The Sword of Fate Read online

  THE SWORD OF FATE

  Dennis Wheatley

  Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

  For

  W. P. WATT

  My good friend of many years’

  standing, who advised me wisely

  upon many things and who sug-

  gested the main theme of this

  book

  Contents

  Introduction

  I

  An Englishman in Exile

  II

  The Voice in the Night

  III

  Under a Clouded Moon

  IV

  The Sinister Major

  V

  Caught Out

  VI

  The War is on in Earnest

  VII

  The Skeleton in the Cupboard

  VIII

  Divided Loyalties

  IX

  At the Ancient Temple

  X

  In the Hands of the Enemy

  XI

  In the “Big House”

  XII

  A Desperate Gamble

  XIII

  Great Days

  XIV

  Red-Hot Conspiracy

  XV

  One Minute to Live

  XVI

  Grim Moments

  XVII

  In Cozelli’s Toils

  XVIII

  The Great Decision

  XIX

  The Stage is Set

  XX

  The Hurricane Breaks

  XXI

  Strong Measures

  XXII

  Dark Journey

  XXIII

  Death for Two

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ‘all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  Chapter I

  An Englishman in Exile

  After all those hours of desperate seeking, after all those days of heart-breaking disappointment and nights of tortured longing, I had found her. Daphnis was lying there, sound asleep on a pile of rugs in a corner of the cellar. All my grim forebodings had been baseless, she was alive and well. Not a hair of her lovely head had been harmed. The light of an old beaten copper oil-lamp, which stood upon a rough table, was enough to show the tender, healthy flush of her cheeks and the gentle rise and fall of the coverings under which she lay.

  The cellar was fairly large and had evidently been used as a storeroom. From the ceiling there hung a number of fat, homemade sausages, which bulged in places to the thickness of the muscle in a boxer’s arm, and near them dangled some big bunches of dried herbs. One corner of the room was piled high with logs; in another there were some earthenware crocks and a child’s rocking-horse, carved out of wood and hand-painted which, from its battered state, looked as though it had served the children of several generations in some peasant family. The third corner had evidently been cleared to make room for the pile of goat-skins upon which Daphnis was sleeping, and the fourth was occupied by the old worn stone stairway upon which I was standing. It was the only entrance to the cellar and the only light in daytime evidently came from a grille which was set high up, in a shaft cut in the thick stone wall. There was no heating and it was very cold.

  I tiptoed down the stairs and across the room. A thick soft wrap of white angora wool was drawn up below Daphnis’ chin. It was early yet and she was in the first deep sleep of night. An empty glass stood on the floor near the head of her rough couch. It had a faint white film in it, showing that it had contained milk, and the slightly sour smell mingled with the pungent spicy odour of the herbs and sausages.

  The relief I felt at having found her now submerged all thought of time and place and danger. I knelt down beside her. At first it was difficult to realise that I was actually gazing once again at that dear familiar face, with the short straight nose and the little birthmark on the upper lip which had always played such havoc with
my senses. In these last weeks I had dreamed of them so often, only to wake to bitter disillusion, but the dark lashes which curled upon her cheeks and the firm, full-lipped mouth were real. I knew that time was precious, yet I wanted to prolong that unique moment of utter relief and happiness before I woke her and we began to plan how we might get away through the battle zone to the safety of the Allied lines.

  I had few fears about getting her back through the battle zone. There must be many goat-tracks over the mountains as yet unguarded by the Germans, which we could take to if I had to abandon my car, and we could count upon the Greek peasants to aid us. Although it was most unlikely that anyone would discover until the morning that she had escaped and we had the whole night in front of us, the important information that she must have obtained while at the German G.H.Q. demanded that we should put as great a distance as possible between Ventsa and ourselves before dawn.

  It was just as I put out my hand to touch her dark hair that a slight sound behind me made me turn my head. For a moment I remained utterly still; it was as though I had suddenly been gripped by a painless but acute paralysis. My muscles were numbed by the same horror and fear that one might experience on bending to smell a bunch of sweet-scented flowers and suddenly seeing coiled among their leaves a deadly snake, within a few inches of one’s eyes and just about to strike.

  Von Hentzen was standing framed in the arched doorway at the top of the stone steps and a big German Service automatic was gripped firmly in his hand.

  He was now wearing a feldgrau Brigadier’s uniform. It hardly showed against the grey stone walls, but his heavy-jowled face and high-domed head stood out white and livid.

  Utterly unexpected and ill-timed for us as his sudden appearance was, it was not that which filled me with such indescribable dread. It was the fact that he seemed entirely oblivious of my presence. He was staring straight past my head at the sleeping girl. His gun was pointed not at me but at her, and from every line of his powerful bulky form there radiated cold, horrible purpose.

  Next second the pistol spurted flame; the whole cellar seemed to rock with the deafening thunder of its repeated explosions. Before I could draw my gun or spring up and charge the stairs, the bullets thudded into the pile of rugs where Daphnis lay sleeping.

  She half sat up, her mouth open, her eyes staring. Her hands fluttered helplessly.

  But it is useless now to dwell upon that terrible moment. If I am to tell the story of my great love and of those fateful days in Egypt and Greece, I must begin at the beginning.

  . . . . .

  When the war broke I was at Splitz on the Dalmatian coast. All through the long hot August days I had enjoyed the bathing among the holiday crowd mainly composed of foreigners. For over two years past I had avoided English people of my own class for very excellent reasons.

  During those years there had been so many war scares that by the time the real crisis came one’s apprehensions had been blunted. It seemed almost certain that the French would urge us to give way, as they did at Munich, or that Hitler’s bluff would be called at last and that he would climb down. Of course, there had been quite an exodus of the panicky ones during that last fateful week, but, to most of us, even on the Sunday morning when we learned that the time limit for the ultimatum was up and that Britain was once again at war with Germany, the whole thing seemed unreal.

  Those who remained, mostly Central Europeans, gathered to drink their usual Vermouth-Cassis or Amer-Picon in the smart French bars that morning and it was only in the afternoon that they began to pack for a hurried return to their own countries lest these too should be drawn into a swift spreading of the conflagration.

  Léonie lunched with me in my private suite at the hotel. She was a blonde and bewitching Dane, tall, blue-eyed, slender, and one of the most graceful swimmers that I have ever known. The strong sunshine of the Adriatic had bronzed her fair skin until she now looked like a golden goddess as, with easy strokes, she sped or twisted through the water. Naturally, Léonie assumed that inoffensive little Denmark was beyond all danger of being involved in the war, so she had decided to stay on, but, seeing that I was only twenty-six, she took it for granted that I should be going home to volunteer at once and I did not attempt to disillusion her. She had made my stay at Splitz a very happy one, so our farewells after luncheon were long and tender.

  Léonie had been a delightful companion for those idle summer days, but when, for the last time, the doors of my suite closed behind her, she left nothing in my heart or in my rooms but a friendly memory and a lingering breath of intriguing perfume. As I felt sure the feeling, or rather lack of depth in it, was mutual, I had nothing to reproach myself with, and, going back into the bedroom, I lay down again to face the bleak uninviting future.

  Yet, was it bleak and uninviting? For most people, definitely yes. The world had gone mad again and it might be years before it recovered. In the meantime, the lives of countless thousands of men and women would be prematurely ended in an abrupt and ghastly manner, while countless millions more would suffer every kind of hardship and privation quite unnecessarily and without any gain to show for it afterwards.

  Even as I lay there, the Nazis might be preparing their air armada for its first ‘devastating attack on London. At Munich Hitler had threatened Chamberlain that he would send over a hundred bombers an hour for twenty-four hours in succession. By morning two-thirds of the British capital might be in ashes, with half a million people slain or maimed. That was the way that most of us visualised large-scale air raids before they actually happened.

  In any case, for the great majority, the war would mean the breaking-up of homes, the halting of careers, the ruin of businesses and the sacrifice of all personal ambitions. But what had I to lose?

  It was over two years now since I had severed all connection with my family and the friends of my youth. I had a comfortable fortune, inherited from my father, which was skilfully dispersed in investments mainly in the Americas. I had no business, profession or occupation which could be smashed by the war and no home of my own which the war could wreck. In fact, except for a few weeks of hectic excitement the previous winter, during which I wrote the fore-runner to this journal, calling it The Quest of Julian Day, I had lived utterly without purpose ever since I left the Diplomatic Service.

  Those days were still near enough for me to remember clearly how glorious I thought it would be to wake up every morning with no tiresome telegrams to decipher, no dreary routine reports to compile and no boring elderly people upon whom I was expected to dance attendance. But I soon found that nothing can be so wearisome as idleness or so desperately depressing as the thought that there’s no one to give a tinker’s cuss if you stay in bed for the rest of your life, provided that you pay your hotel bill regularly each week.

  Here, then, seemed to be the very escape from myself for which I had been longing. Instinctively, from the moment I had learned that the war was definitely on, I felt the natural urge to volunteer, but what I had not realised was that to me it might prove a real blessing in giving my life new usefulness and direction.

  The only question was where and how should I get into the Forces? Owing to my peculiar position I still did not fancy the idea of going home, where I should certainly run into many of my old friends, and if I applied for a commission there was the horrid possibility that, at some stage of the formalities, those ghosts of my past might rise again to shame me.

  It was then that I suddenly got the idea of going to Egypt. The previous winter, during my quest for Cambyses’ treasure, I had come into contact with that great English police chief, Essex Pasha. He was one of the few people who knew the whole truth about the grisly skeleton that lay locked in my cupboard, yet I felt confident that he would smooth the way for me into one of the Services without my having to answer too many questions.

  In the course of my self-imposed exile I had got to know the Balkans and the Near East fairly well, so I needed no travel expert to tell me that, apart from the
airways which would be impossible at such a time, the quickest route to Egypt was by train through Sarajevo and the old Serbian city of Uskub, or Skoplje as they now call it, down to Salonika and by ship from there across to Port Said. I managed to catch the evening train and six days later I was in Cairo.

  Essex Pasha received me very kindly, and after a short talk it was decided that I should be attached to the Arab Bureau. But please don’t get the idea that I was booked for all sorts of exciting Secret Service work just because you happen to know that Lawrence of Arabia was attached to the Arab Bureau in the last Great War. I was recommended solely on the fact that, in addition to several European languages, I speak fairly fluent Arabic, and it was reasonably certain that later on a considerable number of interpreters would be required for attaching to troop formations.

  It was abominably hot and dusty in Cairo, so I was glad enough, a few days later, to be posted to Ismalia on the Suez Canal, where I was to lend a hand in organising new levies of Arabs which were being recruited as extra police to patrol the canal banks as a precaution against attempts at sabotage. Everything was very rough and ready in those early days, so I carried out such orders as I could get and for the rest exercised my common sense, working for the best part of eighteen hours a day until we got things into some sort of order.

  Later on, my position was regularised. The Major under whom I had been working gave me a decent chit; I did an abbreviated two months’ course in Cairo and emerged from it at the end of January, 1940, with a commission as a full-blown second lieutenant of the Interpreter Corps.

  By that time the first Australian and New Zealand units were arriving in Egypt for advance training before being despatched to France and I was attached to a New Zealand battalion. They were grand fellows and my duties were absurdly light, consisting almost entirely of arbitrating in an occasional dispute where an Arab farmer claimed that his crops or property had been damaged by the troops, and assisting the military police in keeping under control the swarm of beggars and hawkers that were always endeavouring to get into the camp.