Jamie held the door for him. ‘There was one point. Do you know anything about the relationship between Heydrich and a man called Hans Frank? Frank was an SS bigwig who ruled over most of Poland for four years of the war. He was hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg.’
Simon frowned. ‘No. But David would. You should stay in touch with him. He’s a handy man to know. Look after yourself, laddie.’
When he was gone, Jamie sat down at the computer and stared at the man on the screen. The words beneath the picture confirmed most of Simon’s chilling biography. Heydrich’s subordinates went in terror of him and had nicknamed him The Hangman. How he came by it was never properly explained, but Jamie could hazard a guess. Heydrich had been cleverer than Himmler, Goering and Goebbels combined, more cunning than Bormann and saner than Hitler, if your definition of sanity encompassed an anti-Semitic mass murderer with ice-water in his veins. If he hadn’t been killed he would undoubtedly have become one of the visionaries of the Nazi regime, taking his place among the coterie of thugs and bullies who clung to Hitler like lice, even a possible successor to the Führer himself. Where Hitler saw the destruction of the Jews as a means to an end, Heydrich had been taught to hate them from the cradle and approached their extermination like a Holy War. Kicked out of the German navy in 1931, for seduction of all things, he’d thrown in his lot with the Nazis, making himself indispensable to Himmler while the future Reichsführer-SS was still a Bavarian chicken farmer. Heydrich had created a political power base in the Sicherheitsdienst, Himmler’s feared security service, used the Night of the Long Knives and the corpse of Hitler’s former ally Ernst Rohm as stepping stones to help him up another few rungs of the ladder, before, with the Führer’s blessing, making it his business to rid the world of the Jewish race. When he had been rewarded with the Protectorship of Bohemia-Moravia, it must have seemed just another step in the right direction. But two British-trained Czech agents brought his career to an abrupt close with a couple of hand grenades on a warm spring morning in Prague. The date was 27 May 1942. No wonder Hans Frank’s interrogators hadn’t believed him. If he’d made a present of the Raphael to Heydrich early in 1942, surely it must have been in his possession when he died?
It was all very interesting, but it wasn’t getting him any closer to the painting or his grandfather’s mission. He retrieved the journal and the silk map from the drawer and placed them side by side on the desk in front of him. When he looked at it now he wondered why he hadn’t seen the similarity between the design of the wheel and the SS lightning-flash runes immediately. Runes? The word stirred something in his memory, something he’d read about Heinrich Himmler.
He brought up Google on the computer and typed in the words Schutzstaffel and symbolism.
There were thousands of hits, but a name and a place drew his attention as if they’d been written in lights. He clicked on the link and there it was: a large room with a marble floor surrounded by pillars. In the centre of the floor was a circular symbol identical to the one on the reverse of Matthew Sinclair’s silk map. The place was Wewelsburg Castle, the very heart of Himmler’s SS empire. The symbol was known as the Black Sun.
A few miles away the search results were replicated on another computer screen.
XV
‘WE HAVE WHAT we need. The package is no longer required.’ The disembodied voice crackled in their earphones.
‘About time.’ The younger of the two Chinese men parked in a blue Ford across the street from Jamie’s flat reached below his seat and fitted a silencer to the pistol hidden there. The driver put a hand on his arm.
‘Wait.’ He punched a number into the hands-free phone on the dashboard in front of him. ‘Please confirm.’
‘Are you questioning my order?’
The driver, Li Yuan, who used the work name Charles Lee, was a senior operative of the Second Bureau of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. He bit back the comment that threatened to get him into further trouble. Who was this pup they’d parachuted in from Beijing to treat him like one of the waiters in the upmarket Cantonese restaurant he ran? Lee had been trained in assassination and covert operations, but his primary function was intelligence gathering, and ten years of work was in danger of being compromised by this cowboy from the Fourth Bureau. It was a measure of the importance of this mission that they were even prepared to consider what they were about to do, but if he was going to terminate this Saintclair he wanted to be certain.
‘Seeking clarification. If the subject is making progress, perhaps—’