The Excalibur Codex (38 page)

‘What guarantees do I have—’

‘There are no guarantees.’ The words came out as a snarl. ‘Take it or leave it. All you need to know is you won’t get blown up or shot at. If you want Excalibur and the computer a million is the price you have to pay. And if that’s not incentive enough, maybe I’ll throw in the chance to get even for making you look like a five-star clown on the fencing mat. No guards, no tips. Just you and me and two swords. An old-fashioned duel, though I doubt you’ve got the guts to meet me face to face.’

When he hung up, he discovered the sweat was running down his back and his hand was shaking.

He’d cast the lure, but would Adam Steele take it? He closed his eyes and a familiar face filled his mind. He would do it. He had to do it. For her.

Before he drove off he plugged the phone into the in-car charger and made sure it was switched on.

The two days spent more or less under house arrest had been useful for planning the journey and he had a printout of the relevant section of the Excalibur codex to give him a rough guide. It had been a spying mission – albeit with a secret at its heart – and he reckoned on the German boys not doing much more than twenty miles a day over the hilly northern countryside. He studied the first section.

That summer … My eight-man section cycled east from Manchester and then north up the spine of the country. After just over a week we reached a range of low, bleak hills where seldom a tree grew. We camped with an armoured unit under training in the area and they made us welcome, almost treating us as comrades. They appeared to have no suspicion of the war we knew was coming and for which we had trained. We thought them … very naive.

Jamie covered the two hundred miles between Potters Bar and Manchester in just under four hours, including a stop at a Little Chef for a meat pie that had pastry the consistency of cardboard, and was filled with a browngrey sludge. At Manchester, he swapped the M6 for the M62 and headed over the Pennines towards Leeds. He was happy to stay on the motorway for the moment. The tricky part would come later.

His gaze fell on the mobile phone plugged into the
charger. Jamie was banking on the near certainty that its previous owner had installed some kind of tracking device and was even now trying to make up the miles between them. Steele’s instinct would be to lash out with deadly force, but the question was whether he’d give Jamie time to find the true sword, or cut his losses. If he took the second option that would be unfortunate for Jamie, but something deep in his gut told him Adam Steele was as obsessed with Excalibur as Harold Webster, only for different reasons. And that meant he would wait. Of course, Steele wasn’t the only potentially lethal fly in the ointment. There was always the possibility Al-Qaida were still on his tail, looking for payback and to make good their promise of a farewell video with an edge. And the cops who’d been watching him were unlikely to just sit back and accept his disappearance. By now he was probably on Britain’s Most Wanted list. He glanced at the traffic behind him, looking for the dark 4x4s that seemed to be the discerning assassin’s vehicle of choice, and finding more possibles than he liked. Maybe he should have taken the Chief Inspector’s advice and stayed in jail.

He hit the main A1(M) at three in the afternoon and turned north again, hugging the east side of the hills, but conscious he would eventually be pushed ever closer to the North Sea. Soon there would be a decision to be made and he pulled into another service station to study the map. At first glance, the problem with the codex was the lack of detail, yet when he considered it,
he wondered if, for him, that wasn’t actually its greatest asset.
The spine of the country –
that was the key. There was no deviation to take in likely espionage targets like industrial Darlington and Middlesbrough, the population centre of Durham or the port of Newcastle. Wulf Ziegler and his
Hitler Jugend
boys had stayed with the Pennines because the hills were the arrow taking them straight to the heart of their true goal. The more he studied the map, the more certain he became. His finger followed the line of the hills right up to the border. Here in this crucible of broken country south of Hadrian’s Wall lay the answer. And he would find it tomorrow.

Sensing that he’d soon need a breathing space, he switched off the phone before he reached Darlington and a few miles later he turned off the motorway. This was the gateway to the western reaches of County Durham, and took him across the Wear valley and into the sparsely populated moor and farmlands of the north Pennines. Here, among the rolling hills, he could finally picture the hardy, brown-shirted German boys on their heavy iron bikes gritting their teeth as they attacked each climb, before the whooping, exhilarating plunge into the valley beyond. They’d have sung their marching songs, the same songs they’d sing a few years later when they invaded Poland and France, Belgium and Holland, Denmark and Norway. And Russia, where most of them probably still lay in unmarked graves. When they rode these drystone wall flanked highways they were just children. Yet these children had been sent on a perilous
mission by their country’s highest leaders. It was almost impossible to imagine now, in this over-televised, Xbox, PlayStation age that sucked young people into the nearest screen. Yet he supposed there were boys not much older serving their country, and dying for it, arguably for a lot less reason, in the heat-fractured dust bowl of southern Afghanistan.

He shook the melancholy thought from his mind and concentrated on the countryside around, his eyes seeking anything that might resemble Ziegler’s description of
low, bleak hills where seldom a tree grew
. His heart sank as he came to the conclusion that it fitted everything in the landscape for about twenty miles.

As dusk fell he approached the east–west axis between Carlisle and Newcastle that more or less followed the route of Hadrian’s Wall. It also followed the line of the Tyne and he’d already identified Corbridge, a village on the north bank of the river, as a possible location for the
small town with an impressive ruin
.

Dog-tired he booked into a bed and breakfast just outside the town centre and after dinner at the local Italian restaurant fell into a fitful sleep where he was always chasing something that never came within his grasp. He hoped it wasn’t an omen for tomorrow.

‘Can I help you?’

Jamie looked up from the leather-bound volume and returned the woman’s smile. She was about fifty and reminded him of his mother; narrow, intense features and wavy silver-blond hair swept back from her forehead. It was just after eleven and Corbridge library had only been open for about five minutes. He sensed she was uneasy about a stranger’s presence at this time of the day and felt he had to explain. ‘I’m just trying to find out a few things about the local area.’

The smile lost a little of its sparkle. ‘You’ll be here for the Wall.’ Her voice told him most people came here for the Wall and not much else. ‘Well, if there’s anything else just let me know.’

‘There might be one thing.’ He explained about the small town with the spectacular ruin.

The riddle piqued her interest. ‘That doesn’t sound
much like Corbridge. The only ruins we have here are a few Roman foundations and a couple of pillars. They’re just outside the village: interesting, but nobody could describe them as spectacular. Hexham, along the way a bit, has an abbey. It’s old, but it’s no ruin.’

He thanked her and continued his research as she returned to her desk, staying for an hour until he ran out of patience with ancient tomes full of descriptions of local country houses, none of which remotely resembled the one described by Wulf Ziegler. As he was leaving the library a thought struck him. ‘It’s just a long shot, but would there be any hills around here with a very distinctive silhouette?’

‘Plenty of hills round here, but none that you’d say were that distinctive.’ She shook her head ruefully. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not being much use to you.’

He smiled his thanks. ‘It was worth a try … One last question. Would you know if there was some sort of army training camp around here during the war?’

‘Och, the army’s been using Otterburn since Pontius Pilate was a bairn.’ The grizzled character at the bar of the Otterburn Arms had a distinctive accent that seemed to have little need for the letter r, so the words came out as ‘Otta’bu’un’ and ‘bai’n’. He supped gravely on the pint Jamie had bought him. ‘They took the place ova’ before the First War, all sixty thousand ugly acres of it. Seen more bombs, shells and bullets than the Somme, a’ reckon.’

‘Would there have been tanks here before the Second World War?’

‘No tanks now.’ He shook his head. ‘The muckle things they have these days is too heavy for the soft peat. But before the war they had these wee light boogas that could barely stop a bullet. There’d have been plenty of them.’

Jamie’s anticipation had been growing since he left Corbridge and saw the long, low shadow of the Cheviot Hills in the distance. The librarian had laughed. ‘That would be Otterburn Camp. It was here during the war and it still is. It’s about twenty miles up the road. You’ll see it away to your right, beyond the village.’

He left the old man with a second pint. As he drove north from Otterburn, the ground began to rise and soon he was among bleak hills clad in heather and rough grass that exactly fitted Wulf Ziegler’s description,
where seldom a tree grew.
The road wound up a long cleft in the hillside before the sky opened up and he found himself at the top of a rise with the whole country laid out before him like a rumpled plaid carpet of grey, brown and green. He slowed and pulled into a layby by a big boulder bearing a sign that announced he was WELCOME TO SCOTLAND and got out of the car into the bite of a chill wind. With his heart in his throat he studied the great swathe of patchwork, captivated by the shadows of individual clouds that scudded across the land from right to left. Finally he understood. Wulf Ziegler’s target hadn’t been in the north of England.
It was the south of Scotland. At first he didn’t see it amongst the jumble of humps and hillocks stretching far to the north. Then, in the middle distance, there it was. Ziegler’s signal post. Three hills standing shoulder to shoulder like warriors in a shield wall. A silhouette that was unique and utterly distinctive. He returned to the car with a feeling of growing awe and a sense that fate was leading him inexorably towards a prize beyond his comprehension.

A few miles ahead the road dropped into a winding river valley with cliffs of layered red sandstone occasionally peeping from the trees. Eventually the valley opened out and on the far side of a long green meadow lay the next marker –
a small town with an impressive ruin
. The town was Jedburgh, and the spectacular ruin the remains of some great abbey with a square tower a hundred and fifty feet high. Intrigued, he turned off the main road and drove across a bridge towards the town centre. The way took him over the top of a rise, with the soaring walls of the abbey to his left. As he topped the rise he glanced casually to his right and his blood froze as two black 4X4s passed by in convoy on the main road below. Was he starting at shadows? He looked at the mobile on the passenger seat to make sure it was still switched off and broke into a cold sweat at the thought that he’d planned to turn it on after Otterburn. Coincidence? Adam Steele was no fool, he could follow the trail as easily as Jamie. The question was how much he knew? If Steele had the location of
the
small schloss
there wasn’t a lot Jamie could do about it. But it might cause danger to people he hadn’t even met. Reluctantly, he resisted the temptation to follow the cars. Instead, he drew into a car park opposite the abbey that backed onto a low flat building advertising itself as a tourist information centre. Since information was precisely what he was looking for, he decided to take a look inside.

The walls were lined with posters and shelves filled with colourful guidebooks, fluffy knitwear and endless tartan scarves. A long counter took up most of one side of the interior and the floor was scattered with stands filled with more books, fliers for local businesses and maps.

He rummaged through a selection of Ordnance Survey maps on one of the stands and chose a large-scale chart for the approximate area of the hills he’d seen. As he approached the counter to pay, a display of books by local writers caught his attention. Several had the same name on the spine. One in particular made the breath catch in his throat. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he’d last seen it in Hal Webster’s library. On instinct, he added it to the map and took it to the sales assistant.

‘This book looks very interesting. I was wondering if the author lived around here?’

The girl nodded. ‘I believe he does, though I’m not exactly sure where, sir.’ Oddly, her accent was entirely different from those on the far side of the imaginary
border ten miles to the south. ‘But you’ll find him in the telephone directory.’

‘Where can I get one?’

She smiled and reached below the counter. ‘We don’t do this for all our customers, but seeing as it’s you …’

‘It was good of you to meet me at such short notice.’

The older man nodded graciously. ‘I was intrigued by your interest in Arthur. The subject is a passion of mine, as you’ll know from
The Lost Kingdoms
.’ He indicated the book Jamie was carrying. ‘And also that you wanted to meet somewhere off the beaten track with this particular vista.’ He waved a hand that encompassed the three hills looming on the far side of the Tweed Valley. Alistair Moffat was tall, but with the slight stoop tall men take on when they’re not entirely comfortable with their height. Balding, with a neatly trimmed, fast greying beard, and shrewd, deep-set eyes in a face scattered with humour lines, there was something almost Pickwickian about the writer. The two men had arrived a few minutes earlier from opposite directions on the narrow minor road and parked side by side in the little car park overlooking the River Tweed. Moffat continued: ‘The legends say these hills were a single mountain until the wizard Michael Scott, who hailed from these parts, split them into three.’ He smiled as he regaled the unlikely myth. ‘The truth is a wee bit more prosaic, the Eildons are probably the product of volcanic activity. Mind you, Scott was the very man for splitting mountains. He was
an alchemist and sorcerer, a figure of awe and fear who had mixed with the greatest thinkers of the time. The problem with the story is that he lived in the twelfth century – he was an astrologer to Frederick the Second in his court at Padua – and the Romans called these hills Trimontium at least a thousand years earlier.’ His grey eyes took on a self-mocking twinkle. ‘The clue is in the name.’