The Sacred Scroll (37 page)

As for the great leader, he had ceased to carry the thing with him all the time. The man was losing his grip on reality, they could all see that. Reinhardt knew how to make himself indispensable to the Führer, and he was pleased to see how the man clung to him, rambling on about the virtues of loyalty in the face of adversity. All the better that the Führer was getting vague. He talked to his goddamned dog, for Christ’s sake.

But AH put his trust in Reinhardt too, kept him close, and had let enough slip, as the young general eavesdropped on his meandering monologues to the dog, to alert the general to the potential of the little clay tablet he nowadays kept locked in that drawer of his desk.

It looked innocuous enough, but when he had held the tablet he felt an electric shock. He had no idea of its full potential, but he’d heard enough to know what it could do, in the right hands.

He’d deposited the tablet in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum. The director of Middle Eastern antiquities, an understanding man, had accepted it with a show of gratitude, though Reinhardt, who had done his research, knew that his tablet was one of hundreds, if not thousands, already in the museum’s vaults.

Safety in numbers.

There it lay now, wrapped in cotton wool, in a wooden case, among innumerable others, safe in a cellar of the museum, the only thing to distinguish it a discreet label:
On Permanent Loan by the Grace of the Freiherr Hans von Machtschlüssel-Reinhardt
.

Machtschlüssel
. The key to power. His little joke. And he knew how to lay hands on it again, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, before he left the Fatherland, either for ever, or to return one day in triumph. But he needed additional surety.

It had fallen to him to travel on two secret missions to the American Office of Strategic Services bureau in Bern, Switzerland. These concerned secret negotiations between Heinrich Himmler and the OSS about a possible trade-off which would, Himmler hoped, save his skin when the Reich fell. But talks with the American secret service mattered little to Reinhardt. He took the opportunity to have a letter drawn up by a Swiss lawyer, proving his right to the tablet and describing how it could be identified. The lawyer’s office kept a copy; another was placed in a safe-deposit box in the Bern branch of a private bank.

Satisfied that he had covered every eventuality, Reinhardt returned to Berlin. The Swiss lawyer, however, didn’t file the letter in the firm’s files but locked it in a drawer of his own desk.

The lawyer had another client: the Office of Strategic Services.

When he received a copy, the coordinating officer at Allen Dulles’s Bern office looked over the letter. It appeared to refer simply to a more or less valuable artefact from Ancient Mesopotamia, legitimately lodged at
the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum by a member of the German General Staff. Family heirloom for safekeeping.

The coordinating officer had more important things on his mind. He had his clerk file the letter away, and forgot about it.

New York City, the Present

Leon Lopez knew something was wrong the moment he reached the corridor outside her studio-apartment in the downtrodden block in an anonymous street in the South Bronx. The front door was ajar, the flimsy lock unforced, worked open with a credit card, the oldest trick in the book.

Lopez was on his guard immediately, though his heart had been in his mouth since he’d started the drive up here to find out why she wasn’t answering her phone.

He’d told nobody of his unauthorized field-trip. Part of his mind told him what a fool he was being, but something had tempted him to follow this lead for himself. Any connection to Dandolo was vital; it’d be a coup if he could bring new information into the fold, rather than just analyse what others had found.

They’d overlook any breach of discipline in the face of a new breakthrough.

But now, in the quiet apartment, with its threadbare furnishings, a bed along one wall, he felt misgivings.

There were untidy bookshelves, a desk and chair, and a small sofa with a plywood coffee table in front of it, angled to face a television in a corner.

He wasn’t suited to this, he was unprepared, he hadn’t got a gun. What had he let himself in for?

Off the main room was a cubby-hole with a lavatory, washbasin and shower. Empty, too. Across the living area from the bathroom, there was an open arch with a bead curtain stretched across it, which led to a kitchenette.

Picking his way cautiously across the room, Lopez felt his heart thump hard in his chest.

He lifted the strands of the bead curtain.

Annika lay curled up like a foetus on the square of battered beige linoleum tiles which covered the floor, hemmed in on three sides by waist-high cupboards, the tops of which carried a sink, facing a grimy window overlooking a grey wall ten metres away, across a narrow courtyard; and a collection of pots, pans, crockery, packets of cereal and pasta, and an elderly microwave. An equally venerable fridge hummed noisily between the cupboards. Lopez couldn’t open the cupboards because Annika’s body was blocking the doors. He kept his eyes averted from her face as he touched her. She was still warm, but there was no doubt that she was dead. There wasn’t much blood, but the haft of a kitchen knife jutted from under her left breast.

It was a student’s flat, untidy and cluttered; posters and reproductions on the walls made an attempt to relieve the dinginess; the bed was carelessly made. Hard to know whether anyone had searched the place, but, with mounting panic, Lopez searched it himself, steeling himself to shunt the corpse aside to peer into the kitchen cupboards. He did it all fast. He didn’t know if Annika’s killers would return, and he didn’t know how much time he could allow himself. After half an hour, he resigned himself to the fact that there were no documents, ancient or otherwise,
relating to what Annika had described in the coffeehouse a handful of hours earlier. There were no memory sticks, no CD-ROMs; and there was no computer either, though on the desk lay the power line which belonged to one, as well as a set of headphones, an iPod dock, a printer-scanner and a hub. He noticed a clearing in the dust on the desk where a laptop had been parked, leaving its outline traced.

A drawer in the desk contained pencils and notepads, and the $50 Lopez had given her.

A light from the corridor came on and filtered under the door. He could hear footsteps slowly approaching. He froze, but the footsteps passed by.

Lopez felt sweat pour down his back under his clothes, and down his face. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead and eyes. His glasses had steamed up, and he wiped them too.

It was time to go.

Straits of the Bosphorus, Year of Our Lord 1203

The day was fine and sunny, the wind mild and favourable; the ships had unfurled their sails to the breeze.

Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, and the author of this work – who has never, to his knowledge, put anything in it contrary to the truth, and who was present, moreover, at all the conferences recorded in its pages – here testifies that so fine a sight had never been seen before. It seemed, indeed, that here was a fleet that might well conquer lands, for as far as the eye could reach there was nothing to be seen but sails outspread on all that vast array of ships, so that every man’s heart was filled with joy at the sight.

 

Geoffrey, sitting on the warm stern afterdeck of the galley which had carried him here, stopped dictating to his secretary and looked out across the water. It was late afternoon on Friday, 12 July. They had arrived from Corfu a week earlier.

The marshal of Champagne knew they were in safe hands. They had dropped anchor, unopposed, within a few cables’ length of the shore. This was the first surprise, since all the company had been ready for battle, expecting the Greeks of Constantinople, who had long since heard
of the army’s great triumph at Zara, to be well prepared for them. But there was nothing. There had been no naval resistance at all, though no surprise showed on the face of Doge Dandolo.

And he was the one to be trusted. Of old, they had learned, he had knowledge of this city, whose walls and towers looked like something from a fairy-tale, a magical idea of what a city should be like.

Dandolo’s commands were obeyed without question. On his orders, the army quartered itself on the north shore of the great inlet which bordered the city on its northern side. No resistance there either, though the army of the Great City had the reputation of being one of the finest in the world. There were unprotected farms with granaries overflowing with grain, and rivers and streams where the fresh water was plentiful. A couple of hundred village girls were rounded up and pressed into service. Not enough to go round, but they would serve.

Geoffrey had come back to his ship to get cool, for the heat was fierce. There had been casualties already, five knights dead of burst hearts or struck down by the sun. They had learned not to exercise during full daylight, and to do so in light clothes.

But did they need to train for battle? At all?

Geoffrey thought back to the day of their arrival. In his mind, he started to compose the next part of his memoir, ready for dictation:

We’d decided to make an impression the moment they came within close range of the seaward walls. Trumpets were sounded, brass fanfares of defiance carried to the
city on the wind, along with the thunder of their drums. The citizens were already on their rooftops and ranged along their walls, but for a time there was nothing else. Nothing except lines of people watching the fleet, but they were too far away for us to be able to see whether they were looking at the fleet with anything other than wonder and curiosity.

On that day, Dandolo did not hesitate. He gave the order immediately.

 

Transports were towed close to shore by galleys, the rowers sweating and straining at their oars. There was no hanging back – everyone was eager to be first ashore – and first were the knights, rushing down the gangways thrown on to the beach, their horses kicking up sand and pebbles. Infantry poured from the transports beaching behind.

 

There had been a show of resistance. One great gate swung open in the walls, and a troop of horse- and pikemen, silver and black, and red and yellow, appeared on the shore, on our left flank, charging towards us, a brave run, threatening to take us before we could wheel and face. But the discipline of our troops was strong and their morale flew higher than an eagle.

 

Geoffrey smiled at the memory. How those Greeks had broken and run! How they scuttled back, and how fast the gate had closed behind them!

Call that a fight? There were barely a dozen dead on the beach.

‘We found ourselves – and all within an hour – in possession of an easy victory,’ said Geoffrey aloud, and his
clerk looked up and dipped his pen. But the marshal lapsed into silence, closing his eyes and letting the sun warm his face until it set behind the dark walls of the city and ceded heaven to the stars.

The walls cast their shadow over the water. They had stood for a thousand years. They had seen off greater enemies than these.

But their core was rotten.

New York City, the Present

Relief hit him the moment he closed the office door.

He’d started to feel safe as soon as he’d passed through the warm, well-lit foyer of the hotel which masked INTERSEC’s operations.

He’d got back in one piece. No chase, no fight, no knives, no gunfire. Comfortingly, there were other people about in the building, night staff, hunched over blue screens, smoking cigarettes furtively near air-ducts, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, concentrating on other jobs. But unaware of what was unfurling in Room 55.

Several thoughts fought for supremacy in his mind. He should report this, but to whom? What would he say? That he’d gone out on a limb and that the limb had broken?

He also thought:
how did the other side know
? Annika had been a master hacker. A few more lessons and she would have been his equal. Who had locked into her computer? Or had a different trail led the others to her? He was sure the connection with her ancestor, Frid Eyolfson, had opened a door for Annika. A door she’d wanted to lead him through.

He would never know now. She was gone, and so was her information. He had to report it. And face the consequences of not having told anyone sooner.

Shit!

Scrambling his private cell-phone, switching off the INTERSEC log-calls function, which he wasn’t supposed to know about, he rang Mia again. He told her it looked as if it was going to be a long night. Her voice was resigned but irritated. Maybe she’d see him in the morning.

She put barbs on the ‘maybe’, and hung up.

He sighed. He went to his desk, clicked on his 12-core Mac Pro, and gazed emptily at the screen. He went to
Get Mail
just for something to do, to marshal his thoughts; he wasn’t expecting anything. Then he stiffened. Something new, from a sender whose address was a cipher of numbers and letters.
No Subject
. He opened it, clicked on the attachment. His breathing thickened.

Fast as the machine was, the blue line at the bottom right of the page took an age to fill up. Then, there it was. Old writing on crumpled, dark-beige paper. A long document.

She’d scanned and sent it to him before … What? Before anything happened to her? As a failsafe? Had she had some warning? Some premonition? He knew she would have erased anything connected to this from her hard drive immediately afterwards. She would have remembered to do that much. He sent a heartfelt thanks to that poor little corpse. He thought of her daughter, Mia, for the first time. Where was she? No evidence of a child in the apartment. With her grandmother? He could only hope so. He would find an address, try to contact the woman. Someone else would discover the body, alert the police.