Down: Trilogy Box Set (140 page)

“Did you miss me?” he shouted, opening his arms.

There were hugs, kisses, and tears.

“I don’t think a minute’s gone by that I haven’t wondered how you were doing,” John said.

“We’ve been so worried about you,” Emily added.

“Worried enough to come back for a visit?” Brian said. “It’s not like popping across town to see a mate for a meal and a chat.”

“Didn’t they tell you what happened and why we’re here?” Emily asked.

“Of course they did. Just teasing. Sounds like bloody chaos. Hellers belong in Hell. Not like I’m prejudiced, mind you. Some of my best friends are Hellers but the two worlds aren’t meant to be connected, are they?”

“Queen Mécia hasn’t soured on you yet?” John asked.

“Au contraire mon frere,” Brian said, evoking a smile from the listening Forneau. “We’re getting along swimmingly. Guess what she’s made me?”

“A leash?” John asked.

“Fuck off. She’s made me a General of the Iberian army. Imagine me, little Brian Kilmeade from the BBC, a bloody general.”

Simon leaned in and said, “We’re done for.”

“So you don’t regret staying,” Emily said.

“Look, I’ll be honest. There’s tons that I miss but I’m having a blast.” He clapped his scabbard. “I was meant for this. Carrying a sword, drawing up battle plans, drinking ale with sweaty warriors. I was born in the wrong era. I’ve always said that. So where’s my man Trevor?”

“Somewhere in Brittania with the SAS looking for a group of schoolboys who came over,” John said. “Let me introduce you to a couple of the guys.”

John made a megaphone with his hands and called over to O’Malley and Culpepper who were working on some plaster molds on the other side of the forge.

“I’ve seen you on the tele,” Culpepper said when he was introduced to Brian. “Had to go to bloody Hell to meet a celebrity.”

“I know your outfit,” Brian said. “22 SAS. You lads are fierce.”

“We do what we have to do,” O’Malley said.

“I know you do,” Brian said, pumping his hand. “Good to have you on the same team. So, you’re making AK-47s, I hear. Brainy idea.”

“Meet the man who made it happen,” John said. “Brian, this is my brother, Kyle Camp, the best gunsmith in the USA.”

Kyle and Brian began to chat and soon Brian was off, examining molds and casts and O’Malley’s finished product.

Garibaldi nudged a stranger forward, a blue-eyed man with a sober face, greatly elongated by a goatee. A second man with a long scar, poorly hidden by a reddish beard, stood behind him.

“This is the new friend I want you to meet,” Garibaldi said to John and Emily. “I introduce Valery Ostrov, who has offered to help you find your man, Loomis. And this gentleman who speaks not a word of English, French or Italian is his compatriot, Pavel Antonov. Ostrov and I have cooked up a plan.”

Much of the entourage retreated to the cool air outside and sat on the grassy bank of the Seine while Garibaldi explained his idea to John and Emily. Ostrov, though simply dressed in rough peasant clothes, had been a high-ranking officer in Stalin’s army until he defected a fortnight earlier, making his way to the French lines where he offered to join Garibaldi and betray Stalin’s military preparations.

John wanted to know how Garibaldi could trust him but instead of asking the Italian he asked Ostrov directly.

Ostrov, a man with a straight spine and a military bearing, spoke excellent English with a thick, lugubrious Russian accent. “I have long history with Stalin, you see. I was a colonel in the Red Army, very loyal to Stalin, serving in 8
^th
Army under Colonel General Grigori Mihailovich Shtern when he and many officers were arrested in purge. Under Stalin’s orders, Beria had us shot. What were our crimes, I ask you? None. When I come to Hell for my own sins, I find myself serving Stalin again. Irony, yes? When I see him again, do I ask him why I was purged? No, I am scared to be in rotting room. Much worse than being purged. So I do what I must do to survive, like my silent friend Antonov here, and I become soldier again. Then I hear men talk about this new king of Italia, King Giuseppe. I know of Garibaldi from school. I hear about how he want to make better world here. I like these ideas. Antonov like too. So when we have chance we defect. Now that we meet this great man and talk to him I want to help his cause with all my might.”

Garibaldi patted him on the shoulder in a fatherly way and said, “This plan of ours, it’s not a perfect one. None are. There are always risks but with Ostrov’s help and one of your AK-47s I think we might just get you safely into Stalin’s palace in Cologne.”

The essence of the plan was this: Ostrov would reappear at the Cologne castle with the story that while on patrol near the border of Francia he had been captured by Garibaldi’s forces. Transported to Paris, he was tortured but gave up nothing. He escaped from prison with the help of a sympathetic jailer and overpowered a guard who was carrying this weapon. He would present the trophy to Stalin as a demonstration that he had not been recruited as Garibaldi’s spy. However, his real mission would be to pass a letter from Emily to Paul Loomis and bring him to a place outside the castle where Emily and John could interrogate him.

“You’re right,” John said when Garibaldi and Ostrov had finished. “It isn’t perfect. It’s got so many holes in it I almost don’t know where to start. I take it back, I do know where to start. You’re giving away your biggest strategic asset. Stalin will be able to rip the rifle apart and cast each piece. He’ll be mass producing them in no time and then at best, you’ll be at a draw.”

“We will have the primer chemicals,” Garibaldi said. “He will not.”

Emily said, “Within all of Germania and Russia, surely he’ll find someone with enough knowledge of chemistry to make the lead styphnate or another explosive primer.”

Garibaldi said he had considered that. “But we will have the advantage of time. We can begin to mass-produce the rifles, the ammunition, and the primer. If we strike early and strike hard with conventional and singing cannon and an infantry carrying these new rifles then we will surely crush Stalin and crush his coalition. Perhaps we can achieve this dream of unifying Europa. And, armed with the knowledge that Loomis will impart, you might achieve your dream of severing the connections between our unhappy world and yours.”

“I think Giuseppe’s idea could work,” Emily said. “It’s better than trying to take the castle by force.”

John kept raising objections to the Trojan horse plan but everyone else challenged him to come up with a better alternative.

In the end he admitted he couldn’t. He looked into Ostrov’s unblinking eyes and asked, “Here’s what I don’t get. Tell me, what do
you
get out of this?”

Ostrov answered smoothly, “I get satisfaction of helping this noble cause of King Giuseppe’s and pleasure in seeing the butcher Stalin sent to rotting room.”

“Is that it?” John asked.

“And maybe if all goes well, the king will give me nice palace in Moscow and enough gold to buy many pretty women to fill rooms.”

While Emily cringed, John nodded and told Garibaldi, “You know, that’s the first believable thing this guy’s said. Let’s go to Germania.”

King Henry was not amused and neither was Malcolm Gough. The basic issue was that both men wanted to go home. Henry was no longer enchanted by the mysteries of television and the day before he had flung the remote control across the room, smashing it against the wall.

“I will not gaze upon it any longer,” he had shouted. “It makes my head throb and it gives me no more pleasure. Take it away.”

He had also grown tired of all the new foods he had, at least, initially sampled and begun to demand the same simple roasted meats and savory pies he ate in his own land.

Then there were his constant demands to be allowed to leave the confines of his room and go riding and hunting in the green countryside he saw through his windows. The cadre of MI5 minders stationed in the country house summarily turned down all requests and he ranted and raved about the outrage of imprisoning the king of England.

“Does the present queen know of my treatment?” he had demanded of Gough.

“She certainly does,” Gough had said.

“I am astonished she would permit this injustice.” Henry had used his learnings of the queen’s royal heritage to assert that it was no wonder she would treat him so, she being the patrilineal product of German royalty, to wit the House of Wettin.

Gough had made some remark about the preference of the present quarters to the Tower of London and Henry had unleashed a tirade.

“Teutonic blood!” he had raged. “The queen of England possesses Teutonic blood. Is it any wonder she treats a pureblooded son of Tudors in such a beastly manner? And you, what of you, Gough?” the king had shouted, a pint mug in his hand.

“My father is English, my mother Italian.”

“Another half-blood!” Henry had screamed, throwing the mug and narrowly missing Gough’s head.

“I will return when his Majesty has settled down,” Gough had said, pulling his sports jacket from the back of a chair. He had stayed away for several hours until the king had settled down.

On this day the issue was once again women. Henry resumed his daily demand to have comely women introduced into his bedchamber and Gough lost his patience. The professor had been under considerable stress over his own confinement and his separation from his family during a period of unprecedented national emergency. Perhaps if he had been allowed to tell his wife that he had been tasked with babysitting Henry VIII and given some sort of documentary evidence of the truth of the outlandish statement, she might have understood. But all he could repeat, when she agreed to take his calls at all, was that he had been given a top-secret assignment by MI5 and couldn’t talk about it, alluding to the fact that his calls were undoubtedly monitored. When she asked what in God’s green Earth did the security services need from a professor of Tudor history, he could only spout silly non-answers and infuriate her further.

Perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back was the conversation Gough had that morning with Ben Wellington. The professor had been sustained by the treasure trove of interview material he had amassed, all of it carefully recorded on a small digital recorder he had been provided. The insights and sheer volume of detail about Henry’s reign he had collected during their time together was staggering. He had begun outlining the structure of the book he would write. It would be the mother of all Henry books, the mother of all Tudor books, the mother of all history books. He would call it something like,
From the King’s Mouth to My Ears—The Life and Times of Henry VIII
. It would rise to the top of the bestseller lists, something none of his previous books had come close to achieving, and it would stay there for years. He would be booked solidly for speaking engagements for a decade. His snarkiest academic critics would be sick with envy. It would transform the rather shy professor into a national institution. But when he asked one of the more-senior MI5 people on site to review one of the transcripts concerning Anne Boleyn from a recording made a few days earlier, he was denied access.

“Mr. Wellington,” he had said on the call, “are you telling me that you won’t reverse this refusal to let me have the transcripts or the primary digital files?”

“I’m afraid that is correct, professor. The decision to limit the distribution to people with the highest level of security clearance in the government has been taken by the prime minister.”

“But how am I to write my book without access to these files?”

“Book? What book?”

“Why, my book redefining Henry’s reign? Surely you must know I intend to write about the staggering insights I’ve gleaned from talking to the man.”

“Look, I don’t know how to say this more plainly,”

Ben had said, “but there can never be any book or articles or interviews or any mention whatsoever about your interactions with Henry as long as the government deems the material to be secret.”

“And how long is that likely to be?”

“Until Hell freezes over, I’d imagine, excuse the inappropriate expression.”

After the longest pause, Gough had announced that under the circumstances he would be leaving immediately. Ben, realizing he had a situation on his hands, had sought to mollify him by promising a thorough review of the matter once the crisis was over then played the patriotic-duty card. In the end, Gough agreed to stay.

Now, he lost his temper with the pouting king who was flopped on his unmade bed, chewing on a chicken leg.

“For the last time, I am not a procurer of women. I am not a pimp. You and I are both prisoners here, if you must know, and neither of us will be granted conjugal visits!”

Henry threw the covers off and bounded out of the bed toward the professor who pushed his panic button for the first time. Two MI5 men rushed in with Tasers drawn.

Henry stopped dead in his tracks and glowered at the oddly shaped weapons in their hands.

“I will speak to the queen immediately,” he said. “Tell her it is not a request, it is a demand.”

To Gough’s surprise, the word came through an hour later that the queen would, indeed be calling. A telephone was brought into the room and placed on speaker mode.

At first Henry refused to believe the voice coming through was the queen’s but she assured him that it was indeed she.

The queen asked how he was getting along and Henry responded with a litany of complaints, up to and including his lack of carnal pleasurement. The queen replied that she had been assured his basic safety and comforts were being well attended to and that the details of his confinement were in the hands of the security services.

Far from satisfying Henry his ire was merely stoked. He unleashed a tirade of abuse, impugning her Germanic heritage and comparing her unfavorably to a host of farm animals.

A male voice suddenly came on the line. “See here, you. How dare you speak to her majesty in this despicable manner. This call is over.”

The line went dead.

“And who was that?” Henry said, staring at the quiet telephone.