Arriving at Heathrow, they took the Underground to Paddington station and paused in the station restaurant for a horrible breakfast that advertised itself as sausages and eggs, but wasn’t, and an equally terrible cup of coffee. Breakfast eaten, they climbed aboard the Virgin Rail train to Wales and three hours later found themselves in the country town of Leominster.
“Lemster,” as Peggy pronounced it, had achieved some notoriety in the Middle Ages as a thriving market town where you could buy the best lamb’s wool in the world—“Leominster Oro” as it was called. Since then it had become a quaint backwater on the ancient and often disputed border between England and Wales. To Holliday it seemed to have the same faintly over-varnished look of tourist towns in the States that often survived on their questionable history, their tourist appeal, and the quality of their French fries, or in the case of Leominster, its Mousetrap Cheese and its endless variety of antique shops.
“Just a little ‘twee,’ ” as Peggy put it, strolling down the High Street toward something called “The Butter-cross” looking for a place to rent a car. She settled on a squat-looking little Toyota Altis from Avis, and after getting some complicated directions from a pimply young attendant named Billy who kept on referring to Peggy and Holliday as “Yanks” they set off, heading west on the Monkland Road. Switching to the even narrower A44 after a few miles, Peggy gripped the wheel tightly as she piloted the car between the bracketing hedgerows on both sides of the road. Every now and again they’d reach the top of a hill and, for a second or two, they’d catch a glimpse of the pastoral patchwork of fields they were driving through.
“Its like going down a bobsled run,” she muttered, praying that they wouldn’t meet someone driving in the opposite direction; the road was barely wide enough for the compact Altis, let alone a full-sized car, truck, or God help them, some lumbering piece of farm machinery—or even worse, a flock of the wooly sheep the area had once been so famous for.
“Okay,” Peggy said to Holliday, keeping her eyes peeled for jaywalking sheep. “Reality check time. You’re giving up a month of trout fishing in Patagonia, and I turned down a choice assignment in New Zealand, a place I’ve never been, I might add. So once again, why are we doing this?”
“Because that son of a bitch Broadbent had Uncle Henry’s house burnt down,” said Holliday.
“That doesn’t explain why we caught the red-eye to Heathrow and had to eat British Airways cheese rolls,” said Peggy.
“Presumably he burned down the house in an effort to hide the fact that he’d stolen the sword,” answered Holliday. “The sword was that important to him.”
“It’s just a sword, Doc. An artifact from the Middle Ages, like Leominster back there. What does it have to do with us?”
“A thousand years ago somebody in the Knights Templar sent a message to one of the Templar founders in France. It was so important that the message was sent in code, wrapped around the hilt of the sword that Uncle Henry found in Hitler’s country house in the Bavarian Alps. Uncle Henry thought it was important enough to have hidden it away and never mentioned it for more than half a century. In fact he was making sure that no one got hold of the sword until after he was dead—that’s why he put the clue in that copy of The Once and Future King. It was important to the Knights Templar a thousand years ago—it was so important that your grandfather went to great lengths to hide it away, and it was important enough for Broadbent to commit a crime for it. That means the message encoded on the sword is still important. That’s why we’re doing this.”
Following young Billy’s directions they took the second right turn after the A44 intersection and headed down a narrow unnamed road for a hundred yards or so, then turned onto a wooded country lane with a small sign that read L’ESPOIR in faded white letters painted on a rusted milk can perched precariously on a pile of stones.
“The Hope,” translated Holliday, reading the sign. They drove down the lane, the dense scrub of witch elm and lime trees on either side of them almost brushing against the car. An old steel farm gate yawned open on the right. Peggy turned the car into the scruffy front yard of L’Espoir.
There were half a dozen buildings scattered about in a loose cluster around the main farmhouse including a pair of sagging, half-timbered barns, something that might have once been a stone granary, and a more recent Dutch-style open structure with a very old-looking curved, corrugated, and rust-stained iron roof. Instead of hay under the roof there was an eighteen-foot coble dinghy overturned on sawhorses desperately in need of paint. Holliday could read the name on the transom: Dawn Treader. Clumps of grasses grew waist high everywhere in the yard except on a gravel-strewn patch where the oil leaks of cars and farm machinery had stained the soil.
There were two ancient-looking Volkswagen campers beside the Dutch barn, an even older Morris Minor estate wagon up on blocks beside the granary, and a relatively new-looking but extremely muddy Land Rover parked beside the farmhouse. Off to one side there was a weed-choked pond surrounded by a bank of dried-out bulrushes. All of this was enclosed by a shielding fortress ring of hedges, trees, and shrubbery run amok.
“Not much hope here,” said Peggy, pulling up beside the Land Rover. They climbed out of the car and stood looking at the farmhouse in the early-afternoon sunlight. The house was as much a hodgepodge as the rest of the property: a central building of thatched-roof stone with a sagging half-timbered extension that could easily have been sixteenth or seventeenth century and finally a “modern” brick extension that looked like early Victorian, all of it cobbled together with struts, timbers, and unsuccessful patchworks of stucco and plaster. At first glance there didn’t seem to be a window or doorframe still hanging true.
There were three doors on the near side of the farmhouse to choose from. Holliday knocked on the most substantial, an oak-planked slab with iron strap hinges, the wood stained almost black with the passage of time.
A moment later they heard shuffling footsteps and then the drawing of a heavy bolt. The door opened. The man who answered the knock was tall and a little stooped, with thinning hair that looked as though it might have once been blond but that was now a peculiar color of nicotine gray. He appeared to be in his eighties, and once upon a time he would have been called handsome. He wore bright red half-framed reading glasses on a long aquiline nose, a tatty green cardigan that was missing a button or two over a striped white shirt and wrinkled cotton trousers that were splattered with paint. There were expensive-looking slippers on his feet, and a tumbler with an inch of amber liquid in his left hand.
“Yes?” he said.
“Sir Derek Carr-Harris?”
“Mr. Carr-Harris will do,” he answered, almost sheepishly. “The ‘Sir’ makes me feel too much like a country squire out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. Sir Watkyn Bassett in The Code of the Woosters or something. And you are?”
“John Holliday and Peggy Blackstock.”
The man standing in the doorway beamed.
“From America. Henry Granger’s nephew and his granddaughter, yes?”
“That’s right,” nodded Holliday.
“How wonderful!” Carr-Harris said. “Do come in!” He stood aside and waved them in with his whiskey glass. They stepped into a short hallway lined with bookshelves, and Carr-Harris closed the door, bolting it behind him. He led them into a large, high-ceilinged living room; the rafters were made of hand-hewn beams two feet thick.
There were framed paintings on the walls, all oils and all from the British Romantic School of the early nineteenth century: bucolic country scenes with buxom milkmaids and Turneresque sailboats setting out on stormy seas. Where there weren’t paintings there were roughly made bookcases. Between two of the bookcases there was a tall, Victorian walnut gun case with a glass door. There was a vaguely musty smell that came either from the books or the moldy thatch in the roof. There wasn’t the faintest sign of a woman’s touch anywhere in the room.
Peggy wrinkled her nose.
The furniture was
old, worn, and unpretentious, club chairs and a couch or two drawn up in a vague circle around an oval hearth rug that stood in front of an enormous stone fireplace. There was a large utilitarian desk off to one side with an old IBM Selectric typewriter on it surrounded by piles of books and papers. Carr-Harris folded himself into one of the club chairs and waved Peggy and Holliday to a couch. They sat.
“So how is dear old Henry?” Carr-Harris asked. “Well, I hope, although one mustn’t expect too much at our age of course.”
“He’s passed away,” said Holliday.
“Oh, dear,” murmured Carr-Harris. He took a long swallow of his drink and sighed. “He was very old,” he said philosophically. “Like me.” He took another sip of whiskey and looked lost in thought for a few moments. “I saw him quite recently,” he said finally. “The Old Members Lunch at the College, you know.”
“In March,” said Holliday.
“That’s right,” said the elderly man.
“That’s why we’re here,” said Holliday.
“Ah,” nodded the old man. “You found the sword then. Well done, young fellow. Henry said you would, you know!”
It was a long time since Holliday had been referred to as “young fellow.” He smiled.
“You knew about the sword?” Peggy asked, surprised.
“Of course I knew about the sword, young lady. I’ve known about it since Postmaster. Nineteen forty-one or thereabouts.”
“Postmaster,” said Holliday, making the connection. “The photograph of you and Henry on the wall of his office.”
“That’s right,” said Carr-Harris. “It was no great secret. Henry and I were working with that young Fleming lad in Naval Intelligence, the one who wrote all those dreadful penny dreadfuls.”
“James Bond,” supplied Peggy.
“Umm,” nodded Carr-Harris, polishing off his drink. He set the glass down on a small table beside his chair, then fumbled around in the pocket of his sweater and brought out a package of unfiltered cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one and took a deep drag, easing himself back into his chair.
It was an odd sight; Holliday was used to seeing smokers in craven little huddles in their narrow ghettos outside of office buildings, not in mixed company, and he certainly wasn’t used to seeing smokers in their eighties. Carr-Harris was clearly a man from a different age and time.
“What was Postmaster?” Peggy asked.
“Like something from a Hornblower novel,” said Carr-Harris, chortling happily. “A cutting-out expedition.”
Peggy frowned. “Cutting out what?”
“A ship,” answered the old man. “An Italian liner called the Duchess of Aosta. We suspected her of being used as a mother ship for German U-boats. She was based on the island of Fernando Póo off the coast of Guinea in West Africa. I believe they call the island Bioko or some such now.”
Holliday wondered what any of this had to do with the sword, but he kept silent and let the old man rummage in his memories.
“The name Postmaster was something of a joke,” said Carr-Harris, puffing on his cigarette. “It’s what they call an undergraduate student at Merton College, and all of us were from Balliol. Silly. They were the ones who’d organized the whole thing, including Maid of Honour.”
“Maid of Honour?” Peggy asked.
“A Brixham trawler,” explained Carr-Harris. “Part of the Small Scale Raiding Force. Special Operations Executive, and all that lot. The sort of thing that Fleming and his sort thrived on, at least in the planning if not the execution.”
“Leonard Guise and Donald Mitchie,” said Holliday, “the two other men with you and Uncle Henry in that photograph.”
“That’s right.” Carr-Harris nodded. “At any rate the Duchess of Aosta was in Fernando Póo. Malabo, I believe the port is called. Filthy place. A swamp really. Anyway, the ship was there as well as a pair of German trawlers that were supposedly interned for the duration.
“The main job was to take Maid of Honour into the port, put a line on the Duchess, and tow her off to Lagos down the coast. Henry and I went into the town to get the captain and the crew drunk while the rest of the crew hauled the ship away. What we were after were the codes of course, not the ship itself; that was a bonus.”
“Codes?” Holliday asked.
“Kurzsignalheft,” said Carr-Harris, “the German code books. We already had the Enigma by then, but the German Kriegsmarine had any number of codebooks and they kept on switching them. Cheeky lot. The Kurzsignalheft we managed to filch off the Duchess of Aosta were the first ones they had at Bletchley Park.”
“The British cryptanalysis headquarters,” said Holliday, nodding.
“That’s right,” said Carr-Harris. “They both worked there eventually, Guise and Mitchie. Ended up doing something frighteningly scientific with computers, I think.”
“I really don’t see what this has to do with Grandpa Henry’s sword,” commented Peggy, clearly a little frustrated by the old professor’s roundabout tale.
“Ah,” said Carr-Harris. “The letter.”
“The letter?”
“The Duchess of Aosta’s regular route was from Genoa to Argentina and back. It was in the mid-Atlantic on its return journey when war was declared and the shipping line ordered its vessels into neutral ports. In the case of the liner, that was Fernando Póo. One of the passengers on board was a man named Edmund Kiss, purportedly an archaeologist and a crony of Hitler’s. Kiss had been in Buenos Aires on behalf of the Nazis discussing some silliness about an Aryan race in Antarctica. We found the letter in one of the staterooms on the Boat Deck; Herr Kiss must have overlooked it when he disembarked.
“He was a South American specialist, I believe, or described himself that way. The letter was from Hans Reinerth, Himmler’s so-called Director of German Prehistoric Studies, and mentioned another archaeologist, an Italian colleague named Amedeo Maiuri, and a sword he’d found during his excavations in Pompeii. Maiuri was convinced the sword was of Templar origins. Apparently Maiuri had talked about the sword with Mussolini himself, suggesting that it would be an ideal gift for Hitler on their next meeting. Henry was very excited by that bit.”
“What was so exciting?” Holliday interjected.
“I’m not entirely sure. The propaganda value, perhaps. Like Hitler’s supposed reliance on astrologers, or that utterly apocryphal story about his lack of testicles. There was some folderol in the letter that mentioned that the sword could well have been forged from the Spear of Destiny, the spear that pierced Christ’s side at the Crucifixion, and might have occult powers like the granting of eternal life.”
Carr-Harris made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Clearly it didn’t work for Mr. Hitler.” The professor shrugged. “That was the first we ever heard of the sword. There were other rumors about it throughout the war, and then of course Henry and I discovered it when we were sent to Berchtesgaden.”
“Did you ever meet a man named Broadbent when you were there?” Holliday asked, still searching for a connection between the two men.
“Not that I recall,” said Carr-Harris.
“Why would Grandpa keep the sword’s existence a secret?” Peggy asked.
“And why all the sudden interest now?” Holliday added.
“I’m not entirely sure,” mused Carr-Harris. “I do remember him swearing me to secrecy when we discovered it. Order of the New Templars. Black Shields and White Shields or some silliness like that. He seemed very serious about it.”
The old man clambered to his feet and picked up his empty glass.
“Drink?” he said, gesturing toward a simple wet bar on a table beneath one of the big lopsided windows to one side of the fireplace. There were half a dozen bottles of various liquors, a seltzer bottle, and several glasses.
Holliday and Peggy both declined. Carr-Harris shuffled across the room and poured himself another whiskey, adding a noisy spritz of soda. He turned and headed back to his seat, the ash on his cigarette now dangerously long.
10
They threw themselves onto the floor. In front of them the body of the old professor bled into the oval rug. A second shot entered through the already shattered window and thumped into the back of the couch. There was no other sound.
Suppressor, thought Holliday. Maybe an M4A1 like they’d used in Iraq. Mean suckers. A big-bore rifle for special operations, dead silent, dead accurate, and just plain deadly.
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