‘It’s impossible,’ Sarah said. ‘This is just a drawing. Perhaps if we could find the original?’
‘Well, we don’t have it. There has to be another way.’ He struggled with the possibilities for a few moments. ‘Can you get the road map we brought, please?’
They studied the two suns and the map, seeking out any similarities.
‘Hey! You’re a genius, Saintclair.’ Sarah broke the silence. ‘Pick a town. Any old town. See the way the roads radiate from the centre the way rays shine from the sun.’
‘So we’re looking for a town with nine roads?’
She looked at the silk Sun again. 1357. 1357?
Jamie watched her elation grow as the permutations went through her mind. ‘Not necessarily. Remember we’re dealing with the same people who drew that map on the Wewelsburg sun. Nothing is what it seems.’
She pointed at the spokes on the drawing. ‘One. Three. Five. Seven. Not nine roads, four, and in this very distinctive configuration.’
He saw it, but he was still sceptical. ‘So we study every city, town and village in Germany, until we find the right one?’
Sarah’s eyes met his, and he recognized the challenge there. ‘I did my bit. Your turn now. Let me see that book again.’
‘OK.’ But after half an hour of staring his vision began to blur.
‘Your granddaddy had quite a war.’
He nodded. ‘I grew up without a father, so it came as a shock to find that the only father figure in my life wasn’t the man I thought he was. I need to know, but I’m still not certain exactly what it is I need to know, even now. Until I read about Walter Brohm’s great discovery I’d only been kidding myself I was trying to find the Raphael. If that sounds like I was leading you on, well, as I said, I’m sorry.’
She leaned forward and he thought she was going to kiss him. Instead she stared into his eyes as if she was looking for something there. Eventually, she must have found it. ‘At least now we know why someone would go to the trouble of pushing you under a train. The big question is do we believe it?’
‘That Brohm discovered something during the war that has stayed hidden for sixty years? On the face of it, that seems unlikely,’ he admitted. ‘From what’s recorded in Matthew’s diary, we know Walter Brohm was an egotistical dissembler who exaggerated his capabilities, sucked up to his superiors and would have shopped his own granny.’
‘Shopped?’
‘Betrayed. But stranger things have happened. If Brohm did make it to the States it’s possible he passed on his formula, but that the Yanks – sorry, Americans – for their own reasons either suppressed it or discovered that it didn’t work in the first place.’
‘Why would they suppress it?’
‘For any number of motives, most of them economic. They’d spent hundreds of millions developing nuclear technology and along comes this new wonder-power that makes it redundant about sixty years before they’ve recouped their investment. Maybe it’s sitting in a wooden crate in some big warehouse, like in that Indiana Jones film.’
‘This isn’t Indiana Jones, Jamie, this is real life, but I take your point. What do you think it is?’
And there it was. The sixty-four million dollar question. The problem being that he didn’t have an answer. Not yet. ‘I don’t know and I don’t think we can even make an educated guess. If you believe Brohm, it was a one-off discovery that paved the way for a great scientific breakthrough; something of enormous power that even Hitler feared. Since Hitler was willing to do anything to win the war, we can assume that whatever it was it must have had a fearsome potential to make him walk away. Greater even than the nuclear capability he’d just given up on.
‘That’s why it’s so important to find out where this map takes us and what happened at the end of my grandfather’s journal. If Brohm didn’t reach America, then the great secret is still hidden in Germany.’
The question was where.
Sarah read the diary with a frightening intensity, as if she was trying to force the answer from its pages with the power of her mind. ‘Was this why we came to Wewelsburg?’ She pointed to a paragraph and he looked over her shoulder.
‘No, it was a wild shot. I looked up Himmler and the occult on the computer, I found the photograph with the Black Sun and it seemed the most likely place to start. Why?’
‘Because Walter Brohm pointed you towards it. And I think he gave you the first clue to the Raphael.’
‘Where?’ He made a grab for the book.
She drew it away from his hands. ‘You had your turn, Saintclair. What is Wewelsburg?’