The Stone of Madness

by Nick Baker

  ‘Of course not. What sort of people do you think I’m acquainted with?’ Lex replied with a look of affront etched on his face. ‘No. Let’s just say that, having worked in the industry for many years, I know some people who’d be very interested in the kind of security system ARC utilises. ARC has a reputation for state of the art technology. If you could tell me some of the, er, shall we say, more advanced aspects of their hardware, I’m sure we’d get a good price for our trouble. A little bit of industrial espionage might be very rewarding for us both. It sounds like we could both do with the cash, and don’t forget who’s responsible for the predicaments we find ourselves in!’

  Thjiis nodded his head slowly as scepticism gave way to greed. ‘How much do you think we’d get?’

  ‘Enough to keep me travelling for another six months and you in plenty of these,’ Lex replied, lifting an empty beer bottle from the table.

  ‘But we could get in trouble,’ Thjiis replied, a little more circumspectly.

  ‘Who would ever find out?’ Lex said nonchalantly. ‘No one would ever make the connection, particularly if we never meet again. Just leave me your bank details, and I’ll wire the cash as soon as I get it. It’s as easy as that.’

  Thjiis started to mouth a protest, but Lex forestalled him with a placatory smile and a shake of the head. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about, Thjiis. After all, ARC owes us, remember?’

  Thjiis nodded in meek acquiescence before proceeding to speak for the best part of an hour with not so much as a second thought, oblivious to Lex pouring another beer into the, by-now, wilting pot plant.

  Lex felt a glow of pride as he sat back and listened to Thjiis wax lyrical about perimeter locks, window alarms and interior sensors before completing his dialogue with the whereabouts of a safe in the curator’s office on the third floor. When he had finished, Thjiis wrote down his bank details on a shabby beer mat, which Lex accepted with relish. After offering Thjiis his hand, Lex got up and left the bar without further ado.

  On his return to the hotel, Lex smiled to himself as he screwed up the piece of card inscribed with Thjiis’ sort code and account number. With a quick turn of the head to ensure he was alone, he tossed the crumpled beer mat high into a starless sky and watched it fall onto the inky black waters of the nearby canal and drift silently away.

  *

  The rain had well and truly soaked through Lex’s supposedly waterproof coat and cast a chill deep into his bones. He pulled up the collar of his dun-coloured raincoat and tipped his beret to prevent the steady trickle of rain running down from his sprawling hair onto the back of his neck. He shivered involuntarily. Despite the low cloud that had not shifted all day, his spirits were high. He had spent most of the morning loitering outside a telephone kiosk waiting for a call while doing his best to discourage the occasional passer-by from entering the booth. Fortunately, no one had challenged him, mainly thanks to the threatening manner he had displayed whenever anyone came near.

  Lex had contacted Aurelia the moment he had arrived in Amsterdam, and she had greeted him with the unwelcome news that Price was also planning a visit to the city, suggesting that the ‘great man’ deemed the theft of the manuscript important enough to track down the second copy for himself. It also implied that Price had tipped-off the library about the Order’s interest in the book, raising the possibility that the curator might move the book to somewhere secure, an eventuality Lex had been hoping to avoid. Because of this, Lex had been tempted to make an immediate move, but he had held his nerve, resulting in the invaluable information he had gleaned from Ackerman.

  Lex had subsequently spoken with Aurelia on a daily basis and had chosen the kiosk just in case the hotel was monitoring his calls, hence the last few hours spent dawdling in the soaking drizzle. When the phone eventually rang, Lex jumped two feet in the air in his rush to answer it, almost knocking a passing cyclist into the nearby canal. The cyclist managed to swerve at the last minute, cursing Lex with a few choice words barked angrily in Dutch.

  Lex barely noticed as he grabbed the receiver and called out, ‘Yes,’ in a breathless frenzy. Much to his relief, it was Aurelia on the other end of the line bearing the exceptional news that she had managed to delay Price by another twenty-four hours on his journey to the city. It was just what Lex was hoping for, thus giving him free rein to break into the library without interference from Price.

  He looked melancholically at the kiosk, knowing he would not need it again, and set off for the hotel. As he strode purposefully along Bloemstraat, he could not resist a smile at this fortunate turn of events. Once safely ensconced in the hotel, his thoughts returned to the small matter of retrieving the book.

  At eight p.m., much to the surprise of the desk clerk, Lex checked out of the hotel and set off in search of a café in the cosmopolitan area of the Jordaan. En route, he passed the tall, imposing four-storey frontage of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, and noted with satisfaction that the library was already shrouded in dark.

  Lex was travelling light, having replaced the metallic case with a compact rucksack safely strapped over his shoulders. The holdall looked far lighter than its contents gave credit for, jammed with all the tools he had selected for the job, including a bespoke assortment of painstakingly packed instruments and volatile chemicals. Lex walked steadily upright to avoid the risk of a fall; he was no physicist but understood the concept of critical mass should he stumble.

  The debonair café Lex chose for a leisurely supper was just a few minutes’ walk from the library and was bustling by the time his Dutch pea soup arrived. A pretty waitress had taken his order thirty minutes earlier when the restaurant was quiet, and rather than being dismayed by the slow service, he had been content to sit and watch his fellow diners socialising and enjoying their food.

  Lex took his time eating the thick, green soup, which was hot and appetising in equal measure. After drinking a stimulating cup of strong Dutch coffee, he left the café and was pleased to note that the surrounding district was already showing signs of quietening down.

  He scouted the streets for almost an hour before making for the library, having planned to enter just after midnight when the streets would be deserted—the perfect time to scale the walls, break-in and acquire the book. If all went to plan, he would be out in time to catch the early morning train and keep his rendezvous with the skipper. All being well, if the crossing were a little more favourable than the outward journey, he would be back in Blighty before anyone realised the book was gone.

  Lex was alerted to the appointed hour when the bell rang out from the nearby Westerntower, twelve loud chimes to signal the end of one day and the beginning of the next. He looked up and squinted, barely able to make out the silhouette of the tower set against a jet-black sky. As he turned into Bloemstraat from the intersection between Rozengracht and Prinsengracht, he pulled up the collar of his coat. He turned towards the library, awash with a dull glow from the neon streetlights, and tipped the peak of his baseball cap, casting his features into shadow. The street was empty, but Lex had no intention of breaking in from here; it was far too vulnerable to prying eyes.

  Lex scrutinised the three asymmetric, interconnected buildings that comprised the library. It was the first and tallest of the buildings that interested him most, consisting of an attic and three floors nestled beneath a steeply curving roof that resembled an old warehouse. The rarest and most valuable books were located on the third floor, and this was where he expected to find the manuscript, either on the shelves or in the safe.

  He ambled nonchalantly past the library and turned into an alley deeply cast in shadow. After a few loping strides, he halted at a tall iron gate nestled between sheer brick walls. He peered upwards and eyed with dismay the unscalable tangle of barbed wire sitting on top of the gate.

  He unstrapped the backpack and set it down at his feet, freeing the clips to reveal an array of miscellaneous tools, meticulously stowed in exactly the right order. He withdrew a sturdy metal
vacuum flask brimful of liquid nitrogen. He pushed the canister’s long, thin nozzle into the cylindrical lock, and gave the controlling lever a squeeze. The liquid vapourised into clouds of nitrogen gas that billowed from the nozzle, hissing like an alley cat, and once he was confident that the metal pins had frozen, he shoved a pencil-thin screwdriver into the keyhole. After a hefty twist, the lock shattered like glass. He was not called Liquid Lex without good reason, and with a wry smile, he retrieved the rucksack and shouldered the gate.

  Lex hurried through the gap into a deserted courtyard abutting the library’s towering rear wall and slipped off his heavy woollen overcoat, bundling it into a pile at the foot of the wall before rummaging through the backpack for a bizarre pair of fabric gloves and overshoes. He huffed and puffed as he squeezed the unyielding material onto his paws, but eventually, and with some trepidation, he slipped his arms through the straps of the pack and began to climb. Like a besuited Peter Parker, he reached out, tentatively at first, pulling himself skywards along the library’s sheer wall, and after leaving a first-floor window in his wake, his confidence soared.

  As he climbed, he marvelled at Abel’s ingenuity in providing him with such a wondrous new accoutrement to his villainous trade. Abel called them his ‘Gecko Gloves’, and as Lex edged closer to the library’s summit, he even had time to reflect on Abel’s baffling explanation of how the gloves clung to masonry as if stuck with glue.

  When Abel had visited him two weeks earlier bearing gifts that would allow the scaling of buildings with consummate ease, Lex had struggled to contain his excitement. After all, he had performed similar feats in the past with nothing more glamorous than a grappling hook and rope, and he could remember all too well the time he had toppled fifteen feet to the ground when a parapet on the rooftop of a Parisian art gallery had given way. A fractured radius was one thing, but smuggling objects another, and not having to acquire additional equipment on his arrival in Amsterdam had been a major boon.

  Abel had excelled himself this time in fabricating the Gecko Gloves there was no doubting it. Despite his fumbling exterior, he had once again demonstrated the brilliance of a mind few could aspire to. He had explained that the unique material, fabricated in the Academy’s laboratory, was based on a gecko’s remarkable gravity-defying ability to climb walls. Unfortunately, when he described how the microscopic elastic hairs covering the lizard’s toes were split into terminal spatulas, allowing the gecko to hold onto surfaces because of van der Waals forces, the weakest of all intermolecular attractive forces, Lex soon lost interest.

  During Abel’s subsequent discourse on the alchemical process required to synthesise a polymeric material of multi-walled carbon nanotube hairs, Lex’s mind was already elsewhere, imagining the dastardly applications to which he could put the amazing gloves and shoes; scaling walls and hanging from ceilings to name but two. Lex did not care about the large surface area of the flexible structures that demonstrated strong nanometre-level adhesion forces two hundred times greater than the hairs on a gecko’s foot. All that mattered was that they worked, and here he was in the heart of the city scaling a one hundred-foot building because of a force named after a former Professor of Physics at the University of Amsterdam! How ironic, he thought as he pulled himself over the gable end of the roof wearing Abel’s Gecko Gloves in all their adhesive glory.

  After clambering onto the rooftop, Lex relaxed, safe in the knowledge that he was no longer visible to anyone on the ground. He glanced at the gently glowing hands of his wristwatch and smiled. Twenty past midnight; plenty of time to break in, find the book and escape. Demonstrating dexterity borne of daily Yoga routines, he stashed the Gecko Gloves in his backpack and set off across the steeply pitched roof towards an angled skylight barely visible in the low light.

  Lex edged carefully towards the window, slipped the backpack from his shoulders and wedged the straps between two conveniently crooked slates. He rifled through the bag for a powerful torch and began a systematic evaluation of the window. Just as Ackerman had described, there was a magnetic contact switch on the frame and foiling inside the glass. Any attempt to open the window would separate the contact from the magnet and release a lever that would break the circuit to set off an alarm. Additionally, a thin piece of foil ran around the perimeter of the glass and inserted into two terminals to form a closed electrical circuit, thus breaking the glass would tear the delicate foil, and once again, the alarm would trigger.

  Armed with this information, Lex knew that he could neither open the window nor break the glass without setting off the alarm, but this did not deter him; after all, he had done this many times before. Using a thick black crayon purloined from a nearby kindergarten, Lex began to draw. Round and round he went, marking a perfect circle in the centre of the glass an inch wider than the girth of his waist. Leaving the circle free, he systematically reinforced the surrounding glass with duct tape. Then, with fastidiousness bordering on obsession, he scored the circle using a diamond-tipped glass-cutter, tracing and retracing the line in a leisurely manner. With each passing rotation, the glass gradually weakened. Finally, he took a blob of modelling clay and adapted it carefully against the unadulterated inner circle of glass.

  He took a deep breath, and with the precision of a surgeon, he lightly tapped all the way round the score mark with a dainty silver hammer while pressing an ear to the glass. He had performed this action many times before, and with his hearing attuned to the task, he could detect any slight change in sound that would forewarn him of a poorly propagating crack.

  Tap-tap … tap-tap … tap-tap … and then, suddenly, the glass gave way, spiralling earthbound in a trajectory of eccentric beauty. The duct tape had done its job, leaving the window perfectly intact apart from a gaping hole in its centre. Lex watched in fascination as the glass tumbled towards the attic floor, even failing to shatter as it hit the rafters due to the retentiveness of the clay. He waited with bated breath for the sound burglars know and love so well—silence.

  He tossed the rucksack through the window and followed feet first with all the elegance of an Olympic gymnast. He bent his legs, landing perfectly on two feet with barely a sound. He smiled. He was in! He retrieved the torch and sent a powerful beam of light flitting back and forth across the steeply sloping roof. There, nestled between two large storage boxes fifteen feet away, was the hatch Ackerman had described that led down to the library.

  The air in the confined space of the attic was dank, and as Lex crawled along creaking rafters, myriad cobwebs danced around his face like a curtain of shimmering gossamer. By the time he reached the hatch, the urge to cough was overpowering, but rather than yank open the communicating door for the fresh air residing on the other side, he spent some moments recalling Ackerman’s description of the room situated twelve feet below his current position.

  The library’s third floor reading room was a simple rectangular affair with a trapdoor in the ceiling conveniently opening into the centre of the room. Rows of books adorned the walls with infrared motion security alarms protecting the stairwell at one end and a small office at the other. He had seen it all before in various museums, banks and art galleries around the world, and like all the other heists he had previously orchestrated, this would be no different. The alarms were perfectly placed to intercept an unwary burglar approaching from downstairs but they had not been positioned with an approach from the roof in mind. Lex shook his head in disgust; sometimes it was all too easy.

  He rummaged inside the rucksack and withdrew an elongated pair of odd-looking goggles, slipping them onto his forehead and tightening the elastic to ensure that they would not fall down over his eyes. Lex was especially proud of the goggles, having purloined them from the desk of a military bigwig while rummaging through the drawers in search of a top-secret document for Pearly. He had picked the goggles up on a whim because of their curious appearance, and although he had not realised it at the time, he had serendipitously procured a set of the most up-to-date night vis
ion devices known to the army.

  After foolishly asking for a demonstration of how the goggles worked, Abel’s subsequent discourse on infrared image intensification tubes that focused light onto a photocathode plate, causing the emission of electrons to strike a second plate, thus producing an image recognisable to the human eye, was all but lost on Lex. Nevertheless, it took him no time to realise how useful the goggles would be, no more so than in the next few minutes.

  The neglected trapdoor creaked in protest as Lex hauled it open. He poked his head through the gap and peered into the pitch black room below. He pulled the goggles over his eyes and the view changed in an instant. The motion sensors at opposite ends of the room emitted narrow beams of infrared light that were invisible to the naked eye, but shone with a sickly green hue through the viewfinders of Lex’s goggles to illuminate the room as clear as day.

  Lex dispensed with the torch and lowered himself from the attic, swinging like a lemur as he dropped to the floor. He looked around in wonder at the thousands of books surrounding him, orderly arranged by subject, and after orientating himself to make sure he did not encroach on the alarms, he began a systematic evaluation of the room. He started with the ancient wooden bookcase housing books under the subject heading of Alchemy, but after withdrawing and carefully reading the title and author’s name of every single book, he found no trace of Piotrowski’s work. He moved on to the adjacent bookcases. Anthroposophy … then Freemasonry … Gnosis … followed by Grail, Hermetica, Kabbalah, Knights Templar, Mysticism, Rosicrucianism, Sufi, Theosophy. Nothing! The book was not there.

  He approached the only bookcase he had not already searched. Western Esotericism. Lex nodded confidently, recalling Piotrowski’s association with the Esoteric Brotherhood. He trailed a finger methodically across the spine of each book, alphabetically arranged by the author’s name: Faivre, Guénon, Hanegraaf, Lévi, Papus … Schuré. A space! There was a gap barely wide enough to house a single book. He stared in horror and cursed. Piotrowski’s book was missing!