The Sacred Scroll

by Anton Gill

  ‘We can’t let her go. We’ve got to keep her secure. We might as well make some use of her. She wants to help find her friends; clear up this mystery. She’s bright, she’s on our side …’

  ‘She’s had no security clearance whatsoever.’

  ‘Jack – you sure this is such a great idea?’ said Lopez

  ‘Otherwise what do we do with her?’

  Over the TV connection, Graves and Lopez exchanged a look.

  ‘Maybe we should talk about this, Jack,’ Lopez said tentatively.

  ‘Maybe you should,’ added Graves, more crisply than she’d intended. She fiddled with her ring, not the emerald today, and scratched the tattoo hidden beneath it.

  ‘I’ve told you, Laura, she’s clean,’ said Marlow tersely, running a hand through his hair and closing the subject. ‘Leon, can you fill Laura in on Su-Lin’s father?’

  ‘Nothing dramatic.’ Lopez turned to some notes in front of him. ‘Marco de Montferrat. Major industrialist. Bad press in Italy during the Berlusconi years because he described the politician as a dangerous little prick. Some enemies, as you’d expect, but all of them straightforward business rivals. No Mafia connections. Big charitable foundations in India and China. Died in his bed in 2005, aged fifty-three. Heart. Wife died a year later. Killed herself. Grief.’

  ‘So Su-Lin’s a rich woman,’ said Graves.

  ‘Not necessarily. Most of the money that didn’t go to the taxman – and, admittedly, not much did – went to the foundations. Some unaccounted for, sure. I’ve had my people look into one or two of the computer files of his banks in Switzerland, and they’re harder to crack than the Pentagon’s. We’ll find it, but wherever it is, he’s covered his traces well.’

  ‘How much do we think?’

  ‘Not a lot – 10 million.’

  ‘Dollars?’

  ‘Swiss francs.’

  ‘Sounds enough to me,’ said Graves.

  ‘From her background, Su-Lin doesn’t live life on the high side,’ commented Lopez.

  ‘Dig up anything more you can on her. I’m not letting her in too deep before we’ve covered everything. See what you can get on the MAXPHIL connection. They gave her a grant for the Dandolo Project, but she couldn’t open up on that.’

  ‘Or wouldn’t,’ said Graves.

  Marlow glared at her.

  ‘OK. And now I’ll leave you two lovebirds to it,’ grinned Lopez.

  ‘See you in two days,’ said Marlow.

  ‘I’ll grill you a stripsteak,’ said Lopez. ‘Nothing like down-home cooking.’ The screen flashed CLOSE and went black.

  ‘We’re going back that soon?’ asked Graves.

  ‘Sir Richard’s champing at the bit. Taylor’s wife’s got it into her head that they’ve been kidnapped by a Turkish fundamentalist group, and she’s been to the New York Post with it. I have to throw him a sop.’

  ‘Are we taking her with us?’

  ‘What do you think? Where we go, she goes.’

  ‘New York in two days, then?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Marlow, relieved at the prospect of leaving Paris and the dark memories the city held for him, couldn’t have imagined how wrong he was.

  62

  Berlin, the Present

  Conversation among the mainly male audience, though there was a scattering of young women, too, sitting around the tables in the club, died down as the houselights dimmed. The only illumination now came from candles in black holders. The stage was bathed in an orange glow cast by spotlights high in the ceiling.

  The stage held two saltire crosses equipped with restraints for wrists, ankles and waist, and a black table to the rear on which some kind of equipment was concealed under a cloth.

  Music came from speakers hidden around the room. Into its rhythms were woven the eager, submissive cries and whispers of women.

  Four men dressed in leather breeches and executioner’s hoods appeared, dragging between them two girls, one an ebony-black blonde, the other an almond-white brunette. The girls were buxom and broad-hipped, and filled their overly tight dark-red leather bikinis. Their legs were sheathed in thigh-high boots.

  The girls feigned terror. The acting wasn’t great, reflected Rolf Adler as he watched, but it would satisfy his clientele, who weren’t here for the art, after all.

  He looked on from the plate-glass window which gave on to the clubroom from his office above, and sipped a cognac as the girls were divested of their bikinis and strapped to the crosses. Their moaning became more terrified.

  They were getting better at it, thought Adler, thinking he’d pay a bonus to the wannabe actress he’d hired as their coach. It had been nothing short of a miracle. The black girl had been lifted from Somalia barely a month earlier, and the white one was a Ukrainian schoolteacher’s daughter who’d run away to the New World in search of a better life. Neither had what you would call perfect English. But they’d shown promise.

  Not that it mattered any more. All they’d had to do so far in their performances was writhe and moan under the fake lashes of soft leather scourges. What they didn’t know was that tonight was special.

  There would be real whips. Their blood would really flow. Their cries would soon require no acting.

  Afterwards he’d have them patched up, see to it that they were paid $100 apiece, have them driven way into the country and thrown out into the middle of nowhere. No point in killing them. Messy, and a waste of time and money.

  There’d be other girls; he put on a show like this for selected guests. The rest of the time his club, Zara la Salope, down an alley off Mott Street on the Lower East Side, not to be found in any directory or anywhere on the web, provided upmarket porn to a tiny membership rich enough to afford the fees. Only one couple in the room were not regulars, a middle-aged English husband and wife, she – plump, with waist-length dyed dark hair, wearing a miniskirt twenty years too young for her and 10cm too short; the man gaunt, greying, wet-lipped and long-jawed, blue eyes so pale they were almost white, his suit hanging on his bony body as it might hang on a scarecrow.

  Valued employees. Pip Trotter and Evelyn Sparkes.

  Adler waited as the young men flung the cloth from the black table, to reveal, as the audience gasped in anticipation, a selection of truncheons, canes and flails. He watched the first minute or so of the show to ensure that his customers were getting their money’s worth then touched a button in the panelling. A velvet curtain slid across the window. Another button, and the sound from the clubroom cut out.

  He returned to the meeting he’d convened.

  The office, perched on the mezzanine above the clubroom, had no windows. The whisper of filtered air was now masked by the soft tones of the Mozart piano sonata which had replaced the hungry whimpering of the girls. It was teak-lined in a manner which Adler believed reflected the best taste of cultivated, opulent class; hung on them were paintings of moist-eyed girls by Romantic sentimentalists such as Jean-Baptise Greuze. There was a heavy desk with gold pen-sets and stationery holders. The telephone and the computer were concealed, as their harsh modernity jarred with Adler’s preferred overall impression of imperial grandeur.

  The desk had a leather chair behind it. To one side sat Frau Müller, thinner, if possible, than ever, her blonde hair almost white and held up by a black elastic velvet band, clear of her forehead. Her pale skin, her eyes, furtive and dark brown, her tilted nose, her slight overbite, her thin but hungry lips – Adler found it hard to imagine how this woman could ever have appealed to him. What had their nicknames for each other been? The Wolf and Red Riding Hood. The memory embarrassed him.

  But her loyalty and discretion guaranteed her position at his side; and, as long as she feared him, she was a dependable factotum, ready to do whatever was demanded of her.

  Her makeup just failed to mask a bruise on her left temple.

  The floors of the room were strewn with silk carpets from Iran. There was a heavy bookcase holding, among worthy but untouched
tomes, a set of leather-bound telephone directories; and a low, ornate table, on which a handful of untouched copies of The New Yorker, Country Life, Paris-Match, Haus und Garten and Manager Magazin was tastefully scattered.

  The place had been carefully planned. The room was not just the club’s office. It was the seat of MAXTEL’s unaudited operations in the New World. Only half a dozen people knew of it.

  Around the table were arranged a low chesterfield and three club armchairs, all upholstered in red leather. On the table with the magazines was a cluster of silver-stoppered decanters, an ice-bucket and tumblers by Riedel. Nuts and cornichons lay in silver bowls next to pristine linen napkins. Additionally, there were glass ashtrays, a cedar box of Cohiba Lanceros and a tall silver match-stand.

  Ignoring most of this proffered hospitality, though each had a frozen Grey Goose martini before him, three men occupied the armchairs. They were dressed in grey suits, pale shirts and dark ties. Their eyes differed. One pair was black, the next chestnut brown, the third, ice blue.

  The meeting had gone well. Everything was in place. And the three men – the Chinese, Indian and Russian representatives of MAXTEL’s operations in their respective countries – had made satisfactory reports on their operations.

  Except for one thing.

  ‘I need to know where it is,’ said Adler, coming immediately to the most important point, the thing that nagged at his mind day and night and would not let him go. ‘I need to know fast. I am so close.’ In the pocket of his plum-coloured velvet dinner jacket, he caressed a key. He was never without it.

  The three men shifted in their seats. Adler regarded them. Guang Chien, Vijay Mehta and Sergei Kutuzov had been with him for years, and were the best and the most loyal executives on his staff. Which was why they ran MAXTEL in their countries – the most important countries – for the business. The markets and the potential, and the political fragility, offered Adler everything, except one last item.

  Their influence and contacts stretched throughout the Middle and Far East. If what he sought had been in Asia, they would have found it.

  ‘We must continue our search’ was all he said.

  ‘We have done all we can,’ said Kutuzov, turning his glass in his hand.

  ‘Our principals begin to grow anxious,’ said Chien. ‘I speak for all of us.’

  ‘They’ve invested heavily in this project,’ added Mehta, noticing the expression which had crossed Adler’s face. ‘And they’ve invested on trust. After all, MAXTEL is copper-bottomed. But even so –’

  ‘They want to see a return. Progress,’ growled Kutuzov. ‘A bone to gnaw on, anyway. Otherwise –’

  ‘I am aware of that,’ Adler replied, uneasy at any hint of rebellion. But he knew Kutuzov’s manner was bovine, and let the surliness in the man’s tone pass. ‘I intend to cast the net a little wider.’

  Indeed, he already had. But Western Europe had yielded no results yet, and Paris remained a work in progress. As for the Americas … Nothing more was to be had out of anyone at Yale or Venice without showing his hand too much. Two apparent suicides on campus and three missing archaeologists was enough.

  But Adler was not a patient man. He hadn’t been patient since he’d learned, on a cold autumn day in Venice three years earlier, about the existence of the object which had empowered a doge of that city. A man whom he’d never heard of previously but whom he had come to enshrine as his ultimate role model.

  At first he’d been cynical, but then delved deeper, tapped into the city’s archive, a bribe here, a bribe there, extracted what he needed, covered his tracks, left enough behind to encourage the curiosity of others, sent out pointers in the right directions. Academics seemed the safest bet. Good cover, and a quite logical, unquestionable means to his end. As far as Adler had been able to ascertain, the secret he’d discovered was shared by no one else, except his original informant, an intelligent man, but a hopeless drunk, now dead, alas. And MAXPHIL was ideally placed to finance such a valuable research project.

  He smiled at his colleagues. He liked to think of them as colleagues. After all that communist nonsense he’d endured while he was growing up, he thought of himself as a good friend of democracy.

  ‘Have another drink.’ He smiled. ‘And I’ll explain …’

  Half an hour later, Adler brought the meeting to a close. He opened the curtain and switched on the sound. They had unstrapped the girls and were dragging their torn bodies offstage as the music rose to a crescendo and the lights cut to blackout. In the clubroom, the lighting rose and the audience beckoned East European waitresses, dressed as schoolgirls, to refresh their glasses.

  ‘How much do they pay for these shows?’ asked Guang Chien, as the meeting broke up. ‘These special shows?’

  ‘More than they should,’ smiled Adler.

  ‘$5,000 a seat,’ said Kutuzov. ‘But we include a bottle of Taittinger.’

  ‘Pocket money,’ said Adler.

  It amused him to run the club, and its exclusivity guaranteed his security. There wasn’t a single member whose own position in life wouldn’t have been drastically compromised if he or she divulged its existence.

  ‘What made you choose such a name?’ asked Mehta. ‘Zara la Salope? Zara the Slut. Isn’t that rather a giveaway?’

  Adler gave him a thin smile that promised nothing. ‘Private joke,’ he said, thinking of a city which, long ago, had been brought to its knees by his hero.

  His hero had sought to conquer the West. Apart from the obvious jewel of Brazil, Adler’s ambitions lay in the opposite direction.

  Conquer the East, and the problem of the West would take care of itself.

  But he needed the box which the key in his pocket fitted. Within the box, he was convinced, lay the secret. And with the secret in his grasp, he could achieve more than his hero had ever have dreamt possible.

  After his associates had left, he turned to Frau Müller. ‘We need to speed things up,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell them what to do. We’ve wasted enough time on that line of enquiry.’

  She nodded, but he could see that she was hesitating. He waited.

  She looked at him diffidently. ‘Shouldn’t we give it a little longer? It seemed so promising.’

  ‘If there was anything to get out of them, we’d know it by now. I want the thing aborted. Send them back to do it personally.’

  She nodded, fear in her face. He always liked to see that, it reassured him, and he knew that in some twisted way she enjoyed it. Then she left.

  He turned and sat at the desk. His mind turned to the next meeting, the one tomorrow morning. The one which he had really come to New York to attend.

  The one with friends in high places.

  63

  Zürich, AD 1917

  Early April, just before dawn, and it was cold. Erich Ludendorff stood near the front of locomotive Hk1.293, flanked by a semicircle of five general staff officers. All were wrapped in stiff, high-collared greatcoats. All were tense. Their breath plumed in the freezing air.

  Ludendorff hated the assignment, but it was necessary if the war, already abandoned as hopeless by his colleague Tirpitz two years earlier, had the faintest chance of being won.

  Russia had to be neutralized, so Germany could concentrate on the Western Front, and this was the only way of achieving that aim. By good fortune, protests among the Russian people had spread. The hardships the country was enduring as a result of the war had forced the tsar to abdicate. Russia was now a leaderless country on the brink of revolution.

  There was a new leader waiting in the wings, a leader who’d been in exile a dozen years. And that leader was living here, in Zurich.

  The German officers waiting at the central railway station drew themselves up as, from the dark entrance to the platform, a group of thirty Russians emerged. At their head was a stocky, balding, middle-aged man with a goatee. He was pale and underfed, but his Mongolian features and his hard eyes made him instantly recogniza
ble to Ludendorff, who stepped forward to greet him.

  Neither made a move to shake hands. For his part, Ludendorff had a horror of everything which Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his Communist Party stood for. But there’d be time to deal with them later, when they’d achieved the desired effect and plunged Russia into civil war. Russia would then no longer be a threat to Germany. On the contrary, Russia would be grateful.

  ‘Is everything in place?’ asked Lenin, looking at the locomotive. The engine, with its flanged smokestack and its sturdy cattle-bar, looked tough enough for a long journey, but the single first-class carriage it drew looked frail and vulnerable.

  ‘Yes,’ Ludendorff ground out.

  ‘The train enjoys extraterritorial status?’

  ‘As you stipulated.’

  ‘Good.’ Lenin looked around. His open overcoat had a fur collar, but he was bareheaded, and under the coat Ludendorff could see that the man’s suit and shirt were threadbare. Lenin looked round at his companions and then back at Ludendorff. ‘We will go,’ he said, in a voice used to command.

  Ludendorff didn’t like his tone.

  ‘My people will sit in the front half of the carriage, you Germans, segregated, must take the back two rows.’ Lenin looked keenly at the general. ‘But I will need to have some conversations with you,’ he added.

  His German was good, his accent thick.

  Five minutes later than the appointed time of 4 a.m., the train rolled out of Zurich Hauptbahnhof. It was still dark. There was frost on the inside of the carriage windows, but this quickly thawed with the heat of the bodies of the passengers. Ludendorff didn’t like the smell of the Russians, either metaphorically, or – as he was coming quickly to realize – physically. It was going to be a long few days, getting this lot to Berlin. From there, Lenin and his followers would make their way across Sweden and Finland and end up at Petrograd’s Finland Station. St Petersburg, which the tsar had renamed Petrograd two years earlier, was in the hands of the Bolsheviks, and from there Lenin could create whatever havoc he wanted, thought Ludendorff; just as long as it kept Russia out of the kaiser’s war.