The Doomsday Testament

by James Douglas

  Sarah picked up the glasses and Jamie carried on as if nothing had been said.

  ‘Let’s just say this pipe dream is a possibility: who would be the big winners?’

  Mike shook his head. ‘Jesus, Jamie, what happened to old, boring, non-confrontational, wouldn’t-sayboo-to-a-goose Mr Jamie Saintclair? I think I liked him better.’

  Sarah reappeared with the drinks. ‘Why, he fell under a train, Mike. This is the new improved version.’ Her laughter was so infectious that Mike couldn’t help joining in.

  ‘Ach, to hell with it. Who’d win? Whoever got there first. The Yanks, the Russians, who’ve already got us by the balls with their big gas reserves, or, God help us, the Chinese. They’re way ahead on research, but they haven’t made the big breakthrough yet. So, governments. And corporations. One of the big global industrial companies would, literally, pay the earth for something like this.’ He sobered. ‘In fact, they’d kill for it. Any of them. So maybe you’re right and your Uncle Mike doesn’t need to know. Then, of course, there is the potential down side. You’ve heard of the Hadron Collider?’

  Jamie shrugged. ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Christ, where have you been? Cern. A four-billion- dollar investment. A seventeen-mile tunnel dug through France and Switzerland to bury the biggest particle accelerator ever created so that they can mimic the conditions of the day the universe was born. The Big Bang. And if that bang isn’t big enough they’re also hoping to find the God particle and shed light on what we know as Dark Matter. Taken all together, it could open the door to what we’re talking about. Sustainable nuclear fusion.’

  Jamie frowned. ‘So if they’re already doing this, what’s the big deal about it all?’

  ‘Because no one knows whether it will work and there’s that teeensy-weensy down side.’

  ‘Teensy-weensy?’

  ‘The very small matter of it going out of control and creating a Black Hole that could swallow the planet.’

  ‘And you really think that’s a possibility?’ Sarah demanded.

  Mike smiled at her naivety. ‘The whole point of scientific experiment is to push back the boundaries of our knowledge. To do that, scientists have to stick their noses in some dark and sometimes dangerous corners. Just ask Marie Curie. How likely does a global catastrophe have to be for a scientist to back off from a big experiment? A couple of guys, including the president of the Royal Society, looked at the Collider and worked out that, based on astronomical evidence and assumptions about the physics of a few hypothetical particles called strangelets that we don’t really understand, the odds of turning the earth into a dead planet were about fifty million to one. Good odds, eh? About the same as my chances of winning the lottery. Only someone out there wins the lottery most weeks. Scientists are as fallible as the next man, Sarah. The Hadron Collider is playing with the building blocks of the universe, and the truth is that nobody has the slightest idea what the true risk is. Hell, they must cross their fingers every time they press Start.’

  LI

  THEY REACHED THE landing outside Jamie’s flat just as an elderly woman was disappearing through the door opposite and the atmosphere lay heavy with the scent of freshly sprayed air freshener.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Laurence,’ Jamie greeted his neighbour.

  She turned to glare at him. ‘I don’t know how you dare show your face after all that noise the other night.’

  ‘What was that all about?’ Sarah said after the door had slammed shut.

  Jamie shrugged. ‘Search me. I thought we’d always got on pretty well.’ As he put his key in the lock an unsavoury odour caught in his throat. He groaned. ‘The fish. That dozy bugger Simon has forgotten to feed them.’

  The moment he pushed open the door the smell hit him like something solid, instantly reacting with his gut to fill his mouth with bile. Someone had closed the thick velvet curtains and it took time for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. When they did, they were drawn to a bulky object in the centre of the room that shouldn’t be there. His brain seemed to fragment into a thousand pieces, but somehow he managed to grope for the light switch and Sarah stifled a scream as the full horror of what they’d walked into dawned.

  ‘Oh, fuck.’ Jamie’s legs threatened to give way and he crouched down with his hand over his mouth. The sound of his thundering heart almost overwhelmed the buzz of the hundreds of flies that had risen from the alien object and now filled the room.

  Blood everywhere. Old blood that stained the walls and the carpet a deep brown. But that must have come at the end.

  He forced himself to study the scene as if the central figure was not his friend. They had tied Simon – yes, Simon was present somewhere in that bloated, heavily marbled caricature of a human being – to a kitchen chair. He was naked to the waist and his feet were bare. That must be one of his own socks stuffed into the thing’s mouth. Internal gases had inflated the body until the darkened skin threatened to split and vile black fluids flowed from his nose, ears and where the eyes should be. Despite the decomposition it was possible to work out what they had done to him. The faint cooked-meat smell just detectable beneath the overpowering stench of death must have been caused by the blow torch or soldering iron they had used on his nipples and chest. At least four toes, and as many fingers, were missing, which presumably meant they were lying around somewhere among the mess of papers and household items strewn across the carpet. Once they had what they’d come for they had slashed his throat with an obscene, terrible violence that had splattered his life blood across the room, but which must have come as a blessed relief to its victim.

  ‘They were looking for us.’ Sarah’s voice shook.

  Jamie nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He tore his eyes away from the horror that had been his friend and surveyed the rest of the room. Every drawer had been ripped open and turned out on to the floor. The cushions of the sofa were sliced apart and the stuffing scattered. Even the furniture itself had been gutted, leaving the springs sticking out of the cloth. He glanced through to the study and saw a similar picture. In addition his computer had been taken apart and he knew that the hard disk would be missing.

  ‘I’m to blame for this. I underestimated how much the Sun Stone meant to Frederick and his thugs. When we vanished from Braunlage this is the first place they would have looked for us.’

  ‘No. You could never have predicted this. No one could. These people are psychopaths; they’ll kill anyone who gets in their way. Maybe we should just give up now?’

  Jamie forced himself to look at Simon. Frederick and the Vril would never give up while he and Sarah were still alive. The only way they would ever be free of them was to find the Sun Stone.

  ‘No.’

  * * *

  Three days passed before the police were satisfied with their statements. It seemed clear to the inspector in charge of the investigation that Simon’s murder was linked in some way to the find of the Raphael in Germany. Jamie had spent two of those days convincing him that he wasn’t trading in stolen artworks from a secret warehouse that the dead man had been tortured to identify.

  When they were allowed to leave, Jamie decided to set up home at his grandfather’s house on the grounds that it would be much easier to spot any watchers in the leafy lanes of north Welwyn than in central London. It turned out to be a good decision because a hand-delivered letter was waiting for him inviting him to visit the family lawyer, which presumably meant there was some movement on the sale of the house. While he walked into the town centre, Sarah continued her research.

  ‘This stuff on Operation Paperclip is incredible,’ she called as she heard the front door opening an hour later. The lack of reply puzzled her and when she went to investigate she realized instantly that something was very wrong. Jamie’s face wore the haunted look of a man walking away from the fatal accident he’d just caused.

  ‘What’s happened, Jamie? Is it about the house?’ She saw he was clutching two envelopes, one larger and white, but the paper so aged as t
o be a faded, marbled yellow, and the other a narrow dun-coloured oblong that might have been from the tax man. He brushed past her into the lounge and collapsed in a chair at the table. He put the larger of the two envelopes on the table in front of him and laid the second aside.

  Sarah sat opposite him. She noticed that the yellowing envelope had words written on it in a tight, almost archaic script and she understood instinctively that it wasn’t the solicitor’s writing. With a little effort she made out the inverted words. For the attention of Master James Sinclair. The use of Sinclair proved it had been written and deposited before Jamie’s mother had changed their name to the more upmarket version. It was padded, but not bulky, and clearly contained more than a single sheet. She knew better than to reach for it. Instead, she waited while the silence lengthened to the point where it became unbearable.

  ‘My grandfather instructed the solicitor to only pass it on after he was dead.’ Jamie’s voice came out cracked, as if all the moisture had been sucked from his throat by the dry, aged object in front of him.

  ‘What is it?’

  The green eyes filled with a combustible mixture of grief and pain, anger and loss that almost made her turn away. ‘The final pages of his diary.’

  Her fingers made an involuntary lunge for the envelope, but he put his hand, palm down on top of it. He saw that he’d hurt her feelings, but the hand didn’t move.

  ‘I need to think about this, Sarah. I’ve read the first few pages, but I couldn’t . . . I want to see it through his eyes as it happened. We need to go back to Germany.’

  She reached out and placed her hand over his. The flesh was cold. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ she reassured him. ‘Just tell me where you want to go and I’ll book the flights. Do you want to hear about Paperclip?’

  He shook his head. ‘Paperclip can wait. First you have to know what I know.’ He reached into the envelope and counted out four lined sheets of paper, identical to those from the blue journal.

  He began speaking in a flat monotone and the first thing she noted was that Matthew Sinclair was no longer in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, but was recording his memories of the period four years earlier, in the summer of 1941. It began as a love story.

  ‘We met in that old church hall by the cathedral, the one that smelled of stale sweat, flat beer and Capstan Full Strength. It was a time of hate, but you drove it away with your laughter. My soul was blackened and rotten, but you healed it with your goodness. My heart had turned to ice, but you melted it with the warmth of your love. When I picture your eyes they are the shifting colours of a tropical sea on a sunlit summer’s day; sometimes blue, sometimes green, their surface sparkles but in their depths lies the smoke and the fire that makes you you.

  ‘Your mother disapproved of me and the army disapproved of you, but you were clever enough to defeat them both. I can never smell the musty earthiness of old straw or feel the kiss of the sun on my bare flesh without thinking of you. You came to me bathed in the scent of elderflower and new-mown grass, your skin soft as velvet and hot as naked flame, and together we found a new place, far from war, far from pain, and far from fear.

  ‘I had forgotten how to live. You gave me life.

  ‘When the war found us again, your courage humbled me. Who would have believed we would ever become a target in our harmless old town? But then Hitler is a serial devourer of all that is good, with his Junkers and Heinkels, his incendiary bombs and his aerial torpedoes.

  ‘On the best day of my life, but one, you made me prouder than any man, standing tall before the priest even as the ground shook beneath our feet in the big shelter under the railway station. Remember how we laughed when he said, “Do you Margaret . . .” because you will never be anything but Peggy to me? When we emerged into that living hell, shattered buildings were our guard of honour and our confetti the falling ash. You smiled through your tears and spent our wedding night mending torn bodies and splinting broken bones, while I dug the living and the dead from the rubble that had been their homes. Coventry, 14 November 1941. And still we were happy. Because the seed had already been sown.

  ‘They appeared, like snowdrops at the end of March, earlier than expected but never more welcome. Elizabeth and Anne. Anne and Elizabeth. I held them in my arms and felt the life I had created squirm and bubble within them. I looked into their eyes and saw your eyes. Perfect. Have two new human beings ever been more perfect? How many hours did I have with them, and with you? I count them every day, but somehow I can never reach a proper tally. Did I ever see them smile? I dream that I did, but I do not truly know.

  ‘I try not to remember that day, Peggy, but the devil perches on my shoulder and whispers the details in my ear. I know I was at the camp when I heard the sirens. I ran, God knows how I ran, until the breath was like a knife in my throat and my legs collapsed under me. What is there in bricks and mortar to make them burn so? Flames, leaping from the roof like a giant funeral pyre. Flames, spewing from every window so it was as if I peered into the very mouth of hell. Flames all around. A sea of flames. No, an ocean of flames. I knew you would have been taken to the shelter, so why did I run to the hospital? But Elizabeth was sick, and Elizabeth couldn’t go to the shelter. So you stayed. You all stayed. I wept for you as I watched the hospital burn, all the time praying that you had escaped. All the time knowing – knowing – you had not. Then you were there. In the doorway. A shimmer in the heat. A smudge of darkness against the gold and the red. Of course, you would get them out, brave Peggy. You would smell the smoke and carry them through the wards and down the burning stairs and into the burning hall and out into the burning world. I called out your name, but the fire devoured it. Just as it devoured you. And Anne. And Elizabeth. You were on fire as you walked towards me, a pillar of flame with a halo of gold around your pretty head. Was it your feet that melted first? Or was it the tarmac? Did you hold them out to me as I ran into that wall of burning air? Did you cry my name as they held me back from you? I can’t remember, Peggy. All I remember is lying on the hot ground with my hair on fire and watching you melt, sinking slowly down until you and my babies became one with the burning earth.

  ‘And then I went mad.’

  Jamie’s emotionless voice faded and the only sound in the room was Sarah’s sobbing.

  ‘You realize what this means?’ he said harshly. ‘My grandfather had another wife. Another family. If the Germans hadn’t killed that woman and her children Jamie Saintclair wouldn’t have existed. They died, so that I could live. How do you think that makes me feel?’

  Her reaction astonished him. She lifted her head and her eyes flashed. ‘They had names,’ she snapped. ‘Peggy and Elizabeth and Anne. Don’t try to kid yourself that if you don’t give them names they don’t exist as real people, the way the Germans do by not mentioning the Jews. Spare me your fucking self-pity, Jamie. Matthew left you those pages so that you would understand. Don’t tarnish his memory and theirs by using it as an excuse to feel sorry for yourself. If you want to sit here and mope, that’s fine by me, but I’m going to pack.’

  He let her get to the door.

  ‘We fly in to Munich, but we do this my way.’

  She turned and gave him her hard stare.

  ‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘We’ll do it your way. But just remember, Jamie Saintclair, that I like you how you are now. The guy who was prepared to take on the Chinese army and the Indian air force just for little ol’ Sarah Grant. Not the way you were before somebody threw you under that train. Don’t go all boring on me.’

  He nodded and when he lifted his head the old Jamie was back. ‘At least we know what we’re fighting for. Maybe you should tell me what you found out about Operation Paperclip?’

  She shook her head. ‘I need to book our flights for tomorrow and I suspect it will mean an early start. I’ll explain on the plane.’ They headed for the stairs and she glanced back at the table. ‘You forgot your other envelope. What is it anyway?’

  He picked up
the letter and put it in his inside pocket.

  ‘Just a detail my mother left me to sort out.’

  LII

  ‘WE LOST HIM.’

  Bob Sumner couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘What do you mean you lost him?’

  ‘You told us to keep him on a light rein, so that’s what we did. His secretary said he was due back in the office this morning, but he called her last night and said she should take a couple of weeks off once she’d cleared his diary.’

  ‘The girl?’

  ‘We think she’s with him.’

  Sumner allowed himself a few moments of menacing silence, while the other man fidgeted at the end of the phone.

  ‘Get everybody on it. Two weeks means they’re going travelling. That means airports. I want to know where they’re going, what their seat numbers are and what they’ve taken along to read. Everything. You have until noon.’ He didn’t say or else, he didn’t have to. He put down the phone and immediately picked it up again for the call he wasn’t going to enjoy making.

  ‘Operation Paperclip.’ Sarah read from her notes and wriggled herself into a comfortable position in the cramped economy-class seat of the Gatwick–Munich flight. ‘As the war was ending the good old US of A belatedly realized that with the Red Army overrunning most of Germany they also had their hands on most of the Nazis’ military secrets, including their nuclear programme. This was about the time when what became the Cold War looked like it might be pretty hot, so it was suddenly very important to get any scientists and technicians in Allied hands back to America where they could be squeezed of what they knew. President Roosevelt had specifically ruled out offering these guys any guarantees, but Harry Truman overturned that decision – on condition they weren’t involved in war crimes.’

  ‘Truman was one of your more naive presidents?’

  ‘Yes, he was, or maybe he knew that the people he was letting loose on Operation Paperclip didn’t have the time or the morals to make such fine distinctions. In the end, the OSS smuggled out more than seven hundred scientists and their families. According to their documents they were whiter than white, but now we know better. Werner von Braun was the best known. He had designed the V2 rocket and went on to play a key role in the NASA space programme, but he was originally tagged a security risk to the United States. He was an angel compared to some of the others. Kurt Blome infected hundreds of concentration camp prisoners with plague vaccines. He got a job with the US Army Chemical Corps. Arthur Rudolph ran the Mittelwerk factory at Dora-Nordhausen in the Harz, where they made V2s and twenty thousand prisoners died from hanging, beating and starvation. He became a US citizen and designed the Saturn 5 rocket for the moon landings. A couple of guys called Hermann Becker-Reysing and Siegfried Ruff carried out medical experiments on inmates at Dachau, including placing them in an altitude chamber and decreasing the pressure until they died. They were paid to write their findings by the USAAF. And so it goes on. Klaus Barbie, for Christ’s sake. You’d think being labelled the Butcher of Lyon might have given them a clue?’