The Ludwig Conspiracy (41 page)

“All the cameras are making me paranoid,” she said softly, pointing to another lens mounted in a corner. “You really do feel you’re under observation the whole time.”

“Any idea how many people go around this place every day?” Zöller said, standing in contemplation of the furniture. Once again, Steven felt that something was troubling him. “It’s sometimes up to ten thousand a day in the summer. Ten thousand idiots who think they can paw everything here. Without security cameras, you might as well shut up shop.”

Zöller went ahead as they finally, by way of the anteroom and the dining room, reached the king’s bedchamber. The magnificent neo-Gothic furnishings were as impressive as the stage set for a Wagnerian opera. In the left-hand corner stood the broad bed with its carved wooden canopy. Next to it was an equally ornate washstand with a silver swan providing water. Two doorways led to the private chapel next door and a small, artificial grotto with a conservatory. The bedroom walls were covered by mural paintings from the legend of Tristan and Isolde, and here again the small cameras made sure that improper behavior by any visitors was immediately detected.

Lost in thought, Steven looked at the bedside table. Its wood looked curiously thin and cheap. Once again, the bookseller thought of what Zöller had said just now.

Most of this stuff is only smoke and mirrors . . .

“So let’s see what we have here,” Uncle Lu said, leafing through a booklet about legends of the Middle Ages. He then scrutinized the paintings and furniture. “The washstand has running water, and there is a flushing toilet,” he lectured. “Ludwig always made use of the latest technology. Nonetheless, the fittings and furnishings were so grotesquely like something out of a fairy tale that only a few weeks after Ludwig’s death, Prince Regent Luitpold threw it open to the public as evidence of the king’s insanity. This bed, for instance . . .”

Suddenly Zöller stopped short. He adjusted his reading glasses and inspected the lavish carvings on the canopy.

“What is it?” Sara asked. “Have you found something?”

“No,” the old man murmured, shaking his head as if waking from a nightmare. “I must be mistaken. Anything else would be . . .”

He chuckled as if he had just heard a bad joke. Then he shrugged and pointed to a mural on the left, showing a pair of lovers in the shade of a broad treetop. “The lady in the white dress there is Isolde,” he said. “So the man embracing her so soulfully must be Tristan. Aha, and over there he is handing her the fatal love potion.”

“Maybe it would be helpful if you could give us a brief summary of the plot,” Sara said. “I’m apparently the only person here who doesn’t know her way around the world of the old Germanic legends.”

Uncle Lu grinned. “You don’t know the most famous love story in Germany? Very well, here’s the short version.” He cleared his throat. “King Rivalon is burning with love for the beautiful Blanchefleur, but their relationship must be kept secret. Just when she becomes pregnant, Rivalon is killed by the wicked King Morgan. Blanchefleur dies of love and grief, and her child grows up without ever knowing his real parents. That child is Tristan.”

“So what about Isolde?” Sara asked.

“Don’t be so impatient.” Uncle Lu raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “Much later, Tristan is to pay court to the Irish princess Isolde on behalf of King Mark of Cornwall. On the crossing to Britain, the two of them accidentally drink the love potion that was really meant for Mark and Isolde. And then fate takes its course.”

Zöller pointed to a mural showing Isolde mourning at the bedside of a mortally sick Tristan. “Tristan loves a woman who is betrothed to another man. A theme popular to this day in romantic novels and soap operas. The handsome young man does marry another girl, who as it happens is also called Isolde, but even his marriage cannot extinguish his love for the true Isolde. In the end they both die after a few complications so unbelievable that no TV producer would allow them to pass. End of story.”

Sara applauded slowly. “Thanks for the lesson, Herr Zöller, even if I still have no idea what the keyword is. My head is positively ringing with all those names instead.” Sighing, she enumerated them. “King Rivalon, Blanchefleur, Morgan, Mark, another Isolde . . .”

“And I’ve left out most of the names, too.” Uncle Lu grinned. “Otherwise it would be a performance to fill a whole evening.”

Suddenly, something clicked inside Steven’s head. It was as if a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that he had spent a long time looking for had finally moved into the right place.

Was it possible?

“Just a moment! What was the name of Tristan’s mother again?”

Zöller looked at him in surprise. “Blanchefleur. Why do you ask?”

“Blanchefleur . . .” The bookseller frowned, and his eyes lingered on the woman in the white dress in the mural. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but if my French isn’t letting me down, then Blanchefleur means . . .”

“White flower,” Sara muttered. “White like the lilies that Marot picked for Maria. Do you really think
Blanchefleur
is our keyword? There are an awful lot of letters in it.”

Steven nodded eagerly. His voice almost cracked. “Why not?” He held up three fingers. “The first keyword was
Maria,
the second was
lilies
. And number three,
Blanchefleur
, is both a woman
and
a white flower. So the word stands both for a lily and for Maria. It’s the sum of the two first keywords.” In his excitement, he pointed to the mural. “And Blanchefleur and this King Rivalon also had to keep their love secret, just like Tristan and Isolde and just like . . .”

“Theodor and Maria!” Sara struck her forehead. “I think you’ve got it.” She took out her laptop and typed the name . . . “Bingo. Although . . .” A shadow clouded her face.

“What’s the matter?” Steven asked. “Is something wrong?”

“Damn it, all we get is roman numerals again.” Sara pointed to the monitor and a row of capital letters shimmering on it.

I, IV, II, V, III, IV, IV, I, IV, IV, IV, IV, II

“First the titles of those poems, and then nothing but two sets of figures,” she said crossly. “I’m beginning to think that friend Theodor is playing an elaborate joke on us.”

“Suppose it’s not the keyword?” Zöller suggested. “Maybe the name is a false trail?”

“Nonsense!” With one finger, Steven tapped the mural showing the lady in white and Tristan. “
Blanchefleur
is the third keyword, I’m sure it is. If only I knew . . .”

Suddenly he stopped in alarm and looked up at the ceiling, where one of the CCTV cameras was mounted above the mural.

“Listen, I may be wrong,” he murmured, “but wasn’t that camera just pointing in a different direction?”

All three stood there as if turned to stone and stared up at the ceiling, like small children caught stealing cookies.

Finally Sara broke the silence. “Hell, Steven, you’re right,” she whispered. “The thing must have moved. But how . . .”

There was a faint humming sound, and the lens moved several degrees to one side. All at once Steven had a feeling that the camera was looking straight at him, like the eye of some unearthly being staring down at him with interest.

Sara nervously pulled at his sleeve and pointed to a second camera behind them. It, too, turned in their direction, also humming softly. Only now did the bookseller notice a detail that had escaped him entirely in his excitement.

A small black microphone was fitted over the lens of each camera, and a little red light blinked wildly whenever they made the slightest sound.

“Oh shit,” Sara said.

Still humming, the two cameras now moved their lenses down, as if to greet old friends.

L
ANCELOT LOUNGED ON
the comfortable, black leather sofa in the middle of the control room, playing with the regulators on the control panel. Above him flickered more than two dozen monitors, each showing one of the rooms in the castle. Most of them were empty; in one of them there was panic.

They had obviously noticed what he was doing, but that didn’t matter. He knew what he wanted to know. The king would be grateful to him. Well, maybe not grateful exactly, but at least Lancelot had fulfilled the major part of his contract and could hope for a good fat fee. He knew the third keyword; he had brought together everything that was worth knowing about this man Steven Lukas and his woman. Now all he needed was the diary, and then his mission would be complete.

Caribbean, here I come.

He had to admit that the king’s plan had worked perfectly. They had fallen into the trap like so many mice, and now they were gaping stupidly at the camera lens like mice staring at a snake. With a tingling sense of anticipation, Lancelot zoomed in on the face of the little slut who had put his eye out. Her expression was partly baffled, partly terrified. He could see every bead of sweat on her brow. Now he moved the camera a little lower, so that he could admire her heaving breasts.

Nice cleavage. A pity I can’t get the camera to look up her skirt.

Suddenly the young woman’s expression changed. Her bewilderment and fear vanished, and her eyes flashed angrily. With determination, she approached the camera.

Sara showed him her middle finger, took a piece of chewing gum out of her mouth, and stuck it over the lens. The monitor went black.

What the hell . . .

A moment later, the other screen showing the bedroom went blank as well. Snarling, Lancelot stood up from the leather sofa and took the safety catch off his well-oiled Glock 17. He had been having fun long enough.

Now it was time to tidy up.

S
ARA STUCK THE
last remnant of her chewing gum on the second microphone and turned furiously to her two companions.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” she whispered. “But someone seems to be watching us. And probably listening to everything as well.”

“One of the security guards, maybe?” Zöller suggested. “Or the head of Manstein Systems herself? It could be that Frau Manstein is just checking the system and having a little joke at our expense. She did say she was going to the control room.”

“In that case she’s not going to be very happy that you’ve stuck gum all over her expensive cameras and microphones,” Steven said. “Although that’s exactly what Peggy from Texas would do, with her adolescent sense of humor.”

“Very funny.” Sara rolled her eyes nervously. “Come on, admit that you’re terrified. And still no one has said that . . .” Suddenly she stopped dead.

“What is it?” Steven asked.

“The picture,” she said slowly, pointing to the mural showing the woman in white. “In your excitement just now, you touched that picture.”

“So?”

“Frau Manstein said she’d switched the alarm system on. But no alarm went off, even though you tapped the painting several times. So someone switched the system off again.” She looked cautiously out at the corridor leading to the artificial grotto. “Someone who doesn’t want to be disturbed in his work.”

“Sara, please don’t turn paranoid,” Steven replied skeptically. “This unknown Someone would have had to get into the castle to switch off the system. You saw for yourself how complicated that is. Numerical code, fingerprint, facial recognition—who’d be able to get past all that?”

“I don’t know,” Sara said, looking around the room. “But someone has to clean this place. There are tour guides, watchmen . . .” She suddenly fell silent and bent down. Steven blinked and tried to get a clearer view.

Beside the tiled stove with the two figures of Tristan and Isolde, there was a small electronic distributor box at knee level, as black as the cameras. An adhesive label on it showed the logo of a company and some writing. Sara cried out in surprise.

Now Steven knelt down as well to get a better look at the label.

“Camelot Security,”
he read aloud.

But it was not the words that drained the color from his face; it was the logo underneath them.

It showed a golden swan with outspread wings. Below it, there was another inscription in tiny, old-fashioned script, forming part of the logo.

Tmeicos Ettal.

It took Steven some time to remember where he had seen that logo and the inscription before. The realization struck him like a blow in the pit of the stomach. It was the same as on the amulet worn by the dead Bernd Reiser, the man in the cellar of his antiquarian bookshop in Munich. Steven felt his heart beating faster as everything suddenly fitted together. Was this possible?

Camelot Security . . . It’s a case of combining the old and the new.

The bookseller groaned under his breath. He didn’t want to believe it, but the longer he thought, the clearer it all became. It made no sense, but nonetheless it was logical. Even before he could follow his train of thought all the way to its terrible end, a sound startled him.

“Time to go,” Lancelot said, suddenly appearing in the bedroom doorway. His good eye sparkled mockingly as he sketched a small bow.

“Allow me to escort you,” he growled in his deep, bass voice. “The Royal Highness awaits to grant you an audience.”

T
HE KING RECEIVED
them in the throne room, sitting ramrod straight on a plain wooden chair without arms or a back, a mere stool, placed exactly on the raised part of the apse where Ludwig’s throne had once been destined to stand.

To the left and right of this improvised throne the paladins Gawain and Mordred stood guard, holding their automatic Uzis in front of them, like lances adorned with pennants. To hold audience, the king wore the royal cloak of white ermine from which the professor’s blood had been removed by chemical cleaning. A thin aristocratic hand tightly gripped the same Derringer the king had used to spray Paul Liebermann’s brain matter over the forest floor. In honor of the day, the king wore a little mascara and some discreet lipstick. The makeup harmonized perfectly with the king’s short gray hair, and equally gray pantsuit.

“Welcome to my castle, Herr Lukas,” Luise Manstein said. “I must confess that you have given me considerably more problems than I assumed you would. Strong blood flows in your veins.”