The Charlemagne Pursuit (18 page)

S
TEPHANIE OPENED THE BEDROOM DOOR
. T
HE MASTER SUITE BED
was made, everything tidy, like the rest of the house. A bathroom door hung open, and daylight from the four windows cast a bright glow across the room’s Berber carpet. Outside, trees jostled by the breeze shifted and black shapes danced across the floor.

“No ghosts?” Davis said.

She pointed down. “False alarm.”

Then something caught her eye.

One closet was equipped with pocket doors and appeared to be Mrs. Rowland’s, women’s clothes hung in a haphazard fashion. A second closet was smaller with a hinged paneled door. She could not see inside, as it sat at a right angle to her, in a short hall that led to the bath. The door hung open, its inner side visible from where she stood. A plastic hanger on the inside knob rocked, ever so slightly, from side to side.

Not much, but enough.

“What is it?” Davis asked.

“You’re right,” she said. “Nothing here. Just nerves from committing a burglary.”

She could see that Davis had not noticed—or if he had, he was keeping the realization close.

“Can we get out of here now?” she asked.

“Sure. I think we’ve seen enough.”

W
ILKERSON WAS TERRIFIED
.

He’d been forced at gunpoint to make the call to Dorothea, the man from the sidewalk telling him exactly what to say. The barrel of a 9mm automatic had been nestled close to his left temple, and he’d been warned that any variation in the script would result in the trigger being pulled.

But he’d done exactly as instructed.

He’d then been driven across Munich in the rear of a Mercedes coupe, his hands cuffed behind his back, his kidnapper at the wheel. They’d lingered awhile, his captor leaving him alone in the car while he spoke on a cell phone outside.

Several hours had passed.

Dorothea should be at the train station soon, but they were nowhere near its location. In fact, they were driving away from the city center, heading south, out of the city, toward Garmisch and the Alps, sixty miles away.

“How about one thing?” he asked the driver.

The man said nothing.

“Since you’re not going to tell me who you work for, how about your name? That a secret, too?”

He’d been taught that to engage your captors was the first step in learning about them. The Mercedes veered right, onto a ramp for the autobahn and sped ahead, merging onto the superhighway.

“My name is Ulrich Henn,” the man finally said.

THIRTY-SIX

AACHEN, 5:00 PM

M
ALONE FOUND HIMSELF ENJOYING HIS MEAL
. H
E AND
C
HRISTL
had walked back to the triangular-shaped Marktplatz and found a restaurant that faced the town’s
rathaus.
On the way they’d stopped in the chapel’s gift shop and bought half a dozen guidebooks. Their route had led them through a maze of snug, cobbled lanes lined with bourgeois town houses that created a medieval atmosphere, though most were probably only fifty or so years old given that Aachen had been heavily bombed in the 1940s. The afternoon’s cold had not deterred shopping. People crowded the trendy shops preparing for Christmas.

Hatchet Face was still following and had entered another café diagonally across from where he and Christl were seated. Malone had asked for and received a table not at, but near, the window, where he could keep an eye outside.

He wondered about their shadow. Only one meant he was dealing with either amateurs or people too cheap to hire enough help. Perhaps Hatchet Face thought himself so good that no one would ever notice? He’d many times met operatives with similar egos.

He’d already skimmed through three of the guidebooks. Just as Christl had said, Charlemagne had considered the chapel his “new Jerusalem.” Centuries later Barbarossa confirmed that declaration when he donated the copper-gilded chandelier. Earlier Malone had noticed a Latin inscription on the chandelier’s bands, and a translation appeared in one of the books. The first line read, “Here thou appearest in the picture, O Jerusalem, celestial Zion, Tabernacle of peace for us and hope of blessed rest.”

The ninth-century historian Notker was quoted as saying that Charlemagne had the chapel built “in accordance with a conception of his own,” its length, breadth, and height symbolically related. Work had started sometime around 790 to 800
CE
, and the building was consecrated on January 6, 805, by Pope Leo III, in the presence of the emperor.

He reached for another of the books. “I assume you’ve studied the history of Charlemagne’s time in detail?”

She nursed a glass of wine. “It’s my field. The Carolingian period is one of transition for Western civilization. Before him, Europe was a seething madhouse of conflicting races, incomparable ignorance, and massive political chaos. Charlemagne created the first centralized government north of the Alps.”

“Yet everything he achieved failed after his death. His empire crumbled. His son and grandchildren destroyed it all.”

“But what he believed took root. He thought the first object of government should be the welfare of its people. Peasants were, to him, human beings worth thinking about. He governed not for his glory, but for the common good. He said many times that his mission was not to spread his empire, but to keep one.”

“Yet he conquered new territory.”

“Minimally. Territory here and there for specific purposes. He was a revolutionary in nearly every way. Rulers of his day gathered men of brawn, archers, warriors, but he summoned scholars and teachers.”

“Still, it all vanished and Europe lingered another four hundred years before real change occurred.”

She nodded. “That seems the fate of most great rulers. Charlemagne’s heirs were not as wise. He was married many times and fathered lots of children. No one knows how many. His firstborn, Pippin, a hunchback, never had the chance to reign.”

Mention of the deformity made him think of Henrik Thorvald-sen’s crooked spine. He wondered what his Danish friend was doing. Thorvaldsen would surely either know, or know of, Isabel Oberhauser. Some intel on that personality would be helpful. But if he called, Thorvaldsen would wonder why he was still in Germany. Since he didn’t have the answer to that question himself, there was no sense begging it. “Pippin was later disinherited,” she said, “when Charlemagne birthed healthy, nondeformed sons by later wives.

Pippin became his father’s bitter enemy, but died before Charlemagne. Louis, ultimately, was the only son to survive. He was gentle, deeply religious, and learned, but he shrank from battle and lacked consistency. He was forced to abdicate in favor of his three sons, who tore the empire apart by 841. It wasn’t until the tenth century that it was reassembled by Otto I.”

“Did he have help, too? The Holy Ones?”

“No one knows. The only direct record of their involvement with European culture are the contacts with Charlemagne, and those come only from the journal I have, the one Einhard left in his grave.”

“And how has all this remained secret?”

“Grandfather told only my father. But because of his wandering mind, it was hard to know what was real or imagined. Father involved the Americans. Neither Father nor the Americans could read the book from Charlemagne’s grave, the one Dorothea has, which is supposed to be the complete account. So the secret has endured.”

As long as she was talking he asked, “Then how did your grandfather find anything in Antarctica?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that he did. You saw the stones.”

“And who has those now?”

“Dorothea, I’m sure. She certainly didn’t want me to have them.”

“So she trashed those displays? What your grandfather collected?”

“My sister never cared for Grandfather’s beliefs. And she is capable of anything.”

He caught more frost in her tone and decided not to press any further. Instead he glanced at one of the guidebooks and studied a sketch of the chapel, its surrounding courtyards, and adjacent buildings.

The chapel complex seemed to possess an almost phallic shape, circular at one end, an extension jutting forward with a rounded end at the other. It connected to what was once a refectory, now the treasury, by an interior door. Only one set of exterior doors were shown—the main entrance they’d used earlier, called the Wolf’s Doors.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

The question jarred his attention back to her. “The book you have, from Einhard’s grave. Do you have a complete translation of its Latin?”

She nodded. “Stored on my computer at Reichshoffen. But it’s of little use. He talks about the Holy Ones and a few of their visits
with
Charlemagne. The important information is supposedly in the book Dorothea has. What Einhard called a ‘full comprehension.’ ”

“But your grandfather apparently learned that comprehension.”

“It seems so, though we don’t know that for sure.”

“So what happens when we finish this pursuit? We don’t have the book Dorothea has.”

“That’s when Mother expects us to work together. Each of us has a part, compelled to cooperate with the other.”

“But you’re both trying like the devil to obtain all the pieces so that you don’t need the other.”

How had he managed to get himself involved in such a mess?

“Charlemagne’s pursuit is, to me, the only way to learn anything. Dorothea thinks the solution may lie with the Ahnenerbe and whatever it was pursuing. But I don’t believe that’s the case.”

He was curious. “You know a lot about what she thinks.”

“My future is at stake. Why wouldn’t I know all that I could?”

This stylish woman never hesitated for a noun, searched for the correct tense of a verb, or failed to voice the right phrase. Though beautiful, smart, and intriguing, something about Christl Falk didn’t ring quite right. Similar in his mind to when he’d first met Cassiopeia Vitt in France, last year.

Attraction mixed with caution.

But that negative never seemed to deter him.

What was it about strong women with deep contradictions that drew him? Pam, his ex-wife, had been difficult. All of the women he’d known since the divorce had been handfuls, including Cassiopeia. Now this German heiress who combined beauty, brains, and bravado.

He stared out the window at the neo-gothic town hall, tower roofs at each end, one with a clock that read five thirty.

She noticed his interest in the building. “There’s a story. The chapel stands behind the town hall. Charlemagne had them connected with a courtyard, enclosed by his palace compound. In the fourteenth century, when Aachen built that town hall, they changed the entrance from the north side, facing the courtyard, to the south, facing this way. That reflected a new civic independence. The people had become self-important and, symbolically, turned their backs on the church.” She pointed out the window at the fountain in the Marktplatz. “That statue atop is Charlemagne. Notice that he faces away from the church. A seventeenth-century reaffirmation.”

1. Octagon

1. Octagon 2. Choir

2. Choir 3. Entrance Hall

4. Matthias Chapel 5. Anna Chapel

6. Hungarian Chapel 7. All Saints’ Chapel

8. St. Michael’s Chapel

9. Charles and Hubertus Chapel 10. Baptist Chapel

10. Baptist Chapel 11. All Souls’ Chapel

12. Treasury (Small Dragonhole) 13. Cloister

13. Cloister

14. Church-yard

He used her invitation to glance outside as an opportunity to examine the restaurant where Hatchet Face had taken refuge—a half-timbered building that reminded him of an English pub.

He listened to the babble of languages mixed with the clanking of plates and cutlery around him. He found himself no longer objecting, either openly or silently, no longer searching out explanations for why he was here. Instead, his mind played with an idea. The cold weight of the gun from yesterday in his jacket pocket reassured him. But only five rounds remained.

“We can do this,” she said.

He faced her. “Can
we
?”

“It’s important that
we
do.”

Her eyes were lit with anticipation.

But he wondered.