The Excalibur Codex (42 page)

In desperation he sank his teeth into the tender flesh of Adam Steele’s ear. Now it was Steele’s turn to shriek as Jamie worked at the ear like a hyena tearing the flesh from a dead antelope. Steele loosed his grip and tore himself away, leaving a hunk of his flesh in the other man’s mouth. Jamie spat out the vile piece of meat and lurched after his opponent. By now there was no Fiona or Charlotte or Trevor, only the two men fighting for their lives. He swung and missed, the weight of the sword almost carrying him over as it passed Steele’s shoulder to strike a marble statue of the house’s owner with a terrible mistuned clang. His opponent saw his chance and tried to ram his point into Jamie’s defenceless guts. Jamie saw the sword as if in slow motion, the bright streaks of the honed edge, the twinkle of reflected light on the point. He was exhausted, but so was Steele. Somehow his legs found the strength to sidestep the blow and as the sword slipped past he brought his own blade up to counter-attack. But there was no blade, only a jagged eight-inch stump.

He heard Steele’s manic laughter at the knowledge his enemy was disarmed, Charlotte’s scream of delight and Trevor’s shout of, ‘Finish him, boss.’ But even as the words reached his ears he darted forward, knowing Steele was off balance and this was his only chance. With the last ounce of his strength he rammed the saw-toothed edge of broken metal two-handed up under Adam Steele’s chin and felt the awful crunch as it broke through flesh and muscle and cartilage, scraped against
bone, tore through palate. Steele gurgled and wriggled, his mouth pleading and eyes gaping with shock and terror. Jamie snarled like a dog as he forced the terrible spike upwards until it reached the brain and the eyes suddenly turned puzzled. Finally, Jamie hauled the stump of sword clear and blood pulsed from the wound as Adam Steele collapsed forward, taking the art dealer with him and covering him with gore.

As he struggled to free himself, he heard Charlotte scream and by the time he managed to get to his feet she had her pistol aimed at his head. Very deliberately, the muzzle dropped until it was pointed at his groin.

‘You bastard,’ she snarled.

A blur of movement from somewhere to her right distracted her and Trevor’s shouted warning came too late for her to react to the mini-whirlwind of Fiona Maxwell, who launched herself screaming at the other girl. Charlotte went down, cursing under a hail of blows, and Jamie turned his attention to the final threat. Trevor was still by the door where he’d been throughout the fight and he had his pistol aimed unerringly at Jamie’s head. He was a professional and the smile on his face said he wasn’t going to miss.

Jamie knew he was dead, but still the fighter in him had to try. ‘It’s finished, Trevor,’ he gasped. ‘Without Adam Steele whatever you’ve been plotting is never going to happen. You can walk away now.’

Trevor’s expression didn’t even alter. ‘I don’t think so. There are plenty more where he came from. Anyway,’
he touched the back of his neck, ‘I owe you for this. No hard feelings, old son.’

Jamie recognized the moment thought turned to action. He knew he’d see the flash of the muzzle before he heard the sound and felt the bullet hit. But somehow Trevor’s resolve faded, the gun dropped and the black droplet that had magically appeared below his eye became a well gushing blood. Without a sound his legs buckled and he dropped to the floor.

Jamie slowly swivelled to find Charlotte staring at him with a look of puzzlement and her pistol aimed at his head. It all seemed a bit unfair, really.

‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, dear.’ The words seemed to come from inside him, but it wasn’t his voice, it was a commanding voice, more mellow and terribly upper class. His last thought before he collapsed was that maybe it belonged to God.

‘You were hoping I’d kill him,’ Jamie’s voice emerged as a soft croak. ‘Or that he’d kill me.’

The Director General of the Security Services’ nose twitched like a suspicious rabbit as he looked down at the body of Adam Steele and prodded it with his foot.

‘I’m afraid we’re not that devious, Mr Saintclair. The reason for our untimely arrival was that we got lost, sometimes it’s as simple as that.’ He sniffed. ‘Mind you, I’m not saying it’s not convenient. Adam Steele will become the sixth victim of a terrorist atrocity that unfortunately consumes his house and five other
upstanding members of society at ten o’clock this evening.’

‘Is one allowed to ask who they are?’

‘No, but I’m sure you’ll read the obituary of the outspoken MP and former Defence Secretary Colin Franklin in the newspapers in the next few days. Unfortunately, there’ll also be one of our own. A young man with a bright future. SAS hero and all that. Adam Steele managed to seduce him with his awful vision.’ He sighed and his gaze wandered over the weapons and suits of armour until they settled on the skull of the unfortunate aurochs. ‘His time was past, you see. All of their times were past. They’d never have done it.’ He sounded as if he might have been trying to convince himself. ‘The General they thought was their trump card came to us as soon as they approached him. That’s when we put in Gault.’ He looked up. ‘You didn’t know? Oh, yes, Gault was one of ours. The only problem was he couldn’t penetrate the inner circle. So we had to bide our time.’

‘And then the M25 happened.’

He nodded. ‘We were under pressure to move. To make mass arrests. But Gault persuaded us to hold our hand. If he came back with Excalibur, Steele would give him access to the inner circle and we’d know everything.’

A figure appeared in the doorway. Dark haired, tanned and compact in his blue bomber jacket. ‘Hello, David,’ Jamie said quietly. ‘I wondered when you’d turn up.’

‘Is she here?’

The DGSS called to someone in the armoury and Charlotte Wellesley appeared in handcuffs between two men. She looked resentfully from Jamie to the Israeli and Jamie had a moment of, not quite doubt, but perhaps regret, which he swiftly brushed from his mind. She was responsible for the deaths of too many people to deserve his sympathy.

‘We have a place out in the Negev,’ the Mossad man said conversationally. ‘An oven in summer, an icebox in winter. You will spend many happy hours there with the old ladies of Baader Meinhof and Hamas, and never see sunlight again.’

She started screaming as they led her away.

‘Just out of interest,’ the DG asked conversationally, ‘when did you realize she was a bad ’un?’

‘Not soon enough.’ Jamie shook his head in dismay at his own blindness. ‘I think Charlotte Wellesley is the most truly evil person I’ve ever met. Keeping me close was like a game for her. I was her trophy, to be used for her amusement. A constant reminder of what she’d made me suffer.’ The memory of all her victims made him grimace. ‘But she wasn’t a good enough actress to carry it off and it was the fact that we were so close that betrayed her. I think I had my first suspicions when we were in Corfu. After that, it took a long time for everything to come together, but by the time we were in New York and the laptop was used to try to frame me for the M25 attack, I became certain she was linked to Abbie’s last message.’ He shrugged and the other man stared at him. ‘
febluis.
At first I thought it was code, then I understood it was much simpler than that. You see, she was trying to tell me that the person who killed her was female, and in a certain light I realized that Charlotte Wellesley had the most startling blue eyes.’

The house backed onto the south-east slope of the triple peak, mottled pink stone and grey slate set squat and low to fend off the winds that had battered their way down the valley for countless millennia. Judging by the hotchpotch of building styles and the outbuildings that clung haphazardly to either side, it might be only the most recent manifestation of at least three earlier structures.

‘Home,’ Fiona Maxwell announced, pushing back the door with her uninjured hand, the other held across her chest in a makeshift sling. ‘This is my place. My mother and father usually look after Abbotsford, but fortunately they were away for the weekend. I was only standing in.’

She led the way through the house to a back room obviously used for storage. A painted door was set in the far left of the rear wall and she opened it to reveal a deep cupboard. Not for the first time, Jamie wondered if he
was in a dream as Fiona reached up and pulled at the right hand wall until it slid aside with barely a squeak. ‘My uncle’s work,’ she explained. ‘He was a great one for the joinery.’ The gap led into a short corridor that led in turn to another door. She stood in front of it and turned to him, her green eyes shining cat-like in the gloom. As she spoke the pain of his wounds seemed to fade.

‘You have the right, twice over,’ she said formally. ‘The blood of kings runs through you. The St Clairs of Ravensneuk are descended through the matriarchal line from Lllachar, ruler of hosts, remembered in the Gododdin, and whose forefathers held this land for the High King of the Votadini. Yet you need not pass if you do not have the will.’

‘You said twice.’

‘And because you have been touched by the Lady. But you already know that.’

The Lady was Isis, paramount goddess of Ancient Egypt, and he had recovered her crown that had been lost for two millennia. Jamie felt a moment of utter certainty unlike any other in his life. ‘Then I will pass.’

She pushed the door back and they were in a tight space between the house and the hills, hidden from above by an overhang and from the sides by outcrops that buttressed the rear of the building. In front of them lay an ominous cleft that looked to Jamie like the entrance to the Underworld.

‘A great stone once covered this,’ she explained in a
spectral voice that seemed to come from another age. ‘It was a shrine through the centuries and men came with offerings though they knew not what they worshipped. Then, in the time of William, known as the Lion, a young man was found wandering these hills, his hair turned white as a mountain fox in a single night. He carried one gold piece and told of a dark cave, a great treasure and a terrible king who had woken and ordered him to begone or be swallowed by the mountain for ever. The townsfolk took the madman to Michael Scott, the wizard, who had ceased his wanderings for a time, but he never recovered his senses. It is said Scott placed a spell of concealment on the cave and appointed himself its Guardian. Scotts have been the Guardians ever since.’

‘But you are a Maxwell.’ Jamie was surprised at the tremor in his voice.

‘My aunt was a Scott,’ Fiona said simply, ‘the last of that line, and someone must be chosen. Come.’

He shivered and would have hesitated before the dank, freezing tomb if Fiona Maxwell hadn’t led the way unflinchingly inside. She produced two tall candles from some hidden void and lit them with a long match. In the flickering yellow light Jamie saw that the sloping six-foot-high passage beyond the entrance had been cut from the rock by men and widened so that two people could pass side by side. Fiona set a steady pace over the uneven surface and Jamie followed at a slight crouch to shield his head from the tunnel’s rock ceiling. After
a few minutes they reached a horizontal stretch and somewhere far ahead Jamie had an illusion that the walls were rippling as if they were a molten river. It was only when they came closer he realized the effect was caused by an uneven line of gleaming two-foot bronze discs ingeniously set into each side of the passage. When Fiona reached the first of the polished metal plates she placed her candle in a holder so that the disc reflected the entire light of the flame. The effect was astonishing. The curvature and angle of the mirror-surfaced disc focused the light diagonally on to a similar disc on the opposite side of the tunnel, which repeated the exercise on to a third, and a fourth until twenty discs illuminated the space a hundred paces ahead. When she took Jamie’s candle and inserted it in the disc on the opposite side of the passage the effect was almost as bright as day.

Oddly, the lights only increased Jamie’s sense of foreboding.

They continued down the passage and he noticed scorch marks on either side of the floor. A few paces later Fiona warned against a dark stream that cut across their path, appearing from one side of the tunnel and disappearing into the other, through a channel that had been cut by hand. Very gradually he began to work out where he was. The growing realization was reinforced by the dark oblong of a great pit ahead and his step faltered and his stomach seemed to drop as the full, quite literally awesome, reality threatened to overwhelm him. The emotion he experienced was as intense as when
he first entered the Sistine Chapel or gazed upon the great paintings of the Louvre, but magnified a thousand times.

‘We’re in a Mithraeum?’

‘Yes.’

Mithras, god of the East, the soldier’s god, bull slayer and keeper of the mysteries. Jamie could imagine it now. The naked initiate escorted down the tunnel, his senses battered by sights and sounds and smells. The heat from the twin fires singeing his flesh, and then the bewildering drop into the freezing cold waters. Every step a test of courage. A single flinch or a foot backwards and the ceremony would be abandoned. Beyond the stream they would have lined the floor deep with cattle entrails and whispered in the man’s ear that they were the remains of his family. Something soft and fleshy forms a barrier. A sword placed in his hand. ‘Your eldest son. Thrust deep and sure, or Mithras rejects you.’

And finally the grave pit with your sword in your hand. The sound of the bull being brought and the terrified lowing as it scents the gore. And then you’re drowning in blood, gallons of it pouring over you, hot and thick and oily from the beast’s slashed throat, choking and blinding you and filling your nostrils with the stink of death.

And then you rise. Reborn.

Sweat poured from Jamie’s body as if he’d personally suffered the ordeal. He was so focused on the pit that he almost didn’t notice the skulls cut into niches in
the walls, each of them topped by an exotic helmet of ancient origin: a distinctive Thracian cap with its griffin crest; the conical dome of a Scythian archer; the plumed headgear and fish-scale neck protector of a Parthian cataphract; a Celtic-era pot helmet from Gaul or Hispania decorated in gold. Even a jewelled headdress that looked as if it might have originated from somewhere on the Russian steppe.