Blood Red City (7 page)

Streets, people, cars and buildings. But the drawings were indistinct, with not enough detail, despite the quantity of images, to identify where the place was. Obviously somewhere industrialised and modern – but it could be Britain, the USA, even Germany …

Over each image Number Seventeen drew the same symbol. Two triangles pointing in at each other, overlapped at the tips. Just an outline, but Hoffman could see the details. It was the same image he saw in his own mind, but his image was stronger, focused, detailed. He could see the runes carved into the stone the artefact was fashioned from.

But what was it? On the one hand he didn't want to show too much interest in it, afraid that might somehow give him away. On the other, Hoffman was desperate to know.

‘This shape,' he said to Kruger finally, ‘why does she draw this on every page?'

Kruger shrugged, inspecting the latest sheet. ‘Some sort of interference, perhaps? Or maybe it represents some defect in the creature's vision. Perhaps this is how cats see the world.' He smiled to show he was not being serious. The smile faded as he caught Hoffman's answering expression. ‘I don't know,' he admitted.

‘Does it represent something?' Hoffman asked. ‘Have you seen it before?'

Kruger looked back at the drawing he held. ‘There is something about it,' he admitted. ‘It did seem familiar when I first saw it. Something held in the Vault, perhaps.'

Hoffman shook his head. ‘There's nothing like that down there.' He had checked. As soon as the image had appeared in his own mind, he had checked.

‘Even so…' Kruger leafed back through the past few drawings, although the shape was identical on them all. ‘I'll tell you where it might be,' he said at last.

‘Yes?'

‘Have you seen the archive footage?'

‘Not all of it,' Hoffman admitted. ‘And a long time ago.'

‘Just a thought,' Kruger said. ‘But perhaps the answer lies in what happened back in 1936.'

*   *   *

One of the most surprising courses that Sarah took was ‘Deception Training'. What surprised her was not being taught how to lie convincingly, how to tell when someone else was probably lying, or the importance of apparent self-confidence and techniques to suppress any outward signs of fear or unease.

What surprised her was that the instructor was Leo Davenport. He smiled at her as their eyes met, but made no comment. So she too did her best to give no sign that they knew each other. Everyone else knew who Davenport was of course, which made it easier to keep up the pretence.

She made sure she was the last to leave at the end of the day, waiting until there were just the two of them.

‘Making a little extra on the side?' she asked. ‘I thought you were off on a film somewhere.'

‘Cover story,' Leo told her. ‘Brinkman knows I moonlight here from time to time. Part of the conditions of SOE letting me leave them to join Station Z in the first place. Between you and me, no actor can stay as busy as I claim to be. More often than not, the film or radio work you think I'm doing is down here bringing light and enlightenment to potential agents. Well,' he added, packing away his notes into a leather briefcase, ‘if what I teach ends up saving the life of just one of them, then it's time well spent.'

Sarah had to agree. ‘You down here for long?'

‘Heading back this evening. Just as soon as I've delivered my reports on each of today's students.'

‘Oh?' She raised her eyebrows.

‘Don't worry, you'll pass with flying colours.' He grinned suddenly. ‘And I am glad to see you're taking this new “Bare legs for Patriotism” campaign seriously.'

*   *   *

Ralph Rutherford didn't wait for an answer. He knocked on the study door, and went straight in. He knew immediately that he shouldn't have done.

The bookcase behind Crowley's desk had been pulled back from the wall on one side – hinged like a door. Before Rutherford could retreat, Crowley himself stepped out from behind the bookcase. He saw Rutherford immediately, and Crowley's deep-set eyes seemed to recede even further into his head as they narrowed.

Without comment, Crowley swung the bookcase closed again, concealing whatever lay behind it.

‘I'm sorry,' Rutherford said. ‘I shouldn't have come in.'

‘No,' Crowley agreed in a monotone. ‘But what's done is done.' He raised his hand so that Rutherford could see he was holding a heavy bracelet made of dull metal. ‘Is everyone ready?'

Rutherford nodded. ‘I was coming to tell you.' He smiled apologetically, trying to make light of his mistake. ‘So what else do you keep in there?'

Crowley didn't answer for a moment, and Rutherford felt suddenly cold and empty inside. Another mistake. Then the older man's long face cracked into a grim smile.

‘Pray that you never find out,' he said.

*   *   *

‘I promise you, it won't hurt,' Crowley had told her. Either he was wrong or he was lying.

The chanting reached its peak, echoing round the candlelit cellar. One of the robed women held a silver tray out in front of her. Her head was bowed so that her long, fair hair spilled over the tray, obscuring what was on it. She raised her head as the chanting stopped, revealing the bracelet.

Crowley lifted the bracelet from the tray, murmuring the words of power. He opened the bracelet and turned to Jane Roylston standing beside him. She raised her right arm and Crowley slid back the sleeve of her loose gown with one hand. With the other, he placed the bracelet over her forearm and snapped it shut.

The pain was immediate and intense, like fire burning, stabbing, and burrowing right through her. It started in the arm, shooting up to her neck then out through the whole of her body. Her vision swam as she struggled to contain the fire. When it slowly subsided, and her eyes refocused, she was somewhere else.

Crowley's words were faint and muffled, as if he was speaking to her from another room.

‘What do you see?'

She was close to the ground, padding along a deserted street. Rubbish blew across the pavement in front of her. Jane knew she was the cat again. But now she didn't just see through its eyes like she had back in February. She could feel what it felt, she knew what it knew. She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. Smelling the rancid decaying food and the traffic fumes.

When she opened them again, she was back in the cellar. The scent in her nostrils was the smoke from the candles. The bracelet burned on her arm, but she could cope. She was used to pain – she had Rutherford to thank for that. She could detach herself from it, use it to give her the strength to be herself.

‘Los Angeles.' She was surprised how strong and assured her voice sounded. ‘I was in Los Angeles. Whatever the Vril are searching for is there.'

‘Very good, Jane,' Crowley breathed. ‘Thank you. Do you know what it is?'

She shook her head. ‘Only what it looks like.'

At a gesture from their master, the robed figures bowed their heads and backed away. All except one.

‘Will you tell Brinkman?' Rutherford asked, throwing back his hood.

‘Perhaps. I haven't decided.'

‘I don't think we should.'

Crowley pushed back the hood of his own robe and stared back at Rutherford impassively. ‘I repeat,
I
have not decided.'

The discussion over, Crowley turned back to Jane, reaching for the bracelet on her arm. It was warm to the touch, the inlaid silver tracery glowing faintly in the dimly-lit cellar. And when he tried to unclasp it, the bracelet didn't give. It was like it was a single ring of solid metal welded to her arm above the wrist.

 

CHAPTER 5

The death of Reinhard Heydrich on 4 June cast a shadow over Wewelsburg. He had been injured in an assassination attempt in Prague on 27 May, taking a week to die from his infected wounds.

Himmler was in a foul mood. He had visited Heydrich in hospital two days before his death, and found the man in philosophical mood, resigned to his fate.

Hoffman didn't really care either way. He had never much liked Heydrich – the man was too full of himself, like so many of the higher-ranking Nazis. The blood on his hands was thicker than on most. This was the man who more than anyone else devised the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. But Hoffman knew that he would soon be replaced, and the reprisals against probably innocent Czechs would be brutal and extensive.

The only good thing to come out of it was that Himmler was preoccupied. Heydrich had been on his way to Berlin when he was attacked.

‘The Fuhrer had decided to reassign him to France,' Himmler had told Hoffman. Another irony, Hoffman thought – if the Czechs had only waited, they would have been rid of their ‘Protector'.

‘The situation in France has worsened,' Himmler went on. ‘The resistance there is gaining traction. We need a man of Reinhard Heydrich's drive and commitment to subdue the subversive elements entirely.'

Determined to have a say in how to fill the power vacuum left by Heydrich's death, Himmler departed for Berlin, leaving Hoffman in Wewelsburg. It was the first chance he'd had to follow up on Kruger's suggestion that the answers to his questions might lie in what had happened back in 1936 …

*   *   *

Station Z's continuing pursuit of the artefact Jane Roylston had seen in her visions took place largely below ground. In a vast chamber built beneath the Great Court of the British Museum, in the centre of London, Elizabeth Archer worked through days, nights and the increasingly infrequent air raids without distinguishing one from the others. When he was available, Leo Davenport helped, but for the most part it was a lonely and painstaking task. Exactly as Elizabeth liked it.

The department of the British Museum for which Mrs Archer was responsible was different from all the other departments in two important ways. First, its greatest treasures and most valued acquisitions had not been removed from the Museum to be stored safely down disused tube tunnels or Welsh coalmines. They were safer left where they were, in this deep, cavernous vault beneath the Museum's Great Court well away from prying eyes and – it was hoped – German bombs.

The second difference was that the Department of Unclassified Artefacts, ironically given its name, did not officially exist. It was a secret kept from all but a few. The artefacts for which Mrs Archer was curator did not fall into any other department's remit for the simple reason that they should not, according to accepted science or history, exist. Or if they did then they, or what they implied, were certainly too dangerous to be made public.

Over the years the collection had grown, stored in a vast chamber that even most of the Museum's staff had no idea existed. Shelves, crates, and boxes were home to ancient Egyptian canopic jars, manuscripts written in human blood, sophisticated electrical componentry found beneath an Iron Age burial mound, and much more. Almost all of it was meticulously catalogued, almost none of it fully understood.

Now old and increasingly frail, Elizabeth had worked here almost all her adult life, starting unofficially in the 1880s until finally she succeeded her husband George Archer as curator when he died. Her knowledge of the department's collection and of the more arcane corners of history and science was almost unparalleled.

If anyone could track down a mysterious artefact from a rough sketch drawn by a woman who saw it while in an occult trance, then it was Elizabeth Archer. Leo Davenport had no illusions about that – here, for once, he was relegated from lead role to spear-carrier. His task was to help, to encourage, and to keep Elizabeth company. But as a keen amateur historian and archaeologist, and as one who enjoyed academic discussion, it was a role he was very happy to accept.

Thursday 18 June 1942 was the day that Winston Churchill arrived in Washington for meetings with Roosevelt and the US military. And it was the day that the months of research paid off and Elizabeth Archer finally found what she was looking for.

‘I think this might be it,' she said with typical calm understatement, and so quietly that Davenport almost didn't hear her.

He hurried over to where she was working her way through a pile of ancient manuscripts and volumes. ‘Let me see.'

Elizabeth held Jane Roylston's drawing in one thin, bony hand. The skin was stretched tight and her veins stood proud of the skin. She held the drawing next to another, this one on yellowed parchment showing a similar artefact, but fixed at the end of a pole or rod.

Davenport nodded. There was certainly a distinct similarity. ‘You'll have to enlighten me, my ancient Greek isn't as good as yours.'

‘The Axe of Theseus,' she told him. ‘Or rather, just the axe-
head
in Miss Roylston's drawing. Probably all that survives, since the handle was wooden. If this is it.'

‘Oh this is it, all right,' Davenport told her. ‘An axe-head, yes…' He headed back to the table where he had been working.

‘What is it?' Elizabeth watched as he sorted through more modern papers and documents.

‘I should have paid more attention. These are catalogues and lists of artefacts in various museums and collections in Los Angeles.'

‘Where Crowley claims the Vril are hunting for our artefact.'

Davenport nodded. ‘I had Jack Warner tear himself away from his work in the studios for long enough to send over anything he could get his hands on. He thinks I'm mad. He's probably right. But he owes me a favour for stepping into the breach at the last minute when one of his so-called stars threw a tantrum and walked off set. Then there was that potentially embarrassing business with the showgirl and the slide trombone … Ah – here we are!' He pulled out a printed booklet and leafed through it. ‘I saw it listed as native American and didn't look to see if there was a photo as we were hunting for something more classical in origin. Yes.'