The Doomsday Testament (11 page)

A timid knock at the door interrupted his thoughts and he looked up as a lovely dark-haired girl of about nineteen carried a tray into the office.

‘Your coffee, Herr Direktor.’

‘Thank you, Hannah, that is kind of you.’ He smiled. She truly was beautiful. Even wearing the dowdy, striped grey shift, Hannah Schulmann radiated a kind of inner tranquillity that always made him feel at ease with himself. And she was as talented as she was pretty; he had never heard the piano played more movingly than when her supple fingers moved over the keys. Her presence in his bed had made the last few months almost bearable.

The girl flinched as a guard dropped a box of files and he stood up and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t be frightened, my dear. You must go and join the others now.’

He watched her leave and experienced a painful twinge of what, in another man, might have been conscience.

It had been the late summer of 1941 before he had felt confident enough to approach Himmler
with
his findings. He found it difficult to think of Heini as the bogey man who had terrorized Europe. The intense, myopic stare and the unnatural stillness could be unnerving at first, but the Heinrich Himmler he had come to know was an affable dinner companion who called him by the familiar du and had always shown a genuine interest in his work. Himmler, who delighted in anything mysterious or enigmatic, had been fascinated by the Changthang casket, and when Brohm presented the paper outlining his discovery’s possible potential the owl’s face shone with excitement. As the panzers probed the suburbs of Leningrad, threatened Moscow and completed the encirclement of Kiev, Brohm received a call telling him to report to Templehof aiport. Two hours later he was on a Junkers 252 transport to Rastenburg for a personal interview with Adolf Hitler at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters. It was the only time he had met the Führer and he had emerged both hugely impressed and hugely disappointed. With the war all but won, Hitler had been at his most affable. In person, he had none of the enormous presence he projected at the great rallies Brohm had attended, but the scientist found himself mesmerized by the aura of power surrounding the man. To meet him was to truly believe. Hitler had clearly been well briefed on the subject and had immediately grasped its potential, but, just when Brohm believed he had
received
agreement to proceed, the Führer had called a third man into the room. The moment he recognized the visitor, Brohm realized he had been outmanoeuvred. Six years earlier Werner Heisenberg had been involved in a scientific scandal that had brought him into conflict with Himmler. Brohm had supported his chief and Heisenberg had been fortunate to survive. Now he was back in favour and Brohm knew he was in trouble.

Heisenberg went over the arguments for and against Brohm’s project and then pointed out the potentially catastrophic consequences of an error. Brohm had been forced to acknowledge the hazards and argued that no scientific experiment was without risk, but he knew he had already lost the battle. The Führer had brusquely shaken his head, too timid to truly appreciate the capabilities of what Brohm was offering. He left the meeting in a rage. Hitler had cost him his place in history.

But he had underestimated Heinrich Himmler.

When he met Himmler two weeks later, the Reichsführer-SS had been at his most charming. Since the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the Führer had a great deal to occupy his mind and could not be expected to oversee every tiny detail of national policy. Brohm’s project would go ahead, but under the auspices of the SS-WVHA, the economic and main administration office of Himmler’s vast organization. It was only now that
Brohm
was given an insight into just how vast. The SS had developed from Hitler’s bodyguard into a state within a state and with the financial power to match. After years of fighting for funding and laboratory time, Brohm now had everything he wanted, and more. More staff and more funding meant he could make greater progress, which in turn increased the project’s importance. When the bombs began to fall on Berlin the scientists and engineers had been evacuated to the bunker, the most advanced research facility in the world, and Brohm had been able to experiment on a scale that would previously have been unimaginable. And with each experiment he moved a step closer. Closer to harnessing the power of the stars.

And just as he had it within his grasp, it was over.

He felt a surge of anger that restored his resolve. His work was too important to stop now. Much more important than petty considerations like nationhood.

‘The Sun Stone is ready to be transferred, Herr Brigadeführer.’

Brohm looked up at his aide, Ziegler, in the doorway. He nodded. ‘Good, and you have my personal documents and records?’

‘Yes, Herr Brigadeführer. They have been placed in fireproof security boxes as you ordered.’

‘Very well.’

He could trust Ziegler. The Sun Stone and
the
records, the bargaining chips that would assure his future, would travel by convoy to the armoured train which would take them to their final secret destination. The Ivans and the Amis were closing in. Free Germany was like a piece of ham between two slices of pumpernickel and the ham was getting thinner with every hour. Still, he’d left enough time for the move. He would make his own personal arrangements for escape. It was time to go.

The grey-clad commander of the security detachment appeared at the door, his face red from the exertions of the morning and one of the new Sturmgewehr automatic rifles on his shoulder.

‘Shall we take the Jews outside?’

Brohm considered for a moment. The Jews. Such an all-encompassing, unsatisfactory and entirely fatal classification. In reality many of the three hundred scientists, engineers and technicians in the barracks below were men and women he had worked with long before the war, people he had come to like and respect. People like Hannah.

‘No, do it where they sit. It will cause them less anxiety.’ The SS man frowned; what did he care about anxiety? They were only Jews. Nobody had bothered about anxiety on the Ostfront. Brohm saw the look. ‘It will save time,’ he suggested. ‘And this place will make a very appropriate tomb.’ The frown was replaced by puzzlement. ‘They will be like three hundred of the pharaoh’s servants,
buried
in memory of his achievements,’ Brohm explained wearily.

He risked one last look at the painting on the wall. A pity, he would have liked to take the Raphael. It had been a birthday gift from poor old Heydrich, who had somehow, in his sinister way, prised it from Frank’s grubby little fingers. But he wasn’t going to escape Germany’s Gotterdamerung carrying a large piece of wooden board. He would be travelling light; just his new identity and the secret that would change the world.

JAMIE’S HEART BEAT
faster as he studied the drawing. Something about it felt familiar. It was in the shape of a wheel, with nine articulated spokes that met in a geometric pattern in the centre. Below were three words –
In Faust’s spuren
– which, if Jamie had the translation correct meant, ‘In Faust’s footsteps’, and a date: 1357. They obviously had some sort of significance, but it was the larger significance of the symbol that drew Jamie’s attention. The composition looked vaguely South American; some sort of abstract solar symbol? But he wasn’t dealing with Aztecs or Mayans, he was dealing with Nazis. He ran a finger slowly down one of the articulated spokes and felt the room go cold. The almost savage way it changed course drew another shape in his mind; a sinister emblem that had brought terror and darkness to two continents.

He tapped a few words on the keyboard of his laptop and hit enter. Plenty of options. He placed the arrow of his mouse over the word ‘Images’ at the top of the screen,
clicked
and hit enter again. This time his screen filled with monochrome thumbnail pictures of soldiers. They stood in their long, orderly ranks, hard-eyed, unsmiling faces showing what? Determination? Discipline? Severity? The determination of the fanatic. The discipline of the automaton. The unbending severity of the executioner. He saw the picture he was looking for, but curiosity made him ignore it for the moment. He double-clicked to enlarge a photograph in the top row. Some kind of parade. They had been chosen for their square-jawed features and Nordic perfection; proud, confident, blood untainted by any undesirable element. Even a missing tooth would have denied a man a place in this picture, taken around 1939. Their defenders claimed that, man for man, they were the finest soldiers the world had ever known. Their detractors decried them as butchers who killed without a shred of conscience. Their superiors had demanded ‘unparalleled hardness’ and they had willingly provided it. They had died in their thousands and their tens of thousands in the snowy wastes of the Russian steppe, in the hedgerows of Normandy, the forests of the Ardennes and the burning ruins of Berlin.

The mouse hovered over two more photographs, but he didn’t have to enlarge them. He knew the precise wording that hung below the stark iron gateway in what had been some Polish backwater before it had become a factory of death. And who would ever forget the boy in flat cap and short trousers as he raised his hands in surrender to the laughing jackbooted warrior liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto?

One
final picture. A close-up, head-and-shoulders shot of a uniformed man with wide-set eyes and narrow, fine-boned aesthetic features. It was a medieval face, the face of a scholar, or of a monk, but where a monk’s eyes might show compassion this man’s lacked any semblance of pity.

The men in the pictures all had one thing in common. They wore the twin silver lightning flashes of the SS – the
Schutzstaffel
– Heinrich Himmler’s private army.

Jamie looked again at the symbol on the back of the map. Yes, it was there. The same coarse, almost brutal, simplicity of design, as if they had been created by the same hand with the help of a blunt bayonet.

A sharp knock at the door interrupted his train of thought and he felt a momentary flutter of panic that he instantly dismissed. Idiot. They wouldn’t knock. If you’re not safe here where are you safe? Still. He picked up the heavy crystal whisky glass and wrapped it in his fist. With a last glance around the room he reached for the handle . . . hesitated, retraced his steps and retrieved the journal and the escape map and put them in the nearest drawer. Only then did he open the door.

‘Hey, how are you?’ A grinning face peered through the narrow gap and Jamie relaxed his death grip on the glass. Simon’s eyes were drawn to the movement and he waved a tawny bottle with a white label. ‘I see you’re prepared. Couldn’t manage the Macallan, but I thought you might fancy something a little more robust. Islay’s finest. Enough peat to bury you in.’

Jamie waved his friend inside, accepting a bottle of
whisky
almost as old as he was. Simon had always been generous, but even for him this was a little excessive. ‘I don’t suppose you’re here for a cup of tea?’

Simon surveyed the semi-organized chaos with a practised eye. ‘I doubt if you could find the pot even if I did, old boy. No, I’ll have whatever medicinal tincture you’re having. I just came round to make sure you were OK.’

Jamie searched for a second cleanish tumbler. Simon wandered the room casually, picking up a book here, surveying a painting there. His eye settled on a tank of tropical fish that Jamie had bought a few weeks earlier in a moment of misguided enthusiasm.

‘Haven’t these bloody things died yet? My goldfish never lasted more than a week.’

Jamie looked up. ‘They’re not goldfish, they’re freshwater exotics.’

‘Christ, what’s that?’ Simon’s attention had switched to a vividly coloured rural scene in a plain frame. ‘Planning to sell it?’

‘No. I like it.’

‘I would if I were you. The market for contemporary regional tosh is moving in the wrong direction.’

Even at university Simon’s interest in art had been purely economic. He treated it the way he now treated the stocks and bonds he dealt with each day at his bank, as a commodity to be bought and sold at a profit.

‘Are you still going to the gym?’ Jamie asked innocently.

‘What?’ Simon blinked like a startled owl behind his designer spectacles. ‘Oh, this?’ he said guiltily, running
a
hand over the bulge above his belt. ‘Couple of weeks of circuits will soon get rid of it. I’m considering hiring a personal trainer, what do you think?’

Jamie grinned. ‘Can’t do any harm, especially if she’s a looker. Who needs circuits when you could be chasing a plump Lycra-encased backside round the park for an hour? Cheers!’ He handed the other man a glass filled to halfway with glowing amber.

Simon sighed as he took his first sip of the malt. ‘Christ, I needed that. How’s your research going?’ The tone was casual enough, but the words gave Jamie the odd sensation he was in the room with someone else. It only lasted a split second before he mentally discarded the thought, but it had definitely existed. ‘Only I couldn’t help noticing the picture on your computer,’ Simon continued, waving his glass at the spare room. ‘The uniform seems familiar.’

Jamie led him through just as the screen-saver turned the monitor blank. He tapped the mouse and restored the aristocratic face with the cold, certain eyes and an expression a calculated millimetre from a sneer.

‘Fuck!’ Simon stepped away from the computer as if it was contaminated.

‘You recognize him, then?’

All the bonhomie had been stripped from Simon’s voice by the image on the screen. ‘The Devil Incarnate. I’m a true Brit, albeit of the mongrel variety, Jamie, but first and foremost I’m a fucking Jew. You’d never forget the man who sent your grandparents and eighteen of your other relatives to the gas chamber. Reinhard
Heydrich
. If Hitler was the chairman of Holocaust PLC, Heydrich was the chief executive. You know he was the first person to use the words
Final Solution
?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

Simon drained the rest of his whisky in a single swallow. ‘A complete bastard of the first water and a remarkably thorough man. Even Himmler feared him. Once he had his murder squads up and running in Poland and Russia, he banned Jews from the occupied western countries from emigrating and effectively made Europe their prison. When he had them trapped, he created an enormous Nazi killing machine that first processed, then murdered them. At the Wannsee Conference he estimated that they would have to “deal with” eleven million Jews. Fortunately, I suppose, he could only get his hands on half of them. When he was killed in Prague the Nazis murdered or deported thousands of innocent people in retaliation, but ask any Jew and he’ll tell you it was worth the sacrifice. Look,’ he placed his empty glass beside the computer, ‘this has put me off my liquor. I have to go now, but let me know if you need anything. Enjoy the whisky.’