The Sword of Moses (42 page)

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Basilica di San Clemente

Via Labicana

Rione Monti

Rome

The Republic of Italy

Although Ava had done her research on the basilica and knew pretty much what to expect, she was unprepared for the sheer scale of what greeted her as she edged inside the front door.

She had never seen anything quite like it in a twelfth-century building.

Churches of the period were usually mini-castles.

They had impregnable stone walls pierced by tiny windows, and were normally built around wide arched columns supporting low barrel-vaulted ceilings. She was particularly fond of them. It was easy to imagine medieval knights in dirty chainmail clanking around inside to the disapproving glares of women in silks and elaborate head-dresses.

But the Basilica di San Clemente, although it had clearly begun life as a large twelfth-century building, had been ever more richly rebuilt and decorated over the centuries.

The result was one of the most lavish churches she had ever seen.

It was like stepping into a Fabergé egg.

The ceiling soaring high above her was divided into diamond, oval, and myriad other coffers with gilded stucco ridges creating dozens of separate sections. It resembled an elaborate chocolate box—each compartment filled with an intricate fresco.

As her eye moved down the cream-coloured building, it was unavoidably drawn to the east end, where the entire domed wall behind the high altar was spangled with a gleaming golden mosaic of glass and stone, completely filling the vast concave apse.

Glancing at it, she could see blue streams feeding a colossal tree of life with vines, flowers, peacocks, and deer all playing across it, above a row of thirteen dutiful-looking lambs. In its centre, growing out of the spreading tree of life, binding it all together, there was a cartoon-like crucifixion with white doves perching on the cross.

“Look there,” Ava pointed to either side of the mosaic, whispering.

Ferguson squinted hard.

“The men depicted either side. Their names are written into the mosaic beside them.” She leant closer to him, pointing out where she was looking.

He spelled them out hesitantly. “AGIOS PAVLVS’ and ‘AGIOS PETRVS?”

“Exactly. Just like on the medal. Saint Paul and Saint Peter.”

Ferguson looked uncertain.

“
Agios
is the Greek for saint,” she explained. “In the twelfth century, they often mixed up Greek and Latin in religious inscriptions. And there was no letter U—they used a V. So it just says Saint Paul and Saint Peter. I get the feeling it’s not a coincidence that the two saints feature on the medal, and here they are, too.”

Dropping her gaze downwards from the mosaic, she spotted the huge high altar housing the relics of Saint Clement, the third pope. She did not have much interest in him, save that his execution sounded particularly barbarous. The Romans had tied him to an anchor and thrown him off a ship into the Black Sea.

As her eyes moved to the foreground, they travelled along the mesmerizing decorations in the cream-coloured marble floor—inlaid with multicoloured stones, marble, and glass to create hypnotic swirling geometric patterns.

In the very centre of it all, her eyes rested on a small rectangular enclosure with low white carved marble walls. Inside it, two rows of ancient wooden pews faced each other across a central aisle. It was a choir. A very old one—sixth-century, according to the discrete sign.

The overall effect of the basilica was breathtaking.

Ava thought back to the Burj al-Arab in Dubai. Granted, a visitor to the seven-star hotel could be waited on hand and foot. But somewhere in the passage of time down the centuries, the subtlety of craftsmanship had been lost, even for patrons with the deepest wallets.

She glanced across at Ferguson, who was still looking stunned at the intricacy and skill of the decoration.

“Look there,” he pointed to one of the pillars on the right side of the altar. “Consecration crosses.”

She followed his finger, and sure enough, a cross marked where the building’s wall had been blessed.

“This has to be a good sign,” Ava whispered. “Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and consecration crosses.”

He gave a low whistle. “It’s unbelievable. Not like the churches back home.”

“Amazing,” she added. “It isn’t even famous.” She glanced. “As you can see—there are barely any tourists in here.”

Spotting movement up ahead, she dropped her voice. “Here we go.”

The two van drivers who had entered after them were now making purposefully for the choir, where a chubby white-haired priest was collecting leaflets from the ancient pews.

As he bent, his elderly movements were restricted by his bulky clothing—a long white tunic, belt, and dangling rosary, topped off with a full-length black cloak and a short black shoulder cape.

She instantly recognized the medieval habit of a Dominican friar.

She had known a group of Dominicans when she was working in Amman. She had regularly visited Jerusalem, where they ran the
École Biblique
—Jerusalem’s most prestigious school of archaeology,

She had rapidly discovered they were an order of intellectuals with a rich past—as scientists, philosophers, and even as heretics.

At the
École Biblique
, as she pored through their treasures, she had been fascinated to learn of the order’s famous members down the ages. There were scholastic titans like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, whose razor-sharp logical minds lit up the emerging universities of Europe, sweeping away the intellectual gloom of the dark ages. There were also bold and progressive scientists like Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake long before Galileo for stating the sun was a star and for believing there was intelligent life on other planets. On the darker side, later, there was the restless inquisitor Bernardo Gui, who alone racked up nearly a thousand convictions of heretic Cathars around Toulouse. And then the obsessive Heinrich Kramer, whose twisted but thorough witch-hunters’ manual, the
Malleus Maleficarum
or
Hammer of the Witches
, had caused the death of hundreds of innocent women.

Looking around the church, she thought on a lighter note of a more famous and certainly more cheerful member of the order, and figured he would probably have liked the building very much. In his own eyes, he had been a simple Dominican priest from Tuscany. But the world knew him as one of the most penetrating and sensitive painters of all time—Fra Angelico.

All in all, Ava had learnt from her Jerusalem experiences that the Dominicans were usually mentally sharp, frequently mavericks, and rarely to be underestimated.

They were certainly good at surprises.

As the van drivers approached the priest, they showed him their official gas company ID cards. She could not follow their fast Italian, but knew they were explaining that a gas leak had been detected underground, and the entire building needed to be evacuated immediately.

“Let’s just hope he doesn’t have a PhD in physics,” Ava whispered to Ferguson.

“The priest?” He stared back at her blankly.

“Don’t worry, I’ll explain another time.” She pointed towards the sacristy and book shop. “Let’s move. The stairs are that way.”

“And … go!” Ferguson announced, pushing the button on his watch to start the fifteen-minute countdown.

The drivers rapidly cleared the ground floor of the few members of the public looking about, then disappeared into the bookshop and down the steps to the lower levels, where they began officiously expelling the remaining flustered-looking tourists from the building.

Moving fast, Ava and Ferguson followed them into the bookshop.

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La Gioconda Caf
é

Maze Hill

London SE10

England

The United Kingdom

Uri could not afford to relax.

Although he was making good progress with Otto and the Skipper, he knew he also had to build out the rest of his life as Danny Motson.

He needed to work on his cover—to do things in character, to develop observable patterns of behaviour.

In short, he needed to do what a normal person would do.

He had long ago found that the quickest and easiest way to achieve this was to get into a few routines that would make it look like he was settling in.

As tempting as it was to keep himself to himself, he needed a visible public life—however small and controlled. If he was going to pass as just another guy who had moved into the area looking for work, then he had to be seen doing exactly that. Attention to these details would be vital if Otto or the Skipper came asking questions about him. And after last night at
The Bunker
, that seemed increasingly likely.

He didn’t want to get too friendly with anyone, of course—just enough to remove the natural suspicion of outsiders, to fix him as a member of the community.

So he quietly established a daily public routine.

Every morning, he purchased a copy of the local newspaper and
The Sun
from
The Ottoman Convenience Store
—a metal-grilled bazaar that smelled mildly of bleach, and sold everything from mousetraps to cheap wines, and flip-flops to cling-filmed trays of unidentified oriental sweets. As he paid, he was careful to exchange a few pleasantries with whichever extended family member happened to be behind the till that day.

Then he took his newspapers and sat in a nearby café, where he made a show of reading the jobs pages—circling interesting advertisements and telephoning the relevant numbers.

It had taken some effort to find the perfect café. But he had finally managed, and it was working well.

The fatty breakfast festival of fried pork on offer in the various English greasy spoons had been a nonstarter. And the branded coffee shop chains were too impersonal.

What he really needed was a small place that served breakfast like back home—vegetable salad, goat’s cheese, bread, olives, some pastries, and a steaming spiced coffee. But that was not going to happen. And it would attract a lot of attention if he tried ordering anything even remotely similar.

So he settled for a compromise—a late breakfast at the homely Italian café,
La Gioconda
, in the next street.

It was intimate, and run by a family from Campania who had decorated the walls with the usual array of garish prints and plates painted with landscapes and prominent buildings from their native region.

As he was unemployed, there was no need to be one of the early crowd. So he waited until the cake-munching clusters of Italians had finished their traditional breakfasts, before he sat at his usual small round metal table and enjoyed a sweet coffee, fresh bread, cheese, olives and a few spoons of Mediterranean salad off the all-day menu.

It was cheap as dirt, and the family who ran it became increasingly friendly as they got to recognize him.

He stayed for forty-five minutes every day, reading his papers and glancing occasionally at the small silent television in the corner. He did not understand the Italian captioning on the rolling news programme, but the presenters were usually easy on the eye.

Once he had finished with the job advertisements, he browsed quickly through the classifieds in
The Sun
.

But he was not shopping or looking for lonely hearts.

It was where they had agreed Moshe would communicate with him in the unlikely event Tel Aviv triggered the contact channel.

Moshe had carefully chosen a paper that could be found all over England and, in case the mission took Uri abroad, in most other countries, too. As a failsafe, it could even be accessed globally via its online version.

There were, in fact, two messages Moshe could publish. One would be for Uri to make contact in case there had been any critical developments. The other would be to stand him down and bring him back home.

But Uri knew Moshe. The veteran did not do chitchat and idle talk. He had briefed Uri thoroughly on the background and operational objectives. In Moshe’s world, that was enough. He now expected Uri to make of it what he could. That was the old-fashioned way. It was how Moshe liked it. And it was why he had chosen Uri.

Uri expected that if he ever saw a message from Moshe, it would be telling him to wrap it up and report back to base.

He was therefore genuinely surprised on turning to the classified section to see Moshe had activated the contact channel.

The pre-agreed advertisement was there in black and white:

FOUND. ONE OLD METALLIC TRUNK WITH EXTENDABLE HANDLES. LUGGAGE LABEL BELONGING TO MR MOSES.

Uri read it three times to make triple sure. But there was no doubt. And it was hardly likely to have been published by anyone else. Moshe had chuckled as he dictated the message to Uri for him to memorize. It was exactly Moshe’s sense of humour.

There was a contact telephone number at the end of the advertisement. Uri quickly tapped it into his phone, and sent an SMS.

This was going to be interesting.

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The Mithraeum

Basilica di San Clemente

Via Labicana

Rione Monti

Rome

The Republic of Italy

Once through the bookshop, Ava turned into the wide staircase leading down to the fourth-century Roman church below.

The pale stone steps were shallow, with down-lighters under the banisters casting a dim glow onto the thin apricot-coloured bricks of the ancient wall. Occasional wall lamps, neat glowing cylinders on poles, added to the eerie lighting.

As she stepped off the last of the long flight of stairs, she found herself in the old church’s small narthex—the ancient antechamber where the unbaptized catechumens stood to observe the Christian mysteries from without.

Immediately to her left, she could make out two thin classical columns sunken into the crumbling brick wall. They stood one-and-a-half yards apart, guarding what had once been the entrance to the church, long-since bricked up. A large iron grille now sat firmly between them, seeping cold musty air from the old church onto the stairs.

Ava shivered.

Following Ferguson into the dark nave, she paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the extraordinary sight around her.

It was a long low room, with rows of squat solid columns dividing it into four dark aisles stretching away into the gloom.

In stark contrast to the upper basilica, this much more ancient church was not covered in a rainbow of gold, stones, glass, and marble—but simply made of bare honey-coloured brick and tufa.

Ava gazed in awe at the faded frescos just visible between the low brick arches—all suffused with a dull orangey warmth thrown off by more of the glowing cylinder lights on poles.

Aware a clock was running, she barely had time to register the ancient paintings. But as she moved quickly through the aged vaulted church, she saw a Greek-looking Madonna in an ornate headdress, a scene of souls descending into limbo, a pope in immaculate ninth-century dress, and a host of other images she could barely take in.

The late Roman age was not her speciality, but she had a good working knowledge of Roman Christian archaeology, and could instantly tell that this was one of the most important buildings in existence from the period.

“Come on!” Ferguson grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the frescos. “You can do the tourist bit another time.”

Following him, she hurried through the dimly lit vault, feeling a noticeable drop in temperature.

As she got closer to the far end, she was suddenly aware of a low rushing sound in her ears.

Telling herself to keep it together, she made for the far end of the left aisle, where she could see Ferguson disappearing down another staircase.

Moving quickly, she passed a plain stone altar table set over a rough granite sarcophagus, and realized it must be the tomb of Saint Cyril—the inventor of the first Slavic alphabet who gave his name to Cyrillic, and was now joint-patron saint of Europe. Without pausing, she ran past the ancient tomb and hurled herself down the crooked staircase behind it at full speed.

The stairs were older than the ones from the upper basilica. She figured they dated from the period of the first church, some time in the fourth century.

It was darker on these stairs, and as she followed them around an abrupt left-hand dogleg, she could hear the rushing sound in her ears more loudly.

Half worried she might be having some kind of seizure, she felt the noise became more distinct as she hit the bottom of the stairs and she realized to her relief that it was definitely not inside her head.

“Roman sewer system,” Ferguson shouted back at her from up ahead.

She nodded, looking around to get her bearings.

This lowest level of the complex was dark, dank, and cold—exactly as she had expected. They were now three floors below street level, where no sunlight ever penetrated. There was occasional electric lighting, but the good Dominican friars who ran the basilica above clearly had no funds to heat the bowels of the building.

Looking around, she was staggered to realize she was on the remains of what had once been a first-century Roman street. Next to her she recognized the unmistakable arrangement of an
insula
—a typical Roman apartment complex that had shops on the ground level and residences on the higher floors.

Unable to believe her eyes, she registered that most of the area was cordoned off, still unexcavated.

It never ceased to amaze her how many archaeological sites around the world had been identified but then remained unexplored. She was in the middle of Rome, once one of the richest cities in the world, and here was a slice of it still waiting for someone to unearth its prizes.

Moving forward, the brick walls glowed an eerie dark orange in the half-light, reminding her of the great fire of Rome that had ravaged them in AD 64. Some people had blamed the emperor, Nero, saying he wanted to clear the area for his new palace. But he was having none of it, and placed the blame squarely on the city’s Christians, whom he nailed to crosses, doused in pitch, and set alight—human torches to illuminate the night sky. She often wondered how many children enjoying Roman Candle fireworks knew of their gruesome origin.

Focusing back on the job at hand, she followed Ferguson down the musty dank corridors—first left and then right, until she suddenly found herself in the heart of the ancient Mithraic complex.

She briefly thought of Cyrus in his Soho office. She prayed he was already many miles away from London—on a hot beach somewhere, far from Malchus.

Looking about, she could see an antechamber to her right, complete with pilasters and a ceiling spangled with vegetative and geometric patterns.

But to her left was the reason they were there—the second-century temple of the Mithraic mysteries.

Her heart began to beat faster.

“One minute gone. Fourteen left,” Ferguson announced as the men carrying the flight cases arrived behind them.

She ducked further along the corridor, leaving the temple behind for now. She quickly needed to check the rest of the complex for any further information. Even the smallest detail could make a difference.

The mildewy corridor ended abruptly at a doorway opening into a large room. Its broken dirty floor was made of black and white mosaic, and the walls featured seven niches of varying sizes along with the faded portrait of a bearded Roman in a scarlet cloak. It looked like some sort of Mithraic schoolroom—the niches no doubt for objects symbolizing the seven grades of its mysteries.

Heading back to the temple, she ducked into the low space just in time to see the gas men opening the smaller flight case to reveal an array of tools.

The temple itself was a small hollow, about ten yards by six, hacked directly out of the tufa. The walls and ceiling were covered in original rough Roman concrete, applied unevenly to recreate the atmosphere of Mithras’s original cave.

There was a small stone altar at the far end. Above it, a low barrel vault spanned the space, marred by a hole where excavations from the church above had broken through. Along the two main walls, irregular short-backed stone benches provided the temple’s only seating.

“Two minutes gone. Thirteen remaining.” Ferguson’s voice sounded crisp and controlled.

The main object in the room stood alone in the middle of the floor: a square pedestal supporting an engraved bas-relief of the tauroctony—the mandatory scene of Mithras slaying the lunar bull.

“Is this what you were expecting?” Ferguson asked, looking around the cramped temple.

Ava nodded. It was a textbook mithraeum. Exactly as she had imagined, its bare decoration gave modern visitors no real idea of the original experience. The same was true of the great temples of Greece and Rome, and even the majestic castles, cathedrals, and churches of medieval Europe. Just like all of them, this small temple had originally been completely painted in a riot of blazing bold colours.

In stark contrast, the drab grotto around her was a forlorn husk of the vibrant multicoloured space it had originally been, with its rich Mithraic symbolism embedded into the long-vanished mosaics, paintings, and objects that formerly adorned it.

Right on cue, there was a loud click, and all the lights went out.

Excellent.

The van drivers had been tasked to find out from the lady in the bookshop where the principal electricity breakers were, and then explain to her that the possibility of gas build-up and naked light bulbs was not a good combination. They were also to insist that just flicking off the light switches was not sufficient—the whole power system needed to be shut down in case anything was sparking anywhere along the many miles of old cabling.

As Ava had anticipated, the lady had clearly been only too happy to cooperate.

So far so good. Now the CCTV cameras were safely off the grid, she and the men could get to work.

She flicked on the headlamp mounted to her helmet, and the others quickly followed her lead. As each LED kicked five hundred lumens out into the gloom, the dark interior of the rock-temple was suddenly criss-crossed with piercing tunnels of bright white light.

“Spread out.” She did not have to speak loudly. It was a small space. “Quickly. Test all the walls, and the fronts and seats of the stone benches. See if anything seems hollow.”

The men silently fanned out across the room, and began tapping the stonework with the tools they had taken from the flight case.

With no electric light, the temple regained some of its former drama.

As Ava set to work on a section of stonework, she could imagine the ceremonies the temple had hosted, with costumed initiates moving through the mysterious grades of Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Sun-Runner, and Father.

There was something primal and energizing about the setting. It reminded her of the symbolic power of caves in the human subconscious, and the strong traditions in the early Church that Christ had been born in a cave, not a stable. She was endlessly surprised people did not realize that many of the traditional Bible stories, like the stable, were not universally accepted in the early centuries.

The sound of the tools striking the concrete and stone echoed around the small temple, but so far with no result.

“Five minutes gone. Ten remaining.” Ferguson’s countdown underlined how little time they had.

“It’s in here somewhere,” she announced, confident she was not mistaken. “Keep trying the walls.”

She tapped the bench in front of her. The stone was completely smooth, worn by centuries of use.

If only the stones could tell what they had seen.

“Eight minutes gone. Seven remaining,”

Ava could feel the pressure mounting quickly.

More than half the time was gone.

They needed to hurry up.

The men were working methodically and purposefully with no discussion or duplication of effort. They operated like a thinking organism, each methodically alongside the other.

As she watched them, Ava could not help wondering who they were, these ‘friends’ of the Foundation.

Only one group of people she had ever come across worked this effectively and efficiently as a team.

The military.

But if that was right, she was struggling to identify their country of origin. They all understood her English, yet the drivers had spoken native Italian to the priest, and she had overheard French and even some Spanish when they had been ushering the tourists out.

She did not know of any multilingual armies in the world. It was possible they were mercenaries, she supposed, but that would not square with Saxby’s insistence that the Foundation was a peaceful institute.

“What do you reckon?” Ferguson’s voice came from the far wall behind her. “Has it gone?”

Ava shook her head emphatically. “It has to be here.”

He tapped the wall in front of him with the heel of a hammer. “Eight hundred years is a long time.”

She gritted her teeth as she stretched round the end of the bench. “An object like the Menorah leaves its footprint wherever it goes. If it’d been moved, it would’ve left some trace.” She ran her fingers along the stone’s smooth edges. “An artefact of that significance couldn’t have been taken away without leaving some kind of a trail—accounts, rumours, myths, legends, anything. Some noise would have echoed down to us if it’d been discovered here.”

He checked his watch again. “Nine minutes gone. Six remaining.”

He was cool under pressure. She gave him that. Her own insides were beginning to knot.

“Try the floor,” she ordered the men. “There’ll be flagstones under the compacted dirt. Scrape around to find the edges. See if any of the flagstones are a different height, texture, or colour. Look for any anomalies.”

She began to feel sweat prickling down her back. Even if they found it, it would take them a while to get it out.

The knot in her stomach tightened.

They were running out of time.

She got down on her knees by the doorway and began scraping away at the dirt floor to reveal the flags underneath, worn smooth by years of shuffling feet.

She ran her fingers along the edges of the stones, realizing with a wave of disappointment they were all bonded tightly with ancient Roman cement.

“How long?” The strain was audible in her voice.

“Ten minutes gone. Five left.” Ferguson joined her, examining the ancient grouting between two large flags.

One of the gasmen approached her. He was short but powerfully built, and his deeply creased face indicated he had spent his life smoking professionally.

“We’ve checked the rest of the floor.” He spoke with a sandpaper voice and thick French accent.

“And?” Ava looked up at him expectantly.

He shook his head.

She caught sight of the name label on his overalls, illuminated in the beam of her helmet torch. “Is that your real name, Max?”

He shook his head. “But it’ll do.”

“Okay, Max,” she stood up. “We’ve got about four minutes left.” She could feel the sweat now running freely down her back. “Search the antechamber.” She did not think it was likely. But they had to be thorough.