Brotherhood of the Tomb (9 page)

Whoever had tied them had done a good job: not too tight, not too loose. Just right. Once they were firmly fastened in their chairs, of course the rest had been easy. They had probably bought the plastic bags and rubber bands in Quinnsworth’s. They could not have cost them more than a pound.

Behind the plastic, the faces were chalk white. Natalya Pavlovna’s alabaster neck was creased and swollen. A small patch of cerulean blue had appeared on her left cheek. Chekulayev’s tongue protruded like a rubber cork, black and ugly.

The heads had been shaven. Hair lay discarded on the floor, an innocent reminder of old barber shops. Patrick stepped up close. On each scalp three figures had been inscribed in ballpen: 666.

He looked up. On the wall behind, the same pen had been used to write a single line in Greek:

Patrick recognized it. The words came from the Book of Revelations:

Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?

He glanced at the shaven heads and remembered another verse from the same chapter:

Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and

six.

‘666’: the number of the Beast. He prayed nobody he knew was behind all this.

ELEVEN

They were walking through St Stephen’s Green, a little like lovers, a little like strangers. Everywhere, sculpted faces watched them pass: Mangan and Markievicz, Emmet and Tone and Kettle - poets and freedom fighters turned to civic amenities. There was a little sunlight: not enough to send the clouds packing, but sufficient to lift people’s spirits an inch or two. Buskers had played for them at the top of Grafton Street, A Raibh Tu ag an gCarraig, the pipes muted, the tin whistle sweet and swollen with its painful melancholy. They had taken lunch at the Shelbourne, then crossed the road directly into the park.

Everything seemed normal here: children played or fed the ducks on the tiny lake, lovers embraced on benches, old men in shabby coats lingered by the bandstand, as though waiting for it to fill again with music. It was not yet spring, but the air held a promise of change. On Grafton Street, old Lord Mustard danced to jazz tunes in a silly hat.

Sometimes she held his hand, at others she folded her arms and walked ahead of him, as though impatient to be somewhere. She was wearing a long fur coat from Zwirn with Pancaldi shoes, and for the first time he thought she looked out of place. She wore them as a means of distancing herself from the squalor of her occupation, from the everyday demeaning acts she performed in the name of reason. He thought of her clothes more as symbols or guarantees of loyalty: Ruth Ehlers could not be bought. Not, at least, for money.

‘I want you to leave, Patrick,’ she said. Beside

them, a fountain of green and bronze bulrushes threw water high into the February sky. ‘I mean it: don’t get involved in this thing any further.’

It was the first time she had referred to the subject all day. Oddly enough, it seemed to bring her closer, as though she felt easier dealing with an impersonal matter.

‘I am involved. I was involved from the beginning.’

‘But that’s as far as it goes. Let somebody else handle it now. You gave this all up, remember?’

‘I’ve been recommissioned, Ruth. You don’t just walk away from a friend’s body.’

They were standing beside the white marble relief of Roisin Dubh, beneath Mangan’s placid bust. Ruth stroked the pale face with a gloved hand.

‘Yes, Patrick, you do. If you want to stay alive. Listen, I’ve been putting the pieces of this thing together.’

‘And?’

‘A few weeks ago, we intercepted a signal from a Soviet AGI ship off Malin Head. When I say “we”, I mean the radio intercept station at Hacklaw in Scotland, run by the British. They passed it on among a pile of routine stuff to the NSA’s liaison office at Benhall Park. Benhall passed it to us.’

He had heard about AGIs - Auxiliary General Intelligence vessels, Okean-class ships the Soviets kept moored off the coast of Donegal. Their main function was to keep track of US nuclear submarines using Holy Loch as home base.

‘Usually,’ Ruth went on, ‘these are low-grade signals intended for their agents in Ireland. Routine stuff, usually something to do with the IRA. But this one had taken Benhall three days to crack. I got to see it the day it arrived. If I’d known then...’ She paused. A gust of wind caught her scarf. It flew across

the marble face like a multi-coloured veil, before she caught it and wound it round her neck again.

‘The message came from the very top, Patrick -from Moscow Centre, from General Kurakin, Chief of the First Directorate. It was addressed to the rezidentura in Dublin. It began with apologies for sending the message by such an insecure route, but there had been no time to arrange for anything better. Dublin station was to drop everything it was doing and get ready for the arrival of somebody very important. The code-name was unfamiliar to us. He was known as “Obelisk”.’

Patrick had been watching a bird preening itself on a nearby bush, a robin escaped from a Christmas card. He turned and took Ruth’s arm tightly, drawing her away from the marble figure down the path.

‘It’s cold,’ he said, ‘let’s go back.’

They headed for the bridge over the little lakes.

‘You know who I’m talking about, don’t you, Patrick? You know who “Obelisk” was.’

‘Of course. Chekulayev. It’s his old name, it’s always been his name.’

‘We didn’t know that. Not then. No one thought to check on their Middle East agents. It didn’t seem obvious, not then.’

They came out onto the street, into the mid-afternoon traffic, and headed up towards Baggot Street.

‘There were no more messages from Centre after that, not through the AGIs anyway. We notified Irish intelligence, kept a look-out for ourselves, but he slipped through. We think he was dropped off the coast from a sub one dark night. Or maybe he just flew into Dublin airport, God knows. Patrick, we didn’t think about the Middle East. Maybe I should have guessed - knowing you were in Dublin.’

‘You weren’t the only one who knew I was here.’

‘No, but... I had more reason to think about you.’

They were walking arm in arm now. Away from the open spaces of the park, she seemed smaller. Her breath hung white and momentary on the frozen air. He could feel it burn his cheek when she turned to speak.

We knew he’d arrived,’ she continued, ‘because a few days later we picked up a signal from the rezidentura using the same code as the earlier message. That was careless. The signal was signed “Obelisk” and referred to something called “Passover”. He’d started work, he said. Two days later, you disappeared.’

She held him more tightly, as though frightened he would vanish again, like smoke, like warm breath on cold air, like a thought started but not completed. An elderly nun smiled at them in complicity as she hurried past. Only the celibate truly understand the meaning of passion.

‘Even then I failed to make the connection. “Obelisk”, “Passover” - Jesus, Patrick, it should have been obvious.’

‘Nothing’s obvious in this business. Look, what’s so worrying about all this? Dublin station knew Chekulayev was here, nobody warned me, I found out the hard way. So, why the sudden panic?’

‘No panic, Patrick. Just sensible precautions.’ She paused. ‘I haven’t told you everything. We got the NSA to feed the code-name into their computer system at Fort Meade. They carry records of all diplomatic and SIGINT traffic in and out of Ireland. That includes all their own intercepts from Menwith Hill and Morwenstow in England, which covers all Intelsat V communications through Elfordstown, as well as anything GCHQ feeds in. They use a word-recognition

programme that can handle four million characters a second. We asked them to track the word “Passover” in about a dozen languages over the past month.’

‘And?’

We got nothing. Not a damn thing. We tried “Obelisk” and “Chekulayev” - still nothing. Somebody suggested “Easter”, but all that gave us was a couple of routine messages from the Vatican to their nunciature. Then the penny dropped. I fed your name in.’

As though by mutual accord, they stopped. They were just crossing the bridge over the Grand Canal between Lower and Upper Baggot Street. Like half-finished wire casings, frozen trees flanked the water’s edge, stretching into the distance in either direction. He let her speak.

‘You got three mentions. Number one was from somebody in Tel Aviv to a friend in the Israeli embassy, wanting to know what the hell you were doing in Dublin. The second was peculiar. It was a radio message using a diplomatic wavelength and a standard code, but the transmitter was located somewhere on the west coast, near Galway. It was beamed somewhere towards southern Europe - northern Italy or Yugoslavia, perhaps. You’d been seen visiting Eamonn De Faoite. Someone had run a check on you and discovered you were with the Company. They thought you still were.’

She turned and looked down the canal, in the direction of Mount Street. Trees like guttered candles, lifeless, without flame. Water like base metal, flowing silently between grass and concrete.

‘You said there were three. Three messages.’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated. He noticed how she bit her lower lip, small white teeth on the red flesh. We think it was the reply to the second, a telephone call.

All the NSA can tell us is that the call originated in Venice, Italy. The number’s untraceable. It went to a number outside Oughterard, a little place not far from Lake Corrib, to a holiday cottage. It was taken by an answering device.’ She paused.

‘Yes?’

‘The cottage has been empty all winter, Patrick. Locked up. Or so the owner says. We sent someone to check. There was no answering machine. The telephone was disconnected.’

‘What was the message?’

‘It was in Italian. The speaker left instructions that you were to be eliminated along with Eamonn De Faoite. Your house was to be searched for papers, papers De Faoite might have given you.’

‘When was it sent?’

‘Three weeks ago. About twenty-four hours before you found De Faoite murdered.’ She turned to him, tense, angry, almost weeping. ‘For God’s sake, Patrick, the cottage wasn’t empty when our people got out there. There was a child, a boy of ten. What was left of him. The heart had been cut out: they found some of it later in a garbage can. It had been burned. He ... The doctor thought he’d been dead about a week. We got an ID on him yesterday.’

All about them the world seemed ordinary. Traffic passed in a constant stream. Only yards away, a small queue had formed at the Bank of Ireland cash machine on the corner of Haddington Road. And they stood on the bridge talking of children with their hearts ripped out.

‘His name was Alessandro Clemente, the son of Paolo Clemente, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs. The boy had been kidnapped from outside his private school off the Via Galvani in Rome. That was about two weeks before the body was found. The

Italians were keeping the whole thing quiet. It was hard enough finding out what we did.’

“What about this guy Clemente, the father. Is he speaking? Does he know what all this is about?’

‘He isn’t speaking to anybody, Patrick. He’s dead. His wife found him in his study with a shotgun rammed down his throat and most of his head decorating the wall. This was about ten hours after the report of the boy’s death reached him. We did discover one thing, though. There was a note on his desk. Not in his own handwriting, so his wife says. It was just one line. I’m told it’s from the book of Leviticus. “He hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name.”

‘Just what the hell is going on here, Patrick?’ She was crying, hot, stinging tears that lined her cheeks. Not for the boy, not for Patrick, but for herself. She had lifted a stone of marble and seen the horrors that slithered to and fro beneath. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

TWELVE

Back in her flat on Pembroke Road, they sat on a long couch in front of the fire, close but not quite touching. Beneath high ceilings, shadows moved on Mondrians and van Doesburgs and Fontanas, line upon measured line, shadow upon shadow. In one corner, a painted sculpture by Dhruva Mistry, half man, half beast, kept careful watch. On the hi-fi, Klaus Nomi was singing an aria from Saint-Saens’ Samson and Delilah.

Only the fire seemed real. A fine odour of warm peat crept through the room. Red and yellow and gold flames cast bright reflections on brass and copper. Ruth had made mulled wine filled with heavy spices: cloves and cinnamon and aniseed, with orange and lemon peel. They sipped the wine and listened to the music, and Patrick thought how unnatural everything had become, how far removed from a world in which the bodies of pale children decayed in summer cottages, and priests, like Oedipus, were blinded on high altars.

‘It troubles me that God can allow such things,’ he said.

‘I thought you didn’t believe in God.’

He watched smoke spiral upwards, imagined it grey and nebulous on the darkening air outside.

‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘But that’s just it, don’t you see? I can’t believe in a God who lets things like this go on. Oh, and things worse than this. Much, much worse. Any other god I could believe in, but not this one. To be omnipotent and hold back, to be capable and do nothing. Just watch. Watch and judge. I remember...’

She twisted a little towards him, her eyes fixed on his profile.

‘I remember,’ he continued, ‘something I once read. It was in a book of Islamic theology: “These to heaven, and I care not. These to hell, and I care not.” What sort of God is that? And the Christian God isn’t any better. He lets children die on the street in Calcutta just so people can say what a wonderful woman Mother Theresa is. At least Molech kept his depredations to a reasonable level.’

Who was Molech, Patrick? What did it mean, that verse they found on Clemente’s desk?’

‘Molech? He was a Canaanite god. Phoenician, if you prefer. He had a taste for children. Their parents used to take them up to his altar at a place called Topheth. That was where they did it - the burning, the sacrificial offering. To keep the crops from spoiling. To make their cattle fertile. For whatever reason - for whatever seemed important to them.’