The Sacred Scroll (20 page)

I am in Berlin
.

The next thing was to make her way to the INTERSEC contact point but, because of international cutbacks, some of the agencies had been re-defined, or closed down altogether. Berlin had been a prime location during the Cold War, but times had changed, and focus had shifted. INTERSEC’s presence in the city had been reduced to one official representative within INTERPOL.

She had no idea what day of the week it was, even. But she could orientate herself now.

She jogged painfully down Strasse des 17. Juni and had just reached the Brandenburger Tor at Pariser Platz when exhaustion hit her. She bent down, resting her hands on her knees, steadying her breathing. One last push, she told herself. But as she straightened up she saw three men dressed in black tracksuits and trainers emerge from behind the line of trees on the north side of the avenue she’d just left. They started running towards her.

Oh, shit, she thought, forcing her body forwards once more. She crossed the broad square to the east of the triumphal arch and set off along Unter den Linden. There were plenty of people about now, but Laura knew that her pursuers wouldn’t be deterred by the thought of shooting in a crowd. She kept going.

Up ahead she saw a red neon sign on one of the new office buildings. MAXTEL. A glimmer of hope lit up in her. She knew she wouldn’t be able to make it to the safety
of INTERSEC now, but MAXTEL might spell some kind of safety.

The three men were closing in fast, and the glimmer went out. She knew she didn’t have a hope of making it to the office block.

At that moment, as she drew to an exhausted halt, a blue Mercedes CLS 63 AMG shrieked to a standstill at the kerb next to her. The driver leaned over and pushed the passenger door open.

‘Get in!’ he ordered.

Graves did so, fast. Behind her, her pursuers had drawn their automatics. The car screamed off, to an outraged fanfare of car horns.

Graves turned to her rescuer, shocked and relieved as she recognized him.

The thin hope had paid off.

Jack Marlow smiled at her. ‘You’re safe now,’ he said.

New York City, the Present

‘Your timing was almost perfect,’ Graves told him later.

She hadn’t had much faith in the chip they’d implanted in her upper left arm before the Turkish operation had started, and they’d explained that the system wasn’t foolproof, but, safe back in New York now, she had reason to be grateful. If Marlow had arrived even a minute later, she would have been dead meat.

‘We lost the signal on GPS several times, and then when they took you to a second-level sub-basement it went altogether, but we’d pinpointed you to Pankow, though where you were before that, we don’t know. Maybe they’d second-guessed us and were able to put a block on the signal. We picked you up again when you escaped and I shadowed you from there. I’d have picked you up sooner but we lost you again on the bus. I’d noted the route, however. Picked you up again when you got off, though it took a while to reach you then.’

‘Why Berlin?’

‘That we don’t know.’

‘I saw a sign for the MAXTEL offices just before you rode up in your shining armour.’

Marlow shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean anything. Adler was most anxious to locate you too – offered all the help he
could.’ He shook his head. ‘Not out of sentimentality, though – he wants to know what happened to his three missing archaeologists just as badly as we do – he thinks his reputation’s on the line.’

‘Why’s he involved in this anyway?’

‘It’s his project. MAXTEL put a million dollars into the Dandolo Project through MAXPHIL, and that gives him a right to be more than a concerned bystander,’ Marlow replied, but he didn’t sound comfortable. ‘He’s clean, anyway. Cleared with Sir Richard and God knows who else higher up the chain.’

Leon Lopez had entered the office as Marlow was speaking, a sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘He’s probably funding INTERSEC too,’ he said. ‘Practically everything else is privatized now – why not us?’

‘He’s a businessman. It’s second nature for him to want to know what’s happening to his money,’ said Marlow.

‘He’s not the only one,’ said Graves.

Marlow turned to her. ‘I want you to think again. Can you tell us anything more, anything at all, about these people?’

‘If you’re still thinking along the lines of a group like al-Qaeda, no. I think there was a European couple there at first, and I’d also say the methods these people use aren’t typical of terror groups. There remains that question they kept asking me. Over and over again.’ Graves shuddered at the memory.

She rubbed her bruised arms. She’d been back in New York three days now, she’d just been released from INTERSEC’s hospital wing, and she’d been warned that it’d be a month before she was fully recovered.

‘If they are the people who got to the tomb first – if they are the people who picked our scientists’ findings clean and then disappeared Adkins and the others – they must know we haven’t found anything they might have overlooked,’ said Lopez.

‘That doesn’t follow,’ said Marlow. ‘Whatever it is they’re after, they’re desperate to locate it. We have to assume that Adkins, Taylor and de Montferrat haven’t been able to help them, or they wouldn’t have come after Laura. But they have no guarantee that we – or Haki’s people – haven’t found what they want.’

‘Meanwhile, we do have this to go on,’ said Lopez, placing the papers on the desk in front of them. What they had was a set of refined, high-definition prints of the missing key. The inscription along the sides of its shank was now clearly visible, the etching as clear as it had been on the day it was incised.

Marlow took a long, hard look at it.

At eleven the next morning he called a meeting. The three of them went over his findings together.

‘I guessed this was some kind of numerical code,’ Marlow began. Graves was leaning close over him, and her hair brushed his cheek.

‘This is Aramaic script,’ he went on. ‘So it’s either a conscious use of an archaic language, or the key itself is very old indeed. We can’t know that until we have the key and can date it, but Aramaic was being replaced – gradually – by Arabic as the
lingua franca
of the Middle East by the seventh century after Christ.’

He looked round at them. ‘The history is very important.
As I told you, Aramaic’s an old language, dating back to Babylonian times. We don’t know where it came from originally, but the Aramaens were a people who settled in northern Mesopotamia and spread from there, as the old empires of Babylon and Assyria fell into decline.’

Marlow broke off, thinking about the specialities of the scientists involved in the Dandolo Project. Then he realized the others were watching him expectantly.

‘What we’ve got here,’ he continued, ‘is a code based on gematria. It’s an ancient practice of assigning numerals to letters or groups of letters either directly or by association. It can operate on various levels of complexity, but this one isn’t too difficult. What is hard is to make any sense of the meaning of the words the numbers relate to.’

‘And what does it say?’ asked Graves.

‘The first side describes a dark eagle descending on the earth. An eagle, maybe a vulture. Its talons are outstretched to clutch, and its beak is ready to tear, the world. And it cannot be stopped, unless –’

‘Unless what?’

Marlow reached for the second photograph, which showed the other side of the key’s shank.

‘
Unless I open the box and you choose to be saved
.’

The three of them looked at one another.

Jerusalem, the Present

Geoffrey Goldberg stood at the door of his electrical goods shop on Misgav Ladach, a short way west of the al Aqsa mosque. Like everywhere else, business was slow, and he whiled away his time standing in his doorway, watching the world go by.

The young woman had caught his attention two days earlier. At first, he’d taken her for just another Japanese tourist trying to find her way to the old town – either she must have been one of the few independent travellers from that country, or else she’d got separated from her group.

She certainly looked lost.

It was when she passed by the shop for the third time, always dressed the same, gradually becoming more dishevelled, that Geoffrey, a kind man and a pillar of the local Rotarians, began to take more serious notice.

There was a vulnerability about the young woman that tugged at his heartstrings. He was convinced that she was in need of help.

Seeing her pause in the street just opposite his shop, looking wistful and sad as the people bustling by jostled her, Geoffrey’s heart melted.

Crossing the road, he was soon level with her. He was
naturally a shy man and once he was close to her he was unsure what to do. But the eyes that met his seemed forlorn and questioning, so he pulled himself together.

‘Can I help you?’ he said in English.

She looked at him blankly. ‘Sorry?’

‘You seem to be – ehrm – in need of help. Can I help you?’

Her mind seemed to engage with the present then, for her eyes lost their blankness and she looked at Geoffrey gratefully. ‘Help me? – Oh, yes please!’

‘Have you lost your way?’

The blank look again.

‘Come over to my shop.’ Geoffrey took her arm and steered her back across the road. Once inside, he sat her in a chair and went behind the counter to the cubby-hole which contained a kitchenette and the means to make coffee.

He handed her a cup and leaned with his own on the counter near her.

‘What seems to be the matter?’ he asked, feeling awkward.

‘I don’t know.’ She was the verge of tears.

‘Have you lost your party?’

‘I don’t know!’ she wailed suddenly. ‘I don’t know where I am! Where am I?’

Geoffrey was surprised. ‘In Jerusalem. The Old City. Near the al Aqsa.’

‘Where?’

‘Jersusalem. In Israel.’

‘Oh –’ But she continued to look confused.

He tried a different tack. ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

She looked at him in wide-eyed panic. ‘My name?’

Geoffrey had realized by now that something was seriously amiss. He saw that the girl had broken into a sweat. Part of him began to wonder if he hadn’t been rash in getting involved, but the woman seemed unfortunate rather than mad. ‘I wonder if you have a passport,’ he said gently.

‘I think so.’ She rummaged in her bag but then let it fall to her lap as she gazed dully into space. ‘I don’t know who I am or where I am or how I got here,’ she said flatly.

But Geoffrey could see the corner of a passport sticking out of an inner compartment of the bag. ‘May I?’ he said.

She didn’t react, and so he delicately extracted the document and opened it. It was an Italian passport, and there was her photograph, date of birth, and name. An unusual name. Su-Lin de Montferrat.

Geoffrey picked up his phone and called the police.

Istanbul,
AD
1915

General Erich Ludendorff had been very reluctant to undertake this assignment. Germany was a year into a deadlocked war, and he felt that his proper place was in either Berlin or at the Front, not stuck here. Of course he knew that the Fatherland had to maintain a firm controlling influence in the crumbling remains of the Ottoman empire, and that if it didn’t keep a hold on Turkey, the Sick Man of Europe, Russia would fill the gap; but surely that could have been left to the diplomats.

Nevertheless, when the renowned archaeologist, and his fellow-countryman Robert Koldewey had wired news of his findings in the Church of Saint Irina, he obeyed orders to go and evaluate them, as well as providing a bit of military muscle and senior presence to back up the efforts of the German Navy. And the informal request of his friend and superior officer Marshal von Hindenburg had actually been a thinly veiled order as, after thirty-three years in the army, he’d been quick to recognize.

Istanbul – Constantinople, as it was still called by most people – was a jewel a lot of people were interested in; but the British were putting their foot in it, with their usual grandiose we-rule-the-waves high-handedness, and the French were havering about on the sidelines – again, as
usual. The Germans, on the other hand, had two battle-cruisers in port, the
Goeben
and the
Breslau
, and their own man, Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, in place and ready to become the Ottoman empire’s naval commander-in-chief.

Turkey was in Germany’s pocket, but the Germans trod carefully, deferentially renaming the warships
Yavuz Sultan Selim
and
Midilli
. And Souchon wore a fez with his uniform.

Still, it was a balancing act. Everyone knew that the Ottoman empire under Mehmet V was on its last legs, and that there was a powerful nationalist movement, the Young Turks, under a new leader, Kemal Atatürk, waiting impatiently in the wings. And the Germans had to pretend that their military were under Ottoman command.

Ludendorff was a soldier first and last, but he hadn’t risen to number two in the High Command without having learned a few other aspects of the game. If Koldewey had something the Fatherland could use to its advantage, well and good. And it wouldn’t hurt, Hindenburg had suggested as they parted company in Berlin, to play the violin under Atatürk’s window as well.

Koldewey, five months Ludendorff’s junior, carried weight. Grumpy and anti-academic, dour and misogynistic, he’d never held a university position. He’d studied architecture and art history, but hadn’t shone in either. His archaeology was largely self-taught, but his dogged determination when directing a dig had earned him an international reputation, especially for his work in Turkey and those parts of the Ottoman empire defined by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates – ancient Mesopotamia. He’d not only located the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon,
but also the Tower of Babel and the Great Gate of Ishtar, and he also had the ear and the personal support of Kaiser Wilhelm himself.