Page 53 of The Last Kingdom

Lexi Blake.

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DERRICK LEFT THE RESIDENZ.

He’d spent an hour with the duke, listening to a full report of what Stefan von Bayern had been doing for the past twenty-four hours, and what could be reasonably anticipated to come next. Albert had promised to keep him informed, and Derrick assured his old friend that things would keep moving forward on his end.

He’d read about the Kamehameha cross in a few of the old CIA reports. But seeing it. That made a difference. This crap was real. The deed could well be waiting out there. Somewhere. But plenty of people were looking for it.

He was tired.

Sleep would be welcome.

He was getting too old for all-nighters.

He stopped under a lit stoop and checked his phone. It had been on silent mode for the past hour. An email had come from Luke, with images attached. Pages from the book stolen earlier, along with a message that they would talk in the morning.

He looked forward to that.

The walk back to the Charles Hotel would take about fifteen minutes. Munich was settled in for the night, an icy-edged wind clearing the streets of all but the hardiest pedestrians.

He stepped ahead and walked.

This whole thing was becoming complicated. Nothing with the Chinese was anything but. Long ago, as a young recruit, he’d been told a parable. Supposedly, if a beach was an espionage target, the Russians would send in a submarine. Frogmen would steal ashore in the dark of night and collect several buckets of sand to take back to Moscow. The Americans would target the beach with satellites and produce reams of electronic data. The Chinese, though, would send in a thousand tourists, each assigned to collect a single grain of sand. When they returned, they would hand each grain over. And, in the end, they would know far more about the sand than anyone else.

That relentlessness was hard to beat.

In fact, it took everything you had.

He was already walking a tightrope, playing the White House against Cotton Malone and vice versa. This might be his last chance to strike pay dirt and get something he could bargain with. He hated having to resort to this. But the game had been established a long time ago. The rules simple. Those with power get power. Those without got nothing. He’d tried to work his way up the ladder, obeying orders, doing the right thing, and all that bullshit. Which had literally got him nothing. Luckily, most of the time he’d managed to remain above the gray gas of professional depression. Now he felt like it had engulfed him. So he was going to force the issue.

But first he had to find that deed.

If it even existed.

He came to the end of the commercial way, which drained into the ring road that encircled Munich’s Old Town. A black velvet sky provided a contrasting backdrop to the steady fall of snow. He sucked in the cold air, trying to rid his lungs of the staleness of anxiety. His nerves were stretched taut. Cars passed sparingly. The bells of a distant church burst in the night like drumfire aimed at his stubborn soul. He waited for the traffic signal and permission from the lights to cross the four-lane boulevard.

Before he could, a dark sedan pulled to the curb.

His senses sprang to red alert.

The rear door opened.

Trinity Dorner stared out at him. “Get in.”

Chapter 29

COTTON STEPPED CLOSE TO THE COMPUTER MONITOR AS MARKFenn adjusted the multi-window mode to focus on the cameras atop the exterior castle walls. Three vehicles were parked at odd angles before the main gate. Six men with automatic weapons stood near them.

Fenn reached for the phone on his desk and stabbed a button. “Are the main gates closed?” A pause while he listened. “Good.” Fenn slammed the receiver down. “Come with me.”

He followed his host from the study, through the castle, to a vaulted entrance foyer. Richly colored stuccos were reflected in the shiny marble floor. There, a steward waited with a heavy coat and gloves, which Fenn donned before stepping out into the cold. They trudged across the cobbles, careful with their steps as ice had formed in places, to a staircase that wound upward against the outer wall. Fenn climbed with quick, determined pounds on the wooden risers. They reached the top of the ramparts, where sentries once patrolled, and stomped down the battlement walkway, the crenellated outer wall to their right.

“What are you doing?” he asked Fenn.

“Dealing with a problem.”

They made their way to a spot above the main gate. The six men with weapons stood below in the wash of the floodlights. But a seventh, unarmed man had joined the group, at the forefront with both hands stuffed into the pockets of a long wool coat. In the distance, among the trees, the raging pyre from earlier still burned.

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