The Doomsday Testament (46 page)

‘When Walter Brohm returned to Germany and opened the casket he found in Tibet, he suspected he had in his hands something enormously significant: a substance hitherto unknown to man. As a scientist it was his duty to discover the properties of that material and, at a time of great upheaval for his country, their significance and potential value. Yet the very upheaval which spurred him proved to be his greatest obstacle, because with war on the horizon no one was interested
in
possibilities – a dream that promised some distant panacea – only in certainties.

‘But Walter Brohm, for all his faults, was a man with several admirable qualities, not the least of which were persistence and self-belief. Somehow, he found the time and the resources to carry out his experiments. We don’t know the mechanics of it, but it appears that some time before early nineteen forty-one he came to the conclusion that the Sun Stone consisted of what we now call Dark Matter. That led in turn to the possibility, even the probability, of creating controlled nuclear fusion.’

A stir ran through the men in the church at the mention of the goal which had brought each of them here.

‘Now, he was able to turn directly to Hitler for support, but his beloved Führer failed him. Why? Because Hitler feared the power the Sun Stone was capable of unleashing. But one man had no such reservations. Walter Brohm sold his soul to the devil and the devil’s name was Heinrich Himmler.’

He waited for some reaction to his words, but none came.

‘Brohm needed to operate in total secrecy. That meant the labour to build the bunker in the Harz Mountains had to be expendable. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Russian prisoners, Polish slave workers and, of course, Jews were rushed off to the gas chambers the moment the bunker was complete. But the killing didn’t stop there. Scientists and technicians. Even the SS guards. When the time came to close the bunker down . . . when
he
was on the very brink of another breakthrough . . . Walter Brohm sacrificed them all to save himself and his precious secret.

‘And, just as Brohm never questioned the ethics or the danger or the morality of what he was doing, he knew his value to the last dollar. Germany could burn, her soldiers could be slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands, German boys could throw themselves at tanks, but Walter Brohm and his work must survive. As the war ended, he dangled the Sun Stone under the noses of people with even fewer morals than himself, and they took it: hook, line and sinker.

‘Within a month, he would have been welcomed to America and given more resources than he could ever have dreamed of to complete his project. But for one man.

‘One man recognized the true danger of the Sun Stone and Walter Brohm. That man was my grandfather. He shot Brohm through the head and hoped that when he died, the Sun Stone would die with him. But, of course, it didn’t, which is why we are here.’

‘Enough of the history lesson, Saintclair. We came for the stone. Where is it?’

Jamie shook his head. ‘You had my grandfather killed, Mr Vanderbilt, and a Polish war hero called Stanislaus Kozlowski who was his friend. Who knows how many more have been sacrificed on the altar of your greed? You were even prepared to betray your own kind.’ Vanderbilt flinched as if someone had slapped his face. ‘Oh, yes, Mr Vanderbilt. You’re not the only one
who
can bug a telephone. I suspect you and your friend Frederick will have lots to talk about when this is over. But the more I discovered about Matthew Sinclair, the more certain I was that he would have died to keep the Sun Stone away from men like you.’

‘The old man was an accident and the Pole was in the way.’ Vanderbilt’s voice was almost a plea. ‘Don’t you understand that this is more important than life or death? The Sun Stone can assure the future of the planet and the survival of our civilization.’

Jamie ignored him and looked around the cathedral, meeting the eyes of Mr Lim and Frederick in turn, before focusing his attention on Sarah Grant. ‘I came to the Frauenkirche prepared to sacrifice everything to make sure Walter Brohm’s legacy remained unfulfilled. To do so I would have blown up this place and everyone in it.’ They looked at the building around them, wondering if they’d been lured into a trap, all except Sarah who had forgotten Howard Vanderbilt and whose eyes never left Jamie. ‘But fortunately, I don’t have to do that.’

‘What do you mean?’

Jamie stared at the industrialist, wondering what was going through his head. ‘When he left the bunker in February nineteen forty-five Walter Brohm believed he had chosen the safest place in Germany to hide the Sun Stone. Little old Dresden, famous for nothing more than its crockery and its culture. Untouched by six years of war and likely to stay that way. He knew every stone of this great church, because his father had been pastor here. In particular, he knew the stone vaults
below
it as no one else did. Where better to keep the Sun Stone and his research papers until they were needed? Brohm probably calculated it would be lunacy to waste resources on bombing Dresden at that late stage of the war.’ The church had gone very still. He could probably have whispered and they would still have heard him. ‘But Brohm forgot that lunacy and war go hand in hand. There’s some suggestion the decision was taken because the
Wehrmacht
was likely to retreat this way from Czechoslovakia, as it was then. The more likely reason is that somebody at Bomber Command was looking for another box to tick on his long list of targets.’

He heard a grunt of bitter laughter. It wasn’t surprising that Frederick had worked out what was coming. Frederick was German, and Germans knew all about the history of Dresden.

‘Walter Brohm believed Dresden was the ideal place to keep the Sun Stone safe. He was right . . . up to a point. That point came on the night of February the thirteenth nineteen forty-five, probably about a week after the stone was brought here, when a formation of 723 Lancaster bombers proved him wrong. The bull’s-eye for the raid was to be a sports stadium about three hundred metres from here in the Aldstadt, but the Pathfinder mosquitoes dropped their target markers over the cigarette factory about a mile to the east. If every plane had dropped its bombs on target, everything would have been fine, but there was a phenomenon during the war called bomb creep, where every subsequent crew tended to drop its bombs a little further back than those that had gone
before
. Bomb creep resulted in an arrowhead pattern one and a quarter miles long and one and three-quarter miles broad at its widest point. In the next twenty-four hours that arrowhead would become the most dangerous place on earth. The first RAF attack would be followed by a second, a few hours later, and a daylight raid by B17 bombers of the USAAF. Twenty-seven hundred tonnes of high explosive and incendiaries rained down from planes flying at eight thousand feet and the flames of Dresden could be seen by air crew from as far as five hundred miles away. In the middle of the arrowhead was the Old Town; in the middle of the Old Town was the Frauenkirche. At least twenty-five thousand people were killed, crushed beneath falling buildings or incinerated in the firestorms that followed.’ He paused. ‘Nothing was left but rubble.’

Mr Lim appeared to be praying. Frederick’s vengeful eyes never left the back of Vanderbilt’s head. Sarah and the industrialist stared at the church around them.

‘Oh, yes, this too,’ Jamie assured them. ‘The Frauenkirche may look like an eighteenth-century Renaissance masterpiece, but it was built – or rebuilt – as an exact replica of the original only after the Communists were kicked out and it was finally completed in two thousand and five. All that’s left of the old Frauenkirche are those little black stones you see decorating the exterior. The church that was here in nineteen forty-five was blown to bits by at least one four-thousand-pound blockbuster bomb. The RAF in their schoolboy fashion called them Cookies and
they
were designed to bury themselves deep in the earth before exploding. They were among the most destructive weapons of that uniquely destructive war. The bomb reduced everything, including the vaults of the Frauenkirche, to dust and bricks. Whatever was down there ended up with the millions of tonnes of rubble from the rest of Dresden.’

Vanderbilt’s face had turned ash grey. ‘What happened to it?’ he whispered. ‘What happened to the Sun Stone?’

Jamie took Sarah Grant’s hand and she didn’t resist as he walked her steadily towards the doorway. No one tried to stop them. Through the door he could see the flashing lights of half a dozen parked police cars. He didn’t envy Lotte Muller the job of cleaning up the diplomatic mess, but the pictures and phone transcripts from Mr Lim should help.

‘It’s out there, Howard,’ he continued. ‘The rubble from the old city was used to build the foundations for the new Dresden, and to pave the roads for a couple of hundred miles around. About half a million people are living on top of the Sun Stone.’

They emerged into the early evening sunshine.

‘It’s all yours.’

Special thanks go to my friends Shirley and Kenny Allan for lifting the lid on the beautiful city of Dresden and keeping me straight on my German, and to fellow writer Gabriele Campbell for helping me negotiate my way through the Harz mountains. Heinz Hohne’s masterful book
The Order of The Death’s Head
gave me the fine detail I needed on the world of the SS and Matthew Sinclair’s diary probably owes more to
With the Jocks
by Peter White, one of the best memoirs of the Second World War by a fighting soldier, than any other history I read. Finally to Simon my editor and his fantastic team at Transworld, and to Stan, my agent at Jenny Brown in Edinburgh.

James Douglas
is the pseudonym of a writer of popular historical adventure novels. This is the first thriller to feature art recovery expert, Jamie Saintclair.