The Sword of Moses (52 page)

He handed it to Ava, pointing at the screen. “What do you make of this?”

Ava looked at the small blocks of black writing on the screen. They appeared to be a series of text messages Prince had recently exchanged with someone whose name she had saved in her contacts simply as ‘K’.

Ava read the exchange of messages slowly.

“Does any of it mean anything to you?” Ferguson looked at her hopefully.

She stared at the messages for a few moments, scrolling up and down, going over each line to try to make any connections.

“My God,” she murmured slowly, as the light began to dawn.

It couldn
’
t be.

But the more she read and re-read the texts, the more it seemed to make sense. “I don’t believe it,” she whispered.

“What?” Ferguson moved in behind her to look at the messages.

Ava breathed out heavily. “This explains why she was so hostile to my suggestions the Bible may not be a hundred per cent historically accurate. And why she dismissed any claims the Ethiopians may have to the Ark.”

“Why?” Ferguson was peering at the screen.

Ava looked up at him. “The ‘URIM’ and ‘THUMMIM’ were two objects the high priest of Israel carried in his sacred breastplate—jewels, or wood, or bone, no one is quite sure. He used them for cleromancy—like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ dice, to tell the will of God.”

She scrolled down. “And the next pair, ‘YAEL’ and ‘JUDITH’, are two women from the Bible. Yael saved Israel from military defeat by feeding the enemy general with milk, then once he had fallen asleep, she hammered a tent peg through his temple. Judith performed a similar feat by ingratiating herself with the enemy general, Holofernes, whom she then decapitated while he was in a drunken stupor.”

Ava looked up at Ferguson. “Are you beginning to see a pattern yet? You know the next pair, right? The ‘IRGUN’ and the ‘LEHI’?”

Ferguson nodded. “Zionist paramilitary terror groups in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, fighting for a Jewish state.”

“Right,” Ava nodded. “And ‘ANONYMOUS SOLDIERS’ was their marching anthem.”

“So how does that explain Prince’s attitude to the Bible and the Ark?”

Ava looked pensive. “I’d say the senders of these messages have a strong interest in the history of Israel—and especially in its military successes. And that raises the likelihood of them belonging to one organization in particular.”

“What, like AIPAC?” Ferguson suggested. “American friends of Israel?”

Ava shook her head. “I think it’s more serious than that.” She paused. “If her contact, K, is short for
katsa
, then our friend Prince has been leading a double life—with the Mossad.”

“Christ.” Ferguson muttered under his breath. “That’s all we need.”

Ava turned for the door. “We need to get out of here.” She was through it in an instant, and jogging towards the gateway back to the Outer Circle.

Once out of the park and onto the noisy pavement, she took the SIM out of Prince’s phone and handed it to Ferguson along with the phone unit. “Wipe our prints and lose these, separately—far away from here.” Ferguson nodded as she hailed a black cab, incongruously spray-painted all-over with an advertisement for a beach paradise somewhere. She let Ferguson into the cabin, before climbing in herself.

“Drop me at the nearest tube station, please,” she asked the driver, before giving Ferguson back the binoculars. “I haven’t got time to get stuck in traffic. You can take the cab home, where you could start looking further into De Molay and Saxby and their story about the Foundation. See if the Templar angle really could add up.”

“What about you?” he asked, winding down the window to let in some fresh air. “Where are you going?”

Ava smiled. “I’m going to follow up on the last SMS Prince sent to the
katsa
: ‘OLD LONDON STATION, BETWEEN THE PILLARS, IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?’”

Ferguson rubbed a hand over his face as the cab pulled up outside a narrow flight of steps down into a tube station. “Don’t tell me that means something to you?”

“Not to me,” she smiled, getting out of the cab. “I’m going to ask the widow’s sons themselves.”

——————— ◆ ———————

London Underground

London

England

The United Kingdom

Ava had learned long ago that some things had not changed in the century and a half since London’s irrepressible Victorian engineers had put in the world’s first underground railway.

It was still the quickest way to get around town.

The network’s builders had taken a boundless pride in all aspects of their gleaming new project, ensuring it was the envy of the world—state of the art in functionality and style.

But as Ava looked around the starkly bare concrete platform, which had long since lost its bespoke glazed tiles and polished wooden finishings, she could not help but wonder what the Victorian pioneers would have thought of it now.

When the train arrived and she got on, she was greeted by an overcrowded worn and grotty interior. The saggy seats were covered in a drab threadbare orangey fabric, and the windows opposite her were graffitied with thin angular black writing, preserved for posterity under layers of grey dust.

It was clear the underground no longer needed to look attractive in order to guarantee the unending flow of customers that crammed into its four thousand ageing carriages every day.

She gazed into the middle distance, ignoring the distractions of the garish advertising posters plastered above the seats directly opposite her.

She was going over in her mind the thought processes that had brought her here, making sure she had not made any errors.

Time was critical, and she could not afford to take a wrong turn.

Not now Malchus had the Ark and the Menorah.

Back in the ice cream hut, she had reached some conclusions about Prince’s furtive phone messages to K.

Most importantly, she had immediately recognized what the first six SMS messages were.

From the hours she had spent learning similar sequences, she was certain they were pre-agreed pairs of identification words—simple exchanges designed to enable agents in the field to single out their friends.

If her assumption was correct, it made decoding the sequence of SMS messages significantly less daunting, because the identification word-pairs had no meaning—just a purpose. There was no hidden message. They were purely functional.

They almost certainly meant nothing more than that whoever chose the words back in Tel Aviv wanted to reinforce the idea of a strong and combative Israel.

But what had struck her more than the symbolism of the word-pairs was the fact Prince and K had used three sequences. It suggested there was something unusually secure and confidential about their exchange. She could not tell whether it was the fact they were communicating or the content of the message, but either way, the two agents were displaying an unusually high level of caution.

Taken together with the militaristic tone of the word-pairs, it had reinforced her suspicion she was dealing with the Mossad. She could think of few other agencies which combined that level of thoroughness, paranoia, and aggression.

But as she had stood in the ice cream hut and looked down at the messages, the one that stood out the most was the last.

It was of a completely different character to the others.

OLD LONDON STATION

BETWEEN THE PILLARS

IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?

For a start, it was made up of full phrases.

And second, it had not elicited any response from K.

If she was right about the first three exchanges being identification pairs, then the last three lines were almost certainly the main message—the real reason for the entire communication.

At first she had been able to make no sense of the three lines at all.

She knew for certain there was no underground or railway station in London called ‘OLD LONDON STATION’. She was sure of that.

She was also positive there was no old or disused station simply called ‘LONDON STATION’. The abandoned ones were well known—like British Museum, Lords, and Trafalgar Square. She had never heard of one called ‘LONDON STATION’.

But if the first line was baffling, the second and third were even more elusive.

Based on the strongly biblical themes of the identification pairs, she had pondered whether the phrases ‘BETWEEN THE PILLARS’ and ‘IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?’ might also be drawn from the Bible.

Perhaps ‘BETWEEN THE PILLARS’ was a reference to the Hebrew Nazirite, Samson—famous for his suicide attack on Gaza’s great temple to Dagon?

According to the book of Judges, he had been standing between the temple’s pillars when he unexpectedly pushed them over, bringing down the roof and the three thousand people on it, raining fatal chunks of masonry onto himself and the crowd of his enemies in the temple around him.

Like most of the heroic stories of the Old Testament, modern scholars viewed it as a symbolic tale rather than eye-witness history. Nevertheless, Ava had recently been fascinated to learn that excavations in the region had uncovered the fact that Philistine temples of the period did indeed have two central columns supporting the roof. Although she had also been interested to read that from their size, it would have taken an earthquake measuring high on the Richter scale to move them an inch.

Still, she was only guessing, and by no means certain that ‘BETWEEN THE PILLARS’ was a reference to Samson. It was a possibility. A guess. Nothing more.

Prince’s third line—‘IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?’—was equally enigmatic.

All she had been able to think of was the Bible story in which Jesus stumbled across a Galilean funeral procession outside the village of Nain. On learning that the dead body was the only son of a widow, he had brought the corpse back to life. It was the first of his three raisings of the dead, and was often described as the miracle of the widow’s son.

But, as she had turned the idea over in her head, she instinctively knew she was on the wrong track.

The biblical references Prince and K had used in the identification pairs—the ‘URIM’ and ‘THUMMIM’, and ‘JUDITH’ and ‘YAEL’—were drawn from the
Tanakh
, the Hebrew sacred scriptures better known in the West as the Old Testament.

So the story of the widow of Nain did not fit alongside them at all. It was from a different source altogether—the New Testament, which was a collection of unrelated Christian writings stapled onto the Hebrew scriptures by the Church many centuries later. Ava found it hard to believe Prince and the
katsa
would suddenly switch to Christian texts. It would make no sense if they were both working for the government of Israel.

She shifted in her train seat, trying to block out the noise of the scuffling school party of French teenagers that had just got into the carriage.

She had reached these conclusions quickly back in the ice cream hut. But as she had forced herself to think of all the possible angles, it had occurred to her there may actually be no biblical link at all to the three lines of Prince’s actual message.

After all, why should there be?

The identification pairs were one thing.

Prince’s message was quite separate.

Wracking her brain for other possibilities, she had at first drawn a blank, until something had begun to stir at the back of her mind.

It was a more radical thought, and not something she knew much about.

But as she had continued to puzzle over the message, it had begun to seem more and more worth considering.

Freemasonry.

It was not a connection she would normally have made. But it had popped into her mind as a result of Ferguson’s revelations about Sir Robert Moray and the Invisible College and Royal Society, and Saxby and De Molay’s hint that the Templars were somehow responsible for the secretive fraternity.

Knowing next to nothing about the freemasons, Ava had been intrigued enough to do some research while waiting at home for the car Saxby had sent to take her and Ferguson to the airport en route to Rome.

She shifted in her seat again. It was hot in the carriage, and the French teenagers were getting increasingly rowdy. Looking up at the tube map on the opposite wall, she was pleased to see she only had one stop to go.

Once she had started surfing freemasonry, she had initially been delighted by the amount of information she had been able to dig up on the shadowy brotherhood. But her pleasure had rapidly turned to frustration as she discovered the vast majority of the information was maddeningly cryptic and impenetrable—much of it raising far thornier questions than it answered.

She had rapidly understood that the information made little sense without certain keys, which she soon discovered were not available to the general public. In no time, she felt as if she was trying to watch a scrambled satellite television channel without the all-important decoding chip.

After several hours of research, she had come away wrestling with a baffling world of veiled allegories, symbols, and secrets surrounding the building of King Solomon’s Temple three millennia ago.

But she felt none the wiser.

However, as she had looked at Prince’s SMS messages in the ice cream hut, she had been surprised to recognize that the three lines of message could easily be connected to the shadowy fraternity.

From what she had read, ‘BETWEEN THE PILLARS’ could have been a phrase lifted straight from a freemasonic text. Although she had not understood the reasons why, she had seen in her reading that freemasons attached great significance to the architecture of pillars and columns.

Taken by itself, this connection to freemasonry was tenuous.

But it was the third line—‘IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?’—that had stopped her dead in her tracks and made her think of them.

Although the freemasonic website she had seen it on had been unclear, she was sure she had seen a reference to providing ‘help for the widow’s son’.

The words Prince had typed were a little different—‘IS THERE NO
PITY
FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?’ But she was nevertheless struck by the distinct similarity.

Overall, she had realized, a freemasonic explanation for the enigmatic combination of pillars and the widow’s son seemed more promising than her first thoughts about Samson and the widow of Nain.

As she had hailed the cab with Ferguson, she also realized that following up on the freemasonic angle presented the perfect opportunity to find answers to something else that had been bothering her.

On De Molay’s coach in Rome, Ferguson had asked if the Foundation was a front for freemasonry. Saxby had replied cryptically, “Well, yes and no. That is—not entirely.”

Ava had been struck by his evasiveness, and wanted to ask more. But the conversation had quickly moved on, and she had forgotten about it until later that evening, when she had again been struck by quite how odd an answer it had been.

What was he hiding?

Was there some connection between the Templars and the freemasons that he was not prepared to talk about?

She was not at all sure.

But it was something she now urgently needed to find out.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the train slowing down as it pulled into Covent Garden tube station.

She hurried out of the carriage and headed for the elevators back up to ground level—and to the worldwide headquarters of the ultra-secretive fraternity of the freemasons.