The Excalibur Codex

by James Douglas

  Jamie swallowed to ease the noose tightening around his neck. Suddenly the room seemed infinitely smaller and it was as if he was in the bottom portion of an egg timer with the sand pouring over his head. Right now, it had reached his chin, but in a few more minutes it would be a lot less comfortable.

  ‘Inspector, I—’

  The door swung open and the Chief Inspector turned with a shout of fury. ‘Get the—’ The words died in his throat as he recognized the grey-haired man in the camel coat who filled the doorway.

  ‘I think we’ll be taking it from here, Inspector,’ the Director General of the Security Services announced.

  ‘Sir, I have to protest … protocol … this isn’t right.’

  But the DGSS was above protocol and he didn’t give a damn whether it was right or not. ‘Close the door on your way out.’ His bodyguards were already ushering the Chief Inspector and blue suit from the room. ‘And make sure the office next door is cleared.’

  The door closed behind them and the two men were left in silence. The DGSS’s eyes ranged over Jamie with a hint of mild distaste, as if he’d just found greenfly on one of his roses. ‘Now, Mr Saintclair, perhaps you can explain what this is all about.’

  For a moment, Jamie felt like collapsing. The first stage of his unlikely plan had worked. Now came the difficult bit. ‘I thought you were never going to bloody get here.’

  XXXVII

  The Scotland Yard anti-terrorist surveillance team assigned to Jamie Saintclair/Sinclair/al-Awali reported him getting into a taxi outside his Knightsbridge flat and followed it to his fourth-floor matchbox of an office in Old Bond Street, where he emerged from the cab and entered the building. The lights went on in said office exactly seventy-five seconds later and the surveillance team settled in for a long day. It was only when the lights went out at five p.m. and nobody left the building that the alarm bells began to ring.

  ‘We’ve lost him.’

  The Chief Inspector’s rage was legendary and entirely predictable. ‘Well, bloody well find him again, and don’t come back until you do, or you’ll end up back on the beat in bloody Brixton.’

  Several hours earlier, Jamie had crouched in the rear of the taxi as the lookalike substitute wearing his clothes got out and walked into his office building. He stayed with the cab until the driver was certain they were no longer being tailed and dropped him outside King’s Cross Station. There he bought a ticket to Welwyn, where he still had his grandfather’s house, but left the train five stops early and picked up the hire car he’d arranged to have left at Potters Bar. The route was fixed in his head, even if the destination was uncertain. All he was missing was the Baedeker map Wulf Ziegler and his Hitler Jugend troop had used to guide their way north.

  Before he started he had one more thing to do. He picked up the slim Nokia phone from the passenger seat. It seemed a long time since Gault had given him it as part of Adam Steele’s package for hunting down Excalibur. He’d left it behind in the flat by mistake during the rush to get ready for the New York flight and it seemed a shame to waste it. The number he dialled came easily to his fingertips and the call was picked up on the second ring.

  ‘Hello, Adam.’ He’d vowed to stay detached and the cold menace so apparent in his voice came as a surprise to him. Still, it was perfectly understandable. The man on the other end of the phone had tried to destroy him and might yet succeed. The silence stretched out like a high-tension wire and for a long moment he wondered if Adam Steele was going to hang up.

  ‘Jamie?’

  ‘I thought you’d be surprised, old chum. After all, you’ve already got me dead and buried, or at least what wasn’t scattered across half of New York.’ He heard the splutter of false indignation and the beginning of a denial, but he cut the businessman short and continued swiftly, making no attempt to conceal his contempt.

  ‘Let’s not waste our time, shall we? The bottom line is that, whether you like it or not, I’m still in the land of the living, and by now you know about the sword. That was a bloody shock, I can tell you. A lovely piece of early medieval workmanship, but about two hundred years too late to be Excalibur. It would have served you right if I’d offered the Websters the million quid you boasted about at the start. But I wasn’t certain then, and you’d have found a way to wriggle out of it, because you’re a real slippery bastard, Adam. In fact, you’re so slippery you give slippery bastards a bad name. You might even have got away with it, but you were too clever for your own good. The laptop computer you hoped would be blown to bits with me wasn’t as secure as you thought. If anyone was to link the computer to you all those succulent titbits of information you planted to blacken my name would condemn you before you could say Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘Naturally, I deny all this,’ Steele replied, all the false bonhomie gone from his voice. ‘But why don’t I humour you, for old times’ sake? What do you want, Saintclair?’

  ‘I want that million quid you promised me, Adam. For that you get the computer and all that juicy information that, with a little help from me, could put you away for the rest of your life in a place with no servants or Chateau Lafite ’eighty-two, and where a good-looking chap like you would be very popular at shower time.’

  ‘Not good enough, Saintclair.’

  ‘It is if I tell you where to find the real Excalibur.’

  Steele gave a snort of disgust. ‘You must think I’m a fool.’ He paused and Jamie could almost hear his mind working. ‘Unless you switched swords before the flight from Reno.’

  ‘Gault will tell you that wasn’t possible. No, the sword you have is the sword from Nortstein Castle.’

  ‘Then you’re selling me a bigger fantasy than the Ziegler codex—’

  ‘Think about it, Adam.’ Jamie let him hear the urgency of a desperate man. ‘Reinhard Heydrich went to a lot of trouble to acquire a specific sword. He would have known the moment he saw it that it wasn’t the real thing, just as you did, but he managed to convince Himmler it was Excalibur. To do that, he must have had some pretty solid evidence. If I’m right, part of that evidence was the English country house it was stolen from. The codex isn’t a fantasy, it’s a trail that will lead me to the sword. Excalibur exists and I will find it, but I want a million pounds.’

  ‘And what if I agree to this foolishness?’

  ‘Get Gault to drive the pair of you north towards Newcastle and keep your phone charged. I’ll be in touch and let you know where we’ll make the exchange. And make sure you bring the sword. I promised someone I’d get it back to the former owners and, unlike you, I keep my promises.’

  ‘You’ve never struck me as greedy, Saintclair.’ Suspicion edged Steele’s voice like a surgical saw. ‘Why would you want a million pounds?’

  ‘Because I know Excalibur’s worth it to you and because, to be truthful, you haven’t left me much choice. I’ve got half the police forces in Europe, not to say the States, looking for my Islamic alter ego. I need to disappear before they link him with Jamie Saintclair Esquire of this parish and a million quid will help me do it in a bit of style.’

  ‘What guarantees do I have—’

  ‘There are no guarantees.’ The words came out as a snarl. ‘Take it or leave it. All you need to know is you won’t get blown up or shot at. If you want Excalibur and the computer a million is the price you have to pay. And if that’s not incentive enough, maybe I’ll throw in the chance to get even for making you look like a five-star clown on the fencing mat. No guards, no tips. Just you and me and two swords. An old-fashioned duel, though I doubt you’ve got the guts to meet me face to face.’

  When he hung up, he discovered the sweat was running down his back and his hand was shaking.

  He’d cast the lure, but would Adam Steele take it? He closed his eyes and a familiar face filled his mind. He would do it. He had to do it. For her.

  Before he drove off he plugged the phone into the in-car charger and made sure it was switched on.

  The two days spent more or less
under house arrest had been useful for planning the journey and he had a printout of the relevant section of the Excalibur codex to give him a rough guide. It had been a spying mission – albeit with a secret at its heart – and he reckoned on the German boys not doing much more than twenty miles a day over the hilly northern countryside. He studied the first section.

  That summer … My eight-man section cycled east from Manchester and then north up the spine of the country. After just over a week we reached a range of low, bleak hills where seldom a tree grew. We camped with an armoured unit under training in the area and they made us welcome, almost treating us as comrades. They appeared to have no suspicion of the war we knew was coming and for which we had trained. We thought them … very naive.

  Jamie covered the two hundred miles between Potters Bar and Manchester in just under four hours, including a stop at a Little Chef for a meat pie that had pastry the consistency of cardboard, and was filled with a browngrey sludge. At Manchester, he swapped the M6 for the M62 and headed over the Pennines towards Leeds. He was happy to stay on the motorway for the moment. The tricky part would come later.

  His gaze fell on the mobile phone plugged into the charger. Jamie was banking on the near certainty that its previous owner had installed some kind of tracking device and was even now trying to make up the miles between them. Steele’s instinct would be to lash out with deadly force, but the question was whether he’d give Jamie time to find the true sword, or cut his losses. If he took the second option that would be unfortunate for Jamie, but something deep in his gut told him Adam Steele was as obsessed with Excalibur as Harold Webster, only for different reasons. And that meant he would wait. Of course, Steele wasn’t the only potentially lethal fly in the ointment. There was always the possibility Al-Qaida were still on his tail, looking for payback and to make good their promise of a farewell video with an edge. And the cops who’d been watching him were unlikely to just sit back and accept his disappearance. By now he was probably on Britain’s Most Wanted list. He glanced at the traffic behind him, looking for the dark 4x4s that seemed to be the discerning assassin’s vehicle of choice, and finding more possibles than he liked. Maybe he should have taken the Chief Inspector’s advice and stayed in jail.

  He hit the main A1(M) at three in the afternoon and turned north again, hugging the east side of the hills, but conscious he would eventually be pushed ever closer to the North Sea. Soon there would be a decision to be made and he pulled into another service station to study the map. At first glance, the problem with the codex was the lack of detail, yet when he considered it, he wondered if, for him, that wasn’t actually its greatest asset. The spine of the country – that was the key. There was no deviation to take in likely espionage targets like industrial Darlington and Middlesbrough, the population centre of Durham or the port of Newcastle. Wulf Ziegler and his Hitler Jugend boys had stayed with the Pennines because the hills were the arrow taking them straight to the heart of their true goal. The more he studied the map, the more certain he became. His finger followed the line of the hills right up to the border. Here in this crucible of broken country south of Hadrian’s Wall lay the answer. And he would find it tomorrow.

  Sensing that he’d soon need a breathing space, he switched off the phone before he reached Darlington and a few miles later he turned off the motorway. This was the gateway to the western reaches of County Durham, and took him across the Wear valley and into the sparsely populated moor and farmlands of the north Pennines. Here, among the rolling hills, he could finally picture the hardy, brown-shirted German boys on their heavy iron bikes gritting their teeth as they attacked each climb, before the whooping, exhilarating plunge into the valley beyond. They’d have sung their marching songs, the same songs they’d sing a few years later when they invaded Poland and France, Belgium and Holland, Denmark and Norway. And Russia, where most of them probably still lay in unmarked graves. When they rode these drystone wall flanked highways they were just children. Yet these children had been sent on a perilous mission by their country’s highest leaders. It was almost impossible to imagine now, in this over-televised, Xbox, PlayStation age that sucked young people into the nearest screen. Yet he supposed there were boys not much older serving their country, and dying for it, arguably for a lot less reason, in the heat-fractured dust bowl of southern Afghanistan.

  He shook the melancholy thought from his mind and concentrated on the countryside around, his eyes seeking anything that might resemble Ziegler’s description of low, bleak hills where seldom a tree grew. His heart sank as he came to the conclusion that it fitted everything in the landscape for about twenty miles.

  As dusk fell he approached the east–west axis between Carlisle and Newcastle that more or less followed the route of Hadrian’s Wall. It also followed the line of the Tyne and he’d already identified Corbridge, a village on the north bank of the river, as a possible location for the small town with an impressive ruin.

  Dog-tired he booked into a bed and breakfast just outside the town centre and after dinner at the local Italian restaurant fell into a fitful sleep where he was always chasing something that never came within his grasp. He hoped it wasn’t an omen for tomorrow.

  XXXVIII

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Jamie looked up from the leather-bound volume and returned the woman’s smile. She was about fifty and reminded him of his mother; narrow, intense features and wavy silver-blond hair swept back from her forehead. It was just after eleven and Corbridge library had only been open for about five minutes. He sensed she was uneasy about a stranger’s presence at this time of the day and felt he had to explain. ‘I’m just trying to find out a few things about the local area.’

  The smile lost a little of its sparkle. ‘You’ll be here for the Wall.’ Her voice told him most people came here for the Wall and not much else. ‘Well, if there’s anything else just let me know.’

  ‘There might be one thing.’ He explained about the small town with the spectacular ruin.

  The riddle piqued her interest. ‘That doesn’t sound much like Corbridge. The only ruins we have here are a few Roman foundations and a couple of pillars. They’re just outside the village: interesting, but nobody could describe them as spectacular. Hexham, along the way a bit, has an abbey. It’s old, but it’s no ruin.’

  He thanked her and continued his research as she returned to her desk, staying for an hour until he ran out of patience with ancient tomes full of descriptions of local country houses, none of which remotely resembled the one described by Wulf Ziegler. As he was leaving the library a thought struck him. ‘It’s just a long shot, but would there be any hills around here with a very distinctive silhouette?’

  ‘Plenty of hills round here, but none that you’d say were that distinctive.’ She shook her head ruefully. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not being much use to you.’

  He smiled his thanks. ‘It was worth a try … One last question. Would you know if there was some sort of army training camp around here during the war?’

  ‘Och, the army’s been using Otterburn since Pontius Pilate was a bairn.’ The grizzled character at the bar of the Otterburn Arms had a distinctive accent that seemed to have little need for the letter r, so the words came out as ‘Otta’bu’un’ and ‘bai’n’. He supped gravely on the pint Jamie had bought him. ‘They took the place ova’ before the First War, all sixty thousand ugly acres of it. Seen more bombs, shells and bullets than the Somme, a’ reckon.’

  ‘Would there have been tanks here before the Second World War?’

  ‘No tanks now.’ He shook his head. ‘The muckle things they have these days is too heavy for the soft peat. But before the war they had these wee light boogas that could barely stop a bullet. There’d have been plenty of them.’

  Jamie’s anticipation had been growing since he left Corbridge and saw the long, low shadow of the Cheviot Hills in the distance. The librarian had laughed. ‘That would be Otterburn Camp. It was here during the war and it still is. It�
��s about twenty miles up the road. You’ll see it away to your right, beyond the village.’

  He left the old man with a second pint. As he drove north from Otterburn, the ground began to rise and soon he was among bleak hills clad in heather and rough grass that exactly fitted Wulf Ziegler’s description, where seldom a tree grew. The road wound up a long cleft in the hillside before the sky opened up and he found himself at the top of a rise with the whole country laid out before him like a rumpled plaid carpet of grey, brown and green. He slowed and pulled into a layby by a big boulder bearing a sign that announced he was WELCOME TO SCOTLAND and got out of the car into the bite of a chill wind. With his heart in his throat he studied the great swathe of patchwork, captivated by the shadows of individual clouds that scudded across the land from right to left. Finally he understood. Wulf Ziegler’s target hadn’t been in the north of England. It was the south of Scotland. At first he didn’t see it amongst the jumble of humps and hillocks stretching far to the north. Then, in the middle distance, there it was. Ziegler’s signal post. Three hills standing shoulder to shoulder like warriors in a shield wall. A silhouette that was unique and utterly distinctive. He returned to the car with a feeling of growing awe and a sense that fate was leading him inexorably towards a prize beyond his comprehension.

  A few miles ahead the road dropped into a winding river valley with cliffs of layered red sandstone occasionally peeping from the trees. Eventually the valley opened out and on the far side of a long green meadow lay the next marker – a small town with an impressive ruin. The town was Jedburgh, and the spectacular ruin the remains of some great abbey with a square tower a hundred and fifty feet high. Intrigued, he turned off the main road and drove across a bridge towards the town centre. The way took him over the top of a rise, with the soaring walls of the abbey to his left. As he topped the rise he glanced casually to his right and his blood froze as two black 4X4s passed by in convoy on the main road below. Was he starting at shadows? He looked at the mobile on the passenger seat to make sure it was still switched off and broke into a cold sweat at the thought that he’d planned to turn it on after Otterburn. Coincidence? Adam Steele was no fool, he could follow the trail as easily as Jamie. The question was how much he knew? If Steele had the location of the small schloss there wasn’t a lot Jamie could do about it. But it might cause danger to people he hadn’t even met. Reluctantly, he resisted the temptation to follow the cars. Instead, he drew into a car park opposite the abbey that backed onto a low flat building advertising itself as a tourist information centre. Since information was precisely what he was looking for, he decided to take a look inside.