The Sacred Scroll (51 page)

Five bodies lay sprawled and broken under the window. Only one moved, but no sound came from the contorted face, as his whole jaw had been shot away.

Marlow listened in the silence, but there was nothing. The dog stopped whimpering, and then the only noise which re-established itself was the sound of the wind in the trees. The white light bathed everything in an eerie glow.

Then there was another noise. Creaking, whirring. Electric doors opening.

The garage doors.

Marlow craned through the window. To his right, he could see the main gates opening. Then the noise of a car. A black Porsche SUV roared out of the garage and, as it sped up the drive and out of the gates on to the lane, he caught a glimpse of the passengers: a plump woman at the wheel, and next to her a thin man, both dressed in what looked like boiler suits.

He sprang through the opening, gun ready, and made for the garage.

Its interior was illuminated. There was a second car there, a burgundy-red Rolls. Near it stood Adler, a gun in his right hand. His other hand held Graves’s upper left arm in a vicious grip as he manhandled her towards the car.

Marlow stepped into view, drawing out his HK but wary of lining up a shot as Graves’s body was between his line of fire and Adler. Graves saw him, and Adler followed her line of sight with his eyes before she could dissimulate. Swearing, he swung his weapon round and fired wildly. One of the three rounds he got off found its mark in Marlow’s shoulder, in the same place as his earlier wound. Marlow was knocked off balance as he felt his collar-bone smash and went down. Adler was wielding an
AutoMag V and the .50-calibre bullet had done a hell of a lot of damage. By the time Marlow had raised himself to one knee and levelled his own gun with a shaking hand, Adler had had time to bundle Graves into the car, hitting her neatly over the back of the head with the automatic’s barrel to subdue her, and had taken his place at the wheel.

Marlow fired at the tyres as the Rolls’ engine kicked in, but his aim was wide and his bullets hammered harmlessly into the wing. The big car turned heavily on to the drive, slowly picking up speed. You can’t hurry a Rolls.

But then something happened. The main gates began to close. Adler accelerated to beat them, but a woman had appeared, framed by the gateway, in the middle of the drive, caught in the light. A thin woman in late middle-age. Adler drove straight for her, but she made no attempt to move. Instead, she raised her right hand. It held a tiny gun – a Ruger LCP. She brought up her left hand to steady her right and fired just before the car was on her. The .38 bullet was enough to shatter the windscreen. The big car swerved at the last moment, catching the woman and flinging her to one side before smashing into one of the gateposts. Flames burst under the bonnet in an instant.

Marlow ran, his heart battering his aching ribs. Once, he stumbled, turning an ankle, but he forced himself back to his feet and ran on, reaching the car and wrenching the nearside rear door open, using his good arm and all his strength to drag Graves’s unconscious form out by her legs, pulling her free and across the grass as far as he could before he collapsed. On the other side of the drive, he could see the shape of the woman, dressed in a fawn mac. She lay still. Over the roar of the fire in the car Marlow
could hear Adler’s screams, could see the flailing arms and the twisting body as the man struggled to get out, could see his head catch fire and turn into a burning skull, the jaw still snapping open and shut as the fire ripped flesh and muscle from it. Then it gave a last convulsion and slumped on the ivory leather seat, like a puppet with its strings cut, as the flames closed in on it and covered it like a shroud.

Frau Müller had taken her revenge.

New York City, the Present

‘What will happen to her?’ Graves wanted to know.

‘Does it matter?’ Marlow smiled, and shifted his position in the armchair at Graves’s apartment. The effort sent a shooting pain through his heavily bandaged shoulder, and he winced. ‘In any case, you don’t have to worry about Frau Müller. She’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, but she’ll live, and we’re not taking any action against her. No one is. It’s not worth it. She’s not worth it.’

‘Isn’t she a risk?’ asked Lopez, from the other armchair.

‘No. Without Adler, she’s nothing. When he fired her, her life was over.’

‘But she was a willing aide. In all those projects of his …’

‘She’s already told the police everything she knows. She’s implicated the three international businessmen we know of, one Chinese, one Indian and one Russian, but it’ll be one hell of a job to bring any kind of case against any of them. They’re just too powerful. Even if we did get them, there’d be others like them, but as far as these guys are concerned, without Adler and without MAXTEL, they’re nothing. They’ll have the police watching them for ever; their teeth are drawn.’

He thought of the other two accomplices, the
middle-aged couple in the car who’d got away before Adler. God knows who they’d been. Domestics? Aides? Rats deserting the sinking ship? They’d probably thought an army was descending on them. But he’d never know who they were now. The German police and EUROPOL had drawn a blank. They’d vanished. There was nothing to pursue.

‘Memories are short,’ said Graves, interrupting his thoughts.

‘So is life,’ said Marlow. ‘The important thing is, they don’t have this.’

The other two followed his gaze to the little clay tablet that rested innocuously on the coffee table between them. Marlow had picked it up from the scorched grass where it had fallen from Adler’s burning hand and transferred it quietly to his pocket in the confusion of police cars, fire engines and ambulances that had invaded Bönigsdorf in the wake of what the international press later reported as ‘the tragic loss of billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist Rolf Adler, in a freak auto accident at his country seat outside Berlin’.

No one breathed a word about the other circumstances. House cleaners had arrived and done their work well before the press was let near the site. As for the public services, they turned the blind eye they always did when called to similar scenes.

‘So what’s to be done with it?’ said Graves, picking the tablet up and turning it over in her hands.

The other two were silent for a moment.

‘We know what it can do,’ said Marlow.

‘If the whole thing isn’t a myth,’ said Lopez.

‘A myth? You mean it only worked because they believed that it did? Is it worth putting that to the test?’

‘It could be a major force for good,’ said Lopez, guardedly.

‘What do you mean – we could use it as a force for world peace?’ Marlow’s tone was mocking. ‘I don’t think even this tablet’s that powerful.’ He paused for a moment. ‘In any case, the risk of its being used for other reasons is too great. And that is a greater likelihood, whoever gets their hands on it.’

‘We’re the only ones now who know what it does, how to use it,’ said Graves thoughtfully.

‘I hope so,’ Marlow replied. ‘But just in case, I decided to buy this.’ From his shoulder-bag, which lay at his feet, he pulled a plastic bag, and from it, an ordinary hammer. A large one.

‘You can’t be serious,’ said Graves, alarmed.

Marlow ignored her. ‘Leon,’ he said, turning to him, ‘have you done what I asked you?’

Lopez nodded gravely. ‘All data on this thing has been erased from every file we have.’ He looked at Graves. ‘I’ve hooked into your system and done the same there,’ he added. ‘Sorry. Orders. All INTERSEC files are blank now.’

‘And the ones in Istanbul? Haki’s stuff?’

‘Not enough to put two and two together.’

‘So the secret’s safe?’ said Graves.

‘I hope so,’ said Marlow again.

‘You’ll get hell from Sir Richard.’

‘Will I?’

‘I take it you didn’t consult him before taking this decision?’

‘Should I have done? It was always my department’s responsibility.’

‘It got bigger than that,’ said Graves.

‘I know,’ said Marlow. ‘And I knew for sure from the moment we found ourselves unable to trace that woman in the Westwood coat who was bidding at the auction. She was working for Sir Richard, wasn’t she? Or for the CIA. Or even Homeland Security direct.’ A pause. ‘You’re expecting him, aren’t you?’

Graves was silent.

‘Any time now,’ Marlow prompted her.

‘Yes,’ she said, biting her lip.

‘I kind of knew – as you must have done – that people other than MAXTEL were interested from the moment Yale baulked at translating the document you found at the Cluny Museum.’

‘But I translated that for us.’

‘You did. But then you wondered. And, quite rightly, you double-checked. And you decided we couldn’t handle this on our own.’ Marlow leaned forward. ‘Then there was the delay on the delivery of the Reinhardt letter. That clinched it. The Land of the Free thought the best place for this thing would be in its custody.’

Graves was silent again, as Lopez looked at her in silent astonishment. ‘I didn’t tell Adler anything,’ she said to Marlow at last. ‘He was going to torture me, but I wouldn’t have told him.’

‘You weren’t working for him. You are a good operative. But you were supposed to be working for me. Not Sir Richard. Not the CIA. Not Homeland.’

‘I did what I thought was right!’

Marlow sat back. ‘Each of us owes the others one hell of a lot,’ he said. ‘More than you know. And we won. Kind of. So, if there’s a hatchet to be buried, let’s bury it now.’

‘Shit,’ said Lopez. ‘I’m going to open a bottle of Laura’s Chablis.’

But he was interrupted as they heard movement outside Graves’s door, then a key in the lock. A scent of cigars and expensive aftershave. The dapper figure of Sir Richard Hudson entered the room.

He looked at the three of them in mild surprise, then at the tablet, which lay in the centre of the table.

‘I see he has a key to your place,’ said Marlow evenly.

‘I’ll take that,’ Sir Richard said, indicating the tablet. ‘Ms Graves –’

‘Sit down,’ said Marlow.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Sit.’

Dumbfounded, but clinging to his dignity, Hudson did as he was bidden.

‘That artefact is in my custody now,’ said Sir Richard. ‘It represents a potential international security threat. Heaven forbid that it should fall into the wrong hands. The damage could be incalculable.’ He paused, for effect. ‘I am here to ensure that it is properly contained.’

‘Good,’ said Marlow. ‘So am I.’

He took the hammer in his hand and, concentrating against the pain in his left shoulder as he made the effort, swung it, smashing it down again and again on the tablet, on Adhemar’s Sacred Scroll, on Dandolo’s key to the destruction of the Eastern Roman empire, on whatever other evil the thing had served since it left the hands of its
creator, until it was a mess of rubble, and the coffee table beneath it, an expensive piece of furniture which Marlow would have to replace, was a total wreck.

In the silence that followed, Sir Richard smiled aridly. ‘The best-laid plans of mice and men …’ he murmured, half to himself.

‘What do you mean?’ said Marlow sharply.

Hudson spread his hands. ‘I mean that we misjudged you. It’s a pity. You played your role almost perfectly.’

Marlow shared a look with Lopez.

‘I’d better explain,’ Sir Richard went on. ‘We knew about your little upset with that ghastly blonde. We knew how much you’d been hurt and how vulnerable that had made you. We thought that might be useful. Neat, too – turning an Achilles’ heel into an instrument for us to use.’

‘You
knew
about Juliet?’ Marlow’s mind hurtled back to sunlit days in Paris, over a year earlier, and a needle went into his heart even now.

‘The HR woman? Yes. And what she’d done to you. The first time in years you’d been able to trust somebody completely and she blew up the bridge you were on. So there you were. On the other hand, we’d had our eye on Adler for a long time and we knew how he played the game.’

‘You were taking one hell of a risk – didn’t you think perhaps there were too many imponderables?’

‘We couldn’t be sure how things would pan out, but our game is a little bit like chess, don’t you think – a mixture of anticipating your opponent’s moves and hoping for the best? That was why, when it came to the question of a
new person to head Section 15, I thought of you, though of course I had you covered.’ He paused. ‘And it almost came off.’

Marlow looked at the shattered pieces of terracotta on the floor. ‘But it didn’t.’

‘No – at the last minute, you took the initiative.’ Hudson rose. ‘But don’t worry. We’re not going to turn you loose. You’re too good a soldier. And, anyway, we couldn’t afford to. Turning you loose would also have to mean terminating your contract permanently.’

Marlow knew what that meant.

‘You don’t have a choice if you want to live. So this is what is going to happen. The new section head is Ms Graves. You will work to her orders from now on.’ He smiled at Marlow and put out his hand. ‘Come on, Jack – that’s the business. No hard feelings, eh?’

Barbary Coast, Late in the Year of Our Lord 1205

Brother Leporo sat in chains on the deck of the corsairs’ ship, thinking. The wind chilled him under his habit. He hadn’t eaten properly in a week.

First, he thought about the attack. He brooded for long hours about the attack every day. Had God’s hand been in it?

After they’d buried Dandolo with all due ceremony, Leporo himself assisting the new cardinal and the papal legate at the altar of St Irina, the monk had hastened to complete his arrangements for departure. His ship was ready, and the heavy transport, laden with goods for Leporo’s own new monastery close to Padua, was taking on its last riches. Of course, Frid was there all the time. It had been Frid who’d seen to it that the old doge was buried in precise accordance with his wishes, the tablet clenched in his right hand. Frid who had stood over the coffin as it was lowered into its vault with its treasures, to make sure nothing upset the arrangements. Frid who had kept him, Leporo, under a stony and watchful eye.