by Scott Baker
‘No!’ Shaun said, giving a little on his grip. ‘Not until you tell me!’
The Italian refocused his gaze. ‘Tracking! You are being tracked. A device was planted on you.’
‘Device? A tracking device? But when?’ Shaun thought back, replaying the events in his mind. Yes, after Lauren had been shot.
The female cop. She had touched him on the shoulder to turn him away from the bed. To comfort him. She had pushed too hard, he remembered.
Instantly he struggled out of his jacket with his free arm, taking a moment before realising he could not take it off and maintain his grip on this man.
‘Who are you? Why do you want to kill me? Why did you kill Lauren?’ Shaun persisted.
‘We want what you have. We want the map. We want—’ Suddenly the Italian’s face turned ashen white as the chain railing broke away. In an instant Shaun fell forward under the doubling of weight and slid onto his stomach halfway off the platform. Instinctively he dropped the gun and grabbed at the edge. The Italian’s free hand pulled at Shaun’s jacket, loosening the diary, which had sat precariously in the inner pocket.
‘Arrrgghhh!’ Shaun screamed under the weight. The Italian dangled freely out over the water below. Shaun hung grimly, his feet hooked around the opposite side of the platform, his free hand wrapped round its edge, his torso hanging off up to his navel.
Then, there was a strange change in the sound of the wind. The rushing whoosh sucked in and sounded like a hollow howl. Shaun knew the sound. It was the sound of an approaching tunnel. The Italian had seen it too, and Shaun fought desperately to pull them both back up.
‘Please! Please, let me go. Let me fall into the water!’ The Italian begged suddenly. Shaun didn’t understand. He turned to see the approaching rock wall of the tunnel and then looked down at the water below. The fall might kill the man, but not as definitively as the wall of stone rushing towards him at sixty miles an hour. No! He wanted answers. He could not let the man—
‘Please! You must let go now. Now or I don’t have time to hit the water.’
Shaun’s hand opened.
The Italian disappeared out of sight almost instantly, pulling Shaun’s jacket with him just as Shaun plucked the diary from it. Shaun would never know blue-shirt’s fate. Without the added weight, he scrambled back onto the platform just as the tunnel wall plunged him back into darkness.
In one hand he gripped the diary. The gun bounced on the platform and Shaun noticed a small lever on the side of the weapon. Above it was the word ‘safety’ and the lever pointed to ‘on’. Shaun flicked the lever and re-entered the carriage.
CHAPTER 30
Cardinal François Le Clerque sat in quiet contemplation. He had not expected the news they had just given him. Losing the school teacher was not part of the plan. Now he had to decide what to do about it. He thumbed again through the pile of papers on his desk. The bundle had been recovered from a motel in south-east America. Hebrew mostly. He had translated these personally.
Much of it was interesting, but not particularly relevant to the task at hand. In any other situation, finding documents of this kind, in this condition, would have been cause for celebration, but there was still no map. He’d had the documents analysed, of course. They were all two thousand years old or more, but … there was no map. The frustration gnawed at him.
He had been a close friend of Müller for more than a decade and had the old fool’s implicit trust. Indeed, it had been Le Clerque’s influence over the conclave, including ‘suggestions’ to certain council members about the way they should vote, that had guaranteed the German’s rise to the papacy.
What would the old man think now if he knew what was happening? Ah, it wasn’t his concern. Every Pope had their own agenda, a legacy they wished to leave. Why was it that they all cared so much about making their impression on this Church? Le Clerque had grander ambitions, and Müller was running out of time. The cancer eating away at his body would soon force the old German to retire – a move almost unheard of in the papacy, but Le Clerque knew that this was the pontiff’s intention. The congregation of cardinals would again vote, and Le Clerque had seen to it that this time when the white smoke rose, he would ascend to the station of Holy See. Of the one hundred and fifteen cardinals who would vote, Le Clerque had ‘persuasive information’ on eighty-three of them.
Müller had been a close personal friend and confidant of his predecessor, the Polish pontiff Nicholas II, and yet, not even he had known what the old man had really been up to. Müller had not known about The Facility.
It was now Le Clerque’s official duty to head up the commission that was investigating the multitude of unanswered questions that the death of Nicholas II, back in 2005, had left. Suddenly it had come to light that the old man had secrets; secrets not shared with even his closest friends, nor any of the other high-ranking members of the cloth. Vatican resources had been used. Vatican connections had been exploited.
There was even a select group of loosely associated Vatican employees whom the cardinal was still ferreting out. He shook his head.
‘How did you keep it quiet for so long, Karol?’ he said to himself, imagining the old Pope in the room with him. The phone rang, breaking his concentration.
‘Bonjour?’ It was his private line, and he knew that anyone calling on this number would have news he wanted to hear.
‘It’s me. We checked all the passenger manifests for the tickets he bought. He’s boarding Flight 912 to Madrid this morning.’
‘Madrid?’ the Frenchman asked, a little surprised.
‘Yes, your Eminence, but there’s something else. The man who met Alberto in the cafe last year here in Paris – we believe he has been in Madrid for some months now.’
Le Clerque had taken care of Alberto, but the other man had escaped his team.
‘They are going to meet?’
‘We do not know, but it would seem a logical assumption. Do you want us to move and intercept?’
The cardinal considered. ‘No … two birds. Let him lead us to Mr Black, then get that map.’
‘Yes, your Eminence. We have a unit on its way as we speak.’
CHAPTER 31
The airport at Richmond, Virginia, was an interesting hybrid of cultures. Further south, in Raleigh–Durham, or further down to Myrtle Beach, the locals were mostly affluent Caucasians. Up here in Richmond, Shaun was close enough to DC to see the influence of true multiculturalism. Faces of every descent passed him, observed him briefly, then looked away to carry on with their business.
He moved briskly along a silver travelator. He had no luggage and had passed through check-in easily, grateful Lauren had made him carry his passport rather than pack it. The idea of sneaking the gun on the flight had crossed his mind briefly, but the remainder of the train trip had proved uneventful, and Shaun had discarded the gun in a trash can outside the train platform.
After all this time, it had been his jacket. They had planted a bug on it. He had been so paranoid about using his phone. The time and energy he could have saved if he had just used his phone! Still, he had taken seven cabs to get to the airport, swapping at various ill-sited interchange points, making attempts to follow him all but impossible. That is, if they didn’t already know he was heading to the airport. But how would they? For all they knew, Shaun was now lying at the bottom of a river somewhere after falling from an Amtrak train.
Using his credit card to buy a plane ticket was not something Shaun had wanted to do. He was getting close to maxing out the card, and he knew that the moment he used it he would give away his location, but he had run out of options. It was not a comforting prospect.
He was going to need money from his brother. He hoped Tim had received that desperate email and wired some across. After buying a plane ticket to Madrid, Tokyo, Sydney and Quito, Shaun felt that if he was going to be tracked, at least he had not made it easy for them.
He arrived at his gate and saw the casual crowd milling in the lounges.
Absently his finger traced the looping symbol on the front of the diary, which now hung in a brightly coloured, complimentary airport bag hanging from his shoulder. It stood out in stark contrast to the crumpled, worn and stained clothes he wore, which reflected the way he felt. Lack of sleep and too many jolts of adrenaline entering his body in too short a time span had wrung him out and beaten him flat.
He focused again on the facts at hand. Saul, the author of this account, was a part of a secret organisation which had trained a group of agents at a place called ‘The Facility’, to travel into the past and interview historical figures. What a wild concept. What a totally, amazingly wild concept. Indeed, the whole idea was one that had intrigued and engaged Shaun for much of his professional life, although he was more concerned with the mechanics of the whole process than what its eventual application might be.
Who would you meet? his brain prompted.
‘Da Vinci,’ Shaun said aloud.
‘Excuse me?’ the woman behind the counter asked.
‘What?’ he said, staring blankly at her.
‘I asked you what kind of coffee you’d like,’ the woman said, her big white teeth shining a friendly smile out from her smooth dark-brown skin. ‘I don’t think we got anything called a “Da Vinci”, although you might find that at Starbucks. We just stick to your regular old cappuccino, latté or flat white. Unless, that is, you’d like yourself a little short black?’ the woman asked with a wink and a giggle.
‘Nuh, um, just a …’ he played with what little change he still had in his pocket. ‘Just a cappuccino, thanks,’ he said ignoring her joke.
So, if you could meet anyone in history and ask them anything, it would be Leonardo Da Vinci?
‘Or Isaac Newton, or Einstein,’ Shaun said, again lost in his thoughts.
‘You sure you don’t wanna switch to decaf?’
Shaun took the coffee, paid and walked away, distracted.
Fontéyne had said that there were others: officers assigned to others. For what? To interview them? To ask all the great minds of history, ‘Why?’ To ask them, ‘How?’ To ask them all the things we want to know in this world today? Or maybe to tell them what was coming? What a concept!
He looked at the diary as he sat down and pulled it out from his bag. He was about to get on a plane to take him to Spain. Why? Because he believed it all? Because he believed that this book was a diary written by a man from modern-day America sent back two thousand years into the past? No. No, he wasn’t doing it because he believed it; he was doing it because he didn’t know what else to do. Lauren was gone. Lauren was killed for this. Someone believed it, and someone would kill to get it, and that was enough.
‘If you went back to interview someone would you tell them about the future? What would you do if you saw something happening that you didn’t like? Would you change it? Would you interfere? Could you change it? Or was the fact that it happened one way proof that it could not have happened any other way?’ Shaun found himself talking out loud again.
‘You’re weird, mister,’ a voice said from beside him. He looked over at the little girl who had crawled over the seats to the one next to him. ‘Who are you talking to?’ she asked.
Shaun smiled. ‘I’m talking to my brain,’ he answered her.
‘Your brain?’ she asked, screwing her face up in a way that only little girls can.
‘Yeah. Sometimes I ask my brain questions and it goes away and works on the answers while I do other things,’ Shaun said.
‘How can you do other things while your brain is answering questions?’ she persisted, curling her top lip to expose the large gap waiting for her front tooth to arrive.
‘Well, you see your teeth there?’ he said pointing at the girl’s mouth.
‘Uh huh.’
‘Well, it’s kind of like that. Your brain is telling your new tooth it’s time to come down, but you’re off playing with your friends.’
She considered this for a moment, then beamed. ‘My friend Jessie has a new doll house!’
‘Does she now?’ he said, loving the way a child’s mind considered all things, cosmic and trivial, equally important.
‘Susan, come away and stop bothering that man,’ the girl’s mother said from a row back after realising her daughter had again gone missing. ‘I’m sorry. She just disappears sometimes. I have to watch her like a hawk.’
‘It’s okay. When I was a kid I ran off on my mom in the museum and sat by the stuffed polar bear in the corner for hours.’ The woman smiled, didn’t see the relevance, and pulled her daughter back by the arm gently.
He thought back to that moment when his mother came to find him; to her face as she saw him sitting alone, any anger she had far outweighed by the sense of relief she felt. What he wouldn’t give to see his mother’s face again. What he wouldn’t give to go back and tell them not to go to church that morning. He would have played sick; he would have done anything if he had known.
If he had known … That’s what it came down to in life. You think the important things are whether you get your assignment done in time, or whether you’ll be late to that boardroom meeting or miss that job you were pitching for. Then the universe comes along and reminds you that the important things in life are the cars in your blind spot that sideswipe you at eight-twenty on a Sunday morning. No, he knew that if he could go back and speak to anyone in history, it would be to his mother and father. It would be to tell them that he had done okay. To tell them that he loved them. Da Vinci could wait.
‘This is the first and final boarding call for flight LH912 to Madrid. Your plane is now ready for boarding through gate twelve,’ a woman’s voice came over the PA system.
Twenty minutes later, he was seated in the middle seat on the far right of the plane, bounded on each side by fellow passengers. The man on his left was enormous. Shaun tried not to get caught staring at the rolls of fat on is neck, but it was mesmerising, reminding him of one of those wrinkled pug dogs.
The older woman on his right sat with her thin spectacles sliding down her nose as she stared intently out the window, willing herself away from the two men on her left, one obese and sweaty, the other unkempt and unwashed.
Shaun didn’t care. He didn’t even notice when the huge jumbo roared to life and sped down the runway. For his first experience in a plane, Shaun Strickland missed the best part, but it was a good trade, he thought later, considering he was about to read the most important information of his life.
CHAPTER 32
The tunnels were dark and forbidding. The orange light from Mishca’s torch filled a circle that danced out only feet in front of us. He had taken us down several sets of stairs and through countless doors seemingly hidden in the stone.
‘This way takes us to tunnels that lead under the city,’ Mishca said without slowing his pace.
‘I left my post at gate four when I saw you on the far side of the arena. I told my supervisor that I had to go to the toilet. He will be looking for me by now.’
‘What are you doing here?’ I finally brought myself to ask. ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘No. They beat me pretty good, but then they gave me work to do. I was assigned to the arena straight away. They wanted me to assist in running the fights, you know, setting up the armour and bringing the gladiators to their chambers and everything like that. They make it clear that for a slave, the only way to survive is to do as I am told.’ He touched the back of his head absently. ‘They make it very clear.’
Just then voices drifted down the tunnel from behind us. How did they know where we were? Obviously Mishca was not the only one who knew these tunnels. The voices were not far.
‘Where do these tunnels lead?’ I asked him.
‘Well,’ he began, ‘they connect all kinds of things. I know some of them lead out into the city at lots of different places, and some of them lead to where they keep the animals.’
‘Where they keep the beasts?’ Malbool asked exasperated.
‘D
o not worry, there are big iron gates that separate us from those chambers.’ As if on cue another sound echoed down the tunnel. This sound was not human. This sound was unearthly, deep, tormented. The roar of a beast.
‘And they wouldn’t open those gates for any reason would they?’ I asked Mishca rhetorically. As one, we quickened our pace and drove into the darkness, away from the sound.
It was a labyrinth, a maze unseen by human eyes for decades. The ground changed from dirt to rock and then finally to inch-deep water. The dampness came from everywhere: the walls, the roof, and the very stones themselves. The only thing on my mind, however, was the intermittent guttural sounds that permeated the darkness.
I was terrified. Whether it was the culmination of a day of defending my life, or the eeriness of the atmosphere, all the clichés suddenly held weight: I felt my skin crawl, my hairs stand up and my blood run cold.
‘Mishca! What’s the quickest way out of the city?’ I asked. The boy hesitated. ‘I … I don’t’ know,’ he said.
‘The aqueducts,’ Malbool said suddenly. ‘If we can get to the aqueducts, we can follow them all the way up into the mountains.’
‘I don’t want to go to the mountains. I want to go to the sea. I need a boat to Israel … I mean, Judea.’
The roar came again. Then another sound. Not like a lion, but something much, much bigger.
‘What is that?’ I asked, beginning to visualise all manner of fierce creatures moving relentlessly down the passageway. We were still travelling at a rapid pace, trusting Mishca’s decisions when we came to twists and turns in the tunnels.
‘What about the river?’ I asked. ‘Malbool, you said there’s a river that runs through the centre of the city. Surely that would be our best way to the ocean?’
‘It would, but to get there we would have to leave the Coliseum by one of the gates, which would be heavily guarded by now. I think also that the river might be hard to travel on unnoticed—’
