The Doomsday Testament(46)

He was about to put the book away, but the next passage caught his eye because the tone was so different from those he had read so far.

6 May 1945 I dreamed of Peggy last night. She had the most beautiful hair, soft and flaxen, and the colour of spun gold. It was silhouetted against the sun, so that it made her appear like some haloed Madonna. I went to take her in my arms, but it was as if I had run into some sort of invisible barrier. I called out her name and she smiled at me.

He read the words twice, flicking back to Matthew’s doomed love affair and confirming that the description of Peggy matched the unnamed lover of the earlier pages. This was wrong. Peggy had been his grandfather’s pet name for Jamie’s mother, but . . . He shook his head in frustration. He didn’t have time for another mystery. He already had too many things to think about.

He dug out the paperback copy of Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus he’d bought in the hope that it would help him decipher the meaning behind ‘In Faust’s footsteps’. So far it was hard going and he’d discovered nothing that seemed to be relevant. Faustus had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for increased power and knowledge. Walter Brohm had sold his soul to the twin devils of Nazism and science. Was that the message? And if it was, where did it take them? Or could it be some sort of mea culpa from beyond the grave by Matthew Sinclair for his part in Operation Equity? Somewhere in these pages were the clues that might lead him to the Raphael and bring him closer to Walter Brohm’s great secret. The problem was that there were too many of them. Brohm had created a blizzard of riddles to camouflage the truth, whatever the truth was. Jamie desperately needed time to sit down and unpick them. He picked up the diary again and turned the page.

We are south of Augsburg now, heading west, and our little unit is increasingly nervous. For months this area has been cast as the great stage for a suicidal last stand by Nazi fanatics still loyal to Hitler’s shade, who operate under the codename Werewolf. The Final Redoubt. By now we knew the Redoubt was probably just wishful thinking, but the mountain roads are just a little too narrow and the twisting valleys too ambush-friendly for us to relax. Nobody wants to die now, when it is clear the war has only a few days at most to run. The tension affects us all and the division between Brohm and the two other Nazis grows ever deeper. He sought me out last night and nodded towards fat little Strasser. ‘To look at him,’ he says, ‘you would not believe that he holds a world record; like Jesse Owens, but a little different, eh?’ He saw that he had aroused my curiosity. ‘It’s true, Leutnant Matt. In September nineteen forty-one, just outside Kiev, our friend Strasser personally shot eleven hundred and sixty-five individuals in a single day. Extraordinary, no? But I have seen the papers. They gave him a medal, I think. And more extraordinary still that he is now accompanying a man like me to a new life thanks to our American friends. Why? you ask. I will tell you, Leutnant Matt, because you and I should have no secrets. Our Strasser discovered that killing made him nervous, so they transferred him to the Ausland-SD, where he became most adept in counter-intelligence against the Soviet union  . My good friend Strasser, the Ox, knows more about the NKVD than any other man alive, so he will not hang, as he deserves, but will sunbathe overlooking Long Island Sound as he sips his whisky sour. And Klosse? Look at him,’ he spat, ‘a monster who carried out experiments in the camps, even on children. The very sight of him makes me ashamed of the uniform I once wore. And why does he deserve your charity, Leutnant Matt? Because he knows things that would make your flesh creep. What civilized person would make war with germs that are capable of wiping out entire nations? Bubonic plague, anthrax and awful things that don’t even yet have names. Gases that strip a man’s flesh from his bones in seconds. You have read Frankenstein, of course, Leutnant Matt. Compared to Gunther Klosse, Dr Frankenstein is a kindergarten teacher.’ What bothered Brohm most, was that, as he saw it, Klosse’s work had no benefit for mankind, whereas Brohm’s, of course, did. I asked him how he knew these things. He shook his head regretfully, all part of the performance: ‘Once I was an important man, Leutnant Matt, and I made it my business to know things.’ What he was telling me was almost certainly the truth, but the reason he was telling me was to set him apart from these other men. The guilty. If Walter Brohm was guilty of anything it could only be of genius, which he then went on to reinforce. When I think of all we have suffered and all the men who have died, I can’t get Brohm’s words out of my head. He talked of things I didn’t fully understand; a ‘Nuclear Age’ that was over before it had begun, superseded by this thing he was on the very brink of creating. Something that was beyond the comprehension of most ordinary men – though not Walter Brohm. He painted an image of himself as a great Germanic hero. Another Humboldt. Before the war, he had walked in a land of giants, seeking the heart of Aryan purity and there, in the most unlikely place on earth, he had found it. His only regret was that he did not dare stay longer, because he was certain there was more to find. When the Americans gave him the resources he would replicate its qualities. It would be the wonder of the age . . .