3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  ‘And of course, Ashe, let us not forget that if Abraham was Mithanni, and the Mithannis were Aryans – as they have been called – then, my dear boy, the children of Abraham are the descendants of an Aryan aristocracy! So Hitler’s mob murdered the true Aryans. Ironic, is it not?’

  Ashe paused, the profundity dawning on him. ‘My God! What would people think of that? The Jews – as Aryan as the ancient Iranians and Brahmins! From this standpoint, the Nazis had to fabricate the whole Atlantis-Nordic legend to make up for the fact they weren’t real Aryans! They must subconsciously have felt inferior to the Jews.’

  ‘The inferiority complex can be a very dangerous and very powerful thing. It has turned many a man into a raving lunatic. God help us when the lunatics seize the reins of power! That’s what ODDBALLS is all about, Ashe: catch ’em while you can!’

  The two men were halfway down the dark, narrow passage of Brasenose Lane. Glorious Radcliffe Square, with its great domed library chamber, the Radcliffe Camera, opened before them. But as he entered the porter’s lodge of Brasenose College, Ashe was oblivious to his environment. His thoughts were at last becoming clear. He had to go on.

  ‘The thing is, sir, what your work adds up to is this. What the world has been taught to accept as true is a pack of lies. And these Yezidis, they’re really onto something.’

  ‘Is that why they have been persecuted, Ashe?’

  75

  The college scouts were already delivering the prawn cocktail starters to the guests seated at High Table. Crayke stood at ease, surveying Brasenose’s 500-year-old hall until he caught Sir Moses Beerbohm’s restless eye. Smiling broadly, the rotund Nobel Prize-winner summoned Crayke to sit beside him.

  ‘Ran! Ranald Crayke! My dear chap, how marvellous to see you! Glad to know that Baghdad does let you get away on occasion.’

  ‘There’s life beyond, dear friend. Do you know Dr Toby Ashe?’

  ‘Delighted. Didn’t you write a book, Dr Ashe? The Generous…?’

  ‘Gene. Yes, Sir Moses. All my fault.’

  ‘Come, come! It wasn’t strictly science, but it wasn’t rubbish either. What is your current field?’

  Crayke interjected. ‘For the moment, let’s call it “aspects of Mesopotamian civilisation”. Ancient, mostly. Toby has a question for you.’

  Ashe winced at being put on the spot.

  ‘Don’t let old Crayke take liberties, Ashe. What’s the question?’

  Ashe looked at Crayke. Crayke’s eyes widened. ‘What was that extraordinary story you told me? The one about Adam and Eve.’

  ‘Sounds like Genesis, not genetics, Ran, old boy!’

  ‘Same concept, surely, Moshe!’

  ‘Come, come! Must keep science and religion apart.’

  Crayke nudged Ashe in the ribs, discreetly.

  ‘Well, Sir Moses, it’s… it’s about people… a people I’ve been studying. They have this legend about Adam arguing with Eve.’

  ‘How very true to life!’

  ‘Eve insists she can have children by herself; she doesn’t need Adam.’

  ‘Eve – the original feminist!’

  ‘And Adam says she’s wrong. She needs him.’

  ‘The original fantasist!’ Beerbohm’s massive frame bobbed with laughter.

  ‘So, Sir Moses, Adam and Eve decide to test the merits of their convictions by conducting experiments.’

  ‘I don’t know who these people are, Dr Ashe, but they sound like proper scientists.’

  ‘So Adam and Eve both place their respective reproductive—’

  ‘Not over lunch, surely!’

  ‘Pardon me. They put the product of their fertilities into separate jars and leave them for the prescribed period. After the gestation season, the jars are opened.’

  ‘Is that the question, Dr Ashe – what was in each jar?’

  ‘No. That’s been answered. Eve’s jar was opened. Inside they found a putrid mess.’

  ‘How disappointing for her. And in Adam’s jar?’

  ‘Two healthy, bouncy children. A boy and a girl.’

  ‘The question?’

  ‘What do you think was the story’s original meaning?’

  ‘Goodness! Well, my dear boy, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say this old tale constituted an ancient insight into the relative significance of X and Y chromosomes. An intuitive realisation that a sperm bearing a Y chromosome makes an embryo into a male. A gene on that chromosome leads the growing embryo on the road to masculinity, regardless of the number of X chromosomes. It’s something in the male’s sperm that does the job.’

  Ashe stared at Crayke; Crayke smiled, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘May I enquire, Dr Ashe, as to the provenance of this mythological titbit?’ Beerbohm picked up a loose prawn, and swallowed it.

  ‘It’s a Yezidi story, Sir Moses.’

  ‘Yezidi? Where have I heard that?’

  ‘From me, you old duffer!’

  ‘Of course, Ran. Kurds! Northern Iraq. Armenia. Now I remember. Was a time you talked of little else.’

  Beerbohm went quiet for a while. Goblets of wine were filled and Dover sole was served.

  Ashe could hardly believe his direct hit. He was about to get another.

  ‘Ran, old boy! Perhaps your friend Ashe here would be interested in some of the latest research concerning the Kurds.’

  ‘Research?’

  ‘Their genes, man! Not really my field, but there’s an interesting link between some Jews, and some Kurds and Armenians.’

  Ashe slapped his silver cutlery on the polished table.

  ‘Please, Ashe!’

  ‘Sorry, sir. Please, Sir Moses. I’d like to know more.’

  ‘We all would, my dear fellow. That’s why we’re still here. Well, as I recall – and that’s not much – the work in question is being carried out by Michael Hammer, who’s a fine geneticist, and a nephrologist, Karl Skorecki. The team’s been building on a study by Ariella Oppenheim, carried out at the National Academy of Sciences in the USA. Can’t be sure, but I think there was a contribution from my old protégé and plagiarist, Sami al-Qasr.’

  The name ‘al-Qasr’ stuck out like a sore thumb. Al-Qasr, the son of the fanatical anti-Semite and anti-Mason; al-Qasr, the beneficiary of Istanbul bomber Razak’s forgery skills. Now, al-Qasr the geneticist, whom Sir Moses accused of stealing ideas! Ashe began to wonder if he had been chasing the wrong fox altogether.

  ‘Are you there, Dr Ashe?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sir Moses. I was just taking in what you were saying about the genetic link.’

  ‘Between some Jews and Kurds, yes. Well, the team discovered a haplotype.’

  ‘Haplo…?’

  ‘Haplotype. Surely you remember? Genetic mutation in the chromosome, or what we call a “marker”. The team called their new one the Cohen Modal Haplotype.’

  ‘Sounds like a sixties psychedelic band, Sir Moses.’

  ‘Well, you’ll know more about that sort of thing than I do.’

  ‘Why the “Cohen” bit?’

  ‘The Cohen bit, Dr Ashe, comes from a Jewish word for “priest”. It was a fairly common Jewish surname, indicating descendants of Judaean priests of two thousand years ago, when the Jews had their priesthood and temple in Jerusalem. Something like 56 per cent of Sephardic Cohens have the haplotype. Sephardic Jews have ancestors that can be traced to southwest Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Anyhow, a lot of geneticists got quite excited about it. There’s a chap here in Oxford, David Goldstein. He reckoned the chromosomal type was a constituent of the ancestral Hebrew population.’

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Interesting, certainly. Anyhow, it turns out the Cohen Modal Haplotype was not specific to the descendants of Jews.

  ‘Dr Levon Yepiskoposyan at Armenia’s Institute of Man in Yerevan found the haplotype in some Armenians. Looking further into the Transcaucasus region, Dr Brinkmann found the haplotype was actually common among Iraqi Kurds. And Ariella Oppenheim found the domin
ant haplotype of the Iraqi Kurds was only one microsatellite-mutation step away from the Cohen Modal Haplotype. Pretty significant. So, to sum up, the haplotype evidence supports the view that Kurds and Armenians are close relatives of today’s Jews. That probably means the majority of Jews today have paternal ancestry from the northeastern Mediterranean region.’

  Ashe could hardly contain his excitement: solid scientific support for his hypothesis. ‘Let me get this right, Sir Moses. You’re saying, in effect, that the Jews and the Kurds are related.’

  ‘Going on the haplotype evidence, absolutely. A lot of Jews and Kurds are related – distantly anyway.’

  ‘Could Abraham have come from what is now Kurdistan?’

  Sir Moses thought for a moment. A twinkle appeared in his eye. ‘Yes, I suppose he could. And from what I remember of the Bible, that would make sense of a lot of his movements. I don’t know what difference it would make to anyone, but yes, it’s more than possible that ancestors of Jewish people began their existence in an area within or near to Kurdistan. Is that useful at all, gentlemen?’

  Two hours later, Ashe and Crayke stood on the step outside the Brasenose gatehouse. Eyes red from drink, their hearts were euphoric.

  ‘Must be the wine, Ashe. Let’s pull ourselves together. Do you know Lee Kellner?’

  ‘Director of the Counter Terrorism Centre, CIA.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Never met him, sir.’

  ‘Time you did. Zappa’s been trying to wheedle intel from me about Sami al-Qasr. Seems al-Qasr’s disgraced himself again and quit the US. The CTC must be desperate if they’re nudging Zappa in my direction.’ He seized Ashe’s shoulder and whispered, ‘Time’s come to nudge you in theirs.’

  76

  Only a few minutes’ drive from the centre of Washington DC, the Morrison House Hotel in South Alfred Street, Alexandria Old Town, was the perfect place for Ashe to collect his thoughts. A fine Federal-style red-brick house with arched sash windows, the hotel resembled nothing so much as a grand survivor of the 1864 Atlanta burning immortalised in Gone with the Wind. It was General Sherman who ordered the Atlanta conflagration and Ashe enjoyed the irony that it was another Sherman who introduced him to the warm Southern hospitality of the 4-star Virginian hotel 140 years later.

  Having fixed a meeting with Kellner for later that afternoon, Beck left Ashe sitting quietly in the warm sunlight of an early eighteenth-century-style parlour ‘Grille’. A genial black pianist played not ‘As Time Goes By’, but Debussy’s ‘Danse Bohémienne’. Even so, Ashe could not but dream that from among the immaculately dressed, refreshingly discreet ladies who sipped champagne on polished antique Windsor chairs, a latter-day Ingrid Bergman might yet appear with a story and an ache for meaningful adventure. Finding little inspiration in the large splashes of colour framed like Picassos to encourage enthusiasm for cocktails, Ashe looked to the pianist’s fingers that acrobatically surmounted the tones and semitones, sharps and flats of the shiny keyboard.

  While Ashe had felt hot on the trail where Crayke’s researches were concerned, it was by no means obvious how to apply his new knowledge to the key questions.

  Who was responsible for the Kartal Lodge bombing?

  How was Kartal linked to the attack on the Tower?

  The picture was a tangle and the clarity of his surroundings mocked his attempts at untangling it.

  There had been disappointments. Trust in Colonel Aslan might be misplaced; Aslan had his own concerns, lodged, it seemed, within Turkish security priorities. Though he had grounds to suspect Aslan had used him to locate Yildiz and Yazar for internal Turkish purposes, he could not prove it. Had Aslan misled him? That might be going too far, but there was something suspicious about Aslan’s reticence where the Baba Sheykh’s presence on the Lodge guest list was concerned; Aslan’s changed attitude struck Ashe as significant – but what did it signify?

  If Aslan was not to be trusted, what of Aslan’s belief that the Kartal Lodge atrocity was connected to the Tower bombing? Was this a blind? Maybe, but a new concern had emerged: Sami al-Qasr.

  There was certainly a British angle to al-Qasr. He was a contact of Hafiz Razak’s, the pro-al-Qaeda terrorist linked directly to attacks on British interests in Istanbul. Al-Qasr had significant British experience, including acquaintance with high-level scientific figures with intelligence contacts, such as Moses Beerbohm. Al-Qasr had quit Britain in the eighties to undertake secret work for Saddam and subsequently for the US. The British had tried to frustrate al-Qasr’s military-scientific work in 1992, when the RAF had bombed a facility he used north of Basra. That much was clear from al-Qasr’s old file. If al-Qasr followed his father’s beliefs, hatred for a so-called ‘Jewish-Masonic conspiracy’ could have been a motivator, as well as a grudge against Britain whose air force might have wrecked his plans.

  Ashe looked at his watch. The meeting at Gadsby’s Tavern with Kellner and Beck was scheduled for 3 p.m. With only a quarter of an hour in hand, Ashe declined the hotel’s generous offer of a car and chauffeur, stepped down from the hotel’s pillared portico, and headed east along King Street, past the village-like colonial houses and overgrown grass verges towards the centre of Old Town Alexandria. Only the parked cars spoilt the near-illusion of a vanished America.

  Ashe’s thoughts were racing. As Sami al-Qasr loomed larger in his investigations, he also had to contend with the emergence of another mystery figure. How had the Baba Sheykh entered the scene, and what did that mean?

  It had been Laila who had mentioned him first. In her anxiety to find her brother, she had brought the sheykh to Ashe’s attention. Now the sheykh and Laila’s brother were in Germany, or so Laila believed. Meanwhile, Crayke’s work pointed to endogamy in the sheykh’s family, a fact of genetic importance still obscure to the overall picture.

  Then there was Aslan.

  Aslan either regarded the sheykh as insignificant, or else wished to deflect Ashe’s attention from the sheykh’s place on the Lodge guest list. But there was another possibility. Any link between the sheykh and the Lodge bombing might have been coincidental. After all, had it not been for Laila, Ashe would never have heard of him. Perhaps the Baba Sheykh was a red herring. But then there was the genetic side of the picture: an ancient link between Jews and Kurds. And genetics was al-Qasr’s territory.

  An odd connection with Freemasonry ran through the picture. While al-Qasr may have been motivated to attack Freemasonry, Laila believed the Baba Sheykh wanted to harness Freemasonry in support of the Yezidi cause.

  More confused than ever, Ashe turned into North Royal Street, opposite Alexandria’s Market Square. Feeling nervous, he approached the multi-storey Gadsby’s Tavern, opposite Alexandria’s City Hall with its splendid clock-tower. Ashe could only hope Kellner would shed light on the conundrum. If Kellner could not, Ashe had better keep his expenses to the minimum.

  77

  Dubbed the ‘finest old tavern in America’, Gadsby’s was a fabulous survivor from pre-industrial times. It had been a tavern since at least 1785, and by the end of the eighteenth century had been developed into a successful hotel by English entrepreneur John Gadsby. During a colourful history, it had played host to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. It had also played host to Toby Ashe. Ashe had been invited by Washington’s Alexandria Masonic Lodge No. 22 to address their annual St John the Baptist Festival some years previously. Happy memories of that occasion encouraged Ashe to suggest it as a suitable venue for his first meeting with Lee Kellner. A Mason himself, Kellner agreed to the location with alacrity.

  The sight of two conspicuous limousines and a pair of obvious secret service operatives outside the tavern brought a smile to Ashe’s face. In America, it seemed, even the secret service relied on advertising. Recognising Ashe, the agents checked his ID and led him inside, across the polished white-oak floor of the old-time downstairs bar and restaurant to a private conference room upstairs. The candlelit dining room had hardly altered since 1814, when,
across town, a British army had burned down Washington’s White House and Capitol in retaliation for US support of Bonaparte and a planned invasion of Canada. How times had changed!

  Kellner and Beck rose, smiling, from their seats round the antique table as a well-frisked Ashe was shown in by the two alert agents guarding the room and corridor.

  ‘Welcome to Washington, Dr Ashe! I must say I admire your taste. Good of you to get me and Agent Beck here out of Langley. Care for a snack? Beck and I just ordered a Chesapeake Bay crab-cake sandwich.’

  Ashe observed the bottle of Rapidan River Merlot on the table.

  ‘A glass of the local vino will do very nicely, thank you.’

  ‘Not eating?’

  ‘Prefer to eat after the meeting. I was hoping you’d join me at the hotel.’

  Kellner looked at Beck. ‘Cancel the sandwiches.’

  In spite of the rumble in Beck’s stomach, the meeting got off to a good start. There was an instant spark between Kellner and Ashe. Beck, on the other hand, was wary and a mite suspicious of Ashe’s charm; it eclipsed his own. Beck couldn’t help feeling that Ashe would have preferred to speak to Kellner alone. In this he was correct; Ashe had requested a head-to-head, but Kellner wanted the factual backup and didn’t want to have to repeat whatever might pass between himself and the Englishman. Unlike Beck, who was fond of admonishing others to ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’, Kellner was not unduly suspicious of Englishmen. If the Brits were the new Greeks and the Americans the new Romans, that was fine; roots mattered.

  Kellner had intended to get the ball rolling by explaining the concerns the US had about sharing intelligence with the British. Doubts about British security went at least as far back as the catastrophic disclosures of Burgess, Philby and co. Furthermore, there were voluble US critics who saw Great Britain as hampered by human-rights legislation, a soft-option hang-out for jihadists and anti-Americanism. However, one look at Ashe’s smile and knowing eyes, together with the thought of his old friend Ran Crayke, told Kellner that Ashe knew all this anyway and they might as well put at least some of their cards on the table and cut to the chase.