Ava could not resist a creeping smile of satisfaction.
Here it comes
. “Which is why, I suppose, we’re having this little off-the-record chat?”
Prince bit her lip, then nodded slowly.
“You want me to keep actively looking for it, so I can be an early warning system if I find anything out?” Ava voiced the American’s thought for her. “Unofficially, of course.”
“Something like that,” Prince conceded. “DeVere thinks you’re just helping to find out more about Malchus. But I always like to think ahead a little, so I’m asking you to go further. Dr Curzon, we need the Ark.”
Ava thought she had been clear about this back in Qatar. “I don’t work for the Firm any more. Those are no longer my loyalties. I’m working for a private collector at present. If I discover anything, I report to him. Why do you think I’d tell you anything?”
Prince put her hand into her long blue coat, and pulled out a flash drive. “Because I’m going to help you.” She slid the stick across the seat to Ava. “I’m hoping you’ll feel a little indebted to me for this. And then, if your collector pulls out or is out-priced, you might think it worth a tip off back to me.” Prince smiled at Ava. “A favour for a favour—the old fashioned way in our business.”
Ava picked up the flash drive. It was a metallic grey plastic tube the size and length of half a cigarette. On one side, she recognized the unmistakable thirty-pin connector for an iPhone. “What’s on here?”
“You’ll like it.” Prince replied confidently. “It’s information about where to find Malchus. This weekend.”
Ava glanced sharply at Prince.
How did she know?
“Don’t worry,” Prince replied reassuringly. “General Hunter told me about your little conversation in Qatar. He also told me that when he left you afterwards, you looked murderous. So I put two and two together. And I can already see I’ve not misjudged you.”
“DeVere doesn’t need to know about this,” Ava replied quietly. “This remains between us.”
“Fine by me.” Prince nodded. “So we have an understanding.” It was a statement not a question.
Prince handed Ava a card with her numbers. “Call me if you need anything.” She paused. “There’s just one more thing.”
There always is with these people
, Ava thought, but kept it to herself.
“We’re supposed to be watching you. And we’re responsible for your safety, however you might feel about that. So we have orders for you to take a chaperone from now on.”
“You?” Ava fought to keep the alarm out of her voice. Having Prince tagging along would be a disaster.
Prince shook her head. “Ferguson. And you don’t have a choice, I’m afraid.”
“I really don’t need a minder,” Ava replied, tucking the flash drive and Prince’s card into her coat pocket. “I can look after myself. I don’t know if you heard about Kazakhstan, but let’s just say Ferguson and I did some role reversal.”
Prince raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t need his help,” Ava insisted.
“Sorry,” Prince replied. “Nothing I can do about it.”
The taxi hummed down Victoria Street and stopped at the traffic lights by the station.
Prince hammered on the glass partition separating the driver from the passenger cabin.
As the car pulled in by the curbside, she popped open the door, and unfolded herself from the car. “Well, good night, Dr Curzon” she said, straightening up. “I’m sure we’ll meet again soon.”
With that she was gone into the rain.
——————— ◆ ———————
10b St James’s Gardens
Piccadilly
London SW1
The United Kingdom
Ava spent the rest of the journey in silence, lost in thought, staring out of the window at the glistening pavements and bright windows of the empty shops, all long since closed for the night.
The cab eventually stopped outside her flat—the ground floor of a large building tucked away in the quiet streets of eighteenth-century houses behind London’s historic Green Park.
It was not a flat she would, or could, ever have bought. It had belonged to her mother’s grandparents, and different members of the family had made use of it over the years.
Ava had lived there while working at the Firm, and then afterwards when at the British Museum. Her father had spent the working weeks there with her, but had gone back to the family home in Somerset for weekends.
After he died, no members of her family spent time in London anymore, so when she moved to the Middle East, she decided not to rent it out, but leave it free for when she was in town. She came back a couple of times a year, and relished having a space furnished with her own things, instead of the empty cupboards of a bland hotel. It was a luxury, but always open to family and friends when she was away.
She turned the key and pushed open the dark blue door. It was set back from the road under a white pillared portico, and looked just like any of the other wooden front doors on the street. What passers-by did not know was that it had been custom-made in Sweden out of rolled steel, and could withstand an attack with power-tools for twenty minutes. The police had installed it for her father when he had started receiving threats during a particularly nasty operation.
Inside, the flat was warm and welcoming. The ceilings were low, and the rooms small—but it had the perfect proportions of housing built in Hanoverian London, and previous owners had looked after its original ornamental features well. As a result, it was cosy and elegant.
An upstairs neighbour and family-friend came in every day to arrange the curtains and set the light timers, and Ava had telephoned ahead to let her know she was coming. The old lady had thoughtfully fired up the boiler and flicked on a selection of welcoming table lamps. Ava was delighted to see she had also stocked the fridge.
Slipping off her coat, she poured herself a glass of chilled white wine and loaded a plate with some food.
Carrying it through to the book-lined study, she settled into the single armchair. It was an old-fashioned room, largely as her great-grandfather had left it. No one had seen any reason to redecorate, and it was Ava’s favourite place in the house.
She pulled Prince’s flash drive from her pocket and examined it for a moment, turning it over in her fingers before clicking it smoothly into the bottom of her iPhone. She had never seen a flash drive for an iPhone before—it was clear the techies at the Pentagon still enjoyed a world-class research-and-development budget.
As she gazed at the phone’s screen, wondering what would happen next, a new icon appeared, simply entitled ‘MM’. It was greyed out, but when the little bar inside it had rapidly filled, the small square glowed a deep blue.
Tapping the new icon, her camera roll opened, revealing a number of images that had not been there before.
Swiping through them, she instantly recognized the photographs of Malchus and the Thelema which Prince had shown her and DeVere earlier.
They told her nothing new.
As she came to the end of the photographs, she was beginning to wonder if Prince had made a mistake, when the screen suddenly filled with the image of a typed document.
As she read the opening lines, her heart skipped a beat:
FM: LONDON STATION
TO: MOD
TO: CABINET OFFICE
TO: JIC
TO: SECURITY SERVICE
IMMEDIATE
CX 08/6378468/03 JULY 2013
SUBJECT: HOSTILE INFILTRATION OF M.O.D. CIVILIAN STAFF
SOURCE: A RELIABLE ASSET CLOSE TO THE COLUMBIAN TRADE DELEGATION
Ava recognized the layout immediately.
It was a CX report. She had written and read many in her time.
She knew the style intimately.
She also knew that by possessing it without official MI6 authorization, she was committing an imprisonable offence.
CX reports dated back to the earliest days of the service, and were the information lifeblood that flowed through the corridors of MI6.
The service’s indefatigable founder, Captain Mansfield Cumming, had required all material to be passed solely to him—so the reports were marked ‘CX’, short for ‘Cumming exclusively’. When the new C took over after Cumming’s sudden death, he saw no reason to change the system. And the tradition had stuck.
Almost as quickly as she realized it was a CX report, she noted it was copied to both the Cabinet Office and its all-powerful Joint Intelligence Committee.
Most CX reports never made their way out of Legoland. Only the most important were flagged up to other government departments.
The distribution list she was looking at meant this particular report was deemed to contain nationally important intelligence.
Prince had clearly run a very real risk in passing it to her.
Taking a sip of the cool wine, Ava enlarged the image to full screen size, and settled down to read it thoroughly.
Scanning through its pages, she was disappointed to find it turned out not to be about Malchus. Instead, it dealt with civilian staff working for the Ministry of Defence on Wiltshire’s ancient isolated and mysterious Salisbury Plain.
The report briefly alluded to the one hundred and fifty square miles of military installations on the Plain, then went on to catalogue the findings of a seven-month undercover operation which had unearthed evidence of Columbian infiltration of the civilian game wardens. It explained that the wardens regularly ranged across the more remote reaches of the Plain, and consequently had intimate knowledge of the location of sensitive and secluded installations that did not feature on any map.
The report highlighted the Firm’s real concern that the Columbians could gain front-row seats to covert trials of new military vehicles, weapons, equipment, and tactics. While of little practical use to the Columbians, the information would readily attract buyers on the open market.
Ava read on. Although disappointed, she was not surprised that the main subject of the report seemed irrelevant.
It was frequently the way.
Nuggets of intelligence rarely came pre-packaged and labelled. Useful information lurked in the strangest places. If the report contained information about Malchus, it was quite likely to be an incidental reference—not significant to the report writer, but gold dust to the right reader.
She swiped quickly through the main body of the report, and found Prince had highlighted a section in the appendix.
It dealt with forthcoming events on the Plain.
Ava read on, discovering there was to be a rally one-and-a-half miles south of the garrison town of Larkhill, at the mysterious prehistoric temple of Stonehenge.
From what she could gather, it was some sort of pan-pagan festival, scheduled to last for three days.
There were groups listed from Wiccans and druids to far-out Odinist heathens and Irminist Aryans. The report writer was evidently concerned one or more of them may not be quite what they seemed.
Ava could not see any obvious Columbian connections among the participants. Instead, the names were redolent of pre-Christian paganism, with groups promoting everything from nature and woodland worship to cultic gods and goddesses of love, sex, night, discord, war, and countless other time-honoured human preoccupations.
She stopped scanning the list and slowly read the section Prince had highlighted.
It was a schedule of events, and stated that a ‘Meister Marius Malchus’ would address the rally on the subject of ‘The Underground Tradition and the Will’.
Ava’s pulse quickened as she saw the date of his appearance.
Tomorrow.
There was no additional detail. But it was enough.
Reaching the end of the document, she started at the beginning again, reading over the whole text once more, memorizing anything that seemed relevant.
When she had finished, she turned to the internet, pulling up page after page on the pagan groups listed, trying to piece together a coherent picture of what they each stood for, and how they related to each other.
This was Malchus’s world, and if she was going to find him, she needed to become familiar with it.
As her eyelids became heavier, she wished her father was there. He would have unwrapped it all for her in a moment.
But he was not.
She had to do this by herself.
When fatigue finally overtook her, she unplugged the flash drive and slipped it into her pocket. As she did so, the ‘MM’ icon disappeared from the screen.
Impressed, she opened the phone’s camera roll to be sure, and saw the photos from the flash drive had also gone. Knowing from hard experience that once photos were deleted from the phone they were gone for good, she gave a mental nod of appreciation to the white coats at the Pentagon. They thought of everything—even sparing her the need to run a separate sanitization app.
After checking the following day’s train times to Salisbury, she crawled into bed to sleep off the jetlag.
As her brainwaves slowed and her mind started to switch off for the day, jumbled images began to flash before her eyes, along with a certainty that she had now gone beyond the point of no return with Malchus and the Ark.
The last thought she was aware of was that she would have her role to play in Malchus’s story, whether he liked it or not.
——————— ◆ ———————
The Pride of Normandy
The English Channel
50° 41’ 09.73” N 1 °02’ 49.55” W
No passengers were interested in the windy rain-lashed deck of
The Pride of Normandy
.
Instead, as the bulbous ferry nosed through the wet black night, they filled the boat’s duty-free bars—making the most of the untaxed alcohol.
The few passengers who had chosen the unsociable sailing time from Cherbourg to Portsmouth and were not in the stale-smelling bars were dozing or sleeping on the saggy plastic-covered chairs lining the ship’s interminable corridors.
None were outside on deck.
Except one.
Moving quickly along the lowest deck on the port side, Uri tucked himself behind a large lifeboat crane, and quickly opened his dry sack. It was largely empty aside from a long coil of ten-millimetre rope, a pair of lightweight trousers, a shirt, and fifty thousand pounds sterling in cash.
It all weighed next to nothing.
He took out the rope and, as a final act of preparation, breathed in deeply, clearing his head and relaxing himself, savouring the salty tang in the air.
From here on in, he was on his own. Moshe had been very clear about that.
There was to be no contact with anyone in England. No one was to know about this operation—not even his Institute colleagues lurking in the Israeli embassy in Kensington.
There would be no assistance or backup if he got into trouble or needed any favours. The mission was a hundred per cent deniable, and he was going in sterile, with nothing to link him back to his country.
If he was caught, the State of Israel would deny all knowledge of him. As far as Tel Aviv was concerned, he did not exist.
It was fine with him.
He had never been a team player anyway.
There was one contact channel only, and it was strictly one way—for Moshe to inform him if there were any critical developments, or if he was to stand down.
That was it.
He breathed the salty air in deeply, grateful for the rain. It reduced visibility, and meant he would not be disturbed.
Both were added bonuses.
For speed, he had changed in the washrooms below—donning a three-millimetre full-length wetsuit and a lightweight harness under the thin overcoat.
He checked again that there was no one about.
But he need not have bothered.
He was quite alone.
No one wanted to be on deck in the English Channel in the small hours of the night.
It was too early even for the seagulls.
Slipping off the overcoat and canvas shoes, he dropped them into the dry sack, slid it onto his back, and tightened the straps so it was clamped close to his body.
Then he looped the rope around one of the thick stanchions supporting the handrail, and carefully threaded a munter-hitch through the wide carabiner on his harness.
With one final glance around, he swung himself over the rail and took a firm hold of the rope—one hand in front, the other behind. Without pausing, he hurled himself out into the darkness, quickly rappelling down the side of the ship.
As he approached the numbing water, he braced himself, aware the low water temperature and the even colder night air were a lethal combination. The wetsuit would keep his body core warm, but his hands, head, and feet would soon seize up in the inky coldness of the night swim.
There had been no time for acclimatization training against hypothermia. He would simply have to make the best of it by keeping moving.
Treading the chilly water, he tugged on the rope, which slithered round the stanchion and slid down into the sea.
He let it sink. He would not need it again.
He also did not need the extra weight of the harness, but he could get rid of it later. Right now, speed was the only priority—to get as far away as possible from the ship and its giant propellers.
As he began to swim, he could just about make out the lights of the Isle of Wight glinting a mile off in the distance. But he did not need them for orientation—the high strength magnet in his luminescent wrist compass would guide him directly to the rock, pebble, and sand beach at Bembridge, the easternmost village on the island.
He had calculated he could make it in around thirty to forty minutes. The sun would not rise for another hour after that, giving him plenty of time to change, find a café for a steaming hot breakfast, then catch the hovercraft to Southampton and the train on to London.
He smiled to himself.
Who needed a passport anyway?