Stone of Fire: An ARKANE Thriller (Book 1)

Chapter 9

ARKANE Headquarters. London, England.
 May 19, 9.15am

      Jake Timber walked the short distance from Embankment tube station to one of the hidden entrances of ARKANE. It was a nondescript doorway on Duncannon Street next to the Halfway to Heaven pub, a surprisingly appropriate name given what lay beneath. Camouflaged behind famous sculptures and carefully painted, the location of the various entrances was known to only a few. Most visitors would approach the official offices of the ARKANE Institute at the corner of the Strand and St Martin’s Place where there were several floors on the top levels of the building and a semblance of diligent research was demonstrated. The windows could be seen from Trafalgar Square, flanked by Corinthian columns with a balcony topped by a flagpole, the Union Jack flying proudly in the breeze. A second tier of columns sat on the sixth level up from the ground, and it was here the Director of the Institute had his office suite. The public face of ARKANE had to be somewhere appropriate and imposing, but Jake knew it was a smokescreen for what really went on here.
     He remembered when Marietti had first introduced him to the place and explained the history. Started as a purely Christian defense, the Arcane Religious Knowledge And Numinous Experience, or ARKANE, Institute had developed into the world’s most advanced, secret research center for investigating supernatural mysteries across all religions. It had an official face which ran publications and seminars and had experts speak from around the world, but it also had this secret wing that only a few in the top echelons of government knew about. It was called in to investigate when events went beyond the physical, when the police or other agencies needed experts in this unusual field. Their remit was circumscribed by a secret Act of Parliament that meant ARKANE worked above the law of the lands they operated in, hidden by the shadows between what could be proved and that which no one would admit to. In a modern world where ancient faith was now beginning to play an increasingly political role, they were often behind the scenes at the crux of international flash-points.    
    ARKANE were also called in whenever there was a situation that could be called supernatural. The people who worked in the small teams across the globe understood that there are other entities loose in this world, not human, not alien. There is an evil that humans conjure and use against each other even as it stalks their souls. There are words of power that can be used as weapons and a host of unseen things that were better off being denied. Myths that have spanned millennia are based on strands of truth and sometimes the evidence was hidden down here, in the vaults under London that belonged to ARKANE.
     Jake put his eye to the retinal scanner and entered his password into the secure keypad on the elevator entrance. He entered and the elevator descended to the main level of offices below the throngs of tourists heading to Piccadilly Circus. The ARKANE Headquarters was built underneath the crypt of St-Martin-in-the-Fields church and extended right under Trafalgar Square in the heart of London.    
    In its current form Trafalgar Square was designed and completed by Sir Charles Barry in 1845. Barry had been a supporter of ARKANE and included the building of its subterranean tunnels and rooms in his design. The rooms were plotted on maps, stored amongst archives that marked the stolen treasures of kings, and protected as secrets of the realm. With the square constantly watched by cameras and people always present, it was also a secure location for precious artifacts. There was even a tunnel leading straight to No. 10 Downing Street, the British Prime Minister’s residence. In the days when he cared about religious affairs, it was often used for secret meetings and even as a way out away from the reporters permanently camped outside the office. But the entrance had been locked and sealed after the Second World War and now the Prime Minister was in the dark about the occult knowledge they sought and studied.
     Jake walked along the central corridor towards the main research rooms, his thoughts preoccupied with questions about the stones. He was also disturbed about having to work with Morgan Sierra. He was used to working alone or with a team who did as he said, and he had certainly never had to factor in an unpredictable, if highly capable, outsider. In modern times, funded by handsome grants from secret sponsors and the sale of certain precious artifacts, ARKANE’s underground base had been redesigned to be an ultra-modern workplace. Flat screens and laptops sat in all the rooms, centrally placed as the walls were covered with bookshelves. The physical library was spread across the whole place in this way, except for those books that needed special environments or were too precious to be on display. These were held in pressure and temperature controlled vaults but ARKANE was no longer just a fusty library of old books.
     As Jake walked, he looked into the rooms through glass paneled doors. Various teams were working in each, some in lab coats testing strange devices and others, white gloved, poring over manuscripts. He was a field operative but most at the base were researchers, eagerly working down here with their secrets. There was no natural light in the underground section but the lighting had been subtly tuned so it was bright but not fluorescent. On some of the walls were intricate trompe l’oeil paintings, so detailed they looked real. Windows looked out onto the Mediterranean sea or the Pyramids, one was a gabled room view onto the Eiffel Tower, and another a glade with birds and flowers. The rooms had different scents and sounds, surf and sea-spray or birdsong with sage and lavender. Jake knew it had been designed for peak creativity, making the place feel more idyllic than a deep, dark cavern underground where enigmas lurked in corners.
     Martin Klein’s office was one of the tiniest rooms in the ARKANE layout but it was a rare privilege to have an office to himself. He was officially Head Librarian but was considered more like the Brain of the Institute. He was highly intelligent, perceiving patterns where others could see nothing. He created worlds on the walls of his office in colored markers, drawing fantastical creatures and plants, other-worldly scenes of beauty while he pondered the problems of the Institute. Every now and then, the whole office would be painted white and he would begin again on the fresh canvas. His mathematical and data processing ability was considered genius level, but he did not quite understand the subtleties of human interaction. His compulsions may have set him apart in the office, but his ability to figure out how disparate knowledge fitted together was phenomenal and had earned him the affectionate nickname, Spooky.
    Jake knocked on the door of Martin’s office, and made sure the young man was aware he was there before he spoke,
“Hey, Spooky, what you working on?”
     Martin spun around in the desk chair and jumped up, bobbing towards Jake and then retreating back to his desk. He was a tall man with a shock of blond hair, too long for an academic. He couldn’t bear to be touched by a barber, so he roughly chopped it himself with scissors now and then, when hunks of it began falling down over his eyes. His glasses had thin wire rims, the lightest he could stand to have on his skin.     
“Jake, welcome back. What do you need?” he said briskly.
     There was no small talk with Martin: he moved in a linear fashion across the face of the world, he needed a problem to solve and didn’t waste time. Jake liked him and felt a kinship with his loner status. The other ARKANE workers didn’t socialize much with Jake because he worked mainly outside the office, on secret missions for the Director, while they did the real research beneath the teeming city.
     “It’s about the stones of the Apostles and relates to that death in Varanasi you were looking at a few weeks back. I need to know what else you’ve found, and I’ll need your backup from here while we try to retrieve the other stones.”
     Martin sat down at the desk again, tapped out a staccato rhythm on the keyboard and pointed out the data on four monitors arrayed in front of him.
     “After Varanasi, I set the ARKANE search engine into gear on the stones and the Apostles to try and triangulate mentions of them in historical record and myth. These are just some of the results I’m compiling for you with the topography of the regions mentioned. It narrows down the potential search possibilities at least. I’ll have it finished before you leave.”
     The search engine was powerful, unique to ARKANE and had been programmed by Martin himself as one of his first jobs when he was recruited from Cambridge with his Doctorate in Computer Science and Archaeology. Director Marietti had charged him with making sense out of the chaos of data so he had built super character recognition scanners and software, tying texts to multiple translations. He triangulated ancient legends with online maps and images, enabling patterns to emerge from the riot of information. With access to scanned data from all the libraries in the world, his empire was a digital powerhouse of knowledge, untouchable and unfathomable by most people. He drove the system like a well-oiled machine, knowing when to coax and when to use heavy handed programming tactics to get the information he needed. He was always adding more linkages, more ways to find related data, and continuously improving the algorithms. Jake examined the screens, seeing how far the ancient missionaries had roamed in their sacred quest. They had indeed reached the ends of the known earth at the time and there were some new locations that weren’t included in the notebooks they had been given.
“That’s a great start. What about the location of Everett?”
“We have his house under surveillance in Arizona but there’s no sign of Dr Sierra’s family. He has a complicated system of shell companies which the forensic accountants are sifting through. It may be that he’s holding them in a place owned by one of them. Marietti has ordered surveillance only though.”
    Jake understood the stones were the primary objective but he felt an edge of unease that ARKANE was less concerned with the lives of Faye and Gemma Price. Even if the location was found, he knew Marietti wouldn’t authorize their rescue unless the stones had been taken out of circulation. They also needed the leverage to get Morgan Sierra to work with them. What did Marietti see in her?
“I need to find out some other information as well. Can I use the pod?”
     Martin grinned at him. “Sure, go ahead. I just added some new features. I think you’ll like them.”
     Jake stepped over to a device that looked like a tanning booth squashed between Martin’s desk and the back wall. It was a prototype user interface for the vast libraries of digital knowledge that ARKANE held. The environment put people inside a virtual library where they could physically interact with the information. Martin had created it based on the Radcliffe Camera of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but it was actually an old fashioned skin on a highly technical relational database. The user could roam the shelves, pulling various objects out and creating virtual pin boards or files of information. The system would suggest other artifacts or documents in the form of a friendly virtual librarian.
     Jake entered the pod, and pulled the door shut behind him. As the device initialized he was transported to the open space of the Radcliffe Camera, surrounded by stacks of books and a high ceiling that stretched into the dome above. Even the quality of light was softer here, rays of sunlight streaming in from the arched windows. The librarian walked out from behind the stacks. She was the archetype of fantasy, complete with brunette bun and buttoned-up beige cardigan. Jake noticed that her cardigan had a button undone showing just a little more cleavage, no doubt one of Martin’s ‘improvements.’ He addressed her directly.
“I need information on Morgan Sierra, paranormal psychologist and lecturer at Oxford University. What do you have on her?”
     As the librarian accessed the databases, her image flickered. Then she smiled, passing him an old fashioned file that opened up to a full view screen in front of him. He scrolled through the information, flicking through Morgan’s past, displayed in images, documents, even audio and video clips. ARKANE had access to all official records but also shared information with other secret services around the world. He stopped at her record from the Israeli Defense Force. He knew she had served, as all young men and women there are conscripted for military service, but there was more detailed information on her life back then.
    Jake felt a twinge of guilt at looking through her life in this way, but he needed to know what he was dealing with. He saw that Morgan had been funded in her psychology studies by the Defense Force and had specialized in religious fundamentalism. She had headed up a team to try and understand as well as change the hearts and minds of those who hated Israel. It would have been a thankless task. There were also notes about her mental health and physical fitness. It seemed she could look after herself, being proficient in Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art. There were photos of her even competing in national competitions.
    Jake opened the file on the death of Morgan’s husband, Elian, who was killed in active service. It seemed she had been there when he died. Then he swore under his breath to read about her parents. Both were deceased, but her father had been murdered by a suicide bomber on the number 12 bus in downtown Beersheba, Israel. He opened the images. There were devastating shots of body parts strewn amongst metal shards and shopping bags. One picture showed a sack of oranges in bright color as a severed arm reached for them in the foreground. After the incident, Morgan had changed her name back to her father’s Sierra and left Israel for life as an academic. Jake wondered whether the memories of that violence still haunted her, as the death of his own family tormented his endless nights and did it make her an unstable partner? Jake swiped the file into his storage area for later retrieval. A ping sounded and a message flashed in the corner of the screen from Martin. ‘Marietti wants to see you. NOW.’

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