The Seventh Sanctuary

by Daniel Easterman

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Within days of his attempted murder, David Rosen, an American archaeologist, learns that his parents and four of his colleagues have been killed. Convinced that the deaths are linked, Rosen and Leyla, the beautiful Palestinian guide who becomes his lover, are quickly involved in trying to stop a scheme intended to bring about the destruction of Israel and the rebirth of the Nazi Reich.

Release date: December 4, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

A low grey mist lingered on the fringes of the river and hovered about the balustrade of the humped and pillared bridge. It clung to him with an air of faint menace as he approached the tall iron gates that lead to Butt Close and the eastern court of Clare College, where it huddles discreetly between Trinity Hall and King’s. His feet crunched the cold grey stones of the gravel path beneath him, and he shivered again as the cold November air wrapped him in its damp embrace. To his right, beyond the river and above the mist, the great west window of King’s Chapel hung in its frame of ancient stone, catching and transmuting in its coloured panes the light of the sinking sun. Seen from the other side, the window would be a blaze of blue and gold light, the rays of the sun bent and torn and shaken like pools of translucent ink across the pale limestone slabs that stretch to the foot of the heavy west door.

He walked on and the walls of Clare blocked out the view, reduced his horizon to the confines of the tiny court. Lights had already flickered on in silent rooms all around him. As evening closed and the shadows darkened, the stillness, the confident intimacy of College life, asserted itself as it had always done against the coming of the night. It was a moment few visitors ever saw, the quiet assumption of its unquestioned privileges that academic Cambridge reserved for itself through the frozen nights of its long winter when the wind came off the Fens and the river turned to ice.

John Gates felt cold and stupid and alone in that comfortable world of twinkling lights and softly shifting fires. He had arrived in Cambridge four years earlier when he was twenty-one, the print still damp on his first-class degree in Archaeology from Manchester, acutely conscious of his provincialism and his lack of academic experience, unloved, unresolved, uncertain of the future. Within his first term at King’s, he had found love, and it had, in a measure, reconciled him to whatever it was had first dismayed him about life. Louise had stayed, had endured him longer than anyone had ever done, had lived through his brooding uncertainties, brought out warmth from his sterile and bookish interior, and in the end departed as her own doubts, fomented by him, had grown. That had been almost a year ago. Since then he had travelled furiously and written the last chapter of his doctoral dissertation in a haze of regret, filled with a brooding sense of pointlessness. His parents could not help, he had no close friends, his world was empty except for his books and his research.

He looked back and shivered. Behind him, shadows clung to the walls, empty and fading with the light. Ghosts? Christmas past and Christmas present and Christmas yet to come. It would be Christmas soon and white snow would fall and cover the lawns and courts and pathways. All the ghosts of Cambridge would assemble in the streets to gaze at the lighted windows and listen to carols sung by candlelight. Generation upon generation of ghosts, a succession of men and women who had taken their day in the groves of academe and gone, the taste of cream teas still lingering on their tongues, the frost of a May Ball morning still rimed upon their long dead hair. This year he would join them, a disembodied presence drifting silently past the festivities of the living.

His thoughts over two thousand miles away among the ruins of a vanished empire, he walked on past Clare porter’s lodge and out beneath the low archway of the main gate down to Trinity Lane, where it runs behind the Old Schools. There he turned sharply right to pass a moment later through the little gate that gives onto the west end of King’s Chapel. Behind him, a don on an ancient bicycle rolled merrily out of Senate House Passage as he had done every evening for the past fifty years. Shifting his small pile of books and files from his left hand to his right, John skirted the back of the chapel and turned into the opening between it and the grey flank of the Gibb’s Building. As he came level with the south door, the silence faltered and gave way before the muffled susurration of the choir within, their voices held tightly by the bindings of the heavy stone. He looked at his watch. It was almost four o’clock – choir practice had started about ten minutes ago. They would be rehearsing for the Advent carol service on Sunday, only a few days away now.

The small iron gate to the chapel porch was locked against visitors until 5.15, when it would be opened for choral evensong. Suddenly, without knowing why, he vaulted it and pushed open the lower part of the door that led into the chapel proper. The vast and hollow nave into which he stepped was in darkness, the wide fan-vaulting above his head almost indiscernible in the dimness. But to his right candles flickered in the choir, their flames and shadows bobbing gently as if in time to the music. For a moment there was silence in which echoes hovered, then the voices rose into the stillness carrying another tune. He recognized it at once: Ravenscroft’s setting of the sixteenth-century carol, ‘Remember, O thou man’. He stood and looked at the decorated pillars rising to the dim ceiling and thought of Christmas.

Remember, O thou man,

O thou man, O thou man,

Remember, O thou man,

Thy time is spent.

This evening his oral examination would take place. His fate would be decided. Until today, he had been confident, but now, this evening, here in the melancholy darkness of the old chapel, he was no longer certain of his own merit or the value of the work he had done during the past four years. It seemed to him as he stood there, the music drifting to him across the vaulted space of the nave, that when Sunday came he might not be among those at the carol service, that his life in Cambridge might have come to an abrupt end. And if that happened, what else was there?

He went back out into the night, vaulted the little gate once more, and set off towards his supervisor’s room in Bodley’s Building down near the river. Dr Greatbatch had told him to call round about four to have sherry with him and the two examiners before settling down to the more arduous task of grilling him on his thesis. Here in Cambridge, torture was civilized. The lamps had gone on round the front court, and already townspeople were beginning to pass through the gate on King’s Parade to cut through the college on their way home. Footsteps rang out on the icy pathways. The door of the Wilkins’ Building opened and closed as students rushed in and out of the common room. He felt like a ghost walking past, unnoticed, indistinct, his thin frame little more than a shadow, hugging his thesis to his chest like an amulet, as if to ward off some impending evil.

At Bodley’s, he hurried up the stairs of ‘Y’ staircase to Greatbatch’s rooms on the third floor. Greatbatch was an odd character: a College Fellow for some twenty years, he had been married briefly – so it was rumoured – and then suffered some curious tragedy, following which he had moved into these rooms, where he had lived ever since. Morose at times, frequently introspective and touchy, Gates had found in him a much-needed friend and mentor. He had interfered little in Gates’s work, but his long conversations, rambling on as often as not until midnight or beyond, had subtly guided him and tuned him to the nuances of his field. Greatbatch’s Arabic was extraordinary for a man who had never once set foot in the East, his knowledge of South Arabian archaeological sites astonishing for one who had never been on a dig or wielded a trowel. Greatbatch lived in and through other men’s explorations, other men’s books. But from them he extracted things that those with the direct experience had failed to observe, made correlations they were incapable of making. Without them, Gates felt he would have remained little more than a competent but plodding scholar, but from him he had imbibed enthusiasm and imagination so that even dry texts had charmed him and the dust of a routine dig acquired a patina of life.

He opened the outer door, then the baize partition, and knocked briefly on the inner door. It was opened immediately by Greatbatch, tall, lunatic, dishevelled, every inch the donnish figure of ripe eccentricity that jaded schoolmasters and aspiring undergraduate girls dream of in the long summer months before term begins. The gaunt man looked at Gates quizzically, almost adoringly, then raised an eyebrow and drew him in.

‘John,’ he whispered, as if they indulged a secret together, ‘hurry on in. It must be freezing out there. I’ve had to turn my fire up once already, it’s going to get stuffy.’

Gates slipped inside and shut the door carefully behind him. The sudden warmth of the room gathered about him in a moment of flushed selfconsciousness as he caught sight of two men by the far windows turning to glance at him. Before he had a chance to recover, Greatbatch had him by the arm and was steering him at breakneck speed in the direction of the two strangers, one a dark-haired man of about thirty-five, the other aged and white-haired and, Gates thought, oddly familiar.

‘John, let me introduce you to your examiners,’ Greatbatch said. With his right hand, he gestured towards the old man. ‘You will, of course, know by reputation Professor Paul Haushofer. He arrived from Heidelberg this afternoon, and I’ve persuaded him to stay at least until the carols on Sunday.’

The old man look ill, his face pale and strained and his frame sagging within clothes that seemed several sizes too large for him. As he reached his hand in his direction, John had difficulty connecting the face, with its huge, staring eyes, to the photographs he had seen. Haushofer must have aged rapidly, John thought, to have changed so much. The thought went through his mind that the old man was dying. Yet the hand that took his was firm, and the eyes that met and probed his were clear and filled with energy.

‘Well,’ said the old man, his voice weak but distinct. ‘I am privileged to meet you at last, Mr Gates. The illustrious Dr Greatbatch here has told me much about you. And now I have read your thesis. Such an impressive piece of work. I have told several colleagues about it. You make me jealous.’

Gates’s head spun. He had not expected this. Of all the men to choose to examine his thesis, Greatbatch had gone to Haushofer! Was Greatbatch mad after all? John smiled and frowned simultaneously and clutched the old man’s hand. What a fool he felt, to come here among these people, with his pretensions and his raw ambitions. He felt Greatbatch’s hand on his arm again and turned to greet the younger man.

‘John,’ Greatbatch said, ‘you know Peter Micklejohn, but I don’t think you’ve actually seen a lot of each other, have you?’

John shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Dr Micklejohn was on sabbatical the year I arrived, then I was away on field trips, and we never met except at occasional sherry parties.’

Micklejohn chuckled. He was a short, thick man with an enormous beard like a small shrub. His friends called him ‘The Gnome’, his detractors ‘The Cro-Magnon’.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe there’ll be a chance to rectify that after all this nonsense is over. I’m going out to Buraimi this vacation, and I’d like your opinion on something before I leave. There’s plenty of time. We’ll fix up something later this evening.’

Detecting a pause, Greatbatch swooped.

‘You’ll have a sherry, John, won’t you? ’Course you will. Before we get down to the serious business.’ He said it with a smile, but it did little to cheer John up. Get him drunk first, that was the idea.

Without waiting for John’s reply, the don swept off to the side table where he kept his Persian decanter with the portrait of Nasir al-Din Shah and half a dozen antique sherry glasses. Gates smiled nervously and sighed inwardly. In four years he had never plucked up the courage to tell anyone, least of all the insistent Greatbatch, that he really hated sherry, or at least the uncompromisingly dry variety served up in so many College combination rooms.

Glasses in hand, the four men seated themselves around Greatbatch’s dining table. The highly polished wood caught and held fast the soft glow of the yellow wall-lights; the reflection seemed to lie deep beneath the surface of the wood, in another world, contiguous to yet curiously remote from the world in which they sat, four modern European men whose lives and thoughts were hostage to another age and another part of the globe. On the table in front of them, they arranged four copies of Gates’s thesis, together with the notes and papers they required for the evening’s work. Greatbatch muttered a few words by way of introduction to the business at hand, then turned the meeting over to Haushofer. The old man gazed at the table, then lifted his eyes and looked at John.

‘Mr Gates,’ he began, ‘I told you when we were introduced that I had found your thesis impressive. That was not mere flattery. I have neither the need nor the wish to flatter. What I said was true, I was impressed.’ He paused for a moment, breathing deeply. ‘I’m an old man,’ he went on, ‘and quite recently I’ve become very ill. You see how I am becoming wasted. I shall be dead soon, perhaps even before Christmas.’

The room hushed around him. He continued.

‘But I’m not worried about that. It has to happen, doesn’t it? Still, I’m glad I’ve read your thesis. You have promise, Mr Gates, you’ll go far. It is good to think I shall be leaving scholarship in hands such as yours. It makes it easier.

‘Now, there really are some very remarkable things in this piece of work. You have made some interesting discoveries and put forward some extremely provocative theories. I don’t agree with all of them, of course, but I find them well argued. And there is one discovery that is truly exciting, if it leads to what you hope – I’m sure you know what I’m referring to. Well, before we discuss that, I think we should look at more routine matters. Let me see. Yes, on page fifteen you mention the problem of late Kassite ware in the Umm al-Nar tombs at Abu Dhabi …’

So it began.

In the warm room, lulled by soft voices and shadows that dipped and swayed around him, John Gates saw his future being born, his life shaped and patterned for him in the space of an evening. He knew now that he would be given his doctorate, encouraged perhaps to apply for a fellowship, helped to find funding, enabled to make the discovery that he was certain lay in wait for him, if only he could take men and equipment and dig for it. If digging was even necessary. And he knew his name would become synonymous with that discovery, like Schliemann and Troy, Woolley and Ur. He would be more than a mere weaver of theories about the past, more than a plunderer in dark ruins: he would bring part of the past to life again.

A clock ticked tidily on the wall by the fireplace. The gas hissed as the fire glowed cheerily into the old, comfortable room. It only wanted to snow outside, white flakes to fall across the river and lie on the lawns, for all to be perfect. The questions and the long, detailed explanations that followed hardly mattered. What mattered was the stillness, the sense of belonging, the simple security. John wished the evening would never end, that darkness could lie endlessly over Cambridge and the world so that he might sit like this, watching the lights shine on surfaces of polished wood about the room for ever.

No-one noticed the door as it opened silently inwards. It is a College custom to leave rooms unlocked when the occupant is at home. People often call. There was a soft sound as the door swung back again. A man stood there, indistinct in the gloom, his face masked by a long shadow that ran across the doorway. Greatbatch lifted his head, squinting in the direction of the door.

‘Yes,’ he called, ‘who is it? Is it Jonathan? Look, I’m afraid I can’t see you at the moment, Jonathan; we’re in the middle of a viva, and I don’t expect we’ll finish for an hour or two. We might be in time for hall, so perhaps I’ll see you there.’

The man by the door said nothing. Then he stepped out of the shadows. It was not Jonathan. It was not anyone from ‘Y’ staircase. He was a young man, but old in the way he stood, in his facial expression. It was a serious face, remote, more a shield than a border with the world. The skin was pale, almost like alabaster. He reminded Greatbatch of a South Arabian statuette, a pale alabaster god. He was above average height and slender, but well-built, not thin or weak. His eyes observed everything, revealed nothing. He was dressed in pale colours, as if to match his skin. It made the resemblance to a doll all the more complete. A light-coloured trenchcoat hung unbuttoned to reveal the pale suit and shirt underneath. He was not dressed well for winter; but in spite of his pale skin, he showed no signs of cold. He carried a large briefcase in his left hand.

Greatbatch rose, his hand on the back of the chair, an odd sensation taking hold of him. It felt like fear, but he knew no reason for such an emotion.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘you really can’t just come into someone’s room like this. Perhaps it’s someone else you want to see. As you can tell, we’re very busy right now. You’d be better off at the porter’s lodge.’ But, of course, the man would not want to walk all the way back to the front of College.

By now everyone had turned to stare at the intruder. He could see their round, surprised faces bent towards him, their eyes curious, impatient at interruption. He put his briefcase on the floor. It was black and seemed heavy, as if it contained documents of great importance.

Greatbatch was on his feet now, approaching the man, the beginnings of anger taking him.

‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave,’ he said. Perhaps the man was a foreigner, an out-of-season tourist without English, sheltering from unaccustomed frost. ‘If you need directions,’ he said deliberately, ‘the porter will be pleased to help you.’ He did not like the look of the man. There was something about the eyes, a sneering sort of look, almost icy, like a cat that has taken a dislike to you. And the way he just stared, standing there, saying nothing. It was unsettling.

The man slowly peeled off the tight leather glove from his right hand and slipped the hand inside his jacket. When he drew it out again, he held a pistol, a long, black affair tipped with a matt black silencer. Greatbatch stared in disbelief as the gunman raised his heavy, ridiculous weapon in two hands and levelled it at his head. It seemed like a stunt, but it was a long way from rag day. Behind him, Greatbatch’s three colleagues stared in amazement. Micklejohn stood, pushing back his chair in a decisive manner. ‘An armed robbery,’ thought Greatbatch, unable to believe the enormity of what was happening. The police would have to be informed, College security tightened at once.

The man’s finger moved gently on the trigger of the gun, easing it back effortlessly in a practised motion. There was a low noise and blood rushed out of the back of Greatbatch’s head. The gun recoiled slightly as the killer lifted it up and away from his target. The hole in Greatbatch’s forehead reddened. His eyes stared in a last seizure of horror and disbelief. He made no sound as his legs buckled under him and he fell lifeless to the carpeted floor, staining it.

In John Gates’s head, irrelevant, insistent, the words of the carol began to echo:

Remember, O thou man.

It was a nightmare. A wordless killer, Greatbatch shot in his sanctuary, death in the room. Micklejohn made towards the man, uncertain how to proceed, nervous of the gun, but frightened and angry.

‘What the hell’s going on!?’ he shouted. It sounded weak and silly, the sort of thing people say in amateur dramatics. But what do you say to a man who has just shot your friend in cold blood? Who still holds a gun in a hand that is not even shaking.

There was no time to think. The man raised his gun a second time and aimed at Micklejohn. The bearded man shouted out, something incoherent, something final. There was no time for words. The gun popped obscenely and the bullet took him fully between the eyes, just where his nose had joined his forehead. It passed directly through his brain and sped out again, diminished by the impact with bone. Micklejohn fell like a tree.

O thou man, O thou man.

Still unsmiling, showing no emotions of either joy or sadness, the man went about his task. He pointed the gun at Haushofer. A wisp of blue smoke escaped from the end of the silencer. The old man sat very still, knowing he was about to die, not understanding why. He had understood the cancer, even accepted it, but not this. The pale finger caressed the trigger once again and a bullet smashed through the German’s skull. Blood washing his white hair crimson, he slumped forward across the table.

Remember, O thou man.

John Gates struggled to put his thoughts in order, to think of a means of escape. This could not be happening, there was no reason, no logic, no motive. A moment ago, he had seen his future stretch before him, a long vista of research and discovery. And now madness threatened to take that away with the casual movement of a gunman’s finger. The blood rushed through his head. He felt sick and he wanted to cry. He tried to speak.

‘I …’ he said, but he could not say more. The words stuck in his throat. Was not that simple declaration of personal existence enough? What more could anyone say in the face of death?

The man faced him and smiled. It was a strange smile, cold yet somehow understanding. Surely it indicated hope. Why did the man not speak? It occurred to John that perhaps he was dumb, chosen for that reason to be another man’s secret killer. He wondered if all killers were dumb, if perpetual silence was a qualification for murder. It seemed important suddenly to know about such things, but now that he stood face to face with his own killer, there was no time any longer to ask the questions that rose in his mind.

He noticed that the man had a long, pale scar down his left cheek. It seemed somehow trite that a killer should boast a scar on his face. Shouldn’t his killer have been less ordinary? The smile caused the scar to wrinkle. The eyes narrowed as the gun was levelled at his face and steadied. John watched the hands, fascinated. They were rock-steady, there was not a trace of nervousness. The man had done all this before, would do it again. John watched the trigger finger. His mind raced, out of control, singing.

Thy time is spent.

The bullet tore a pathway through Gates’s singing head, tearing the carols and cribs and reindeer and all the sights and sounds of Christmases past and present and yet to come into a tangled mass of dying tissue. His body fell against the table and drops of blood fell like berries of holly on the white open pages of his thesis.

The clay tablet collapsed and fragmented in his hand. One moment it was there, a piece of history, four and a half thousand years old, the next it was mere clay again, wet shards that crumbled into even smaller pieces as they fell, dust that joined the ochre deposit at his feet. David Rosen sighed, dropped his trowel and eased himself painfully into a standing position. A light rain still fell. He was cold, cold to the bone. He had been working at that tablet for almost an hour, scraping, brushing, gently working it out from the earth in which it had been lodged with hundreds of others for over four millennia. The rain had started again last night, heavy, pitiless rain, and some time during the downpour the tarpaulin over the archive pit had collapsed, exposing a section of the unexcavated tablets to the storm. By morning, whole chunks of history had been melted down into a featureless mass of dull-coloured mud. And the rain still fell.

Through the grey drizzle, the low ruins of Ebla lay all about him, dark, wet and sepulchral. He had seen them only in summer before, when the heat of August shimmered across the baked stones, and sand out of the Syrian desert blew into the cracks and crevices of the newly excavated courts and walls and gates of the ancient city. Now, as he dug there in the deepening November gloom, he tried to visualize the site as he had seen it in the sun, with the warm light flowing like liquid over the stones and filling them with life after their long sleep underground. Walls and doors and stairways had acquired shape and identity once more, the light and shadows limning them against the blue sky. But since the rain began in October, the ruins had lost their contours, returning to their primal condition of rock and sand and mud. The rain and cold had been unaccustomed this year, relentless and depressing. Digging out of season, alone but for the Arab, had filled him with a quiet despair. He thought he would go mad if the rain went on much longer. It was insidious, numbing, like the cold that ate into his bones as he worked hunched over the tablets, like the bleak landscape that held nothing but drab men and even drabber women, sorry, bedraggled sheep and even sorrier, more bedraggled children. And yet Ebla and its broken stones had somehow seeped inside him during the last month more deeply than anything had penetrated him in any of his previous digs. The original inhabitants, after all, had known winter as well as summer, rain as well as sun. Here, without the others, he could feel the old ghosts around him.

The Arab was still digging to his left, the bent figure crouched wearily on the earth. He resented Rosen. And, David thought, suspected him. He had certainly been sent from Aleppo less to help with the excavation of the tablets than to watch over Rosen and report his movements back to Syrian security. They shared a tiny hut in Tell Mardikh village, whitewashed and shaped like a giant bee-hive. It was windowless and gloomy, illumined only by an oil lamp, and it felt like prison in the long winter nights. They talked little. Rosen sat through the hours of darkness, reconstructing, collating, transcribing, sometimes translating the tablets dug up in the course of the day. The Arab helped, but he was surly and taciturn, and David spoke little with him. He wanted to finish the work by Christmas, return to Cambridge, and get back to his book on Eblaite chancery records of the Mardikh IIB1 period. But before he could do that, he had unfinished business here in Syria, at a, military installation five miles west of Sefire. He would have to lose the Arab for a while, but that was easier thought than done: the man was a human leech, soft, pliable, and clinging.

At thirty-four, David Rosen was already acknowledged as the rising star of Eblaite research. An archaeology graduate from Columbia, his imagination had been irrevocably captured by Paolo Matthiae’s discovery in the mid-seventies of the lost city and empire of Ebla, hidden from the eyes of men for countless centuries beneath the Syrian hill known as Tell Mardikh. Tells are man-made hills formed from the rise and fall of towns built, one on top of the other, on the same site, the debris of generations growing until the ground is abandoned by nature or covered by the latest series of buildings. Ebla had first been built around the time of the foundations of the First Dynasty of Egypt, towards the end of the fourth millennium BC. It had risen to greatness in the middle of the next millennium, only to be destroyed by Naram-Sin of Akkad about 2300. Twice again it had risen and been destroyed even before the days of Abraham, to lie almost unoccupied as the years and the weeds and the sands of the desert grew thick upon its stones and ashes.

David had set eyes on the site for the first time in 1977, shortly after beginning his graduate studies at Chicago. It had no soaring columns like Palmyra to the south-east, no treasure-trove like Tutankhamen’s tomb, no monumental carvings like Persepolis. But he had not gone there in search of such things. Between 1974 and David’s arrival in 1977, Matthiae and his team had uncovered major caches of clay tablets in the second-period Palace. Giovanni Pettinato had deciphered the Eblaite language, and a new world had begun to reveal itself. For David Rosen, it had been the right world, and he had thrown himself into the study of Eblaite with all the passion of a long-thwarted lover. It was as if he had lost something precious and had to scrabble recklessly for it in the dust, lest it vanish for ever.

To look at, David possessed none of the trademarks of the conventional scholar. No glasses, no stoop, no pallor. When he was not in the library or back home in his study, he would be out jogging or weight-training in the nautilus gym near the campus. Thick, curly black hair framed a face Burne-Jones would have enjoyed painting had it not been for the perpetually defiant expression in the eye and the line of the chin, pushed forward as if to meet trouble half-way. His father and grandfather had worn black and ruined their eyes poring over Talmudic texts in half-lighted yeshivas. In David, all that had been altered. In him, the passivity, the brooding acceptance of suffering and death had given way to confidence in life and resilience.

The Arab coughed. He had been coughing a lot recently. David hoped he would fall ill and be forced to leave. He knew they would send another one to take his place, but what he had to do up there at Sefire would not take long, not long at all. Perhaps there w