The Sacred Scroll by Anton Gill Read Free Book Online Page A

owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasìab
.’
    ‘But what has all this to do with us? And what’s the connection with these missing archaeologists?’ asked Graves.
    ‘That’s what we’ve got to find out. But I told you – Dandolo was after something more.’
    ‘World domination? Again?’ Her tone was bordering on sarcastic.
    ‘Why not? He was one of the first to see beyond Europe and Asia. He knew – somehow – that the world was bigger than that.’
    Graves paused, not able to believe it. ‘You mean the Americas? But he lived nearly three hundred years before Columbus!’
    ‘It’s exactly what I mean.’
    She shook her head. ‘But where are you going with this? You haven’t answered my question about how he diverted the Crusade.’
    ‘That’s crucial. Dandolo must have had a means – a surefire means – of holding on to all the power he wanted, and the
way to get it
.’
    ‘Is that what –?’
    ‘How do you think he managed to control and divert a whole crusading army to suit his purposes? It wasn’t just economic leverage. So –
what power did he have over them
?’
    ‘So what now?’
    ‘Get Leon in here. I don’t care if he’s finished or not.’

8
     
    ‘Let’s go over what we’ve got,’ Marlow said fifteen minutes later. Laura?’
    ‘Taylor and Adkins are both married men in their forties, and research fellows at Yale University. They started their research in Venice back in 2004 – the year of the eight hundredth anniversary of the Fourth Crusade. The project was joint-funded by Yale and Venice universities. Su-Lin de Montferrat is the 33-year-old daughter of an Italian father and a Chinese mother who’d been resident in Genoa for years, but who died within days of each other five years ago. We need more on Su-Lin, but she’d been a senior research student at the time she was co-opted from research in Venice to the Dandolo Project. With a bursary from MAXPHIL – which was also the main sponsor of the dig.’
    ‘And MAXPHIL is the philanthropic arm of MAXTEL.’
    They all knew about MAXTEL. Everyone did. MAXTEL was a household name.
    ‘The guy who runs it is Rolf Adler. He was born in Cottbus, in what was East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, in 1959,’ said Marlow, scanning through a secure file on his terminal.
    ‘Tough town,’ remarked Lopez, remembering a rare field trip he’d made there years ago. ‘Remember?’
    ‘Don’t live in the past, my friend,’ said Marlow, but he remembered too. That time, Lopez had saved his life. He turned from the computer and rapidly went on, not needing to refer to notes. ‘MAXTEL was founded in 1991, so Adler didn’t waste any time after Germany was reunited. He got some capital together and started selling reconditioned TV and radio equipment, then went into cars, Mercs and BMWs mainly, then branched into the media. Started a small local radio station in 1992, but Cottbus isn’t that far south of Berlin, so he had access to a biggish audience – if anyone was interested in what he was pumping out.’
    ‘What was he pumping out?’ asked Graves.
    ‘Western pop, pretty old stuff, and some soft-political right-wing material – nothing Nazi, but some people thought there might be undertones. That’s when the first files on MAXTEL were opened.’
    ‘Where’d he get his money?’ asked Graves.
    Marlow shrugged. ‘Basket of backers. Some pointers to the Russian mafia. Kept its head down when Gorbachev was in power, but grew a little bolder under Yeltsin. The rest is history.’
    ‘Any proven connection?’ Lopez pursued.
    Marlow shrugged again. ‘Adler was already wealthy by the mid-nineties, and he was one of the first East Germans to put investment feelers out towards the West. He was never one of the true in-crowd, but no one could accuse him of not being pushy.’
    ‘I remember working on this,’ said Graves. ‘He went from strength to strength to strength but kept his sheet clean. By the end of the