Free The Excalibur Codex by James Douglas Page A

beat faster, if that were possible, and I hurried towards the far end of the room. Here the panelled wall was decorated with a much larger display of very fine swords, formed in a circle, their blades shining dully in the gloom. I walked towards the swords and turned left, down a narrow, concealed passageway that led to a windowless room. When I reached it, I closed the door behind me and risked flicking on my torch, blinking as the thin beam cut through an almost Stygian blackness. The room was entirely empty. Bare stone walls and grey flagstones, but a worn step in the centre of the far wall indicated the existence of a long filled-in doorway. My legs shook as I crossed the last few paces. I laid the torch aside so that I could use both hands as I knelt before the step. It seemed massive, utterly immovable, but I had been instructed what to do. I ran my hands over the block until my fingers found a narrow crevice onthe right, between the step and the wall. I pulled with all my strength using my own weight to exert more power. To my astonishment the great stone slid back, pivoting away from the wall on some sort of hidden mechanism. For a few moments I couldn’t move, paralysed by the enormity of what I had achieved. A thousand voices roared out the ‘Fahnenlied’ in my head. I lifted the torch and shone it into the cavity I had exposed .

VII
    ‘What do you think?’
    Jamie was so engrossed in what he was reading that he hadn’t heard Steele returning to the library. He looked up in annoyance at the banker’s interruption. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said sharply. ‘Where was this house?’
    ‘My people are working on it. Probably in the north of England, we believe. We’ve confirmed that MI5 suspected the Hitler Youth of sending out spying missions just like Ziegler’s, under the guise of a cultural exchange. They were also worried that the Boy Scouts who went to Germany were being indoctrinated.’ He smiled. ‘Apparently Baden Powell was very keen on Adolf Hitler.’
    ‘Have you considered that this might be another Hitler Diaries hoax? What better way to lure you into paying a fortune for some expensive forgery.’ The Hitler Diaries had been one of the great scandals ofthe nineteen eighties, after the German magazine Stern claimed to have bought sixty-two handwritten volumes of memoirs written personally by Adolf Hitler and recovered from a crashed plane at the end of the war. Reputations and careers had been destroyed when the diaries were authenticated, only to turn out to be crude fakes written by a small-time Stuttgart art dealer called Konrad Kujau.
    Steele nodded solemnly. ‘Yes, that was the first thing I considered. But unlike Stern and The Times, I’ve already had the papers scientifically analysed by some of the country’s top experts. The Hitler Diaries were an enormous fraud; this is a simple account that can be easily verified. Wulf Ziegler is a real person. He exists, or at least existed, and his family still live in the centre of Dortmund.’ Passion made his voice quiver. ‘The codex is the key that opens the first door into what could be a straightforward journey, or a bloody complicated quest, Jamie. Can we afford not to turn that key?’
    Jamie wasn’t convinced. ‘I still think it’s impossible.’
    ‘That may be so, but what if you’re wrong?’ Steele demanded, the over-bright eyes daring his guest to argue. ‘We are talking about creating history. The greatest sword ever created. Excalibur. There, I’ve said it even if you won’t. The sword of Arthur, lost for a hundred generations. Proof positive that the man who wielded it truly existed. And I want you to find it. Take up my offer and the name Jamie Saintclair could be mentioned in the same breath as Howard Carter andthe Earl of Carnarvon. I want to know, Jamie, and I’m willing to commit a million pounds to find out, and a lot more to get hold of it if it does exist.’
    The audacity of it took Jamie’s