The Excalibur Codex

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Charlotte walked into the office as Jamie and Gault were going over their technical equipment. The former SBS man barely spared her a glance as she sat down at the table. He handed Jamie a mobile phone that looked as if it had come straight from the box. ‘Satellite phone for secure encrypted calls between you and the boss only. Press two and it will speed dial his number and connect from anywhere in the world. The encryption code changes with every call, so theoretically it’s impossible to break into. This phone,’ he held up a slim Nokia, ‘is for everyday use if you want to contact either of us.’

‘Us?’ Jamie asked.

Charlotte grinned like a schoolgirl preparing for her first class trip overseas. ‘Adam decided my research skills might come in useful after all. I’ll be organizing our travel and accommodation.’

‘The boss thought it would be more natural having Her Ladyship along,’ Gault said. ‘Provide a nice bit of natural colour while we run around on our wild-goose chase.’ He grinned at Charlotte and she glared back at him.

There were clearly tensions here that Jamie didn’t understand, and he wondered if the pair had some kind of history. ‘You don’t believe in the sword,’ he asked the soldier, ‘so why agree to come along?’

Gault shrugged. ‘Because the boss is the boss, and traipsing around Europe babysitting you is better than doing real work. Now, if we can get back to business?’ He drew a laptop from a padded case. ‘Like the phone, this is state-of-the-art kit with the best security available. Any searches you do on the Internet, files you create or e-mails you send should be safe.’

‘You say should? You’re not certain?’

‘This is the stuff the CIA uses, which means it’s been tested until it squealed for mercy. Who knows what they know and we don’t? For the same reasons the Russians, the Chinese and maybe even the Iranians will have their best people trying to get into it. You should have one of these already?’ The last was to Charlotte, who nodded.

‘Well, you might as well get started,’ Jamie said. ‘We’ll need three flights to Dortmund tomorrow and two nights’ hotel with an option to extend. Oh, and we’ll need a car.’

She jotted the requests in a notebook. ‘Anything else?’

‘While you’re at it, see if you can track down some reading material for the plane. What I’m looking for are the names and a short profile of all the candidates who might have taken part in the Excalibur ritual.’ He saw the shadow of dismay cross her face. ‘Don’t worry,’ he smiled, ‘there weren’t all that many SS-Obergruppenführer in the early days and we only need Himmler’s allies: the men he thought of as his Knights of the Round Table; men who were available to attend the meeting in April nineteen forty-one.’

The next direct flight to Dortmund was with a budget airline and left from Luton at an unearthly hour, so Steele’s ‘First Class all the way’ would have to wait for another day. Fortunately, it had the advantage of being less than half full and they were able to choose their seats and even have a little privacy. Charlotte handed out the sheets she had made up on the possible participants in the Excalibur ritual and Jamie was impressed by the cast list she’d put together in such a short time, some of them with photographs.

Jamie studied the first two familiar faces on the list. There didn’t seem to be anyone within eavesdropping distance, but he kept his voice low just in case and the others huddled close to hear him. ‘I think we can rule out Martin Bormann and Rudolf Hess, because Himmler regarded them both as rivals and their SS rank was more or less honorary. The meeting was also less than a month before Hess made his crazy flight to Scotland to try to stop the war, so he may have had other things on his mind. Any initial thoughts?’

‘Some of the things I read almost made me sick,’ Charlotte said. ‘It seems obscene even to think of these men as Knights of the Round Table.’

‘Every one a bastard,’ Gault confirmed. ‘Only some are bigger bastards than others.’

Jamie had to agree. ‘I thought Heydrich was the biggest bastard of them all, but even though he was Himmler’s right-hand man, created the einsatzgruppen and is responsible for more deaths than the Black Plague, he’s just a pen-pusher compared to some of these butchers.’

‘Friedrich Jeckeln …’ Charlotte paused as a steward approached offering snacks and hot drinks from a trolley. When he was out of earshot, she continued: ‘After the invasion of Russia Himmler gave him command of all einsatzgruppen — why don’t we call them what they were, murder squads? — in the east. He was an educated man,’ she shook her head as if decent schooling should be a barrier to mass murder, ‘an engineer, but regular firing squads weren’t efficient enough for him because the victims would sprawl all over the place and fill up the mass graves too quickly. Jeckeln developed a method he called “sardine packing” where the people to be killed lay down in rows on top of the already dead before they were shot in the back of the head. Anyone who didn’t die immediately was just buried alive. Jeckeln was hanged by the Russians in nineteen forty-six, but it’s surprising how many of these people survived the war.’

‘Udo von Woyrsch.’ Gault pointed to an image of a hard-eyed man with a nose like an executioner’s axe and identified by the collar tabs of an SS general. ‘Death squad commander and a personal friend of Himmler. His unit were so brutal in southern Poland that the Wehrmacht petitioned the Gestapo to have them removed from the area. He only served ten years and lived till he was eighty-three.’

‘Gottlob Berger is the only man I’ve actually been able to confirm was among Himmler’s chosen few,’ Charlotte continued. ‘His biography states quite openly that he was one of the Reichsführer’s Twelve Apostles. Subordinates called him “The Almighty Gottlob”, as in Almighty Gott/God? Himmler put him in charge of the Eastern Territories in nineteen forty, so if what we know about our ritual is true, he’s almost certain to have been involved. He was captured, did a few years in jail and died in nineteen seventy-five.’

As the flight continued, Jamie ran through the rest of the candidates for places at the Round Table. Kurt Daluege, notorious for wiping out the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia after Heydrich’s assassination in Prague, hanged 1946; Erwin Rösener, who had encouraged terror and massacre in Slovenia, where his Domobranci anti-Partisan units’ favoured method of execution was by woodsman’s axe, also finished up on the end of a rope; Karl Wolff, Himmler’s one-time adjutant, who would later become Heydrich’s rival and notorious for his part in the massacre of Italian partisans late in the war; Karl von Eberstein, who brought Himmler and Heydrich together, and was later responsible for Dachau concentration camp, served just three years and died peacefully in 1979; Sepp Dietrich, a soldier-thug and unlikely occultist who served in every theatre of the war, and who would find infamy as the instigator of the Malmedy Massacre when American prisoners were shot in cold blood during the Ardennes offensive in 1944; Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, destroyer of Warsaw and responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, somehow escaped the rope to die in prison; Oswald Pohl, overseer of a ruthless slave empire based on the concentration camps exploiting his victims for their gold teeth, their hair and their every belonging before consigning them to the ovens. And the two who interested him most: Darré and Hildebrandt, architects of the Ahnenerbe and encouragers of Himmler’s obsession with the occult.

He saw Gault frowning. ‘You have a problem with this?’

‘Only that for all their very obvious faults these were practical men. They don’t seem the types to have been taken in by Himmler’s mumbo-jumbo. I can see them cheerfully slaughtering Russians and Slavs and Jews because they thought they were racially superior, but not standing around in the dark in hoods and cloaks muttering incantations over a set of old cutlery.’

Jamie allowed himself a smile. ‘Practical, maybe, but every man on our list was in Himmler’s thrall. By nineteen forty-one they’d spent twelve years steeped in a culture of his creation, and the SS culture was defined by ritual and theatre. They wore Death’s Head rings and carried Death’s Head daggers. The SS leaders, his twelve Apostles, were each allocated their own coat of arms and on their deaths those arms would be burned and their ashes kept in his Camelot at Wewelsburg, along with the Totenkopf ring of every SS man who fell in battle. Himmler based the organizational structure of the SS on the Jesuit order, but in reality they were more like medieval Templars, or the Knights of St John. He wanted the SS to be cloaked in mysticism and fear, and he succeeded. Worship of the past was bred deep and his enthusiasm for the occult directly linked to his obsession to make contact with the great figures of history, whether it was through seance, ritual or some kind of object, like the Spear of Destiny that was used to kill Christ …’

‘Or Excalibur,’ Charlotte whispered.

‘Yes,’ Jamie said, ‘or Excalibur. The point is that Himmler believed in an ancient race of Aryan supermen capable of using mind-control on their enemies, and he believed they could provide him with the weapons for world domination. He believed that the Spear of Destiny would bring with it a power that the Nazis could use. In their hearts, these practical men may not have believed with the same fervour, but what really mattered was that where Himmler led they were prepared to follow. They proved that by doing things that no rational human being would have done and that left them with the blood of countless millions of people on their hands.’

Jamie settled back and turned his attention to the window and the spotless white carpet of cloud below. Far away to the west a tiny replica of their own jet slid smoothly across a pristine sky of eggshell blue. He could feel Charlotte’s warm presence and smell the sweetness of her perfume. The scent brought with it a wave of nostalgia that threatened to overwhelm him. Abbie would have been fast asleep now, with her head on his shoulder. She loved to travel, but always slept the moment the plane took off. What would she make of this strange quest? He decided she would approve. The romantic in her would have seen Excalibur as a symbol of justice and good. Maybe Adam Steele was right and Britain needed a new Arthur, but it was too late for Abbie. What was clear now was that whether he found the sword or not, he would have to wade through the most degrading filth and pestilence of war to reach his goal. Because the twelve men who attended the Excalibur ritual had been the men who had enforced Heinrich Himmler’s writ in the East. Not his Knights of the Round Table.

His Angels of Death.