The Camelot Code (18 page)

From the rain-puddled roof of the Augur’s Tower, Myrddin gazes nostalgically across the shimmering estate’s vast lake into the distant forests where the red deer run.

It seems only a couple of springs since he hunted and fished there as a young man, his head full of plans and his heart swollen with love. In those days, he lived on whatever he caught. Venison, rabbit and salmon, when he was lucky. Rat and squirrel when he wasn’t. Every day brought fresh adventures. His craft needed to be learned. Secrets had to be discovered. The magic of life was still to be learned.

As he descends to his solar, he can’t help but think that the years have flown faster than the falcons he used to train. Nowadays, he feels he has become a slave to the very crafts he strove so hard to master. Knowledge has tired him. The sheer weight of it has fixed leaden boots to his weary feet.

He is sinking.

And Owain Gwyn is the reason why.

He guided him from boy to man. Made him his charge. His protégé. The manifestation of all his hopes and loves. It became his life’s work to empower him, to help him achieve his greatness – and goodness. To make Owain a king among men.

The small cot of a bed creaks and his old spine cracks as he stretches out on the hard boards and worn-out mattress. He’s never afforded himself luxuries – except for his imagination. Inside his mind, he has indulged himself in pleasures mere mortals would never comprehend.

Sleep comes quickly.

And visions, too. Mixed and confused. Like multiple movies spliced together.

There is water. Vast stretches of it. Bigger than a lake. Smaller than a sea. People speaking in foreign tongues. Loved ones separated by geography, united in grief.

Then there are bodies. Burning bodies. Buried bodies. Decomposing bodies that stir in the soil and rise from their wormeries. Living bodies, still bleeding, rattling with death but not yet surrendered.

And women.

There is a young woman and an old one. Together but strangers. Women from different lands. One he recognizes; one he doesn’t. The older one is terribly powerful. A threat to everything and everyone he holds close.

But there is goodness about her as well. And vulnerability.

Out in the unmarked fields, in plots known only to the Arthurians, bones that once bent and broke for the betterment of mankind shake off their blankets of soil and once more feel the kiss of the sun.

But this is no resurrection. No Day of Judgement. No moment of divine redemption. This is exposure. Destruction of the Order. The end of secrecy.

Myrddin’s closed eyes are blinded by the bright lights of his vision. Blues and reds and oranges and whites. His ears ache from the shouts of voices, male and female, adult and child. They are crying. Begging for the pain to stop. Their screams overlap. Fight to be heard above each other.

And there is Owain. At the centre of the pain. Desperately trying to soak it all up.

Unable to stop it.

Melissa Sachs shows the Americans out and returns to Sir Owain’s office. ‘Are you ready for your call with the Home Secretary, sir?’

‘I am. Thank you, Melissa.’

George Dalton rises from the sofa. ‘Would you like me to leave?’

‘No. Stay. We need to talk as soon as I’ve dealt with this call.’ A light on his phone flashes. He picks it up and answers. ‘Hello, Charles. How are you all coping?’

‘Best we can. How much do you know?’ Charles Hatfield suspects it’s at least as much as he does.

‘Only the briefest details. Bomb on the Eurostar. Explosion at the British end. Something like fifty dead.’

‘Might be more. We won’t know until the emergency services report back. The device went off south of Ashford, five minutes from the station. A pensioner saw a man doing something with wires inside a rucksack and she alerted train staff. When the guard questioned the suspect, he made a run for the toilet, locked himself inside and exploded the bloody thing.’

A live video feed from a helicopter is already up on the monitor in front of the ambassador. It shows the splayed track, smoke and flames rising from the concertinaed carriages, corpses on the rails and the blinking lights of fire engines and ambulances. ‘I’m finishing up a meeting here and then I’ll come into Whitehall. I assume you’ll be putting together a Cabinet Office briefing?’

‘Research team is already working on it. When can you join us?’

‘Within the hour.’

‘Good.’ Hatfield checks fresh data on his computer as he speaks. ‘I know this is of no comfort to those victims or their blessed families, but thank God the bomb didn’t go off in the tunnel. A blast mid-channel would have been an even bigger tragedy.’

‘That must have been the intention.’ Gwyn watches the helicopter on his screen come to a stationary hover directly over the cratered track. ‘Anyone claimed responsibility yet?’

‘Not yet. But it’ll be al-Qaeda.’

Gwyn puts the phone down and returns to Dalton. He can tell his colleague is worried. ‘What is it, George?’

‘I’ve been thinking about the interview with the Americans. I fear I may have messed things up.’

‘Why?’

‘In retrospect, I don’t think that lieutenant knew I was at the diner near Dupont, and now I’ve confirmed I was.’

‘The fact she raised it with you meant she had good reason to believe you were there. The big mistake was taking the Lincoln.’

‘I had no choice. I was in the Lincoln when I got the message that Marchetti’s men were heading out to Kensington. Had I swapped cars, I would never have got there in time.’

‘I need to get directly involved in this Eurostar blast, so you must take care of the Americans. Have someone find out where they’re staying. I want their room turned over and electronic or human surveillance on them all the time, until I say otherwise. Let’s see if we can stop this investigation before it stops us.’

News of the train bombing plays on the radio in the Rolls.

Once the bulletin finishes, Mitzi calls Sir Owain’s office and leaves a message with Melissa. The ambassador had been right, there was good reason for her to apologize.

The journey to their new hotel is a long and muted one. Despite the privacy glass, neither she nor Bronty feel comfortable discussing their interview.

They book into The Dean, a new hotel in Soho, close to famous media haunts like the Groucho Club and Ivy and debrief over room-service club sandwiches, fries and two large pots of coffee.

‘So what did you make of our friend the British Consul?’ He slaps the bottom of a ketchup bottle to release a blat of sauce.

‘Dalton’s up to his neck in the whole thing.’ She opens her sandwich like a book. ‘Why is this bacon so much better than the stuff I have back home?’

‘The Brits do good bacon. How d’you know he’s implicated?’

‘First slip he made was to admit the Lincoln had been outside Amir Goldman’s store. No surveillance footage put him there. Then he got nervous and referred to the brown SUV as “the target car”.’

‘Maybe he’s an ex-soldier, or policeman.’

‘He’s not. I checked before we flew out. But he might be a former spook, MI5 or 6.’

‘It’d explain the manner in which he followed the Escalade.’

‘Yeah. But not
why
he followed it. Or what he was doing when the SUV stopped in the woods and Sacconni got whacked.’

‘You think Dalton killed him?’

‘No. I think Sacconni was killed by his partner-in-crime, Bradley Deagan. But I think Dalton may have killed Deagan at the Dupont diner.’ She reaches into her purse and produces a small plastic bottle of water. ‘Which is why this little baby might help us.’

‘Your drink from Gwyn’s office?’

She smiles, ‘No, not mine. Dalton’s. And I’m willing to bet the DNA on this matches the profile we lifted from blood in the diner’s bathroom – blood mingled with Deagan’s.’

‘Who exactly is Deagan?’

‘A fraudster who tried to pull a con on an auction house with a painting called
The Ghent Altarpiece
.’

His eyes widen. ‘Also known as
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.
One of the greatest and most stolen pieces of art ever created.’ He points to her laptop. ‘Mind if I use that for a second?’

‘Be my guest.’

He opens a search engine and types in ‘Ghent Altarpiece’. ‘Here, look at this.’

 

He paraphrases text below the paragraph. ‘It was commissioned in the fifteenth century for an altar in a private chapel in Belgium. The twenty-four panels form one overall picture when opened up and then a completely different one when closed.’

‘I only see twelve.’

‘Twelve front, twelve back.’

Now she sees it. ‘Stupid me.’

‘It’s been the object of thirteen crimes over six centuries, including six separate thefts and a ransom demand.’

She pours fresh coffee for them both. ‘Come on then, more detail: tell me the juicy stuff.’

‘In the early nineteenth century some panels were pawned by the Ghent Diocese and ended up in England. They were bought by the King of Prussia and exhibited in Berlin. After the First World War, they were confiscated from the Germans as part of reparations. When the Second World War broke out the Belgians sent the paintings to the Vatican for safekeeping. At least that was the plan. Hitler’s troops intercepted them, brought them to Bavaria and locked them in a castle. When Allied attacks intensified, he moved them into salt mines. Then when we beat the Nazis, our troops returned them to the Belgians.’

‘And the ransom?’

He takes a second. ‘Let me get this right. Back in the thirties, two panels, a front and back, were stolen from St Bavo Cathedral in Ghent. Often it’s reported as one, but actually there were two. One called ‘The Just Judges’ and the other John the Baptist. A lot of ransom letters were sent. They demanded more than a million Belgian Francs and warned that unless it was paid the paintings would be destroyed.’

‘What happened?’

‘The bishop never paid the money. There were some negotiations and the John the Baptist painting
was
recovered, but ‘The Just Judges’ was never found. Another painter was hired to fill in the blank on the altarpiece, but by all accounts there are errors in the scene.’

‘Okay, enough history,’ says Mitzi. ‘My head’s exploding and to be honest the last thing I want is a missing painting to add to a homicide that already has religious relics and secret codes.’

‘Have the cryptologists got anywhere with that?’

‘I have to call Vicks and check. It would be great if this Code X stick gave us all the answers.’

‘Did you say “Code X”, as in the letter X?’

‘Yeah. Why do you ask?’

‘Have you got the stick?’

‘Sure.’ She digs it out of her purse and passes it to him.

Bronty reads ‘C-O-D-E-X’ and smiles.

‘What?’

‘It’s “Codex” not “Code X”. One word, Latin by origin, as in ancient bibles and manuscripts. So your secret code is no new thing. It’s hiding something that’s probably been hidden for centuries. Something people are probably prepared to kill to keep hidden.’

Cabinet Office Briefing Room ‘A’ is said to be the venue from which the press originated the acronym COBRA. Around its famous conference table are Defence Secretary Sir Wesley Piggott-Smith, Home Secretary Charles Hatfield, Deputy Prime Minister Norman Batherson and the ACPO chief, Milton Coleman.

Ambassador Gwyn is shown into the cool, darkened room by a Whitehall aide and takes a seat next to the deputy PM.

The Home Secretary acknowledges his appearance, ‘Good afternoon, Sir Owain. I had only just started.’ He stands in front of a giant screen playing mute video footage from the blast scene. ‘The latest figures we have are fifty-four dead and forty injured. The prime minister is in Scotland but in the next half hour will helicopter down to Ashford and hold a press conference at the scene. The bomb squad is checking the remains of the train for secondary devices and, of course, the track is being inspected as well. The railway operator has contingencies to bus people around the derailment, but they’ve been told there’s no chance of trains running through the tunnel for at least the next twelve hours.’

The police chief, a tall, thin man in his late fifties, throws a question across the table. ‘Have we got confirmation it’s al-Qaeda behind all this?’

‘They plan to post a video,’ answers Owain. ‘It will be uploaded to an Al Jazeera server in the next few minutes. It will warn travellers in the West to expect more bombs and deaths.’

No one asks how the ambassador knows this. He does, after all, have special responsibilities for counter-terrorism and everyone in the room has been present at other meetings where he’s been more reliably informed than they were.

‘What are we facing, Owain?’ asks the Deputy PM. ‘A specific campaign of terror aimed at the UK? Or is this a wider strategy linked to the US bomb?’

‘It’s wider. And not just America. I expect there to be further attacks, and on soil less used to bloodshed than ours.’

The Defence Secretary knows what he’s alluding to. ‘Italy?’

‘Exactly.’

Sir Wesley explains to the rest of the group. ‘We’ve been hearing the same thing. Possibilities of attacks on Rome as a response to the Pope’s condemnation of what he called ‘maliciously misguided Muslim fundamentalists.’

Owain adds a little more depth to the comment. ‘Al-Qaeda is thought to have a new, three-pronged strategy – firstly, business as usual; that means bombing the hell out of Britain and America. Secondly, as Sir Wesley just said, attacking soft Christian targets, such as Rome. This hasn’t been done before and has the Spaniards just as worried as the Italians. We also believe they intend to use a new generation of highly trained assassins to kill high-profile VIPs.’

The door swings open and a young civil servant steps in and whispers discreetly to the home secretary, then leaves.

Charles Hatfield fingers the remote control and points it at a screen. ‘Al Jazeera just ran this. It’s exactly as Sir Owain said.’

The man who appears on screen doesn’t fit the traditional stereotype of the Muslim terrorist. There’s no straggly beard. No loose white robes. No Koran in hand. For once the video doesn’t look like it’s been shot in a school hall, with a dark curtain behind. There are no masked soldiers in the background with rifles across their chests. Instead, a calm young man in his late twenties, with neat hair and beard looks straight into camera. He is dressed in a charcoal-grey suit and, despite the rugged sandy backdrop of an Afghan hillside, he looks as calm as a foreign correspondent.

‘Citizens of the west,’ says a steady voice in excellent English. ‘When you see this, it will be because I have killed and injured many people. Many innocents who did not deserve for such a thing to happen to them.’ His tone is flat and without a trace of rage. ‘I regret their deaths and injuries. But most of all, I regret that their governments made it necessary for them to die. As you watch, listen and read of the deaths, ask yourself this: what does al-Qaeda want? Why are they doing these things? Why are they killing so many people?’ He takes a pause and lets the seeds of the questions he scattered germinate in the fertile minds of those who might listen.

‘There has to be a good reason, doesn’t there? Such as the belief that your own country should be free of your enemies. That every person should have their own home, their patch of land, their personal
base
in life – because that’s what the words al-Qaeda mean – “the base”. Ask yourselves this, if foreigners tried to occupy
your
country, change
your
government and kill
your
friends, family and parents, what would you do?’ His soft dark eyes hold the camera before he continues, ‘I think I know. You would fight. You would fight to the death. As you count the bodies of today and the bodies of tomorrow, think beyond the rhetoric of your leaders, think about my words. When would you surrender?’ Now the gentle eyes narrow and the camera shot tightens. ‘Never. You would never surrender. Nor will we.’

The video stops on a freeze frame.

Owain Gwyn points at the screen. ‘This is a new breed of terrorist. And the start of a new campaign of terror. Fought by new leaders in new ways.’

‘I think you’re wrong,’ says the Defence Secretary. ‘New
faces
perhaps, but it’s the same old game. They bomb. They run. They hide. They have limited resources and limited support. We’ll find them soon enough and this time we’ll wipe every one of them from the face of the earth.’

Owain bites his tongue. Sir Wesley couldn’t be more wrong. A storm is coming. One unlike any seen before.