The Sacred Scroll (44 page)

Once he’d sorted this out, he’d deal with the next item on his agenda. His heart wrenched at the thought.

But this first.

He tapped in Graves’s number. He’d need her help with tackling the combination lock. Lopez’s expertise in that particular field would have been greater, but Marlow didn’t want to include Lopez, not yet. Graves answered
immediately, fully awake. Fifteen minutes later she was there. Marlow used the time to make coffee, a major task, hampered by his shoulder. He wanted her to start work the moment she arrived, but she insisted on looking at his wound and calling a medic. While they were waiting, she interrogated him about Zwinger and Dels. He told her as much as he needed to.

The medic arrived. Marlow refused point-blank to go anywhere, but he allowed the woman to clean and dress the wound properly, and apply sutures. He was lucky they’d been using hard-nosed bullets, and none had lodged. The medic stayed half an hour, then left, after extracting a promise from Marlow that he’d stop by the clinic before midday.

Graves, meanwhile, had been addressing the problem of the steel box.

The lock required a five-digit combination, but the permutations were endless. They started with various possible numeric values of names associated with Enrico Dandolo. The first and then the last groups of letters of other names followed. All in vain.

‘Maybe we’re looking too hard,’ Marlow said finally.

‘Meaning?’

‘It’d be unusual for anyone to put a code in here that was entirely unrelated to the contents of the box,’ said Marlow.

Graves looked at him. ‘You took one hell of a risk,’ she said. ‘You could have been killed. Easily.’ A moment passed. ‘With you dead, what would we have done?’

‘I assessed the consequences. That’s what you do. And that’s not relevant now.’

‘Whoever it was expected you.’

‘Or someone else.’

‘Anyone at the saleroom likely to have recognized you?’

‘My mother wasn’t there.’

‘Think.’

‘No one.’

‘Then we’re back to square one.’

‘Unless we try a little more lateral thinking.’

‘That requires coffee,’ said Graves, leaving to fetch it.

Marlow looked at his watch: 5.30. He tried typing in numeric codes relating to the names of the dead archaeologists, and Su-Lin’s name. But the box remained closed.

Graves appeared with the coffee minutes later, and reapplied herself to her work.

‘Here goes nothing,’ she said, and typed in: 13124.

The mechanism whirred, and the box clicked open.

‘What did you set?’ asked Marlow.

‘13-1-24.’

‘Which is?’

‘Simplest thing in the world. You were right. Lateral thinking. All I did was type in the numbers that relate to the position in the alphabet of three letters.’

‘That’s …’

‘Exactly.’

Marlow took this in then said urgently: ‘Who knows?’

‘Like I said, they were expecting you.’

Marlow shook his head. His heart was hammering, despite himself. ‘Here goes.’

Turning the steel box so that its opening was facing away from him, to deflect any booby-trap blast, he flipped the lid open. Inside, nestling on a bed of crimson velvet,
lay the box. Next to it, fixed in a niche specially made to hold it, lay the key, familiar to them from the photographs they already had of it.

‘There could still be some kind of trap here,’ warned Graves.

‘We haven’t set anything off.’

‘Yet.’

‘We’ve got to take that risk.’ He looked at her. ‘You’d better back off. Kitchen should be far enough. There isn’t room enough in here for more than a small blast.’

‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’

Marlow swung the steel box round again, so that its opening was facing him once more. Gingerly, he tried the lid of Adhemar’s box. It was locked. Cautiously, he lifted the key. Fitted it into the lock. He turned the key, and it moved as smoothly as if it were brand-new.

There was a gentle click.

Marlow lifted the lid.

The box was empty.

Graves and Marlow looked at one another, thinking the same thought.

‘They’ve got it,’ said Graves.

‘Maybe.’

‘Where do we start?’

‘Finish deciphering that code.’

‘Nearly there,’ she said grimly.

‘Don’t forget that there’s still no indication that they’ve used the tablet.’

‘You think they haven’t figured that out?’ said Graves. ‘Adhemar’s mistake.’

‘It’s a possibility. We might still have a chance.’

‘Why do you think they defended an empty box so fiercely?’ asked Graves.

‘I don’t know. And why leave the key with it?’ replied Marlow. ‘To gain time? Or to mock us?’

‘That’d be an expensive kind of mockery,’ said Graves. ‘To waste four lives.’

‘We’re not dealing with the kind of person who’d regard that as any kind of waste,’ said Marlow grimly. ‘But if the idea was to buy time …’

‘The guys in the Zwinger and Dels factory didn’t know that what they were defending was worthless?’

‘They can’t have done.’

‘There’s another possibility,’ said Graves.

‘Yes?’

‘What if the tablet was never
in
the box?’

‘Something isn’t holding water,’ said Marlow. He stood up, reached for his jacket. ‘I’ll find out. Contact you again in four hours.’

‘No way I’ll have it deciphered by then.’

‘Short of a miracle,’ said Marlow.

‘Short of a miracle.’ Graves smiled tightly. ‘And you shouldn’t be going anywhere.’

Marlow ignored that, but his cell-phone buzzed as he was leaving. Lopez.

‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘Urgently.’

‘There’s a coffeehouse on East 75th, near the Whitney. Can you meet me there?’

‘That’s close to INTERSEC. Is it secure?’

‘It’s the last place anyone will look. Eye of the storm.’

Lopez was waiting for him, hunched over an untouched espresso. Lopez had planned this moment. He knew this was the unique opportunity he’d have to confess and – if Jack would listen – redeem himself at the same time.

‘What’ve you got?’ Marlow noticed that Lopez’s hands were sweating.

‘There’s something I have to tell you – and something I haven’t told you,’ he began.

Marlow looked serious, but not threatening. ‘Shoot,’ he said.

Lopez swallowed hard, and told him the whole story – about Annika Lundquist, the original Frid document, his visit to her apartment, and what he had found – and not found – there.

Marlow listened in silence and, at the end, remained silent. Someone knew where they were and what they were after. Someone had been watching them and watching anyone who made contact with them. Lopez had blown cover badly.

‘Every action has its consequences,’ said Marlow at last. ‘The action you took should destroy you, you know.’

‘I was trying to –’

‘
I
know.’ Marlow paused. ‘The question is, what do we do about it?’

‘I know what I deserve.’

‘But I also know what you’ve done in the past – for the organization, and for me.’

‘I don’t expect that to count.’

‘You saved my life.’

‘That doesn’t buy me anything.’

‘It shouldn’t. You know the rules.’ Marlow paused again. ‘On the other hand, your action produced results – important ones. And if anyone else knows you stepped out of line, apart from the dead girl and me, they aren’t going to go running to Hudson with it.’

‘I hope.’

‘Whose interest would it be in?’

Lopez looked up. ‘What do you mean?’ He was thinking of Mia and the kids. If he died. He hadn’t considered consequences thoroughly enough. Now he was at his friend’s mercy; and his friend was a professional.

But Marlow had his own secrets. He too had been vulnerable, weak; and because of that, he would carry Lopez part of the way. He understood what Lopez had done, and why. The reasons behind his own actions were
murkier. He snapped back. Some mistakes could be corrected. Some damage could be repaired.

He looked at Lopez. ‘You’re lucky. For the moment you’re more useful alive than dead. You’re getting a second chance. Only one. Step out of line again and you know what will happen.’

The tension in Lopez’s neck slackened and his head dipped like that of a man reprieved.

Marlow broke the mood. ‘Time to bring you up to date.’ He looked round the room, checking it. Office people, preoccupied with keeping the machinery of business oiled. Preoccupied with their own lives. No one showing a hint of interest in them.

‘Listen carefully,’ he said. ‘There isn’t much time.’

He told Lopez about the recovery of the box. ‘But we’re stuck on the code.’

‘That’s why I called you,’ said Lopez, playing his last card, but glad his friend had spared him before he had to play it.

In Room 55, Lopez unlocked his Mac and opened a series of encrypted files – boxes within boxes.

‘It’s Frid’s five-liner,’ he explained. ‘I knew it was a code based on numbers, and numbers are my field. Laura would have got there, I guess, in time, but I needed to try as well – I needed to redeem myself.’

‘You shouldn’t have had a copy,’ said Marlow. ‘Where did you get one? I had your copy deleted.’

Lopez looked at Marlow. ‘We go back a ways, Jack. I already knew, more than you did, just how little time we had.’

‘I hope you’re going to make me grateful.’

‘You were right all along – the code’s like the one on the key. The difficulty, why Laura couldn’t get it immediately, is that whoever wrote it deliberately skewed its logic. Can’t have been Frid; we know he was illiterate, and we can reckon that he was innumerate too. But what matters is that I’ve recognized it.’

Lopez adjusted his glasses. ‘The numbers here don’t correspond to the usual letters, but to their opposite number, if you like. And we’re talking about a version of Aramaic with a basic 22-letter alphabet, so there’s no single central letter. Look:
kaph
is letter number eleven,
lamadh
number twelve. Those are the two “central” letters.’

‘And the code?’

‘In the end, it’s simple. It’s another mirror-image of what it should be. The first letter of the alphabet here is given the value eleven instead of one, so the eleventh letter,
kaph
, its value is one, not eleven. In the second half of the alphabet, the last letter doesn’t have the value twenty-two, but twelve, so it’s
lamadh
, the twelfth letter, that has the value twenty-two.’ Lopez looked up. ‘It’s skewed. But when you apply that to the numbers in Frid’s five-liner, you get this.’

Lopez tapped in a series of instructions on his keyboard. The screen, which had been showing a cleaned-up version of the uncertain script on Frid’s document, now dissolved and resolved itself into a pattern – letters related to numbers, according to Lopez’s theory. The computer had transposed the letters into the Roman alphabet, and separated them into words, which Marlow recognized as the same dog-Latin that the clear-text part of the manuscript had been written in.

In part, he could read it, but he couldn’t make sense of it alone.

‘Call Graves now,’ he said.

She arrived within fifteen minutes. The five lines of code had rendered a short paragraph of text. She was able to translate it quickly.

‘If you were right, this may be a reprieve, of sorts,’ she replied. ‘I think this must be something Dandolo – or an aide other than Frid – encoded and copied down somewhere; the original is lost, I guess, but Frid must have had it, and copied it into his “will”, either as a safeguard or as
a reference for his own future use – assuming he knew what it meant.’

‘You said something about a reprieve.’

‘Yes – the tablet wasn’t in the box – it never was.’

‘What?’

‘This is what it says.’ Graves cleared her throat. ‘“I, Enrico, Doge of Venice, Master of Constantinople and of the Great Tablet of Power, state that through the agency of my loyal and trusted servants, Father Leporo de Monteriggioni, and Frid Eyolfson, late of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard, am laid to rest in the Church of Saint Irina in the Great City, and that according to my inviolable instructions which are unalterable under pain of my curse, I am buried in my ducal robes, and that the Tablet shall remain where it last lay, in the grip of my right hand, to lie with me for ever, hidden from the sight of Man and God, its Power to cede to no successor.”’

She looked up. Marlow remembered the doge, as he lay in the open tomb in Istanbul. He remembered the broken fingers of Dandolo’s right hand.

‘The box must have been taken by archaeologists. There were plenty of digs going on in the early twentieth century. They must have missed the key,’ Graves said. ‘The three artefacts were separated. The locked box, we now have. Whoever stole it from the auction already had the key –’

‘– which they took from Montserrat, Adkins and Taylor.’

‘But they can’t have found the tablet. Like us, they must have thought it was still in the locked box which Bishop Adhemar had made for it,’ added Marlow. ‘And there’s the
question of the gloves Major Haki had dated for us – a hundred years old.’

‘The Germans had a lot of influence in Turkey around the First World War,’ said Graves. ‘And the Kaiser was a keen patron of archaeology. Several important finds were made at about that time in Turkey and Mesopotamia.’

‘Like the Gate of Ishtar,’ said Lopez.

‘Discovered by Robert Koldewey, who was an expert on ancient Mesopotamia,’ added Graves. ‘And the Gate of Ishtar is now in Berlin.’

‘I can throw some light on that,’ Lopez said. ‘You asked me to research the history of the box before it came into the hands of those New York dealers – Lightoller and Steeples.’

‘Yes?’

‘The IRS came up with some stuff, remember? Nothing’s computerized or been put on any kind of electronic file, but there was an incomplete archive of Lightoller and Steeples’s transactions which went to the tax authorities after the business was wound up, and they let me access it. It contains more details. Apparently, Harvey Lightoller bought the box from someone called Aloysius Guttmann in Vienna in 1946.’