by Will Adams
Croke stood up. ‘They’ve found them?’
‘Not exactly.’ He gave a little grimace. ‘We had people watching the coach station. But apparently there are stops on the way out of town too.’
‘For fuck’s sake. Didn’t they think of that?’
‘There wasn’t enough manpower to cover everything. But they did ask the drivers to report any couples they picked up.’
‘And?’
‘The first driver out picked up a woman at one stop, a man at the next. He didn’t make the connection. But apparently they left Victoria coach station together. And their descriptions match Luke and the girl.’
Croke touched a finger to his temple. He wanted to yell at someone, but he couldn’t see how it would help. ‘Where are they now?’
Morgenstern shrugged. ‘They left on foot. They could have gone anywhere. We’ll try to track them through our CCTV network, but that’s a bitch, believe me. We’re more likely to find them when they break cover again, which they’re bound to do, sooner or later. We’ve put taps on their families and friends, and we’re monitoring the major media groups in case they go that route. And we’ll keep a close eye on Twitter and the Internet too.’
‘Okay. Good. Let me know if they surface. Or when we get through to the chamber.’
‘Will do.’ He nodded and withdrew.
Croke rested his head back against the wall, closed his eyes. Morgenstern should be able to stop Luke and Rachel damaging this operation before he left for Israel. But they could certainly still cause future grief, particularly for Walters and his men. And if those three went down, they’d likely take him with them. At some stage, he’d have to make sure that couldn’t happen. But for the moment they were still too useful.
He called Walters now, briefed him on the Victoria coach station sighting. ‘The NCT are out looking for them,’ he told him. ‘But I’d much rather deal with them in-house if we can.’
‘Too right,’ agreed Walters. ‘We’re on our way.’
TWENTY-FIVE
I
After the big build-up from Luke, Rachel was a little disappointed by Jay Cowan. She’d expected him to stand out in some way, yet he could scarcely have been more ordinary: slight, neat and generally unobtrusive. He had an oblique way about him, too, never facing either of them directly, or looking them full in the eye. He also held himself unnaturally still, as if someone had once told him to stop fidgeting, and he’d taken the words too much to heart. And while his green shirt and black drainpipe trousers and brown brogues were each perfectly fine in themselves, they looked awful in combination. Not ordinary, then, so much as trying his very best to appear ordinary, and falling strangely short.
‘Luke,’ he said, opening his front door. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We didn’t wake you, did we?’
‘I was working.’
‘Working?’ asked Rachel, giving him her warmest smile. ‘At this time of day?’
He didn’t look at her so much as over her left shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he said. He turned back to Luke. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked again.
‘We need help, mate.’
‘With what?’
‘Can we come in? If I don’t get a coffee soon, I’m going to keel.’
Jay stood there a moment longer, then nodded and let them in. A short corridor led to a dingy stairwell with worn brown carpeting. They went up to the first floor. Boxes stacked against the wall were covered by a white sheet. ‘What’s all this?’ asked Luke.
‘A project.’ He led them inside his flat and into a large, book-lined room that should have overlooked the street, except that the thick crimson curtains were drawn across the windows, leaving it lit by a table lamp and an array of six computer screens stacked in two rows of three, each of which showed a hand from a different online poker tournament.
‘That’s your work?’ asked Rachel. ‘Poker?’
‘This is the best time,’ he said. ‘People who’ve been playing all night are tired by now. They make more mistakes when they’re tired.’ He began cashing out of the games one by one, switching off the screens.
‘And you can make a living from it?’
‘You wouldn’t believe how bad some of them are. They bet in situations where there’s no possible benefit to betting. Then they do it again.’
‘Maybe they’re trying to prove themselves,’ suggested Luke.
‘Or maybe they just want to go to bed,’ said Rachel.
Jay looked directly at her for the first time. ‘Then why wouldn’t they just go to bed?’
With the screens gone black, the room suddenly felt a little spooky. ‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘Good point.’
‘How about that coffee?’ said Luke, setting down Olivia’s laptop. ‘We’ve had one hell of a night.’
‘Of course,’ he said. He led them through to an impeccably neat kitchen, turned on the kettle. ‘What do you need my help with?’
Luke fished his cipher text from Pelham’s pocket. It was badly smudged and crumpled, so Jay found him a fresh pad of paper on which to write it out clean. ‘Rachel and I found this last night,’ said Luke. ‘We think it’s a cipher, perhaps devised by Newton.’
‘A Newton cipher?’ Jay’s eyes opened a little wider. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. I gave someone my word.’
‘You want my help and you won’t tell me?’
‘I’m sorry, Jay. If I gave you my word on something, you wouldn’t want me to break it, would you?’
Jay considered this for a moment, like a boy with a scraped knee wondering whether or not to start bawling. ‘It won’t help me solve the cipher.’
‘You can do it anyway. I’ve been telling Rachel how brilliant you are.’
For a moment, Rachel feared the flattery was too blatant, but Jay only nodded, so she decided to back Luke up. ‘It’s quite true,’ she said. ‘He’s been bragging shamelessly about you.’
Jay’s throat reddened slightly and he squinted at the architrave above the kitchen door. ‘I can’t promise anything.’
‘Of course not,’ said Luke, pouring boiling water into three mugs. ‘Just give it your best shot.’
He nodded and set the pad square in front of him on the countertop.
BE 22108 BF
BE 10460 BF
BH 01256
BC 10484
KD 11201
‘Five rows of five numbers,’ said Jay. He turned to Luke. ‘You’ve already checked for a grid, I assume.’
‘For a what?’
Jay sighed. ‘There are twenty-six letters in the Latin alphabet. If you treat I and J or Y and Z as one letter, you can fit the entire alphabet into a five-by-five grid. Code-makers have been using that for centuries. It would have been old hat to someone like Newton.’ He pointed to the top row of numbers: 2 2 1 0 8. ‘If that’s what this is, then these numbers might indicate how many times each letter is used in the cipher text. This first 2, for example, would imply that the letter A appears twice.’ He wrote two capital As at the top of a fresh sheet of paper. ‘This second 2 would indicate two Bs.’
‘I’m with you,’ said Rachel. ‘One C. No Ds. Eight Es.’
‘How do you know the grid reads left to right?’ asked Luke, a little piqued. ‘Maybe it goes from top to bottom.’
‘E is by far the most common letter in the alphabet,’ said Jay. ‘Eight Es therefore makes sense. Under your system, we’d have just one E, but eight Us. Are you really arguing that eight Us are more likely than eight Es?’
‘I guess not.’
‘Plus my way also gives us six Os, which I’d say makes rather more sense than your six Ws. Maybe you’d disagree? Maybe you’d prefer your six Qs to my six Is. At least it would give you something to do with all those Us. ’ He glanced at Rachel, almost with a smirk, as though showing off for her. ‘And I get four Rs and eight Ss, not to mention three Ns and two As, Ms and Ts, all of which make sense. That’s why, incidentally, I can be co
nfident that this is a YZ cipher rather an IJ one. Any other questions, or may I get on with it?’ He didn’t bother waiting for Luke to answer, but instead wrote out all the letters in sequence:
A A B B C E E E E E E E E
F H H H H I I I I I I
L M M N N N N N O O O O O O
P R R R R S S S S S S S S T T T T
U V W W Y/Z
‘What about the pairs of letters before and after the numbers?’ asked Rachel. ‘What are they for?’
‘The numbers stood for letters,’ said Jay. ‘So perhaps the letters stand for numbers.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘A equals one. B equals two. E equals five. Add all the letter pairs up and what do you get?’
Luke shook his head. ‘What?’
‘My god, Luke! How long have you had this? Sixty. Now count up the numbers.’
‘Sixty?’ hazarded Rachel.
‘Exactly. Well done. Sixty. Now do you see?’
‘No,’ said Luke.
Jay took a fresh sheet of paper, set it next to the list of letters. He wrote two dashes on the left of the page, followed by a space and another five dashes, as in in a game of hangman. ‘There’s your first B and E,’ he said. He wrote two dashes and then six more on the right-hand side of the page. ‘And that’s your first B and F.’ He repeated it immediately beneath, then followed it with a third line of two dashes followed by eight, a fourth line of two and three dashes, with eleven and four dashes on the bottom line. ‘Now all we have to do is fit these sixty letters onto these sixty blank spaces until we’ve got a phrase that makes sense. Which would be easier if I knew where’d you found this thing, or what its context was.’ But he said this more to make the point than in reproach, for he was clearly enjoying the challenge now and didn’t want it made easier.
‘Maybe we should each have a go,’ suggested Luke.
‘Yes. Or maybe you could allow me some silence in which to work.’
‘Fine,’ said Luke. ‘We’ll leave you to it.’
II
The farm was a few kilometres north-west of Megiddo Junction, an old kibbutz that had died twelve years before from internal rifts and a lack of new blood. Thaddeus and his friends had bought it cheap, sold off the surplus arable land and then switched its remaining cattle facilities from dairy to beef. They’d refurbished the dormitories for their American volunteers and had added state-of-the-art farming facilities, including a laboratory for testing, treating and preserving semen samples. Then they’d set about breeding themselves a red heifer.
The yard was dark and deserted when Avram parked outside the main house. But a light came on inside even as Shlomo pulled up alongside him, and then Francis came out, dressed with unusual modesty in tattered farmhand clothes, deliberately downplaying his status here. Avram nodded at him. He beckoned for them to follow him to a cavernous barn, pungent with animal smells. Huge strip lights flashed and shuddered like a silent storm before finally coming on. Certificates, photograph albums and other documentation for the heifer lay on a pair of worktables inside the door. Another pair of tables against the end wall were arrayed with bowls, knives, vestments and everything else they’d need for the sacrifice itself. Water splashed into a ritual bath opposite the door, while the wall behind it was covered intriguingly by a vast white sheet. And, to their left, a wooden altar had been built beneath an expanse of open roof.
Yet, for all these marvels, Shlomo and his men had eyes for just one thing.
And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying: This is the statute of the law which the Lord hath commanded: Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer, faultless, wherein there is no blemish, and upon which there never came yoke.
A red heifer, faultless, wherein there is no blemish. And there she was, caged in a steel pen in the corner of the barn, trembling a little, shying away from the sudden light and the crowd of staring men.
Purity was impossible in this world. Try as one might, one simply couldn’t avoid death and dirt and disease. Yet no observant Jew had been allowed to enter the grounds of the Temple while tainted. And certainly none would ever even contemplate intruding impure upon the Holy of Holies. That would have been a terrible sacrilege. On the other hand, Jews had still needed to visit the Temple. Before each visit, therefore, they’d cleansed themselves with ritual bathing and the anointment of ashes from a perfect red heifer.
Nine times in history such a heifer had been identified, sacrificed and burned. But then the Romans had destroyed the Temple and there’d been no more ashes. With the exact location of the Holy of Holies lost to human knowledge, few observant Jews would now dare walk upon the Temple Mount, let alone enter the Dome of the Rock, lest by accident they trespass on that most sacred space. Only by anointing themselves with the ashes of a new red heifer, therefore, could Shlomo and his men so much as venture onto the Mount. Only with a new heifer could they and their brethren bring down the Dome and build the Third Temple.
They edged tentatively towards her, almost as frightened as she was. They clustered around the small pen, leaned over the steel bars, yet not getting too close, as though scared that something cataclysmic might happen. But then one of them touched her by accident and instantly the spell was broken. Their hands were all over her, and they were babbling and laughing as they sought in vain the one white hair that might disqualify her, the one whisker.
Avram glanced at Francis. He looked serenely confident. Whatever dyes, tweezers or other tricks he’d used, they’d surely fool a dozen city boys like this. Reassured, he went to join them and share their joy as the truth dawned exultantly on them.
The heifer was real. The moment was real.
The time of the Third Temple had come.
TWENTY-SIX
I
Rachel opened the curtains a little way to allow some morning in. A cyclist wobbled by outside, and a yawning man trudged gloomily towards the river. Everything seemed so normal. She nodded at Jay’s phone. ‘You think he’d mind if we called Pelham’s sister? See how she’s getting on, if she needs any help?’
Luke shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t put it past them to be monitoring her phone. If they are, they’ll be able to trace incoming calls. They’ll be here in no time.’
She closed her eyes a moment. ‘I keep forgetting.’
Reproductions of portraits of famous people were hanging either side of the kitchen door. Rachel hadn’t noticed them in the earlier gloom, but now one caught her eye — the Kneller portrait Luke had mentioned earlier as the model for the Newton sculpture. She pointed it out to him. He grinned and murmured: ‘Jay would give his right arm to see what we’ve seen.’
Rachel nodded. Jay liked his scientists, that was for sure. And neatness, too. Each picture had its counterpart on the other side of the door: Einstein matched with Newton; Faraday with Curie; Linnaeus with Darwin; Edison with Tesla. She went to his bookshelves. They were arranged primarily by subject matter but then by size, with the largest to the left. Five whole shelves were devoted to writings by or about Newton. He also had extensive collections on alchemy, chemistry and other sciences. Luke smiled mischievously and pulled down a history of electricity, flipped to its index.
‘What are you looking for?’ she asked.
‘These Babylonian batteries of yours. I think you made them up.’ He showed the index to her. ‘See. Nothing here.’
‘That’s because they’re Baghdad batteries,’ she said, pointing out the entry to him.
‘Damn it,’ he said. He turned to the page and began to read. Then a puzzled look furrowed his brow.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
He closed the book. ‘These batteries. How would you describe what they did? At their simplest level, I mean.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not with you.’
‘They used acid to turn base metals into gold, right? Doesn’t that remind you of something?’
Now she saw it. ‘Alchemy?’ she frowned.
‘
Alchemy was essentially based on texts written in and around Alexandria during the early centuries AD,’ said Luke. ‘But that doesn’t mean the idea originated there. Baghdad was one of Alexandria’s major trading partners. Is it really so far-fetched to imagine merchants gossiping about these miraculous vessels they’d seen that used acid to turn other metals into gold? And is it such a great leap to believe that Alexandrians would have coveted this know-how and sought to replicate it for themselves?’
‘They’d have done anything for it.’
‘They’d have failed, of course. But the effort was the thing. The belief that it was possible, if you just got the mix of ingredients exactly right, or if you used a particular mineral as a catalyst, or maybe if you were pure enough of heart or you waited until Saturn was in conjunction with Venus. And so they wrote down their ideas and aspirations and experiments, and that’s the stuff that your Harranian friends preserved as their sacred texts, and which eventually reached Europe.’
‘Alchemy based upon a misunderstanding of primitive electroplating?’ Rachel gave a joyful laugh. ‘What a wonderful idea.’
‘It would mean awarding Newton the coconut for his theory about electricity as the philosopher’s stone. And if it was part of what he was working on during 1693, it could even explain his breakdown too. Hallucinations, confusion and long-term cognitive damage are exactly the symptoms you’d expect from exposing yourself to a series of electrical shocks.’
Rachel nodded. ‘So he stopped his experiments and his hallucinations stopped too.’
‘He stopped doing them himself, at least. As President of the Royal Society, he appointed his own Curator of Experiments and had him concentrate almost exclusively on electricity.’
‘Looking for the philosopher’s stone by proxy?’
‘Isn’t that what you’d have done? Hire some poor wannabe to take the shocks and the visions on your behalf?’ He glanced at the door. ‘Maybe we’re getting carried away. Let’s run it by Jay, see what he thinks.’