The Revelation Code

by Andy McDermott

  ‘It might not be on it,’ said Eddie. ‘It might be hidden inside it, we don’t know. All we do know is that these angels are something to do with the Book of Revelation – and somebody’s kidnapped my wife to try to get hold of them.’

  Derrick stopped in surprise. ‘Kidnapped your wife?’

  Rothschild anticipated his next question. ‘He’s married to Nina Wilde.’

  ‘Nina Wilde? The Nina Wilde?’

  ‘You know her?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Of course I do! We have never met, but I know of her, naturally. Menschenskind! Married to Nina Wilde. A remarkable career she has had, yes.’

  Eddie took a moment of pleasure from Rothschild’s visible jealousy – whatever her issues with Nina, Derrick didn’t share them – but had more important concerns. ‘They’re forcing her to look for these angels. And we think they’ve already found one.’

  ‘In Rome,’ added Rothschild. Seretse had given them the news during the flight. ‘Someone broke into the Jewish catacombs in the Villa Torlonia last night. Nobody knows what they took, but they smashed a hole in a wall to get it. And murdered two security guards as they escaped.’

  Derrick was shocked. ‘Murdered! Who are these people?’

  ‘Some sort of religious cult,’ said Eddie. ‘Their leader reckons he’s a prophet.’

  ‘Since they seem obsessed by the Book of Revelation, it’s reasonable to assume that the prophecies they’re interested in are of the doomsday kind,’ Rothschild said.

  ‘Okay,’ said Derrick, perturbed. They set off again. ‘Then you are here because the altar – or the Throne of Satan – is mentioned in Revelation?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Eddie replied. ‘Soon as I told the Prof about it, she knew what it meant.’

  ‘Mr Chase thinks Dr Wilde had already made the connection but was deliberately holding it back to buy time,’ said Rothschild. ‘Whether she did or not, she still apparently identified another site, possibly the Synagogue of Satan from Revelation – and because of that, two innocent people were killed.’

  ‘Don’t you bloody dare,’ Eddie warned her. ‘She’d have done everything she could to slow them down. If she hadn’t, they might already be here.’ He glanced at the museum’s visitors. ‘And even more people could get hurt.’

  Derrick was becoming more alarmed by the moment. ‘There could be a danger to the public? I shall arrange more security.’

  ‘If we find this angel, you might not need to,’ the Englishman told him. ‘Once I’ve got it, I’m going to use it to make them let Nina go.’

  ‘Two points,’ said Rothschild. ‘First: even if we do find it, it’s not yours to take – it’s the property of the German government, and I doubt they’ll let you simply hand it over to some murderous cult. Second: how will you let these people know you have it? You don’t have any way to contact them.’

  ‘I’ll find ’em. Or they’ll find me. Either way, they’ll know I’ve got the thing. Once we figure out where it is.’

  Derrick led them to a set of glass double doors with a barrier in front. He moved the obstacle aside. ‘I do not know if there really is an angel hidden inside the altar, but’ – he opened the doors wide – ‘you are welcome to look.’

  Eddie followed the avuncular German through – and stopped in astonishment.

  The room was a cavernous space in its own right, but its contents were what had impressed him. The far side was occupied by what he assumed was a Greek temple, wide stairs leading up between the two arms of the inspiration for the museum’s exterior. Elegant columns supported a roof bearing several statues, an opening beyond the top of the steps leading to a display room.

  There was more to the temple than sheer size, though. Around its base was an elaborate frieze, larger-than-life carved figures of gods and heroes locked in combat with monstrous creatures. Sections were missing, however, pale blank stone filling the gaps.

  ‘Okay, wasn’t expecting this,’ Eddie said. ‘It’s pretty good.’ Rothschild made a faintly exasperated sound.

  Derrick was apparently more used to British understatement. ‘It is, yes?’ He swept an arm from one side of the frieze to the other as they approached. ‘That is the Gigantomachy, the battle of the gods of Olympus – Apollo, Athena, Hecate and others – against the giants. There are more panels along both the sides.’

  ‘Lot of gaps in ’em,’ Eddie observed.

  ‘Yes, unfortunately. But there are many more pieces that we are reassembling. Some day we hope to finish the whole display.’

  ‘So where’s this altar, then?’ Eddie looked up the steps, assuming it would be at the top, but saw nothing.

  Derrick gave him a confused look before laughing, while Rothschild struggled to contain a mocking snigger.

  ‘All right, what’s the joke?’ Eddie demanded.

  ‘This is the altar,’ said the German. He waved his hand again to encompass the whole of the massive structure. ‘All of it! The Altar of Zeus, moved brick by brick from Turkey.’

  Eddie stared up at the building in dismay. ‘Buggeration. This might take longer than I thought . . .’

  13

  Eddie reached the end of the Gigantomachy frieze on the altar’s right wing, gazing up at the final panels – displaying a warrior with his face and one arm missing beside an equally incomplete horse – before turning and retracing his steps back around the structure to the same position on the left side. A tall mirror was mounted on the back wall to create the illusion that the building continued deeper into the museum; his reflection regarded him disconsolately.

  There were numerous winged figures amongst the carved combatants, which he had immediately thought were angels, but Rothschild and Derrick explained during the group’s examination of the ancient temple that they were actually Greek gods such as Nike and Uranus. It was a sign of his growing concern that he hadn’t made a joke about either name. The German had assured him that the sculptures were solid slabs of marble, with nothing concealed either inside or behind them, and that they long pre-dated the birth of Christ.

  ‘So where is this bloody thing?’ he asked himself. The balding mirror image had no answer. With a sigh, he went back the way he had come.

  The two archaeologists were at the top of the stairs, in the display room behind the facade. Eddie ascended to find them examining another frieze set out along the walls. ‘Have you found anything?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Derrick replied. ‘There is nothing I know of on the altar that could possibly be any kind of Christian symbol, not even in the unrestored pieces in storage.’

  ‘Damn. And there’s no way the gods with wings might have been seen as angels?’

  Rothschild shook her head. ‘The early Christians explicitly rejected the Greek and Roman pantheon – they called this place the “Altar of Satan” for a reason. And the modern image of an angel, a man with wings on his back, doesn’t match the Biblical descriptions of them. They generally look indistinguishable from ordinary people, but they can also be beings of fire, or lightning, or even resemble some sort of machine – “a wheel intersecting a wheel” is I think how it’s worded. The angels in Revelation are just as varied, but none are described as men with wings.’

  ‘How are they described?’ Eddie asked. ‘Anything that matches these guys?’ He indicated the frieze.

  ‘Not that I can think of.’

  He turned away in frustration, trying to think of anything to help him locate the angel – and his wife. ‘These arseholes found something in Italy. Nina worked out where it was . . . but what was it? How did they know what to look for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rothschild. ‘But according to Oswald, they went to a specific spot in the catacombs and smashed a wall open to reveal a cavity. Presumably they took whatever was inside.’

  ‘The angel?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘Maybe. But nothing else appeared to have been damaged.’

  ‘So why did they go to that spot?’ wondered Eddie. ‘This catacomb – is there a
nything on the walls? Paintings, inscriptions, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Some paintings, yes,’ said Derrick. ‘I have not been there, but I have seen photographs. Most are decorative, but there are some Hebrew religious symbols . . .’

  He broke off, lips pursed. ‘What is it?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Hebrew symbols,’ the German replied. ‘I did not think about it earlier, because you told me you were looking for Christian symbols. But there is a piece in storage . . .’ He searched his memory, then his eyes widened. ‘Yes, I know which one. Come with me.’

  He strode from the antechamber, Eddie and Rothschild hurrying down the stairs after him. ‘What is it, Markus?’ asked Rothschild.

  ‘There is a panel that we have not yet managed to match to a specific location on the altar,’ said Derrick, leading them into a side room. This was also closed to the public, plastic sheets covering some of the exhibits and scaffolding rising up one wall. Eddie had been married to an archaeologist long enough to recognise that the treasures in this room were Roman rather than Greek. The columned front of a pale marble structure rose almost to the high ceiling. ‘The Market Gate of Miletus,’ the German remarked as he headed up a ramp and through a doorway at its centre. Another barrier beyond blocked the way; he moved it.

  ‘God, it’s like I’ve stepped through a time portal,’ Eddie exclaimed as he took in his new surroundings on the far side. Roman history had given way to Arabian, the gateway through which they had come a towering blue arch topped by elaborate castellations. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘The Ishtar Gate,’ Derrick told him, replacing the barrier. ‘Part of the walls of Babylon. We are now in the Vorderasiatisches Museum – the Museum of the Near East.’

  Eddie looked down a corridor ahead, the walls of which were lined with more relics. ‘I’m almost glad Nina’s not here,’ he said with a grim smile. ‘She’d never leave the bloody place.’

  ‘This way.’ Derrick brought them to a flight of stairs. The museum had now closed, Eddie realised; there were no other visitors. He went up the steps after the other man, who opened a side door and led them down a passage. ‘This is where we are restoring the Gigantomachy frieze.’

  The German showed Eddie and Rothschild into a large room. A faint smell of dust and plaster hung in the air. Lights flicked on to reveal a pair of long workbenches, upon them adjustable lamps and free-standing easels bearing photographs. Beyond the benches was a large piece of machinery that Eddie didn’t recognise, though a sticker displaying the international warning symbol for a laser – a starburst at the end of a horizontal line – gave him a clue as to its function. Past that, running along both long walls, were the movable, track-mounted shelving banks of an archival storage system.

  ‘How are the restorations going?’ Rothschild asked.

  ‘Very well. We have a new high-resolution laser scanner.’ Derrick rounded the benches and stopped beside the machine, opening a large semicircular shield to reveal a steel platform within. A gleaming mirror on a rotating base was mounted behind a glazed vertical slot in the scanner’s casing beside it. ‘We can scan a piece over two metres long to a precision of less than half a millimetre. Once we have the scan, we can either send it to the milling machine’ – he pointed out another piece of hardware at the room’s far end – ‘to make a copy, or we can give it to the computer to find a match with other pieces automatically. Like a jigsaw puzzle in three dimensions,’ he added to the Englishman. ‘The computer is much faster than a human being at putting the broken pieces together.’

  Eddie regarded one of the easels, which held photos of various sculpture fragments. ‘So it’s worked out that these fit together, and now you’re going to rebuild ’em?’

  ‘Yes, that is right. Of course, that does not mean that they will fit, only that they should. That is why we make the copies, to test them, so we do not damage the original pieces.’ He went to a table by the storage units, on which was a large, heavy book. ‘Now, let me try to find this piece.’

  Derrick leafed through the tome. Each page had a picture of a fragment of the frieze, along with a description, and there seemed to be several hundred pages. ‘Hope that thing’s got an index,’ said Eddie.

  ‘It could take some time,’ Derrick admitted. ‘There is a machine outside if you would like a drink.’

  ‘You want something?’ Eddie asked Rothschild with a shrug.

  ‘Coffee,’ she replied. ‘White. Two sugars.’

  ‘Hemlock or no hemlock?’

  Her only reply was a scowl. Grinning, Eddie headed for the door.

  He had not only returned with drinks, but had also finished his by the time Derrick called to his guests. ‘Here, see,’ he said, tapping at a picture.

  Eddie and Rothschild joined him. The image showed a ragged-edged marble slab bearing the carved relief of a robed man with one hand held out from his side. A ruler beside it provided scale; the piece was about two feet tall and a foot wide.

  ‘That’s it?’ asked the Yorkshireman.

  ‘Yes,’ Derrick replied. ‘When I told you about the Hebrew symbols, I remembered this.’ He indicated a marking beside the figure, but it was too small to make out clearly. ‘Now I shall find it.’ He checked a number at the bottom of the page, then went to one of the storage units.

  Rothschild put on her glasses and peered at the photo. ‘The sculpting is crude compared to the rest of the frieze. Where on the altar did it come from?’

  ‘We do not know,’ Derrick told her. He took hold of a wheel on the end of the rack and spun it effortlessly. The shelf unit silently rolled apart from its neighbour, revealing banks of large drawers. ‘There are many pieces that we have not yet found a place for.’

  ‘So this might not have come from the altar at all?’

  ‘No, no,’ the German insisted. ‘Everything was brought from the site at Pergamon. The original excavation by Carl Humann was very thorough. Ah! This is it.’

  He slid open a drawer. Inside was a bulky wooden box. He carefully lifted it out and brought it to one of the workbenches. ‘Here,’ he said, lifting the lid.

  Eddie immediately saw that Rothschild had been right. It was obvious even to a layman like himself that the sculpture was of a far lower quality than those around the Altar of Zeus. The stone was roughly carved, even chipped in places, and the figure’s face was crude and almost amateurish compared to the perfection of the Greek gods. ‘Looks like someone palmed it off on their apprentice. Or their kid.’

  ‘I can’t imagine that it was made at the same time as the rest of the frieze,’ agreed Rothschild. ‘Where’s the Hebrew symbol?’

  Derrick pointed. ‘There.’

  The visitors leaned closer. Inscribed next to the standing figure was a coarse but recognisable representation of a menorah. Above it Eddie saw letters, barely a centimetre in height. ‘What does that say?’

  ‘Some of the characters are Akkadian – not my speciality, I’m afraid,’ said Rothschild. ‘But these others are Hebrew letters, dalet and kaf – although they can also represent numbers. These would mean twenty-four.’

  ‘So this guy’s the Jewish Jack Bauer?’ Eddie said with a smirk.

  Neither archaeologist responded to the joke, both deep in thought – and reaching the same conclusion. ‘The twenty-four Elders?’ said Derrick.

  ‘It could be,’ Rothschild replied, intrigued. ‘We should find out if the spot that was broken open at the Villa Torlonia had the same symbols. If it does, this might also be a marker.’

  ‘A marker for what?’ asked Eddie. ‘One of these angels?’

  ‘Maybe. But if it is,’ she went on, ‘we still won’t be able to figure out where it’s hidden unless we can identify where this piece of the frieze belongs.’ She turned to Derrick. ‘Markus, you don’t have any idea where it should fit?’

  The German shook his head. ‘No. We have not yet matched it to any part of the altar.’

  ‘So maybe it isn’t part of the altar,’ Eddie suggested. ‘Can you stand i
t up? Let’s see the rest of it.’

  ‘There is nothing on the other sides,’ Derrick assured him.

  ‘Humour me.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Rothschild asked as the German started to lift the piece. ‘I know that attitude – I’d expect it from Nina.’ Her own attitude was not exactly approving.

  ‘Guess I’ve picked up bad habits from her. But you know what one of her other bad habits is? Usually being right. About archaeology, anyway. Kids’ names, not so much.’ A brief smile, which vanished in a flare of anger at the thought of her still being a prisoner.

  That in turn hardened his resolve to do whatever it took to get her back. Derrick had by now stood the thick block on its end; Eddie took hold of it. ‘Wait, you should not—’ the archaeologist protested, but he had already pulled it around a half-turn. ‘This is a valuable artefact! Only museum staff are allowed to touch it.’

  ‘Report me to the boss. Oh, wait, that’s you,’ Eddie replied, switching on the bench’s lamps. ‘Hey, look at this.’

  The back of the block appeared plain. ‘Look at what?’ said Rothschild.

  Eddie ran a fingertip over the surface. Large parts felt rough to the touch, like a fine sandpaper – not at all like marble, even though it was the same colour as the rest of the piece. ‘The front and sides are all lumpy, like the sculptor was a bit cack-handed – but this is almost flat. And it feels different.’

  Derrick gave it an experimental stroke with a fingertip. ‘He is right,’ he told Rothschild. ‘It is like . . . like a patch, where a flaw was repaired.’ His hand moved back across the blank face. ‘But this is too big to be a simple fix. I think . . .’ He trailed off.

  ‘You think there’s something inside it?’ Eddie finished for him. ‘Like this block’s hollow – they chiselled it out, stuck the angel in the hole, then filled it in again?’

  ‘It can’t be,’ said Rothschild, though with some uncertainty.

  Derrick bent down to scrutinise the surface. ‘It is possible,’ he admitted. ‘Look, here – with the light at the right angle, you can see where the repairs were made.’