Steve Berry - The Charlemagne Pursuit

"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 writing."

"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."

He silently translated. The Charlemagne pursuit.

"How do you know that any of this is connected with that sub?"

"Father wasn't there by accident. He was part of what was happening. In fact, he was the reason it was happening. I've been trying to obtain the classified report on Blazek for decades, with no success. But you now have it."

"And you still haven't told me how you knew that."

"I have sources within the navy. They told me your former boss, Stephanie Nelle, obtained the report and was sending it to you."

"Still doesn't explain how you knew I'd be on that mountain today."

"How about we leave that a mystery for the moment."

"You sent those two to steal it?"

She nodded.

He didn't like her attitude but, dammit, he was intrigued. He was beneath a Bavarian abbey, surrounded by an array of ancient stones with strange markings, and staring at a book, supposedly from Charlemagne, that could not be read. If what Dorothea Lindauer said was true, there may well be a connection to his father's death.

But dealing with this woman was nuts.

He didn't need her. "If you don't mind, I'll pass." He turned to leave.

"I agree," she said, as he headed for the door. "You and I could never work together."

He stopped, turned back, and made clear, "Don't screw with me again."

"Guten abend, Herr Malone."

WILKERSON STOOD UNDER THE SNOWY BRANCHES OF A BEECH tree and watched the bookshop. It was located midway into an arcade of picturesque boutiques, just outside the pedestrian-only zone, not far from a boisterous Christmas market where the squeeze of bodies and a hot glow from floodlights infused an element of warmth into the night's wintry blast. The aroma of cinnamon, gingerbread, and sugarcoated almonds drifted on the dry air, along with scents of sizzling schnitzel and bratwurst. High atop a church, strains of Bach rose from a brass ensemble.

Weak lights illuminated the bookshop's front window and signaled that the proprietor was dutifully waiting. Wilkerson's life was about to change. His current naval commanding officer, Langford Ramsey, had promised him that he'd be coming home from Europe with a gold star.

But he wondered about Ramsey.

That was the thing about blacks. Couldn't be trusted. He still recalled when he was nine years old, living in a small town in southern Tennessee, where carpet mills provided a living for men like his father. Where blacks and whites had once lived separately, a shift in law and attitude had started forcing the races together. One summer's night he was curled on a rug, playing. The adjacent kitchen was full of neighbors, and he'd crept to the doorway and listened as people he knew debated their future. It had been hard to understand why they were upset, so the next afternoon, while he and his father were outside in the backyard, he'd asked.

"They destroy a neighborhood, son. Niggers got no business livin' around here."

He summoned the courage and asked, "Didn't we bring 'em over from Africa in the first place?"

"So what? That mean we owe 'em? They do it to themselves, son. Down at the mill, not a one of 'em can keep a job. Nothing matters but what white folks give 'em. People like me, and the rest of the folks on this block, work their whole lives and they just come along and destroy it."

He remembered the night before and what he heard. "You and the neighbors going to buy the house down the block and tear it down to keep 'em from living here?"

"Seems the smart thing to do."

"You going to buy every house on the street and tear them down?"

"If that's what it takes."

His father had been right. Can't trust none of them. Especially one who'd risen to become an admiral in the US Navy and the head of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

But what choice did he have? His road to the admiralty passed straight through Langford Ramsey.

He glanced at his watch. A Toyota coupe eased down the street and parked two businesses away from the bookshop. A side window descended and the driver motioned.

He slipped on a pair of leather gloves, then approached the bookshop's front door. A light rap and the proprietor unlatched the lock. The tinkle of a bell announced his presence as he entered the store.

"Guten abend, Martin," he said to a squat, overweight man with a bushy black mustache.

"Good to see you again," the man said in German.

The proprietor wore the same bow tie and cloth suspenders he'd worn weeks ago when they'd first met. His shop was an eclectic mixture of old and new, with an emphasis on the occult, and he had a reputation as a discreet broker.

"I trust your workday has gone well?" Wilkerson asked.

"Actually, the day has been slow. Few customers, but with the snow and the Christmas market tonight, people's minds are not on books." Martin closed the door and twisted the lock.

"Then perhaps I can change your luck. Time to conclude our business."

For the past three months this German had acted as a conduit, acquiring a variety of rare books and papers from differing sources, all on the same subject and, hopefully, unnoticed by anyone.