The Age of Exodus Read online

  And it sounded as if he had been talking about smuggling arms to Palestine.

  On the face of it, and from what he had seen outside the Savoy, it looked as though Casement had no intention of getting involved – but then a thought occurred to Forrester. He had just claimed Casement’s rejection of the man had been because he was being watched. What if that was literally true? In that case Casement’s involvement in the events of the past few days could be seen in an entirely different light. If he secretly supported the Jewish cause, might he even be linked in some way with the men who had tried to kill Ernest Bevin?

  Forrester had no idea, but he knew the first thing he had to do was to tell Lanchester what he had learned. He stepped outside the Automat, hailed his first New York cab, and asked to be taken to the Waldorf Astoria.

  * * *

  Toby Lanchester listened attentively as Forrester described what had happened to him since he left the ship.

  “Well done,” he said finally, flicking a strand of dark hair from his eyes. “I can see why the Foreign Secretary wanted you here.”

  “You think it is arms smuggling to the Middle East?”

  “That’s quite possibly what your Mr. Hausen wanted. There’s an arms embargo: there are people trying to get around it. It’s interesting to hear they plan to set up a staging post in Italy; probably one of the old wartime airstrips.”

  “Do you believe Casement’s involved?”

  “Not at all. He may have made sympathetic noises to a Jewish pilot who happened to fly him out of trouble in the war, but he’s got too much at stake to get into this sort of business. I’m not surprised he told your man to get lost. He doesn’t want the FBI after him – and in fact to be on the safe side I’m going to suggest he reports this officially. He’s got to be whiter than white if he wants to do business in America – and as I think I’ve made very clear, we want him to do business in America.”

  “Unless he’s involved in illegal arms dealing and that was the reason he killed Charles Templar in London and Billy Burke on the Queen Mary and then tried to kill me.”

  “As you know, we don’t believe he did any of those things.”

  “Perhaps because you don’t want to believe it.”

  “Because there’s no evidence, old chap. And trying to find the evidence could wipe out one of our best chances to get the country solvent again. So, as I say, lay off that and concentrate on what you’re here for, which is making sure nobody takes another potshot at Ernie Bevin. Have you looked round the hotel yet?”

  “Not yet, I came straight to you. I haven’t even unpacked my case.”

  “Well go and unpack your case, take one of those excellent showers they have here and go down to the dining room. The food’s excellent and it’s a good place to see who’s around. Then take a book or a newspaper or something down to the lobby. Stay there for a bit and look out for any familiar faces.”

  “Don’t forget I have to give my lecture at the conference tomorrow.”

  “That’s all right: the Foreign Secretary isn’t due at the UN until the day after.”

  “Will I need a pass? To get into the General Assembly?”

  “There’ll be a packet in your room by tonight. And good luck with your lecture, I’m sure you’ll be a credit to us all.”

  12

  THE EFFIGY

  On the way to Columbia Forrester reflected on the fact that the reason the programme to develop the atom bomb was codenamed the Manhattan Project was that it had begun here in New York – at the very university he was going to. An ivory tower, maybe. But an ivory tower with the intellectual firepower to obliterate mankind.

  The first thing that struck Forrester about the Columbia Archaeology Conference was just how slickly organised it was. Beautifully produced signboards at regular intervals in the broad, cool, well-polished corridors directed him to presentations on The Influence of the Etruscans on Roman Civilisation, The Geology of the Caves of the Delphic Oracle, The Correct Identification of the Sea Peoples, A New Approach to Hittite Inscriptions and The Latest Efforts to Decode Linear B, to which his own name was attached. He glanced again at his notes and made himself known to the conference organisers.

  “If you have any slides, Dr. Forrester, you’ll be pleased to know that every lecture theatre has a built-in projector and a state-of-the-art sound system,” said one of the organisers, and when Forrester shook his head the man smiled sympathetically. “I guess you guys are still recovering from the war,” he said. “Okay, let me take you in and introduce you.”

  The lecture was a success: it was well attended, Forrester’s account of the work he and Kretzmer were doing on the stele from the Gorge of Acharius was enthusiastically received, and afterwards he dealt diplomatically with a barrage of questions from excited Minoan scholars. One in particular, a dumpy woman from Brooklyn College with bottle-thick glasses who chain-smoked throughout the lecture, was particularly persistent. Her name was Alice Kober and she had been trying to decipher Linear B since the 1930s, to which end, she told him, she had mastered Old Irish, Akkadian, Chinese, Basque, Hittite and Tocharian, and was currently getting to grips with Sanskrit. What’s more, she assured him, she had devised a system of punched holes to create a database, and had already created 180,000 such holes in forty notebooks with a homemade punch.

  Forrester did not normally indulge in making mischief, but he could not resist giving Kretzmer’s address to Alice Kober. His German nemesis might be more appreciative of him, thought Forrester, if he had to use his green ink to deal with a woman who liked to write her letters with a hole punch. He was in the process of disentangling himself from Alice Kober and heading for an interesting-sounding lecture on New Excavations at Carchemish, when he saw something that brought him back to the present with a jerk: a woman hurrying down the corridor towards a lecture room.

  Theresa Palmer.

  Firmly taking his leave of Alice, Forrester slipped down the corridor in time to see Mrs. Palmer disappear through the door of a lecture room. He was about to follow her into it when on instinct he turned around – and caught a brief glimpse of someone stepping hurriedly back into a side corridor.

  Once again, he was almost but not quite certain it was Aleister Crowley.

  Aboard the Queen Mary, Forrester had felt certain Theresa Palmer had played some sort of mind game with him, made him see Aleister Crowley when he wasn’t there, led him off on false trails. Was Crowley here in New York or was she doing it again, distracting him so he did not find out what she was up to in that lecture room?

  Forrester decided he was not to be distracted, made a conscious effort to put Crowley out of his mind, and pushed through the swing doors. He sat down in the back row of the steeply raked room and saw Mrs. Palmer three rows below him, apparently unaware of his presence and absorbed in the lecture.

  The lecturer himself was an elderly man, billed on the mimeographed sheet beside him as Professor Herbert Washington, with a neatly trimmed beard and a sonorous voice. Beside him, next to the lectern, was a small table. On the table there was an object, about six inches high, swathed in a green cloth.

  Forrester settled down in his seat and began to listen – and as he did so he felt the hairs on the back of his neck gradually rise.

  Because the lecture was about Sumerian mythology.

  “A kind of aura surrounded the gods of Mesopotamia,” Washington was saying, “blinding and awing those who worshipped them. But they looked and often acted like humans, not only requiring ordinary food and alcohol, but sometimes becoming drunk. Flawed beings indeed, but beings who were nevertheless all-seeing, all-knowing and immortal: Anu, Enlil, Enki, Utu the sun god, Sin the moon god and Inanna, goddess of sex and war.”

  During these generalities, Forrester’s attention wandered, and as he looked across the audience to see if there was anyone else he recognised, he began to suspect that many of those attending weren’t here as students of archaeology. There were many of the pale, strained faces he associated wi
th Crowley and his devotees.

  “This, then, is the context into which we must fit the object I am about to present to you today. It was originally discovered during the expedition I led to Tel Mandir in Iraq in 1939, an expedition sponsored in part by that great Sumerian scholar Sir Edward St. John Townsend, who was present when it was found. But when war broke out we returned in some haste to the United States, taking what we could, and proceeded to catalogue our finds. The subject of today’s presentation was tentatively identified as early as 1941, but bearing in mind its significance I have spent the intervening years confirming my initial hypothesis, and it is only now that I feel confident enough to share it with the world.” Washington reached out for the green baize, began to lift it – and then, to general frustration, seemed to change his mind.

  “First, however, I feel I should remind you about two books of the Bible, the first being the Book of Daniel.”

  Forrester could feel the level of tension in the room rising.

  “The Book of Daniel describes the adventures of a nobly born Jew who was taken to Babylon to study the lore and language of the Chaldees. It is told in six stories followed by four apocalyptic visions. The stories are among the most memorable in the Bible, and include Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego being thrown into the fiery furnace and emerging unscathed, Nebuchadnezzar’s madness when he goes into the fields and eats grass, the prophetic writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, Mene, Mene Tekel Upharsin, and the well-known tale of Daniel in the lions’ den. And as many of you will know, in one of his apocalyptic visions Daniel was told to ‘Shut up the words and seal the books even to time of the end.’

  “This idea was elaborated in the second Biblical text to which I wish to refer you, which is found in the Book of Revelation, where John of Patmos foretold that the Lamb with Seven Horns and Seven Eyes would open the Seven Seals and reveal information known only to God.

  “I believe that the creature John refers to as the Lamb was in fact the goat god Narak, Lord of the Seals.”

  Forrester tensed as he remembered the winged creature depicted in the scene he had rolled out from Templar’s cylinder seal. The audience held its breath; every eye was fixed on the shrouded object.

  “In Sumerian mythology,” said Washington, “Narak roamed the world seeking the seals, which had to be kept out of his clutches at all costs to prevent him bringing down all the other gods. Happily the example we found, though it has the traditional niches into which the seals were to be inserted, contained no seals.” There was a polite ripple of laughter, but not much. Most of the audience was now seething with impatience to see what lay under the shroud.

  “Until our expedition,” said Washington, “we knew of Narak only through texts and images on cylinder seals, and no three-dimensional representation of him had ever been found. Then we came to Tel Mandir, and brought our find back to America, and it is my great privilege today, ladies and gentlemen, to reveal publicly for the first time, an entirely intact three-dimensional effigy of Narak, Lord of the Seals.”

  And this time, with dramatic swiftness, Washington finally whipped the covering from the object on the table and revealed a six-inch high goat-like figure standing upright.

  It resembled the famous Ram in a Thicket from the royal tombs of Ur, but its wings were double and outspread, the upper pair rising above its head, the lower pair down to its feet, and whereas the ram looked harmless and contemplative, the effigy of Narak radiated malevolence: its mouth was a twisted grimace, its eyes bulged with anger.

  It was made out of black stone.

  There was a collective gasp as it appeared, and as the buzz of comment gradually died down the speaker gave chapter and verse for its provenance, detailing the translations of the cuneiform tablets which had been found beside it, gradually, word by word, bringing the object from the world of mythical terror into the safe haven of academic scrutiny. But not quite. As Washington finished his address and asked for questions, Theresa Palmer rose to her feet.

  “Have you tried inserting cylinder seals into any of those seven cavities, Professor?”

  The lecturer laughed, nervously. “Not yet, madam, not wanting to give Narak undue influence on the Sumerian pantheon.”

  This time the ripple of slightly nervous laughter spread to the room, but Theresa Palmer ploughed on.

  “Surely, however, it’s an experiment that should be undertaken if you’re confident of your identification? And according to the mythology a single seal would be perfectly safe, wouldn’t it?” And suddenly Theresa Palmer was walking down the steps towards the lectern, holding something high enough for the audience to see. “I hold in my hand one of the very cylinder seals which you say were designed to fit into those cavities. I’m assuming you’d have no objection to demonstrating that your theory is correct?” Forrester almost rose to his feet. She had a seal! Was it the seal? The seal for which Templar had died? And then he sank down again. The object she held between her fingers was red; Templar’s had been black.

  An excited buzz filled the room, and grew more intense as Theresa Palmer reached the dais and handed the seal to the startled academic, who looked at it nervously.

  “This is unexpected,” he said, uneasily.

  “As is the existence of this effigy, as you yourself have made clear. I invite you to see if the seal fits.”

  Washington was clearly at a loss.

  “I really don’t know what to say,” he temporised.

  “Well, why not just try it?” said Theresa Palmer, reasonably. “If it doesn’t fit, you can simply hand it back to me. If it does, this may be a great moment in archaeology.”

  The lecturer looked up at his audience helplessly, willing someone to say something which would enable him to resist the willpower of this alarming woman. But no one said a word, and it was clear that every person in the room wanted him to do exactly what she was asking him. In the end, realising he had no option, he licked dry lips, turned to the effigy and gently slid the cylinder into the top cavity in its chest.

  Immediately the lecture room was filled with a sound like that of an immense stone door slamming closed in some deep underground labyrinth. The lights flickered and went out.

  And, as if returned to its natural realm of darkness, Narak’s body began to glow, first red, then white, until it became so bright Forrester was forced to close his eyes – at which point the keening noise began, growing more and more intense, until people were clutching their ears to shut it out.

  And as it reached its climax, the great underground stone door slammed again and suddenly the room was filled with blessed silence.

  Gradually people in the room opened their eyes and took their hands from their ears. The overhead lights flickered and came on again. Everyone was there, just as they had been before the cylinder was inserted, though they now looked as if they had just come through a ferocious storm. Even Theresa Palmer was still exactly where she had been, a foot or two from the lectern, supporting herself with one hand on the nearest seat. The one significant difference was clear as Washington, his face white, turned his head slowly to the table where the effigy had stood.

  Narak, Lord of the Seals, had vanished.

  13

  WORLD’S FAIR

  For a long moment no one moved, and then, as people began to rise in their seats, Washington gathered his wits and requested that they all sit down and wait for campus security.

  “I ask that no one leave the room until this matter has been dealt with,” he announced in a slightly uncertain voice. “There has been an unforgivable theft, but I assure you we will find the perpetrator.”

  “Rubbish,” said Theresa Palmer. “We all saw what happened, and this was no theft. Narak has returned. He is at large in your city. He will take vengeance on those who have desecrated his memory.”

  A tall, authoritative man with a shock of white hair and the accent of a Boston Brahmin, whom Forrester assumed to be one of the academics, rose to his feet.

  “I stron
gly object to hearing this kind of nonsense,” he said. “We’re rational people here, and we put superstition behind us a long time ago. Professor Washington is right – someone has stolen the artefact, and the sooner the culprit owns up the sooner we get out of here.”

  Theresa Palmer turned to face the man, and Forrester had to admire the authority with which she spoke.

  “You study ancient religions,” she said, calmly enough, “but you dismiss the possibility that they connect you with a reality we do not yet fully understand. Though it was in this very university that research began into turning the building blocks of matter into a force of unbelievable destructive power. I believe you have just witnessed the unleashing of another elemental force.”

  “Or a very elaborate son et lumière,” said Forrester. Mrs. Palmer looked at him in angry surprise: clearly she had not registered his presence. “I’d suggest everyone look behind them, at the back wall.” They did so, and saw the aperture in the wooden panelling. “This university is equipped with the best available projection system, and I submit it was hijacked for the little display you just saw. As was the sound system,” and he drew their attention to the speakers all around the room. Forrester was certain he could hear the relief in the murmurs which filled the room, but Theresa Palmer was as firm as ever.

  “And yet, Dr. Forrester,” she said, “I promise you that even if the campus police search every one of us before he or she leaves this room, Narak will not be found, because he is no longer a piece of statuary, but a being of power returned to our world.”

  “Or because under cover of all the noise and light a confederate of yours came into the room and took the object while everyone was either deafened or blinded by the light,” said Forrester.

  Again, he was aware of vigorously nodding heads: yes, this was the explanation they all wanted. And yet, some deep, primitive part of Forrester’s brain wanted to believe that he had indeed witnessed a supernatural event: the confluence of our own everyday world and another richer, stranger one.