Day of the Vikings. A Thriller. (ARKANE) (6 page)

The vortex smashed against the roof until the metal struts between the glass panes began to warp and bend. A part of Morgan screamed that this must be an illusion – how could the staff hold the power to do this? But the evidence was before her eyes. She could only imagine what it must look like from outside. The sound of smashing glass and howling wind must be heard by the press and police, who were surely now escalating their plans to storm the museum.
 

When the hole in the roof had stretched across half of the widest part of the Great Court, the Valkyrie stopped her spinning. The wind died down. The sound of a helicopter grew louder, and then it appeared, a shadow against the blue sky above. It was a Black Hawk, the open door revealing two men inside as well as the pilot. Hovering directly above, they lowered a winch basket that descended to the floor of the museum. The Valkyrie didn’t even look back at the hostages. She entered the basket and two of the Neo-Vikings entered with her, all three holding tight to the mesh sides.
 

They can’t possibly get away, Morgan thought. A helicopter this low over London would have the military out after them. They weren’t so far from Parliament and Buckingham Palace, after all. Concern flashed through her mind, for this group was clearly well funded. This was not the work of a two-bit cult in furs. Everything in Morgan wished for a weapon to stop them, to punish them for what they had done. Instead, she lay with Blake under the overhang, unable to do anything to stop the escape.

“Your sacrifice has earned you a place in Valhalla,” the Valkyrie said to the men who would be left behind. Two nodded, watching as the basket was winched up to the helicopter above the museum.
 

“No, take me too,” one of the men shouted, his eyes wide with fear of what would befall him if left behind. He ran wildly for the cage, which was now just six feet from the ground. The man jumped and caught hold of the bottom, his fingers protruding into the cage. The winch shuddered and inched up more slowly.

“Let go,” the men in the basket shouted, stamping at his fingers. “It’s too heavy.”
 

The cage inched higher and the man still held on.
 

“Please,” he screamed. “Don’t leave me.”

As the cage reached the upper third of the open space, the Valkyrie bent and slashed at the man’s fingers with her knife. When he still didn’t let go, she began to saw at them.
 

“No,” he screamed as blood ran down his arm. Finally, he couldn’t hold on anymore. He let go, his scream silenced as he smashed into the flagstones, his blood running into the words of Tennyson carved in the marble floor of the Great Court.

The cage was winched up the final meters and the Valkyrie and her men pulled into the helicopter as it banked away out of sight, the noise of the blades fading as it flew off. Morgan’s resolve was steel, refined by the heat of her rage at the murder of the curator, the injuries to the hostages and the despoiling of this great museum. She would hunt down this Valkyrie and get the staff back, and she would find the Eye of Odin.

The Neo-Vikings left behind threw their shields down. Without looking at the hostages, they ran toward the back of the museum. The hostages, many cut and bleeding, sat in stunned silence for a moment. Then one man stood up and walked toward the entrance, his steps halting as if he couldn’t believe he was free to go.
 

There was a crash from the museum’s front entrance and a team of armed police and medics swarmed in, one wrapping the man in a blanket as they passed to triage those huddled on the marble floor. A policeman called for body bags and soon the hall was alive with activity, processing the crime scene and helping those with injuries to waiting ambulances. Several of the armed police headed toward the back of the building, but Morgan considered that this was so well planned, the Neo-Vikings may well have got away unseen.
 

In the group of medics that entered, Morgan saw Peter Lovell, one of the ARKANE London support team. With fifteen years as a military doctor, Peter’s buzz cut, upright posture and confident bearing made him stand out, and he was definitely overqualified for this type of first aid care. He came straight to her, ignoring all the others, leaving them to the official emergency services.

“Morgan, are you OK?” Peter asked. “Where are you hurt?”
 

“Just get these cuffs off,” she said, holding her wrists out as he reached into his bag for a scalpel. “This is Blake.” Morgan nodded to the side, where Blake sat staring up at the hole in the magnificent glass roof. “He has a head wound that needs to be dealt with before you look at me properly.”
 

“Director Marietti wants you back at base ASAP, if you’re OK,” Peter said. “I’ll take you back now and leave this lot to the crime scene techs. ARKANE will help the police coordinate the search with expert help on where the Neo-Vikings might have gone.”
 

“Let me guess,” Morgan’s mouth twisted in a wry smile as he finished cutting her cuffs. “I’m the expert help.”

Once Morgan’s wrists were free, Peter cut away the restraints on her feet and then did the same for Blake.
 

“I’m going to find them,” Morgan said, her hand resting on Blake’s upper arm, feeling the tension under his skin. “I’ll get the staff back and they’ll pay for what they did to the curator.”

Blake looked over to where the body of the mutilated man was being lifted onto a stretcher.
 

“He was a cantankerous old bastard sometimes, but he was a respected colleague and pretty fun at Christmas parties.”

He smiled painfully at the memory and turned to Morgan, his blue eyes meeting hers, and she saw that his resolve matched hers.
 

“I want to help. You know what I can do, and if we want to find them quickly, I think we need to check out The Lindisfarne Gospels. They might have a clue as to what happened to the original Valkyrie.” He turned his head so Peter could clean his wound, wincing with the sting of the antiseptic on his bruised skin and open cut.

Morgan knew that Director Marietti wouldn’t like involving a civilian, but the London ARKANE office didn’t have anyone with psychometric ability – not that she knew of, anyway.
 

Her only hesitation was that she had a bad habit of involving other people who ended up getting hurt. Morgan thought of Dr. Khal el-Souid, badly beaten in the caves of Mount Nebo as they searched for the Ark of the Covenant. He’d been lucky to escape with only minor concussion. She blushed a little as she remembered the night that followed. Khal’s dark eyes meeting hers in the light of the early morning as the muezzin called the dawn prayers … How his arms had felt around her. She and Khal had shared something in the desert, but Morgan knew a relationship was never going to work, so she had left him behind and they hadn’t spoken since. Blake reminded her a little of Khal, a smart man with gorgeous skin, his blue eyes the ocean to Khal’s deep brown. She pushed aside her concerns. Blake was involved now, whether she liked it or not, and she needed his help for just a little longer.
 

“I’m sorry, Peter. I’ll call Marietti en route, but we need to go to the British Library before I head back.”

MORGAN AND BLAKE JUMPED in a black cab and headed for the British Library, only a few blocks northeast toward St Pancras station. Morgan finally had reception to make a call and dialed Director Marietti’s personal phone.
 

“Morgan, are you all right?” The gruff voice of the Director was tempered by concern. “I’m viewing some of the security camera footage now, and it’s brutal stuff.”

“Yes, I’m fine sir, and I’ll report in full soon, but right now we have a lead that may help us locate where the Neo-Viking group are heading. Were the police able to track the helicopter?”

“The Neo-Vikings used the same type of Black Hawk helicopter as the Americans allegedly used for the raid on Bin Laden. It doesn’t show up on radar, but we’re tracking physical sightings right now. They flew east, then must have landed either on a boat or transferred to land transport.”
 

Morgan frowned. “It suggests some serious funding behind the group.”

“Exactly.” Marietti’s voice held the promise of further investigation. “There was also a vicious wind that surrounded the helicopter as they headed east, low over the river toward the sea. Nothing could get close to it. I want you back here to work on what the hell is going on.”

“The leader of the group was a woman calling herself the Valkyrie, and she said some things that reminded one of the academics at the museum of The Lindisfarne Gospels.” Morgan didn’t want to try and explain Blake’s unique ability right now, especially as she knew that Marietti might try to recruit him or at least want to know a lot more than she had time for. “The researcher is with me now, and we’re going to check the Gospels out. Can you call ahead and get that cleared so we have access?”

Morgan heard the hesitation in Marietti’s voice.
 

“All right, go check the Gospels, but then you’ve got to get back here, Morgan. The press are having a field day with this. While the police work on the crime angle, we need to get that staff back. Based on the footage of the Valkyrie and the wind she generated, there are plenty of people who are going to want it.”

Morgan knew that there was an underground network of organizations and individuals who collected such objects. Most of them kept to the shadows, but others emerged with their plans to impact the wider world. The staff of Skara Brae, resonating with ancient power, would draw them all when the footage was inevitably released on YouTube. Some would dismiss it as fake special effects, the conspiracy theorists would turn it into the start of some global plot, but some would know the truth and seek it out. The staff was powerful in the right hands, and Morgan knew she had to get it back. If they could locate the Eye of Odin as well, then all the better.

The taxi pulled up in front of the British Library on the Euston Road. Morgan and Blake walked into the forecourt, past the huge bronze statue of Newton, bent to measure the world with his calipers, frowning with concentration. The British Library was a modern building, red brick on two sides of the piazza square, with the gothic spires of St Pancras station towering behind it. Three flagpoles stood in the middle of the square, the Union Jack fluttering in the breeze, while readers streamed in the doors or drank coffee in patches of sun, fingers flicking through books. Despite the modern exterior, this library was a treasure store of the written word, a nirvana for any bibliophile. Morgan loved to come here, to feel a part of the grand heritage that was England.

“I’m not sure we can just walk in and demand to see The Lindisfarne Gospels,” Blake said, as they walked across the square.

“We won’t have to,” Morgan said. “ARKANE has phoned ahead.”

Blake chuckled. “I envy you. My research is usually a combination of my own psychometric reading and then a period of begging for access to get it verified through official sources.”

The entrance to the library was flanked by security guards who nodded them through, and they stepped into the spacious atrium. Sun streamed down from skylights high above the central light well, and three levels of reading rooms could be seen, with readers bustling between them carrying the clear plastic bags that were mandatory in the Reading Rooms. The sense was of open space, not crammed stacks, a portal to the information housed here in so many forms, much of it now digitized.

“The Gospels are in the Ritblat Gallery, alongside the other Treasures of the Library,” Morgan said. “This way.”

Up a short flight of stairs, the entrance to the Ritblat Gallery was dark, the light dimmed to preserve the precious objects within. Each glass case held priceless documents, from pages of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks to an eleventh-century manuscript of
Beowulf
, the handwritten pages damaged by fire. Thomas Hardy’s original manuscript of
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
was here, his fine cross-hatched edits still evident, as well as more modern treasures like the lyrics to The Beatles’ “Yesterday.”
 

A huge globe dominated one area of the room, a baroque vision of the heavens painted with ancient constellation figures. Pegasus, the winged horse, galloped next to the Great Bear, paws uplifted to stride across the globe. Nearby stood the collection of Christian manuscripts, most illuminated by the hands of monks long dead.
 

Morgan couldn’t help but look into the case holding the Codex Sinaiticus, her thoughts going back to St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, where it had originally been kept. Written over 1600 years ago, the handwritten manuscript with heavily corrected text was the Christian Bible in Greek, containing the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Pages of the text had been sewn into other book bindings, and a fragment had pointed her and Khal to a new location for the Ark of the Covenant not so long ago. Despite the dangers of ARKANE, Morgan lived on the edge of the boundary between the ancient world and the modern, and there was nowhere else she would rather work.

A librarian waved at them from a side door.
 

“Are you from ARKANE?” the woman asked. Morgan nodded. “The Lindisfarne Gospels are normally kept on display here, but they’re currently resting.”

“Resting?” Blake asked.
 

The librarian gave him a smile as she touched her hair, her eyes twinkling more as she addressed him directly. Blake’s injuries only seemed to heighten his good looks.
 

“Even though the lights are dimmed in here, the manuscripts are still affected so we like to give them a rest in the dark now and then. Our aim at the British Library is to make sure these treasures last another thousand years for everyone to enjoy. Normally we wouldn’t allow anything to disturb them, but you seem to have a special pass. We’ve just retrieved the Gospels from their resting place and they’re ready for you to view. Follow me.”