The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  “So what have you got for me?” she asked Ferguson, nodding a greeting at him and shading her eyes from the sun. Her tone was businesslike. She was clearly in no mood for pleasantries. “What has our friend Dr Curzon found out about the Ark?”

  “She needs more information on Malchus,” Ferguson replied matter-of-factly. “He’s not an easy man to find.”

  Prince started walking west, along the narrow path hugging the inside of the park’s outer border, giving Ava a clear view of their route, only obscured every now and then by a tree. If they headed beyond the Wildlife Gardens and towards York Bridge, she might have to move, but that would be fine. The trees and bushes provided her with plenty of cover.

  “Not even in Rome?” There was a heavy note of sarcasm in Prince’s voice. “Do you want to tell me what that little jolly was about?”

  Ferguson set off alongside her so they were walking abreast. “She knows he’s collecting biblical artefacts. But she’s in the dark about where he’s keeping them. Or even why he wants them.”

  There was a pause, in which Ava could only hear the sound of their shoes on the hard dirt. “So you’re not going to share with me what you’ve been working on, then?” Prince was clearly not happy at being given the brush-off. “There’s nothing you want to tell me, for instance, about a group calling itself the Foundation?”

  Ava smiled to herself.

  That was good news.

  Prince must have heard them discuss the Foundation, but clearly lacked further details.

  “She didn’t find any leads to the Ark in Rome, if that’s what you’re asking.” Ferguson was playing dumb, as they had agreed.

  “Look,” Prince stopped walking and turned to face Ferguson, the trees casting a dappled shadow onto the two of them. “There are an increasing number of organizations joining this particular party.” She paused, her voice striking a more sombre tone. “Dr Curzon is going to need friends like us if she’s going to navigate her way successfully through this mess.”

  What happened next was so quick that if Ava had blinked, she would have missed it.

  Without warning, Prince’s body lifted a few inches off the ground, spun ninety degrees in the air, then slammed to the ground in a spray of red mist. With a split second delay, Ava heard a high-pitched zipping sound through her earpiece, ending abruptly in a wet thudding noise

  She gasped in horror as she heard Ferguson’s voice coming over urgently. “She’s down!”

  Ava could see that.

  Prince was lying on the grass, her face in the dirt, her torso twisted at a right angle to her legs. But more disturbing than the odd position of her body was the six-inch gaping hole in the middle of her back, along with the sprays of blood and shreds of soft tissue spattered over her neat grey jacket.

  It looked as if a tank shell had passed straight through her.

  The American’s expression was glassy and still. She had not had time to register any shock or pain before her entire system had comprehensively shut down.

  Ava had never seen anyone killed by a sniper before, but she knew that only a round from a high-powered sniper’s rifle made that sound and inflicted that kind of damage. One well-aimed shot was all it took, leaving behind the massive telltale injuries of a supersonic high velocity round that had torn and tumbled its way through soft body tissue.

  As Ferguson’s shout faded in her ears, Ava instinctively dived for cover, hitting the mossy ground as hard and fast as she could.

  Until she knew what the situation was, she had to assume the sniper was still out there, and potentially taking aim again. For now she had no information on whether it was a targeted hit on Prince or a disgruntled Londoner taking out his rage on the public. In a big city, all options were open.

  But whoever the sniper was, he clearly knew what he was doing. This was no Hollywood attempt to hit Prince between the eyes. It was just one well-aimed shot to the centre of the body mass. It was as professional as it got—and the results were visibly devastating.

  Ferguson clearly had similar thoughts. Ava saw him reach down with lightning speed, then zigzag the five yards to the nearby fence separating the park from the Outer Circle. He was over it in an instant, and gone.

  Ava glanced around, praying no one had seen him beside Prince when she had dropped. Although the park was virtually empty, he absolutely did not want to be connected to the murder of a senior U.S. intelligence officer.

  Still on her belly, she rapidly scanned the south-east corner of the park where the shot must have come from, peering through the binoculars for any clue to where the sniper was hiding.

  As she swivelled the binoculars around the park’s periphery, she suddenly saw it—a tiny glint reflecting in the early morning sun.

  Zeroing in the binoculars, she could see a grey ice cream hut in an empty children’s playground. It was not yet open and serving refreshments, but she had definitely spotted something flash in its window.

  Focusing her eyes back on where Prince was sprawled, she could make out a clear line of sight from the hut to the body.

  She pulled out her phone, and punched Ferguson’s number.

  He answered immediately.

  “Something moved in the ice cream hut, children’s playground by the Avenue Gardens,” she panted.

  “I’m on it. You stay put.” Ferguson hung up.

  His watch was still transmitting, and she could hear the sound of him running. She could not see him yet, so figured he was approaching the hut from the back.

  In under a minute, she heard his breathing quieten, then the slamming sound of a door being shoved open hard.

  There was a moment’s pause before his voice came over her earpiece.

  “He was here. It reeks of cordite. But he’s gone now.”

  Ava picked herself up off the ground and began jogging around the perimeter to Ferguson. It would have been quicker to go straight across the open lawn, but she had no way of knowing if the danger had fully passed.

  She sped up, running faster, trying to work out who would want to kill Prince.

  Malchus?

  Unlikely, she reasoned. She was not even sure if Malchus had ever heard of Prince.

  The Foundation?

  They certainly had the skill and resources to pull it off. It would have been child’s play for Max and his Légionnaires. And the Danquah affair showed the Foundation seemed unafraid to intervene in international affairs when it suited them.

  But she could not think of a single good reason why the Foundation would want to kill Prince, still less in such a public, high-profile, and risky way.

  Arriving at the ice cream hut, she found it was, in fact, a solid flat-roofed metal caravan on wheels, although it looked as if it had not been moved for many years.

  The door was usually locked, but the dull chrome hasp was hanging open, and the padlock was gone. Whoever removed it had probably sheared it with bolt-croppers, then had the sense to take the evidence away.

  Pushing the door open, she doubted very much anyone who was that careful would have left any traces or fingerprints.

  This had been a professional job.

  The hut would almost certainly be forensically clean.

  It was warm inside, and stuffy from the hot air being expelled by the three chest freezers lining the back wall. From the tattered and faded stickers on their lids, it was clear they housed the stock of multicoloured ice creams and lollies dished out on sunny and rainy days to the capital’s children and their long-suffering parents.

  The rest of the hut was cramped, making it difficult to move. The wooden shelves on the walls overflowed with cardboard boxes of crisps. And most of the floor space was piled high with shrink-wrapped palettes of fizzy drinks.

  She breathed in deeply. Ferguson was right. A gun had undoubtedly been fired inside the hut within the last few minutes. The smell was unmistakable.

  He was looking at the small window, which was open a few inches, giving a clear line of fire to where Prince’s mang
led body lay about three hundred yards away. “I’ve already notified HQ she’s been hit. They’re sending a clean-up team, which will hopefully get here before the parkies find the body.”

  Ava pulled the miniature receiver from her ear and put it into her pocket.

  “What did you pick up from the ground beside Prince?” She had been baffled to see him waste precious seconds reaching down, when all instinct and training would have told him to get as far from Prince’s body as fast as he could.

  “This,” he answered, holding out a slim silver mobile phone. “It fell out of her pocket as she went down.” He already had it flipped open, where he had been scrolling through it while waiting for Ava. “I thought it might tell us something about why she was monitoring you.”

  He handed it to Ava, pointing at the screen. “What do you make of this?”

  Ava looked at the small blocks of black writing on the screen. They appeared to be a series of text messages Prince had recently exchanged with someone whose name she had saved in her contacts simply as ‘K’.

  Ava read the exchange of messages slowly.

  “Does any of it mean anything to you?” Ferguson looked at her hopefully.

  She stared at the messages for a few moments, scrolling up and down, going over each line to try to make any connections.

  “My God,” she murmured slowly, as the light began to dawn.

  It couldn’t be.

  But the more she read and re-read the texts, the more it seemed to make sense. “I don’t believe it,” she whispered.

  “What?” Ferguson moved in behind her to look at the messages.

  Ava breathed out heavily. “This explains why she was so hostile to my suggestions the Bible may not be a hundred per cent historically accurate. And why she dismissed any claims the Ethiopians may have to the Ark.”

  “Why?” Ferguson was peering at the screen.

  Ava looked up at him. “The ‘URIM’ and ‘THUMMIM’ were two objects the high priest of Israel carried in his sacred breastplate—jewels, or wood, or bone, no one is quite sure. He used them for cleromancy—like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ dice, to tell the will of God.”

  She scrolled down. “And the next pair, ‘YAEL’ and ‘JUDITH’, are two women from the Bible. Yael saved Israel from military defeat by feeding the enemy general with milk, then once he had fallen asleep, she hammered a tent peg through his temple. Judith performed a similar feat by ingratiating herself with the enemy general, Holofernes, whom she then decapitated while he was in a drunken stupor.”

  Ava looked up at Ferguson. “Are you beginning to see a pattern yet? You know the next pair, right? The ‘IRGUN’ and the ‘LEHI’?”

  Ferguson nodded. “Zionist paramilitary terror groups in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, fighting for a Jewish state.”

  “Right,” Ava nodded. “And ‘ANONYMOUS SOLDIERS’ was their marching anthem.”

  “So how does that explain Prince’s attitude to the Bible and the Ark?”

  Ava looked pensive. “I’d say the senders of these messages have a strong interest in the history of Israel—and especially in its military successes. And that raises the likelihood of them belonging to one organization in particular.”

  “What, like AIPAC?” Ferguson suggested. “American friends of Israel?”

  Ava shook her head. “I think it’s more serious than that.” She paused. “If her contact, K, is short for katsa, then our friend Prince has been leading a double life—with the Mossad.”

  “Christ.” Ferguson muttered under his breath. “That’s all we need.”

  Ava turned for the door. “We need to get out of here.” She was through it in an instant, and jogging towards the gateway back to the Outer Circle.

  Once out of the park and onto the noisy pavement, she took the SIM out of Prince’s phone and handed it to Ferguson along with the phone unit. “Wipe our prints and lose these, separately—far away from here.” Ferguson nodded as she hailed a black cab, incongruously spray-painted all-over with an advertisement for a beach paradise somewhere. She let Ferguson into the cabin, before climbing in herself.

  “Drop me at the nearest tube station, please,” she asked the driver, before giving Ferguson back the binoculars. “I haven’t got time to get stuck in traffic. You can take the cab home, where you could start looking further into De Molay and Saxby and their story about the Foundation. See if the Templar angle really could add up.”

  “What about you?” he asked, winding down the window to let in some fresh air. “Where are you going?”

  Ava smiled. “I’m going to follow up on the last SMS Prince sent to the katsa: ‘OLD LONDON STATION, BETWEEN THE PILLARS, IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?’”

  Ferguson rubbed a hand over his face as the cab pulled up outside a narrow flight of steps down into a tube station. “Don’t tell me that means something to you?”

  “Not to me,” she smiled, getting out of the cab. “I’m going to ask the widow’s sons themselves.”

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  81

  London Underground

  London

  England

  The United Kingdom

  Ava had learned long ago that some things had not changed in the century and a half since London’s irrepressible Victorian engineers had put in the world’s first underground railway.

  It was still the quickest way to get around town.

  The network’s builders had taken a boundless pride in all aspects of their gleaming new project, ensuring it was the envy of the world—state of the art in functionality and style.

  But as Ava looked around the starkly bare concrete platform, which had long since lost its bespoke glazed tiles and polished wooden finishings, she could not help but wonder what the Victorian pioneers would have thought of it now.

  When the train arrived and she got on, she was greeted by an overcrowded worn and grotty interior. The saggy seats were covered in a drab threadbare orangey fabric, and the windows opposite her were graffitied with thin angular black writing, preserved for posterity under layers of grey dust.

  It was clear the underground no longer needed to look attractive in order to guarantee the unending flow of customers that crammed into its four thousand ageing carriages every day.

  She gazed into the middle distance, ignoring the distractions of the garish advertising posters plastered above the seats directly opposite her.

  She was going over in her mind the thought processes that had brought her here, making sure she had not made any errors.

  Time was critical, and she could not afford to take a wrong turn.

  Not now Malchus had the Ark and the Menorah.

  Back in the ice cream hut, she had reached some conclusions about Prince’s furtive phone messages to K.

  Most importantly, she had immediately recognized what the first six SMS messages were.

  From the hours she had spent learning similar sequences, she was certain they were pre-agreed pairs of identification words—simple exchanges designed to enable agents in the field to single out their friends.

  If her assumption was correct, it made decoding the sequence of SMS messages significantly less daunting, because the identification word-pairs had no meaning—just a purpose. There was no hidden message. They were purely functional.

  They almost certainly meant nothing more than that whoever chose the words back in Tel Aviv wanted to reinforce the idea of a strong and combative Israel.

  But what had struck her more than the symbolism of the word-pairs was the fact Prince and K had used three sequences. It suggested there was something unusually secure and confidential about their exchange. She could not tell whether it was the fact they were communicating or the content of the message, but either way, the two agents were displaying an unusually high level of caution.

  Taken together with the militaristic tone of the word-pairs, it had reinforced her suspicion she was dealing with the Mossad. She could think of few other ag
encies which combined that level of thoroughness, paranoia, and aggression.

  But as she had stood in the ice cream hut and looked down at the messages, the one that stood out the most was the last.

  It was of a completely different character to the others.

  OLD LONDON STATION

  BETWEEN THE PILLARS

  IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?

  For a start, it was made up of full phrases.

  And second, it had not elicited any response from K.

  If she was right about the first three exchanges being identification pairs, then the last three lines were almost certainly the main message—the real reason for the entire communication.

  At first she had been able to make no sense of the three lines at all.

  She knew for certain there was no underground or railway station in London called ‘OLD LONDON STATION’. She was sure of that.

  She was also positive there was no old or disused station simply called ‘LONDON STATION’. The abandoned ones were well known—like British Museum, Lords, and Trafalgar Square. She had never heard of one called ‘LONDON STATION’.

  But if the first line was baffling, the second and third were even more elusive.

  Based on the strongly biblical themes of the identification pairs, she had pondered whether the phrases ‘BETWEEN THE PILLARS’ and ‘IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?’ might also be drawn from the Bible.

  Perhaps ‘BETWEEN THE PILLARS’ was a reference to the Hebrew Nazirite, Samson—famous for his suicide attack on Gaza’s great temple to Dagon?

  According to the book of Judges, he had been standing between the temple’s pillars when he unexpectedly pushed them over, bringing down the roof and the three thousand people on it, raining fatal chunks of masonry onto himself and the crowd of his enemies in the temple around him.

  Like most of the heroic stories of the Old Testament, modern scholars viewed it as a symbolic tale rather than eye-witness history. Nevertheless, Ava had recently been fascinated to learn that excavations in the region had uncovered the fact that Philistine temples of the period did indeed have two central columns supporting the roof. Although she had also been interested to read that from their size, it would have taken an earthquake measuring high on the Richter scale to move them an inch.