The Doomsday Testament(30)

‘Yes, Herr Brigadeführer. They have been placed in fireproof security boxes as you ordered.’

‘Very well.’

He could trust Ziegler. The Sun Stone and the records, the bargaining chips that would assure his future, would travel by convoy to the armoured train which would take them to their final secret destination. The Ivans and the Amis were closing in. Free Germany was like a piece of ham between two slices of pumpernickel and the ham was getting thinner with every hour. Still, he’d left enough time for the move. He would make his own personal arrangements for escape. It was time to go.

The grey-clad commander of the security detachment appeared at the door, his face red from the exertions of the morning and one of the new Sturmgewehr automatic rifles on his shoulder.

‘Shall we take the Jews outside?’

Brohm considered for a moment. The Jews. Such an all-encompassing, unsatisfactory and entirely fatal classification. In reality many of the three hundred scientists, engineers and technicians in the barracks below were men and women he had worked with long before the war, people he had come to like and respect. People like Hannah.

‘No, do it where they sit. It will cause them less anxiety.’ The SS man frowned; what did he care about anxiety? They were only Jews. Nobody had bothered about anxiety on the Ostfront. Brohm saw the look. ‘It will save time,’ he suggested. ‘And this place will make a very appropriate tomb.’ The frown was replaced by puzzlement. ‘They will be like three hundred of the pharaoh’s servants, buried in memory of his achievements,’ Brohm explained wearily.

He risked one last look at the painting on the wall. A pity, he would have liked to take the Raphael. It had been a birthday gift from poor old Heydrich, who had somehow, in his sinister way, prised it from Frank’s grubby little fingers. But he wasn’t going to escape Germany’s Gotterdamerung carrying a large piece of wooden board. He would be travelling light; just his new identity and the secret that would change the world.





XIV


JAMIE’S HEART BEAT faster as he studied the drawing. Something about it felt familiar. It was in the shape of a wheel, with nine articulated spokes that met in a geometric pattern in the centre. Below were three words – In Faust’s spuren – which, if Jamie had the translation correct meant, ‘In Faust’s footsteps’, and a date: 1357. They obviously had some sort of significance, but it was the larger significance of the symbol that drew Jamie’s attention. The composition looked vaguely South American; some sort of abstract solar symbol? But he wasn’t dealing with Aztecs or Mayans, he was dealing with Nazis. He ran a finger slowly down one of the articulated spokes and felt the room go cold. The almost savage way it changed course drew another shape in his mind; a sinister emblem that had brought terror and darkness to two continents.

He tapped a few words on the keyboard of his laptop and hit enter. Plenty of options. He placed the arrow of his mouse over the word ‘Images’ at the top of the screen, clicked and hit enter again. This time his screen filled with monochrome thumbnail pictures of soldiers. They stood in their long, orderly ranks, hard-eyed, unsmiling faces showing what? Determination? Discipline? Severity? The determination of the fanatic. The discipline of the automaton. The unbending severity of the executioner. He saw the picture he was looking for, but curiosity made him ignore it for the moment. He double-clicked to enlarge a photograph in the top row. Some kind of parade. They had been chosen for their square-jawed features and Nordic perfection; proud, confident, blood untainted by any undesirable element. Even a missing tooth would have denied a man a place in this picture, taken around 1939. Their defenders claimed that, man for man, they were the finest soldiers the world had ever known. Their detractors decried them as butchers who killed without a shred of conscience. Their superiors had demanded ‘unparalleled hardness’ and they had willingly provided it. They had died in their thousands and their tens of thousands in the snowy wastes of the Russian steppe, in the hedgerows of Normandy, the forests of the Ardennes and the burning ruins of Berlin.

The mouse hovered over two more photographs, but he didn’t have to enlarge them. He knew the precise wording that hung below the stark iron gateway in what had been some Polish backwater before it had become a factory of death. And who would ever forget the boy in flat cap and short trousers as he raised his hands in surrender to the laughing jackbooted warrior liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto?

One final picture. A close-up, head-and-shoulders shot of a uniformed man with wide-set eyes and narrow, fine-boned aesthetic features. It was a medieval face, the face of a scholar, or of a monk, but where a monk’s eyes might show compassion this man’s lacked any semblance of pity.