Dark Ages

Dark Ages

For the Glorious House of Sinanju

DestroyerBooks.com

With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.

Copyright

First published in the United States in 2005 by Worldwide

First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016

ISBN: 978-0-7515-6089-3

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2005 Warren Murphy

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Sphere

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

Contents

Dedication

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Epilogue

About the Authors

Chapter 1

The castle was burned to the ground.

Funny thing about that. Stone castles aren’t supposed to burn to the ground, but there was no denying that Loch Tweed Castle was reduced to ashes. The local gossip placed the blame on the late Mrs. Tweed-Smythe, who had taken to collecting newspaper clippings during the Second World War. What started as a hobby, the locals claimed, became an obsession. Mrs. Tweed-Smythe tried to keep it secret that she was filing away a copy of the newspaper, each and every day, year after year.

The locals who were employed by the late Mr. and Mrs. Tweed-Smythe reported on the unusual volume of newspapers received by the old couple. The London Times, the Peebles Shire News, plus the Edinburgh Evening News and some others. No one could explain the need for all those newspapers.

There had to have been twenty or thirty thousand daily newspapers stored in the old cellars of the castle. With that much fuel, the fire would burn on and on, until even the stone walls crumbled. It was the only reasonable explanation for the extent of the castle’s obliteration.

“So there’s no chance of finding any bones,” the locals decided as they discussed the matter endlessly. “There’s nothing left but dust.”

This made the tragedy even harder on the good people of the little Scottish village. Many of their sons and husbands and fathers—and a few wives—were driven mad during the recent troubles. They had stormed the castle, for reasons that were too foolish to believe and best left unsaid. They killed the poor old Tweed-Smythe and his helpless, daft wife, then burned the castle down around them. Nobody understood why it had happened. All they knew was that their loved ones were dead and gone, without even bones to bury.

The simple, mourning villagers were wrong. Old Mrs. Tweed-Smythe was as crazy as they came, but she didn’t hoard newspapers, and it wasn’t a stash of six decades of the Strathspey & Badenoch Herald that fueled the flames. The cause was the strategically placed phosphorus tablets. The secret researchers who worked below the castle placed the phosphorous to be sure that, if the castle burned up, it burned up real good.

The villages were also wrong about there being no bodies.

“Fuh! Christ!” The English gentleman got a face full of putrid air when he wrenched open the trapdoor. Something inside was decomposing.

The Englishman staggered away and vomited into the ashes, then rested with his hands on his knees.

This was awful. He shouldn’t have to do this kind of thing. There should be people to do it for him. All his life there were people to do it for him, whatever it was.

But he couldn’t trust anyone else, friends, family or coconspirators. Not with this. And he had to do it now, because surely some sort of a cleanup detail would be here soon to make absolutely sure the place had burned completely. Then his prize would be lost forever.

But did he have what it took? Of course he did! He was an Englishman—a true, old-fashioned, unflappable Brit.

But could he really do it?

Well, certainly. He had faced unpleasantness before and come through with flying colors. There had been the bit of murder down in Africa a few years back, and then the other bit of murder, also, coincidentally, in Africa, also a few years back. His constitution had been fully tested and hardened. Or so he had thought, until he had breathed in the fumes of the rotting corpses down there.