The Sacred Scroll

by Anton Gill

  Long before then, though, Ludendorff would have handed the Communist leader over to his fellow revolutionaries. His job ended at Berlin’s Stettiner Station. His part of the mission would be over. Thank God.

  He bunched his hands inside his gloves to try to warm them further.

  They crossed the border into Germany later that day, and the Russian exiles, watching through the grimy windows of the carriage, commented irritatingly on the absence of men at the stations they rolled past in the fields, and in the towns. The only males they saw were elderly, teenagers, or children. Any man between sixteen and sixty was fighting in the trenches of Belgium and France. Ludendorff hoped the German situation didn’t look desperate to his unwelcome charges.

  On the second day, Lenin moved from his usual seat to place himself next to Ludendorff, who sat alone, apart from his officers, as his senior rank dictated. He smiled sociably at the German general, who nodded back guardedly.

  ‘I love Beethoven’ was Lenin’s unexpected opening remark.

  ‘Really?’ replied the general, uncertain of himself, disliking the man’s guttural accent as much as he disliked the scent of violet cachous which came from his mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ continued the Russian reflectively. ‘But some of his music, I cannot listen to.’ He paused, looking at Ludendorff, and when the general remained silent, unable to formulate any kind of response to that proposition, he continued, ‘Especially the piano sonatas. Especially the Appassionata.’

  Ludendorff shifted in his seat. ‘And why might that be?’ he asked helplessly.

  Lenin’s eyes became distant. ‘Because it engenders emotions in me which I cannot afford to have.’

  Ludendorff looked at him blankly. There was an awkward pause, after which he said, ‘I hope they’re feeding you well. Looked like you and your friends needed a bit of that.’ He spread his hands. ‘No shortage of food in Germany, as you can see. I gather they have a problem with that in Russia.’

  Lenin ignored him. ‘I cannot afford emotions which make me wistful and sad. I need to concentrate on things which are solid, which are material. But I also need’ – his voice became more confidential and he leaned forward; Ludendorff could smell the violets strongly on his breath – ‘I also need to be able – without fear of making any mistake – to sway the minds of men.’

  The thought of a man like Lenin ever feeling wistful and sad made Ludendorff want to laugh, but he suppressed it. ‘You have the support of the German state,’ Ludendorff assured him, his official voice switched on. He’d read some of Lenin’s writings, had even ploughed through What is to be Done? He couldn’t make much of it, but he’d done enough research to know what to say: ‘And your ideas will fall on fertile soil.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Lenin. ‘But I need to be sure.’ In the silence that followed, broken only by the repetitive rattling of the train, he shifted his position so that he was sitting in the window seat opposite Ludendorff.

  The two men looked each other straight in the eye. All around them, fellow-passengers were reading or sleeping. There was no conversation except for desultory exchanges between Lenin’s wife, Nadya Krupskaya, who looked to Ludendorff like a codfish, and her companion. A nib scratched on paper as one of the officers behind Ludendorff compiled a report.

  For a time, Lenin turned his attention to the monotonous farmland the train was passing through. It was a grey day, and the countryside lay sullenly under a sky the colour of cement. ‘And if I am sure,’ he continued, as if the silence had lasted a matter of seconds rather than minutes, ‘you can be sure that Russia will be out of the war. Your Eastern Front will no longer exist, and you can transfer the forces that become available to defeat the British and the French. You’ll need all the men you’ve got. Hasn’t the United States just joined in – finally – on the Allies’ side? Silly of you to sink that liner. They might have stayed out of it.’

  Ludendorff pursed his lips. The man was well informed. ‘You have our full, disinterested support,’ he repeated guardedly.

  ‘But the faster I move, the faster you can, no?’ said Lenin.

  Ludendorff didn’t know where the conversation was going, but something within him didn’t like the turn it was taking. He remained silent.

  ‘My friends in Berlin – a friend, I should say, a professor of ancient history at Moscow university, currently in exile on account of his political views – has been most enthusiastic about the discoveries made by his colleague, your compatriot, Robert Koldewey,’ Lenin continued, looking out of the window as if fascinated by the dull view.

  ‘Not my field,’ said Ludendorff. ‘Know nothing about it.’

  Lenin turned to him, raising his eyebrows. ‘Now that is surprising. I’m told you were with Koldewey in Istanbul only two years ago.’

  ‘Official business, that’s all.’

  ‘Of course.’ Lenin paused, but could not conceal his impatience. It was as if he were trying to pace himself. Ludendorff waited, hoping to be able to counter whatever was coming next. Damn it, how much did the man know?

  ‘I hear you brought some trifles back from Koldewey’s dig to Berlin,’ Lenin continued, his voice less light. ‘Among them, something of great value – great power.’

  ‘A handful of artefacts, yes. I left all that to Koldewey. He’s the expert.’

  ‘This … this thing I’m thinking about,’ Lenin went on insistently, and there was no doubting the gleam in his eye now. ‘It seems that it’s being kept under wraps. But if it were in the right hands, it might be – how shall I say? – of enormous practical and political value.’

  ‘To you?’

  Lenin spread his hands. ‘Who else? And don’t forget, my friend, that my success is your success.’

  ‘You want us to give you this thing?’

  ‘My friend Professor Kaschei has had several conversations with Dr Koldewey. Discreetly. They have drunk vodka together. My friend the professor assures me that this is a line well worth pursuing. And if nothing comes of it, no harm will have been done.’

  ‘And if something does come of it?’

  Lenin smiled. ‘As I said, if I win, you win. You needn’t think for a moment that a grateful Russian Soviet Republic, with all the might of our natural resources and a truly motivated workforce, wouldn’t be eternally grateful to our friend, benefactor and ally, Imperial Germany.’ Lenin looked at him. The eyes were bright and dark, and bored through the general. There was something of genius and something of madness in them.

  ‘But I have tired you,’ said the Russian, stretching and rising to his feet. ‘I will rejoin my companions and sleep. You should sleep too. There is little else to do on this train except eat, read, and try to keep clean.’ He turned to go but something made him turn back. The eyes fixed Ludendorff. ‘All I ask is that you think about what I have proposed. We could change history together, you and I.’ Lenin relaxed. ‘We will talk again,’ he said in parting. ‘We still have a day, I think, before we reach Berlin.’

  Left to himself, Ludendorff closed his eyes. But he didn’t sleep. His mind was not in turmoil, it never was that, but he was disquieted, and there was no one to consult. Nor would there be, for there was no time. The schedule of the journey to the Finland Station was tight, and it was crucial that it be kept to. He tussled with the idea Lenin had put to him for two hours.

  But by the end of that time, his decision was made. Whatever else Herr Lenin might say to him in the twenty-four hours in which he was forced to remain in the Russian’s company, nothing would sway him from his course.

  64

  Edirne, the Present

  It felt as if they had been walking for days, not hours, and the ragged landscape burned under the high sun. Rocks cut their feet in the depths of the remote valley, they were still blinded by the light after so long a time in the darkness of their prison, and yet they stumbled along, hauled upright, pushed and shoved whenever either of them showed any sign of collapse.

  But they were out, away from the torture. A
nd the blindfolds had been taken from their eyes when the black SUV had come to a halt after a long drive.

  They didn’t know where they were, or what country they were in. Somewhere hot, somewhere southern. But the rocks, tussock grass and sparse shrubs, among which lean goats foraged, gave them few clues. There were no villages, no people. But, drugged and beaten though they had been, they knew they couldn’t have travelled far – they had never completely lost consciousness, even if most of their recent experience had unfolded like a dream. How many days or even weeks was it since their abduction? Five? Ten? Fifteen? Time eluded them.

  What they had never been able to understand was how to answer the one question the man and woman – they knew them only by their voices – in charge of their kidnappers and torturers had repeatedly put to them:

  ‘Where is it?’

  They knew it must have to do with the dig they’d been working on. They had, in desperation, invented answers which might please their gaolers, but these were never satisfactory. Now the two Americans had other things on their minds.

  At last they halted. Their eyes had grown accustomed to the light and they could see the people who accompanied them. Five men, dressed in T-shirts and jeans. Young men, brawny, with harsh faces and dead eyes.

  And the two others, the man and woman whose voices Brad Adkins and Rick Taylor had heard in their cell. The man, stick-thin, was dressed in a beige desert suit with high boots. His face was covered by a silk paisley handkerchief. The plump woman had squeezed herself into a Laura Ashley dress. She also wore a straw hat with a scarf wrapped round its crown. Her dyed dark hair hung down under it, tossed gently by the wind. She looked like an old hippie. The wide brim of the hat cast a shadow over her face, and she was careful to keep her head low, but they could see her mouth, which was set and cruel.

  The group encircled the two men.

  ‘We’ll ask you one last time,’ the woman said, in her cut-glass accent.

  ‘One last time,’ repeated her male companion, whose voice was similar, rasping.

  There was a silence in which the two men looked at one another in despair. Suddenly they knew what would happen to them if they could not, at this eleventh hour, provide an answer.

  The only sounds were the whispering of the stiff stalks of the shrubs, the hot breeze and the tedious grating of crickets.

  After a long minute, the man consulted his watch and looked at the woman.

  ‘Silence is your answer, then?’ the woman said to her captives.

  ‘We have told you that we found nothing.’

  ‘That’s it, then,’ said the man. ‘I told you that days ago, but you never listen.’

  ‘You are not in charge.’

  ‘More’s the pity.’

  She laughed. ‘We sound like a bickering old married couple.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we are?’

  The woman stopped laughing, and turned to her henchmen. ‘You know what to do,’ she said. She and her companion walked back, still bickering, to the SUV, parked 75 metres away. Adkins and Taylor watched them. Had they really only walked that far? They couldn’t remember when they had last eaten. They’d been given water to keep them alive, that was all.

  One of the five men left behind supervised while the others divided into two pairs, each seizing one of the Americans and dragging them to separate rocks, to which they chained them. The walls of the valley craned down, enclosing everything, leaving only a blue slit of sky above, in which the white disc of the sun hung like an angry eye.

  Then the fifth man approached, drawing a long knife with a broad, heavy blade. A butcher by training, he removed the men’s hands and feet quickly and efficiently. He then took a smaller knife and cut out their tongues.

  65

  They were a few kilometres outside Edirne, way north-west of Istanbul, on the Bulgarian border.

  On Detective-Major Haki’s advice, Su-Lin had been left at the police station in town. That she had been allowed to come with them at all had bothered Graves, but Marlow convinced her that the archaeologist was sufficiently recovered. She kept her reservations about her colleague’s fixation with the woman, and her own feelings, to herself.

  Looking at the bodies of Brad Adkins and Rick Taylor, Marlow was glad they’d left Su-Lin in Edirne. Graves wished she had stayed behind herself.

  They’d come to the place in two police Toyota Land Cruisers, Haki and his men in one, leading the way; Graves and Marlow in the other, with their driver.

  Now the three of them stood by the corpses chained to the rocks, five metres apart, looking down at them in the flat light of dawn.

  ‘You say they’ve been here three days?’ said Marlow.

  ‘A goatherd discovered them late yesterday,’ replied Haki. There was no twinkle in his eye now. ‘Three days is what our forensic trawl’s determined. But it didn’t take them that long to die. We think they must have been dead within the ten hours after they’d been put here.’ It was a moment before he continued. ‘Blood loss, dehydration. Can happen quickly. Especially when you consider what was done to these guys.’

  The overnight flight in the INTERSEC Falcon 7X from Paris to Istanbul had taken just under five hours, but Marlow had never felt less tired, even after the helicopter and car journey from Istanbul to Edirne, and from Edirne, over rocky and inhospitable terrain, to this site of slaughter. His senses were alert, the ghost which haunted him forgotten. If only it would stay that way. He’d told Su-Lin her colleagues were dead. He did not tell her the manner of their deaths.

  ‘So they were brought here last Wednesday, and they’ve been missing …’

  ‘Fifteen days,’ supplied Graves. She was looking at the cadavers, her face abstracted. There was a connection here, something familiar about the manner of their deaths, if only she could place it.

  Marlow and Haki followed her gaze in silence. In the short time since their deaths, the two men had shrivelled within their ragged clothes. Crows had pecked out their eyes and it was easy to imagine, in this heat, what incursions larvae had made in the tender recesses of their bodies.

  The postures of the bodies showed that the two men, while life remained in them, had strained out towards one another.

  ‘Move them, shall we?’ said Haki. ‘We’ve done all we can here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marlow agreed. Turning to Graves, he said, ‘Make the arrangements, and inform their families, and Yale. Do it through the New York office. Tell Leon to get Hudson to handle it. But keep it close, and don’t go into detail. This mustn’t get out.’

  She nodded. ‘What about Su-Lin? Do we go public on her?’

  He looked at her impatiently. ‘She has no family to tell, and she can’t give us any names of friends.’

  ‘Tyre marks not far away,’ said Haki. ‘And the headman of the village four kilometres away saw an unfamiliar black vehicle on a track not far from his place three or four days ago.’

  ‘Any chance he recognized the make?’ Marlow didn’t hold out much hope.

  ‘Oh, absolutely. Porsche SUV. He recognized it from an ad on his satellite TV.’

  Marlow looked thoughtful. He knew the organization which had abducted Graves in Istanbul was responsible for this. But why kill them in such a way? Was a message being sent?

  66

  Istanbul, the Present

  Alone with her, Marlow comforted Su-Lin as best he could. But she seemed inconsolable.

  ‘Who could have wanted to kill them? What harm had they done anyone?’

  ‘We’ll find out.’ He almost told her they had a trail to follow, but checked himself in time. He made to go.

  ‘Are you leaving me?’

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘Don’t leave me alone.’

  He returned, took her in his arms, stroked her hair. ‘You are perfectly safe here.’

  ‘Stay with me!’

  He forced himself to go. The need to keep her safe was paramount to him. If only they could close the last gaps in her memory. But something
else troubled him. Su-Lin was making inroads into his loneliness. She was so vulnerable. But he’d have to keep her out.

  They were not staying at a hotel this time, but in a flat above Haki’s office for the night before returning to Paris. The day was been spent contacting Lopez at base, transmitting the details of what they’d found. Marlow returned to the Operations Centre with a heavy heart.

  All day Graves had been distracted. Now Marlow found out why. ‘Baldwin of Flanders,’ she said briskly, as he entered the room.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Baldwin of Flanders!’

  ‘Take me with you.’

  ‘Baldwin of Flanders was one of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade,’ Graves said. ‘He was the golden boy, the one they crowned emperor of the new Catholic empire in the East, after they’d taken Constantinople.’

  ‘And ripped it apart between them.’

  ‘When I saw the bodies, I knew there was something. Some connection.’

  Marlow noticed the troubled look had left her face. She was focused now.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It didn’t take long for the new empire to start showing cracks,’ she continued. ‘Boniface wasn’t as useful to Dandolo any more, which was why Baldwin got the crown – that, and the fact that Baldwin was younger, less intelligent, less experienced – much more manipulable, in other words.’ She paused. ‘Boniface established his own territory around Thessalonika and carved out his own kingdom. There was no problem with Baldwin.’

  ‘So Boniface did well.’

  ‘Yes, but he was double-crossed by the Bulgarians, who didn’t like so much power on their doorstep. They ambushed and killed him in the summer of 1207, only three years after the sacking of Constantinople.’

  ‘Sure, but what has all this to do with our archaeologists?’

  ‘Wait! The conquered Greeks of Constantinople weren’t out of the picture, and they allied themselves with the Bulgarian king, Johanitza, who didn’t have any time for Baldwin either. Johanitza was Eastern Orthodox Christian, not Catholic, don’t forget. There was a battle between Baldwin and Johanitza in April 1205, which Baldwin lost. The little emperor was taken prisoner. The battle took place – at Adrianople.’