Unholy Crusade Read online

  UNHOLY CRUSADE

  Dennis Wheatley

  Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

  With love, for

  ‘Smallest Daughter’

  SHEILAKIN

  With whom my wife and I

  spent our happiest days

  in Mexico

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Lucky Adam Gordon

  2 An Author in Search of a Plot

  3 The Man-God

  4 A Girl with a Gun

  5 Out of the Past

  6 The Eavesdroppers

  7 ‘Our Man’ in Mexico

  8 The Sweet Cheat Gone

  9 A Dark Ceremony

  10 A Ghastly Ordeal

  11 The Stolen Honeymoon

  12 At the Pyramid of the Magician

  13 The Road to Prison

  14 A Living Nightmare

  15 In the Toils

  16 The Terrible Betrayal

  17 While Time Runs Out

  18 In Desperate Straits

  19 A Truly Bitter Pill

  20 ‘There’s Many a Slip …’

  21 A Bid for Freedom

  22 Out on a Limb

  A Note on the Author

  Also by 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

  1

  Lucky Adam Gordon

  Adam Fallström Gordon had come to Mexico to collect material for a book.

  He had recently made a big name as a writer of unusual adventure stories with authentic historical backgrounds. The adventures were the product of his mind, so it was background material for which he had come in search. But Fate plays many a strange trick and, before he was much older, he was soon to find himself, all against his will, the central figure in a series of situations more desperate than any he could have thought up.

  He had arrived in Mexico City in the early hours of the previous morning and on this, his first evening, he was sampling high-life in the roof restaurant on the fourteenth floor of the Del Paseo Hotel. The big room was dimly lit; three sides of it consisted of plate-glass windows. Through them, owing to the crystal-clear air up there at seven thousand five hundred feet, could be seen the million twinkling lights that at night turned the city into a fairy-land stretching for miles.

  A small band played soft, seductive music. Immaculate waiters moved softly from table to table occupied by fashionably-dressed women and prosperous-looking men. Although it was past eleven o’clock, most of them had only just started dinner—because upper-class Mexicans keep Spanish hours. Many of the women were strikingly good-looking. Here and there, a table light glinted on their diamonds, emeralds or rubies. It was a scene of grande-luxe that could not have been surpassed anywhere in Europe.

  Adam Gordon was twenty-eight. As he looked about him while waiting for his first course of avocado pear filled with minute eels, he felt that in fourteen years he had come a long, long way from the poor fishing village on the east coast of Scotland where he had been born, and that, perhaps, his friends were right in nicknaming him ‘Lucky’ Gordon.

  But none of them knew the whole of his story. They based their assessment of him on his recent good fortune and, no doubt, were a little envious of his physical attributes; for he had a good brain, a fine body and had never known a day’s illness. He was not a giant, but he stood six foot three in his socks, with broad shoulders, and his hands were so strong that he could bend an iron bar. He was fair-skinned and freckled, had pale-blue eyes a little on the small side, a straight nose, good teeth, and thick, red-gold hair which waved despite his efforts to brush it flat. His firm chin was also covered with short, crisp, red-gold hair, for he had grown a beard while doing his National Service in the Royal Navy and had decided to keep it. In his Navy days his mates had nicknamed him ‘the Viking’, and that had been truly apt, as he had inherited strong strains of Norse blood from bo
th his mother and father.

  From his late teens onward, wherever he went his striking appearance attracted the interest of girls and women. Several of them at nearby tables had been casting covert glances at him ever since he had entered the restaurant, but for some time past he had deliberately ignored such overtures. For him women, in the persons of both Polly and Mildred, had meant only brief periods of enjoyment followed by bitter disenchantment. Finding that absorption in his work enabled him to do without romantic attachments, he had made up his mind not to let himself become involved again.

  Unlucky as he had been in love, he had certainly been lucky in other ways—extraordinarily lucky—because Fate had played him a number of really scurvy tricks that had looked like destroying for good any prospect of his advancement. Yet, after each had come an entirely unexpected break, lifting him from the rut in which it seemed he had foundered.

  He had arrived in Mexico City only very late the previous night and had no introductions; so he was dining alone. While he drank his daiquiri cocktail he amused himself by recalling the strange seesaw of events which, interspersed with spells of desperate poverty, had now brought him to affluence.

  Adam’s father, Jamie Gordon, had come from Findhorn in Morayshire and had started life as a fisherman. Tall, strong and level-headed, he had made a useful hand on a trawler; but he had had only a rudimentary education, so he had expected to spend the whole of his working life at sea. But one day in Inverness he had met Gurda Fallström. She was there to see a lawyer, as her father had recently died and, having lost her mother when she was still in her teens, she had come into his estate.

  Gurda was as fine and stalwart a woman as Jamie was a man and from that very first evening, when they had supped together off kippers and tea in the house of a mutual friend, they had known that they were made for each other. But Gurda was most averse to taking a husband who would frequently be away from her for considerable periods and, through being a fisherman, might at any time be drowned in a storm.

  The estate she had inherited consisted only of an old house further north in Sutherland, not far from the estuary of the Helmsdale river, and a few hundred pounds. But a cousin of hers owned the fish-net factory in the nearby village of Portgower and it was arranged that Jamie should be given a job there.

  The house was centuries old and perched on the very edge of a high cliff. It was much larger than Jamie had expected, for the Fallströms had once been comfortably off; so it contained numerous pieces of good, if worn, furniture and a collection of several hundred old books.

  Jamie would have been happy to make his home with Gurda in a butte-and-ben, but to live with her in such surroundings was, to him, like being in the seventh heaven, and he worked at his new job with such a will that, within three years, he was made foreman at the net factory.

  To add to their contentment the couple were blessed with five handsome and healthy children: two girls and three boys, of which Adam was the youngest and, in due course, the cleverest. His childhood in the house on the cliff could not have been happier and he was his mother’s favourite.

  For this there was a special reason. Gurda was a very unusual person. Like many Scots she was that strange mixture of down-to-earth good sense and visionary subject to pyschic influences. But in her case this had developed into a definitely dual personality. Normally she was a practical, hardworking housewife, but at times she neglected everything and would sit dreaming for hours. During these periods it was evident that she was living in another world. She even talked to herself and recited long poems in a strange language which she told her family was ancient Norse.

  The only explanation for these semi-trances seemed to be that in an earlier incarnation she had been the wife of a Viking chieftain and, in that role, had known such exceptional happiness that, from time to time, her spirit was drawn back to re-experience episodes in it. She was herself convinced of that and, although when she returned to normal she could recall these ‘dreams’ only hazily, she could describe what life had been like in the time of the Scandinavian Vikings.

  Her husband and elder children—all rather unimaginative people—regarded ‘Mother’s day-dreams’ with mild amusement and never questioned her about her ‘other life’. But Adam, from the time he could think coherently, had been fascinated and never tired of sitting at her feet asking her about the Norsemen and the long ships in which they sailed each summer to plunder the coast towns of England, Ireland and France.

  She told him of the long winters when there were only a few hours of daylight, the great storms that howled round the house and the softly-falling snow that made it impossible to travel for more than a short distance. But, snug in their houses, they saw the winter through: the men amusing themselves making fine wood-carvings of snake-heads for the prows of their ships, or hewing oars and tools to cultivate the land, while the women worked at their weaving or sewed the skins of trapped animals into fur hoods and jackets.

  Then there were the evenings of celebration: Feast days sacred to the gods, weddings and the bloodings of a jarl’s new sword. The long tables weighed down with roast flesh and great flagons of heady mead; the recitation by the bards of past deeds of valour, sometimes drunken quarrels with drinking horns hurled, then bloody duels with the long swords to settle matters on the spot; but laughter and the joy of living; libations poured to the red-headed Thor—the god of victories and the Jupiter of the North—with the conviction that if his votaries died in battle they would go straight to his heaven of Valhalla and there drink mead out of the skulls of their enemies.

  After a time, delighted with the boy’s interest, his mother had supplemented what she could tell him from her dreams by reading to him some of the old books she had inherited, which dealt with that period of history. Then, soon after his ninth birthday, Adam too began to have ‘dreams’. Not, to begin with, day-dreams like his mother, but vivid dreams at night. Whether he had inherited her ability to go back in time, or his dreams were a normal result of his absorption in the subject, it was impossible to say. But the former seemed probable because, during his dreams, he spoke and could understand the Norse language. On learning this, his mother began to teach him Norse, so that he could recite many of the old Icelandic runes. By then, too, he found that, occasionally, when sitting alone on the cliff or the river bank, he could see the many-oared ships of the raiders, send his mind back, and seem to become Ord - the golden-haired Viking commanding the approaching fleet.

  He was already aware that, when the long winter ended and spring came again, a fever of restlessness seized the menfolk. All true-bred Norsemen were fighters born and bred. They cared nothing for agriculture and left the women and slaves to cultivate the few fields about their homes that would produce enough wheat for a supply of the small, hard loaves with a hole in the centre, that resembled doughnuts in shape.

  For them there were the shimmering green seas, sometimes riding mountain-high; but then all the greater challenge to courage and endurance. Beyond them lay the lands of weak peoples, living in softer climes and, therefore, easily to be overcome. From them many things could be had for the taking: strange garments made of soft, shiny material, iron helmets, strings of blue beads and ornaments of gold.

  Generally their forays were made against the nearer lands: Scotland, Ireland, England, the north coast of Germany; but many of Adam’s forbears and relatives had gone much further afield—to Spain, as he now realised, and by the Baltic rivers even down to Kiev in the Ukraine, to the shores of the Black Sea, and there made contact with the fabled peoples of the East who worshipped a prophet named Mohammet.

  In the Norselands they had long worshipped Thor, Odin and Freyja, and, when a great chieftain died, buried him, his ship and many articles of value in the sacred bogs which, after some months, sucked them under and made them part of the earth. But by this time—about A.D. 950—certain fearless men, humble and austere, had occasionally come out of the South preaching a new religion.

  It was of a Man-God
who had allowed himself to be crucified so that others should be absolved of their sins. The story was difficult to believe; for it did not make sense that a god should submit himself to pain but, as a concession to the possible malice he might indulge in if ignored, they had begun to couple his name, when in danger, with that of Thor.

  Then there came another strange development in Adam. Alternating with his night dreams of storm-tossed galleys at sea, burning villages in which he led his bearded henchmen to kill, rape and plunder, and the bleak, cold Norselands under winter snow, he found himself in utterly different surroundings. He was living in a country of mountains, volcanoes and vast forests where, down on the coast, there were palm trees, many exotic fruits and it was intensely hot. There were cities with great pyramids and splendid palaces. The people were brown-skinned, had hooked noses, black hair and high, sloping foreheads. They wore many-coloured cloaks with geometrical designs and, on days of celebration, the principal men among them put on gorgeous feather headdresses.

  Where this other country could be he had no idea, and his mother was equally mystified; but he knew that he had been immensely happy there and infinitely preferred it to the harsh, primitive life led by the Vikings in the inhospitable North.

  By the time Adam was fourteen, his older brothers and sisters were all working in the fishing-net factory; so the income of the family was, for people of their class and simple tastes, more than adequate. They all loved the roomy old house, had no desire to leave it for a city, and were leading a thoroughly contented life.

  Only one worry nagged at Jamie from time to time. The base of the cliff on which the house stood was being eroded by the sea. During the greater part of each year he rarely thought about it, but on nights when the winter storms raged and great waves thundered on the beach below, causing the old house to shudder, he became troubled and felt they really ought to leave it for a safer home. Yet, owing to its precarious position, it would be next to impossible to find a purchaser, and with only a few hundred pounds put by they could not buy another. As they had always lived rent-free, even to rent a house would entail so considerable a charge on their income that they would have to give up many small luxuries to which they had long been accustomed. Still worse, instead of this roomy old home with its pleasant garden, the only sort of home they could afford would be a small one in the village.