Free The Sacred Scroll by Anton Gill

midnight, a dark Mercedes limo dropped Marlow and Graves at the bright and expensive hotel in the busy tourist district, which they’d chosen precisely because of the crowds and the anonymity.
    ‘Drink?’ asked Graves, motioning towards the bar. She was feeling shaky, the tiredness had caught up with her, but she was trying to digest what Haki had told them, and to second guess what he had in store for them the next day.
    ‘Rooms first,’ said Marlow, keeping the urgency out of his voice. ‘Need to check.’
    Graves collected their laptops from the concierge’s safe and followed him upstairs. They had a suite withbedrooms and bathrooms opening off either side of a large central salon, equipped with all the WiFi and broadband necessary to any tourist or businessman who might stay in this kind of hotel. Graves was about to place the laptops on the coffee table when Marlow stopped her.
    ‘Just a moment,’ he said.
    She watched as he went into his room, returning with a simple extendable metal tape-measure. On the coffee table, on one of the bedside tables, and on the desk which stood under the windows, with their spectacular view over the Sultanahmet Camii and the Sea of Marmara beyond, a number of casually arranged books and magazines lay. Moving swiftly, Marlow measured the exact distances from the edges and corners of the magazines and books to the edges of the surfaces of the tables. After the first three measurements, he relaxed, but that disappeared after he’d worked on the coffee table. He checked again. Then he remeasured the distances on the desk. He stood back.
    ‘Check your room, Laura,’ he told Graves. ‘Carefully.’
    She did as he asked and returned. ‘Nothing missing,’ she said.
    ‘Everything as you left it?’
    ‘Ye-es –’
    His disquiet was beginning to affect her. She wanted to relax. She cast a glance at the mini-bar. ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘The magazines aren’t as I left them,’ he said. ‘A centimetre out of place. We’ve had visitors. And those guys sure as hell weren’t following us just to check we’d be coming back here. Whoever they are, they know about us.’

12
     
    Constantinople, Year of Our Lord 1171
     
    Thirty years before the Fourth Crusade attacked the great city of Constantinople, affairs in Venice were not going well.
    They were not going well for the Venetians who lived in Constantinople either.
    That was why a fleet had been organized in Venice. A war fleet. The doge, Vitale Michele, had divided the city into six districts, the better to raise the taxes needed to pay for it. But where in hell had it all gone wrong? Vitale Michele wondered. They’d had good relations with Constantinople for years. The emperor of the Byzantine Greeks, Manuel, had been westward-leaning and friendly, even when, in the past, his domain had to put up with crusading armies passing through on their way to Jerusalem.
    Recently, he’d been getting ambitious. He was reducing the privileges of the twenty thousand Venetian businessmen who lived in and around Constantinople and favouring instead their rivals from Amalfi, Genoa and Pisa. And he’d taken a huge chunk of the Dalmatian coast from Hungary. It was worrying.
    The crunch had come early in 1171.
    The fourth day of February, the Feast of St Isidore,was always considered an unlucky day for the world. Tradition had it that on that day babies were born without a conscience – people who had no hearts. In the small hours of St Isidore’s Day that year, families in the Genoan community near the Golden Horn were awakened by a commotion in their streets.
    The Genoans clutched each other in their beds, gathering their children to them. There was thunderous hammering at their gates then the splintering of wood and hinges as doors were staved in. Torn howling from their homes, men, women and children were driven into the streets and hacked down by hooded men, heavily built, much bigger than the average Greek, some on horseback, the