The documents from the records clerk in Cologne were only forwarded to him because of his well-known interest in technology, but he could still remember the dry feeling in his throat as he had read them for the first time. They dated from 1943 and included requisition orders for certain materials, tools and equipment that seemed to point to only one thing – and a name.
That was when he had launched the resources of the Vril Society on this hunt to discover Walter Brohm’s whereabouts and the location of his research materials. The first hint of progress had come with an investigation into Brohm’s background and the revelation that he had been a member of the 1937 Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet. Most of the official papers had been destroyed, but enough evidence remained to reconstruct the route of the expedition and satellite images of the Changthang crater confirmed enough of what the Brohm papers hinted at to set his heart racing. It had taken six years to track down the casket and another three before he had the confidence to give the Menshikov operation the green light. In the meantime, his Vril contacts in the State department and the Bundestag were making efforts to discover Walter Brohm’s fate. The German authorities had traced a Red Cross document confirming Brohm’s incarceration in a prisoner-of-war camp near Leipzig, where he had been placed in protective custody. His rank was given as private and, even more curiously, the paper had later been stamped ‘Unconfirmed’. There was no further evidence of Brohm’s existence in the camp system. Much later, the State department official found Brohm’s name in a list of potential prisoners who might be suitable for what would become Operation Paperclip, a secret OSS programme to recruit Nazi scientists and exfiltrate them to work for the American government. The next big breakthrough had come when some nuisance of a computer hacker had leaked dozens of archived Pentagon files on the internet, including a document marked ‘Highly Restricted’ which named Jedburgh teams Dietrich and Edgar. The military record showed that Team Edgar had been wiped out in an ambush in the Bavarian Alps on 8 May 1945, the day the war ended. On further investigation, it was found that two survivors from Team Dietrich, Captain Matthew Sinclair and Lieutenant Stanislaus Kozlowski, had been subsequently awarded the Military Cross for their actions on that date. Walter Brohm had never been heard of again.
The pony-tailed man’s investigators confirmed that Matthew Sinclair had left the Army and been ordained into the Anglican Church. Between 1949 and 1963 he had carried out missionary work in the African Congo, until, in an altercation that had made the front page of many newspapers, he had physically assaulted the mercenary commander of Katanga province, Colonel Michael Hoare, and been sentenced to death. When he returned to Britain all trace of him was lost.
Stanislaus Kozlowski, the only other member of Team Dietrich, had been traced to a home for the elderly in Rugby, Warwickshire. At first, he had been reluctant to talk about his military service, but eventually he was surprisingly forthcoming about his wartime experiences. Kozlowski’s insistence on telling his story to a wider audience had required his removal, but it was from transcripts of the Kozlowski interview that he had learned of the fate of Jedburgh teams Dietrich and Edgar. And of the journal that Team Dietrich’s commander had kept so assiduously in the final weeks of the war.
From that moment on, he had devoted every resource at his disposal to the discovery of Matthew Sinclair and his surviving relatives. How ridiculous that after all this time and effort and investment it came down to one man.
He picked up the telephone on his desk. ‘Get me Sumner.’
XL
JAMIE REACHED THE doorway where Sarah had disappeared. To his right, her torch lay on the floor, still gently rocking, the beam playing on the base of the far wall. He froze as he heard a gentle shuffling and raised his own torch to illuminate whatever had made the noise.
‘Oh, Christ!’
The silent scream in the tormented, eyeless face reflected the terror of her end, the jagged hole in her skull clear proof of the method they had used to snuff out her life. He reached forward to touch her shoulder.
‘Why did they do this?’ Sarah’s hushed voice came from the corner behind him. He almost cried out with relief as he caught her in the spotlight. Safe. Hunched into the angle of the wall, her body seemed smaller and more fragile, her eyes shone huge and liquid in the torchlight.
He turned back to the desiccated body dressed in the remains of a striped grey shift which lay slumped across the steel bench. In the torchlight her still perfect teeth shone like pearls in the ivory skull. Small and delicate. Like Sarah’s teeth. Leathery hands with long slim fingers that might have once played the piano stretched out towards him as if in welcome. He heard the shuffling again and a mouse peered cautiously from the eye socket of the skull where it had made its nest. The torch lifted and the beam took in dozens, no, hundreds, of other skeletal bodies. A sea of bones that stretched the length of the room.