She sniffed and shook her head. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, buddy. You’re not the only one who can pull a rabbit out of a hat.’ There was a rustle as she retrieved something from the rucksack. ‘I made a mistake. Two sheets instead of one. If I leaned heavily enough we should be able to retrace the lines . . .’
Between one breath and the next she was straight back to business. They laid the tracing paper flat on the wooden floor, pushing the chest of drawers aside to make room. Sarah’s pencil had left a barely visible impression when she’d drawn on the top sheet Frederick had confiscated. She began highlighting the faint lines. It wasn’t easy, sometimes a mark that looked significant was only a crease where she had folded the sheet into her rucksack. It took twenty minutes before they had a semblance of the original.
‘It’s a pity the paper wasn’t big enough to cover it all.’ She brushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘But I think I got the centre pretty much mapped, apart from the section that’s missing.’
As they worked over the paper, they moved closer together until their heads touched above the centre of the drawing.
She pulled back, smiling nervously. ‘I think that’s us about done.’
Reluctantly, Jamie drew away. They studied the diagram she had created, and he felt the excitement growing in him like a bottle of champagne about to pop.
‘You said mapped. Can you see it?’ It hadn’t been visible on the marble of the castle floor, but the tracing had brought out faint lines on the symbol’s twelve spokes, spaced by unidentifiable blobs. ‘The guide said the castle was to be the centre of the world. Well, this is a map of the SS world. Twelve spokes of the Black Sun. Twelve Obergruppenführers to do Himmler’s dirty work. Twelve departments. I bet if you had enough information you could identify each one and its headquarters.’
‘That means . . .’
‘If the Wewelsburg Sun is a map, so is ours.’
Sarah frowned and bent low over the paper.
‘I think . . .’
‘What?’
‘Look closer. Those blobs are symbols of some sort.’
He got down beside her. His hip nudged hers, but she didn’t seem to notice.
‘You’re right. These are runes, like the SS lightning flashes, but much more complex. See, there’s a kind of upturned Z in a square, and a pair of what look like arrowheads in a circle. There could be twenty different variations here and we’re only looking at one small part of the Black Sun.’
‘And they seem to be linked by the lines.’
‘Maybe, it’s difficult to tell. But if they are . . .’
‘And this is a map . . .’
‘The placing of each rune would correspond to a location and the rune itself would tell whoever knew the code what is being stored or kept there. This was the place of secrets. No one but the twelve SS generals were meant to see this, and only they knew the meaning.’
‘And now Frederick must know. He said they were the inheritors.’
Jamie shook his head. ‘Not necessarily.’
Her eyes lit up. ‘Because something’s missing.’
‘The golden disc at the centre. What if the disc was the key? It disappeared at the end of the war, but did the SS take it when they abandoned Wewelsburg? Or did the Americans loot it with everything else?’
‘It could have been melted down, or it could still be out there somewhere.’
Jamie studied the detail of the Black Sun again. It was like a star map and if it continued over the entire marble circle it was huge and incredibly complex. Looked at in different ways it could have many different meanings.
‘This is why Frederick couldn’t allow us to have the tracing. He couldn’t afford to let us go with the Black Sun’s secret. And what if there was more? What if the gold disc wasn’t fixed, but rotated? It’s possible that the orientation of the disc opened up another set of secrets to those who could read the runes. Perhaps the Black Sun isn’t a single map, but layers of maps.’
He sat back and found he was breathing hard. ‘This could unlock the whole underworld of the SS. Who knows what mysteries are hidden there? If we could track down the gold centrepiece . . .’
‘If we could decipher the runes,’ Sarah agreed. ‘But we can’t. And this is just a part. We would need it all.’
‘You’re right. We don’t have the time to do this. It will have to wait. We already have enough mysteries to solve, but maybe, some day?’
‘Some day.’
The excitement was still on them as Jamie fetched the silk map with the original Black Sun and spread it beside the tracing. Compared with the drama of the last few minutes, the drab, poorly drawn image seemed to smother their enthusiasm.