resonated through him, and a sudden gripping, clenching pain exploded in the centre of his chest. And in that instant, at the very last moment of his life, Oliver Wendell-Carfax knew he’d achieved a kind of victory, knew he’d defeated the violent psychopath facing him.
He gasped a breath, grunted once and his head slumped to one side. Finally he hung motionless, his eyes wide open, the grimace on his face slowly softening.
Cursing softly, the stranger stood still, his gaze locked on the body of the elderly man he’d travelled so many thousands of miles to find. Then he shrugged, swung the scourge once more across Wendell-Carfax’s chest – a last, pointless act of violence – before folding it up and putting it into his pocket. He needed to refocus.
Three hours later, he gave up his search. Wherever the copy of the parchment had been hidden, he couldn’t find it, and now dawn was approaching. He had to get away from the house before anyone – a gardener or a cook – turned up.
His best hope was that the copy of the ancient parchment would never be discovered. If it was, he’d have to recover it at any cost, even if it meant killing those who got in his way.
2
‘This really isn’t my field, Roger,’ Angela Lewis said, irritation showing in her voice.
‘You work with ceramics.’
‘I’m a
Roger Halliwell leaned back in his swivel chair and looked at his subordinate across his cluttered desk.
‘I can’t spare either of them,’ he said simply. ‘They’re both working on important projects for me here at the museum.’ Halliwell lifted his arm in an all-encompassing gesture that appeared to include the entire premises of the British Museum, rather than just his fairly small section of it. His domain encompassed only pottery and ceramics, and he was in nominal charge of a small staff of about a dozen people.
‘More important than anything I’m doing, you mean?’ Angela snapped.
‘You said it, Angela, not me.’ Halliwell sat forward and rested his hands on his desk. ‘Look, I never intended to ask you to do this. Jane was supposed to be the ceramics expert on this team, but something else came up on Friday afternoon and I’ve had to re-assign her. Right now, there’s nobody else here with enough experience to do the job.’
He smiled at her across the desk. ‘I know it’s not your specialization, but you certainly know enough about ceramics to identify the pieces that have any real value. All I want you to do is be a part of the team we’re sending to the estate and separate the good stuff from the dross. We don’t need you to assign accurate values. That can be done later, when whoever ends up in charge of this decides what to do.’
‘So you want me to do a sort of ceramics triage?’
‘Exactly. It’ll take a week of your time, no more. Look at it as a kind of working holiday in the country. And there’s something else that might interest you. A story about the house, especially after all that time you spent digging about in Jerusalem and Megiddo.’
‘What story?’
‘Apparently the deceased owner’s father claimed that he knew where a really valuable treasure was hidden. He told anyone who’d listen that it was the most important treasure of all time.’
‘Which is what, exactly?’
‘I haven’t the vaguest idea. Anyway, he spent a long time somewhere out in the Middle East, digging for this hoard in several different places.’
In spite of herself, Angela felt a tingle of interest.
‘And did he find it?’
‘No, obviously not.’ Halliwell leaned forward again. ‘But there might be some clues left in the house, clues that you and Chris could follow, I mean – if you’re interested.’
Angela sighed. ‘Look, Roger, I’m not some adolescent schoolgirl you can send off on a treasure hunt. I’ll go to Carfax Hall and look at these ceramics, but that’s all I’ll do. If you want somebody to waste their time looking for buried treasure, you’d better look elsewhere.’ She paused, irritated by Halliwell’s look of relief.
‘Where will we stay?’
‘There’s a pub not far from the estate with about eight or nine rooms. We’ve block-booked half a dozen of them for all of this week, with an option for next week as well, just in case the assessment takes longer than we expect. The museum will pay for your food and accommodation, of course, and even your mileage.’
‘I’m not sharing a room with anyone on the team.’
‘I wouldn’t expect you to. There are only six of you, so you’ll have one room each.’
Reluctantly Angela bowed to the inevitable. It was only a week, after all, and maybe the house would be interesting. ‘When do I leave?’
Halliwell glanced at the wall clock above the door of his office. ‘The sooner the better. In fact, right now would be a good time.’ He passed a sheet of paper across the desk. ‘Here’s the address of the pub where you’re staying, and of the estate itself. I suggest you go to the house first of all to see how the land lies. Richard Mayhew is in overall charge of the team, but you’re all working as individuals, of course. And remember, if you do find a treasure map, I want to know about it.’
3
Jesse McLeod almost always arrived at work early, typically at about six in the morning, for two good reasons.
Firstly, it meant he could leave early in the afternoon and head for the beach with his surfboard, as long as the sun was shining. If it wasn’t, or if he had a lot to do, he’d climb back on his Harley, track over to his penthouse apartment just south of Carmel, right on the Californian coast, and spend the rest of the day working on one of his computers, using his administrator access to remotely monitor the company’s network. Of course, leaving early only worked if nobody had broken anything or otherwise screwed up the system, which didn’t happen quite as often these days because they’d ditched Vista, which only occasionally did what it was supposed to do, and reverted to XP, which was clunky but usually reliable. He was still evaluating Windows 7.
The second reason was that arriving at work two hours before anyone else allowed him to run his usual checks on the operating system, application software, back-up devices and the various linked databases – getting on with his basic network housekeeping, in other words – without any of the non-geeks interfering or asking the usual idiot questions.
McLeod had been the network manager, database designer and just about anything else to do with the NotJustGenetics Inc. – colloquially known as ‘NoJoGen’ – computer system for over ten years, pretty much since the day the company was formed. He’d done well out of it. Not as well as the guy who’d come up with the idea of genetic research and gene manipulation to attempt to cure or at least help combat specific diseases, but well
