‘But how do you know?’ Sarah demanded.
‘I don’t know. But I can feel him all around me. He was exhausted in body and mind by the time he reached here. He just wanted it to be over. When he stepped out of the jeep with those three men they were less than two miles from the Swiss frontier and safety.’
‘So what happened?’ Her voice was almost desperate.
‘Let’s find out.’
The air was cool when they started climbing the path, but they were quickly forced to remove their sweaters as the sun’s heat began to force its way beneath the canopy and the vegetation closed in where the trail narrowed. Jamie studied the ground around them for the few clues his grandfather had left in the diary.
Behind them, ten minutes after they left the car, a Mercedes four by four with darkened windows drew slowly, almost silently, into the car park clearing.
‘Make it quick, but make it certain,’ the driver snapped to his passenger.
The second man took a rucksack from the back seat and walked quickly to the little Volkswagen. It took him less than twenty seconds to break into the car using an electronic key. After a quick search revealed nothing of interest he took a tiny magnetized metal circle shaped like a rivet head from the rucksack and placed it beneath the driver’s seat in a position he knew no one but a mechanic or auto cleaner would ever find it.
Once the combined microphone and tracker was placed, he popped the bonnet of the car and opened the engine compartment. This time the package he took from the rucksack was larger, a heavily wrapped rectangular block, one side of which he sprayed with quick-drying cement and attached to the chassis at the driver’s side wheel arch. It was a little more haphazard than he would have liked, because he had only been told the make of car that morning and didn’t have time to make the kind of precise calculations of thickness of metal and blast potential he would normally do, but he consoled himself that he was using so much explosive that very little would survive of the car. Once he was certain it was firmly attached and the receiver was working properly, he nodded, closed the bonnet and locked the car.
‘Set?’ asked the driver.
The man nodded. ‘Just say the word.’
The driver smiled. ‘Patience. We can’t afford any mistakes this time.’
As Jamie and Sarah climbed, the path became steeper and less well defined, just a scuff of brown dirt winding between the trees, crossed by twisted tree roots and with occasional natural stairways of worn grey rock. Sarah stopped with her hands on her hips and breathed in deeply. ‘You can see why three unfit, middle-aged Nazi war criminals might find this difficult. I almost feel sorry for them.’
‘Don’t. They were bastards, and they probably ended up sunning themselves in Santa Barbara with skins like leather and mojitos in their fists while they watched their pneumatically enhanced mistresses frolic in the pool. I hope I’m that misfortunate.’
‘What?’ She stuck her chest out provocatively. ‘You mean I’m not pneumatic enough for you, Saintclair. You ever even think about a busty blonde mistress, mister, and I’ll replace the olives in my martini with your cojones.’
‘In that case,’ he bowed, ‘let me assure you that it never crossed my mind. Let’s go.’
‘What’s your hurry? We’ve got plenty of time.’
‘I’m not so sure. The clock is ticking and we know we’re not the only people who are looking for the Sun Stone. Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t out there somewhere.’ He studied the trees crowding the edge of the path. ‘At least when Matthew Sinclair came this way he had a gun and he knew how to use it.’
They climbed on, through the sultry heat of midday, only once having a clear sight of the sun when they reached a broad clearing in the woods which had been planted with some kind of grain crop that was just beginning to ripen. They stopped to eat and through a gap in the trees they had a view of the hills to the north and west and the patchwork of cultivated fields in between.
‘Listen,’ Sarah hissed.
Jamie tensed, and wished, not for the first time, that he had some sort of weapon. Even a kitchen knife would be better than nothing. ‘What is it?’
She sat motionless for a few seconds until a faraway machine-gun rattle broke the silence.
‘A woodpecker.’
He felt like strangling her. Instead, he kissed her.
They lay side by side in the grass, staring up at a perfect cupola of pale eggshell blue. Sarah’s hand searched for his and her fingers held him tight. ‘Seriously, Jamie, do you ever wonder what happens after?’ There was a wistful regret in her voice that sent an icicle through his heart.
‘After?’
‘When it’s over. When you know Matthew’s story. When we’ve found the Sun Stone or we haven’t. When we don’t have the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to chase.’
He shrugged, which was awkward lying on his back. ‘If I do think about it, I think about you and I together, having fun,’ he said, aware that his words lacked conviction. ‘There are still plenty of things we have to do and see. Together.’
She squeezed his hand.
‘Sure there are, Jamie, but don’t you sometimes worry that we’ll be different people then?’
‘Do you?’
She rolled over so she could look into his face. ‘Look, the first day we met, you’d just been pushed under a train, that’s hardly normal circumstances. Since then it’s been a roller-coaster of World War Two puzzles and crazy quests, rabid Nazis, lost masterpieces and long-dead Jews, and this mysterious discovery that might not even exist except in our heads. Hell, we’ve been living on adrenalin and coffee and sex for the last month. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, but while we’ve been chasing rainbows we’ve been completely different people from the ones that scrounge a living back in London. Do I know the real Jamie Saintclair? I’m still not sure. And you sure as hell don’t know the real Sarah Grant.’
He got to his feet and dusted himself down, trying not to let her see his disappointment. There were certainly things he didn’t know about Sarah Grant and things he suspected, but didn’t want to know quite yet, but he’d been prepared to discover them in his own time. ‘Maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t. But the one thing I’m certain of is that I’d like the chance to find out.’
He set off up the slope, expecting her to follow, but when he looked round a few minutes later, she wasn’t with him. He turned back along the path just as she appeared through the trees, head down and deep in thought. She looked up and he saw she’d been weeping.
‘Hey. Things aren’t that bad. We’ll work it out. I’ll take you for a swanky dinner in the West End when we get back home and we can talk it over. Unless you’d prefer to have a quiet night in.’
She grinned through the tears and nodded. ‘Look, it’s . . . it’s just that I’m confused, Jamie. Everything has happened so fast and there’s been so much going on. I don’t know what’s up and what’s down. Just give me time, huh.’
He bent and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Sure. Come on, it can’t be far now.’
They reached the clearing with the stream after another ten minutes of climbing. Sarah recognized it first. She stopped in her tracks. ‘A runnel through a clearing beside a steep ravine, that’s what Matthew described. I had to look up runnel in the dictionary.’
‘This is it.’ Jamie tried to keep the tension from his voice. He walked to the edge of the gully that slashed the woods. This was the moment he’d been waiting for since he first opened the journal. His imagination had painted a dark, gothic landscape of jagged rocks and brooding, dangerous forest, but it wasn’t like that at all. Around him, the sun’s rays turned the summer leaves into a hundred thousand sparkling emeralds and birdsong echoed among the trees. Still, he had no doubts. ‘This is it.’
He fumbled in his rucksack and his hands shook as he withdrew the yellow-white envelope containing the final diary entries.
LVI
> ‘8 May 1945, 1 p.m., 3 miles south of Blumberg. We have travelled two hundred and fifty miles over the past seven days and throughout that time I have felt as if a volcano has been building up inside me. Klosse and Strasser might look like a pair of mismatched British Army cooks in their ill-fitting battledress, but the miasma of evil surrounding them is as corrosive as mustard gas. They literally stink of death, or perhaps it is truer to say that the stink of death has never left my nostrils. I have done many things that sickened me during six years of war, but I have never felt dirtier than while helping these men to escape the justice that awaits them back in Germany. I knew now that Klosse was the Nosferatu of the camps. I had seen the camps. The awfulness of Belsen will never leave me; the living turned into walking skeletons, the dead discarded like so much refuse, the smell of decaying flesh and the taste of burning bodies on my lips, the staring eyes of doomed children pleading from the faces of old men. The beaten, the starved, men torn apart by dogs, shot or hanged. Physically destroyed by the inhumanity of their treatment and mentally by the misery of their existence and the removal of all hope. Casual violence is symptomatic of war. The systematic annihilation of a race is beyond comprehension. Yet, if I am to believe Brohm, Klosse’s crimes went beyond even that. He had hovered unseen in the smoke from the ovens and chosen his victims from among the living dead below: men, women and children, every individual specifically selected to suit his purpose; measured, weighed, injected or dosed, analysed and inspected in their agonies, each convulsion recorded, until the last, and finally eviscerated, dissected or disassembled for the knowledge their abused bodies would provide, their organs and parts bottled and stored for comparison with those who had gone before and those still to come. Not human beings. Not even animals. Things. Experiments. And all of it justified in the name of progress. There is no remorse in Klosse; it is plain on his smug Prussian face as he contemplates his new life. I think I have never hated anyone more. By comparison, Strasser is a babe in arms in the pantheon of genocide, a mere torturer; extractor of teeth and toenails, and twister of genitals. A dull bureaucrat driven by ambition and flattery to exchange his pen for a cattle prod and a soldering iron. Strasser is already doomed. Escaping to America will not save him, because he cannot escape from himself. For the same reason, he will never know forgiveness or absolution. The things he has seen and done are devouring him from the inside and the only escape will be oblivion. I can feel no pity for him. His crimes, paltry as they are in this terrible war, surely cannot just be forgotten.
‘Yet it was only when Walter Brohm told me about his bomb “greater than any bomb ever invented” that I finally came to my decision.
‘He sits directly opposite me, beneath a tree on the bank of the stream, watching me write, smiling that knowing smile of his, well fed and satisfied, certain of his own greatness, his genius merely dormant and soon to flower again beneath the benevolent rays of a Californian sun. I know of no crime Walter Brohm has committed, apart from the crime of complacency. He is a garrulous, almost likeable man, who, but for a tendency towards arrogance, would make a perfectly acceptable dinner companion. In a world full of enemies, Brohm wishes to be everyone’s friend.
‘Why is Walter Brohm more dangerous than a hundred Klosses? Because his curiosity knows no boundaries. Because no price is too high if it proves him right. Because no risk is too great if it enhances his genius.
‘I carefully placed the journal in my pack and roused them from their rest. Klosse and the Ox were reluctant to move, but I explained that our contact was waiting for us across the border less than an hour away.
‘Klosse laughed. “Gut,” he said to me. “At least the Amis will treat us with the respect we are due. I intend to report you for your treatment of your prisoners. You will be reprimanded.”
‘Strasser eventually pushed himself to his feet, grumbling quietly and scratching his fat backside.
‘Walter grinned at me. “You will visit me in America, Leutnant Matt? They say we will have fine houses and big cars. Perhaps even a swimming pool. Who would believe such a thing? That is how precious my work is to them.” He took my hand and shook it. “I thank you for bringing us here. Do not mind Klosse. His opinion counts for nothing against Walter Brohm.”
‘I detached myself and told them we wouldn’t be stopping again. If they wanted to take a pee now was the time to do it.
‘They stayed together, as men do in such circumstances, and lined up along the ravine as I had predicted they would.
‘I had the Browning ready, with the safety catch off and I walked quickly up behind them. I shot the Ox first, in the back of the skull, and his body was thrown forward on to the rocks below. Klosse turned, prepared to attack me, but a man with his penis in his hand is peculiarly vulnerable and I had time to aim the gun directly at his heart. He died cursing me, as I suppose was his due. Walter Brohm calmly finished what he was doing and turned to face me . . .’
JAMIE’S VOICE FADED. He had read the final paragraph automatically, not taking in the meaning of the words and the shocking reality dawned on him only slowly. This was a confession of cold-blooded murder. The scene replayed itself in his mind, but his brain wouldn’t connect the man who pulled the trigger with the picture he had of the real Matthew, a smile on the kindly face and eyes that glittered with gentle humour.
LVII
‘READ THE REST, Jamie. Matthew wanted you to see this. You won’t understand why unless you stay with him to the end.’
‘I . . .’
‘Read it. What happened to Walter Brohm? What happened to the Sun Stone?’
‘At first Brohm didn’t believe he was to die with the others. He was Walter Brohm. He was guilty only of genius. Klosse and Strasser were war criminals. He was a scientist. It was only when I kept the muzzle of the .45 pointed at his chest and he saw the implacable resolve on my face that the smile faded. He began to plead for his life.
‘He offered me the contents of his briefcase, which, he said, were worth a king’s ransom. When I kicked it aside he reached for the top pocket of his tunic. I almost shot him then, and he knew it, because his hand began to shake. He took out a silk escape map with some sort of Nazi symbol on the reverse. This, he said, would lead me to the Raphael and everything else. He explained how to decipher it, but I wanted nothing from Walter Brohm. I knew that whatever he offered would be poisoned by contact with him. I despised him. He thought he was better than the two men I had just killed, but he was the worst of them. In his arrogance and his conceit he was prepared to unleash Armageddon upon this world in the name of science. A thousand Coventrys in a single explosion of white light. How many Peggys and Elizabeths and Annes must die to prove Walter Brohm right? Worse, he was prepared to risk the End of Days, and for what?
‘He attempted to justify his work. It was the wonder of the world and only he, Walter Brohm, had the skills and the genius to make it happen. Unlimited energy, Leutnant Matt, think about it. Heating for every house. Power for industry. And that was only the start. Ordinary people would ride in cars and automobiles and trains designed to use his technology. Air travel would be so affordable and swift any man could go anywhere in the world, yes, and take his family too.
‘He tried to tell me about the Sun Stone, but I wouldn’t listen. I almost spat in his face. “What about the bomb, the bomb with all the power of the sun?” I demanded. “What about Peggy and Elizabeth and Anne” He looked bewildered, he knew nothing of any Peggy or Elizabeth, I was trying to trick him. By now he was weeping and I almost wavered, but I knew I had to harden my heart for the sake of the world.
‘He went down on his knees and asked me to hear his confession, as if that single gesture would gain him absolution for all the sins he forced me to listen to. The deaths of Tibetan monks and Russian slave labourers. Jews shot down for having clumsy fingers or slaughtered for having the temerity to know too much. Yet his greatest sin of all he would not confess. The sin of certainty.
‘When he was finished I shot hi
m through the head and carried his body to the ravine and threw it over. Then I climbed down and did what I could to cover them in a decent fashion.’
In a daze, Jamie walked across to the edge of the gully and looked down. After sixty years there was nothing to see except a jumble of moss-covered rocks twenty feet below and a thin stream barely worth the name running amongst them. ‘He killed them all. They were unarmed. He executed them. It was murder, Sarah, cold-blooded murder. They would have hanged him if they’d found out.’
‘But they didn’t,’ she said firmly. ‘And I’m not sure they would have . . . hanged your grandfather, I mean. The three men he killed were monsters. Each one of them was responsible for hundreds of deaths. Even thousands. You heard what Matthew said about Walter Brohm’s confession? Jews slaughtered for having the temerity to know too much. Well, we found the evidence of that massacre, didn’t we? That alone would have been enough to have Walter Brohm hanged at Nuremberg. And Klosse, with his vile medical experiments on children. Strasser, the executioner. Do you know how many Jews were killed at Kiev in September nineteen forty-one? Thirty-three thousand innocent men, women and children. Come on, Jamie, these people were scum. If anyone deserved killing, they did. Matthew Sinclair did the world a favour when he fired those three bullets and you know it.’
‘Who they were doesn’t change the fact that my grandfather murdered three men in cold blood. He brought them here, he let them eat a last meal and he killed them. He and my mother brought me up to believe in justice, Sarah, but my grandfather set himself up as judge, jury and executioner.’
She gave a long drawn out sigh. ‘Christ, Jamie, you’re doing it again. This isn’t about Jamie Saintclair. It’s about Matthew and the war and the Sun Stone. You read what the journal said about his family. He watched his wife and children being burned alive by German incendiary bombs. That’s enough to drive any man crazy. Yet he fought back. He endured the rest of the war and took part in some of the toughest battles of them all. He was tired and he was sick and what happened in Coventry had overwhelmed his mind. When he met a man who promised to build a bomb that would create a thousand Coventrys in a single night what the hell was he going to do? What the hell would you have done? Don’t tell me you would have watched Walter Brohm and Klosse and Strasser walk away into the sunset en route to their cosy retirement in the States and then waited for the news that America had dropped the world’s most powerful bomb on Moscow, because I won’t believe you. In the same circumstances both of us would have done exactly the same thing, and you know what? We would have been right. Maybe it wasn’t legal, but any way you look at it, it was justice. Remember the bunker? You seem to have forgotten what you promised, but that doesn’t matter any more because Matthew Sinclair, your grandfather, did the job for you. It’s simpler this way.’
The Doomsday Testament Page 32
