The Sacred Scroll Read online

  ‘Exactly.’

  Marlow took this in then said urgently: ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Like I said, they were expecting you.’

  Marlow shook his head. His heart was hammering, despite himself. ‘Here goes.’

  Turning the steel box so that its opening was facing away from him, to deflect any booby-trap blast, he flipped the lid open. Inside, nestling on a bed of crimson velvet, lay the box. Next to it, fixed in a niche specially made to hold it, lay the key, familiar to them from the photographs they already had of it.

  ‘There could still be some kind of trap here,’ warned Graves.

  ‘We haven’t set anything off.’

  ‘Yet.’

  ‘We’ve got to take that risk.’ He looked at her. ‘You’d better back off. Kitchen should be far enough. There isn’t room enough in here for more than a small blast.’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’

  Marlow swung the steel box round again, so that its opening was facing him once more. Gingerly, he tried the lid of Adhemar’s box. It was locked. Cautiously, he lifted the key. Fitted it into the lock. He turned the key, and it moved as smoothly as if it were brand-new.

  There was a gentle click.

  Marlow lifted the lid.

  The box was empty.

  101

  Graves and Marlow looked at one another, thinking the same thought.

  ‘They’ve got it,’ said Graves.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘Finish deciphering that code.’

  ‘Nearly there,’ she said grimly.

  ‘Don’t forget that there’s still no indication that they’ve used the tablet.’

  ‘You think they haven’t figured that out?’ said Graves. ‘Adhemar’s mistake.’

  ‘It’s a possibility. We might still have a chance.’

  ‘Why do you think they defended an empty box so fiercely?’ asked Graves.

  ‘I don’t know. And why leave the key with it?’ replied Marlow. ‘To gain time? Or to mock us?’

  ‘That’d be an expensive kind of mockery,’ said Graves. ‘To waste four lives.’

  ‘We’re not dealing with the kind of person who’d regard that as any kind of waste,’ said Marlow grimly. ‘But if the idea was to buy time …’

  ‘The guys in the Zwinger and Dels factory didn’t know that what they were defending was worthless?’

  ‘They can’t have done.’

  ‘There’s another possibility,’ said Graves.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What if the tablet was never in the box?’

  ‘Something isn’t holding water,’ said Marlow. He stood up, reached for his jacket. ‘I’ll find out. Contact you again in four hours.’

  ‘No way I’ll have it deciphered by then.’

  ‘Short of a miracle,’ said Marlow.

  ‘Short of a miracle.’ Graves smiled tightly. ‘And you shouldn’t be going anywhere.’

  Marlow ignored that, but his cell-phone buzzed as he was leaving. Lopez.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘Urgently.’

  ‘There’s a coffeehouse on East 75th, near the Whitney. Can you meet me there?’

  ‘That’s close to INTERSEC. Is it secure?’

  ‘It’s the last place anyone will look. Eye of the storm.’

  Lopez was waiting for him, hunched over an untouched espresso. Lopez had planned this moment. He knew this was the unique opportunity he’d have to confess and – if Jack would listen – redeem himself at the same time.

  ‘What’ve you got?’ Marlow noticed that Lopez’s hands were sweating.

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you – and something I haven’t told you,’ he began.

  Marlow looked serious, but not threatening. ‘Shoot,’ he said.

  Lopez swallowed hard, and told him the whole story – about Annika Lundquist, the original Frid document, his visit to her apartment, and what he had found – and not found – there.

  Marlow listened in silence and, at the end, remained silent. Someone knew where they were and what they were after. Someone had been watching them and watching anyone who made contact with them. Lopez had blown cover badly.

  ‘Every action has its consequences,’ said Marlow at last. ‘The action you took should destroy you, you know.’

  ‘I was trying to –’

  ‘I know.’ Marlow paused. ‘The question is, what do we do about it?’

  ‘I know what I deserve.’

  ‘But I also know what you’ve done in the past – for the organization, and for me.’

  ‘I don’t expect that to count.’

  ‘You saved my life.’

  ‘That doesn’t buy me anything.’

  ‘It shouldn’t. You know the rules.’ Marlow paused again. ‘On the other hand, your action produced results – important ones. And if anyone else knows you stepped out of line, apart from the dead girl and me, they aren’t going to go running to Hudson with it.’

  ‘I hope.’

  ‘Whose interest would it be in?’

  Lopez looked up. ‘What do you mean?’ He was thinking of Mia and the kids. If he died. He hadn’t considered consequences thoroughly enough. Now he was at his friend’s mercy; and his friend was a professional.

  But Marlow had his own secrets. He too had been vulnerable, weak; and because of that, he would carry Lopez part of the way. He understood what Lopez had done, and why. The reasons behind his own actions were murkier. He snapped back. Some mistakes could be corrected. Some damage could be repaired.

  He looked at Lopez. ‘You’re lucky. For the moment you’re more useful alive than dead. You’re getting a second chance. Only one. Step out of line again and you know what will happen.’

  The tension in Lopez’s neck slackened and his head dipped like that of a man reprieved.

  Marlow broke the mood. ‘Time to bring you up to date.’ He looked round the room, checking it. Office people, preoccupied with keeping the machinery of business oiled. Preoccupied with their own lives. No one showing a hint of interest in them.

  ‘Listen carefully,’ he said. ‘There isn’t much time.’

  He told Lopez about the recovery of the box. ‘But we’re stuck on the code.’

  ‘That’s why I called you,’ said Lopez, playing his last card, but glad his friend had spared him before he had to play it.

  102

  In Room 55, Lopez unlocked his Mac and opened a series of encrypted files – boxes within boxes.

  ‘It’s Frid’s five-liner,’ he explained. ‘I knew it was a code based on numbers, and numbers are my field. Laura would have got there, I guess, in time, but I needed to try as well – I needed to redeem myself.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have had a copy,’ said Marlow. ‘Where did you get one? I had your copy deleted.’

  Lopez looked at Marlow. ‘We go back a ways, Jack. I already knew, more than you did, just how little time we had.’

  ‘I hope you’re going to make me grateful.’

  ‘You were right all along – the code’s like the one on the key. The difficulty, why Laura couldn’t get it immediately, is that whoever wrote it deliberately skewed its logic. Can’t have been Frid; we know he was illiterate, and we can reckon that he was innumerate too. But what matters is that I’ve recognized it.’

  Lopez adjusted his glasses. ‘The numbers here don’t correspond to the usual letters, but to their opposite number, if you like. And we’re talking about a version of Aramaic with a basic 22-letter alphabet, so there’s no single central letter. Look: kaph is letter number eleven, lamadh number twelve. Those are the two “central” letters.’

  ‘And the code?’

  ‘In the end, it’s simple. It’s another mirror-image of what it should be. The first letter of the alphabet here is given the value eleven instead of one, so the eleventh letter, kaph, its value is one, not eleven. In the second half of the alphabet, the last letter doesn’t have the value twenty-two, but twelve
, so it’s lamadh, the twelfth letter, that has the value twenty-two.’ Lopez looked up. ‘It’s skewed. But when you apply that to the numbers in Frid’s five-liner, you get this.’

  Lopez tapped in a series of instructions on his keyboard. The screen, which had been showing a cleaned-up version of the uncertain script on Frid’s document, now dissolved and resolved itself into a pattern – letters related to numbers, according to Lopez’s theory. The computer had transposed the letters into the Roman alphabet, and separated them into words, which Marlow recognized as the same dog-Latin that the clear-text part of the manuscript had been written in.

  In part, he could read it, but he couldn’t make sense of it alone.

  ‘Call Graves now,’ he said.

  She arrived within fifteen minutes. The five lines of code had rendered a short paragraph of text. She was able to translate it quickly.

  ‘If you were right, this may be a reprieve, of sorts,’ she replied. ‘I think this must be something Dandolo – or an aide other than Frid – encoded and copied down somewhere; the original is lost, I guess, but Frid must have had it, and copied it into his “will”, either as a safeguard or as a reference for his own future use – assuming he knew what it meant.’

  ‘You said something about a reprieve.’

  ‘Yes – the tablet wasn’t in the box – it never was.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is what it says.’ Graves cleared her throat. ‘“I, Enrico, Doge of Venice, Master of Constantinople and of the Great Tablet of Power, state that through the agency of my loyal and trusted servants, Father Leporo de Monteriggioni, and Frid Eyolfson, late of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard, am laid to rest in the Church of Saint Irina in the Great City, and that according to my inviolable instructions which are unalterable under pain of my curse, I am buried in my ducal robes, and that the Tablet shall remain where it last lay, in the grip of my right hand, to lie with me for ever, hidden from the sight of Man and God, its Power to cede to no successor.”’

  She looked up. Marlow remembered the doge, as he lay in the open tomb in Istanbul. He remembered the broken fingers of Dandolo’s right hand.

  ‘The box must have been taken by archaeologists. There were plenty of digs going on in the early twentieth century. They must have missed the key,’ Graves said. ‘The three artefacts were separated. The locked box, we now have. Whoever stole it from the auction already had the key –’

  ‘– which they took from Montserrat, Adkins and Taylor.’

  ‘But they can’t have found the tablet. Like us, they must have thought it was still in the locked box which Bishop Adhemar had made for it,’ added Marlow. ‘And there’s the question of the gloves Major Haki had dated for us – a hundred years old.’

  ‘The Germans had a lot of influence in Turkey around the First World War,’ said Graves. ‘And the Kaiser was a keen patron of archaeology. Several important finds were made at about that time in Turkey and Mesopotamia.’

  ‘Like the Gate of Ishtar,’ said Lopez.

  ‘Discovered by Robert Koldewey, who was an expert on ancient Mesopotamia,’ added Graves. ‘And the Gate of Ishtar is now in Berlin.’

  ‘I can throw some light on that,’ Lopez said. ‘You asked me to research the history of the box before it came into the hands of those New York dealers – Lightoller and Steeples.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The IRS came up with some stuff, remember? Nothing’s computerized or been put on any kind of electronic file, but there was an incomplete archive of Lightoller and Steeples’s transactions which went to the tax authorities after the business was wound up, and they let me access it. It contains more details. Apparently, Harvey Lightoller bought the box from someone called Aloysius Guttmann in Vienna in 1946.’

  ‘An Austrian?’

  ‘Or German. The name Guttmann may have been assumed anyway. There were a lot of senior SS and Gestapo trying to get away in the mid-1940s, turning precious objects which they’d either looted or requisitioned into cash to pay the fare to South America and set them up in new lives.’ Lopez paused. ‘This Guttmann disappeared without trace, but he may have been one of the three unidentified fatalities of a train crash between Vienna and Zurich which occurred a couple of days after the transaction. There was also a note in the paperwork giving the address of a firm of lawyers in Bern. It’s long gone out of business, but its records are intact. The firm was wound up after the senior partner, Anton Hoffmann, was shot dead by an intruder at his offices in 1949. That’s all a matter of record, it was just a question of following it up.’

  ‘But it still brings us to a dead end,’ said Marlow. ‘The German connection’s a long shot, though it’s worth pursuing. Too many “maybes”, Leon.’

  ‘Not necessarily. It seems from the 1949 Bern police reports that the intruder who killed Hoffmann wasn’t after the cash in the safe. But Hoffmann had certain connections, and papers in his keeping may have compromised them. Some of the papers he passed on to, let’s say, confidential clients with special interests in them. But he kept copies, as a kind of insurance.’

  ‘Which was bad news for him in the end,’ said Marlow.

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘We’ve still got to find the tablet,’ said Graves.

  ‘I wonder if Robert Koldewey took it,’ Marlow said, thinking of the gloves. ‘I wonder if he knew what it was.’

  ‘Which would mean that it could have ended up where?’

  ‘In Berlin.’

  ‘There’s a lead I can follow,’ said Lopez after a moment’s thought.

  ‘Where does it go?’ asked Marlow.

  ‘Can’t say yet, but if I’m right, it comes very close to home.’

  103

  Berlin, the Present

  Now? Now they were going to withdraw support? Now, when he was so close to his goal?

  ‘I have told you repeatedly,’ he said to the three men once again assembled before him, but this time in the windowless conference room on the eighteenth floor of MAXTEL’s office building in Berlin, ‘this is not the moment.’

  ‘Our principals are not happy,’ said Vijay Mehta. ‘We have all invested deeply in your project because of our long association with you. It is time to cut our losses.’

  Rolf Adler held the Indian’s eyes for a moment before turning to the others. Both Guang Chien and Sergei Kutusov returned his gaze steadily, hard-eyed.

  ‘By pulling out now, you risk losing everything we have worked for,’ said Adler. ‘Almost within our grasp is the instrument which will give us total control. No market fluctuations, no wars – nothing – can possibly affect us again; and natural disasters can be predicted with accuracy, their consequences planned for in advance.’

  ‘The key word in that little speech is “almost”,’ said Chien.

  ‘After all, we have only ever had your word,’ added Kutuzov. ‘The effectiveness of your business makes us take you seriously. But we are beginning to think that your project is mere fantasy.’

  ‘Is unlimited business control – the control of nations – so fantastic? It has been attempted before in history with great success.’

  ‘Never lasting,’ said Mehta.

  ‘This time it will be lasting. And we can hand it on to our chosen successors. The East – the countries you represent – holds the key to the future. The economies of the West have passed the tipping-point. We all know that. In the past, men looked towards the West for new opportunities; now, it is the turn of the East.’

  He had not told them all he knew, of course. He needed their support right up until the moment when he could turn on them and discard them, along with their worthless and narrow-minded visions of mere financial control. Adler knew what he wanted – to control Destiny itself. After that, MAXTEL, its satellites already in place above the earth, would replace God, through its radio, internet and television arms, for a grateful and obedient world. That world would become his plaything.

  He thought back over his researches. Adhemar had
partially understood the meaning of the tablet. Even he, with his meagre comprehension, had achieved some success. Dandolo had gained more, but could not dominate every dissident voice. Adler did not know into whose hands the tablet had passed, since – as he guessed – it had been unearthed a century ago. Perhaps it had lain forgotten in some vault, not understood at all. Not finding it among the discoveries of the archaeologists Adkins, Taylor and Montserrat, he’d guessed that Dandolo’s tomb had been opened before, and his researches had led him to suspect the interference of the archaeologists of the colonial period. British? No, not British. They had never held more than a precarious position in Asia Minor; but Germany, his own country, had. The tablet was close, perhaps even, and in mockery of his own frustrated search, in this city – his city!

  And he understood the tablet fully, better than anyone before. He had had the benefit of eight more centuries of knowledge and research to draw on.

  It was so close. He could feel it. But these three henchmen who now came crying to him because their creditors were on their heels for the money they, in turn, had lent him threatened to ruin everything. MAXTEL, unknown to anyone but them, had taken a serious knock in the fiscal crisis of 2008. But it would recover. It had recovered, though there was still work to do. Hence his need for these wretches in the first place. But, within days now, he was sure, he need never fear the unexpected again.

  He had to give a sharp pull on the reins of these people. Fortunately, he still had it within his power to do so.

  ‘May I remind you, gentlemen, that our joint ventures over the years have included operations which, if exposed to public view before we have complete control, would be enough to bring us – or rather, you – down, as disastrously as Icarus fell when he flew too close to the sun.’

  The men looked at each other. They knew what he was talking about.

  ‘You wouldn’t dare – you are as compromised as we would be, in such a case,’ said Mehta.

  ‘I think not,’ replied Adler. ‘I think you will find that there are no records anywhere to connect either me personally, or MAXTEL as an organization, with any of the … hobbies … we have indulged in together.’