The Secret of Excalibur_A Novel Read online

  “Well, you know,” said Chase, “if the subject’s interesting, kids’ll pay attention.”

  Holly pouted. “I’m not a kid.”

  “Okay, so, what? Young lady?”

  She shrieked. “Oh, God! That’s even worse! That sounds like you’re telling me off!”

  Chase shrugged helplessly. “So what do you call fifteen-year-olds?”

  “We used to call you trouble,” offered Nan. “Edward and Elizabeth were such rivals when they were young! Always fighting, they were.”

  “Thank God that’s stopped, huh?” Nina chirped, wishing she hadn’t when she saw Chase’s and Elizabeth’s expressions.

  Fortunately, Holly provided a distraction. “So, you know you said you broke your arm when you saved New York, Uncle Eddie?” She gestured at his left sleeve, voice dropping in part-fearful, part-gleeful anticipation. “Was it, like, snapped in two? Or did it get sort of … squashed?”

  “You want to see it?” asked Chase.

  Holly winced, hands over her mouth. “Oh, no, no! I don’t know. Is it still gross? Not if it’s gross. Is it?”

  “Tell you what,” Chase said, taking off his leather jacket. “why don’t you judge for yourself?” He rolled up his sleeve and held out his left forearm. Holly recoiled, then moved back for a closer look. A crooked, X-shaped scar ran almost from wrist to elbow, smaller lines of wounded skin branching out from it.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked, one hand hovering above his arm, afraid to touch it.

  “It bloody did at the time!” Chase assured her. “Smashed both the bones, had a great jagged spike three inches long sticking out right through the skin there.” He pointed, Holly making a high-pitched Eeeeeeew! “They had to bolt it all back together with titanium. So I’m sort of bionic now. Freaks ’em out when I go through the scanners at airports.”

  “Edward, that’s terrible!” cried Nan, looking appalled. “You poor thing! Does it still hurt? How long did it take to mend?”

  “It was in a cast for nearly two months,” Nina told her.

  “Yeah,” Chase added. “When it finally came off, I had one arm bigger than the other.”

  “Just like when you were fifteen and had all those magazines under your bed,” said Elizabeth, with the air of someone who’d just scored an unbeatable point.

  Chase held back a rude reply and turned instead to his grandmother. “It still hurts a bit sometimes, but it’s more or less fixed now. Had to be careful when I was training back up, though. Didn’t want to overdo things and have a bolt pop out through my arm.”

  Holly remained fascinated by the scar. “So now you’re okay again … could you beat just about anyone in a fight?”

  Chase nodded. “Why, got someone you want me to sort out?”

  “No, no!” She paused, thinking. “Although there’s this absolute cow at school …”

  “Nah, I don’t hit girls,” Chase told her. “Unless they’re a really, really bad person. But if you ever have any bloke trouble, just let me know and I’ll have words.”

  “Eddie,” snapped Elizabeth, an angry warning.

  “So who could you beat?” Holly asked, ignoring her. “Could you beat … Jason Bourne?”

  Chase laughed mockingly. “Doddle. He’s CIA, he’s a spook. They’re all wimps.”

  “What about Jack Bauer?”

  “Hmm. Tougher, but … yeah. No problem.”

  “James Bond?”

  “Which one?”

  “Any of them.”

  He pretended to consider it. “All of ’em except … Roger Moore,” he said at last. “He’s the one I wouldn’t want to mess with. That eyebrow, I just can’t match it.”

  Holly giggled. “You used to be in the SAS, right? Could you beat the SBS?”

  “Course I could. The SAS is the best fighting force in the world. No contest. Why?”

  “Because there’s a girl in my class whose big brother is in the SBS, and she says that he says that the SAS are just a bunch of gayers.”

  “Holly, don’t say things like that,” Elizabeth chided, although she was clearly amused by Chase’s affronted expression.

  “I’m just saying what she said he said!”

  “Some SBS guy said that, did he?” Chase growled, irked not so much by the insult as its source.

  “What’s the SBS?” Nina asked.

  “Special Boat Service,” Elizabeth told her. “They’re supposedly much tougher than the SAS.”

  Chase scowled. “Oh, fu—” His gaze flicked between his niece and his grandmother. “… sod the SBS.”

  “Fusod?” Nina teased.

  “It’s … a military term.”

  “Oh, it is, huh?”

  “Well,” said Elizabeth, pointing up the hill, “the SBS are based just up the road in Poole, so maybe you could go and challenge them to an arm-wrestling contest or something as pointlessly macho.”

  “Maybe I could,” Chase replied scathingly. “’Cause that’s all serving your country’s about, being macho. I’m sure there’s all kinds of other worthwhile stuff I could have done instead in the last eighteen years. Any suggestions, Lizzie? I mean, with all your accomplishments …”

  Recognizing that the siblings were about to reach critical mass and explode, Nina desperately tried to change the subject. “So, Holly, you, uh … like sending text messages, huh?”

  To her astonishment, Holly didn’t consider the question to be as hopelessly lame an attempt at distraction as Chase and Elizabeth obviously did. “Oh, yeah! I mean, I prefer instant messaging, because who doesn’t? But Mum won’t let me on the computer much anymore because I’ve got exams coming up, so I have to use texts, but my phone’s so old and rubbish.” She held the offending item out as proof. To Nina, it looked like a perfectly capable piece of technology. “I mean, it doesn’t even have video! All my friends have better phones than me. It’s embarrassing.”

  “It’s just a phone, Holly,” said Elizabeth, exasperated. “It makes calls, it does texts, that’s all you need. Anything else is just an expensive gimmick.”

  “But gimmicks are part of the fun, right?” Chase said, winking at Holly. He pointed at a mobile phone shop up the street. “Tell you what, seeing as I didn’t bring you a present, how about I get you a new phone? Something flashy, with all the bells and whistles. Including video.”

  Holly’s eyes widened. “Really?”

  “Yeah, course! Wouldn’t be much of an uncle if I couldn’t do something cool for my niece, would I?” He led her toward the shop, looking back at Nina. “I’ll give you a call when we’re done, come and find you. Shouldn’t be too long, we’ll just get whatever’s the most expensive!”

  Nan watched them go with an admiring smile. “He always was such a nice lad. It’s lovely to see him again. Don’t you think, Elizabeth?”

  Elizabeth’s only answer was silence, but Nina didn’t need to hear any words to know she could have quite happily killed Chase at that moment—and probably his fiancée as well. “So, ah,” she said weakly, unable to endure her future sister-in-law’s thunderous glare any longer, “what’s the view like from that balloon?”

  • • •

  The view from five hundred feet up was actually quite impressive, Nina decided. The park below was a long finger of grass and trees with a small river running down its length, angling away to the glinting sea a quarter of a mile to the south. It was encircled by weaving, narrow roads—apparently the broad avenues and straight lines of Manhattan were anathema to English town planners. She could even see her hotel, a recently built octagon of pinkish stone overlooking the pier to the west of the park’s far end. The only blot on the landscape was a hulking glass-fronted block dominating the pier approach, a disused IMAX cinema that, according to Nan’s ongoing and increasingly vitriolic tirade against it, had once been voted the ugliest building in England. Nina nodded and made “Uh-huh” sounds at appropriate moments, though she had to concede that Chase’s grandmother did have a point.

  But even that
rant was preferable to the alternative. The view had done nothing to defuse the argument between Chase and his sister. And in the confines of the balloon’s gondola, there was no way to escape it.

  “I am so mad at you right now,” Elizabeth hissed to Chase. Holly and Nan were at the opposite side of the gondola, just out of earshot, but Nina was an unwilling eavesdropper.

  “For fuck’s sake, Lizzie,” Chase replied irritably. “I bought my niece a present. So fucking what?”

  “Because you didn’t ask me, and if you had bothered to ask me, I would have told you not to, because the last thing Holly needs right now is yet another distraction when she needs to concentrate on her schoolwork.”

  “Nan said she was doing fine. So did you. Sounds like she’s doing okay.”

  “I don’t want her to do ‘okay’! She can do so much better than ‘okay,’ Eddie! But she’s a teenager, there are a million other things she’d rather be doing. It’s hard enough to get her to pay attention to what’s actually important without you giving her toys!”

  “Jesus Christ, Lizzie. What is this, some kind of overcompensation thing?”

  Elizabeth’s eyes flashed with fury. “No, it’s an irresponsibility thing.”

  “Eh?” Chase looked at her, confused. “When did I say you were irresponsible?”

  “I meant you’re being irresponsible, Eddie!” She was barely able to keep her voice down. “You have no idea how hard it is to be a parent—Holly’s fifteen, for Christ’s sake, so right now to her I’m like bloody Hitler always on her back about everything. And then you come along, being Cool Uncle Eddie the hero, running around playing bloody Indiana Jones and encouraging her to be just like you!”

  Chase angrily held up his left arm, exposing part of the scar. “Yeah, this was playing. Never mind that I saved thousands of lives, huh?” He pulled the sleeve back down, voice taunting. “This isn’t about me at all, is it? It’s about you being jealous. Must be killing you, mustn’t it? Your useless little brother’s actually accomplished something worthwhile, but the one who got into Oxford’s stuck selling insurance. Sorry, Lizzie, but that’s not my fucking fault.”

  “We both know exactly whose fault it is, Eddie,” Elizabeth said coldly.

  “Well, what the fuck ever.” He turned away, walking around the gondola as the balloon began its descent, steel cables pulling it back to earth.

  “Oh, same old story,” said Elizabeth, this time loudly enough for everybody to hear. “Whenever things go bad, Eddie Chase just turns his back and walks away!” She flung her hands out theatrically, striding after him. “Well, where are you going, Eddie? You’re in a balloon! Can’t just walk out on me here.”

  “Mum!” Holly said through gritted teeth, cheeks bright red. Nina shared her embarrassment.

  “Well, that was a lovely ride,” Nan piped up, turning away from the view to face Chase and Elizabeth. “It’s so nice to see things from a new perspective.” For a moment Nina couldn’t believe she’d missed Elizabeth’s rant, but the briefest of exchanged glances told her that she’d heard it perfectly—and probably not for the first time. She pinched Chase’s cheek again. “So good to see you again, my little lamb chop! I wonder, could you do me a favor? You said you’d hired a car. You wouldn’t mind taking me to the supermarket so I can do a big shop, would you?”

  “No problem at all, Nan,” said Chase. “The car’s at the hotel—it’s not far. Although Nina’s meeting a friend soon, so she won’t be able to come.” Nina looked at her watch, realizing she’d completely forgotten about Rust—it was already after two-thirty.

  “Oh, that’s a shame. Well, hopefully I’ll see you again later, Nina—I can tell you what Edward was like when he was little. I’ve got photos.”

  Now it was Chase’s turn to look embarrassed. “Aw, Nan!”

  “‘Little lamb chop’?” Nina whispered to Chase as the balloon touched down. “That’s so sweet!”

  “Yeah, yeah …”

  “I’ll show you his medals, as well,” said Nan. “He gave them to me after he left the army, even his Victoria Cross. He got that from the queen, you know!”

  Nina gaped at Chase. “Now you know where the box is,” he told her, smiling slightly. The attendants secured the gondola and opened its gate, and the passengers stepped out. “Okay, you go and meet this bloke and I’ll take Nan on her supermarket sweep.” He hugged Holly.

  “Thanks for the phone, Uncle Eddie,” she said.

  “Glad you like it. Just don’t spend too much time on it, okay? Wouldn’t want to distract you from your schoolwork.”

  Holly tutted. “God, now you sound like Mum!”

  “I hope not.” Chase shot Elizabeth a cutting look, then kissed Holly on the cheek and joined Nina and Nan. “I’ll see you again before we go, okay?”

  She waved. “Bye, Uncle Eddie!”

  “Bye, Holly.” Chase turned away.

  “Nice to meet you both,” said Nina pointedly, before following Chase and his grandmother in the direction of their hotel. “What was that all about?” she whispered to him.

  “Family stuff.” When it became obvious that he wasn’t going to elaborate, all Nina could do was sigh and make the most of a pleasant stroll through the park.

  THREE

  After Chase and his grandmother left, Nina returned to the hotel room to get her laptop and the encrypted disc. Making her way back through the maze of softly lit corridors, she wondered again what secrets it held—and why Rust would reveal them to her only in person.

  Rust was waiting for her in the Paragon’s Vista Lounge, an elevated, semicircular, glass-walled extension overlooking the seafront. Above it on the western cliff was a large brick building proclaiming itself as the Bournemouth International Centre; the beach and pier were to the south. With the bright afternoon sun shimmering off the waves and vacationers ambling about, it was an attractive view, marred only by the looming IMAX building east of the pier. Nina found herself agreeing with Nan that it was an eyesore.

  So, to her surprise, was Rust. When she’d met him previously, the German had been smartly dressed, almost dapper. The disheveled figure who stood up to greet her, on the other hand, looked as though he’d spent the night sleeping in a ditch. His jacket was crumpled and unkempt gray hair stuck up at angles as if he’d received an electric shock. With his thick-framed glasses, he looked almost like a cartoon of a mad scientist.

  He still had his manners, however. “Ah, Nina!” he said, standing and bowing as she approached. “So good to see you again. And I am grateful you agreed to meet me.”

  “Well, you didn’t leave me much of an option,” she replied as she shook his hand. “I got the feeling you would have camped out on the U.N.’s doorstep if you had to.”

  She meant it as a joke, but Rust nodded. “Perhaps. But we are both here! Come, sit down.” He directed her to his table near the back of the room. Nina realized he had chosen to sit as far from the lounge’s other occupants as possible, most of them opting for a clear view of the sea. Rust pulled out a chair for her, then regarded the other people present suspiciously before sitting himself.

  She followed his darting glances: an elderly couple sharing tea and biscuits, a young man with overgelled hair talking animatedly on his phone, a large bearded guy with an ugly scar carved into his forehead concentrating on his newspaper. Nina briefly felt sorry for the man—whatever caused his disfigurement had clearly been a serious injury—before turning her attention back to Rust. “So, what’s the big secret?”

  Rust leaned closer, voice dropping to a conspiratorial near-whisper. “Nina, tell me … what do you know about King Arthur?”

  Had Nina prepared a list of potential subjects Rust might bring up, she doubted that would even have appeared in the top thousand. “Er … in the historical sense, or as mythology?”

  “Historical, of course.”

  “Of course,” she said, trying to conceal her bewilderment. “It’s not really my area of expertise, but I know enough to know there�
�s not much to know. He was the leader of the ancient Britons in the sixth century, he united the tribes of Britain following the withdrawal of the Romans, and fought against the Saxons and the Picts until the Saxons finally conquered England by the seventh century. Beyond that …” She shrugged. “That’s when legend and Monty Python take over.”

  Rust nodded approvingly. “And what of King Arthur’s sword? Do you think that is just legend also?”

  “I don’t know. There are some historical accounts, but they’re very sketchy. I mean, there isn’t even agreement over whether it was one sword or two. Excalibur’s the name everyone knows, but in some sources he had another one before it, although I don’t remember what it was called—”

  “Caliburn,” Rust cut in.

  “Caliburn, right. So Excalibur might have been another name for Caliburn, or they might have been two completely different swords. If you go by the legends, then Caliburn was the sword in the stone, which only Arthur was capable of removing as proof that he was the true king of Britain, and Excalibur was forged for him by Merlin after Caliburn was broken in battle.” She gave the German a look. “But you know all this already, so why are you asking me?”

  “Yes, I know it,” Rust admitted. “The story of Arthur has been an … an obsession, I suppose, of mine for many years. But I wanted to be sure you were the right person to tell what I’ve discovered.”

  Nina raised an eyebrow. “What you’ve discovered? I thought this was about my parents. What’s King Arthur got to do with them?”

  Rust’s lips pursed as if he were chewing a lump of something indigestible. “Actually, the truth is, Nina … nothing.”

  “What?”

  “If I had told you why I really needed to see you, you might not have been interested. This was the only way to be sure. I am sorry.”

  “What?” Nina repeated, now with anger. “Wait, you lied to me? You just wanted an excuse to talk to me?”

  “Please, I am sorry, I really am! But I had to talk to you. You are the only person I could turn to for help.” His voice dropped to a whisper and he glanced around the lounge again, then hissed, “My life is in danger!”