The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  He was plainly playing in the major league. She was used to MI6 or the comparable agencies of other countries having access to networks of friends in industry who could provide equipment and employment at a moment’s notice. But she had never heard of a private organization with the same reach or influence.

  She was aware that Italy was a country where people still looked after friends and family. But she had the strong impression Saxby would have been able to pull off the same trick in Washington, Moscow, Bombay, Shanghai, or a dozen other global cities.

  “And the men?” She had counted three in each van, all wearing remarkably authentic-looking and lived-in engineers’ overalls.

  “That’s where the illusion ends, I’m afraid.” He looked apologetic. “They’re not real gas engineers. But don’t worry—no one will know the difference.”

  Ava glanced at them again, noting that, without exception, they were alert-looking athletic men in their twenties and thirties. “Who are they?”

  “Friends,” he answered, “professional and discreet.” He did not elaborate further.

  That was fine by Ava. She needed physically able men more than gas engineers. “Have they been briefed?”

  “Yes, exactly as you required.” Saxby slid open the door of the second van and ushered Ava and Ferguson inside, handing them each a pair of overalls bearing the multicoloured logo of the gas company.

  “What’s the emergency services’ response time?” Ava slipped the overalls over what she was wearing.

  “Twenty minutes—maybe more, maybe less. It depends on traffic and their unknowable Roman sense of timing. It could be anything, so you’ll need to be quick.”

  Ferguson pulled up his left sleeve and primed the countdown dial on his canvas-strapped steel watch. He set it for fifteen minutes. “To be safe,” he explained to Ava.

  She watched as the men got out of the second van and heaved a large metal flight case from the back. It was worn and dented, and the gas company logo stencilled onto it was chipped and battered. It would do nicely. It looked sturdy, and had a strong set of wheels underneath, exactly as she had requested. They put it onto the pavement.

  Returning to the van, they took out an equally wide but much thinner case, just as worn, and placed it on top of the first one.

  It all looked like standard emergency response kit.

  “Okay. Let’s go,” Ava announced, zipping up the remaining few inches of her overalls and grabbing a safety helmet from the rack inside the van.

  Turning to the drivers, she gave further instructions. “Follow us into the Piazza di San Clemente. Park just outside. Make sure the vans’ back doors are open at all times, and keep the engines running. We could be out of the building any time.”

  “Good luck.” Saxby lowered his voice and leant a little closer to her, almost conspiratorially. “So, do you really think it’s still there?”

  Ava seriously hoped it was, or she was going to look ridiculous. And she expected that if this turned out to be a false alarm, the Foundation would not be so keen to continue with her services either.

  “We’ll soon find out.” She injected as much optimism into her voice as she could, hoping he had not registered her moment of anxiety.

  As she and Ferguson moved off alongside the men wheeling the flight cases, the two drivers jumped out of their vehicles and followed them round into the Piazza di San Clemente, where they placed a large orange and black striped emergency barrier outside the basilica’s entrance.

  Its bold letters left passers-by in no doubt as to the serious problem:

  ATTENZIONE!

  FUGA DI GAS.

  È ASSOLUTAMENTE VIETATO L’INGRESSO ALLE PERSONE NON AUTORIZZATE.12

  Ava was acutely aware of the noise the cases were making as the men rolled them along the pavement.

  This had better work.

  She reminded herself she had designed this to be a high-visibility operation. It was not a stealth exercise. She wanted people to look at them.

  They were at the squat doorway set into the ancient porchway in no time. Passing through it, they moved into a tranquil tree-shaded cloister of Ionic columns clustered around a small fountain in the centre of a cobbled quadrangle.

  At the opposite side of the courtyard, behind a colonnade of five arches, lay the entrance to the basilica. It was flanked by a pair of thin palm trees, and had a simple white façade with just one airy round-topped window underneath a large triangular pediment.

  Striding quickly across the courtyard and through the central archway, they were in.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  69

  Basilica di San Clemente

  Via Labicana

  Rione Monti

  Rome

  The Republic of Italy

  Although Ava had done her research on the basilica and knew pretty much what to expect, she was unprepared for the sheer scale of what greeted her as she edged inside the front door.

  She had never seen anything quite like it in a twelfth-century building.

  Churches of the period were usually mini-castles.

  They had impregnable stone walls pierced by tiny windows, and were normally built around wide arched columns supporting low barrel-vaulted ceilings. She was particularly fond of them. It was easy to imagine medieval knights in dirty chainmail clanking around inside to the disapproving glares of women in silks and elaborate head-dresses.

  But the Basilica di San Clemente, although it had clearly begun life as a large twelfth-century building, had been ever more richly rebuilt and decorated over the centuries.

  The result was one of the most lavish churches she had ever seen.

  It was like stepping into a Fabergé egg.

  The ceiling soaring high above her was divided into diamond, oval, and myriad other coffers with gilded stucco ridges creating dozens of separate sections. It resembled an elaborate chocolate box—each compartment filled with an intricate fresco.

  As her eye moved down the cream-coloured building, it was unavoidably drawn to the east end, where the entire domed wall behind the high altar was spangled with a gleaming golden mosaic of glass and stone, completely filling the vast concave apse.

  Glancing at it, she could see blue streams feeding a colossal tree of life with vines, flowers, peacocks, and deer all playing across it, above a row of thirteen dutiful-looking lambs. In its centre, growing out of the spreading tree of life, binding it all together, there was a cartoon-like crucifixion with white doves perching on the cross.

  “Look there,” Ava pointed to either side of the mosaic, whispering.

  Ferguson squinted hard.

  “The men depicted either side. Their names are written into the mosaic beside them.” She leant closer to him, pointing out where she was looking.

  He spelled them out hesitantly. “AGIOS PAVLVS’ and ‘AGIOS PETRVS?”

  “Exactly. Just like on the medal. Saint Paul and Saint Peter.”

  Ferguson looked uncertain.

  “Agios is the Greek for saint,” she explained. “In the twelfth century, they often mixed up Greek and Latin in religious inscriptions. And there was no letter U—they used a V. So it just says Saint Paul and Saint Peter. I get the feeling it’s not a coincidence that the two saints feature on the medal, and here they are, too.”

  Dropping her gaze downwards from the mosaic, she spotted the huge high altar housing the relics of Saint Clement, the third pope. She did not have much interest in him, save that his execution sounded particularly barbarous. The Romans had tied him to an anchor and thrown him off a ship into the Black Sea.

  As her eyes moved to the foreground, they travelled along the mesmerizing decorations in the cream-coloured marble floor—inlaid with multicoloured stones, marble, and glass to create hypnotic swirling geometric patterns.

  In the very centre of it all, her eyes rested on a small rectangular enclosure with low white carved marble walls. Inside it, two rows of ancient wooden pews faced each other
across a central aisle. It was a choir. A very old one—sixth-century, according to the discrete sign.

  The overall effect of the basilica was breathtaking.

  Ava thought back to the Burj al-Arab in Dubai. Granted, a visitor to the seven-star hotel could be waited on hand and foot. But somewhere in the passage of time down the centuries, the subtlety of craftsmanship had been lost, even for patrons with the deepest wallets.

  She glanced across at Ferguson, who was still looking stunned at the intricacy and skill of the decoration.

  “Look there,” he pointed to one of the pillars on the right side of the altar. “Consecration crosses.”

  She followed his finger, and sure enough, a cross marked where the building’s wall had been blessed.

  “This has to be a good sign,” Ava whispered. “Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and consecration crosses.”

  He gave a low whistle. “It’s unbelievable. Not like the churches back home.”

  “Amazing,” she added. “It isn’t even famous.” She glanced. “As you can see—there are barely any tourists in here.”

  Spotting movement up ahead, she dropped her voice. “Here we go.”

  The two van drivers who had entered after them were now making purposefully for the choir, where a chubby white-haired priest was collecting leaflets from the ancient pews.

  As he bent, his elderly movements were restricted by his bulky clothing—a long white tunic, belt, and dangling rosary, topped off with a full-length black cloak and a short black shoulder cape.

  She instantly recognized the medieval habit of a Dominican friar.

  She had known a group of Dominicans when she was working in Amman. She had regularly visited Jerusalem, where they ran the École Biblique—Jerusalem’s most prestigious school of archaeology,

  She had rapidly discovered they were an order of intellectuals with a rich past—as scientists, philosophers, and even as heretics.

  At the École Biblique, as she pored through their treasures, she had been fascinated to learn of the order’s famous members down the ages. There were scholastic titans like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, whose razor-sharp logical minds lit up the emerging universities of Europe, sweeping away the intellectual gloom of the dark ages. There were also bold and progressive scientists like Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake long before Galileo for stating the sun was a star and for believing there was intelligent life on other planets. On the darker side, later, there was the restless inquisitor Bernardo Gui, who alone racked up nearly a thousand convictions of heretic Cathars around Toulouse. And then the obsessive Heinrich Kramer, whose twisted but thorough witch-hunters’ manual, the Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of the Witches, had caused the death of hundreds of innocent women.

  Looking around the church, she thought on a lighter note of a more famous and certainly more cheerful member of the order, and figured he would probably have liked the building very much. In his own eyes, he had been a simple Dominican priest from Tuscany. But the world knew him as one of the most penetrating and sensitive painters of all time—Fra Angelico.

  All in all, Ava had learnt from her Jerusalem experiences that the Dominicans were usually mentally sharp, frequently mavericks, and rarely to be underestimated.

  They were certainly good at surprises.

  As the van drivers approached the priest, they showed him their official gas company ID cards. She could not follow their fast Italian, but knew they were explaining that a gas leak had been detected underground, and the entire building needed to be evacuated immediately.

  “Let’s just hope he doesn’t have a PhD in physics,” Ava whispered to Ferguson.

  “The priest?” He stared back at her blankly.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll explain another time.” She pointed towards the sacristy and book shop. “Let’s move. The stairs are that way.”

  “And … go!” Ferguson announced, pushing the button on his watch to start the fifteen-minute countdown.

  The drivers rapidly cleared the ground floor of the few members of the public looking about, then disappeared into the bookshop and down the steps to the lower levels, where they began officiously expelling the remaining flustered-looking tourists from the building.

  Moving fast, Ava and Ferguson followed them into the bookshop.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  70

  La Gioconda Café

  Maze Hill

  London SE10

  England

  The United Kingdom

  Uri could not afford to relax.

  Although he was making good progress with Otto and the Skipper, he knew he also had to build out the rest of his life as Danny Motson.

  He needed to work on his cover—to do things in character, to develop observable patterns of behaviour.

  In short, he needed to do what a normal person would do.

  He had long ago found that the quickest and easiest way to achieve this was to get into a few routines that would make it look like he was settling in.

  As tempting as it was to keep himself to himself, he needed a visible public life—however small and controlled. If he was going to pass as just another guy who had moved into the area looking for work, then he had to be seen doing exactly that. Attention to these details would be vital if Otto or the Skipper came asking questions about him. And after last night at The Bunker, that seemed increasingly likely.

  He didn’t want to get too friendly with anyone, of course—just enough to remove the natural suspicion of outsiders, to fix him as a member of the community.

  So he quietly established a daily public routine.

  Every morning, he purchased a copy of the local newspaper and The Sun from The Ottoman Convenience Store—a metal-grilled bazaar that smelled mildly of bleach, and sold everything from mousetraps to cheap wines, and flip-flops to cling-filmed trays of unidentified oriental sweets. As he paid, he was careful to exchange a few pleasantries with whichever extended family member happened to be behind the till that day.

  Then he took his newspapers and sat in a nearby café, where he made a show of reading the jobs pages—circling interesting advertisements and telephoning the relevant numbers.

  It had taken some effort to find the perfect café. But he had finally managed, and it was working well.

  The fatty breakfast festival of fried pork on offer in the various English greasy spoons had been a nonstarter. And the branded coffee shop chains were too impersonal.

  What he really needed was a small place that served breakfast like back home—vegetable salad, goat’s cheese, bread, olives, some pastries, and a steaming spiced coffee. But that was not going to happen. And it would attract a lot of attention if he tried ordering anything even remotely similar.

  So he settled for a compromise—a late breakfast at the homely Italian café, La Gioconda, in the next street.

  It was intimate, and run by a family from Campania who had decorated the walls with the usual array of garish prints and plates painted with landscapes and prominent buildings from their native region.

  As he was unemployed, there was no need to be one of the early crowd. So he waited until the cake-munching clusters of Italians had finished their traditional breakfasts, before he sat at his usual small round metal table and enjoyed a sweet coffee, fresh bread, cheese, olives and a few spoons of Mediterranean salad off the all-day menu.

  It was cheap as dirt, and the family who ran it became increasingly friendly as they got to recognize him.

  He stayed for forty-five minutes every day, reading his papers and glancing occasionally at the small silent television in the corner. He did not understand the Italian captioning on the rolling news programme, but the presenters were usually easy on the eye.

  Once he had finished with the job advertisements, he browsed quickly through the classifieds in The Sun.

  But he was not shopping or looking for lonely hearts.

  It was where they had agreed Moshe would communicate wit
h him in the unlikely event Tel Aviv triggered the contact channel.

  Moshe had carefully chosen a paper that could be found all over England and, in case the mission took Uri abroad, in most other countries, too. As a failsafe, it could even be accessed globally via its online version.

  There were, in fact, two messages Moshe could publish. One would be for Uri to make contact in case there had been any critical developments. The other would be to stand him down and bring him back home.

  But Uri knew Moshe. The veteran did not do chitchat and idle talk. He had briefed Uri thoroughly on the background and operational objectives. In Moshe’s world, that was enough. He now expected Uri to make of it what he could. That was the old-fashioned way. It was how Moshe liked it. And it was why he had chosen Uri.

  Uri expected that if he ever saw a message from Moshe, it would be telling him to wrap it up and report back to base.

  He was therefore genuinely surprised on turning to the classified section to see Moshe had activated the contact channel.

  The pre-agreed advertisement was there in black and white:

  FOUND. ONE OLD METALLIC TRUNK WITH EXTENDABLE HANDLES. LUGGAGE LABEL BELONGING TO MR MOSES.

  Uri read it three times to make triple sure. But there was no doubt. And it was hardly likely to have been published by anyone else. Moshe had chuckled as he dictated the message to Uri for him to memorize. It was exactly Moshe’s sense of humour.

  There was a contact telephone number at the end of the advertisement. Uri quickly tapped it into his phone, and sent an SMS.

  This was going to be interesting.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  71

  The Mithraeum

  Basilica di San Clemente

  Via Labicana

  Rione Monti

  Rome

  The Republic of Italy

  Once through the bookshop, Ava turned into the wide staircase leading down to the fourth-century Roman church below.