Ava paused. “I have to be honest. I don’t yet know where this will lead. But the more information we can get about what he’s up to, the easier it’ll be to make the right decision.”
Drewitt nodded slowly. “What exactly do you need to know?”
“Anything,” Ava replied. “Anything at all. What he’s up to. Who he’s dealing with. Where he’s travelling. What he’s focused on. Is he doing anything out of the ordinary? Has he changed his routines? What’s his fixation with King Solomon’s Temple? Has he acquired anything recently? We need to piece together a full picture of exactly what he’s doing.”
Drewitt stood up. “How do I get in touch with you?”
“Just call, the old ways are sometimes the best.” She walked over to a small antique desk with a pile of college crested notepaper on it and wrote out her mobile number on the top sheet.
Drewitt steered her to the door, and held out his hand to shake hers. “Have I just been recruited?” he asked, managing a weak smile as he shook her hand.
“Something like that,” she smiled back, as she slipped out of the doors and onto the ancient creaky wooden stairs.
——————— ◆ ———————
Stockbridge House
Nr Newton Tony
Wiltshire SP4
England
The United Kingdom
Lord Drewitt gently pushed open the door of his family’s country house—the home in which he had grown up.
As a younger man, it had always held fond memories for him.
But ever since Malchus had effectively moved in, he had avoided returning there—preferring to stay at his comfortable rooms up in Oxford.
However, the visit that morning from the young woman, who he later realized had not given her name, had changed everything.
Although it had been a terrible shock to learn that the incident at Berlin’s
Palasthotel
all those years ago was in files people were now reading, by the end of the meeting he had been overwhelmingly pleased she had tricked her way in to see him.
If there really was a chance that the net was closing in on Malchus, then he was ready to do everything he could to be helpful.
He had carried the burden of Malchus’s demands for so long, like some chronic disease he had come to accept with a black fatalism.
But now he had the chance to do something about Malchus, and it filled him with a newfound optimism and energy.
Once she had left, he had quickly finished up his work for the day, then got on the road down to Wiltshire, eager to begin.
As he drove though the countryside, he had started looking at the situation from all angles, and had begun wondering if maybe it was a trap—if it was some twisted new game Malchus was playing with him.
Perhaps that was how the woman knew about East Berlin?
But after turning it over in his mind for most of the journey, he had concluded it was unlikely to be a trick. He could see no reason why Malchus would go to such lengths to find out he hated him. It was hardly a secret between them.
No. It was far more likely that Malchus had upset the wrong people, and a long-overdue payback was finally coming.
Now, standing on the doorstep, smelling the freshly cut grass from the lawns, he pushed open the heavy front door, and felt an excitement he had not known in years.
Something was finally happening, and he wanted to be a part of it.
Closing the door firmly behind him, he quietly crossed the hallway, and peered into the main drawing room.
It was empty.
Looking about, he could see that everything was in order. There was no sign Malchus had been there recently.
He stepped back out into the hallway and checked all the other rooms on the ground floor, one by one.
They were all likewise empty.
The only other place Malchus was likely to be was on the first floor, where he had taken a suite of private rooms for himself.
Climbing the wide sweeping stairs as stealthily as he could, he turned into the corridor that led to the north wing.
The thick old Afghan rugs muffled the sound of his feet on the polished parquet floors as he strode quietly down the vase- and painting-filled corridor.
Dropping down a shallow step into an older part of the house, he arrived at a set of pillars dividing off an elegant lobby.
Stepping quietly across it, he approached the door leading to the suite of rooms Malchus used.
The doorway to Malchus’s study was partly open.
He listened attentively outside it, but could hear nothing.
Nudging the door wider, it swung open, giving him a clear view of the whole room.
There was no one in it.
Even though Stockbridge House had been the Drewitt family’s ancestral home for over four hundred years, Malchus had been categorically clear that these rooms were his personal sanctuary. He forbade Drewitt or anyone else from entering.
So as Drewitt stepped quietly into Malchus’s study, he knew he was crossing a line.
It was an act of open defiance.
He looked around and could feel his pulse quickening.
Even though his parasitic guest was not at home, he knew enough about Malchus’s violent rages to be aware what would happen if he was caught there. But after all the years of fear, it felt good to be one step ahead. And if it helped get Malchus out of his life, it was a risk he was more than willing to take.
He looked round the once-familiar room with distaste.
He had never imagined there being a shrine to such darkness in his home.
Malchus had truly made it his own.
Despite the fact it was afternoon, the curtains were drawn, and no natural light entered.
One wall was hung with a pair of large framed photographs.
To the left was a young Heinrich Himmler in interwar Munich, posing in front of a paramilitary truck alongside the henchmen of his fledgling SS. Drewitt could not see how the scrawny bespectacled bureaucrat, the second most powerful Nazi after Hitler, could have been any use in the orchestrated street violence at which his thugs were by then becoming proficient—but his watery eyes already had that distant mechanical gaze.
Beside it was a signed portrait photograph of
SS-Brigadeführer
Karl Maria Weisthor, who Malchus had explained was ‘Himmler’s Rasputin’. Weisthor had been drafted into the SS as high priest in charge of spiritual matters, research into runes and the prehistoric Germanic super race, and developing rituals honouring Got, the ancient Germanic deity at the centre of SS worship. It was Weisthor, Malchus had confided, who designed the infamous
Totenkopf
skull-and-rune ring presented to all SS officers—returned on death to a great chest in the crypt of the castle at Wewelsburg, the SS Valhalla where the fallen were honoured.
It all made Drewitt feel ill.
Above the repulsive photographs hung a parade banner. The large words emblazoned across it read ‘THULE GESELLSCHAFT 1919’, which Malchus had explained with relish was a group of occult ariosophists that had given birth to the Nazi party—providing the bedrock of magical mystical beliefs that were to underpin the party.
Malchus had stroked the banner reverentially, pointing out that it was embroidered with the early date of 1919, and already prominently featured a swastika swathed in oak leaves.
Drewitt turned away in disgust.
On the opposite wall, as if representing the other half of Malchus’s dark longings, was a large brooding image of Baphomet—the demonic deity supposedly worshipped by the heretical and blasphemous medieval Knights Templar.
Malchus had told him the picture was by the renowned French occultist, Eliphas Lévi, who had represented Baphomet as a breasted man with a horned goat’s head and hoofs. The beast was sitting cross-legged with one hand pointing to Heaven and the other to Hell, a large pentagram branded into his broad forehead.
Repulsed, Drewitt looked away, towards the far side of the room, where he knew Malchus’s prize possession lay—inside the shallow safe sunk into the floor.
He had already decided it would be the best place to start his search.
Stepping over to the room’s far corner, he lifted the silk rug to expose the polished floorboards underneath. Pulling up two that were loose, he uncovered the safe and quickly dialled in the combination. He knew the code by heart—his father had put the strong box in many years ago.
When he heard the mechanism click, he turned the heavy handle, lifted the thick steel lid, and peered inside.
He could immediately see that apart from Malchus’s prize object, it was empty.
He breathed out deeply with disappointment. He was not sure what he had been expecting to find—but he had hoped there would be something.
Anything.
Instead, he gazed down at the familiar large bundle Malchus had once ecstatically unwrapped for him.
He pulled it out and gingerly took off the small outer rope, curious to see the object again—this time without Malchus insisting that human hands may not touch it.
As he unwrapped the cloth, the material fell away to reveal a narrow leaf-shaped piece of metal about a foot long, tapering to a vicious point. It had clearly been ravaged by time and was a mere shadow of what it had been the day it emerged, white-hot, from the smith’s fire. Nevertheless, it was still instantly recognizable—an antique spearhead.
Running his fingers gently over it, he could see it had been mended many times over the years. There was a gold sleeve over the middle section, and the rest was held together by six bands of tightly bound silver wire, which also acted to secure an old nail laid into its blade.
Malchus had told him it was the Lance of Longinus, the Spear of Destiny—the weapon that a Roman soldier had used to slice open Christ’s dead flank on the cross. The nail, he had explained, was from the crucifixion itself.
The claim sounded deluded and insane to Drewitt, but Malchus had seemed transported by the object, explaining it had long been believed to give its owner celestial powers over enemies, which is why it had been sought and owned by all history’s great warriors, including Alaric, Charlemagne, Barbarossa, and the Hapsburgs.
Malchus told him that Hitler had wasted no time in seizing it from conquered Vienna in 1938, fired up by its role in Wagner’s opera,
Parsifal
, and convinced it was a talisman of power he had wielded in a former life.
Hitler had brought it triumphantly back to Nuremberg in an armoured SS train, and put it in the former monastery church of Saint Katharina. Later, in 1944, as the end of the war approached and he became concerned for its safety, he had it moved by his agents to a secret location, from where the liberating American army recovered it in 1945.
But, Malchus had gloated, in the late 1980s, while still a Stasi officer, he had learned that the end of the story was not all it seemed.
Towards the end of the war, a fraternity of Catholic priests of Nuremberg, still secretly devoted to Saint Katharina, had switched the spear, ensuring a fake was handed over to Hitler’s agents. So the ‘holy spear’ discovered by General Patton’s victorious army and returned to its glass case in Vienna’s Hofburg palace was a useless replica.
Malchus had become obsessed with the priests’ treachery, and had tracked down the three elderly celibates, who still guarded the true spear. He had them seized and brought to the basement of the Ministerium, where he was able to work on them undisturbed. Although they put up more resistance than he thought possible from elderly men, the combination of prolonged major trauma and strong drugs proved too much—as it always did. In their screaming delirium, they confessed the spear’s hiding place, and signed their own death warrants.
So Malchus had taken possession of the spear, and it now lay safely in Drewitt’s house.
He was not concerned about elaborate security, because as far as the world knew, the spear was safely under permanent guard in the Hofburg palace in Vienna.
Drewitt shuddered.
Everything in the room reeked of violence, pain, and darkness.
He wrapped up the spearhead again and locked it away in the safe, dropping the carpet back into place before walking over to the antique desk against the far wall.
It had once been a favourite room and desk of his—before Malchus had come. Its top surface was inlaid with old brown leather and edged with a gold patterned border. Tall bronze lamps sat firmly at either end, casting their gentle light down over the desk. If the curtains had been open, the windows would have given an attractive view out over the gardens.
It had been a restful place to work.
But the thick dark curtains Malchus had installed were firmly closed, and the lamps cast a pale glow down over his strange books and papers.
Drewitt flicked idly through the top book. It was a leather-bound copy of something called the
Monas Hieroglyphicas
by Dr John Dee. He had never heard of it. As he turned the pages, he could see they were all in Latin, covered with strange geometrical and astrological symbols.
It was like those older books in the college library that ever fewer people were able to read. He had always wanted to be able to understand Latin properly—not just the occasional word here and there. He had never needed it for his work as an economist, but it would be a fun project for his retirement.
Moving the book aside, he could see underneath it several more ancient leather tomes, all filled with similarly incomprehensible writing and symbols. The titles were equally strange to him—
Ars Almadel
,
Ars Theurgia Goetia
,
Grimorium Verum, Liber Iuratus Honorii
.
He had no idea what they were all about, but the dark collection of texts left him feeling disturbed.
Before meeting Malchus, he had assumed all these occult materials were mumbo-jumbo. But now he knew very differently. The things men like Malchus were prepared to do in order to find such books, and what they did once they had become intoxicated by them, were very far from harmless.
It was pure evil.
As he moved the books aside to uncover a piece of paper on which Malchus had been writing, he caught sight of a purple leather case hidden under the pile.
It was about the size of a cigar box. The leather was heavily worn, and the silver clasp that once held it together at the front now hung loosely, long broken.
He put a fingernail under the catch, and carefully lifted the lid.
It rose with no resistance, and he exhaled audibly at the sight of what lay nestled on its pearl-coloured silk lining.
It was a seal or a medal—he could not tell the difference, a little larger than the width of his hand.
He knew a thing or two about paintings, but was out of his depth with solid objects.
His first impression was that it was old—but he was worldly enough to know that modern forgers were highly skilled, and regularly duped all but the most experienced specialists. Nevertheless, he could see it had a certain irregularity and smoothness that suggested it had not come out of a Chinese factory or off a counterfeiter’s workbench. It had an undefinable inconsistency and mellowness hinting at authentic age.
He touched its surface, tracing the images and writing covering the front face. He could read some of the words, but they made no sense to him.