The Excalibur Codex (21 page)

‘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.’

They got lost twice in Ketrzyn, the pretty little Polish town closest to the
Wolfsschanze
. Gault stopped to ask for directions, but it took them three attempts before they found someone who could speak enough English to put them on the right road. Eventually they reached the eastern outskirts and wound their way through two smaller villages until they reached what was little more than a track that followed the railway line through open country. A few minutes later a dense forest of evergreens seemed to wrap itself around the car and they found themselves in almost pitch darkness with the headlights creating a tunnel in front. Gaps in the trees revealed an occasional glimpse of ancient railway line with the rusting steel tracks laid direct on a layer of ash.

‘Christ,’ Gault complained. ‘It’s like somebody switched off the sun.’

As they drove on, the gloom of their surroundings seemed to be fighting its way into the car and it was
a relief when they saw the sign for the Wolfsschanze Hotel and Gault turned off to the left. A hundred yards ahead they came to a clearing and the former SBS man slowed to a halt.

They studied their surroundings with varying degrees of bewilderment. ‘Did somebody turn the clock back?’ Jamie asked. ‘We appear to be in nineteen forty-five.’

‘I booked us into the nearest hotel,’ Gault said defensively. ‘The website said it used to be Hitler’s former security bunker, but I thought they might have done it up a little since he was in residence. At least it’s got atmosphere.’

‘Sure, atmosphere as in all the ambiance of a concentration camp.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ Charlotte pointed out. ‘Your concentration camp has a beer garden.’

The hotel looked what it was, a relic of the Second World War that had been given a coat of green paint. Fortunately the interior, though equally gloomy because of the small windows, turned out to be modern, if functionally basic in a way that reminded Jamie of his school canteen. They were met at the check-in by a cheerful, slim young man in a white shirt and dark trousers who thankfully spoke German, and broke into passable English when they produced their passports.

‘Let me know when you want see Wolf’s Lair,’ he suggested. ‘You need guide to get best of site, but official guides only speak Polish. Hermann gives good rates for English peoples. Shows you everything.’

He handed them a leaflet boasting the highlights of the complex, with pictures of enormous bunkers cloaked in green ivy, intimidating subterranean tunnels and huge chunks of nameless concrete. ‘Just the place to come for a cheery relaxing holiday,’ Gault chuckled. ‘And that’s without an introduction to the former residents. Anybody fancy a trip to the shooting range in General Jodl’s staff bunker?’

Hermann’s face split into a grin. ‘You like? Try Mauser sniper’s rifle, MP40?’

‘What about a
Panzerfaust
?’ Gault asked innocently.

‘You joke with me, right? I get you discount. We talk later, I serve in restaurant.’

He walked away with a shy smile at Charlotte. Gault said he’d check in with Adam Steele. Jamie and Charlotte decided to take a walk in the grounds around the hotel to familiarize themselves with their surroundings. They moved silently in the dim light beneath the towering pines and beeches, passing a memorial cross topped by a crowned eagle. The writing was Polish, but a German translation commemorated the Polish engineers killed and injured in these woods during the ten years it took to clear 54,000 mines laid by the Nazis. Jamie shivered and not just from the raw chill that ate into his bones. This was a place of ghosts. He half expected a spectral SS general to walk out of the gloom. Huge shadowy bunkers loomed among the trees and his imagination created the mighty fortresses they had once been. Many looked as if they’d been tossed
high in the air and crashed back to earth in giant pieces, some of them the size of a small house. Everything was overgrown with the creepers and moss that thrived in the damp atmosphere. He wondered how Hitler, the hypochondriac, had fared here.

‘I see it’s your turn to be preoccupied.’

‘I’m sorry.’ His mind took a little time to clear. He’d almost forgotten Charlotte was with him. She studied him, the blue eyes appraising, but the moment he looked up, she turned away, as if she couldn’t bear him to read the message in them. Tall and slim in tight blue jeans and a jacket of shiny black leather, he suddenly realized just how achingly beautiful she was. ‘I was just thinking that the very earth of this place is tainted by the Nazis, even after all these years.’

‘I’ve been thinking, too,’ she said seriously. ‘Remember we were talking about Lauterbacher’s description: a walled castle beside a lake?’

He nodded. ‘We decided it wasn’t much help because there are thousands of lakes.’

‘And hundreds of castles.’

‘Sure,’ he agreed.

‘What kind of people build castles?’

He wondered what this was all about, but decided to play along. ‘Kings, princes, dukes, barons …’

‘And knights.’

He stopped. ‘Yes, and knights.’

She laughed, pleased with herself for surprising him. ‘I did some research and I discovered that East Prussia
is the creation of an order called the Teutonic Knights. They have their roots in the Crusades – Richard the Lionheart, the Saracens, and all that – a bit like the Knights Templar, but later they turned their sights closer to home. They drove the pagan Prussians out of their lands and established themselves here, building castles left, right and centre. Their hereditary enemies were the Lithuanians, and, like someone we know, the Poles and the Russians. The emblem of the order was a …’

Jamie dredged a memory from somewhere. ‘A black Maltese cross. The holy Knight’s Cross.’

‘I know it doesn’t take us much further forward, but it—’

‘Hang on a second.’ He delved in the rucksack for the journal. ‘I should have seen this before. There’s always been a name that doesn’t quite fit.
Joyeuse, the sword of Charlemagne; Durendal, the sword of his lieutenant, Roland; Gotteswerkzeug, the sword of Werner von Orseln, defier of the Eastern hordes; Zerstorer, the sword of Barbarossa; and your sword, the most powerful of them all, the sword of Arthur: Excalibur.
Charlemagne, Barbarossa and Arthur were all kings in their own right. Roland was, at worst, a prince, and in any case his holdings were in France. The question is: who was Werner von Orseln, the man who carried a sword called God’s Instrument?’

They walked back to the hotel, passing the beer garden. The route took them through the car park and Jamie noticed a large black car with mirrored windows,
what the Americans called an SUV and the Brits a 4x4. He didn’t realize it was occupied until the driver gunned the engine and drove away as they came up behind it. He glanced at Charlotte, but his companion didn’t react. Hermann was polishing the glass panels in the hotel’s front door, and as they passed him Jamie asked how long the car had been standing there.