The Babylon Idol

Chapter 33

Back in the study, Ben crouched by the trapdoor, unlocked the floor safe and hauled open the heavy steel door. It wasn’t booby-trapped. Standing anxiously over him, Anna let out a gasp of relief when she saw the stacks of papers inside. ‘Grazie a Dio!’

Ben lifted out the entire contents of the safe and dumped them on the floor. Anna fell on her knees next to him to start sifting through the heap. The papers were a mixture of photocopied images of ancient carvings, stone tablets and other relics, and loose sheets covered in handwritten scribbles made up from an alphabet that didn’t look to Ben like any modern language. It wasn’t Arabic, nor did it much resemble the ancient Hebrew or Aramaic script that he’d laboured to comprehend as a student at Oxford, way back in another life.

‘Old Anatolian Turkish,’ she explained. ‘Not used since the fifteenth century. Ercan uses it as a kind of code for all his written notes. He works the same way as I do, recording everything he does in a kind of diary form for later reference. Except, of course, my notes are all in Italian.’

‘And you can read this?’

‘Not as well as he can, but I can get by,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent some time studying a variety of these ancient languages.’ From her handbag she snatched a leather spectacle case with PRADA emblazoned across it. Putting on a pair of designer glasses that only emphasised the perfection of her eyes and cheekbones, and smoothing her long black hair away from her face, she took a thick handful of the handwritten notes to the desk and began to study them intently under the light of the lamp, flicking from one sheet to another.

Ben had never much relished the chore of poring over ancient languages during his theology days, and he disliked codes and ciphers even more. Watching Anna bent over the desk, totally absorbed in her work, the memory flashed through his mind of the fiendish code he’d had to crack years earlier at the height of his running chase with Usberti’s hired killers in the Languedoc region of southern France. It had been the same sultry, summer night that Anna had been attacked in her villa by the near-indestructible Franco Bozza, who would have carved her into pieces if Ben hadn’t raced to the scene when he had. Holed up in a hotel suite later that night with Roberta Ryder fast asleep nearby, he’d struggled deep into the early hours to decipher a set of maddeningly cryptic alchemical riddles and number puzzles that had almost driven him over the edge. Ercan Kavur’s scribbles didn’t seem any less impenetrable to him. He was glad that Anna was here to figure them out.

Letting her get on with the task, he returned to the window for another check of the street outside. More snow clouds were gathering in the sky. Thick flakes were drifting down in spirals that caught the glow of the streetlights like swirling haloes. The footprint tracks on the path were slowly disappearing under a fresh layer of white. A lone car hissed by on the snowy road, taking it slow and easy in the slippery conditions.

‘This is strange,’ Anna muttered from the desk.

‘Make anything of it?’ he asked, glancing over.

She shook her head, not looking up from the papers she’d carefully arranged on the desktop. ‘I thought Ercan was working on the Muranu tablet, but instead he seems to have been going into a whole other set of historical archives. Nearly all this material is sourced from the PFA.’

‘The what?’

‘The Persepolis Fortification Archive,’ Anna explained, fluttering a sheet of paper at him as though scolding him for not being informed on such elementary stuff.

‘That makes everything so clear to me.’

She frowned. ‘Persepolis, literally “City of the Persians”, was the seat of the Achaemenid Empire in what is now Iran, founded in 518 BC by Darius the First, grandson of Cyrus the Great who overthrew Babylon. The archive was set up in 1933 after a team of archaeologists from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, who were excavating the ruins of palaces of the Persian kings, came across a fantastic cache of clay tablets hidden in two rooms in a bastion of a fortification wall. Hence its name, the Fortification Archive.’

More excavations, more tablets. Ben was scarcely in the mood for another lecture on the history of archaeology. ‘I get it. Or maybe I don’t. What about it?’

‘They found tens of thousands of tablets, which to this day haven’t all been deciphered. It’s a monumental task that will take many more years to complete. The archive mostly comprises administrative and bureaucratic records dealing with matters of local government, transport, trade, food distribution and so on. It’s been a really important source of our knowledge of everyday life during the Achaemenid period.’

‘I’m sure that’s all spellbindingly fascinating,’ Ben said, ‘but I fail to see what it has to do with us.’

‘So do I, frankly,’ Anna replied, frowning back at the sheet of paper in her hand. ‘This comes as a complete surprise to me. It’s as if Ercan had taken a totally different tack.’

‘He did say that the tablet fragments were too badly damaged to work with,’ Ben reminded her. ‘Maybe he just gave up on them altogether.’

She nodded, looking even more mystified. ‘That would fit with what he told me.’

‘Or else this is something entirely different he was working on,’ Ben said. ‘Nothing to do with your Muranus or your Babylon idol at all.’

‘Quiet. Let me read this.’

‘Fine, but don’t take too long.’

She fell back into a concentrated silence as she went on examining the notes. Ben struck up another Gauloise, wondering whether maybe Ercan had smoke detectors built into the place that would drench him with water. Nothing happened, but Ben was more and more on edge. He wanted to get out of this place.

‘I think I understand,’ Anna suddenly exclaimed. ‘This is amazing. This is it. This will lead us to the next step.’

Ben asked, ‘What next step?’

But before she had time to explain what she’d found, he heard the sound of engines outside. He snapped back around to peer out once again through the crack in the curtains.

Oncoming headlights made him blink. Four of them, carving beams through the thickening snow. A pair of vehicles approaching fast. Unusually fast, for the slippery road conditions. Heading for the house. The one in front was a big, boxy Volvo SUV. Behind it was a muscular black Audi saloon. Both cars slithered to a halt outside Kavur’s front gate. Their lights went dark.

‘We have company,’ Ben said quietly.

Anna looked up from the desk, startled, plucking off her reading glasses. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

‘Too late for that now,’ Ben said, watching. Two men jumped from each vehicle and gathered in a group in the empty street. And one thing was for sure: they weren’t stopping by for a friendly social call.

The briefest glimpse of them was all Ben’s trained eye needed to take in every detail. They were dressed in black like a tactical raid team, which was exactly what they appeared to be. Their faces covered by goggles and gas respirator masks. The same combat boots on their feet that had made the earlier tracks in the snow, tactical combat gloves on their hands. They knew how to move, fluid and fast, especially the one whose obvious command over the others singled him out as the leader.

He wasn’t tall, wasn’t muscular, but he exuded power and authority and confident expertise in just the same way as a thousand top-level operatives Ben had seen, known and worked with in the past. This guy was a soldier, or had been.

From their equipment, he and the others could have passed for a Turkish police SWAT team. The leader and one other man were armed with stubby 9mm automatic carbines fitted with tactical lights. The third was armed with a full-size assault rifle bombed up with a grenade launcher attachment that Ben guessed from the masks was loaded with tear gas. The fourth was what military close quarter battle teams designated as the breacher. His weapon was a radically cut-down shotgun with a jagged muzzle attachment designed to be pressed hard against a lock or hinge. Special frangible door-busting ammunition would blow through just about anything that stood in the assault team’s path. Ben had gone through plenty of doors that way, back in olden times.

The leader signalled the breacher to lead the way to the house. They hurried in long, purposeful strides towards the door, boots crunching on the fresh snow. Ben slipped the knife out from his belt. Now he understood what his sixth sense had been telling him all this time.

Usberti’s men had returned in full force. Except it wasn’t strictly a return — because the fact was, they’d never really left. It was the answer to the question why they’d taken Ercan Kavur away: to leave an empty house as bait for their real targets to be lured inside, to feel safe and let their guard down while the assault team waited and watched somewhere nearby, preparing to come back and catch them unawares.

It was a carefully considered move, tactically speaking. The team could have been lurking hidden inside the house to surprise them on arrival, but they knew who Ben was and what he was capable of. They knew, or had been instructed, that a man like him wouldn’t walk into an ambush unprepared. They knew, or had been warned, that there would have been a fight. Ben was a dangerous threat to be eliminated, but Anna Manzini was a precious asset to the employer. She could have been hurt, or killed, or escaped. Their orders were not to let any of those things happen, under any circumstances.

And it was a strategy that begged too many questions for Ben’s liking. The enemy had known he and Anna were coming here. Usberti was cunning, but he wasn’t a mind reader. How could he have predicted their moves so well?

Answers might come later, or they might not. Either way, the trap was sprung.

And Ben and Anna were caught right in it like a couple of rats.