Foretold by Thunder Read online

  Florence had booked a hotel in the Sultanahmet district, where the cobbles and wooden houses were more to Jake’s taste. And he was relieved to see alcohol on sale everywhere – perhaps the Laphroaig he’d bought in the airport was unnecessary. Better safe than sorry, though. He had been caught short in Islamic countries before.

  Florence had barely talked on the flight, engrossing herself in Britton’s legacy. But if anything was hidden there it had eluded her, and she had grown infuriated.

  “Why the heck did he leave us Life of Constantine?” she muttered as they took the sea air on the little toe of the European continent. “Eusebius lived two hundred years before John the Lydian. And this of all of his works! Chapter after chapter about what a devout Christian the emperor was – you’d never guess Constantine murdered his own family.”

  Jake didn’t reply. He had learned that the archaeologist had moods in which she was best handled like a poisonous flower: from a distance and with gloves on. Instead he gazed out to Asia Minor, once gifted to Rome in the will of a Greek king.

  Work at the Agya Sophia began at 9 a.m. the next day. The neighbouring Blue Mosque is the more famous sight, but it was the Agya Sophia that filled Jake with awe. The Sophia’s crowning glory is a dome some hundred feet wide – during construction many had said that it could never support itself. The clay-red leviathan fell away beneath the rim, arch upon balustrade upon buttress.

  “A true monument to devotion,” said Jake. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  He glanced at Florence, expecting scorn – but she was smiling at him.

  A representative from the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul gave the pair a tour. Dr Adnan Gul had an explosion of pewter hair, skin like a used teabag and a nicotine-yellow moustache. Jake warmed to him at once. They entered through the Portal of the Emperor, with its forty-foot doors of oak and iron. Within was the biggest room he had ever set foot in, hewn from marble of blue and volcanic pink.

  The scale of the undertaking hit him in full.

  *

  Jenny peered over the balcony. The people below were like matchsticks, but she could identify Wolsey by his shock of blond hair. He stood with palms flat as if steadying himself, and his mouth was a dot of black.

  Her radio crackled.

  “Can you see him?” said Jess Medcalf. “Coming through the really big door.”

  “I’ve got him,” she replied. “I take it that’s Chung?”

  “That’s her,” said Medcalf. “I don’t know if you can tell from up there, but man, she is a hottie.”

  Jenny’s radio crackled again.

  “We don’t know who the third guy is,” said Alexander Guilherme, who had attached himself to an Indian tour group. “A Turk, by the looks of it. They met outside – by appointment, I would say. It was all very formal.”

  Jenny’s eyes went right, to where Medcalf was inspecting a brass chandelier strung from a hundred and twenty feet up. She smiled. They were a good team. But so they needed to be. Jenny felt another surge of adrenaline at what they were about to do.

  14

  It was the journalist’s departure for Istanbul that had precipitated the decision. Charlie Waits had collected his thoughts and announced: “Oh, all right then. Let’s get him.”

  The spymaster’s voice was effete without being fey – Jenny found him rather frightening.

  “Run along to the embassy in Istanbul,” he continued. “We’ll send a bag for you by dip-post. Pick it up and do what needs to be done.”

  Waits’s next pronouncement was lost to Jenny. Her handler’s voice was level as he hung up and said to the wall: “Fuck and shit and damn and balls.”

  The Foreign Office could send everything except radioactive material by diplomatic bag – no doubt cocaine was a frequent flyer. Yet the spymaster’s gift was deadlier than Peruvian powder, and Jenny felt a chill in her bladder as she opened the Samsonite briefcase. Nestled within were three 8.5mm pistols, made from toughened porcelain to evade metal detectors. Lying alongside were the silencers, fat as leeches. There was another brick of Turkish lira, and then the pièce de résistance. Jenny couldn’t help but smile. MI6 still did things with a flourish. The case contained two umbrellas with tips that could fire a capsule into the human body from close range using compressed gas. It was with such a device the Bulgarian Secret Service had assassinated a dissident on Waterloo Bridge in 1978 – the ricin took four days to kill him. She turned one of the umbrellas around in her hands. Black, masculine, expensive-looking. The canvas of the second umbrella was a printed ladybird. An old trick, that. Introduce one memorable detail and it’s all the witnesses can recall – they would describe Medcalf’s ladybird umbrella, but not her above average height nor her blue-green eyes.

  And now the device was to be used.

  A crowd eavesdropped on the old Turk as he pontificated on a carved pavilion that stood in the centre of the basilica. Medcalf loitered nearby, a splodge of scarlet protruding from her coat pocket. Jenny watched Jake rush to pick up a mitten that had been tossed from a pushchair by a toddler. He gave it to the child’s mother – she hadn’t noticed the garment being cast away and her gratitude was obvious. Jenny closed her eyes, opened them again.

  “Jenny?” Guilherme was the spotter. “This is as good an opportunity as we’ll get.”

  The single word nearly caught in her throat. “Go.”

  Far below her Medcalf broke away from the chandelier and began closing on the pavilion. Jake and Florence had their backs to the agent, unaware of her approach.

  But wait … two Indian women were accosting Medcalf. Was it innocent? Jenny breathed again as the tourists handed her a camera and deployed their photograph faces. The Ulsterwoman snapped away, the umbrella tucked under one arm as she rearranged the tourists into different poses. What a pro. But the moment was lost: Jake’s guide was pulling them away from the pavilion, shepherding them toward the upper galleries.

  Then it all went wrong.

  It’s how these things always unravel – the unexpected, something no amount of planning can account for. To Jenny’s horror one of the tourists broke from her friend’s embrace and gave Jake the camera. The journalist turned, gormless, eager to help. And (God in heaven!) the woman threw an arm around Medcalf to include her in the photo. There was no escape – refusing to be in it would make her face ten times more memorable to the journo. Jake corralled the three into the viewfinder and hit the shutter release. Jenny was one down.

  What on earth will I tell Charlie?

  The tourists wandered off arm-in-arm, inspecting the photos. Medcalf peeled away in the opposite direction, making eye contact with Jenny as she passed below the balcony. Her expression was grim.

  Something alerted Jenny to the movement of her other agent.

  Guilherme had broken free of his tour group and was homing in on the targets. Jake and Florence drifted toward the main staircase, where sightseers were pressing to get in. It would be tightly packed in there. Guilherme was two feet behind the journalist as they passed through the archway, the black umbrella swinging from his wrist. Suddenly he gripped it like a dagger – Jenny realized her heart was racing.

  *

  The atmosphere in the staircase was claustrophobic. Tourists were all around Jake and he had to moderate his pace. Then several things happened in quick succession. He heard a yell of “Pickpocket!”; a Chinese tourist lunged towards him; he felt a stab of pain in the buttock. The pickpocket was away at a sprint, but Jake was left with the impression of a lean South Asian in his forties.

  “He want your wallet,” the Chinese tourist said. “I stop him.”

  “Thanks,” Jake replied. He rubbed his backside and turned to Florence. “I think something just stung me.”

  15

  When Jake and Florence arrived at the Agya Sophia the next morning, a curious thing happened. He emptied his pockets, but the metal detector went off anyway. The guard pulled him aside to scan him with the wand and as the device passed over
his waist it bleeped.

  “Empty pockets please,” he said.

  “They are empty,” Jake insisted, turning them inside out.

  The guard yawned and wanded him a second time; it bleeped again.

  “Arms up, sir.”

  Jake could smell coffee and stale tobacco as he was patted down. He winced as the guard brushed his buttock – it was still sore from the insect bite and antihistamine had not helped. Finally the guard waved them through.

  But it was not an insect that had stung Jake, nor was it a designer poison that would shut down his heart and leave no trace. For deep within his behind nestled a homing device. The transmissions were picked up by the British Embassy, encrypted and beamed into space; a nanosecond later they were received by SIS’s satellite on the 57th Parallel, dissected into ten thousand slivers and fired down to Vauxhall Cross.

  As Edwin de Clerk watched the magenta dot awake from its arrest and enter the precinct of the Agya Sophia, one corner of his mouth rose in a smirk.

  *

  Jake and Florence began with a sweep of the basilica’s floor, examining the many engravings spread across it. The passage of tourists had worn most inscriptions down to a trace, but Florence said this was a blessing in disguise. If they had been readable John the Lydian’s tomb could have been found decades ago; as it was, a sarcophagus might remain undiscovered. The journalist and the archaeologist fell into a routine. Florence was fluent in Greek, in which most of the carvings were written – but Latin was everywhere too, and Jake found his A Level classics returned quickly.

  On the third day he found a flagstone by the altar engraved with the name ‘John’. A second and third word followed, each worn to near-nothing. Florence’s cheeks were flushed as she took high resolution photographs, using a series of filters to winkle out the original inscription. But there was to be a disappointment. It was not ‘John the’, but ‘John of’, and the final word revealed itself to be ‘Nicomedia’, a small Byzantine town.

  The task became tedious. It was literally a fingertip search – every inch of the Agya Sophia had to be caressed in case touch detected what the eye had missed. Florence rose at 6 a.m. each morning, shaming Jake out of bed and working until the janitors threw them out at nightfall. And with each fruitless day Jake’s anxiety rose. You didn’t get a job on Fleet Street without knowing how to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but they’d found nothing whatsoever. Where would the words come from?

  Florence was the silver lining. Jake had put her down as a beautiful but unassailable bitch, yet as the days passed she thawed. Maybe it was the fact that he was mucking in with the hunt – or perhaps his love of history was shining through. Jake didn’t care either way. The archaeologist’s beauty was no longer a fearful thing, and at times he was coherent in her presence.

  He learned about her background over grilled sardines in a blue-collar restaurant. Inside it was warm and pleasant and they wiped condensation from the windows to watch smokers fishing in the Bosphorus. Florence’s parents lived in Richmond – her dad was a dentist who owned four practices, while her mum “lunched prodigiously”. Florence had read law at Oxford, and her choice of profession had caused a hell of a stink.

  “Archaeologists make even journalists look well-heeled,” she said. “It’s not a career a Chinese father has in mind for his only child.”

  “You look like you do ok for yourself,” Jake observed with a nod to her wrist. Perched on that elegant slip of flesh was a watch by Tiffany.

  “It was a present,” Florence shot back.

  But by the end of the week gloom was descending. They had found nothing of interest and Jake’s hope of ‘drawing out’ some conspiracy looked naïve in the extreme.

  “What’s wrong?” Florence asked as they explored Sultanahmet one evening. “You seem quiet.”

  The whole story spilled out. How he would be sacked if he didn’t pull off a ‘spectacular’, how he’d lost his way a long time ago, how he couldn’t find the energy to cut it at the highest level. Yet neither could he rid himself of the suspicion he had special gifts: a good brain and the ability to ‘stumble upon’ stories other reporters missed. Jake felt wretched for wasting his talents. But still he didn’t give the job his all, and the lethargy only increased with each setback. He stopped short of acknowledging that the consumption of eighty units a week contributed to the vicious circle. Florence listened with understanding and Jake realized he was close to falling in love with her; already he was dangerously in lust.

  “Maybe it would help if you weren’t so scruffy,” she said, ruffling his hair in a way that made his balls shrink. “When was the last time you shaved?”

  They were passing a barber’s shop and before Jake could complain Florence pulled him inside. The elderly barber blinked rapidly as he worked, lending him something of the appearance of a mole rat. Florence shrieked with delight when he lit a paraffin-covered gauze to blow fireballs into Jake’s ears. If only he could bring himself to make a move. If only.

  That evening they visited the Cagaloglu Hammam, an Ottoman bathhouse once frequented by Florence Nightingale. Perhaps steam would ease joints stiff after hours knelt on marble. When he saw her wearing only a towel it was like being kicked in the heart. But the baths were segregated.

  “Oooh,” Florence whined. “I hoped we’d get to go in together.”

  Jake lay on hot stone and stared at the ceiling through patches of transparency in the mist. The only sound was the metronomic drip of water echoing off marble, and as dreams gambolled through his mind he had the feeling of being removed from time. He no longer cared if Heston fired him. He would become an archaeologist. This would be their life: wining and dining their way through the world’s most electrifying cities, uncovering the glory of the past. Paranoid professors and lightning strikes could not have been further from his mind.

  Then the whole imagined edifice came crumbling down around him.

  16

  “What have Tintin and Lara Croft been up to then?” Charlie Waits chuckled at his own joke. “Our intrepid reporter and his new squeeze doing anything I should know about?”

  “She’s not his squeeze,” said Jenny. “I should know. We’ve got their bedrooms bugged.”

  “Well, not yet perhaps. In any case I think it’s time we had a chat face to face, if you can indulge me.”

  “Of course.” Jenny took the phone from her ear to check the time on the screen. “If I get the next flight I could be at Vauxhall for eight.”

  “Actually, I’m outside right now.”

  She ran to the window and there he was, wearing chinos and a pale pink shirt open at the collar. A cashmere sweater was slung over his shoulders – he seemed not to feel the cold.

  Waits waved at her. “Shall we promenade?”

  Medcalf looked up from her novel. “No fecking way … Charlie’s outside?”

  Jenny nodded grimly.

  “What is he, a ghoul or something?” The Ulsterwoman returned to her reading, shaking her head.

  Jenny laughed. “I admit there’s a whiff of brimstone about the man …”

  Jenny liked her agent. The pair had begun keeping each other company in their hotel rooms in the snatched moments of downtime, chatting or playing backgammon. It reminded her of university days, and Jenny was surprised to note a wistfulness for lost friendships.

  Waits led her to the Grand Bazaar; he wanted to buy a carpet for his landing. The mass of stalls dealt in Ottomanesque tat for the most part, but there was the odd antique shop where one might find something decent. Out of season the stallholders were desperate for custom, yet at a glance from Waits they shied back, scenting the sulphur. The spymaster had been sitting at their last meeting and Jenny was surprised to see how short he was. But still he projected that haughty ease a certain breed of Englishman possesses in spades.

  “Shall we talk about what happened in the Agya Sophia?” he enquired.

  “Yes, let’s,” replied Jenny, bracing herself for a reprimand. MI6
didn’t like things getting fraught, regardless of whose fault it was.

  “Never mind about the photograph,” said Waits, swatting away an imaginary fly. “Accidents happen.”

  “Thanks, Charlie, I appreciate that.”

  “I’m more concerned about this other fellow, the one who got involved on the staircase. Chinese chap.” He stopped to peer at a rug. “What are your thoughts? An innocent bystander?”

  “Alexander Guilherme thought he was clean,” she replied. “Said he didn’t seem the type. For a start he was very overweight …”

  Jenny caught herself too late. A glint of anger stirred in Charlie’s eyes – perhaps her handler was conscious of his own ample figure.

  “Nice one, that,” he said, adjusting his glasses to peer at a rug. “Nineteenth-century Hereke, if I’m not much mistaken.”

  Jenny knew not to apologize. Contrition would only highlight Waits’s loss of control.

  “Alexander says if the Chinese guy was working for someone else then he was a damn good actor,” she said, turning to look the spymaster in the face. “Was he working for someone else?”

  “I don’t know, why should I know?” Waits’s chin quivered from left to right. “We’ve got absolutely no evidence anyone else is keeping an eye on him.”

  “Evidence is not suspicion. Is there suspicion?”

  His smile fell away like rock cleaved from the cliff face. “We’ve absolutely no evidence anyone else is keeping an eye on Wolsey but ourselves,” he repeated. “Well then – how about tea?”

  Damn the man, Jenny thought as they sat at a small café. Waits chose his words with the care of a Queen’s Counsel barrister; the same judiciousness was now being applied to the cake-stand. She watched in distaste as he selected four large baklava, oozing with syrup.