Newton’s Fire (21 page)

‘Quickly,’ said Pelham.

Luke zipped Pelham’s jacket inside Olivia’s laptop case to keep it clean, slung the strap over his shoulder, grabbed the rope and slid down fireman style, the rope rubbing hot against his palms. He swung inside the passage and helped Rachel in after him, then began hurriedly to rebuild the wall. Footsteps above. Olivia. The rope slithered upwards. A few moments later it tumbled down again, a plastic bucket knotted to its end so that it danced like a hanged man a foot or so above the water, clattering the walls. Despite everything, Luke couldn’t help but smile. Anyone looking down now would assume it was part of the feature.

The basement lights went out, leaving it pitch black. Rachel switched on the lamp but turned it away from the shaft so that it wouldn’t give them away. A minute passed. He heard footsteps running above, men yelling. The lights flickered back on. He had only one brick left to complete the wall, but each time he tried to fit it in, it pushed its neighbours out into the well. He muttered a soft curse and gave up.

Through the small remaining gap he could see the rope swinging in slow ellipses, like the weight of a pendulum. Anyone who looked down would be bound to notice. He reached out through the small gap, let the rope nudge his fingers, moderating its motion a little. It swung away again, then back, allowing him to slow it a fraction more. But then he heard footsteps above and men talking and he had no choice but to withdraw his hand and watch as the rope continued its gentle oscillation, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t be seen.

Croke was first through the splintered museum door, but the NCT search and secure team quickly left him behind. Four of them went upstairs; the remainder ran down, checking doors as they went, shouting instruction at each other, turning on lights. A yell from the staircase. Croke and Morgenstern hurried to check it out. A massively built thirty-something man and a grey-haired woman were sitting side by side at a desk in a cramped office: Pelham Redfern and Olivia Campbell, to judge from the descriptions he’d been given. They were both wearing headphones attached to a single small handset, and both were doing their very best to look shocked.

‘What is this?’ protested the woman, taking off her headphones, getting to her feet. ‘What’s going on? Who are you people?’

‘Skip the bullshit,’ said Morgenstern. ‘We’re not in the mood.’

‘What are you doing here? How did you get in? You haven’t damaged my door, have you?’

‘You should have answered when we knocked.’

‘We didn’t hear you.’ She held up her headphones. ‘How were we supposed to hear you?’

Croke walked over to the desk, put an earphone to his ear. Nothing. He gave her a wry look. She clicked the play button and a woman began explaining how to produce oxygen by chemical reaction. ‘Our new audio-guide,’ she said. ‘I was showing it to Mr Redfern. We’re planning a new exhibition and we’ll need to do one of these for it.’

‘Why bother with headphones?’ scoffed Morgenstern. ‘Who were you going to disturb?’

She picked up the handset. ‘These things only work with headphones. We can’t have people playing them out loud in the museum, or it would ruin everyone else’s experience, wouldn’t it?’

For the blink of a moment, Croke almost bought it. But then he remembered the aborted phone call, the figure scoping out the rear alley. ‘Sure,’ he mocked. He turned to Redfern. ‘You were in Cambridge earlier today.’

‘Is that against the law?’

‘You picked up two people there. A man and a woman.’

‘Your accent?’ frowned Redfern. ‘It’s American, isn’t it? I trust you won’t mind my asking what authority you have to question me?’

Croke glanced at Morgenstern. Morgenstern nodded at the door. They went outside for a murmured conference. ‘They’re lying,’ said Croke. ‘The others were here.’

‘Maybe,’ said Morgenstern, nodding at his squad leader, who was indicating to them that the museum was clear. ‘But they’re not here now.’

‘These two know where they’ve gone. We need to make them tell us.’

Morgenstern shook his head. ‘If you mean what I think you mean, forget about it. The Brits are too squeamish. Especially as the woman really is curator of this place, and she’s claiming Redfern as her guest.’

‘Then what do we do?’

‘We can put pressure on them. Charge them with obstructing justice, abetting a murderer. They’re soft. They’ll break soon enough.’

Croke shook his head. ‘I don’t want them entering the system. I can’t risk them talking to lawyers.’

Morgenstern nodded. ‘I can have them driven up to Birmingham for interrogation. Then have them transferred to London instead. We can bounce them around for at least twenty-four hours.’

‘Good. Do it.’

An NCT officer approached, holding up some dust-covered women’s clothes. ‘Found these in the washroom, sir,’ he said.

Morgenstern and Croke shared a glance. They matched what Rachel Parkes had been wearing. And some splashes of water on the blouse indicated she’d been there recently.

‘How the hell did they get out?’ scowled Croke.

‘I don’t know.’

‘They can’t have got far. I want everyone you can spare out hunting. Have them watch the train and bus stations. Taxi companies. And have them look for couples.’

Morgenstern passed on the orders, then they headed downstairs together into the basement where two NCT operatives were scanning the floor with ground penetrating radar. ‘There’s something down there,’ said one. ‘A chamber of some kind. And metal. Iron for sure. And I know this will sound crazy, but maybe gold too.’

‘It’s not crazy. How can we get down there?’

The man grimaced. ‘It won’t be easy. It’s at least ten feet deep. We’ll need specialist cutting and lifting equipment. If I put the order in now, we should be able to get it here by morning. All goes well, we can pop the floor early tomorrow afternoon.’

Morgenstern glanced at Croke. ‘Will that work for you?’

Croke pulled a face. To meet Avram’s deadline, he’d need to depart City Airport no later than midnight tomorrow. Allowing a few hours for transporting it there, and for the inevitable fuck-ups along the way, and they were pushing it tight. ‘It’ll work if it’s down there,’ he said. ‘But what if it’s not?’

‘We could take a look first, if you’d like,’ said the man.

‘How?’

He put his hand on one of the display cabinets. ‘First we move this thing,’ he said. He crouched down and touched where one of its feet was bolted to the floor. ‘Then we drill directly beneath here. A small-diameter hole all the way down to the chamber.’ He made a circle with his finger and thumb. ‘It’ll have be about yea wide because of the width-depth ratios. Once we’re through, we can feed down an endoscope. You know endoscopes, right? Miniature cameras with integrated lighting and a fish-eye lens on the end of a long fibre-optic cable, like the ones they stick up your arse when they’re—’

‘I know endoscopes,’ Croke assured him.

‘We use them a lot for surveillance,’ said the man. ‘They’ll show us everything down there. If you still want to, we’ll have time to take up the floor. If not, we just pull the endoscope back out, plug the hole with filler and bolt the cabinet back in place. No one will ever be the wiser.’

‘Have you got everything you need?’ asked Morgenstern.

The man shrugged. ‘We’ve got a drill in the van, but isn’t long enough. And we don’t have enough cable for our endoscope. This is a
very
unusual job. But we can get started now and have the necessary extensions here in a couple of hours. That should give us a first look around sunrise, which is about the earliest we could hope to get the heavy cutting and lifting equipment here anyway.’

Croke glanced at Morgenstern. ‘When does this place open tomorrow?’

‘It doesn’t. Not on a Monday. It’s ours all day.’

‘Okay,’ said Croke. ‘Let’s do it.’

Luke and Rachel made their way back to the vault, on the basis that they were far more likely to be overheard if they stayed near the well shaft. They turned off the lamp to save its batteries, then sat in the darkness with their backs to the Emerald Tablet.

‘So how come Newton?’ asked Rachel.

Luke shrugged. ‘He caught my imagination, I suppose.’

‘You’re writing a biography of the man,’ she teased. ‘You’ll need to have something better than that on the blurb.’

Luke laughed. ‘Okay. There’s this story about him I first heard when I was a kid. It’s kind of a nerd’s fantasy. You’ll find this hard to believe, I suspect, but I was a bit of a nerd myself back then.’

Rachel feigned shock. ‘No. Get away with you.’

‘This was 1697 or thereabouts. Newton was in a really bitter dispute with Leibniz over who invented the calculus. They both did, as it happens, but each was convinced the other had stolen the idea from them. The Brits supported Newton. The Europeans backed Leibniz. One of Leibniz’s mates, an Italian called Johann Bernoulli, devised a pair of mathematical puzzles that proved too fiendish for Europe’s top minds to crack, so he came up with a cunning plan. He sent them to Newton, hoping he’d fail too, thus wrecking his reputation for genius. Newton received them after a day at the Royal Mint. The following morning he sent off the answers to the Royal Society. They published them anonymously, but everyone knew. Even Bernoulli. You know what he said? He said: “You can tell the lion by its claw.” I just loved that. I used to daydream people saying it about me. Mind you, I was ten at the time.’ He laughed and tipped his head to the side. ‘Your turn,’ he said. ‘How come archaeology?’

Rachel sighed. ‘I don’t know. I guess it meant something at the time.’ The question seemed to make her restless. She stood and turned on the lamp, took a circuit of the walls.

‘Tweed suits you,’ Luke told her, as she came back around. ‘You’ll make a fine professor.’

‘It itches like you wouldn’t believe,’ she said. Her gaze slid from him to the Emerald Tablet inscription behind him, and then she frowned. ‘How about that?’ she murmured, to herself as much as Luke. ‘An acrostic.’

He turned to read the first letter of each line. ‘Balinus?’ he frowned.

She nodded. ‘It’s what the Harranians called Apollonius of Tyana.’

‘If that was meant to make things clearer for me,’ said Luke, ‘you might want to give it another shot.’

‘Apollonius was a Turkish holy man from the time of Jesus. We found a lot of his cult objects on my excavation in Antioch. And one of my colleagues from the dig is
the
authority on the guy.’

‘What’s his name doing here?’

‘The Harranians lived in Southern Turkey, right in the path of the Muslim Conquest. But they were allowed to continue with their own religion, which seems to have been almost alchemical in its nature. Their sacred texts were the
Hermetica
, which is how they survived until the Renaissance, and why Newton had to translate them from Arabic rather than Egyptian, Greek or Latin. And here’s the thing: they revered this Balinus or Apollonius guy for having saved the Emerald Tablet before them. He was one of their heroes.’

‘So our cabal decided to honour him too,’ said Luke. ‘But why use an acrostic? Why not just write his name?’

‘Because Apollonius was a
very
controversial figure, particularly among Christians. A male child whose birth was announced by heavenly beings, who embraced poverty and celibacy, who went everywhere barefoot and who refused to eat meat. A great moral teacher who healed the sick, raised the dead, cast out demons and predicted the future. Sentenced to death by the Romans but ascended into heaven instead.’

‘Apollonius?’

‘Which made him rather problematic for Christians preaching about the unique glories of Jesus,’ said Rachel. ‘Though I’m surprised to find that Newton was a fan. I always understood he was a devout Christian.’

‘He was,’ Luke assured her. ‘But a very idiosyncratic one. He believed in the
teachings
of Jesus, but he didn’t think him God. That was his great heresy. He loathed the doctrine of the Trinity, and therefore the Catholic church for foisting it on the world.’

‘What about these other guys?’

Luke shook his head. ‘All pretty conventional, as far as I know. But you had to be back then. Antitrinitarianism was a serious crime. At the very best, it would be the death of your professional and social life. No Antitrinitarian would ever have got to rebuild St Paul’s, for example.’

‘St Paul,’ muttered Rachel. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘Of course what?’

‘Here.’ She beckoned Luke around the other side of the plinth and crouched in front of the second inscription. ‘Apollonius wasn’t problematic for Christians just because of his similarities to Jesus. He was even closer to St Paul. The name Apollonius comes from Apollo, which is close enough to mistake for Paul. He was born in southern Turkey, about thirty miles north of Tarsus, where St Paul came from. And he studied in Tarsus himself throughout his teens. So essentially you have these two men with similar names, born at the same time and place, both growing up to become itinerant preachers famous for the letters on morals they wrote to the citizens of major Mediterranean cities. Both had encounters with wild animals in Ephesus. Both wrote about sacrifices and ritual. And both were Roman citizens who crossed emperors and were sentenced to death.’

‘You’re saying they were the same person?’

Rachel shrugged. ‘Plenty of people have thought so over the centuries. Maybe these guys did too. What do you think? Could they have believed in St Paul as Balinus, the secret alchemist who saved the Emerald Tablet?’

‘I can’t speak for them all,’ said Luke. ‘But Newton, sure. He didn’t think of the prophets as mystics inspired by divine revelation, like most people seem to. He thought of them as immensely intelligent and informed, masters not just of religion but also of mathematics, astronomy, alchemy and all the other disciplines of natural philosophy. So Moses, Enoch, Elijah, Hermes Trimegistus, Solomon and the rest were great alchemists
by definition
. That was what Newton aspired to for himself, so it would have made perfect sense to him that St Paul was the same. Especially as he was already a considerable figure among the alchemists.’