Pulling it slowly towards her, she slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans.
Seeing her move, Malchus stood up and walked round to where his bag was.
Oh God.
Ava’s heart was hammering.
That was stupid. What had she been thinking?
She braced herself for whatever blow was coming.
But none came. Malchus opened his bag and pulled out a small black USB stick. “Save the file to this,” he instructed her, handing over the stick.
She did it quickly, her pulse racing. It was now or never.
Malchus took the stick and walked across the room. “I’ll be back,” he informed Saxby, pushing open the heavy wooden door and striding out.
“Well, Dr Curzon,” Saxby looked down at Ava. “As you are the only Hebrew and Aramaic reader among us, it seems we have another use for you tonight. The earthly representative of Anat will conjure Yahweh, then immolate herself on his altar.”
Ava was barely listening. “I need to go to the washroom.”
Saxby looked at her suspiciously, his eyes boring into her.
She kept her voice low and calm. She could not blow this. “What am I going to do? Jump out of a third floor window?” She started walking towards the door.
“Stay with her,” Saxby ordered the guard. “It’s down the corridor, on the right.”
Ava strode confidently out of the room. She did not dare put her hand in her pocket to check if the phone was still there. But she could feel it against her hip—that was reassurance enough.
At the end of the dark corridor was a simple door marked: ‘TOILETTE’.
She pushed it open, and stepped inside.
It was not a medieval hole in a bench hanging out of a window, but it was not far off—a damp, cramped stone room with most of the space taken up by an unstable-looking seatless lavatory and a tiny stained corner sink.
Sliding the bolt on the door, she pulled out Malchus’s phone.
Flicking it on, she was greeted by a locked screen:
ENTER PASSWORD
She had to try hard not to shout with frustration.
She did not have time for this.
Staring at the small screen, she was surprised to see it wanted only three characters.
She tried what she had once heard were the two most common passwords in the world, each of which only had three characters—‘GOD’ and ‘SEX’.
Nothing.
Slamming her fist hard against the cold stone wall, she wracked her brain for three-letter words that Malchus might have chosen.
She entered ‘DEE’.
Again nothing.
If she did not get this cracked fast, she was going to lose her opportunity.
Come on. She ordered herself. Think!
It was corny, but she typed in ‘666’, at the same time aware it was hardly the type of secure code she would expect from a former Stasi agent.
To her amazement, the password prompt melted away to reveal the phone’s home screen.
Yes.
She breathed a loud and rapid sigh of relief.
She was in.
Flicking to the browser, she pulled up the homepage of the United Grand Lodge of England.
Clicking the CONTACT US tab, she found a pane where she could leave a message.
She typed in short bursts:
TO MR L CORDINGLY — AT WEWELSBURG CASTLE — FRIENDS ARE FALSE — PARTY TO END ALL PARTIES — TONIGHT — SOME OF US WILL NOT MAKE IT TO SURVIVORS’ BREAKFAST — MAX NEEDS TO BRING FRIENDS AND FIREWORKS URGENTLY — KATE ADAMS
She signed herself using the name she had first given at Freemasons’ Hall, hoping he would remember.
She was taking a big gamble.
Saxby might not be the only rotten Templar. It was possible Cordingly was in it with him, too. Maybe that was why Ferguson had arrived with Saxby and Malchus’s paramilitaries instead of Max and his men.
But she had no choice.
There was no one else she could contact who would believe her story and react in time. It was Cordingly or no one. Besides, if Cordingly passed the message back to Saxby, she doubted her position was going to be any worse than it was at the moment.
She was interrupted by the guard hammering on the door. “What are you doing in there? Hurry up.”
There it was again. The unmistakable hint of an Israeli accent.
“Just a minute,” Ava called, trying to keep the tension from her voice.
She hit SUBMIT, and watched the screen disappear, replaced immediately by the United Grand Lodge of England’s homepage.
She frowned.
Had it sent?
The guard pounded on the door again. “Don’t make me break it down.”
She had to pray the message was now winging its way to Freemasons’ Hall.
She quickly opened up the phone’s control panel and found the internet settings. She cleared the browser’s history, cookies, and cache. When Malchus found it all wiped, he would probably assume there was a fault with his phone. At worst, he would suspect someone had tampered with it. But at least he would not know that it had been her—or what message she had sent.
She prayed the phone had not kept a record of her activity anywhere else. She did not know the model well enough to be sure.
“Okay. Have it your way,” the guard announced. Hearing a massive crash as he slammed into the flimsy wood, she flushed the loo and opened the door, glaring at him.
“Come on,” he ordered gruffly, shoving her at gunpoint back towards the room.
She entered at a fast pace, heading straight for the bench where she had been sitting.
There were two other guards in the front room now, and Ferguson was no longer pinned to the far wall. They had unshackled him, and were holding him between them. Saxby and Malchus were sitting on the bench.
Before anyone could stop her, she sat down quickly between Malchus and his bag and computer, knocking them both sideways.
She tutted as she reached out to stop the bag and computer falling to the floor. At the same time, she dropped the mobile phone softly onto the bench beside the bag, her body obscuring Saxby and Malchus’s view of what she was doing.
She glanced across at Ferguson. The two guards either side of him had not noticed what she had done. But he had. He blinked slowly in acknowledgement.
Good.
She only prayed that someone would pick up the message and get it to Cordingly—and also that he was not in league with Saxby and Malchus.
He was her one and only hope.
“It’s nearly time,” Saxby announced. ‘We all need to prepare. Dr Curzon, the guard will take you downstairs, where you will ready yourself.”
Saxby turned to Ferguson. “And you’ll be pleased to know, Major Ferguson, that I have found a use for you.” He wandered over to the metal-framed window behind which he had been standing, and opened it. “You’ll assist Dr Curzon in keeping up her motivation.” He nodded at the two guards. “Take him.”
Malchus pushed Ava towards the window. After a few minutes, she saw Ferguson emerge into the castle’s moonlit courtyard below, frogmarched by the two guards either side of him.
As the three approached the castle’s well, Ava gasped in horror as the guards lifted Ferguson up, holding his feet over the stone-rimmed edge of the hole. Although his arms were free of the handcuffs, he had no time to land any punches. He tried kicking, but his legs were already disappearing down the deep shaft.
Before she had time to shout her objection, they had dropped him in.
Ava turned furiously on Saxby, her eyes blazing. “Get him out now, or I will not help you.”
Saxby smiled coldly. “I don’t think so, Dr Curzon. The only way to save him now is to go through with your part in the ceremony. Once you have read the conjuration and the sacrifice is complete, then we will retrieve him.”
“Why on earth would I trust you?” she fired back at him.
“Because if you don’t cooperate, we’ll shoo
t him, and then come up with other ways of incentivizing you to play your part. You, I’m afraid, will not see the night out. He, on other hand, has the chance to live. The gift is in your hands.”
Saxby pulled the window shut and twisted the large metal thumb screw, locking it. “Now, go and prepare yourself.” He looked at her long and hard. “Tonight you will die like a goddess.”
Feeling a sharp jab in the back of her neck, she spun round to see Malchus holding a miniature syringe.
With a hot nauseous feeling, she felt the ground rush up to meet her.
——————— ◆ ———————
105
The ‘Gruft’ Vault
Wewelsburg Castle
Büren
Paderborn
North-Rhine Westphalia
Federal Republic of Germany
Ava came around slowly.
She felt groggy and confused, disconnected from her senses.
It was as if she was being smothered.
As she fought through the fog, she found a memory—the pain of a needle as Malchus injected something into her neck.
She had been drugged.
With a sickening rush, the scene in the castle’s upper room came flooding back, along with Saxby’s announcement that she would be ritually slain during a ceremony that night.
Forcing her eyes open a fraction, she saw she was not alone, but in a gloomy room together with a large group of people. It was hard to tell exactly how many—her brain was only half functioning, and the lighting was so low as to be almost non-existent.
Although she never had anxieties about enclosed spaces or crowds, she had a nagging feeling there was something very wrong about this particular group of people.
Something unnatural.
Staring blearily out at the faces, the fog lifted a little more, and she instantly understood what it was.
There were no women in the crowd—just men.
And most of them were staring hard at her.
With a rising panic, she shook her head to clear the haze and tried to turn, to see if the threatening scene was the same behind her as well.
But, for some inexplicable reason, her body was not responding.
Sensing real danger now, her brain finally kicked into gear, expelling the last vestiges of chemical confusion, and pulling her back to alertness.
Looking around, she could see she was in the middle of a dark circular underground room, on a raised stage.
As her brain reconnected itself to her body and she regained full use of all her senses, she understood why she could not move.
She had been tied to a tall wooden stake.
There were ropes around her chest, hips, and ankles—lashing her firmly in place. Her wrists were similarly bound, pinned to the front of the post above her head.
Clever.
Someone had thought this through.
It meant that if by some miracle she managed to free her hands, everyone watching would see immediately. She would have no chance of slipping them loose with no one noticing.
She was not going anywhere.
Judging by the leers on some of the onlookers’ faces, it was also apparent that her being a woman, tied up, seemed to be the cause of much of their interest.
With a sickening jolt, she recalled that she was not the only one in danger. Ferguson was now struggling for his life, deep in the castle’s well.
And his survival would all be down to her.
Saxby’s words rang in her ears.
“You’re the perfect Anat. It’s one thing for us to summon Yahweh. But wouldn’t it be so much better if we offered him an earthly incarnation of Anat, sacrificing herself to him in a blood offering, knowing how sweet the smell of burning flesh is to his nostrils.”
She felt a hot mix of fear and outrage.
Who did Saxby think he was?
Who gave him the power to decide who lives and dies?
As her eyes became increasingly accustomed to the gloom, she was able to make out more of the room’s details around her
What little light illuminated the scene was coming from a dozen incense braziers—small perforated lanterns arranged in a circle around the edge of the stage. They threw out a weak light from the burning flames and charcoal within, bathing the space in long shadows which moved with the restless crowd.
The room itself was an underground chamber, and had clearly been designed for elaborate rituals. If the ceremony was to be some sort of bloody neo-Nazi pagan sacrament, then Saxby had chosen the venue impeccably.
The vault had been built to resemble a cave, and was similar in size to the solar she had just been in. That was on the third floor of the large north tower, so she suspected she must now be in its basement.
High up in the domed roof, she noticed long angled stone tunnels ending in small windows, shining a glassy black. From their height, they looked like they just reached ground level.
As her eyes adjusted further, she could see that the walls were not hewn out of rough rock, but faced with 1930s neo-medieval brickwork—which explained the elaborate grey swastika motif moulded into the centre of the ceiling, its arms splayed out into extended geometric shapes.
She counted twelve small plinths around the curved wall. Above each was a matching niche.
Was that where the urns of the twelve leading SS knights were supposed to have been buried?
There was clearly a numerological significance woven into the room’s fabric.
Is that how Himmler thought of himself? Like some latter-day Christ, Charlemagne, or King Arthur, with his twelve loyal paladins?
The whole effect of the low lighting and rough monumental architecture was primal.
If the building had genuinely been the spiritual headquarters of the SS, as Saxby claimed, then this looked like their purpose-built ritual room.
The low circular stage had been built up in the chamber’s centre. It was black, and on it had been painted a large white unicursal hexagram like the one on the end of Malchus’s rosary. The star was contained within a circle, and at each of the six points, where its sharp angles intersected with the curve, there was what looked like an occult sigil.
Malchus’s team from Boleskine House was the closest group of men to her, forming an inner cordon round the dais’s edge. From the sleek submachine guns cradled in their arms, it was clear they were the evening’s security.
Beyond them, filling the rest of the darkened room, the other men were equally menacing.
They were exactly what she would expect of fascist gang members. Many bore the scars of street fights and bar brawls cut into their arrogant and aggressive features.
They were wearing random pieces of Nazi militaria along with their ordinary clothes—army jackets, leather trench-coats, stahlhelms, and black death’s head caps, all with a variety of national flags stitched or painted on.
Judging by the telltale bulges in pockets, under arms, in waistbands, and around ankles, most of them were armed with handguns, knives, and an assortment of other concealed weapons.
She calculated there was probably more hardware surrounding her than if she had been abducted by the crime cartels of San Pedro Sula.
Seeing the expression of violent desire on many of the faces staring at her, it was all she could do to stop herself from imagining what horrors the evening held in store for her.
Glancing down at her body, she realized with a hot flush of indignation that the leering onlookers were not the only ones specially dressed for the occasion.
While drugged and unconscious from whatever Malchus had injected into her, someone had undressed her and changed her clothes.
She was now wearing a knee- and elbow-length hauberk of chainmail, partially covered by a similarly shaped plain black tunic, narrowly fringed in gold around the neck, elbows, and knees. It was pulled in hard at the waist with a purple-flecked black sash, and another identical sash dropped lower, hugging her hips. Tucked into it was a sword, gleaming in the dull light
from the braziers.
It was a perfect period weapon, accurate in every regard—with its straight hard bronze blade extending around ten inches before bending into a lethal sickle-shaped arc.
Her period military clothing was completed by greaves on her shins and vambraces on her forearms, all made from boiled leather with bronze reinforcement bands.
When asked about ancient weaponry, she often enjoyed explaining that hardened bronze was actually stronger than wrought iron, even though the Iron Age came after the Bronze Age. The only historical reason for the military success of iron was the scarcity and cost of the copper and tin needed to forge bronze, compared with the relative ease and cheapness of iron production. As a result, long into the Iron Age, hardened bronze remained the metal of choice for high-status warriors—like in the Roman army, where the ordinary soldiers wielded iron swords, but wealthier officers still preferred bronze.
However, now was not the time to analyze antique weaponry. She had much more pressing dangers to think about.
As she swallowed drily and moistened her lips, she realized her face had been caked with a harsh white makeup, and her lips smeared coal-black with what tasted like ashes. She could not be sure, but she also thought her eyes had been painted with heavy black circles around them.
Glancing up at the backs of her hands, she saw someone had covered them with crude swirling patterns of dark orangey-red henna.
Becoming increasingly aware of her body, she realized that her hair was no longer in a ponytail either. It had been oiled, coiled into a rope, and piled onto her head. Tendrils escaped and hung down the side of her face and neck, smelling overpoweringly of perfumed oil—thick, spicy, and sweet: unmistakably exotic and eastern. As she moved her head fractionally, she could also feel and partially see a pair of heavy beaten metal discs hanging from her ears, and a thick torque around her neck. To top it all, there was something on her head. She sensed by the weight it was some sort of metal headband.
Saxby had clearly spared no expense on her costume.
The Sword of Moses Page 75
