The Excalibur Codex

XXX

‘We’re here.’ Gault’s voice woke Jamie from a nervy, jet-lagged slumber where he’d been dreaming of being chased by enormous knives with a life of their own. He hoped it wasn’t a portent for the next few hours. Fortunately, when he forced his eyes open he was greeted by a breathtaking Sierra Nevada vista of snow-draped mountain and steel-blue lake, the slopes below carpeted by a dense covering of pines and the glittering waters stretching into the distance. But while his eyes feasted on the scene, his mind struggled to catch up. He remembered that Charlotte had stayed in New York, putting together some kind of exit strategy in the event they actually did find anything they needed to get out of the United States without the authorities knowing about it. Then he and Gault had flown west to Reno.

‘Where exactly is here?’

‘Lake Tahoe. We’re about an hour out of Reno. Incline Village is on the bay in front of us, but the place we’re looking for is somewhere in the hills off Highway Thirty-eight.’ He nodded to the left, where a road hugged the Nevada shore. ‘But given that the lake is more than twenty miles long and our man doesn’t encourage visitors, I could do with another pair of eyes.’

Jamie picked up the file Adam Steele had put together on Harold Webster. For such a successful businessman Webster had kept a surprisingly low profile even before the age of the TV star entrepreneurs like Donald Trump, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. He’d made his first fortune manufacturing electrical batteries after the war, where he’d served as a flight engineer in the US Eighth Air Force, then identified the potential of television before any of his rivals. But the real money had come when he’d branched out into computers at just the right time. The few pictures of him had all been taken in the fifties and he’d disappeared from public view entirely after the death of his son and successor in less than clear circumstances about a decade earlier. Since then he’d lived as a recluse on his ranch in the mountains. What linked an American multi-millionaire with a dismantled Polish castle? Jamie still wasn’t sure of the what, but he was certain the link existed. Harold ‘Hal’ Webster had been the original patron of the Bialystok Foundation long before it had attracted its respectable veneer of distinguished Polish board members. The foundation was Hal’s baby. And the envelope containing the late Rolf Lauterbacher’s medals and addressed to the former SS man had a Reno, Nevada, postmark. Coincidence? Maybe, but as an old friend had told him, there was no such thing as a coincidence when you had a dead body at your feet.

Equally interesting was the fact that Hal Webster hadn’t answered any of Adam Steele’s enquiries. All right, a recluse was hardly going to welcome a request for a meeting, but you’d think he’d be curious enough to ask what it was about, especially when it was accompanied by the offer of a substantial donation to his pet foundation. In Jamie’s experience, historical artefacts and rich men went together like the proverbial apple pie and ice cream. Excalibur was nearby. As Adam Steele would say, he could feel it in his bones.

And that was why Mr Hal Webster was about to get a surprise visit: if they ever found the ranch.

They took the winding road down through the village past substantial mansions and condos hidden amongst the trees. When they reached an intersection by the lake, Gault turned the big SUV on to Tahoe Boulevard and followed the shoreline at the foot of towering mountain peaks that seemed to hang over them like a gigantic Sword of Damocles.

‘Gold Rush country,’ Jamie said to Gault as they passed the rusting skeleton of some kind of heavy equipment. ‘Fortunes made and lost in a day.’ The former SBS man only grunted. ‘You don’t like me much do you, Mr Gault?’

‘It’s not a question of liking. You’re an amateur. Amateurs get people killed.’

Sarah Grant’s face appeared in Jamie’s head and he went very still. Just for a moment he wondered if Gault was mocking him about her death. Someone had killed Sarah, and he had spent the days since David’s concentration-enhancing phone call on the Corfu balcony trying to work out who. The most likely explanation was that she’d been murdered by the lone Al-Qaida assassin who’d escaped from the forest, but there was another possibility. Gault had been AWOL at the Wolf’s Lair for the whole shooting match. What if the SBS man had been lying? What if, instead of running the other way, he’d followed them? He’d no doubt Gault had access to weapons. It would have given him ample time to put three bullets in Sarah Grant and then get back to the crash site at the same time as Jamie. Then there were the hints that Charlotte had dropped before they flew to Corfu. Maybe there was more than luck to Gault’s great escape. ‘Remind me where you got to while I was so busy being an amateur at the Wolf’s Lair?’ he said.

Gault stared at his companion as if he’d sensed the change in atmosphere. ‘Now don’t get me wrong, your lordship. You didn’t do too badly. How many was it? Three? Four? And all with a Second World War pop gun. Proper little Rambo we are.’ His voice turned sly. ‘Maybe if you’d dumped your little squeeze Charlotte a bit sooner, we wouldn’t have needed help from your Russki mates. Still, it must have taken some doing. All those trigger-happy ragheads after your blood and you managed to outfight them.’

Jamie turned to him. ‘Everybody needs a little luck, Mr Gault. Even you.’

‘Why are you getting so worked up all of a sudden?’ Gault felt the cold eyes on him and his fingers fumbled for the radio, filling the car with the sound of a wailing country-and-western crooner. ‘We can’t be far away now.’

‘I lost a friend back there and I wondered if you had anything to do with it.’

‘Hermann?’ Gault looked at him as if he’d gone crazy. ‘Hermann wasn’t a friend, he was a Kraut hustler. Hermann, a friend.’ He chuckled. Jamie sank back in his seat. If Gault had anything to do with Sarah Grant’s murder he was hiding it very well. He closed his eyes as the SBS man darted another puzzled glance at him. ‘What you need is a good night’s sleep, your lordship. Now where is this fucking place?’

‘You mus’ be thinkin’ of Thunderbird Lodge — fancy place by the shore just along apiece,’ the young man running the coffee booth in a roadside picnic area suggested. Jamie said no, he was certain the Webster ranch lay in the mountains between Carson City and Lake Tahoe. The boy’s brow puckered beneath his dark-blue Reno Aces baseball cap. ‘Hell,’ he laughed.

‘You must mean that outfit way out by Marlette Lake. Nobody goes there, on account of there’s no road.’ Jamie exchanged a pained glance with Gault and the young man caught the look. ‘Ain’t no road, but thar’s what you might call a trail takes you so far before it’ll tear the axles out of your truck, then you hitch on your pack and keep climbing till you can’t climb no more. Once you hit the top of that old hill, you see the lake laid out below you, maybe a mile wide and three long. On the far shore you’ll see a jetty, maybe with a Twin Beaver tied up there.’ He grinned. ‘That’s the sensible folk’s way of visiting. The ranch house is somewhere in the trees beyond. Man, that fella likes his privacy; I hope you guys got an invite. Not too popular with the folks round here, though. This here’s an eco-management area. No development, period. My daddy told me that about twenty odd years ago these here trucks just started rolling up the old sluice way and they started building. Didn’t even use one local pair of hands. Whadya’ think of that?’

Well, they didn’t think much of that, but they had business with the gentleman in question and they weren’t going to let a little old mountain stand in their way. Jamie hadn’t expected it to be easy, but equally he hadn’t expected to do any mountain climbing. Fortunately, they’d come prepared for a hike and when they surveyed the hill as Gault parked the car off the road at the end of the trail, it looked more of a steep walk than an alpine ascent. They pulled on anoraks of camouflage green and sturdy walking boots.

‘Here.’ Gault handed Jamie a rucksack and the younger man grunted at the weight.

‘Hand grenades or mortar bombs?’

‘You’ll thank me when we get wherever it is we’re going,’ the former soldier said as he hitched an identical bag onto his shoulders.

They followed the course of a stream up through the scattered trees and multi-coloured patches of wild flowers with Gault setting a thigh-burning pace that left Jamie gasping in his wake. He considered himself fit, but hiking in the Sierra Nevada was a world away from his morning jog around the park. A few hundred feet higher and his lungs were burning and his head began to spin. The sensation was similar to an experience he’d once had in the Himalayas and it was only when Gault helpfully pointed out they were probably at around seven thousand feet that he realized just how high these mountains were. At this height they were tramping through a dusting of snow that crunched beneath their feet and made the walking even harder on the thigh and calf muscles, but Gault was relentless. Jamie gritted his teeth and put one foot in front of the other, determined not to be outdone.

Once they reached the crest the former soldier stopped among the thin cover of the trees and shrugged off his rucksack. Sweat coursed down his face and his breath rasped from his lungs, but he was still grinning. ‘Like the Brecons, but without the mud and the sleet.’ Far below, a lake shaped vaguely like a hump-back whale stretched away diagonally northwards in a narrow cleft between the mountains. The wider part lay closest to them and it narrowed the further north it went. Gault hauled out a pair of binoculars and sighted the lenses on the far side. After a few moments he handed them to Jamie.

‘You can see the jetty just to the north-east at the top end of the lake, but I don’t see any sign of a float plane.’ Jamie found the wooden pontoons in his lenses.

‘Hopefully that means he’s alone, like a good recluse, or maybe just with a couple of staff.’ He studied the area behind the jetty, but the trees were denser in the valley than on the slopes and it was difficult to make anything out. Unless … ‘I think I can just see a tile roof among the trees, but it’s difficult to tell because it’s hidden by the contour of the hill.’ He scanned the rest of the lake, looking for the best way to approach the Webster property. He followed the line of what looked like a track to the south end of the lake. ‘Bastard.’

Gault looked up round in alarm. ‘What can you see?’

‘A road. A road that the little prick at the coffee stand didn’t tell us about. We could have driven most of the way.’

The SBS man took the glasses and laughed. ‘A Yank with a sense of humour? You don’t meet one of those every day.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s hardly a surprise. If they were supplying the place by float plane, there’d be one here permanently. Never mind, your lordship. We’ve had a bracing stroll and now we’re about to have another. It might be for the best. Harold Webster may be a recluse, but he’s a reclusive millionaire, and I’ve never met a millionaire yet who didn’t want his security as watertight as a duck’s arsehole. I’m betting our man will have the road watched and every car that stops checked out and there’ll be a few juicy surprises in those woods.’

Jamie took the binoculars again. ‘If the security is that tight, how the hell are we going to get in?’

The other man grinned. ‘Leave that to your Uncle Gault. The house hasn’t been built that I couldn’t get inside. Once you’re in, it’s up to you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you can persuade the old man to part with the sword, that’s fine. Pay him what he wants. If not, you’re going to have to steal Excalibur.’