man, well dressed, hunched over on sticks but standing with as much dignity as he could muster, his face virtually indiscernible. Behind him was a single-storey shack made of corrugated metal, festooned with ivy and surrounded by lush vegetation.
‘This was taken outside the nunnery, in front of the shack where he lived for more than thirty years,’ Morgan continued. ‘The nuns looked after him, cared for him when he became too ill to fend for himself. In return he tended their gardens, did odd jobs. He’d been a choral scholar in his youth, and sang Gregorian music for them. He took in tramps, down-and-outs, fed and clothed them, put them up in his shack, the full Christian charity thing.’
‘Sounds a little messianic to me,’ Costas murmured.
‘I doubt whether he had any delusions about that,’ Morgan said. ‘But California in his day was the world of Steinbeck, of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, a whole subculture on the margins of society. And these were the ones he felt most at home with, outcasts, drifters, people who had forsaken their own background and upbringing, men and women like himself.’ He paused, and then spoke quietly. ‘What do you know about the Pelagians?’
‘We know there was an Everett family connection. His grandfather was a member of the New Pelagians, the Victorian secret society.’
‘Good. That saves a lot of explaining,’ Morgan replied, relaxing visibly. ‘In one of his letters he reveals his Pelagian beliefs, something he clearly wanted to talk about, and it explains a lot about where we’re going this afternoon. It’s as if he was living a double life, a devout ascetic Catholic on the one hand, and privately about the most radical heretic you can imagine.’
‘When was that letter written?’ Jack said.
‘About the end of the Second World War. He was already pretty ill by then, rambling a little, and there was no more correspondence.’
‘That explains it,’ Jack murmured. ‘I don’t think he would have risked revealing himself before then.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Okay. What do you know about his origins?’
‘It’s an amazing story. Born in the centre of the city of London, in Lawrence Lane, where his family had lived for generations. They were Huguenots, and his father was a prominent architect. Went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was a wrangler, achieving first-class Honours in Mathematics, and also studied languages. One of his tutors was the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He was offered a fellowship but turned it down, having promised his father that he’d go into partnership with him. Ten prosperous years as an architect, unexceptional, got married, had three kids, then his father died and he suddenly gave it all up, family, job, and disappeared to America.’
‘Any explanation given?’ Costas asked.
‘He’d converted to Roman Catholicism. His wife’s father was vehemently anti-Catholic. The father gave him an ultimatum, then bought him off. Seemingly as simple as that. The children’s education was paid for by their grandfather on the condition that they had no contact ever again with their father. A sad story, but not unique, given the antipathy that existed between Protestant and Catholic in England, even as late as the Victorian period.’
‘But we know the true reason he left,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘His father’s death, the will, his sudden overwhelming responsibility for the family heirloom. The question is why he came here, and what he did with it.’
‘Why convert to Catholicism?’ Costas said. ‘Was that part of the plan? Hide in the least likely place?’
Morgan paused. ‘It could have been. But it could have been heartfelt. He’d been Anglo-Catholic, and others like him had taken the step. Remember, the followers of Pelagius, those who traced their Christianity back to the earliest British tradition before Constantine the Great, were not necessarily great fans of the Church created by King Henry VIII either. What had discomfited them about the Roman Church, the ascendancy of the Vatican and the Pope, had an uneasy conterpart in the English monarch as head of the Church of England, divinely appointed. It seemed one step from the emperor as god, the grotesque apotheosis that had ruined ancient Rome. Whether pope or king many had a problem with the Church as a political tool.’
‘Yet for some like Everett, the Roman tradition of worship came to have more attraction,’ Jack said.
Morgan nodded. ‘The letters show that he still saw himself as a follower of Pelagius, and some of his theological views would have seemed heretical to Catholic purists. But the Roman liturgy, the rituals, above all the music, seemed to offer him great spiritual comfort.’
‘What Jeremy said in London yesterday about Sir Christopher Wren, missing the beauty of the old rituals,’ Costas murmured. ‘Speaking as a Greek Orthodox, I can understand that.’
‘That was what mattered to Everett. But his fundamental faith remained unchanged.’
‘And the thought police were a long way from a remote valley in Californa,’ Jack murmured.
‘I believe that was part of the plan. He came here to safeguard what he had with him, to a country where religious freedom had provided a haven for all Christian denominations. He still needed to be careful, to pick the time and place to reveal what he had, to find some way of passing on the secret.’
‘So he arrived here in 1912,’ Costas said.
Morgan nodded. ‘He sailed to New York, gained American citizenship, then worked his way west. After what Jeremy told me, I now believe that what he did took huge strength, a decision to preserve an extraordinary treasure not for his own benefit but for humanity, for the future. Once he’d been assured of his children’s upbringing, he made the greatest sacrifice a father can ever make, and walked away assuming he would never see them again.’
‘I only hope it was worth it,’ Costas said.
‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ Jack replied, turning to Morgan. ‘Do you know anything more about his life, anything that might give us clues?’
Morgan paused. ‘August 1914. Europe is torn apart. Britain mobilizes. The First World War begins.’
‘He goes to fight?’ Costas said.
Morgan nodded. ‘In the folly and horror of the First World War, people often forget that many at the time believed it was a just war, a war against impending evil. Everett felt morally compelled to join. Winston Churchill wrote about men like him.’ Morgan leaned back so he could read the inscription below a framed portrait on the wall, showing a young man in uniform. ‘“Coming of his own free will, with no national call or obligation, a stranger from across the ocean, to fight and die in our ranks, he had it in his power to pay tribute to our cause of exceptional value. He conceived that not merely national causes but international causes of the highest importance were involved, and must now be decided by arms.”’ Morgan paused. ‘That’s a friend of Churchill’s, Lieutenant Harvey Butters, Royal Field Artillery, an American killed on the Somme in 1916. J. Paul Getty was a great admirer of these men, Americans who volunteered to fight German imperialism even before the United States joined the war.’
‘So Everett returns to Europe,’ Costas said.
‘He went north to Canada and enlisted in the British Army. By early 1916 he was an officer in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, on the Western Front. In June that year he was gassed and wounded in a terrible battle at Hulluch, near Loos. During his recuperation his mathematical skills were discovered, and he was transferred to British Military Intelligence, the original MI1. He worked in the War Office in London, and then was seconded to Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty down the road, in a top-secret complex known as Room 40. He was a codebreaker.’
‘No kidding.’ Jeremy leaned forward, excited. ‘Cryptography.’
‘They were desperate for people like him,’ Morgan continued. ‘And he was recruited by intelligence just in time. What happened next may well have won the war.’
‘Go on,’ Jack said.
‘Ever heard of the Zimmerman telegram?’
‘Yes!’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘Of course! It’s what brought America into the First World War.’
‘A coded telegram dispatched in January 1917 by Arthur Zimmerman, German foreign secretary, to the German ambassador in Mexico,’ Morgan continued. ‘It revealed the German intention to begin unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping, and to help Mexico reconquer the southern States. The plan seems ludicrous now, but it was deadly serious then. The British intercepted and decrypted the telegram, then passed it on to the US ambassador to Britain. Sentiment in the United States was already pretty anti-German because of earlier U-boat sinkings that had killed Americans. A month after the telegram was deciphered, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany.’
‘Let me guess,’ Costas said. ‘The decipherment was done in the British Admiralty Room 40.’
