The Excalibur Codex

XIII

‘Christ, that was—’

Gault didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence. They came out of the shadows in a screaming mob when he and Jamie were halfway across the car park. Jamie’s first glance took in dark clothing and faces masked by black scarves, a couple of pool cues and baseball bats at the head of the pack and the rest coming up fast behind. He counted eight before being forced to duck under a swinging cue and managed to land a straight right in his attacker’s middle, doubling him up and disabling him for the moment. Gault was similarly engaged, disarming his man with a twist of the wrist and throwing him with some kind of ju-jitsu move that left him with the baseball bat just as two more thugs arrived to batter him to the ground, their fists pumping like steam hammers. With bewildering speed Jamie found himself facing three wild-eyed young men jockeying for position, but too wary to rush him. He didn’t have time to wonder who their attackers were, but he had his suspicions. He ducked and weaved, using all the skills that had almost won him a boxing Blue at Cambridge, but was unable to avoid a lashing boot that sent a lightning bolt of pain through his thigh. The problem was keeping them all in his line of sight, because there was always one on the periphery of his vision. A scream of agony proved they weren’t having it all their own way with Gault and Jamie used the momentary diversion to dance forward and ram his fist into the centre man’s face, feeling a satisfying crunch of breaking cartilage as it landed plumb on the thug’s nose. All the time his mind had been screaming at him that the greatest danger wasn’t to his front. Where was the eighth man? The one with the second baseball bat. ‘Jamie!’ The only thing that saved him was the high-pitched scream. He ducked and turned in the same movement, the bat ruffling his hair as it missed his skull by a millimetre. Only one chance. He went in low, aiming his shoulder at the batsman’s midriff and keeping his legs pumping as he drove forward in a textbook rugby tackle. But the instant they were down the boots started to come in and he felt a savage blow and a lance of agony in his side that felt like someone had stove in a rib. ‘Fuck you, English.’ Someone gripped his hair and pulled his head up. The last thing he saw was a hand holding some kind of can, before his eyes caught fire and he could feel his eyelids melting. The men who were intent on maiming him were forgotten. All he could think about was saving his eyes. In the same instant, he’d inhaled some kind of gas that stopped the breath in his throat and made him choke, his whole body reacting to what was happening by having some kind of seizure.

His last conscious thought was: Please put me out of my bloody misery.

‘Pepper spray.’ The voice was Gault’s, but the hand applying something soothing and cool to his eyes wasn’t. ‘All you can do is let it pass.’

The hand moved away and Jamie protested, a sort of mooing sound in his throat. He tried to open his eyes, but it was like being underwater, a blur of light and shade that didn’t mean anything until one piece of shade moved.

‘Just lie back, Jamie,’ Charlotte said, and the soothing coolness returned. It didn’t help the pain so much as make him feel mothered, which was unusual and quite pleasant, because he hadn’t been mothered even when he had a mother.

Everything faded rapidly and he disappeared into a pain-filled, gasping half-sleep. When he opened his eyes again he could finally see, which was an improvement. He was lying on the soft sheets of the bed in his hotel room and he could hear voices murmuring not far away. The downside was that his lungs felt as if they had been scoured by acid, and when he tried to move someone stabbed him in the side with a skewer. He let out a groan of agony.

‘Stay still, we think one of your ribs might be broken.’

Charlotte’s head appeared on the right and Gault on the left.

‘Probably only popped cartilage. More painful, but it’ll heal quicker,’ the former soldier gave his opinion.

‘What happened?’

‘That little bastard Otto and some of his pals jumped us.’

‘Why the Christ would he do that?’

‘For fun? He seemed the type. But it appears he’s not the only one around here who’d like to see a Fourth Reich. According to the hotel manager, there are certain areas where groups of young Nazis can more or less get away with anything, and Dortsfeld where we were is one of them. They break up Turkish businesses and throw bricks through restaurant windows and the cops won’t touch them.’

Memories of the attack came flooding back and Jamie felt a cold sweat as he remembered the moment when the spray hit his eyes. ‘I thought I’d had it.’

‘You would have done. They were all set to put your lights out and I had my hands full when Charlie here …’

‘Charlie?’ Charlotte shrugged and Gault grinned.

‘Charlie came to the rescue. She rushes them, screaming, and Otto turns to take her out with a baseball bat. Next thing you know the Kick-Boxing Queen here …’

‘Tae kwon do, actually.’

‘… pivots and her size-six Jimmy Choo takes Otto right in the chops and his teeth are all over the Tarmac. Never seen it done better. With the head boy out of action and their casualties mounting — your man with the broken nose didn’t look too chipper — they decided they’d had enough fun and legged it, shouting compliments as they went. And that was that.’

‘Apart from you lying there clawing at your face and gasping your lungs out.’ Concern made Charlotte’s voice ragged. ‘I thought someone had thrown acid in your face, but Mr Gault, who knows a suspicious amount of detail about such things, diagnosed pepper spray, and said that there was no point in taking you to hospital, because the effects would fade eventually.’

‘That was very good of Mr Gault.’ Jamie was fairly certain that he’d read somewhere that pepper spray had killed several dozen people in the States when used to excess by law enforcement agencies. Still, he’d survived. Just.

‘A pity we didn’t get anything from Ziegler,’ Gault complained. ‘Apart from the fact that his father was a murdering thug — and that was only because of his Nazi bastard of a son. It makes the whole trip a bit of a waste.’

‘We didn’t get any closer to the castle or the sword,’ Jamie admitted, ‘but we didn’t come away with nothing. Ziegler said he was named after the man who saved his father’s life on the Seelow Heights. I’m pretty certain there will only be one or two SS Gruppenführers called Rolf. So that’s your next job, Charlotte — track them down and cross reference them until you find one with links to the Hitler Youth, who was on the Seelow Heights and has some sort of connection to one of our twelve Angels of Death.’ Charlotte nodded. ‘And Charlotte?’

‘Yes, Jamie?’

‘I really appreciate you saving me, but I was just wondering why you didn’t drive the car at our Nazi kameraden with the lights blazing and the horn blowing, which would probably have been enough to scare them off?’

‘Oh, I wasn’t in the car. I was in the shop. You can’t leave a girl on her own for two hours in the cold and not expect her to go for a wee.’

Charlotte came off the phone the next morning with a look of what could only be called conspiratorial smugness. ‘Just the one match: Rolf Lauterbacher; born Halle, nineteen twenty. Adam’s having the details checked at the Berlin Document Centre where they hold all the captured SS personnel records, but he seems to fit. Joined the Hitler Youth when he was of age, and the Nazi party a few years later. By the time he was nineteen he was something called high area leader of the Hitler Youth West, which I’m told would have taken in Wulf Ziegler’s Dortmund unit. He was also close to Reinhard Heydrich, who took an interest in his career because the two families were friends. He didn’t join the SS until the start of the war, but by nineteen forty he was already a Sturmbannführer and on the staff of … guess?’

Gault looked as if he wanted to take her by the throat and shake her and Jamie thought he’d better play along if violence were to be avoided.

‘One of the chosen few?’

‘Correct.’ She grinned. ‘Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, then commander of the Liebstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. If Dietrich attended the Excalibur rite in nineteen forty-one, then it’s very likely Lauterbacher would have accompanied him. He must have risen rapidly through the ranks because by nineteen forty-five he’s a Gruppenführer in command of an SS Panzergrenadier division that suffered severe casualties on the Seelow Heights. He was seriously wounded in the fighting there. I don’t have any information on his post-war life. Adam’s people are working on that, too, and they’ve promised to send me anything that seems relevant.’

‘Tell them everything is relevant and that we need it today.’

She nodded and opened her laptop. ‘I’ll e-mail them.’

By lunchtime Jamie had made a sufficient recovery to be able to think about food and they went to a restaurant close to the hotel where they had steaks washed down with Hövels beer. When they returned to Jamie’s room Charlotte’s e-mail reply had arrived, complete with a downloaded report.

Her eyes widened as she read the contents and Jamie moved in beside her so he could see what was on the screen.

‘Don’t bloody hold out on me, woman,’ Gault growled.

Jamie read from the computer file. ‘Our Gruppenführer has had an interesting life. After the surrender, Rolf Lauterbacher was tried for war crimes. The Americans accused him of murdering Allied prisoners of war and the crew of a shot-down bomber. The court acquitted him, but he was still wanted in Poland, where he would almost certainly have faced the death sentence. In nineteen fifty he turned up in Buenos Aires, where he’s suspected of providing an escort for one Adolf Eichmann, who arrived around the same time. A few years later the CIA, would you believe, sent him to Egypt where he trained anti-Israeli guerrillas. By nineteen fifty-six he’s back in Germany, in Munich, but he disappeared again when the authorities began sniffing about. The suggestion is that he was being protected by the Gehlen Organization.’

‘Gehlen?’ Charlotte’s voice mirrored her confusion.

‘It was an independent spy service set up by the Americans under a tame former Wehrmacht general at the start of the Cold War. They used Nazi intelligence experts who still had contacts behind the Iron Curtain. Lauterbacher must have somehow fitted the bill. He didn’t resurface until the mid-seventies when he was an adviser to the Omani ministry of youth. Last known living the life of a recluse in Madrid, Spain.’

‘He’s still alive?’ Gault demanded.

‘There’s nothing here that says otherwise,’ Jamie frowned. ‘But he must be in his eighties now.’

Charlotte reached for her laptop. ‘Then we’d better get there quickly.’