Blood on the Temple Floor

By Pamela Lamb

When Martin is captured by Islamic State terrorists, Zoe travels to Syria to rescue him. It is a race against time as Martin’s kidnappers will wait only so long before they eliminate him. Thrust into the middle of a brutal civil war, Zoe finds it difficult to tell friend from foe. With time ticking away, she is forced to accept help from an unlikely source. Zoe’s ordeal does not end with Martin’s rescue. Because, with no money or ID, how will they find their way home to Australia?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pamela Lamb
• Release date: Jan 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370731855

Pamela Lamb

Must ... stop ... writing ... Sometimes I really wish I could. It gets in the way of real life. At the weekend I prefer sitting in front of the computer with my pretend friends instead of going out with my real ones. It destroys my sleep. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night knowing I need to change one word in the paragraph I wrote the evening before - and I have to get up and do it. And it makes me a dangerous driver. Get me on the road and my characters start having conversations in my head. And why are they so much more lucid and logical then than when I attempt to scribble them down at the next red light?I write because I love language. I love English with its collection of mongrel words. It's like an enormous button box where you can pick between half a dozen languages each one of which holds the history of Britain at its heart. I love the shape of words and the sound of them. I love what you can make them do on the page. And what you can make them do to your readers. Laugh, cry, stay up at night.What I like best is having a conversation with a reader about one of my characters. The reader talks about my character as if s/he is a real person. Discusses the character's motivation. Speculates about what the character did after the end of the novel. And I think, but it's all made up. Every bit of it. Out of my head.Then I know it is all worthwhile. Bringing characters alive to walk on the page. Creating a world for them to live in. Immersing myself in the shape and rhythm of a novel in the making. It's exciting stuff. And it's even more exciting when the book is finished and I hand it over to you, the reader. Enjoy!

Book preview

Blood on the Temple Floor

Pamela Lamb

Published by Agneau Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2017 Pamela Lamb

Discover other titles by Pamela Lamb at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/pamelalamb

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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The story so far ...

Zoe Carter is a helicopter pilot working for the environmental organisation Brightsward. She was born to a hippie mother and an unknown father and was raised by her grandparents in Bowen, a sugar town in north Queensland. She spent the early part of her career in Australia’s Top End. She and her partner Martin Christian, an ancient history scholar, live on Darlington Station in the Kimberley which Brightsward is developing as a nature sanctuary and tourist destination.

After a fire that destroyed his New York house, Brightsward’s CEO Eric Van Eps and his granddaughter Madeleine now live and work in Queensland. They divide their time between Brisbane and a sheep station near Quilpie in the far west of the state where Eric lives with his manservant and friend Johannes Brecht.

Blood on the Temple Floor is the fourth book about Zoe Carter. The first three are: Blood on the Snow, Blood in the Dust and Blood in the Water.

Chapter One

May 2015

The body lies in a pool of blood on the uneven stone pavement of a temple forecourt. In the background, broken columns stand against a blazing sky. I know who it is. Dr Al-Karim Wasin Khoury, Director of Antiquities at the National Museum of Damascus. My boy-friend’s boss. And I don’t need the line of masked figures and the ominous black flag to know who killed him. ISIS. Islamic State. Daesh. Call it what you like. Whichever name you use, it makes my blood run cold. It has done ever since Martin went off to the other side of the world to save bits of ancient stone, leaving his baby daughter behind. With me.

I stare at the tiny image on my phone until the screen goes blank. It is six o’clock on an autumn morning in outback Queensland. Grey dawn, the harsh cry of a bird eager to begin another baking day, the clink of the dog’s chain on the veranda outside my bedroom window. I roll from my back onto one elbow, the phone grasped in a hand greasy with sweat. I jab my finger on the screen to reactivate it and scroll down to see if there is a message from Martin. The image has come from his phone and it is the time of day he makes his calls when he can. Early morning here, just before bedtime wherever he is in Syria. It’s why I keep the phone under my pillow night after night. So I won’t miss his call.

But there is nothing. Nothing at all.

I use my finger and thumb to enlarge the image and take in the details. The body, an old man in pale-coloured Western clothes flat out on the stone pavement, his head a mess of blood and bone. Six men in dark fatigues standing behind him, legs straddled, guns held across their chests, their faces covered with black masks. The IS flag with its white scrawl of Arabic writing held up by the two in the middle. It is a familiar enough image, seen night after night on the TV News until the media decided - or were told - they were doing the jihadi’s propaganda for them. But this ... this is different.

Heart pounding, I push myself upright and swing my legs over the side of the bed. Bare feet on wooden boards gritty with dirt, the bedroom door wrenched open, the kitchen light yellow in the gloom of the hall. In the kitchen, Johannes, immaculate in his chosen uniform of khaki shorts and shirt, is shovelling cereal into my daughter’s mouth. As I enter the room both stop what they are doing. Their heads swivel in my direction, as if I am interrupting some secret activity they don’t want me to know about.

‘Coffee’s on the stove.’ says Johannes. And then, ‘What’s up, Zoe?’

I sit at the table and push the phone in his direction. He shoves in another spoonful, then gets up to fetch my coffee. He picks up the phone and squints awkwardly at the screen. Johannes is not a fan of new technology.

‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

He hands the phone back to me and I thumb my way through to the photo. He is standing behind me, his big hand on my shoulder and I pass the phone up to him.

A short silence, then, ‘From Martin?’

‘From Martin’s phone.’

‘What are you saying?’

My reply is silenced by the sound of an incoming message. I grab the phone from Johannes. This time it is Martin’s image filling the screen. Martin’s head, mercifully still on his body, against the same backdrop of broken pillars and brilliant blue sky. And a message.

Stay by your phone and wait for instructions.

I stare up at Johannes. ‘He’s been kidnapped.’

It was a stupid idea right from the beginning except that, at the beginning, nobody knew how bad things were going to get. Last year when IS declared its caliphate in Syria and Iraq, Martin and I were living in Brisbane, having been driven from our home on Darlington Station by the wretched and prolonged illness I suffered in the months before our daughter’s birth. Martin was an ancient history scholar and his immediate concern was less for the poor souls being beheaded or sold into slavery, than for the antiquities which the terrorists vowed to destroy as idolatrous or sell on the black market to finance their activities. When he was contacted by UNESCO and offered a position on a team that would document the ancient monuments under threat in Syria he jumped at the chance. I didn’t blame him. There wasn’t anything to keep him at home.

By then our daughter had been born. We named her April - or rather Martin suggested the name and I didn’t care one way or the other. April’s difficult birth had plunged me into a pit of misery from which I could do nothing to extricate myself. I was a helicopter pilot and, through Brightsward, an active environmentalist - had been for years - and I found it hard to accept that I couldn’t do something other, more ordinary, women did every day. Produce a child without being ill for half a year and then cut open by someone I didn’t know. She was the first new-born baby I’d ever seen and, when the nurse held her up over the blue screen, I was in no mood to be impressed by what I saw. A long, pale, unattractive child with dark, impassive eyes that seemed too old for her face.

Right from the start April wanted to have nothing to do with me. I don’t know why. Maybe she was as glad to be out of me as I was to get her out. All I know is she yelled when I picked her up, yelled when I fed her, yelled when I laid her back down. The only time she stopped yelling was when she was lying in her father’s arms practicing her trade of wrapping him around her little finger.

After Martin left, I packed up the Indooroopilly house and moved to Quilpie where Johannes added another skill to what was already an impressive list: manservant, friend and business partner to Eric Van Eps; manager of the vast Quilpie station; and now nursemaid and best friend to a tiny, angry child who didn’t know where her daddy had gone.

Johannes wiped April’s mouth with a quick swipe of her bib, enclosed her body with his big hands and pulled her out of the high chair. He sat her on the kitchen floor and straightened up.

‘I’d better get Eric.’

April flipped herself expertly onto her hands and knees and crawled rapidly to where I sat at the table. She pulled herself upright against my legs and stared at me with Martin’s eyes, surrounded by thick black lashes that came from who knows where.

The phone beeped again.

Another image of Martin, this time in some dark space. A light was shining on his face showing black shadows under eyes that were eloquent with fear and exhaustion.

The message said: $5M US.

I looked up as Eric entered the room and held the phone out to him. He walked around the table, touching my daughter gently on the top of her head as he passed, and dropped heavily into a chair opposite where I sat.

‘Give it to me.’

I pushed the phone across the table.

He waited until Johannes placed his coffee in front of him then picked up the phone with his blunt fingers. He pushed his glasses on top of his head and peered at the screen.

He looked up at me. ‘Five million US?’

‘I know.’ I dropped my head into my hands. ‘Where am I going to get that kind of money?’

Eric picked up his cup and sipped the hot liquid. ‘It’s not that, Zoe.’ He sipped again and placed the cup carefully on the saucer. ‘I need to make some calls.’

I didn’t move while Eric was out of the room. With the phone silent in front of me, I watched Johannes clear April’s cereal bowl and wipe the high chair, top up my coffee and his own, make toast and butter it. Outside the sun was up, casting long shadows across the parched grass. The north was copping a drenching in a late monsoon but, down here in the western corner of Queensland, dry day followed dry day in an endless procession.

Eric came back into the room. He placed his finger tips on the table in one of his old board room poses and leaned forward.

‘It’s no go. I’ve talked to some people in Canberra and we can’t pay the ransom.’ He put up one finger. ‘Can’t, Zoe. It’s against federal government policy to give money to a terrorist group. For any reason.’

‘So what do we do?’

He shrugged, his eyes blank with misery. ‘They said they could try diplomacy.’

‘Diplomacy?’ I leapt to my feet, scattering chair and child. ‘But they’re thugs, Eric. They’re not going to listen to anything the Australian government has to say. Are they?’

‘No. I don’t suppose they are.’

I turned around and set the chair carefully on its feet. For the first time in a long time I could feel blood fizzing through my veins. ‘Then I’ll have to go and find him.’

Two days later I was in Istanbul.

Chapter Two

The hotel was in an area of old shops and apartment buildings that were in the process of being renovated to accommodate the young and wealthy. The hotel itself was not part of the smartening up that was going on in the rest of the street and its facade had a slightly seedy appearance compared with the new paint and bright windows surrounding it.

My room was clean enough and the crisp white sheets on the bed were tempting for someone who had been travelling for a day and a half. The room hadn’t been designed for a queen-sized bed and the lack of space for any other furniture than a small desk and chair under the window meant the TV was mounted on a metal bracket so high on the wall it was impossible to see the screen unless you were lying down.

The bathroom was equally compact. As I sneaked in sideways to take a shower, the door banged hard against the edge of the toilet bowl. I thought of the knees of anyone unfortunate enough to be sitting there when someone else opened the door. Then I thought of where I was going and decided to stop whingeing about the inconvenience of a clean bed and a hot shower. I wondered how long it would be before I had such things again.

After my shower, I shuffled around the bed and lifted the heavy net curtains that covered the window. Across the way an old apartment building was being gutted and there was a large yellow skip on the footpath that forced the pedestrians to step off the high stone kerb into the street. They were mostly female and dressed alike: high heels, tight pants, small dogs, mobile phones. Coffee shops with crowded tables alternated with boutiques catering for the slim and trendy. Narrow tobacco kiosks were crammed into the gaps. The street was lined nose to tail with parked cars. Judging by the dust and pigeon shit on their paintwork, it looked like they were permanent residents. The only things actually moving in the street were scooters and the occasional delivery van.

Further up the street was a tiny park separated from the footpath by a low stone wall topped with an elaborate wrought iron railing. It was a jewel of green among the city buildings and a haven for the smart young things with their handbag pooches. I watched for a while as they came and went through the narrow iron gate until I realised that the park was being used not as an oasis of rest and relaxation but as a doggy dunny. Women loitered at the end of leads attached to the collars of their squatting dogs, before quickly