Stealing Sacred Fire Read online

  I am always waiting for something, he thought, kept on hold: but for what? What is it that I have forgotten?

  Memories of his past were hazy. Only dimly could he recall the training he had undertaken at university, and the faces of his parents, long dead, were simply blurs. He did not know if this was the same for other people, because he had never discussed it with anybody. His life, for the past twenty-five years or so had been filled only with work. He had lived here in this house all that time, but could not remember moving into it, or where he had lived before.

  For the first time in twenty-five years, Cameron Murchison considered the possibility that something had happened to him in the past, something that his mind had blotted out completely. A strange feeling of anger filled his heart. Someone should be blamed for this, but who?

  He lay awake until morning light filled the room, then got up. Something was very wrong. He had never felt this way before, as if the foundations of his life were moving beneath his feet, about to open up and reveal a startling abyss of buried truth. He was afraid and nervous, but also weirdly excited.

  When he looked in the mirror in the bathroom, it seemed to him as if another face was hiding beneath his own: not different in feature, but in expression. It was the face he should have. Lines scored his face, but he no longer felt they belonged there. They had been imposed on him. He straightened up, a toothbrush in his hand.

  They have aged me, he thought, and through that have sentenced me to an early death. He didn’t know why he should think that. The thought was unreasonable, crazed.

  Mrs Melrose arrived at half past nine, letting herself in the front door and calling, ‘Hello-ee!’

  Murchison was waiting for her in the kitchen, unfamiliar in his posture, pacing around the table, tapping it with his fingers. The housekeeper paused in the doorway, surprise on her face.

  ‘Is something wrong, Mr Murchison?’ An understatement. Something was clearly wrong.

  He paused in his table circuit. ‘Tell me, Mrs Melrose, how much do you remember of your childhood?’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Can you remember details; times, dates, faces? This is a serious question. Please answer me.’

  She folded her arms, thought about it. ‘Well, some things, yes. Why, Mr Murchison?’

  ‘Would you consider it strange if a person had barely any recollection of their formative years?’

  She laughed uneasily. ‘You’re the doctor. Surely you’re more qualified to answer that!’

  He turned away from her to gaze out of the window. He could not open up to this woman; their relationship was not that kind. She would think him mad, and he was sure any hysterical confidences from him would be unwelcome. He should not have spoken at all, but Mrs Melrose was the nearest he had to a friend.

  ‘It’s clear,’ she said.

  ‘What is?’ He still did not face her.

  ‘You must go back to the ancient domain. It is time.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ He turned round quickly. Her face was blank.

  ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘You did... you said...’

  She frowned, shook her head. ‘Look, are you sure you’re all right, Mr Murchison. You don’t seem yourself today.’

  He pressed fingers against his brow. ‘No, perhaps it’s a touch of summer flu.’

  ‘Then go back to bed,’ Mrs Melrose said, coming forward. This was safe territory.

  ‘Well... I...’

  ‘Go on. I’ll bring you a tray.’ She put her hands on his arm and pushed him towards the door. ‘My, you feel hot! I’ll get you some aspirin, too.’

  He could not rest. He did not want to get back into his bed. Sleep? Impossible. Mrs Melrose appraised him as he meekly took the aspirins she had brought for him. He did not like the intensity of her stare.

  ‘Mr Murchison...’ A pause. ‘Have you any family I could call, perhaps?’

  He laughed bleakly, handed back to her a glass of water. ‘I look that bad, then?’

  She looked uncomfortable. ‘Well... It’s more than just a chill, isn’t it?’

  He frowned up at her. There was something in her tone — a covered nervousness. ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  She went to his bedside table, put down the glass and tidied the already-neat pile of medical journals that constituted his rare bed-time reading. ‘It’s just that I couldn’t help noticing...’

  ‘What?’ Was she afraid of him?

  ‘Your study. As I walked past. The strange mess it’s in.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He stood up. ‘What mess?’

  Mrs Melrose cowered away, her hand reaching behind her for the door handle. ‘I know it’s none of my business....’

  Murchison jumped up from the bed and strode towards the door, his house-keeper flinching away. He heard her voice calling after him as he ran down the stairs. His feet seemed hardly to touch the carpet. It was like flying.

  In the doorway to the study, he came to a staggering halt. Someone had been in there. Desecration. Vandalism.

  All the furniture had been pushed to the sides of the room. The cases that held his precious artefacts gaped wide, as if they’d been flung open from within. The shelves were bare. Everything stolen. No.

  Murchison’s panicked eyes swivelled downwards. There, on the carpet, in the middle of the room, the ancient relics were arranged in a perfect circle: small, stone heads, fragments of pottery, funerary figures.

  Their owner stood trembling in the doorway. Mrs Melrose crept up behind him, perhaps intent on sneaking to the front door.

  ‘I didn’t do this,’ Murchison said. ‘No matter what you think.’

  His voice, now, was calm. Mrs Melrose stopped behind him. ‘Then who did? Surely, you’d have heard intruders?’

  Murchison scraped his hands through his hair. ‘Yes, I would have thought so, but I slept deeply... What kind of joke is this?’

  Mrs Melrose was clearly moved by the ragged edge to his voice. She put her hands on his arms. ‘Perhaps we’d better call the police,’ she said.

  He nodded, gulped. ‘Yes...’

  ‘I’ll see to it. You go back to your room and lie down.’

  Wearily, Murchison obeyed. As he went slowly back up the stairs, he was wondering what kind of housebreaker moved furniture around and arranged artefacts on the floor. In his heart, he suspected no-one had entered his house in the night. Whatever had done that in the study somehow lived here already.

  He lay on his bed, fanned by the air that came in at the open window. Outside, the sound of children playing braided with the cacophony of traffic, of distant crowds. He smelled warming tarmac, cut lawns, the scent of the rose that grew against the wall of his house. His eyelids drooped involuntarily. The sounds outside tumbled around themselves, resolving into a skirl of eastern music, the jabber of foreign voices, the creak of carts and the braying of mules. There was an aroma like that of a great slow-moving river — stagnant yet fecund — frilled with the smells of human waste, sweat, cooking meat and rare perfumes.

  Lead me, he thought.

  Before the police arrived with questions that could not be answered, he had already packed a bag to leave.

  Chapter Eight

  And Saw That They Were Fair…

  Istanbul, Turkey

  Shemyaza had no fear of pursuit: Melandra was sure of this. He had used the name Michael Jacobs on the flight over to Istanbul, flying business class with two companions. She had been unable to elicit any information from the airline herself, but a quick call to Nathaniel Fox’s office had been sufficient to set wheels in motion elsewhere. After securing a last minute cancelled seat on the next available flight to Istanbul, she’d sat in an airport bar awaiting a return call. She’d not had to wait long.

  Fox told her that the Children of Lamech had operatives in Turkey, who’d already been mobilised, and once her target had landed in Istanbul, would follow him discreetly to his accommodation. Melan
dra questioned whether her services would actually be needed now. Her words were greeted with a brief but eloquent silence, then Fox spoke, ‘My child, you have your duty as others have theirs.’

  ‘We have to presume he’ll be alerted at some point,’ Melandra said. ‘My operation at his previous address will have been discovered by now.’

  ‘That is inevitable.’

  Melandra detected a faint note of censure in his voice, but what else could she have done at the Grigori hotel? ‘I’ll be taking off soon,’ she said stiffly. ‘Shall I call you when I reach Istanbul?’

  ‘Call me only when you have something to report,’ Fox replied, and broke the connection.

  Summer in England had been stifling, but the heat that enveloped Melandra’s body when she stepped off the plane in Istanbul seemed almost unnatural. She’d been brought up in the wet, cool north of America, and disliked hotter climates. As instructed by Fox, she took an expensive taxi ride into the city some kilometres away, and booked into the appointed hotel in the Sultanahmet, the old district of the city. Here, she awaited contact from one of Fox’s operatives. She sensed tension in the air all around her that did not simply originate from her own stress levels concerning the job she was here to do. A vibrating sense of danger and repressed fury seemed to seep through the walls of the hotel from the air outside. Political tensions were high, of course, but it was more than that. She could not dispel the impression that something was forming invisibly around her — an event of some kind. For a few brief moments she felt as if her whole purpose was preordained, but not just by the Children of Lamech. She had a part to play, involuntarily, and had already embarked upon it.

  Dismissing the sensation as paranoia, she calmed herself by assembling her weapon, which had been concealed, dismantled, in various items of luggage. Her cases had hidden compartments, but not suspiciously hidden. Their presence might seem convenient, rather than sinister; a way to keep certain parts of her luggage separate from her clothes. In the event of surveillance equipment discovering them, the compartments were filled with innocent-looking devices such as a hair-dryer, a travel iron, jumbo canisters of deodorant, hairspray, air freshener. The light-weight components of the gun itself were concealed within these items.

  A sniper rifle might have been useful here, but in the event her semi-automatic proved unsuitable, she would have to improvise. First, she wanted to pinpoint her target and observe him. She felt that, in London, the job would have had to be swift and anonymous, but out here she sensed she had more time to be elegant and thorough. What was Shemyaza doing here? Fox hadn’t discussed that with her.

  Melandra looked out of the window: stark lines of modern buildings, but within and below and beside them, the ancient sub-city, the perfume-breathed seductress who held all the secrets of history. Car horns might blare and the stink of traffic eclipse the incense aroma of the forgotten past, but still to a sensitive ear, the land rang to the plaintive call of archaic instruments, and the swish of women’s hair in darkness. This land was not of Melandra’s Lord, Jesus Christ. She shivered as she thought this, attempting to dismiss it from her mind. The whole world was Christ’s. But still, a heavy, brooding female power seemed to sway and murmur at the edge of her perception, its curling hands undulating through smoky air, calling out to her, demanding recognition. She turned away from the window. The people here mostly worshipped Allah. What female deities could possibly hold sway in this place?

  She did not make personal contact with the operatives who were effectively working for her. A letter arrived, written by hand, and seemed to have originated from an old friend of hers, given the tone. The letter chatted informally about a mutual acquaintance and how Melandra could look him up while in the city.

  By now, he’ll know, she thought. His people will have told him about what happened at the hotel. Is he waiting for me?

  The letter didn’t give any indication of a problem, but she felt her nerves tighten within her body, almost as if his evil mind had suddenly become aware of her thoughts and had homed in on them. In America and England, she had simply thought of Shemyaza in terms of a target, but out here, so close to the sacred centre of the world, he seemed to have become large and terrible in her imagination. For some reason, the Children of Lamech had been unable to take a decent photograph of the man, and all she’d been shown were blurry representations that told her nothing. Therefore, her own mind provided the details. She knew he was blond, yet couldn’t help imposing Satanic features onto him; dark, leering face, greasy black hair, cruel, hard eyes. The Devil.

  In the morning, she took breakfast in her room, eschewing the traditional Turkish meal of bread and jam, and ordering a selection of fresh fruit. She could almost taste the fermenting sugar in the ripe flesh. By the time she went out into the city, she felt slightly heady, dressed in a modest long-sleeved cotton dress and dark glasses, her hair pinned up on her head. She carried a large shoulder bag, of the type used by many Western women; the contents, however, differed radically from what you’d normally expect to find in a woman’s bag.

  The city hummed and rustled with secret life. Again, beneath the blare of car horns and human shouts, she detected the eerie wail of a female voice raised in song; a song of invocation or adoration. This seemed peculiar, because she knew it was not the time of day when the voices of temple callers would normally ring out over the city. Also, she thought it was usually men who sang the calls. The woman’s voice seemed to be all around her, and did not originate from any particular area.

  Melandra had a finely honed sense of direction and had little trouble in locating the hotel where her target was staying. For a while she sat outside a café, under the awning, drinking strong Turkish coffee and dreamily watching the stuccoed doorway to the hotel. The heat pulsed around her. She noticed how the bodies of the Turkish women swayed in their concealing robes as if they danced within their purdah. You cannot suppress the female celebration of life. The thought came unbidden. She visualised an image of dark, shady hallways, where fans turned slowly on the ceiling, parting the thick smoke of hashish; dark eyes behind a lattice, the low chuckle of feminine laughter, the swish of light cotton against polished floors. Such a strange summoning. Melandra smiled to herself. The demons of the east might attempt to seduce her, but she was made of fibres too tough to yield.

  It seemed the day was unwinding around her, in a slow, measured pace. She drank more coffee, smoked cigarettes under the shade of the awning, and watched the hotel entrance. People came and went. The double doors were open, and she could see part of the darkened hall-way beyond. She felt no fear, even though he might be watching her from an upstairs window, aware of her purpose.

  A slight, warm breeze lifted her hair like exploring fingers. She shook her head to dispel the impression, her attention caught by a sudden commotion nearby.

  A number of scrawny dogs had run out from a shadowy side alley and were fighting in the dusty street, rolling over and over, their jaws slavering, their howls high-pitched. Melandra experienced a deep revulsion as she stared at them. Passers-by ignored the hysterical creatures, even when more dogs, perhaps excited by the noise, started to whine and bark excitedly in shuttered courtyards. The whole street was suffused with the clamour. Almost as if the animals had been enacting some bizarre invocation, a wind started up, spiralling the dust into eddies and swirls. Again, Melandra heard a woman’s voice ululate loudly over the din; a proud, eastern song. Then the doors to the hotel slammed shut.

  Melandra cricked her neck turning to see. At the same moment, the dogs broke apart and ran off in different directions. The sobbing echoes of the woman’s song streamed away down the twisting alleys and the last particles of dust fell back to the street.

  The doors to the hotel opened once more, slowly and seemingly without the agency of a human hand. As they hit the white walls, their handles rattled. A figure stepped out from the shadows and stood at the top of the shallow flight of steps that led to the street. He was tall, clad in tradi
tional Arab dress of white cloth, his head and most of his face concealed from view. At his appearance, the environment around him seemed to slow to utter stillness, and become bleached of colour.

  It’s him, Melandra thought.

  He did not look at her, or make any other sign that he was aware of her presence. After surveying the scene around him for a few short moments, he stepped down onto the street and walked right past where she sat beneath the awning.

  Sound and colour and movement returned, and Melandra came back to her senses. He was walking away from her, out into the labyrinth of the city. She got to her feet, knocking the table and spilling the dregs of her coffee onto the cloth.

  There was no doubt in her mind that the man who’d emerged from the hotel was her target. She could see his tall shape moving slowly but purposefully ahead of her through the bustle of the streets, and checked her pace to keep a short distance behind him. His height made him easy to keep in sight above the heads of other people.

  He walked into the bazaar and here paused. Melandra thought he had sensed her presence behind him, but maybe he was only examining merchandise on one of the stalls. Melandra was surrounded by the aromas of spice and coffee, hot pistachios and sweetcorn. Sunlight off brass dazzled her eyes. The stall-holders all seemed to be grinning at her with long teeth, as if in some private joke about her. She stopped as if to examine an array of floating coloured scarves, keeping her target in the periphery of her vision. He did not look round.

  When he moved on, Melandra followed. He turned up a side alley, where the tall, white buildings seemed to meet overhead. Awnings flapped above them, and brightly-coloured carpets hung from balconies. Sunlight was scant in this area. Shops and stalls still lined the narrow street, but Melandra sensed a subtle difference in the air. The people sitting cross-legged behind their merchandise looked at her blandly; their dark eyes the only visible features in faces swathed in striped cloth. There were fewer people browsing among the stalls.