Durov ushered her up the house’s white steps, through the front door, and into a spacious marble entrance hall.
Looking about casually, she checked for surveillance cameras, but there were no signs of any. Presumably the two bodyguards who had entered before them, and the two still out on the street, were all the security he needed.
Durov was walking ahead of her, past an elegant long table, down the opulent hallway. He passed under a large ornamental archway, before arriving at a closed door. Ava followed, stopping beside him as he gently turned the brass handle and pushed the door open.
The room behind it was utterly bizarre.
It had no furniture, but was draped in thick scarlet damask silk covering the walls, windows, and ceiling. The only light inside came from a dozen or so candles fixed to the walls in a variety of assorted antique candleholders.
Durov motioned for Ava to enter.
It was hotter inside than in the hallway, but she barely noticed.
Her attention was fully locked on what was inside.
She had never seen anything like it.
Religious icons filled every square inch of wall space. But unlike an iconostasis screen in an Orthodox church – where the icons were usually arranged in neat groups – here they were hung wherever there was a space, creating a seamless mosaic of floor-to-ceiling sacred imagery.
She had never seen so many icons in one place.
Her eyes scanned the artworks, taking in the wide variety in size and age – the large almond eyes, the faded reds and golds, and the ancient warped boards on which most of them were painted.
It was an unnerving collection – far too intense to be aesthetic.
As she started processing the individual images, an alarm bell began ringing in her head – quietly at first, but getting louder in the second or two it took her to survey the whole room.
Unlike most Orthodox shrines, there were no images of Mary, George, Basil, Nicholas, Christopher, or any of the other best-known eastern saints.
And that was for one simple, but very troubling, reason.
All the icons were of the same man.
The same almond eyes, gaunt face, and long hair greeted her, but with an incalculable number of variations.
She was already feeling uneasy about being alone with Durov – what she saw in front of her was not helping.
The room was an obsessional shrine to the face of Jesus.
Even without the earlier warning from Swinton, her instinct was now telling her unambiguously that she was in dangerous territory.
The bizarre room was just one further indication that inside Durov’s mind ordinary rules simply did not apply.
She looked across at her host, who was indicating for her to walk over to the far wall.
After a moment’s hesitation, she complied, and he pushed the door firmly closed behind him.
As the latch clicked loudly in the silence, she was aware of the tension in the room heightening instantly.
And she knew exactly where it was coming from.
She could feel his excitement.
This was clearly one of his pleasures.
He was enjoying closing her in.
She focused on his eyes as the candlelight played on his features – casting dramatic shadows across his face.
She was aware that the situation was moving quickly, and had just become significantly more dangerous.
He was clearly playing games. But she refused to give in to her natural instinct to leave the room as fast as she could.
He had information, and she wanted it.
“This,” he indicated a large icon in front of him, “is an ancient copy of the Image of Edessa, the cloth you mentioned, which tradition says Jesus sent to King Abgar.”
Ava turned to look at the centuries-old image, wondering how he came to have it in a private residence in London. She was not an expert in icons, but her best guess was that it was early Byzantine.
“As you see, the face has a delicate teardrop shape, unlike the Turin Shroud, where the face is rugged and rectangular, with deep eyes under a prominent brow.” Durov was now pointing to a replica image of the Shroud on the adjoining wall. She had not noticed it before, hidden among the dozens of facial images.
He moved a little to the left. “And this is a copy of the Plat Veroniki, the veil that Veronica pressed to His face.”
Ava’s gaze shifted to the icon. It was also extremely ancient – older than the Image of Edessa. The face on it was almost invisible under the black patina left by centuries of oil and candle smoke.
“It’s almost identical to the Image of Edessa.” Durov indicated the lower portion of the icon. “They both have three distinctive V-shaped clusters of hair – a beard in the middle, and long hair falling from either shoulder.”
She compared the paintings.
He was right. They were strikingly similar.
“By contrast,” he moved to the replica Shroud image, “the Turin man has a forked Viking-style beard, and his hair is gathered into a ponytail.”
She stood back and watched him peering fixedly at the picture.
What was his point?
She was finding the lecture baffling.
Of course the images were different.
Back at the embassy, when she said the Shroud was not unique, she meant that cloth relics like the Image of Edessa and the Veronica were also believed to be miraculous imprints of Jesus’s features onto material. She had not meant that the images were visually identical.
What did he think – that they were photographs?
All three images were the work of different artists, divided by country and separated by many centuries.
She took a deep breath to clear her mind.
Was it the Shroud that fascinated him, she wondered, or – as the dozens of other icons in the room suggested – was it a general obsession with pictures of Jesus?
Taking a step forward, she decided to push him a little further. “On the other hand,” she ventured, “none of these pictures are anything like the historical Jesus.”
He turned his head sharply and glared at her.
She had expected he would not like the idea, but she was unprepared for the depth of resentment she could see etched into his face.
He was annoyed now.
It was an emotion whose positive uses her instructors at MI6 had drummed into her. Durov’s feelings now had the better of him. He would not be thinking entirely rationally, and he was more likely to say something unguarded.
The fine judgement she had to balance was how far she could go before she sent him over the edge, into the violence he was clearly no stranger to.
Years spent in MI6 and then living in the Middle East had left her with no concerns about defending herself in a fight. But she would need speed and surprise to match Durov’s strength, and the small hot room offered no opportunity for either.
She therefore had to be very careful.
“Written descriptions of Jesus give a different picture,” she explained. “And they’re much older than these icons.”
Durov snorted derisively. “There are no descriptions in the Bible.”
“Who mentioned the Bible?” It never ceased to amaze her how little some people strayed beyond the Biblical texts, despite the mass of other writings from the period.
“There are many other books that circulated widely in the earliest decades of the Church. Some were pagan. But others were Christian – although eventually discarded from the canon of official Church literature.”
He was glaring at her now.
This was no time to stop.
“In the first century, the pagan philosopher Celsus said Jesus was ugly and small. Around the same time, the Jewish-turned-Roman writer Flavius Josephus said Jesus was short, hunchbacked, with scanty hair, a thin beard, and eyebrows that met in the middle.”
She knew that the Josephus manuscript in question was no longer thought to be genuine, but for centuries people had considere
d it to be accurate, and it had been widely influential.
“A little later,” she continued, “the second-century Acts of Paul and Thecla say Jesus was small, bald, hook-nosed, with crooked legs, and eyebrows that met in the middle.”
Durov was breathing harder now, not even attempting to disguise his anger.
“I thought you might have been a believer,” he spoke slowly, his voice low. “I was clearly mistaken.” He seemed to be struggling to control his feelings of rage.
It was a striking contrast to the serene images of Jesus around them.
As his internal struggle to control himself became more apparent, she began to wonder if she had made a terrible miscalculation.
The skin across his temple tightened, then suddenly the atmosphere was broken by the sound of a mobile phone vibrating.
He let it continue several times, not taking his eyes off Ava. Then he slowly reached into his pocket and took out a slim handset. He continued to glare at Ava, leaving it to buzz in his hand several more times, before pressing the button to answer it, and placing it to his ear.
He listened for a few moments, then replied curtly in Russian.
Ava knew she was not going to get another chance.
She pointed to the door, then headed for it.
Once in the hallway, she breathed deeply, relishing the cooler air.
She checked the front entranceway to make sure the coast was clear, then turned and headed in the opposite direction, deeper into Durov’s house.
She had no idea how long she would have before his call ended, so walked quickly down the elegant corridor.
Almost immediately, she saw a door down at the end of the wide hallway. It was set a little apart from the others, and was almost certainly the lavatory.
Despite the impression she had given Durov, it was not what she was looking for.
She passed silently on down the hall.
The first door she came to on her right was ajar. She stopped and peered through the crack into a darkened sitting room.
She moved on.
Further down, across the hall, there was another partially open door. But this time her heart started beating faster at the sight of light spilling out from behind it.
Crossing the shiny-floor, she peered through the gap and found herself looking into a book-lined room with a circular dark wooden desk at its far end. On its surface, a brass lamp was casting a narrow pool of light onto a selection of papers and books.
Durov’s study.
Gently pushing the door open a little wider, she peered around it to check there was no one in the room.
It was empty.
She was alone.
Once inside, she made straight for the desk.
On it, spot lit by the lamp, was an A3-sized photograph of the Turin Shroud.
She peered at it, bewildered, trying to make sense of the lines in vermillion ink that Durov had drawn onto it.
He had marked a circle around the body, like some macabre homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Then he had added an array of squares, triangles, and interconnecting straight lines, as if working out the underlying geometry of the body depicted on the Shroud.
She frowned.
What on earth was he doing?
There did not seem to be any logic to the bizarre geometric shapes he had created.
What did he think the Shroud contained?
Something coded into it?
A map?
Perplexed, her eyes flicked to the small open book lying on the table next to the photograph.
It was cased in a soft dark grainy Moroccan leather binding, coarse and worn. It looked old, like a World War One pocket book.
But instead of the diary or journal entries she was expecting to see, its open page revealed a curious picture.
It was drawn with a scratchy fountain pen, and showed a cross resting on a skull, with faded Russian writing around it in an old-fashioned hand. The characters were poorly formed, and there were unpredictable and clumsy size differences in the letters.
It was utterly bizarre.
It certainly did not match her expectation of Durov’s writing. He was concerned with appearances, and she expected his writing would be neat and slightly flamboyant.
She gently flicked through a couple more of the pages, and found they were all covered with the same chaotic scrawl. Sometimes it filled the whole page, other times just a few lines.
She lifted the book’s front cover to check for any information there or on the spine, but they were blank.
Turning to the first page, there were just three simple hand-written words in large letters.
She read them slowly, trying to make out the individual letters.
Although jerky, the writing was legible.
ГРИГОРИЙ ЕФИМОВИЧ РАСПУТИН
She worked through the first word methodically.
G R EE G O R EE
She had hoped the three words might be a title. But it was clearly a name: Gregory.
That made sense. The three words were most likely a full Russian name.
She tried the second.
Y E F EE M O V EE TCH
That was definitely a patronymic, which always came second in a Russian name. It was YEFIMOVICH, or son of Yefim.
So it was definitely not Durov’s name.
She turned to the third word, which would be the surname.
R A SS P OO T EE N
She whispered the word out loud, and as she did, felt a charge of electricity run straight through her.
She stopped dead, and stared at the paper.
That was surely not possible?
She must have made a mistake.
She deciphered each letter again carefully, going over the whole word once more.
As she came to the last letter, the blood drained from her face.
There was no mistake.
She said the word again quietly, as if not believing it until she heard it aloud.
“Rasputin.”
She stared in disbelief at the little notebook – taking in its age and the faded handwriting and ink.
Was it possible?
Her training as an archaeologist and in museums had long ago taught her that what at first seemed to be blindingly exciting often turned out to be much more mundane.
She flicked through the book, fighting back her mounting excitement.
There would be definitive tests that could establish its date and content.
Experts would be able to tell.
In all likelihood, it would turn out to be a fake – like the infamous discovery in the 1980s of sixty volumes of Hitler’s diaries, which a leading German newspaper had purchased for nearly four million dollars before the hoax was uncovered.
She laid her hands on the pages of the book.
The chances of this being Rasputin’s pocketbook were virtually non-existent. It was much more likely that some Russian conman had found an old notebook and pen, then thought of an excellent scam. He no doubt had a good laugh inventing the innermost thoughts of one of the twentieth century’s most infamous mystics. It was probably a great project, recreating the personal jottings of the rough country monk who charmed his way into the tsar of Russia’s household as healer to the young Tsesarevich, then personal counsellor and political adviser to the distraught and lonely Tsaritsa Alexandra.
On the other hand, if it genuinely was Rasputin’s pocketbook, and if it had been hidden in one or more private collections all these years before coming onto the market, then she had no doubt believing that Durov was exactly the kind of person who would acquire it.
Thinking fast, she pulled the phone from her small formal handbag. Holding it eight inches above the desk, she rapidly took half a dozen shots of the Shroud photograph with Durov’s superimposed geometric patterns, the front page of the notebook, and the page with the bizarre cross.
As she took the photographs, she tried to order her thoughts, which were beginning to run away with h
er.
How was the notebook linked to the Shroud?
Had Rasputin known something about it?
She doubted it. Epic drunken binges and debauching the women of Saint Petersburg were far more his style.
She took a more detailed close-up of the cross and skull, making sure she had captured all the writing.
With a jolt, her concentration was broken by the sound of the front door closing at the other end of the hallway.
Startled, she was suddenly acutely aware that time was ticking.
She had been gone too long already.
She slipped the camera back into her bag, and made sure the objects on the desk were in exactly the same position as when she had arrived.
Satisfied that she had left no traces of her visit, she moved silently to the doorway, and listened carefully, her heart hammering.
Was anyone heading this way?
She could not hear anything.
She counted to five, then left the room quietly, making quickly for the lavatory at the end of the hallway, praying she had not been spotted.
Once the door was safely closed behind her, she leant up against it, breathing deeply.
At least she now had an answer to one of her questions.
Durov had a personal obsession with the Shroud.
And with Jesus.
And possibly with Rasputin.
What she still did not know, though, was whether it was a fixation shared by other people he was connected to.
When her pulse had returned to normal, she flushed the loo and washed her hands.
Opening the door, she stepped confidently out into the hallway.
Retracing her steps, she passed the sitting room, which was now lit, and saw Durov leaning against the carved chimneypiece of the large period fireplace.
She entered, and as she did so, realized too late that they were not alone.
There was another man in the room, who had just stepped midway between her and Durov, and was looking right at her.
Ava’s insides knotted as she recognized the slim bearded face.
It was Lunev – the Spetsnaz soldier who had escaped from the roadblock at Nuremberg the previous morning.
The Apocalypse Fire (Ava Curzon Trilogy Book 2) Page 9
