Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
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PENGUIN BOOKS
Clive Cussler is the author or co-author of a great number of international bestsellers, including the famous Dirk Pitt® adventures, such as Crescent Dawn; the NUMA® Files adventures, most recently Devil’s Gate; the Oregon Files, such as The Jungle; the Isaac Bell adventures, which began with The Chase; and the recent Fargo adventures. His non-fiction works include The Sea Hunters and The Sea Hunters II: these describe the true adventures of the real NUMA, which, led by Cussler, searches for lost ships of historic significance. With his crew of volunteers, Cussler has discovered more than sixty ships, including the long-lost Confederate submarine Hunley. He lives in Arizona.
Jack Du Brul is the author of the Philip Mercer series, most recently Havoc, and is the co-author with Clive Cussler of the Oregon Files novels Dark Watch, Skeleton Coast, Plague Ship, Corsair, The Silent Sea and The Jungle. He lives in Vermont.
DIRK PITT® ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER
Crescent Dawn
(with Dirk Cussler)
Arctic Drift
(with Dirk Cussler)
Treasure of Khan
(with Dirk Cussler)
Black Wind
(with Dirk Cussler)
Trojan Odyssey
Valhalla Rising
Atlantis Found
Flood Tide
Shock Wave
Inca Gold
Sahara
Dragon
Treasure
Cyclops
Deep Six
Pacific Vortex
Night Probe
Vixen 03
Raise the Titanic!
Iceberg
The Mediterranean Caper
NUMA® FILES ADVENTURES FEATURING KURT AUSTIN BY CLIVE CUSSLER WITH PAUL KEMPRECOS
Devil’s Gate
Medusa
The Navigator
White Death
Polar Shift
Fire Ice
Lost City
Blue Gold
Serpent
OREGON FILES ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER
WITH JACK DU BRUL
The Jungle
The Silent Sea
Corsair
Plague Ship
Skeleton Coast
Dark Watch
WITH CRAIG DIRGO
Sacred Stone
Golden Buddha
FARGO ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER WITH GRANT BLACKWOOD
The Kingdom
Lost Empire
Spartan Gold
ISAAC BELL ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND JUSTIN SCOTT
The Race
The Spy
The Chase
The Wrecker
NON-FICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND CRAIG DIRGO
The Sea Hunters
The Sea Hunters II
Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed
A thick fog filled the valley and spilled out over the surrounding mountains. Borne on a slight breeze, the mist made it look as though the peaks were breathing. From the ground, the dense forests were just shapes and silhouettes rather than individual trees. No animals scurried on the carpet of leaves and pine needles, and no birds were heard crying out. All was eerie silence. Even the army’s horses were subdued by the impenetrable gloom. An occasional muted hoof stomp was all that betrayed their presence.
Slowly the sun began to burn away the haze, and like something rising from the depths, the topmost section of the castle’s roof emerged out of the fog as though suspended above the ground. The fired-clay-tile roof glistened with moisture. Next to be revealed were the towering walls that surrounded the town. The rampart’s crenellations were as even as dragon’s teeth. From a distance it was easy to see guards patrolling along the tops of the walls, long spears laid casually over their shoulders. They knew the Great Khan’s army was nearby, but they appeared confident that the town’s fortifications were more than adequate.
It was said that in China a village without a wall was like a house without a roof, thus every hamlet, no matter how small, had protective bulwarks of stone or at least stockades of wood. Siege and countersiege became the preferred method of warfare, and its tactics had been honed over a thousand years of conflict.
Before their conquest of China, the Mongols had fought as light cavalry, sweeping off the Steppes and decimating their enemies in lightning raids. But they adapted to the Chinese method of battle, albeit reluctantly. The weeks and months, and sometimes years, it took to breach the walls of a fortified city, using captured slaves to fill moats and man battering rams under withering barrages of arrows from the parapets, went against their ingrained desire for a quick victory.
If things went as planned, and the sun burning through the fog indicated it would, a new strategy would be employed this day that would make every walled citadel a trap from which there was no escape. The few warlords in the region who had not yet proclaimed their fidelity to the Khan soon would, or face swift annihilation.
For a week the army of five hundred mounted warriors and another thousand foot soldiers waited in the forests just beyond the city’s fields. The harvest was in, leaving the fields cut low and yellowed. It would give the archers within the citadel an excellent opportunity to slaughter anyone foolish enough to launch a direct attack. Just as critical for the defenders, it meant that they had enough food to wait out a long siege. If winter came before the walls fell, it was likely the Mongols would return north to their capital and not come back until spring.
General Khenbish had orders from the Khan to take this town before the first snows dusted the roof of his palace. Though the general had never been graced by the Khan’s presence, he would no more disappoint his king than if the man were his best friend. He only wished the Great Leader had not sent an emissary to witness the battle. And such an ugly man at that, with his sallow skin and great hooked nose – plus he had the devil’s eyes. Khenbish did give him credit for his beard. While he himself could only grow a drooping mustache and a wispy few strands from his chin, the lower half of the observer’s face was hidden behind thick dark curls.
General Khenbish, unlike in any other siege, had not constructed dozens of scaling ladders and towers or built trebuchets and catapults. He’d brought only enough slaves to tend to his soldiers’ needs and build but two wood-framed towers placed in the field just beyond the reach of the town’s archers. Atop the towers were large copper cones opened to the sky. The inside of each was layered with a fine coat of silver that was polished until it shone as dazzlingly as the sun itself. Under each, a barrel like that of a small cannon protruded from the wooden box supporting the eight foot cone. The whole upper assembly, held fifteen feet off the ground by a timberwork truss, could be pivoted and elevated on a sturdy gimbal. Four of Khenbish’s best men stood on top of each structure.
Had the Khan’s ambassador any questions about the strange towers, he held them to himself.
For a week the red ger had stood outside the town’s tall and tightly sealed gates. As was Mongol tradition, a white tent was erected first and the town’s leaders given the opportunity to discuss their surrender without fear of death. When the red woolen tent, the ger, replaced the white tent, that indicated an attack was imminent. When the red tent was dismantled and a black tent took its place, that indicated all within the walls would die.
In the days since the red ger began swaying and billowing as it abutted the road leading to the gate, rains had fallen or the sky had been heavy with clouds. Today promised the first clear weather, and as soon as Khenbish was certain the sun would burn through the last of the haze, he ordered slaves out across the fallow fields to tear down the red tent and set up its more ominous counterpart.
Archers fired at the slaves as soon as they were within range. Flights of arrows so thick they seemed to swarm peppered the ground around the men. And met flesh as well. Four slaves dropped where they were hit; two more struggled on with thin wooden shafts protruding from their bodies. The others ran unimpeded, protected by the bulk of the bundled black tent.
Replacements were sent out immediately. They zigged and zagged, trying to throw off the archers’ aim. Most were successful but a few went down, driving arrows deeper into their bodies as they plowed into the earth. In all, it took twenty men to erect the tent, and of those only five made it back to the Mongol lines.
‘Seems a bit wasteful,’ the observer remarked in his thick accent.
‘It is how it is done,’ Khenbish replied without turning his horse. ‘White tent, red tent, black tent, death.’
‘The Khan never mentioned why this town is being attacked. Do you know?’
Khenbish wanted to answer, curtly, that the Khan’s reasons were his own, but he knew he had to treat the man with the respect due his status. He said, ‘The local warlord didn’t pay the Khan all of his taxes last year. The amount was trivial and might have been overlooked by the Khan’s generosity. However, he was overheard by a royal post messenger bragging of his thievery.’
The Empire was famous for its postal service, with strings of rest houses along all major routes so riders could either switch horses and keep going or pass along messages to rested carriers who were already waiting. In this way news from all reaches of the Khan’s vast holdings could reach him in weeks, sometimes mere days.
‘Such a transgression’, Khenbish continued, ‘cannot go unpunished.’
‘ “Render unto Caesar,” ’ the emissary said.
The general ignored the unknown reference and glanced skyward. The last of the mist was almost gone, leaving a blue dome over the battlefield. He reined his horse around to check on the men waiting behind him. They all wore full bamboo armor and were mounted on sturdy ponies, descendants of the animals that had allowed the Mongol hordes to attack and then hold the breadth of a continent. Each rider had a special oilskin bag hanging off the side of his saddle. The cloth was completely waterproof, and the contents had been carefully mixed and measured by Khenbish’s best alchemist. Behind the cavalry were ranks of foot soldiers armed with pikes nearly twice as tall as the men. The keen blades were honed to a razor’s edge.
‘General,’ an aide called to get his attention.
He turned to face the distant village. On each of the two strange siege towers, a soldier waved a red battle flag – the signal that they were ready.
Khenbish nodded to his own flag-bearer. The man stepped forward so he could be clearly seen and waved a silk standard over his head. Out on the towers, the men dropped their banners and concentrated on the odd machines they had brought to the field. They maneuvered the ungainly contraption so that the small bore in the coffin-sized wooden box faced the top of the fortified wall. One of the soldiers pulled a cover off the cannonlike barrel while the others slowly swung the box back and forth. When either of the two devices was aimed directly at an archer or observer on top of the castle wall, it paused for a moment.
Nothing seemed to change. There was no noise, no projectile fired, no indication at all that anything was happening, yet each time one of the barrels focused on a watchman, that man suddenly ducked away and never showed himself again.
The Khan’s emissary looked to Khenbish for some sort of explanation. The taciturn general was studying the parapets through a pane of dark-tinted glass the size of a lady’s hand mirror. He finally turned and noticed the look of confusion on the man’s face. He kneed his horse to edge him closer, and then reached across to hand over the glass viewer.
The diplomat took it by its ornately carved ivory handle and held it up to his eye. He blinked quickly and then peered over the edge to look at the walled city unobstructed. Just as quickly he looked back through the glass.
The shaded glass cast the entire scene in an eerie twilight despite the bright sun, but that wasn’t what had startled him. It was the solid rays of light, as thin as rapiers’ blades, that emanated from the two towers. The crimson beams shot like lances from the odd structures and raked across the top of the walls. As he watched, a guard popped his head into the gap between two crenellations. Both beams zeroed in on him instantly. The light raked across his face, and though the distance was too far to be certain, the emissary thought the beams centered in the guard’s eyes. It took only seconds for the hapless man to duck down again, his head shaking furiously.
He lowered the glass a second time. The sepia tint was gone; the ruby rays of light too. Everything was still and placid except for the movement of the two wooden boxes being turned back and forth, their purpose, without the glass, unknowable.
His expression was even more uncomprehending than just moments before.
‘Dragon’s Stare,’ Khenbish said without turning.
‘That is what my men call it.’
‘And you,’ the envoy asked, ‘what do you call it?’ Khenbish tugged at the reins to wheel his horse
around. ‘Certain victory.’
‘I don’t understand. How does it work?’
‘There is a long octagonal crystal in each device from an ancient mine far to the south. Do not ask me the science, but using a set of mirrors with holes in them, it somehow channels sunlight captured in the cone on top and focuses it in such a manner that it can temporarily blind a man who gazes directly into it.’
‘Yet it is somehow invisible?’
‘It appears as a small red dot when it strikes an object, but the beam can only be seen in the air through that glass you are holding.’ He turned his focus back on his horsemen. ‘Now is the time to end this siege.’
The Khan’s man once again regarded the towering ramparts and the thick wooden gate. It seemed as impenetrable as the Great Wall to the north of the capital. He couldn’t understand how blinding a few lookouts could possibly end a siege. But then he came from a family of merchants and knew nothing of warfare or military tactics.
‘Charge,’ Khenbish ordered.
Though the emissary expected a wild explosion of man and beast racing for the distant walls, the attack was instead a stealthy and slow walk. The horses’ hooves were muffled with thick woolen sacks so they barely made a sound as they moved. Harnesses, saddles, and panniers had all been cinched so tightly that the usual creak of leather was absent, and the men urged their mounts with soft whispers. Closing his eyes, the emissary couldn’t tell that fifty horsemen were trotting past. Of all his senses, only his nose detected the faint whiff of dust kicked up by the animals’ muffled hooves.
Though not a military man, he knew instinctively that this was the critical phase in the general’s plan. He glanced up. The sky remained clear directly overhead, but a single puffy cloud was moving toward the battlefield. Its shadow cut like an eclipse across the hills behind the town. If it swept over them, he feared Khenbish’s secret weapon would be rendered useless.
No lookout had shown himself for many minutes. He could imagine the anxiety and confusion among the defenders, not knowing what had struck them or how it had rendered them blind. This wasn’t a particularly large community, and he knew from his travels that rural people tended to be superstitious. To what manner of witchcraft had they ascribed their sightlessness?
Like an army of ghost soldiers, the column of horsemen was making deceptively good time across the fields. The mounts were so well trained that none whinnied or neighed.
The cloud was still several minutes away. The emissary did some quick calculating in his head. It would be a near thing, and yet the riders didn’t quicken their pace. The general instilled discipline above all else.
A head popped over the wall, and both light cannons swung on him so quickly that he got the barest glimpse of the battlefield before his retinas were seared by the invisible beams. Khenbish stiffened on his horse, waiting for a cry of alarm that would signal unseen archers to release their arrows. A scream from above caused him to suck air through his teeth. It was nothing more than a crow in the branches of a tree behind them.
The lead rider reached the wooden gate and casually tossed the bag he’d been carrying in the dirt at its foot. A moment later another joined it, and another. And another. The pile grew until it was a misshapen hillock pressed up against the stockade.
Finally someone within the walls showed some intelligence. When he raised his head over the battlements just to the right of the gate, he kept one hand shaded over his eyes and his gaze downward. His warning shout carried clearly across the field. The element of surprise had been shattered.
The riders abandoned their pretense at stealth and quickly had their horses at full gallop. The last few hurled their bags at the gate and wheeled around. They scattered as arrows fired blindly from within the walls once again darkened the skies.
But it wasn’t so much the arrows blotting out the sun as it was the cloud that had been so silently approaching. And by some twist of fate the winds that had sustained it ceased, and it hovered like an enormous parasol over the village. Without direct sunlight, Khenbish’s ray guns were nullified.
Alert sentries realized what was coming and started throwing buckets of water onto the pile of bags that reached almost halfway up the thick wooden gate. The general had anticipated this and made certain each had been coated with a thick layer of resin so the water couldn’t permeate it.
Motivated by desperation, archers appeared along the wall and took careful aim before loosing their arrows. The horsemen wore armor on their chests, and helmets covered their heads, but their backs were exposed, and soon arrows found their marks. In moments there were several jockey-less horses milling on the field, their riders lying sprawled on the ground, some writhing in agony, others ominously still.
One of Khenbish’s men raced parallel to the wall, standing high in his stirrups, a nocked arrow ready in his short cavalry bow. Rather than a sharp bronze point, the arrow’s tip was a pitch-soaked wad of cloth that burned brightly. He fired and immediately pulled hard on the left rein. The horse knew the signal and went down onto its flank in a cloud of dust, its legs kicking awkwardly while its heavy body shielded the rider from what was to come.
The arrow hit the pile of bags near the base of the gate at the same moment a bucket of water was tossed off the parapet. The flame turned to white smoke and steam, and then nothing. Time on a battlefield has an elasticity that defies all logic. It seemed forever elapsed, but it was less than a half second before the last dying ember of the arrowhead burned its way through the bag and touched off the contents inside.
Alchemists searching for the Elixir of Life had stumbled upon the ratio and composition of chemicals, and so it was called hǔo yào, or Fire Medicine. The world would later know it as gunpowder.
Because it is a slow-burning explosive, gunpowder needs to be compressed to do much more than flash and sizzle. The first bag burst into smoky flame, igniting others on the outside of the pile, until flames were shooting dozens of feet into the air. The pyre was enough to detonate the bags buried at the base of the mound, and the weight of the sacks above tamped the expanding gases long enough to produce a titanic explosion.
The concussion wave rippled across the field, sending a wall of hot air as far as the general and his remaining foot soldiers. The blast knocked the ambassador off his horse, and to him it felt as though he’d stood before a potter’s kiln. Flame and smoke rose high into the air, while on the other side of the wall the gates were blown inward and shredded. The debris scythed down anyone in its way, while archers and lookouts along the parapet were tossed like limp dolls, their cries shrieking over the roar of the blast.
The Khan’s man slowly regained his feet. The ambassador’s ears were ringing, and when he closed his eyes, the afterimage of the explosion was burned on the inside of his lids. This was the second miracle weapon he had seen today. First the light gun and now some means of containing fire in bags and unleashing it all at once. Truly this was an amazing land.
On the battlefield, the scattered horsemen turned as though a shoal of fish and began charging for the destroyed gates, where wood smoldered and the dazed defenders ambled in shock. Swords were unsheathed and reflected the sunlight brightly now that the cloud had moved on. The men in the towers searched for victims, but the explosion had taken the fight out of the garrison.
General Khenbish released his reserves of foot soldiers to follow after the cavalry. With a roar almost as loud as the blast of gunpowder, the men tore off across the field, eager to do the Khan’s work and restore his honor from being robbed and, worse, made to look weak because of it. They would spare the comeliest women, and boys who could be used as slaves, but everyone else in the town would be put to the sword and the entire village razed. The local warlord’s head would be placed on a pike in the nearest settlement as a reminder for those who thought their Khan’s wrath was not swift and all-consuming.
‘I wish to know more of your amazing arsenal,’ the ambassador said as he and Khenbish dismounted. It wasn’t common practice for the general himself to take part in the slaughter, and the ambassador had no desire to see what was happening on the other side of the wall.
‘I will introduce you to my alchemist. He can explain both in greater detail than I. For me it is enough that they work.’ An aide handed him a bone-porcelain cup of strong tea.
As they started off toward the copse of trees where camp servants and staff waited to treat any wounded from the battle, the ambassador mused that there were so many remarkable things that he’d witnessed during his years roaming this strange nation. Some things he would never reveal, like the intimacies he’d enjoyed with some of the Khan’s concubines. And some things he would never discuss because they were just too bizarre to be believed. Like the Great Wall – it had the height and breadth of a five-story stone building and yet it stretched from horizon to horizon and beyond. It alone dwarfed every bit of Roman engineering that lay across Europe. There were the rocklike bones of dragons he’d been shown in the central desert, skulls as big as wine barrels, with teeth like daggers and femurs as tall as a man. And then there was what he saw today: a device capable of throwing light intense enough to blind a man.
For his own sake he wanted to know how this weapon operated – Khenbish had mentioned a crystal of some sort – but he knew that this was one more mystery he would take to his grave.
Marco Polo strode alongside the general, unsure that his fellow Venetians would believe even the more banal stories he could tell about his travels in China.
William Cantor had sneezed into the microphone before he knew he was about to. The need hit him that hard, and he didn’t have the chance to turn his head away. The phlegm the sneeze had discharged into his nasal passages had to be snorted back, and that amplified sniff echoed through the nearly deserted meeting room.
‘Sorry,’ he said miserably and coughed, covering his mouth and turning away so as to show the ten-odd people here for his lecture that he wasn’t a complete philistine. ‘As an American I knew at Christ Church College said’ – that’s right, you rubes, I went to Oxford – ‘I can shake a hand, I can shake a leg, but I sure can’t shake this cold.’
The response from the crowd might have been polite laughter or, most likely, a muted cough.
God, how he hated these lectures, the ones in annex buildings or village libraries, where the only attendees were pensioners with no interest in the subject but nothing better to do with their afternoons. Worse than those, actually, were the ones in cities such as Birmingham, so blighted that the sun never seemed to shine, and the people in the room were just here to get warmed up before heading out to panhandle or line up at soup kitchens. He had counted ten attendees before taking the lectern and no fewer than fourteen overcoats. He imagined a string of rusted shopping carts, overladened with detritus, in the library car park.
‘ “I have not told half of what I saw.” ’ A much better opening line than spraying the microphone with bogies, Cantor thought ruefully. Still, he had goals, and one never knew, maybe the bundled-up woman toward the back of the fluorescent-lit room was secretly J. K. Rowling in mufti. ‘These were the last words uttered by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo upon his deathbed.
‘We know from his legendary book, The Travels of Marco Polo, dictated to Rustichello da Pisa while both languished in a Genoese prison, that Polo, along with his father, Niccolò, and uncle, Maffeo’ – the names tripped off Cantor’s tongue despite his head cold, this being far from the first time he had given this particular talk – ‘that he made many incredible discoveries and beheld many amazing sights.’
There was a disturbance at the back of the room as a newcomer entered from the library’s brutalist-style reading room. Metal folding chairs creaked as a few people turned to see who had come to hear the speech, probably assuming it was a homeless buddy coming in from Chamberlain Square.
The man wore a cashmere overcoat that nearly swept the floor over a dark suit, dark shirt, and a matching dark tie. Tall and big, he gave an apologetic wave and took a seat in back before Cantor could see his features. This looked promising, the cash-strapped scholar thought. At least this bloke was wearing clothes that hadn’t already been discarded a few times.
Cantor paused long enough for the gentleman to settle. If this was a potential financial backer, he might as well start licking the guy’s boots now.
‘Even in his day, Polo’s Travels sparked debate. People simply didn’t believe he had seen and done all that he claimed. They couldn’t look past their own prejudices to believe that there was another separate civilization that could rival or even surpass the European states. Later, a glaring omission arose. Simply stated, for all his years in China, and all that he wrote of that distant land, he never once mentioned its greatest achievement, its most iconic image.
‘You see, at no point in his dictations to Rustichello da Pisa did he ever mention China’s Great Wall. That would be like a modern tourist saying they’ve been to London but not seen the Eye. Wait. That hideous Ferris wheel may be something a savvy traveler would want to forget.’ Cantor paused for laughter. Got more coughing. ‘Ah yes, then, his failure to mention the Great Wall, which is just a short distance from Beijing, where Polo spent so much time, led his detractors to discount his entire tale.
‘But what if fault lies not with the dic-ta-tor but the dic-ta-tee.’ Here he had planned to make a play on words and mention the despotic Genoese doge who had imprisoned Polo and the scribe, Rustichello, but decided against it. ‘Little is known about the man Polo dictated his story to while they served time in a Genoese prison cell following Polo’s capture at the Battle of Curzola. Rustichello himself had been captured some fourteen years earlier after the pivotal Battle of Meloria, which marked the beginning of the decline of the Pisan citystate.
‘Rustichello was, to put it in today’s vernacular, a romance writer who’d gained some measure of success prior to his being taken prisoner. Think of him as the Jackie Collins of his day. That would give him a strong insight into what would capture the imagination of his reading audience and what would be seen as too fantastic to believe.
‘With that in mind, I see him not only as the man wielding the pen that put Polo’s story to paper but as his editor as well, a man who could perhaps blunt some of Polo’s more controversial discoveries in order to give the manuscript more mass appeal. Medieval noblemen – and that’s almost exclusively who writers wrote for at the time – wouldn’t appreciate that China rivaled them and in many cases surpassed their achievements in the fields of medicine, engineering, social administration, and especially warfare.’
Cantor paused a moment. Expressions on the faces of his audience ranged from asleep to slack-jawed indifference. So long as they were out of the freezing rain pounding the central English city, they didn’t much care what he said. He wished he could see the man in the dark suit, but he was hidden behind a tall homeless fellow who slept in an almost perfectly erect posture.
‘It was with this thought in mind – that perhaps Rustichello took notes during their long confinement that were edited out of the final draft of Travels and that those notes would account for some of the lapses in Polo’s story that have vexed future scholars and made them question the validity of the entire book – that I come to you today.’ The line sounded clunky to Cantor’s ear too, but he was trying to come off as learned, and all his dons at Oxford spoke in run-on sentences that could fill a page or more.
‘I believe,’ he continued, ‘that somewhere in the world exist those notes, those bits of Polo’s story that couldn’t get past the medieval censor – that was the Vatican – and would have raised too much doubt among the contemporary readership. Since leaving Christ Church’ – no sense admitting that he hadn’t graduated – ‘I have searched across Italy and into France for a hint of such a book. And finally, six months ago, I believe I found it.’
Did Black Suit stir at this news? It seemed to Cantor that the shadow at the back of the room shifted position slightly. He felt like a fisherman who senses that first nibble on the end of his line. Now he had to set the hook before reeling in his prize.
‘I was given access to the sales records of a small antiquarian bookshop in an even smaller town in Italy that has been in business since 1884. They have a record of selling a copy of Rustichello’s seminal work, Roman de Roi Artus, in 1908. Included with the book of Arthurian legend was a folio of loose pages.
‘At this time, Edwardian English families were exploring Italy in order to broaden themselves. Think of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View.’ To most of this lot it should be Cardboard Box with a Cellophane Window, but Cantor knew he was really playing to an audience of one. ‘Like any tourist, these travelers brought back souvenirs. Furniture, statuary, just about anything they could get their hands on that would remind them of Lombardy or Tuscany. One particular family fancied books and returned with veritable trunkloads of them, enough to fill a library about the size of this room floor to ceiling. Some of the volumes dated back to a century before Polo was even born. It is this family who acquired the Rustichello works.
‘For a fee, I was granted limited access to their library.’ Five hundred pounds for an afternoon, Cantor recalled bitterly. He recalled most things bitterly these days. The current library’s owner was a right miserable git who, knowing Cantor’s desperation to see the library, wasn’t above capitalizing on the scholarly interest of a thirty-year-old researcher.
Cantor had scraped together only enough for a single visit, but it had been enough. And that was what he was really doing here today, and for the past few months. He had no interest in enlightening dowagers and the homeless. He was hoping to find a patron who would help him fund his research. The folio’s owner had expressed in no uncertain terms that he would not sell it, but he would be willing to allow Cantor access, at five hundred pounds per day.
The young academic was sure that once he published his research, pressure from historical societies would force the owner to, if not donate, at least let a major university authenticate Rustichello’s work and thus cement Cantor’s reputation and hopefully his fortune as well.
‘The text is written in typical medieval French, my specialty along with Italian from the same era. I managed to translate only a small portion since I only discovered it toward the end of my sojourn in the library, but what I read is mind-boggling. It is the description of a battle Polo witnessed in 1281 where a general named Khenbish obliterated his enemies using gunpowder, which Polo had never seen used in such a way, and a most remarkable device that utilized a special crystal to channel sunlight into a focused beam, much like a modern laser.’
Cantor paused once again. Dark Suit had gotten to his feet and skulked from the library annex room, his long overcoat dancing around his ankles like an obsidian cape. Cantor cursed under his breath. He’d failed to set the hook, had in fact scared the fish out of the water entirely. He looked dejectedly at the unshaven and sullen faces arrayed against him. What was the point of continuing? They no more wanted to hear his nasal monotone than he wanted to deliver it.
‘Ah, thank you very much. Were there any questions?’ He was taken aback when a spidery hand went up. The woman had the scrunched face of one of those dolls made of nylon stockings. ‘Yes?’
‘Can you spare some change?’
Cantor grabbed up his briefcase, tossed his worn mackintosh over his arm, and strode out to a chorus of hoarse cackles.
Darkness had fallen completely when he stepped through the library’s doors. The impersonal expanse of Chamberlain Square was hemmed in by the concrete monstrosity of the library on one side, the three-story classical Council House on another, and by the Greek temple-like Town Hall on a third. In the middle was the monument to Joseph Chamberlain, who’d been someone or another in this dreary city. To Cantor, the structure looked like thieves had made off with an entire Gothic cathedral and left behind the top sixty or so feet of one of its spires.
If the city fathers had intended to design a less harmonious space architecturally, he couldn’t see how.
Maybe throw in the odd zeppelin shed, he thought uncharitably, or an Eastern Orthodox onion-domed church.
The rain had slowed to a cold drizzle, and though Cantor raised his collar, icy water found its way down the back of his neck. He longed for a warm shower and a hot toddy, and for his sore nose to stop leaking.
His battered Volkswagen was parked over on Newhall Street, and he had just turned onto Colmore Row when the driver’s-side window of a sleek Jaguar sedan whispered down.
‘Dr Cantor, might I have a word?’ The voice was cultured, with a continental accent – French, German, maybe Swiss, which to Cantor sounded like a combination of the two.
‘Ah, I don’t have my doctorate yet,’ he stammered when he recognized the black shirt and tie of Dark Suit sitting behind the wheel of the luxury sedan.
‘No matter, you gave a compelling speech. I would have stayed for the rest, but I received a call I couldn’t ignore. Please, just a few moments, is all I ask.’
‘It’s raining.’ Bending to peer into the car sent a spike of pain through Cantor’s strained sinuses.
‘Not in here.’ The man smiled, or at least his lips parted and his teeth were revealed. ‘I can drive you to your car.’
Cantor looked up the street. There was no one about and his car was five blocks away. ‘Okay.’
He stepped around the long sloping bonnet and heard the electronic lock disengage for the passenger seat. He slid into the supple leather. In the glow of the dash lights, the sedan’s considerable woodwork shimmered.
The stranger slipped the car into gear and eased it from its parking space. The Jag was so smooth that Cantor hadn’t realized the engine had been running.
‘An associate of mine heard the lecture you gave last week in Coventry and was intrigued enough to tell me about it. I had to hear for myself.’
‘I’m sorry, you are?’
‘Oh. My apologies. Tony Forsythe.’ They shook hands awkwardly since Forsythe had to reach under his left arm so as to not release the steering wheel.
‘And what’s your interest in Marco Polo, Mr Forsythe?’ Cantor asked.
He got an odd vibe from the man. He was around forty and had plain, unexceptional features, yet thick dark hair that was so dense it could have been a toupee. Still, there was something else. Cantor realized what it was. His hands had been large and callused. His grip hadn’t been overly forceful, but Forsythe’s hand had practically swallowed Cantor’s. In his experience, men in £1,000 overcoats and £60,000 cars didn’t have calluses.
‘I’m a dabbler in history, you might say, and I’m interested in this folio and its contents.’
William Cantor had looked for a fish, but he had the sudden feeling he’d nabbed a shark. ‘Um, I’m down Newhall.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Forsythe said, which rather bothered Cantor, but the stranger added, ‘Have you there in a jiff. You mentioned the folio’s owner had no interest in selling, correct?’
‘Yes, the man’s loaded. I think he asked me to pay to see his library just to get under my skin.’
‘But no price was discussed?’
‘Ah, no. It was all I could do to come up with the five hundred quid to see the damned thing for a day.’
‘Pity,’ Forsythe said almost to himself. ‘A simple cash transaction would have been preferable.’
To Cantor’s relief, the Jag made the left-hand turn onto Newhall.
Forsythe glanced at him for a second. ‘I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me the gentleman’s name?’
‘I, ah, I don’t think that would be in my best interest, now would it?’
‘Oh, but it would, friend William. It is most certainly in your best interest.’
The Jaguar suddenly leapt forward under hard acceleration. Cantor got a fleeting glimpse of his blue VW Polo as they raced past. ‘What the bloody hell do you—’
The arm of a person who’d been lying flat and unseen in the spacious rear seat snaked around Cantor’s neck with the strength of an anaconda, choking the words in his throat. A sharp jab to the neck, a strange metallic taste in his mouth, and three seconds later William Cantor slumped over in drug-induced unconsciousness.
With his parents long dead from an accident on the M1 and no siblings or girlfriend, it wasn’t until his landlord knocked on the door to his tiny one-room flat a month later that anyone knew Cantor had gone missing. The handful of presentations he’d planned had been courteously postponed by a person claiming his identity. It would be another several days before a missing persons report was matched with the headless and handless corpse found floating in the North Sea off the fishing town of Grimsby about that same time.
There were two things on which all the police involved agreed. The DNA found in Cantor’s apartment matched that of the body fished from the water. The second was that before the man died he’d been tortured so severely that death would have been a blessed relief.
Because Cantor kept all his notes on the Rustichello Folio in his briefcase, which was never recovered, there was one more crime the authorities never realized was related to his disappearance. There had been a botched break-in of a Hampshire estate down in the southern part of the country near a town called Beaulieu. It happened two days after the last confirmed Cantor appearance. Forensic reconstruction showed that the burglars had been surprised by the widower owner during the robbery, bashed him over the head with a jimmy bar left on the scene – no prints – and fled in panic, not even bothering to take the pillowcases stuffed with sterling silverware they’d already gathered.
None of the police gave a second look at the slim gap in the rank upon rank of books that lined the estate’s paneled library.