Foretold by Thunder Read online

  “Why not interview Britton’s PhD student?” she suggested. “She accompanied him on a few digs. She’ll be much better placed to flesh out the personality of the man than me.”

  But if Jake was expecting some dowdy old thing sniffling into her tea he was mistaken. The moment they were introduced – in Britton’s very office – his heart juddered. Why did she have to be beautiful?

  A string of failed relationships followed by a prolonged drought had left Jake incapable of conversation with attractive women. He forgot the basics, like whether you were supposed to hold someone’s eye when speaking to them – and if so, for how long? The hotter the girl the more acute the problem, until he couldn’t look them in the face at all. And so it was with Florence Chung. Oh Christ, he thought. Ooooh Christ.

  She was third-generation Chinese, with a flawless complexion (always a turn-on) and a delicate, ethereal beauty. Her eyes were big and brown and on seeing him she smirked, revealing naughty incisors. Jake wondered what her legs were like and knew he would never sleep with her.

  “I hear you want to talk to me about Roger?” Florence blinked and on cue her eyes were damp.

  Jake stumbled over the condolences; when he grasped for his notepad the tremble in his fingers had returned.

  “What was Professor Britton like?” he asked. “As a person.”

  “He was passionate about his work,” she said. “And I mean truly passionate. It’s just one of those things you say about dead people isn’t it?” She laughed softly. “But with Roger it was the gospel truth. He lived for the period.”

  “Which was ancient religion?”

  “Right. But he specialized in the Etruscans. We broke the earth all over Italy and made some important discoveries. It was his dream to piece together the entire Disciplina Etrusca.”

  “Sorry, the what? Can you spell that?”

  She obliged. “It was the holy text of the Etruscans.”

  “Why are the Etruscans so important? If we want this obit to get a decent showing I need to really sell his achievements.”

  “They were a fascinating culture,” she replied. “The first home-grown civilization on the Italian peninsula. The Etruscan dialect is unrelated to any other known language – it’s as alien to Indo-European as the Kalahari click language. And they were the go-to people when it came to matters spiritual. If you wanted your fortune told in the ancient world, you’d find an Etruscan.”

  Jake chanced eye contact. “As it happens I wrote a story about the Etruscans earlier in the week. About a meeting set up in World War Two, by …”

  “By Winston Churchill!” she cried. “I read it. Very weird. I’d love to know more about all that.”

  Jake could feel her studying him – it no longer felt like an office in mourning.

  “So then,” he said to break the moment. “Tell me more about Etruscan religion.”

  “It was a different kettle of fish to Graeco-Roman theology,” she said. “A bit … darker, somehow.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, Greek and Roman Gods were all humanoid figures, running around sleeping with each other and getting plastered on nectar. But the earliest Etruscan Gods were formless, manifesting themselves in the air itself – closer to the modern idea of God, perhaps.”

  “How is that darker?”

  “Because the Etruscans gave themselves over to their Gods completely – they dominated man’s every activity. The Etruscan religion was pure subordination. In that respect I suppose it was nearer to Islam. ‘Submission’, as Islam translates to.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call Islam a ‘dark’ religion,” said Jake.

  “No, me neither,” she snapped. “That’s not what I meant. Anyway, Etruscan religion took submission to a different level. The Etruscans had a real dread of all these dark forces swimming around them. Man was a complete non-entity – he was under the thumb, his fate utterly in the Gods’ hands.”

  “Sounds like a barrel of laughs.”

  Florence ignored him. “Etruscan religion was all about attempting to divine the will of these dark forces by various means. Like examining livers of sheep, observing the flights of birds, or studying bolts of …” she sighed.

  “Lightning,” Jake finished.

  7

  “Hence the irony.”

  It was a mistake. Tears sprang back into Florence’s eyes at the comment and she stared out at the Embankment. Jake noticed the curve of her neck.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have gone there.”

  Florence sniffed. “It’s just … the other students are laughing about it, like this is some kind of joke. ‘He didn’t see that one coming,’ and so on. Can you believe it?”

  Jake sought a change of subject. “Tell me more about this …” He flipped through his notepad for the two words that were not encoded in shorthand. “Disciplina Etrusca.”

  At once Florence was composed. “The story goes that some farmer was ploughing a field when he unearthed a live child,” she said. “He was a young boy, but wizened as an elderly man. This kid was called Tages, and he revealed the Disciplina Etrusca to the farmer. It was essentially a rulebook concerning the relationship between the Gods and human beings. A precise guide to divining the will of the divinities, and ergo the fates of men. Along with Judaism, Etruscan religion is the only revealed religion of the ancient Mediterranean. In other words, God dictated the holy text to man word for word.”

  “And Roger was trying to, what, track down a copy of this Disciplina thing?”

  “He was piecing it together bit by bit. No one will ever find a complete copy. Etruscan religion was considered heretical by the early Christians – all its sacred texts were destroyed. No Etruscan literature survives, no history. Virtually everything we know is from inscriptions on graves. Here …”

  Florence slid an inscription across the dead man’s desk. It looked slightly like Greek – but runic and primitive, a barbarian script.

  “Of all the inscriptions yet discovered, just eight are more than a hundred words long,” she said. “Three of those eight were found by Roger and me.”

  The Hollywood smile revealed itself.

  “What did you discover?” asked Jake. This was good material.

  “The Disciplina Etrusca was split into three books,” she replied. “The first was the Libri Haruspicini, which dealt with examining livers. The second was about rituals – the proper ceremonies to carry out when founding cities and so on. But everything we discovered was from book three – the Libri Fulgurales.”

  Book of Thunder.

  *

  “Together we found two new passages,” said Florence. “One in Rome, the other at a dig near Naples. We were supposed to be going to Istanbul next week to look for another segment.”

  That perfect lower lip wobbled. Jake risked a glance at it: a cherry-red sack, barely a fingertip long. He had the mad impulse to put his hand over hers, but of course he did not. The moment drew out and became uncomfortable.

  “I have to ask this,” the journalist said eventually. “I get the feeling Roger was – troubled, somehow. Am I right?”

  Florence looked at Jake with vulnerable eyes. “You wouldn’t write anything bad about him?”

  “Strictly for background.”

  “You promise?”

  “I flatter myself that I’m a proper journalist,” he said. “I am not in the habit of lying to people.”

  Florence nodded and blinked. “Roger was depressed. He’d lost credibility. He’d got a bit too tangled up in all the old beliefs. It happens to academics sometimes, when they’ve spent a lifetime living their subject. Roger was never overt about it, but he would make pointed comments every now and then to the effect that some aspects of Etruscan religion were worth taking seriously. That was enough to shoot his reputation. Then about six months ago he began getting seriously withdrawn. Paranoid, even.”

  “Why?”

  Florence put her hands up. “I don’t know, ok?�
��

  After a pause, Jake said, “Right, that’s probably enough material. I’m so sorry for disturbing you when everything’s still so fresh.”

  “It’s fine.”

  A statuette of a robed man wearing a cap shaped like an inverted funnel stood on the bookshelf.

  “Who’s that guy?” asked Jake. “He looks hilarious.”

  “He belongs in a museum really,” said Florence. “But you wouldn’t think he was funny if you were an Etruscan. In any way. He’s a fulguriator. A lightning priest.”

  Jake studied the figurine. The orientalized eyes and eerie smile were a far cry from the realism of Roman sculpture and he saw then how the Etruscans were worlds apart from their contemporaries: China to the West.

  “I’d be fascinated if you get anything more on that Churchill stuff,” said Florence. “It was nice meeting you, Jake.”

  Unexpectedly she squeezed his hand; Wolsey felt an alarming flare of blood in his loins.

  How can you be an archaeologist?

  “Florence …” A giddy moment. “Can I have your number?”

  The smile departed her face.

  “Just in case I find anything else out about the Churchill stuff,” Jake backtracked, feeling his face turn beetroot. It was time to go.

  “Of course you can,” said Florence, sweetness again.

  On the other side of London someone was breaking into Jake’s flat.

  8

  It always made Jenny Frobisher smile to see Hollywood’s depiction of a Secret Service incident room. There would be banks of glowing monitors, agents roaming around some 3D-rendered desert, satellites being repositioned at a moment’s notice. The reality was somewhat different, Jenny thought, as she looked about her base of operations. Four computers, four telephones, whiteboard, kettle. The only impressive thing was the view of the Thames. She could make out a guide pointing up at them from the deck of a tourist ferry as he honed his James Bond spiel.

  Jenny considered her team. There was Alexander Guilherme – a small, shrewd man whose parents were Sri Lankan émigrés. He was very London, very street; she knew from his file that in the Eighties he’d hung out with New Romantic bands and used cocaine. Paradoxically, MI6 valued such people. By confessing drug use or sadomasochism at the first opportunity, an agent became impossible to blackmail. At that moment Guilherme was in Battersea, dressed in workman’s overalls and removing a window pane from Jake Wolsey’s back door.

  Sat in front of her was Jess Medcalf of Belfast: feisty, foulmouthed and flame-haired. Like Guilherme, Medcalf was a party animal, but she was tough too. Her records revealed that as an eighteen-year-old she had beaten up two Catholic teenagers (both male) who’d attempted to assault her. Medcalf’s crime had been wearing a Rangers shirt. One of her attackers ended up in hospital.

  The third of Jenny’s team was Edwin de Clerk, a computer boffin back from secondment at GCHQ’s listening post in Cheltenham. He was pale and lank-haired, but a gifted triathlete. De Clerk was also a genius. They had trained together in Gosport; then as now amorous interest radiated from him shyly.

  “Ok, folks,” Jenny began. “For as long as this job continues, we work twelve-hour shifts. Edwin’s the computer geek, so he’ll be based here.”

  “It’s true,” de Clerk admitted. “I am a geek. That’s why I love this job – I get to be surrounded by people just as geeky as me, all pulling together for a common purpose.”

  Jenny felt his eyes linger and averted her gaze. After the travesty of her engagement she had forsworn relationships altogether, at least for the foreseeable future. She had the sense men found her attractive and she would use this to her advantage if the job demanded. But romancing a colleague? Not a chance.

  “That means the rest of us will have to take turns keeping tabs on the journalist,” she finished. “One by day and one by night, while the third agent rests.”

  “Nice of you to join in with all the sneaking about,” said Jess Medcalf.

  “Nothing hacks me off like the boss being cosy and tucked up in bed while I’m up all hours,” said Jenny. “Besides, I don’t know why, but the powers that be have given us way less manpower than we need for a watch like this. We all need to muck in.”

  “I’ve already got a tap on his personal mobile and landline,” said de Clerk. “The work phone’s not far off.”

  “Just how hard are we going on this dude?” asked Medcalf. “Like, are we tapping his fecking parents?”

  “Yes,” said Jenny. “Good thought.”

  “And bugging their house?”

  “No. Actually … actually, yes. We’ll see if we can spare Alexander to get down there tomorrow. Edwin, how close are we to his emails?”

  De Clerk was frowning. “I’ve already got the Gmail account, but the paper’s security is tougher than most. Give me a couple more minutes.”

  “Good stuff. Alexander’s putting ears in his flat, and he’s got a little moped – a sky-blue Vespa. We’ll get a tracker on that too.”

  Medcalf made furious notes.

  “One more thing,” said Jenny. “This is basic stuff, but I want you to all make sure your passports aren’t out of date. Wolsey travels at short notice. His last ports of entry were Paris, Marrakech and Warsaw.”

  De Clerk stopped typing. “Jenny, do you have even a clue what this is all about?”

  She smiled. “Edwin, as of this moment I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Jenny’s phone bleeped; her smile tightened. Another text from Dad.

  9

  Where to begin the obituary? Going in on the lightning strike would be crass, but Jake had to start somewhere and Florence had given him a wealth of material to choose from. The plink of an arriving email interrupted his cogitations. It was a response from the Cabinet Office. His Freedom of Information request had been rejected. Already. That was weird – usually they prevaricated for weeks. Jake swept aside the sea of press releases and business cards that covered his desk and a tower of new post capsized under the wash. There was a package from King’s College London.

  Britton.

  Jake turned the parcel around in his hands – it crinkled to the touch and when he opened it he was assailed by the whiff of old paper. This was normally a pleasant perfume, but now the odour only heightened his unease. He turned the package upside down and a bundle of pages spilled out.

  Dear Mr Wolsey,

  I hope you won’t find this overdramatic, but I want to entrust this to you. If anything untoward happens to me, I hope you will have the decency to give it your full attention.

  Respectfully yours,

  Roger Britton

  Jake’s mouth was dry.

  Well … there was something that struck me as a bit rum.

  An idea came to him and he called the Royal Mail.

  “I’m doing a survey on collection times,” he said. “You’ve got a letterbox on the Embankment, just west of Blackfriars Bridge. It was supposed to be emptied at 10 a.m. yesterday. Could you confirm whether that happened on time?”

  “Right …” Suspicion seeped from the press officer’s voice. “Let me find out – we’ll call you back.”

  As Jake waited, his gaze settled on a page of The Histories by Polybius, a Roman historian who lived in the second century BC. Britton had quadruple-underlined a paragraph.

  The Romans succeeded in less than 53 years in bringing under their rule almost the entire inhabited world. It was an achievement without parallel in human history.

  Jake frowned, rummaging through the pile. Another Polybius quotation caught his eye, this one on the defeat of Hannibal by the Roman general Scipio Africanus. Britton had marked it with a star.

  Scipio made the men under his command more sanguine and more ready to face perilous enterprises by instilling into them the belief his projects were divinely inspired.

  This was off the hook. Madness.

  Amid the mass of pages lay a single paperback – Life of Constantine, written in the fourth century AD by Eusebius, a Ro
man historian and a Christian. It was the only unmarked item. Jake was still examining the book when the press officer phoned back.

  “I can confirm that post-box postcode WC2 2PR was emptied at 10.06 a.m. yesterday,” he said. “That’s well within our targets.”

  Jake digested the information. “How can you be so sure of the time?”

  “We record the progress of our vans through sat-navs. The collection was spot on – you won’t be twisting this into a negative story I trust?”

  Jake ignored the question. “When was the next collection made?”

  There was a clicking of buttons. “Ten past four in the afternoon.”

  That was four hours after the boat steward had seen what purported to be a Royal Mail van empty the post-box a dozen paces from Britton’s cooling body. Jake felt a little ill as he replaced the receiver. It was unreal. Plus it made no sense. When he ran a hand through his mane his hair felt claggy – he’d overslept that morning and had no time to shower.

  On impulse he dialled Florence Chung.

  “Hello, who is this please?”

  Saints preserve us, he was actually speaking to her.

  “It’s Jake,” he managed, regretting not having planned what to say. “We met earlier.”

  “Oh. You.”

  “Listen. There’s been a development. Can we catch up?”

  There was another pause. Then she said, “No, sorry. I’m flying out to Turkey this evening – the field trip’s going ahead.”

  “I received a package in the post today from Roger Britton.”

  “Really?” Florence’s whole voice had changed. “What was in it?”

  “Pages, lots of pages – torn out of old hardbacks by the looks of it. He’s underlined a few sentences. And one whole book – Life of Constantine by Eusebius.”

  “What else? Anything about Istanbul?”

  Jake shuffled the pile. Bingo! “Yes – there’s a diagram of the Agya Sophia here too.”