Jenny felt a rush of childish disappointment. The message was clear enough, but at least she knew where she stood. Anyway, what was she thinking? They were playing too dangerous a game for distractions. She blinked and swept the crumbs from her lap.
Jake snapped his fingers right under her nose.
She looked up at him, annoyed now. But Jake’s eyes were wide and he cupped one hand by his ear. Then she heard it too: people speaking Mandarin, not far off. And the language barrier couldn’t hide the identity of the hectoring female voice soaring above the rest.
It was Florence.
And she was getting closer.
“Quickly,” Jake hissed, snatching up the remnants of food and bundling them into his shirt. “Down there.”
They scrambled to the bottom of a shallow valley below the mound. The depression was choked with hawthorn bushes and they wriggled into the foliage.
“How did they know to come here?” whispered Jenny.
“Florence had the Ethiopian inscription too, remember.”
But privately Jake doubted she could have deduced the meaning of Eusebius’s gnomic prose.
She had been drawn here.
Twenty minutes passed before the Chinese team reached the conclusion that there was nothing to be found. Jake heard raised voices, glimpsed Florence’s face through the screen of leaves. Her features were twisted in frustration. How did I ever find that woman attractive?
But instead of departing Florence sat and stared at the horizon, as if waiting for something. Her agents began to smoke and play cards. Jake and Jenny had no choice but to remain in the thicket – the slopes around them were too exposed to make a dash for it. After three hours he heard a powerful engine approach.
To his astonishment a JCB digger hoved into view.
*
The excavation took all night. By the small hours the temperature had fallen to single figures, but Florence’s voice could still be heard, directing the dig. A veil of condensation fell, leaving Jake sodden. Yet he dared not move – the Chinese had erected powerful arc-lamps, turning night into day. Jenny clung to him for warmth, shivering without complaint, and he did his best to wrap her in his body. Cramp set in, then hunger and thirst; it felt as if the night would never end. Sleep came in fits and starts before Jake finally drifted out of consciousness at about 4 a.m.
He awoke to silence.
The world was cast that simmering blue which precedes sunrise, as if a projectionist had been challenged to brew up the sky. As Jake listened the dawn chorus picked up in a collage of cheeps and rasps. He peered through the foliage – they were alone.
Jake unfolded himself from Jenny and clambered from the bushes, groaning as he stretched; they had been lying there for more than twelve hours. The Iron Age mound had been clawed from existence. Earth and boulders lay strewn across the hillside, as if some giant mole had erupted from beneath it. For two thousand eight hundred years this place had defied the elements. Now it was destroyed forever, and even in his exhausted state Jake registered anger at the vandalism.
His phone began ringing.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Jake, Luke McDonagh here – I got your new number from Niall.”
The image of a freelancer with a lazy eye swam to mind. Jake hadn’t thought about McDonagh for weeks; the man belonged to a previous life. When had they last met? Swiftly it came to him: The Dolphin, deepest King’s Cross. Suddenly Jake was wide awake.
Winston Churchill.
1941.
The ancient Etruscan matter.
For weeks Jake’s head had been full of thoughts of Rome. And with the constant fear of death, that dash across the globe, he had almost forgotten how it all began: a single-line memo from a batch of declassified documents. But good old McDonagh had been nosing away in the National Archives all the time.
“I think I’ve found something,” he began. “Don’t know what to make of it to be honest …”
“Don’t say anything else!” Jake interrupted. “Don’t say anything at all.”
Jenny was beside him, rubbing her eyes. “What’s going on?”
“A contact on the phone,” he mouthed. “It’s related.”
“Tell him to get out of wherever he is right now. Tell him he needs to lie low somewhere until we get back in touch, nowhere he normally frequents. For God’s sake don’t let him stay with a family member or anything.”
“You hear that, Luke?”
“Yes. Jake –”
But before McDonagh could finish Jenny snatched the mobile and hung up. Instantly it began ringing again, but she dropped the call and turned off the phone.
“We need to get out of here,” she said. “Right now.”
*
In London Edwin de Clerk punched the air in triumph. “Yeah! Gotcha!”
With Jenny brushing away Jake’s technological spoor, de Clerk had changed tack: he had arranged a tap of every individual Jake had been in contact with over the last two months. Not even Jenny would suspect a fishing expedition on such an industrial scale. De Clerk had sat through countless hours of it by then. Journalistic patter; trips to Indian restaurants planned by people he would never meet; the seditious politics of the bridge club attended by Jake’s mother. And now the breakthrough had come, just as de Clerk teetered on the edge of a nervous collapse through exhaustion. McDonagh was a trusted freelancer, so Jake’s gatekeeper at the newspaper had given him the newest mobile number right away. But either McDonagh had ignored Heston’s order not to ring from his normal phone, or he had forgotten.
Mistake.
*
When they were back in Rome, Jake followed Jenny’s precise instructions on how to make contact with McDonagh. First he bought two pay-as-you-go phones. Then he texted the freelancer, telling him to buy two disposable phones of his own. McDonagh sent Jake the number for just one of the devices, and Jake called that number on his first pay-as-you-go phone. With that line he asked McDonagh to read him the number of his second disposable mobile. This McDonagh did right away, before de Clerk had time to tap the conversation. Jake then rang this number with his mobile number two, and voilà: a clean line of communication had been established, de Clerk powerless to catch up.
“What’s going on then, mate?” McDonagh began, fear in his voice now.
“Have you been following all this MI6 stuff in the papers, Luke?”
“Sort of – why?”
“It’s related to the Churchill file, somehow.”
“You’ll need to stay in a hotel tonight,” said Jake. “Keep the receipts of any expenses, obviously we’ll cover them. I’ll be back in London tomorrow, then let’s meet.”
“Sure thing, oh my God, sure thing. Where?”
Jake thought fast. “Same place, same time. See you tomorrow, Luke.”
*
The use of four phones to establish a safe line was cute, but immaterial. Because after the first call McDonagh had dithered for thirty minutes, unsure whether to take Jenny’s order to get out seriously or not. And by the time he left his flat, Evelyn Parr was waiting outside.