The Apocalypse Fire (Ava Curzon Trilogy Book 2)

by Dominic Selwood

  The servers behind him immediately kicked into gear, propagating the film around the internet, sending its message of fear and hate global, switching phone lines and IP addresses every ten seconds, bouncing the messages across six continents.

  Within minutes, it would be flying between the accounts of thousands of the world’s jihadi sympathizers. In twelve hours, it would be everywhere.

  He sat back and picked up a fresh pack of cigarettes, tearing the foil on the top of the soft packet, and tapping one out into his hand.

  He swivelled round to look out of the smeary window at the cloud-covered sky.

  Right now, anyone logging onto the White House’s website would see a desert-based jihadi fighter, complete with balaclava, black-and-white-checked scarf, and AK-47, vowing to bring oceans of blood to the kuffar of America.

  Nikolay had thought the film was very slick from the moment the contact had given it to him. He had not needed to do much beyond scrambling the insurgent’s voice to make it more threatening, and distorting his eyes to defeat any retinal or iris identification.

  The Middle East was not Nikolay’s fight. But he was being paid very handsomely, and that was the best ideology he knew.

  He lit the cigarette and inhaled slowly, savouring the sensation of the nicotine hitting his bloodstream as the pummelling music in his ears rose in a crescendo.

  What he did not know was that, at the same moment as he was taking on the White House for his unknown masters, others in Moscow that morning were uploading different jihadi films to other websites, while yet more were unleashing a barrage of social media support from ‘lone wolf’ militants, all threatening to bring the war directly to American soil.

  Chapter 8

  British Museum

  Bloomsbury

  London WC1

  England

  The United Kingdom

  THE BASEMENT OF the British Museum was a rabbit warren of ultra-hi-tech laboratories.

  Standing in the largest, in its bright lights and purified air, Ava clicked open the catches of the silver case, and thought back over the last few hours.

  After refuelling the helicopter in Germany, the team had dropped her and Mary at the large central London barracks of 21 SAS, before returning to base at Credenhill in the Welsh Marches.

  Ava was impressed that MI13 had been able to mobilize the Regiment from Hereford at such short notice. Whatever cover Swinton and his colleagues operated inside the Ministry of Defence, they clearly had teeth and could get things done fast. It made a pleasant change from all the paperwork at MI6.

  Mary’s presence, on the other hand, was still something of a mystery.

  Ava could see why the Vatican wanted to stay close to the Shroud. After all, the pope had only been given the relic in 1983, and it would hardly look good if the Church lost it within several decades – especially after the House of Savoy had safeguarded it for over four hundred years. So Vatican involvement made sense. But, so far, Ava had no idea how Mary came to be sitting in an SAS helicopter on an active operation, how she was connected to MI13, or where she had learned to shoot like that. None of it fitted any mental picture she had of the Vatican.

  Shortly before landing, Ava had explained to Mary that they needed to get the linen back to the Museum in order to run some basic tests to see if it really was the Turin Shroud.

  After a fraught hour of telephone tag, Mary confirmed that the Vatican was happy for the British Museum to examine the cloth and check its condition.

  Now in the laboratory, Ava rested her hand on the case’s lid, enjoying the cool sensation of the metal. One of the SAS troopers had scanned it for explosives before they took off from Nuremberg, so she was not worried about nasty surprises.

  Instead, her heart was beating a little more quickly than usual as she wondered what she was going to find inside.

  Would it be the real Shroud? Or did the Church only keep a replica on display in Turin, with the genuine relic safe in a vault deep under the Vatican, or in a secure storage facility beneath the Alps?

  She exhaled deeply.

  She was about to find out.

  Lifting the lid, she peered down into the case.

  There, wrapped in acid-free paper, was a neatly folded section of ivory-coloured linen.

  She slipped on a white lab coat and a fresh pair of sterile latex gloves, and carefully removed the cloth from its wrapping, laying it out fully on a sterilized glass workbench.

  On the other side of the lab, Mary was connecting her mobile phone to the small plastic handheld unit she had pressed up against the Russian soldier’s phone back in Nuremberg.

  Ava watched her for a moment, noting that Mary’s manner was relaxed and confident. She had not really had a chance to look carefully at her before. She had dark hair cut fairly short around a broad face with wide cheekbones. Ava guessed she was in her early thirties.

  Turning back to the examination bench, Ava flipped on the powerful lighting underneath it, and stood back to look at the illuminated length of linen.

  She noted the scorch-marked holes, the fine herringbone weave, and the world-famous images.

  As she took it all in, she felt a familiar sensation building – the thrill of investigating an unknown object, of uncovering its secrets, teasing out its clues, and establishing its history.

  The Shroud had always fascinated her. Despite the fact many of her colleagues treated it as a subject for the tin-foil hat brigade, she had long been intrigued by a number of puzzling and unanswered questions it raised.

  And here it was. In her laboratory.

  She walked over to the computer terminal beside the workbench, and sat down in front of its two large monitors.

  Typing quickly, she activated a ceiling-mounted high-definition camera above the workbench, and began to take a series of images.

  The first ones were of the whole cloth, and clearly showed the two parallel tracks of irregular triangular burn holes running the length of the fabric. These, she knew, had been caused in Chambéry, in the early 1500s, before the Shroud had been moved to Turin. A fire had broken out in the chapel where it was kept, and molten drops of the protective silver reliquary case had burned right through the fragile linen. Miraculously, though, the damage had not touched the two extraordinary life-size images – the front and back of a man – which showed up on the cloth as faint sepia smudges.

  “It’s not very clear, is it?” Mary was peering over Ava’s shoulder. “I expected the image to be… sharper.”

  Ava typed quickly, and the image of the Shroud on the main monitor suddenly transformed into a photographic negative.

  Mary exhaled sharply as the indistinct brown shadows transformed into striking sharp white-on-black images of a gaunt fork-bearded and pony-tailed man.

  “An Italian lawyer, Secundo Pia, took the first photographs of the Shroud in 1898.” Ava zoomed in on the image of the bruised face. “This is pretty much exactly what he saw on the negatives in his darkroom. He was amazed, and made them public. No one had ever seen the Shroud like this before. It became world famous overnight.”

  Mary peered at the screen. “And how come you know about it?”

  “My speciality is the ancient Middle East and its religions,” Ava flicked to the next image, “which covers most Judeo-Christian religious artefacts – and they don’t get much more famous than this one.”

  She moved a joystick, repositioning the ceiling camera to take close-up shots of individual sections of the linen. “We often get questions about it in my department, especially given our role in the radiocarbon dating.”

  “You dated it?” Mary looked impressed.

  Ava shook her head. “Before my time. In 1988 the Vatican asked the Museum to organize carbon dating. So we set it up with labs in Oxford, Zurich, and Arizona. Each one was given a small square of the Shroud to test to destruction. Completely independently of each other, they came up with a date range of AD 1260 to 1390.”

  Mary was still behind her. “But don�
��t lots of people say the test was flawed? That the samples were taken from the edge of the cloth, which may have been repaired in the past with newer linen?”

  “I wouldn’t say lots of people.” Ava measured off the size of the man against the markers on the bench. They showed he was around five feet seven inches tall. She switched to a microscope camera. “But you’re right. Not everyone accepts the carbon dating.”

  Mary continued to peer at the image.

  “If you’re with the Church,” Ava spun the chair round to face Mary, “then do you believe the Shroud is the actual burial cloth of Jesus?”

  Mary shrugged. “The Vatican has no official line. And anyway, even if it did, who’s to say I’d follow it? Gregor Mendel, the biologist who pioneered genetics, was a Catholic priest. So was Georges Lemaître, the professor of physics who invented the Big Bang theory. We don’t all turn our rational brains off the moment someone lights some incense.” She walked around to the other side of the workbench. “What else do you know about the Shroud? Has anyone ever examined it scientifically?”

  Ava clicked a key to focus the macro camera. “The only known scientific examination was in 1978. The team was made up of scientists from NASA, the US Air Force Weapons lab, Los Alamos nuclear lab, several major defence and IT contractors, and even medical and oceanographic computer imaging organizations. They performed a wide range of tests with state-of-the-art equipment: photography, microscopy, X-ray fluorescence, spectrophotometry, thermography, UV reflectance, and a battery of others. They analysed the data for three years, and reported back in 1981.”

  “Go on.” Mary was bending low over the linen, peering at it closely.

  “They concluded that the Shroud depicts a man who was tortured, and then crucified, in the same way as the Bible describes the execution of Jesus.”

  Mary straightened up. “That’s not really an answer, though, is it?”

  Ava walked over and joined her at the workbench.

  “Look.” Ava pointed to the hundreds of rust-coloured stains. “These are blood. They show up white on the photographic negative. The team found that they contain biological material – haemoglobin and albumin.”

  She pointed to the small bloody patches on the front and back images of the head. “For example, this ring of stains suggests sharp punctures to the forehead, side, and back of the scalp.”

  Mary’s eyes narrowed as she focused on the marks, nodding. “The crown of thorns.”

  Ava pointed to the man’s back. “And there are over a hundred bloodstains, shaped like small dumbbells, running from the shoulders all the way to the lower back, and then down the back of the thighs and calves.”

  Mary followed where Ava was indicating.

  “The number, pattern, and direction of the wounds are consistent with whipping, or scourging, with a Roman flagrum – a type of flail whip. In this case, the leather thongs seem to have been tipped with sharp dumbbell-shaped metal ends.”

  Mary blanched.

  “And here.” Ava pointed to a large pool of brown staining on the left of the sheet. “This is the man’s right side, as the Shroud imprint is obviously in reverse. As you probably recall, the Bible says that the Romans didn’t break Jesus’s legs, which they usually did to speed up death…”

  “But seeing he was already dead, pierced his side with a spear.” Mary finished the sentence.

  “And here,” Ava pointed to the man’s left hand, lying over the right one, “is a bloody wound, consistent with nailing.”

  Mary looked at it, then down at the man’s feet, where there was an equally visible mark from a nail through the right foot.

  Ava swung a wall-mounted magnifying lens and light down over the Shroud. She motioned Mary to look through it. “Do you see the direction of the blood flow?”

  Mary peered closely through the large lens.

  “Autopsy experts say that the amount and direction of the blood trickles are precisely consistent with what they would expect from a newly dead and washed body lying on its back. As you can imagine, a living body bleeds much more. This is supported by most pathology experts, who say that the body shows signs of rigor mortis.”

  Mary looked at Ava in surprise. “You’re saying you believe this is the genuine burial shroud of Jesus?”

  Ava shook her head. “In my opinion? This is medieval art. Incredibly detailed and immensely skilled. We’d struggle to do it today.”

  Mary walked back over to the computer and peered at the negative image. “Would it really be that hard to make it? With all our modern technology?”

  Ava focused a pair of bright lights on the linen. “The injuries are relatively straightforward.” She leant over the bench with a piece of laboratory tape, laying the sticky surface onto a corner of the cloth, then peeling it off carefully. “Artists down the centuries have studied and even dissected bodies. In medieval times, a determined artist would have been able to get hold of a fresh corpse, especially when the Black Death was decimating Europe, which coincides with the Shroud’s first appearance. All he had to do was inflict the wounds the Bible described, then observe.”

  Mary followed Ava to the computer terminal, where Ava pulled up one of the microscope photographs.

  “The problem,” she continued, “is here.” She magnified the photograph until the individual cylindrical fibres of the Shroud filled the screen. “Do you see how the blood soaks through and around the fibres? Just like you’d expect if someone bled onto a piece of linen which absorbed the blood?”

  Mary nodded.

  “Well, now look at the image of the body.” She switched to a close-up of the fibres bearing the sepia-brown image.

  Mary peered at the screen. ‘I don’t see anything.”

  “Exactly.” Ava zoomed out to show the surface of the cloth, then in again. “The 1978 team couldn’t find any paint, stain, pigment, dye, or anything that could account for the image of the crucified man. As you can see, the cloth hasn’t absorbed any liquid to form the image. The team concluded that it was as if just the very top level of the fibre’s individual fibrils – no more than a few microns – was somehow oxidized and dehydrated, lightly changing its colour.”

  Mary looked baffled. “How would someone do that? Early photography?”

  Ava shrugged. “That’s the mystery. No one knows. But it’s not photography. Or paint. The team found no residues of chemicals, spices, oils, or – apart from the blood – organic traces produced by living or dead humans. The closest anyone has been able to get is with heat and acid. A large number of fans – mainly scientists and artists – have tried to reproduce the physical properties of the image, but no one has even come close to mirroring all its features.”

  “Seriously?” Mary looked sceptical. “You’re saying a medieval artist used a technique more sophisticated than anything known to modern science?”

  Ava sat down. “I’m sure someone could work it out if they got to examine and test the cloth really thoroughly. Just because we don’t understand something at the moment doesn’t automatically make it a miracle, even if some of its features seem inexplicable.”

  Ava began dragging the images into a folder. “For instance, if you feed an ordinary photograph into an isometric projector – which uses algorithms to map brightness and give an approximation of a three-dimensional image – the projection it produces is very distorted, because photos don’t contain enough visual data of depth and proportion. However, if you feed in a picture of the Shroud’s head, the projector’s image comes out as a fully recognizable three-dimensional human face.”

  Mary frowned. “But how’s that even possible?”

  “I don’t know,” Ava admitted, “although I’m pretty convinced it’s medieval. The carbon dating gives a range of AD 1260 to 1390, and the first time the Shroud appears in history is in a small village in France around AD 1355, which fits exactly. Anyway,” she enlarged an image of the Shroud’s head on the screen, “if you forget everything, and just focus on the face – on those long
square features – any art historian will say it’s medieval. It looks exactly like all those statues of imposing biblical prophets on medieval cathedrals.”

  Mary stared at it, and smiled. “I guess it does. But if the carbon dating’s wrong and the Shroud is much older, how come no one knew about it until the 1300s. Surely it would’ve been one of the most famous objects in early Christendom?”

  Ava nodded. “As I say: it’s almost certainly fourteenth-century. In fact, a few years after it was exhibited in France in 1350, the local bishop conducted an inquiry, and then announced that he’d found the artist who ‘cunningly painted’ it.”

  Mary turned, confused. “But you just said it wasn’t painted?”

  Ava flicked off the screen. “There’s a lot about the Shroud we just don’t know.” She turned off the lights under the workbench. “Anyway, we’d need to carry out a lot more tests to be a hundred per cent certain, but from what I can tell today, this is the same Shroud from Turin that was examined by the American team in 1978, and there’s no obvious sign of any damage having been done to it in the last fifteen hours.”

  “Then I need to get it back to Turin.” Mary pulled out her phone. “They’ll close off the chapel for maintenance while they mend the case. The cloth needs to be back in place before anyone suspects it’s gone.”

  “You might consider a few more alarms and some independent cameras,” Ava suggested. “The linen is fragile, at least seven hundred years old, worth an astronomical price on the black market, and needs a lot more protection than it had yesterday.”

  Mary’s phone buzzed, and she glanced down and scrolled through the incoming message. “While we’re tackling difficult questions, here’s one for you. Why would the Russian team that stole it have been led by Major Yakov Lunev, a seasoned Spetsnaz Special Forces officer?”

  Ava tried to hide her incredulity. “Are you seriously getting this level of detail from the Vatican?” She found it difficult to keep the surprise from her face. “What exactly is Vatican Liaison?”