He closed his eyes and backed off to slide down the far wall before his legs turned to rubber.
‘Jamie, are you all right?’
He shook his head. ‘Not once did I ever believe we’d find it. Not even when we walked up that stairway and along this corridor.’
‘But you have.’ Her eyes glittered in the torchlight. ‘This is yours. All yours. I have my story, but the lost Raphael will make Jamie Saintclair famous.’
‘It’s too much. Now that I have it I wish . . . Can you understand? It was the hunt and the following the clues in my grandfather’s journal. It was being with you and having this great adventure after my routine, boring, London life. And now – it’s over, and I wish it could start all over again, but I know that it can’t.’ As he came to terms with the enormity of their discovery the excitement began to bubble inside him. He could already imagine the press conference where they would announce the recovery of one of the world’s greatest lost masterpieces. He would never have to beg for another commission. There would be a reward that would set them both free to do whatever they wanted with their lives. Television appearances, lectures. And she was right, he would have fame of a kind he could only previously have imagined. They . . .
‘Jamie?’
Christ, what was he thinking? They didn’t have time for daydreams.
Sarah reached for the door of the cubicle.
‘Don’t!’ The word came out as a sergeant major’s bark and he instantly regretted it. She stared at him, her eyes a mix of anger and hurt. He sighed. ‘The office has been sealed,’ he explained. ‘If we open the door and change the conditions we could destroy the painting.’
She shook her head, her expression a combination of disbelief and exasperation. ‘We can’t just leave it after all we’ve gone through to get it back.’
He knew she was right. Not after what had happened to them. Think.
A noise. A sort of dull, echoing clank. They’d jammed the metal door shut with the fallen branch. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had. Someone had just forced it.
‘Jamie.’ Her eyes were wide, pleading.
Fuck it.
He gripped the handle and turned. Unlocked. Thank Christ for that. In one movement he opened the door and slipped through the gap into the office, making as little disturbance as possible. A dark heap in the centre of the floor might have been a dead body, but was actually some kind of exotic rug. Clearly Walter Brohm liked his little luxuries. No time for finesse. He unzipped the rucksack and removed a plastic bubblewrap bag from one of the compartments. It had been folded flat, so there’d be very little air inside. He waved it to fill it with the fetid atmosphere of the room. It was crude and probably pointless, but under the circumstances it was all he could think of. He could feel Sarah staring at him through the glass, urging him on, but when he looked into the enigmatic eyes of the young man in the picture a sort of paralysis overcame him. It was as if he was back in the river, but this time his feet were trapped in quicksand. Fortunately, the window rattled like an alarm bell to break the spell. Hurriedly he lifted the painting from its mount and gently slipped it into the bag, which had been selected in a fit of unlikely optimism specifically because it would hold something of the Raphael’s dimensions. It had a ziplock fastener which he closed and secured as he retraced his steps to the door.
Sarah was already running for the stairs and when he glanced to his left he understood why. A pale orange glow painted the far end of the corridor where the stairs emerged.
They were coming.
XXXVIII
IF ANYTHING, GUSTAV’S astonishment when he reached the tunnel was greater than Jamie’s. But where it had inspired fear in his quarry, the German only felt a sense of wonder and pride at the incredible feat of engineering his forefathers had created and kept secret for so many years. There had never been any doubt he would capture the fugitives, but this made it simpler and more convenient. No one would hear them screaming from beneath thirty feet of concrete.
In the yellow beam of his torch two distinct sets of footprints disappeared into the darkness. It was almost laughable. He felt like a fisherman reeling in his line. Gustav had watched through binoculars as they scurried like trapped ants along the base of the cliff seeking a non-existent escape route. He’d experienced a few moments of concern when they disappeared into the gully, but when he had reported the problem to Frederick it was almost as if the other man had been expecting the news. Frederick had issued very specific instructions and a warning. In the dying weeks of the war and for unexplained reasons, the Oder facility had been red-flagged by Himmler himself. There could be any number of reasons for that, but one thing was clear. Some secrets must stay secrets. For ever.