THE ACTIUM DECEPTION
By Thomas Davidson
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2008 Thomas Davidson All Rights Reserved
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Aknowledgements
This being my first finished novel, it had many midwives. Mr. Jerry Gross provided helpful suggestions on the early drafts. Ms. Carol Ramsey provided an extraordinary and selfless level of detailed criticism and shaping of the final manuscript. None of this would have worked without her tireless support and incisive assistance. My wife Marilyn, who has read this book more times than I have also deserves more credit than I can express for her suggestions and encouragement.
The Cover Art is entitled Blind-Eyed Rocketry by Leslie Lerner and is used with permission. The glamorous graphics are by Teresa Garcia.
For my Parents and for Mo
This book is published on Kindle and in a few limited print editions. Persons interested in exploring exciting distribution opportunities may contact the author at tomho@nccwildblue.com
Prologue:
The Battle of Actium - 31 BC
The hostage woke. His eyes scanned the cramped confines of his wooden prison, counting the planks and beams that encased him. His hand inched up towards his throat and felt for the golden chain he wore there – wore and never removed – the chain from which hung the greatest secret in the world. It was safe.
He exhaled heavily and stared around his cell as if there might be some avenue of escape he had somehow overlooked before. He let his head fall back against the hard pallet and closed his eyes. Why had his queen not sent for him? She had to be frantic herself. Without the chain and its secret, she would be lost too – Octavian’s slave once this fool’s expedition failed finally. Why?
When he opened his eyes again, he noted the first faint fingers of light blushing through the planking above him. Dawn. He listened as the ship came slowly to life – footfalls from the deck above him and gulls squawking. At length he heard a harsh clatter of boots down the ladder that ran beside his cell. Then the jangling of keys and the turning of a rusted metallic lock. The door swung open, revealing an armed Roman centurion.
“Lord Basicles, the commander wishes to see you.” The soldier turned and Basicles followed him up the narrow ladder to the ship’s weather deck. As he emerged he could hear ropes creaking in their blocks and oars sliding into their locks. Around him sailors cursed, officers bellowed orders, and the wind whistled through the ship’s shrouds and stays. Battle was near.
A figure on the upper deck turned as he noted Basicles and the guard approaching. He handed a roll of charts to a nearby officer and motioned him to step away from the confrontation that was about to occur.
“You will release me, now, Antony!” Basicles demanded.
“I think not,” Antony whispered. “And I would advise you to speak more respectfully and discreetly in my presence.”
“The queen…”
Antony held up his hand. “I know,” he interrupted. “The queen wishes to know where you are and how you fare. I know. She has sent me a long string of messengers through the night.”
“And?” Basicles insisted, his eyes narrowing to venomous slits.
“I have informed her that her half-brother is safe. But I have also informed her that you will sail with us today and that she will not see you until after the battle.”
Basicles swallowed. Antony had explained his reasoning the night before when he had taken Basicles into custody. As all of the senior officers in Antony’s command knew, the real purpose of the impending battle with Octavian was not victory but flight. Antony’s Roman ships and their crews would be sacrificed to buy time so that Cleopatra’s faster Egyptian ships could escape along with those few Roman and Egyptian officers who had been chosen to survive. Antony had taken Basicles hostage to make sure that Cleopatra did not panic and flee before Antony and his officers could join her.
“I have to say,” Antony continued. “She seems genuinely concerned about your well-being – a bit out of character if you ask me. You two wouldn’t be hiding anything from me would you?”
“Nonsense,” Basicles replied. He spoke so quickly and so loud that Antony wondered if perhaps he had stumbled onto something important.
Basicles inhaled deeply. He grasped his own right arm at the wrist lest his hand reach for the chain again. Had he betrayed it already?
Antony might have questioned his hostage longer if he had had the time. But he did not. A trumpet blast from behind him signaled that the first squadron of his fleet had cast off its mooring lines. The low, growling cadence of the ox-hide drum in the leading ship’s belly throbbed across the waves as its banked oars dipped in and out of the still waters. One by one, the other ships came to life – the pulses of their drumbeats synchronized with one another, pounding ever louder and faster and louder and faster.
Beyond the headlands of the gulf, Octavian’s fleet waited. As Antony’s ships formed their battle arc in the open sea, Octavian ordered his ships into a slow retreat. He did this not to flee, but to tire Antony’s oarsmen and to stretch out his line. After about an hour, Octavian’s ships stopped. For a time all was still. Then a plume of flame erupted from the deck of Octavian’s flagship. The fiery ball rose high into the air in a spiraling trail of orange flame and thick sooty smoke. It splashed hissing and steaming into the sea twenty yards from its target, which was the ship just to the starboard of Antony’s flagship. Seconds later, another fireball streaked into the air. This one did not miss, but struck the neighboring ship square amidships, scattering burning pitch across its deck and into the rowers’ stations below.
Basicles watched grimly as the flames engulfed the ship’s sail and rigging. From behind him, a soldier barked the command “Fire!” A massive oak catapult disgorged a salvo of stones against an approaching enemy galley. The stones scuttled across the enemy deck, felling at least twenty soldiers in a shrieking cacophony of splintering bone. As Basicles looked back to congratulate the crew’s marksmanship, an approaching soldier caught his eye.
“Follow me,” the man whispered to him.
“What for?” Basicles demanded impatiently.
“Hurry,” the soldier insisted. “It’s time.”
Basicles obeyed as the soldier turned and raced towards the stern of the ship. At the ship’s rear deck, a throng of soldiers grappled with a heavy line, allowing it to inch down to the sea below. Basicles leaned over the ship’s rail to see a small boat rocking in the waves. Suspended in the air, six feet from the waves, a man dangled from the rope. The sailors in the skiff reached up to pull the man aboard. It was Antony. Two other Roman officers seated in the boat looked about nervously. The boat’s crew pushed off from the flagship and began to row towards a nearby trireme. The trireme was one of the fastest ships in Antony’s fleet and, with its complement of healthy and rested oarsmen, could out-run any of Octavian’s ships. In it Antony would join Cleopatra’s squadron and make his escape to Egypt.
The soldier who had summoned Basicles instructed him to wait. The boat would return soon. Basicles watched anxiously, gnawing at his clenched fist as the little dinghy reached the distant trireme and unloaded its passengers. The crew of the dinghy cast off again and made for the flagship. Basicles urged the rowers on, cheering them as if they were athletes or race horses. But they were already too late.
From behind him, Basicles heard and felt a beam-splitting crash. The ship lurched sharply to port, the violent motion snapping its rigging and throwing Basicles to the deck. As he raised himself, the prow of an enemy galley loomed impossibly close to the starboard rail of the flagship. Catwalks reared up on either side of the enemy ship’s bow then fell, their spiked ends digging into the flagship’s gunwales like the claws into the flanks of a tethered horse. The enemy was about to board.
Basicles drew his sword and backed towards the ship’s port rail. Cohorts of enemy marines hurtled down the catwalks and swarmed the deck. Below, Basicles could hear the shrieks of drowning oarsmen as the ship’s ribs collapsed under the pressure of the enemy hull and the in-rushing sea.
Three enemy marines closed on him. As he turned to parry a javelin thrust, a cold sword-blade pierced his abdomen. The steel split his diaphragm and unstrung his lungs. They would not obey his command to breathe. He stared into the grinning black teeth of the soldier who had done the deed, and who was now forcing his body overboard. He crashed through the ship’s oars and sank into the seawater, still alive. An electric finger of icy brine probed the open gash in his belly as the weight of his armor dragged him down.
He was dying. But maybe, if he could regain the surface, the oarsmen in the dinghy might recognize and recover his body and with it the golden secret that it guarded. He looked up through the water and could see the brightness of the sky above him. He could even see the shadow of the little boat a few feet away. He kicked with his legs and flailed with his arms. The light seemed a bit closer. As he reached out with his hand and kicked again, his shoulder caught hard on an oar blade. He twisted to free himself but the motion only tangled his cloak tighter. He dug his fingers into the fabric and tore at it frantically. It had been close to a minute since he had last drawn breath. He felt for the chain under his tunic. It was safe. He yanked at the tangled fabric, drawing the oar away with his other hand. He felt a sudden release as the cloak came loose, but, after that, his arms and his legs no longer obeyed his mind’s commands. It couldn’t be, he raged to himself. Another few feet were all he needed. Just one more kick. Nothing. He felt himself sinking slowly back into the cold depths of the sea. As the shadows around him deepened, he forgot what he was trying to do and why. Then darkness.
Chapter 1
The 21st Century - Approximately 5 Weeks Ago – The Excavation Site of the Battle of Actium
Deep beneath the waves of the Ionian Sea, beyond the reach of the waning sunlight, the robotic maw of the Swiss-made dredging device pursued its unsleeping harvest among the jagged stone outcroppings. Its hydraulic jets blew silt and sediment up from the sea floor in shallow clouds of broken shell, sand and rust. From time to time its broad mouth would fix upon a loose object and rip it from its resting place, leaving only another cloud of debris in its wake.
From a crevice in the rock face, five feet above the sandy seabed, two dead black eyes set in a petrified skull surveyed the machine’s progress. Beneath the skull’s splendid jawbone flowed a garland of lime-crusted gold and the treasure over which it had stood sentinel for more than two thousand years.
The dredger moved closer, drawn to the surface of the nearby stone. The skull could not retreat from its fastness -- only watch. The machine’s titanium-joined arm paused in its ascent as if it had detected some ancient trace of blood in the water. The mindless mouth turned in a piece towards the crusted mass of the skull and crept tentatively towards its prey. Up the rock surface it climbed closer and closer until, only a few inches away, it veered abruptly to the right. It moved past the skull, higher up and safely away. Then the hydraulic hose below caught on a fragment of stone. The jolt loosened the dredger’s mouth from the rock wall. As it fell writhing through the water, it latched spastically onto the object that dangled from the skull’s jaw. The ancient chain disappeared into the machine gullet. The vortex accelerated the dense stainless steel mouth hard into the outcropping and split the skull from the rock.
The skull was too large for the machine to consume. Its suction lost again, the hose gyrated through the water like a blinded serpent in a slow-motion whipsnap. The mass of hose and armature crashed heavily to the sea floor, sending up a long rooster tail of silt. The skull smashed against a limestone slab on the seabed, cracking open in a hideous silent shriek as it broke away from its powdering jawbone. The treasure it had guarded for so long disappeared into the machine’s metallic throat, returning at last to the world of the living.
Chapter 2
Later that Same Evening
The hooded silhouette of the cobra’s head burst suddenly from the flowing silt. Emily Sinclair gasped and leaped back from the processing tank. After a moment, she let her fingers fall away from her throat as she laughed at her own foolishness. The cobra was not alive. It never had been.
She approached the tank again and reached out to touch the object. She peered at it under her delicately drawn brows. Even covered in silt and lime, the sculpture conveyed the cobra’s grace, poise, and peril with an admirable economy of line. Though only twenty-six, and still a year away from completing her doctorate, Emily was confident that the carving had been the work of a late Hellenistic craftsman of considerable skill. It was almost certainly a relic of the battle of Actium, whose site she was excavating.
She ran her fine tapered fingers down the artifact’s length and gently freed it from the mass of debris in which it was entangled. It was larger and heavier than she had expected it to be and was attached to a heavy metallic strand. What can you be? she wondered to herself as she carried it to her workbench.
Fixing the object onto a jeweler’s stand, she recorded its shape and dimensions in her notebook. It was flat and triangular in shape, almost eight inches tall and about six inches wide at its base. The sculpted cobra’s head formed the object’s apex and was apparently decorative. She could not identify or even guess at the artifact’s function.
As she ran a stream of distilled water over its surfaces, the last of the silt gave way to a crust of calcium and salt against which mere water was useless. She retrieved a bottle of cleaning solution from her supply cabinet and loaded an eyedropper with the powerful chemical, feeling her hand tremble as she positioned the glass tip over the serpent’s right eye. She blew a strand of blond hair out of her face, took a long breath, and allowed two deliberate drops to fall onto the carved head. The chemicals hissed as the serpent’s eye emitted a tiny wisp of chlorine-scented vapor. She ran a light stream of water over the sizzling surface of the snake’s eye, revealing a gleaming green surface of perfect clarity. The cobra’s eye was an emerald.
“Well, I see we have something in common,” she whispered to the serpent as she applied the solvent to its other eye. “Have unworthy men desired you, too?” she inquired in an amused sisterly whisper.
She paused as the second emerald eye flashed through the bubbling foam. She spent the next minute staring into those jeweled eyes like a lover’s. Her breathing grew heavier. Around the emeralds gleamed the unmistakable signature of fine gold. “Won’t Mr. Scrope be pleased,” she mused disdainfully, immediately regretting the invocation of his hateful name.
She applied more of the solvent to the object. With each pass, more and more of the ancient lime crust slipped from the softly gleaming, tawny surface. She paused at every step to assure herself that the chemicals were doing no harm to the artifact. Her caution slowed the process but she could not allow herself to harm this thing. Moment by moment, it revealed an intricately crafted beauty. The attached chain was even slower to clean because the lime had worked its way deep into the spaces between its links. When she finished the last of it, she ran the strand through her fingers, admiring its workmanship and the way the gold shone against her skin. She looked over her shoulder at the doorway. It was closed.
She lifted the chain and pendant and placed it around her neck. She rose to see how the relic looked on her in the mirror on the door, reaching behind her long neck and pulling her hair up behind her head so she could see how the links sat on her softly hollowed collarbones. She let her hair fall and tilted her head down and to the right, then smiled and turned her right leg slightly. The movement raised her heel off the ground, highlighting the lean musculature in her long thigh. She laughed at the gesture. “Eez not for you, darlink,” she told herself in a fake Hungarian accent, and laughed.
She took the artifact off slowly and placed it into a graduated beaker of water to measure its displacement. She recorded the result, then weighed the object on a jeweler’s scale. Applying the same technique that Archimedes had invented millennia earlier, she computed the artifact’s specific gravity. The result astonished her. She repeated the calculations three times before she satisfied herself that she had gotten them right the first time. She leaned back in her chair, staring wide-eyed at the artifact. Every cubic millimeter of it was pure gold.
She took the treasure into her hand and studied its strange triangular shape and the intricate, cryptic carvings on its surfaces. She had never seen anything like it before either in person or in any text.
“What can you be?” she asked the serpent, tilting her head as if it just might answer. She laid the object on a soft black cotton cloth and photographed it from several angles, entering the images into her computer. Then she wrapped it carefully in the same cloth and placed it on the corner of her desk. She would have to deliver it to Mr. Scrope soon, but she wanted her assistant to see it first. The delay, she realized, was a breach of the project’s protocol, but she was sure that Mr. Scrope would be sufficiently impressed with the find to overlook the offense. She was right in one respect. He would be impressed – more so than she could imagine – and grateful too. Then he would have her killed.
Chapter 3
Four Months Earlier
As the polished glass elevator glided silently towards the tower’s pinnacle, Leander Scrope surveyed the mass of tuxedoed and sequined humanity in the great open atrium below him. Sifting through his memories of the evening’s conversations, he could not recall a single interesting or original remark – just the foamy chatter of fashionable opinion borrowed from National Public Radio or the Discovery Channel. He felt a twinge of regret as he reminded himself that he had sponsored the event himself as a benefit for the city’s art museum. He had hosted it as well. The Scrope Tower was his.
It was among the newest office towers in Palm Beach and was the headquarters of his investment-banking firm. The building’s lobby was a cathedral of filtered light and open space. Its ceiling arched two hundred feet above the floor, supported by a forest of soaring columns inspired by the Mosque of Cordoba. They joined one another in their dizzying ascent in intersecting and layered arches rendered in alternating shades of cream and oxblood marble. People sometimes came to the building simply to walk there or to meditate beside the limestone fountain that plashed soothingly in its lobby.
The elevator car in which Scrope was riding slowed then stopped. The geometrically engraved copper doors slid open and Scrope emerged into the granite-lined reception area of his firm’s offices. He touched the palm of his hand to a glass screen. A bar of blue light passed across the screen and a gentle click above the thick glass doors signaled that access to the interior of the complex had been granted.
He stepped inside and walked across the soft charcoal carpeting until he reached his own office. The door was locked. He removed a card from his pocket, swiped it through the recognition panel, and went in. The room’s optical and heat-sensory devices responded to his presence and triggered a bath of diffused light from alcoves in the ceiling.
Scrope entered the private lavatory that adjoined his office and removed the golden studs from his shirt front and the matching cuff-links from his sleeves. He tossed the shirt and the rest of the tuxedo into a laundry bin and paused for a moment to inspect his body in the mirror.
He was not a tall man, standing only five-ten, but the deficit in his height was well compensated by the breadth of his shoulders and the musculature of his chest. His face was narrow, with a fine chiseled nose. High hollow cheeks framed pale blue eyes under black downturned brows. His lips were thin and nearly colorless. He wore his gray-flecked brown hair somewhat long, brushed back from the temples and forehead to emphasize its continued vigor. The only prominent lines on his face formed at the confluence of his brows and provided him an expression of habitual inquiry. The smooth flesh around his mouth and nose revealed nothing. Even at fifty-six, his were a face and a frame that a woman, or even another man, might enjoy. In the last fifteen years, none had.
He stepped into the shower stall and turned the steam regulator to one hundred and twenty degrees. He sat on the teak bench and waited for the hot mist that was even now hissing out of the regulator to do its work. After evenings like these, he believed that a thorough cleansing of his pores was helpful.
The steam lasted for twenty minutes. He followed it with a cold shower, then dried himself and dressed in a lightweight tan poplin suit. Looking at his watch, he saw that he still had a few minutes before he would have to leave for his midnight flight. He went to his desk. The office was modern, with most of its fixtures and furnishings of recent Italian or Brazilian design. A cobalt blue leather sofa from Milan stretched stiletto-thin across the room’s east wall, flanked by brushed stainless steel end tables. A pair of serpentine bocote chairs faced the desk in the room’s center. The desk was the only antique in the room – a good specimen of 18th century Philadelphia craftsmanship. It had belonged to Scrope’s father, an oil painting of whom hung over the credenza behind Scrope’s claret leather chair.
The portrait was better than most that one sees in corporate settings. It had been painted by a real artist for one thing – and by one who had found his subject worthy of his skills. A viewer’s eye was usually drawn first to the shock of wild white hair that crowned the image’s forehead. From there it might be caught by some feature or another in the face or clothing, perhaps the black velvet patch that covered the left eye. Inevitably, though, it would be fixed on the surviving ice-blue eye that peered down out of the frame. It was not a serene image.
Thirty-five years ago the painting had been famous in south Florida. It had been the picture that the local newspapers had published in connection with the elder Scrope’s suicide and his murder of most of his family. The sight of the painting on display in a public space in succeeding years would have inspired curiosity, if not scandal, to anyone familiar with the Scrope family’s history. But that was then. It had been many years since anyone had asked Scrope about the portrait. Most visitors were unaware of the elder Scrope’s identity, much less his history. If the subject ever came up, Scrope would explain that he kept the portrait because the man had been his father and to remind himself of the blood from which he had come.
Scrope sat at his desk and sifted through the envelopes and packets arrayed there. He did not have to open any of them to know that they could wait until he returned from his trip. One manila envelope, however, caught his attention. The neat block lettering on its face and the absence of a return address identified its sender. Scrope smiled hungrily as he reached for it.
He slit the envelope open and removed a cluster of newspaper clippings, a copy of a credit report, and a file from an employment agency. All of the articles and documents concerned a woman named Miranda Collins. Her husband, Mark Collins, formerly an attorney with the New York law firm of Hemingway & Cole, had been arrested four years earlier on drug charges. After a long and publicized trial that consumed not only his fortune but his soul, Collins had been convicted and sent to a federal prison for what would be, in effect, a life term. He had, in fact, been innocent of the charges. Scrope knew this because his own agents had planted the evidence that had framed him.
While Mrs. Collins’ art history degree from Wellesley had been appropriate for the wife of a Manhattan attorney, it had not prepared her to compete in the New York job market. Her attempts to find employment had been unsuccessful and humiliating. Her name no longer opened doors and her resume was thin. As her credit report showed, she had accumulated debts that she had no means to repay.
Her suicide had been reported in an article from the Times’ inside pages. The story refreshed the public’s memory on the details of her husband’s drug conviction and listed her survivors, including her father, Stanton Parker, who had served as a United States attorney during the Nixon administration and who was now retired in Boston. He had been among the federal lawyers who had prosecuted Scrope’s father in the early nineteen-seventies.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the victim of a correct act of vengeance had to know why he was suffering and at whose hands. Scrope thought that Hobbes had been mistaken on both counts. Not only mistaken, but self-indulgent. Was it not better to deny one’s victims closure? Consider old Parker. His son had died three years earlier – drunk at the wheel of a stolen car. His daughter was a bankrupt suicide. Scrope was sure that Parker blamed himself for both tragedies. Self-blame was the type of thing that enlightened parents did in response to their children’s failures. The old man would no doubt spend his remaining days wondering what he might have done to raise his children better. Meanwhile his seed had been extinguished.
Over the years, Scrope had dealt similarly with the other men who had been complicit in his father’s and his family’s destruction. He never harmed the offenders directly, choosing instead to ruin their families and their children. He saw no point in providing his father’s persecutors the swift oblivion that death afforded, preferring instead to feed them years of grief by the spoonful.
After re-reading the newspaper article, Scrope reached his hand into the water goblet on his desk and sprinkled a few drops onto the clipping, watching as the paper drank up the fluid. He held the damp newsprint under his nostrils and inhaled the moldy aroma. He closed his eyes, remembering the scent of another wet newspaper: the October 15th, 1973 London edition of International Herald Tribune, in which he had first read the news of his father’s suicide and massacre of his family. He took a second and longer breath and lingered for nearly a minute in the re-created grief and rage of that London hotel room thirty-five years ago.
It had been his secret – that day. For while the facts of the crime were published in papers and tabloids, the truth could never be. The truth was his own – the truth that only the survivor could know and never communicate. It was not a thing to be talked about. At first that had been because no one wanted to hear it. They just wanted him to go away, or if he didn’t go away at least to be silent. Later, some seemed to want to know, to hear – or at least to be among those he might think interested, who might profit from his illusion. But what had he to share with such others? Would he share with them anything? His memories of his sister – dead now these many decades? She had been older than he. When he was very small, she would sometimes buy him outfits with her allowance. On his birthdays she would give him a card she had made by hand and sometimes a cup cake she had baked. It had been near forty birthdays since then. He touched his fingers to the damp newsprint again. He knew he would never speak of any of it to anyone except to his own memory.
He put the articles and reports back into the manila envelope and tossed them all into the receptacle for papers to be shredded. This file was closed and now best forgotten. The word “file” reminded him of another item on his agenda. He activated his computer screen and checked his e-mail. Twelve messages solicited his attention. Eleven could be deferred. The twelfth could not. Scrope had been waiting for this one for some time. It was from Wallace. Scrope clicked on the message and waited for the encryption software to complete its work. Then the message appeared.
The item is, as you suggested, of Macedonian origin. Analysis of a sample from the sword hilt indicates that the gold was mined and refined in northern Greece using techniques that were abandoned in late antiquity. Given the location where the divers located this sword hilt, it was almost certainly lost at the Battle of Actium and belonged to a very high-born Macedonian-Egyptian officer. How many of them could there have been at the battle and how many would have died there? There is one other item that will be of interest to you. The ocean floor where this sword hilt was found is extremely deep and is characterized by large rock outcroppings. Any heavy object that fell into this environment even two thousand years ago would likely not have moved from its original resting place. Unfortunately, the site is in Greek territorial waters, which will inhibit any underwater search. To complicate matters further, there is an underwater archeological expedition underway at the Actium site. I am not comfortable with the idea of informed and educated spectators to any search we might undertake, assuming we can get the Greeks to allow it in the first place. I will brief you in greater detail when we meet next week.
Scrope smiled as he re-read the message. Its implications were stunning, in the literal sense that he was unable to comprehend them in a piece. Until now, he had been constrained by circumstances to confine his vengeance to the individual actors who had contributed to his family’s destruction. Only now had he obtained the means to strike at the power in whose name they had acted – America herself.
Chapter 4
Scrope’s jet streaked out of Russian airspace just after 10:00 in the morning local time. It would land in Damascus two hours later. He took a sip of the strong Jamaican coffee from the sapphire-and-cream-colored Limoges cup on his tray and peered through the aircraft’s window at the landscape below. It stretched flat and brown to the horizon, laced with the lighter tan ribbons of the roads and the dried riverbeds of the Turkish steppe. From the shadows on the terrain and the intersections of the roads he could make out the locations of a handful of villages or farms. Far in the distance gray-green mountains rose, their peaks hidden in clouds and fingers of snow. The land looked as ancient as it was.
As his plane sped through the thin blue air, Scrope noticed another aircraft vectoring towards his own on an interception course. He watched as the other plane drew alongside his own until it was so near that the two planes’ wingtips nearly touched. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the strange plane banked sharply to the left and soared high and out of sight. An hour later it would land in Ankara and a man answering Scrope’s description and furnished with papers identifying him as Scrope would deplane, check into an Ankara hotel, make a half dozen telephone calls, and attend an investor’s conference for a Turkish steel manufacturer. There would be no official record of Scrope ever flying to Damascus that day or any other.
As the plane bearing his impersonator disappeared, Scrope took another long sip of coffee, then turned in his sculptured leather seat and opened a red calfskin folio on the tabletop to his right. He had reviewed the folio’s contents earlier in the flight but decided to do so again now. There were no flaws in the dossier and no corrections to make or issues to resolve. That was why Scrope wanted to read it again. It was a perfect example of its kind and he admired its craftsmanship. He had been very fortunate to recruit the document’s author, Benjamin Wallace. In the months to come he would need his services as never before.