12
The Blue Danube
As the 19.30 Austrian Airlines jet lifted from the tarmac at Heathrow, Ethan relaxed for the first time since discovering the bodies in his grandfather’s study. In his inside jacket pocket nestled the doctored passport that had seen him through passport control and would take him into Austria and beyond if necessary.
He’d paid Lindita three thousand pounds for it. Passports were her speciality. She’d cloned an ePassport for him, using RFdump software to download data from an original, before loading it onto a blank chip. Once that was done, she’d added some visa stamps from her stock and asked Ethan to add a false signature. She’d restyled his hair, added a fake moustache (she had a box of them, all different sizes, shapes and colours) and coloured contact lenses, taken a digital photo of Ethan, tipped it into the clone, and covered the ID page with a hologrammed plastic sheet.
And the original passport? Still safe and snug in its owner’s pocket or a hotel safe. Ten days earlier, its RFID chip had been read from a short distance away by a Solejmani gang member in London, using a reader he’d bought on eBay for two hundred euros.
Ethan was travelling as Dafydd Williams, a teacher from Swansea. Apart from their age, the two men had nothing in common. Passport control wouldn’t be able to compare the photo in Ethan’s version with the one in Williams’s original.
He passed through Austrian passports and customs, then out into the main concourse. As he did so, a wave of overwhelming tiredness swept over him, almost dragging him down all the way into dark waters. He’d planned to hire a car and drive straight to Bad Vöslau, desperate to get on Aehrenthal’s track. But lack of sleep over the past few days had left him limp and uncoordinated, and he knew he couldn’t risk making mistakes.
Deciding on sleep, he walked to the NH Airport Hotel and checked in to a single room. Here again Lindita saved his bacon. She had created an online bank account for Dafydd Williams, into which Ethan had transferred a large balance. Once this had been done, it was a simple matter for her to encode all the necessary details onto the magnetic strip on the back of a blank Amex Centurion black card.
‘It’s real thing,’ she’d said.
‘Real?’ He’d picked it up. It was in his wallet now. And he remembered how strange it had felt. Heavy, even though it was light.
‘Is titanium,’ she’d said. ‘Is not plastic. Is only maybe ten thousand made in whole world. Cost two and half thousand dollar from year. You only get from invitation. Is only for very rich.’
‘Won’t it make me stand out?’
She’d shaken her head.
‘You carry this in hand, you buy almost anythings you wants. Is no limit.’
He’d nodded. He still had no idea how much this was going to cost him, what the final bill would look like. He’d spend all he had and more to rescue Sarah, to see her safe and well again.
After checking in (and learning the true meaning of the word ‘fawning’), he went straight to his room and made a telephone call. There was something vital to do before he could risk putting his head on a pillow. The number had been given to him by Lindita. Half an hour later, there was a knock on his door. Ethan didn’t know the name of the man who stepped inside, nor did the man know his. Money was passed over, and Ethan took a small parcel in return. Not a word was exchanged during the brief transaction.
He slept badly that night. Not even tiredness granted him sweet dreams. The places he entered were uncanny realms of nightmare, where words and images combined to tarnish his soul. Sometimes he would wake with the taste of ashes in his mouth, or a vision of death before his unseeing eyes. More than once, he was returned to the tomb and its humid, musty smells, and more than once he saw his grandfather pinned to the wall and watched as Sarah was stripped and threatened.
When he woke at last, the nightmare still lay on him like a fog. He felt a terrible fear mixed with guilt. He was, after all, on the run from a murder charge, and if he couldn’t find and save Sarah, he would never be able to prove his innocence. His greatest fear was not prison, or what he would face inside as an ex-cop; it was for Sarah, whose face was as clear to him as his own face in the mirror while he shaved.
He rented a four-wheel drive, a Mercedes ML, and headed south. The urban landscape began to open out to the east after Wiener Neudorf. He picked up speed on the Süd Autobahn as it swept like a sword between fields on his left and a cluster of small towns on his right that formed an almost unbroken chain between Vienna and Wiener Neustadt. As the traffic thinned, he rammed his accelerator down hard, taking the car smoothly up to just below the speed limit of one hundred and thirty kilometres per hour.
Sometimes the buildings would open, revealing high forested hills that ran back westwards to the Alps. Snow covered the fields, as white as lilies; it lay like sifted flour on the forests, it covered the roofs of passing houses as if laid there to provide insulation. Outside, it was minus three celsius. The air was crisp and pure beneath a dark blue sky. He drove with his eyes fixed on the road. His thoughts were dark and bitter, constrained by memory and anger. The dream had not quite left him, and though the white fields and the lambent air did their best to lighten his spirits, his mood remained low. Anxiety gnawed at his thoughts like a rat, filling him with the fear that he’d done the wrong thing, headed in the wrong direction. Sarah could still be in England, he had no way of knowing. Aehrenthal could have killed her, dumped her body somewhere, and headed back to some sort of hiding place here in Austria.
On his hip, in a concealed holster, he wore the gun Lindita’s man had brought him before he slept, a Beretta 93R. The 93R had two unusual features for a handgun: a front grip that could fold down beneath the barrel to permit two-handed action, and a shoulder stock, now tucked away in Ethan’s bag. The man had left him with a box of 20-round magazines carrying 9mm Parabellum rounds, and shown Ethan how to set it for single-fire, burst-fire, or semi-automatic modes. The gun gave Ethan some comfort, but the last thing he wanted was to get caught up in a gunfight.
He left the autobahn just after Baden, got himself onto the ER59, and drove a short distance along side roads to Bad Vöslau airport.
Aehrenthal had touched down in the Beechcraft at 09.30 hours on the morning of the previous day. He’d piloted the plane along with a co-pilot. The Beechcraft had been configured as an air ambulance, and there had been a passenger in the rear, a woman called Ileana Paulescu.
Hearing this, Ethan frowned.
‘Did you see the woman?’
He’d found a representative of the airport management agency, Flughafen Wien AG. The man wasn’t sure that the details of Herr Aehrenthal’s journey should be made available to a stranger. But Ethan had brought the police warrant card he’d pretended had been stolen. He flashed it, knowing he wouldn’t be asked to compare it with his passport.
‘Kriminaloberkommissar?’
Ethan nodded, hoping that was right.
‘Can you tell me, Herr… Kriminaloberkommissar Ushingwood…’
‘Usherwood.’
‘Yes, so sorry. Why do you want to find this man?’
‘That’s restricted information. But it is urgent.’ Ethan prayed the man would not contact the local bobbies.
‘Very well. I understand.’
It was then Ethan realised the man would not call the police. He would be hoping no local law enforcement officials would be called to his airport.
The representative, Herr Veit Schiegl, nodded sagely.
‘You have not mentioned this to our local polizei, to the kriminalpolizei?’
‘They’ve been informed, naturally, but they don’t want to be involved. It’s a purely British matter. And I would prefer not to cause any fuss here. Especially not for you or the airport.’
Herr Schiegl nodded again.
‘The woman was bandaged,’ he said. ‘They were taking her to Romania, to a spa. She has a skin condition.’
‘Romania? Where?’
‘Herr Aehrenthal refuelled, th
en made arrangements with air traffic control to fly on to Oradea. He did not give the name of the spa. They have many spas in Transylvania. My wife wants to go to one. She is always pestering me, she says she wants to visit Dracula’s castle and stay in a spa. Rheumatism. It is a big problem for her.’
Ethan arranged a private flight with one of the companies operating out of Bad Vöslau. It took half an hour to arrange things. The plane was a Cessna 208 Caravan. It would fly the nearly 600 miles to Oradea in well under two hours. What would happen after that, Ethan had no idea.
13
Transylvania
They flew across the great Hungarian plain, and all the way there was little cloud. But as they came near to Romania the weather darkened and winds buffeted the little plane. As they dropped from the clouds, Ethan, who was flying up front in the co-pilot’s seat, saw mountains rise up ahead. The Carpathians formed a circle of sullen snow-enchanted peaks, carpeted with trees. The pilot turned and grinned.
‘Transylvania,’ he said, baring his teeth to make a vampire smile. He turned back and started the descent into Oradea.
Ethan was waved through customs, his pistol tucked deep inside his overnight bag, a tourist come at the wrong time of year, without skis or a snowboard. He found a taxi and told the driver to take him to a good hotel. With luck, he wouldn’t have to stay for long; but for now he needed a base to work from.
The driver, whose English was far from good, deposited him at the Hotel Vulturul Negru. The name, to Ethan’s surprise, meant The Black Eagle. It formed an art nouveau building, refurbished and restyled for the upmarket tourism its owners hoped to draw to what was still Europe’s poorest country. The receptionist was goggle-eyed at the sight of Ethan’s Centurion card; the influx had clearly begun. Ethan realised he could have asked for women, drugs, caviar flown direct from the Caspian, and they would have been sent up to him without a murmur or a raised eyebrow.
His room was smart if eccentric, with a tall four-poster bed. He’d have slept in the bath so long as there was somewhere to plug in his laptop and get Internet access. The boy who showed him to the room did it all for him. Ethan handed him fifty new lei, about ten pounds, and told him he didn’t want to be disturbed.
He was still tired after his ordeal and the journey that had followed. By now, the police in Gloucester would be looking for him. Lindita had created an untraceable email address for him, and so far only she knew it existed. She’d promised to let him know as soon as his escape appeared in the papers or on the radio and telly.
He was at a loss. All he had to go on was that Aehrenthal had chosen to fly Sarah all the way from Oxford to this place. Not to Bucharest, not to Bernstein, not to Budapest or anywhere else along the way. What was so important about Transylvania or, for that matter, this particular neck of the woods? Was there a connection with the relics, with scholarship on Libya or the early Church? Was there a collector living out there, Ethan wondered, someone from whom Egon Aehrenthal could expect a large sum of money just on Sarah’s say-so? Or another expert, a scholar who could be relied on to echo Sarah’s conclusions. It would have to be someone willing to overlook any signs of physical or mental abuse, to ignore anything she might say about her kidnap.
He started hunting. Piecing together a rough and ready knowledge of Romania and Transylvania, he read the country’s history, from Vlad the Impaler, the original for Dracula, to Queen Marie, a granddaughter of Victoria given to grand gestures and displays of patriotism matched only by her assiduous promotion of her own image. He discovered spa towns everywhere: Baile Felix, Baile Herculana, Covasna, Sovata – enough mineral water to cure the ailments of the continent. There were Saxon fortified churches to visit, a bison reserve in Hateg, castles everywhere. If he travelled further afield, near Bramov, he could have visited Bran Castle, once owned by Queen Marie and more famous as the model for Dracula’s castle in Bram Stoker’s novel.
He googled for antique dealers, for societies of archaeologists and biblical scholars, using an online dictionary, but turned up only Romanian websites he could not translate. He discovered that Transylvania had once been part of the Kingdom of Hungary, then Austro-Hungary, and that there was still a sizeable Hungarian population there.
He decided that it was time to fetch an interpreter who might help him, someone who might even know the answers to some of his questions. He went to a general tourist website to see if he could find someone, and as he did so noticed something out of the corner of his eye.
It was a thumbnail of a castle, a dark-looking place surrounded by forest. The caption read Castel Almásy. That was all. Ethan might easily have missed it or ignored it. But he remembered Burg Bernstein, another Almásy castle, and one closely linked to the man he was hunting.
Feeling a knot tighten in his stomach, he clicked on the thumbnail picture. It opened to reveal a web page about the castle, with a larger version of the thumbnail photograph. He noticed a little Union Jack at the top of the page, and when he clicked on it the text turned to English. Not very good English, but enough to guide him through the basic facts.
Almásy Castle had been built between 1270 and 1275 by Zoltán Erdoelue, the first voivod of Transylvania, and had remained in the hands of the Erdoelue family until the country became part of the Hungarian Kingdom, when it fell into the hands of a branch of the Báthorys, princes of Transylvania for many generations. In the nineteenth century, it became the property of the Almásys. The short article did not make clear who the present owners might be. But it did go to some trouble to say that it was closed to the public at all times of the year. It had an evil reputation, the writer said, though that had nothing to do with vampires or any other superstition. It was more to do with the politics of the castle’s owners in the 1930s and 40s, though this was not explained in any detail.
Several phone calls and a rented car later, he was on his way. The little Dacia 10 hardtop was a four-by-four, though Ethan found it hard to believe it would have the strength to tackle any seriously rough country.
The castle was located in the Vladeasa Mountains, east of Oradea. At the hotel, they’d warned him that the castle could be cut off. It was midwinter, they said, and the place was remote enough in summer. A guide at the local tourist bureau said he might not be able to do the entire journey in the Dacia.
‘Is no good roads in this area,’ the interpreter told him.
‘But this is a four-by-four, an off-road vehicle.’
She looked at him as if she’d just eaten sliced lemons.
‘Is Dacia, not Land Rover. One big mistake, is axle broken.’
She sold him a hiking map and pointed to the rough area where the castle should be.
‘Is not on maps,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘For one things, is not called Castel Almásy. Before was Castel Lup. Local peoples, they call it Castel Lup. Always Castel Lup on old maps.’
‘Meaning?’
She raised her eyebrows, as though the name should have been obvious.
‘Wolf Castle,’ she said.
Ethan thought she was about to sell him a string of garlic and some wooden stakes before making the sign of the cross and running off. But she stood her ground, and if she was trembling inside, she gave no sign of it.
‘You have to ask local peoples,’ she said. ‘They know tracks. But is very hard to find in winter because is snows. Look…’ and she ran her hand across a vast expanse of the map, ‘…all this is Apuseni Mountains. Is all forest from Mount Vladeasa in west’ – she pointed – ‘to here’ – she stabbed her finger further east. ‘It is Trascau Mountains here. All forests, all mountains, all caves. You find wolfs, you find bears. Maybe sleeping, maybe not. Seasons changing, some animals is waking in winter. Wolfs is hungry, sleepy, angry.’
He drove out of Oradea on the E60, in an effort to get into the Vladeasa Mountains from the north. These were not high mountains. The highest – Vladeasa itself – was around six thousand feet, much lower than any of the peaks in the Alps. But Ethan was not going
mountaineering.
A drive of over forty miles took him through a long defile between mountains. Mist had formed on their lower slopes and, above it, clouds lay battening on the peaks. The countryside was white with snow, and dark green where the branches of tall trees peaked through. There was little sign of habitation anywhere. Roadside shrines added colour to the winter gloom, their frescoes bright in the still air. Twice he caught sight of a tall church steeple. Some cars and a bus passed him, headed for Oradea. And he passed a number of carts drawn by horses or donkeys, trotting in the opposite direction.
The Dacia’s heating struggled to spread a little comfort through the interior. He’d bought a padded jacket and heavy trousers at a shop near the tourist office, but sitting still allowed the frost outside to work its way inside him.
He came to Huedin, a small town on a crossroads. This was the gateway to the Apusenis. It was a grim place, its buildings mainly erected in the communist era under the rule of the dictator, Ceaucescu. Gaunt and forbidding, they belied the rural character of the place, making ugly the countryside into which they seemed to have been set down by a malign hand.
He took a right turn, heading south towards Sancraiu, a Székely village. This was hilly country, but everywhere Ethan looked he could see the forest-covered mountains climbing and soaring to greater heights.
Entering Sancraiu, he imagined he was driving through a carefully contrived theme park, ‘Hungarian World’ (for this was little Hungary) or ‘Medieval Transylvania’. Had it not been for the straggling telephone wires and the infrequent but more blatant satellite dishes on the sides of houses on both sides of the narrow road, he might have thought himself lost, not in space, but in time. The village had changed little in centuries, and the people wore an ancient air, their rustic clothing crying out, not merely poverty, but tenacity.
Spear of Destiny Page 13