They’d been sitting for a few minutes when they were joined by a pony-tailed man in a denim jacket who looked as if he’d just escaped from a 1970s pop group. Gradually, recognition dawned. Howard Vanderbilt never voluntarily appeared on TV business shows, but despite his best efforts a few images of him survived. The pictures they used were either photos from a time when the ponytail had actually been in fashion or blurred shots of a distant figure on the hundred-million-dollar yacht that transported him around the Bahamas every summer. Jamie tried to tell himself he’d been expecting this, but it was still a shock to be sitting within feet of one of the richest men in the world – especially when that man was holding a gleaming 9 mm pistol that appeared to be aimed in the direction of his heart.
‘Mr Saintclair, I’m glad to meet you at last.’
‘I wish I could say the same, sir.’
The fact that Howard Vanderbilt was carrying a gun told Jamie everything he needed about the billionaire industrialist’s state of mind. Just like Walter Brohm, Vanderbilt had been driven beyond logic and reason by the Sun Stone. Why else would a man who could buy and sell whole countries be running around with a pistol when he had half a dozen perfectly good executioners sitting within fifteen feet? Their relative positions meant they were forced to talk across Sarah, who seemed not to have noticed the pistol and was showing similar signs to a volcano about to erupt. Her hands clutched at the shoulder bag in her lap and Jamie hoped she would keep them there.
A commotion at the back of the church signalled a new influx of visitors and Jamie turned his head to see a dark-suited figure he recognized as Frederick push his way past Vanderbilt’s bodyguards. Four shaven-headed minders in leather jackets and jeans accompanied him, sweeping the interior of the Frauenkirche with their eyes and evidently not liking what they saw. They’d still be trying to figure out Gustav’s mysterious disappearance and it would make them jumpy, but Jamie hoped not too jumpy. He was reassured when a word from Frederick brought them to heel. He noted a flaring of the nostrils when the previously impassive German recognized the man sitting beside him. Interesting, but they’d have to wait to see how interesting.
The German took his seat in the second pew, off to Jamie’s right but within touching distance of Howard Vanderbilt’s left shoulder. An aide approached the tycoon and he visibly stiffened when he heard whatever information he’d been given. Vanderbilt snatched a glance towards the man seated behind him and Frederick’s pale eyes hardened, confirming the surveillance information Mr Lim had provided in exchange for the location of the Sun Stone. Of course, the trade had been a little one-sided and Mr Lim hadn’t expected to be part of a delegation, but Jamie hoped he was a man who appreciated irony.
For a few seconds the two sets of bodyguards jockeyed for position in the open spaces around the pews as if they were part of a carefully choreographed ballet. Vanderbilt frowned, his patience evidently wearing thin. ‘As you can see, Frederick, I have this situation under control,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Your presence is not required. We can talk about this later, but for now I think you and your friends should leave.’ The only answer was a short laugh and at some unseen signal one of Vanderbilt’s bodyguards moved to Frederick’s right where he could cover the German’s gun hand.
Howard Vanderbilt sighed and when he spoke, Jamie detected a lack of certainty in his voice. The weariness of a man who had run out of time, or ideas, or both. Obviously this wasn’t going according to the industrialist’s plan.
‘You have caused me some trouble, Mr Saintclair. I have spent a great deal of time and money seeking out what has brought us to this place. It ends here. Am I clear on that?’
‘Very clear, Mr Vanderbilt.’ He thought he heard the word ‘chicken’ but Sarah might only have been sighing. ‘But I would have thought that in your world everything was a matter of negotiation?’
Vanderbilt leaned closer to Sarah. ‘I can buy it, or I can take it, son, it’s up to you. Name your price. We’re finished playing games.’
Jamie shook his head and looked around. ‘Do you think you and your stormtroopers are the only people who’ve been following me? Bugging my phone? There’s probably an NSA satellite up there right at this moment, listening to every word we say. The cheerful Oriental gentleman at the back with his two friends is to my certain knowledge a representative of the Chinese government. Everybody wants the Sun Stone, Howard, and frankly you’re the last person I’d give it up to. All you want to do is exploit it, whatever the cost. Just like Brohm.’
Vanderbilt’s face hardened. ‘Have it your own way, son.’ He moved the barrel of the pistol from Jamie to Sarah. ‘Tell me where the stone and Brohm’s documents are or I’ll kill the girl.’
Jamie stared at him. Not even Howard Vanderbilt could get away with murder in a church full of witnesses, but suddenly the church wasn’t so full. Young men in dark suits began ushering the tourists out. Most went, but Jamie could hear Mr Lim politely refusing the offer of assistance to leave, and the distinct sound of a pistol being cocked seemed to indicate that the pro-Frederick members of the Vril Society were prepared to stand their ground. Jamie hoped that he hadn’t misread the cast who’d assembled here, the last thing they needed was a shooting war in the Frauenkirche.
Vanderbilt took a big breath. ‘I . . .’
It wasn’t often a man like Howard Vanderbilt could be rendered speechless, but the muzzle of the little pistol Sarah Grant was screwing into the flesh beneath his right ear achieved what presidents and prime ministers had routinely failed to do.
‘The Sun Stone belongs to the State of Israel,’ she said loudly enough for everyone in the church to hear.
‘Perhaps I should have mentioned that, Howard,’ Jamie said patiently. ‘Miss Grant and the handsome gentleman who has the drop on us from the walkway up there are here to represent the people who were sacrificed to help Walter Brohm unlock the potential of the Sun Stone.’
It was time. He got to his feet and addressed everyone in the church. ‘Gentlemen.’ He raised his voice and it rang around the enormous space that had been designed precisely for that purpose. He allowed himself a smile at Sarah. ‘And lady. This is a place of worship, let us not turn it into a war zone. As you can see, we have a number of competing interests for the legacy of the late Brigadeführer Walter Brohm. Mr Vanderbilt here believes he has a divine right to exploit it and the gun in his hand suggests he is probably prepared to go further than any of you to get it. The shadowy gentleman behind him, representing the paramilitary wing of the Vril Society, may have a legal point were he to suggest that what Walter Brohm called the Sun Stone was in the gift of the then Tibetan government and that the investment which brought the major breakthrough in exploiting it was made by his countrymen. I suppose the German government could make a similar claim, though I doubt that they would want to press it. Mr Lim,’ the Chinaman bowed his head, ‘of the Chinese People’s Republic, would argue that his country has a more legitimate claim to it than any of you, because the Sun Stone was first discovered in the soil his people lay claim to, although I know the supporters of a Free Tibet would dispute that claim. And finally, Miss Sarah Grant, representative of the State of Israel, who can give evidence, which I’d be happy to support, of the human sacrifice her people were forced to make by Walter Brohm in the pursuit of his obsession.
‘But,’ he continued, ‘as I said, this is a place of worship. It is not a law court. You are all here because you want to know the story of the Sun Stone, particularly how it is going to end. My grandfather, like Walter Brohm’s father, was a churchman, so please indulge me if I preach you a short sermon about greed.
‘When Walter Brohm returned to Germany and opened the casket he found in Tibet, he suspected he had in his hands something enormously significant: a substance hitherto unknown to man. As a scientist it was his duty to discover the properties of that material and, at a time of great upheaval for his country, their significance and potential value. Yet the very upheaval which spurred h
im proved to be his greatest obstacle, because with war on the horizon no one was interested in possibilities – a dream that promised some distant panacea – only in certainties.
‘But Walter Brohm, for all his faults, was a man with several admirable qualities, not the least of which were persistence and self-belief. Somehow, he found the time and the resources to carry out his experiments. We don’t know the mechanics of it, but it appears that some time before early nineteen forty-one he came to the conclusion that the Sun Stone consisted of what we now call Dark Matter. That led in turn to the possibility, even the probability, of creating controlled nuclear fusion.’
A stir ran through the men in the church at the mention of the goal which had brought each of them here.
‘Now, he was able to turn directly to Hitler for support, but his beloved Führer failed him. Why? Because Hitler feared the power the Sun Stone was capable of unleashing. But one man had no such reservations. Walter Brohm sold his soul to the devil and the devil’s name was Heinrich Himmler.’
He waited for some reaction to his words, but none came.
‘Brohm needed to operate in total secrecy. That meant the labour to build the bunker in the Harz Mountains had to be expendable. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Russian prisoners, Polish slave workers and, of course, Jews were rushed off to the gas chambers the moment the bunker was complete. But the killing didn’t stop there. Scientists and technicians. Even the SS guards. When the time came to close the bunker down . . . when he was on the very brink of another breakthrough . . . Walter Brohm sacrificed them all to save himself and his precious secret.
‘And, just as Brohm never questioned the ethics or the danger or the morality of what he was doing, he knew his value to the last dollar. Germany could burn, her soldiers could be slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands, German boys could throw themselves at tanks, but Walter Brohm and his work must survive. As the war ended, he dangled the Sun Stone under the noses of people with even fewer morals than himself, and they took it: hook, line and sinker.
‘Within a month, he would have been welcomed to America and given more resources than he could ever have dreamed of to complete his project. But for one man.
‘One man recognized the true danger of the Sun Stone and Walter Brohm. That man was my grandfather. He shot Brohm through the head and hoped that when he died, the Sun Stone would die with him. But, of course, it didn’t, which is why we are here.’
‘Enough of the history lesson, Saintclair. We came for the stone. Where is it?’
Jamie shook his head. ‘You had my grandfather killed, Mr Vanderbilt, and a Polish war hero called Stanislaus Kozlowski who was his friend. Who knows how many more have been sacrificed on the altar of your greed? You were even prepared to betray your own kind.’ Vanderbilt flinched as if someone had slapped his face. ‘Oh, yes, Mr Vanderbilt. You’re not the only one who can bug a telephone. I suspect you and your friend Frederick will have lots to talk about when this is over. But the more I discovered about Matthew Sinclair, the more certain I was that he would have died to keep the Sun Stone away from men like you.’
‘The old man was an accident and the Pole was in the way.’ Vanderbilt’s voice was almost a plea. ‘Don’t you understand that this is more important than life or death? The Sun Stone can assure the future of the planet and the survival of our civilization.’
Jamie ignored him and looked around the cathedral, meeting the eyes of Mr Lim and Frederick in turn, before focusing his attention on Sarah Grant. ‘I came to the Frauenkirche prepared to sacrifice everything to make sure Walter Brohm’s legacy remained unfulfilled. To do so I would have blown up this place and everyone in it.’ They looked at the building around them, wondering if they’d been lured into a trap, all except Sarah who had forgotten Howard Vanderbilt and whose eyes never left Jamie. ‘But fortunately, I don’t have to do that.’
‘What do you mean?’
Jamie stared at the industrialist, wondering what was going through his head. ‘When he left the bunker in February nineteen forty-five Walter Brohm believed he had chosen the safest place in Germany to hide the Sun Stone. Little old Dresden, famous for nothing more than its crockery and its culture. Untouched by six years of war and likely to stay that way. He knew every stone of this great church, because his father had been pastor here. In particular, he knew the stone vaults below it as no one else did. Where better to keep the Sun Stone and his research papers until they were needed? Brohm probably calculated it would be lunacy to waste resources on bombing Dresden at that late stage of the war.’ The church had gone very still. He could probably have whispered and they would still have heard him. ‘But Brohm forgot that lunacy and war go hand in hand. There’s some suggestion the decision was taken because the Wehrmacht was likely to retreat this way from Czechoslovakia, as it was then. The more likely reason is that somebody at Bomber Command was looking for another box to tick on his long list of targets.’
He heard a grunt of bitter laughter. It wasn’t surprising that Frederick had worked out what was coming. Frederick was German, and Germans knew all about the history of Dresden.
‘Walter Brohm believed Dresden was the ideal place to keep the Sun Stone safe. He was right . . . up to a point. That point came on the night of February the thirteenth nineteen forty-five, probably about a week after the stone was brought here, when a formation of 723 Lancaster bombers proved him wrong. The bull’s-eye for the raid was to be a sports stadium about three hundred metres from here in the Aldstadt, but the Pathfinder mosquitoes dropped their target markers over the cigarette factory about a mile to the east. If every plane had dropped its bombs on target, everything would have been fine, but there was a phenomenon during the war called bomb creep, where every subsequent crew tended to drop its bombs a little further back than those that had gone before. Bomb creep resulted in an arrowhead pattern one and a quarter miles long and one and three-quarter miles broad at its widest point. In the next twenty-four hours that arrowhead would become the most dangerous place on earth. The first RAF attack would be followed by a second, a few hours later, and a daylight raid by B17 bombers of the USAAF. Twenty-seven hundred tonnes of high explosive and incendiaries rained down from planes flying at eight thousand feet and the flames of Dresden could be seen by air crew from as far as five hundred miles away. In the middle of the arrowhead was the Old Town; in the middle of the Old Town was the Frauenkirche. At least twenty-five thousand people were killed, crushed beneath falling buildings or incinerated in the firestorms that followed.’ He paused. ‘Nothing was left but rubble.’
Mr Lim appeared to be praying. Frederick’s vengeful eyes never left the back of Vanderbilt’s head. Sarah and the industrialist stared at the church around them.
‘Oh, yes, this too,’ Jamie assured them. ‘The Frauenkirche may look like an eighteenth-century Renaissance masterpiece, but it was built – or rebuilt – as an exact replica of the original only after the Communists were kicked out and it was finally completed in two thousand and five. All that’s left of the old Frauenkirche are those little black stones you see decorating the exterior. The church that was here in nineteen forty-five was blown to bits by at least one four-thousand-pound blockbuster bomb. The RAF in their schoolboy fashion called them Cookies and they were designed to bury themselves deep in the earth before exploding. They were among the most destructive weapons of that uniquely destructive war. The bomb reduced everything, including the vaults of the Frauenkirche, to dust and bricks. Whatever was down there ended up with the millions of tonnes of rubble from the rest of Dresden.’
Vanderbilt’s face had turned ash grey. ‘What happened to it?’ he whispered. ‘What happened to the Sun Stone?’
Jamie took Sarah Grant’s hand and she didn’t resist as he walked her steadily towards the doorway. No one tried to stop them. Through the door he could see the flashing lights of half a dozen parked police cars. He didn’t envy Lotte Muller the job of cleaning up the diplomatic mess, but the pictures and phone tran
scripts from Mr Lim should help.
‘It’s out there, Howard,’ he continued. ‘The rubble from the old city was used to build the foundations for the new Dresden, and to pave the roads for a couple of hundred miles around. About half a million people are living on top of the Sun Stone.’
They emerged into the early evening sunshine.
‘It’s all yours.’
THE END
Acknowledgements
Special thanks go to my friends Shirley and Kenny Allan for lifting the lid on the beautiful city of Dresden and keeping me straight on my German, and to fellow writer Gabriele Campbell for helping me negotiate my way through the Harz mountains. Heinz Hohne’s masterful book The Order of The Death’s Head gave me the fine detail I needed on the world of the SS and Matthew Sinclair’s diary probably owes more to With the Jocks by Peter White, one of the best memoirs of the Second World War by a fighting soldier, than any other history I read. Finally to Simon my editor and his fantastic team at Transworld, and to Stan, my agent at Jenny Brown in Edinburgh.
About the Author
James Douglas is the pseudonym of a writer of popular historical adventure novels. This is the first thriller to feature art recovery expert, Jamie Saintclair.
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
The Doomsday Testament Page 36
