The Sword of Moses (50 page)

“The tracker’s not moving any more.” Max’s heavily accented voice was calm and factual. “Our vans will be there in about thirty seconds.”

De Molay and Saxby jumped up and ran through to the office, immediately followed by Ava and Ferguson.

Max punched a button on the telephone. “Bravo One this is Zero. Report status. Over.” He directed the order into a small microphone stalk jutting off the complex-looking telephone control panel.

The telephone’s speaker kicked into life. “Bravo One. Target is in car park and stationery. Over.”

Max pushed the button again “Zero. Investigate with caution. Over.”

There was a pause. Ava could hear van doors sliding open, and the unmistakable sound of weapons being readied.

After a moment, the voice came again over the sound of running feet. It was breathless. “Bravo One. Approaching the target. Standby. Over.”

There was a long pause, before the voice resumed. Its tone was flat, the urgency gone. “Bravo One. Target abandoned. No sign of occupants. Over.”

Max thumped the desk hard and swore under his breath as he pushed the button again. “Zero. Where’s the flight case? Over.”

Ava looked at De Molay. His face was ashen.

There was a pause before the voice came again. “Bravo One. Affirm the flight case is here. It’s empty. I repeat. The flight case is empty. Over.”

The words hit Ava like a physical blow. “Tell them to keep searching.” She could feel a mounting panic. “We can’t let him get away.”

“Zero. Search the area.” Max barked into the phone. “They can’t be far. Bravo Two as well. Over.”

Ava peered at the screen. “Where’s that car park? Assuming they switched vehicles, where could they be heading?”

Max held a finger to the monitor, showing a large neo-classical building of some kind, with a maze of streets radiating off it. “The Victor Emmanuel monument.”

A wave of hopelessness crashed over her. It felt almost physical. She knew the Victor Emmanuel monument. It was a traffic nightmare—a massive white marble folly around a hundred and fifty yards long, cut into a labyrinthine old neighbourhood at the base of the crowded Capitoline Hill. Dozens of roads radiated around it, feeding back into the crowded surrounding area, offering a limitless rat-run of traffic pandemonium.

She pushed the hair back off her face. “They’re gone.” She spoke slowly, her voice flat and dejected. “We’ll never find them round there.”

She was fuming. Malchus had this all planned. Even down to the change of vehicle.

De Molay looked over at Saxby. “What’s Plan B, Edmund?” There was no mistaking the authority in his voice.

“We wait,” the older man replied. “If Malchus tries an airport or border crossing, we’ll know about it.”

“I wouldn’t hold your breath.” Max cut in grimly. “The north of Italy has a hundred and one ancient paths across the mountains, carved through the clouds by generations of smugglers. They’re all off the grid. And the rest of Italy is one long coastline with an infinite number of places to get a boat away. If they want to get out, they will.”

De Molay turned to Max. “But that’s going to take organization and time?”

Max shrugged apologetically. “I could get us out of Italy under the radar in a hurry if I needed to. So we have to assume they can, too.”

Despite wanting more than anything for Max to be wrong, Ava knew instinctively he was right. The chances of Malchus allowing himself or his men to be tagged or picked up as they took the Menorah out of the country were next to nil.

“What now?” Ava asked, deflated. The Menorah was doubtless on its way to join the Ark in whichever safe place Malchus used for storing his most precious objects.

Her frustration was rising to boiling point. For all the power of Prince, DeVere, and now De Molay, no one seemed to have any idea where Malchus was holding the looted artefacts.

Saxby turned to Ava, the anxiety showing on his face. “It’s best you leave Italy immediately, in case there are any wrinkles in smoothing out the mess at the basilica. We’ll get you on a flight back to London this afternoon. We’ll rendezvous there when I’m done. I’ll contact you. For now, the most useful thing you can do is try to work out why Malchus has gone to such lengths to get the Ark and the Menorah, and what he plans to do with them.”

Ava nodded silently.

She could not think of any better plan.

For now the trail was dead.

——————— ◆ ———————

Undisclosed location

The walls of the north-west room of the isolated house by the lake were bare, except for a large oil painting of an Elizabethan nobleman.

His face looked elderly, but keenly intelligent eyes shone from the age-worn face. His long white beard was sharply pointed in the fashion of the day, but his close-fitting black skullcap lent an air of austerity and asceticism. The small gilded plaque fixed to the bottom of the frame read simply:

IOANNIS DEE

1527–1608

LONDINENSIS
¹³

Beneath the old man’s gaze, Malchus had lit three tall black candles on great bronze tripods at each of the room’s cardinal points. Their flickering flames cast a dull sallow light around them and onto the painting.

He had also hung a large silver thurible over the mantelpiece, with a block of smouldering charcoal inside it covered by a light dusting of white-hot ash.

It had taken him an age to find a censer quite like it—but he finally had, from a discrete dealer in Budapest.

Like the more typical church thuribles, it was heavy solid silver with three long chains allowing it to be hung or swung. But it was not the usual lidded pot with fine decorative holes through which the sweet incense smoke could escape. Instead, it was capped with a diminutive smoke-blackened goat’s skull, whose curling twisted horns and pinched face forged a cruel frame around the gaping black eye and nostril sockets.

He checked that everything he would need was assembled in the room, before taking a purifying cold shower and anointing himself with the remainder of the sacred Exodus oil of myrrh, cinnamon, calamus, and cassia.

When he was ready, he wrapped a freshly laundered black sheet around his waist, and entered the room from the south.

Taking the thurible down from its hook, he sprinkled a pinch of the
qetoreth
Temple incense onto the hot ashes. Within seconds, the pungent spicy bitter-sweet smell of the stacte, onchya, galbanum, and frankincense began streaming out of the goat’s nostrils and vacant eye sockets.

Swinging the thurible gently as he moved, he walked slowly anticlockwise around the dimly lit room, pausing to genuflect at the guttering candles marking each point of the compass. As he passed through the four stations, he offered invocations at the four quarters to the dark Guardians overseeing his work.

Satisfied the space was properly consecrated, he picked up the silver metal case from among the small pile of objects he had laid out.

He flipped open the catches and lifted the lid.

Nestled inside, wrapped in black velvet pouches, were the seals he had cast in the woods. He had trimmed down the sprues and cleaned the excess wax off the edges so they were now smooth and unblemished.

They were perfection.

He lifted out the four smaller ones first. Carefully unwrapping them one by one, he laid them on top of their velvet bags.

He gazed at them reverentially, drinking in the sight.

The seals of power had not been reunited for four hundred years.

Until now.

He ran his fingers slowly over their raised markings, as if he were reading braille—feeling the forces that coursed within them.

He shivered with anticipation.

Picking up a rolled red silk rug, he unfurled it, laying it out in the dead centre of the room. He had measured it meticulously. The instructions were precise. It was exactly two yards square.

Next he took the four small seals, and placed them onto the rug in a square formation, one yard by one yard.

When satisfied with their arrangement, he turned to the wooden table he had placed in the corner. He had felled the tree himself last Samhain, then sawed the timber when it was dry. He needed to feel connected to the tree—to its life force, and to its death. In cutting it down with his own hands, he had sealed the necessary etheric bond between them.

The table was light, and still smelled of fresh timber. He had not varnished or painted it. He needed it in its raw natural state.

He placed the table down in the centre of the room so that each leg lay on one of the four small seals, channelling their energy upwards to the tabletop.

Good
.

He gazed at the arrangement with satisfaction. The table was a yard square, and the legs were each a yard long.

It was exactly how it should be—a perfect cube.

These things mattered.

All was correct.

He glanced up at the sombre portrait of Dr John Dee looking down on him. He knew the Elizabethan magus would approve. After all, had he not written down the instructions all those centuries ago so others could follow in the work?

Inhaling a deep lungful of the incense, relishing the ancient sacred taste in his nose and mouth, he took up a pot of yellow oils and a brush, and began painting a series of complex angelic and demonic sigils on the table’s untreated surface. He did not need a picture to copy. He knew the patterns by heart.

Once the invocations had dried, he bent low and solemnly lifted up the great
Sigillum Dei.

He looked again with satisfaction at the multiple layers of messages encoded on its embossed whorls. It was an interlaced geometric marvel: a pentagram over a circle within a septagon within a septagram within a septagon within a circle divided into forty quadrants, all intricately labelled with the glyphs and symbols of the adepts.

It was sublime.

He laid the great seal carefully onto the table’s surface, making sure it was in the exact centre, then covered it with a red silk tablecloth, precisely one-and-a-half yards square, so the silk completely covered the seal and hung down over the sides of the table, its long tassels almost brushing the ground.

He stared at the arrangement long and hard, looking for anything out of alignment.

But it was perfect.

Satisfied, he bent to pick up the crowning touch—the object that would sit at the apex of the energies channelled by the table of power—Dr Dee’s great dark mirror of Tezcatlipoca.

The dullards in the British Museum still had no idea it was missing. There were no doubt hundreds of tourists a day ogling the impotent substitute Malchus had switched it for.

Idiots
.

Couldn’t they feel the difference?

How could they not know that one of the mirrors had been bathed in the hot sacrificial blood of young Aztec men, screaming as their hearts were ripped bloody and beating from their smashed ribcages? While the other was merely a plain slab of obsidian from a stonemason’s yard.

Holding the sacred mirror over the table, he placed it in the middle of the cloth so it rested directly over the centre of the great seal.

Offering a quiet prayer, he stood back to admire his handiwork, drinking in the sight.

It would soon be time.

Taking up the thurible again, he sprinkled fresh crystals of
qetoreth
over its hot ashes. Wafts of the biting smoke filled the room as he began to intone the opening of the liturgy, “
Introibo ad altare domini inferorum
.”
¹⁴

His heart singing, he walked slowly around the table anticlockwise, censing his unholy altar, focusing on the Great Work he would accomplish there.

——————— ◆ ———————

10b St James’
s Gardens

Piccadilly

London SW1

England

The United Kingdom

Ava woke slowly.

She felt disorientated at first, struggling to remember where she was.

Although she was rarely fazed by time-zones or jetlag when travelling, the first few seconds after waking were often confused.

On the table beside her head, the glowing red digital readout above the radio’s matt white speaker told her it was 6:00 a.m.

She blinked fuzzily, unsettled by the strong sunlight creeping around from behind the heavy creamy curtains.

Brushing the hair out of her eyes, she realized she was in London, where the sun rose well before 5:00 a.m. in summer. After so many years in Africa and the Middle East, her body seemed permanently programmed to be closer to the equator, where the sun was never an early riser.

Looking round, she took in the familiar honey-coloured bookshelves and the pair of upholstered chairs. Her clothes from last night lay on them in a pile—she had been too tired to put them away.

As her mind cleared, she recalled arriving back from Rome late the previous evening.

The hot and overcrowded commercial flight had stood on the tarmac at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci – Fiumicino airport for one-and-a-half hours before finally taking off. She had spent the time praying the delay had nothing to do with the authorities trying to find her and Ferguson. But eventually the aeroplane had started moving, after the captain had sheepishly explained that engineers had been replacing his damaged seat.

When the wheels were up at last, Ava breathed a sigh of relief to be finally out of Italy, and away from the mess Saxby was hopefully clearing up at the Basilica di San Clemente.

She got out of bed and threw on a set of clean clothes, recalling that Ferguson had come back from the airport the previous night straight to her house.

He had wanted to be ready and waiting when Saxby called.

She padded into the light-flooded kitchen, and flicked on the kettle. While the majority of the world woke to the bitter aroma of coffee, she still preferred to start the day with the more subtle smoky flavours of tea. It was a habit she had carried with her since childhood.

Glancing through into the sitting room, she saw Ferguson had not made it to his bed. He was asleep, fully clothed, on the long sofa.

She stared at his face for a moment, surprised by how familiar his features were becoming.

As she looked at him, she was suddenly aware it had been a long time since she had let anyone sleep on her sofa.

With a jolt, she realized it had also been three days since he asked her to give him the time to prove he could be useful.

She had assumed the three days would pass relatively swiftly, and then she would be free of him—and, more importantly, of Prince. That had been an offer she could not refuse.

But now, without even thinking about it, she knew that quietly, over the three days, she had come to reassess that view.

It was not just that he had been useful. He genuinely had. She had to give him full credit for thinking of consecration crosses, and for piecing together the Foundation’s freemasonic connections—whatever they might turn out to be. He was also the one who had got her thinking of the Mithraic
taurobolium
, and who had kept her focused after Drewitt’s murder. She was finding it very useful to have intelligent company around. He helped her think more clearly.

But beyond that, she had also become aware that he had his own personal reasons for wanting to remain involved, and she needed to take those into account, too. He had begun to talk animatedly about what was happening, and it was plain he was getting in as deep as she was. Although his official role was as Prince’s eyes and ears, she could clearly see he was now motivated by something stronger—more personal.

No doubt he still wanted to recover the Ark, and perhaps also the Menorah for the political reasons he had expressed to her back on the airfield in Qatar on that first day. But he now seemed to have a deeper, more personal interest, too. Having seen what Malchus’s thugs had done to Lord Drewitt, and after being at the receiving end of Malchus’s brutality in Rome, he now gave all the indications of also having a few scores he wanted to settle himself.

All in all, she concluded, if he wanted to stay around and see this through, she was not going to object.

The kettle shut off with a click, breaking her thoughts.

Heading back into the hallway, she saw a free London tabloid newspaper had been pushed through the letterbox, and now lay on the Turkish rug covering her dark wooden hall floor.

A photograph of General Danquah stared up from the bottom of its front page.

Curious, she picked up the paper and took it back into the kitchen, where she spread it out onto the dark granite counter.

The headline read simply:

DANQUAH BESET BY TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES

She scanned the article with mounting curiosity.

It appeared that around the time she had been sitting on the tarmac in Rome last night, the Somali authorities had been turning General Danquah’s presidential flight away from Mogadishu’s revamped Aden Adde airport, citing irregularities in the filing of his flight plan. It seemed he had been forced to turn around mid-air and fly home again without ever touching Somali soil.

Is that what Saxby had wanted her to see, she wondered, when he told her to keep an eye on the story?

Had the Templars somehow used their influence to foil Danquah’s lethal shopping spree?

Perhaps it was, she mused. It would certainly be consistent with De Molay’s cryptic assertion that the Templars existed to make the world a safer place.

So was that what they did, she wondered? Wield their influence to pull strings from behind the scenes?

If so, she was not sure it made them an organization she wanted to be associated with. Few people would mourn the end of an African dictator’s arms-buying trip. But it left open many questions about what else they may be involved in. Politics? Diplomacy? Finance? The legal system?

If they were some sort of self-appointed vigilante force, then who was to say that everything they did was for the common good? And who stopped them if they got it wrong?

She thought of the gossipy Roman poet Juvenal, whose thorny question about those in power was still as relevant as it had been two thousand years ago—
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes
? But who shall guard the guards?

Checking her watch, she calculated it was 7:15 a.m. in Rome—an hour ahead of London—so it would be fine to call Saxby. She picked up her phone off the counter, found his number, and dialled.

He answered almost immediately.

“So General Danquah didn’t make it after all?” she noted.

“Ah, you saw that.” Saxby sounded pleased. “It seems a busybody Somali airport official spotted one of the questions on the General’s flight plan had been incorrectly filled in. Something to do with the wake turbulence category of the aircraft and whether it had a heavy, medium, or light maximum take-off weight.” He paused. “I don’t understand all the ins-and-outs myself. But it seems these details are vital, and the Somalis are very strict with their paperwork apparently.”

“Don’t tell me,” Ava hazarded a guess, “the long arm of the Foundation even extends to air traffic control in Mogadishu?”

“Something like that,” There was now a more serious tone in his voice. “What’s the point of power if you don’t use it for your aims?” He paused. “I should be back in London later today. I’ll call.”

With that, the line went dead.

Ava put the phone back down onto the counter, and took a sip of tea.

If what Saxby had said was true, then the Templars were clearly an Order with extraordinary reach.

Taking a bite of a shiny red apple from the polished wooden fruit bowl, she was suddenly distracted by a flurry of sharp clicking sounds.

She cocked her head to listen.

It was coming in bursts, and sounded weak and tinny, as if it was being made by a cheap mechanical toy.

It stopped for a moment. Then it started again.

As she listened, trying to focus in its source, she was surprised to realize it was coming from the phone she had just hung up and put onto the counter.

Intrigued, she stepped towards it, and could now clearly hear its small speaker relaying the clicking noises of what sounded like someone typing in short bursts.

Baffled, she picked it up, and was surprised to see the screen was not locked, but fully awake and moving, displaying a live feed of Prince’s head and shoulders.

The tall American was sitting at her laptop, obviously unaware of the real-time video stream beaming direct from her web-camera to Ava’s phone.

Ava looked closely at the image moving slowly on her phone’s screen, aware something about it was not quite right.

She stared at it long and hard, before realizing it was not the image of Prince that was wrong, but what her screen was displaying. Or rather, what it was not displaying, because she could not see the normal inset box showing the corresponding image of her that was being simultaneously beamed to Prince. That was standard on her video app.

Disconcerted, she put down her cup of tea and tapped the screen to pull up some options, but nothing happened. It continued to stream the video of Prince.

Perplexed, she hit the round home button to close the app down.

It made no difference. The image of Prince remained firmly on the screen, with Prince seemingly wholly unaware Ava was watching her.

Confused at why she was seeing a picture of Prince at all, Ava stared at the screen, bewildered how her phone came to be connected to the camera on Prince’s laptop.

She had never accepted any requests to add Prince as a contact, and she had never even called Prince from her phone, let alone set her up in the address book. Even if she had jogged the phone when putting it down after her call with Saxby, or even if it had malfunctioned and randomly dialled someone from its address book, there was no way it could have found Prince, because Prince’s details were simply not in her phone, in any form.

At that moment Prince looked up into her laptop’s camera.

Her hard blue eyes were staring directly at Ava.

Ava flinched involuntarily, embarrassed by the unexpected eye contact. She had no idea how she would explain this.

But it never happened. Prince did not bat an eyelid, but merely continued typing and peering at her own screen with a slightly irritated expression. She seemed puzzled by something.

“What the ... ?” the American muttered. “Can’t they get anything right?” She tapped a key on her laptop, and the picture on Ava’s phone flickered then disappeared, only to be replaced with a live image of Ava that appeared to be streaming from her phone’s camera. A moment later, the screen blacked out, and the live feed of Prince returned.

“Christ,” she heard Prince mutter in irritation, frowning at her laptop’s screen. “What’s wrong with this thing?” She furrowed her eyebrows, clearly still unaware Ava was watching her. “How hard can it be?” She sighed in exasperation. “I said I want to see
her
, not me.”

Ava again heard the sound of a key being struck forcefully. Then the image and sound cut out, leaving her phone screen completely black.

She reeled.

Had she heard right?

She felt a flush of indignation.

Prince was watching her?

Her mind whirring with the new information, she looked on with incredulity as the phone’s black screen was replaced by a scrolling list of file names—line after line of white text flashing across the background.

It looked like the phone was dumping some kind of activity log. She had seen her computer do it before. But never her phone.

The titles of the files in the data dump were composed of six-digit followed by four-digit sequences, which she immediately recognized were sequential date and time stamps. From the .mov extensions at the end of the file names, it was immediately apparent they were video files.

As the list finished scrolling, a confirmation message appeared:

> GV5.SYS - ADDRESS D48S8J59

> PHYSICAL TRANSMISSION DUMP COMPLETE

> END TRANSMISSION LOG

> TRANSMIT OKAY

Ava felt the familiar hot prickle of adrenaline.

What on earth?

Had these files been sent? From her phone?

She put her finger onto the screen and swiped downwards, scrolling back up to the top. As the list sped backwards to the beginning, she was amazed to see there were over a hundred files.

They were in accurate date and time order, and as she arrived at the top of the list, she was stunned to see the date of the earliest file.

She looked at it more closely, frowning.

It couldn’t be.

But there was no doubting it. There it was, unmistakable, in black and white.

The first file was dated the night she had arrived back in England from Dubai after the auction fiasco at the Burj al-Arab.

The night she had met DeVere and Prince at Legoland

Incensed, she tapped one of the files.

The video panel opened, and began to play.

The picture on the screen showed an indistinct expanse of white. But she recognized the voice immediately. It was hers.

“
It
’
s the obverse, or front, of a papal bull. In the olden days, the Vatican sent riders all over Christendom with written orders and letters from the pope. The most important documents were called
‘
bulls
’
.
”

She recalled the conversation immediately. It had been in her house—the night Drewitt sent her the photographs of the medal. She had been explaining the significance of the images to Ferguson.

As the video continued, she heard his voice reply.

“
Like the animal?
”