The Black Madonna (31 page)

When he was a child, growing up in Cape Town, Marcus Frey had had a mental image of the White Cliffs of Dover. He had heard the sentimental old Second World War song played on the sort of
nostalgia
radio programmes his mother and her friends were fond of. He had imagined them as a towering, glacial, ivory wall surmounted by giant cartoon bluebirds.

Only now, as he watched the cliffs, in reality a medium-height green-flecked truncated chalk ridge much like the one on the French coast facing, did it strike him as odd that for all his years as an adult in England he had never actually seen them before.

Air travel and the Channel Tunnel had done away with much of the need for the old-fashioned ferry business. Yet it still survived, in fact did a roaring trade, not least in day-trippers who flocked to France and Belgium to buy cheap booze and cigarettes. It was also by far the softer option for anyone anxious to avoid the most
rigorous
immigration controls.

The big sign in white on blue declared UK BORDER but it seemed to Marcus the woman in the glass box paid little heed to the
documents
handed over through the window of the Espace as they rolled off the P&O Calais to Dover ferry. She passed them before some sort of scanner, but clearly no alarm bells had been set ringing. ‘
Remember
to drive on the left –
tenez la gauche
,’ was her only comment, the latter half in execrable French, as she waved them on their way.

Yes, Marcus felt like shouting at her, and have a nice day
yourself
, you’ve just let one of the world’s most wanted terrorists into the country. He didn’t, of course. He couldn’t. Because they had only handed over one passport, his, plus apparently plausible-looking – who knew, maybe even legitimate – French identity cards for his two companions. No longer masked and in black, but wearing freshly pressed jeans and checked shirts they did a fair impression of
itinerant
jobbing waiters from Marseille of distant Algerian origin. For all Marcus knew, maybe that was even what they were.

Their leader, the one Nazreem now also referred to as ‘al-Saladin’ was travelling separately with her. On a bus, as it turned out. On another ferry. From another port. On God only knew what
passport
. What he had been promised, grimly, and had no reason to disbelieve, was that if either of them gave so much as a signal to the immigration or customs officials that they were travelling under duress or that their companions were anything other than bosom buddies, then the other would not reach London alive.

What would have happened if they had been stopped by
immigration
or customs, if their ID cards had been queried, Marcus did not dare to think. As far as he knew they had not risked bringing firearms into the country, but they had made it perfectly clear to Marcus that each carried a set of knives that no customs official could object to as tools of the trade for French chefs working in London: Sabatier cooks’ knives, sharp enough to easily sever a head.

It seemed their captors had done their homework and calculated the risk accurately. Watching the queues of vehicles as two ferries docked within minutes of each other, Marcus had the impression that scarcely one car in a hundred was stopped and it was invariably that of a Brit, suspected of smuggling cigarettes.

As the vehicle swung out of the Western Harbour area and onto the main road, his two companions smiled for the first time in
Marcus’s
short and brutal acquaintance with them, and hit their palms in the air in a wholly un-Islamic ‘high five’. In so doing the car veered almost automatically onto the right side of the road and for a moment it looked as if the driver was going to leave it there, until an abrupt blast on a whistle from a policeman on points duty at the harbour exit corrected them. The constable held out his arm, but then merely pointed them back onto the left with a shake of his head and a steely frown.

The driver let out a sudden sigh of relief and then, as the vehicle began the long climb up the hill away from the coast, caught
Marcus’s
eye in his rear-view mirror.

‘Smile,’ he said. ‘Be happy.’

And then, as if an afterthought: ‘Now maybe you live.’

Great, thought Marcus. He really didn’t like the ‘maybe’.

Edward Mansfield was not impressed. In his experience men who said they represented ‘government security forces’ were little more than armed villains. Men who were ready to die for their flag and country were usually willing to trample all over anybody else’s.

He understood that there had always been warrior cultures; he just happened to prefer those that belonged to the distant past rather than the present. He had seen what the US army in the name of peace, democracy and civilisation had done for the treasures of Iraq, seen the tank treads scored into the ancient pavements of Babylon, watched on television as armed men trashed the remnants of the world’s oldest civilisation, in the name of the modern variation. He was decidedly not impressed.

‘I’m afraid,’ said Sebastian Delahaye, seated in front of him in his little office in the back corridors of the museum, ‘that it’s imperative, a genuine matter of national security.’

‘I don’t see what the fuss is about. Dr Hashrawi merely entrusted me with some personal items, academic material, while she was travelling. I don’t see any reason why she should not simply come in here and pick it up. It has been entrusted to my care, and I don’t care to abuse that trust.’

Delahaye smiled, his biggest ‘believe me, it’s all for the best’ smile. God, these old buggers could be difficult.

‘We have reason to believe that Ms … that Dr Hashrawi is in some personal difficulty. How shall I put it – that she may be being blackmailed?’

‘Blackmailed? Over what? I don’t understand.’

Delahaye sighed, a practised, well-meaning sigh.

‘I understand, Dr Mansfield. It’s just that this is somewhat
delicate
. We’re not asking a great deal of you. Merely that when she calls in advance to arrange to pick up this bag she left with you, that you ask her to come in at a specific time, in the evening, after most of the museum has closed. You can explain that you are out – at a
conference or something – the rest of the day, but that you will be happy to see her for a coffee. At the bar in the Great Court.’

‘But that’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t she come straight here, to my office, like she usually does? I don’t want to sit out there, like some bloody tourist.’

‘Believe me, I think Dr Hashrawi will prefer it. To be honest I think she may even insist that you meet somewhere more open, rather than in a, if you’ll pardon my saying so, rather enclosed space like this.’ He looked around him at the cramped, book-lined office.

‘You make it all sound so terribly cloak-and-dagger. If it’s so important to national security why are you leaving it here at all,’ he pointed to the brightly-coloured padlock-zipped nylon bag lying next to the wastepaper basket in the corner. ‘It seems there’s no way for me to prevent you doing anything you want to.’

Delahaye swung his head round. He had not actually asked to see the object in question and found it almost bizarrely amusing that this cheap nylon ‘made in China’ bag contained something so sought after. He was sorely tempted to open it, but it would be
difficult
to do so without obviously tampering with the padlock. And after all, if it was really only some historical relic, he had very little interest. His sole interest in the thing was using it as bait.

‘Because,’ he resumed, ‘she is expecting – the people with her are expecting – it to be with you.’

Mansfield looked at him askance.

‘This isn’t dangerous, is it? You’re not asking me to stick my neck out to catch some criminals, mafia-types or something.’

‘I can assure you,’ Delahaye told him, ‘that we will do everything possible to make sure that there are no problems. All you have to do is meet with Dr Hashrawi and hand over the bag as arranged. It should take no more than a couple of minutes and you can
disappear
back to your office as soon as you like.’

Mansfield harrumphed. ‘Well, I don’t know, I suppose so. She hasn’t done anything wrong, has she? I mean, you’re not going to arrest her or anything, just because she’s Palestinian?’

Delahaye pulled out another from his repertoire of smiles for appeasing civilians, this time his very best ‘wouldn’t even think of it, don’t you worry about a thing’ smile: ‘As far as we are concerned, Dr Mansfield, your colleague has done nothing wrong whatsoever. Believe me, we are simply trying to help her out.’

‘So when is this all going to happen? She’s due to call me, you said.’

‘We believe so. It could be any time, any time at all, but almost certainly within the next forty-eight hours. All you have to do is let us know straight away, and ask her to come in around five fifty-five in the evening.’

‘But, if it is in the next forty-eight hours, the Great Court closes at six p.m. from Sunday to Wednesday.’

‘Like I said, we only expect it to take a couple of minutes and it will be easier if the museum is almost empty.’

Delahaye walked down the steps feeling something like remotely in control of the situation once again. ‘Remotely’ being the operative word if, thank God, no longer as remotely as it had been. Squaring Mansfield had been the last little element. Once it had been
established
that the ridiculous artefact that was drawing his quarry as surely as a wasp to a honeypot was at the British Museum, it had not taken a minute to find out which of the institution’s resident ‘keepers’ was most likely to be an acquaintance of Nazreem Hashrawi. Edward Mansfield was a regular attendee at conferences in Cairo.

And now Hashrawi was back on British soil and so – far more importantly for the security community and the potential career advancement of one S. Delahaye in particular – was the man who until now had been nothing more than a video nasty, the man who called himself ‘Son of Saladin’. If everything went according to plan, his salad days were about to be well and truly over.

Rashid Hussein al-Samarri, as it said on the Saddam-era Iraqi
identity
card he had not used for years, had entered the United Kingdom at eleven forty-five using a high-quality forged identity card under the name Abdul Youssef Bezier, latterly of Marseille, currently of Lille,
département du Nord
, on a coach sightseeing-excursion to
Canterbury
, crossing the channel on the ten-thirty a.m. (French time) Eurotunnel shuttle departure from Calais to Folkestone. Amongst the other passengers on board the coach was a Ms Nazreem Pascale Hashrawi travelling on a French (non-resident) passport.

The nutty professor had come through Calais on the P&O ferry in a black Renault Espace, accompanied by two French nationals of Algerian descent. So they were keeping them apart. It made sense. It made sense primarily if Frey and Hashrawi were reluctant
collaborators
, which according to the ‘Box’ man they almost certainly were.

There were, to say the least, elements of the operation Delahaye
had never been happy with and he still wasn’t. For a start, he had not got his head around the significance of the ‘archaeological thing’. The idea that people were risking their lives for what might or might not be some statue of the Virgin Mary was beyond his
comprehension
. This was the twenty-first century for Christ’s sake. The only Virgin Mary Seb Delahaye had ever known had been one of his
sister’s
friends who came round to play on Saturdays. And that name hadn’t stuck long.

Mr so-called Saladin on the other hand was a prize he sorely coveted. There were innumerable intelligence reports positively linking him to the beheadings of hostages, first in the early days of the occupation of Iraq, and latterly in the Gaza Strip where he was believed to have been amongst the most insidious influences on the hardline anti-negotiating elements within Hamas. There was also more than enough reason to want to question him in connection with both the London and Madrid bombings, but in truth the only real evidence trail had led to one of his associates, the one whose body parts had ended up split between an Israeli border post and a Bavarian monastery.

The tangential Madrid connection had been one of the reasons Delahaye had been unwilling to involve Spanish security forces. The temptation to grab the man for themselves would almost certainly have been too much for them, and the last thing anyone wanted – in particular the Americans – was for a player like ‘Saladin’ to end up slipping through a wide net because of insufficient evidence to hold up in a court of law. The transatlantic ‘cousins’ idea of a future for Mr al-Samarri was at the very best an orange jumpsuit and a piece of paper that said ‘take me to Cuba’ or wherever they now substituted for Guantanamo Bay. For that reason, even here in Britain, it was important to get Mr Saladin to blot his copybook in public. One excuse, that was all Delahaye needed.

As he left the museum gates on Great Russell Street he stopped and looked up at the imposing portico of the great building. Where he was standing was a favourite spot for tourists to take pictures of Sir Robert Smirke’s masterpiece of the Greek Revival movement. But Sebastian Delahaye was not admiring the architecture. He was looking at the roof.

He had gone fishing and hooked a shark. Now he had played him back into his own swimming pool. It was a case of eat or be eaten.

The sun was setting slowly over the Victorian rooftops of Bloomsbury as the black Mercedes pulled up at one of the few parking meters within walking distance of the British Museum. Nazreem had her heart in her mouth as they approached the great steps. She had phoned Ed Mansfield who said he would be delighted to see her, and yes, of course, her bag was still where she left it. She almost detected a slight nervousness to his voice, but realised it was probably down to the man’s foolish and ill-disguised infatuation. He was just
plucking
up the courage to ask her out. She had read that in his face the last time she had seen him. Now she wished she could have hinted he had a whole lot more to worry about.

The man by her side, who had listened to every word she said over the phone was the same man who had tailed her from
Heathrow
she had realised when he and two burly thugs had collected her, al-Saladin and a third bodyguard who had travelled on the coach from France with them, at a car park on the outskirts of Canterbury and supplied them with firearms. Now he was telling her to make sure the meeting was somewhere public, somewhere open. Saladin was not stupid enough to walk into some tight corner like a blind man. But she need not have worried:

‘How about a cup of coffee in the Great Court,’ Mansfield was saying. ‘Upstairs round the back of the old Reading Room. It’s very pleasant and quite quiet in the early evening, when most of the
tourists
have gone.’ Next to her, Barani smiled his agreement. Public and open, he signalled to the spiritual leader he stood in awe of, even when the man was dressed as now so untypically in a cheap French business suit.

But at the entrance to the museum itself, she was relieved at last to see Marcus emerge from the Renault Espace, even if in the company of the two men she had feared at the slightest provocation would have killed him. He smiled, and she was happy to note there was still a genuine warmth in it. Over the past twenty-four hours, since
she had witnessed three brutal murders in the space of an hour, her mind had been in turmoil. The risks she had taken were too great. Not too great for her, but too great for him. He thought she had lied to him, while she had told herself she had been trying to protect him, but the outcome had been the same.

Saladin took her firmly, but forcefully, by the arm and walked up the steps to where Marcus and his minders waited. Then together, leaving Barani and his men outside on the steps, they walked into the echoing marble foyer. On either side people were pouring out of the galleries. The main part of the museum was closing. Even the Great Court would close at six p.m. to all but reserved diners in the restaurant. They walked through the great double doors that opened onto the most grandiose space in London.

Above their heads the great soaring tessellated glass roof with its myriad triangular panes let in the last rose-tinged vestiges of the dying daylight to cast a surreal shadow network across the
majestic
pale limestone walls. From one corner a giant elongated stone head from Easter Island looked at them with its blind almond eyes, from another the great stone lion from the Mausoleum of
Halicarnassus
. And at its heart was a circular structure into which the great glass roof folded, a building within a building that had at least as much historical import as any of the museum’s exhibits. This was the former Reading Room of the British Library, the repository of freely available learning in which Karl Marx had dreamt up the roots of what was to become one of the most oppressive social systems on earth. Amidst the relics of so many religions, here too the totem of another, the militant atheism of communism.

To Marcus all of this was – as ever – a source of constant wonder. To Saladin, as they climbed the steps that led to the Court Coffee Shop elevated behind the Reading Room, all of it was an irrelevance: heresy, apostasy and idolatry. There was no God but God. All others deserved destruction.

Edward Mansfield sat alone, at a table by the balcony looking down onto the rapidly emptying courtyard below. But for one or two bored-looking staff the café was deserted. All around the court
concealed
lighting had come on, turning the multi-paned roof above their heads into a gleaming celestial net that held the darkening sky with its handful of evening stars. From the Great Court the gleaming pristine Portland stone of the vast neoclassical gateway led into the
collections from Iran, Arabia and ancient Egypt. And yet, thought Marcus, could it be that the nondescript garish nylon bag that lay on the floor by Mansfield’s table contained an object as important at least as any wonder they contained?

‘My dear, Dr Hashrawi,’ said Mansfield, standing up as they approached. ‘How very, very nice to see you again. And are you going to introduce me to these gentlemen?’