TWENTY-NINE

‘I want you to look at this for me.’ Hart held out the same sheet of vellum parchment he had shown to Nalan Abuna – the one containing Johannes von Hartelius’s last words.

Amira spooned some more Dim Sum into her mouth, disdaining the throwaway chopsticks the caterer had provided, and which Hart was manipulating with what she felt was a certain louche dexterity. ‘I’ve already seen it. You showed it to me last summer, remember? Just after your late girlfriend and her tame SS storm trooper had tried to kill me. I don’t understand why you’re still so fascinated by it.’

‘Look again. Hold it up against the light. Better still, play your lighter backwards and forwards behind it. Just try not to burn it, please.’

Amira made a face. She flicked on her lighter and held the parchment against it. She drew in her breath at the mass of additional material revealed by the flame – the dozens of words snaking between the conventionally written lines and up the margins of the vellum. ‘I can tell you this much. Your ancestor had verbal diarrhoea. Either that or extreme Asperger’s. They say it’s genetic, you know?’

Hart pretended he hadn’t heard. ‘Nalan discovered the hidden writing by torchlight when we were hiding in the cellar in As Sulaymaniyah. She says Hartelius must have done it with urine, or sperm, or some other colourless liquid available to him in his cell. Something that wouldn’t show up on a cursory reading, but only when held up against a concentrated light source. Like a candle with a reflector, say.’

Amira shoved the manuscript back across the table to Hart in feigned distaste. ‘Nalan?’

‘Oh come on, Amira. Nalan Abuna. My guide and translator in Kurdistan. You’ve already written about her, remember? Not only that, but it was your own bloody newspaper who paid her to assist me in the first place.’

‘What? You don’t mean that stunningly photogenic twenty-seven-year-old Kurdish woman whose life you so heroically saved and whose photos you’ve been bombarding my editor with?’ Amira raised her eyebrows dramatically. ‘The one who was no doubt oozing with gratitude towards you once she’d managed to pull herself together after you shot the bomber. New girlfriend, John?’

‘She’s engaged to be married. So no. She’s not my girlfriend. Nor is she ever likely to be.’

‘Not for want of trying, I’m sure.’

Hart slid the parchment back inside its protective cover. ‘Not even that. If you knew more about her life, you’d understand. She’s got no reason to be grateful to men for anything. And certainly not to me. In fact, to all intents and purposes, it was she who saved my life, and not the other way round. If she hadn’t known about the Red Interrogation House, we’d both have been mown down in the street during the first ten minutes of the attack.’

‘So why are you showing me this gobbledegook now?’

‘Because it’s not gobbledegook. Because in it my ancestor talks about a thing called the Copper Scroll. Something historians know for a fact existed, and which was believed by the Templars to hold the key to the secrets of the Temple of Solomon. Also of where to find Solomon’s hidden treasure, with which the Temple was to be funded.’ Hart jabbed his finger at the parchment in frustrated emphasis. He understood exactly who he was dealing with. Amira put work first and relationships second. In that way she was entirely predictable. And doggedly consistent. ‘Johannes von Hartelius knew he was going to die when he wrote this. He had nothing left to lose. So he left this parchment to posterity, knowing it would be sealed inside the Holy Spear by his executioners as a warning to others. In it he tells how he succeeded, where no one else had, in getting the scroll translated by the Yazidis in Lalish. It also tells us how and where he managed to hide it before the Hashshashin got their hands on him.’

‘The Hashshashin? Copper Scrolls? The Yazidis in Lalish? You can’t be fucking serious?’

‘I’m perfectly serious. The scroll, which was considered the greatest treasure of the Templars, went missing in 1198. Which coincides exactly with the dating of Johannes von Hartelius’s deathbed confession. Boreas 1198.’

‘Boreas? What’s that?’

‘It means winter. Boreas was one of the Anemoi. He was the Greek God of the freezing north wind that heralds winter. His other name was the Devouring One. He had snakes instead of feet, and he conjured up the wind by blowing through a conch shell. They say he could turn himself into a stallion and father colts simply by getting his mares to turn their hindquarters into the wind. Without the actual need for coition, in other words.’

‘Sounds ideal. I wish there were more men like him.’

Hart refused to be derailed. ‘He lived in somewhere called Hyperborea. Which is the place beyond the north wind. A place of exile. A place beyond the pale. Which also happens to be where Hartelius hid the Copper Scroll.’

‘You don’t say.’ Amira rolled her eyes. ‘He hid the Copper Scroll in a place beyond the pale? And it says all that here? On this itsy-bitsy scrap of parchment? Extraordinary.’

Hart threw himself back in his chair. Amira wasn’t the easiest person to convince of anything. Her first instinct, when offered unsolicited information, was to doubt it. It was what made her a first-class journalist. ‘Not the Boreas bit, no. Frau Erlichmann found all that out for me last year. But listen to this. I emailed a photograph of the new text you’ve got in your hands to Frau Erlichmann’s grandson, Thilo, and he took it straight over to his grandmother’s house.’

‘Frau Erlichmann?’

‘Oh come on, Amira. You remember Frau Erlichmann. The old lady who took me under her wing in Germany last year? The one who gave me her father’s malfunctioning First World War pistol? Well, she translated the manuscript for me from the Old German. I received Thilo’s reply containing her translation on the plane coming home. If the scroll is still where Hartelius says he left it, its discovery will be the biggest story since the Dead Sea Scrolls were stumbled upon by three Bedouin shepherds back in 1947.’

‘And where did Hartelius leave it? I assume he went into a little more detail than simply “beyond the pale”?’

Hart laughed. ‘Ah. That’s the tricky bit. He left it in a place called Solomon’s Prison. The Zendan-e Soleyman.’

‘And where’s that? No. Don’t tell me. You haven’t got the faintest idea.’

‘Wrong, Amira. I’ve got a very good idea. It’s a hollow mountain in a precise geographical location. Legend has it that Solomon used it to incarcerate his prisoners – one myth has it that he even imprisoned monsters in there. There’s no way in but over the lip. And then there’s an immediate drop of nearly eight hundred feet to the bottom, which is entirely sealed off by sheer walls. No other way to enter or exit but down the vent. I suppose the prisoners were fed – if they were fed, that is – via a basket let down over the side. I’ve confirmed from the Internet that the mountain really exists. And hardly anyone ever visits it. And no one, as far as I can tell, has ever been allowed to climb down the funnel.’

‘You’re joking. A place like that will be oozing with climbers and risk-takers and pot-holers, or whatever they’re called.’

‘No, it won’t.’

‘So where is it then? Don’t keep me in suspense. North fucking Korea?’

‘No. But you’re closer than you think. It’s on pretty much the same latitude, both politically and geographically. It’s in Iran.’