“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.”
4
“Let me try and wrap my head around this for a minute.” Noah looked up at the screens. The faces might have been replaced by the harsh reality of the Israeli landscape, but that didn’t matter. His head was filled with Catherine Meadows’ digital ghost falling to its knees, arms rising up in a desperate V. He rubbed his fingers against his temples. “You’re telling me we’re looking at a plot to assassinate the Pope, okay, I’ll buy that, but a plot dating back to a sect that committed mass suicide two thousand years ago? Now that’s… special. And not special in a good way, I might add”-he sucked in a disbelieving breath-“as if that wasn’t enough, not only has our whistleblower been dead for the best part of five hundred years, he just happened to be a fortuneteller who couldn’t spell Hitler and marked Saddam as the Antichrist. Does that about sum it up?” He looked around the table. “I mean, seriously, do you have any idea how bloody ridiculous that sounds?”
Lethe met his gaze full on and held it. He was the youngest of the group by a good decade, and right then he looked it. He touched the black frame of his glasses. “I’d say we’re merrily skipping down the yellow brick road into Looney Town,” Lethe agreed with a wry smile, “but what we’ve got here is a link. The modern world is all about links, degrees of separation and joining the dots. The only thing that makes any kind of sense is that something happened at Masada and these people burned themselves alive because of it. I’m not claiming it makes a good kind of sense.”
Noah didn’t know much about the kid. The old man had introduced him to the team as a researcher. Noah had always assumed that meant hacker. He was the archetypal nerd with his thick-framed glasses and tufts of beard that really didn’t seem all that keen to grow through. Lethe took his glasses off. Without them he looked another five years younger, if that was possible. Noah liked the kid, even if he spent too much time jacked into the neural net or whatever it was he did as a substitute for having a healthy sex life.