Before she had time to shout her objection, they had dropped him in.
Ava turned furiously on Saxby, her eyes blazing. “Get him out now, or I will not help you.”
Saxby smiled coldly. “I don’t think so, Dr Curzon. The only way to save him now is to go through with your part in the ceremony. Once you have read the conjuration and the sacrifice is complete, then we will retrieve him.”
“Why on earth would I trust you?” she fired back at him.
“Because if you don’t cooperate, we’ll shoot him, and then come up with other ways of incentivizing you to play your part. You, I’m afraid, will not see the night out. He, on other hand, has the chance to live. The gift is in your hands.”
Saxby pulled the window shut and twisted the large metal thumb screw, locking it. “Now, go and prepare yourself.” He looked at her long and hard. “Tonight you will die like a goddess.”
Feeling a sharp jab in the back of her neck, she spun round to see Malchus holding a miniature syringe.
With a hot nauseous feeling, she felt the ground rush up to meet her.
——————— ◆ ———————
The
‘
Gruft
’
Vault
Wewelsburg Castle
B
ü
ren
Paderborn
North-Rhine Westphalia
Federal Republic of Germany
Ava came around slowly.
She felt groggy and confused, disconnected from her senses.
It was as if she was being smothered.
As she fought through the fog, she found a memory—the pain of a needle as Malchus injected something into her neck.
She had been drugged.
With a sickening rush, the scene in the castle’s upper room came flooding back, along with Saxby’s announcement that she would be ritually slain during a ceremony that night.
Forcing her eyes open a fraction, she saw she was not alone, but in a gloomy room together with a large group of people. It was hard to tell exactly how many—her brain was only half functioning, and the lighting was so low as to be almost non-existent.
Although she never had anxieties about enclosed spaces or crowds, she had a nagging feeling there was something very wrong about this particular group of people.
Something unnatural.
Staring blearily out at the faces, the fog lifted a little more, and she instantly understood what it was.
There were no women in the crowd—just men.
And most of them were staring hard at her.
With a rising panic, she shook her head to clear the haze and tried to turn, to see if the threatening scene was the same behind her as well.
But, for some inexplicable reason, her body was not responding.
Sensing real danger now, her brain finally kicked into gear, expelling the last vestiges of chemical confusion, and pulling her back to alertness.
Looking around, she could see she was in the middle of a dark circular underground room, on a raised stage.
As her brain reconnected itself to her body and she regained full use of all her senses, she understood why she could not move.
She had been tied to a tall wooden stake.
There were ropes around her chest, hips, and ankles—lashing her firmly in place. Her wrists were similarly bound, pinned to the front of the post above her head.
Clever
.
Someone had thought this through.
It meant that if by some miracle she managed to free her hands, everyone watching would see immediately. She would have no chance of slipping them loose with no one noticing.
She was not going anywhere.
Judging by the leers on some of the onlookers’ faces, it was also apparent that her being a woman, tied up, seemed to be the cause of much of their interest.
With a sickening jolt, she recalled that she was not the only one in danger. Ferguson was now struggling for his life, deep in the castle’s well.
And his survival would all be down to her.
Saxby’s words rang in her ears.
“
You’re the perfect Anat. It’s one thing for us to summon Yahweh. But wouldn’t it be so much better if we offered him an earthly incarnation of Anat, sacrificing herself to him in a blood offering, knowing how sweet the smell of burning flesh is to his nostrils.
”
She felt a hot mix of fear and outrage.
Who did Saxby think he was?
Who gave him the power to decide who lives and dies?
As her eyes became increasingly accustomed to the gloom, she was able to make out more of the room’s details around her
What little light illuminated the scene was coming from a dozen incense braziers—small perforated lanterns arranged in a circle around the edge of the stage. They threw out a weak light from the burning flames and charcoal within, bathing the space in long shadows which moved with the restless crowd.
The room itself was an underground chamber, and had clearly been designed for elaborate rituals. If the ceremony was to be some sort of bloody neo-Nazi pagan sacrament, then Saxby had chosen the venue impeccably.
The vault had been built to resemble a cave, and was similar in size to the solar she had just been in. That was on the third floor of the large north tower, so she suspected she must now be in its basement.
High up in the domed roof, she noticed long angled stone tunnels ending in small windows, shining a glassy black. From their height, they looked like they just reached ground level.
As her eyes adjusted further, she could see that the walls were not hewn out of rough rock, but faced with 1930s neo-medieval brickwork—which explained the elaborate grey swastika motif moulded into the centre of the ceiling, its arms splayed out into extended geometric shapes.
She counted twelve small plinths around the curved wall. Above each was a matching niche.
Was that where the urns of the twelve leading SS knights were supposed to have been buried?
There was clearly a numerological significance woven into the room’s fabric.
Is that how Himmler thought of himself? Like some latter-day Christ, Charlemagne, or King Arthur, with his twelve loyal paladins?
The whole effect of the low lighting and rough monumental architecture was primal.
If the building had genuinely been the spiritual headquarters of the SS, as Saxby claimed, then this looked like their purpose-built ritual room.
The low circular stage had been built up in the chamber’s centre. It was black, and on it had been painted a large white unicursal hexagram like the one on the end of Malchus’s rosary. The star was contained within a circle, and at each of the six points, where its sharp angles intersected with the curve, there was what looked like an occult sigil.
Malchus’s team from Boleskine House was the closest group of men to her, forming an inner cordon round the dais’s edge. From the sleek submachine guns cradled in their arms, it was clear they were the evening’s security.
Beyond them, filling the rest of the darkened room, the other men were equally menacing.
They were exactly what she would expect of fascist gang members. Many bore the scars of street fights and bar brawls cut into their arrogant and aggressive features.
They were wearing random pieces of Nazi militaria along with their ordinary clothes—army jackets, leather trench-coats, stahlhelms, and black death’s head caps, all with a variety of national flags stitched or painted on.
Judging by the telltale bulges in pockets, under arms, in waistbands, and around ankles, most of them were armed with handguns, knives, and an assortment of other concealed weapons.
She calculated there was probably more hardware surrounding her than if she had been abducted by the crime cartels of San Pedro Sula.
Seeing the expression of violent desire on many of the faces staring at her, it was all she could do to stop herself from imagining what horrors the evening held in store for her.
Glancing down at her body, she realized with a hot flush of indignation that the leering onlookers were not the only ones specially dressed for the occasion.
While drugged and unconscious from whatever Malchus had injected into her, someone had undressed her and changed her clothes.
She was now wearing a knee- and elbow-length hauberk of chainmail, partially covered by a similarly shaped plain black tunic, narrowly fringed in gold around the neck, elbows, and knees. It was pulled in hard at the waist with a purple-flecked black sash, and another identical sash dropped lower, hugging her hips. Tucked into it was a sword, gleaming in the dull light from the braziers.
It was a perfect period weapon, accurate in every regard—with its straight hard bronze blade extending around ten inches before bending into a lethal sickle-shaped arc.
Her period military clothing was completed by greaves on her shins and vambraces on her forearms, all made from boiled leather with bronze reinforcement bands.
When asked about ancient weaponry, she often enjoyed explaining that hardened bronze was actually stronger than wrought iron, even though the Iron Age came after the Bronze Age. The only historical reason for the military success of iron was the scarcity and cost of the copper and tin needed to forge bronze, compared with the relative ease and cheapness of iron production. As a result, long into the Iron Age, hardened bronze remained the metal of choice for high-status warriors—like in the Roman army, where the ordinary soldiers wielded iron swords, but wealthier officers still preferred bronze.
However, now was not the time to analyze antique weaponry. She had much more pressing dangers to think about.
As she swallowed drily and moistened her lips, she realized her face had been caked with a harsh white makeup, and her lips smeared coal-black with what tasted like ashes. She could not be sure, but she also thought her eyes had been painted with heavy black circles around them.
Glancing up at the backs of her hands, she saw someone had covered them with crude swirling patterns of dark orangey-red henna.
Becoming increasingly aware of her body, she realized that her hair was no longer in a ponytail either. It had been oiled, coiled into a rope, and piled onto her head. Tendrils escaped and hung down the side of her face and neck, smelling overpoweringly of perfumed oil—thick, spicy, and sweet: unmistakably exotic and eastern. As she moved her head fractionally, she could also feel and partially see a pair of heavy beaten metal discs hanging from her ears, and a thick torque around her neck. To top it all, there was something on her head. She sensed by the weight it was some sort of metal headband.
Saxby had clearly spared no expense on her costume.
If she was supposed to be a Bronze Age Middle-Eastern war goddess, she could not fault his historical accuracy. Had she been ten feet taller and made of painted wood, she would have been convincing in any cult temple.
But she was not, and nor was she at a weekend reenactment society meeting.
She was in real physical danger, and she could feel it palpably.
The atmosphere was aggressive and intimidating, and it seemed Saxby had meant what he said about her role in whatever macabre rite was to follow.
From where she was standing, she was on the left-hand edge of the stage, facing forwards. In front of her, built into the centre of the stage, was a large flame-blackened iron grate, beneath which red coals were smouldering under a dusting of white ash. It did not take her long to recognize it as a fire for burnt offerings.
Including her.
Trying to banish the horrific thought from her mind, she could feel the perspiration starting to run down her back.
On the far right of the stage were two objects draped in heavy black velvet coverings. Her heart began to beat faster as she realized one was probably the Menorah, and the other must be the Ark.
Despite the terror of her predicament, there was a part of her that even now felt an excitement at being in the same room as the Ark.
It was clearly to be an integral part of the ceremony.
She had waited so long to see it. And that wait would soon be over.
Behind her, at the rear centre of the stage, was Dr Dee’s Table of Practice. It was flanked by two grand 1930s art deco wooden thrones, each with period SS lightning runes and stylized skull emblems carved prominently into their backs.
Without warning, the noise of the crowd suddenly dropped, and the wall of people at the front parted, allowing two figures to emerge and step forward.
Ava’s breath caught in her throat as she saw their black robes and tall conical hoods, rising to a point a foot and a half above the top of their heads. Their arms were crossed in front of them, with their hands folded into the sleeves. They were completely swathed in black cloth from head to floor. She could see nothing of them save through the two small eye-slits in the sinister hoods.
It was a chilling sight—instinctively associated in her mind with pain and suffering.
Medieval brotherhoods of fanatical Spanish penitents and flagellants had worn identical
capirote
hoods as they tore their own flesh with whips, hooks, and chains. Victims of the most holy Catholic Inquisition had them jammed onto their heads before suffering unspeakable tortures and death. And on the other side of the world, in a gruesome throwback, the white supremacist Protestant knights of the Ku Klux Klan donned them in the deep south of the United States before mutilating and lynching their black neighbours.
A cold ball of fear tightened in the pit of her stomach as she stared at the two figures making for the stage, their hooded disguises promising nothing but degradation and pain.
——————— ◆ ———————
Wewelsburg Castle
B
ü
ren
Paderborn
North-Rhine Westphalia
Federal Republic of Germany
In the torch-lit third-floor room, Uri had watched through the window over the woman’s shoulder as Saxby’s men had dropped her partner into the castle’s courtyard well.
“Major Ferguson”, they had called him. British army, Uri assumed. He looked the part.
Uri was no fan of the British armed forces.
The animosity between their two countries went back to the 1940s, to the violent birth of the modern State of Israel, when Jewish terrorist groups and the British army had locked horns in a bloody insurgency as the terrorists tried to seize the country.
But the conflict had been over long before Uri’s time, and at the moment he could not afford the luxury of continuing the wars of a different generation. Right now, he needed support. And Ferguson seemed to be the only person he had come across all day who might be able to give it.
It was the kind of gamble he usually meticulously avoided. But this was turning into a fully improvised mission. And, to Uri’s surprise, he was thriving on it—relishing the need to stay one step ahead in an ever-changing landscape. He had not felt this kind of excitement before. It introduced an edge he had never imagined he would savour.
Anyway, if it came to the worst and Ferguson turned out to be a bad choice, he could always put him back where he found him.
He saw his chance after Malchus had drugged the woman and Saxby had ordered him to take her to the antechamber downstairs so she could be “prepared”.
Once he had carried her unconscious body down and delivered her as instructed, he had found himself on his own. As far as the Skipper knew, he was with Malchus. As far as Malchus knew, he had gone back to find the Skipper. So no one would miss him.
He was free to make his move.
Looking out into the darkened courtyard, he could see groups of men in varying items of Nazi regalia heading for the north tower. He had not passed any of them on the stairs on his way down—so he assumed they were making for the tower’s basement.
Ducking left, he entered the east wing—a long two-storey range leading down to a smaller tower at the castle’s south-eastern corner.
The ancient hallway was low-lit, and he moved stealthily to silence any noise made by his shoes on the hard floor.
Most of the doors along the corridor looked as if they led to offices or other administrative rooms. He could see no lights shining from under any of them, and all appeared empty.
But they were not what he was looking for.
About three-quarters of the way down, he spotted a smaller less important-looking door.
It seemed much more promising.
Trying the handle gently, he found it was not locked, and opened into a modest-sized handyman’s storeroom.
It was ideal.
He slipped inside and locked the door behind him, taking up an observation position at its darkened narrow windows, giving him a clear and unobstructed view out into the length of the courtyard.
He watched intently as streams of men continued to tramp across the irregular cobbles towards the north tower.
Observing them, he reflected that since he had begun researching his legend as Danny Motson back at HQ in Tel Aviv, he had spent countless hours familiarizing himself with the English extreme right-wing scene—lurking in their chat-rooms and poring through their propaganda-filled e-zines.
He reckoned he now knew more about their complex history, ideology, and operations than many of their own members.
The night Otto had taken him to
The Bunker
had been an eye-opener. In all his time with the Institute, he had never imagined he would have ringside seats at a neo-Nazi rally. Still less become one of their front-line soldiers.
For all its novelty, what he saw at
The Bunker
had not ultimately surprised him. England was a naturally liberal country filled with obsessives, of whom it was painstakingly tolerant. It had a long history of extreme left- and right-wing fringe politics, all of which it allowed to flourish so long as no mainstream laws were broken. But it was a philosophy that acted as a magnet for all sorts of concealed extremism, and if Uri had been an investigative journalist researching neo-Nazism, he would instinctively have started in England.
But here at Wewelsburg, looking at the improvised uniforms moving across the courtyard, he was shocked by the range of countries they came from—the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Greece, the former Soviet bloc, the United States, South America, and white Africa. Almost the only flag he could not see was the Israeli one—although he had been as dumbfounded as everyone a few years ago when the newspapers had been filled with a story of the arrest of a violent anti-Semitic neo-Nazi organization of Jewish citizens in Israel.
He felt genuine physical anger towards these people, and knew he was getting emotionally involved. As a salary-earning member of the Mossad’s
Metsada
division, no one was ever going to mistake him for a political liberal. He had no problem squeezing the trigger. But the men in front of him stood for the annihilation of his people. In his mind, that gave him the right to take it personally.
As the men continued to stream across the darkened courtyard, he began to feel impatient. There were many more men arriving than he had imagined, and he wanted to get on with the job in hand before the sheer number of people derailed his plans.
Rituals and ceremonies were not his area of expertise. He had never had much time for ouija boards and séances, and nor had he ever been particularly interested in religion. He had no idea who Anat was, or what
The Sword of Moses
was supposed to do. But he had smiled when he heard the name,
The Sword of Moses
. It described him perfectly. Moses was the English form of the Hebrew name Moshe, and that is exactly what he was—the old man’s sharp unsheathed weapon.
Rubbing his hand across his face, he focused on how the situation had become more complicated.
On the helicopter over from Scotland he had heard the men next to him cursing how awkward it had been handling the seven-branched candlestick up the stairs.
Although he was pretty hazy on most of the Jewish Scriptures, he knew there had only ever been one important seven-branched candlestick in the history of Israel—the ancient Temple Menorah. He had no idea whether it still existed or had been destroyed thousands of years ago. However, if Malchus had a seven-branched candlestick as well as the Ark, then he had better take that as well. He would leave it to the experts back in Israel to sort out whether either of them were real.
But he had realized his biggest problem the moment the helicopter had dropped low over Wewelsburg. He had immediately seen that he would have no chance of just leaving with the Ark and the Menorah. It was a castle, and there was no easy way out of the building and off the mountain.
And that was where Ferguson came in.
The artefacts were too heavy for him to move alone. But, if he had help, he could hide them somewhere in the building, and then call in an ops team to come and pick them up when the coast was clear.
It was not a perfect plan, but it would achieve his objective. And he was all too aware of the consequences of failure. If he did not manage to hide the Ark and Menorah tonight, then Malchus would undoubtedly move them on somewhere else after the ceremony, and there was no guarantee Uri would ever find them again.
So he would locate them tonight, and then, together with Ferguson, secrete them somewhere in the castle.
That just left the question of how many people he was going to have to hurt as he implemented the plan
He had made up his mind back in London that he would put a bullet into the Skipper’s head. He could not pretend it was a strategic priority. It was simple revenge for making him wear the SS
Leibstandarte
jacket. That was a humiliation the large man would pay for with his life.
Strictly speaking, executing the Skipper was not within operational parameters—not unless the Skipper defended the Ark with his blood, which seemed highly unlikely. But Uri would make him pay anyway. He was on a deniable mission, which meant he had a licence to handle the field operation any way he wanted. He would have to fill out the usual forms and explain his actions back at HQ afterwards, of course. But he doubted anyone at the Institute was going to lose sleep over the Skipper. He might in fact just be saving the local team another wet job down the line.
Anyway, he might not even admit to the killing.
However, the Skipper was no longer his only problem.
He had learned a lot more about Malchus since he had arrived at Boleskine House, and he had also discovered a great deal of troubling information about the group’s leader, Saxby.
He had been thinking hard about what to do with the pair of them.
Saxby was easy. He would hand the old Nazi’s details over to Moshe, and let the official channels take over. Saxby was someone HQ would definitely want to know about.
What they did with him was up to them. They might simply decide to keep him under observation, or perhaps infiltrate a suitable agent permanently into his organization. Or maybe one day he would suddenly disappear—lifted off the streets and put on a black flight to an unofficial facility, where they would pump him full of enough drugs to learn what he had eaten for breakfast every day of his life.
Uri did not need to think any more about it. The decision would not be his.
But Malchus—he was a different story entirely.
Uri knew that most people would never understand why he had chosen to do what he did for the Mossad. But to him it was a job. It always had been. He did it because his government asked him to, and he was good at it. He neither liked nor disliked the act of political killing. It was a necessary function, and it was his profession.
But from what he had seen and heard, Malchus had a very different approach. He did not work for any government, nor did anyone sanction his activities. He did what he did because he was a savage sadist who got visible pleasure and gratification from torturing, maiming, and murdering. It was a deviant pathology—an acute mental sickness. He was the face of the fanatical crusading knights who slaughtered in Europe and the East. He was Stalin’s torturers from the gulags in Siberia and the soundproofed basements behind the Iron Curtain. And he was Hitler’s camp commandants, snuffing out life on an industrial scale for a perverse bestial gratification.
Uri needed to think more about what he was going to do with him.
Focusing out of the window, he again noticed how well-armed the men streaming past were. He strongly doubted they were particularly skilled with their weapons, but it was a reminder that he was deep in hostile territory.
Eventually, the last of the men crossed the courtyard towards the north tower, and the area fell silent.
He checked his watch, and waited to make absolutely sure there were no more coming. When ten minutes was up, he slipped swiftly out of the room and back down the corridor, out into the quiet courtyard.
It was a cloudy night, and there was minimal light from the moon or the stars.
Good
.
He did not want to be seen.
Striding over to the well, he peered over the edge.
It was a simple hole in the ground. There was no wall around it, roof on top of it, or winding mechanism over it. It was a plain circular hole with a four-inch stone lip running around its rim.
He could immediately see Ferguson at the bottom of the dark tunnel, treading water about six feet below ground level. He must have heard Uri’s footsteps coming, because he was staring up at him, his face a mask of anger and determination.
The surface of the well’s interior wall was slimy and smooth, and there was clearly no way he could climb out by himself. He had no option except to tread water and pray for rescue. Uri figured he must have been down there for almost an hour already, and after that amount of time he would, at the very least, be exhausted and perhaps in shock. At the worst, he may be developing hypothermia.
“Odd time for a swim?” Uri spoke softly. He could not afford to be overheard. Dozens of dark windows overlooked the courtyard, and he had no idea who could be looking out, unseen.
Ferguson glared back at him, clearly not taking any chances on whether it was a friendly visit.
Uri slipped off his SS waistcoat, and squatted beside the well’s stone lip, wedging his feet against it.
Leaning over the dark hole, he dangled the waistcoat down towards Ferguson. It was not as good as a rope, but it was a solid piece of leather with no stitching or seams.
It should be strong enough.
“Grab it,” Uri ordered, holding it as deep into the well as he could—a couple of feet above Ferguson’s head.
Ferguson’s eyes radiated mistrust.
“Or has someone made you a better offer?” Uri waggled the waistcoat.
Ferguson swung with his hand to reach it—but it was too far above him to catch hold of.
Uri leaned over a few inches more. Any further and he risked losing his footing and being pulled into the well. “Don’t screw it up,” had been Moshe’s parting words. He had no desire for the old man to get a report on his desk saying Uri had blown the operation by drowning with a British soldier in a well.
He stretched his arm out as far as it would go. Ferguson made another grab for the waistcoat—but the lifeline was still out of reach.
Uri peered down. “Jump for it. On the count of three.”
Ferguson nodded, and dropped his hands back down under the water, circling them by his sides.
Uri counted out loud. As he got to three, he gave an extra stretch of his back, lowering the waistcoat another inch. At the same time, Ferguson propelled himself up out of the water, making a grab for the leather with both hands.
It had not been a very spectacular jump—but it was enough. Uri could suddenly feel Ferguson’s weight on the end of the waistcoat.