If she was supposed to be a Bronze Age Middle-Eastern war goddess, she could not fault his historical accuracy. Had she been ten feet taller and made of painted wood, she would have been convincing in any cult temple.
But she was not, and nor was she at a weekend reenactment society meeting.
She was in real physical danger, and she could feel it palpably.
The atmosphere was aggressive and intimidating, and it seemed Saxby had meant what he said about her role in whatever macabre rite was to follow.
From where she was standing, she was on the left-hand edge of the stage, facing forwards. In front of her, built into the centre of the stage, was a large flame-blackened iron grate, beneath which red coals were smouldering under a dusting of white ash. It did not take her long to recognize it as a fire for burnt offerings.
Including her.
Trying to banish the horrific thought from her mind, she could feel the perspiration starting to run down her back.
On the far right of the stage were two objects draped in heavy black velvet coverings. Her heart began to beat faster as she realized one was probably the Menorah, and the other must be the Ark.
Despite the terror of her predicament, there was a part of her that even now felt an excitement at being in the same room as the Ark.
It was clearly to be an integral part of the ceremony.
She had waited so long to see it. And that wait would soon be over.
Behind her, at the rear centre of the stage, was Dr Dee’s Table of Practice. It was flanked by two grand 1930s art deco wooden thrones, each with period SS lightning runes and stylized skull emblems carved prominently into their backs.
Without warning, the noise of the crowd suddenly dropped, and the wall of people at the front parted, allowing two figures to emerge and step forward.
Ava’s breath caught in her throat as she saw their black robes and tall conical hoods, rising to a point a foot and a half above the top of their heads. Their arms were crossed in front of them, with their hands folded into the sleeves. They were completely swathed in black cloth from head to floor. She could see nothing of them save through the two small eye-slits in the sinister hoods.
It was a chilling sight—instinctively associated in her mind with pain and suffering.
Medieval brotherhoods of fanatical Spanish penitents and flagellants had worn identical capirote hoods as they tore their own flesh with whips, hooks, and chains. Victims of the most holy Catholic Inquisition had them jammed onto their heads before suffering unspeakable tortures and death. And on the other side of the world, in a gruesome throwback, the white supremacist Protestant knights of the Ku Klux Klan donned them in the deep south of the United States before mutilating and lynching their black neighbours.
A cold ball of fear tightened in the pit of her stomach as she stared at the two figures making for the stage, their hooded disguises promising nothing but degradation and pain.
——————— ◆ ———————
106
Wewelsburg Castle
Büren
Paderborn
North-Rhine Westphalia
Federal Republic of Germany
In the torch-lit third-floor room, Uri had watched through the window over the woman’s shoulder as Saxby’s men had dropped her partner into the castle’s courtyard well.
“Major Ferguson”, they had called him. British army, Uri assumed. He looked the part.
Uri was no fan of the British armed forces.
The animosity between their two countries went back to the 1940s, to the violent birth of the modern State of Israel, when Jewish terrorist groups and the British army had locked horns in a bloody insurgency as the terrorists tried to seize the country.
But the conflict had been over long before Uri’s time, and at the moment he could not afford the luxury of continuing the wars of a different generation. Right now, he needed support. And Ferguson seemed to be the only person he had come across all day who might be able to give it.
It was the kind of gamble he usually meticulously avoided. But this was turning into a fully improvised mission. And, to Uri’s surprise, he was thriving on it—relishing the need to stay one step ahead in an ever-changing landscape. He had not felt this kind of excitement before. It introduced an edge he had never imagined he would savour.
Anyway, if it came to the worst and Ferguson turned out to be a bad choice, he could always put him back where he found him.
He saw his chance after Malchus had drugged the woman and Saxby had ordered him to take her to the antechamber downstairs so she could be “prepared”.
Once he had carried her unconscious body down and delivered her as instructed, he had found himself on his own. As far as the Skipper knew, he was with Malchus. As far as Malchus knew, he had gone back to find the Skipper. So no one would miss him.
He was free to make his move.
Looking out into the darkened courtyard, he could see groups of men in varying items of Nazi regalia heading for the north tower. He had not passed any of them on the stairs on his way down—so he assumed they were making for the tower’s basement.
Ducking left, he entered the east wing—a long two-storey range leading down to a smaller tower at the castle’s south-eastern corner.
The ancient hallway was low-lit, and he moved stealthily to silence any noise made by his shoes on the hard floor.
Most of the doors along the corridor looked as if they led to offices or other administrative rooms. He could see no lights shining from under any of them, and all appeared empty.
But they were not what he was looking for.
About three-quarters of the way down, he spotted a smaller less important-looking door.
It seemed much more promising.
Trying the handle gently, he found it was not locked, and opened into a modest-sized handyman’s storeroom.
It was ideal.
He slipped inside and locked the door behind him, taking up an observation position at its darkened narrow windows, giving him a clear and unobstructed view out into the length of the courtyard.
He watched intently as streams of men continued to tramp across the irregular cobbles towards the north tower.
Observing them, he reflected that since he had begun researching his legend as Danny Motson back at HQ in Tel Aviv, he had spent countless hours familiarizing himself with the English extreme right-wing scene—lurking in their chat-rooms and poring through their propaganda-filled e-zines.
He reckoned he now knew more about their complex history, ideology, and operations than many of their own members.
The night Otto had taken him to The Bunker had been an eye-opener. In all his time with the Institute, he had never imagined he would have ringside seats at a neo-Nazi rally. Still less become one of their front-line soldiers.
For all its novelty, what he saw at The Bunker had not ultimately surprised him. England was a naturally liberal country filled with obsessives, of whom it was painstakingly tolerant. It had a long history of extreme left- and right-wing fringe politics, all of which it allowed to flourish so long as no mainstream laws were broken. But it was a philosophy that acted as a magnet for all sorts of concealed extremism, and if Uri had been an investigative journalist researching neo-Nazism, he would instinctively have started in England.
But here at Wewelsburg, looking at the improvised uniforms moving across the courtyard, he was shocked by the range of countries they came from—the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Greece, the former Soviet bloc, the United States, South America, and white Africa. Almost the only flag he could not see was the Israeli one—although he had been as dumbfounded as everyone a few years ago when the newspapers had been filled with a story of the arrest of a violent anti-Semitic neo-Nazi organization of Jewish citizens in Israel.
He felt genuine physical anger towards these people, and knew he was getting emotionally involved. As a salary-earning member of the Mossad’s Metsada divi
sion, no one was ever going to mistake him for a political liberal. He had no problem squeezing the trigger. But the men in front of him stood for the annihilation of his people. In his mind, that gave him the right to take it personally.
As the men continued to stream across the darkened courtyard, he began to feel impatient. There were many more men arriving than he had imagined, and he wanted to get on with the job in hand before the sheer number of people derailed his plans.
Rituals and ceremonies were not his area of expertise. He had never had much time for ouija boards and séances, and nor had he ever been particularly interested in religion. He had no idea who Anat was, or what The Sword of Moses was supposed to do. But he had smiled when he heard the name, The Sword of Moses. It described him perfectly. Moses was the English form of the Hebrew name Moshe, and that is exactly what he was—the old man’s sharp unsheathed weapon.
Rubbing his hand across his face, he focused on how the situation had become more complicated.
On the helicopter over from Scotland he had heard the men next to him cursing how awkward it had been handling the seven-branched candlestick up the stairs.
Although he was pretty hazy on most of the Jewish Scriptures, he knew there had only ever been one important seven-branched candlestick in the history of Israel—the ancient Temple Menorah. He had no idea whether it still existed or had been destroyed thousands of years ago. However, if Malchus had a seven-branched candlestick as well as the Ark, then he had better take that as well. He would leave it to the experts back in Israel to sort out whether either of them were real.
But he had realized his biggest problem the moment the helicopter had dropped low over Wewelsburg. He had immediately seen that he would have no chance of just leaving with the Ark and the Menorah. It was a castle, and there was no easy way out of the building and off the mountain.
And that was where Ferguson came in.
The artefacts were too heavy for him to move alone. But, if he had help, he could hide them somewhere in the building, and then call in an ops team to come and pick them up when the coast was clear.
It was not a perfect plan, but it would achieve his objective. And he was all too aware of the consequences of failure. If he did not manage to hide the Ark and Menorah tonight, then Malchus would undoubtedly move them on somewhere else after the ceremony, and there was no guarantee Uri would ever find them again.
So he would locate them tonight, and then, together with Ferguson, secrete them somewhere in the castle.
That just left the question of how many people he was going to have to hurt as he implemented the plan
He had made up his mind back in London that he would put a bullet into the Skipper’s head. He could not pretend it was a strategic priority. It was simple revenge for making him wear the SS Leibstandarte jacket. That was a humiliation the large man would pay for with his life.
Strictly speaking, executing the Skipper was not within operational parameters—not unless the Skipper defended the Ark with his blood, which seemed highly unlikely. But Uri would make him pay anyway. He was on a deniable mission, which meant he had a licence to handle the field operation any way he wanted. He would have to fill out the usual forms and explain his actions back at HQ afterwards, of course. But he doubted anyone at the Institute was going to lose sleep over the Skipper. He might in fact just be saving the local team another wet job down the line.
Anyway, he might not even admit to the killing.
However, the Skipper was no longer his only problem.
He had learned a lot more about Malchus since he had arrived at Boleskine House, and he had also discovered a great deal of troubling information about the group’s leader, Saxby.
He had been thinking hard about what to do with the pair of them.
Saxby was easy. He would hand the old Nazi’s details over to Moshe, and let the official channels take over. Saxby was someone HQ would definitely want to know about.
What they did with him was up to them. They might simply decide to keep him under observation, or perhaps infiltrate a suitable agent permanently into his organization. Or maybe one day he would suddenly disappear—lifted off the streets and put on a black flight to an unofficial facility, where they would pump him full of enough drugs to learn what he had eaten for breakfast every day of his life.
Uri did not need to think any more about it. The decision would not be his.
But Malchus—he was a different story entirely.
Uri knew that most people would never understand why he had chosen to do what he did for the Mossad. But to him it was a job. It always had been. He did it because his government asked him to, and he was good at it. He neither liked nor disliked the act of political killing. It was a necessary function, and it was his profession.
But from what he had seen and heard, Malchus had a very different approach. He did not work for any government, nor did anyone sanction his activities. He did what he did because he was a savage sadist who got visible pleasure and gratification from torturing, maiming, and murdering. It was a deviant pathology—an acute mental sickness. He was the face of the fanatical crusading knights who slaughtered in Europe and the East. He was Stalin’s torturers from the gulags in Siberia and the soundproofed basements behind the Iron Curtain. And he was Hitler’s camp commandants, snuffing out life on an industrial scale for a perverse bestial gratification.
Uri needed to think more about what he was going to do with him.
Focusing out of the window, he again noticed how well-armed the men streaming past were. He strongly doubted they were particularly skilled with their weapons, but it was a reminder that he was deep in hostile territory.
Eventually, the last of the men crossed the courtyard towards the north tower, and the area fell silent.
He checked his watch, and waited to make absolutely sure there were no more coming. When ten minutes was up, he slipped swiftly out of the room and back down the corridor, out into the quiet courtyard.
It was a cloudy night, and there was minimal light from the moon or the stars.
Good.
He did not want to be seen.
Striding over to the well, he peered over the edge.
It was a simple hole in the ground. There was no wall around it, roof on top of it, or winding mechanism over it. It was a plain circular hole with a four-inch stone lip running around its rim.
He could immediately see Ferguson at the bottom of the dark tunnel, treading water about six feet below ground level. He must have heard Uri’s footsteps coming, because he was staring up at him, his face a mask of anger and determination.
The surface of the well’s interior wall was slimy and smooth, and there was clearly no way he could climb out by himself. He had no option except to tread water and pray for rescue. Uri figured he must have been down there for almost an hour already, and after that amount of time he would, at the very least, be exhausted and perhaps in shock. At the worst, he may be developing hypothermia.
“Odd time for a swim?” Uri spoke softly. He could not afford to be overheard. Dozens of dark windows overlooked the courtyard, and he had no idea who could be looking out, unseen.
Ferguson glared back at him, clearly not taking any chances on whether it was a friendly visit.
Uri slipped off his SS waistcoat, and squatted beside the well’s stone lip, wedging his feet against it.
Leaning over the dark hole, he dangled the waistcoat down towards Ferguson. It was not as good as a rope, but it was a solid piece of leather with no stitching or seams.
It should be strong enough.
“Grab it,” Uri ordered, holding it as deep into the well as he could—a couple of feet above Ferguson’s head.
Ferguson’s eyes radiated mistrust.
“Or has someone made you a better offer?” Uri waggled the waistcoat.
Ferguson swung with his hand to reach it—but it was too far above him to catch hold of.
Uri leaned over a few inches more. Any further and he ris
ked losing his footing and being pulled into the well. “Don’t screw it up,” had been Moshe’s parting words. He had no desire for the old man to get a report on his desk saying Uri had blown the operation by drowning with a British soldier in a well.
He stretched his arm out as far as it would go. Ferguson made another grab for the waistcoat—but the lifeline was still out of reach.
Uri peered down. “Jump for it. On the count of three.”
Ferguson nodded, and dropped his hands back down under the water, circling them by his sides.
Uri counted out loud. As he got to three, he gave an extra stretch of his back, lowering the waistcoat another inch. At the same time, Ferguson propelled himself up out of the water, making a grab for the leather with both hands.
It had not been a very spectacular jump—but it was enough. Uri could suddenly feel Ferguson’s weight on the end of the waistcoat.
Taking a deep breath, he made sure his feet were firmly wedged against the well’s stone lip, and began to lean backwards, levering Ferguson upwards.
In no time, he was panting with the strain. It was not a good angle for lifting a hundred-and-seventy-pound man with waterlogged clothing.
Uri had originally thought he would reel the waistcoat in, like pulling a rope in a tug-o’-war match. But now that Ferguson was on the other end, he immediately realized that would not work. If he let go with one hand, even for a fraction of a second, the leather would be ripped out of the other by Ferguson’s weight, and they would be back at square one.
As if sensing the problem, Ferguson pulled himself up so he was holding the leather in both hands at chest height. Then, agonizingly slowly, he placed one hand higher than the other, and then again.
Uri nodded a grudging respect. He had assumed the man would have no strength left. But he watched as Ferguson doggedly inched his way up the leather lifeline, hand over hand, as if climbing a rope.
He could see Ferguson grimacing with the immense effort—the veins on his neck and temple bulging with the exertion as he hauled up not only his own weight, but also that of his sodden clothing and shoes.
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