‘Not long after that, Almásy went back to Egypt. He contacted his old friends, the desert scholars. In 1951 he mounted an expedition to search for the remains of a great army the Persians had sent to the Siwa Oasis. Herodotus tells us that fifty thousand men went out into the desert, and not one of them returned. They say they’re out there still, their bones hidden by the desert sands. The official story is that Almásy became obsessed with the search.
‘But it turned out to be his last adventure. Before it could get properly under way, he contracted amoebic dysentery. He was invalided back to Europe, where he died in a clinic in Salzburg.’
The priest paused. He was coming close to the heart of the matter.
‘There is one strange thing about Almásy’s death,’ he said. ‘When his brother went back to his apartment in Cairo, he found it empty: all the papers were gone, all the desert diaries, all the maps. The plans for the Cambyses expedition were missing, the records he’d kept about the Cave of the Swimmers. Everything had gone.’
‘How does all this concern Egon Aehrenthal or, for that matter, me or Sarah?’ Though the Libyan desert was far away on the other side of the Mediterranean, Ethan could feel its warm breezes brush his cheek. How had this happened? he wondered. To have gone to midnight mass in preparation for the greatest Christmas his family had ever known and woken to carnage, to have seen relics of the man Jesus and followed them to a place he knew only from vampire movies…
Father Iustin answered.
‘I believe Almásy’s papers found their way to Burg Bernstein soon after his death, and remained there until many years later, when Egon Aehrenthal stumbled over them. He found books and papers that stirred his imagination. But one thing in particular drew his attention. He read a tale about relics. Almásy had met your grandfather Gerald in Cairo, and had made contact with the other members of the LRDP unit who had been with Gerald when they found the lost city. Somewhere along the way, Almásy got wind of a place where relics of Jesus had been found, and perhaps more than relics.
‘The hunt for the remains of Cambyses’s army was a bluff. Over the years, more than one expedition had gone in search of the lost soldiers, and no one had found them. The desert out there is vast, it might have taken a lifetime, and he still might not have found so much as a bone.
‘Almásy wasn’t in the least interested in dead Persians. He suspected that out there, not so very far from the Siwa Oasis, he might find the bones of Jesus. In addition, he would be able to track down all the relics that had been taken from the city. He thought what this might mean to the Ordo Novi Templi and to the other semi-defunct orders and temples and cults and fellowships that held to the old beliefs. With the power of the relics, with the magic potency he thought rested in the sacred bones, there might be a revival. Not just of the occult demi-monde. He hoped for the revival of a belief system that had only recently terrorised the globe. A new Volk, a new Führer, a new Reich. I know he dreamt of it. But until recently, I thought his dreams had been buried with him in 1951.
‘But I was wrong. My sources tell me that Aehrenthal bought everything from a relative of Almásy’s while he still lived in Bernstein. Or perhaps he stole it, I would not find that surprising. In one way or another, he came into possession of the diaries and found a reference to your grandfather and what he had found. I don’t think he knew too much to begin with. He may have assumed the relics were still far out in the desert, in the City of Wardabaha.
‘That was when he shifted his interests to biblical archaeology and began to earn a living as an antiquary in that field. Stories came back to us from time to time, of certain searches he had made, of certain objects and manuscripts he had found.
‘A few years ago, some of us became more concerned than usual about Aehrenthal. It started when I spoke with a man in London, a scholar working for the British Museum in Middle Eastern antiquities. He had come across Aehrenthal more than once, and on several occasions he suspected he’d been cheated out of an important discovery by him. This man still frequents St Dunstan’s. He is not an Orthodox Christian, but an Anglican. However, he and I discovered that we had mutual interests. When I was a young priest, I studied Hebrew and Aramaic and took a great interest in biblical matters. We talked about biblical history and went from there to archaeology, about which I knew little.
‘He told me that Aehrenthal had managed to get his hands on Almásy’s papers. A few weeks earlier he’d met Aehrenthal in Jerusalem. Aehrenthal was in high spirits. He could barely restrain himself from laughing, and kept telling my friend that he was close to finding the Holy Grail. About a week after that, Aehrenthal headed for the Libyan desert. He employed half a dozen Tuareg guides. Word got around that he was planning to finish Almásy’s expedition, the search for the lost Persian army. But weeks passed and nothing was heard of him or his guides, and people thought he’d headed into the empty places, that he’d joined Cambyses’s soldiers, that he’d never be seen alive or dead again.
‘But then he popped up in Tripoli. He had grown gaunt and more arrogant, he had been lashed by desert winds and emerged like a prophet or a man chased by demons. What he had seen he would not say, and perhaps he had seen nothing. He did not speak of a discovery, and he brought nothing out with him. But anyone who met him at that time said he was a changed man.
‘My friend — the man I spoke to you about — went to Tripoli and met him. He offered to buy anything Aehrenthal had brought out of the sands, but he was turned down flat. Aehrenthal said there was nothing, not even bones or fragments of bones. No chariots, no harnesses of horses or camels, no armour, no spears, no swords, no axes. Just sand. But he let something slip: that he was looking for men in England, old men, men who’d been in the desert with Almásy, or without Almásy — it was never clear which. My friend asked about the Grail, asked what Aehrenthal had meant, but this time the man was silent.
‘He went back to Austria soon after that, where he visited several organisations and met with various people. Then he returned here and took up residence in the castle where Miss Usherwood was kept prisoner. That is his headquarters now; the Austrians are too watchful, their security services keep a close eye on his comings and goings. Here, things are more relaxed. Of course, there are plenty of old Nazis in Austria, and a great many new ones, but the state watches them. Here, in the forests of Transylvania, he can plot his plots and weave his webs.’
Ethan got to his feet. He wanted to walk and stretch his legs. Tiredness enveloped him, and though he expected little comfort in a monastic bed, he wanted to lie down and close his eyes, longed to be wrapped in sleep.
‘I still don’t understand what Aehrenthal wants to achieve, what his ambitions are exactly. I can see he hopes for some sort of Nazi revival, and that he plans to use the relics as symbols, as rallying points for his great endeavour. But why this obsession with Sarah? He has what he wanted from us, why does he have to waste time with her?’
Father Iustin stood as well and walked to the fireplace, where the embers still held a certain degree of heat.
‘Ethan,’ he said, ‘I’ve been avoiding this question, but I don’t think I have the right to hold it back from you. He wants Sarah, but he will have you just as readily. You know something he does not, and he will stop at nothing to extract it from you.’
‘The location of Wardabaha.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But he has the relics. He can display them, open a museum to hold them, make a documentary about how they were found.’
‘He wants much more than that. We only found out about this a year ago, and we weren’t certain until…’ He hesitated and reached out to take a poker with which to stir the embers into a little life. ‘Well, quite honestly, not until you arrived this evening. There had been certain rumours, but what you and Sarah have told me seems to settle the matter.