Splintered Icon (35 page)

Debbie said, 'How can you know it was lost? Maybe they just kept it hidden. And even if it was lost, you can be sure that successive generations tried to crack the code. That's looking for the Cross, isn't it?'

'But the Cross was never mentioned in your family wills. We can be sure of that. And there are rival claimants.'

'The Jamaican poorist?'

'For one. Where did he get it from? Did he really dig it up from the ground? Has it really been in his family for generations, in which case he may have a claim. And if it was buried on Jamaican soil, especially on property owned by the state, which the
Sevilla la Nueva
plantation now is, then the Jamaican government may claim it as treasure trove. Public law may also then be involved and the complications become, forgive me, Byzantine.'

I interrupted: 'But Debbie bought it from him.'

'Thereby, possibly, admitting that she didn't own it in the first place.'

'But destroying the Jamaican poorist's claim. He sold it.'

'It might be argued that you cheated him. Offering him three hundred dollars for a thirty-million-dollar item.'

'That was three hundred dollars more than he was entitled to,' Debbie said determinedly.

'Maybe so. But if the poorist dug it up from the ground this may strengthen the Jamaican government's claim on the icon. And there's another problem.'

Debbie said, 'Another problem? How can there be more problems than this?'

'Who's to say that de Clari was entitled to the Cross in the first place? After all, he stole it during the Crusades. Possession by theft doesn't confer ownership. The Church may argue that the Cross belongs to it and that the Tebbits were never entitled to it.'

'Which Church?' Zola asked.

Sir Joseph frowned. 'Now we get into dangerous territory. Constantine, or one of his minions, discovered the Cross in Jerusalem in 327 AD and took it to Byzantium. That would seem to make it the property of the Greek Orthodox Church, who would claim the True Cross from this act.'

'Joe, are you saying Hondros and Cassandra were entitled to the icon all along?' Zola was open-mouthed with surprise.

'I'm only anticipating what expensive lawyers might say. On the other hand, the Catholic Church makes the claim of apostolic succession, and their expensive lawyers would say this establishes their client as the true inheritor of the Cross of Christ. I wouldn't like to be the judge who has to make a decision between these two powerful rivals.'

'I'm not so sure either Church could make a claim,' I suggested. 'After all, the Cross was stolen and held by the Mohammedans for centuries, during which time the Churches stopped looking. From what you say, they therefore gave up on the claim.'

'But the Catholic Church tried to retrieve the Cross. That's what the Fifth Crusade was about.'

'It was an excuse for plunder, not a genuine attempt to retrieve it.'

Sir Joseph sipped at his milk. 'Possibly. Who can know for sure what went on in the mind of some pope eight hundred years ago?'

'So where do we go from here?' Zola asked.

'We stick to the deal. My legal team is looking into the question of ownership. But others may well make claims to the icon and the issue could drag through the courts for months at enormous expense. Keep in mind too that after the emancipation of the slaves, people had to fend for themselves. Many went into the interior of the island and then just scraped a living on whatever land they could; there was no question of lawyers defining land boundaries or creating deeds.'

I said, 'The deal was that I persuade Debbie to give you first refusal on the Cross, based on an independent valuation.'

'Correct. I've had it valued at twenty million dollars.'

'My people put it at forty plus. I can't advise her to accept less.'

Sir Joseph waved a dismissive hand. 'Debbie, I'm prepared to offer you ten million dollars for the icon, should it turn out to date from the time of Christ. That's to say, you drop all claims to ownership in exchange for ten million dollars. I take the heat of the legal actions. If it turns out you own the icon, you keep the money and give me the icon. If it turns out you don't own it, you keep the money anyway.'

'And if it turns out to be a medieval fake?' I asked.

'Debbie gets nothing.'

Debbie turned to me. 'Harry?'

I said, 'A quiet confab, Debbie.'

We sat at opposite ends of a big couch in Zola's living room. Debbie had dismay written all over her. 'This doesn't seem right. It's been in the family for centuries.'

'Okay, Debbie, but if you go through the courts and it turns out not to be legally yours, you could lose two or three million sterling in costs. Do you have that sort of money?'

'Picardy House might be worth that. But there's all the hassle, and Uncle Robert sticking his nose in. It's not worth the gamble.'

'And if the icon turns out to be a fake, you don't have anything anyway. I think you're being offered a reasonable deal. My advice would be to take it, subject to a lawyer getting the details nailed down. But it's your decision, not mine, not Uncle Robert's, and not a lawyer's.'

'Harry, look at me. Do I look the type for a pearl necklace and a cashmere sweater? Someone who'll marry a Hooray Henry with nothing up top but the social column in
Country Life
and the price of silage? Do you think I want to spend the rest of my days rattling around inside a family pile?' She shook her head firmly. 'Daddy's gone and it's time to move on. I want out of Picardy House. And I want rid of the icon.'

'That's quite a decision, Debbie. It's been in your family since the Crusades. A piece of the Cross, no less.'

'And what good has it done, to us or anyone else? I've given this thought, Harry. The best thing I can do for my six children when I have them, and all the Tebbit generations to come, is stick it in a museum where it belongs.'

'The Curse of the Icon,' I said stupidly.

'Sell the damn thing. I'm going to sell Picardy House and buy pads in London, Paris and Monte Carlo, and I'm going to enjoy life. I'll see the Jamaican poorist all right, and you get ten per cent for acting as my agent. So do Zola and Dalton.'

'Dalton's a public servant, he can't take anything from you.'

Debbie sniffed. 'Ten million dollars is a lot of money. Eight after you and Zola have your cut. Let's go for it.'

'Final answer?'

She hesitated, pondered the options, little lines of tension puckering her mouth. Then she gave a little smile. 'Final answer.'

Sir Joseph had finished his milk and was trying to look nonchalant. I said, 'I've advised Debbie to reject your offer.'

'That is foolish.'

'The icon is probably hers and its value is in excess of forty million dollars. I can't in all conscience advise her to accept a quarter of its value.'

'But can Debbie afford the fees when the legal actions start? They'll be astronomical.'

'We'll find a no-win, no-fee law firm. They'll be queueing up for this. Sorry, Sir Joseph.'

'I can go to fifteen.'

'Twenty.'

'Fifteen and that's my final offer. Accept it now or all offers are withdrawn.'

'Twenty million dollars and it's yours.'

'You're calling my bluff?'

'Uhuh. You're not the only museum owner in the universe.'

Sir Joseph looked at me thoughtfully. For some seconds the loudest noise was the ticking of the clock on the kitchen wall. Then a grin and, 'A wonderful piece of brinkmanship, Harry, congratulations. I agree your terms. If you ever need a job...' We shook hands on it, then Debbie shook hands with Sir Joseph and everybody was shaking hands with everybody else.

Twenty million dollars. Fifteen million sterling, enough to buy Debbie a herd of horses. Less my commission of 1.5 million and the same to Zola.
A good morning's work.

Sir Joseph was saying something, and I dragged myself back from some stupid fantasy about swimming pools and Aston Martins. 'I'll have my people draw up the papers. All this is conditional on the icon being the correct date. Two thousand rather than one thousand years old.'

The correct date.
Carbon-14 was the key. We had each taken a tiny splinter from the Cross and sent it to separate laboratories. Mine had gone to one in East Kilbride. Dalton and Zola didn't tell where theirs had gone, and I didn't ask. Three separate samples, three independent groups, and the True Cross still there in case of any dispute.

They'd explained the business to me in East Kilbride. It was all very technical. It seems that radioactive carbon, or carbon-14 as it's called, is created in the atmosphere when cosmic rays hit ordinary carbon atoms in the carbon dioxide of the air. These radioactive atoms decay with a half-life of 5,500 years. There's a balance between the rate at which the radioactive carbon is created by cosmic rays and the rate at which it decays spontaneously. The carbon dioxide is ingested through the leaves of plants and so enters the food chain. When the plant dies, or the herbivore which eats plants dies, or the carnivore which eats herbivores dies, it stops taking in carbon-14. The remaining carbon-14 in the bones of the animal, or in the dead wood of the tree, then goes into decline, with no food coming in to replenish it. If you measure the proportion of carbon-14 in the remains, you get the age of the plant or animal from the moment of death. A lot of carbon-14 in the bones means a recent death and a noisy Geiger counter; a little means an ancient death and a quiet counter.

There's a complication. There always is. Sometimes more cosmic rays come in from space, sometimes fewer. Most of the cosmic rays come from the sun, and the sun, for some reason, has a 200-year cycle of activity. This puts little 200-year wiggles in the graph, which, if you don't allow for them, can put you out by a century or two. But the smart men allow for these little wiggles; they assured me they could date a splinter of wood 2,000 years old to within a century, maybe even fifty years. Some enthusiasts thought they could do better.

The difference between a medieval fake and the True Cross is a thousand years. The smart men said I was asking them to hit a barn door from six inches away.

I smiled tensely at Dalton over the top of the unopened champagne bottle. 'What has this meant for you, most of all?' I asked him.

'Nailing the villains'. That was simple enough. Hondros had been communicating with his Byzantium Circle through movies on the Internet. Each frame of the movie could have a million pixels, and if you knew the algorithm you could pick the right pixel, putting dark=0, light=l or whatever, and so could send a message in binary with an unbreakable code if the other party knew which pixels to look at. It was a long, long way from Babington and his letter substitutions. But they'd found a CD in Hondros's Lego house, the NSA had cracked it in a couple of weeks, and from that point on Hondros's home movies had become an Aladdin's cave. A massive operation was now underway, nasty little terrorist cells being broken up in Greece, Turkey and Italy. You could follow its progress every night on CNN. The Pope's regular vacation in Castelgandolfo Palace had been cancelled without explanation, and rumours of an aborted assassination plot had spread 'like the plague', as Ogilvie would have said. It had to be the highlight of Dalton's young career.

'And you, Zola?'

'Reaching out and touching history. Ogilvie's journal bringing it to life. And I loved that yacht sail to Cuba. I'll buy a yacht, fifty feet long with all the trimmings. I'll call it
Aldebaran. Debbie
for short.'

I looked over at Debbie, who was tapping her heels against a cupboard door. 'This is what Daddy would have wanted me to do.' I understood. She might be rejecting Picardy House and the family icon, but she was still defining her life in the context of the family; she was still Deborah Inez Tebbit. And she'd had an experience she'd remember for the rest of her life.

I looked at Sir Joseph. He said, 'Do you need to ask? To have recovered a piece of the True Cross of Christ for my museum. And what about you, Harry?'

'If the Cross turns out to be genuine?' I let my fantasies out. 'First I'll get rid of the overdraft and the loans. Then I'll go mad. I'll buy a house with a few acres of garden and a swimming pool, with a Porsche or an Aston Martin out front. And once I've got that out of my system, I'll settle down and devote the rest of my life to my passion.'

'Your passion.'

'Seeking out ancient maps and manuscripts in the back streets and bazaars of the world.'

'Sounds good,' said Zola. 'Maybe I could join you now and then. We could sail to the Bosphorus in
Aldebaran,
and scour the Book Market in Istanbul.'

Said light-heartedly. But was there an undercurrent of something? Ancient hormones stirred. She was reading my mind, smiling slightly.

I said, 'Just don't ask me to make any more paella.'

Sir Joseph gave me a puzzled look.

Debbie said, 'They all depend on the dating, don't they? All these dreams.' She had come down the previous evening, and the ladies and I had spread ourselves around the little flat in sleeping bags. Sir Joseph had turned up at the crack of dawn, Dalton an hour ago. The three laboratories had all promised an answer by mid-morning. It was mid-morning now.

'Would anyone like a cup of tea?' Zola asked. Nobody replied.

The telephone rang. It was starting on its second ring by the time Zola had cleared her chair and was picking up the receiver. We were all on our feet. Sir Joseph had knocked over the stool. I realised that my fists were clenched tight, but for the life of me I couldn't loosen them. There was muffled talking, and then Zola was handing the receiver to me. Her voice was agonisingly stressed. 'It's the East Kilbride people.'

I took the phone, said, 'Harry Blake here. Good morning, Jim. I'm handing this over to a third party. Tell her everything.' I turned to Debbie. 'It's your icon. You take it.'

Debbie listened. The muffled voice went on for about a minute. Then she was saying, 'You're absolutely sure?.. . Give or take fifty years... Thank you very much then... Goodbye.'

She put the receiver down, closed her eyes and leaned her head briefly against the wall telephone. Then she turned and looked around, wide-eyed. She seemed surprised to see us there.