The Doomsday Testament (8 page)

2 May 1945 As the German army began to collapse in front of us I was summoned to Major Fitzpatrick and briefed for one final mission
. . .

‘
YOU CALL YOURSELF
professionals? I could have picked a child from the street to do a better job.’ The figure behind the desk stared at the two men in a way that made them feel as if he was sizing up their organs for a transplant. They called themselves Campbell and McKenzie, but their closest contact with Scotland had been through the mouth of a whisky bottle. McKenzie raised a hand to gingerly touch his bruised nose, but dropped it when he noticed the pale lips tighten in the unlined, expressionless face. It was a face that might have belonged to an albino, but for the eyes, which were points of lifeless pewter. When you looked again you realized that the odd colouring of the skin was less a matter of pigment than of a life lived in permanent shadow. Despite the setback at the target house the two men regarded themselves capable of handling any situation that could be resolved by force, but from the first they had sensed something in this man that made them wary. A dangerous stillness that took them back
to
days in South Armagh. Days when shadowy men whose abilities they’d learned to respect appeared from nowhere for operations that resulted only in clean kills. The leaden eyes pinned them remorselessly as the pale man continued in a deliberate, faintly accented English. ‘This was to be a discreet, low-profile operation with minimal disturbance to the house and no – I repeat, no – violence. Yet what do I read on the police computer? A man we may require to cultivate is assaulted and taken to hospital with concussion. The property ransacked and overrun with investigators – now wondering why someone would go to so much trouble without stealing a single item. Any fool would have understood the need to take a few pieces of jewellery or the television set.’

‘He hit Mac and—’ Campbell, the man who had brained Jamie with his grandfather’s ceramic tea caddy, was silenced by a raised hand.

‘That is of no consequence now. What matters is that you will stay within reach of the grandson, but not so close that he might be alerted. If the journal exists, the chances are that this Jamie Saintclair now has it. For the moment, we will maintain electronic surveillance. When the opportunity arises you will enter his apartment and his office and carry out a search. Do you believe you can achieve that, gentlemen . . . discreetly and without violence?’

The question was delivered softly, but the unspoken threat was clear. The two men nodded.

‘Then we’ll say no more for the moment.’

When they left, he stared at the door for a long time.
Not
quite sure. It might be better to be safe than to take the chance. He picked up a secure satellite phone from the desk and punched a speed-dial button. It was answered after two rings.

‘Well?’

‘I think it may have been a mistake not to bring in our own team.’

The man at the other end gave a faint snort of irritation. ‘We talked about that. The risks outweighed the advantages.’

‘Perhaps we are pushing forward too quickly and too hard,’ the pale man persisted. ‘We have waited a long time for this opportunity. What is another few months, even years, when balanced against the possible rewards?’

They had also talked about that, and he knew bringing up the subject would annoy the other man. Old men were always in a hurry, trying to make up for the time they had wasted in their youth and fearful that their next breath might be their last. Ever ready to snatch at opportunities. He was different. He had been taught patience from the day he was born, groomed to take advantage of the chance that might be about to present itself.

His listener chose to ignore the question. ‘What are your specific concerns about these men, Frederick?’

The younger man smiled, amused by the use of his work name. Their dealings were conducted by single-use satellite phones using software that scrambled their voices, but the employment of the name was still a
threat
and they both knew it. ‘They were recommended to me by a security company on the basis of their local knowledge and past record. I fear their talents may have been exaggerated.’

‘They dealt with the old Pole discreetly enough.’

‘That is true, but I questioned them again about Saintclair’s grandfather. Campbell claimed it was an accident, but I think there may be more to it than that. They knew how vital he was to the operation. They knew he was an old man. They should have treated him with more caution. Either they were careless or they overstepped the mark. Campbell says he squirmed free as they were taking him upstairs. Perhaps that is true and perhaps it is not, but the fact is it should never have happened.’

‘Do you believe lasting damage has been done?’

‘No,’ Frederick admitted. ‘The police are treating it as a household accident and are not linking it to the burglary. There is no reason Saintclair should be alerted.’

‘But?’

‘But perhaps Mr Campbell and Mr McKenzie should be given a demonstration of the consequences of any further mistakes.’

The shortest of pauses. ‘Arrange it.’ Despite the scrambler, he could hear the grim smile in the other man’s voice. ‘What is your feeling about the journal?’

Frederick frowned, annoyed by the question. He didn’t deal in feelings. He dealt in facts. That was what made him different from the other man. For the moment, he was the junior, but there was no telling when that might
change
. ‘If,’ he placed heavy emphasis on the word, ‘the journal exists, then Saintclair is the way to get to it.’

‘Very well.’ Were the words followed by a period of hesitation, or merely contemplation? ‘As long as Saintclair is useful to us I want him protected. Once we have what we want, get rid of him.’

JAMIE’S HEART QUICKENED
. He was closing in on Operation Equity.

I have a great deal of respect for Fitzpatrick. He has led three Jedburgh operations in France and Holland, and I know only too well the kind of strength, physical and mental, that is required to survive that kind of test. Still, it is difficult to describe the loathing I felt for him at that moment
.

For weeks we have been swanning around Germany in the wake of the Allied spearhead, strong-arming German mayors and interrogating hundreds of suspect men and women. Strange that not one of them had ever been a Nazi, in a country where the majority of people who weren’t Nazis ended up in the awful concentration camps we’ve liberated. After Belsen my German tastes like vomit in my mouth. We still lose a few men to ambushes and accidents, but we regard this holiday from
the
war as just recompense for our earlier efforts, which were considerable. Compared to Malestroit and Arnhem this was a picnic
.

Frowning, Jamie tapped the word ‘Jedburgh’ into the laptop Gail had brought to the hospital. Pages and pages on a quaint historic market town in the Scottish Borders. Puzzled, he added the word ‘operations’ . . . and was invited into a deadly new world.

Jedburgh was the code name for small teams of highly skilled clandestine soldiers, operated by the Special Operations Executive and the American OSS, who were dropped by parachute into Occupied France prior to the D-Day invasion. This also explained the reference to the meeting in Baker Street – the location of SOE headquarters. Unlike SOE’s undercover agents, the first priority of the Jedburghs, normally a three-man unit composed of experienced special forces soldiers from the United States, Britain and the host country, was not to gather information or carry out sabotage. Instead, their primary purpose was to liaise with local resistance movements and provide guidance, training and access to weapons. Sometimes this would involve a few dozen men, but in one well-recorded case, in Brittany, more than a thousand resisters supported by Jedburgh teams and a squadron of French SAS, had fought an entire German regiment to a standstill.

Now Jamie knew how Matthew had been employed after he returned from North Africa. He could only imagine the strain of hiding for weeks on end behind
enemy
lines, under the constant threat of betrayal or discovery. The Jeds dropped in uniform, but that meant little after Hitler’s ‘Commando Order’ in October 1942, which sentenced captured Allied raiders to death without trial. The war had almost run its course, but now they had a new and unwanted mission to complete.

Fitz at least had the grace to look embarrassed when he handed over our orders. Two three-man teams, codenames Dietrich and Edgar, commanded by Captain Matthew Sinclair, will proceed south-west to a given map reference, where they will be issued with further orders. This mission, Operation Equity, is to be treated with the utmost secrecy – which I took as the greatest insult of all, since I have been operating in the utmost secrecy for the last four years. I should tell him I am the wrong man for this job. That I am burned out and numb, and that I welcome the numbness because it protects me from the man I have become. The war has drained me of all humanity. I feel like a boxer at the end of a fifteen-round contest. I have nothing more to give
.

What is war? War is chaos and stupidity as the norm; hunger as a constant companion; death – non-judgemental, arbitrary, messy death – ever-present and around every corner; a callous disregard for life or the living, ingrained so deep a more religious man would call it evil. And of course hatred. Hatred for the people who made
you
like this, hatred for the enemy who wants to kill you, hatred for the bovine civilians too stupid to run away, hatred for the mines and the bombs and the bullets and the shells and the flame-throwers, that will castrate, mutilate, eviscerate or incinerate, just state your preference. Oh, yes, you can hate an inanimate object, just as you can hate the dead for making you kill them. You hate the tanks and the planes and the guns, as long as they are the other side’s tanks and planes and guns. You very quickly learn to love your own tanks and planes and guns in the same way you love the soft, red Saxon earth that crumbles beneath your entrenching tool to give you sanctuary, right up to the moment it buries you alive. You hate the trees, for giving shelter to the enemy and for those great, jagged, TNT-propelled splinters that can tear out a man’s eyes or his throat. You hate the birds for giving away your position. You hate the weather, in all its many forms, because heat and thirst can kill you just the same as damp and cold. You hate your friends, because you know they are going to die all too soon. But most of all you hate yourself
.

I could tell him all that, but I won’t because I know it won’t do any good. Whatever the mission, I am the best man to complete it. I know it as well as he does
.

Jamie paused and re-read the last passage. He had believed he had no illusions about war, but the war Matthew fought was one he struggled to comprehend. This was victory, the Allies had cut deep into the Third Reich and the outcome was no longer in doubt. Yet his grandfather recorded it with all the pain and despondency of a defeat. Travelling in two armed reconnaissance jeeps, a subdued Matthew and his five companions – two British SAS men, an American, a Frenchman and a German-speaking Pole, who had to be Stanislaus Kozlowski – had set out at dawn.

Progress is slow because the Yank columns we drive past are nervous. Like us they feel it would be silly to be killed when the war is almost over. The remnants of the Fourth Panzer Army are heading our way with the Russians on their tail and we are meeting local opposition. Some of the Gerries still don’t know when they are beaten. Our American allies have an interesting way with snipers. We were stopped for an hour near Jena while they dealt with some chap who’d taken a potshot at a convoy from an isolated farmhouse. A British unit would have sent in a patrol to flush him out. The Yanks called in an air strike by three rocket-firing Typhoons and then sent in Firefly tanks to finish the job with their flame-throwers. By the time the shooting stopped, the farmhouse was just a blackened pile of bricks. A GI major emerged grinning from the smoke with
the
sniper tied to the front of his jeep like a hunting trophy. The Gerry must have been thirteen years old
.

Their destination was close to a pretty Bavarian town that had been left eerily untouched by the war.

We drove west out of Coburg into a heavily wooded area where the Americans have set up a reception centre. It isn’t a prison camp, at least not so you’d recognize it. No machine gun towers or searchlights, just a group of wooden huts hidden behind a barbed-wire fence among the trees. I handed over my orders at the gate and was told to report alone to a building at the far side of the complex. The officer behind the desk had the coldest face I’d ever seen; a long nose and thin lips, eyes like ice-chips. The kind of face that would send a man to his death and not even blink. He wore the uniform of an American colonel, but I doubt he’d ever been on a parade ground. I loathed him on sight. Behind him stood two others, dressed in civilian suits but with military haircuts. I recognized the breed immediately. I was back in cloak and dagger land, but these cloak and dagger types weren’t the usual enthusiastic SOE amateurs, they were genuine hard-eyed, government-sponsored killers. The officer didn’t introduce himself. ‘You’re familiar with the area around Lake Constance, Captain.’ I admitted
I’d
done some walking there before the war and he nodded. He handed over a sealed envelope and without another word one of the civilians escorted me to a door at the rear. Beyond the door, three seated figures in khaki overalls were waiting on a bench by the far wall. One had a leather briefcase perched primly on his knees and looked up with a wide smile. Two of them were the most evil men I would ever meet. The third was Walter Brohm
.

JAMIE PAUSED. WALTER
brohm? The context and the way the name was mentioned suggested it should be significant – someone well placed in the Nazi hierarchy – but it meant nothing to him. His research into looted artworks had given him a working knowledge of the coterie of top Nazis around Hitler and he could name every senior officer in Herman Goering’s semi-official looting organization, but that was the limit of his expertise.