Tom Knox - The Marks of Cain

2:58

2:59

3:00

There was no sign of him. David glanced warily at the station clock.

3:02

3:03

3:04

Angus was by his side, saying nothing — for once. The tension evident in his face. Amy looked pensive to the point of depression.

What did she know? She had been noticeably different since they landed in Amsterdam and made their way across Germany, to Nuremburg Station where they had agreed to meet Simon. Why? Maybe she now suspected he was Cagot, or maybe she was merely reacting to his changed mood, his sudden intense anxiety. His distant chilliness, his violent moodswings, as he ransacked himself for answers or solace or quiescence.

He'd stopped making love to her. He couldn't do it any more. Once they had been rough, playful, sharply passionate. And now? He could see himself biting her, that white female flesh, and drawing blood.

It was an abyss, and he had to look into it, he had to reach far inside his soul, to get a hold of his essential self. Because he needed his last reserves of equanimity, for the crucial hours ahead. The crucial days, the crucial minutes.

3:07

3:08

3:09

Maybe Simon wasn't coming. They had sent one email from Amsterdam, and had got one quickly in return: Yes.

There had also been one other email in David's inbox, a very surprising email — from Frank Antonescu. His granddad's old lawyer in Phoenix had been doing some research of his own, and, through a contact at the IRS — who apparently owed him a favour — had eventually, 'after a lot of grafting and grifting!' worked out where the money came from.

The Catholic church.

The money was, Antonescu wrote, 'Paid not just to your grandfather but to a number of people immediately after the war. It was known as "Gurs money". I have no idea why. The fellow at the IRS was similarly mystified.'

So that was another joist of an answer — in the rising structure of a solution. But the full edifice would only be revealed when they got to Zbiroh. And found the Fischer results.

3:16

3:17

3:18

Was Simon ever coming? Maybe something terrible had happened to him. Maybe Miguel had got there first.

'There!' said Amy.

A slightly scruffy, breathless, freckled, fair-haired man of about forty came running along the concourse. He stared at Amy and David -

'David Martinez!'

'Simon Quinn?'

The older man, the Irish journalist, glanced at the three of them, and smiled, shyly.

'You must be Amy. And you…'

'Angus Nairn.'

Hands were shaken, formal introductions made. But then David and Simon looked long and hard at each other and the absurdity of their formality became apparent to both of them — at the same time.

They hugged. David embraced this man he had never met — like a lost brother. Or like the sibling he'd never had.

And then the tension, the spiralling terror of the situation, recrudesced. Amy reminded them, as she had reminded them repeatedly for the last three days:

'Miguel is still after us…'

Amy's fear of Miguel seemed to have grown since they fled Namibia. And maybe, David surmised, that was adding to her depression. The relentlessness of their pursuer was destroying her will. Perhaps she was actually resigned to Miguel's triumph. He always found them in the end; maybe the Wolf would find them this time, and finish the job.

Unless they got to the data first.

They went quickly to the hire car.

Angus was in charge of the map. He directed them out of the suburbs of Nuremburg, into the undulating countryside, and onto the Czech border. As they went, Simon confessed: he told them of his brother being held by the Society. Kidnapped and brutalized.

Even from the driver's seat, David could see the grief in Simon's eyes. The grief — and the guilt. No one spoke for a good few minutes when Simon finished his confession. The fate of this man, Tim, was also in their hands.

It was too much.

The frontier approached. The old Iron Curtain. In nearby fields, useless and rusting, stood derelict watchtowers and old coils of barbed wire. But the contemporary border was just one bright glass office — entirely empty. They didn't even have to show passports.

Simon spoke:

'Why Nuremburg? Why meet there?'

Angus explained that they wanted to convene in a big anonymous city, across the border from the Czech Republic. To confuse anyone who might be following.

Simon nodded.

'And this castle?'

'The map shows it's in a town called Zbiroh. But the entrance is two miles away, a little village called Pskov. Some kind of tunnel. The tunnel itself leads from a synagogue in Pskov.'

Again Simon nodded. His demeanour was enormously subdued.

They drove on. The Czech side of the border was a notable change from the German prosperity next door. Everything was a little more hunched, grubby, and humble. And the road to Plzen was lined with thirty-something women in tiny skirts and blonde wigs.

Angus explained:

'Prostitutes.'

'Sorry?'

'Came here for a conference a few years back, in Prague. The women here are working girls…the punters come over from Germany. Truck drivers and businessmen. They also sell gnomes.'

Amy queried this: 'Gnomes?'

The Scotsman pointed at a shop by the road. An entire rank of garishly painted garden gnomes was set up in front of the store.

'Because of some tax law, the gnomes are cheaper here, so again the Germans come over. For hookers and gnomes!'

He laughed drily. No one else laughed. But David was glad that Angus was laughing. The Scot was the only one amongst them who seemed to possess any positive energy, any real optimism. His intellectual need to know the Fischer results, his sheer curiosity, his selfish desire to know if he'd been right, was — rather ironically — keeping them all going.

But soon the car was silent, once more, as they sped along the motorway to Plzen. Angus had the map on his lap. Thick forests encroached. The drizzle was turning into proper rain.

'OK,' said Angus. 'Enough fucking brooding. Let's do something. Let's help Simon! Tell him the story so far. Poor guy's a freelance hack, he needs a story, to help with the mortgage. Let's pool everything we know.'

The mood in the car was so tense, so depressive, so frightened, David welcomed this impulsive idea. Talk. Just talk. Talk about anything. So they did: as David drove, they put together every segment of the puzzle, each adding their portion to the pot. And as they discussed, Simon scribbled in his notebook.

Then the journalist sat back. His voice was cracked with emotion, but at least he was managing to speak.

'OK. This is, ah, how I see it. What we know so far.'

David felt the flutter of his own anguish; he had an absurd fear that Simon would turn and point to him, and say You, of course, are a Cagot.

Simon began.

'The beginnings of the mystery go back three thousand years, when the Bible was being written in Babylon. At various places in the Book of Genesis, there are passages which hint at human beings other than Adam and Eve.'

Amy was staring out of the window. Looking at the cars behind and ahead, with anxious intent. Looking for red cars, maybe.

Simon went on:

'The problems caused by these insidious Biblical hints have always been with us. But they truly came to a head, in Christendom, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the persecutions of the Basques and the Cagots.'

He glanced at Angus. Then went on:

'The Basques are truly a breed apart, with a unique language, culture and society, unusual blood type, and so forth. Their race possibly dates back to pre-Indo-European times — 30,000 BC. They have long suffered persecution for being…different. These persecutions peaked with the witch burnings of 1610–1611, the so-called Basque Dream Epidemic.'