The Sacred Scroll (17 page)

‘Now for the hard part,’ said Graves, failing to read the thoughts etched on Marlow’s face.

‘Haki’s very charming, but he hasn’t a clue what’s happened. Maybe he isn’t that concerned. Turkish Security hasn’t been breached.’

‘True, but it’s not as if we’re going away empty-handed.’

‘We’ve come away with a basket-load of questions, and we’re no closer to what’s happened to Adkins and his team. But there’s nothing more for us here. Maybe back at base we’ll be able to dig out more on
why
they vanished.’

‘They’ve told Adkins’s and Taylor’s families. But they’ve been muzzled.’

‘When’s our plane?’

‘Six-thirty in the morning.’

Marlow looked at his watch. ‘Get the new data to Leon. Maybe he’ll have some ideas on the code on the key.’

‘That’s my department and I’m already working on it,’ said Graves, irritated. Marlow and Lopez might have gone back a few years, but she wasn’t going to be treated like some intern.

‘The gloves too.’

‘Those goddamned gloves! They give me a headache.’

Marlow shook himself. He was tired, and he knew that his companion was too. They hadn’t eaten since breakfast early that morning. And when he was tired he had to fight harder to keep at bay the black thoughts which assailed him, which never left him. ‘The key, the broken hand – everything points to the reason for Adkins’s disappearance.’

‘Haki will keep us posted with anything new.’

‘Do you trust him?’ asked Marlow.

Graves was nonplussed. ‘What choice do we have? His credentials check out.’

‘He ruled out Islamists,’ said Marlow thoughtfully.

‘What are you driving at?’

‘There’s nothing in any records at all about what might have been buried with Dandolo. He was a major figure in Venetian history. He brought huge prosperity and financial stability to the city-state. New trade-routes, dominion over Egypt and Crete, and that at a time when the Seljuk Turks had pushed the Christians out of the Holy Land.’

‘All very interesting, but it has nothing to do with our mission –’ Graves broke off. She was getting too tired to think, Marlow saw; and that was a dangerous thing.

‘Let’s eat,’ he suggested.

The hotel was modern and functional. Its restaurant was cavernous, gloomy, fashionably stark and underlit. It wasn’t any more attractive than the sanitized Turkish food it served. And the thought of eating there, followed by a couple of hours’ work in one or other of their severely furnished rooms, depressed them both.

‘Let’s find a proper restaurant,’ Marlow decided. ‘This place is like a morgue.’

Graves, new to fieldwork and anxious about security, agreed with the idea in her heart, but her head questioned the security risk, and she said so, adding, ‘Isn’t there a good chance that we haven’t been able to shake off whoever it is who’s so interested in us?’

‘There’s a place down the road. It’s safe. You can see it from here.’

He pointed. A short distance away, red and gold lights flickered along a jazzy frontage.

But he checked his gun. A Heckler & Koch USP Compact 9mm. Light and inconspicuous, it’d do enough damage at close range. He drew his jacket open just enough to let Graves see it. She nodded, patting her shoulder-bag. Good, he thought. Not such a novice after all. Their computers were in the hotel safe, in concealed compartments within their briefcases. Everything was covered.

Like the outskirts of most airports, the streets and buildings around the hotel shared its bleakness. The restaurant was an oasis, owing its existence to airline staff tired of plastic food.

It was dark by now, and lights from streetlamps, and
from the hotel’s façade, were mirrored in the polished surfaces of cars as they made their way across the hotel car-park to the road. Occasional buses, trucks and cars drove past at speed to and from the city centre, but the principal sound punctuating the night was the noise of aircraft engines, coming in with a whine or taking off with a roar.

There was a metallic, dusty smell in the air.

They were halfway across the car-park when Graves saw the first figure, out of the corner of her eye. If the man hadn’t moved, she wouldn’t have spotted him at all, and even the slight, stooping movement he made as he started to run towards them she mistook at first for a trick of the light.

Marlow caught her reaction immediately and jerked his automatic out of its holster, holding the firearm steady as they stood back to back, his eyes straining to pick out the figure again, Graves following his gaze.

But there was nothing. The man had disappeared.

‘He was there,’ Graves breathed. ‘I know it.’

‘Let’s move. Back to the hotel.’

They retraced their steps. There was no one about; the hotel doorman had disappeared into the dimly lit foyer. If there was any assailant out there, Marlow thought, he’d make his move now.

Suddenly there was a flurry of movement behind them, to the left and right. The men must have been hiding behind cars. How long had they been watching the hotel, waiting for just such a chance? How had they managed to spring this ambush?

There was a gentle thud – the noise of a silenced gun
– and a bullet hissed past his right ear. Graves was already crouching, her pistol up and ready, swinging this way and that. Marlow turned quickly and got a shot off in the direction of the man who’d fired at him, a hooded figure in black fifteen metres away. He went down, but Marlow hadn’t time to make sure, as the sound of a scuffle and the dull crack of a gun behind him made him turn again. Three men, similarly dressed in black, hoods pulled over their heads, had taken Graves and were dragging her fast towards a black Porsche Cayenne SUV which stood nearby with its doors open and its engine running.

Jack started to run towards them as another bullet flew past him. He ducked as he heard the soft sound of a third muffled shot.

Venice, Year of Our Lord 1201

They’d had a hard journey. It had rained for days, and all the roads were mired, slowing their horses and bringing their three baggage-wagons to a complete halt so often that they’d been on the point of abandoning them. The whole countryside, marshland and sullen farmsteads, slouched under the weather, and all colour was drained from the trees and the grass. Even the clinging mud, which got into everything, from their sodden clothes to their hair, looked grey.

‘Look there!’ Geoffrey de Villehardouin cried suddenly.

The others turned their gaze in the direction he was pointing.

Across the bleak plain of the Veneto they could see the pale outline of the city on the horizon. They breathed a sigh of relief. But the hard part – the negotiations – was still ahead of them.

Geoffrey de Villehardouin, one of the group of ambassadors – six French noblemen and generals – paused to reflect on their mission. They’d stopped in the light drizzle which was falling on their aching bones to look at Venice, barely discernible through the thin mist. Somewhere high above, there was a hint that the sun was struggling to break through. They set up a makeshift
camp to await the return of the couriers they’d sent ahead earlier to announce their arrival.

It had all started a handful of years earlier. A crusade led by the kings of England and France and the Holy Roman Emperor had failed to take Jerusalem, lost to Saladin’s army fourteen years before, back from the Turks. That was a thorn in the side of Rome, which conveniently ignored the fact that Jerusalem was also the holiest city in Islam after Mecca; and the energetic young man who’d taken over as pope in 1198 wanted to wrest the city back. The problem was getting there. The Kingdom of Jerusalem had been reduced to a few coastal towns, and they were clinging on by their fingernails.

The leaders of the new crusading force which was being organized in response to Pope Innocent’s appeal, Count Baldwin of Flanders and the Marquess Boniface de Montferrat, wanted to attack from the south, using grain-rich Egypt as their operations base. And for that they needed a fleet to get their army across the Mediterranean.

The best shipbuilders were in Venice and Genoa. Genoa wasn’t the better bet. Hence this embassy to Venice.

It was all taking time. Things weren’t well organized, thought Geoffrey. He hoped the eloquence of at least one of his fellow ambassadors, Conon de Béthune, would help swing things. He’d heard
that the doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, though very old and, it seemed, blind, drove hard bargains.

Within a few hours the couriers returned with the news that the doge and his council awaited them at their convenience and extended to them the warmest of welcomes. Warm, dry lodgings and fresh clothes had also been made ready for them.

To the bedraggled Frenchmen, it seemed almost too good to be true.

Having bathed, changed and eaten, warm at last and rested, there followed three days of the usual diplomatic tiptoeing around under the guise of hospitality and bonhomie. Everyone was testing the water – but that was to be expected. There was a difference, however, and Geoffrey wondered if he were the only one to have noticed it.

He sounded out four of his companions, but they were unaware of anything out of the ordinary. They even enjoyed the necessity of bathing – a formality they weren’t used to – before visiting the courtesans who’d been placed at their disposal.

But Geoffrey de Villehardouin was not reassured. His apprehension grew worse. Something strange seemed to have crept into his soul.

After some hesitation, he shared his fears at last with Conon, the most aloof and, in Villehardouin’s view, intelligent, of the six Frenchmen.

‘Seigneur de Béthune, a word –’

‘Speak, Lord Marshal.’

Villehardouin hesitated, not knowing quite how to formulate his words, but he could no longer keep his doubts to himself, however uncertainly he expressed them: ‘Do you feel that – somehow – we are beginning to think ourselves
in complete accord
with the Venetians?’

De Béthune eyed him keenly before replying: ‘You’ve eaten too much good food and drunk too much good wine, Geoffrey. We all have. And it’s the rest and warmth after our hard journey.’ He waited a moment. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll be on our guard when the time comes.’

At length, the deputation was summoned to the Council Chamber of the doge’s palace. The huge vaulted interior impressed the northerners with its grandeur, no less than the solemn ranks of the forty-six councillors in their red-and-gold gowns trimmed with ermine.

At their centre sat Dandolo. Despite his ninety-one years, he sat ramrod-backed on the ducal throne, the gnarled fingers of his left hand grasping the arm of his seat, his right concealed within his robe. He was clean-shaven, and you could see that there was still flesh on his bones. He exuded a vitality which seemed unnatural in a man of his years.

Only his eyes appeared to have no light in them, though Geoffrey could have sworn he saw a ruby glint in the left one.

After the preliminary courtesies and introductions were out of the way, Conon began.

‘My lords,’ he said. ‘We have come to your noble city and court as envoys of the chief barons and knights of France, who have taken up the Holy Cross in order to take vengeance on those who have outraged Our Lord Jesus Christ by the usurpation of the City of Jerusalem, and, if it be God’s will, to recapture it for the Church.’ He paused for effect. He realized he was anxious – more anxious
than he had imagined – to get the sober ranks of big businessmen seated before him on his side.

He would do anything for them.

He noted, too, that all of them kept looking towards the doge to gauge his reaction. Clearing his throat, he continued, ‘And since the great lords of France who sent us know that nowhere in the world exists a nation better fitted to aid them in this great enterprise, they entreat you, in the Name of Our Lord God, to share the pity they have taken on Jerusalem and the offence caused to God by its capture by barbarians, and most graciously to do your utmost to supply us with a fleet to the purpose, both ships of war and of freight.’

There was a long pause, a pregnant silence during which the stony-faced council regarded the envoys who stood isolated in the middle of the chamber.

‘And how do you suggest we set about this laudable task?’ the doge asked at last.

‘In any way that you care to propose,’ replied Conon immediately – and to his consternation. It seemed
not to be his voice
that was speaking. He cast an eye at his colleagues, who were nonetheless smiling and nodding their approval. ‘As long as our leaders can meet your conditions and bear the cost,’ he added, mastering himself.

But as he continued, he found himself playing entirely into the Venetians’ hands, losing any sense of playing his hand, of bargaining, and trading on the responsibility Venice should show unhesitatingly towards the Church.

‘I see,’ said the doge. He looked around his council and exchanged whispered words with those nearest to him. Then, grasping the armrest of the throne with his left
hand, his right hand still firmly tucked within his robe, he stood up. An elderly Cistercian monk at his elbow hastened to assist him, but he shook the man away. Finding his balance, he looked – Conon was sure he
looked
– piercingly into the ambassador’s eyes and went on. ‘Your French leaders are asking much of us. This is an ambitious enterprise, not to be undertaken lightly. We will debate the matter and give you our answer in one week’s time.’

Conon started to speak, but the doge stayed him with a gesture. ‘Do not be surprised at this delay. It is an important matter. It requires our full consideration.’

With that, he bowed stiffly, and made his way, the monk in close attendance, towards a door set in the wall a short distance behind the throne. He seemed to know his way. Near the door stood a huge, red-headed, battle-scarred man in late middle age, whose outstretched arm the doge leaned on. This man – no Italian, thought Conon, noticing the furious look the monk shot at the giant – led the doge through the door. The rest of the assembly broke up without further ceremony. The audience was at an end.