The Dakota Cipher

‘Is that any likelier than Yggdrasil and Asgard? Your science is just the myth of our times, supplying a beginning. Aye, we’ve forgotten as much as we’ve learnt, almost as though we’ve had a blow to the head that obliterated vital memory. Then the Knights Templar began to rediscover the truth. I’m on that path, and you’ve appeared to help me.’

‘Appeared, or dragooned by you and your mad Danes?’

‘Our being here, on this pitching ship, was foreordained.’

‘By whom?’

‘That’s the mystery, isn’t it?’

All nonsense, of course, but I suppose it was just as well the voyage gave him time to jabber and me to rest. By the time we’d parted company with Pauline on the coast highway in France I was wrung out as a dishcloth, had a cramp in one leg, and was thoroughly unsettled by a visit from a squadron of French dragoons sent to look for me after the ambush of my carriage. They caught up with us just a few miles on our detour towards Brittany. I was frantically pulling on my boots, hoping to outrun what I assumed was General Leclerc’s vengeance, when a lieutenant saluted me through the coach door as if I wore epaulettes. He handed me an envelope. ‘Compliments of the First Consul, sir. You slipped away before orders could be issued.’ He carefully kept his eye off Pauline.

‘Orders?’ Was it back to Temple Prison as an unrepentant fornicator of the consul’s sister? Or simply a quick firing squad in the woods?

No, it was a directive, in Napoleon’s quick hand, ordering me to wait on the coast for final instructions before departing for America.

‘You’re not here to arrest me?’ I sounded incriminating, but I’m not used to such luck.

‘Our orders are to see you to a public coach and escort Pauline Bonaparte back to Paris,’ the man said, his face a careful mask. ‘We are to ensure that everyone is on their correct path.’

‘So gallant is your concern, Lieutenant,’ said Pauline, who at least had the decency to redden.

‘The concern is your brother’s.’

Once again Napoleon was demonstrating his command of the situation. I was to be hurried off to America, and Pauline back to her home. Frankly, it was time to get distance from the girl. Nor, once I was spent, did I feel entirely moral about my performance. Conquering a Bonaparte was not as satisfying a revenge for my rough treatment as I’d imagined. Once again I wondered if I’d learnt anything from my tumultuous adventures; if I was, in fact, impregnable to sense and good fibre. ‘He is a governor that governs his passions, and he a servant that serves them,’ old Ben had lectured. Bonaparte thought too much about the future, I of the moment, and Bloodhammer of the past.

So Magnus and I, tired and reprieved, climbed down from the stage and gave fumbled salutes to the dragoons. My new companion was tipsy from having warmed himself with a bottle of aquavit he’d smuggled from Mortefontaine with more sly initiative than I’d have given him credit for. We waved Pauline off to Paris, caught a public stage at first light, and eventually arrived at the coast like two vagabonds. With my rifle and tomahawk and Magnus’s map case our only luggage, we were about as inconspicuous as a gypsy circus – but seaports draw odd men, so no one questioned us too closely when we showed enough francs. The Breton rebel Georges Cadoudal was rumoured to have returned to France from England to conspire against Napoleon, and we could have been anything from Bourbon sympathisers to the secret police. Accordingly, we were left alone.

We found a brig for New York that was waiting for a break in the weather and the British blockade. The foul season was the ideal time to slip out.

In Le Havre, my decision to take a break from France was reinforced when I received further instructions and one hundred silver American dollars, minted in Mexico, from the French foreign minister, Talleyrand himself. He informed me that the American commissioners were writing to my government to alert them of my coming. He added that France itself had a particular interest in my mission. Talleyrand wrote:

It is in the utmost confidence and secrecy that I must inform you that agreement has been reached with Spain to return to France her rightful possession of Louisiana, a territory four times the size of my nation that, as you know, was lost in the Seven Years’ War. Announcement of this accord will probably be made early next year. The government of France has the keenest interest about conditions in Louisiana, and expects that your investigations with the Norwegian Magnus Bloodhammer may lead you to that territory. I must also advise that rumours of an amatory nature make it advisable for you to be at some distance from Paris, out of the sight of Pauline Bonaparte’s husband and brothers, for a while.

It’s about as easy to keep a secret about a tryst in France as it is a sea profit in Boston, and no doubt my absence with Pauline rivalled my fireworks performance as theatre gossip. Best to set sail.

As a confederate of the First Consul, I hope you will be able to (1) ascertain if the Norwegian’s theories are at all true, (2) inform us and your own country of Britain’s designs on the northwest frontier, and (3) explore the possibility of new alliances between the Indian tribes of that region and France, so as to secure the sovereignty of both French holdings and the border integrity of your own United States. Our two nations, I trust, will always live in harmony along the boundary of the Mississippi River. In return, I enclose a preliminary payment for expenses, and a letter and seal to gain you the assistance of any French representatives you may encounter in your travels. Make no mistake: France’s enemy, England, is the enemy of your young nation as well. Treat all British representatives with the utmost caution and suspicion, and work towards the rebuilding of the natural alliance between our two republics.

– Talleyrand

Louisiana back to France? I dimly remembered, from my reading of aged American newspapers, about Spanish threats of closing New Orleans to American shipping down the Mississippi, choking off the west’s only access to the sea. If Napoleon had somehow bamboozled the Spanish into giving New Orleans back, the United States and France might find themselves in commercial partnership, with me neatly in the middle. Surely there was money to be made!

All I had to do was stay friends with all sides.

CHAPTER TEN

So we put to sea, and if the ship had once stopped heaving up and down so distractingly I might have had the presence of mind to leverage my secret knowledge into a fortune. Instead, I had to listen to the fairy tales of Magnus, who like all fanatics seemed to live as much in his imaginary world as the real one. He displayed that unwavering conviction that always accompanies meagre evidence, because to admit anything might be untrue would be to undermine his entire edifice of belief. He was entertaining, but eventually I had to interrupt his yarns about drunken gods and sly elves.

‘Enough, Magnus!’ I cried. ‘I’ve been assaulted in a wine cellar, nearly incinerated by fireworks, forced to flee to America in weather that could sink a continent, and am allied to a lunatic who babbles about a mysterious map. What is going on?’

He looked about. ‘What lunatic?’

‘You!’

‘Me! The man who saved you at Mortefontaine?’

‘Magnus, you said those were your enemies, not mine. I have nothing against Denmark. I could barely find Norway on a globe. I don’t care what the numbers of a roulette wheel add up to, or coincidences in 1776, and I’m not entirely certain what we’re supposed to do when we reach the United States.’

‘Uncertain? You, the famous Freemason?’

‘I’m not a famous Freemason. My late friend Talma took me to a lodge meeting or two.’

‘Do you deny the significance of October 13^th, 1309?’

‘The significance of what?’

‘Come, Ethan, don’t be coy. Let’s agree that the events of that black Friday the Thirteenth were momentous for world history.’

Now I remembered. That was the night the French king Philip the Fair had arrested hundreds of Knights Templar, two centuries after the order’s founding in Jerusalem during the Crusades. My old jailer, Boniface, had told stories about it. Grand Master Jacques de Molay, unrepentant at the end, had gone to the stake in 1314, vowing correctly that both Philip and the pope behind him would follow him to the grave within a year. Philip had allegedly tried to plunder an organisation both mysteriously rich and annoyingly independent, and found frustratingly little to