The Sacred Scroll (6 page)

The next sheet contained a quotation Marlow recognized, from near the end of the New Testament, concerning the fall of Babylon. The sheet was a high-scan photocopy of a manuscript, written in a shaky but educated hand. There was a signature at the bottom, which started with a boldly
penned ‘L’, followed by what looked like an ‘e’ and a ‘p’, but the rest of the name was indistinct. A typescript of the text accompanied it, and told him that the quotation was from the Book of Revelation:

And the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and were wanton with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning; they will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say,

‘Alas! Alas! Thou great city,

 

Thou mighty city, Babylon!

 

In one hour has thy judgement come.’

 

And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo any more, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls.

 

‘The fruit for which thy soul longed has gone from thee, and all thy dainties and thy splendour are lost to thee, never to be found again!’

 

The merchants of these wares, who gained wealth from her, will stand far off, in fear of her torment, weeping and mourning aloud,

 

‘Alas, alas, for the great city that was clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, bedecked with gold, with jewels, and with pearls! In one hour, all this wealth has been laid waste.’

 

And all the shipmasters and seafaring men, sailors and
all whose trade is on the sea, stood far off and cried as they saw the smoke of her burning,

 

‘What city was like the great city?’

 

And they threw dust on their heads, as they wept, and mourned, crying out,

 

‘Alas, alas for the great city, where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth! In one hour she has been laid waste.’

 

Rejoice over her, O heaven, O saints and apostles and prophets, for God has given judgement for you against her!

 

Marlow glanced across at Graves, still on the telephone, and read on. Whatever all this was about the destruction of Babylon, it was linked to the disappearances, and the Dandolo Project. The photocopy was of a parchment dating from a good eight hundred years ago – he didn’t need Laura to confirm that.

He knew who had copied it out, all those centuries ago. But why?

Graves watched Marlow as she waited on the phone and he read.

He was about 1.85m, she reckoned. He looked as if he worked out, but that was unsurprising in an INTERSEC field officer. His body movements were lithe and keen – in a word, she thought again, sexy.

The face was more interesting than handsome, but attractive. Regular features – straight nose, clean-shaven, chin firm but not chiselled. Dark hair. Guarded eyes, as she’d already noted; but it was there that the attractiveness lay.

There was also something restless in his attitude as he sat there, brow slightly furrowed, reading with swift concentration.

She hoped they’d work well together. She was aware she was Sir Richard’s appointment, not his.

She listened to the voice at the other end of the phone for a few seconds then hung up. Marlow was nearing the end of the file on his lap. From the lab came muted, metallic sounds.

Marlow flipped the folder shut and glanced at her. She walked over to him.

‘Anything?’ he asked her.

‘On its way.’

He handed her what he’d been reading. ‘Take a look at the biblical stuff.’

She read it quickly.

‘It’s from a document the archaeologists turned up in the State Archives in Istanbul. Copied out by a man called Leporo, who had something to do with the doge of Venice. Quite why, since he would have had easy access to a Bible, we’ve no idea.’

‘Obviously important to him.’

‘The description isn’t far off what the Crusaders did to Constantinople,’ said Marlow.

‘Doge Dandolo was one hell of a guy.’

‘Dandolo was already an old man, and – some say – blind.’

‘How old?’

‘For those days, almost supernaturally old. We don’t know exactly, but he was probably around ninety-five.’

‘Not possible!’

‘Perfectly possible.’

‘But if he was doge of Venice, what was he doing getting involved in a Crusade? I thought the Venetians put trade and commerce well above war?’

‘And so he did. That’s why he got involved. Constantinople at the time was a big trade rival to Venice.’

‘But Constantinople was a Christian city,’ she said.

‘Nothing gets in the way of business.’

Graves looked at him as he smiled sardonically. ‘You’re not going to tell me that he diverted the Crusaders to Constantinople?’

‘That’s exactly what he did,’ he replied.

‘How?’

‘That’s easy, at least on the face of it. The Crusaders were mainly French and German. Small nobility and
farming stock, most of them. They were country bumpkins by the standards of Venetians – and Greeks, for that matter. They were far more sophisticated. The Crusaders ordered a fleet from the Venetians because their plan was to sail to Egypt and attack the Holy Land from the south.’

‘Were they sailors?’

‘No – but the Venetians were. What the Crusaders didn’t know was that Venice had just concluded a peace agreement with Egypt, which supplied them with grain, and a trade route to the East. Alexandria was to be a big centre of commerce.’

‘But Egypt was already a Muslim country.’

‘What did I just say about business?’ said Marlow. ‘Egypt was weak at the time, there’d been a civil war and the Nile had failed to flood for five years in a row, so food was scarce. The Egyptians didn’t want a crusading army marching through their country. Dandolo was prepared to guarantee that that wouldn’t happen, in exchange for the advantages I’ve just mentioned.’

‘I still don’t see how –’

‘Dandolo came from one of the oldest Venetian families – one of the ones which founded the city. He was already an old man when he was elected doge – in 1193. His one
overriding
ambition was to make Venice controller of European commerce. He wanted a monopoly. To that end, he needed to knock out any trade rivals, and he’d stop at nothing to do it. But apart from that’ – Marlow’s voice darkened –‘he had other ambitions …’ He turned to the newspaper report he’d been reading. ‘Well, he succeeded. “Pillaging and destruction” … “Maniacal Crusaders” …’

‘You mean –’

‘You should read some of the reports of the people of Constantinople who were writing at the time,’ Marlow went on. ‘There was one guy, Nicetas Choniates, who was a senior official there. He wrote a whole history of the siege of the city, and the sack of it which followed. The Crusaders burned down his library, along with others. Countless classics of antiquity must have been lost to us for ever. But not only that, they melted down or smashed up priceless statues and monuments, just to turn it all into ready money. They ran amok, in other words. Only the Venetians had the sense to hang on to some of the good stuff to ship back home as prizes. Look at the horses on St Mark’s in Venice. They’re just one of the trophies looted from Constantinople in 1204. And there were religious relics too – the Catholic priests who’d gone along with the Crusaders weren’t slow to snap up everything they could find. There are churches all over Europe today which display stuff – pieces of the True Cross, heads and limbs of saints, that kind of thing – which all came from the looting of Constantinople – the greatest city in the world at the time.’

‘I remember something about that,’ said Graves. ‘Louis IX of France bought the Crown of Thorns from the Venetians, in 1239, I think. He spent half the country’s GDP on it – 135,000 livres – and built the Ste-Chapelle to put it in.’

‘So what were the archaeologists looking for? What had they found?’

‘I think I read something in the background study about Nicetas,’ said Graves, catching some of Marlow’s urgency as she skimmed through notes of her own. ‘Here
it is:
They have spared neither the living nor the dead. They have insulted God; they have outraged his servants; they have exhausted every variety of sin.
That takes some beating.’

‘They did a thorough job. Even two hundred and fifty years later, when the Ottomans under Sultan Mehmet II finally took the city, it was still a kind of ghost of its former self. Mehmet was only twenty-one years old when he rode into Constantinople, and its ruin moved him to quote an old Persian poet:
Now the spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars. Now the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasìab
.’

‘But what has all this to do with us? And what’s the connection with these missing archaeologists?’ asked Graves.

‘That’s what we’ve got to find out. But I told you – Dandolo was after something more.’

‘World domination? Again?’ Her tone was bordering on sarcastic.

‘Why not? He was one of the first to see beyond Europe and Asia. He knew – somehow – that the world was bigger than that.’

Graves paused, not able to believe it. ‘You mean the Americas? But he lived nearly three hundred years before Columbus!’

‘It’s exactly what I mean.’

She shook her head. ‘But where are you going with this? You haven’t answered my question about how he diverted the Crusade.’

‘That’s crucial. Dandolo must have had a means – a surefire means – of holding on to all the power he wanted, and the
way to get it
.’

‘Is that what –?’

‘How do you think he managed to control and divert a whole crusading army to suit his purposes? It wasn’t just economic leverage. So –
what power did he have over them
?’

‘So what now?’

‘Get Leon in here. I don’t care if he’s finished or not.’

‘Let’s go over what we’ve got,’ Marlow said fifteen minutes later. Laura?’

‘Taylor and Adkins are both married men in their forties, and research fellows at Yale University. They started their research in Venice back in 2004 – the year of the eight hundredth anniversary of the Fourth Crusade. The project was joint-funded by Yale and Venice universities. Su-Lin de Montferrat is the 33-year-old daughter of an Italian father and a Chinese mother who’d been resident in Genoa for years, but who died within days of each other five years ago. We need more on Su-Lin, but she’d been a senior research student at the time she was co-opted from research in Venice to the Dandolo Project. With a bursary from MAXPHIL – which was also the main sponsor of the dig.’

‘And MAXPHIL is the philanthropic arm of MAXTEL.’

They all knew about MAXTEL. Everyone did. MAXTEL was a household name.

‘The guy who runs it is Rolf Adler. He was born in Cottbus, in what was East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, in 1959,’ said Marlow, scanning through a secure file on his terminal.

‘Tough town,’ remarked Lopez, remembering a rare field trip he’d made there years ago. ‘Remember?’

‘Don’t live in the past, my friend,’ said Marlow, but he remembered too. That time, Lopez had saved his life. He turned from the computer and rapidly went on, not needing to refer to notes. ‘MAXTEL was founded in 1991, so Adler didn’t waste any time after Germany was reunited. He got some capital together and started selling reconditioned TV and radio equipment, then went into cars, Mercs and BMWs mainly, then branched into the media. Started a small local radio station in 1992, but Cottbus isn’t that far south of Berlin, so he had access to a biggish audience – if anyone was interested in what he was pumping out.’

‘What was he pumping out?’ asked Graves.

‘Western pop, pretty old stuff, and some soft-political right-wing material – nothing Nazi, but some people thought there might be undertones. That’s when the first files on MAXTEL were opened.’

‘Where’d he get his money?’ asked Graves.

Marlow shrugged. ‘Basket of backers. Some pointers to the Russian mafia. Kept its head down when Gorbachev was in power, but grew a little bolder under Yeltsin. The rest is history.’

‘Any proven connection?’ Lopez pursued.

Marlow shrugged again. ‘Adler was already wealthy by the mid-nineties, and he was one of the first East Germans to put investment feelers out towards the West. He was never one of the true in-crowd, but no one could accuse him of not being pushy.’

‘I remember working on this,’ said Graves. ‘He went from strength to strength to strength but kept his sheet clean. By the end of the nineties the papers here were calling him the Murdoch of the East.’

Marlow nodded. ‘One or two of his competitors sold out to him without any argument, even when their own market share was strong. But there’s nothing definite. Except that their acquiescence was sudden – dramatic, even. Boris Isarov of Global Technology was flying high when Adler shot him down. Global started to lose ground, senior executives peeled off – all of them, in fact, except one, Vladimir Bilinski, Isarov’s right-hand man and a hard nut, ex-KGB colonel, all that.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Lopez. ‘I remember the name.’

‘He went off to the Moscow office in his Volvo with his chauffeur and his bodyguard one morning as usual, after kissing his wife and kids goodbye, and that was it. None of them was heard of again. The Russian and the German police looked into it, not very hard. Isarov launched an investigation himself. Whether he found anything out, nobody knows. But soon afterwards his own family was killed in a fire at his house. Wife and four children, oldest twelve, youngest two. Isarov sold his majority share in Global to MAXTEL soon afterwards and went into retirement.’