Silver

3
Thirteen Martyrs

Nah Larkin lay on his back, looking up at the cheap hotel room’s equally cheap ceiling fan. The blades stuttered as they turned, making a painfully shrill squeal every fourth revolution. The room, in the basement of an old Victorian Town House, set him back twenty quid a night. As the old saying went, you got what you paid for, and what he’d paid for was a mattress riddled with the black smears of crushed bed bugs, a crusty top sheet that hadn’t been washed since Victoria herself sat on the throne, and water stains that crept more than halfway up the wall.

The light from the fly windows looking onto the street was almost non-existent.

The room smelled of whiskey-fueled dreams, stale sweat and week-old kebab relish. It was not a pleasant mix.

He closed his eyes.

On the other side of the bed the woman shifted her weight, causing the entire mattress to yaw alarmingly. A coil of bedspring stabbed into Noah’s backside. The woman beside him wasn’t a beauty, but that really didn’t matter to him. It wasn’t that Larkin was deep or looked beyond the shallows of beauty; he wasn’t and he didn’t. There were no hidden depths to him. Like the room, she was cheap, and like the room, he got exactly what he paid for. It wasn’t about sex. He hadn’t touched the woman. He just wanted someone to sleep beside him. Of course, he couldn’t sleep.

Mercifully, his mobile rang. He reached over for the phone on the night stand.

“Larkin,” he said, sliding back the handset.

“Where the hell have you been?” Ronan Frost’s Derry brogue grew more pronounced when he was angry. That one sentence would have been enough for a linguist to pin-point what street he was born on.

Noah looked down at the prostitute as she lay beside him. Her red lace bra sagged beneath the weight of the years. She opened her eyes. They were lost, like one of T.S. Elliot’s Hollow Men. She smiled up at him. “Preoccupied,” he told Frost.

“Well, stop arsing about and get yourself down here, soldier. The brown stuff’s exploding all over the fan.”

“On my way, boss,” he said.

On the other end of the line Frost grunted.

Noah killed the connection and fumbled the phone back onto the nightstand. Beside it, the neon light of the clock tried to convince him it was almost midnight. He didn’t believe it for a minute.

He pushed himself out of the bed.

The prostitute leaned forward on her elbow, studying his naked body. He repaid the compliment. He would have said something but he couldn’t remember her name. Instead he took his wallet from his pocket, folded a handful of notes in his hand and offered them to her.

“It’s too much,” she said, looking at the cash. It was. It could have paid for her for a week.

Noah shrugged. “Call it a bonus for not having to do the deep and meaningfuls while we cuddled up.”

She rolled the notes and stuffed them into her bra.

“The room’s paid for the night. Stay here, sleep. Get yourself a good breakfast in the morning.”

He went across to her side of the bed, bent down and kissed her gently on the forehead. It was a surprisingly intimate and tender gesture. She reached up and touched his cheek, her red-painted fingernail lingering on the scar that cut through the midnight shadow of stubble. And for just a moment they might have been lovers. The roll of money in her bra banished the illusion quickly enough.

Noah left her in bed. As he closed the door behind him he remembered her name: Margot.

He stepped out into the street. The North Star was bright in the night sky. Street lights burned sodium yellow on the pavement. A fat-bodied rat scurried out from beneath the mountain of plastic trash bags stacked in the gutter. No matter where you were in London you were never more than ten feet away from a rat, or so they said.

Noah’s 1966 racing green Austin Healey was parked up against the curb. It looked like a relic from a better, nobler age, surrounded by the corporate uniformity of the Volvos, Fords, BMWs and Citroens lining either side of the street. The Austin’s side panels were beige, finished off with gold and black piping. The black leather soft top was down. He had fallen in love with the car when it was a wreck up on cinderblocks in a wrecking yard by Clapham Common. There was just something about it. It was like the proverbial bullet with his n it; they were destined to be together eventually.

The registration papers listed its original date of sale as March 27, 1966. He liked the idea of the car being “born” on the same day Pickles found the old Jules Rimet trophy under a hedge in South London. Noah had spent thousands of pounds and hundreds of hours restoring the car. In truth, the car was the one constant in his life; the one thing he loved. No doubt a shrink would point to a loveless childhood and a lack of hugs when he scraped his knee, either that, or every time he entered the car he was thinking about his mother in some Oedipean way. Sometimes, though, a car was just a car, and that man-love was just man love for the wire rims and the walnut dashboard.

He gunned the engine and peeled away from the curb.

London at night was a strange beast. It was alive with the pheromones of danger, adultery and random acts of senseless violence. Like Sinatra’s New York, it was his kind of town. On the corner he passed a three-legged dog trying to piss up against the wall without falling over. Ahead of him two girls walked, arms linked, down the white line in the middle of the road. He honked once, then swept around them, accelerating from a crawl to sixty in a couple of seconds and back to a dead stop at the first set of red lights. Noah loved the illusory freedom the wind in his hair gave him, even if it was short-lived.

This part of London existed on three levels: the underground; street level, with its instant gratifiers of fast food joints, discount clothes shops, electronics stores and florists; and overhead, with its amazing architecture that everyone down below was too preoccupied to notice. Windows were hidden behind steel shutters, the steel shutters hidden beneath inventive graffiti and spray-painted gang tags. He could never get used to the sheer emptiness of the city at night. It wasn’t that the city was dead. It wasn’t. It was vampiric. Come midnight the only people out were those who for one reason or another were afraid of sunlight.

Bracing the wheel on his thighs, he reached down for the rack of CDs lined up beside the gearstick and picked the one he wanted. Ignoring the lights, he took the left onto Belgrave Road at seventy-five and chased it down through Pimlico, hitting Vauxhall Bridge Road just shy of ninety miles per hour.

As he crossed the Thames, James Grant’s melancholic voice wondered who in their right mind would want to live in this city of fear. It was a fair question. Noah loved London almost as much as he loved Grant’s voice. Both had that lived-in quality that made them immediately comfortable, familiar but not so much so as to breed contempt. Both of them were so much more than they appeared to be when you scratched away at the surface. The voice and the streets were steeped in hidden subtleties. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. He was a London boy to the core. He lived and breathed the city. He grinned, knowing full well that no one would be in a rush to accuse him of being in hisht mind.

The needle on the speedometer only dipped below ninety twice on the thirty-mile drive out to Ashmoor and Nonesuch Manor. He cranked the volume up louder as the road opened up and lost himself in the music. Noah left the main road a mile short of Ashmoor proper, and took a bridle path up that jounced and juddered along the side of the grazing land toward the trailing avenue of lime trees that marked the way to Nonesuch. Out of the city the night was absolute. There were no stars. The branches trailed low, whispering in the Austin’s wake. Up ahead of him rose the towering iron gates of Nonesuch Manor House. Two grotesque gargoyles perched on the gateposts watched him drive up. Their eyes had been hollowed out and replaced with surveillance cameras.

Noah decelerated, tires spitting gravel as he followed the drive up to the house. The drive was spotlighted. All around him the powerful lights conjured shadow demons that bent and bowed with the wind. He pulled up alongside Ronan Frost’s Ducati Monster 696. It was the only bike in the courtyard. The rest were cars, and every one of them was something special. There was a Lamborghini Diablo with mud splashes up its sides, a flame-red E-Type Jaguar, a Bugatti Veyron, a canary-yellow Lotus Elan, Sir Charles’ own Daimler, a timeless classic, and pick of the bunch, a silver v12 Aston Martin Vanquish. As Frost liked to say, if you had no life, the very least you could do was drive a nice car.

Noah lifted himself out of the bucket seat. He left the keys in the ignition.

No one was going to steal the Austin from outside of Nonesuch.

He walked toward the house, though calling it a house was a misnomer. In truth it looked more like a castle. The left wing was even crenellated, part of which had crumbled where the climbing plants had undermined the masonry and worked their way deep into the crevices between the bricks. The ring wing appeared to be a huge gemstone, opalescent in the night. It was the old man’s atrium with his hundreds of rare plants. The glass turned the night on itself. Lights burned in three of the windows on the ground floor, the rest covered with wooden shutters.

The old man’s butler, Max, was waiting for him beneath the portico. “I trust you had a pleasant drive, sir?” Noah nodded. There was no love lost between the two. “Sir Charles is waiting for you with the others in the drawing room. May I take your coat, sir?” Noah shrugged out of his leather jacket and handed it over. “Thank you, sir. Will you be requiring anything else?” And then, almost as an afterthought, the butler added, “Toothpaste, perhaps? Your breath reeks of whoever had the misfortune of sitting on your face tonight.”

Noah ignored him and went inside.

Nonesuch was a huge, sprawling old house with narrow passages, mezzanine levels and servants’ staircases. The foyer was oak paneled. They showed signs of water damage. The old man’s family crest stood above a huge open fireplace. There was no sign that a fire had burned in the grate in the last decade.

On a small table beside the empty fire, an exquisitely carved chess set played out the Saavedra position. It was a beautiful endgame and a wonderful example of how one move could make someone famous well outside their own lifetime. It was a salutary lesson to every man who didn’t understand the nature of war. Sometimes subtlety is more important than might.

A granite and iron staircase rose in three tiers to the upstairs. The center of each riser was worn smooth by the scuffing of thousands of footsteps over the three hundred years since the old house had been built. There was a wheelchair stair-lift and wear marks along the wall where the old man’s chair had bumped up against it. Somehow he couldn’t imagine Sir Charles enduring the humiliation of the stair-lift. He wasn’t that kind of man. No, he was more likely to claw his way up on his hands and knees. That was the kind of man that he was.

For all the grandeur of the entrance hall there was an almost tired air to it, like the staircase and the cracked oak shutters covering the windows. There were no priceless works of art on display, no old masters, no precious antiquities. The casual visitor would have been forgiven for thinking the old man was broke. He wasn’t; he just invested his money elsewhere.

Noah crossed the foyer. The drawing room was the first door on the right, opposite the library.

He didn’t knock.

He pushed the door open and walked inside.

The drawing room was anything but the classic Englishman’s retreat. The old man called it the crucible. Noah thought of it in military terms: it was the debriefing room. The vast room was essentially the gloss of glass and the sharp lines of steel juxtaposed against Old World England’s conservative charm. Everything in the room was laid out with Sir Charles’ disability in mind.

One entire wall comprised twelve huge high-definition plasma displays capable of showing either a single image as a visual mosaic orspliced into a dozen individual ones. On the second wall there were two bookcases: one filled with priceless first editions-Bunyon, Marlowe, Fielding and Goethe on the first shelf, folio editions of Lavater and Glanvil, Maturin and Collins, each annotated with corrections in the author’s own hand-and the other with worthless antiqued faux leather books. If Noah didn’t already know which was which, he never would have been able to guess.

Behind the fake books was a service elevator down to an area they called the nest. It was the nerve center of Nonesuch. It housed the servers and their zettabytes of stored information, harvested newswires, ran surveillance equipment, monitored satellite signals and maintained emergency power for the manor. It was the beating heart beneath the floorboards. The ruse wouldn’t fool a halfway decent intruder-wheelchair tracks in the deep pile of the carpet disappeared beneath the second bookcase-but a halfway decent intruder would never make it as far as the crucible. The fake books were there simply because Sir Charles enjoyed the game.

Recessed spotlights were set into the ceiling. They were dimmed low. The screens showed a powerful single image: a burning woman with her arms spread wide. It was time-stamped 1500 hours Zulu Time. Almost ten hours earlier.

Marble statuettes stood on plinths, each offering an aspect of war personified. There was Babd, the Celtic crow, and her sisters, Macha and Morrigan, the ghosts of the battlefield; Bast, the Egyptian lioness, standing proud and tall, fiercely defiant, while the Greek Ares and the Roman Mars both wore the guise of hunters; one-eyed Odin, with the ravens Hugin and Munin on either shoulder, encapsulated fury and wisdom, wrath and beauty, the Norse god the dichotomy of war itself; and of course, in the center of them all, Kali, the Hindu goddess of death.

The statuettes lent the room a curious air of the occult that the old man liked to foster. They were a reflection of his eclectic tastes and another part of the game. He could have chosen anything to decorate the crucible, for wealth was not an issue. Neither was taste. The old man possessed both in abundance. No, the statuettes were a very deliberate nod to the past, to death, and rather ironically, to glory.

Other than the bookcases, the main concession to traditional taste was what at first glance appeared to be a Georgian mahogany dining table in the center of the room, only instead of the leather inlay the entire table top had been cut away and embedded with a powerful touchscreen computer.

The table was surrounded by five high-backed, green leather chairs.

In four of the five chairs sat a member of Sir Charles Wyndham’s brainchild, codename Ogmios. They were bound by Mandate 7266 issued by the Secret Service, their job, to do anything and everything necessary to preserve the sovereignty of the British Isles. What that meant was more difficult to pin down. They weren’t spies. Officially they weren’t anything but outside of the law, removed from the security of the State. They were deniable. If something went wrong they were on their own. If something went right no one ever said thank you. When things went south, they were there.

The old man might call them the Forge, Noah called them the Lost Cause. It was a slightly different interpretation. Noah didn’t know who they reported to, who watched the watchmen, so to speak, but he assumed it was someone in MI6. Someone breathing the rarified air of the “higher ups.” The old man only ever referred to him or her as Control.

Noah didn’t know how the old man had picked his team. He didn’t know very much about them at all, despite the fact that every one of them would put their lives on the line for him. He knew that because they did, every day.

They put themselves into areas of unrest, sometimes to mediate, other times to facilitate, and when necessary, to bring the hammer down.

Good lies were simple lies, so they kept cover stories to a bare minimum. Less detail to remember meant less detail to forget. And of course, being deniable, any background checks run against any of the team would fail to find any links to the Secret Services.

Closest to him was Ronan Frost, the blue-eyed boy, steel-gray hair, steel-gray suit fashionably cut by Ted Baker. Frost didn’t look up. He had served with 1 Para in Kosovo in ’99 before joining the SAS’ Special Projects team-counterterrorists, to the rest of the world. Next to him was Orla Nyren, every bit the Mediterranean ideal with her flawless olive complexion, rich chocolate eyes and shoulder-length black hair, fine bones and heart-shaped lips. She was actually mixed decent; her father came from a small Italian town down on the Amalfi Coast, her mother from the ice of northern Sweden. And Orla herself was a curious blend of both gene pools. Her Scandinavian heritage was obvious in her build. Coupled with her beauty-and she was beautiful, strikingly so, Noah thought-at half an inch shy of six feet she cut an imposing figure. Her Italian side manifested itself in other ways, most of them skin deep, including one hell of a temper. Noah had been on the receiving end of it once, and once was more than enough. Nyren was ex-MI6, a Middle East intel specialist, fluent in a dozen languages, two of them dead. She was also the closest thing Noah had ever had to a crush.

On the other side of the table Konstantin Khavin inclined his head in greeting. Konstantin was ex-KGB and the very definition of the spy who came in from the cold: he had come over the wall in ’88 with nothing more than the clothes on his back and his id. He was older than the others, but he had lived the kind of life that carved itself into every inch of skin. His mouth was a thin slit like a knife cut above a dimpled chin. Noah had the distinct impression that the Russian only smiled when he wad to emphasize just how eager he was to take you outside and beat you bloody with fists and feet. Needless to say, Noah was quite happy that Konstantin wasn’t smiling. He sat there making a cat’s cradle out of his stubby fingers. The tip of the right index finger was missing and his shirt sleeves were rolled back on a cheap plastic digital watch.

They, each of them, had their own stories, their own flaws. None of them were squeaky clean or they wouldn’t have been working for the old man, but Konstantin was different. Sometimes it was impossible to tell if his stories were down to his rather dry Russian sense of humor or not. He had done things the rest of them couldn’t imagine, but he had a habit of reassigning all of the ills suffered by his people a place in his own story. He’d told Noah a story once of how he had been forced to walk down the street with his mother’s entrails draped around his neck to prove his loyalty to the State. Noah wanted to believe it was just one of Konstantin’s macabre stories because he couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of man could put a kid through something like that. It didn’t fit into his philosophy, and trying to claim that by doing it the nine-year-old Konstantin would somehow be proving his loyalty to some invisible government? It went beyond inhuman.

And then there was Jude Lethe, the cuckoo in this nest of soldiers, the team’s tech wizard. He was a nerd, but more than that, he was their nerd. He looked painfully serious in his black Joe 90 glasses.

Together they were Ogmios, named after the Celtic hero who himself was fashioned after the legends of Hercules.

What should have been the sixth seat at the head of the table was left open for the old man’s wheelchair.

These were his people, and they made an unlikely-and dangerous-group.

“So glad you could join us, Mister Larkin,” the old man said from his place at the table.

Noah nodded and took the last seat.

“Now perhaps we can get started?”

“Don’t mind me,” Noah said.

“Thank you.”

The old man adjusted the position of his wheelchair. It was the paraplegic equivalent of arranging his papers. He reached out and tapped his finger on the empty touchscreen, bringing the computer beneath it to life. The image on the wall array brightened immediately. Another tap and it started playing.

“London is one of the most closely watched cities in the world. There isn’t a square meter that isn’t covered by some sort of CCTV or private surveillance camera. What you are seeing now happened in Trafalgar Square at three p.m. today. There are various angles but they all show the same thing.” There was no need for Sir Charles to elaborate; the picture was worth considerably more than a thousand words. Noah watched the woman burn. She held her arms wide and turned and turned, stumbling finally as though she had become dizzy. “A minute before she committed suicide the woman placed a call to the BBC news desk,” the old man continued. He stroked the touchscreen, minimizing the freeze-frame of the burning woman on her knees, and brought up the audio recording of her call.

She spoke to them with the voice of the dead: “There is a plague coming. For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now.”

“Who is this? Who am I talking to?” a second voice asked.

“I don’t need to tell you my name. Before the day is through you will know everything there is to know about me apart from one important detail.”

“And what’s that?”

“Why I did it.”

Sir Charles played it again.

And again.

Her final sentence hung in the air.

“Do we know who she is?” Orla Nyren asked. She leaned forward in her chair. The woman had a habit of coming alive when things around her became interesting. Most people did, but it was her definition of interesting that set her apart from “most” people.

“Mister Lethe? Would you care to share your discovery?” Sir Charles inclined his head slightly.

Lethe noddded, and rather self-consciously fiddled with the black rim of his glasses. “We ran facial recognition software, looking for a cross-match for our Jane Doe in various databases. IDENT1 struck out. Likewise there was nothing on the Server in the Sky, so we’re not talking FBI’s Most Wanted here. That meant we had to look closer to home. We got hits from the DMV down in Swansea along with one from the IRIS system at Heathrow. Those helped us find out all the not-so-nitty-gritty details.

“Our fiery female is one Catherine Meadows, age 39, graduate of Newcastle University, with no romantic entanglements. Ms. Meadows was, at the time of her combustion, a relatively well regarded forensic archeologist. Most recently she had testified at the Radovan Karadzic war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Her resume reads like a Who’s Who-or Where’s Where, I guess-of archeology. But that’s it. That’s her life. She was obsessed with the past. She didn’t live in the here and now.

“Reading between the lines, she was a lonely woman more likely to end her day cuddling up with her cat, a cup of Horlicks and the latest episode of Eastenders, rather than locking lips with some gorgeous Lothario. There’s nothing here to suggest she might be typical terrorist material, or even atypical terrorist material,” he said with a shrug. “Indeed, right up to her going out in a blaze of glory I would have said Ms. Meadows was, for want of a better word, boring.”

“It’s amazing what you can find out with Google,” Noah joked.

“Actually, to be honest, half of this was out there in the public domain. Given her name and her picture, any one of you could have found it. She had a Facebook page that’s littered with pictures of her ginger tom, that links her up with the class of ’91 at Newcastle Uni, and had some rather unfortunate photographs dating back to her time as a Cure fan.” Lethe raised a wry eyebrow behind his glasses. “You would think an archeologist ought to have known that some things are best left in the past, wouldn’t you?” He chuckled at his own joke. “She’s written for a number of academic journals. The articles are likewise online for people with insomnia to peruse at their leisure.”

“So why burn herself like that? I mean, that’s a pretty extreme way to go,” Ronan Frost asked, his accent a soft burr now.

“In my country we would be looking for the invisible men,” Konstantin said, rather cryptically.

“Precisely,” the Irish man agreed with him. “Something about this stinks. A boring woman doesn’t just suddenly decide to set fire to herself on a whim. So who is hiding in the shadows? Who are the invisible men?”

“Sir Charles?” Lethe said, indicating the old man should pick up where he’d left off.

The single image on the plasma screens fractured into twelve seemingly identical ones. No, not identical, Noah realized, just remarkably-disturbingly-similar. The center of each screen was dominated by a burning figure. The time-stamp on each read 1500Z. But that was all they had in common.

Working his way around the screens he recognized Dam Square and the white stone pillar of the National Monument in Amsterdam, the glass pyramid of the Palais du Louvre in Paris’ first arrondissement, the red brick facade of Casa de la Panaderia in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, the towering majesty of the cathedral in Stephansplatz in Vienna, the obelisk in the heart of St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the Vatican hidden behind the flames, and the glass monstrosity of the Sony building in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. There were more cities and more monuments he didn’t recognize. Noah counted them, even though he knew full well there were twelve screens.

“Well now it is starting to get interesting,” Orla said. An errant strand of hair curled over her brow and across her left eye.

“Thirteen people set themselves alight in very public places all across Europe at exactly the same time? I’d say we’ve moved way beyond interesting,” Noah said. Interesting really wasn’t the word he would have chosen though. The whole thing had a fatalistic simplicity to it.

“Oh, it gets better than that, or worse, depending upon your perspective,” Jude Lethe told them.

“Don’t tell me, more of that Google-Fu?”

“Something like that,” Lethe said. He leaned forward and started rapidly manipulating the images on the screen, zooming each one in until the display was filled with their screaming faces. The detail and precision of the digital images was nothing short of horrific. The images were hideously sharp. Noah had seen enough death to last him a lifetime, but something about this, as Frost had said, was different. Wrong.

“Italy, France, Spain, Germany, England, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Russia,” Lethe reeled off the countries where thirteen martyrs had self-immolated. “You can’t really tell the ethnicity from the faces now, too much damage, but the facial recognition software picked up hits for all thirteen here in the UK.”

“You’re telling me they’re all English?”

Lethe nodded. “Passports issued by the UK and Commonwealth Office.”

“This is nuts,” Noah said, trying to take in the logistical nightmare of forcing thirteen people to commit suicide in public, and in such a violent manner. “What’s the news reporting? I presume it’s all over every channel in the world.” He found himself thinking about the old Smiths song “Panic,” though his imagination took it way beyond the streets of London and Birmingham.

“At the moment truth is rather fragmented,” the old man said. “As one would expect, the initial reports were very insular. Then within an hour of the event, the scope of the actual event began to come clear. Regional television stations were broadcasting identical CCTV images of the suicides. It’s difficult to deny the evidence of your own eyes, of course. No one wants to believe it. The reporters are playing down any connection, for now, but it is obvious for anyone to see.

“The actual content of the telephone calls hasn’t been broken yet, but that is only a matter of time. And when it does-and people hear that promise of forty days and forty nights of terror-then as the Americans like to say, everyone will just be waiting for the other shoe to drop. That is the kind of world we live in, I am afraid.”

“Thankfully, no one seems to have picked up on the fact that the victims are all British. But that only puts us a few hours in front of the press. Some enterprising soul will put two and two together soon enough.”

“We can’t worry about that,” the old man said. “Right now the only thing we need to concern ourselves with is the facts. What we know from monitoring the newswires is that the major broadcast networks in each respective country received a call precisely one minute before the suicides. In all but two the message was the same.”

“And the others?”

“This was the message in Rome.” Lethe triggered another audio file. The voice was male. Taut. Barely held together. This wasn’t the voice of a man who wanted to die. This wasn’t a religious fanatic or some crazed zealot sacrificing himself for a cause. There wasn’t a trace of resignation in it. This was an ordinary man, still hoping against hope that somehow he would be saved. “Roman Pontiff beware of your approaching, of the city where two rivers water, your blood you will come to spit in that place, both you and yours when blooms the Rose.” And then, after almost thirty seconds of silence, “ell Isla I love her. Please. Tell her that.”

Jude Lethe didn’t wait before playing the final message. Questions could come later. “This call was made to Das Erste in Germany.” Again it was a man’s voice. This one was more composed than the last. He spoke slowly and calmly, as though reciting a script. Each word was enunciated clearly: “The Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big cross he was killed by a group of soldiers.”

“The first message was quatrain 2.97 from the prophecies of Michel de Nostredame. The second is an excerpt from the third secret of Fatima. Both are believed to foretell the assassination of the Pope,” the old man put in.

“Okay, so let me get this straight, we are talking crackpot sects and a healthy dose of make believe?” Noah asked. It still didn’t make the logistics of this kind of mass sacrifice any less complicated, but fanaticism would go some way to explaining it. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin. No, that didn’t jibe with the first man’s voice or his plea to tell some woman he loved her. That wasn’t in the fanatic’s genetic makeup. They were too fired up with the righteousness of their cause to worry about earthly crap like the people they left behind.

“If only that were the case. What we appear to be dealing with here is at the very least systematic and well thought out. You don’t burn thirteen people alive like this, with such military precision, without having planned for all of the contingencies. This is a very public opening gambit, Noah. It was designed to be seen, and there’s only one reason for that-because whoever is behind it wanted it to be seen,” the old man said. Sir Charles changed the display, bringing up the passport photographs of the suicides. As with every passport photo Noah had ever seen, the victims looked somehow less human than they had when the flames had burned away their faces. “With that in mind, Mister Lethe, please continue.”

Jude Lethe manipulated the touchscreen computer, bringing up a series of photographs. Some were vacation shots; others were newspaper clippings and the like. “When I saw that all thirteen victims were British nationals my first thought was not only do I dislike this kind of coincidence, I don’t buy it. Thirteen people commit suicide in an identical manner in thirteen countries and they all just happen to come from the same place. There has to be a link. So then it was a case of looking for that link.”

“Makes sense,” Noah agreed. “I take it you found one?”

“Of course,” Lethe said, without a hint of hubris. “All of our victims were academics, and, more precisely, all of our victims dabbled in the field of archeology in some way or other. One was a university professor running the history department at Durham. Three were postgrads who have stayed in the field: One worked on that TV show where they dig up old ruins and try to make history sexy; another was a curator at the British Museum; a geophys specialist; a historian with a Middle Eastern specialization… The list goes on, but you can see what I am driving at.”

“Looks like you’ve been busy,” Noah said.

“Ah, it wouldn’t have looked half as impressive if you’d been here at three o’clock, believe me.”

“So there’s something to be said for being late, then.” Noah smiled ruefully.

“Quite,” the old man said, cutting across the banter. There was an awkward silence for a moment as Lethe seemed to forget he’d been in the middle of briefing the others. He triggered the next sequence on the computer and the images on the screen were replaced by a single shot: a lowering sun and a huge orange-red, flat-topped rock formation. In the far right corner was the washed-out blue of the sea.

Noah studied the colored striations that marked the sides of the mesa.

“This place is the one thing they all have in common,” Lethe said, gesturing up at the screens. “Masada. It’s a World Heritage Site situated along the Dead Sea Road on the eastern edge of the Judaean Desert. According to Josephus, who is pretty much the oracle on all this stuff, the original fortress was built by Herod and was a stronghold for an extremist sect known as the Sicarii. They appear on the face of it to be the world’s first terrorists, but Josephus was also an inveterate liar and had a habit of grossly exaggerating everything he wrote about, so who knows? One thing for sure though, the Sicarii committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. The fact that we’ve got two mass suicides linked to the same place is another coincidence I’m not particularly enamored of.”

“All well and good,” Orla Nyren began, “but how exactly does this link our suicides? I’m missing something here.” She scratched at her right eyebrow-there was a slight scar beneath the hair-with the thumb of her left hand. It was a curiously awkward gesture.

“I’m glad you asked, Orla,” Lethe said in his best wise, old soul voice. He changed the image on the screen again. This time the displays showed a dozen images of an excavation in progress. “Without a crystal ball I canyst tell you how important it is in relation to today’s events, but in 2004 an earthquake damaged the crumbling walls of the old fort. The upshot was several previously hidden chambers and an elaborate subterranean network were uncovered. And this, my friends, is where two plus two could either be four or five: all of our victims were part of the team that went to excavate the site.”