Working his way around the screens he recognized Dam Square and the white stone pillar of the National Monument in Amsterdam, the glass pyramid of the Palais du Louvre in Paris’ first arrondissement, the red brick facade of Casa de la Panaderia in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, the towering majesty of the cathedral in Stephansplatz in Vienna, the obelisk in the heart of St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the Vatican hidden behind the flames, and the glass monstrosity of the Sony building in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. There were more cities and more monuments he didn’t recognize. Noah counted them, even though he knew full well there were twelve screens.
“Well now it is starting to get interesting,” Orla said. An errant strand of hair curled over her brow and across her left eye.
“Thirteen people set themselves alight in very public places all across Europe at exactly the same time? I’d say we’ve moved way beyond interesting,” Noah said. Interesting really wasn’t the word he would have chosen though. The whole thing had a fatalistic simplicity to it.
“Oh, it gets better than that, or worse, depending upon your perspective,” Jude Lethe told them.
“Don’t tell me, more of that Google-Fu?”
“Something like that,” Lethe said. He leaned forward and started rapidly manipulating the images on the screen, zooming each one in until the display was filled with their screaming faces. The detail and precision of the digital images was nothing short of horrific. The images were hideously sharp. Noah had seen enough death to last him a lifetime, but something about this, as Frost had said, was different. Wrong.
“Italy, France, Spain, Germany, England, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Russia,” Lethe reeled off the countries where thirteen martyrs had self-immolated. “You can’t really tell the ethnicity from the faces now, too much damage, but the facial recognition software picked up hits for all thirteen here in the UK.”
“You’re telling me they’re all English?”
Lethe nodded. “Passports issued by the UK and Commonwealth Office.”
“This is nuts,” Noah said, trying to take in the logistical nightmare of forcing thirteen people to commit suicide in public, and in such a violent manner. “What’s the news reporting? I presume it’s all over every channel in the world.” He found himself thinking about the old Smiths song “Panic,” though his imagination took it way beyond the streets of London and Birmingham.
“At the moment truth is rather fragmented,” the old man said. “As one would expect, the initial reports were very insular. Then within an hour of the event, the scope of the actual event began to come clear. Regional television stations were broadcasting identical CCTV images of the suicides. It’s difficult to deny the evidence of your own eyes, of course. No one wants to believe it. The reporters are playing down any connection, for now, but it is obvious for anyone to see.
“The actual content of the telephone calls hasn’t been broken yet, but that is only a matter of time. And when it does-and people hear that promise of forty days and forty nights of terror-then as the Americans like to say, everyone will just be waiting for the other shoe to drop. That is the kind of world we live in, I am afraid.”
“Thankfully, no one seems to have picked up on the fact that the victims are all British. But that only puts us a few hours in front of the press. Some enterprising soul will put two and two together soon enough.”
“We can’t worry about that,” the old man said. “Right now the only thing we need to concern ourselves with is the facts. What we know from monitoring the newswires is that the major broadcast networks in each respective country received a call precisely one minute before the suicides. In all but two the message was the same.”
“And the others?”
“This was the message in Rome.” Lethe triggered another audio file. The voice was male. Taut. Barely held together. This wasn’t the voice of a man who wanted to die. This wasn’t a religious fanatic or some crazed zealot sacrificing himself for a cause. There wasn’t a trace of resignation in it. This was an ordinary man, still hoping against hope that somehow he would be saved. “Roman Pontiff beware of your approaching, of the city where two rivers water, your blood you will come to spit in that place, both you and yours when blooms the Rose.” And then, after almost thirty seconds of silence, “ell Isla I love her. Please. Tell her that.”
Jude Lethe didn’t wait before playing the final message. Questions could come later. “This call was made to Das Erste in Germany.” Again it was a man’s voice. This one was more composed than the last. He spoke slowly and calmly, as though reciting a script. Each word was enunciated clearly: “The Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big cross he was killed by a group of soldiers.”
“The first message was quatrain 2.97 from the prophecies of Michel de Nostredame. The second is an excerpt from the third secret of Fatima. Both are believed to foretell the assassination of the Pope,” the old man put in.
“Okay, so let me get this straight, we are talking crackpot sects and a healthy dose of make believe?” Noah asked. It still didn’t make the logistics of this kind of mass sacrifice any less complicated, but fanaticism would go some way to explaining it. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin. No, that didn’t jibe with the first man’s voice or his plea to tell some woman he loved her. That wasn’t in the fanatic’s genetic makeup. They were too fired up with the righteousness of their cause to worry about earthly crap like the people they left behind.
“If only that were the case. What we appear to be dealing with here is at the very least systematic and well thought out. You don’t burn thirteen people alive like this, with such military precision, without having planned for all of the contingencies. This is a very public opening gambit, Noah. It was designed to be seen, and there’s only one reason for that-because whoever is behind it wanted it to be seen,” the old man said. Sir Charles changed the display, bringing up the passport photographs of the suicides. As with every passport photo Noah had ever seen, the victims looked somehow less human than they had when the flames had burned away their faces. “With that in mind, Mister Lethe, please continue.”
Jude Lethe manipulated the touchscreen computer, bringing up a series of photographs. Some were vacation shots; others were newspaper clippings and the like. “When I saw that all thirteen victims were British nationals my first thought was not only do I dislike this kind of coincidence, I don’t buy it. Thirteen people commit suicide in an identical manner in thirteen countries and they all just happen to come from the same place. There has to be a link. So then it was a case of looking for that link.”
“Makes sense,” Noah agreed. “I take it you found one?”
“Of course,” Lethe said, without a hint of hubris. “All of our victims were academics, and, more precisely, all of our victims dabbled in the field of archeology in some way or other. One was a university professor running the history department at Durham. Three were postgrads who have stayed in the field: One worked on that TV show where they dig up old ruins and try to make history sexy; another was a curator at the British Museum; a geophys specialist; a historian with a Middle Eastern specialization… The list goes on, but you can see what I am driving at.”
“Looks like you’ve been busy,” Noah said.
“Ah, it wouldn’t have looked half as impressive if you’d been here at three o’clock, believe me.”
“So there’s something to be said for being late, then.” Noah smiled ruefully.
“Quite,” the old man said, cutting across the banter. There was an awkward silence for a moment as Lethe seemed to forget he’d been in the middle of briefing the others. He triggered the next sequence on the computer and the images on the screen were replaced by a single shot: a lowering sun and a huge orange-red, flat-topped rock formation. In the far r
ight corner was the washed-out blue of the sea.
Noah studied the colored striations that marked the sides of the mesa.
“This place is the one thing they all have in common,” Lethe said, gesturing up at the screens. “Masada. It’s a World Heritage Site situated along the Dead Sea Road on the eastern edge of the Judaean Desert. According to Josephus, who is pretty much the oracle on all this stuff, the original fortress was built by Herod and was a stronghold for an extremist sect known as the Sicarii. They appear on the face of it to be the world’s first terrorists, but Josephus was also an inveterate liar and had a habit of grossly exaggerating everything he wrote about, so who knows? One thing for sure though, the Sicarii committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. The fact that we’ve got two mass suicides linked to the same place is another coincidence I’m not particularly enamored of.”
“All well and good,” Orla Nyren began, “but how exactly does this link our suicides? I’m missing something here.” She scratched at her right eyebrow-there was a slight scar beneath the hair-with the thumb of her left hand. It was a curiously awkward gesture.
“I’m glad you asked, Orla,” Lethe said in his best wise, old soul voice. He changed the image on the screen again. This time the displays showed a dozen images of an excavation in progress. “Without a crystal ball I canyst tell you how important it is in relation to today’s events, but in 2004 an earthquake damaged the crumbling walls of the old fort. The upshot was several previously hidden chambers and an elaborate subterranean network were uncovered. And this, my friends, is where two plus two could either be four or five: all of our victims were part of the team that went to excavate the site.”
4
Slouching Toward Megiddo
“Let me try and wrap my head around this for a minute.” Noah looked up at the screens. The faces might have been replaced by the harsh reality of the Israeli landscape, but that didn’t matter. His head was filled with Catherine Meadows’ digital ghost falling to its knees, arms rising up in a desperate V. He rubbed his fingers against his temples. “You’re telling me we’re looking at a plot to assassinate the Pope, okay, I’ll buy that, but a plot dating back to a sect that committed mass suicide two thousand years ago? Now that’s… special. And not special in a good way, I might add”-he sucked in a disbelieving breath-“as if that wasn’t enough, not only has our whistleblower been dead for the best part of five hundred years, he just happened to be a fortuneteller who couldn’t spell Hitler and marked Saddam as the Antichrist. Does that about sum it up?” He looked around the table. “I mean, seriously, do you have any idea how bloody ridiculous that sounds?”
Lethe met his gaze full on and held it. He was the youngest of the group by a good decade, and right then he looked it. He touched the black frame of his glasses. “I’d say we’re merrily skipping down the yellow brick road into Looney Town,” Lethe agreed with a wry smile, “but what we’ve got here is a link. The modern world is all about links, degrees of separation and joining the dots. The only thing that makes any kind of sense is that something happened at Masada and these people burned themselves alive because of it. I’m not claiming it makes a good kind of sense.”
Noah didn’t know much about the kid. The old man had introduced him to the team as a researcher. Noah had always assumed that meant hacker. He was the archetypal nerd with his thick-framed glasses and tufts of beard that really didn’t seem all that keen to grow through. Lethe took his glasses off. Without them he looked another five years younger, if that was possible. Noah liked the kid, even if he spent too much time jacked into the neural net or whatever it was he did as a substitute for having a healthy sex life.
“I think that’s a bit of a leap of logic,” Orla Nyren interrupted his train of thought. Noah looked her way, worried for a moment that he might have said part of what was going on in his head. Thankfully, she wasn’t looking at him. Orla brushed that errant strand of hair away from her face again. She moved her cell phone so that it sat exactly perpendicular to her on the table. It was a tiny adjustment that smacked of an obsessive need for order that went beyond needing things around her to make sense. It was all about controlling her world and what happened in it. Noah could respect that so long as it didn’t involve turning widdershins three times and rolling up a trouser leg before opening a door.
“That it might be, but anything else would mean a second layer of coincidence, wouldn’t it?” Lethe reasoned. He pinched at his nose. It was obvious he’d been staring at computer screens for hours; his focus had that kind of glazed quality life online brought with it. “If it isn’t Masada that links these suicides, then it is either a totally random collusion of circumstance, a coincidence to the power of thirteen, if you like, or somewhere out there, there’s another singularity where these thirteen unfortunate souls come together. My money is on Masada though, not a black hole. Occam’s Razor and all that,” Lethe said.
“Look hard enough and you’ll start to see conspiracies everywhere,” Orla shrugged. “And forgive me, but I don’t exactly see how this falls under our remit. We aren’t bodyguards. If someone is out to kill the Pope, we should pass on what we know to the authorities and wash our hands of it.”
“Very Pontius Pilate of you, my dear,” Sir Charles said, settling back in the seat of his wheelchair. “However, our remit is whatever I say it is on any given day. You knew that when you took this particular king’s shilling. Now, given the links to Masada and the Sicarii, I believe we are in a unique position to investigate. Perhaps our martyrs did find something on their excavations. It isn’t out of the question. And when you consider the fact that Masada is a biblical site, anything they found would very definitely fall under our area of interest, or could be twisted until it did, wouldn’t you say?”
Orla Nyren stewed in silence for a full minute. She did not look remotely convinced. She moved her phone twice, once nudging it slightly out of true, and again to return it back to its perfect perpendicular. Finally she pursed her lips and shook her head. It was a short, decisive denial. “No, not buying it. Sorry, boss. Dress it up any way you like, this isn’t our business. This is MI6 and defense of the realm stuff. Suicide…”-she paused, catching herself mid-breath. Noah wondered if she had been about to say bombers; it was such a natural extension of her old life the two words would almost certainly have fused together in her mind-“… and terror threats,” she continued, her eyes drifting unconsciously toward the screens, “are way beyond the capabilities of five people. We can’t be the last bastions of democracy.”
“Nor should you be,” the old man agreed. He leaned forward in his chair. It was a subtle shift in his body language that implied complicity. “We will, of course, be feeding any information we discover up the line, and it will be for Control to decide how it is distributed. But there is a convergence of events here that we will investigate, and that’s my final word on the matter.”
Orla shook her head. The gesture was barely perceptible. “Why do I get the feeling you know more than you are letting on here?”
The old man smiled indulgently and spread his arms wide as if to show just how helpless he was. Noah knew it was all an act. Sir Charles had been paralyzed by an IRA bomb in the London Docklands over twenty years ago, and even in the hospital bed in the days immediately after the attack, he hadn’t been helpless.
The story was, he’d whispered into the right ear, and in turn the right ear had placed a call to a not-so-upstanding friend of an even less upright gent. And while that chain reaction played out, Sir Charles settled back into the starched pillows, content that his whisper had lit a very short fuse. The chemist suspected of being behind the bomb was involved in a not-so-tragic accident less than forty-eight hours later.
That was the kind of man he was.
He didn’t get angry.
He didn’t rail against the world.
He got even in his own very quiet, almost understated, way.
And right then the old man’s smile was a
match for any the Russian had ever conjured. “Because, my dear, I am dreadfully predictable and you know me far too well. It’s the curse of spending too much time together. I will admit this much, I have my suspicions. I can only assure you that some very good reasons underpin those suspicions-but I am not ready to voice them just yet. As soon as I am sure, you will be the first to know. Until then, he who speaks first and thinks later has an idiot for a mouth. And contrary to what you may believe, I am not an idiot.” This time his smile was both self-deprecating and honest. It was a gentle deflection.
Noah half-expected her to challenge the old man again. She could be like a dog with a bone sometimes. She didn’t. Noah understood why. Thirteen burning faces told them all it was an argument for another day.
“Okay,” she said instead, “let’s think about this rationally. The one question that’s begging to be asked is: who else was involved in that dig? For all the conspiracy theory nonsense, the dig is the one thing we know for sure that the suicides have in common. Logically, anyone else who had been there is either in danger themselves, or more likely, is wrapped up in the whole thing somehow. Either way, we need to find them.”
Lethe had a partial answer. It wasn’t what any of them wanted to hear. “More than fifty locals were used as casual labor. The dig was overseen by one Akim Caspi, who is not, I hasten to add, an archeologist. Caspi is a lieutenant general in Tzahal, the Israeli Defense Force. I sincerely doubt he has a list of names, unfortunately. Archeologists are great for keeping itemized records on fossilized donkey crap, but they don’t seem all that concerned about people if they haven’t been dead for a millennium or more.”
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