Newton’s Fire (33 page)

‘Your word!’ scoffed Croke.

‘Yes,’ said Luke. ‘Our word.’

Croke walked over, crouched down in front of him. ‘I want you to remember something,’ he said. ‘We’re still holding your two friends from Oxford. Fuck with me and it won’t just be your own neck you’ll forfeit. Understand?’

‘We understand,’ said Rachel.

Croke stood up again, turned around to Walters. ‘Can you handle them?’

‘As long as they’re all friendlies downstairs,’ said Walters.

‘They’re all friendlies,’ Croke assured him. ‘But they might not exactly welcome spectators.’ He bit his lower lip. ‘Take them to the cathedral floor; only bring them down to the crypt once we’ve broken through. That way we’ll present them with a
fait accompli
.’

‘How will we know when you break through?’ asked Walters.

Croke laughed. ‘We’re taking up half the floor. I imagine you’ll hear us.’

Jay came across once he was gone. ‘I told you they needed me,’ he said.

‘Your uncle, more like,’ said Luke. ‘Who the hell is he?’

‘A great man, Luke. A
great
man.’ He sounded exuberant now that the skirmish had been won. ‘You’ll like him. You’ll both really like him. He’s not a scientist or a historian, but he knows his Newton, honestly he does.’

‘You never mentioned him before.’

‘I didn’t know him until recently. He’s not really my uncle. My third cousin twice removed. He just likes us to call him Uncle.’

‘Us?’

Jay shook his head and turned more towards Rachel. ‘You have to understand,’ he said. ‘Not every page that Newton ever wrote has been checked and translated and understood. Not
properly
. Not by a Newton expert. Not by someone who knows Greek, Latin, Hebrew and French as well as English. Not by someone familiar with his handwriting and abbreviations, who understands his natural philosophy, theology and alchemy. That’s
my
project: to study everything he ever wrote. Every page, every sentence, every word.’

‘Out of my way, kid,’ said Walters. He uncuffed Luke and Rachel from the radiators, allowing them to stand, stretch, flex their fingers. ‘No games,’ he warned.

‘No games,’ agreed Luke.

Jay walked alongside them to the door, eager to finish telling them about his self-appointed mission. ‘Every word that Newton ever wrote,’ he said. ‘Mostly, it’s easy. The papers have all been photographed and put online. I never even have to leave my flat. But not everything’s like that.’ They reached the steps, began heading down. ‘Not all the Yahuda Archive is available online, for example. That’s why I had to go to Jerusalem, to see the rest for myself. I
hate
going to new places. But I have family there, so I got in touch with them. That’s when Uncle Avram offered me a room. He even arranged a special pass for me at the National Library of Israel. And that’s where I found them, on the reverse of a pair of pages about the ancient cubit: faint traces of ancient texts and sketches that Newton had himself rubbed out, but not perfectly—’

‘Shut it,’ said Walters, as they neared the foot of the steps. ‘I want silence.’

They emerged onto the empty cathedral floor a few moments later, went over to the crypt stairs. They could hear hammering and drilling below. It wasn’t yet time. They milled around as they waited, looking at the altar, the pillars, upwards at the great cupola.

‘So have you worked it out, then?’ asked Jay.

‘Worked what out?’ asked Luke.

‘What this is all about. What we’re about to find.’

‘No,’ said Luke. ‘What are we about to find?’

Jay gave a reproving cluck of the tongue. ‘Come on, Luke. Haven’t you even noticed the
geometry
of this place?’

‘Eight sides topped by a Dome,’ said Luke. ‘What about it?

‘Oh.’ He looked downcast for a moment. But then he cheered up. ‘But I bet you don’t know where Wren got the idea from, do you?’

‘You mean the tomb of Christian Rosencreutz?’ said Luke.

‘No!’

‘That Bourbon chapel in Paris, then?’

‘St-Denis?’ exclaimed Jay excitedly. ‘Of course not St-Denis. How can you be so obtuse? Don’t you know what the English believed back then? They believed themselves descended from a lost tribe of Israel. It was almost an article of faith.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Rachel.

‘A lost tribe of Israel,’ said Jay. ‘London was their new Jerusalem, and this spot right here its most sacred site. The high point of the city, the focus of their worship. Did you know that St Paul himself reputedly came here and preached at this very spot?
This very spot
.’ The drilling and hammering grew so loud that Jay had almost to shout to make himself heard. ‘And what, in Wren’s day, did Jerusalem have on the Temple Mount, on its most sacred site?’

‘The Dome of the Rock?’ hazarded Rachel.

‘Yes!’ cried Jay. ‘The Dome of the Rock! Now do you see?’

Luke went a little numb. ‘An eight-sided building topped by a dome,’ he murmured.

‘An eight-sided building topped by a dome!’ Fervour flushed Jay’s face. ‘Have you ever seen Perugino’s painting of the Virgin? It shows the Temple of Solomon in the background, and it’s
exactly
like the Dome, eight walls topped by a dome. And Raphael too. The same thing. Eight walls topped by a dome. And yet you somehow think that Wren’s design for this place was a
coincidence
? That it was just dumb luck that he settled on the
exact same formula
? No. A thousand times no. He designed it like this precisely because—’

A great cracking and splintering noise came suddenly from below, like hell splitting open. ‘I guess that’s our cue,’ said Walters, herding them towards the steps. They went down together, turned left towards Nelson’s tomb. Even as they arrived, a great slab of floor began to rise, hoisted by a yellow workshop crane, steel cables creaking and groaning with the strain, so that the people nearest took an instinctive half step back. But everything held and the slab of mortar and hardcore inched upwards, bumping and scraping the sides as it came, throwing off a cascade of ancient dust that spread in a thick, low mist and set off a round of throat-clearing coughs.

The slab lifted clear of the floor. It was massive, not just fat but tall, a good foot taller than Luke himself. The operator swung it sideways above a makeshift mattress of blankets and dust sheets laid as a buffer on the mosaic, bumped it down. Everyone edged to the brink of the great black pit in the floor and stared seven or eight feet down to a pair of rotted wooden beams laid parallel across the shaft, then another eight feet or so of open space to a dusty flagstone floor at the head of a flight of stone steps that led into the darkness below Nelson’s tomb.

Jay turned to Luke again, his voice barely a whisper now. ‘London was the new Jerusalem,’ he said. ‘And Wren wanted his cathedral to do the same job as the Temple of Solomon did in the old Jerusalem. The same job that the Dome has been doing ever since.’

It was hard for Luke to concentrate on what Jay was saying, so mesmerized was he by the pit, by all the torches being shone down into it. ‘Protecting the rock?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Jay impatiently. ‘Protecting the Holy of Holies. The place where it used to be, at least. The
exact
place.’

‘But why?’ asked Luke.

‘Why do you think?’ demanded Jay. ‘My God! What was the Holy of Holies
for
? What was its
purpose
? What was it designed to
house
?’

Jay had Luke’s full attention now. He turned and stared at his old friend in disbelief. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he said.

Jay’s eyes glittered triumphantly. ‘Oh, but I am,’ he said. ‘And you’re about to see it for yourselves.’

No one seemed to be in charge. Morgenstern had headphones and a throat mike on, the better to describe what he was seeing to the Vice President and answer her questions. Everyone else was staring raptly down, forgetting that they had work to do. Croke therefore stepped up to the plate. He turned to an NCT man. ‘Get the ladder,’ he said.

The man nodded and fetched it, lowered it into the hole, twisting it sideways to feed it between two beams before setting it on the floor. The chamber was deeper than they’d anticipated; only the top rung protruded above the mouth, making descent somewhat precarious. ‘I’ll go first,’ said the NCT man. ‘I can hold it from the bottom.’

‘No,’ said Croke. ‘
I’m
going first.’ He sat on the floor, felt for a rung with his foot, turned around and steadied himself before he began his descent. It grew dark more quickly than he’d expected. At the foot, all he could see was a few marble steps leading down into the blackness, and pale walls that glowed like ghosts around him. He was about to call up for a flashlight when he saw Morgenstern already on his way down with two of them, though both were turned off at present, presumably so that the Vice President could share the moment of revelation with them. And now the cameraman joined them at the foot, taking pains not to film their faces.

Morgenstern passed Croke the spare flashlight. ‘Ready?’ he grinned.

‘Ready,’ agreed Croke.

They turned on and raised their flashlights together. Their beams pierced the darkness, their flare making Croke blink. The marble steps fanned out as they led down to a large chamber directly beneath Nelson’s tomb, perhaps eight paces square and twelve feet tall, its walls inlaid with mosaics of a garden paradise, sunlit orchards heavy with fruit, streams cascading into lily-pad lakes while gorgeous birds thronged the cloudless skies. But that wasn’t what grabbed their attention. For there was a second, smaller chamber nested inside the larger. Its walls were of flawless white marble and it was fronted by a pair of tall ebony doors. Croke advanced, mesmerized, down the staircase towards it. He stepped up onto its dais, took hold of the twin golden handles, tried to pull the doors towards him. The hinges had stretched over the centuries, however, so that the doors dragged across the floor, screeching and scoring tiny marks in the marble. He took them one at a time instead, lifting the right-hand door then shuffling backwards before setting it down again. Christ, it was heavy. He still couldn’t see inside, for a white linen curtain was draped across the mouth. Rather than drawing it back straight away, he opened the left-hand door instead. Now he glanced at Morgenstern. Morgenstern nodded. Croke took a deep breath and swept the curtain aside. ‘My god,’ he muttered, when he saw what was inside. And it sounded, even to his own ears, like a prayer.

The walls, floor and ceiling of the inner sanctum gleamed with gold, dazzling as dawn in the sudden torchlight. And on a low marble central plinth, there it stood, the Ark of the Covenant itself, a chest of wood and gold, smaller than Croke had anticipated, smaller than the legends that surrounded it, but beautiful nonetheless, and extraordinarily potent, with its carved panels and the pair of golden cherubs kneeling in adoration on its lid, facing each other with their wings outspread and almost touching.

Something touched Croke’s heart then, a childlike awe he hadn’t expected to feel again. A sense that there was so much more to the universe than he understood; more to destiny and the divine. And he found himself, to his own surprise, crying out to the Lord and falling to his knees before it; and then Morgenstern and the cameraman did likewise, and the others behind, all falling to their knees and crying out to the Lord.

The tension in the Jerusalem basement had grown like closeness before a storm. Avram had hoped that a shared sense of purpose would overcome the manifold differences between Shlomo’s and Danel’s parties, but he’d quickly been disappointed. It had taken all his energy and diplomatic skills to keep them together. And then his architect friend Benyamin had arrived. One look at all the squabbling and sniping and he’d spun on his heel and had almost left before Avram had been able to stop him.

But at last something was happening in London. The black screen came to life, showing a great slab of stone and mortar being winched from a mosaic floor. There was no sound, however, and impatient mutters told Avram that the show wasn’t impressing its audience. The slab was set aside. The camera peered down into the gaping hole. A ladder was fed into the darkness. The feed jerked and jumped as the cameraman made his descent. The lighting became ever more darkly atmospheric. Blacks and greys erupted in flares of golden torchlight. The very roughness of the pictures somehow added to their authenticity and mystique, and the basement fell quieter and quieter.

The cameraman walked down a flight of stone steps. There were gasps as the inner sanctum of white marble and ebony doors came into focus. The doors parted reluctantly. A curtain was swept aside. For the longest moment, total silence fell in the basement, astonishment and awe. But it didn’t last. The place erupted with cries of joy, jubilation, even ecstasy. Enemies a few minutes before now laughed and hugged each other, wept openly on each others shoulders. Some prayed while others danced, their euphoria needing physical release as, at long last, they all came together on this night of
Rosh Chodesh Sivan
. A single mind. A single heart. A single Israel.

He turned to Benyamin, that diehard cynic and sceptic, put his hand on his arm. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘Are you coming with us?’

Tears were streaming freely down the big man’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m coming with you.’

The wave of religious enthusiasm died quickly, leaving Croke feeling almost sheepish. He got back to his feet, brushed his knees, assumed his most purposeful expression, the one that said there was serious work to do. He checked his buttonhole camera then turned to Morgenstern, who was still murmuring a commentary to accompany his cameraman’s footage.

This was no time for asking permission. He placed himself squarely in front of the lens, unplugged the microphone jack. ‘Congratulations, Madam Vice President,’ he said. ‘The Reverend told me you were the new Esther. It seems he was right.’