“So, Dr Curzon, I’d help if I could. Truly. But I will not betray my promises. I’m duty bound to keep them—to the living, and to the dead.”
This was not at all what Ava had wanted to hear.
“For what it’s worth,” he continued. “I don’t think the message would mean much to you anyway. For a start, the first line is not freemasonic. And the last two lines, even though they have a freemasonic meaning, are not coherent when put next to each other in this way. I’m not at all sure myself what the whole message means.”
The words hit Ava like a blow.
For all his reticence, Cordingly no doubt understood the message as well as anyone could. So either he was not being honest with her, or she had to face the possibility she may have made a mistake. Maybe it was not freemasonic? Perhaps there was another angle she was missing?
As they passed through the Memorial Hall and into another glossy marbled corridor, he stopped outside a numbered committee room door.
“I’m sorry I can’t help further.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a leaflet. “There’s a floor-plan of the building on the back.” He handed it to her. “Follow this corridor all the way down and then left, and the map will show you how to get to the exit.”
She nodded her thanks.
A brick wall again.
“Just one more thing,” she asked, deflated. “If you knew I tricked my way in here, why did you agree to see me?”
He placed a hand on the door handle, before answering slowly. “Actually, it was your work in Baghdad.”
She was no longer surprised at what he knew about her. His database was clearly plugged in where it mattered.
“Are you aware there are no freemasonic lodges in the Middle East?” He pursed his lips thoughtfully.
She shook her head. It was not the sort of thing she had ever thought about.
“There were once.” He looked back down the corridor at the dappled and colourful light coming from the shrine. “We used to be a global brotherhood. After we unveiled ourselves here in Covent Garden in 1717, Britain spread our beliefs throughout the empire, and all over the world. There were thriving lodges across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. You could find us from Chicago to Cairo, and Karachi to Kuala Lumpur.”
He looked solemn. “I had hoped maybe your visit here today might directly or indirectly reveal there was again freemasonic activity in the Middle East.” He shrugged. “So we’re both disappointed.”
He held out his hand to shake hers.
“The secret handshake?” she smiled ruefully, as she felt his hand wrap around hers.
His eyes twinkled, but there was nothing out of the ordinary in the warm handshake he gave her. “I’m sure you think us foolish, with our handshakes and secrecy. But one day the world will recognize our contribution to the tolerance and civilized liberal values at the heart of what is best in Western thought. We’ve been around in one form or another for centuries, and our loyalty is our strength. Enemies of our beliefs have tried to bring us down many times. But none have ever succeeded. The Church’s Inquisition failed to break us, and so did the twentieth century’s dictators. Whether we are kings or paupers, and we are both and more —we stay silent and true. Even the ruthless agents of the KGB learned nothing when they tried to penetrate our ranks during the Cold War.”
He nodded to indicate the interview was over. “Good luck, Dr Curzon. I hope you find your answers. You can keep the map.”
But Ava was no longer listening. A panel of floodlights had just flashed on in her head.
The map.
The KGB.
Of course!
She kicked herself.
She could not believe she had not seen it before.
She turned on her heels and run back down the echoing marble corridor, shouting a hurried goodbye to the startled man watching her disappear into the palatial depths of one of London’s least-known buildings.
——————— ◆ ———————
Brompton Road
South Kensington
London SW7
England
The United Kingdom
Ava went over the message again in her mind:
OLD LONDON STATION
BETWEEN THE PILLARS
IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?
How could she have been so blind?
She continued to kick herself as she headed away from Freemasons’ Hall and towards the underground station.
The answer was so obvious, and had been staring her in the face all along.
It was pure espionage history—just the sort of thing Prince and the
katsa
would have used.
And she should have recognized it
.
‘LONDON STATION’ was not a railway or tube station. It was another kind of station altogether.
A spy station.
And not just any spy station. ‘LONDON STATION’ was the infamous name the KGB used for their elaborate London operations during the Cold War.
It was ‘old’ because the KGB no longer existed. In the new modern post-
Glasnost
Russia, it was now the Federal Security Service, the
Federal
’
naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti.
The Kremlin apparatchiks said the old days were gone and it was now a fresh organization for a new era. But all watchers of the Former Soviet Union knew nothing had changed. It was still the same people in the grim Lubyanka building, plying their grisly trade.
Despite Cordingly’s assertion that he immediately recognized parts of Prince’s phrase, she had begun to have doubts when he said it was not an “X-marks-the-spot map.” It had made her seriously consider the possibility the message did not have any connection with the freemasons.
Because if Ava was now right, that was precisely what it was: a map giving the
katsa
directions—almost certainly to a dead letter box, where she suspected Prince had left something valuable.
She should have twigged straight away, because Prince was not referring to just any dead letter box.
It was the most famous one of all.
Ava remembered being taught about dead letter boxes during her training back at MI6’s centre at Fort Monckton. At first she had thought it all sounded amateurish and melodramatically cloak-and-dagger—largely irrelevant in the modern world of hi-tech gadgetry. She imagined there must be a hundred and one cleverer and more efficient ways to pass data covertly in the computer age.
But that was before her instructors had split the students into teams to set and uncover their own dead letter boxes. It was only then she learned how difficult they were to identify.
She and her fellow students quickly became expert in how to take multiple forms of transport to ‘clean’ off any pursuers before visiting their dead letter boxes. And they were shown how to set pre-agreed signs to indicate when the box was full and needed clearing—anything from the number of plant pots on a balcony to the way a newspaper in a public rubbish bin was folded.
On joining her first desk, she had rapidly seen how effectively dead letter boxes really worked in hostile territory. She quickly understood why they had stood the test of time so well. Their simplicity, anonymity, lack of reliance on gadgetry that could malfunction or be discovered, and their ultimate deniability, were unbeatable.
She raced out of South Kensington’s confusing underground station, and rushed northwards.
The KGB’s main dead letter box in London was legendary. She and her fellow students had all smiled when they were told about it. But they soon realized it was an inspired idea.
It was in a large building with an infinite number of dusty corners. People of all nationalities came and went at all hours, seven days a week, and they moved about it at their own speed, kneeling and standing as they pleased. And none of this behaviour ever raised any eyebrows.
It was a perfect place for hiding information.
She emerged onto Cromwell Road by the leafy twelve-and-a-half-acre site of the Victoria and Albert Museum—the heart of London’s Albertopolis. With around a hundred and fifty galleries filled with decorative arts and thronging crowds, it was a supremely anonymous place.
But she hurried past it, to the smaller building next door.
Built around twenty years later, its pollution-encrusted Portland stone façade meant it could easily have passed for an extension of the museum. But the towering statue of the Virgin Mary high over the porchway gave it away instantly as something else.
It was a Catholic church—a rather grand one.
Ava ran through the iron gate fencing it off from the busy street, and pounded up the six shallow stone steps to its portico.
There were three sets of heavy doors into the building, and she made straight for the nearest one. As she approached, she caught sight of the wooden board screwed to the wall to its right. It displayed the times of mass, and she was surprised to see the fathers of the Oratory still offered a number of daily services in Latin.
She knew it was the first Catholic church to have been built in London after Catholicism became legal again in the mid-1800s, but she had no idea it was so old-fashioned. Even the pope rarely said mass in Latin any more.
It was clearly a very traditional place.
As she pushed open the heavy door and entered the cool of the dark building, she paused to take in the sight.
When she and Cyrus had explained to Ferguson that Christianity was an ancient Roman mystery religion, still largely unchanged after two thousand years, she realized she should just have brought him here.
The church was cavernous, larger than most cathedrals, heavy with neo-classical art and statues. So much so, it looked as if it had been carried stone by stone from ancient Rome. With a little imagination, she could have been in the Roman Pantheon, where the old rites to the pagan gods had eventually given way to the new state religion of Christianity.
As she entered, diagonal tunnels of bright light from the circular windows in the roof pierced the immense gloom, increasing the drama of the ancient scene inside.
The first thing to hit her was the smell. It did not seem to come from anywhere in particular, but to have been impregnated into every inch of the decorated ancient walls, the big-eyed statues, and the gilded portraits of heroic saints hanging in agony and ecstasy.
It was a rich sweet and spicy scent—a heady mix of incense, candle smoke, and polish, recently topped up by the cloud of frankincense and myrrh lingering thickly over the high altar from the mass that had just ended.
The handful of people who had attended were now shuffling towards the doors—some stopping in side chapels to light candles or rub the toes of saints in whom they trusted.
She knew what she was looking for.
The ‘pity’ of the widow.
It was a common statue in Catholic churches—usually known by its Italian name, the
piet
à
. She knew exactly what it would look like. They were always the same—a distraught young mother cradling the mutilated corpse of her executed son.
She thought back to Prince’s message.
The clue she had missed was the word ‘pity’. She could not believe she had not spotted it sooner. Prince’s message read ‘IS THERE NO
PITY
FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?’ She had remembered that the freemasonic phrase was ‘is there no
help
for the widow’s son’, but assumed the difference had not been important.
It had.
Prince’s message had not been freemasonic at all.
The widow, Ava was now sure, was the Virgin Mary. According to ancient Church traditions, Mary lost her husband young. Although the Bible did not explicitly say Joseph died, it never mentioned him again after Jesus’ childhood, and the theologians of the early Church quickly concluded Mary had been widowed.
Ava scanned the church for the
piet
à
.
The amount of art ornamenting the building was overwhelming, but as she moved down the south side of the nave, she finally saw it—a wide marble statue behind an iron railing. It was about ten paces in front of her, obvious to anyone walking towards the high altar, just as it had been throughout the Cold War.
It was larger and grander than she had expected—a dramatic and poignant interpretation of a parent’s desolation at the violent death of a child.
As she drew closer, she could see the side chapel it was tucked into was dedicated in gothic letters to Saint Patrick.
The dark recess was dominated by a high ornate altar bristling with oversize candlesticks. Above it hung an overbearing triptych featuring a golden painting of the grey-bearded patron saint of Ireland, dressed as a bishop. To the right was a bank of guttering candles, lit by the faithful hoping for intercession.
She remembered how Professor Duffy, one of her palaeography tutors at Harvard, always enjoyed telling incredulous Irish-American freshmen that Saint Patrick was not remotely Irish, but actually from England. They listened in horror as he explained Saint Patrick’s connection to Ireland only came when he had the misfortune to be kidnapped by Irish raiders and carried off as a slave to their green wet and windy island.
It had opened her eyes to the myths surrounding the thousands of saints—many of which she discovered were shockingly inaccurate. Like when, years later, working in Jordan, she had discovered that Saint George, the bombastic patron saint of England, had never even set foot in the continent of Europe, let alone England. Born and brought up in Palestine, he never travelled further west then Turkey, where he was decapitated.
Looking around, she could see that people were still milling about after the mass. To avoid drawing attention to herself, she dropped some coins into the rusty metal box bolted loosely under the rickety candle rack, and stood in line to light a candle.
When the side chapel had cleared, she was finally able to approach the
pietà
.
It was a luxurious statue, carved from a block of creamy-grey marble. As she had expected, it was a classic arrangement. Mary sat, grief-stricken, cradling Jesus’ broken body—her face hidden, her neck bent in sorrow.
By contrast, Jesus’ face was rendered in fine detail. Gazing at it, she questioned, as she often did, why artists insisted on depicting him as a lanky well-muscled long-haired and bearded northern European. She wondered how western history might have been different if religious art had been more ethnically accurate. It would have shown him as a small olive-skinned short-haired and clean-shaven man—more identifiable with the faces on the streets of the Middle East than Scandinavia.
As she neared the
piet
à
, she could see a long list of names inscribed on the wall behind the statue. Across the top it read: ‘DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI’, which she immediately recognized as the famous line, ‘It is sweet and noble to die for your country’.
On the black-and-white-checked marble floor were inlaid the words ‘CONSUMMATUM EST’, Jesus’ traditional dying words, ‘It is done’. Beside the lettering, she spotted the years ‘1914’ and ‘1919’ marbled into the floor, and realized that for the second time that morning she was looking at a memorial to the fallen of the First World War.
She had long ago realized that England was a country where the war dead were everywhere. The losses England had suffered in the conflicts of the twentieth century were still a defining part of the country’s national identity.
Focusing back on the
pietà
, she knew the KGB’s infamous dead letter box had been somewhere around the statue, but as she examined it critically, taking in the folds of carved fabric and the angles of the bodies, she could not see any obvious places to hide or retrieve anything. There were no cavities on the front or sides, and it was physically impossible to reach behind the statue, as it was set too far back from the protective iron railing.
Nevertheless, she was sure she had not made a mistake. This
had
to be where Prince had left the information for the
katsa
.
Stumped, she took a step back, and looked at it afresh.
What was she missing?
That’s when she saw them—a pair of monumental pillars standing to the left of the
piet
à
.
Looking around the church, she could see each of the many side chapels had a similar pair of pillars, flanking its entrance off the main nave. They were colossal structural columns, hewn and polished out of dark-veined marble, supporting the vast ceiling arches that covered each side chapel.
Was that it?
Was that what Prince meant?
She had been assuming that ‘BETWEEN THE PILLARS’ had been referring to the church’s architecture in general. But perhaps Prince had meant exactly what she had written. Maybe the drop she had arranged with the
katsa
was not behind the
piet
à
itself, but was quite literally ‘BETWEEN THE PILLARS’ next to the statue.
As far as Ava could see, it was the only place that anything could be hidden.
She moved closer, her eyes fixed on the pair of columns.
As she neared them, she could make out to her relief that they were spaced far enough apart for someone to reach an arm into the gloom between them.
Even though their square stone bases almost touched, there was a narrow gap running between them, and another to the rear between their bases and the wall. Either space was easily large enough to hide something small.
She needed to move quickly—to find whatever was hidden there, and get back to Ferguson. Whoever had murdered Prince was still on the loose. Until she knew who it was, and why they had targeted Prince, she had to assume she and Ferguson were also on the list.
But as she took the last few steps to the pillars, she could see a major problem developping.
A twenty-something man in a fawn corduroy jacket was talking to a stocky black-cassocked priest with an incongruous shock of scruffy blond hair. The man had pulled a small book from his pocket, and was pointing out a passage to the priest. The two were deep in discussion. And they had moved to stand directly in front of the pillars.