Newton’s Fire

‘I’ll see to it for you,’ said the man. ‘Consider it my gift. To celebrate our deal.’

Croke had glanced sideways. The faint sheen on Irina’s forehead had been his first hint that she could speak German after all. He’d turned back to his host.

‘Call me superstitious,’ he’d said, ‘but I never celebrate a deal before the ink’s dry.’

‘Call me superstitious,’ his host had returned, ‘but I never make a deal unless I have a bottle of champagne on ice.’ And he’d looked around at his two bodyguards at that moment: nothing dramatic, just enough to put them on alert.

Irina had been with Croke since the debacle in Doha. She’d proved attentive, smart, discreet, loyal, quick to learn and fun to bed. Everything he could have asked. On the other hand, his safety was now at stake; not to mention a potentially lucrative relationship.

‘Well?’ his host had pressed, pen poised above the dotted line. ‘Do we have a deal?’

Something unfamiliar had fluttered inside Croke’s chest at that moment; and he’d realized, not without a certain perverse pleasure, that it was fear. It was an unexpected drawback of success, that it allowed you to cut risk out of your life. But risk was excitement; risk was joy. So he’d looked unflinchingly up into his host’s gaze. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he’d said.

A pinch of garlic salt in the Bloody Marys, a dash of Tabasco, ice cubes and a slice of lemon. He was a traditionalist when it came to drinks. He took the heavy crystal tumblers over to Irina, gave her hers. She took a large swallow. Her eyes gleamed and her jaw muscles tightened. ‘You considered his offer,’ she said bitterly. ‘I saw you considering it.’

‘I considered the situation,’ he said mildly. ‘It’s not the same thing at all. Besides, if it makes you feel better, it wasn’t about you.’

She snorted at that. ‘It felt like it was about me.’

‘I’m sure it did. But it wasn’t. If it had really been about you, he’d never have signed the contract. We might not even have got out of there alive. It was about me. Specifically, he wanted to know if he could trust me, or whether I was the kind of man who could be bribed or bullied into giving up something I valued.’

‘I thought you were going to say yes,’ she said, the slight quaver in her voice betraying the way her world had trembled beneath her feet. ‘I thought you were going to give me to that … that monster.’

‘But that’s the point,’ said Croke. ‘It wouldn’t have been a gift. Not under coercion like that. It would have beentribute.’

She took another gulp, frowned and shook her head. ‘I don’t see-’

‘Tribute is something demanded by the stronger party and paid by the weaker,’ explained Croke. ‘I don’t pay tribute. I never pay tribute. It sends all the wrong signals. It lets people know you can be pushed around. Gifts, on the other hand, are what equals exchange freely and willingly. They’re a valuable part of what I do; they’re how I form bonds with other powerful people, how I build my influence. Here’s a tip for you: in situations like this morning, where you find yourself at a temporary disadvantage, do whatever you can to achieve parity first, and only then show generosity. Otherwise it will be misinterpreted as weakness. Do you understand?’

She sat a little heavily down in one of the white leather armchairs. ‘My head,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t feel so good.’

‘A reaction to the tension, I expect.’

‘Yes.’

‘Or perhaps to what I put in your Bloody Mary.’

She frowned a moment then looked in dismay down at her drink. But it was already too late. She tried to push herself up but collapsed back down again.

‘You really should have let me know you spoke German,’ he told her. ‘I need to be able to trust the people around me.’

She tried to say something, maybe explain herself, but nothing came out. The tumbler slipped from her weakening grasp and shattered on the polished marble floor, tomato juice spreading like blood around the translucent shards. Her eyes glazed and her head lolled forward, a little pinkish drool leaking out onto her white blouse.

The door banged open, Manfredo and Vig sprinting in, handguns already drawn, alarmed by the tinkle of breaking glass. ‘It’s all right,’ Croke assured them. He nodded at Irina, slumped unconscious in her armchair. He turned to Manfredo. ‘Take her back to our friend from this morning, would you,’ he said. ‘Tell her she comes with my compliments, to celebrate our deal.’

Manfredo holstered his gun. ‘Yes, sir. And afterwards?’

‘Meet us at the airport. We wouldn’t want to miss our slot.’

‘No, sir. Anything else?’

Croke knocked back the dregs of his Bloody Mary, set his glass down on the counter. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’d better call Francesca in Geneva for me. We should probably let her know I’ll be needing a new assistant.’

TWO I

‘You found them,’ said Penelope Martyn in an awed murmur, when Luke tracked her to her kitchen. ‘I don’t believe it.’

Luke allowed himself a smile. ‘I don’t either,’ he admitted.

‘And? Are they … are they what you were hoping?’

He didn’t quite know how to answer that. Her house was grand but badly rundown; and he’d got the distinct impression, when they’d chatted earlier, that a windfall would be more than welcome. ‘They’re alchemical papers,’ he said carefully. ‘Four sheets, written front and back. Citations from other authors, as far as I’ve been able to tell.’

‘Oh.’ She tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the shadow of disappointment from her expression. ‘So not his original work then?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ He’d already explained to her the sliding scale of value for Newton’s papers: the highly prized letters he’d written to both his famous and lesser-known friends; the coveted annotations for Principia Mathematica and Opticks; the significantly lesser interest in his theological and alchemical writings, especially those that didn’t represent Newton’s own thinking, but were merely his transcriptions of other authors. ‘It could have been worse,’ he said. ‘They could have been his papers from the Royal Mint.’

‘Newton was at the Royal Mint?’

‘He joined just a year or two after he wrote these pages, as it happens. Ran the place for decades. Oversaw a complete recoinage of the realm.’

She shook her head. ‘Why would a man like Newton take a job like that?’

Luke shrugged. It was a question that had vexed many academics over the years, and no one had really come up with a satisfactory explanation. ‘The Principia Mathematica had made him a star,’ he said. ‘We think maybe he wanted to go to London to bask in all that glory. The Royal Mint was his ticket. And the money was pretty good too, especially after he was appointed Master.’

‘Oh, well.’ She touched the papers with her fingertip. ‘Is there anything of interest in them?’

‘I haven’t been through them properly yet,’ Luke told her. ‘I wanted to show them to you at once. Besides …’ He gestured at the cramped handwriting, the upside-down passages, the esoteric words, the passages in Latin and French, indicating how hard they were to read. ‘But there is at least one thing.’

‘Yes?’

He pointed out the four words to her. Then, unsure of her eyesight, he read them out aloud. ‘It says “Fatio