by Bill Napier
'Yes and no, Sir Joseph. I'm calling from a police station in the Jamaican hinterlands. It's being held by the local police as material evidence. We won't see it for years, if at all.'
'And our Balkan friends?'
'Up to their necks in it. Seven dead, and they're bringing people in from all over the island.'
'I'll try to contact the Foreign Secretary. Where exactly are you?'
'It's called Bog Walk.'
'Sit tight. Be as unhelpful as you can to the local police. Tell them nothing about the icon. If I can't contact the Secretary I'm afraid you're in for a long night.'
Mr Lizard was watching me from the corner of his eyes. He muttered something to the sergeant, who was licking his lips nervously. The sergeant came over. 'Why are you using an official telephone, sir?'
I put the receiver down and shrugged. The sergeant said, 'Would you follow me, sir?'
'What you doing in Jamaica?' The policeman had dispensed with statements about rights.
'I was on business.' The interview room wasn't much bigger than a broom cupboard and most of its space was taken up by a small, square table and four chairs. I sipped at the coffee; it was half-cold and flavourless.
'And the nature of your business?'
'I was looking for something on behalf of a client.'
'God Dem you, Mr Blake,' said the sergeant impatiently. 'Just answer the questions properly. What exactly yuh looking for?'
'An old family heirloom, which my client thought might be in Jamaica.'
'What sort of heirloom?' The sergeant was shouting now. Maybe he thought this would impress the superintendent.
'Just a family antique.'
For a moment I thought the man was going to hit me. But Mr Lizard interrupted the flow. He lit a small cigar. 'Mr Blake, the position is this. We get a phone call from your Special Branch in England to say y'all are being held by an armed gang. They even tell us exactly where. We get you out of there, risking the lives of my officers in the process, and I have seven carcasses on my hands. Now, you don't expect us to just walk away from that situation, surely? Do you?'
'Of course not.'
'I'm glad you see it that way. We already have Amnesty International breathing down our necks on account of some people think we have a bad record when it comes to defending ourselves under fire. What am I to tell the Police Commissioner? That all this was over that piece of wood we found on the table? Now we are going to need to know who these people were and what they wanted and where you come into it. Give me some help here, Mr Blake.'
The man's question was reasonable and his tone was urbane, even civilised. He was scaring the hell out of me.
'And I don't want you taken to East Central Kingston for a more formal interrogation. Want to avoid that if we can. Much better if we can clear everything up here. So.' His tone became businesslike. 'What is it about this piece of wood?'
CHAPTER 40
The British Ambassador turned up in person. He was a young man, surprisingly unstuffy, and he was accompanied by two men even younger than him. His arrival was announced by an extremely nervous policeman who tapped at the door of the interview room and put little more than a nose round it.
'Of course I have no authority here,' the Ambassador agreed with Mr Lizard. 'But I'm expecting your Police Commissioner to call at any time.'
As if on cue, there was another knock at the door and the same nervous policeman announced to Mr Lizard that, 'There a call for yuh, suh.' We left the stuffy little interview room. There was no sign of Debbie or Zola and I had to assume they were being interviewed in stuffy little cupboards elsewhere. Mr Lizard took the receiver, and I watched with satisfaction as his vinegary expression melted, thawed and dissolved into a sullen acquiescence.
'Where is it?' The Ambassador wanted to know.
'Sir?' The Lizard was pretending not to understand.
'The Ambassador is referring to the piece of wood. You know, the one you've been questioning me about for the past hour.'
The policeman looked blank.
'Perhaps we should telephone the Commissioner,' the Ambassador suggested smoothly. 'I'm sure he won't mind being called out of bed again.'
'Sergeant Mortimer, see to it. And arrange an escort for our witnesses.'
An escort. But where to? I didn't want escorting anywhere, not with the Lizard in charge. I wanted out of it and far, far away from here. A surge of anxiety washed over me. I put it down to tiredness setting my imagination into overdrive.
Her Majesty's Ambassador was either reading my mind or ahead of me. 'Thank you, but I'll be taking my people back in the Rolls.'
We waited for the Ambassador next to the Rolls-Royce. It was bottle-green and had a little Union Jack, and it felt reassuringly British, even if the firm was owned by BMW. In a minute he appeared with the triptych. It was three o'clock and things were beginning to ease. Inspector Mclntyre, who'd led the raid, told me they'd netted thirty people that night. They were being held at more than a dozen stations dispersed round the island.
The Ambassador emerged from the porch with his minions. Dalton arrived at the car seconds later. 'You go ahead. I have things to clear up here.'
'Unbelievable,' said the Ambassador. He had an overnight stubble and a slightly bewildered look about him. The car was moving with monastic silence and gliding over the potholed road like a hovercraft. His assistants were in the front. 'The Foreign Secretary explained it to me just an hour ago. I can hardly take it in. What did you tell the local constabulary?'
Zola said, 'Some tale about being chased by thieves into the Blue Mountains. It was totally incredible and nobody believed it for a second.'
Debbie said, 'It was all we could think of at two o'clock in the morning.'
'Especially as we'd been swimming in blood half an hour earlier,' I reminded him.
The Ambassador grunted. 'Never mind. It worked.' He patted the triptych on his knee. 'This could go out by diplomatic bag later today. Where would MI6 like to send it, Mr Blake?'
It took a few seconds to dawn. Zola caught my eye for the briefest of moments. I hesitated. The Ambassador said, 'Of course. I'm stupid at this hour.' He pressed a button and a slab of thick glass slid quietly up between the driver and passenger compartments.
'Picardy House?' I asked Debbie.
'Better not. Uncle Robert. I think we'll just hold on to it.' Something in her voice told me there would be no point in arguing.
The Ambassador nodded. Debbie took the triptych from him and rested it on her thighs. She glanced at me and smiled. I thought, After nine hundred years.
Zola said, 'What do you know about this operation, Ambassador?'
'Only what your people have told me.'
'But I'm not sure what that is,' she said. 'We've been out of touch for the past day or two.'
The Ambassador glanced uncertainly at Debbie. Zola said, 'It's okay, Debbie has access to the same material as us. You can speak freely.'
'Okay, let me give you a resume of my briefing. I knew nothing about any of this until it arrived a couple of hours ago. What I'm told is that a couple of years ago the Israeli police questioned a priest of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem about gun running. They released him for lack of evidence, but the incident was enough to tickle the interest of British and American intelligence. It turned out that he wasn't a priest at all, but a clerk in their Arabic department. Can't remember the name.'
'Apostolis Hondros,' Zola said.
'That's it, I remember. That's his adopted name, right? He was actually born Enver Bayal. Turkish by birth but converted to Greek Orthodox around the turn-of-the-century. The story is that he tried to enter the priesthood but was rejected. According to the Bishop Aristarchus of the Greek Patriarchate, his opinions were becoming ever more extreme, he was developing a fanatical hatred of the Vatican and was violently opposed to the 1993 agreement between the Orthodox and Vatican churches. He was equally opposed to the country of his birth for political reasons which I just skim
med over for lack of time. Something to do with support for the Bosnian Muslims. How am I doing?'
Zola said, 'Very good so far, Ambassador. They seem to have given you a thorough briefing.'
'The Turkish police associated him with several assassinations of Muslim clerics in Istanbul in the late nineties, but nothing was ever proven. He disappeared for some years, but at the turn of the millennium founded a group calling itself the Byzantium Circle. It has the usual cell structure which makes it hard to penetrate, and it attracts the usual mish-mash: religious extremists, nationalist extremists, young idealists, naive academics, the rootless, the resentful and the disturbed.'
'They're all disturbed.' I said that because I wanted to keep the Ambassador talking.
'It's their goal.' The Ambassador shook his head. 'I can hardly take it in.'
'What goal is that?'
Don't push your luck, Zola!
The Ambassador looked momentarily puzzled. 'They don't have more than one, do they?'
'How much did they tell you about it?' Zola asked.
'Not much. I don't suppose you can tell me anything?'
'Sorry, Ambassador. Official Secrets Act.'
It occurred to me that Zola hadn't lied once throughout the conversation.
We'd had about three hours' sleep - three hours seemed to be my ration these days - when Dalton turned up, hammering noisily on doors and telling us that we just had time for the Caribbean sunrise. It was all pink and gold and high mare's tails and we watched it and yawned as we had coffee and breakfast baps on the veranda. The Ambassador, it seemed, had the baps flown in from England every morning.
'We were bait, right?'
'I'm sorry, Harry, but it's not customary for MI6 to say anything at all about its operations. In fact if the Ambassador hadn't slipped up you wouldn't know—'
'Or maybe I was the bait and Zola and Debbie were unexpected complications. Either way, HMG has no right to put its citizens in jeopardy like that.'
Dalton said, 'The rules are changing, Harry. We're living in dangerous times.'
'And my father?' Debbie asked. 'He wasn't killed by burglars, was he?'
Dalton shook his head. 'I'm so sorry, Debbie, I wish I could tell you. But I'm just not at liberty to say. There still has to be an inquest.'
'Bend the rules this once, Dalton,' Zola snapped. I think it was loss of sleep. 'It means a great deal to her.'
'Dalton means yes,' I said to Debbie. 'I can read his body language like a book. Cassandra was in on it.'
Debbie said, 'You think so, Harry? In that case I'm satisfied.' She looked dreamily out over the sea, and her eyes moistened. 'Very satisfied.'
Dalton said, 'I'm that bad an actor, am I? No matter. You're all going to have to sign the Official Secrets Act.'
Zola said, 'Guess some more, Harry, so we can all watch Dalton's body language.'
'Piece of cake.' I gave Dalton a look. 'You knew there was a major terrorist operation brewing. You knew they were after Ogilvie's manuscript but didn't know why. Maybe you knew they'd killed Debbie's father but warned off the local police. They had my description of Cassandra. So you let us run with the manuscript to see where it would lead. Okay so far?'
Dalton was spreading butter on his bap and pretending not to hear. He was making little swirling patterns with his knife.
Zola said, 'That sounds plausible, Harry, except for one thing. Where does Sir Joseph come into it? I just asked him for expertise on the Crusades issue and Dalton appears, as if by magic. Dalton, who happens to know all about religious icons and also merges into the Jamaican background. How could Joe have that on hand?'
'He didn't, Zola. But if I was under surveillance by MI6, so were you. I don't doubt that your call to Sir Joseph was monitored and that Sir Joseph, in the national interest, was persuaded to recruit Dalton, who was no doubt given a crash course in relics, crusades, medieval bigotry and religious fanatics.'
Dalton was spooning marmalade on to the bap. 'If I were guessing the way you're guessing, I'd say that MI6 can already call on people with expertise in these areas. Ancient hatreds are a big thing with us these days.'
'Where did Cassandra come into it?' I asked.
'She's just another crazy like Hondros, of course,' Zola said, spreading butter on a croissant. An early morning hummingbird was moving in fast, iridescent little jerks around a Mexican creeper on the wall.
'Or was she in it for the money? Of course, it can be hard to say. But let's not compromise our MI6 colleague here. He's a high-flyer, keen to stay on the fast-track promotion route.'
'They were all driven by conviction, not money,' Dalton confirmed. 'I shouldn't be saying this, but you'll be reading it in the newspapers by the time we get back to England. The Byzantium Circle, as it was called, had been preparing the operation for at least two years, before anything was known about the True Cross.'
I said, 'So, when they learned there was a paper trail which might lead to the True Cross...'
Zola wiped a spot of jam from the corner of her mouth. 'Learned from... ?'
Debbie completed the sentence. 'Uncle Robert?'
'No. Your Uncle Robert was questioned while you were getting suntans here. He guessed that the journal might have something to say about the lost family icon and he had ideas about going for it on his own.'
'Stealing from me.'
'But he had nothing to do with the Byzantium group. Harry and Zola's suspicions were wrong in that respect. We think Hondros was informed by someone in the office of the Jamaican lawyer, Chuck Martin. Someone who looked into your family's history, found out the story about de Clari and then alerted Hondros or Cassandra - how, we don't know. Presumably the party involved was looking for a percentage. The Jamaican Constabulary are investigating.'
I said, 'Something you don't know. The longitude of the Bog Walk police station. It's seventy-seven degrees west.'
'What?' Debbie gasped. 'That's amazing.'
'And Sevilla la Nueva, where they buried the icon, is about the same.'
Zola was saying, 'Do you think Ogilvie—?'
I interrupted. 'Let's think about that later. Meantime we should get off the island quickly. We're holding an icon worth a fortune and stories will be getting around.'
Dalton said, 'I thought you'd never catch on, Harry. And there may soon be other claimants turning the screw on the Police Commissioner. The Jamaican government itself may have ideas. You don't seriously think I got you up early for the sunrise.'
Debbie said, 'We can't lose it, not now.'
'While you people were sleeping I booked us on a mid-afternoon BA flight to London which we won't be taking. We'll be on a chartered yacht to Cuba by eight o'clock this morning.' He glanced at his watch. 'That's in one hour and nine minutes.'
Debbie said, 'Go, go, go.'
I gulped down the last of my coffee. 'I've never sailed a yacht in my life. We'll capsize and get eaten by sharks.'
'Don't be such a wimp, Harry,' said Zola. 'Sailing a yacht is easy, I expect.'
Dalton stood up. 'Move it, folks. Pack up and hand in the key.'
'Don't forget the Cross,' I said. 'Not after all this.'
CHAPTER 41
It was like one of those Agatha Christie mysteries with the suspects assembled in the drawing room.
We were crowded together in Zola's little Greenwich kitchen. Sir Joseph was perched on a high stool with a tumbler of milk; Debbie, in dark skirt and sweater, was sitting on a work surface next to the kitchen sink. Her face was flushed with excitement. Dalton, Zola and I were on chairs at the little circular table. My gunshot wound had more or less healed and I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt to show it off, like a duelling scar. It made me feel heroic. There was an unopened champagne bottle in an ice bucket, and a cluster of glasses.
The True Cross had been taken briefly out of its Bank of England vault, and Zola, Dalton and I had taken three tiny splinters from it before tucking it away again.
'I've taken advice on the ownership is
sue,' Sir Joseph declared. 'Want to hear it?'
There was a chorus of assent.
'It's not simple. It depends on how long it was lost, whether it was searched for by successive generations, and how it was searched for.'
'How can you search for something if you don't know where to start looking?' Debbie asked.
'There's no absolute answer to this. It depends on the actions of your ancestors down through the generations. If, say, a couple of generations, or even one generation, of your ancestors gave up looking, even for a period of ten years or so, it could be argued that they had given up the claim. In that case, if someone else finds it, that someone else is entitled to it.'
'The story that we had the True Cross hidden away somewhere has been handed down through our family from generation to generation. The icon has always been seen as part of our heritage. De Clari of Picardy hid it away somewhere - it was hidden, not lost. Someone knew where it was. The proof is that Marmaduke StClair went out to Jamaica with it. And Marmaduke StClair is an ancestor of mine.'
Sir Joseph nodded. 'Good point. Another point in your favour is that instructions for retrieving it were given to your father, albeit indirectly, by a direct descendant of Marmaduke.'
'It belongs to the Tebbits, then. It's mine.'
'But if you're handing something down from one generation to the next, it's not enough to say, "I bequeath everything to you." You have to mention a specific item. Marmaduke merely buried the Cross and left a coded message for his descendants to find. It's pretty obvious that successive generations failed to understand the code, and so it might be argued that the Cross was thereby lost to your family.'
Debbie said, 'How can you know it was lost? Maybe they just kept it hidden. And even if it was lost, you can be sure that successive generations tried to crack the code. That's looking for the Cross, isn't it?'
'But the Cross was never mentioned in your family wills. We can be sure of that. And there are rival claimants.'
'The Jamaican poorist?'
'For one. Where did he get it from? Did he really dig it up from the ground? Has it really been in his family for generations, in which case he may have a claim. And if it was buried on Jamaican soil, especially on property owned by the state, which the Sevilla la Nueva plantation now is, then the Jamaican government may claim it as treasure trove. Public law may also then be involved and the complications become, forgive me, Byzantine.'
