The Doomsday Testament(123)
‘Nope. Not exactly.’
‘I think I have a vague idea. But we have to hurry.’ He broke into a jog and she kept pace by his side. They reached the twisted door to the production hall. ‘You take the flowers to where we found the bodies. I’ll go on to the office. We’ll meet back here.’ He saw she was about to protest. ‘It makes sense. Lotte Muller will expect to see some evidence we’ve been there.’
‘That’s not what I was going to say, idiot. Just because this section is lit up like a Christmas tree doesn’t mean to say everywhere else is. Do you have a torch?’
‘Aaah, no.’
She reached into her jacket and came out with her penlight. ‘This might help.’
He grinned. ‘I suppose it might.’
She reached up to kiss him on the lips.
‘Now git!’
Jamie set off down the passageway. He ran swiftly, never hesitating at an intersection or a corner, because he’d lied. He knew exactly where he was going. But he was glad of the torch.
The bunker should have been filled with ghosts, but even though he had seen the horrors that had been perpetrated down here, the corridors held no threat. The dead no longer called out for retribution, because Matthew Sinclair had avenged them sixty-three years earlier when he had put a bullet in Walter Brohm’s skull.
When he reached the stairs he took them two at a time and the rusting metal creaked beneath his feet. At the top was the office where they’d found the Raphael. The door hung open and he stepped inside. He swung the torch across the walls, spotlighting the dust-free oblong where the painting had hung behind Walter Brohm’s mahogany desk. Strange that it didn’t really matter any more.
Now he turned his attention to the rest of the office. It was just as he remembered from that single glance before the Raphael had bewitched him. Spacious, but functional. One wall filled with the empty filing cabinets that would have contained Brohm’s research and all the minutiae of running the bunker with its hundreds of irritating, petty human hindrances. Jamie suspected Walter Brohm had hated it here. Brohm the genius would have preferred to be in his laboratory dealing with problems he could understand. But Brohm was a cultured man who did himself well, with his Old Masters, his fine French wines . . . and all the other luxuries the new Nazi empire could provide.
Only Astra can find the answer.
He had puzzled over Brohm’s odd reference from the moment he read it. Astra was the Latin word for stars and he’d assumed it was a reference to the potential of the Sun Stone. Yet in the context of their conversation it had seemed out of place. Then it had struck him that Walter Brohm and Matthew Sinclair had been speaking in whispers to keep what they were saying from Klosse and Strasser. What if Matthew had misheard?
Not ‘Only Astra can find it’, but ‘Only Astra can hides it’. Astra can. Astrakhan.
The Oriental rug made of the distinctive black fibres lay in the centre of the floor, trampled and disfigured by dusty footprints, more or less where Brohm had left it. Like Jamie, anyone who entered this office would only have had eyes for the space where the painting had been, or the desk.
Taking a deep breath he kicked the musty heap of cloth to one side, exposing the marble floor beneath. And suddenly everything was clear.
‘You bastard. You cunning bastard.’
He was looking at a mosaic of a third Black Sun, the style identical to the first two, with a distinctive pattern in the centre that would represent some combination of rivers and roads. What was different was the inscription below the circle. The inscription that finally revealed what he had been looking for.
Die kreuzung wo die frau betet.
The crossroads where the women pray.
He pulled out his mobile phone and dialled the number on the card he held in his hand. For a moment he thought the signal in the bunker would be too weak, then the ring tone purred twice before it was answered.
‘May I speak to Mr Lim, please?’
LX
LOTTE MULLER PARKED outside the police offices and Jamie retrieved what looked like the decaying carcass of a long-dead animal from the boot of the BMW. ‘I think you should hold on to this,’ he suggested.
‘This is a police station, Mr Saintclair, not a recycling depot.’ Her long nose wrinkled with distaste at the scent of decay, ‘Although I believe whatever it is may already be beyond recycling.’
Jamie grinned. ‘I hope not. Because I think it could be a very valuable Oriental rug. The man who hung a Raphael on his wall wouldn’t have any old carpet on the floor. At least have an expert look at it.’
Reluctantly, the police chief stretched out her hands for the mouldering heap of cloth. But Jamie was already on his way into the police office. ‘No need for both of us to get our hands dirty.’