth leaned over him. ‘Ye alroight down there, sire?’ Liam vaguely recognized the face as one of Nottingham’s blacksmiths.
He nodded. A rough hand grasped his and pulled him up on to legs that wobbled uncertainly.
‘I – I lost my weapon and my shield …’ he said.
‘Not to worry,’ the man grinned. ‘There’ll be plenty more to pick up soon enough, sire,’ he said, then turned away, scrambling up the gravel to join the thick ruck of men fighting to hold the breach.
At the top, Liam thought he caught sight of Bob: the back of his head, his broad shoulders; one arm swinging a long-handled axe to and fro like a scythe.
His head was swimming with pain, a sharp stabbing agony that almost made it impossible to gather together a single coherent thought.
But he just about managed one.
When the hell’s Becks coming back?
John watched the distant struggle from the balcony of the keep’s Great Hall. From this far away the squirming press of men looked like insects fighting over a dung hill.
Every last man of the garrison was over there, and a good proportion of the town’s menfolk, all fighting for their town.
And fighting for me.
He felt sick of his weakness, his cowardice. The sight of blood had always left him in a cold dread.
You have not the heart of a king – that’s why you shall never be one; something Richard had once said to him back when their father had been alive.
‘Perhaps you are right,’ John whispered miserably. And yet … he thought he’d caught a glimpse of something inside himself. Perhaps ‘courage’ was too grand a word for it, but it was a firmness of resolve, perhaps even a hint of defiance as he’d parlayed with Richard earlier.
I was strong then, was I not?
Strong?
He stroked his beard absently with a hand that trembled like an autumn leaf ready to take flight on a fresh breeze. ‘No … you are just a weak fool,’ he answered himself.
‘Sire?’
John looked over his shoulder to see one of the keep’s squires standing beside the drapes. A pale-faced, effeminate man in expensive linens. ‘Sire? Should we – should we not close the castle’s gates? Should they break through, we would be safe in the castle a while longer!’
John felt something deep inside him turn away in disgust.
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Have you a sword and mail?’
The squire’s eyes rounded. ‘Sire?’
‘You heard.’
‘I – I – I suppose I have … somewhere …’
‘T
hen fetch it.’
‘F-fetch it, S-sire?’
‘Yes.’ John took a deep breath to steady the timbre of his voice. ‘We shall be joining them.’
CHAPTER 78
2001, New York
Maddy leaned against the crumbling brick wall of their transplanted archway, watching the others standing over on the grass-tufted hummocks of silt along the East River.
‘Madelaine?’
She turned round to see Becks standing in the opening beneath the fully raised shutter.
‘You all done?’
Becks nodded an affirmative.
‘If I lock your hard-drive partition again, what you know – what you’ve just read, it’s all gonna be safe in there, right?’
‘That is correct.’
Maddy nodded thoughtfully. No one else would know what secret message was hidden in the Grail, not even Becks herself.
She’d already made her mind up on the matter: she was going to unlock Becks’s partition with Foster present; they’d both hear what she had to say. And then together figure out what it meant, what they’d have to do about it, if anything.
‘Ready to lock that information away?’
‘Affirmative.’
She uttered the three words quietly. Becks blinked several times then cocked her head. Her voice immediately returned to its softer, more feminine tone. ‘I register thirty-seven minutes of absent data …’
Maddy raised her hand. ‘It’s OK, I’ve been talking with your alter ego.’
Becks consulted something inside her mind. ‘My code-word-locked partition?’
‘Yup.’ Maddy looked at the others. ‘You decoded the Holy Grail successfully. It’s now safely locked away in your head.’ Maddy laughed. ‘Not even you can get in there.’
Becks nodded approvingly. ‘A sensible precaution, Maddy.’
She was about to say a thank-you when she heard Sal’s voice calling out. She could just make out her small outline in the twilight, turning away from the river towards her.