Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

I crossed myself. ‘This secret is too great to hazard to inheritance. If any of us dies, he will take it to his grave.’

This agitated him. ‘What of my wife? She must get something if I die. Am I to mortgage her widowhood?’

‘A merchant who invests in a voyage cannot reclaim his capital while the ship is at sea. Any money you put in must remain with the partnership until it is completed.’

He sighed, his face grey with defeat. I clapped him on the shoulder and tried to feign enthusiasm. ‘Forget this talk of death. In two years’ time you will laugh that you ever doubted me.’

I stood at the gate and watched him wander down the road, a sad and haggard man. Had I reduced him to this state? Lost in the labyrinth of my schemes and my debts, I could no longer tell if I was his benefactor or his nemesis.

‘Did he bite?’

Kaspar walked out of the barn. His sleeves were pulled up, and a round welt shone on his palm from pushing the engraving tool into the metal.

‘He’ll pay.’

‘Then why so sad?’

Kaspar reached out to stroke my cheek. But my dealing with Dritzehn had left me in a solitary mood. I turned away.

‘What has come over you? You are so morose: you trudge around as if all the world was piled on your shoulders.’

‘Perhaps it is the weight of the gold I owe.’

‘Do you remember the old times? You were a much more interesting man then. Before this obsession with gold and loans and debt. You were an artist; now you are a money-changer.’

‘Finance is as much part of this art as lead or ink or copper,’ I snapped. ‘It is the size of this enterprise which justifies it. You want to create things of rare and novel beauty – and no man is better at it. But for this art, the beauty comes from its scale. A drop of water is nothing, but a river is majestic. An ocean is unfathomable.’

‘Have you ever looked at a drop of water? Suspended from a branch on a sunlit morning, the whole world reflected in its orb – stretching as the bough shakes, not knowing if it will cling on or fall and disappear into the earth. That is beautiful.’

‘If I could do this work for nothing and give it away for free, I would. But you have seen how the costs pile up on each other – and we are not nearly finished yet.’

‘Either beauty is present or it is not.’ Kaspar and I were in different conversations. ‘If you print one indulgence, or cast one mirror, it is what it is. Whether it is unique or there are a thousand others the same, it does not matter.’

‘What about gold? Are a thousand gulden more beautiful than a single coin?’

‘They are to you.’

Two months later, Andreas Dritzehn died.

Strasbourg

The hotel provided free Internet access in the room. Nick spent ten minutes lying on the bed and staring at the wall socket, fighting the temptation like a saint. After a week offline he felt as though he’d lost a limb; he was desperate to reconnect. But the men who were chasing him seemed to have an almost telepathic ability to trace his movements. Could he risk it?

The Internet was a vast and deafening conversation; Nick’s presence would be a whisper in comparison. And he knew a few tricks. Tingling with doubt, he swung himself off the bed and plugged in his laptop.

Working in digital forensics had made him paranoid about safety. First he cleared all the stored history in his web browser – anything that might inadvertently check in with a site he’d used before and betray him. Then he made his computer a citadel. He threw up a firewall around it and closed all the ports except one, so that all traffic had to pass through a single well-guarded gateway. Like all walls, it was as much about what was kept in as what was kept out. Inside, his antivirus patrolled the corridors and courtyards of the fortress, vigilant to any hint of suspicious activity. It wasn’t a frontal attack he feared but spies.

Now to venture out. He connected to the Internet and immediately went to a website which styled itself an anonymiser. It was the sort of thing popular with perverts, criminals and conspiracy nuts, but it had its legitimate uses. Borrowing a metaphor, Nick thought of it as an invisibility cloak, a way of sneaking around the Web without leaving any trace of who you were or where you’d come from.

Even with all his defences up he still felt nervous – like sneaking down to the living room in the middle of the night to explore his father’s liquor cabinet. Every page he loaded felt like a floorboard waiting to squeak. Gradually, though, the flow of information closed around him. He forgot the dangers and was swept along on currents of knowledge, following connections as they branched all around him.

He began with the kings of Israel and found little beyond a series of names that were at first familiar and quickly became obscure: David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijam, all the way through to Zedekiah. The online encyclopedias provided a lot of regurgitated Bible history, but nothing that looked relevant.

Next he moved on to the Sayings of the Kings of Israel. That brought a run of information that quickened his pulse. The Sayings of the Kings of Israel was a work casually referenced in the Book of Chronicles. Click. 2 Chronicles 33:18: ‘The rest of the acts of King Manasses, his prayer to his God, and the words of the seers who spoke to him, these are recorded in the Sayings of the Kings of Israel.’ Click. These sorts of references were scattered through the Old Testament, throwaway clues to other books that might once have existed but now only remained as ghosts to taunt scholars. Click. Like Sherlock Holmes adventures alluded to by Dr Watson but never written by Conan Doyle. Click. The case of the politician, the light-house and the trained cormorant.

Nick realised he’d reached a dead end. He backtracked and went down a different path, picking up on another keyword, Manasses. Sixteenth king of Israel. Apostate who was captured and taken to Babylon, but who was restored to his kingdom when he repented and returned to God. Click. Prayer of. Although the Sayings of the Kings of Israel had been lost (if it ever existed), someone around the first century AD had taken it on themselves to invent Manasses’ prayer of repentance and pass it off as the original. A sort of fan fiction. It was a fake, but a fake so old it had acquired its own value. It was now included in the Bible as part of the Apocrypha.

Click back to the Bible. ‘I am weighted down with many an iron fetter, so that I am rejected by my sins and I have no relief.’

I know how you feel, Nick thought.

Finally, he went back to Gillian’s homepage. He knew it was risky, but he had to look.

GILLIAN LOCKHART

is in mortal peril

(last updated 02 January 11:54:56)

It hadn’t changed; she hadn’t been back. He looked at the images again, his own absence, and cringed as he thought of the photo in his wallet. He went back to the billboard, just in case.

There was one new comment.

Are you safe? Did you find it? Please call me. I have a new number: www.jerseypaints.co.nz

(posted by Olaf, 11 January 17:18:44)

Nick read the message three times over. He checked the date on his watch. Two days ago. Caution told him he shouldn’t go further; it was a trap. He shouldn’t even be online. But he couldn’t resist.

A new page appeared on screen: a picture of a rainbow-striped cow standing on a ladder, wielding a paintbrush and grinning. ‘Home and industrial paint solutions.’ There was a phone number prefaced by what Nick assumed was a New Zealand area code, and a couple of testimonials from satisfied customers. There was no mention of anyone called Olaf.