Cædmon ran a hand over his unshaven jaw. The Universe, for all its marvels, was an intrinsically dangerous place. He’d never doubted that the Vril force could be generated; but it was what the Seven Research Foundation intended to do with it that staggered him.
Still grappling with the idea of time travel, he raised the teacup to his lips. Grimacing, he took a few sips of McGuire’s potent Irish brew. Were it not for the fact that he needed to keep his wits about him, he would have opted for a G&T. The headache powder that he’d mixed earlier was doing little to dull the throbbing pain radiating from his skull down his cervical vertebrae to his right arm.
McGuire snatched the carton of milk and poured a dollop into his teacup. ‘If I don’t take out these bastards, we’re talking doomsday scenario.’
‘If we don’t take out these bastards,’ Cædmon stated matter-of-factly, having thrown in his lot with Finnegan McGuire the instant he learned Kate had been abducted. He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘The heliacal rising of Sirius will take place in ten hours and thirteen minutes. At six thirty sharp. While rescuing Kate is a priority, we must also prevent Doctor Uhlemann from creating the Vril force. From what you’ve told me, it’s the linchpin in his time-travel experiment.’
‘That isn’t a helluva lot of time. Particularly since we don’t know where their hidey-hole is located.’
‘I assume that Dr Uhlemann has a laboratory somewhere in Paris.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘As with any laboratory, it would require electricity to operate.’ Leaning towards the coffee table, Cædmon unthinkingly reached for his laptop computer with both hands, his right triceps painfully protesting the rash move. He bit back a groan. ‘I’m going to contact my old group leader at Five and have him pull the utility records for the Seven Research Foundation.’
One dark brow quizzically raised, the commando was clearly surprised. ‘Your guy can do that?’
Pulling up his email account, Cædmon quickly typed a missive. ‘In the grand scheme, it’s a rather low-level request for MI5. Information is to spooks what bullets are to commandos.’
‘Indispensable ammunition.’
‘Precisely. Hopefully, our digital shot across the bow will hit a target.’ He hit the ‘send’ button.
‘Better blow it out of the water or we’re fucked.’
Cædmon made no comment. He and the commando were tentatively dancing around the ring, pugilists sizing up the opponent. Except they were no longer opponents. They were now, for better or worse, mismatched allies. Soldier and spy. Each had a strength and expertise that the other lacked. As long as they acknowledged that, their unlikely partnership should hold.
Shrugging off his fatigue, Cædmon set the laptop on the coffee table. ‘Knowledge is all about the connections between seemingly disparate elements. Once you make those connections, knowledge becomes a powerful tool. That said, is there anything else which Doctor Uhlemann disclosed that you haven’t told me?’
Scowling, as though annoyed by the request, McGuire said, ‘Don’t know if it’s important, but he mentioned that the original Seven came into possession of an ancient Egyptian manuscript that contains step-by-step instructions for generating the Vril force.’
‘How fascinating.’
‘Yeah, I was real enthralled,’ McGuire deadpanned. ‘I think he called it the Ghayat al-Hakim.’
‘The Ghayat al-Hakim … Yes! That makes perfect sense.’ The pieces starting to fall into place, Cædmon got up and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that lined the back wall of the ‘drawing room’. Dragging the wheeled library ladder to the middle case, he gingerly climbed several rungs to reach a book on the top shelf.
As he walked back to his club chair, he blew a puff of dust from the gilded edge of the leather-bound volume.
‘This is a corrupted version of the Ghayat al-Hakim,’ he said, retaking his seat. ‘Entitled Picatrix, it’s a fifteenth-century Hermetic grimoire that was translated into Latin by the Florentine scholar Marcilio Ficino for his patron Lorenzo de Medici.’
‘Does the Latin version mention anything about the Vril force?’ McGuire asked, cutting to the chase.
‘Not specifically. As I said, it’s a corrupted version of the Arabic original. Nonetheless, encoded within the text’s magical incantations are instructions for manipulating astral energy.’ Cædmon idly flipped through several pages, momentarily distracted by a lavish illustration of a knight, astride a griffin, a sword in one hand and an enemy’s head in the other. ‘I’m going out on a limb here, but I suspect that, like the Seven, the Knights Templar also had a copy of the original Ghayat al-Hakim. It would explain how the Templars devised their blueprint for the Axe Historique in Paris.’
‘According to Uhlemann, a shady Cairo bookseller gave a copy of the original Arabic text to the Nazis,’ McGuire informed him. ‘How the hell did the Templars get their copy of the Ghayat al-Hakim?’
‘When the Knights Templar were arrested en masse in 1307, the Grand Inquisitor accused the Templars of being in league with the agents of Islam.’
‘A charge that will land you on a waterboard in Guantanamo these days.’
‘And on the rack in the fourteenth century,’ Cædmon countered, the torture tactics of the Dominicans far more brutal than those used by the CIA. ‘Unlike most of the charges brought against the order, this one actually had merit. During their tenure in the Holy Land, the Knights Templar did maintain a secret affiliation with Rashid ad-Din Sinan. Better known by his guerre de nom, the Old Man in the Mountain, Rashid led a group of Syrian warriors called the Assassins.’
‘Those were the dudes who smoked hash before they went into battle, right?’
Cædmon nodded. ‘The hashish induced a psychoactive response, the effects of which turned the Assassins into raving berserkers on the battlefield. Invincible warriors who knew no fear.’
‘You mean warriors who scared the crap out of the enemy,’ the commando affirmed with earthy aplomb.
‘Which mightily impressed the Knights Templar. Although they hailed from different religions and different cultures, the Templars and the Assassins were nearly identical in one regard: both belonged to a brotherhood of warriors who believed that dying bravely in battle was the only means of achieving glory in heaven. As such, they immediately recognized one another as kindred spirits.’
‘I’m a soldier so, yeah, I get it. The Templars wouldn’t have had much in common with dandified European knights trying to impress their lady loves at a jousting match,’ McGuire sagely observed. ‘But they’d be on the same wavelength with the fedayeen.’
‘Those who redeem themselves by sacrificing themselves,’ Cædmon reflected, having always thought that the fedayeen, a.k.a. the Assassins, were a class of warriors unto themselves.
‘During the Crusades, the Templars and the Assassins maintained this covert relationship, beheading and disembowelling one another on the field of battle, but embracing one another as blood brothers behind closed doors. That clandestine relationship continued after the Europeans lost control of the Holy Land. Which leads me to one other shared commonality.’ Cædmon paused, certain that his next remarks would elicit a sceptical jeer from the commando. ‘Both the Templars and the Assassins were deeply involved in acquiring esoteric and arcane knowledge. Although the Old Man in the Mountain maintained his base of operations in Syria, he was a subject of the Fatamid Caliphate who –’