Newton’s Fire (29 page)

‘I love it,’ said Rachel.

‘The King did too. But not the Dean. It wasn’t enough for it to
look
good, you see. It had to work too. A church needs a focal point for services and sermons. The focal point of an octagon is its centre. But that means having your congregation seated all around you, leaving many unable to see properly, or even hear. You could, of course, put the altar against a wall, but that would rather negate the purpose of the design. And then there were the acoustics! My Lord! Don’t get me started on the acoustics!’

Luke nodded. ‘Strange that he should even have suggested it.’

‘Yes. Well. Paris was the great centre of architectural fashion at the time. Wren had his head turned by the buzz there about a Bourbon chapel planned for St-Denis.
That
never got built either. Such designs work best on paper. And the technical challenges would have been enormous. To accommodate the same number of people, the dome would have needed to be even bigger that it is now. And it weighs nearly seventy thousand tons as it is.
Seventy thousand tons!
And even that almost proved too much.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The piers and pillars started to crack and burst from the weight. They got so bad that Wren had to dig up the crypt floor and anchor them to each other with huge iron chains.’

‘Wren dug up the crypt?’ asked Luke, glancing at Rachel. ‘When?’

‘They began noticing the cracks in the 1690s, I believe. But Wren spent years in denial. He couldn’t bear to acknowledge that he’d made a mistake. Besides, the obvious solution was these iron anchors I mentioned, yet Wren had mocked other architects for such tricks. Pride’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? But by around 1705, I think, it got so bad he had no choice. It’s still a taboo subject among Wren fans. He or his disciples even spread rumours that he’d had the iron anchors cut through, just to prove that they weren’t really necessary.’

‘What bit of the crypt is beneath the dome?’ asked Luke.

‘Nelson’s tomb,’ said Trevor, returning the folder of plans to its place. ‘They lowered his coffin through a hole in the main floor during the service. A fine looking thing, though frankly far too
black
for my taste. I know death isn’t the cheeriest of events, but I’d still fancy something lighter myself. A good pine, if you’ll forgive the pun. Though why should you?’ he added gloomily. ‘It’s an
awful
pun.’

‘I’ve made worse,’ said Luke.

‘Very kind of you to say so, but I’m not altogether sure that’s possible.’

‘Nelson didn’t die for another hundred years after 1705,’ pointed out Rachel. ‘What was in the crypt until then?’

‘Nothing much, as far as I know, other than Wren’s own tomb. It only became
the
place to be buried after Nelson. Then everyone wanted in.’

‘And Nelson’s coffin?’ asked Luke. ‘Is it beneath or above the floor?’

‘Above,’ said Trevor. ‘But why do you ask?’

‘No reason,’ said Luke.

Avram packed the jar of ashes safely into the passenger footwell of his truck then bade farewell to Shlomo and his men and drove southwest towards the coast. His back and ankle began to ache from the accumulated driving, yet it was lack of sleep, engine fumes and the heat of the day that really got to him. He kept having to pinch the skin on the back of his hand to keep himself awake.

He reached Netanya in good time, however. He stopped for something to eat then continued to the warehouse. He entered the passcode into the keypad and the steel shutter clanked slowly upwards. He parked inside, lowered the shutter again, and turned on the lights. The warehouse was packed with the detritus of a hundred house clearances: old washing machines and refrigerators, boxes of books, rolled up carpets, beds and sofas. The only items that looked out of place were three dust carts he’d had stolen several months before from the streets of Jerusalem.

He checked his watch: still half an hour until Danel arrived. Plenty of time to check in with Croke. He set up the satellite phone outside and hurried through the security protocols.

‘Finally,’ grunted Croke. ‘I was beginning to think you’d bolted.’

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘We’ve all been busy.’

‘You’ve found it, then?’

A grunt of laughter. ‘How the hell are we supposed to find it when you and your idiot nephew keep sending us to the wrong damned places?’ And he ran Avram through recent events, including the switch back to London.

‘You’ll find it,’ said Avram, unperturbed. ‘What’s destined is destined.’

‘Maybe. But we’re cutting it fine. Incidentally, we’ll be filming it live for our friends in the States. Will you want to watch too?’

‘Of course,’ said Avram. ‘And my nephew is to be there as well.’

‘I’ll see what I can arrange.’

‘No,’ said Avram. ‘He is to be there. And then he is to accompany it on every step of its journey.’

‘Like I said, I’ll see what—’

‘You’re not listening to me,’ said Avram. ‘I know what can be done with technology these days. I know about special effects and computer-generated imagery. I know about switches and decoys. So let me make it clear: this won’t happen unless my nephew verifies it to my complete satisfaction then stays with it all the way. Do you understand?’

‘Fine,’ sighed Croke. ‘I’ll see to it.’

There was still no sign of Danel, so Avram now took care of another piece of business. He set up a new Hotmail account on his laptop and filled its contacts list with email addresses for as many journalists, media companies, embassies and pressure groups as he could find. Then he opened a new Word document and drafted his two sets of demands, searching the net for the names of suitable prisoners for the first, double-checking the registration number of Croke’s jet for the second.

He was just about finished when Danel finally arrived at the wheel of a white minibus. Avram waved in welcome. They’d first met some four years ago while he’d been on a tour of the settlements, lecturing on the Third Temple. Danel had stood up during the Q&A and asked bluntly why so many Jews
talked
about bringing down the Dome, yet never
did
anything. A common enough question, but while everyone else had laughed, Danel himself had remained stonefaced. Avram had intercepted him at the door, had asked him whether
he
was prepared to do something about it. Not only he, it had turned out, but his fellow settlers also, enraged by the recent demolition of their Havat Gilad homes.

They climbed down from the minibus, stretched and joked. Ten of them in all. In their T-shirts, shorts, trainers and sunglasses, they could scarcely have drawn a starker contrast with Shlomo and his Haredim. They even had two women with them. Yet, though young and seemingly casual, they were in truth tough, disciplined and incredibly angry.

Avram nodded greeting to them all. ‘Let’s get busy,’ he said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

Police officers were decanting from three vans outside St Paul’s as Walters and his men arrived. They gave no sense of imminent action, however, but were standing around chatting among themselves, awaiting orders.

‘What now?’ asked Kieran.

Walters shrugged. Snatching people was hard at the best of times. A double snatch in a tourist spot surrounded by police … Yet they had to shut Luke and Rachel up if they could. ‘Let’s find them first, eh?’ he said, buying tickets and leading the way along the aisle.

‘And then what?’

Walters nodded up at the whispering gallery that encircled the base of the dome a hundred feet or so above them. ‘The boss and his mate are about to have this place cleared,’ he said. ‘They’re going to give the police orders to secure the perimeter then stay outside until the NCT guys arrive. That means it’ll soon be completely empty in here. Wouldn’t it be a terrible shame if a couple of people panicked during the evacuation for some reason, and fell from way up there?’

‘Fat chance we’ll be lucky enough to find them up there,’ said Kieran.

‘Who said anything about luck?’ asked Walters. ‘Do this right and they’ll go up there of their own accord. It’s just a matter of finding them and showing ourselves to them in the right way. We can herd them like sheep wherever we want.’

Pete grinned. ‘Then we just wait until the place is clear, and finish this.’

The floor of the crypt was crowded with memorial plaques for the great and the good, so that picking one’s way between them seemed like a macabre game of hopscotch. That impression was heightened by the gloomy lighting, for though there were chandeliers and wall-lamps everywhere, they were all turned atmospherically low.

Luke and Rachel found Nelson’s ebony coffin easily enough, high on a marble plinth between Wellington’s tomb and the Churchill Gate. It wasn’t the coffin that
caught Luke’s attention, however, but rather the layout
of
the place itself, a small dome supported by eight pairs of
pillars, just like the main cupola on the floor above.

‘So?’ asked Rachel, when he pointed it out to her.

‘The tomb of Christian Rosencreutz,’ said Luke. ‘The vault beneath the Ashmolean. The dome upstairs. The Greek
Cross design. Now this. Everywhere we go, eight sides topped by a dome.’

She nodded. ‘What does it mean?’

‘I don’t know. But it can’t be coincidence, can it?’

The floor around the tomb was laid with geometric mosaics. He crouched by one depicting the mystery of the Trinity, and smiled to himself. Newton would have just loved that. ‘So what are we thinking?’ he asked, looking up at Rachel.

‘You first.’

‘Okay. How about this: Tradescant the Elder is on his travels when he acquires something extraordinary. Maybe he comes to believe he’s been sold a fake, and is embarrassed by it; or maybe he thinks it’s just too precious to declare. Whatever, he doesn’t put it on display, doesn’t even tell his son about it. But then Ashmole comes cataloguing and recognizes it for what it is. He sets his heart on it and tricks Tradescant the Younger and his wife out of it. Then he brings in the other members of the cabal. He can’t bear to part with it until he dies, however, at which time he leaves it to Newton. But Newton, Wren and Evelyn want it in London rather than the Ashmolean. They want it here beneath the dome.’

‘But they can’t bring it here until Wren has built a vault for it,’ said Rachel, picking up the thread. ‘And that’s not so easy, what with this place on a schedule and a budget. So he starts muttering about cracks in the piers, giving himself the perfect excuse to dig up the floor. But now he can’t bear the thought of people mocking him for his mistake, so he spreads a rumour about cutting through the anchors before laying them. And he and the others also arrange for a cipher to be left in the Ashmolean vault, perhaps as a kind of apology to Ashmole for having reneged on their—’

Alarm bells began to sound at that moment, screeching like a natal ward. Everyone stopped what they were doing, but calmly, assuming it was a malfunction or a drill. But the noise went on and on, and the guides and wardens began hustling visitors towards the exits. Luke glanced at Rachel. ‘It’s those bastards again,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll bet it is.’

Rachel grimaced. ‘How did they find us?’

‘Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they just cracked the cipher themselves.’

‘If they’ve found the cipher, they have to know we were in the vault before them. They’re bound to be looking for us.’ Even as she spoke, she recognized a man near the exit, scouring the crowds as they filed out. She grabbed Luke’s wrist and pulled him behind a pillar. ‘Our fair-haired friend,’ she whispered.

‘Hell,’ said Luke.

‘What do we do? They’ll be watching all the exits.’

He nodded towards the Triforium steps. ‘Let’s try Trevor. Tell him everything, throw ourselves on his mercy.’

‘You think he’ll believe us?’

‘Only one way to find out,’ said Luke.

When Avram had first resolved to bring down the Dome, he’d taken it almost for granted that the hardest part would be the assault itself. But as he’d studied the various problems, he’d quickly changed his mind. The Temple Mount was surprisingly thinly protected: a hard shell of Israeli police checkpoints around a soft centre of
Waqf
, the Muslim religious trust’s guards, armed only with batons and the like. No. The hardest parts were recruiting the right personnel, arranging the necessary supplies and then – most difficult of all – getting them all into position at the right time. For the Old City was the worst place in the world from which to launch an attack like this. Its compressed nature, heritage status and paranoid atmosphere made it almost impossible to stash munitions for any length of time. And the surrounding new city was little better, infested as it was with snoops and gossips, with police and soldiers.

Two of Danel’s men heaved the last of the washing machines aside. ‘Is this it?’ asked Danel, kicking a roughened patch of re-laid concrete with his heel.

‘That’s it,’ agreed Avram.

They attacked the concrete with hand drills, quickly breaking it up and clearing it away to reveal the hatchway of an old fuel sump. Three of Danel’s men climbed down inside and passed up supplies that the others laid out on the warehouse floor: nine Predator short-range assault weapons fitted with anti-bunker payloads; body-armour, night-vision goggles, assault rifles and handguns; explosive charges and detonators; military clothing and boots; laptops and cameras; a roll of blue silk, two deflated neoprene mattresses and six canisters of industrial foam.

Avram plucked at Danel’s sleeve while this was going on. ‘I need a word,’ he murmured.

‘About what?’

‘About Ana and Ruth. Our friends tonight won’t have women.’

Danel scowled. Like many settlers, he despised the Haredim as parasites and cowards. Only by assuring him that Shlomo and his friends had been volunteers in the IDF’s
Yeshivat Hesder
had Avram persuaded him to accept them as allies at all.