The Isis Covenant

by Douglas, James

  Matthias, or perhaps his brother, appeared to remove the remnants of their meal. Bernie frowned, and poured himself another glass of wine. For a moment, he seemed to shrink into himself, but from somewhere he found the strength to straighten in his chair.

  ‘I’m not proud of what I’m going to tell you now, but I can’t change any of it, though please believe me, I’ve done what I can in the past few years to try to make up for it. Geistjaeger 88 wasn’t just a freeloading operation to hunt down trinkets that might interest Crazy Heinrich; it was part of the plan to turn the SS into the richest and most powerful organization in Germany. Even more powerful than the Nazi party itself. Between nineteen forty-two and ’forty-five, Bodo Ritter and Max Dornberger organized the transfer of hundreds of millions of marks’ worth of gold bullion, works of art, currency, government bonds and jewellery to numbered accounts in Swiss banks in Zurich. I became part of this operation in nineteen forty-four when Himmler agreed to transfer most of Geistjaeger 88’s personnel to SS units fighting on the Eastern Front and Ritter didn’t have no option. We’d dress as civilians and use diplomatic passports to cross into Switzerland at Gaillingen, north-west of the Bodensee. Once we hit Zurich either Bodo or Max would present their credentials at the bank and we’d make the deposit. But this was Geistjaeger 88 and nothing was that simple. Right from the start Bodo operated a policy he called System H: one for Heinrich and the rest for the boys. Himmler only wanted the good stuff and the relics that fulfilled his fantasies, so what were we going to do with the rest? Donate it to the party? Not a chance. We took what we wanted from a chateau or a villa and torched the place so that we could claim the stuff went up with the house. In the early days that was fine, but the problem was there was just too much loot. Soon we began to look like a caravan from the Arabian nights. So the Zurich trips would have a double purpose: to fill the SS accounts and to top up the G88 pension fund. Naturally, only Bodo or Max had access, but Bernie Hartmann isn’t a thief for nothing. On one trip I followed Max to find out which bank they were using. Now, the only thing I needed was a way to get at the account. Security in Swiss banks wasn’t as tight as it is now, but tight enough. Still, it turned out to be easier than I thought. Every time Max and I came back from a Zurich trip, I noticed him palm something to Bodo. A key maybe? Eventually I worked out that it was a piece of paper that Bodo kept in his billfold, because he thought it was so innocuous no one would suspect what it was used for. That’s why, when Bodo was knocked unconscious outside the bunker, I took this from him.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out half of a playing card, torn from top to bottom up the centre. ‘The ace of spades.’ He grinned. ‘My passport to paradise. All I had to do was walk into the bank, say I was Bodo Ritter and present my half of the card and they’d show me to the vault, no questions asked. Then, I’d fill a case with what I fancied and carry it across the street to a second Swiss bank where I’d opened an account in a new name. Bodo Ritter paid for this,’ he waved at the picture window, ‘my place in Boston and the villa in the South of France. He also paid to set up my security consultancy and the safe manufacturing business, from which I’ve now retired. You look sceptical, young man? Maybe you think Old Bernie’s off his rocker?’

  ‘It just seems so easy …’

  ‘Oh, it was easy all right. Our Swiss friends were remarkably cooperative. It’s just business, after all, and they’re so very good at business. I wouldn’t be surprised if the SS account still exists. You think I’m kidding, just look in the papers. Not two years ago a prosecutor from Geneva working on some money-laundering case opened a vault in the Zürcher Kantonalbank and found fourteen paintings by Monet, Renoir and Pissarro. The account was in the name of Bruno Lohse, an art dealer who was part of the Göring operation all those years ago. Lohse had been cleared of any crime after the war and continued to work as a dealer. Who knows how many paintings were put in that vault when he opened it?’

  ‘So you made your fortune from money and paintings from the Jews?’

  ‘Don’t waste your anger or your disgust on me, Detective Fisher. In the past few years I’ve heaped enough self-disgust on myself for a hundred lifetimes. In any case,’ he smiled, ‘this old, wrinkled skin is like rhinoceros leather, it would take much more than that to hurt me.’

  ‘Then let me be equally frank, Mr Hartmann. We didn’t come here to listen to your life story, interesting as it is. We came here to find out what happened to the Eye of Isis. Maybe it’s time you quit stalling and told us.’

  Bernie Hartmann nodded as he made his decision. ‘Of course, but I’m an old man and it’s getting late. Please be my guests and stay the night. We have plenty of room and you’ll be perfectly safe under this roof. Tomorrow, after breakfast, I’ll tell you everything. I promise. There’s only one thing I ask in return.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jamie said warily.

  ‘If Bodo Ritter is alive, kill him. If he’s dead, find his grave and put a stake through his black heart.’

  XXXIII

  PAUL DORNBERGER JUMPED from the steps of the private jet onto the tarmac at Zurich airport and walked swiftly across the apron to his waiting car. Once inside the gleaming black Mercedes SUV he wasted no time.

  ‘Is everything in place, Sergei?’

  ‘Not yet, sir.’ The man beside him flinched at the blind rage in Dornberger’s eyes. ‘There are complications. The house is on a narrow strip of land between the lakeside road and the Zurichsee. It’s walled on all landward sides and covered by security cameras, which we have to assume are monitored twenty-four hours. Given the target’s area of expertise, we also have to plan for additional security precautions within the grounds themselves. None of that would matter if there was a suitable position nearby to use as a base for a surprise attack, but the lakeshore is heavily populated and short of taking over a neighbouring property there’s nowhere satisfactory. We would be compromised before we could get anywhere near the walls, never mind the house.’

  Dornberger listened with growing anger. Like Oleg Samsonov’s security team, these men were all former Special Forces soldiers, but there the comparison ended. They were freelancers, Russian and east European mercenaries hired on a mission-by-mission basis and paid for by a special fund Paul had created over the years, and which he alone could access. These people were professionals, they were supposed to supply solutions, not whine about their problems. ‘I want to see for myself.’

  It took thirty minutes to drive through the town and another twenty to reach the property, halfway along the lake’s twenty-mile east bank. One pass was enough to confirm what the Russian said. The attack would have to be at night and the first hint of a vehicle stopping would set the alarm bells ringing. There was no screened parking within a mile. Despite the grandeur of the house and those around it, the area was heavily built up, with homes, shops and factories bordering the roadside, each of them no doubt with their own security arrangements and CCTV cameras.

  ‘If you could give us another forty-eight hours to do a proper reconnaissance …’

  ‘No.’

  Sergei nodded and his voice regained its confidence. ‘In that case, our only option is to come in from the lake. Two assault boats, four men each – we estimate a security team of not more than four men – we come in silent and make our landing among the trees beside the lake. I would suggest dawn, when experience tells us there will be a heavy mist on the water at this time of year. We approach the house in stealth, taking care of any opposition as we go, but when we reach it, we go in hard, stopping for nothing.’

  ‘You understand I want the old man alive?’

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s understood by everyone. What about the rest?’

  ‘Kill them all. I don’t want to leave any witnesses.’ Saintclair and the woman had done their part, they had led Sergei to the house. They were no longer required. In any case, it would have been only a matter of time. He already had Hartmann’s identity from the document trail the old fool had left as a result of the don
ations he had made to the Jews and to his family. ‘And for the withdrawal?’

  ‘We’ve identified a place for insertion two miles to the north, but we plan to withdraw to the opposite side of the lake in the exit phase of the operation. There’s a suitable landing ground that isn’t overlooked at a place called Vorder Au, directly opposite the target house. We’ll sink the boats and return separately to the rented accommodation.’

  Paul Dornberger smiled for the first time since landing in Zurich. So close, after twenty years. He had feared the old man might already be dead and the trail gone cold, but he could almost smell the scent of Berndt Hartmann’s fear. The payments to the families in New York and London had been the start of a long paper trail. Electronic penetration of the company named as the proxy of the Jersey lawyer’s office had revealed first dozens, then hundreds of regular payments to Jewish support organizations and individual survivors of the so-called Holocaust. Not a Holocaust, his father would have said, but a reckoning. One of those payments had led them from a corporation that manufactured safes in the United States to a small holding company based in Zurich, Switzerland. After that, all it had taken was money.

  Hartmann is soft, his father had said, he does not have our strength of will. He will reveal himself.

  And now he had.

  Twenty years. He could wait another twelve hours.

  ‘We go in at dawn.’

  XXXIV

  IN BED LATER, they tried to make sense of the day. It had felt like being on one of those fairground rides Jamie remembered from his schooldays: a perpetual spinning and bumping on a sea of choppy, mismatched waves, and all accompanied by a blur of faces and the sickly sweet scent of candyfloss and toffee apples.

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  Danny turned to face him, her small breasts peeping over the covers. ‘I think Bernie Hartmann would give Pinocchio a run for his money in the veracity stakes. For a while there I wondered why his nose wasn’t growing. All that sob-story stuff about his old man and working with the communists. My guess is he was a career criminal who ratted on his friends when he got caught and volunteered to do anything that would get him out of the concentration camp.’

  ‘You can’t really blame him for that.’

  ‘No, but it makes me wonder how much we can believe.’

  Jamie turned Hartmann’s confession over in his mind.

  ‘You’re right; there were more holes in his story than a Swiss cheese. I have the feeling our friend Bernie was protecting the picture of himself he’d created since the war. A lot of very bad stuff must have happened during those three years with Geistjaeger 88, but Bernie wants us to believe he was just a bystander when the blood was spilled. The reality is that unless he’d been prepared to tie the noose or pull the trigger, Bernie Hartmann wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the SS. Oddly, though, when it comes to the important things, I do believe him.’

  Danny nodded and the small breasts quivered invitingly. Jamie reached out absently to stroke one, but she slapped his hand away.

  ‘Not while I’m thinking, Sherlock. The whole thing begins to make more sense. The Crown of Isis existed. Ritter or Dornberger—’

  ‘He was telling the truth about Ritter, I’m convinced of that.’

  ‘Okay, Ritter, then. Ritter has the Crown and Bernie Hartmann has or had the Eye. The dead child in Wilhelmstrasse on the twenty-ninth of April 1945, is evidence, circumstantial maybe, but still evidence, that one of them, probably Ritter, believed in that mumbo-jumbo about the Crown’s powers. Sixty years later, someone starts knocking people off who may or may not know the location of friend Bernie, but only after turning the heat on them in the worst possible way. That tells me that Bodo Ritter …’ She saw his shake of the head. ‘Okay, I grant you it’s unlikely, but can we really discount the possibility until we know otherwise? Bodo Ritter, or someone connected with Ritter, is trying to reunite the Crown of Isis with the Eye. All of which makes my trip here worthwhile and makes me just a little more optimistic that I am going to put this guy away for a long, long time.’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘Yes, why has it taken sixty years for whoever has the Crown of Isis to decide that he needs to reunite it with the Eye?’

  It didn’t come in a flash of inspiration, more with the thud of a body falling to the floor. ‘Simple, Sherlock.’ She snuggled a little closer and placed his hand over her breast where it had been earlier. ‘Because Bodo Ritter is dying and he thinks that only the Crown of Isis can save him.’

  It was still dark when they heard the soft knock on the door. Jamie switched on the bedside light and threw on the towelling dressing gown he’d found in a wardrobe. When he opened the door, Bernie Hartmann was standing there, fully dressed and grinning like a malignant sprite.

  ‘It’s an old man’s privilege or an old man’s curse, Mr Saintclair, that he doesn’t need much more than four hours’ sleep. I like to get up about now and watch the sun rise over the lake while I breakfast; I thought you young folks might like to join me and I can finish my little story. Shall we say twenty minutes?’

  ‘I hope you like eggs Benedict? The Swiss, they think tea, bread and butter is fine in the morning. When I was in the States I learned to enjoy starting the day with something more substantial.’

  It was still dark outside, and at first all they could see in the picture window were their own reflections, but gradually Jamie became aware of a dull leaden grey beyond it, that grew imperceptibly lighter with each passing minute.

  Bernie Hartmann finished his eggs and ham and wiped his lips with a napkin. Matthias, or his brother, removed the plates and brought another pot of coffee. ‘The Swiss may know nothing about breakfast, but they make a fine cup of coffee. Last night, I was telling you … what?’

  Danny stifled a yawn, drawing a glare from the little man. Jamie grinned. ‘I do believe that Bodo Ritter had just shot you in the arse.’

  ‘That’s right, I landed in that heap of sand and I was heading for the hills when I felt this sting in my left butt cheek. Still got the scar, if you’re interested.’

  Danny had a vision of something pale, scrawny and wrinkled and was glad she’d finished her breakfast. ‘No thank you,’ she said politely.

  ‘Your loss.’ Bernie’s eyes twinkled. Again, the narrative emerged in that curious mix of American vowels and German cadence, and it was punctuated by unlikely cackles of laughter.

  ‘Fortunately, it was just a nick, but maybe it saved my life. The Ivans thought it was fucking hilarious. So there I am, richer than I’ve ever been in my life and with a hole in my arse, running through the streets of Berlin in an SS uniform trying to avoid a hundred thousand Red Army Frontoviks who would like nothing better than to put another hole in me, only this time in the head. I had a pistol, but not a rifle, and what good was a rifle going to do me anyway? There’s tank fire ripping through the air, mortars dropping in the streets, long-range artillery with shells the size of a kübelwagen bringing down whole buildings. The Ivans are fighting their way to the centre street by street, house by house and room by room, and our boys are defending every cellar and every attic with machine guns, rifles, ’fausts: a Devil’s symphony of sudden death, and Bernie Hartmann’s right in the middle of it. Where was I going? The only thought in my head was: West. If there was a way out of Berlin, it was west. The first thing I did was get rid of my SS grey. I came to this corner and here was this kid standing like a signpost and staring at me. It was only when I looked again that I saw the hole below his right eye. The kid should have been at school, what was he doing looking round corners in the middle of a battle? By then the idiots in charge were calling up twelve- and thirteen-year-olds for the Volkssturm. Well, he’d looked round his last corner and he didn’t need his feldgrau any more. These kids, they gave them full-size uniforms and they just turned up the sleeves and trousers: one size fits all. So Bernie Hartmann’s one step from being a civilian again, eh? By now I’m somewher
e near Potsdamer Station, trying to reach Tiergarten, because I reckon I can hide up there till dark and I’ll have a better chance of getting out that way towards Zossen. The last I’d heard they were still holding out in the Zoo flak tower. But the further west I went, the more Ivans I began to run into. Shit-brown uniforms and a 7.62 mm welcome on every corner. Any way you looked at it, Bernie is in trouble. I could have wept. I did fucking weep. When night came I found a shell hole in the garden of an apartment block. I was out of luck and out of options. The only chance I had of getting out alive was to take a chance and give myself up.’ He paused and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Well, Bernie’s been in a lot of dark places, but this is the nearest he’s come to despair. I’ve got enough dough in that sparkler to last me ten lifetimes, but if I don’t surrender, I won’t even have one life. And if I surrender with it, some other bastard is going to take it away. The only thing I can do is hide it somewhere and hope that I get the chance to come back for it. Maybe, because I’m a kid, they’ll let me go? But in my heart I know that’s not true. We’d heard all about the camps and the salt mines. Siberia here I come. Only I won’t be coming back.’

  By now, the darkness outside the window has been replaced by the pewter grey of old ashes. Bernie heaved himself out of his chair and dimmed the lights. ‘You’ll like this,’ he promised.

  ‘So you buried the Eye of Isis in Berlin and never went back for it?’ The disappointment was manifest in Danny’s voice. ‘It’s still there buried under a DDR office block or somebody’s new porch?’

  Bernie ignored the implied rebuke and resumed his seat, with his back to the door and facing the window.