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.