The Excalibur Codex

XX

‘If you aren’t capable of finding these people then perhaps I should find a Head of the Security Service who is?’

The DG’s nose wrinkled with distaste and his aides kept their eyes on the table. She wasn’t the first politician to threaten him — no, not by a long way — but at least the others had made a pretence of subtlety. She had a point, of course. More than six weeks after the M25 attack they were no closer to discovering the identity of the perpetrators than on the day it happened. It wasn’t as if they weren’t trying. His operatives were working round the clock. He’d hoped for some sort of breakthrough, on either the communications or the guns, or even on the transport they’d used, but despite using every resource at his disposal — nothing. And then there was the other problem, which was becoming increasingly complex. He sighed. Perhaps she was right. But no, he would not be forced out by these upstarts. He would go in his own bloody time, and not before.

‘I can assure you, Minister,’ diplomacy came naturally to him, it had to in his position, ‘that everything that can be done is being done. We are focusing our efforts on the weaponry. Those guns and rockets must have come into the country somewhere. They were stored and they were distributed. My people continue the search for the warehouse where the lorry was kept—’

‘Not bloody good enough.’ Her fist slammed the table with each word. ‘Don’t you understand the pressure the Prime Minister is under? That I am under? His own backbenchers are turning against him, threatening a coalition with the opposition unless strong action is taken. That odious little shit Franklin is talking about sweeping the threat from the streets, as if all you had to do was run around with a broom and the problem would go away. They’re calling for the immediate detention without trial of all known Islamic extremists and anyone who supports them. Identity cards to be carried at all times and that would affect the bearer’s right to state employment and benefits, even a driving licence. Screening centres and immediate expulsion of those who prove suspect, regardless of place of origin. We’ve already increased police stop-and-search powers, and you’ve seen the backlash we’ve had from the Asian community. I’ve had to introduce a quota system of one white face for every four black or brown to prove we’re not racist.’ She took a deep breath. ‘The Prime Minister is actively considering a free vote on the return of the death penalty for murders involving terrorism or paedophilia in the hope that it will unite the party. It would certainly be popular in the country.’

The DG frowned. What she meant was that it would be popular with the voters who had put her where she was and who she hoped would put her there again. He had his own views on the death penalty, but he was damned if he was going to get into a debate with this bloody woman. Still, he couldn’t just sit back.

‘Of course, such a move would require the utmost analysis and consideration.’

‘Of course it bloody would. I’m not a fool and, believe me, I do not wish to be remembered as the Home Secretary who returned the United Kingdom to the Dark Ages.’

Perhaps he’d misunderstood her. ‘I’m sure you will come to the correct conclusion, Minister. And you have our every support.’

‘I don’t need your support,’ she snapped peevishly. ‘I need progress. What I said earlier is not an idle threat. I would not take the decision lightly, but I may be left with no choice.’ The DG smiled. The cards were on the table now. If heads must roll she would sacrifice him to save hers. Ah, well. He felt her eyes on him. ‘We cannot let the terrorists win, Director General, because if we do we unleash the forces of the worst kind of extremism. We have already seen the results in the capital, the Midlands and the north, but I fear that is just the spark. One more atrocity may trigger a bloodbath and nothing you or I can do will stop it.’

‘Minister, you should see this.’ An aide switched on the television set at the far end of the room. ‘A large explosion on the Madrid underground.’

She walked up and peered at the screen. ‘Atocha again,’ she groaned. ‘Don’t they ever learn?’

The Director General said nothing. His organization had stopped four attacks just like this the public knew about and another six they never would. All the terrorists had to do was succeed once more and this powder-keg of a country would go up in flames.

And the bombs in Cologne and Madrid proved it wasn’t only Britain that was at war, it was the whole of Europe.

They set off after breakfast the next day in a sleek black BMW 5-series Gault had hired for the trip. Jamie offered to drive part of the way, but he was glad the ex soldier turned him down when he realized that Polish drivers were worse than the Italians, never happier than when they were playing ‘chicken’ with an eight-wheeler truck. Instead, he studied the journal and glanced through the notes Charlotte had put together about the area they were approaching. Hitler’s Wolfsschanze, his theatrically named Wolf’s Lair, lay to the east of Ketrzyn, formerly Rastenburg, in the centre of what, prior to 1945, had been the German province of East Prussia. It now lay just a few miles south of the border of the Kaliningrad Oblast, which was effectively part of Russia, but hemmed in by Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north and east. He knew that this had been the scene of some of the most vicious fighting of the Second World War, with the SS and the Wehrmacht battling to keep the vengeful Red Army from German soil. Kaliningrad, then called Konigsberg, endured a three-month siege before it surrendered in April 1945, leaving twenty thousand dead and at least five times as many captives of the Red Army. When the war ended, East Prussia had been carved up between Russia and Poland. What worried him was that, even if they did manage to find the castle in a land full of castles, there was no telling what might be left of it after the devastation of 1945.

‘Then why are we here?’ Charlotte asked.

He blinked as he realized he’d voiced the thought aloud, a lifelong habit that was going to get him in trouble one day.

‘We’re here because the boss wants us here,’ Gault interrupted like an attack dog defending its master. ‘This is where the sword was in nineteen forty-five and this is where we’ll get the next clue to where it is now, isn’t that right, your lordship?’

Jamie ignored reference to the manufactured upmarket drawl his mother had insisted he cultivate for Cambridge and which he’d never quite been able to lose. ‘All we know for certain is that this is where the Excalibur codex says the sword was last seen,’ he said. ‘It’s not only the obvious place to come, it’s the only place. Logically, there are two options. If it was here, either it’s still here or it was taken somewhere else during the war. In the first case, there’s a possibility some local, or someone involved with the castle, will have information, even if it’s only an old folk tale about a buried hoard. We check it out, report back to Adam and walk away to give the treasure hunters a chance.’

‘And if it was taken away?’ Charlotte persisted.

‘That would depend on who took it. If it was front-line troops of the Red Army, we have a problem. Excalibur could have ended up chopping kindling for some Siberian peasant. But it would be dangerous for a private to try to hold onto something of real value like that. Stalin was surprisingly discerning in his approach to loot. The frontovik could have his fancy carpet or an electric stove to impress his wife in their non-electric cabin, but the good stuff went to the Boss. He set up special Trophy Brigades that did to Germany exactly what Goring’s Rosenberg Foundation did to France. At least two and a half million artworks and ten million books ended up in Soviet museums, or, more often, their basements, and most of them are still there.’ He smiled at the thought. ‘If Adam has the financial clout, I’d be happy to spend six months trawling through the cellars of the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Pushkin in Moscow.

‘The more likely possibility, though, is that the Nazis evacuated it either during the war or at the end, when the Russians were closing in. Most of the Third Reich’s treasures, including its gold reserves and the loot they collected in the Occupied Territories, ended up in places like the Kaiseroda salt mine at Merkers in Austria. It’s possible there are other Kaiserodas still waiting to be found.’

He hesitated as he noticed that Gault appeared to be spending as much time looking in the mirrors at what was behind them on the two-lane highway as at what was in front.

‘Do we have a problem, Mr Gault?’

Gault shrugged and twitched the wheel as an oncoming lorry threatened to ram them. ‘All the cars behind us have their lights on, but they’re identifiable by the beams. It looks to me as if a couple of them are in no hurry to get past us, which is unusual judging by some of the driving we’ve seen this morning. I slowed down a while ago and they kept their distance.’

‘The only two law-abiding drivers in Poland.’ Jamie laughed, but there was no humour in it. This was a forbidding landscape. Big-sky country where the overhang of leaden cloud threatened to squash you into the ground. The terrain alternated between moderate-sized patches of cultivated land, each attended by a small farm, dark-green, impenetrable forest and, the further north they travelled, lakes large and small. Not the kind of place you wanted to stop and pass the time of day with someone.

‘I’ll keep an eye on them and maybe stop in one of the towns up ahead,’ Gault said.

Twenty minutes later they pulled off the motorway and drove into the town square of a lakeside settlement that announced itself as Mragowo. For a few minutes they sat in the car while Gault studied the traffic entering the square behind them, but either he didn’t see anything suspicious or he wasn’t saying.

‘I’m going to stretch my legs,’ Jamie announced.

Gault made as if to veto the idea, but he relented with a begrudging: ‘Don’t get into any fucking bother.’

Charlotte suggested she join him and Jamie smiled. ‘Er, you’re welcome, but “stretch my legs” was actually a bit of a euphemism for “look for somewhere to have a pee”.’ Her face turned pink and she settled back into her seat. ‘I’ll let you know if I find anywhere,’ he promised.

He was wandering round the centre of the town looking for somewhere favourable when he noticed a slim young woman walk into a nearby grocer’s shop. Something about her made his heart quicken for no apparent reason, and he followed in her wake. By the time he entered the store she’d already disappeared. Puzzled, he searched among the long aisles of carelessly stacked boxes and sacks until he came to a magazine rack.

‘Don’t turn and look at me. Don’t do anything. You’re searching for a newspaper.’

The voice came from behind him in a low whisper, and the intensity in the words made the hairs on his neck stand on end. He hadn’t heard that voice for more than two years, since she’d walked out on him to ‘find herself’ back home in the States. Which begged the question why Sarah Grant, late, or perhaps not so late, of some shady offshoot of Mossad, was doing in a one-horse town in northern Poland?

He was about to ask when she cut across him like a whiplash. ‘Do you trust these people? Don’t answer; it wasn’t that kind of question. Just hear me out and we’ll go our separate ways. You got that?’ He supposed he was allowed to nod. ‘You’re way out of your league on this one, Jamie boy. This makes the Sun Stone look like a kid’s parlour game. Take my advice and get yourself on the first train back to Warsaw.’ Jamie forced himself to concentrate on the newspapers and magazines in front of him, though his mind whirled with any number of questions. The Sun Stone had been an ancient artefact that the Nazis had hoped would bring them the Holy Grail of unlimited energy, and the search for it had almost cost Jamie and Sarah their lives. They’d become lovers along the way, but he’d never been completely certain whether it had been the real thing for her, or just part of the job. Before he could speak she slipped something into his hand. ‘My number’s on there. Call me if you need help to get out.’ He turned to reply, but the shop door was already closing behind her. The object in his hand was a simple strip of card embossed with a twelve-digit number.

He walked back to the car trying to come to terms with the bizarre meeting. What the hell was Sarah doing here and what did it mean for him? It seemed clear enough that when she’d left him to go to ‘find herself’ in America, she’d instead found her way back to the Mossad agents who had originally recruited her and partnered her with him in the search for the Sun Stone. But how did Mossad know about the hunt for Excalibur? And if they did, why would they be interested in some madcap, probably doomed quest to find an ancient sword that nobody was sure even existed? One thing was certain, it wasn’t just to warn Jamie Saintclair he was out of his depth — as if he needed to be told. What was it she’d said? Do you trust these people? If she meant Gault and Charlotte, or Steele and his people, the answer was probably a qualified no. In the last few years he’d learned to trust only his closest friends. The problem was he didn’t have many left. Gault was too clever for his own good, and a shifty bastard at that, but that was probably why Steele employed him in the first place. Charlotte appeared what she seemed, a competent enough organizer, who was brighter than the little-girl-lost act she sometimes put on. Yet she’d come away with all that high-kicking, unarmed combat stuff that had saved his neck and left Otto Ziegler with a broken jaw. As for Steele, a status-obsessed banker with a liking for edged weapons and humiliating his employees, you could never trust his motives even if you could understand his ambition. But did that mean he would walk away? He knew the answer to that. Steele had challenged him as deliberately as if he’d thrown down a gauntlet or slapped him in the face. Jamie had never walked away from a challenge.

And then there was Excalibur. Myth or not, Arthur’s sword was the embodiment of good against evil. He wanted it to exist and he wanted Jamie Saintclair to find it. For Abbie.

When he got back to the car Charlotte and Gault were chatting. He threw the paper he’d bought in the back and took his seat in the front. Charlotte’s giggle made him look round. She was peering at the newspaper. ‘Jamie, you idiot. You know none of us can read Polish.’