The Charlemagne Pursuit

by Steve Berry

  He collapsed to the tiles.

  SEVENTY

  OSSAU, 3:00 AM

  MALONE WATCHED ASCHRISTL REMOVED A LAPTOP FROM HERtravel bag. They’d returned to the inn

  without seeing or hearing anyone. Snow had started to fall outside, a wind spinning it into fluffy eddies. She switched on the machine, then removed a handheld scanner and connected it to one of the USB ports.

  “This is going to take a while,” she said. “It’s not the fastest scanner there is.”

  He held the book from the church. They’d thumbed through all of the pages, which seemed a complete translation of each letter of the language of heaven into its Latin counterpart.

  “You realize this is not going to be exact,” she said. “Some of the letters could have double meanings. There could be no corresponding Latin letter or sound. That sort of thing.”

  “Your grandfather did it.”

  She eyed him with an odd mixture of annoyance and gratitude. “I can also instantly convert Latin to German or English.

  I didn’t really know what to expect. I was never quite sure if Grandfather was to be believed. A few months ago Mother allowed me access to some of his notebooks. Father’s, too. But they told me little. Obviously, she withheld what she deemed important. The maps, for example. The books from Einhard’s and Charlemagne’s graves. So there was always a nagging doubt that Grandfather may have simply been a fool.”

  He wondered about her openness. Refreshing. But also suspect.

  “You saw all that Nazi memorabilia he collected. He was obsessed. The odd thing is that he was spared the disasters of the Third Reich, yet he seemed to regret not being a part of their downfall. In the end, he was just bitter. It was almost a blessing he lost his mind.”

  “But he now has another chance to be proven right.”

  The machine dinged, signaling it was ready.

  She accepted the book from him. “And I plan to give him every chance. What are you going to do while I work?”

  He laid back on the bed. “I intend to sleep. Wake me when you’re done.”

  RAMSEY MADE SUREDIANEMCCOY LEFT FORTLEE AND HEADEDback to Washington. He did not revisit the

  warehouse so as not to draw any more attention, explaining to the base commander that he’d borne witness to a minor territorial dispute between the White House and the navy. The explanation seemed to have satisfied any questions that may have arisen from so many high-level visits over the past couple of days.

  He glanced at his watch. 8:50PM .

  He sat at a table in a small trattoria on the outskirts of Washington. Good Italian food, understated setting, excellent wine bar. None of which he cared about tonight.

  He sipped his wine.

  A woman entered the restaurant. Her tall, slender frame was draped by a stitched-velvet aletta coat and dark vintage jeans. A beige cashmere scarf wrapped her neck. She threaded a path around the tightly packed tables and sat with him.

  The woman from the map store.

  “You did good with the senator,” he told her. “Right on the mark.”

  She acknowledged his compliment with a nod.

  “Where is she?” he asked. He’d ordered surveillance on Diane McCoy.

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  A new chill sheathed his spine.

  “She’s with Kane. Right now.”

  “Where?”

  “They roamed the Lincoln Memorial, then walked the basin to the Washington Monument.”

  “Cold night for a stroll.”

  “Tell me about it. I have a man with her now. She’s headed home.”

  All disturbing. The only connection between McCoy and Kane would be him. He’d thought her placated, but he may have underestimated her resolve.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked. Hovey.

  “I need to take this,” he said. “Could you wait near the door?”

  She understood and left.

  “What is it?” he said into the phone.

  “The White House is on the line. They want to speak with you.”

  Nothing unusual. “So?”

  “It’s the president.”

  That was unusual.

  “Connect us.”

  A few seconds later he heard the booming voice the whole world knew. “Admiral, I hope you’re having a good night.”

  “It’s cold, Mr. President.”

  “You got that right. And getting colder. I’m calling because Aatos Kane wants you on the Joint Chiefs. He says you’re the man for the job.”

  “That all depends if you agree, sir.” He kept his voice low, below the level of muffled conversations around him.

  “I do. Thought about it all day, but I agree. Would you like the job?”

  “I’d willingly serve wherever you like.”

  “You know how I feel about the Joint Chiefs, but let’s be real. Nothing’s going to change, so I need you there.”

  “I’m honored. When would this be made public?”

  “I’ll have your name leaked within the hour. You’ll be the morning news story. Get ready, Admiral—it’s a different ballpark than naval intelligence.”

  “I’ll be ready, sir.”

  “Glad to have you aboard.”

  And Daniels was gone.

  A breathless moment passed. His defenses dropped. His fears abated. He’d done it. Whatever Diane McCoy was doing mattered not.

  He was now the appointee.

  DOROTHEA LAY IN THE BED, TREMBLING IN THAT STATE BETWEENsleep and wakefulness where thoughts

  could sometimes be controlled. What had she done, making love to Werner again? That was something she’d never thought possible—a part of her life that had surely ended.

  Maybe not.

  Two hours ago she’d heard the door for Malone’s room open, then close. A murmur of voices seeped through the thin walls, but nothing she could decipher. What was her sister doing in the middle of the night?

  Werner lay pressed beside her in the narrow bed. He was right. They were married and their heir would be legitimate.

  But having a baby at age forty-eight? Perhaps that was the price she would be required to pay. Werner and her mother had apparently forged some sort of alliance, strong enough that Sterling Wilkerson had to die—strong enough to transform Werner into some semblance of a man.

  More voices leaked from next door.

  She rose from the bed and approached the connecting wall, but could understand nothing. She padded lightly across the thinly carpeted flooring to the window. Fat snowflakes fell in silence. All of her life she’d lived in mountains and snow.

  She’d learned to hunt, shoot, and ski at an early age. She wasn’t afraid of much—only failure, and her mother. She rested her naked body against the chilly windowsill, frustrated and mournful, and stared at her husband, curled under the comforter.

  She wondered if her bitterness toward him was nothing more than grief overflowing for their dead son. For a long time afterward the days and nights had assumed a nightmarish quality, a sensation of rushing forward with no purpose or destination in view.

  A chill stole the room, and her courage.

  She folded her arms across her bare breasts.

  It seemed with each passing year that she became more bitter, more dissatisfied. She missed Georg. But maybe Werner was right. Maybe it was time to live. To love. To be loved.

  She flexed her legs in a long stretch. The room next door had gone quiet. She turned and stared back out the window at the snow-pelted darkness.

  She caressed her flat belly.

  Another baby.

  Why not.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  ASHEVILLE, 11:15 PM

  STEPHANIE ANDEDWINDAVIS REENTERED THEINN ONBILTMOREEstate. Davis had risen from his brawl,

  caught in the clutch of pain, his face bruised, but his ego intact. Chinos was in custody, albeit unconscious at a local hospital with a concussion and multiple contusions from the beating. The local police had escorted
the ambulance and would remain there until the Secret Service arrived, which should be within the hour. Doctors had already told the police it would be morning before the man could be questioned. The château had been sealed and more police were combing its interior seeing what, if anything, Chinos had left behind. Tapes from security cameras located throughout the house were being carefully reviewed in search of more information.

  Davis had said little since he’d climbed from the pool. A call to the White House had confirmed both their identities and credentials, so they hadn’t been forced to answer questions. Which was good. She could see that Davis was not in the mood.

  The estate’s chief of security had accompanied them back to the inn. They approached the main registration desk and the administrator found what Davis wanted, handing him a slip of paper: “Scofield’s suite number.”

  “Let’s go,” Davis said to her.

  They located the room on the sixth floor and Davis banged on the door.

  Scofield answered, wearing one of the inn’s signature robes. “It’s late and I have an early morning tomorrow. What could you two possibly want? Didn’t you cause enough havoc earlier?”

  Davis brushed the professor aside and marched into the suite, which contained a generous living area with a sofa and chairs, a wet bar, and windows that surely provided spectacular mountain views.

  “I put up with your asshole attitude this afternoon,” Davis said, “because I had to. You thought we were nuts. But we just saved your ass, so we’d like some answers in gratitude.”

  “Someone was here to kill me?”

  Davis pointed at his bruises. “Look at my face. He’s in the hospital. It’s time you tell us some things, Professor.

  Classified things.”

  Scofield seemed to swallow some of his insolence. “You’re right. I was an ass to you today, but I didn’t realize—”

  “A man came to kill you,” Stephanie made clear. “Though we need to question him to be sure, it certainly looks like we have the right person.”

  Scofield nodded and offered them a seat.

  “I can’t imagine why I’m a threat after all these years. I’ve kept my oath. I never spoke of anything, even though I should have. I could have made quite a name for myself.”

  She waited for him to explain.

  “I’ve spent all my time since 1972 trying to prove, in other ways, what I know to be true.”

  She’d read a brief synopsis of Scofield’s book, which her staff had provided by e-mail yesterday. He supposedly had established that an advanced worldwide civilization existed thousands of years before ancient Egypt. His evidence was a reappraisal of maps, long known to scholars, like the famous Piri Reis drawing, which had all been drawn, Scofield concluded, using more ancient maps, now lost. Scofield believed that those ancient mapmakers were much more

  advanced scientifically than the civilizations of Greece, Egypt, Babylonia, or even the later Europeans, mapping all of the continents, outlining North America thousands of years before Columbus, and charting Antarctica when its coasts were ice-free. No serious scientific study corroborated any of Scofield’s assertions but, as the e-mail had noted, none had refuted his theory, either.

  “Professor,” she said. “In order for us to learn why they want you dead, we need to know what’s involved. You have to tell us about your work with the navy.”

  Scofield bowed his head. “Those three lieutenants brought me crates full of rocks. They’d been collected during Highjump and Windmill back in the 1940s—just sitting in a warehouse somewhere. No one had paid them any mind.

  Can you imagine? Evidence like that and nobody cared.

  “I was the only one allowed to examine the crates, though Ramsey could come and go as he pleased. The rocks were engraved with writing. Unique curlicue-like letters. No known language corresponded to them. Making it even more spectacular was that they came from Antarctica, a place that has been under ice for thousands of years. Yet we found them. Or, more accurately, the Germans found them. They went to Antarctica in 1938 and located the initial sites. We went back in 1947 and ’48 and collected them.”

  “And again in ’71,” Davis said.

  Disbelief spread over Scofield’s face. “We did?”

  She could see he truly didn’t know, so she decided to offer a bone. “A submarine went, but was lost. That’s what started all this now. There’s something about that mission somebody doesn’t want anyone to know.”

  “I was never told about that. But that’s not surprising—I didn’t need to know. I was retained to analyze the writing, To see if it could be deciphered.”

  “Could it?” Davis asked.

  Scofield shook his head. “I wasn’t allowed to finish. Admiral Dyals ended the project abruptly. I was sworn to secrecy and dismissed. It was the saddest day of my life.” His manner matched his words. “There it was. Proof that a first civilization existed. We even had their language. If we could somehow learn to understand it, we’d know all about them

  —know for certain if they were the ancient sea kings. Something told me that they were, but I never was allowed to find out.”

  He sounded both thrilled and brokenhearted.

  “How would you have learned to read the language?” Davis asked.“It would be like writing down random words and trying to know what they say.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. You see, on those rocks were also letters and words I recognized. Both Latin and Greek.

  Even some hieroglyphs. Don’t you see? That civilization had interacted with us. There was contact. Those stones were messages, announcements, pronouncements. Who knows? But they were capable of being read.”

  Her annoyance with her own stupidity changed to a strange uncertainty, and she thought about Malone and what was

  happening to him. “Did you ever hear the name Oberhauser ?”

  Scofield nodded. “Hermann Oberhauser. He went to Antarctica in 1938 with the Nazis. He’s partially the reason we went back with High-jump and Windmill. Admiral Byrd became fascinated with Oberhauser’s views on Aryans and

  lost civilizations. Of course, at that time, post–World War II, you couldn’t speak of those things too loudly, so Byrd conducted private research while there with Highjump and found the stones. Since he may have confirmed what

  Oberhauser had theorized, the government slammed a lid on the whole thing. Eventually, his findings were simply forgotten.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill over this?” Davis muttered out loud. “It’s ludicrous.”

  “There’s a bit more,” Scofield said.

  MALONE AWOKE WITH A START AND HEARDCHRISTL SAY,“COMEon, get up.”

  He shook sleep from his eyes and checked his watch. He’d been out two hours. When his eyes adjusted to the room’s lamps he saw Christl staring at him with a look of triumph.

  “I did it.”

  STEPHANIE WAITED FORSCOFIELD TO FINISH.

  “When you view the world through a different lens, things change focus. We measure locations with latitude and longitude, but those are relatively modern concepts. The prime meridian runs through Greenwich, England, because that was the point arbitrarily chosen in the late nineteenth century. My study of ancient maps revealed something quite to the contrary and quite extraordinary.”

  Scofield stood and found one of the hotel’s notepads and a pen. Stephanie watched as he sketched a crude world map, adding latitude and longitude markings around its perimeter. He then drew a line down the center from the thirty-degree east longitude position.

  “This is not to scale, but it’ll do for you to see what I’m talking about. Believe me, applied to a scaled map everything I’m about to show you is proven clear. This center line, which would be thirty-one degrees, eight minutes east, passes directly through the Great Pyramid at Giza. If this now becomes the zero-degree longitude line, here’s what happens.”

  He pointed to a spot where Bolivia would be in South America. “Tiahuanaco. Built around 15,000BCE . The capita
l of an unknown pre Inca civilization near Lake Titicaca. Some say it may be the oldest city on earth. One hundred degrees west of the Giza line.”

  He pointed to Mexico. “Teotihuacán. Equally as old. Its name translates as ‘birthplace of the gods.’ No one knows who built it. A sacred Mexican city, one hundred twenty degrees west of the Giza line.”

  The pen’s point rested in the Pacific Ocean. “Easter Island. Loaded with monuments that we can’t explain. One hundred forty degrees west of the Giza line.” He moved farther out into the South Pacific. “The ancient Polynesian center of Raiatea, sacred beyond measure. One hundred eighty degrees west of the Giza line.”