The Excalibur Codex

by James Douglas

  Jamie studied the first two familiar faces on the list. There didn’t seem to be anyone within eavesdropping distance, but he kept his voice low just in case and the others huddled close to hear him. ‘I think we can rule out Martin Bormann and Rudolf Hess, because Himmler regarded them both as rivals and their SS rank was more or less honorary. The meeting was also less than a month before Hess made his crazy flight to Scotland to try to stop the war, so he may have had other things on his mind. Any initial thoughts?’

  ‘Some of the things I read almost made me sick,’ Charlotte said. ‘It seems obscene even to think of these men as Knights of the Round Table.’

  ‘Every one a bastard,’ Gault confirmed. ‘Only some are bigger bastards than others.’

  Jamie had to agree. ‘I thought Heydrich was the biggest bastard of them all, but even though he was Himmler’s right-hand man, created the einsatzgruppen and is responsible for more deaths than the Black Plague, he’s just a pen-pusher compared to some of these butchers.’

  ‘Friedrich Jeckeln …’ Charlotte paused as a steward approached offering snacks and hot drinks from a trolley. When he was out of earshot, she continued: ‘After the invasion of Russia Himmler gave him command of all einsatzgruppen – why don’t we call them what they were, murder squads? – in the east. He was an educated man,’ she shook her head as if decent schooling should be a barrier to mass murder, ‘an engineer, but regular firing squads weren’t efficient enough for him because the victims would sprawl all over the place and fill up the mass graves too quickly. Jeckeln developed a method he called “sardine packing” where the people to be killed lay down in rows on top of the already dead before they were shot in the back of the head. Anyone who didn’t die immediately was just buried alive. Jeckeln was hanged by the Russians in nineteen forty-six, but it’s surprising how many of these people survived the war.’

  ‘Udo von Woyrsch.’ Gault pointed to an image of a hard-eyed man with a nose like an executioner’s axe and identified by the collar tabs of an SS general. ‘Death squad commander and a personal friend of Himmler. His unit were so brutal in southern Poland that the Wehrmacht petitioned the Gestapo to have them removed from the area. He only served ten years and lived till he was eighty-three.’

  ‘Gottlob Berger is the only man I’ve actually been able to confirm was among Himmler’s chosen few,’ Charlotte continued. ‘His biography states quite openly that he was one of the Reichsführer’s Twelve Apostles. Subordinates called him “The Almighty Gottlob”, as in Almighty Gott/God? Himmler put him in charge of the Eastern Territories in nineteen forty, so if what we know about our ritual is true, he’s almost certain to have been involved. He was captured, did a few years in jail and died in nineteen seventy-five.’

  As the flight continued, Jamie ran through the rest of the candidates for places at the Round Table. Kurt Daluege, notorious for wiping out the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia after Heydrich’s assassination in Prague, hanged 1946; Erwin Rösener, who had encouraged terror and massacre in Slovenia, where his Domobranci anti-Partisan units’ favoured method of execution was by woodsman’s axe, also finished up on the end of a rope; Karl Wolff, Himmler’s one-time adjutant, who would later become Heydrich’s rival and notorious for his part in the massacre of Italian partisans late in the war; Karl von Eberstein, who brought Himmler and Heydrich together, and was later responsible for Dachau concentration camp, served just three years and died peacefully in 1979; Sepp Dietrich, a soldier-thug and unlikely occultist who served in every theatre of the war, and who would find infamy as the instigator of the Malmedy Massacre when American prisoners were shot in cold blood during the Ardennes offensive in 1944; Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, destroyer of Warsaw and responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, somehow escaped the rope to die in prison; Oswald Pohl, overseer of a ruthless slave empire based on the concentration camps exploiting his victims for their gold teeth, their hair and their every belonging before consigning them to the ovens. And the two who interested him most: Darré and Hildebrandt, architects of the Ahnenerbe and encouragers of Himmler’s obsession with the occult.

  He saw Gault frowning. ‘You have a problem with this?’

  ‘Only that for all their very obvious faults these were practical men. They don’t seem the types to have been taken in by Himmler’s mumbo-jumbo. I can see them cheerfully slaughtering Russians and Slavs and Jews because they thought they were racially superior, but not standing around in the dark in hoods and cloaks muttering incantations over a set of old cutlery.’

  Jamie allowed himself a smile. ‘Practical, maybe, but every man on our list was in Himmler’s thrall. By nineteen forty-one they’d spent twelve years steeped in a culture of his creation, and the SS culture was defined by ritual and theatre. They wore Death’s Head rings and carried Death’s Head daggers. The SS leaders, his twelve Apostles, were each allocated their own coat of arms and on their deaths those arms would be burned and their ashes kept in his Camelot at Wewelsburg, along with the Totenkopf ring of every SS man who fell in battle. Himmler based the organizational structure of the SS on the Jesuit order, but in reality they were more like medieval Templars, or the Knights of St John. He wanted the SS to be cloaked in mysticism and fear, and he succeeded. Worship of the past was bred deep and his enthusiasm for the occult directly linked to his obsession to make contact with the great figures of history, whether it was through seance, ritual or some kind of object, like the Spear of Destiny that was used to kill Christ …’

  ‘Or Excalibur,’ Charlotte whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ Jamie said, ‘or Excalibur. The point is that Himmler believed in an ancient race of Aryan supermen capable of using mind-control on their enemies, and he believed they could provide him with the weapons for world domination. He believed that the Spear of Destiny would bring with it a power that the Nazis could use. In their hearts, these practical men may not have believed with the same fervour, but what really mattered was that where Himmler led they were prepared to follow. They proved that by doing things that no rational human being would have done and that left them with the blood of countless millions of people on their hands.’

  Jamie settled back and turned his attention to the window and the spotless white carpet of cloud below. Far away to the west a tiny replica of their own jet slid smoothly across a pristine sky of eggshell blue. He could feel Charlotte’s warm presence and smell the sweetness of her perfume. The scent brought with it a wave of nostalgia that threatened to overwhelm him. Abbie would have been fast asleep now, with her head on his shoulder. She loved to travel, but always slept the moment the plane took off. What would she make of this strange quest? He decided she would approve. The romantic in her would have seen Excalibur as a symbol of justice and good. Maybe Adam Steele was right and Britain needed a new Arthur, but it was too late for Abbie. What was clear now was that whether he found the sword or not, he would have to wade through the most degrading filth and pestilence of war to reach his goal. Because the twelve men who attended the Excalibur ritual had been the men who had enforced Heinrich Himmler’s writ in the East. Not his Knights of the Round Table.

  His Angels of Death.

  XI

  Dorstfeld, where the Ziegler family lived, lay on the west side of the city of Dortmund, the opposite from the airport, and they checked into their hotel before Jamie called the number he had been given. The phone was answered with a grunt and in a thick Westphalian accent that his brain took a few moments to decipher.

  ‘Herr Ziegler? Herr Rolf Ziegler?’

  ‘Wait. Old man? It’s for you.’

  Jamie heard the rustle of feet across a carpeted floor and a hard voice confirmed: ‘Ziegler.’

  He sensed the reluctance at the other end of the line as he explained that he wanted to ask a few questions about the will of the late Wulf Ziegler. ‘We will only take up a few moments of your time, Herr Ziegler,’ he assured the man at the other end of the phone, ‘and of course, we’ll be happy to pay you for your trou
ble.’ He saw Gault’s eyebrows rise and shrugged. It was Steele’s money.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Shall we say two hundred and fifty euros?’

  A short pause. ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Park Inn.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘It’s in the city centre on …’ He grabbed for a piece of the hotel’s headed notepaper. ‘Olpe?’

  ‘Sure. You got a car it will take you ten minutes. Drive out to the fifty-four at Sudwall and turn right. Keep going until you hit Rheinischestrasse – you’ll know when you see the old Union Brewery building up ahead – then follow it until you cross the bridge. When you can see the steel works you’re there.’

  ‘The steel works?’

  ‘You can’t miss it. It’ll be on your right. We’re on Joachimstrasse, directly across the road from the old offices. Look for the blue block. Number thirty-four on the second floor. Okay? Opposite Aldi.’ Jamie repeated the instructions and Charlotte took them down on her notepad. ‘When you gonna be here? We’re just about to eat.’

  Jamie looked at his watch: just gone six. ‘Can we say eight o’clock?’

  With what might have been a grunt of acknowledgement the line went dead.

  They had a light meal in the hotel restaurant and Jamie managed to prise a little history from the soft-spoken Gault, who it turned out had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and a few other places he was even less eager to discuss. ‘I wouldn’t have thought there was much call for the web-footed persuasion in Afghanistan, given that there’s very little water there,’ Jamie teased.

  ‘You had to be there.’ Gault grinned, taking no offence at the land-based soldiers’ derogatory label for the amphibious variety. ‘Admittedly, it was drier than you’d like up in the Shahi-Kot Valley and Tora Bora wasn’t exactly tourist territory, but the one that took the school prize was Qala-i-Jangi Fort. Six hundred Terry Taliban prisoners and their Al-Qaida mates bust into the armoury and were about to break out into open country, armed and dangerous, when we got there. Eight of us. We kept them pinned down with an MG till the Northern Alliance arrived and a few of us even snuck into the jail and tried to rescue a CIA bod, who’d got himself captured. The Yanks wanted to give my boss on that mission the Congressional Medal of Honor, but some bastard politician at Westminster vetoed it.’ Jamie found himself the focus of what might be called a significant look. ‘One of the reasons I hate bastard politicians. Time we had a few military men running the country, eh?’ Jamie didn’t rise to the suggestion and Gault shook his head. ‘Anyway, what I’m saying is it’s not only the SAS that can crawl around in the dark, Mr Saintclair. Though I guess you wouldn’t know that, what with your less than glorious military record.’

  Jamie let the jibe at his two short weeks at Sandhurst slide by like a straight right in the boxing ring. ‘Not everybody’s cut out for soldiering, old boy. Taking orders turned out to be not my cup of tea. If you liked it so much, why didn’t you stay in? You’re not that old.’

  ‘I didn’t have any choice, old boy.’

  Before Jamie could ask the obvious question, Charlotte, who seemed to have appointed herself his minder, interrupted sweetly. ‘Isn’t it time we were going?’

  The evening light was fading as they drove out of the hotel car park in the hired black Audi. The street lights showed a Dortmund of steel, brick and glass, with hardly a piece of dressed stone in sight. Jamie reckoned it must be one of the most modern centres he’d ever been in. A city born in the nineteen fifties, and still to mature fully. He mentioned it to Gault and the SBS man, who was at the wheel, laughed.

  ‘If we’d been here sixty odd years ago, there’d have been nothing but rubble for miles around. This is the industrial heart of Germany. Dortmund was right in the middle of Bomber Harris’s Battle of the Ruhr. In the summer of nineteen forty-three the RAF visited Dortmund about once a week with four or five hundred Lancasters. By the time they’d finished you’d be lucky if there was one stone standing on top of another.’ He drove out onto a wide highway and followed the line of the rebuilt city ramparts northwards until they reached an intersection marked by a brick tower topped by a huge spotlit letter U. ‘Left here, I think,’ Charlotte said. Jamie heard Gault mutter something under his breath about ‘not being fucking blind’.

  To their right, running like a broad river through the centre of the city, was a floodlit expanse of rail tracks, which split a couple of hundred yards later to create a concrete peninsula that Gault reached via an iron bridge. ‘Jesus, what a fucking shithole,’ the former SBS man said as an enormous industrial building that must be the Union steelworks reared up to fill the skyline ahead. They continued on until they reached the first actual old building Jamie had seen since their plane landed, a four-storey block of red brick and sandstone decorated with enormous Romanesque pillars. Gault took the first street on the left and turned into the almost empty car park of the supermarket, choosing a space to the rear away from the lights.

  They studied their surroundings. The back wall of the shop was to their right, with the usual collection of bins and a cage full of discarded cardboard just visible in the shadows. Ahead, a row of modern, brightly painted tenements blocked the view. Jamie’s eyes were drawn to the block in the centre, a sickly duck-egg blue, with lights shining on every floor.

  ‘Okay,’ Jamie said eventually. ‘We play this just as we discussed. Gault and I will go in and talk to the son. Charlotte will stay with the car, in the driver’s seat with the engine running.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little over-cautious?’

  ‘You’re not in Hampstead now, Charlotte,’ Jamie said evenly. ‘And that’s not a Waitrose. Strange things happen in Germany, or at least they happen to me. Better safe than sorry. Right, Gault?’

  Gault nodded. ‘And you don’t go for a drive to look at the sights and you don’t nip into the supermarket to see what you can pick up for tonight’s supper.’

  From the back seat came the sound of a wounded snarl as the rear door opened. ‘I wish you’d stop treating me as if I’m some kind of idiot. I’m Adam’s PA, not his bloody bimbo.’ The two men exited the car and Charlotte threw herself into the driver’s seat, refusing to look at either of them. They heard the door slam shut and engine start as they walked warily across the almost empty car park towards the bright lights of Wulf Ziegler’s home.

  XII

  ‘Herr Ziegler? Jamie Saintclair, and this is Mr Gault.’

  Rolf Ziegler studied them in the doorway without inviting them inside. Lank grey hair hung across his forehead to combine with a pair of eyebrows that seemed about to take flight. He must have been close to sixty, with suspicious, deep-set eyes in a worn-out, pinched face, but the muscles beneath his T-shirt were threaded with whipcord tendons, and the thick fingers of his workers’ hands were tipped with black crescents under the nails and looked capable of tearing telephone directories in half. ‘You said something about money?’

  Gault counted off five ten-euro notes. ‘That’s a down payment,’ he said in his featureless military school German. ‘You get the other two hundred when we’re satisfied.’

  The German’s glance flicked from the money in his hand to Gault, but saw nothing there to give him hope that he could extract any more for now. He stepped aside. ‘You’d better come in.’

  Jamie almost gagged on the thick scent of curry that filled the apartment, but Gault grinned appreciatively at their host. ‘I do like a nice hot bhuna.’

  Ziegler ushered them through to a small lounge dominated by a large and plainly very new flat-screen television that stood to the right of an open stairway. A thin, worn-out woman in cardigan and jeans looked up warily from the magazine she was reading, before rising to push her way past a sturdy youth of about seventeen into the kitchen. Rolf made a movement with his head that told the boy to leave them alone, but the teenager glared and stood his ground. He wore his dark hair cropped short and his father’s features were just recognizable in a puffy, slightly
overweight face. Jamie felt a shiver of anticipation as he realized where the opposition in this house would come from. Everything about the kid said: I don’t want you here and I don’t give a shit who knows it.

  ‘My son Otto.’ Rolf shrugged a parent’s resignation that there was sometimes no point in pushing it and ushered them to one of a pair of matching cloth sofas. ‘You want coffee?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Ziegler relayed an order to his wife and waited until she appeared with three large cups. The coffee was thick, black and strong enough that you could stand a spoon in it. Jamie drank appreciatively and Gault took a tentative sip.

  ‘You said this was something about my father’s will?’

  Jamie hesitated, but they’d already decided there was no mileage in trying to deceive Rolf Ziegler if they wanted his cooperation. At the first sign he was being used he would clam up and they’d be as well walking out of the door. ‘We are more interested in the … ah, codex, than the will itself.’

  ‘So you’re here about the old man’s crazy sword story, huh?’ Rolf glanced at the TV and smiled for the first time. ‘Maybe two hundred and fifty isn’t enough.’

  ‘I told you we should have sold the thing ourselves instead of getting that lawyer to do it.’ Otto layered every word with contempt for his father, the visitors and his life in general.

  ‘Shut it, boy,’ his father snarled.

  ‘We’ve got the copy and—’

  ‘I said shut it.’ This time the voice was like the crack of a bullwhip and Otto sullenly resumed his place against the doorframe, his mouth twitching with anger.