The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  It all weighed next to nothing.

  He took out the rope and, as a final act of preparation, breathed in deeply, clearing his head and relaxing himself, savouring the salty tang in the air.

  From here on in, he was on his own. Moshe had been very clear about that.

  There was to be no contact with anyone in England. No one was to know about this operation—not even his Institute colleagues lurking in the Israeli embassy in Kensington.

  There would be no assistance or backup if he got into trouble or needed any favours. The mission was a hundred per cent deniable, and he was going in sterile, with nothing to link him back to his country.

  If he was caught, the State of Israel would deny all knowledge of him. As far as Tel Aviv was concerned, he did not exist.

  It was fine with him.

  He had never been a team player anyway.

  There was one contact channel only, and it was strictly one way—for Moshe to inform him if there were any critical developments, or if he was to stand down.

  That was it.

  He breathed the salty air in deeply, grateful for the rain. It reduced visibility, and meant he would not be disturbed.

  Both were added bonuses.

  For speed, he had changed in the washrooms below—donning a three-millimetre full-length wetsuit and a lightweight harness under the thin overcoat.

  He checked again that there was no one about.

  But he need not have bothered.

  He was quite alone.

  No one wanted to be on deck in the English Channel in the small hours of the night.

  It was too early even for the seagulls.

  Slipping off the overcoat and canvas shoes, he dropped them into the dry sack, slid it onto his back, and tightened the straps so it was clamped close to his body.

  Then he looped the rope around one of the thick stanchions supporting the handrail, and carefully threaded a munter-hitch through the wide carabiner on his harness.

  With one final glance around, he swung himself over the rail and took a firm hold of the rope—one hand in front, the other behind. Without pausing, he hurled himself out into the darkness, quickly rappelling down the side of the ship.

  As he approached the numbing water, he braced himself, aware the low water temperature and the even colder night air were a lethal combination. The wetsuit would keep his body core warm, but his hands, head, and feet would soon seize up in the inky coldness of the night swim.

  There had been no time for acclimatization training against hypothermia. He would simply have to make the best of it by keeping moving.

  Treading the chilly water, he tugged on the rope, which slithered round the stanchion and slid down into the sea.

  He let it sink. He would not need it again.

  He also did not need the extra weight of the harness, but he could get rid of it later. Right now, speed was the only priority—to get as far away as possible from the ship and its giant propellers.

  As he began to swim, he could just about make out the lights of the Isle of Wight glinting a mile off in the distance. But he did not need them for orientation—the high strength magnet in his luminescent wrist compass would guide him directly to the rock, pebble, and sand beach at Bembridge, the easternmost village on the island.

  He had calculated he could make it in around thirty to forty minutes. The sun would not rise for another hour after that, giving him plenty of time to change, find a café for a steaming hot breakfast, then catch the hovercraft to Southampton and the train on to London.

  He smiled to himself.

  Who needed a passport anyway?

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  38

  Piccadilly

  London SW1

  The United Kingdom

  Ava checked her watch as she clicked the flat’s heavy front door shut.

  She was relieved to see it was just before 7:00 a.m.

  She paused on the doorstep and breathed in the cool morning air. After the heat and dust of the Middle East, the smell of an English summer morning was a sensual treat of earth and plants. She had not particularly noticed it when she lived in London before. But now, when she visited England, it seemed as exotic as the perfumes of the Middle East once had.

  Even though the sun had been fully up for several hours, the air still felt damp, and there were pockets of dew on the rainbow of flowers nestling in the rows of window boxes lining the quiet street.

  She looked around carefully, scanning the street in both directions, before heading to the popular French café and bakery on the corner.

  The aroma of hot coffee and fresh buttery pastries had already drawn a buzzing crowd of people grabbing breakfast on their way to work.

  Service was quick. But as she picked up her steaming foam cup of scalding black coffee, she felt a strong hand on her arm.

  “What a surprise!” It was a man’s voice—sounding unusually cheerful for the time of the morning.

  She recognized it immediately.

  She turned, and found herself face to face with Ferguson—looking significantly healthier than when she had last seen him in Kazakhstan.

  He beamed at her, hooking his sunglasses into the neck of his T-shirt. “Dr Curzon, I didn’t know you lived round here.”

  “An amazing coincidence.” She wondered how long he had been outside her house waiting for her to emerge, and kicked herself for not having seen him.

  She needed to be more vigilant.

  Pressing the plastic lid down hard onto the hot cup, she turned towards the door. “Well, it was great seeing you again,” she added, anxious to get away. Prince had clearly been hard at work—passing her address to Ferguson and sending him to stake it out.

  “Actually,” he looked expectantly at her, “as we’re neighbours, maybe we could have breakfast together? Get to know each other a little better? It all ended so quickly last time. Unless,” he paused, “there’s anywhere you need to be going right now?”

  Ava had no desire to take Ferguson to Stonehenge with her, whatever Prince expected.

  “That’s a kind offer,” she answered, buttoning up her black velvet jacket and opening the door of the café. “But if it’s all the same to you, I have to be going. I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.”

  “Why don’t I give you a lift,” he suggested breezily, following her onto the pavement and opening the door of a large steel-grey four-by-four parked directly in front of the café. “It’d be a shame for you to spend such a lovely summer’s day alone.”

  Ava needed to be at the railway station in thirty minutes, and had no desire to waste time pointlessly fencing with Ferguson.

  She moved closer to the café’s outside wall and stood under the navy blue awning overhanging the metal tables and chairs, indicating for him to follow.

  She waited until he was close enough for her to speak without being overheard. “Look, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do today than follow me around,” she began. “So why don’t you just tell Prince that I gave you the slip? I won’t say anything. You can have a day off, doing whatever you do.” She smiled at him encouragingly.

  Ferguson dug his hands into his jeans pockets and nodded several times, making a show of weighing up the options. “Well, I could. It’s actually pretty tempting. But then you’d miss my important update on Malchus, which I’d be free to tell you about at length in the comfort and privacy of the car on our drive to wherever you need to go.”

  Ava could feel her jaw tightening.

  Prince had this all worked out.

  She hesitated for a moment, chewing the inside of her lip as she digested this new piece of information.

  Making her decision, she stepped over to the passenger door and threw him a threatening look. “For your sake, it’d better be good.”

  Ferguson nodded, and headed around to the driver’s side.

  While he was out of sight, Ava quickly bent down and wedged Prince’s flash drive under the car’s front
wheel, before climbing into the oversized cabin and firmly closing the door.

  She put her coffee into the holder by her armrest. “Strange that you were queuing in the café, though,” she said to him, “when you didn’t want any coffee.”

  Ferguson looked for a moment like a rabbit caught in the headlamps. “Not really.” He shook his head, recovering quickly. “Caffeine interferes with my spider senses.”

  Ava groaned inwardly. It was going to be a very long day.

  As Ferguson edged out of the parking space, she opened her window in time to hear the satisfying sound of two tonnes of vehicle splintering Prince’s flimsy flash drive into a thousand pieces.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  39

  Maze Hill

  London SE10

  The United Kingdom

  The trip to London had been easy. It had gone like clockwork.

  After swimming ashore onto the Isle of Wight at Bembridge, a combination of hovercraft and trains had brought Uri to London’s Maze Hill station within four hours.

  So far so good.

  He had never been to Maze Hill before, but his research suggested it had everything he required—good transport, cheap temporary accommodation, anonymity, and a strong history of support for extreme far-right groups.

  As he headed away from the railway station and towards the centre of Maze Hill, he nodded to himself. It was pretty much as he had expected.

  The streets were scruffy and dirty. Tattered posters advertising ‘Old Skool’ club nights and upcoming TV dramas fluttered from hoardings and boarded-up shop fronts. Sandwiched between them, discount stores and fast-food takeaways hid behind chicken wire screens and graffiti-daubed metal security shutters.

  The overwhelming feeling of decades-old neglect and economic deprivation was palpable. Whatever boom had built the chrome and glass skyscrapers of London’s financial district, visible in the distance, it had passed Maze Hill by.

  This would do just fine.

  Heading into a shabby newsagent’s, he bought a copy of the local paper from the shopkeeper, who merely nodded at him before returning to watch a small television under the counter showing a foreign-language film.

  Next door was a tired-looking Money Converters pawn shop. He slipped inside, and picked up a battered pay-as-you-go mobile phone that still had a few pounds of credit on it.

  He could get top-up cards for it anywhere.

  Perfect. Untraceable.

  He knew all too well how mobile phone data was used by law enforcement and the intelligence community. Every registered user’s movements could be exactly tracked by triangulation from masts, or directly by GPS. He could not risk either. He did not want to appear on any system.

  Spotting a workers’ café, The Lite Bite, across the road, he pushed open the door, took a seat at a small plastic table, and ordered a mug of tea.

  There was a group of labourers on the other side of the room tucking into an early lunch of thick greasy bacon sandwiches and crisps.

  Uri shook his head in bewilderment.

  How did people live on that?

  Turning away, he spread the newspaper out on the table and flicked to the property classifieds, where he scanned the columns for one-bedroom flats to rent. He did not want anything out of the ordinary—just something any average working man in the area might live in.

  He would start ringing around once he had finished his tea. Not that he liked milky English tea. He would have preferred strong black mint tea, like they served back home. But his task now was to fit in, not stand out.

  He had never felt particularly warmly towards the English. They had not done his country any favours over the years. But this assignment was the chance of a lifetime, in whichever country it unfolded.

  And there were aspects of it he was already looking forward to very much.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  40

  Wiltshire

  England

  The United Kingdom

  “So, Prince is serious about you tailing me around then?” Ava asked. She hoped from her tone of voice that Ferguson would get the message she was not enthusiastic about the idea.

  “She’s worried about the company you’re keeping,” he replied, keeping his eyes on the road.

  She could not tell if he was being serious, but dropped it. The traffic was already heavy, and he was concentrating on navigating the oversize MI6 car through the grandiose but often narrow streets of west London.

  She waited until they had slipped out of the built-up area and onto the leafy road down to Wiltshire before opening the main subject on her mind. “What have you got?” she asked. “On Malchus.”

  Ferguson turned down the radio. “I’ve been doing some digging. If I’m going to be tasked to you on this, I want to know who we’re dealing with. And I figure you do, too. DeVere and the Firm don’t seem to have a file on him, but Prince was able to pass me a good chunk of the American one.”

  “Not all of it?” If there was a file, she wanted to know what it said.

  He shook his head. “Apparently it’s not a thin file, so she just gave me the highlights. But it’s enough.”

  Ava looked dubious. “I don’t like partial information. Especially when I feel people are hiding things from me.”

  “I don’t think there’s much missing,” he reassured her.

  “Okay,” she replied, taking a sip of her coffee. “I’m listening.”

  Ferguson overtook a car pulling a horse-trailer, and settled back in the seat. “His real name is Oskar Boehme. He was born in Dresden in 1960. Back then, of course, it was part of communist East Germany.”

  Ava looked unimpressed. “You can skip the geography lesson—I know where Dresden is.”

  Ferguson carried on unabashed. “Do you know much about the East German Stasi?”

  Ava nodded. “Enough to know I’m glad I was never their guest.”

  “Highly unpleasant bunch,” Ferguson grimaced. “And it seems Malchus was one of their finest.”

  “I can believe that,” Ava replied, keen for him to get onto the details.

  “His career started off in his home town of Dresden, where school held little interest for him. He preferred the education he got from the city’s black-marketeers. He began with the usual—smuggling and hawking contraband goods, but quickly graduated to hardcore criminality. By the time he was fifteen, the school barely knew what he looked like. Unsurprisingly, he was expelled. And that was when the Stasi started to see his potential.”

  “Any family connections to the Stasi?” Ava asked.

  Ferguson shook his head. “His father was a successful industrialist with the usual communist party connections, so they lived in a big house in a nice part of town. But he was also an alcoholic sadist, who regularly battered his wife and son.”

  “At around the time Malchus was expelled from school, his father beat his mother so badly she was hospitalized with a fractured eye socket, ripped ear, and broken hip. When his father died the next day, the official report recorded he had accidentally electrocuted himself in the kitchen with a faulty kettle.”

  “I think I can see where this is going,” Ava murmured.

  “The Stasi files give another story,” Ferguson confirmed. “Malchus had grown to violently resent his father, and saw his opportunity. He stripped the wiring in the kettle’s power lead, electrifying the metal. When his father came to turn it on the next morning, he plugged himself directly into the Free State of Saxony’s main grid.”

  “So that’s how the Stasi roped him in?” Ava asked. “Blackmail?”

  Ferguson nodded. “They kept his little secret for him, and in return he began to inform on the area’s black-marketeers. It turned out to be a marriage made in heaven. Malchus was able to earn two lots of wages, and at the same time clear his competition off the streets into the Stasi’s prisons and torture basements.”

  “So when did he move to Berlin?” Ava was u
nsurprised by what she was hearing. Someone like Malchus clearly had a violent past.

  “After several years, the local Stasi bosses had come to appreciate his quick mind, brutality, and naked ambition. And it wasn’t long before he attracted the attention of a talent-spotter from head office. He was soon transferred to Berlin’s Ministerium on Ruschestrasse, and given more sensitive assignments.”

  “I can imagine.” Ava knew the Ministerium’s reputation only too well. Along with the Lubyanka in Soviet Moscow and Berlin’s Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse under Nazi Germany, it ranked among the twentieth century’s most brutal fortresses of state torture and terror.

  “He was tasked to stay involved in the black-market side of things given he had an excellent network by this stage. The arrangement suited him, as he could continue to enjoy the bribes and favours that went with the role. But he also started working on political dissidents, which was a much darker trade altogether, and he soon developed quite a reputation for his innovative methods.”

  Ava raised an eyebrow. She wondered what it would take to stand out among the Stasi’s torturers.

  “It seems the incident with his father gave him a long-lasting love of electricity and water. In the basements of the Ministerium, he was able to fine-tune his techniques with car batteries and buckets.”

  Ava shuddered. She had met men like him before. They were never the ones to be found ‘just following orders’—they were a different breed, enjoying the power and brutality. “What about the occult side?” she asked, changing the subject. “How does that fit in?”

  “It doesn’t really,” Ferguson replied. “He kept business and pleasure separate. Magic was his personal obsession. According to the Stasi file, when he was a young teenager, he was rummaging around an abandoned convent to find a hiding place for a consignment of smuggled cigarettes when he stumbled across a book called the Grimoire of Turiel. The file doesn’t say what it’s about, but he was deeply influenced by it. After that, he began his own odyssey into the occult. As he became increasingly obsessed, he bribed and burgled his way into assembling his own dark library.”