Office windows glinted in the gathering sunlight as the taxi sped along Tooley Street towards London Bridge and the Monument. Blake’s mind was still reeling from the unveiling of Mayor Lambton as the Dark King; the man behind the murder of his friends Carla and Eli, not to mention Carla’s father and Henry Ross. At best, the man was a psychopath, but having experienced his unnatural strength first-hand, Blake was now grappling with the notion that he was dealing with something far darker.
Whatever his nature, he was hunting for the Logos Stone to enact an ancient ritual called the Reckoning at midnight tonight, when the star Sirius would be in perfect alignment with the Sun, Earth and Moon. Blake suddenly became white-lipped with anger. Nothing would get in his way to stop Lambton from achieving his goal. The key was finding the Logos Stone. Once located, Lambton wouldn’t be far away.
Blake slipped his hand in his pocket and teased out Carla’s postcard. At first glance, the postcard didn’t look unusual. Blake had seen the same card sold in countless tourist shops around the capital. On its front was a high definition photograph of Wren’s Monument set against a bright blue sky. Blake flicked it over. There were only two lines of handwriting.
To Carla my darling daughter, I am so sorry. Please remember that I have always loved you.
Under this was a more cryptic line of text:
At the Reckoning, follow the Tree of Life to the pyramid and the Logos Stone.
Carla hadn’t recalled any reference to the Tree of Life on the postcard. His mind registered the obvious connection to the Tree of Life diagram within the Sefer Yetzirah that he had liberated from the United Grand Lodge. Similar to Wren’s letter, the postcard also mentioned a pyramid. In London? More questions were stacking up in his head.
The taxi driver braked sharply and gave the white van that had just cut him up a one-fingered salute. ‘Bloody idiot,’ he mumbled to himself. Blake glanced at Mary in the seat opposite and then dropped his focus once again to the postcard. This time, he scrutinised the three numbers handwritten under the postage stamp: three, four, five. Deep in his marrow, Blake knew that somewhere on this card lay the answer to the location of the Logos Stone. It was right under his nose, but he just couldn’t see it.
‘What are you looking at?’ asked Mary.
‘It was sent to Carla by her father, just days before his murder. He was trying to tell her something.’
Reaching over the dog sitting between them, Blake handed Mary the postcard. Like the hands of a Victorian chimney sweep, Mary’s fingers were caked in dirt. As she examined the card, Blake’s eyes roamed across her tattooed hands. Deep black lines of grime crossed her palms, making it hard to distinguish which were inked designs and which were the natural creases of her hand.
‘The location of the Logos Stone is encoded in the Monument,’ she said.
‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘Enoch Hart told me,’ said Mary, almost matter-of-factly.
Blake stared at Mary, not knowing what to think. His mind became plagued with more questions. ‘He told you where it’s hidden?’
Mary quickly shook her head. ‘Only that Wren had hidden some kind of message in the design of one of its plaques. That’s what I was looking at, the day I saw you at the tube station. I’ll show you when we get there.’
Blake settled back in his seat, trying to reset his mental compass after what Mary had just said. All roads seemed to point to Wren’s Monument as the key: Wren’s own letter, Marcus Sabatini’s postcard, and now Enoch Hart’s comment to Mary. What else has Mary yet to mention?
As they turned onto London Bridge, Blake looked blankly out of the window towards the familiar profile of HMS Belfast moored in the Thames. Something else tugged at his mind, and this time it was closer to home. Blake glanced down at the dark band of discolouration surrounding his left index finger. Abruptly, he leaned forward in his seat. ‘Did Enoch Hart mention anything about pyramids?’
Mary nodded with a faraway stare. ‘Enoch didn’t call them pyramids; he called them resonators.’
Blake couldn’t conceal his confusion.
‘He believed they were built in ancient times as giant devices to capture and amplify energy waves.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
‘He said that their dimensions were precisely calculated to resonate with the energy frequency.’
‘What frequency?’
‘The star Sirius, at the time of the alignment.’
Blake was dumbstruck.
Mary carried on. ‘He said that the Great Pyramid in Giza and others were built as machines; harmonic resonators to draw down the power of the star and amplify it. He told me that stretching back through time, the ancients built these pyramids ready for the passing of the Reckoning.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You know that the word “pyramid” comes from the Hebrew urrim-middin?’
Blake looked blank.
‘Enoch said it means “measurement of light”.’
Blake tried to think it through. He remembered reading that one of the shafts in the Great Pyramid of Giza was aligned to Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. He pushed his knuckle into his lips. There was another pyramid he knew whose dimensions were similarly locked into Sirius. ‘Did he ever mention Ur?’
It was clear from Mary’s expression that it wasn’t the first time she had heard the strange name.
‘Did he say something?’
‘He said Ur was where his initiation into the Guardians took place.’
Blake went very still for a moment, the hair on the back of his head standing to attention. He gave her a serious look and tried to bring his racing thoughts into focus. ‘Ur is an ancient city in southern Mesopotamia very close to the modern city of Nasiriyah in Iraq. It’s mentioned in the Book of Genesis as the birthplace of Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths.’
Mary listened.
‘What about the ziggurat? Did he mention the ziggurat?’
A perplexed look came over Mary’s face.
‘The Ziggurat of Ur is a massive stepped pyramid. It’s over 4,000 years old. In its time, it was considered the most spectacular building in all of Mesopotamia. As a young man, my father was an archaeologist who worked for the University of Edinburgh. He was a specialist in ancient Mesopotamian art and spent six months digging in the plains around Ur. He was amazed to find that the people there still spoke and read Aramaic, as Jesus did. It made a profound impression on him. He told me that he even carved his name on the ziggurat. When he returned home, my father was a changed man.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Almost immediately, we sold our house in Glencoe and moved to London. He bought an antique bookshop near St Paul’s Cathedral and we lived there until it was burned down.’ Blake lapsed into thought and a new silence fell over them. Then he leant forward again in his seat. ‘I’ve been there too,’ said Blake with his hand scratching at his forehead.
‘Ur?’ said Mary, surprised.
‘I was in the army in Iraq during the Second Gulf War. I was assigned to a team working to recover objects looted from the Museum of Baghdad. A network of smuggling routes had been established to get the looted artefacts out of the country. I discovered one operating out of Nasiriyah that was transporting huge quantities of artefacts over the border into Kuwait. I worked with the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage to track down and dismantle the smuggling rings. Remembering my father’s stories, I hitched a lift with a US team checking reports of looting at the nearby sacred site of Ur.
‘We got there late in the afternoon. The Royal Palace had been ransacked. The Lamassu, the famous giant human-headed winged bull statues that drove away evil spirits from the city, had been reduced to rubble. Beyond the palace complex, was the soaring stepped pyramid, the Ziggurat of Ur. In the late afternoon sun, I climbed to the very top of the ziggurat. I stood on the capstone and looked out. The view was breath-taking; I could see right across the plains all the way to Nasiriyah. As I clambered down, I noticed something carved into the side of the capstone.’
Blake paused and stared stonily out of the window. ‘It was the name of my father, Cameron Blake, and a date carved into the stone. He hadn’t been the only one who had carved his name. There were two other names, much older and faded. Even so, I could read them: Hugues de Payns, and Godefroy de Saint-Omer, the two founding members of the Templar Knights.’
Mary straightened up. ‘The Templars?’