Thieves Like Us 01 - Thieves Like Us

by Stephen Cole

  Con’s voice softened. ‘You were afraid that if she got her hands on us she’d turn us against you?’

  Coldhardt turned his gaze on Jonah. ‘Those photographs I showed of you – at your arrest, inside the police station … They were arranged by her.’

  A shiver ran through him. ‘She was after me even back then?’

  ‘She had learned from Hela about the cultists’ use of the lekythos, and was aware that the location of the catacombs would be encrypted on its surface. So she thought to acquire a young expert with no ties or loyalties for the day a lekythos was discovered. Someone who could be killed cleanly with no fallout once he’d done his work, so no one but her would know of the location.’

  Jonah stared back at him. ‘So you knew she was after me, and got there first?’

  His face remained impassive. ‘I delivered you from evil, Jonah.’

  ‘Right. I get it.’ Jonah nodded slowly. ‘And once I was on your team, Samraj knew the easiest way to get to me was through you.’

  ‘So she cosied up to you,’ Motti agreed. ‘She clued you in on all her plans.’

  ‘I may be an old man now, but I like to flatter myself my own charms played a part in securing her interest.’ Coldhardt half-smiled. ‘They always worked in the past.’

  ‘But to prove your loyalty to her now, you had to hand over Jonah,’ said Con.

  ‘And as I have said, I would never allow that to happen.’

  ‘Just how far back do you and Samraj go?’

  ‘I care for you all, Con,’ said Coldhardt, ‘but I answer to no one.’

  He didn’t speak again for the rest of the journey.

  Tye was detailed to refuel the plane and get it ready for flight, while the others helped Motti rig up some on-the-fly defences around the castle to buy them some time in case of an attack – which they all knew could come at any moment. She heard Motti talking about trip wires, motion detectors, PIRs, bad-tempered but in his element.

  Jobs done, they all met back in the junior hub, which was looking a little more like the slick sanctum of old. It was a relief to have Coldhardt back at the head of the table. Tye just hoped that Motti’s lash-ups would warn them of unexpected visitors coming to call.

  The only one of them not yet in his place was Jonah. He sat instead at the computer desk, his eyes scouring the monitor screen as he factored in the remaining pieces of the cipher that Coldhardt had acquired.

  ‘So what do we do first?’ asked Con. ‘Sell Demnos the info on his daughter?’

  Coldhardt shook his head. ‘You think he’ll pay us for news like that? He wouldn’t believe a thing without proof.’

  ‘So sell him the truth about Amrita, then,’ Patch suggested.

  ‘Tell him he’s wasted the last twenty years of his life down a blind alley – and that his daughter’s known the truth for some time?’ Coldhardt shook his head. ‘Besides, if our own role in this affair becomes known to him …’

  ‘Like the way you made us break into his place and not Samraj’s, for instance,’ said Motti sourly.

  ‘We still have Demnos’s down-payment,’ Con reminded them. ‘Enough to cut and run?’

  ‘Once travel and operating costs are deducted …’ Coldhardt shook his head. ‘It’s less than satisfactory. And it won’t remove the problem of Samraj.’

  ‘While we’ve got Jonah, we’ve got something to bargain with,’ said Con.

  ‘Nice to feel needed,’ Jonah called.

  ‘I told you, she’ll have a contingency plan,’ snapped Coldhardt. ‘I know she’s been keeping a file on a prominent professor of antiquities and languages.’

  Patch looked worried. ‘Full of juicy blackmail stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know what she has on him. But she’ll find a way to make use of his services, depend on it.’ He smiled bleakly. ‘The moment he’s done his job, I imagine both his secrets and apparent suicide will be splashed all over the broadsheets.’

  ‘She won’t give up, will she?’ said Con.

  Patch sighed. ‘And when she’s worked out how to make Amrita, she’ll have for ever to get us!’

  ‘We have different home bases, we can stay one step ahead,’ Tye argued. ‘Can’t we?’

  But Coldhardt was staring into space.

  ‘Guys. I’ve found something.’

  Everyone looked over at Jonah, Coldhardt included.

  ‘I’ve been tracing the code formulas, following the path the program took, processing the last parts of the cipher.’

  ‘There was an error?’ snapped Coldhardt.

  ‘No.’ Jonah shook his head, his eyes agleam. ‘But you know how I told you it hacked into those ancient language databases?’

  ‘As used at Oxford and Yale.’

  ‘Well it didn’t translate the words into English from the Ancient Greek like we thought it would,’ said Jonah slowly. ‘It translated from ninth-century Arabic.’

  ‘Arabic?’ Motti frowned. ‘But why?’

  ‘The lekythos was Greek – but it was found in Egypt,’ breathed Coldhardt.

  Patch nodded excitedly. ‘And Ophiuchus had been known before as that Egyptian guy, what was his –?’

  ‘Imhotep.’ Coldhardt’s long strides devoured the distance to his desk in moments. ‘What happens if we translate the words back into Arabic?’

  ‘Already on the case,’ Jonah told him, standing up to allow Coldhardt to take his seat. ‘Won’t take long to get a result.’

  They waited tensely.

  ‘Ras Alhague,’ Coldhardt read aloud, ‘Cebalrai, Yed Prior, Sabik … I’ve seen those names, I’m sure of it …’ He looked up at them, comprehension dawning. ‘Of course. Of course.’

  ‘Care to share?’ Motti drawled.

  ‘Stars! They’re the names of stars – in the Ophiuchus constellation!’

  Tye saw Jonah frown, as though he was slowly catching hold of something in his mind.

  ‘Arabic astronomers had been cataloguing the stars since early times,’ Coldhardt went on. ‘Their names for the brighter stars are still often used today – Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Sirius … And they are names that would have been far more familiar a thousand years ago.’

  ‘So now we understand them.’ Tye shrugged. ‘But how does that help us? Why print the names of stars on the side of the vase?’

  ‘And numbers,’ said Jonah. ‘Co-ordinates, Coldhardt – that was your theory, right?’

  ‘A possibility,’ he agreed.

  ‘It fits. But the question is, how do we calculate the scale?’

  Tye frowned. ‘Scale of what?’

  ‘What’s a constellation, anyway?’ Jonah was concentrating furiously. ‘Just a pattern in the sky. A dot-to-dot with stars.’

  ‘And important to the cult,’ Con chipped in. ‘They marked the pattern on that warning note they left for us.’

  ‘Go on, Jonah,’ said Coldhardt quietly.

  ‘Remember the Spartan cipher that kicked all this off? “Stars buried in patterns” – that was a part of it. Those soldiers who found the catacombs must have realised it too.’

  Motti’s frustration was boiling over. ‘Realised what?’ he demanded.

  Jonah looked at Coldhardt, a grin slow-spreading over his face. ‘I think the cipher’s meant to show us how to transfer the dot-to-dot Ophiuchus pattern in the stars on to an area of land.’

  Con stared at him. ‘To mark the place where the catacombs are hidden?’

  ‘Then the coordinates must relate to landmarks,’ said Coldhardt. ‘Things that could be seen from afar.’

  ‘Or even from above,’ Tye reasoned, ‘if you had to cross mountains to reach there. ’

  ‘But which mountains?’ said Patch. ‘What area are we talking about?’

  Jonah shrugged. ‘There’s no mention. I suppose if we were true cultists carrying the lekythos, we would know which country it was.’

  ‘Could be anywhere,’ sighed Con.

  ‘No. Like Yianna said, it’s somewhere the Spartan soldiers campaigned,’ Motti
told her. ‘Somewhere they fought in the fourth century BC.’

  Coldhardt nodded. ‘Today it’ll be part of Europe or northern Africa …’

  Jonah nodded. ‘The cipher mentioned the “north”, didn’t it?’

  ‘That’s still a large area to track,’ said Con. ‘We must do some research, yes?’

  ‘We’ll start at once,’ Coldhardt announced. ‘We should be able to find evidence of Spartan military operations from that era online.’

  ‘And then we’ll need maps for all those areas,’ mused Patch. ‘Really good maps.’

  ‘There’s sat nav on the plane,’ said Tye, ‘including digital terrain models.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Jonah. ‘Can we load the software on to here, too? I’ll program in the pattern of the constellation as an overlay.’

  ‘It won’t be an exact aerial view,’ Coldhardt warned him. ‘It’ll be from a vantage point as Tye suggested – a mountain pass or a plateau.’

  Jonah nodded. ‘With a bit of time I can scale it up or down, rotate it, skew it over each part of the map. See if it fits any features.’

  ‘This is gonna take for ever,’ sighed Patch. ‘Anyway, we’d need maps for, like, a thousand years ago.’

  Coldhardt shook his head. ‘If these acolytes really could live for centuries at a time, they’d choose landmarks unlikely to change over hundreds, even thousands of years. But you’re right – it will take time.’ He started tapping at the keyboard. ‘So let’s start our history lesson at once, and narrow down the field.’

  Motti sighed. ‘I thought we were meant to be clearing out of here?’

  ‘No.’ The word dropped from Coldhardt’s lips with the weight of a brick. ‘There’s no time to waste. And besides, Samraj will be expecting us to cut and run – it’s the obvious move.’

  ‘That’s ’cause it makes sense.’

  ‘Not when she may know the whereabouts of our other bases in Switzerland, Mexico, southern France …’ He nodded gravely. ‘She could be dispatching her guards to any one of those places in readiness for our arrival.’

  Motti sighed impatiently. ‘Well, if nothing else, she’s bound to have this place under observation.’

  ‘A fair assumption,’ Coldhardt agreed. ‘Let us leave the gates ajar, just as they were. And we must black out all the windows. None of you will use your rooms – you will restrict your movements to the hub and the hangout as much as possible.’

  ‘What will you do once we’ve found the catacombs’ location?’ wondered Con. ‘Sell it to Demnos? Let him fight over it with Samraj and lie low somewhere till the heat’s died down?’

  Coldhardt shook his head. ‘We must get to the catacombs ourselves, before she does.’

  ‘Why?’ challenged Motti. ‘So you can get one up on your ex? So you can get the secret of everlasting life all for yourself?’

  ‘So we can acquire ourselves a great deal of money.’ He looked at Motti coldly. ‘This venture is about maximising profit now, nothing more. If those catacombs really are the place where Ophiuchus chose to bury himself alive, imagine what relics and rarities may be hidden inside – quite aside from the unique properties of this “flesh of the gods”.’ He smiled, a true rogue’s smile. ‘And since Samraj seems to be on the warpath, a haul like that should buy us a good deal of protection from collectors all over the world.’

  ‘We could give her the best of it to get her off our backs,’ Patch suggested.

  ‘Give it to her?’ Con was offended. ‘Offer her a discount, maybe.’

  ‘First we have to actually find the catacombs,’ said Jonah.

  Coldhardt nodded decisively. ‘So let’s do it.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jonah woke blearily to the sound of distant engines and the sharp patter of gunfire. He scrambled up from the soft couch he lay on, wide-eyed, disorientated. The hangout was dark. Motti’s quiet breathing carried from a large beanbag beside the bar. Then Jonah noticed a pale blue glow was coming from one of the side rooms.

  ‘Come on! Yes, yes … Come to Papa …Gotcha!’

  It was Patch’s voice. Rubbing his gritty eyes, Jonah padded through and found him sitting in a big squashy armchair in front of a huge plasma TV, playing computer games.

  ‘You scared the hell out of me,’ Jonah complained. ‘Shouldn’t you be sleeping?’

  ‘Sorry mate,’ said Patch, hitting the pause. ‘Only, I’ve never finished this game, see? And, well, after what’s been kicking off around here …’

  ‘You think you might never get the chance?’

  Patch shrugged and hit the pause again, let the room fill with the sound of engines, screaming and flying bullets. ‘Anyway, it helps take my mind off what’s really bugging me.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The prospect of a sudden, violent death is bad enough – but dying a virgin? That really stinks!’ He blew up a couple of out of control tankers speeding towards him. ‘Hey, since I helped save Con’s life, d’you think if I asked her extra-nicely –?’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Jonah advised. ‘Not unless you want that joystick inserted somewhere unpleasant.’ He sighed and yawned, and then his watch alarm went off. ‘Three-thirty am. Con should be coming off shift. I’d better go and relieve her.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Patch grumbled, blowing up a munitions dump. ‘She should be the one relieving me!’

  Jonah smiled through another yawn and set off for the hub. After all he’d been through lately, he felt he could sleep for a year – and a trawl through about a million aerial views and cross-sections of European landscapes was no kind of substitute. He and the others were working in rotas, four hours on, four hours off. All except Coldhardt, who kept ploughing on through the possible locations. He didn’t seem to need sleep, his eyes clear and strong regardless of the time of day.

  The night outside was quiet and still. Jonah hurried through it, keeping close to the perimeter wall of the main building. Motti had spent more time improving the castle’s defences than on the actual task in hand, but no one was complaining. More than thirty-six hours had passed since they’d started the search for the catacombs, and they were all becoming convinced that an attack from Samraj’s guards sometime soon was inevitable.

  One good thing: the threat was a powerful spur to getting a result, and fast.

  Suddenly, Jonah caught movement up ahead. He flattened himself against the wall.

  ‘It is only me.’ Con’s voice.

  Jonah breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I was just coming to replace you.’

  She crossed quickly to him, a tired smile on her face. ‘You think I can be replaced?’

  ‘Er – no! I didn’t mean …’ He cleared his throat. ‘So. How’re things?’

  ‘I have a pain in my guts if you really want to know,’ she told him, grimacing. ‘Ever since we left Samraj’s place.’

  ‘Were you hurt in the fight?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s probably just junk food withdrawal symptoms. Get me some chicken nuggets and I’ll be fine.’

  She started to move past him, but on impulse he blocked her way. ‘Er, Con … I’ve been meaning to say. What happened in my room the night I left –’

  ‘It was nothing,’ she said briskly. ‘I thought I was saying goodbye.’

  ‘So did I,’ he said.

  She just smiled. ‘Then we forget it, yes?’

  Jonah nodded, though it wasn’t the kind of kiss you could ever forget. As she pushed past him with a quick pat on the shoulder, he knew that was all it had been – just a brilliant snog from out of the blue. And he felt kind of weird, because if he’d ever pictured himself snogging anyone round here, it would be Tye …

  Oops!

  Sleep deprivation gave you funny thoughts. He only hoped it didn’t make you hallucinate too.

  A few minutes later, as he neared the hub, he heard Tye whoop for joy. He rushed inside.

  There she was with Coldhardt, poring over some printouts. She looked up at him, a huge grin stret
ching over her face.

  ‘Cracked it,’ she said.

  ‘So this is Macedonia,’ murmured Jonah.

  Barely six hours on, and he was sitting with Tye in the cockpit of the plane staring out over the rugged, mountainous terrain. Viewed from this height, the landscape took on a slightly unreal quality: the glittering grey of glacial lakes, the dramatic drop of the basins and valleys … Like all of this was some weird kind of dream.

  And yet he knew that, for better or worse, nothing in his life had ever seemed more vivid than his time with Coldhardt.

  After so long spent dreaming about life, Jonah felt the time had come to start living it for real.

  ‘We’re flying over the Plakenska Planina,’ Tye informed him, checking her sat nav. ‘That’s the vantage point, right?’

  ‘It’s the most likely mountain pass that the faithful acolytes would have travelled, yeah,’ he agreed. ‘If we’ve got it right.’ There were no guarantees. The Macedonian landscape was riddled with waterfalls, lakes, peaks and ravines and –

  ‘Poljes,’ Jonah announced, pointing down at what looked like a couple of enormous animal footprints in the broad sweep of land. ‘I read about them online. Water dissolves the limestone and it kind of falls away, see, leaving these depressions in the land, several miles across …’

  ‘You’re such a geek, Jonah.’

  ‘Who died and made you Motti?’

  ‘I just hope that after working for two days straight, we’re not on the mother of all wild goose chases.’ Tye yawned noisily. ‘Then I’ll really show you a depression miles across.’

  ‘It’s tough on you,’ he said, ‘having to fly on top of everything else.’

  ‘Want to take over?’

  ‘Nah. Don’t want to crash your party. Or the plane, for that matter.’

  She shook her head with exaggerated weariness. ‘Look, this lake below is one of the points on our do-it-yourself constellation, right?’

  Jonah felt a snap of disappointment as she nudged the conversation back to business. He was probably boring her. And yet he couldn’t help feeling that maybe there was some small connection there, despite the gulf between their backgrounds …

  Get you! came the familiar nagging voice in his head. Projecting all this emotional crap on to Tye, just because she’s the only person who’s ever come after you, the only person who’s wanted you back in her life. But she was only using you to get back her friends.