——————— ◆ ———————
Quedlinburg
Saxony-Anhalt
The Federal Republic of Germany
The reserved landlady of the house, Frau Hahn, had been delighted to have a guest in this low season, even if it was only for two nights.
The quiet man was her first lodger since the three walkers in January, and she had needed to clean the house specially for him. But she did not mind. It was nice to have company again, and the money was very welcome.
Since arriving, her guest had kept to himself and not been any bother. She liked customers like him. Much better than the ones who wanted to talk endlessly, or who expected to be waited on hand and foot. She was quite happy to see her guests for breakfast, and otherwise only in passing on the stairs. It was enough for her to know they were there. It made the house feel less empty.
She nearly made an exception in his case. She was intrigued by the way he talked, unable to place quite where he came from. His German was native, but it was not an accent she recognized.
She looked at her small gold-plated watch. It was getting on for 9:30 p.m.
She had eaten her main meal at lunchtime, so had no great appetite for supper. She would probably just have a little something before bed—a small roll with some cold cuts of
Schinken
and a spoonful of the leftover potato salad would be perfect.
Meanwhile, she opened the drinks cabinet and poured herself another generous measure of
Jägermeister.
Life had been quiet—too quiet—since her husband died four years ago, and she doubted anyone would begrudge her the occasional glass of the warming liquid to see her through the lonely evenings.
As she flicked channels on the television set, she drained the glass and poured another. A third was naughty, she knew, but then she had a lodger for the first time this season, and that was cause for celebration.
She found an interesting documentary on the mysteries of marine life in the deep seas, and watched it through to the end, before getting up to make her bedtime snack.
As she moved into the hallway and looked up the stairs, she thought she should probably first go and check on her guest.
She did not usually bother the lodgers, but he had been so quiet all day, and had not come down for any food even though she had it ready prepared. She wondered if perhaps he was ill in his bed? If he was, she would be happy to make him a hot drink, or even heat him some soup.
She put her glass down on the wooden hall table, and softly climbed the carpeted stairs to the first floor.
Arriving outside Malchus’s door, she momentarily caught the whiff of a strange odour. She inhaled deeply a few times, and smelled it again. Frowning, she turned her head and sniffed the air in the rest of the corridor.
Nothing.
The smell definitely seemed to be coming from the guest’s room.
She raised her hand to knock on the door, but then thought better of it. She did not want to disturb him if he was asleep.
The smell was odd, though. She hoped nothing was burning in his room.
She put her ear against the door and listened.
She could hear nothing at first. But straining for even the slightest sound, she thought she could hear a voice, speaking slowly and quietly.
As her ear tuned in to the sound, she began to make out individual words.
“Turn again and quicken us.
Veni Satana, imperator mundi.
”
5
She strained to make sense of what she was hearing, but her mind was feeling a little fuzzy from the alcohol.
Was it Latin?
It sounded a bit like things the priests at her school used to say during mass, before everything was switched to German.
Struggling to hear more clearly, she bent lower and pushed her ear against the keyhole.
“Make them like a wheel, and as stubble before the face of the wind. Stir up thy might, lord Satan and come. Avenge the blood of thy servants which has been shed. Brothers and sisters, we are debtors to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.”
Perhaps he had bought himself a television, and was watching one of those films? she wondered. Or maybe it was a play on the radio?
As she continued to listen, the voice became slightly louder. Was it now closer to the door, she wondered, pondering how that could be.
“May this incense rise before thee, infernal lord, and may thy blessing descend upon us.”
With a shudder of realization, she suddenly knew it was not the television or a radio. That was her lodger’s voice. She recognized the distinctive accent. She clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle her involuntary gasp.
But not quickly enough.
The door flew open, and her eyes widened in horror at the hellish scene in front of her.
Malchus stood before her, naked, a bloody star daubed on his forehead.
A wave of nausea washed over her as she saw the floor behind him, where there was a circle marked out around four black candles, in the centre of which she could make out what looked like a pair of brass discs, smeared and glistening with something dark and wet.
As her eyes swept the room, the sickness turned to terror at the sight of what lay beside the wet brass discs.
A simple Roman Catholic all her life, she immediately recognized the holy round wafer of Christ’s most precious body, unmistakably stamped with the sacred IHS monogram. But whereas she was used to seeing the wafers nestling in the silver cup in the priest’s hand, the one she was looking at on the floor was dripping with a dark liquid, and raggedly speared through by a dark-stained silver knife.
Putting a hand onto the door post to steady herself, her eyes fell on a shape she could not make out at first.
And then with a sickening lurch, she knew.
It was the gutted body of her cat, lying torn and eviscerated outside the circle. Its blood was seeping out onto the floor, and through her tipsy haze she realized he had used its gore to douse the brass discs and the holy wafer.
She tried to scream, but only a dry hoarse rasp came out. Stumbling backwards to distance herself from the horrific sight, blackness descended as she fainted in terror.
——————— ◆ ———————
Quedlinburg
Saxony-Anhalt
The Federal Republic of Germany
A few moments earlier, Malchus thought he heard a noise outside the door.
He did not stop the ritual, but listened acutely. When he heard the stifled gasp, he knew for certain someone was there.
It was an unwelcome development. The gasp could only indicate his nosy landlady had been listening at the door and had heard him.
He cursed. It meant he would have to interrupt the all-important ritual at a crucial stage.
He knew instinctively that there was only one thing to do now.
He could not let anything or anyone compromise the project.
Not now he had come this far.
Nothing could be allowed to jeopardize the work.
His mind clear, he pulled the door open in time to see her expression of horror as she peered into the room, stumbled, then fainted.
He looked down at her coldly. At least if she was unconscious it would save him the bother of trying to keep her quiet.
Bending low over the still body, he caught a whiff of the spicy spirits on her breath.
Perfect
.
This was going to be easy.
He threw on his dressing gown, and pulled on a pair of black gloves from his bag.
Padding down the stairs, he almost immediately saw what he wanted—the half-empty glass on the hall table.
He sniffed it carefully, recognizing the distinctive botanical aroma of the spirit she had been drinking.
Heading into the curtained back parlour, he quickly found the large antique drinks cabinet. Inside was a pathetic selection—an earthenware bottle of garishly labelled German gin, a cheap cherry Schnapps, and an open bottle of the
Jägermeister
she had been enjoying.
Picking up the bottle, he headed back to the upstairs hallway, where he knelt beside the limp body, lifting her lolling head onto his knee.
Unscrewing the metal cap with his gloved fingers, he held the bottle to her lips, and began to pour the neat alcohol into her mouth.
As the liquid hit the back of her throat, she took a large reflex gulp before choking, spraying the spirit over her chin.
The large dose of fiery liquid was sufficient to bring her round from the faint, and Malchus saw her pale watery eyes widen first with surprise then terror as she looked up at his cold bloodless face.
“Drink,” he ordered, jamming the neck of the bottle hard into her mouth.
He could feel her struggle, but her elderly muscles were no match for him. He held her firm, and angled the bottle so the spirits ran down her throat.
When she again choked in a fit of racking coughs, he placed his thumb over the bottle’s open neck and drizzled a few splashes over her collar and dress front—enough to leave the impression she was sufficiently tipsy to have missed her mouth a few times.
He sloshed a little of the drink onto her right sleeve, then took her head between his hands.
Looking into her terrified wide eyes, he offered a quiet prayer, “
Ecce mitto angelum meum ante faciem tuam, qui praeparabit viam meam.”
6
It was the last thing Frau Hahn ever heard, as with a quick brutal twist, he snapped her neck cleanly.
Hoisting the frail body onto his shoulder, he carried her down the stairs, putting the nearly-empty bottle of spirits on the hall table next to her glass.
He carried her through to the simple neat kitchen, where the food he had not eaten that day was laid out in a bowl covered with a tea-towel.
Spying the narrow white cellar door, he flipped its small latch and pushed it open with his foot, before pulling the cord to turn on the naked bulb that lit the narrow stairs.
Seeing a red plastic basket of washing nearby, he kicked it hard down the cellar steps, watching with satisfaction as the clothing sprayed out over the steps and floor at the bottom. The basket rolled for a moment, then came to a halt a few yards from the foot of the stairs.
Taking the lifeless body of Frau Hahn off his shoulder and standing her upright at the top of the stairs, he leaned her slightly forward, then let go.
He watched with fascination as the still-warm body crumpled, then gravity pulled it tumbling down the cellar steps with a series of sickening cracks and wet thumps, bringing it to rest on the cold cellar floor, the head twisted at an unnatural angle.
Malchus looked critically over the scene. Satisfied it looked like a tragic drunken accident, he took the bowl of food and scraped its contents into the bin, before placing the bowl carefully in the sink.
Back in the hall, he picked up the nearly empty bottle of
Jägermeister
and the half-full glass and moved them into the parlour, setting them on the faded lace cloth covering the wooden side-table next to Frau Hahn’s saggy television armchair.
Returning upstairs, he swiftly washed the bloody star off his forehead and dressed, before packing his things away and meticulously tidying the room.
He took the sheets he had lain on and stuffed them into his bag, before finding a cloth in the adjoining kitchenette and dusting down the room’s hard surfaces to remove any finger prints. He had not left any elsewhere in the house. It was a habit of his to be cautious.
Once he was satisfied he had removed all traces of his visit, he picked up his bag and the silver flight case, and padded down the stairs and along the main hall.
Clicking the front door quietly closed behind him, he slipped out of the house, and into the night.
——————— ◆ ———————
National Museum of Iraq
Baghdad
The Republic of Iraq
Fifty miles north of Babylon, Ava walked through the Ishtar Gate.
Even though it was not the real one from ancient Babylon, it still made her smile. She pictured in her mind’s eye the spectacular original with its glazed blue tiles studded with rows of golden animals—a design so beautiful it had drawn ancient travellers from the ends of the earth, lured by its renown as one of the wonders of the world.
Emerging from the shade of the arched gateway, she squinted at the heavy artillery damage to the museum compound’s walls. The jagged pockmarks had weathered in the intervening ten years, but remained a clear reminder of the ferocity of the urban battle that had raged around the area.
She nodded to the sleepy security guard as she sauntered into the main building. Its long polished corridors were eerily empty—closed to the public since the war had decimated the museum’s priceless holdings.
She opened her office door, and glanced around the familiar sight of her home-from-home.
It was a large high-ceilinged airy room—its polished floorboards strewn with faded oriental rugs. She had furnished it comfortably with a desk, a pair of map tables, filing cabinets, and a sofa area around a low wide coffee table inlaid with pearl and exotic woods.
The shelves running around its walls were lined with books, catalogues, pamphlets, folders, and piles of papers in English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and a range of current and ancient regional languages and dialects. Arranged among them on the shelves were artefacts she had collected over the years—busts, figurines, carvings, terracotta oil lamps, and a variety of other small pieces.
Behind the desk was a small photograph of a woman in early 1900s clothing. She was one of Ava's inspirations: Gertrude Bell—archaeologist, explorer, diplomat, spy, architect of modern Iraq, and founder of the museum.
On the long wall, a large map of the world bristled with a rainbow of pins, photographs, and strands of coloured cotton showing where many of the museum’s thousands of stolen artefacts were believed to be.
Ava had been very happy in the office for the last five years. It was as big as her entire apartment in Baghdad, and in many ways more comfortable.
After leaving MI6, she had first spent three years working for the British Museum—much of it conducting fieldwork in the Middle East. Then, with only the briefest period of notice, she had been seconded to the National Archaeological Museum in Amman for two years.
Altogether, it had been an adrenaline-filled transition from MI6 back into the real world.
She had revelled in again being part of the colourful chaos of the Middle East—bumping across the hot and dusty country to map, catalogue, photograph, and dig archaeological sites. And she had been delighted to be free of the issues that had led to her resignation from the Firm.
She had handed in her notice at MI6 three months after her father died. It was not just that she had been appalled at how badly the service had managed his death, although that was part of it—the whole experience had left her with a bad taste in her mouth.
But she had begun to have serious doubts, and started seeing things from a different perspective, feeling increasingly alienated from the government community she had been told many times would always be there for her.
She had tried to focus on her work, yet it started to throw up more problems than solutions.
She saw the growing number of reports over the winter of 2002 detailing the selective targeting of Iraqi military installations, along with the other combat activities of western covert forces already on the ground in Iraq since the summer.
She listened with increasing disbelief as the politicians talked publicly of peace, while she knew the ground war was already fully under way.
She helped write numerous reports setting out assessments of the potentially disastrous regional consequences of war. But somehow the Joint Intelligence Committee, which funnelled all such concerns to the Prime Minister, did not speak up loudly enough.
When, in March 2003, the world’s media finally showed the futuristic sleek black F-117 Nighthawk stealth bombers dropping two-thousand-pound laser-guided bunker busters on Baghdad, she resigned, disillusioned—unable to recognize the organization she had once been so excited to join.
Shaking off the memories, she stepped into her office and walked over to the desk, collapsing onto the worn Turkish cushion strapped to the creaky wooden swivel chair beside it.
Powering up the laptop on her desk, she turned to the small pile of envelopes in front of her.
There was a letter from a laboratory with analysis results on a medieval textile, a request for cooperation in mapping some ancient mud brick foundations the coalition forces had uncovered while building a helipad, and the usual museum industry literature.
Only when she had finished going through the letters and looked up did she see the small brown package no bigger than a cigarette packet.
Picking it up, she was surprised by how heavy it was. It was also strange that it was addressed to her personally, but with no postmark, stamp, or any indication where it had come from.
Security was a constant priority, and she was not expecting a package. Putting it down, she punched the mailroom’s extension into her desk phone.
The man who answered confirmed that an elderly gentleman had dropped the packet off earlier by hand. The mailroom security team had scanned it for explosives and other harmful agents, but finding nothing, had delivered it to her desk.
Ava turned the package over in her hands. It was not unusual for people to return looted artefacts to the museum anonymously—it saved embarrassing questions about how they came to have them.
But she was curious that the packet was addressed to her personally, as her name was not widely known outside the museum.
She slit open the brown paper carefully and peeled it off to reveal a blue-grey round-cornered ribbed steel box. It looked like a case for photographic equipment, only on a miniature scale.
Snapping the box open, she saw it was lined with plump deep red velvet.
But what caught her eyes immediately was the object the box and velvet were protecting.
As she realized what it was, her eyes widened and she gasped in surprise, instantly sure that what she was looking at had never belonged to the museum. If it had, it would have been one of its most outstanding exhibits.
She gazed at it, spellbound.
It was an oval of green jasper, about two inches long. On the front was the unmistakable portrait of Alexander the Great. On the back was the bizarre image of a man with a cockerel’s head and feet made of curling snakes. He was holding a whip in an upraised hand, and defending himself with a shield. Around him were seven stars, and a scorpion nestled by his feet above the inscribed words:
Iησουσ Xριστοσ
The writing was easy to identify—
koine
Greek, the language of the Church in the first few centuries.
The words were also not difficult to translate. But she could feel her heart beginning to race as she considered the implications of what they were doing on the object.
She read the words aloud: “Iesous Christos.”
Jesus Christ.
Without consulting any books, she knew exactly what the object was, and when it dated from.
Her excitement mounting, she pulled a magnifying loupe out of the desk drawer and examined the amulet more closely.
The jasper was the right size and colour for the region. The writing was higgledy-piggledy, as she would have expected, and the individual letters were the correct shapes for the period.
She held it under her desk lamp, peering at it closely. Turning it carefully, there were no marks indicating it had been made with the help of machines, and it was appropriately worn for something of its age.
She sat back, her mind whirring.
If the amulet was what she thought it was—and she would stake her career on the fact it was—then she was holding one of only a few such objects ever found. She had only heard of them in the Vatican collections.
She turned the ancient green stone over in her hands again.
Despite the fact she touched ancient objects every day, the more extraordinary ones still sent a shiver of electricity jolting through her.
She did not need a second opinion on this one.
What she was holding was a direct connection back to the complex beliefs of the second and third centuries AD, when Middle-Eastern Christians still clung onto their old gods as well as their new one, and their evolving ideas of Christianity swirled in a cocktail of older magical beliefs.
The portrait of Alexander the Great was not an unusual image. He regularly featured on religious artefacts—widely worshipped for centuries as a sun god, the new Apollo.
But it was what was on the other side that made it so rare. Turning it over, she could not for the moment remember the name of the magical cockerel god with the snakes and scorpion. But he had been popular among Gnostic Christians, and to see him along with the words Jesus Christ made the amulet a piece with undoubted global historical significance.
She turned to the laptop beside her, and pulled up an internet search page to look up the strange god’s name—but was distracted by a winking envelope at the bottom right of her screen indicating she had e-mail.
She clicked on the little yellow rectangle, and a message instantly popped up.
I HOPE YOU LIKE THE AMULET? IT’S THIRD CENTURY, PROBABLY SYRIAN. THINK OF IT AS A FIRST GIFT TO THE MUSEUM. I TRUST YOU CAN FIND A PLACE FOR IT.
YOURS, E.S.
Stunned, she checked the time the e-mail had been sent.
One minute ago.
For the second time that morning she felt the wind knocked out of her sails.
How on earth … ?
She looked toward the window.
Was she being watched?
On her guard now, she wondered how the sender had got hold of her personal e-mail address. Old habits died hard, and she always kept her internet identity closely protected.
The sender’s initials, E.S., meant nothing to her. Nor did his e-mail address, [email protected].
She quickly typed ‘www.trample.net’ into the address line on her browser.
It returned nothing—a cyber void. The e-mail address was a meaningless placeholder.
She still had friends who would do her a favour and trace the servers E.S. was bouncing through, but she instinctively knew it would be a pointless exercise. If E.S. was any good—and he or she did seem to be—the entire trail would have been thoroughly anonymized.
Her curiosity piqued, she quickly typed a reply.
DO I KNOW YOU?
In less than a minute, the envelope icon winked again.
She opened the e-mail.
I HAVE OTHER ARTEFACTS I MAY LIKE TO DONATE FOR DISPLAY IN YOUR MUSEUM. I’LL BE AT THE ABBASID PALACE FOR THE NEXT HOUR ONLY.
YOURS, E.S.
E.S. was not lacking in confidence, she had to give him or her that. Baghdad was not a city in which people met up with strangers. Kidnappings were a daily reality. She was required to brief her staff regularly on the risks.
Thinking quickly, she typed a reply:
WHY WOULD I TRUST YOU?
An answer came back in under a minute.
I HAVE TRUSTED YOU WITH AN IMMENSELY VALUABLE ARTEFACT. NOBODY KNOWS YOU HAVE IT. IF IT NEVER APPEARED IN THE MUSEUM, ONLY YOU AND I WOULD EVER KNOW. IF I WANTED TO DO YOU HARM, THERE WOULD BE EASIER WAYS. IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT SAFETY, BRING SECURITY. I’LL BE WEARING A LIGHT GREY SUIT AND IVORY TIE.
YOURS, E.S.
Ava sat back.
So, it was a man.
They were not young men’s clothes or colours, so it was quite possibly the old man who had dropped the package off.
It was not much to go on. But it was a start.
She looked down at the amulet again. It was exquisite. The museum had nothing like it.
As she felt its smooth surface, her mind buzzed with questions. Lost in thought, she turned her chair and stared at the photograph of Gertrude Bell.
Reaching a decision, she flicked off the computer and stood up. She put the amulet back in its steel case, and locked it in the safe behind her desk. Slipping her phone into a pocket, she left the office, pulling the door shut behind her.
On her way out, she stopped at the large desk in the echoing front hall and called round one of the pool cars.
She had already decided she would not take security. She knew how to look after herself, and could not afford to lose the time it would take to book a minder. She had no idea how heavy the traffic would be, and she did not want to miss the window to meet E.S.
She had a hunch the meeting was going to be very worth attending.