Silver (5 page)
Authors: Steven Savile
He didn’t get angry.
He didn’t rail against the world.
He got even in his own very quiet, almost understated, way.
And right then the old man’s smile was a match for any the Russian had ever conjured. “Because, my dear, I am dreadfully predictable and you know me far too well. It’s the curse of spending too much time together. I will admit this much, I have my suspicions. I can only assure you that some very good reasons underpin those suspicions—but I am not ready to voice them just yet. As soon as I am sure, you will be the first to know. Until then, he who speaks first and thinks later has an idiot for a mouth. And contrary to what you may believe, I am not an idiot.” This time his smile was both self-deprecating and honest. It was a gentle deflection.
Noah half-expected her to challenge the old man again. She could be like a dog with a bone sometimes. She didn’t. Noah understood why. Thirteen burning faces told them all it was an argument for another day.
“Okay,” she said instead, “let’s think about this rationally. The one question that’s begging to be asked is: who else was involved in that dig? For all the conspiracy theory nonsense, the dig is the one thing we know for sure that the suicides have in common. Logically, anyone else who had been there is either in danger themselves, or more likely, is wrapped up in the whole thing somehow. Either way, we need to find them.”
Lethe had a partial answer. It wasn’t what any of them wanted to hear. “More than fifty locals were used as casual labor. The dig was overseen by one Akim Caspi, who is not, I hasten to add, an archeologist. Caspi is a lieutenant general in Tzahal, the Israeli Defense Force. I sincerely doubt he has a list of names, unfortunately. Archeologists are great for keeping itemized records on fossilized donkey crap, but they don’t seem all that concerned about people if they haven’t been dead for a millennium or more.”
He put up a picture of Caspi in full military regalia on the screens. The man looked like someone a soldier would be willing to die for.
“Okay, so given that we aren’t going to be blessed with a convenient list of prime suspects, we need to hit the ground running. What ground though?” the Irishman asked.
“We’ve got thirteen potentially blind alleys to run down.”
“Rome or Berlin,” Konstantin said, breaking his silence. “There is a reason those calls deviated from the pattern.”
“I am inclined to agree,” the old man said, “and because of that, Konstantin, I want you to go to Berlin and walk a mile in the dead man’s shoes.”
The Russian raised an eyebrow. “Walk in his shoes?” He made his index and forefingers skip across the tabletop to demonstrate his understanding, or lack of it.
“Relive the last seventy-two hours of his life,” Sir Charles explained. “Go through it with a fine-toothed comb. Every place he visited, every person he saw. No man is an island, especially in this modern age of emails and phone calls. Lethe will support your investigations from back here, following the electronic paper trail. Somewhere in the middle of everything is his killer—and make no mistake about this, he was killed. They all were. Their murderers might not have pulled the trigger, but that is neither here nor there. Death comes upon his pale horse wielding fire, guns and other instruments of death. Nothing says death needs to be intimate anymore. So take his life apart, climb inside his skin. Become him. Let the dead man tell his last tale.”
The Russian nodded.
Sir Charles turned to Noah. “I want you to go to Rome. Whether we consider the threat credible or not, the scant evidence we have points toward the Holy See. To ignore it would be negligent in the extreme,” the old man said. “And given the veneration half the world feels for His Holiness, I can’t say I am particularly eager to have his blood on my hands. So let’s see if we can avoid that, shall we?”
Noah nodded.
“Good. Get out there. Get a feel for the lie of the land. There’s a reason these two messages were different. I don’t know what it is, but my gut instinct is screaming that it is important. Do what you are best at, Noah, make yourself a pain in the arse. Get in there and ruffle some feathers. Shake the holy tree. Just do whatever it takes to unearth that reason. And, for God’s sake, don’t let the Pope die, there’s a good man.”
“Dig up secrets, don’t get His Holiness killed, understood.”
“Let’s not forget the one thing in our favor right now is the sheer scale of this. Everything about today’s events cries spectacle. It’s terrorism in the truest sense of the word. It is theater. If ten times the amount of people had died in a plane wreck, the world would barely have blinked an eye. Planes crash. Nine-eleven changed the nature of fear. It made it global. As a society we have become so desensitized to death that anything less is almost mundane. Terrorists bring down planes and bomb embassies. That is what they do. It’s tragic, yes, but any way you look at it, it’s old news.
The old fears aren’t enough in this brave new world. Everything has to be bigger,”—he let that sink in for a moment—“which is a salutary lesson for us. What it means in this case is, they don’t martyr themselves in broad daylight without having achieved some obvious goal. So what was that goal? Thirteen people burning themselves alive is not frightening, not on a global scale. It is off the front of the newspapers in a few days, forgotten in a few weeks, which is a crime in and of itself, but not one we can afford to worry about.
“If you want my opinion, it is the threat they deliver right before they burn that is frightening. That’s what sends shivers through the strata of society. That’s what makes the good people of the world look over their shoulders.
“Forty days of terror is very precise and obviously picked for its religious connotations. It’s a common biblical time of transition:
And I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.
Later Moses convenes with God on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, and Mark tells us that Jesus emerged from his forty days in the wilderness reborn, having resisted the temptations of Satan. To my way of thinking this all adds credence to Mr. Lethe’s theory about Masada holding the key.
“Ask yourself this: Can our modern society resist forty days of listening to Satan’s overtures? Will it emerge from the terror, from the purge, as every living substance is wiped from the face of the earth? And if it does, if society comes out of the flames, triumphant, what will
we
have become?”
Before anyone could answer, the old man turned to Orla. “My dear, I am going to take advantage of you shamelessly,”—there was nothing remotely sexual about the overture, despite the glaring
double entendre
—
“I want you to find out everything there is to know about the day-to-day lives of the other victims. Work your contacts. Even though the world has been reduced to ones and zeroes, machines will only tell us so much, no matter how brilliant Mister Lethe is. Paper trails are all well and good, but what paper trail ever had loose lips or guilty body language?
“Frost, in Masada. Track down Caspi, he’s the one name we have out there.”
“One thing I did find out about Caspi,” Lethe said. “In 2004 he received an insurance payout in excess of two million dollars, which he dutifully paid an ungodly amount of tax on.”
“Same year as the dig? Well, isn’t that just another happy coincidence?” Frost said. “Now, if that’s everything,”—the Irishman started to push back his chair—“I think a couple of hours of shuteye before dawn wouldn’t go amiss. It’s going to be a long day.”
“This is bullshit,” Orla muttered under her breath. She picked up her phone. For a moment Noah thought she was going to wring the mechanical guts out of it. Instead she pocketed it and pushed herself to her feet. “I spent six years in Israel. I know its heart. I know how it works. I’ve got a network of hundreds of contacts I can fall back on, people in all walks of life. And you’re sending him? This is bullshit.”
“Calm down, Orla.” The old man reversed his chair away from the table, in the process turning his back on her.
“Don’t you walk away from me!” Her voice rose until the last syllable was almost twice as loud as the first.
“I will not be argued with, Orla. Ronan is going to Masada, you are staying here, and that is the end of it.”
“No,” she said, “it’s not.” The defiance in her voice surprised everyone in the room. There was an established order to things. No one argued with the old man when he’d had his final word. It was just the way of things. “It’s a crock of shit is what it is. But it is not over.”
“Orla,” the old man said, a hint of warning in his voice. His patience was stretching thin. “I suggest you sit, take a few deep breaths and calm yourself down.”
“Don’t patronize me. I’m thirty-one years old. I was a field operative for MI6 for almost a third of my natural life, and half of that was spent swimming in the shit of Israeli politics. I’ve been shot at, and blown up, and I’m still here. The country is in my blood. I know it better than I know myself. And you want me to sit here twiddling my thumbs while Ronan goes trampling all over the place with his size nines?” She shook her head. “You need to understand Israel. It’s like nowhere else on earth. And no disrespect to Ronan, but he can’t understand it. It’s impossible.”
The old man looked at her, then at Ronan, and for a moment didn’t say anything. He seemed to be weighing up the cost of losing face over the value of stubbornness like it was some sort of economic factor-equation where one might somehow balance out the other.
Noah wondered how the hell the old man could say no to her. He knew, roles reversed, he wouldn’t have been able to. Orla was all fire and heat, and like a moth, he wanted to get as close to her flame as he could, right up to where her incandescence had his flesh burning.
Sir Charles rubbed at his nose and twisted his lips into an expression that was anything but a smile. “Sometimes arguing with you makes me feel like Sisyphus with his damned stone,” the old man said. And sometimes, Noah thought, listening to you two makes me wish I’d paid more attention at school. “What part of ‘the end of the discussion’ didn’t you understand, Orla? No, don’t bother answering that one, I know the answer. It was the bit where it meant I was saying no to you. You’re like a willful child sometimes. I have my reasons for wanting to keep you out of Israel, but if you are so damned determined to get yourself killed, go to Israel.
“Ronan, that means you’re on foot patrol here.
“Now, Maxwell is waiting to drive the rest of you to the airfield.”
5
The Adoration of Silver
The old man grappled with his wheelchair, banging the steel rim off the doorframe as he negotiated the turn into one of the many downstairs rooms. He cursed the damned thing, reversed and twisted hard on the right wheel to make sure he made it through on the second attempt. There was no need for it; the wheelchair was electric. He could just as easily have angled it gracefully between the gap using the little joystick set into the armrest, but right now Sir Charles needed to look frustrated. To finish playing the part, he needed to take that “frustration” out with sheer physical exertion. Anything else would have given his satisfaction away.
He slammed the door behind him.
And then he smiled the smile of a man content that he had achieved exactly what he had set out to.
The room was yet another different world within the confines of Nonesuch. It was part study, part retreat. This was the old man’s haven. There was an antique pedestal desk with green leather inlay and matching green glass banker’s lamp and blotter. The pedestals were chipped and scuffed where he had caught them with the wheelchair. Above the desk was a mirror. Reflected in the mirror was a Rembrandt, brooding and dark with thick, heavy oils. The painting was priceless—or more accurately, beyond pricing—because the rest of the world believed it to be among the lost treasures of the art world, a variant on his 1629 masterpiece
Judas Repentant
. The painting had fascinated Sir Charles, as had the very notion that there could be no rehabilitation for the penitent sinner. What was it Peter had called Judas’ repentance? He remembered:
The sorrow of a world which worketh death
.
It was getting progressively more difficult to recall the little things, the ephemera of life, which frightened Sir Charles. The idea of his mental acuity slipping into darkness was terrifying. He’d promised himself he would shuffle off this mortal coil if he ever forgot his own name. It wasn’t a promise he was sure he could keep. That was his sorrow. Age.
He studied the painting for the thousandth time. Everything in it appeared to represent genuine shame—the hand-wringing, which mirrored so many portraits of Peter the sinner, the facial expression, even the damage where Judas had been tearing his hair out. They were all classic representations of shame. The difference between this and the original lay in the coins. In the original Judas had been painted as unable to look away from the silver. In this, he offered the blood money up to Mary Magdalene, looking at her with hope, even love, in his eyes. He wasn’t groveling for mercy. Instead, there was a discomforting beauty and truth to the painting that had owned Sir Charles’ soul since he first laid eyes upon it.
He was a boy when his father had taken him to see it hanging in Jacques Goudstikker’s Gallerie in Paris.
It had hung there until the German occupation when, like so many other works of art, it was spirited away into Hermann Göring’s personal collection and thought lost forever in the many vaults beneath the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich.
After decades of litigation, threat and negotiation, a number of paintings had been recovered, but the process was made all the more difficult. Jacques Goudstikker had left his widow, Marei, a typewritten inventory, but without death certificates the Swiss bankers refused to turn over the treasures gathering dust in their vaults.
Of course, Auschwitz, Belsen and Treblinka hadn’t been in the habit of issuing death certificates for the Jews they gassed.
It was all a face-saving exercise for the Swiss, who of course, vociferously denied any wrongdoing.
Sir Charles had managed to secure a copy of Marei Goudstikker’s list. The interpretation of
Judas Repentant
, known as
The Adoration of Silver
, or more simply,
Silver
, wasn’t on that inventory. Its absence had, in part, been the reason behind his obsession with lost treasures.
It had taken him the best part of a decade to grease the right palms, who, in turn, knewe="Georgiht vault to crack open. Smuggling the Rembrandt out of the country after that had been a comparatively easy task. And now it hung above his desk, a constant reminder that there were two sides to every story, even the best known of all. He had made arrangements for the painting’s return to the heirs of its rightful owner upon his death. That, too, was the kind of man he was.
The rest of the room was dominated by a huge orthopedic bed. Again the mahogany frame was scarred where the chair had caught it again and again. Angels, demons and so many creatures of nightmare were beautifully rendered in the frieze that decorated the headboard. Sir Charles had discovered the carving in Palermo and had it shipped to Nonesuch, where he had employed a seventy-year-old artisan to craft the art from a thing of curious beauty into the bed where he intended to die.
There was a green oxygen tank beside the neatly made bed, a clear, plastic mask hanging from the closed valve. The third wall was dominated by more books. Beneath the window an exquisitely hand-carved globe caught the moonlight. It was the oldest thing in the room, the contours of its map hopelessly wrong in this world of GPS and satellite navigation. It was filled with places that had long since slipped off modern maps and into mythology: Hy-Brazil, Hawaiki, Nibiru, Lemuria, Ys, Thule and more. Places that were filled with mystery and promise, lost, like Rembrandt’s
Silver
.
Perhaps, he thought, and not for the first time, they too could be found? There was something curiously soothing about tilting at windmills like Quixote.
Sir Charles angled the chair between the bed and the wall, fastened the mask over his face and breathed deeply as the pure oxygen flooded into his lungs. After several purifying breaths he shut off the valve and hung the mask up again. He closed his eyes. He had always intended that Orla would head up the investigation in Israel. Anything else, as she had so vehemently put it, was a waste of her talents—but he was all too aware of what had happened to her out there. It had to be her choice to return to that forsaken land.
The old man drummed his fingers on the arm of the wheelchair. The rhythm sounded like the funeral march of Geppetto’s wooden toys. His nails
clacked
and
clinked
and
thunked
against the leather, steel and wood. He found his thoughts drifting.
He hadn’t been there for Orla’s debriefing, but he’d read Orla’s file a thousand times since.
He knew all of the intimate details of Tel Aviv and exactly what had happened to her. Knowing didn’t make it any less potent. It didn’t purge or cleanse or offer redemption or retribution.
She had been taken during the second Intifada. After a series of suicide attacks the IDF believed stemmed from the Palestinian camp, she had gone in. They were after Mahmoud Tawalbe, a father of two who owned a record store. He also headed an Islamic Jihad cell and was responsible for a string of deaths through suicide bombings at Haifa and Hadera. Intelligence suggested Thabet Mardawi and Ali Suleiman al-Saadi, two other top-level Islamic Jihadists were also sheltering in the camp.
Orla’s brief had been simple: infiltrate the refugee camp, establish the presence of the primary and secondary targets, and get out. She made her reports, but she didn’t get out. She was dragged away from the makeshift streets of the encampment to the heart of Jenin, the Hawashin district, as the first assault hit on the morning of April 2, 2002. Explosions triggered by the bulldozers as they rolled in buried the sound of her screams.
They had told her she was already dead, that there was no place in heaven for her soul, but promised to keep her alive one more night if she gave herself up to them. They used her. Every night they made the same promise, one more night. They kept her for nine days, and though time lost all meaning for her, she suspected that at least five people raped her every night. Often it was two or three at a time, sometimes one man came alone. She didn’t fight them. They would beat her, enjoying her pain. They would taunt her, goading her to tears. They would abuse her, violate her. But they refused to kill her even when she begged. Somehow she had made it through, night after night, until the IDF “liberated” the camp.
She hadn’t worked for four months when Sir Charles rescued her. The annotation in her service record said simply:
Torture victim. Unstable. Suggest continued observation. If no change in subsequent months
recommend transfer out of active service.
In less clinical words, Orla Nyrén was the quintessential “damaged goods” that could quite easily keep a psychiatrist fed and watered for years.
That didn’t change the fact that during their few years together Sir Charles had grown to think of Orla as the daughter he’d never had. He knew her as well as anyone could, and that natural paternal instinct drove him to at least try and protect her, despite the fact that doing so only served to rile her all the more. His gut instinct had been to send Noah with her. Of all of them Noah was the one he would have entrusted with her life because it was so obvious he shared the same adoration the old man did. Without question, Noah would take a bullet for Orla. But Noah Larkin was every bit as damaged in his ownway as she was, and just as likely to get them taken down a dark alley and shot as he was to save the day.
He had deliberately stressed Konstantin’s qualifications for the Berlin leg of the operation: his familiarity with the city, with the mindset of the people, his network of contacts from both before the wall fell and after. Everything he had said could equally be applied to Orla and Israel, he’d made quite sure of that. The only difference was their relationships with the places. For Konstantin Berlin mean freedom; for Orla Israel meant torture. And because of that, he had been worried she was going to sit back meekly and let Frost take the Israel assignment. He couldn’t begin to imagine the conflict going on inside her mind as she listened to him give her city away. The war of emotions, guilt, relief, anger.
It had been such a relief to see the fire back in her belly. He’d even enjoyed her calling him on his pigheadedness like that, even though on the surface it meant losing face with the others. Frost had been around the block often enough to grasp Sir Charles’ game, and Lethe was too in awe of the whole spy culture they had going on to dare jeopardize his place in it. Noah was Noah. Unpredictable. Difficult to read. Konstantin was different. He came from a culture that respected power, even when that power was incontrovertibly wrong. Still, he had fled for a reason. So even the Russian would find something admirable in the old man being persuaded by her arguments. In truth her flare up only served to cement his position rather than undermine it.
He looked at the grandfather clock, with its tarnished brass pendulum swinging slowly to and fro,
tick
,
tock
,
tick
,
tock
. It made time sound so real, so vital. He heard Maxwell ushering them out, heard Noah saying something deliberately antagonistic to him, the car doors slam and then a moment later the peel of tires spitting gravel as the Daimler accelerated toward the airfield. They would be in the air in twenty minutes and halfway to Berlin, their first stop, before the sun was full in the sky.
How many hours did they have until the first attack? He knew he should have handed everything they had over to MI6. It was stupid not to. But it was 4 a.m. There was nothing the spooks could do that his people couldn’t. Indeed, free of the constraints of protocols and hierarchy, there was plenty the Forge Team could do that an MI6 operative legitimately couldn’t.
He was tired. There were still a few hours until dawn, and as he had told the others, these few hours might well be their last chance to sleep soundly for the foreseeable future.
