The Lost Temple Read online

  “But you came all the way out to Oxford to see me. You could have phoned.”

  “I did. Five times—yesterday—and twice the day before that.”

  “Ah, well, I dare say the porter lost the messages. Anyway, you’re here now. How can I oblige?”

  Muir pulled a cigarette from an ivory case and struck a match. He didn’t offer one to Reed. When the tip was glowing, he reached inside his pocket and extracted a stiff brown envelope which he tossed on to the coffee table between them. “What do you make of this?”

  Reed took the envelope. Inside was a single photograph printed on heavy paper. He squinted at it, then unfolded himself from his chair and crossed to the desk against the wall. He took a thick magnifying glass from a drawer and held it above the image. “A clay tablet—or part of one. There’s a black band across the bottom of the picture that makes it rather difficult to see. There seems to be some sort of inscription on the tablet, though the picture’s too blurred to make it out clearly. Nothing else, except a wristwatch laid flat beside it.” Reed put down the magnifying glass. “Did John Pemberton take this?”

  Muir stiffened. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Did he?”

  “Maybe. Why?”

  Reed tapped the photograph. “The watch. Pemberton always used it for scale when he was photographing artifacts. Rest his soul.” He peered at the photograph again, then at Muir. “You’ve obviously heard of him? I hadn’t imagined you as an enthusiast for archaeology.”

  “When he wasn’t digging up lost civilizations, Pemberton worked for us.” The cigarette had already all but vanished; Muir took the butt and flicked it into the fireplace. It raised a few forlorn sparks.

  “Us?” Reed queried.

  “Military Intelligence. We recruited him before the war—asked him to keep an eye on things in case Hitler set his sights on Crete.” Another cigarette was already shrinking visibly in Muir’s mouth—at least he was doing something to heat the room, Reed thought. “This is all confidential, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “We used Pemberton to liaise with the locals, establish contacts, that sort of thing. As an archaeologist he could wander pretty much anywhere and no one took any notice. It was a damn shame when he died on the first day of the invasion—set us back six months.”

  “A terrible pity,” agreed Reed, shooting Muir an oblique glance from under his snowy eyebrows. “And now you’re looking through his snapshots?”

  “We found the picture in a German archive after the war.”

  Reed scratched his neck where the scarf itched. “You’re not seriously suggesting . . . ?”

  “That Pemberton was a traitor?” Muir gave a short, humorless laugh. “No. When the Germans captured the island they made Pemberton’s villa their headquarters, so they had plenty of opportunity to rifle through his belongings.”

  “Then why . . .”

  “Never mind why.” The second cigarette butt followed the first into the fire. Muir flipped open his case and instinctively reached for another, then checked himself and snapped the lid shut. He drummed his fingers on the ivory, a fast beat like a machine-gun. “All I want to know from you is what this picture shows.”

  Reed picked up the magnifying glass again and reexamined the photograph. “Probably late Minoan or early Mycenaean . . .”

  “In English?” The cigarette case flew open as Muir’s impatient fingers gave up on self-restraint.

  “Very well. The clay tablet in the photograph probably dates from about the fourteenth century BC and comes from Crete or mainland Greece. Not as old as the pyramids, but before the Trojan war.” He smiled. “If, of course, you believe in that.”

  “So it’s Greek and it’s old as sin. What about the writing?”

  Reed sighed and put down the picture. “Come with me.”

  He struggled into his overcoat and jammed a fur-lined hat over his head, then led Muir down the wooden stairs, across the quadrangle and out through the main gate of the college. Shovelled ramparts of dirty snow lined the road, almost waist high, and the few pedestrians who braved the icy pavements were hunched over by the wind that whistled down Turl Street. Roofs groaned under the burden of snow and icicles hung like knives from the gutters, while the college walls—so golden in summer—seemed gray as the sky.

  “Were you here?” asked Reed as they shuffled across Broad Street and past the Gothic turrets of Balliol College. With their crusting of snow, they looked like something out of a fairy tale. “As an undergraduate, I mean?”

  “Cambridge.”

  “Ah,” said Reed, with what appeared to be genuine sympathy. “Procul omen abesto.”

  They walked on in silence, past a snowbound churchyard and across a street to the Ashmolean Museum. Its enormous neoclassical portico seemed out of place amid the medieval austerity of the colleges. A nod from Reed carried them past the guard, through the empty galleries, to a gloomy back room. It seemed to be some sort of cupboard for the clutter of forgotten civilizations. Tall statues stood shrouded in dust sheets, marble toes sticking out under the hems; gold-framed paintings leaned against the walls; and display cases with the glass taken out were pushed into corners like unused school desks. Most of their contents seemed to be missing, marked only by the dark shadows they had left in the bleached backing board, but one case still held a few exhibits. Reed crossed to it and pointed.

  Muir leaned closer. The piece Reed had indicated was a clay tablet, blackened by age and split by three large cracks. Its edges were rough, but the face was smooth. Scratched into the surface, almost invisible in the dim room, were hundreds of tiny, spidery characters.

  Reed turned on the lights and handed Muir the magnifying glass.

  “What is it?” The bite had temporarily gone from his voice.

  “It was discovered—the writing, that is—in about 1900. Sir Arthur Evans found it on Crete at Knossos and named it Linear B. As he was also curator of the Ashmolean at the time, a fair number of the pieces ended up here.”

  Muir put down the magnifying glass and held the photograph next to the tablet. “You mean there’s more than one of these things?”

  “A few score. Maybe a hundred and fifty all told—though some of them are only fragments.” Reed shrugged. “It’s not really my subject. I don’t know why you fagged out to Oxford through this terrible weather to bother me with it. You could have taken a taxi to the British Museum and found out as much. They’re very helpful there.”

  Muir ignored him. “Can you read it?”

  Reed gave a short, shocked laugh. “Read it? Scholars have been trying to break this for almost fifty years. They’ve all failed. Solving it would be the most extraordinary breakthrough since Champollion cracked the Egyptian hieroglyphs. And he had the Rosetta Stone to work from, of course.”

  “Have you tried?”

  Reed shook his head. “As I said—not really my thing. And I don’t know why . . .”

  “I needed an answer quickly and you’re the only man with the clearance for this.” Muir had put down the photograph and was striding around the room, chewing on an unlit cigarette.

  “Clearance?” echoed Reed, baffled. “If this ever held a secret, it was more than three thousand years ago. I suspect it’s declassified by now.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” Muir spun round and advanced toward Reed. “I want you to have a run at this. After the work you did on Ultra it should be money for jam. This stuff’s obsolete.”

  “It’s not really . . .”

  “And I may need you in Greece. If that was where Pemberton took this photograph, who knows what else he found there?”

  Now Reed looked genuinely appalled. “To Greece? But there’s a civil war going on there at the moment.”

  Muir gave a wolfish laugh and stubbed out his cigarette on an empty plinth. “At least it’ll be warmer than this fucking morgue.”

  It was dark by the time Muir got back to London, to the gray building off Victoria Street. Most of
the staff had already gone home, but the night clerk let him into the archives. It took four hours, but at the end of it he had a name and a file. He started reading from the back, flipping quickly through the dry pages. Like most of the files in this section, it began in late 1938, sporadically at first—medical records, training assessments—then more urgently. Between 1940 and 1944 the reports came thick and fast, a Cook’s tour of the war’s many fronts—Paris, Moscow, Athens, Heraklion, Alexandria, Cairo—headed with a mind-numbing variety of ever-changing code words. In 1945 they slowed abruptly, ending in a few paper dribbles as the bureaucracy discharged him. And, on the final page, a single telegram. After the yellowed sheaves of war records the paper was crisp and stark.

  Muir whistled under his breath. “You silly bugger.” He spent another five minutes checking back through the records, then picked up the phone.

  “I need to get to the Holy Land.” A pause. “No I don’t care if it takes a fucking miracle.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Qaisariyeh, Mandate of Palestine

  The castle stood on a promontory, a thumb of land sticking out into the calm Mediterranean. French knights had built it some eight hundred years earlier, to keep out invaders tempted by the flat coast and the tranquil sea. In the end they had failed, but the castle survived: a monument to the crusaders’ extraordinary aptitude for war, gently crumbling through the centuries.

  Now a new generation of colonizers had revived it, embellishing the medieval ramparts with innovations unimaginable to the men who built it. Barbed wire ran along the massive walls, and the crossbowmen in the towers had been superseded by Bren guns. But they were no longer there to keep enemies away. The castle had been turned in on itself, and the stout fortifications now protected the realm by keeping men in rather than out.

  The car pulled up outside the gate just before midnight. Leaving the engine running, the driver jumped out and ran to open the rear door. If he had learned one thing on the long drive from Jerusalem, it was that his passenger was not a man to tolerate delay.

  “Wait here,” came the curt instruction. “I won’t be long.”

  A wand of light cut through the darkness and in a moment a fair-haired man in an officer’s uniform emerged from the arched gateway carrying a torch. “Lieutenant Cargill, sir.”

  “How do you do?” The visitor didn’t introduce himself, nor take the hand that hovered in front of him as it wondered whether to shake or salute. “Don’t you have electricity here?”

  “The generator conked out this afternoon, I’m afraid.” Cargill seemed eager to please; he hadn’t yet discovered that this was a lost cause where Muir was concerned. “How was your journey, sir?”

  “Fucking terrible.” Muir followed Cargill through the arch, down a vaulted passage and out into a courtyard that had become home to a colony of Nissen huts. “Have you been to Jerusalem recently? Our esteemed government’s turned the center of town into some sort of miniature Birkenau and locked themselves inside it. Wrapped themselves in barbed wire. Even then they can’t protect themselves against these fucking Irgun guerrillas.” He shook his head in disgust. “Anyway, our man’s still here?”

  Surprised by the change of tack, Cargill took a moment to answer. “I’ve had him moved to the interrogation room ready for your arrival. Actually, we weren’t sure what time you would arrive—he’s been there a few hours now.”

  “Good. Soften him up. He’s a hard bastard, this one, according to his file. All sorts of heroics in the war. Picked up a DSO, and they didn’t hand those out for digging latrines.”

  “Really?” Cargill sounded surprised. “Not a man you’d expect to find running guns to the Zionists.”

  Muir chuckled. “Three months after they pinned the medal on his tit he disappeared. Deserted. A complex fellow, our Mr. Grant.”

  They reached the far corner of the courtyard, an old stable that had been fitted with a corrugated iron roof and a steel door. Cargill unlocked it.

  “Will you need help, sir? I could fetch a couple of sergeants . . .”

  “No need. Wait here in case there’s any trouble. You’re armed?”

  Cargill touched his holster.

  “Keep it ready, then. If anyone walks out through that door without knocking twice on the inside, shoot him.”

  “Do you really think . . .” Cargill looked appalled.

  “I told you: he’s a complex fellow.”

  The door clanged shut behind him as Muir stepped into the cell. Like the rest of the fortress, it was a strange mix of old and new: medieval stone walls topped and tailed with an iron roof and a hastily poured concrete floor. As in the Middle Ages, it was lit by flame: in this case a Coleman lantern hung from a crossbeam. In the middle of the room, two wooden chairs faced each other across a steel table, and there, his right arm handcuffed to the table leg, sat Grant.

  Muir studied him for a moment. The file photograph must be almost ten years old, but it was impossible to say whether the intervening decade had been good to Grant or not. He had aged, of course—but so had most men who survived the war. In Grant’s case the changes were neither better nor worse. He had scars—one on his left forearm that snaked almost from the elbow to his wrist—and lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes, but they hadn’t changed the underlying face. It was as if the years had taken the young man in the photograph and simply sharpened him up, clarified him somehow. Even cuffed to the table, he managed to slouch back and offer Muir an easy, sardonic smile.

  Muir flipped open a notebook and began reading. “Grant, C. S. Born October 1917, County Durham. Educated . . . nowhere that matters. Left school 1934. Emigrated to South Africa, then Rhodesia. Travelled extensively in southern Africa as a prospector for the Kimberley Diamond Company. Rumored involvement with indigenous anti-Belgian elements in Congo. Returned England 1938, recruited to Military Intelligence, later transferred to Special Operations Executive. Active service in Greece, North Africa, Balkans and Soviet Union. July 1944, awarded Distinguished Service Order; October 1944 missing, presumed deserted, following an incident near Impros, Crete. Subsequently linked to black marketeering in London; later rumored to be working in the eastern Mediterranean, running guns to the so-called Democratic Army of Greece, the Irgun, the Haganah and other elements in the Zionist underground. Whereabouts currently unknown. Correction: whereabouts currently handcuffed to a table in a shitty little cell in the asshole of nowhere, looking at a long stretch at His Majesty’s pleasure for supplying arms to the enemies of the Empire.”

  Muir snapped shut the notebook and dropped into the empty chair. Grant stared back, his eyes wide with mock awe. “Anything else?”

  His voice was not what Muir had expected. Somewhere at the bottom of it he could detect the rough vowels of a boy from the north, but it had been layered with so many other accents and inflections that it was impossible to pin down: a true mongrel.

  “Only that the arms you’ve been smuggling appear to have been looted from caches that were supposed to supply the Greek resistance in the war.”

  Grant shrugged. “No one was using them. The Jews spent most of the last ten years looking down the wrong end of a gun. I thought the least I could do was give them something to shoot back with.”

  “But they’re our fucking guns. And they’re shooting them at us.”

  Grant shrugged. “Us? I didn’t think I belonged in the club any more.”

  “So you thought you’d get your revenge by selling our guns to our enemies?” Muir breathed a contemptuous stream of smoke through his nostrils.

  “Just the money.”

  “I suppose that’s the benefit of working for Jews.”

  Grant didn’t answer, but held Muir’s gaze across the table.

  Muir tapped a fresh cigarette on his ivory case. “Anyway, I couldn’t give a squirrel’s shit what you’re doing at the moment. I came here to talk about Crete and a Mr. John Pemberton.” A spark of flame. “You knew him.”

  “Did I?”

  Grant di
d well to keep his face impassive, but Muir had conducted enough interrogations to see past the façade.

  “Crete—the day the Nazis arrived. We’d sent you to look for the King near Knossos. Instead you bumped into Pemberton. You were the last man to see him alive.”

  “And the first to see him dead. So?”

  “According to your report, he handed over his notebook before he died.”

  “And?”

  Muir leaned across the table. The glowing tip of his cigarette hovered a few inches from Grant’s face, and smoke drifted into his eyes. “I want to know what you did with it.”

  “I gave it to his widow.”

  “Pemberton didn’t leave a widow, you prick. She predeceased him.”

  “Maybe it was his sister.” Grant’s eyes were tearing from the smoke, but he never blinked. He held Muir’s gaze for a long moment—then blew the cloud of smoke straight into Muir’s face, so suddenly that Muir shrank back. “What do you think I did with it? I didn’t have time to visit the library. I binned the book and tried to find some Nazis to kill. If you read my report, you’ll know I managed that pretty well too.”

  Muir leaned back in his chair. “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t suppose you spent much time on the front line.”

  “I don’t believe that a man spent his dying breath giving you this book and the first thing you did was throw it away. Weren’t you curious why it was so important to him?”

  “He could have given me his lucky matchbox and a locket with his lover’s hair and I’d have done the same.” Grant shook his head. “I flipped through the book, but it was all gibberish and mumbo-jumbo. I had a lot of ground to cover and I couldn’t afford to be weighed down. So I lost it.”

  Muir stared at him a moment longer, then abruptly stood. “That’s a pity. If you’d had it, or knew where it was, I might have been able to help you out of here. Might even have been some money in it. After all, I don’t suppose the Yids will be paying you now.” He looked down expectantly. “Well?”