Stealing Sacred Fire (15 page)

Murchison scraped his hands
through his hair. ‘Yes, I would have thought so, but I slept
deeply... What kind of joke is this?’

Mrs Melrose was clearly moved
by the ragged edge to his voice. She put her hands on his arms.
‘Perhaps we’d better call the police,’ she said.

He nodded, gulped. ‘Yes...’

‘I’ll see to it. You go back to
your room and lie down.’

Wearily, Murchison obeyed. As
he went slowly back up the stairs, he was wondering what kind of
housebreaker moved furniture around and arranged artefacts on the
floor. In his heart, he suspected no-one had entered his house in
the night. Whatever had done that in the study somehow lived here
already.

He lay on his bed, fanned by
the air that came in at the open window. Outside, the sound of
children playing braided with the cacophony of traffic, of distant
crowds. He smelled warming tarmac, cut lawns, the scent of the rose
that grew against the wall of his house. His eyelids drooped
involuntarily. The sounds outside tumbled around themselves,
resolving into a skirl of eastern music, the jabber of foreign
voices, the creak of carts and the braying of mules. There was an
aroma like that of a great slow-moving river — stagnant yet fecund
— frilled with the smells of human waste, sweat, cooking meat and
rare perfumes.

Lead me, he thought.

Before the police arrived with
questions that could not be answered, he had already packed a bag
to leave.

Istanbul, Turkey

Shemyaza had no fear of pursuit:
Melandra was sure of this. He had used the name Michael Jacobs on
the flight over to Istanbul, flying business class with two
companions. She had been unable to elicit any information from the
airline herself, but a quick call to Nathaniel Fox’s office had
been sufficient to set wheels in motion elsewhere. After securing a
last minute cancelled seat on the next available flight to
Istanbul, she’d sat in an airport bar awaiting a return call. She’d
not had to wait long.

Fox told her that the Children
of Lamech had operatives in Turkey, who’d already been mobilised,
and once her target had landed in Istanbul, would follow him
discreetly to his accommodation. Melandra questioned whether her
services would actually be needed now. Her words were greeted with
a brief but eloquent silence, then Fox spoke, ‘My child, you have
your duty as others have theirs.’

‘We have to presume he’ll be
alerted at some point,’ Melandra said. ‘My operation at his
previous address will have been discovered by now.’

‘That is inevitable.’

Melandra detected a faint note
of censure in his voice, but what else could she have done at the
Grigori hotel? ‘I’ll be taking off soon,’ she said stiffly. ‘Shall
I call you when I reach Istanbul?’

‘Call me only when you have
something to report,’ Fox replied, and broke the connection.

Summer in England had been
stifling, but the heat that enveloped Melandra’s body when she
stepped off the plane in Istanbul seemed almost unnatural. She’d
been brought up in the wet, cool north of America, and disliked
hotter climates. As instructed by Fox, she took an expensive taxi
ride into the city some kilometres away, and booked into the
appointed hotel in the Sultanahmet, the old district of the city.
Here, she awaited contact from one of Fox’s operatives. She sensed
tension in the air all around her that did not simply originate
from her own stress levels concerning the job she was here to do. A
vibrating sense of danger and repressed fury seemed to seep through
the walls of the hotel from the air outside. Political tensions
were high, of course, but it was more than that. She could not
dispel the impression that something was forming invisibly around
her — an event of some kind. For a few brief moments she felt as if
her whole purpose was preordained, but not just by the Children of
Lamech. She had a part to play, involuntarily, and had already
embarked upon it.

Dismissing the sensation as
paranoia, she calmed herself by assembling her weapon, which had
been concealed, dismantled, in various items of luggage. Her cases
had hidden compartments, but not suspiciously hidden. Their
presence might seem convenient, rather than sinister; a way to keep
certain parts of her luggage separate from her clothes. In the
event of surveillance equipment discovering them, the compartments
were filled with innocent-looking devices such as a hair-dryer, a
travel iron, jumbo canisters of deodorant, hairspray, air
freshener. The light-weight components of the gun itself were
concealed within these items.

A sniper rifle might have been
useful here, but in the event her semi-automatic proved unsuitable,
she would have to improvise. First, she wanted to pinpoint her
target and observe him. She felt that, in London, the job would
have had to be swift and anonymous, but out here she sensed she had
more time to be elegant and thorough. What was Shemyaza doing here?
Fox hadn’t discussed that with her.

Melandra looked out of the
window: stark lines of modern buildings, but within and below and
beside them, the ancient sub-city, the perfume-breathed seductress
who held all the secrets of history. Car horns might blare and the
stink of traffic eclipse the incense aroma of the forgotten past,
but still to a sensitive ear, the land rang to the plaintive call
of archaic instruments, and the swish of women’s hair in darkness.
This land was not of Melandra’s Lord, Jesus Christ. She shivered as
she thought this, attempting to dismiss it from her mind. The whole
world was Christ’s. But still, a heavy, brooding female power
seemed to sway and murmur at the edge of her perception, its
curling hands undulating through smoky air, calling out to her,
demanding recognition. She turned away from the window. The people
here mostly worshipped Allah. What female deities could possibly
hold sway in this place?

She did not make personal
contact with the operatives who were effectively working for her. A
letter arrived, written by hand, and seemed to have originated from
an old friend of hers, given the tone. The letter chatted
informally about a mutual acquaintance and how Melandra could look
him up while in the city.

By now, he’ll know, she
thought. His people will have told him about what happened at the
hotel. Is he waiting for me?

The letter didn’t give any
indication of a problem, but she felt her nerves tighten within her
body, almost as if his evil mind had suddenly become aware of her
thoughts and had homed in on them. In America and England, she had
simply thought of Shemyaza in terms of a target, but out here, so
close to the sacred centre of the world, he seemed to have become
large and terrible in her imagination. For some reason, the
Children of Lamech had been unable to take a decent photograph of
the man, and all she’d been shown were blurry representations that
told her nothing. Therefore, her own mind provided the details. She
knew he was blond, yet couldn’t help imposing Satanic features onto
him; dark, leering face, greasy black hair, cruel, hard eyes. The
Devil.

In the morning, she took
breakfast in her room, eschewing the traditional Turkish meal of
bread and jam, and ordering a selection of fresh fruit. She could
almost taste the fermenting sugar in the ripe flesh. By the time
she went out into the city, she felt slightly heady, dressed in a
modest long-sleeved cotton dress and dark glasses, her hair pinned
up on her head. She carried a large shoulder bag, of the type used
by many Western women; the contents, however, differed radically
from what you’d normally expect to find in a woman’s bag.

The city hummed and rustled
with secret life. Again, beneath the blare of car horns and human
shouts, she detected the eerie wail of a female voice raised in
song; a song of invocation or adoration. This seemed peculiar,
because she knew it was not the time of day when the voices of
temple callers would normally ring out over the city. Also, she
thought it was usually men who sang the calls. The woman’s voice
seemed to be all around her, and did not originate from any
particular area.

Melandra had a finely honed
sense of direction and had little trouble in locating the hotel
where her target was staying. For a while she sat outside a café,
under the awning, drinking strong Turkish coffee and dreamily
watching the stuccoed doorway to the hotel. The heat pulsed around
her. She noticed how the bodies of the Turkish women swayed in
their concealing robes as if they danced within their purdah. You
cannot suppress the female celebration of life. The thought came
unbidden. She visualised an image of dark, shady hallways, where
fans turned slowly on the ceiling, parting the thick smoke of
hashish; dark eyes behind a lattice, the low chuckle of feminine
laughter, the swish of light cotton against polished floors. Such a
strange summoning. Melandra smiled to herself. The demons of the
east might attempt to seduce her, but she was made of fibres too
tough to yield.

It seemed the day was unwinding
around her, in a slow, measured pace. She drank more coffee, smoked
cigarettes under the shade of the awning, and watched the hotel
entrance. People came and went. The double doors were open, and she
could see part of the darkened hall-way beyond. She felt no fear,
even though he might be watching her from an upstairs window, aware
of her purpose.

A slight, warm breeze lifted
her hair like exploring fingers. She shook her head to dispel the
impression, her attention caught by a sudden commotion nearby.

A number of scrawny dogs had
run out from a shadowy side alley and were fighting in the dusty
street, rolling over and over, their jaws slavering, their howls
high-pitched. Melandra experienced a deep revulsion as she stared
at them. Passers-by ignored the hysterical creatures, even when
more dogs, perhaps excited by the noise, started to whine and bark
excitedly in shuttered courtyards. The whole street was suffused
with the clamour. Almost as if the animals had been enacting some
bizarre invocation, a wind started up, spiralling the dust into
eddies and swirls. Again, Melandra heard a woman’s voice ululate
loudly over the din; a proud, eastern song. Then the doors to the
hotel slammed shut.

Melandra cricked her neck
turning to see. At the same moment, the dogs broke apart and ran
off in different directions. The sobbing echoes of the woman’s song
streamed away down the twisting alleys and the last particles of
dust fell back to the street.

The doors to the hotel opened
once more, slowly and seemingly without the agency of a human hand.
As they hit the white walls, their handles rattled. A figure
stepped out from the shadows and stood at the top of the shallow
flight of steps that led to the street. He was tall, clad in
traditional Arab dress of white cloth, his head and most of his
face concealed from view. At his appearance, the environment around
him seemed to slow to utter stillness, and become bleached of
colour.

It’s him, Melandra thought.

He did not look at her, or make
any other sign that he was aware of her presence. After surveying
the scene around him for a few short moments, he stepped down onto
the street and walked right past where she sat beneath the
awning.

Sound and colour and movement
returned, and Melandra came back to her senses. He was walking away
from her, out into the labyrinth of the city. She got to her feet,
knocking the table and spilling the dregs of her coffee onto the
cloth.

There was no doubt in her mind
that the man who’d emerged from the hotel was her target. She could
see his tall shape moving slowly but purposefully ahead of her
through the bustle of the streets, and checked her pace to keep a
short distance behind him. His height made him easy to keep in
sight above the heads of other people.

He walked into the bazaar and
here paused. Melandra thought he had sensed her presence behind
him, but maybe he was only examining merchandise on one of the
stalls. Melandra was surrounded by the aromas of spice and coffee,
hot pistachios and sweetcorn. Sunlight off brass dazzled her eyes.
The stall-holders all seemed to be grinning at her with long teeth,
as if in some private joke about her. She stopped as if to examine
an array of floating coloured scarves, keeping her target in the
periphery of her vision. He did not look round.

When he moved on, Melandra
followed. He turned up a side alley, where the tall, white
buildings seemed to meet overhead. Awnings flapped above them, and
brightly-coloured carpets hung from balconies. Sunlight was scant
in this area. Shops and stalls still lined the narrow street, but
Melandra sensed a subtle difference in the air. The people sitting
cross-legged behind their merchandise looked at her blandly; their
dark eyes the only visible features in faces swathed in striped
cloth. There were fewer people browsing among the stalls.

Ahead of her, she saw a low
wall before a courtyard, where a group of tall women sat upright,
with legs apart, their strong feet firm against the ground. In
front of them, a wanton array of sumptuous fabrics was cast. They
did not look like typical Turkish women. Their faces and arms were
bare, and covered in curling black tattoos. Heavy gold jewellery
studded with hunks of lapis lazuli and turquoise adorned their
ears, throats and nostrils. Their languorous movements and heavy
yet sinuous bodies exuded an almost visible aura of sensuality.
Melandra was suffused with disgust at the sight of them. They might
have stepped from one of the stories about the Fallen Ones; lustful
wantons who had seduced the sons of God. The women turned their
heads to stare at her as she approached. Whores, Melandra thought.
They are whores waiting for custom. She tossed back her head and
forced herself to hold the long-lidded gaze of the women, filling
her expression with contempt. Momentarily, all thoughts of her
target were forgotten. Something about the whores’ confident stance
made her feel uncomfortable. They radiated an essentially female
power, as if they sucked it up through their feet from the earth
itself to shine from their eyes and hang like an aura around their
voluptuous bodies. She had read legends of the sacred prostitutes
of ancient times. They would have been like this.