Foretold by Thunder

by Edward M. Davey

  “Forget about it. It’s been a mad few days. And –”

  Jake broke off mid-sentence. Two pedestrians on the other side of the street had abandoned their natural trajectory to make a beeline for them. They were wearing masks. Jake’s heart-rate doubled and the glut of adrenaline made him want to gag. Next there were guns in their hands.

  The crack of a whip: it seemed to burst from the air itself.

  The shorter gunman staggered. A hand went to his neck. He began clucking. Then he ripped off his mask, and with astonishment Jake saw it wasn’t a he at all – it was the flame-haired tourist whose picture he’d taken at the Agya Sophia. The woman’s eyes were rolling in her head and she dropped her pistol with a clatter.

  “I can’t breathe,” she rasped. “I can’t breathe …”

  At first Jake couldn’t work out what was happening. But two heartbeats later bubbles began foaming through her fingers. Then she let go of her neck and the blood squirted in a four-foot arc, as if the cork had been popped from a shaken bottle of champagne. There was a second crack as another bullet scythed the air. It hit the woman between the eyes and her skull was evacuated in a cloud of red. Instantly the strangulated gasps ceased and Jess Medcalf collapsed to the ground with the ragdoll swiftness of the newly-dead.

  28

  During the agent’s death throes the protagonists had been powerless to look away. But when that red dot appeared on her forehead like a magical bhindi everything changed. Her accomplice reacted first, diving left as another bullet sliced through the night. There was no gunshot – merely a crack as the projectile broke the speed of sound right by them. Even in the chaos of the moment Jake realized the assassin must have a silencer. The bullet missed the plunging figure and a cobble erupted in a puff of shards. The stranger hit the ground in a roll, but he was instantly on his feet, running fast and low, jinking as bullets whizzed through space on either side of him. Three times the assailant fired his sniper rifle. Twice his aim was foiled by the turns. But the third bullet caught the gunman as he rounded the corner; Jake heard the crunch of lead into bone and sinew and the man’s shoulder turned inside out like a juiced grapefruit. Somehow he stayed on his feet until he disappeared around the shoulder of the building.

  Rain lashed against Jake’s face as he ran. He gritted his teeth against the deluge, Florence’s grip bony on his wrist. Behind them Medcalf’s body was inert: black became sepia as her lifeblood was washed beneath the streets of Istanbul. A Mercedes M Class roared into view and slowed, sniffing at the corpse, a man with a gun in the passenger seat. To the journalist’s right a narrow set of steps wound its way between two nineteenth-century apartment blocks. He pulled Florence into the defile.

  “The train station’s this way,” he said. “If we make it we can lose them in the crowds.”

  They rushed through the alleyway. Cracked plaster and graffiti; empty cooking-oil drums; a white cat fleeing before their onrush with its ears flat. The four-by-four slowed, hovering at the top of the steps, and for a moment Jake and the front seat passenger looked into each other’s eyes: he was ginger-haired and square-jawed, with hulking shoulders. An understanding passed between the pair and then the car tore away, the sound of its engine growing quieter – only to grow in volume again. That was when Jake realized.

  The lane doubles back below us.

  The Mercedes rounded the hairpin bend to their left as they made it out of the defile. On the far side of the street another stairway beckoned. It was a race. Already the car was a blur – gaining speed, hunched forward on its wheels. If they didn’t reach the next alleyway they would be run down like dogs. And it was going to the wire.

  He wasn’t going to get there. He wasn’t going to get there.

  He wasn’t –

  The car missed Jake by a hand’s width. Displaced air buffeted him and he stumbled down the steps. The engine note fell away as it raced for the next bend, looking to intercept them below for a second time. Jake clambered to his feet. They had thirty seconds to clear this alleyway and burst across the main road for the safety of the train station. But Florence hauled him back out of the alleyway and pointed up the hill. “That way,” she shouted.

  The walls of the Topkapi Palace formed a black hulk against a sky that still flickered with lightning.

  “It’ll be closed for sure,” Jake gasped.

  Tyres screeched as the Mercedes reached the end of the alleyway they had been about to run down. A block away they heard car doors slam, a frantic three-point turn. Gunmen were coming up the stairway and the Mercedes would be back. There was no time to argue. Two pale arcs illuminated the street as the car rounded the corner. The driver gunned his engine, a bull stamping before the charge. Then the Mercedes shot from the starting blocks, hitting thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour. Jake’s feet crashed through the puddles and his shadow was thrown up in duplicate on the road, a pair of fleeing figures that converged as the vehicle neared. The hill was steep and his breath was ragged. He felt himself surrender.

  He had never known love.

  Energy flooded back into Jake’s bloodstream, his adrenal glands spurred into overdrive. Only this time the surge of hormones didn’t diminish him. His strides became powerful and he pulled ahead of Florence, dragging her along. Now their shadows flickered on the ramparts. He saw a gate; it stood open. It was man against machine, muscle and sinew versus metal and precision engineering. The hunger for survival beside the instinct to kill.

  The engine note rose to a scream.

  29

  Rubber squealed on the wet cobbles. If the driver hit them at terminal velocity the four-by-four would only be able to stop with the aid of Ottoman masonry. Rain became steam on the car’s bonnet as it skidded to a halt. Men fumbled with door handles and Jake recognized the barracuda profile of a silenced Heckler and Koch machine pistol. The gunmen opened fire; at once the ramparts became a blizzard of stone chips. Jake pulled Florence through the gateway into a small courtyard. Neither had been hit.

  Inside grass glistened underfoot and a cherry tree spread its boughs low to the earth. Jake could see a row of ornate pavilions on the far side of the garden.

  “Hey! You no allow now!”

  Workers were everywhere – it appeared the annual deep clean was under way.

  “Is closed mister! Mister, is closed!”

  Now the gunmen were in the courtyard too, scanning for targets – but cleaners scattered in every direction and the killers were impeded by a screen of humanity. Jake and Florence made it into a double-domed room, a golden dais in one corner. This was the entrance to the Sultan’s harem: a gilded prison where wives once poisoned children in a bid for the succession. They kept on running. The second room bore murals of fruit on every wall. The third was a chamber of blue and white tiles, praises to Allah fluttering across the wall like kites’ tails. The rooms blended into each other as the pair headed deeper into the labyrinth. But the flight was uncontrolled and Jake lost his orientation.

  He stopped running. “I don’t know which way is out.”

  Left, right, straight ahead – from then on they chose the directions at random. Somewhere within the maze an alarm began to wail – and before Jake knew it they were looking at fruit murals again.

  Florence was wild-eyed. “We’re back where we started.”

  Jake led her into the mirrored throne room of the Ottoman Sultans. A marble colonnade skirted the chamber; a chandelier dangled like a glassy plum; the ivory throne was strewn with cushions.

  Two gunmen walked in.

  *

  The MP5 is capable of firing nine hundred rounds a minute. That gave the men who now confronted Jake and Florence the firepower of three Second World War battalions. The machine pistols swivelled in parallel as they fired, tracking Jake and Florence’s dash. The throne room disintegrated around the fleeing pair: mirrors smashed, ivory splintered, clumps of stuffing were propelled through the air. The structural integrity of the pavilion was shot through and the structure sagged to
the ground. Somehow they cheated the devastation. Florence was sobbing – out of breath, out of ideas, mucus trailing from one nostril. Jake steered her into a chamber where they could hide. It was pitch black in there.

  A motion sensor switched on the lights.

  They were in a Turkish bath with walls of marble, modesty screens intersecting the room. Jake sensed movement and he grabbed Florence by the neck, pulling her for the cover of a marble bathtub as the gunman fired a burst from his machine pistol. At once the bathroom was full of zings and cracks as the bullets ricocheted off the bath, the ceiling, the walls, bouncing around the enclosure in geometric angles. Jake tried to cover Florence’s body with his own as a bullet whipped past his cheekbone, warming the skin; another slammed into the floor by his foot. At last the rounds pummelled away their kinetic energy. The maelstrom ended.

  Jake could hear what sounded like a seal slapping its flippers on the floor. He peered around the modesty screen. He winced. One bullet had travelled from bathtub to ceiling before revisiting itself upon the gunman – the flattened blob of metal had entered his kneecap from above and opened out a tennis ball-sized crater where it exited. His shinbone was barely attached. Snapped nerves trailed like vermicelli and the hapless man squirmed on the floor, mouth opening and shutting noiselessly.

  “Oh my God,” said Florence.

  “This way,” said Jake.

  He felt himself take control. A new feeling. And a good one. Now their flight was ordered as they headed through the complex. There were no more encounters – perhaps the others were tending to their accomplice before he bled to death. Jake and Florence stepped onto a patio on the north side of the palace to see Europe and Asia splayed before them. Night-time Istanbul was sprinkled across the hills like mulched stars against the sky, a million-dollar view.

  They dropped the small distance from patio to grass and sprinted through Gulhane Park to the perimeter walls, sirens closing in. The grounds were wooded and a few cleaners fled through the trees. Jake and Florence mingled with them, sneaking through the northern gate as the first police cars rounded the corner.

  “What now?” Jake tried to take Florence’s arm, but she pulled from his embrace.

  “We can’t go back to the hotel,” she said. “Let’s cross to Asia.”

  The Kadikoy ferry terminal was nearby.

  Once they were on board Florence went to clean herself up. Jake watched the Topkapi Palace diminish as the ferry buffeted across the channel. The park had come alive, like a termite hill ransacked by children; police cars prowled through the darkness. Only then did he reflect on what he had come through that night. Only then did he consider what he was mixed up in. Only then did he weep with fear and relief, the salt water on his cheeks mingling with the saltiness of the breeze and his sobs lost amid the slap of waves on the hull. Abruptly the tears ceased. He would try not to cry again. He was strong, he knew that now. And he was alive. The storm had blown itself out and a chink of moon winked at him through the clouds, a pale eye keeping up its watch on the affairs of men.

  Part Two

  Tempest

  To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

  Cicero, Roman orator, 106-43 BC

  30

  Jake awoke to find himself lying on grass – a moment of confusion. Further down the slope a campfire made a smudge against the night and as he watched a swarm of embers took wing like disturbed fireflies. There were voices around the flames; he sensed electricity in the air. Suddenly it made sense: he was at Glastonbury. Jake felt a rush of gladness and ran to join in.

  Only this wasn’t Glastonbury, he saw that now. There was no dance music, no hiss and rush as balloons inflated with laughing gas. He couldn’t place the language being spoken around the fire. Yet it was familiar somehow. A spurt of flame illuminated thatched huts. Geese pecked in the dirt. What was this place?

  A young woman beckoned him to sit. She was flaxen-haired and pretty, but there was something primeval about her face – the flat cheekbones, the heavy brow. She handed him a hollow ostrich egg and produced a jug of silver. The lines of the vessel were timeless, it could have been purchased from a Chelsea designer. But then he saw the archaic touch: a ram’s head where handle joined rim. The red wine she poured him tasted tannic and astringent.

  An old man wearing robes of red and yellow tartan approached the flames – his palms were open to the skies and he wore a hat shaped like an inverted funnel. Jake had seen one of these caps in Britton’s office, on a statue that belonged in a museum.

  Now he knew where he was. This was Etruria. It was a very long time ago. And he was looking at a fulguriator.

  At first the lightning priest spoke softly. But there was a cadence to his voice, a rhythm. No, a beat, that better described it: a drumbeat that grew with intensity. The woman poured a slick of wine onto the fire, which sizzled in response. Next a goat was led forward. It seemed ignorant of its fate, willing even, and the priest seized it by the chin. Yet it didn’t shock Jake when iron flashed in the flame, nor was he repulsed at the spilling of blood onto earth. The goat’s legs surrendered, the animal pulled down by gravity to rejoin its mother element. Still the old man’s words unfolded themselves, and the drumbeat of his tongue echoed about the hillside.

  Jake could understand him.

  He heard the priest invoke Tages, the child who had risen from beneath a plough to reveal the proper discourse between Gods and men. He felt the supplication to the pitiless consentes, advisers of the supreme Tin. He absorbed the appeal to dii novensiles, Tin’s consorts, casters of lightning. And he trembled at the final entreaty to Tin himself, whom Eusebius had called the Great All-Seeing Eye.

  At Tin’s name the villagers cast themselves to earth. The clouds tumbled over each other, gathering their strength, and there was the rumble of thunder on the north-west horizon. At this a moaning arose on the hillside – the villagers pulled clods of grass from the earth, clawed at their cheeks. Still the priest continued his exhortation, still the drumbeat rose, and the thunder began to circle them in a dark halo. The beat was in Jake’s ears, in his blood, it pounded through his heart and the air and the earth.

  The lightning struck.

  A rod of energy, smashing through the nearest hut, a column of light that lanced from the heavens to earth. For two seconds the beam held its form. It shrivelled eyes, blasted eardrums, the villagers’ faces shone a ghastly white. Yet it was wondrous and no one could look away.

  The chain of supercharged ions was broken. The hut burst into flames. The valley was quiet again, air filmy with heat. A few villagers whimpered; a baby started crying. A dog which had been pressed into the earth judged the time was right to flee and bolted down the hillside.

  The fulguriator spoke once more, and at last Jake realized what he was witnessing. This was the foretelling of the end of the Etruscan kingdoms. This was the announcement of the always-appointed date, when the Etruscan age would cease, when the baton of power would be passed to a new and brighter people. This was the prophecy of the turning of the wheel.

  And the war of civilizations would go on.

  *

  Jake awoke, gasping for breath. For the second time he was disorientated. Was he still asleep? A dream within a dream? He sat up to find himself on a sofa in a pay-by-the-hour hotel room. His belly was covered in sweat. A sleeping figure lay in the single bed, and slowly it came back to him. The inscription in the Roman Cistern. The woman with the ginger hair. He shook his head like a dog casting off water, trying to rid himself of the dream – the despair of its climax was all-pervasive. Something Florence had said about Etruscan faith came back to him.

  A dark religion. Before the Gods man was a complete non-entity, his fate utterly in their hands.

  Jake shook his head again – bewildered at the power of his own imagination – when his phone began to ring.

  London calling.

  31

  No matter what happens in there, Jenny Frobi
sher told herself, remain calm. This is the supreme test of your professionalism. By all means let him know you’re disgusted, tell him Jess Medcalf was your friend, show him you’ve got a good mind to go above his head if his answers aren’t spectacular. But remain in control.

  She was calm as the embassy guard passed her Hermes handbag through the X-ray machine. She was composed at reception. She was even unruffled when Waits himself appeared, cupping her right hand in both of his.

  “Jenny. Thanks so much for coming.”

  Waits led her to a windowless room in the basement, so like the Vauxhall cell where she was first dragged into this insanity. A table, two chairs, a watercolour of Margate. There was a knock on the door. Evelyn Parr, Jenny guessed – but it opened to reveal an elderly woman with bottle-bronze hair who manoeuvred a trolley into the room.

  “Tea or coffee, dears?”

  “I’ll have a tea, thank you.” Jenny forced a smile.

  “And you, sir?”

  Waits didn’t look up. “Coffee with cream.”

  Jenny stared at him; beneath the table her right knee began shaking uncontrollably. Waits met her gaze, blinked and settled on Margate. His mouth opened and closed – there was something so self-satisfied about the way his jowls settled. The tea lady was footling around with milk and a plate of bourbons. Jenny realized she was jabbing an index finger into her palm.

  “There you are, dear.”

  The cup and saucer shook in Jenny’s hands as she took them. “Thank you, that’s lovely,” she said.

  The tea lady placed the biscuits in front of Waits and rotated out of the room, trolley jangling all the way. The door shut.

  “You bastard!” Jenny screamed.

  God that felt good. But Waits merely leaned back and folded one leg over the other; the little shit was imperturbable.

  “You knew we were going into danger, but you sent us anyway.”