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Foretold by Thunder

Page 21

by Edward M. Davey


  “The cavity,” he whispered.

  Jake manoeuvred himself into the fissure, scenting chalk and mushrooms, damp earth. The ancient builders had used a natural cave for the tomb, walling it in and piling earth on top to create a barrow. A narrow channel cut into the rock had once allowed libations to be poured into the tomb from outside, but otherwise the cavern was unfinished and unpainted. To Jake’s relief there were no Roman numerals chiselled into the rock.

  “Anything?” asked Jenny.

  “It’s the place all right. But there’s nothing here.”

  Whatever it may once have contained had disappeared.

  “We haven’t been very clever, have we?” Jake said as he clambered out. “Did we really expect to find something a team of professional archaeologists missed?”

  She shrugged.

  “But d’you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I’m sorry?” Jenny replied.

  Jake couldn’t resist grinning. He had followed Eusebius to the end of his map and found nothing; the Disciplina Etrusca was no more.

  “I said, who cares? It’s a beautiful day. Look around you. What say for the next hour we forget all about MI6 and Charlie Waits and everything else. And have a picnic.”

  She felt a rush of warmth for him then; at that moment in her life it was exactly what she needed to hear.

  People are more important than work.

  They lay in the grass and ate. The bread was tough, the cheese spongy, but any food is delicious if consumed in the wilderness. And the tomatoes were divine. Jake drew in the air with its scent of leaf and grass and felt the first whisper of contentment in years. For a moment he thought he heard the note of a car engine carrying on the wind, but he let it go; now was not the time. It occurred to him that the countryside looked much as it must have when the first traders arrived from Greece and Carthage in search of iron ore.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” he said between mouthfuls, “to think this was once the edge of the known world? When the first Greeks arrived it must have blown their minds. The people they found were wearing hides, not far removed from hunter-gathering. It would’ve been like visiting untouched tribes in the Amazon.”

  Jenny swung to look at him, face serious.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Can you feel the spirits rising, Jake?”

  He held her gaze, startled. Seconds passed; a crumb fell from his mouth.

  The twitch at the corner of Jenny’s mouth betrayed her. And knowing she was undone she roared with laughter. That set Jake off too, the pair of them howling at the madness of it all until tears ran down their cheeks.

  When he stopped laughing she was looking right at him.

  Right. At. Him.

  Jake’s chest fluttered, as if someone had released a handful of butterflies in his lungs. He opened his mouth, said half a word, blushed and turned away.

  70

  Jenny felt a rush of childish disappointment. The message was clear enough, but at least she knew where she stood. Anyway, what was she thinking? They were playing too dangerous a game for distractions. She blinked and swept the crumbs from her lap.

  Jake snapped his fingers right under her nose.

  She looked up at him, annoyed now. But Jake’s eyes were wide and he cupped one hand by his ear. Then she heard it too: people speaking Mandarin, not far off. And the language barrier couldn’t hide the identity of the hectoring female voice soaring above the rest.

  It was Florence.

  And she was getting closer.

  “Quickly,” Jake hissed, snatching up the remnants of food and bundling them into his shirt. “Down there.”

  They scrambled to the bottom of a shallow valley below the mound. The depression was choked with hawthorn bushes and they wriggled into the foliage.

  “How did they know to come here?” whispered Jenny.

  “Florence had the Ethiopian inscription too, remember.”

  But privately Jake doubted she could have deduced the meaning of Eusebius’s gnomic prose.

  She had been drawn here.

  Twenty minutes passed before the Chinese team reached the conclusion that there was nothing to be found. Jake heard raised voices, glimpsed Florence’s face through the screen of leaves. Her features were twisted in frustration. How did I ever find that woman attractive?

  But instead of departing Florence sat and stared at the horizon, as if waiting for something. Her agents began to smoke and play cards. Jake and Jenny had no choice but to remain in the thicket – the slopes around them were too exposed to make a dash for it. After three hours he heard a powerful engine approach.

  To his astonishment a JCB digger hoved into view.

  *

  The excavation took all night. By the small hours the temperature had fallen to single figures, but Florence’s voice could still be heard, directing the dig. A veil of condensation fell, leaving Jake sodden. Yet he dared not move – the Chinese had erected powerful arc-lamps, turning night into day. Jenny clung to him for warmth, shivering without complaint, and he did his best to wrap her in his body. Cramp set in, then hunger and thirst; it felt as if the night would never end. Sleep came in fits and starts before Jake finally drifted out of consciousness at about 4 a.m.

  He awoke to silence.

  The world was cast that simmering blue which precedes sunrise, as if a projectionist had been challenged to brew up the sky. As Jake listened the dawn chorus picked up in a collage of cheeps and rasps. He peered through the foliage – they were alone.

  Jake unfolded himself from Jenny and clambered from the bushes, groaning as he stretched; they had been lying there for more than twelve hours. The Iron Age mound had been clawed from existence. Earth and boulders lay strewn across the hillside, as if some giant mole had erupted from beneath it. For two thousand eight hundred years this place had defied the elements. Now it was destroyed forever, and even in his exhausted state Jake registered anger at the vandalism.

  His phone began ringing.

  “Hello? Who is this?”

  “Jake, Luke McDonagh here – I got your new number from Niall.”

  The image of a freelancer with a lazy eye swam to mind. Jake hadn’t thought about McDonagh for weeks; the man belonged to a previous life. When had they last met? Swiftly it came to him: The Dolphin, deepest King’s Cross. Suddenly Jake was wide awake.

  Winston Churchill.

  1941.

  The ancient Etruscan matter.

  For weeks Jake’s head had been full of thoughts of Rome. And with the constant fear of death, that dash across the globe, he had almost forgotten how it all began: a single-line memo from a batch of declassified documents. But good old McDonagh had been nosing away in the National Archives all the time.

  “I think I’ve found something,” he began. “Don’t know what to make of it to be honest …”

  “Don’t say anything else!” Jake interrupted. “Don’t say anything at all.”

  Jenny was beside him, rubbing her eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “A contact on the phone,” he mouthed. “It’s related.”

  “Tell him to get out of wherever he is right now. Tell him he needs to lie low somewhere until we get back in touch, nowhere he normally frequents. For God’s sake don’t let him stay with a family member or anything.”

  “You hear that, Luke?”

  “Yes. Jake –”

  But before McDonagh could finish Jenny snatched the mobile and hung up. Instantly it began ringing again, but she dropped the call and turned off the phone.

  “We need to get out of here,” she said. “Right now.”

  *

  In London Edwin de Clerk punched the air in triumph. “Yeah! Gotcha!”

  With Jenny brushing away Jake’s technological spoor, de Clerk had changed tack: he had arranged a tap of every individual Jake had been in contact with over the last two months. Not even Jenny would suspect a fishing expedition on such an indust
rial scale. De Clerk had sat through countless hours of it by then. Journalistic patter; trips to Indian restaurants planned by people he would never meet; the seditious politics of the bridge club attended by Jake’s mother. And now the breakthrough had come, just as de Clerk teetered on the edge of a nervous collapse through exhaustion. McDonagh was a trusted freelancer, so Jake’s gatekeeper at the newspaper had given him the newest mobile number right away. But either McDonagh had ignored Heston’s order not to ring from his normal phone, or he had forgotten.

  Mistake.

  *

  When they were back in Rome, Jake followed Jenny’s precise instructions on how to make contact with McDonagh. First he bought two pay-as-you-go phones. Then he texted the freelancer, telling him to buy two disposable phones of his own. McDonagh sent Jake the number for just one of the devices, and Jake called that number on his first pay-as-you-go phone. With that line he asked McDonagh to read him the number of his second disposable mobile. This McDonagh did right away, before de Clerk had time to tap the conversation. Jake then rang this number with his mobile number two, and voilà: a clean line of communication had been established, de Clerk powerless to catch up.

  “What’s going on then, mate?” McDonagh began, fear in his voice now.

  “Have you been following all this MI6 stuff in the papers, Luke?”

  “Sort of – why?”

  “It’s related to the Churchill file, somehow.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “You’ll need to stay in a hotel tonight,” said Jake. “Keep the receipts of any expenses, obviously we’ll cover them. I’ll be back in London tomorrow, then let’s meet.”

  “Sure thing, oh my God, sure thing. Where?”

  Jake thought fast. “Same place, same time. See you tomorrow, Luke.”

  *

  The use of four phones to establish a safe line was cute, but immaterial. Because after the first call McDonagh had dithered for thirty minutes, unsure whether to take Jenny’s order to get out seriously or not. And by the time he left his flat, Evelyn Parr was waiting outside.

  71

  The British had warned him not to return to the Large Hadron Collider. They told him to run away, to avoid crossing borders at all cost. Go to Naples maybe, go to Sicily, hide up in the Apennines for a while. Yet Dr Nesta had no choice. He was on the cusp of measuring the network’s presence; his work would rewrite science and religion. Nobel Prize be damned: Nesta’s name would be spoken of alongside those of Darwin, Newton, Galileo and Archimedes. Alongside that of Jesus.

  But for the scientific community to accept such a paradigm shift the evidence had to be irreproachable – and he wasn’t there yet. To prove it beyond argument he needed more time with the particle accelerator. But six other projects were sharing it and his funding ran out in a fortnight. With his current reputation he would never get his hands on the damn thing again. He had four remaining sessions in the tunnel, a little less than sixteen hours to prove the existence of a higher sphere of intelligence. Ergo, he had to return.

  If Dr Nesta made it back to the complex he knew he would be safe. The collider was ultra-secure and there were sleeping quarters he could stay in until his experiments were complete. After that Cern would take care of him for evermore.

  The train ride to Switzerland was intense. At Florence a white-haired British gentleman got on and asked him how long it might take to get to Geneva. Dr Nesta answered the foreigner and made a show of leaving for the dining car before getting off at the next stop. Rather than continue by rail he caught a taxi to Genoa Airport; change routes constantly, Jenny had said. He caught an Iberian Airways flight to Barcelona, waited in the Islamic prayer room for six hours, then returned to Switzerland via Hamburg. At such short notice the plane tickets cost hundreds of euros. A Chinese woman sat next to Dr Nesta on the final flight. And in the taxi rank at Geneva Airport there she was again, waiting in the queue four people behind him. The scientist felt his heart go into palpitations. But he was certain nobody followed him in the taxi, and he was quite alone as he passed the security checks at the LHC complex. He booked into his new quarters, briefly wept and then fell asleep.

  *

  But it was naïve of Dr Nesta to think he would be safe there. The British government had hundreds of millions of euros invested in the collider. The scientists were looking for dark matter, the secrets of the universe; there were fears a black hole might be created. Of course there were national security implications, of course MI6 took an interest. So it stood to reason they would have an agent inside. And Charlie Waits was at the third-highest grade of the organization, with access to almost its entire network.

  It was a challenge for Travel Service to knock up the documentation, given the quick turnaround. But their handiwork had passed sterner security checks in the past. The documents went by Dip Post to Geneva, where they were picked up that evening. Back in London Edwin de Clerk pinpointed Dr Nesta’s room from the comfort of his desk. He didn’t know what the information would be used for, but at Vauxhall Cross that was normal.

  By 1 a.m. Dr Nesta was asleep in an armchair, still wearing his suit, his unopened suitcase in the centre of the room.

  The door slid open with a beep.

  The scientist awoke, gasping with fright. “Who are you?”

  Then Dr Nesta’s eyes focused. He relaxed a little. It was a security guard, Cern ID pass dangling around his neck.

  “Bonsoir, mon ami,” said the guard. “Ça va?”

  Instantly Dr Nesta was terrified. The stranger’s accent was appalling. And he wore gloves.

  “Ça va?” the guard repeated.

  “Oui, ça va bien,” managed Dr Nesta.

  “Très bien,” said the stranger. “Très bien. Pardon, monsieur, parlez-vous Anglais?”

  Without warning Dr Nesta dived for the fire alarm. Davis was too quick for him. He grabbed the scientist by the collar of his jacket and unceremoniously dumped him back onto the sofa. Then he locked the door and sat on the bed facing Dr Nesta.

  “I said, parlez-vous fucking Anglais?” Davis repeated.

  “Oui,” said Dr Nesta. “I mean yes, yes. I speak English well.”

  “Good. Then you and I are going to have a little drinky.” From his bag Davis retrieved a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and a cheap cognac. “What’s your poison, fella?”

  “I don’t really drink.”

  Dr Nesta began trembling.

  “Oh, don’t be a party-pooper. I’ve come a long way to see you.”

  “Please, I don’t want to.”

  “But I insist.”

  Davis laid a gun on the bedside table.

  “In that case, I’ll take the whisky.” Now his lip was wobbling.

  “Good choice. Horrible French muck, cognac.”

  The room came with equipped a mug and kettle and there was a water glass by the sink. Davis poured a dram into the latter and sipped it.

  “Best of the budget whiskies, in my humble,” he said. “Nice and smoky. Better than Bell’s anyway – that stuff’ll give you a blinding headache if you drink too much of it.” He filled the mug to the brim and handed it to Dr Nesta. “Now, down the hatch.”

  “Please,” said Dr Nesta.

  Davis growled, revealing the fillings in his teeth. “I said, drink it.”

  Dr Nesta tasted the whisky.

  “You’re annoying me now,” said Davis, screwing the silencer into his pistol and glancing at his watch. “I’m going to give you ninety seconds. If you haven’t polished off that mug of whisky by then I will take it as an affront to my generosity. And I will not be a happy boy.”

  The corner of Davis’s mouth twitched upward as Nesta gulped down the spirits, gagging, whisky dribbling down both cheeks.

  Davis refilled the mug. “And another.”

  Dr Nesta seemed calmer after the second helping.

  “Now then,” said Davis, pressing record on his smart phone. “You’re going to tell me all about your work, all about Roger Britton, and all ab
out that little Italian rendezvous with Jake Wolsey and Jenny Frobisher.”

  They talked for hours. Davis had two singles; Dr Nesta consumed the rest of the bottle. When the whisky was finished the assassin opened the cognac, refilled the mug and sniffed at it suspiciously.

  “See, what did I tell you? Disgusting French muck. Here, you try some.”

  Dr Nesta knew he had to try and please this man if he wanted to live. He raised the mug with both hands – like a chalice – and forced down a third of the liquid. At once he was violently sick and slumped to the floor, gasping; trails of vomit led from his mouth. The whole room was spinning, and when he looked right the speed of rotation increased. He was about to beg for mercy when he became aware that his tormentor had left the room.

  The fire alarm was almost within reach.

  Dr Nesta tried to stand up. He fell flat on his face. He attempted again. This time he made it to his feet, taking three steps towards the alarm. Suddenly Davis towered over him.

  “Oh, no, you, don’t,” he hissed, slamming the scientist onto the floor in an impact that beat the air from his lungs.

  Dr Nesta could hear water running in the bathroom.

  “Don’t kill me,” he whispered, acknowledging for the first time that this was what must surely be coming. “Please, don’t kill me, please don’t do it.”

  Davis stripped Dr Nesta’s lower half first, the scientist’s corduroys turning inside out as they were pulled downward, catching on his ankles. A pathetic sight.

  “It’s time for you to have a good wash,” Davis snarled. “Because you’re a dirty, little, boy.”

  *

  It was so unlike Dr Nesta, his colleagues agreed afterwards. He was a temperate man who nobody could recall drinking more than two small glasses of wine at supper. But he had been under a lot of stress lately – for a start that ludicrous project of his was headed for the buffers. It was the only explanation for him drinking a bottle and a half of spirits by himself. But what a tragic way to go, what a waste of a mind that once seemed to offer so much to physics. Drowning alone in the bath like that.

 

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