The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “We’ve heard about him,” Costas broke in. “The reason why the Nazis went to Greenland.”

  “So this character re-founded the felag?” Jack said.

  “One of his collaborators, a Lithuanian entrepreneur named Piotr Reksnys. Father of Andrius. A nasty piece of work.”

  Costas grimaced. “It runs in the family.”

  “The timing was perfect,” O’Connor went on. “The first decades of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in the Vikings and Nordic heritage in Germany and across northern Europe. After the insanity of the First World War, it became a movement to bolster the idea of racial supremacy among a people who had lost their way. Secret societies thrived, and began to attract the thugs and fantasists who dreamed of a new Reich in Europe. They led to the ugliest society of all, Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, the SS, complete with fabricated Norse ancestry and rituals. The idea of a reconstituted felag fitted this baleful world perfectly, only unlike these other organisations the felag had some historical resonance.”

  “And a different goal,” Jack said.

  “The menorah,” O’Connor said. “They had all the trappings of a supremacist society, but that was just for show. They were obsessed with finding the menorah.”

  Costas picked up the ring. “So what about this?”

  O’Connor waved his hand dismissively. “A sham. Reksnys made out that these rings were some ancient inheritance, forged from the gold in Harald’s treasure, but they were not. They’re typical fabrications of the period. Reksnys knew the Viking kings had been ring-givers, bequeathing gold and silver neck-rings and arm-rings to their faithful followers. Like the Nazis he was obsessed with the operas of Wagner, with the Ring Cycle, the Nibelungenlied, the legend of Ragnarok and the fall of the Norse gods. Reksnys revived the mantra of the old fellowship, hann til ragnaroks. They were fost-br?dralag, sworn brothers, and they called themselves thole-companions, the old Viking name for oarsmen. There were to be twelve of them, and he even refurbished a castle in Norway and persuaded his initiates that it had been an ancient meeting place of the felag, complete with fabricated Viking armour and axes, supposedly left by their Varangian precursors. He even reconstituted the most extreme form of punishment used by the Norse, reserving it for members of the felag who had strayed from their oath of loyalty.”

  Maria looked aghast. “You don’t mean the blood eagle?”

  O’Connor nodded. “Harald’s ship was the Eagle. The guardian of the felag was the great eagle giant Hr?svdg. The blood eagle was to be performed on his behalf, like a sacrificial rite.”

  “It was the Norse equivalent of hanging, drawing and quartering,” Jeremy said. “Only without the hanging and quartering.”

  “The outline of an eagle was carved on the back of the victim, while he was still alive,” Maria said quietly. “Then they cut away the ribs and ripped out the lungs.”

  “God almighty.” Even Costas was at a loss for words.

  “They haven’t used it yet on one of their own,” O’Connor said. “But at the Einsatzgruppen trial one of the Jewish survivors spoke of a rumour that an SS officer had carried out something like this on a group of prisoners, using his ceremonial dagger.” O’Connor looked at the object on his desk with disgust. “Even among the horrors of the Holocaust it was too much to believe, and there was nobody left alive to confirm it. But it would have been in Andrius Reksnys’ area of operations.”

  “I’m really beginning to love this guy,” Costas murmured.

  “And there was one other feature, something that marked the felag out wherever they went.” O’Connor paused. “They slashed their hands across the palm, a sign of blood fealty. They believed they were the Knights of the Blooded Hand, born again.”

  “The SS, the Ahnenerbe, the search for lost Aryan civilizations, for Atlantis,” Jack murmured. “It was all a perfect vehicle for the felag, a cover to reach their goal.”

  O’Connor nodded. “Andrius Reksnys, the son, was a fanatical Nazi. The picture the old Inuit presented of him is typical. A real sadist and bully. But he was an even more fanatical member of the felag, steeped in the obsession since childhood.”

  “Why?” said Jack.

  “Because it wasn’t just mystical. There was a goal, a quest. They worked out that Harald Hardrada must have headed for Greenland. They studied the Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga, which show that the nordrseta, the northern parts beginning around Disko Bay, would have been the staging post for voyages farther west. When they heard that the explorer Knud Rasmussen was planning an expedition to the Greenland ice cap at Ilulissat, they leapt on the chance. By then Himmler had become obsessed with World Ice Theory and a lost polar civilization, and there was no problem authorising an SS Ahnenerbe team to attach themselves to Rasmussen’s expedition.”

  “And Rolf Kunzl? How does he fit in?”

  “Totally innocent of the goals of the felag. He was the one who mapped out the voyage described in the sagas. He was the world expert on the Vikings in the West, the perfect companion for Reksnys. They used him. And when they knew he had found some clue in the ice, something he then concealed, he was doomed.”

  “The runestone in the longship,” Costas said.

  O’Connor nodded again. “Kunzl was quick-witted enough to know he had found something of momentous significance, and the fact that Reksnys was so desperate to get his hands on it was enough for him. Kunzl loathed Reksnys and the Nazis with equal fervour. So he decided to pass the runestone to the old Inuit for safekeeping. Kunzl had known nothing about the felag, but had begun to guess that he was dealing with more than just Nazi lunacy. He and Reksnys had fought in that crevasse, and from then on he must have known it was a blood feud, a duel to the death. That was always the weakness of the old felag. The murders of Thomas Becket and Richard of Holdingham meant that their secrets went with them to the grave. In the thirst for vengeance the killers lost sight of their goal. After the war began, Kunzl was safe as long as he was fighting with the Afrika Korps, but when he was arrested with the von Stauffenberg conspirators, Andrius Reksnys finally had his chance. He used his considerable expertise to try to extract what he could from Kunzl in the Gestapo torture chambers. He failed, and in his rage he let Kunzl be executed along with the others. He must have assumed that Kunzl, the great scholar, would have left some written record, but he discovered that Kunzl had destroyed all of his personal papers and that all records of the expedition had disappeared from the Ahnenerbe headquarters early on in the war.”

  “One question,” Maria said quietly. “The menorah would have meant everything to the Nazis. The ultimate symbol of domination over a race they were determined to destroy. They would have wielded it as the Romans had done in their triumph over the Jews two thousand years ago. What would Reksnys have done if he had found the menorah?”

  O’Connor got up again and gazed pensively at the map. “The search for the menorah was kept secret, even from Himmler. If Himmler had found out anything about the menorah and the felag, that the search was being concealed from him, then Reksnys would probably have suffered the same fate as Kunzl. To answer your question we need to move to the present day. We’re not dealing with neo-Nazis here. Nothing that banal. The felag is still with us, as strong as it ever was. And the menorah has even more potency today than it did in the dark days of the 1940s. They could hold the world to ransom for it. The Catholic Church, the Jewish state, the Arab states. Extremist groups of all persuasions.”

  “Auction it to the highest bidder,” Costas murmured.

  “So it’s really about greed, not ideology,” Maria said.

  “That was what drove the schism in the felag almost a thousand years ago,” O’Connor replied grimly. “Greed and power.”

  “So how do you know all this?” Costas blurted out. “I mean, if it’s all so secret, how does a Jesuit historian in the Vatican get access to this kind of information?”

  “That was to be my last revelation.” O’Connor took a deep breath,
pulled up the right sleeve of his cassock and held his hand towards them, palm outwards. There was a collective gasp of astonishment. Diagonally across the middle ran a jagged white scar.

  “The blooded hand,” Maria whispered. “I thought that was just an old injury.”

  “You can relax.” O’Connor let his sleeve down and slumped into his chair. “I am no longer one of them. My grandfather was an American inventor who was part of the World Ice Theory circle, no less eccentric than its founder but probably slightly less mad.”

  “My God,” Maria exclaimed. “You never told me about this. I thought your family were all academics.”

  “It was a strange period,” O’Connor said quietly, gazing at the floor. “The world started to go insane a few decades before the First World War, and we’re still not out of it.” He looked up and smiled thinly at Maria. “My grandfather was a scientist but dabbled in a lot of fringe stuff like many academics at the time, and eventually let this particular obsession consume him. Like my father before me I was sworn into the felag in my youth, went through the whole initation rite. I loathed it, hated the false rituals, and as soon as I found out about the Nazi connection I wanted out. I discovered my vocation as a Jesuit, and I could not reconcile it with membership of the felag. The felag has always professed to be pagan, to despise Christianity even while they worked within it. I believe they expected me to return to the fold, saw me as a useful future asset within the Church. They agreed to let me go with a vow of secrecy. It is a vow I have now broken.”

  “But you are not bound by their absurd rituals,” Jack said.

  “Indeed.” O’Connor looked down, and then gazed directly at Jack. “But I have stoked the fire of vengeance. Over the years I gathered all I could on Andrius Reksnys. I was merely contemptuous of the felag, but with Reksnys it was different. The more I found out about his murderous activities with the Einsatzgruppen, the more determined I was to bring him to justice, even if it meant breaking my vow of silence. The memory of Rolf Kunzl drove me on. I took my creed from the old Varangian Guard, from the earliest felag, that our fate is predetermined, that Ragnarok is inevitable, so what matters is our conduct in this world. It was my sole inheritance from the old ways. Somewhat at odds with my Jesuit calling, but it linked me to the nobility of the earliest felag and gave me strength.”

  “You can’t have acted alone,” Jack said. “Someone else shot Reksnys.”

  “Once I was in the Vatican, I brought a small group of trusted companions into my confidence. One is here in the abbey today. You may have seen him in the church. Jeremy was to be another. We came close to assembling enough evidence against Reksnys, but not close enough. We were determined that he should experience horror before death.”

  “You reawakened the cycle of blood feud,” Maria murmured.

  “Sometimes justice is best served by the old ways.”

  “And the felag know who you are.”

  “Earlier I told you that the Vatican had been penetrated by the felag in their heyday in the twelfth century. Today there is one again, one among my superiors who knows about the menorah, who has found out about your quest.”

  “How?” Costas said.

  “It could only have been an insider.”

  Jack felt a sudden chill at the thought that one of the trusted members of their team might have betrayed them, but he put his shock aside as O’Connor shrugged bleakly and continued. “I knew the Holy See would do all in its power to prevent the location of the menorah from being revealed, but then I realized that there was more to it than that. The felag will do anything to know what we know, to thwart and destroy us and carry on the search themselves. And there is one we should fear most.”

  “Who?” Jack asked.

  “The grandson. Andrius Reksnys is dead and his son, Pieter, is holed up somewhere in Central America. But the grandson is still at large. I believe he is now a sworn member of the felag. He’s a thug. He inherited the family genes.”

  “Like grandfather, like grandson,” Jack said quietly.

  “The father, Pieter, is no better,” O’Connor said. “Remember his early education on the Russian front. But he seems to be fully preoccupied running his criminal organisation in Central America. The grandson’s the one to worry most about. He’s the warrior of the felag, the point man. He grew up steeped in all the rituals, and it has become his creed. He bought into what I rejected. He’s used many aliases, most recently Poellner, Anton Poellner. Among the felag he calls himself Loki, the name of a particularly nasty Norse god. His absurd warrior creed led him to train as a mercenary, and he gouged a trail of blood through the Balkan conflicts. He honed his skills at a terrorist training camp on the eastern Black Sea, in Abkhazia.”

  “I think we can guess where that was,” Costas said.

  “When his grandfather was assassinated he went on a particularly murderous rampage in Kosovo and let his guard down. He was arrested by the British SAS and convicted in The Hague as a war criminal. Five years ago he was sent to jail for life in Lithuania, the country he claimed as his homeland. They opened up a mothballed jail from the Gulag specially for him, a place where captured SS officers had been held for years after the war before being executed. Then about a month ago a new judge decided the evidence against him was insufficient, and he was released.” O’Connor’s lip quivered in disgust. “He was only a child when I left the felag, but I can still remember his face. His father had refused to cut his palm until the time was right, so Loki flew into a rage and slashed his own face with an axe. He would taunt me with it, pulling his finger hard down the scar until I cried. It used to give me nightmares. And now he’s back. He knows I’m the one who hunted down his grandfather. It’s the blood feud that drives him on. We have precious little time.”

  Jack looked at O’Connor. “What will you do now?”

  “I’m staying here. Rome is too risky.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something else has happened.” O’Connor looked grim, his eyes downcast. “I wanted to fill you in on the background before telling you. There’s been another murder. A modern one this time.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Vatican. Two days ago. The police think it was a mafia hit, because the victim was in the forefront of the battle against the antiquities black market.”

  “Who was it?”

  “The chief conservator.”

  “You mean the man who saw the secret chamber in the Arch of Titus with you?”

  “Alberto Bellini. One of the great modern scholars of Roman sculpture. A huge loss. And the only other man in the Holy See I could confide in.”

  “Do you think…”

  “I don’t think, I know. Alberto was a man who would put himself on the line again and again in the public war against the mafia, who needed armed guards every time he stepped outside the Vatican, but who had no inner strength when he was locked in a room with those who confronted him. He confessed to me the evening before his murder that they had forced it out of him, our midnight discovery at the arch and our interest in the menorah. That puts me in the firing line. And it means you too, I’m afraid.”

  “Do you know who is behind all this in the Vatican?”

  “There’s a kind of internal inquisition, run by one of the cardinals. It’s always been there. But this is more sinister, as bad as it can get. I’m not certain who it is, but I have a pretty good idea. The felag has changed since I left it more than forty years ago. I know who some of them are. The war crimes judge who released Loki, for one.” O’Connor again gripped his chair in anger. “All I can say now is he’s shockingly powerful within the Vatican. He could squash me on a whim. I’ve got nothing to pin on him for certain but enough to put his activities in the spotlight when I go public about this. What I am sure about is that the hit on Alberto was not the mafia. You can probably guess who I think it was, and he won’t be stopping there.”

  “Is there anything you can do now?”

  “I believe I’m sa
fe here for the time being. The holy isle still has some sanctity, even among the new felag. But this has become too big for us to deal with alone. Blood feuds must be a thing of the past. We’re talking murder here, plain and simple. And if they somehow get their hands on the menorah, if it still exists, then the odd murder will seem a trivial matter. The Middle East would ignite like it never has before if the greatest symbol of the Jewish faith was thrown into it. Nobody would come out unscathed-Jews, Arabs, the Catholic Church.”

  “Have you got any documentation?”

  “It’s all here.” O’Connor patted the briefcase by his chair. “Hard copy. I can’t trust it to a computer. Loki is the key. He works alone, with horrifying speed. His masters are the great and the good, judges, senior churchmen, politicians. The days when the felag could all don helmets and wield battle-axes are long gone, however much they fantasise about it. There are no others like Loki. If we can stop him, then we buy the time we need.”

  “Interpol?”

  O’Connor nodded. “I can pull strings. We have some friends in higher places. An international arrest warrant, a global security alert. But I need time, two days at least to assemble a dossier. It would backfire horribly if the application were rejected but the story of the search for the menorah still leaked out.”

  “That gives us a deadline,” Jack said pensively. “Two days or all hell breaks loose. It’s a pretty tall order.”

  “Something gives me faith in you.”

  “Let me help you, Patrick.” Maria leaned forward on her chair, looking at O’Connor and then at Jack. “I think I’ve done all I can for you on Seaquest II, Jack. I was thinking of staying here anyway and having another go at that runestone, to see if there’s anything we missed. But this is way more important. Father O’Connor needs all the help he can get.”

  “I could do with it,” O’Connor said. “We’ve worked well together in the past.”

  “You’re welcome to stay with us, Maria,” Jack said. “More than welcome. I should have made that clearer.”

  “Jeremy can take over as expedition expert,” Maria replied. “If there’s anything more to do with Vikings and the New World, he’s your man.”