The Camelot Code (21 page)

It is the middle of the night when Myrddin hears Sir Owain’s helicopter land in a distant part of the grounds.

He eases his tired bones from the straw-packed mattress, stands by the window slit and watches blinking lights illuminate the dark sky. He doesn’t have to look at a clock to know it’s an hour before dawn. He’s spent countless decades telling the time by the stars, the moon and the sun.

Myrddin wraps himself up and shuffles down the spiral staircase to his rooms.

Owain always comes here first.

Even though it’s summer, the stone chambers are chilly so he stoops before the great hearth and sets light to paper, straw and kindling. He sits and watches red and orange tongues hungrily lick the dry vanilla-coloured wood logs.

There’s a polite thump on the door.

‘Come in.’

Metal locks clunk. Oak creaks. A dishevelled Sir Owain enters, a bag in each hand, his hair blown wild by the helicopter’s rotors. ‘I hoped you would be up.’ He smiles appreciatively.

‘As if it would be otherwise. Put those down and come sit by the fire with me.’

‘Do you have any water?’ He takes off his jacket and heads to one of two hard chairs set either side of the blaze.

‘I drew some from the well, last night.’ Myrddin reaches to a rough wood side table and tips a terracotta jug until crystal clear liquid fills a matching beaker.

Owain takes it and remembers he’s been drinking sweet fresh water from this ancient spring since he was a child.

Myrddin waits for him to finish. ‘Has Jennifer spoken to you of matters of the Cycle?’

‘No. She cannot bring herself to do so. But she carries the secret in her eyes. I saw it in Glastonbury and felt her pain in trying to hide it.’

‘These are tough times.’ He looks to the roaring flames. ‘The most vicious of fires forges the strongest steel.’

‘Vicious is a good description of my dilemma. My wife is pregnant with our first child, and instead of preparing for the birth of my son I must prepare for my death. And, to add insult to such fatal injury, in the white heat of this pain I must hammer out a new love for her.’

‘Such is the way of the Cycle.’

‘Then forgive me, but I wish it were not this way.’ He laughs sadly. ‘Have we picked well, Myrddin? Is Lance truly the man I hope he is, one who can protect her and my son?’

‘He will become that man. Fate decrees it and I will ensure it.’

‘Thank you.’ Owain looks at the grey light pressing the windows. ‘Enough of this now. I am stuffed to bursting with pains of the heart.’ He picks up a gnarled log and throws it on the fire then settles back in the chair. ‘Talk to me about other things. Of life and memories. Anything but our never-ending duties and what is expected of us. I shall spend the rest of the night here with you and will return to the house when a new day has broken and prepare for the meeting with the Blood Line.’

Jet-lagged and hungry, Mitzi sips coffee and watches dawn break, not in all its glory, but in shabby shades of nicotine and burned orange.

She’s come out on the roof garden of the hotel for fresh air, her eyes fixed south towards the Thames but her mind on events thousands of miles away. Her children: one sick and needing her, the other angry and not wanting her. Her sister: lonely and confused because her heart’s been broken. Her ex: violent and troublesome, but still the only man she ever loved. Irish: a good soul, ground down by the job, now just bones and skin waiting to be buried. Life seems to go so fast and to do such damage with its speed.

Mitzi returns to her room, makes instant coffee and tries to work out why Sophie Hudson got killed. She has a very good idea what the motive was, but needs to know all the facts before she draws conclusions.

Once her computer’s powered up she reads the full report from Kirstin, then examines JPEGs of the crime scene. Digital shots of turned-out drawers, smashed vases, and emptied containers. Coffee, sugar, chocolate, rice and cereals are spread all over the floors. Sophie’s clothes have been torn to shreds. Including those she was wearing.

Mitzi checks the ME’s report. The girl was badly beaten. Punched both sides of the face. Hit in the stomach and breasts. There are signs of bruising to oral, vaginal and anal cavities.

A rookie might write off the scene as a rape robbery. It looks for all the world like a cokehead came looking for cash and lost sexual control when he found a pretty girl home alone.

But Mitzi knows better.

Whatever swabs have been sent to the labs will come back to show nil semen and nil DNA. She hadn’t been raped, she’d been cavity searched. The bruise patterns around Sophie’s wrists and cotton traces in her mouth indicate she’d been bound, gagged and interrogated by someone ruthlessly looking for something.

Mitzi opens her laptop case and takes out the memory stick.

It has to be this.

Having seen the autopsy pictures she was in no doubt that Sophie had told her torturer that she’d given the stick to the FBI woman. She’d have spat out that particular fact soon after the first punch in the face, but the murderer would have tortured her just to check it right up to her dying breath.

Now he’ll be coming after her.

Either him, or the men who are paying him for his brutal and homicidal skills.

Angelo Marchetti wakes in pain.

It had been nearly four a.m. by the time nurses at St Thomas’s finished stitching him up. There’d been a couple of awkward moments. One when he’d needed to drop the triage nurse a fifty-pound note and a story about a jealous husband coming home early to stop her calling the cops. And another when he was leaving and saw an ambulance unloading two of the guys he shot.

Aside from that, he counted his blessings. The wound was only two inches deep and hadn’t hit anything except fat on his hips.

He fumbles in the little white bag the hospital pharmacist gave him and takes two painkillers with the last of the water he’d put on the bedside cabinet. For the next hour, he sleeps. Submerges himself in a soft and healing slumber, glad to be unconscious.

It’s eight o’clock when he comes round and stares at the digital clock that’s also charging his iPhone. He makes it three in the morning in DC, the place where there is one less store assistant sleeping soundly because he paid for her to be murdered.

He swings his legs out of bed and blood rushes to his head. He can almost feel the guilt too, growing inside his cranium like a tumour. He knows he mustn’t think about it. He can’t afford to let it eat away at him.

The girl’s a casualty. Collateral damage. Nothing else.

But the harder Marchetti tries to blot her out, the more her ghost haunts him.

He staggers to the bathroom and looks at the blood-soaked patch around his hip. He wishes he’d been killed last night. Wishes those punks had got their shit together and put him out of his misery.

He runs the shower and tries to face up to what he has to do.

Today is the start of another day. Another series of bold steps in the quicksand of sin. And unless he gets what he needs, at least another murder to blacken his soul.

Bronty knuckle-raps Mitzi’s door to walk her to breakfast.

She ushers him in with the overnight news: ‘Sophie Hudson, Goldman’s assistant, got killed in her apartment.’

‘When?’ He shuts the door behind him.

‘Yesterday. I got a call from DC Police just before I went to sleep. Tortured and neck broken. Pro job by the look of the autopsy shots. Twist and snap, it’s much harder to do than they show on TV.’

He flinches. ‘Too graphic, Mitzi. I don’t do death this side of coffee and carbs.’

‘I figure someone’s after the stick she gave me.’ She hands him two sheets of paper that she ran off in the business lounge more than an hour ago. ‘Top page is a copy of the transcript Vicks sent us last night. Underneath is a new fragment she just mailed through from the cryptologists.’

Bronty lowers the paper and sees Mitzi waiting for his opinion. ‘Without seeing much text it’s difficult to know what to make of this. I could easily jump to foolish assumptions and —’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Bronty! People got killed for this. Just tell me what you think without all the lawyery cop-out crap.’

‘Okay.’ He holds the paper so she can see it and slides his finger over a line. ‘Here the writer claims to be a sorcerer.’ He stabs another paragraph. ‘And here he expounds
The Arthurian
Cycle and its role in the universe
. The author goes on to claim he is the sorcerer who made “the true king”. He says he cast him in the image of man. Created him like a circle of iron that has no beginning and no end.’ He pauses to see if she’s making the connections on her own. ‘Does any of this sound familiar to you?’

‘Yeah, I’m thinking about superheroes, Iron Man in particular and how cute Robert Downey Junior is.’

‘Think God instead of Hollywood.’

‘You’re going to have to explain that to me.’

‘Forget King Arthur for a minute, this is a tale of God the Father – he is the sorcerer, and Jesus Christ the true king. It is about how Jesus was created by a divine power, how he died but never died, how he rose and is still among us. How some people believe in him and others think he’s just the stuff of legend, myth and fairy tale.’

‘Shit. Really?’ Mitzi takes the paper from him. ‘You
really
see that?’

‘Was Christ not the King of Kings, the one true King?’

She plays devil’s advocate. ‘Not to everyone.’

‘But you get my drift?’

‘Drift a little more, so I’m certain.’

‘Well, perhaps what’s on that memory stick isn’t a stack of stories about some old king and his knights. It could be that Arthur was just another name for Jesus and what you have here, concealed in centuries of code, is an extract from an unknown gospel. Now, think how precious
that
would be.’