Without needing to think it through any further, she knew her best chance in the circumstances lay in total honesty.
Now was no time to start improvising.
She nodded slowly. “Okay.”
Cordingly raised his eyebrows in an expectant gesture, clearly keen to hear what she had to say.
“You’ll appreciate that for security reasons I can’t share all the details with you,” she began. “But the coded message is linked to something of great historical and political importance, which is currently attracting the interest of a growing group of international intelligence agencies.” She paused, noting his granite expression. “I’m sorry for misleading you. But a number of people have already been killed in connection with this affair, and the message could be an important piece of the jigsaw.”
He pursed his lips, weighing up what she had said. “You do know how far-fetched that sounds, don’t you?”
“More far-fetched than the Deputy Grand Secretary of the freemasons pretending not to know anything about the Knights Templar?” She returned the rebuff.
Two could play at that game.
He ignored her. “I don’t suppose you have any proof of your story?”
“Look,” Ava countered. “You asked for the truth. I’ve given it to you.” She held out the piece of paper again. “Can you help me or not?”
He sighed and took it from her. “I don’t know what you want from me, but the second and third lines of the message do mean something. Quite a lot, in fact.”
Ava felt a wave of relief.
He handed her back the piece of paper. “But I’m afraid that’s as much as I can tell you. You see, freemasonry may not be a secret society any more—if it was, you wouldn’t know we even exist. But we do definitely have things we do not discuss openly. And I’m sorry to say that these are among them.”
Having come this far, Ava was in no mood to be brushed off. “I assure you this is something you would want to help with.” She looked again at the Ark on his tie.
“I’m truly sorry,” his expression was sombre. “I’ll tell you this much—it’s not an X-marks-the-spot map, if that’s what you were hoping.”
Ava could feel her chances of discovering anything useful slipping away. “People are dying, Mr Cordingly.”
He started walking again, his shoes echoing on the glassy floor. “Come with me,” he called over his shoulder, leading her into a wide ornately decorated atrium.
Following him into the grand atrium, she did a double take at the extraordinary sight that greeted her.
At the far end was a vast rectangular art deco casket of burnished brass and bronze, set on its front and sides with bold figures. An ethereal glow from a spectacular stained glass window immediately behind it illuminated the lustrous metal, bathing it in mellow dappled reds, blues, and yellows. Framing it all perfectly, the altar was flanked by two monumental marble pillars, each supporting a dramatic cluster of lamps.
It was a shrine.
Ava paused, overwhelmed—incredulous that such a grandiose and unspoiled 1930s chapel could be hidden away in this secret building, unknown to tourists and guidebooks.
“It’s a memorial.” Cordingly dropped his voice. “In fact, this whole building is a shrine, dedicated to the generation of freemasons cut down in the First World War. The casket is the spiritual nerve-centre of this whole building—peace through sacrifice: a lesson we’ve learned many times in our long history.”
It was one of the most extraordinary memorials she had ever seen.
His voice softened. “I’m sorry people are dying. But it happens every day. If I tell you what those last two lines mean, I’ll be betraying the oaths and values that we have kept for centuries, which brothers have died for.”
“That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?” Ava did not follow his train of thought. She indicated the memorial. “These men didn’t die for freemasonry. They fell in the First World War, like millions of others.”
“Yes and no,” Cordingly replied. “Freemasonry is a philosophy—standing for equality and tolerance, and the things that unite all people. When freemasons fight for freedom, they are also fighting for their most profound beliefs.”
He contemplated the altar thoughtfully. “You may think our secrets are silly and pointless. Or perhaps you think we are occult and dangerous. But we treasure our values. Many freemasons have made the ultimate sacrifice for them.”
He gestured at the room around them. “This shrine is only a memorial to those cut down in the First World War. It says nothing of the many killed in other conflicts—like the thousands of freemasons put into Hitler’s death camps for their membership of the Craft. Here, in this place, we remember them all.”
Ava’s eyebrows shot up. “Hitler persecuted freemasons?”
Cordingly nodded grimly. “They were targeted along with all those the Reich deemed dangerous or deviant. The Jewish tragedy was shared by a great number of others. Many people forget that the majority of those executed by Hitler were not Jewish. We often overlook the millions of other innocent civilians liquidated on ideological grounds for their race or beliefs—Poles, Slavs, Soviets, gypsies, Catholics, freemasons, homosexuals, the handicapped. It’s a long and tragic list.”
“Why freemasons?” Ava asked with incredulity. “What did Hitler have against them?”
“It’s obvious really,” Cordingly replied. “The Nazi state rested on the idea that certain races are biologically and culturally superior to others. Our freemasonic teaching is the polar opposite. We believe in the fundamental equality of all people. The Nazis therefore saw our beliefs as a dangerous and deviant heresy. As a result, many brothers were imprisoned and killed for their ‘degenerate’ beliefs. But our Order stood firm. We did not bend or buckle.”
“I had no idea,” she answered quietly.
“So, Dr Curzon, I’d help if I could. Truly. But I will not betray my promises. I’m duty bound to keep them—to the living, and to the dead.”
This was not at all what Ava had wanted to hear.
“For what it’s worth,” he continued. “I don’t think the message would mean much to you anyway. For a start, the first line is not freemasonic. And the last two lines, even though they have a freemasonic meaning, are not coherent when put next to each other in this way. I’m not at all sure myself what the whole message means.”
The words hit Ava like a blow.
For all his reticence, Cordingly no doubt understood the message as well as anyone could. So either he was not being honest with her, or she had to face the possibility she may have made a mistake. Maybe it was not freemasonic? Perhaps there was another angle she was missing?
As they passed through the Memorial Hall and into another glossy marbled corridor, he stopped outside a numbered committee room door.
“I’m sorry I can’t help further.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a leaflet. “There’s a floor-plan of the building on the back.” He handed it to her. “Follow this corridor all the way down and then left, and the map will show you how to get to the exit.”
She nodded her thanks.
A brick wall again.
“Just one more thing,” she asked, deflated. “If you knew I tricked my way in here, why did you agree to see me?”
He placed a hand on the door handle, before answering slowly. “Actually, it was your work in Baghdad.”
She was no longer surprised at what he knew about her. His database was clearly plugged in where it mattered.
“Are you aware there are no freemasonic lodges in the Middle East?” He pursed his lips thoughtfully.
She shook her head. It was not the sort of thing she had ever thought about.
“There were once.” He looked back down the corridor at the dappled and colourful light coming from the shrine. “We used to be a global brotherhood. After we unveiled ourselves here in Covent Garden in 1717, Britain spread our beliefs throughout the empire, and all over the world. There were thriving lodges across Europe
, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. You could find us from Chicago to Cairo, and Karachi to Kuala Lumpur.”
He looked solemn. “I had hoped maybe your visit here today might directly or indirectly reveal there was again freemasonic activity in the Middle East.” He shrugged. “So we’re both disappointed.”
He held out his hand to shake hers.
“The secret handshake?” she smiled ruefully, as she felt his hand wrap around hers.
His eyes twinkled, but there was nothing out of the ordinary in the warm handshake he gave her. “I’m sure you think us foolish, with our handshakes and secrecy. But one day the world will recognize our contribution to the tolerance and civilized liberal values at the heart of what is best in Western thought. We’ve been around in one form or another for centuries, and our loyalty is our strength. Enemies of our beliefs have tried to bring us down many times. But none have ever succeeded. The Church’s Inquisition failed to break us, and so did the twentieth century’s dictators. Whether we are kings or paupers, and we are both and more —we stay silent and true. Even the ruthless agents of the KGB learned nothing when they tried to penetrate our ranks during the Cold War.”
He nodded to indicate the interview was over. “Good luck, Dr Curzon. I hope you find your answers. You can keep the map.”
But Ava was no longer listening. A panel of floodlights had just flashed on in her head.
The map.
The KGB.
Of course!
She kicked herself.
She could not believe she had not seen it before.
She turned on her heels and run back down the echoing marble corridor, shouting a hurried goodbye to the startled man watching her disappear into the palatial depths of one of London’s least-known buildings.
——————— ◆ ———————
84
Brompton Road
South Kensington
London SW7
England
The United Kingdom
Ava went over the message again in her mind:
OLD LONDON STATION
BETWEEN THE PILLARS
IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?
How could she have been so blind?
She continued to kick herself as she headed away from Freemasons’ Hall and towards the underground station.
The answer was so obvious, and had been staring her in the face all along.
It was pure espionage history—just the sort of thing Prince and the katsa would have used.
And she should have recognized it.
‘LONDON STATION’ was not a railway or tube station. It was another kind of station altogether.
A spy station.
And not just any spy station. ‘LONDON STATION’ was the infamous name the KGB used for their elaborate London operations during the Cold War.
It was ‘old’ because the KGB no longer existed. In the new modern post-Glasnost Russia, it was now the Federal Security Service, the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. The Kremlin apparatchiks said the old days were gone and it was now a fresh organization for a new era. But all watchers of the Former Soviet Union knew nothing had changed. It was still the same people in the grim Lubyanka building, plying their grisly trade.
Despite Cordingly’s assertion that he immediately recognized parts of Prince’s phrase, she had begun to have doubts when he said it was not an “X-marks-the-spot map.” It had made her seriously consider the possibility the message did not have any connection with the freemasons.
Because if Ava was now right, that was precisely what it was: a map giving the katsa directions—almost certainly to a dead letter box, where she suspected Prince had left something valuable.
She should have twigged straight away, because Prince was not referring to just any dead letter box.
It was the most famous one of all.
Ava remembered being taught about dead letter boxes during her training back at MI6’s centre at Fort Monckton. At first she had thought it all sounded amateurish and melodramatically cloak-and-dagger—largely irrelevant in the modern world of hi-tech gadgetry. She imagined there must be a hundred and one cleverer and more efficient ways to pass data covertly in the computer age.
But that was before her instructors had split the students into teams to set and uncover their own dead letter boxes. It was only then she learned how difficult they were to identify.
She and her fellow students quickly became expert in how to take multiple forms of transport to ‘clean’ off any pursuers before visiting their dead letter boxes. And they were shown how to set pre-agreed signs to indicate when the box was full and needed clearing—anything from the number of plant pots on a balcony to the way a newspaper in a public rubbish bin was folded.
On joining her first desk, she had rapidly seen how effectively dead letter boxes really worked in hostile territory. She quickly understood why they had stood the test of time so well. Their simplicity, anonymity, lack of reliance on gadgetry that could malfunction or be discovered, and their ultimate deniability, were unbeatable.
She raced out of South Kensington’s confusing underground station, and rushed northwards.
The KGB’s main dead letter box in London was legendary. She and her fellow students had all smiled when they were told about it. But they soon realized it was an inspired idea.
It was in a large building with an infinite number of dusty corners. People of all nationalities came and went at all hours, seven days a week, and they moved about it at their own speed, kneeling and standing as they pleased. And none of this behaviour ever raised any eyebrows.
It was a perfect place for hiding information.
She emerged onto Cromwell Road by the leafy twelve-and-a-half-acre site of the Victoria and Albert Museum—the heart of London’s Albertopolis. With around a hundred and fifty galleries filled with decorative arts and thronging crowds, it was a supremely anonymous place.
But she hurried past it, to the smaller building next door.
Built around twenty years later, its pollution-encrusted Portland stone façade meant it could easily have passed for an extension of the museum. But the towering statue of the Virgin Mary high over the porchway gave it away instantly as something else.
It was a Catholic church—a rather grand one.
Ava ran through the iron gate fencing it off from the busy street, and pounded up the six shallow stone steps to its portico.
There were three sets of heavy doors into the building, and she made straight for the nearest one. As she approached, she caught sight of the wooden board screwed to the wall to its right. It displayed the times of mass, and she was surprised to see the fathers of the Oratory still offered a number of daily services in Latin.
She knew it was the first Catholic church to have been built in London after Catholicism became legal again in the mid-1800s, but she had no idea it was so old-fashioned. Even the pope rarely said mass in Latin any more.
It was clearly a very traditional place.
As she pushed open the heavy door and entered the cool of the dark building, she paused to take in the sight.
When she and Cyrus had explained to Ferguson that Christianity was an ancient Roman mystery religion, still largely unchanged after two thousand years, she realized she should just have brought him here.
The church was cavernous, larger than most cathedrals, heavy with neo-classical art and statues. So much so, it looked as if it had been carried stone by stone from ancient Rome. With a little imagination, she could have been in the Roman Pantheon, where the old rites to the pagan gods had eventually given way to the new state religion of Christianity.
As she entered, diagonal tunnels of bright light from the circular windows in the roof pierced the immense gloom, increasing the drama of the ancient scene inside.
The first thing to hit her was the smell. It did not seem to come from anywhere in particular, but to have been impregnated into every inch of the decorated ancient walls, the bi
g-eyed statues, and the gilded portraits of heroic saints hanging in agony and ecstasy.
It was a rich sweet and spicy scent—a heady mix of incense, candle smoke, and polish, recently topped up by the cloud of frankincense and myrrh lingering thickly over the high altar from the mass that had just ended.
The handful of people who had attended were now shuffling towards the doors—some stopping in side chapels to light candles or rub the toes of saints in whom they trusted.
She knew what she was looking for.
The ‘pity’ of the widow.
It was a common statue in Catholic churches—usually known by its Italian name, the pietà. She knew exactly what it would look like. They were always the same—a distraught young mother cradling the mutilated corpse of her executed son.
She thought back to Prince’s message.
The clue she had missed was the word ‘pity’. She could not believe she had not spotted it sooner. Prince’s message read ‘IS THERE NO PITY FOR THE WIDOW’S SON?’ She had remembered that the freemasonic phrase was ‘is there no help for the widow’s son’, but assumed the difference had not been important.
It had.
Prince’s message had not been freemasonic at all.
The widow, Ava was now sure, was the Virgin Mary. According to ancient Church traditions, Mary lost her husband young. Although the Bible did not explicitly say Joseph died, it never mentioned him again after Jesus’ childhood, and the theologians of the early Church quickly concluded Mary had been widowed.
Ava scanned the church for the pietà.
The amount of art ornamenting the building was overwhelming, but as she moved down the south side of the nave, she finally saw it—a wide marble statue behind an iron railing. It was about ten paces in front of her, obvious to anyone walking towards the high altar, just as it had been throughout the Cold War.
It was larger and grander than she had expected—a dramatic and poignant interpretation of a parent’s desolation at the violent death of a child.
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