The Charlemagne Pursuit (Cotton Malone 4)

"Thank you, sir. I appreciate the latitude."

"One piece of advice," the president said. "It's true, the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

The phone clicked.

"I imagine Diane is furious," Stephanie said. "She's clearly out of the loop on this one."

"I don't like ambitious bureaucrats," Davis muttered.

"Some would say you fit into that category."

"And they'd be wrong."

"You seem to be on your own with this one. I'd say Admiral Ramsey at naval intelligence is in damage-control mode, protecting the navy and all that. Talk about an ambitious bureaucrat-he's the definition of one."

Davis stood. "You're right about Diane. It won't take her long to get into the loop, and naval intelligence won't be far behind." He pointed to the hard copies of what they'd downloaded. "That's why we have to go to Jacksonville, Florida."

She'd read the file, so she knew that's where Zachary Alexander lived. But she wanted to know, "Why we?"

"Because Scot Harvath told me no."

She grinned. "Talk about a Lone Ranger."

"Stephanie, I need your help. Remember those favors? I'll owe you one."

She stood. "That's good enough for me."

But that was not the reason why she so readily agreed, and her compatriot surely realized it. The court of inquiry report. She'd read it, at his insistence.

No William Davis was listed among the crew of NR-1A.

TWELVE

ETTAL MONASTERY

MALONE ADMIRED THE BOOK LYING ON THE TABLE. "THIS CAME from the tomb of Charlemagne? It's twelve hundred years old? If so, it's in remarkable shape."

"It's a complicated story, Herr Malone. One that spans that full twelve hundred years."

This woman liked avoiding questions. "Try me."

She pointed. "Do you recognize that script?"

He studied one of the pages, filled with an odd writing and naked women frolicking in bathtubs, connected by intricate plumbing that appeared more anatomical than hydraulic.

He studied more pages and noticed what seemed to be charts with astronomical objects, as if seen through a telescope. Live cells, as they would have appeared from a microscope. Vegetation, all with elaborate root structures. A strange calendar of zodiacal signs, populated by tiny naked people in what looked like rubbish bins. So many illustrations. The unintelligible writing seemed almost an afterthought.

"It's as Otto III noted," she said. "The language of heaven."

"I wasn't aware that heaven required a language."

She smiled. "In the time of Charlemagne, the concept of heaven was much different."

He traced with his finger the symbol embossed on the front cover.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I have no idea."

He quickly became aware of what was not in the book. No blood, monsters, or mythical beasts. No conflict or destructive tendencies. No symbols of religion, or trappings of secular power. In fact, nothing that pointed to any recognizable way of life-no familiar tools, furniture, or means of transport. Instead the pages conveyed a sense of otherworldliness and timelessness.

"There's something else I'd like to show you," she said.

He hesitated.

"Come now, you're a man accustomed to situations like this."

"I sell books."

She motioned toward the open doorway across the dim room. "Then bring the book and follow me."

He wasn't going to be that easy. "How about you carry the book and I'll carry the gun." He regripped the weapon.

She nodded. "If it makes you feel better."

She lifted the book from the table and he followed her through the doorway. Inside, a stone staircase angled down into more darkness, another doorway filled with ambient light waiting at the bottom.

They descended.

Below was a corridor that stretched fifty feet. Plank doors lined either side and one waited at the opposite end.

"A crypt?" he asked.

She shook her head. "The monks bury their dead in the cloister above. This is part of the old abbey, from the Middle Ages. Used now for storage. My grandfather spent a great deal of time here during World War II."

"Hiding out?"

"In a manner of speaking."

She navigated the corridor, lit by harsh incandescent bulbs. Beyond the closed door, at the far end, spanned a room arranged like a museum with curious stone artifacts and wood carvings. Maybe forty or fifty pieces. Everything was displayed within bright puddles of sodium light. Tables lined the far end, also lit from above. A couple of wooden cabinets painted Bavarian-style abutted the walls.

She pointed at the wood carvings, an assortment of curlicues, crescents, crosses, shamrocks, stars, hearts, diamonds, and crowns. "Those came off the gables of Dutch farmhouses. Some called it folk art. Grandfather thought they were much more, their significance lost over time, so he collected them."

"After the Wehrmacht finished?"

He caught her momentary annoyance. "Grandfather was a scientist, not a Nazi."

"How many have tried that line before?"

She seemed to ignore his goad. "What do you know of Aryans?"

"Enough that the notion did not begin with the Nazis."

"More of your eidetic memory?"

"You're just a wealth of info on me."

"As I'm sure you'll gather on me, if you decide this is worth your time."

Granted.

"The concept of the Aryan," she said, "a tall, slim, muscular race with golden hair and blue eyes, traces its origins to the eighteenth century. That was when similarities among various ancient languages were noted by, and you should appreciate this, a British lawyer serving on the Supreme Court of India. He studied Sanskrit and saw how that language resembled Greek and Latin. He coined a word, Arya, from Sanskrit, meaning 'noble,' that he used to describe those Indian dialects. More scholars, who began noticing similarities between Sanskrit and other languages, started using Aryan to describe this language grouping."

"You a linguist?"

"Hardly, but Grandfather knew these things." She pointed at one of the stone slabs. Rock art. A human figure on skis. "That came from Norway. Maybe four thousand years old. The other examples you see are from Sweden. Carved circles, disks, wheels. To Grandfather, this was the language of the Aryans."

"That's nonsense."

"True. But it gets even worse."

She told him about a brilliant nation of warriors who once lived quietly in a Himalayan valley. Some event, long lost to history, convinced them to abandon their peaceful ways and turn to warmongering. Some swept south and conquered India. Others surged west, finding the cold, rainy forests of northern Europe. Along the way they assimilated their own language with those of native populations, which explained later similarities. These Himalayan invaders possessed no name. A German literary critic finally gave them one in 1808. Aryans. Then another German writer, with no qualifications as a historian or a linguist, linked Aryans with Nordics, concluding them to be one and the same. He wrote a series of books that became German bestsellers in the 1920s.

"Utter nonsense," she said. "No basis in fact. So Aryans are, in essence, a mythical people with a fictional history and a borrowed name. But in the 1930s the nationalists seized on that romantic notion. The words Aryan, Nordic, and German came to be spoken interchangeably. They still are today. The vision of conquering, flaxen-haired Aryans struck a chord with Germans-it appealed to their vanity. So what started out as a harmless linguistic investigation became a deadly racial tool that cost millions of lives and motivated Germans to do things they would have otherwise never done."

"Ancient history," he said.

"Let me show you something that isn't."

She led him through the exhibits to a pedestal that supported four broken pieces of stone. Upon them were deeply carved markings. He bent down and examined the letters.

"They're like the manuscript," he said. "Same wr

iting."

"Exactly the same," she said.

He stood. "More Scandinavian runes?"

"Those stones came from Antarctica."

The book. The stones. The unknown script. His father. Her father. NR-1A. Antarctica. "What do you want?"

"Grandfather found these stones there and brought them back. My father spent his life trying to decipher them and"-she held up the book-"these words. Both men were hopeless dreamers. But for me to understand what they died for-for you to know why your father died-we need to solve what grandfather called the Karl der Gro?e Verfolgung."