The Sacred Scroll

by Anton Gill

  ‘Everything was in place. But someone had cut the sensors, so Monitoring saw nothing. They raised the alarm immediately. I called you.’

  ‘Took her out through a window in Duff’s quarters. Unbarred there,’ Marlow said. ‘That your reading?’

  The man was sweating. This could cost him his job. Demotion, certainly. Transfer to a desk at the Analysis Centre in Dayton. Or worse.

  There was a cup of lemon tea on the coffee table. Untouched. Marlow touched it. Still warm. An hour? No more. ‘Blanket search, fifteen kilometre radius. Airports, too. Don’t involve the locals. Get one of our doctors over here,’ he said.

  ‘Already on his way. As for the rest, consider it done, sir.’ The night commander withdrew at the double.

  Marlow walked quickly along the corridor to the cubbyhole Duff had called home for the last couple of weeks. Matchbox office, bedroom, shower, kitchenette; nothing else. But it was round an angle of the building, and one window opened on to the rue Pernelle, the narrow street which flanked the block.

  He looked around. It was possible they’d got in through the main entrance; he’d look at the CCTV tapes soonest. How they’d got any further would be up to Ops. to investigate, but how they’d got out was clear: down below a monte-meubles was parked, one of the crane-mounted flat-tops Parisians use to get furniture in and out of the windows of apartments in tall buildings when they move house. Must have had another car for their getaway. Pros. Had they drugged her? She was small, slight, easy to overpower.

  He flipped out his phone, called Graves.

  There was no reply for a long time. He was about to give up, send someone to see what had happened, break the door down if necessary, when finally, just before the call timed out, she picked up.

  Relief undid the knot of stress that had been tightening in his chest.

  ‘Get over here. The Centre. Now.’ His voice was harsher than he’d intended it to be.

  Now came the waiting. Doing nothing is the hardest thing to do, but Marlow had no alternative. Graves arrived dishevelled, apologetic. She looked dead beat. Had she even been to bed? Why had it taken her so long to answer her phone?

  The call came at 5 a.m. Orly Airport. Iberia flight to Barcelona. INTERSEC fieldmen were in place.

  The traffic was still light, so it took them less than fifteen minutes to get there, breaking every speed restriction in the book and outrunning one hysterical cop-car which pursued them down the avenue d’Italie but gave up soon after the Porte. Marlow knew there was no chance of the flics radioing ahead to colleagues, since their 5.5-litre, V8 AMG Merc CLS had unidentifiable plates. The driver only became law abiding when they reached the airport outskirts, but there was little traffic here either, the airport was just waking up, and in the terminal at Orly itself few people were about, most of them tired and grey under the dismal, draining light – lighting which airports specialize in worldwide.

  Graves and Marlow moved carefully through the concourse, pistols loose in their holsters, and joined the leader of the team-in-place at a prearranged vantage point. They clipped on mics and earphones as they spoke.

  ‘Where?’ said Marlow.

  ‘Three of them. Thin man, plump woman. Our subject with them, pliant, probably drugged. Row of seats near the Relay shop. Move in?’

  ‘Let’s have a look at them. See if we can do it without making a noise.’ Marlow knew from the moment they’d got the call that something was wrong here, but he hadn’t yet identified it.

  He moved stealthily towards the spot identified by his fieldman, and saw Su-Lin, empty-eyed, seated between a man and woman who answered the fieldman’s description.

  Their appearance struck a chord in his memory.

  The man was reading a copy of an English tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mail, and the woman – who looked like she’d escaped from an Alan Aldridge album cover – was eating croissants from a Paul paper bag. Both were absorbed in their separate tasks, though the man occasionally glanced at the departures board, squinting as though he needed glasses to see it properly.

  There was a soft leather bag at his feet. The woman’s shoulder bag was at her side. Su-Lin, in black, and looking as if she’d dressed – or been dressed – hastily, continued to stare into space. At one point, when it looked as if he was in danger of her catching his eye, Marlow ducked out of sight, uncertain, but then Su-Lin half stood, with a little involuntary cry.

  She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking past him. She had seen Graves, who hadn’t been as quick as he had.

  Her two guardians were instantly alert. Moving quickly, they each took one of Su-Lin’s arms and propelled her away from the seats towards the departure gates. The woman now held an automatic, a matt-white subcompact gun, a Glock, not easy to spot, maybe plastic-coated, looked like a toy. She’d conjured it up from nowhere, but she’d dropped her Paul bag. The gun must have been in there with the croissants. Marlow spoke tersely into his mic to alert the fieldmen, some of whom he could see out of the corner of his eye, gliding into new positions. Graves had disappeared from view – she’d had the sense to get out of sight, at least.

  None of the airport staff and none of the other travellers, now increasing in number, was aware of anything. Marlow saw that the field commander’s men – five of them – had deployed themselves in a semicircle containing the target group from both flanks and from the rear. The man and the woman were corralled, and they knew it, but they showed no sign of losing their nerve, though up towards Departures the security people at the X-ray machines, even with their two-bit training, were becoming aware that something was going on. One of them, more zealous than her colleagues, started to approach, full of the power her job invested her with. You could see she’d just love to be in the police. Then she saw the gun in the hippie-woman’s hand, and froze.

  The man and the woman seemed amused. The man half turned his head, to look behind him, then looked at his companion and said one word, not loud, but loud enough for Marlow to catch:

  ‘Abort.’

  The thin man let go of Su-Lin with one hand, and of his bag with the other. But left in that hand was a Steyr TMP machine pistol, black and deadly.

  The woman released Su-Lin’s other arm and started to move, fast, through the travellers pushing trolleys. The man did the same on the other side. They made difficult targets in the crowd as they made their way back the way they’d come, outflanking the fieldmen. Su-Lin collapsed where she stood.

  Graves rushed over to Su-Lin and picked her up, flashing a French DGSE card at the approaching security guards, and bundled Su-Lin away, out of sight, into the gathering crowd.

  Not a shot had been fired. A dull silence, the silence of snow, had fallen on the concourse.

  74

  ‘There’s your proof,’ said Marlow, later. They’d taken Su-Lin back to his apartment. She was in the bedroom, sedated, being treated by an INTERSEC medic. They’d question her as soon as they got the OK.

  ‘Proof of what?’

  ‘That they want her as much as we do. We can’t afford to let her back into the wild.’

  Graves was silent a moment, pursed her lips.

  ‘I almost screwed up.’

  ‘Almost?’ replied Marlow. But, seeing her expression, he relented. ‘Everyone does, Laura. Nothing happened this time. And if she’d been killed, who knows? No good to anyone then. Neutralized.’ But he thought about what they might have done to her if they’d got her away. He thought of Adkins and Taylor.

  ‘Do you really think she’s got any more to offer?’

  ‘Yes. If they wanted her so badly.’

  ‘They’ve got to the core of us. How?’

  Marlow shook his head, then changed tack. ‘Now let’s get back to your translation of that inscription.’ He looked at her admiringly. ‘Incredibly good work, by the way.’ He admitted to himself that Graves’s standing in his eyes had climbed several tall ladders.

  She smiled, pleased almost in spite of herself. ‘Still sounds unbelievable. T
he secret of total control. What does that mean?’

  ‘Means, in the wrong hands, goodbye, cruel world. Means in any hands. If this thing is the key to absolute power, who isn’t going to be corrupted by it?’

  ‘What now?’ she asked.

  ‘You follow up on the inscription. Whatever background you can get. I’ll organize a replacement for Duff. We need to know how far this experience has set her back.’

  ‘If at all.’

  Marlow didn’t want to hear that. He went on: ‘But we don’t want a replacement here.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘New York. I’ll get Leon on to it.’

  ‘New York?’

  ‘That’s where we’re going. Fast. Paris isn’t the healthiest place to be any more.’

  ‘Got you.’

  ‘Pack your bags. Get the people at Centre to pack hers too. Bring them over here. And send everything new encrypted to yourself at your own place in NY. Not INTERSEC.’

  ‘They’ll want to see something.’

  ‘Throw them a bone.’

  She was on the point of pursuing that, but asked instead, ‘What’ll we do with de Montferrat until NY?’

  ‘She stays here.’

  Marlow looked in at the door of his bedroom after Graves had gone, but the doctor waved him away. Marlow nodded and went back up the rickety spiral staircase.

  The doubt still nagged him. He made coffee and found the makings of something to eat, a day-old pain-au-chocolat and some grapes. He drank the espresso, ignored the food, picked up a copy of the book he was reading, Alison Weir’s life of Henry VIII – what a bastard he was – and flicked through it without being able to concentrate. He reached for Le Monde instead and found nothing but sombre articles about the unrest bursting out all over the developing world – but what else was there to write about? Sooner or later, Western Europe and the USA would find themselves in the same situation the Romans had, two thousand years ago, when the Goths and Visigoths, Vandals and Huns began to migrate into the fertile territories of the empire in search of food.

  It had already started. An inexorable invasion. A colonization of the privileged by the desperate. History rolling over in its sleep. There’d come a day, Marlow thought, when the battles he was fighting now would look like the antics of a bunch of kids with peashooters.

  He looked ruefully at the whiskey bottle. But no. He wasn’t going down that path again. He turned to his chess board, but that didn’t work either. He noticed that his shirt was buttoned out of synch, and redid it.

  He heard the doctor climbing the stairs ten minutes later.

  ‘She’s OK. Awake, a bit groggy. No psychological damage that I can see. After all this time, they didn’t get away with it. Give her one of these if she gets distressed.’ He tapped a plastic container and placed it on the coffee table near Marlow. ‘Do you want a nurse to stay over, or do you want to keep it tight?’

  ‘Keep it tight.’

  ‘You’ll be OK?’

  ‘Backup downstairs and next door.’

  ‘I’ll be back at 16.00 hours. Call me if you need me before then.’

  ‘Can she talk?’

  ‘You can try. Give her an hour.’

  ‘When can we move her?’

  ‘Tell you at four.’

  Marlow worked on his computer until ten, and was about to descend to the bedroom when he heard movement below. Nothing suspicious. She was awake. He heard the faint sounds of her showering. It had been a long time since he’d listened to someone else getting up in the same place as him.

  It was comforting. It told him that he didn’t have to be alone for ever. When the sounds ceased, he imagined that she’d be waiting, wondering, uncertain.

  He called her name and went down the stairs to the bedroom.

  She was sitting on the bed, wearing a black T-shirt a couple of sizes too big. She looked up at his approach.

  ‘Hello, Jack,’ she said, smiling.

  75

  New York City, the Present

  ‘Adler’s got vast resources,’ Sir Richard Hudson was saying. ‘An international communications company, one of the big contenders. Damn it, he’s got governments in the palm of his hand.’

  ‘Then he’s joined the club,’ said Marlow.

  ‘He’s not asking for secure information, Jack. Nothing like that. Look on his money as an extra reserve. Public/Private Sector Enterprise. All that.’ Sir Richard waved his arm. The movement wafted his eau-de-cologne in Marlow’s direction. ‘He doesn’t even know who we are.’

  ‘I should hope not.’

  ‘We’re using the INTERPOL cover. They’re au fait. No danger of a leak, if he double-checks. Not that he will. Rich maybe, powerful, yes, but a simple businessman at heart.’

  Marlow was silent. He looked out over the New York skyline through the big picture window in Sir Richard’s office on the top floor of INTERSEC Central. Watery sunshine, high cloud. The lighting was warm and discreet. Thick-pile blue carpet. A mahogany bookcase covering the wall behind the teak desk. No trace of a computer or any other vulgar modern equipment. Just three telephones, red, white and blue, and a grey intercom to connect with the outer room. An original Dufy graced the end wall. Not a hint of cuts here.

  ‘I’ve been in this business since Cambridge,’ Sir Richard reminded him sternly. ‘I was three years old when Burgess and Maclean jumped ship. Squeaky clean since then. More or less. They brought in James Bond as housekeeper.’ He waited for his joke to strike home. When it didn’t, he drew briefly on his cigar, and went on: ‘Adler’s deeply distressed at what happened to Adkins and Taylor. And’ – he paused – ‘at Dr de Montferrat’s continued absence.’ He looked at Marlow. ‘Any news there, by the way?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Yale and Venice?’

  ‘No more than what we know.’

  ‘Which is all Adler knows, as well; though I can tell you he’s made quite thorough investigations through the university boards himself.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘And he sent a team of his own to Istanbul. Much to Major Haki’s consternation.’ Sir Richard smiled. ‘Adler’s angry. Impatient. It’d be better to have him safely in the fold. We don’t want any loose cannon rolling about, do we?’

  Marlow considered. The press had been allowed to give the deaths front-page coverage, but below-the-line, with additional biographical background articles in the broadsheets, around page five. Hadn’t lasted more than a day. There’d been vague speculation about a kidnapping gone wrong, about Islamist terrorists, but nothing more. Focus soon shifted to the latest coup d’état in Africa. That was where things were hotting up, ruffling feathers in Whitehall, Washington, Berlin and the Elysée. Bad for business.

  As for the recent suicides at Yale, and another in Venice, there had been obituaries, but nothing more. No conclusions were drawn, or public questions asked.

  ‘What help does he think he can give?’ asked Marlow.

  Hudson spread his hands. ‘Use of his resources, without strings. The man has eyes and ears everywhere. Keeps a good cellar, too.’

  Since this further attempt at levity showed no sign of lightening things up, Sir Richard went on to a different tack: fatherly this time, older brother at least. Sometimes worked, he thought to himself. Worth a try, anyway. ‘Come on, Jack,’ he cajoled. ‘We can do with having all the help we can get. Isn’t it good to have him on our side?’

  ‘Have you read his file?’

  Hudson nodded, and shrugged his shoulders just a little. ‘He’s head of a multinational. All his own work. Don’t get to be that without cracking some heads.’

  He waited. Marlow let him.

  ‘After all, Jack,’ said Sir Richard at last, ‘I am the boss.’

  Marlow nodded, forced himself to smile. Diplomacy, delicacy, these had always been Hudson’s strong points. Marlow, seeing that he had no option, agreed to Adler’s financial involvement, but no more.

  It was a small price to pay for keeping Hudson’s
curiosity at bay.

  It bought him time.

  Leaving the building, Marlow set off on foot, taking himself down 5th past the Frick Collection and the Zoo, then across Grand Army Plaza as far as St Thomas’s, where he turned right along 53rd and continued past MoMA. Left down 7th near the Sheraton, and south again until he reached West 48th and his destination.

  A long walk, but he could be certain no one was following him.

  He went in, checked the lobby was empty, and used his security card to operate the lift. It took him to the thirty-fifth floor.

  He walked down the softly lit, soundless corridor to the last door on the right, pushed the buzzer briefly three times then let himself in with another security card.

  She was waiting for him. Dressed in a purple silk sheath.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said Su-Lin.

  76

  Berlin, AD 1933

  A cold January day, almost the end of the month, and it had been a long twenty-four hours.

  But now the fruit had fallen into his hands – the fruit which had been the goal of his ten-year struggle, his Kampf.

  Longer than ten years. Since the day of his birth in the little Austrian border town of Braunau, Destiny had chosen him for this path.

  He thought of Ludendorff, an old man now, living in retirement, forgotten. The general had turned to God, writing books about the dismal fate of Germany and the world’s ills. A changed man. The old fool had broken with him a year after the last meeting they’d had, when the general had placed the fate of his adopted country firmly in his hands.

  Now, under his undisputed leadership, that country would be purged and, once clean again, go on to purge the world.

  He was alone, looking out of his office window at the procession. It was thousands-strong, the SA men in brown uniforms and badges, their red-white-and-black armbands caught by the firelight of the torches they carried as they marched in celebration and in triumph. Die Fahne Hoch …!