Will Adams - Newton’s Fire

‘We didn’t hear you.’ She held up her headphones. ‘How were we supposed to hear you?’

Croke walked over to the desk, put an earphone to his ear. Nothing. He gave her a wry look. She clicked the play button and a woman began explaining how to produce oxygen by chemical reaction. ‘Our new audio-guide,’ she said. ‘I was showing it to Mr Redfern. We’re planning a new exhibition and we’ll need to do one of these for it.’

‘Why bother with headphones?’ scoffed Morgenstern. ‘Who were you going to disturb?’

She picked up the handset. ‘These things only work with headphones. We can’t have people playing them out loud in the museum, or it would ruin everyone else’s experience, wouldn’t it?’

For the blink of a moment, Croke almost bought it. But then he remembered the aborted phone call, the figure scoping out the rear alley. ‘Sure,’ he mocked. He turned to Redfern. ‘You were in Cambridge earlier today.’

‘Is that against the law?’

‘You picked up two people there. A man and a woman.’

‘Your accent?’ frowned Redfern. ‘It’s American, isn’t it? I trust you won’t mind my asking what authority you have to question me?’

Croke glanced at Morgenstern. Morgenstern nodded at the door. They went outside for a murmured conference. ‘They’re lying,’ said Croke. ‘The others were here.’

‘Maybe,’ said Morgenstern, nodding at his squad leader, who was indicating to them that the museum was clear. ‘But they’re not here now.’

‘These two know where they’ve gone. We need to make them tell us.’

Morgenstern shook his head. ‘If you mean what I think you mean, forget about it. The Brits are too squeamish. Especially as the woman really is curator of this place, and she’s claiming Redfern as her guest.’

‘Then what do we do?’

‘We can put pressure on them. Charge them with obstructing justice, abetting a murderer. They’re soft. They’ll break soon enough.’

Croke shook his head. ‘I don’t want them entering the system. I can’t risk them talking to lawyers.’

Morgenstern nodded. ‘I can have them driven up to Birmingham for interrogation. Then have them transferred to London instead. We can bounce them around for at least twenty-four hours.’

‘Good. Do it.’

An NCT officer approached, holding up some dust-covered women’s clothes. ‘Found these in the washroom, sir,’ he said.

Morgenstern and Croke shared a glance. They matched what Rachel Parkes had been wearing. And some splashes of water on the blouse indicated she’d been there recently.

‘How the hell did they get out?’ scowled Croke.

‘I don’t know.’

‘They can’t have got far. I want everyone you can spare out hunting. Have them watch the train and bus stations. Taxi companies. And have them look for couples.’

Morgenstern passed on the orders, then they headed downstairs together into the basement where two NCT operatives were scanning the floor with ground penetrating radar. ‘There’s something down there,’ said one. ‘A chamber of some kind. And metal. Iron for sure. And I know this will sound crazy, but maybe gold too.’

‘It’s not crazy. How can we get down there?’

The man grimaced. ‘It won’t be easy. It’s at least ten feet deep. We’ll need specialist cutting and lifting equipment. If I put the order in now, we should be able to get it here by morning. All goes well, we can pop the floor early tomorrow afternoon.’

Morgenstern glanced at Croke. ‘Will that work for you?’

Croke pulled a face. To meet Avram’s deadline, he’d need to depart City Airport no later than midnight tomorrow. Allowing a few hours for transporting it there, and for the inevitable fuck-ups along the way, and they were pushing it tight. ‘It’ll work if it’s down there,’ he said. ‘But what if it’s not?’

‘We could take a look first, if you’d like,’ said the man.

‘How?’

He put his hand on one of the display cabinets. ‘First we move this thing,’ he said. He crouched down and touched where one of its feet was bolted to the floor. ‘Then we drill directly beneath here. A small-diameter hole all the way down to the chamber.’ He made a circle with his finger and thumb. ‘It’ll have be about yea wide because of the width-depth ratios. Once we’re through, we can feed down an endoscope. You know endoscopes, right? Miniature cameras with integrated lighting and a fish-eye lens on the end of a long fibre-optic cable, like the ones they stick up your arse when they’re-’

‘I know endoscopes,’ Croke assured him.

‘We use them a lot for surveillance,’ said the man. ‘They’ll show us everything down there. If you still want to, we’ll have time to take up the floor. If not, we just pull the endoscope back out, plug the hole with filler and bolt the cabinet back in place. No one will ever be the wiser.’

‘Have you got everything you need?’ asked Morgenstern.

The man shrugged. ‘We’ve got a drill in the van, but isn’t long enough. And we don’t have enough cable for our endoscope. This is a very unusual job. But we can get started now and have the necessary extensions here in a couple of hours. That should give us a first look around sunrise, which is about the earliest we could hope to get the heavy cutting and lifting equipment here anyway.’

Croke glanced at Morgenstern. ‘When does this place open tomorrow?’

‘It doesn’t. Not on a Monday. It’s ours all day.’

‘Okay,’ said Croke. ‘Let’s do it.’

Luke and Rachel made their way back to the vault, on the basis that they were far more likely to be overheard if they stayed near the well shaft. They turned off the lamp to save its batteries, then sat in the darkness with their backs to the Emerald Tablet.

‘So how come Newton?’ asked Rachel.

Luke shrugged. ‘He caught my imagination, I suppose.’

‘You’re writing a biography of the man,’ she teased. ‘You’ll need to have something better than that on the blurb.’

Luke laughed. ‘Okay. There’s this story about him I first heard when I was a kid. It’s kind of a nerd’s fantasy. You’ll find this hard to believe, I suspect, but I was a bit of a nerd myself back then.’

Rachel feigned shock. ‘No. Get away with you.’

‘This was 1697 or thereabouts. Newton was in a really bitter dispute with Leibniz over who invented the calculus. They both did, as it happens, but each was convinced the other had stolen the idea from them. The Brits supported Newton. The Europeans backed Leibniz. One of Leibniz’s mates, an Italian called Johann Bernoulli, devised a pair of mathematical puzzles that proved too fiendish for Europe’s top minds to crack, so he came up with a cunning plan. He sent them to Newton, hoping he’d fail too, thus wrecking his reputation for genius. Newton received them after a day at the Royal Mint. The following morning he sent off the answers to the Royal Society. They published them anonymously, but everyone knew. Even Bernoulli. You know what he said? He said: “You can tell the lion by its claw.” I just loved that. I used to daydream people saying it about me. Mind you, I was ten at the time.’ He laughed and tipped his head to the side. ‘Your turn,’ he said. ‘How come archaeology?’

Rachel sighed. ‘I don’t know. I guess it meant something at the time.’ The question seemed to make her restless. She stood and turned on the lamp, took a circuit of the walls.

‘Tweed suits you,’ Luke told her, as she came back around. ‘You’ll make a fine professor.’

‘It itches like you wouldn’t believe,’ she said. Her gaze slid from him to the Emerald Tablet inscription behind him, and then she frowned. ‘How about that?’ she murmured, to herself as much as Luke. ‘An acrostic.’