Foretold by Thunder

by Edward M. Davey

  “How reassuring.”

  After a few minutes the bleeding was staunched and Jenny bandaged him up.

  “Well done,” she said. “I realize that can’t have been much fun.”

  Jake retrieved the pellet, his revulsion turning to astonishment. “Well, blow me down. Will you take a look at that?”

  They returned to the village. Jenny got out of the car, and when she returned it was without the bug. “See that tanker over there? Sudanese licence plate. With any luck they’ll be chasing shadows in an entirely different country by tomorrow.”

  “Very conniving.”

  “How are you doing? You look pale.”

  Jake pulled himself up, doing his best to look rugged. “Absolutely fine. Barely felt it.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Oh really?”

  He was about to respond when his work phone began bleeping. It was the first signal he’d had for days, and the emails came galloping in. Jake fished out the device, skimming through his inbox – Heston might have been in touch and he was down to the last bar of battery.

  Subject: Roger Britton.

  “What is it?” said Jenny. “You jumped.”

  “Hold on,” said Jake. He didn’t recognize the sender.

  Dear Mr Wolsey,

  My name is Dr Giuseppe Nesta. I am a scientist. I was in communication with Roger Britton before he was killed. There are some things I must tell you about his death. Can we meet?

  Regards,

  Dr G. Nesta.

  When he saw the signature he jumped again.

  Senior researcher, CERN

  Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland

  Britton had been in touch with a theoretical physicist. Slowly the implications sank in.

  “What is it?” said Jenny. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you in a sec, just let me reply to this.”

  Jake fired an email back. When and where should they meet? Dr Nesta replied within seconds.

  Don’t come to LHC. We could meet in Rome in two days? I have friends there I can stay with.

  It had been years since Jake had been to the city, so he suggested meeting at the first landmark that came into his head. Nesta agreed to be at the Spanish Steps by noon, wearing a red baseball cap for identification.

  Rome: how apt it was. They were going back to where it all began.

  57

  With each mile of Davis’s descent from the Ethiopian highlands the mercury rose. By the time he reached the plains of South Sudan it was hotter than anywhere he had ever been deployed – the open window of his car was like the door to a blast furnace and the sweat got in his eyes, impeding the drive. But he dared not use the air conditioning. He had only half a tank left, and there had been nowhere to fill up since the border. And he couldn’t go fast enough to get a breeze through the window because the track was too bad. If you could call it a track, that was. An hour ago it had joined the bed of a long-dead stream, and the wheels jolted from boulder to stone. If he took it too fast he would bust an axle. Then he would be in a pickle.

  The country he had left behind straddled two worlds, Africa and the Middle East, and the Ethiopian highlanders possessed a twist of Arabia about their features. But the world’s newest nation was Black Africa proper and the people he passed gawped at him. He found the women very beautiful.

  Reeds rose ten feet high on each side of the riverbed. He was driving into an African wilderness and he prayed the car would not break down. Then again, Davis mused, he had almost caught them. His concentration was furious as he picked his way along the obstacle course.

  A heavy jolt sent agony through Davis’s broken ribs and dislocated shoulder; his flank was a patchwork of black and greens where the Toyota had struck and he suspected internal bleeding, no matter what the doctors said. Davis’s face became a scowl at the thought of what he’d do to Jenny when he caught up with them. Abruptly the expression melted into a grin.

  The dot had stopped moving.

  Jenny had parked in a small village a couple of kilometres upstream – it was the middle of butt-fuck nowhere with no ragtag local police to worry about. Perfect. A delicious shiver overcame Davis, the sensation a bull shark must feel as the white membranes roll back over its eyes. After a few minutes he turned off the riverbed and accelerated along a well-used trail. A hut flashed past, then two more, a woman with a basket of dung balanced on her head. There were farmers trying to sell their produce by the side of the track; nothing was on offer but tomatoes and red onions. With rising excitement Frank saw the dots converge on his display. He swept into a clearing between the huts, feeling for his pistol. He frowned – there was no sign of Frobisher’s Toyota. The only vehicle was a petrol tanker, surrounded by a gaggle of villagers pouring fuel into drums. Davis leapt from the car, his pistol in one hand, the scanner in the other. He felt his heartbeat slow.

  Condor time, baby.

  A girl of about fourteen wearing only a pair of yellow shorts watched open-mouthed as Frank bounded across the ground. He rounded the vehicle. But there was no one to be seen. The scanner was adamant: Jake should be standing right in front of him. Realization flared. How could he have been so stupid?

  A bundle of oily rags was wedged between the tank and the chassis. Already knowing what he would find, Davis unravelled the parcel. A metallic pellet gleamed in the sun. He hurled the device across the village, punching the tanker hard enough to cleave the skin from his knuckles. The empty cylinder boomed its reply.

  Charlie Waits would not be a happy bunny. The race for the final inscription was on – but as with so much in the modern world, West was playing second fiddle to East.

  58

  “You idiot!” shouted Jenny. “You absolute idiot!”

  “Why?” said Jake. “What did I do wrong?”

  “I can’t believe you emailed him. Don’t you realize we read all your correspondence? Christ Jake, don’t you read the Guardian? It’s not exactly a big secret nowadays.”

  Jake’s faced turned wan. “Oh yeah.”

  “Now they know exactly where you’re supposed to be meeting him. They’ll grab him for certain. That’s if he is a real person, of course.”

  “It’s no problem. We just email him again and tell him not to go there.”

  Jenny shook her head. “Honestly, Jake, it’s a miracle you lasted this long. From now on every email you send him will be intercepted. MI6 won’t let it through. Plus anything you receive from the scientist will actually be from them. If he exists he’s going to the Spanish Steps now, no matter what.”

  With the help of Google they ascertained that Dr Nesta existed. He had been a leading light at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Geneva, where he had worked with some leading quantum physicists. But there had been a fall from grace. A gossipy profile in the New Scientist revealed Nesta was attempting to detect elements of the supernatural using maths and quantum theory. The work had not been received well and his funding was to end. Jake felt queasy reading the article; he had a fair idea why the scientist and historian were in touch.

  He didn’t tell Jenny of his suspicions. Of course, he had filled her in on Eusebius and his Life of Constantine – but trying to convince her of the living reality of the technology? She’d think he was mad.

  Jenny phoned the Large Hadron Collider, claiming to be a research student from Cambridge. The receptionist informed her Nesta had taken leave at short notice – he had just walked out of the building. She asked for his mobile number, to be told they were “not at liberty to divulge personal information”. He wouldn’t even pass on a message – Dr Nesta had said it was a family emergency and he specifically asked not to be contacted.

  Jake put his head in his hands. “He’s lost. Jesus, I’ve cost a man his life. And we haven’t got a chance of stopping them. Because Nesta won’t even be there, will he? They’ll kill him as well, at their own convenience.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” she said. “You’re still no
t thinking like us. Of course he’ll be there.”

  Jake looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “They know that I’ll be telling you all this. Which means they know that you know Dr Nesta will be there, no matter what. That’s why they won’t change the rendezvous.”

  “I don’t understand.” Jake clenched his hair in his fists; it had been two days since he had showered and when he let go the strands remained vertical.

  “They’ve analyzed your personality, Jake. They’ve run psychological tests, studied your emails and phone conversations. So they know you’ll probably try and get him out anyway. Because that’s what you’re like. And then of course they’ll get you too.”

  “Well, we do have to go and get him,” Jake blurted. “Of course we do.”

  He paused to consider what had just come out of his mouth.

  Blimey. You’re actually not a bad guy, Jake.

  “We can’t go to Italy,” Jenny was saying. “Don’t be an idiot. This is exactly what they want, I’ve just explained it all to you.”

  “They’ll kill him though. Won’t they?”

  She was silent.

  “And he was trying to help us.”

  “Jake, they’ll grab us too. There’s no way we can get him out of there. I’m sorry.”

  “So you’ll let him be murdered.”

  It was Jenny’s turn to put her head in her hands.

  You only wanted to be one of the goodies.

  She sighed. “Well … I suppose we could go and have a look at the lie of the land.”

  Heston paid for the tickets without argument, and wired them a fighting fund of £25,000.

  “Buy whatever you want, bribe whoever you want. Just get the story.”

  With a glorious rush Jake realized the newspaper was right behind him. He was the arrowhead at the tip of a vast editorial machine, the cutting-edge of British journalism, on a story that all Fleet Street was desperate to own. It was an exhilarating sensation.

  “Lives lost in pursuit of the tooth fairy,” his boss had crowed. “It’s amazing stuff.”

  Heston thought they could bring down the government.

  But Jake’s decision to go to Italy was not wholly altruistic. Whatever Britton and Nesta had been talking about, he had to know.

  It prompted the other thought which had been squatting in Jake’s mind – that no matter what they did, the success or failure of this endeavour was already decided.

  All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

  59

  Here was Vespasian, a soldier-emperor, grizzled and thick-set. And here was Marcus Aurelius; the philosopher’s eyes were pools of reflection and a sadness played about his mouth. Then came Trajan, the great conqueror who had expanded the empire to its fullest extent. Once these eyes had stared in dismay at Asia itself, taking in a landmass that funnelled only outwards. Jake submitted to Trajan’s glare and moved on. The heads fanned across the Palatine gallery like a wing of ghosts as he confronted each emperor in turn. Here was Commodus, who had shocked the world by fighting as a gladiator. Hercules reincarnated, or so he had claimed. He wore a lion-skin and his face pulsed with testosterone. And then Augustus, best of them all. A baleful gaze, that tilt of the head; he bordered on godliness.

  Were you holding a secret?

  Jake stared into eyes of stone, challenging them for answers.

  The procession ended with Constantine, a macho figure with his proud nose. The features were rendered in the brutalist style of Soviet propaganda.

  Did you change history more than we ever knew?

  “Hello? Earth to Jake?” Jenny smiled at him.

  “Sorry – off in my own little world.”

  After the museum they sat at a café overlooking the Pantheon, getting to know each other, trying to work out how the hell they could snatch Dr Nesta from the jaws of MI6.

  “You drive a moped in London,” said Jenny. “A sky-blue Vespa.”

  “Do you have any idea how unnerving it is for someone you’ve only just met to know everything about you?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But it could be useful. Two wheels is the only way to get anywhere fast in this city.”

  “Yes, then,” he sighed. “I do have a sky-blue Vespa.”

  “Are you an experienced rider?”

  “Fairly.”

  “What about motorbikes – ever driven them?”

  “Only on holiday,” said Jake. “In Thailand and places. But I think I could handle one if it wasn’t too much of a beast.”

  Jenny allowed herself an inner smile. He was a likeable guy. But he lacked confidence. He seemed afraid of eye contact, for a start. And he was definitely a drinker, Jake’s colleague was spot on about that. Already he had polished off most of his beer, and only on noticing her coke was barely touched had he reigned back: a coachman in charge of untameable horses.

  “You’ve met Frank,” she said. “Not a nice bloke. But if we do try and get Dr Nesta out …”

  “What?”

  She looked him up and down. “You need to be even more careful of this Charlie Waits chap, Jake. He might not look like much. But he’s a scary, scary man.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “The key to understanding Charlie is that at heart he’s a patriot. He really does love Britain – he loves the Queen, the countryside, he loves the institutions. The National Trust, the BBC. God, he bloody idolizes Churchill. Nothing wrong with all that per se. But somewhere along the line he became completely obsessive in defence of what he sees as the national interest. To the point that the way he acts is frankly un-British …”

  A Coke and a beer came to thirteen euros. When Jake grumbled at the price the waitress’s nostrils flared. “But this is Roma!” she cried. “This is the Pantheon!”

  “All right, all right, point made.”

  After the waitress had gone, he showed Jenny the photographs of Debre Damo.

  “Look at this,” he said. “Etruscan characters are written all across the ceiling. And at the far side are two more Roman numerals. It’s just like in the cistern. Eusebius is telling us which verse to look at next.”

  “Amazing,” admitted Jenny with a shake of her head. “Just amazing.”

  “I’ve already looked up the chapter. It’s from the end of the book – Eusebius’s reflections on the Emperor Constantine after his death.”

  Jake passed her the battered volume.

  Chapter LXVIII: An Allusion to the Phoenix.

  We cannot compare Constantine with that bird of Egypt which dies, and rising from its own ashes soars aloft with new life. Rather he did resemble his saviour, who, as sown corn multiplied from a single grain, yielded abundant increase through the blessing of God. A coin was struck. On one side appeared the figure of our blessed prince, with the head veiled. The reverse exhibited him as a charioteer drawn by four horses, a hand stretched downward from above to receive him up to heaven.

  Jenny handed him the book. “I’m not a historian. But it sounds like a pointer to Egypt to me. Would that make sense?”

  “Egypt was part of the Roman Empire in Constantine’s day,” said Jake. “But whereabouts? Eusebius could be talking about anywhere from Alexandria to Aswan.”

  “What does it matter?” said Jenny. “We don’t even need to find any more of the Disciplina, do we? It’s now an academic exercise. You’ve already proved Eusebius stashed it all over the world. And you can show he wrote Life of Constantine to guide people to the inscriptions. All we’d achieve by looking for more passages is unnecessary danger. The only thing we should be concerned with is proving my old boss is psychotic enough to believe lightning prophecy actually works.”

  Once again Jake was unwilling to meet her eye.

  60

  The journalist peered from the doorway of the Church of the Holy Trinity. The Spanish Steps heaved with tourists. No sign of Davis, nor anyone fitting Jenny’s description of her boss. But it would be easy to lose yourself in this cro
wd. The steps were overlooked by dozens of windows. Jenny reckoned they wouldn’t shoot him; Waits needed Jake alive to extract the last two inscriptions. If she was wrong, it was from there he would be liquidated. Davis had to be watching. Once Jake stepped from the eaves of the church he was committed.

  No sign of a red baseball cap. For some reason adrenaline always made the journalist need to urinate; a full bladder was one distraction he did not need. It was 11.45 a.m. They would already be in situ; there was no time to relieve himself. Jake took a step forward. The laughter of tourists was shrill in his ears as he moved from cover into danger. At any moment he expected his head to snap backward. Death would be instantaneous. He took another pace. Then another. Then another, until he was standing in plain view. The Baroque steps fell away beneath his feet, their width undulating elegantly. A memory entered Jake’s head. His grandfather had been inordinately proud of having hopped all the way up the Spanish Steps as a young man. He smiled at the recollection, despite all the fearfulness of the moment. There was still no sign of a red baseball cap. At the bottom of the steps a Hispanic man with matted dreadlocks was fishing coins out of the fountain. His positioning was suspicious. Jake felt a bead of sweat escape his forehead and trickle down his temple. To his left was the house where, the journalist knew, John Keats had died of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century.

  Would I were steadfast as thou art …

  Red baseball cap, at the bottom of the steps. It looked daft on the head of the elderly man who was waving at him. At first the pensioner took the stairs hesitantly – but he gained in confidence as he ascended and when he reached Jake he handed him the cap with a courtly flourish.

  “I believe this is yours.”

  Davis to his left, Waits to his right, both of them closing in. The spymaster drew a pistol. There was a bulge in Davis’s coat. How did they get so close?

  The old man’s eyes skittered between them and his voice was tremulous. “What is this?”