Jenny was taking her morning jog when she saw the woman who should not have been there. To her left sprawled the Topkapi Palace, where the Ottoman sultans had kept their harem. To her right was a vignette of modern Istanbul: kebab houses, massage parlours, internet café. In the last was Medcalf.
The Ulsterwoman had her back to the street, hair bundled into a woolly hat. But one incendiary lock gave her away. Jenny slowed, jogging on the spot. Something was not right here. Her agent had been keeping tabs on Jake all night, she should be asleep – yet there she was, hunched before a screen and tapping away. Jenny slipped into the café and padded toward her agent through a soup of noise. Teenage gamers competed to be heard over Lebanese pop music, but even so Medcalf’s senses were too acute for Jenny. Maybe it was a reflection on the screen; perhaps she simply sensed Jenny’s presence. All the best agents possess a degree of instinct and intuition that is difficult to explain. But at the last moment Medcalf whipped around to face her superior.
“Oh, it’s you.”
Jenny smiled; steel was in her eyes. “Not asleep already?”
“I needed to send some emails to the family.” Medcalf maximized her Gmail account until it filled the screen.
“What were you looking at just now?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes, you were. What was it?”
“Nothing important.”
Jenny wasn’t smiling any more. “Stand back from the computer, please.”
“It’s private.”
“Let me see what you were doing.”
Medcalf’s face pulsed scarlet. “You don’t have the authority.”
“Oh, I do.”
Still Medcalf would not budge.
“Let me have a look or I’ll have Edwin look up everything you’ve been doing remotely,” said Jenny. “And I’d need to notify Charlie Waits about such a step.”
As Medcalf’s resistance wilted Jenny took the chair, her back very straight as she viewed the browser history. But as she clicked from page to page she blenched.
“I think you and I need to have a little talk,” she said.
*
The first website was an Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Etruscan religion:
The calling of diviner-priest was seen by the ancient Etruscans as sacred; his concern was for the very destiny of his people.
Then a dictionary website, open at the word ‘haruspex’:
A priest who practised divination, esp. by examining the entrails of animals. From the Latin hira (gut) + specere (to look).
And the Wikipedia entry for ‘Disciplina Etrusca’:
There is evidence a significant portion of Etruscan literature was systematically burned by early Christians in the fourth century. Arnobius, a Christian convert, wrote in 300 AD that ‘Etruria is the originator and mother of all superstition’. Parts of Etruscan religion do indeed seem perverse to the modern mindset. Among the behaviours forbidden by the text was the consumption of blackberries, which were seen as a cursed fruit …