The Isis Covenant (21 page)

Disappointingly, Saintclair’s secretary had stalled every attempt to glean any further information, either by telephone or by visits from potential ‘customers’, and they’d had to abandon the attempt when it became obvious that she was becoming suspicious. A search of Saintclair’s flat and office had been equally unrevealing, but had allowed them to plant bugs in his phones.

It seemed their only option was to wait until the quarry turned up.

But there
was
still one loose end and Paul Dornberger didn’t like loose ends. He couldn’t allow a rogue element to blunder around London getting in the way of the operation and potentially threatening everything he’d achieved. The hotel his people had pinpointed was
only
a dozen blocks away in the West End and he’d reconnoitred it the previous evening, confirming what they’d already learned by hacking into the computer system. The two men were lying low, existing on room service, booze from the mini-bar and cable-channel porn movies. Harmless enough for the moment, but the very fact they were still in London pointed to a second attempt to kill Saintclair.

It was nine thirty in the evening when he used a cloned card to gain entry to the hotel’s service area. Not late enough to alarm them, but late enough that they’d be sluggish from food and drink and just about to settle down in front of
Prom Girls in the Shower
, or whatever constituted tonight’s entertainment. Once inside he changed into the green overall with the hotel group’s logo and retrieved a workman’s toolbag from his rucksack.

In room 508, Jacko Bonetti lay with his eyes closed listening to Mario’s commentary of what was happening on the screen. Christ, couldn’t he shut up even for one goddam minute? After five days cooped up together the glamour of their situation had long since worn off. How was he to know the mark would be wearing a vest? There was no other explanation for Saintclair’s survival. He had hit him clean. Two right over the heart. No man could survive that. Well, the next time it would be two in the head and brains on the sidewalk.
Get up after that, you prick
.

He was going through the hit in his mind when he
heard
the gentle knock on the door. It was a knock they’d experienced a dozen times during their stay. Routine and unthreatening. Unusual only for the timing.

‘Who is it?’ Jacko’s hand instinctively crept below the pillow where the replacement automatic was stashed.

‘Room maintenance.’

Jacko exchanged glances with Mario, who shrugged. ‘We didn’t call for none.’

‘I know, sir, but the previous occupants of this room reported a faulty window catch. It will only take me a minute to fix it.’

‘Switch that off.’

‘Aw, Jacko—’

‘Switch the fucking thing off.’

Jacko went to the door and opened it to reveal a cheerful, bulky man in the familiar green overall worn by the hotel’s cleaners and maintenance staff. ‘Okay, but make it quick.’ He went back to the bed, his right hand hovering by the pillow.

‘Thanks for this.’ The engineer marched directly to the window. ‘It’d be more than my job’s worth if it was put off for another day.’ He fiddled around with a screwdriver. ‘That’ll do it.’

‘That’s it?’

The bulky man nodded and was heading for the door when something caught his eye. He frowned and pointed at the phone by Jacko’s bed. ‘Can’t trust anyone
these
days.’ Before Jacko could react he was kneeling beside the bed. ‘See, bare wires.’

Automatically, Jacko followed the pointing finger, but all he saw was the nozzle of a small spray can. He opened his mouth to shout a warning, but the nozzle emitted a single concentrated puff and his whole world froze. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He willed his fingers to reach for the gun that was mere inches from them, but they wouldn’t obey his ice-bound mind.

Dornberger held his breath until he knew he was safe from the gas, which had been developed by the KGB to help in the forced return of defectors.

Mario heard the soft ‘phut’ of the spray being released, but his brain was already anticipating the return to the 42-inch plasma screen of a dozen naked, soap-covered female bodies. He turned and looked up into the engineer’s smiling face.

‘I have an appointment to see Sir William at three.’ Jamie smiled at the woman who answered the big oak door. ‘The name is Saintclair.’

‘Of course, sir.’ She ushered him inside with old-fashioned courtesy. ‘Please come in. Sir William will be with you in just a moment.’

She took his coat and led him into a wide room with a wine-coloured carpet and matching walls hung with paintings of ships and seascapes. He was admiring a vibrant oil on canvas of a sea battle when a tall, balding
man
entered, dressed in worn jeans and a ragged blue cardigan.

‘
HMS Agamemnon
’s somewhere in the smoke in the background. My great, great whatever grandfather served as a mid in her at Trafalgar. The ’seventy-four taking on the big Frenchman in the centre is
Superb
.’

‘A beautiful picture. One of Pocock’s?’

The man’s manner, which had been offhand, became appraising. ‘Of course, you’re that Saintclair, the one who found the Raphael. Reason I agreed to meet you, actually. Intrigued. Have to ’scuse the skivvies, but I’ve been working on my transcriptions.’ Sir William Melrose spoke in clipped, machine-gun-burst sentences that for Jamie would always be the speech pattern of the military man, which in turn reminded him that his host had sidestepped the family’s naval tradition and gone on to command tanks instead of destroyers.

‘Your secretary said you’ve been in the Far East.’

‘Mmmmh. Burma and Japan.’ He waved Jamie to one of a pair of antique Chesterfield settees. ‘Publishers weren’t too happy about it. Not commercial enough. Forgotten Army’s still forgotten, poor buggers. Still, if you’re going to do it, do it right, what? Both sides. Very old, of course, the Japanese survivors. Penitent, which was a surprise. Still, the name will sell it hopefully.’

Jamie nodded in bemused agreement. ‘I was reading your book about Berlin recently … In fact, I’m just back from there.’

Sir William smiled. ‘Wonderful city, spent many
happy
months there. Not quite the atmosphere it had in the Cold War, but the Jerries don’t hang around. If Stalin had had his way he’d have bulldozed it and salted the ground. Didn’t dare after he’d given half of it to the Yanks. Something in the book you wanted to chat about?’

Jamie explained how he had stumbled across the passage about the ancient artefact, and the meeting with the Herr Direktor that had confirmed the description of an Egyptian crown. ‘I wondered if you had any more information about the circumstances?’

The author nodded slowly. ‘A murder case, you say? Odd a chap in your line being involved in a murder investigation. Odder still that you’re looking at evidence from more than half a century ago …’

‘All I can say, sir, is that I’m helping the New York Police with the background.’

‘Mmmmmh.’

‘I also wondered why you hadn’t mentioned the crown when you had its description?’

‘Simple enough, really.’ Sir William got to his feet and motioned Jamie after him. ‘No corroboration. Nothing to say where it might have come from. Could have been a child’s toy. Too outlandish, you see. It would have been sensationalist. Tempted, but one must maintain one’s standards. Mary?’ he shouted. ‘Tea for two in the writing room, there’s a dear. Biscuits, too. The chocolate digestives. Now, tell me all about this bunker where you found the painting …’

They descended a stone staircase with a cherrywood banister into the basement of the building.

‘Can’t write without my files,’ Sir William explained. ‘Only place in the house big enough to hold them all. Had to find somewhere else for the wine.’ He led the way into a room lined with wooden shelves packed with files of every shade and colour. In the centre stood an ancient desk as big as a battleship, equipped with an equally antiquated manual typewriter. ‘Can’t be doing with all that modern rubbish. Leave the inter-whatever to my researchers. Too much distraction, you know. Sensory deprivation. Only way to write. Now, where are we? Yes, here it is.’ He waved a languid hand at one wall. ‘
Berlin: the Last Hundred Days
. A hundred sections, one for each day, naturally. Black files for the SS and the Nazi hierarchy. Grey for the Wehrmacht. Red for the Soviets and Comrade Stalin. Green for the Allies, and brown for the civil administration, including our chums the Gestapo. Now, what day did we say it was?’

‘April twenty-ninth. The day before Hitler shot himself.’

‘Of course.’ The author smiled dreamily. He ran his hand along the wall of files caressing the spine of each one, until he reached a slim brown volume. ‘Not a lot of civil administration left by then, of course. Surprising they held it together at all. Fear. And discipline. But mostly fear. You can read German?’

Jamie assured him he did and Sir William handed him
the
file. ‘Take as long as you like with it. If you need any copies, just let me know. We’ve all sorts of technical wizardry upstairs.

‘Ah, Mary, thank you, my dear.’ He accepted a tray from the secretary. ‘Milk and sugar?’

Jamie nodded distractedly, leafing his way through the file until he found what he was looking for. It was a single photocopied sheet of
Geheime Staatspolizei
headed notepaper recording a contact report between
Kriminalassistent
Krebs and informant Zeigler, a jeweller on Wilhelmstrasse. The time was given as 15:47 hours on Sunday 29 April 1945 and the place as the jeweller’s premises at Wilhelmstrasse 94.

Regular weekly contact meeting: Note – Informant displayed uncharacteristic nervousness, but this may have been a result of nearby artillery fire.

Informant Zeigler begged to report a suspicious customer on the morning of 29 April. Suspect knocked loudly on door of Informant Z’s shop premises and refused to leave until door was answered: suspect described as male, thin and of small stature, and dressed in the uniform of an SS-Unterscharführer. Suspect carried a brown hessian bag of reasonable proportions, which he opened on entry to reveal a curious object, which suspect claimed was a crown of Egyptian origin. Informant Z described a coronet of gold, or gold-like substance, decorated with a single stylized eye and mounted
with
the horns of some animal. In Informant Z’s professional opinion a central feature of the piece appeared to be missing. Suspect was visibly agitated and in a hurry. He wished to exchange the crown for its approximate physical value in gold coins or small diamonds. Believing that the item could not have been obtained legally, Informant Z terminated the meeting and suggested the suspect return later, at which point Informant Z contacted Kriminalassistent Krebs. Investigator’s conclusion: suspect is almost certainly a criminal element attempting to sell looted material. Action: further investigation required. Signed: Walter Krebs, Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, 29 April 1945.

‘Astonishing, when you think of it, that our friend Krebs may have been typing that note at the very moment the Russians were knocking on the front door of Gestapo headquarters …’ The author’s voice faded into the background as Jamie flipped idly to the next page in the file, another report by the same agent. Suddenly he found it difficult to breathe.

‘Are you all right, young man?’

XXIV

‘HEY, YOU’RE LOOKING
a little shaky?’

Jamie laid the envelope on the bed in Danny Fisher’s hotel room and retrieved the copies of the two Gestapo reports. He handed the first to Fisher.

She nodded as she read. ‘I don’t know why you’re so down. This is great. The guy in the
Unterscharführer
’s uniform has got to be Hartmann, so it confirms we’re right to follow the Hartmann trail. The thing that was missing was the Eye of Isis. It would make sense for a thief like Hartmann to try to offload the Crown, but hold on to the Eye, which had the benefit of being more portable and infinitely more valuable. Maybe this Dornberger guy eventually got the Crown, but Hartmann kept the Eye. And for us, it’s the Eye that’s important.’

‘I’m not down. I think I’m in shock. All this stuff about the Crown of Isis being stained with blood was just a story until I read this.’ He handed her the second sheet.

Suspicious death, Wilhelmstrasse, 29 April 1945. 16:50 hours.

On returning from contact meeting with Informant Z (see separate sheet LZ1-005) my attention was drawn to the body of a young male that had been recently discovered in a garden off the main street. Under the circumstances, this was not an unusual occurrence, but on investigation the unidentified child, of Aryan appearance and aged around seven years old, appeared not to have died on site from shrapnel or blast injuries, but had suffered a wound to his throat using a sharp instrument that had almost severed the neck. Investigator’s conclusion: subject may have been the victim of Soviet infiltration patrol or communist fifth columnists. Action: no further action possible due to deteriorating local situation. Signed: Walter Krebs, Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, 29 April 1945.

Danny read the words, then reread them with even greater concentration. She tried to picture the scene among the devastation of Berlin. A small, blond figure lying across a pile of rubble, his blank eyes staring at a smoke-filled sky. Lost, orphaned or abandoned, it didn’t make any difference now. Two people standing over him. The finder, by now wishing he’d walked away, and the Gestapo agent, Krebs, probably thinking the same. The boy’s head would be thrown back, the wound …? Yes, that was the key. The wound.

‘Hartmann had the Crown in Wilhelmstrasse a few hours before the boy was killed,’ Jamie said. ‘And from what we know now, if he had the Crown, he had the motive. I’ve always thought of Hartmann as a bit player, the innocent link between the past and the present, but it looks as if Hartmann was as possessed by the Crown as everyone else who held it.’

Danny shook her head. ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions, Sherlock. We know that a day later it was Dornberger who had the Crown. Who’s to say that Dornberger didn’t kill Hartmann and the kid and steal the Crown for himself?’