The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  And that crucial planning was precisely what she had failed to do.

  In her days with the Firm, she would never have gone into the field so unprepared.

  She kicked herself again.

  She would not make that mistake a second time with Malchus.

  But for the moment there was only one priority—to find out what he was doing at the rally.

  And if the guard was not going to let her in to his talk through the front, then she was going to have to find a way in from the back.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  44

  Stonehenge

  Wiltshire

  England

  The United Kingdom

  It was immediately clear to Ava that beyond the rows of cars and vans was an area Malchus and his people wanted to keep shielded from the public eye.

  And that made it her priority. Something would be happening there.

  She was sure of it.

  As she walked away from the upper field and into the more vibrant lower one, she skirted along the edge of the jumbled multicoloured stalls until she saw a gap. It lay sandwiched neatly between a long grey refreshment tent and a St John’s Ambulance post staffed by a bored looking crew.

  Striding purposefully as if she had every right to be there, she slipped into the tunnel between the two large tents.

  Once beyond the public area, she found herself in the belt of parking reserved for exhibitors only.

  The cars here were not as densely grouped as behind the Thelema stand in the upper field, and she was soon beyond them—moving freely.

  As she tracked her way back to the parking area beyond the upper field, she eventually spotted the battered grey Citroën police bus marking out the clump of vehicles into which Malchus and his henchmen had disappeared.

  Approaching, she could see that a number of high-sided vans had been carefully parked in such a way as to block any view of what lay beyond them.

  Getting closer, she was increasingly sure that whatever was due to happen today was going to take place in the private space behind them.

  But she could already see that getting through the belt of parked vehicles unobserved was going to be a problem. She would quickly be spotted if she simply wandered through the cordon of vehicles to where Malchus had gone.

  Dropping to the ground, she rolled under the nearest van.

  It was cramped, but squeezing herself as thin as she could, she managed to move along its length, and closer to where she strongly suspected Malchus and the others were gathering.

  Grateful that the ground was firm and a little springy, she kept as low and flat as she could, using the protection of the vehicle to cover her. She barely had room to move, and the strong smell of petrol, oil, and metal only heightened the sense of claustrophobia.

  She lay still for a few moments and prayed no one was about to start the van’s engine.

  Straining to catch any sounds that would give her clues as to what was happening, she could hear voices up ahead, but they were too muffled and indistinct for her to pick out any individual words.

  She checked her watch, aware that Ferguson would soon discover she had failed to show up at the rendezvous. He would most likely come looking for her, but there was very little chance he would find her—which was exactly how she wanted it. Prince was already too close for comfort, and she had no desire for Ferguson to file progress reports on her.

  Her priority now was to find out exactly what Malchus was up to.

  There seemed nothing for it except to make use of the protection offered by the vehicles in order to crawl closer to where the action was happening.

  She was grateful they had been parked so close together. It would allow her to crawl forward and edge under the neighbouring vans without too much difficulty.

  Inching ahead slowly, she moved forward until she was under the next vehicle.

  She could see a cluster of ankles and feet up ahead.

  Moving more cautiously now, she edged her way under the vehicle in front of her. It was a large off-road four-by-four and offered more space under it than the vans, although it was still a tight fit.

  But what it lacked in comfort it made up for in the view.

  It was a perfect observation post.

  As Ava took in the scene, it was immediately obvious the vehicles had been carefully laagered in concentric circles—like wagons around an encampment.

  The multiple high-sided vans had obscured what she could now see was a central circle, a dozen yards wide, in which there was a low podium with a small table in front of it, draped in another red and white Thelema flag.

  Thirty or forty people were milling around, some talking in small groups.

  She did not have to lie there long before there was activity. With a flurry of movement behind the table, Malchus appeared on the podium.

  He looked around at the crowd purposefully, and held up a hand. The onlookers who had been watching him advance towards the podium fell silent in anticipation. They stopped shuffling, and the noise died down.

  Ava could sense the electricity in the air.

  She lay as still as she could, her head angled so she could get a full view of Malchus.

  “Brothers,” he began in a deep confident voice.

  Ava glanced at the faces in the crowd and the pairs of feet she could see, and realized he was right.

  There were no women present. The crowd was an undiluted display of brawn.

  Malchus continued. “I want to talk to you today about an important but often overlooked aspect of our tradition.”

  Even from under the four-by-four, she could hear his voice—clear and authoritative.

  She kept her eyes on the crowd. They were transfixed.

  “Alchemy.” He announced with a flourish.

  Ava sighed inwardly, preparing herself for the usual mishmash of garbled inaccuracies people endlessly recycled on the subject.

  Although alchemy was often scorned as a feeble-minded medieval obsession, it in fact went back much further, to the eastern Mediterranean world. She was intimately familiar with its oldest core texts—the Corpus Hermeticum and the infamous Emerald Tablet, both from ancient Egypt.

  She steeled herself for the usual nonsense about crackpot magicians fixated on turning lumps of lead into mounds of gleaming gold.

  “Our quest for knowledge is a long and arduous one,” Malchus began in earnest, “beset with difficulties and wrong turns. Today I want to share with you some keys and guides to help you on your journey. And where better to start than with the alchemists of old—the masters of the enciphered path. Gifted men, yes, but much underestimated.” He looked about searchingly with a sense of the dramatic. “And much misunderstood.”

  The crowd murmured its approval, captivated by the proximity to their spiritual leader.

  Malchus continued to cast his eyes around the circle of eager onlookers, keen to draw them in. “Contrary to popular belief, the ancient alchemists had no intention of turning lead into gold. They had no interest in material riches. That was the propaganda of the blinkered tyrants, bigots, and inquisitors of the Church, who sought to weaken the alchemists by ridiculing their work.” His face began to flush. The venom he felt towards the Church was palpable. Ava could feel it, even from a distance.

  “The Church cowered because the alchemists understood the same thing that true adepts throughout the ages have always known. Their goal was change. Not to change metal to gold, but to change themselves—from ignorant to enlightened, from weak to powerful.”

  Ava nodded grudgingly. So far what he said was correct.

  “As Nietzsche demonstrated,” Malchus continued, “we can see clearly there is man and there is superman. And like Nietzsche’s superman, those of us called to the magickal way are set on a journey of change. We train like athletes, but not our physical bodies. We develop our inner strength, honing our skills to harness our innate power for what needs to be done.”

  Looking at Ma
lchus’s bull-like frame, Ava could see he clearly did not neglect his physical training either.

  “The ancient Greeks knew about the importance of change. Heraclitus remarked that no person could step into the same river twice, because all existence and movement is change. Yet people misunderstood him.”

  “And more recently the great Charles Darwin, who knew the importance of racial breeding better than anyone, said it even more clearly. Yet even he was misunderstood. He did not talk about the survival of the fittest. That is a common error. He said the planet’s true survivors and champions were those most able to change. They are the ones who will inherit the earth. And just like the alchemists of old, he fought the Church for the truth of our beliefs.”

  Malchus had the crowd gripped now. They had clearly all heard of Darwin. But from their surprised faces, they had never thought of him as one of them before.

  Clever, Ava had to acknowledge.

  He was building a rich history for his followers, pinning his personal racist beliefs onto highly regarded historical characters—sewing fiction onto fact to create the world the way he wanted it seen. It was subtle: pretending it had always been understood this way by those possessing the secret knowledge of the initiate—drops of which he was sprinkling onto his mesmerized audience.

  “Of course, like all of us in the tradition, like all true seekers, the alchemists of old were ever watchful. To hide their quest from prying eyes, they spoke guardedly, in metaphors. And they were right to. The Church never truly understood their hidden meanings. The ultimate irony, don’t you think, as the Church’s fictionalized hero, Jesus, also taught in hidden messages that he called parables. Yet the hypocrites who guard his tradition have suppressed and marginalized his hidden teachings, like the Gospel of Thomas, in which, along with the masters down the ages, Jesus says, ‘He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.’ But the deceivers in the Church scorn what they do not understand, destroying anything beyond their ‘crapulous creed’ as the enlightened magus Aleister Crowley described it.”

  Ava shifted on her elbow. She would not have put it quite like that, but fundamentally he was right about Jesus’ teachings. Not many people realized just how many times in the biblical gospels, and in the less well-known gospels not included in the Bible, Jesus spoke about his outer and inner messages—some aspects of which were for the public, others only for his close circle of initiates.

  She could see why the Thelema had accepted Malchus as their leader. He had all the gifts of a cult guru—including the ability to blend just the right amount of verifiable fact into his twisted world-view to reassure those who wanted easy answers that he was speaking the truth.

  “The alchemists had a clear goal,” he continued. “And they hid it in symbols. Base metal represented their unawakened state. Gold was the pure magickal being they wished to become. They called their journey ‘transmutation’, from the Latin muto, to change.”

  He stared around at the crowd. “And how did the alchemists make this change?” He was pausing dramatically, pulling the audience in. “More importantly, how do we make this change?” He looked expectantly at the crowd. “What is the ingredient that empowers this mutation?” He had warmed to his theme, and was now in full flow, his voice rising rhetorically.

  “The Will,” he emphasized the word. “It is no accident that the Führer picked up on this theme when he entitled his rise to power The Triumph of the Will. And we, too, need to harness that same force in order to change our world.”

  He put his hand dramatically onto the flag draped over the table in front of him. “That is why the concept is sown into the very fabric of our movement—into our flag and into our hearts. Our very name, the Thelema, means ‘the Will’ in Greek. And that is what we must do. We must triumph by our Will.”

  Ava was beginning to feel stiff under the vehicle. She breathed out and relaxed for a few moments, before propping herself on her shoulder again and focusing afresh on Malchus’s speech.

  She was surprised at its content. She had expected a clumsy neo-Nazi paean of white supremacy and anti-Semitism, with some crude black magic mixed in.

  But what she was hearing suggested Malchus was more intellectually agile than she had thought. The politics were vile. But he clearly knew his history, and he twisted and distorted the facts expertly to suit his case. He had plainly studied it all in depth, and was far from the ignorant thug she had imagined he would be.

  It did not for a moment change the fact he was an extremely dangerous and sadistic extremist. But it strongly suggested there was nothing random about what he did. He was highly intelligent, fixated, and no doubt did nothing without carefully calculating the consequences.

  Whatever his interest in the Ark, she was feeling increasingly sure he was planning something.

  If he wanted the Ark, it was for a reason.

  He did not strike her as an opportunist.

  She pulled herself back to the present and tuned in again to what he was saying.

  It was more personal and purposeful now. “We will become who we need to be. We will be just like the great adepts who came before us. Like the Samaritan Simon Magus, who used his dark magic to successfully challenge the hypocritical disciples. Like the necromancer Dr John Dee, who ripped open the veil into the dark world of spirits and brought their voices to us. Like Countess Erzsébet Báthory, who understood it all, but was walled up in her chamber by bigots and intriguers. Like the strannik Grigory Rasputin, whose mystical dark woodland skills shone so brightly and entranced a nation until cut short by powerful enemies. Like the magus Fulcanelli, who taunted the world with his alchemical successes, before disappearing never to return. Like Aleister Crowley, who understood more than anyone the power of the Will and its ability to affect destiny. And most of all, like the noble men of the glorious SS, who brought all this together into a sublime distillation of will, blood, and iron. All of these great ancestors were themselves no less than living incarnations of the triumph of the Will.”

  Ava watched his eyes as he spoke. They were alive and searching, but calculating and callous. She could see why he had risen fast in the Stasi. She pitied those people over whom he had wielded the power of life and death.

  “The lesson we learn from these ancients is to stay constant in our fight for knowledge and the ultimate gifts—for the tradition will give illumination to all earnest seekers.”

  He was lost in his own rhetoric, drunk on what he was saying. “And we will triumph, my brothers in arms. By our will. We will succeed.” His voice was rising in a crescendo. “We shall see further than our predecessors. We will travel a greater distance down the path than anyone before us.”

  Ava’s concentration was interrupted by a small movement in the corner of her eye.

  She snapped her head towards the far end of the vehicle where it had come from.

  It took her a moment to recognize what it was, before she was filled with a sudden sense of dread.

  Christ—not now.

  She fought to stay calm.

  But there was no mistaking the two-tone black and golden-brown nose of an Alsatian dog, sniffing along the ground by the four-by-four.

  She held her breath, hoping that if she did not move, it would not notice her. But she knew Alsatians did not sense by movement alone. They also relied heavily on smell. And there was nothing she could do about that.

  It already knew she was there.

  Malchus was still in full flow. “To harness the greatest powers of the universe, we need only look within ourselves, and cultivate what we find there. For we are a microcosm of the universe. The ancients summed it up in their mantra: as above, so below.”

  The powerful dog was drawing level with her. She could see it was on a thick black leather leash. A pair of boots was walking a few feet behind it.

  “We all have whatever power we may ever need within us. All we must do is recognize and develop
what we have. It can be a journey of many long steps. But the legends of old are there to guide and inspire us—especially in the Norse and heathen tales, which contain a universe of hidden teachings.”

  Ava was no longer listening. She was focused exclusively on the dog approaching her hiding place.

  What happened next was brutally swift.

  The dog suddenly began to snarl and bark—in loud staccato bursts, throwing its head back and baring its large teeth.

  No sooner had it started than Ava realized with horror it was coming for her—scrambling under the vehicle and hurling itself towards her, the noise of its snarls filling the entire space under the vehicle’s chassis.

  Her body released a massive surge of adrenaline, filling her muscles with blood and hormones, launching her away from the animal’s powerful square head and open jaws as fast as she could.

  But in the cramped space under the four-by-four, she was not fast enough, and had barely moved half a foot before she knew what was going to happen.

  Her body instinctively braced itself for the impact.

  The large dog crashed onto her, its heavy paws cutting into her side and shoulder—its saliva-covered teeth only an inch from her face.

  She felt its hot angry breath on her skin as her ears filled with the throaty sound of its attacking snarl. Before she had time to think, another massive dose of adrenaline prepared her body for the imminent crushing bite to her neck or face.

  But it never came.

  With a series of guttural strangled noises, the dog was yanked out from under the vehicle.

  As Ava stared after its retreating form, her heart hammering hard enough to burst her ribcage, the dog was replaced by the dull grey metal of an old Colt handgun pointing directly at her, followed by a man’s livid face.

  Still in full fight-or-flight mode, her eyes darted about as she tried to assess escape options. At the same time, the man motioned with the handgun for her to come out from under the vehicle.

  Without pausing, she lunged for the other side of the four-by-four, propelling herself as fast as she could away from the threat.