Crusader Gold

12

Maria and Jeremy led Jack and Costas through the imposing west entrance of Iona Abbey and down the worn flagstones of the nave. It was cool inside, a refreshing break from the tepid summer air outside, and the east window above the altar bathed the interior in a rich light. Standing off to one side was a tall, blond man gazing contemplatively at the window, his arms folded across his chest and one hand on his chin. When he saw Jack he seemed to know who he was and pointed towards the doorway opposite him. Jack nodded in acknowledgement and followed the others through a low stone entrance into the open courtyard of the cloister beyond.

“Father O’Connor is waiting for us,” Jeremy said. “He’s a long-standing member of the Iona community, and he has a room in the north range where he retreats for research and writing when he can get away from the Vatican.”

“Do we trust this guy?” Costas said, his voice sounding loud in the cloister. “I mean, he’s a bit of an unknown quantity.”

Maria stopped and turned sharply on him. “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust him.”

“Okay.” Costas saw Jack gesturing at him to back off. “Sorry. It’s just a hell of a long way to come.”

“He insisted that we meet him here.” Maria’s voice was still curt, and she stopped and took out her cellphone. “I’ll join you. I’ve got to make an urgent call. Jeremy knows the way.”

That morning they had flown in the IMU Embraer from Greenland to Glasgow in Scotland, and then taken the waiting helicopter one hundred miles northwest to the island of Mull. It had only been twenty-four hours since Jack and Costas had escaped from the perils of the iceberg, and both men had slept soundly most of the way. On Mull they had joined the well-worn pilgrim route to the holy isle of Iona, taking the ferry across the narrow channel to Port Ronain, then walking up through the village to the abbey buildings in their setting of meadows with the sparkling blue sea beyond. As they gazed at the abbey Jeremy had explained that a building had stood on this spot since the time St. Columba arrived from Ireland almost fifteen hundred years before, had survived Viking raids, the Reformation and abandonment, and was now once again a thriving monastery and one of the holiest sites in the British Isles.

They passed along the sunlit alley of the cloister to another small door and ascended a wooden staircase to an attic corridor with windows overlooking the abbey. Jeremy knocked on a door and a moment later they heard the clatter of a bolt being unlatched and a chain withdrawn.

“Gentlemen. Welcome.” Father O’Connor ushered them in, then locked the door again behind him. He had discarded his Jesuit cassock in favour of the plain brown robe of a monk, and with his cropped white hair and the simple wooden cross hanging on his chest he seemed straight out of the Middle Ages. He looked pale and worn, older than when they had seen him a few days before in Cornwall. The room was small, piled high with books and papers, and they could see where O’Connor had been working at a laptop on a desk in the corner. They picked their way across the floor and sat down on wooden chairs arranged in a semi-circle in front of the desk. Above the small fireplace opposite, Jack recognized a scaled-down reproduction of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Propped up beside it he could see a scanned copy of the exemplar for the map Jeremy and Maria had found in the sealed-off staircase in Hereford Cathedral, showing the extraordinary image of the New World in the lower left corner.

“Let’s get straight to the point,” O’Connor said. “It’s been a long journey.”

“Thank you,” Jack said. He opened the bag he had been carrying and took out the Nazi dagger and the gold ring with the menorah symbol, and placed them on the desk in front of O’Connor. The older man glanced at the objects and flinched slightly, averting his eyes. But then he looked up, staring at Jack.

“First let me apologize to Jeremy for the burden I placed on him. I took him into my confidence over a year ago, when he first came to study the early runic inscriptions on Iona. I had been seeking a younger colleague, a scholar who could carry on the flame. I swore him to secrecy, but told him when we met in Cornwall that the time might come when we would need to reveal everything to you. Even Maria knew nothing until yesterday.”

“Whatever it is, you could have told us when we discussed the Mappa Mundi and the menorah,” Jack said testily.

“I had to be sure of you. Believe me, I am on your side and we have a common enemy.”

“I’m not aware of any enemy.”

O’Connor shifted on his chair, stared distastefully at the objects in front of him and then leaned forward on his elbows. “We’ll begin with the Nazis. As you’ve probably guessed, you’re not the first ones to hunt for the menorah.”

“I never did buy the idea that we were,” Costas said cheerfully. “Stuff like that doesn’t happen. Someone, somewhere will have been searching for it. People never forget lost treasure.”

O’Connor smiled thinly and then turned grim. “It’s not as straightforward as it seems. And it’s not a game. The best way to show you what we’re up against is to tell you something about the characters on that Ahnenerbe expedition in 1938.”

“We know about Kunzl, but we’re still trying to identify the one with the armband.” Relaxing slightly, Jack took out copies of the photographs Kangia had given him and tossed them on the desk.

“I can help here,” O’Connor said quietly. “Ever since the scandal over Pope Pius XII’s failure to condemn the Nazis during the Second World War, the Vatican has been particularly sensitive on this issue. I’ve recently taken over as Vatican spokesman on the Holocaust. Officially we liaise with Jewish groups and apprehend surviving war criminals. Unfortunately most of those who escaped punishment are now dead, but we still try to tie up loose ends for the sake of history.”

“I can’t imagine any of them making it past St. Peter,” Costas said grimly.

“God will make the final judgement,” O’Connor replied. “But most assuredly there is a special place in hell for those who murder children.”

There was a knock on the door, and O’Connor got up and stared through the spy hole before unlatching it and letting Maria in. She sat down in the empty chair beside Jack and they looked expectantly at her.

She was pale, distracted. “I was right,” she said. “I’ve just spoken to an old friend who works for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.” Jack suddenly remembered Maria’s Jewish background, her father’s Sephardic roots. “Our Nazi was a failed student at Heidelberg, with delusions of being a famous anthropologist. He joined the SS in 1933. After the Ahnenerbe expedition he volunteered for the SS-Totenkopfverbande, the death’s-head units. The ones who ran the concentration camps. His name was Andrius Reksnys.”

“Not German?” Jack asked.

“Lithuanian,” she replied.

“There were plenty outside the Fatherland willing to heed Himmler’s call,” O’Connor said. Maria’s cellphone chirped, and she looked apologetically at them and quickly slipped out of the door. O’Connor tapped his laptop and clicked through a series of websites. “I know this man,” he said quietly. “Here he is.”

He swivelled the screen so they could see and read from a scanned document, translating from German.

The Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, Berlin, 5 November 1941

55 copies

(51st copy)

OPERATIONAL SITUATION REPORT USSR NO. 129a

Einsatzgruppe D

Location: Nikolayev, Ukraine

Addendum to Report No. 129 concerning the activity of the Einsatzkommandos in freeing places of Jews and finishing off partisan groups. SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Andrius Reksnys personally executed 341 Jews. Revised total for the last two weeks: 32,108.

“Einsatzgruppen.” O’Connor forced out the word with revulsion. “Himmler’s mobile death squads. Responsible for murdering over a million Soviet Jews, among others.”

“How did this monster escape prosecution?” Jack asked.

“Usual story.” There was an edge of anger to O’Connor’s voice. “Shockingly few of the Einsatzkommandos were ever brought to justice. In the final Russian onslaught in 1945, Reksnys disguised himself as a Wehrmacht private and fled west, to surrender to the British. There were suspicions during his interrogation but nothing concrete. On his release in 1947, now named Schmidt, he recovered his son from an orphanage and went to Australia. Together they made a fortune mining opals near Darwin. Then in the mid-60s he sold his operation without warning and disappeared.”

“And the son?” Jack said. “Surely he was too young to have been in the war.”

“Pieter Reksnys was six years old in 1941,” O’Connor replied. “But there’s an eyewitness account from a Jewish survivor at the Einsatzgruppen trial, at Nuremberg in 1947, that spoke of a boy in Hitler Youth uniform accompanying Sturmbannfuhrer Reksnys in his work. It’s a chilling account, one of the worst of the trial. Apparently the boy loaded his father’s Luger between each batch of executions, even carried out some himself. It was this account that eventually made the connection when Interpol became involved in the 1990s, and led to Andrius and Pieter Reksnys being tracked down to Mexico, where the son ran a drugs and antiquities cartel. He’s now in his early seventies, and is still there.”

“Why so long?” Costas said incredulously. “Why did it take so long to identify them?”

“Contrary to the Hollywood version, chasing down Nazi war criminals was never a priority in the West after the late 1940s,” O’Connor replied. “The main intelligence agencies-the CIA, the British SIS-were completely wrapped up in Cold War espionage. They knew all about Eichmann and Mengele and the other Nazis who had escaped to South and Central America, but few thought they posed a threat. Only the Israelis put serious efforts to bringing any of them to justice.”

“And now we reap the rewards,” Costas muttered.

“Not entirely.” O’Connor opened a drawer and placed a plastic sleeve with a photograph on the table. “You probably won’t remember this. A footnote in the newspapers about eight years ago, but actually the highest-profile Nazi death since Eichmann.”

The picture was a shocking image of a dead man lying on his back in a pool of blood, his eyes and mouth wide open and his face contorted with pain. He was an old man, wearing a dark suit, with his right arm flung over his front; visible through the smear of blood was a red armband with a black swastika.

“He wore that armband in the privacy of his own home,” O’Connor said. “An unreconstructed Nazi to the end. In case you haven’t guessed, that’s Andrius Reksnys. He was shot in the stomach to ensure a slow death, to give him time to be really frightened of where he was going next.”

“Mossad?” Costas asked.

“There is liaison with the Israelis,” O’Connor replied quietly. “But this was an independent operation.”

“What are you saying?”

O’Connor’s face was blank. He spoke coldly. “Andrius Reksnys was a henchman of the devil. All the efforts of international law had failed to bring him to account. He deserved to face the judgement of humanity, as well as God.”

“Are you saying the Vatican runs a hit squad?” Costas said incredulously.

“The Holy See is not just a spiritual beacon,” O’Connor said. “For centuries our survival has depended on strength in the world of men, on the power to persuade the unwilling to submit to God. Look at my own order, the Jesuits. Or the Crusades. Or the Inquisition. For centuries the Vatican has overseen the most successful covert intelligence network in the world, and has never shrunk from using it.”

“The Crusades were hardly a glorious episode, even if the intention was righteous to begin with,” Costas muttered. “I can’t imagine the sack of Constantinople was quite what the Pope had in mind.”

“You’d be surprised,” O’Connor said. “The papacy has always had to resist being drawn too far into the secular world, losing sight of the spiritual plane that bonds together all Christians. By the time of the Fourth Crusade the Vatican had developed a real problem with the Eastern Church, schismatics whom they regarded as heretics. It became a feud, and like all feuds led the antagonists to lose reason. Some apologists for the sack of Constantinople even twisted it into God’s actual purpose for the Crusade, punishment for deviating from the true path.”

“The feeling was reciprocated,” Jeremy added. “The Byzantine eyewitness Niketas Choniates called the Crusaders the forerunners of Antichrist, chief agents of his anticipated ungodly deeds.”

“The Holy See has always faced temptation from the dark side,” O’Connor continued. “Those who struggle against the devil can so easily end up doing the devil’s work. The Crusades were the ultimate challenge of the Middle Ages, and we did not always overcome. Monstrous tendencies have exploded into history in our moments of weakness. There are those among us who feel we owe a debt for failing to stem the greatest evil of all, the Nazi Holocaust.”

“So Reksys’ death has nothing to do with the menorah,” Jack said.

O’Connor paused, then stood. “I fear I may have misled you. His death has everything to do with the menorah. Please bear with me.”

There was another knock at the door, and O’Connor ushered Maria back in. She sat down, fingering her cellphone. “I’ve got news from Hereford,” she said, looking serious. “Fantastic news. My team from the Oxford Institute has finished excavating the manuscripts from the sealed-up stairway. It’s amazing, the greatest trove of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts ever discovered. It’s like finding the Roman library in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, and it’s going to be just as much work putting the pieces all together again.” She glanced at Jeremy, who was leaning forward in rapt attention. “Unless you’re in a hurry to return to the States, there’s going to be a full-time job looking after all this.”

“Yes, please,” Jeremy said.

“So why the glum face?” Costas said.

“It’s what else they found.” Maria suddenly sounded tense. “Right at the bottom of the stairwell, buried under all the paper and vellum. A skeleton of a man, a tall man, dressed in a monk’s cassock. Hundreds of years old, medieval. His limbs were askew as if he’d been thrown there. And the back of his skull was shattered.”

There was a stunned silence, and O’Connor paced towards the reproduction of the Mappa Mundi on his wall before turning to face them. “It is as I suspected. In the spring of 1299, Richard of Holdingham, mapmaker, came to this very place, to the isle of Iona. He was accompanying his ailing master, Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, on his final journey. Afterwards Richard went south to Hereford, to oversee the completion of the map he had started fifteen years before. There were errors in the inscriptions he wanted to correct. He had left an exemplar, a sketch for the Hereford monks to work from, and the illuminator had not been very literate. And now we know from his own personal exemplar, the one Jeremy and Maria found, that he wanted to add more, that he had a secret addition he wanted to make in the left-hand corner of the map, where the monks later added the inscription naming him as mapmaker.” O’Connor stopped in front of the fireplace, deep in thought. “We know he spent his final night at Bishop Swinfield’s palace at Bromyard and that he walked the final road to Hereford in the guise of a pilgrim. After that he vanished from history. The corrections were never made. He was never heard of again.”

“You think he was murdered?” Maria said shakily.

“I have no doubt of it.”

“I felt so close to him,” Maria whispered, her voice shaking with emotion and her hands gripping her chair. “I’ve studied him all my life, and I’ve never felt as close to him as I did that evening in the cathedral. It was almost like he was there.”

“A murder?” Costas looked dumbfounded. “And what was this guy doing on Iona? Can someone tell me what’s going on here?”

“Yes,” said O’Connor, pulling open a drawer. “Listen to me.”

A few minutes later O’Connor sat back in his chair and let the others study the maps he had just been showing them. Rolled out over the desk was a large-scale map of northern Britain, and beside it he had placed a plan of the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. On the large map he had traced a line from the Yorkshire coast near Stamford Bridge up to the northern tip of Scotland and down the west coast to the island of Mull.

“So Harald Hardrada came here to Iona after the battle.” Jack’s mind was reeling as he struggled to comprehend what O’Connor had just been telling them. He lowered himself back into his chair, and the others followed suit.

“He must have been in a hell of a state,” Costas said. “Bad enough for the English soldiers who fought him to assume he was dead on the battlefield.”

“It was a miracle he survived the journey,” O’Connor replied. “He was well looked after. There were about thirty of his warriors altogether, almost all of them grievously wounded, many former Varangian Guards. They were rowed in the two longships by loyal retainers. Some died on the way, some here on Iona.”

The pieces were beginning to fall together in Jack’s mind. “When Harald finally left Iona to sail west, there was a contingent left behind, loyal followers to await the return of their king.”

O’Connor looked at him shrewdly and nodded. “They called themselves a felag,” he said. “An ancient Norse term for a fellowship, a secret society.”

“And who were the felag?” Jack asked.

“At first they were a few of Harald’s companions, wounded survivors of Stamford Bridge who came with him to the holy isle but elected to stay behind when their king sailed west. They were younger men, warriors Harald had nurtured since his Varangian days, men who still had ambition and fire within them to carry on the cause. They may have included several of Harald’s own sons. Quickly they accrued others around them, never more than twenty in number. Their sworn intent was to keep the flame burning for the return of their king, to do all in their power to ensure that a true Viking once again ruled in England.”

“Not very realistic after 1066,” Jack said.

“They hated the Normans and their French Plantagenet successors. Within a few generations the cause of the felag had become the cause of the English. Remember, there was plenty of Viking blood already in England, among those who called themselves Anglo-Saxon. The Viking king Cnut had ruled England in the time of Harald’s youth, and there were huge swathes of the country where Viking raids had led to settlement and intermarriage: in East Anglia, in Northumbria, up here in the western isles. So it was natural that the English, once the enemy of Harald’s Vikings at Stamford Bridge, should unite with them in common cause against the Normans.”

“They can’t realistically have expected Harald’s return.”

O’Connor shook his head. “It became a mystical underpinning, a binding force that made the felag one of the most successful secret societies of the Middle Ages. Those few original companions had sworn secrecy to their king, that they would never reveal his survival or his passage west, for fear that the Normans would try to follow or take reprisals. After a few generations, when the return of the king in this life became impossible, they began to look forward to joining Harald at the great Battle of Ragnarok, the final showdown in Norse mythology between good and evil. They would once again stand shoulder to shoulder with their liege, wielding battle-axes alongside him, vanquishing their foes and spreading fear as they had done in the glory days of the Varangians. Their sacred mantra, the oath that bound them in fellowship, became hann til ragnaroks, Old Norse for ‘until Ragnarok,’ until we meet at the end of time.”

“So the name Harald Hardrada passed into history.”

“Not quite.” O’Connor reached out to his bookcase and handed a volume over to Jack. “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, History of the King of England. A medieval bestseller, mostly fictional.”

“And?”

“The book responsible for the romantic legend of King Arthur.”

“Good God,” Jack murmured. “Of course. The once and future king.”

“Geoffrey was one of the felag, a couple of generations after Harald had gone. They were sworn never to mention the name of their king, but by the middle of the twelfth century the felag had begun to make inroads into English society. In the face of Norman oppression it became expedient to spread the fantasy of an ancient British king, a heroic leader who would one day return to free his people. Peel off the romantic fiction and you’ve got some hard facts.”

“For King Arthur, read Harald Hardrada,” Jack murmured. “For the Knights of the Round Table, read the Varangian Guard.”

“It’s what you said about Atlantis,” Costas added. “Behind every myth there’s some reality.”

“Yes, but people had been debating the Atlantis myth for ages,” Jack replied. “This one’s a bolt from the blue.” He turned to O’Connor. “So the felag wasn’t all just mystical?”

“By no means. By espousing the English cause they easily gained adherents, and as the generations passed the felag came to represent the great and the good among those who claimed Anglo-Saxon and Viking roots. They had little hope of infiltrating the Norman aristocracy, so by the time the last of the original Varangians had died, most of the felag were churchmen, pagans in disguise. The Church was the one area where Englishmen of Anglo-Saxon and Viking blood could still wield power, and the felag used it to their utmost advantage. By the end of the twelfth century their influence reached as far as Rome, and the membership included churchmen in Europe with English connections. Jacobus de Voragine, Richard of Holdingham’s master and one of the senior clergymen in Italy, was the bastard child of an English mother who claimed descent from King Cnut. On several occasions there were even members among the College of Cardinals in the Vatican.”

“So Richard of Holdingham was one of the felag,” Maria said, her voice subdued.

“He was the last of the true felag, of the continuous line from Hardrada.”

“True felag?”

O’Connor paused, clearly troubled. “Early on there was a schism. You can compare it to the struggle in the Church we’ve just been talking about, against the temptation of the devil. We don’t know when it happened or who it was, but it was someone who had seen the menorah with his own eyes, one of the original companions who had chosen to stay behind. A Judas in the midst of the felag. The menorah had already been a secret symbol of kingship to Harald himself, worth far more to his prestige than its weight in gold, and after his departure it became elevated even further as a symbol of the felag, another part of the ritual that bound them together. But where some saw sacred cause, others saw gold. It attracted avarice, greed.”

“Like the Holy Grail,” Costas suggested. “To some a mystical quest, an allegory for some great revelation about Christianity. To others a golden cup.”

“Exactly. To those who could not resist, the search for Harald’s treasure became paramount, an obsession. Secretly they set up their own fellowship, their own felag, with the sole intent of finding the menorah. Those who remained true sensed the malignant force in their midst. Precious knowledge of Harald’s voyage had returned from over the western ocean, knowledge they were able to conceal from those who would use it with ill intent. The knowledge was only ever entrusted to one man, who would pass it on to the next appointed man, master to apprentice, as long as the line could be sustained.”

“I’m beginning to understand,” Jack said slowly. “Jacobus de Voragine, Richard of Holdingham.”

O’Connor nodded. “They were the last. Somehow the line had survived for over a hundred years following its greatest crisis, in 1170. In that year Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by followers of King Henry II in his own cathedral. Becket’s ascendancy had been the time of greatest power for the true felag, and his death was the beginning of the end.”

“Thomas Becket was a member of the felag?” Jack exclaimed in astonishment.

“And the holder of the knowledge,” O’Connor said. “The knights who hacked him down were not only seeking vengeance for Henry II.”

“Did they get what they wanted?”

“He refused to reveal any secrets, and in their rage they murdered him. They were reviled in England and joined the Third Crusade, ostensibly to seek absolution for their crime. They became known as the Knights of the Blooded Hand, for all these men had scars across their palms where they had cut themselves to form a blood pact. Their quest had gained its own mystique, its own rituals, though their allegiance to the cause of Harald Hadrada was a sham. They began to seek the other Jewish treasure, the treasure that Harald had left behind when he escaped from Byzantium with his Varangian companions. The golden table from the Jewish Temple, the Table of the Shewbread.”

“But that was in Constantinople.”

O’Connor nodded. “The knights were all butchered before they could get there, by Saladin and his Muslim warriors before the walls of Jerusalem. But another one did get to Constantinople, a generation later, in 1204.”

“That’s the date of the Fourth Crusade,” Costas said. “What we’ve been looking for in the Golden Horn. The chain and everything.”

It was suddenly cold in the cell-like room, a chill breeze seeping through a crack in the window. Jack’s mind was racing. “Hang on. The sack of Constantinople. That was Baldwin of Flanders. Are you saying…”

“He was the one. As a young man Baldwin had been to Rome and had seen the Arch of Titus in the Forum. The arch had become a place of pilgrimage for the felag, a sacred shrine. Richard of Holdingham undoubtedly went there. They not only saw the image of the menorah, but also the other treasures being carried by the Roman soldiers. They knew what the golden table looked like. Baldwin didn’t divert the Crusade to Constantinople by accident, just to do the Venetians’ dirty work. But others, those of the true felag, knew Baldwin’s intent, and got there in secret before him. There were still Varangians in the imperial guard at Constantinople, men for whom the name of Hardrada was hallowed, a legend from the glory days. They were persuaded to take the remaining treasure and sink it at a secret location in the harbour before the Crusaders arrived. All of the Varangians died in the siege, and the location was lost.”

“Eureka,” Costas murmured. “Not bad for us. Maybe Maurice Heibermeyer’s got something to look forward to in the Golden Horn after all.”

“By the time of the Fourth Crusade, the schism in the felag had turned into an all-out blood feud,” O’Connor continued. “Retribution was sought for the murder of Thomas Becket, and the cycle began. Even those who still held the cause true lost sight of their nobility, and lived in fear of their lives. Like many secret societies they turned in on themselves, began to self-destruct. Richard of Holdingham must have known he was a marked man once he returned from Iona, once he had torched his master’s body in the longboat in the hallowed felag ritual, sending him off to Valhalla at the very spot where their king had set sail. Their enemies knew that Jacobus must have passed on the knowledge to Richard before he died. There was no apprentice for Richard. His last act was to have been his record on the Mappa Mundi, his assignation of their secret to the future, to be discovered and deciphered by someone when the darkness had passed. And with the murder of Richard the line came to an end.”

“Do you think he relented in his final moments, when he faced death in the Chained Library?” Jack asked.

Maria looked at him, her face full of emotion. “He had the spirit of Thomas Becket beside him. He must have known he was going to die whatever he did. I believe he was strong to the end. Fortunately his attacker must have failed to recognise the exemplar of the map for what it was, or maybe Richard had time to conceal it in the library in the moments before he was confronted.”

“He could never have guessed it would be more than seven hundred years,” Jack murmured.

“And I fear the darkness is still with us,” O’Connor said.

“Fine.” Costas was fingering the ring, and held it up between them with the symbol of the menorah clearly visible. He pointed with his other hand at the swastika on the dagger. “And now to the really big question. How do we get from the medieval murder mystery to these bad guys in the twenty-first century?”