The Sacred Scroll (39 page)

‘What riches?’ asked Marlow; but he’d already guessed the truth.

‘Dandolo ordered him to arrange things at his burial. He was to be buried’ – she consulted her notes – ‘
with a certain box, with its key, and a tablet of clay
. These were to be secreted about his person, concealed in his robes, without anyone else knowing.’

‘That would have been difficult,’ said Marlow. ‘Dandolo
must have invested Frid with the authority to oversee the burial. That way, he would have had total control of it.’

‘Everything was buried with him, in accordance with his instructions,’ Graves went on, ‘and the funeral took place on’ – again she consulted the papers she was holding – ‘what looks like 25 June 1205, in Constantinople.
The doge was buried, again according to his instructions, in the aisle of Hagia Irina. Though the funeral was one of great ceremony, the grave was to be covered over, unmarked. Everyone approved of this as a mark of the doge’s great charity, piety and modesty
.’ She looked up. ‘
In the doge’s hand lies the treasure I urge you to seek.
’

She fell silent.

‘Falls into place,’ said Marlow.

‘Yes.’

‘But no one knows where anything, other than the key, is now. The key was found by Adkins and his team, and taken from them.’

‘But they can’t have found the box or the tablet,’ said Marlow.

‘No.’

‘So where are they?’

All three of them fell silent again.

‘Can you make anything of the code yet?’ asked Lopez.

Graves shook her head. ‘The code will take a while.’

‘You’ve done well so far,’ said Marlow. ‘Keep on it.’

Lopez thought, what if the others – the people who have the original – get there first? His stomach grew hollow, but he didn’t dare level with his colleagues. All he could do was pray. There was something else. Marlow knew he was good with numerals. Why hadn’t he been asked to collaborate?

‘And the other writing? The stuff in Old Norse?’ Marlow continued.

‘It
is
Old Norse – you were right. It was penned by a kinsman of Frid’s – someone who knew how to write, but only just – after Frid’s death. It says he doesn’t understand the Latin, but he’s preserving the document, as it must be important, since Frid killed the scribe he dictated it to as soon as the job was finished.’

‘Let’s get on with the rest,’ said Marlow. ‘Leon, get back to INTERSEC. Trace whoever sent this to you. And – give this priority – do a search: museums and specialist antique dealers worldwide. We need to find that box.’

‘OK,’ said Lopez, happy to be away from them. All he wanted was for this nightmare to be over.

Marlow looked troubled after Lopez had gone, and Graves asked him why.

He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing. But Leon and I go back a long way – there was a bad business in Paris and I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for him. But he’s holding something back. I can feel it.’

Graves shrugged. ‘I think he’s OK. He wouldn’t go out on a limb.’

‘Hmn.’

‘He won’t pick up that you didn’t ask his help with the code?’

‘Better that than him knowing what it is before we’re sure he’s solid. And what can he do? He knows he’s covered,’ said Marlow. ‘And he has no copy.’ A moment’s pause. ‘We need that box.’

‘You think it still contains the tablet?’

‘We can’t assume that it doesn’t. We need to locate it fast, before another Dandolo does.’

Marlow thought again about the Yale experts’ failure to translate Adhemar’s ‘scroll’.‘Any further input from Dr de Montferrat?’ Graves asked, just a trace of acid in her voice. ‘You haven’t mentioned her recently.’

Something flashed across Marlow’s eyes before he answered. ‘No progress. The new psychologist is good. Dr Shukman. She seems hopeful. But we’ve been there before.’

‘Good luck with that.’

‘Get started on this code right away. I’ll be back to check progress after I’ve staved off Dick Hudson.’

‘On to us again?’

‘Fire down my neck.’

Graves tapped the papers in front of her. ‘I’m on it.’

Marlow left her and, still troubled, made his way down to the street. But, once there, the direction he took wasn’t the one which led to INTERSEC.

Berlin, the Present

It was just after dawn, but the newspapers were already neatly laid out on Adler’s office desk, all the main European ones. He’d already seen the ones from Russia, India and China online.

Translations into German were appended wherever necessary. The papers from the US and South America would come later. And of course the news had already been slotted into the regular newscasts on his websites, and TV and radio stations worldwide.

He picked up the first paper, a copy of
Die Welt
so crisp he almost imagined the wretched Frau Müller ironed the things for him.

He thought about her briefly. Despite all her efforts, she really was getting too old and scrawny to be good for his company’s image. He’d have to remember to fire her.

He read the headline on the first page of the business section with satisfaction:

MAXTEL OUSTS RIVALS IN KEY NICHES IN RUSSIAN, INDIAN AND CHINESE MEDIA AND ONLINE SECTORS. EYES FIXED ON BRAZIL AND IRAN.

The investment had paid off. The creditors were off his case. They weren’t yet paid, and Adler knew his back would still be against the wall until they were, but it was time he threw his hat into the ring. It would send a warning to those who needed one, who needed to recognize this for what it was – a declaration of war.

Its downside was that he was gambling with chips he didn’t yet have: everything depended on getting the one thing he needed to place him in full control.

India wasn’t hard. China and Russia would be tough to bring to heel. But there were powerful billionaire oligarchs in all three countries now, not just in Russia; not to mention the politicians and the hardened criminals.

But he’d start with the oligarchs.

China was paramount, with its economic stranglehold on the West.

Adler squared his shoulders at the prospect. He was optimistic. He was confident that those who’d benefited from MAXPHIL’s investment in the cultural and academic world would show their gratitude by coming up with a translation of the key part of the document, which Trotter and Sparkes had lifted from the Swedish girl, within the twenty-four hours he’d given them. These days, universities were more and more dependent on private charitable trusts for funding. They’d hate it if that money were withdrawn.

Adler was pleased that Annika Lundquist had left such a clear ethernet trail when she attempted to make contact with INTERSEC. His people hadn’t been able to ascertain precisely with whom, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that the information had arrived in
time for him to intercept her material, and the material looked promising. His people had assured him that she’d been able to pass nothing on, and he could trust his people. They knew what would happen if he found they had let him down.

But they’d done well already. The Latin part of the document was enough to be getting on with. So, there was a box, and the box contained the tablet, and the box was at least nine hundred years old. He was sure, now, that his rivals didn’t have it, so the trail in that direction was cold.

Adler shrugged to himself. No matter. There were other directions to take. And he’d been getting ever more favourable reports from New York.

It was simply a question of waiting for the prey to enter the trap. And that wouldn’t take long now.

New York City, the Present

Marlow woke in the middle of the night.

He was back at his own apartment. He had left Su-Lin late the previous evening.

They had made love with their usual hunger; but when it was over, something prompted him not to stay till morning. She’d been disappointed, had sulked a little after she had tried, and failed, to pull him back to her bed.

‘It’s your safety I have in mind. I don’t want to leave you.’

‘Then don’t. I’m safe with you.’

‘The more I visit you here, the higher the risk. Someone always notices in the end.’

‘Then let’s move – take me somewhere else. I can’t be without you.’

But there was something cornered in his mind. Something he found it difficult to deny. He knew he couldn’t hold it off for ever. His professionalism, everything he stood for, told him that. But he couldn’t accept it.

At first, when he woke, he thought he was back in the Paris flat, but then the more familiar, reassuring surroundings asserted themselves. This was the real thing. This was home, as far as he had anywhere he could call home.

He got up and struggled to remember what it was that had awakened him.

But this was work. Nothing to do with his other misgivings, he knew that. Something to do with what he should be concentrating on. It turned on a question he’d overlooked, or which hadn’t seemed important at the time.

He showered and dressed abstractedly, and was going through the motions of making coffee when it came to him. He looked at the clock on the oven. Four a.m. It would be 10 a.m. in Istanbul.

He hesitated between email and calling, but he needed to talk, to describe, and get an immediate response. The blue phone, the safe line, was in his living-room, concealed in a compartment built into the bookshelves. He made for it, dialled a number, and waited as he listened to the series of clicks which preceded his connection to INTERSEC’s switchboard.

‘Marlow,’ he said when he was through. ‘Section 15. Ultra-secure.’

Another moment while his voice pattern was verified.

‘How may I help you?’ said the preppy voice at the other end.

‘Detective Major Haki, Istanbul.’

More clicks, then a profound silence. Seconds later, the ring tone. Three times, then the phone at the other end was picked up. A moment’s further silence for the security check at the Turkish end. Then Haki’s voice, genial as ever: ‘Hello, Jack.’

‘I want you to do something for me, Cemil.’

‘I rather gathered this wasn’t a social call. What time must it be where you are?’

‘The gloves. The gloves you found at the dig. The ones your Forensics said were a hundred years old.’

‘Yes. I remember them. They’re still in our lab.’

‘I want you to get them back to Forensics. Urgently. I want them to go to work on the gloves. Anything they can pick up. Traces on them, DNA –’

‘That’d be a very long shot.’

‘Never mind. Mineral traces, anything they might have touched, where they might have come from.’

‘I’ll get them to try. After a century, it’ll put them on their mettle to find anything at all.’

‘Get them to work fast.’

‘Front of the queue. Now.’

Marlow, all thought of sleep shaken from him, went down to the basement to collect his car.

Room 55 was deserted, the desks and tables clear. Lopez hadn’t left anything for prying eyes to see, but there was a message on Marlow’s terminal:

There aren’t many iron boxes the right size and period left in the world today. Iron rusts and rots with time, unless it is kept in optimum conditions. Those that are left fetch high prices on the market. One located in the British Museum, London, another was bought by the Getty Foundation three years ago. There’s a third in the Hermitage, and a fourth in a private collection in Lausanne, which I’ve been able to access. The fifth is in Le Clos Lucé at Amboise, in France. The problem is that all have provenances which seem watertight, completely reliable, and none has anything which fits in with what we’re looking for.

The dealers are a little more promising. One example in particular, which was bought from an unknown vendor by Lightoller and
Steeples of Madison Avenue in 1946 and resold by them at auction a year or so later. I’ve yet to trace what happened to it, but although L&S closed down in 1960, some of their transactions may still be on record at the Internal Revenue Service. Unlikely they’ve been transferred to the IRS computer centre in Maryland, so they may still exist in the vaults in Washington. Report on this follows.

There was a space, before Lopez’s narrative continued, the time showing five hours later than his first entry.

Found it. IRS very helpful and there were fully descriptive invoices still on file for several items. This is ours: Iron box, 10 centimetres by eight, five centimetres deep, locked, key missing. Box had never been opened. Finely chased, decorated and inscribed. Probably French origin, date estimated: last quarter of eleventh century. L&S made a good profit on it, by the look of things. Their payment for it recorded but no trace of what happened to it or who might have picked it up. Was to have been drawn on Morgan’s in New York, so will follow up. No other information. Investigation ongoing. Will send copy of original documentation soonest.

Marlow closed the message and dragged it to a safe file. It would auto-delete in twenty-four hours if he didn’t countermand.

Marlow scented blood, but scenting it was a long way from tasting it.

Haki’s return call came in the early evening.

‘That was fast.’

‘We’re up to date here,’ said Haki. ‘CIA funded. They like to keep us chaps on the front line well equipped.’

Marlow didn’t smile. If Turkey ceased to be a secular state, the West would have to brace itself. Fleetingly, he thought of the Ottoman empire. How the Turkish emperors had once held sway as far west as the gates of Vienna. That had been in the seventeenth century. A floodtide which Dandolo’s action in Constantinople, four hundred years earlier than that, had unleashed.

‘What have you got for me?’

‘Verbal or shall I send?’

‘Verbal.’

‘Gist then. Full technical to Section 15, immediate.’

‘That’d be good.’

‘OK.’ Haki paused briefly, and over the line Marlow heard paper crackle. ‘Here it is,’ Haki went on. ‘The gloves were made in Germany, possibly Austro-Hungary, before 1914, but they’re not much older than that. Very little material on them, after all this time, but there
are
traces of sand, and earth, of course – and what could be baked clay, a minute quantity, on the right and left thumb and index fingertips. There are also traces of what could be rust – red iron oxide – but they’re microscopic particles, and
we’ll have to do further tests. Our people found them on the palms and the inner parts of the fingers and thumbs of both gloves.’