“So did you kill my father?”
He looked down at her coldly. “It doesn’t make any difference now.”
“It does to me,” she spat back through gritted teeth, wishing more than anything there was a poker or anything metal and heavy in the fire-grate beside her. But it was empty.
“I wasn’t there when it happened.” DeVere continued. “But I won’t lie to you. He was getting in the way—becoming too interested in the Thelema. I didn’t actually pull the trigger, if that’s what you’re asking. But then in our line, we don’t always have to do the work ourselves, do we? Although,” he looked at his pistol then at Ava, “we do occasionally have to get our hands a little dirty.”
Ava glared at him with undisguised hatred. “You’re not going to get away with this.”
“Somehow, I don’t think you’re in a position to make any threats.” He eyed her coldly.
As much as it pained her to admit it, he was right.
She had to keep him talking.
“Why does Malchus want the Ark and the Menorah?”
DeVere looked blankly at her. “I don’t know. And to be honest, that’s his business.” He paused. “But one thing I do know is that your involvement stops here.”
He pointed the gun at her back, directly behind her heart. “Time to pray, Ava. And say hello to your father from me.”
She stared angrily at him, refusing to let the conversation end. “We’re not done, yet.”
“Oh, I think we are.” He straightened his arm to take the shot.
“What about Prince?” she asked, trying to focus on the question and keep the fear from her voice. “That was a clever hit. It was you, wasn’t it?” From everything she had just learned, she was now sure it had been. She prayed his pride would not be able to resist crowing about it. She needed more time.
“You catch on quick.” An arrogant smirk spread across his face. “She was getting too close. But actually it was you who signed her death warrant.”
Ava stared at him straight in the eye, defying him to pass the blame onto anyone else.
“Oh yes,” he nodded. “When you told me on the bridge that the Americans had a file saying Malchus was involved in your father’s death, you as good as wrote the order. You see, I had religiously cleaned all the MI6 files and filled them with history the way I wanted it to be read. It hadn’t occurred to me the Americans also had a file. But thanks to you, I was able to find the file in Prince’s office and destroy it. And then? Well, you know how we all hate loose ends. So,” he paused, “now things are back to normal.”
“Not quite,” Ava retorted, an idea forming in her mind.
It was something of a long shot, but she had very few options left. “There’s a copy,” she said slowly. “She passed the information on.”
“To you?” DeVere snorted. “Well that’s hardly a threat, is it? Your adventure is over.” The expression in his eyes was flinty.
“Not just to me.” Ava paused, relishing the chance to see his reaction. “To her Israeli handlers from the Institute.” Of course, she knew Prince’s SD card and the information never got near Tel Aviv, but DeVere did not need to know that. She could afford to be a little creative with the truth.
For the first time since DeVere had entered the room, she saw a hint of uncertainty in his eye. “Mossad? Prince? How can you know that?” he challenged her. “You’re lying.”
“Let me show you something.” Ava arched her back upwards, dislodging his foot. She rolled onto her left hip, and with her right hand reached for her jacket’s inside pocket.
In one fast fluid motion DeVere pulled back the silver slide on top of the handgun and released it, drawing a round from the magazine into the chamber with a loud click. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Ava froze, the adrenaline pumping hard.
He kept the weapon trained on her. “How stupid do you think I am?” He moved around to face her. At the same time, she moved onto her knees.
She could feel the cold of the metal as he pressed the pistol’s hard muzzle into her forehead before he bent down and reached to get whatever was inside her pocket. “Keep your hands where I can see them,” he ordered bluntly.
He had done it beautifully. Exactly as she had hoped. She had got him where she wanted him, and in less than a second the opportunity would be gone. It was the only chance she was going to get, and she had no intention of missing it.
He was watching her hands, so was completely unprepared for what happened next.
In a lightning-fast movement, she whipped her head round, and sank her teeth deeply into the soft flesh of his wrist, biting down as fast and hard as she could until she could taste blood and feel bone.
Roaring with pain at the unexpected wound, he staggered back towards the doorway. Seizing the moment, Ava launched herself at him, smashing her shoulder into his upper legs with all her force.
It was second nature to her that an attack requires maximum aggression and maximum speed. That was the mantra of all combat training she had ever done, and she was having no difficulties summoning both. Her blood was up, and she channelled the full force of her anger into the assault.
The power of the impact sent him careering off balance.
Now on her feet, she made a grab with both hands for the gun still pointing at her, wrenching it violently sideways, hoping to dislodge his grip as he staggered backwards. He howled again in pain, but this time it was as his index finger, trapped inside the trigger guard, was neatly dislocated.
To her surprise, despite the force of her onslaught, he recovered quickly. Steadying himself, he moved backwards, away from her rising knee.
With panic swelling, she saw him place his middle finger over the injured one lying on the trigger, and begin to squeeze.
Time seemed to slow completely as she calculated there was no time to do anything except hurl herself towards him in an urgent attempt to be on the other side of the gun’s barrel by the time his finger finished squeezing the trigger.
Flinging herself forward, she heard the deafening bang of the round detonating, as the room simultaneously filled with the biting smell of igniting gunpowder.
But to her surprise, as her ears stopped ringing, she realized nothing had changed.
She and DeVere were still both standing.
Confused, she twisted round over her shoulder to look at her left hand—still holding the gun.
She shook her head, trying to focus clearly.
Something did not make sense.
She still had her hand on the gun, and could not understand why she had not felt the top slide recoil as he had fired. She could not see the spent cartridge shell anywhere on the floor either.
She wondered for a moment if her confusion was a symptom of a severe injury. Perhaps she was going into shock from a massive close-range gun trauma?
As she blinked a couple of time to clear her head, DeVere’s grip on the handgun loosened, and he crumpled before her, dropping like a stone to the floor—revealing Ferguson in the doorway behind him holding his small steel-blue Sig Sauer.
“I had a clear shot.” His tone was matter of fact. “So I took it.” He entered the room, tucking the pistol back into the waistband of his jeans.
“Nice work, by the way,” he added, noticing the livid fresh bite marks on DeVere’s wrist. “Remind me not to get too close to you.”
Ava stepped back, still dazed.
She looked down at DeVere’s body. His head and shoulders lay in a patch of sunlight on the floor—the criss-cross pattern of the window’s leading casting a matrix of diamonds over his frozen features. Trickles of blood and fluid dribbled out over a clump of brain matter poking from a ragged hole where a small piece of his skull had sheared off. His dead eyes looked back up at her with a glassy emptiness.
Her eyes were locked on him—the full horror of the last fifteen minutes only now beginning truly to sink in.
DeVere and Malchus? In it together?
She still could not believe it. She felt paralyzed with incredulity looking at the corpse of the man she had thought for so many years was a family friend.
Ferguson touched her arm, breaking the moment. “There are no cellars. The house is clean. We need to get out of here.”
Snapping back to reality, Ava tore her eyes away. She felt a cold purpose seeping through her as she bent down and pulled the gun from DeVere’s fingers, placing it carefully into her pocket. It would be clean, unregistered—untraceable by the regular police.
From the way things were going, she figured it may come in handy.
She headed for the door. “There are no guards or security here,” she concluded. “It’s clear the Ark and Menorah are somewhere else. Right now, we need to get back to Freemasons’ Hall.”
Ferguson shook his head. “It’s not safe going back to London. We can’t risk it. There are going to be too many people looking for us. We need to lie low.”
But Ava was no longer listening. She was walking briskly back down the hall towards the stairs.
——————— ◆ ———————
Freemasons
’
Hall
Covent Garden
London WC2
England
The United Kingdom
The security guard behind the front desk in the vast art deco foyer of Freemasons’ Hall was the same one Ava had spoken to earlier.
She announced herself to him, and asked to see the Deputy Grand Secretary again.
The guard did not seem bothered by Ferguson’s presence. He nodded a polite acknowledgement to them both, before making a phone call. After a discussion she could not hear, he put the receiver down and pointed her down the lustrously polished corridor to Cordingly’s office.
“It’s open,” Cordingly called out as she knocked on the heavy wooden door.
Pushing it wide, she saw Cordingly rising from behind the large desk dominating the well-proportioned office—its cream walls and polished dark wood decorations entirely in keeping with the singular and striking style of the building.
He was wearing the same black tie as before, and Ava found herself again distracted by the blatant central image of the Ark and the cloven-hoofed cherubs guarding it.
“Dr Curzon? Back again so soon?” He looked surprised, but was smiling warmly. “I did think you had left rather quickly this morning.”
Cordingly stepped around the desk as she introduced Ferguson. “I do hope your trip hasn’t been wasted,” he sounded slightly apologetic. “But I’m sorry to say my position remains unchanged. I’ve made promises I deem inviolable, and I’m afraid I simply can’t assist with the text you showed me earlier.”
“You helped more than you know,” Ava reassured him. “It turned out not to be a freemasonic code—just designed to look like one.”
He failed to keep a flash of relief from his face, indicating for her and Ferguson to take a seat in the suite of comfortably upholstered chairs grouped around a low walnut coffee table. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure this time?”
“Your library,” Ava smiled, walking over to the armchair he had indicated and sitting down. “As we passed through it this morning, I glimpsed a section on cryptology.”
“A discipline in which we have a long history,” he confirmed. “As I mentioned, there have been dark times in our past when circumstances required us to operate in the shadows.” He steepled his fingers, leaning his elbows on the worn arms of the deep chair. “But forgive me. You said the code you brought me was not freemasonic—so how can our library help you?”
“This is something else entirely,” Ava explained. “Another matter—a locked door to which, I think, you may this time genuinely hold the key.”
Leaning forward in his chair, his voice became more serious. “Forgive me, Dr Curzon, but is your enquiry connected to the matter you came to me about earlier? An issue of ‘historical and political importance’ I think you said, which has attracted the interest of several international intelligence agencies?”
“The answer to the previous clue has brought us to another one,” she explained.
He looked pensive. “Treasure hunts are something we are familiar with in this building. However, as I clearly told you, our organization promotes the interests of the brotherhood of mankind—those things upon which all civilized humans can agree. In a word, we don’t do politics. We’re not here to help individual governments with their partisan opinions and rivalries. We have brothers and sisters in hundreds of countries, and their continued safe existence is only guaranteed by our reputation for unwavering non-participation in these things.”
Ava leant towards him. “I can assure you, the forces at work here are not national political ones. To the contrary. They are an unwelcome danger to us all.”
“From whose point of view?” Cordingly asked shrewdly. “It’s often a matter of opinion, I find.”
“Not in this case,” Ava countered. “A truly dangerous group is pursuing an objective we have yet to understand fully. But if, as you said, the Nazis were your chief twentieth-century persecutors, then you have more reason to be afraid than most.”
Ferguson reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. Removing a hard plastic card, he handed it to Cordingly.
Ava could see on it the distinctive blue and white logo of London’s Metropolitan Police force, with Ferguson’s photograph in the top left corner and the designation ‘CO19’ in the top right above the words ‘Firearms Command, SFO’.
Cordingly raised an eyebrow. “Will this check out?”
“Feel free to make whatever calls you need to,” Ferguson reassured him.
Cordingly stared at the card, tapping it against his thumbnail. “Very well,” he replied after a pause, handing the card back to Ferguson and staring at them both keenly. “You have whatever help I can give you. But understand this, if things are not as you say, you’ll have a lot of explaining to do—and not just to me.”
The threat hung in the air for a few seconds, before Ava nodded solemnly. “Perfectly understood,” she confirmed, changing tone. “I was wondering, do you have anything in your library’s cryptology section on Voynich?”
Cordingly looked blank. “I’ve absolutely no idea. How do you spell it?”
Ava wrote the word on the small pad he passed her, before handing it back to him.
“I’ll see what we have,” he stood up. “Please excuse me.”
As soon as Cordingly had left the room, Ferguson pulled out his mobile phone and glanced at it. Ava could see from the screen that he had five missed calls.
“HQ,” he confirmed her unspoken suspicion. “I guess they want to have a little chat with us.”
Ava pointed to the photocard he was sliding back into his wallet. “Since when were you a special firearms officer?”
“You don’t think I’d pass selection?” he feigned a look of disbelief. “The Firm issued it to me when I started doing odd jobs for them. It’s my get-out-of-jail card if anyone gets too curious about what I’m up to. It works wonders when I’m pulled for speeding.”
“You think you’re still approved?”
He nodded. “It should check out just fine. The HR desk-jockeys at Vauxhall Cross haven’t fired me yet—although it won’t take long once they find out that I’m the reason DeVere doesn’t need his corner office anymore.” He slipped the wallet back into his pocket. “It’s a good job our friend here didn’t call the number. I’m afraid our masters are not going to be very friendly when they find us.”
That was an understatement, and Ava knew it. Now DeVere was dead, they were prime suspects for his murder, and did not have a single shred of evidence to support the story DeVere had confessed to her, or the fact he had been about to gun Ava down in cold blood.
She was all too aware the situation had become intensely dangerous for her and Ferguson.
She would be able to show them Prince’s file on Malchus, and they could compare it with theirs, which had been tampered with by DeVere. They would see the discrepancies. But on its own, the file only showed that someone had been interfering with the records. To prove the full extent of DeVere’s treachery, she would need to find Malchus and bring him in.
Malchus was the only person who could corroborate DeVere’s involvement. His testimony about DeVere’s loyalties would be the only evidence that would give her a chance of explaining their innocence.
And it was not just DeVere’s death that threatened her. There was Prince’s assassination, too. DeVere’s confession of pulling the trigger had gone with him to the grave. The authorities would soon find out Ferguson had arranged to meet Prince that morning, and the records would quickly reveal that he had been first on the scene to report the assassination. That would make them number one suspect for that murder, too.
The only thing that would help explain both deaths was if Malchus could be persuaded to give a frank account of DeVere’s double life.
But it was a long shot. He could easily choose simply to blame her for both deaths. It would be child’s play for him to implicate her, and get her out of his way permanently. Perhaps he would even blame her for Drewitt’s murder and that of the priest and Max’s man in the Basilica di San Clemente as well? She had no alibi for any of them, and had clearly been involved with all the dead individuals.
She could only hope that Malchus’s vanity would rise to the challenge, and he would enjoy telling the service how one of their own senior officers had duped them for so long.
Failing that, she would have to hope the Firm’s purpose-built ‘interview rooms’ with their trolleys of chemicals in the basement at Legoland would be enough. They were not the squalid torture chambers Malchus had presided over back in Berlin. The British interrogation teams knew how to get what they wanted from people like Malchus in more sophisticated ways. With a prize like him, there would soon be a host of officers lining up after his confessions to forgive his crimes, turn him, and become his new handler. He was too useful to be locked up.
But she knew they would be wrong to try to run him. He was too skilled at dissembling, and would be back to his usual habits in no time. DeVere’s death would be an inconvenience for him, no doubt, but he would soon convince someone else in the establishment to extend a shield around him. She doubted he would have too much difficulty finding a sympathizer, or someone who could be paid, threatened, or blackmailed to protect him.
How to deal with him more permanently would be her problem—but one she would have to wait to solve until after she had found his museum of biblical artefacts, and after he had cleared her name.
All in good time.
First she had to find him.
And she had to do it before the authorities found her and Ferguson.
She now knew for certain his main base was not at Stockbridge House. Drewitt’s home was a convenient secluded spot an hour and a half from London, but there was no evidence he had the Ark and the Menorah there.
He was plainly keeping them somewhere else.
The postmark ‘Foyers’ on the letter to Drewitt was more intriguing. But somehow she could not quite see Malchus in Scotland. He was an urban creature—more at home in Dresden, Berlin, or London. She could not imagine what could attract him to the rugged Highlands, miles from his supporters and the action.
“Are these what you’re looking for?” Cordingly re-entered the room, closing the door behind him. “What’s this all about, anyway? The librarian got quite excited when I said Voynich.”
He was carrying a pile of books—the largest of which was a glossy hardback, its cover decorated in the same loopy writing as on the letter from Malchus to Drewitt.
He put them down in front of Ava and pointed to the largest one. “He told me this is a full-size facsimile of the entire manuscript—quite rare, apparently.”
Ava opened the book and flicked through a few of the two hundred shiny photographs of light brown vellum folios covered in the same strange characters. Most of them also had fantastical illustrations in muted blue, brown, green, red, and yellow inks.
Ferguson exhaled loudly. “There’s a whole book of that writing?”
“Do explain,” Cordingly sounded as mystified as Ferguson.
“It’s the Voynich manuscript,” Ava leafed through the bizarre pages, “and is as unfathomable to today’s cryptologists as prehistoric stone circles are to modern archaeologists.”
“Don’t governments have departments that can do this sort of thing?” Cordingly looked sceptical. “Surely they could crack it in a jiffy?”
Ava shook her head. “The world’s top cryptologists have wrestled with it ceaselessly. Everyone has tried, from the best-resourced spy agencies like Bletchley Park, GCHQ, and the NSA all the way to leading professors of mathematics and linguistics using the latest supercomputers. But every single person and team has drawn a blank. No one has ever deciphered a single letter of it.”
Cordingly looked at her with incredulity. “So what on earth is it? What could be that securely enciphered?”
Ava shrugged. “No one knows. Its drawings are of plants, herbs, constellations, and miniature people. None of them seem to make any sense. They’re as much of a mystery as the strange alphabet itself.”
She slid the book across the table to Ferguson, who began turning the pages, gazing at the astonishing folios as they changed from images of phantasmagoric plants to circular groups of naked women wearing crowns and holding stars. As he kept flicking, the theme of the images changed again, with the nude women now pictured standing amid hare-brained laboratory equipment and what looked like engineering pipework.
“Listen to this,” he announced, reading aloud from the accompanying introductory notes.
For years, the enigmatic manuscript’s author was assumed to be the medieval English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (
c
.1220–92), the undisputed intellectual colossus of the high middle ages, who made gunpowder and described motorized vehicles and flying machines two hundred years before Leonardo da Vinci. His fascination with experimental science was often seen as heretical, and he spent a period in prison for his ‘novelties’. He taught at Oxford and Paris, and was a fierce advocate of knowledge, whether or not it agreed with Christian teaching. He is known to have worked on advanced cryptography, used codes for his research, and specifically referred to using characters not known to anyone.
Recent scientific analysis, however, has dated the vellum and inks in the Voynich manuscript to the first three decades of the 1400s, and traced its most likely origin to southern Germany or northern Italy.
“Very interesting,” Cordingly mused. “The early fifteenth century was a relatively peaceful period for free-thinkers. The medieval Inquisition was effectively dead, and no one had yet dreamed of the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition, or the later rigid Roman Inquisition that burned Galileo.” He turned to Ava. “So is the Voynich manuscript Christian or heretical?”
“I believe on one page there’s a nude female figure holding a cross,” she answered. “But that’s the only Christian imagery in the whole text.”
“Well, well. A genuinely heretical medieval text. Fascinating,” Cordingly looked delighted.
Ferguson continued: