Prince interrupted abruptly. “So, going back to this messenger who came into our Paris embassy last night. Let me be clear. You’re saying he represents the lineal genetic African descendants of King Solomon?”
Ava could feel Prince bristling at the idea. “Correct. He’s not emperor any more, of course, but he’s still crown prince of Ethiopia, head of the Imperial House of Ethiopia, and the head of the House of Solomon. The Ark at Aksum is therefore a critical part of his family’s history.”
“I can see why he wants answers,” Ferguson noted, raising his eyebrows. “I would.”
“So that’s the story.” Ava concluded. “It looks like the Ark’s owner has now formally registered his family’s interest in what’s happening.”
Ferguson looked across at her. “Well, I’m not going to remember all those details, but at least I’ve learned that we definitely have the right person for the job.”
“I’m very far from convinced,” Prince interrupted brusquely. “There seem to be a lot of ifs and buts, Dr Curzon. And the Bible doesn’t say anything about a relationship between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Until anyone can prove it to me, I’m not going to assume these Ethiopian ex-royals have any legitimate claim on the Ark.”
“But if the Queen of Sheba story isn’t true, how do you explain the Ark’s presence in Ethiopia and all the Hebrew links?” Ferguson asked.
“I don’t have to.” Prince snapped. It was clear from her voice that her mind was made up. “It’s not a priority. From what I hear, there’s a fifty per cent chance the Ark being held by Malchus is the real Ark. Therefore, until it’s safe again and well away from the likes of Malchus or the Iranians, my only priority is to ensure its well-being. We can worry about who owns it later.”
“Of course,” Ava interrupted, “to complicate things further, much of all this depends on whether you believe many of the biblical characters ever even existed. There’s no consensus on that either.”
“Fair enough.” Ferguson concluded, pointing ahead at the large circle of exposed prehistoric standing stones appearing on the horizon.
“Okay. We’re done here.” Prince’s voice had more than a touch of ice in it. “Thank you, Dr Curzon. You’ve made your position perfectly clear.” With that, the phone went dead.
“She’s a bit touchy,” Ferguson observed, swinging off the main road and heading towards the ancient monument.
Ava shrugged. “A lot of this is quite personal. Many people find it hard to challenge beliefs they learned in childhood.”
Ferguson nodded.
“It’s difficult even for non-religious people.” Ava looked across at him. “For example, how would you react if I told you that there are at least three creation stories in the Bible, one of them involving God battling a giant sea monster called Leviathan. Or that of the three sets of Ten Commandments in the Bible, only one is actually called the Ten Commandments and is explicitly said to have been written on stone tablets. However, it doesn’t contain the famous ‘Thou shalt not kill’, but instead absolutely forbids cooking young goats in their mothers’ milk. Or that God specifically forbids tattoos, or wearing polyester—well, mixed fibres. Or that God says he will turn unbelievers into cannibals and force them to eat their children. Or that the Bible specifically says Jesus had brothers and sisters.” She looked at Ferguson. “Do you want me to continue?”
Ferguson looked across at her with incredulity. “You’re making this up, aren’t you?”
“Just don’t tell Prince,” Ava smiled enigmatically, gazing out at the intense green of the rolling plain. “I don’t think she’d like it.”
——————— ◆ ———————
43
Stonehenge
Wiltshire
England
The United Kingdom
For most of the last four thousand years, no one had paid any attention to the extraordinary and inscrutable stones sitting like a crown on the vast green expanse of Salisbury Plain.
But from the moment seventeenth-century antiquarians became interested in the enigmatic monoliths and began romanticizing the druids they believed once worshipped there, the visitors had started to flock. The local tourist industry encouraged them, ensuring they were titillated by tales of pagan orgies and sensationalist drawings of thirty-foot-high ‘wicker men’ cages, in which druids imprisoned their victims and burned them alive.
As Ferguson killed the four-by-four’s engine, he and Ava looked about the car park. It was teeming with hundreds of visitors. Not the usual tourists—but people the CX report had termed ‘neo-pagans’.
Ava had last been there as a student, joining the several thousand who were bussed to the visitor centre every day. In its little huts, they paid their entrance fees and picked up multilingual headsets to learn of the mysteries surrounding the prehistoric temple. With the guide talking to each of them personally, they were funnelled anticlockwise around the mystical menhirs, and buffeted by the biting winds that whipped across the Plain.
When Ava had been there, the reassuring voice in her headphones had explained that the area had been used as a ‘city of the dead’ burial site since the dawn of time. Then, in 3000 BC, before the pyramids were built in Egypt, the colossal stones had been set up in a standing circle.
The audio-guide confessed that history provided no explanation what prehistoric people used the cryptic circle for. Or why the builders had shipped in the vast fifty-ton blue stones from the misty Preseli Mountains in West Wales.
The most tantalizing clue was that the archway formed by the largest trilithon perfectly framed the sun rising over the enigmatic Hele Stone at the midsummer solstice.
But despite awareness of this unique calendrical feature, the mystery of the stones endured. And after four hundred years of study and research, the twenty-first century’s finest minds still had no real idea why the arcane monument had been built.
It was just the sort of puzzle Ava loved.
When she visited as a student, she had watched the visitors soak up the scanty facts and snap their photos, before heading to the gift shop to buy the obligatory post cards and Stonehenge-branded tea towels and fudge.
But not today.
She stepped out of the four-by-four onto the tarmac, and was momentarily stunned by the vibrant colours all around—splashed across robes, scarves, flags, and stalls.
It was a riot of the unconventional.
She and Ferguson headed for the makeshift gate, decorated for the occasion with garlands of summer flowers. A teenage girl with heavy blue eye shadow stood guard, requesting a donation. Ava handed over a few pounds, and the girl stamped their wrists with a smudgy image of an oak tree, then let them in.
There was nothing as organized as a programme or map of the festival, so Ava and Ferguson began to wander among the stalls.
It was immediately obvious that it was a massive gathering.
The stalls spread anarchically from the car park over the neighbouring fields, road, and up to the low rope barriers strung loosely around the stones themselves.
It was plainly the kind of place where people could easily get lost.
Or be hidden.
Close to the car park, Ava could see several groups displaying weather-beaten placards and banners. Their signs announced that the stones were everyone’s birthright, should be freely open to all, and urged people to sign petitions calling for the many exhumed bodies, now in museums and laboratories, to be returned to their ancestral resting place. From the well-worn tents and drying washing outside them, it was clear the protestors were a permanent feature of the site, not just there for the festival. But the atmosphere was good-natured, leaving the hulking vans of police in body armour looking out of place and out of touch.
Ava moved further into the labyrinth of stalls. “If we’re going to cover the area and find Malchus, we’ll need to split up,” she suggested to Ferguson, manoeuvring herself into another aisle of tables hawking jewellery, books, CDs, crystals, incense, ta
rot cards, and countless other new-age accessories. “Otherwise we could miss him altogether.”
Ferguson looked uncertain.
“Unless you have a better idea?” she added, raising her eyebrows.
Ferguson eventually nodded. “Rendezvous back here in forty-five minutes. If you go left and take the upper field. I’ll head round towards the stones.”
With no map and no officials to ask, Ava had no option except to sweep up and down each aisle between the tables, hoping she might see something that pointed towards Malchus and his talk.
As she passed the endless vendors, she wondered how any of them could be making any money, sandwiched between so many other stalls all selling similar wares. Yet many of them were doing a busy trade, serving the hardcore pagans and curious members of the public who jostled side-by-side to try on quartz bangles and sample organic preserves.
Finding nothing in the lower field that seemed linked to Malchus, she headed through the open three-bar gate into the upper field at the back.
There were fewer people here, and as she took in the stalls and their wares, she noted the themes were noticeably darker.
One grimy man by the entrance was displaying tribal wooden carvings with macabre expressions on the crudely chiselled faces.
The stall next to it was offering sinister-looking metal knives and bowls. Ava could only assume they were intended for rituals of some sort.
On her other side, there was a grubby table manned by the Danish chapter of a motorbike gang, whose only connection to neo-paganism seemed to be a taste for gory Nordic images on their back patches. And the battle colours displayed across the front of their stall suggested close-quarter street fighting was more their pleasure than the freedom of the open road.
The atmosphere in the upper field struck Ava as one Malchus would feel at home in. She could not see him having any time for the crystals and fairy magic in the field she had just come from. But as she walked up and down, she could not find anything to suggest an area had been set aside or roped off for any kind of talk.
Turning towards the trilithons where Ferguson was searching, she suddenly saw it, nestled between a battered black caravan offering piercings and tattoos and a greasy couple selling a pungent acrid incense.
Her eyes were drawn to its simplicity.
There were no swastikas or Nazi paraphernalia. But the table was draped in a red flag with the word ‘THELEMA’ embroidered in black and gold lettering inside a large white circle. The Nazi colours were unmistakable, as was the name.
A pockmarked middle-aged man with spiky white hair sat behind the table on an olive green camping chair, fiddling with a chewed biro and clipboard on which he was gathering names.
There was a pile of leaflets at one end of the flag-draped table. Apart from that, the stall was bare.
Ava approached the man, who was watching her suspiciously.
“I understand there’ll be a talk later?” she asked, keeping her voice casual.
A pair of young men approached. One was wearing a loose checked shirt under a denim jacket, the other was in casual sports clothing. The spiky-haired man nodded to them, and they slipped through the narrow gap between the table and the next stall into a collection of cars and vans. After a moment, they disappeared behind a battered old Citroën police bus that had clearly seen better days and now looked as if half a dozen people regularly slept in it.
The spiky-haired man looked back at her suspiciously, eyeing her up and down with an air of distrust, before shaking his head dismissively. “No. Nothing like that here.”
It was not the answer Ava wanted to hear. “I’ve travelled a long way,” she shot him a knowing glance, “for the talk.”
“I just told you,” he replied, not hiding his growing irritation. “There’s nothing for you here.”
She looked at his granite expression and could see she was getting nowhere. If she carried on, he would just dig his heels in further, closing off all avenues.
She needed to try another tactic.
“I’ve been a student of the Meister for many years,” she confided. “He’s a very powerful man.” She emphasized the word powerful, aware it was used in occult circles for someone with strong abilities. It was an inside word—the sign of an initiate.
She was pleased to see she had hit her mark. The man was looking at her with interest now.
She carried on, keen to press home her advantage. “It’d mean a great deal to me to be able to hear the Meister.” She looked at him earnestly.
“And why is that?” The words came from directly behind her—more an accusation than a question. The voice was deep and resonant. The accent was distinctly German.
Ava spun round to find herself staring into the fleshy face and sea-green eyes from the photograph General Hunter had given her in Qatar.
It took her less than a millisecond to recognize him.
Malchus.
He was standing between two thuggish men—although in terms of build and appearance there was little to distinguish the three of them.
Seeing him close up for the first time, she realized how misleading the photograph had been.
His heavy-lidded eyes were more piercing than she had expected—a deep glassy green. But now they were turned to look directly at her, she could feel only their inner hardness. They shone with an icy edge as they coldly took her in. She felt as if she was being scanned by a reptile.
And it was not just his eyes that were unnerving. From this close, she could see that what she had assumed was an affectation—shaving his head and eyebrows—was no such thing. It was his natural condition. Where his eyebrows and hairline should have been, there was just skin. No hair grew there.
“Do I know you?” he asked, eyeing her closely.
Taken off guard, she took a silent deep breath and returned his gaze. Steeling herself, she smiled and extended her hand to greet him. “Meister, such an honour finally to meet you.”
He did not offer his hand in return, but kept looking at her.
She pulled her arm back, brushing off the rejection. “I heard you’ll be speaking,” she continued, kicking herself mentally. She had merely intended to snatch a glimpse of Malchus today, to begin putting together a picture of who he was. She had not thought she would meet him face-to-face.
“What exactly is your special interest in my talk?” he asked pointedly, continuing to look penetratingly at her.
She gazed back at him, returning the stare with a confidence she was not feeling.
At the same time, her mind was filling with thoughts about her father. Something in Malthus’s manner was kindling a feeling—nothing rational, more of an intuition. It was a quiet voice deep inside telling her that the man standing in front of her had undoubtedly been involved in his death.
His cold gaze never left her.
“My special interest?” She repeated the question, buying a few seconds of thinking time. “To learn from the Meister and make progress,” she replied, hoping the answer would flatter his ego sufficiently.
As she spoke, she was aware of a new feeling settling over her. Where MI6 had failed to give her any answers surrounding the circumstances of her father’s death, she now knew with a visceral certainty that this man could.
She took another quiet deep breath. There was no hurry. She had to do this properly.
First she would have to get close to him.
He continued to eye her intensely, inclining his head toward her. “If that is your interest,” he spoke dismissively, “may I recommend you find a good bookshop.” He turned away from her. “Now, please leave us.” He spoke with the easy authority of someone used to having his orders unquestioningly obeyed.
As if to reinforce the point, one of Malchus’s companions threw her a nasty look.
The implied threat was clear.
Malchus headed between the stalls into the area the man at the table was evidently guarding. His two minders followed.
Ava stared after them.
She gazed in disbelief as the retreating figures disappeared out of sight.
He was just walking away?
Quickly running through her options, she was suddenly all too aware she had no Plan B.
She could force her way through the gap in the stalls and follow them to wherever they were going—but not without creating a scene, which was the last thing she wanted to do.
Furious with herself, she turned and headed back down towards the field’s entrance.
One thought was going round and round in her mind.
That had been a spectacularly amateur performance.
She was livid with herself. She may have been out of the game for a while, but she still knew a bungled operation when she saw one. Thinking of all the things she should have said, she strode angrily down into the lower field.
So much for getting close to him.
She had been presented with a golden opportunity to make real progress, and she had thrown it away.
To make it worse, it was entirely her fault. She had been completely unprepared, and the result was a foregone conclusion.
She remembered her tutor at Fort Monckton, the eighteenth-century castle at Portsmouth, on England’s blustery south coast, that MI6 used as a training centre. She had been a regular visitor there for the six months of the Intelligence Officer’s New Entry Course. On the first day, he had written on a board in the classroom a quotation from Count von Moltke, the nineteenth-century Prussian general and strategist of modern warfare. It was burned into her mind because he had left it there for the entire six months:
NO BATTLE PLAN EVER SURVIVES CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY
He had gone on to demonstrate that it applied to all undercover and intelligence field work just as much as to military encounters.
And just as importantly, he had explained that von Moltke’s solution was as valid today as it was then. Combatants had to plan for every eventuality and scenario that could flow from the initial contact. They must never be without a plan for all outcomes.
The Sword of Moses Page 23
