by Iain King
Myles and Pascal crouched down, trying to shield themselves from the heat. Pascal kicked at the fallen shelf, but the flames seemed to strike back. Every kick sent a new flare bursting out. ‘It’s no good,’ he yelled.
Myles started looking elsewhere. The combustible liquid was still raining from the sprinkler system, making the flames roar, and the blaze was getting stronger. They didn’t have long.
Myles shouted over the noise. ‘Pascal – we can’t go down. We need another way out.’ He retreated back into the room – away from the stairs.
Pascal followed, trying to protect the precious box file. ‘Myles, can you see a window?’
Neither of them could.
Then, as they reached one of the book-covered walls, Myles looked up to see in the ceiling, a skylight. ‘Come on – we can climb out.’
He barged into one of the few shelves which wasn’t alight. It tilted, then crashed sideways, until it hit another and stopped. It was left leaning at an angle. Myles began to use the fallen shelves as rungs on a ladder and scrambled up, dragging his weakened leg as he climbed. At the top, he could reach the skylight. It wasn’t locked. He bashed it hard with the side of his fist and forced it open.
Pascal was coming up behind and lifted the boxfile to Myles, who passed it through the hole above them. Then the two men climbed up, and out. They felt the wind, and smoke-free air: they had made it onto the roof.
Standing on Austria’s National Library, they could see smoke coming out from below. Already parts of the rooftop were beginning to smoulder from the fire underneath. One section had fallen through. They both knew the rest was probably unstable.
Pascal wiped soot from his face. ‘We can’t stay up here for long,’ he shouted.
‘Agreed.’
He and Myles looked around for a way off.
Pascal gazed down. ‘We could jump,’ he suggested. But as he said it, he already knew they couldn’t. It was too far down.
Myles tapped his knee. ‘There must be another way.’ Desperately he looked around. Then he saw a cable – probably a phone line. ‘Do you think it’ll take our weight?’
‘Don’t know. We can try.’ Pascal suggested, urging Myles to go first.
Myles approached the wire. He grabbed it with both hands, then leaned forward. Gently, he allowed the cable to take his weight. The cable tensed, but held.
He slid his front hand along, then his trailing hand. Quickly, he was able to progress several metres – high above the hard surface of Heldenplatz.
But as he pulled himself away from the building, the cable started to sag. He felt himself pulling on the metal – the telephone line was stretching.
He called over to Pascal. ‘Stay back – don’t come on yet.’
Pascal understood, hunkering down as flames started to burn through the roof below him.
Myles kept going – sliding his front hand forward, and following up with his rear.
Then he heard a shout from below. A familiar American voice – it was Glenn. ‘Munro: jump …’
He looked down. Firemen were pumping air into a giant yellow cushion below him.
Myles stayed hanging for a little while longer, waiting for the emergency landing pad to inflate fully.
‘It’s safe, Myles. Jump!’
Myles let go. He felt himself drop, then land gradually as the inflatable swallowed him up and took his weight. Not a scratch.
He looked back up. Still carrying the box file, Pascal took a long run up then launched himself from the building. His legs kept running as he travelled through the air. The Frenchman arced forward, then down, landing just next to Myles. And just like Myles, he landed smoothly in the giant inflatable.
Both men tried to find their bearings again. They were confused, disorientated and covered in black marks from the fire. But they were both safe. And so were the papers.
Thirty-Six
9.30 a.m. CET (8.30 a.m. GMT)
* * *
Myles and Pascal were helped to their feet by Austrian firemen. A paramedic covered them in a reflective blanket and huddled them into an ambulance, where they were checked over for injuries. One of the crew took off the flexi-brace to examine Myles’ knee. Pascal’s shirt was stripped off, the flammable liquid was wiped from his skin, and a stethoscope placed on his chest. Both of them made sure the boxfile from the library was always in their sight.
A cordon had been set up around the building and police were holding back a growing mass of people. Journalists and tourists were crowding round. With flashing lights everywhere, and emergency vehicles now dousing the flames with hoses from several directions, Myles guessed the historic building would survive. But the fire engines had arrived too late for most of the books and records in the Upper Reading Room.
Pascal wiped sweat and dirt from his face. Still exhausted from his efforts, he tried to speak calmly to Myles. ‘How did they do it? It can’t be a coincidence. I mean – gasoline in the sprinkler system?’
Both of them were almost too shocked for words. Myles put his hand on Pascal’s shoulder. ‘Thank you for what you did up there.’
‘We saved Stolz’s papers. I hope they’re worth it.’ The Frenchman tapped the box. Myles could see he was tempted to open it.
The paramedics pronounced both of them healthy. The authorities asked for contact details, in case there was any follow up, but Myles simply ignored the request. Instead, he limped slowly back to the cordon, with Pascal closely behind him. There they met up with Glenn and Zenyalena, who had watched the whole of their escape from the library’s fire evacuation point – a spot in the middle of Heldenplatz. Heike-Ann reunited Myles with his aluminium crutches.
Zenyalena grinned with glee when she saw Pascal still carried the box file. She was about to take it when Glenn stopped her. ‘Wait,’ he said, firmly. ‘First we need to know what happened.’
Pascal was still recovering from the fire. ‘Someone set fire to the place. Deliberately. That’s what happened …’ The Frenchman’s voice was controlled but tense. ‘Whoever killed Jean-François – they’re following us.’
Myles accepted Pascal’s words, then realised the arsonist might still be there. Perhaps in the crowd, or pretending to be one of the journalists on the scene. He had read that some serial killers loved to watch as their crimes were discovered – joining the audience gave them a sense of power. But as he tried to spot anything unusual amongst the people standing around the ONB, nothing seemed to stand out. Apart from a small boy who had pointed to Pascal’s sooty face, no one seemed to be watching them. Also, no one had tried to take the boxfile.
Soon, all five of them were scanning the faces of the people in Heldenplatz – studying the firemen, police and library staff just evacuated from the building for anyone suspicious.
Myles wondered about a strange-looking tourist, a large Scandinavian-looking man who didn’t seem as interested in the fire as the others. But then the Scandinavian was joined by a woman, probably his wife, and a young girl –he was probably innocent.
It was Zenyalena who offered an alternative explanation. ‘We don’t know for sure that someone’s following us. The fire could have been set off by a device. Either a timer, or something remote controlled.’
Myles accepted she had a point. ‘True. But we know someone killed Jean-François. It wasn’t suicide.’
The Russian pointed to the boxfile. ‘Come on. We need to read through the papers. Now.’
Heike-Ann and Glenn seemed unsure.
Zenyalena’s voice became stern. ‘Look, we have to be fast. It’s the only way to keep ahead of whoever is doing all this.’
Myles and Pascal relented and with little enthusiasm, Heike-Ann and Glenn did too. Pascal handed the boxfile to the Russian, and the five of them retreated to a café where they could read through it.
* * *
Finally, away from the smoke of the building, the noise and crowds, the team of five sat down. Pascal hailed a waiter from his seat and ordered water. Myles rest
ed his healing leg. Glenn and Heike-Ann kept their eyes fixed on the boxfile, noticing it was slightly charred from the flames and smoke, but otherwise intact.
With a sense of ceremony, Zenyalena slowly reopened the lid. Seeing the text in German, she passed it over to Heike-Ann for translation.
Heike-Ann understood her responsibility. ‘It reads, “Mechanism for predicting the future”’, she announced. ‘It’s a report of some sort.’
Glenn frowned. ‘Who’s it written for?’
Heike-Ann scanned the paper, her face open. ‘Er, it doesn’t say …’ Then she looked at the core of the text and began translating. ‘… It says: “The methods we have found most effective come from Ancient Babylon, Egypt and Greece – pioneers who suspected the universe was more connected than people realised. They tested their assumptions, keeping those which held true and discarding the rest. It took many hundreds of years for the true connections to be distilled in this way …’’’
Glenn shook his head, distracting everyone. ‘So Stolz was doing mumbo-jumbo shit!’
Zenyalena slapped the air, telling him to shut up and allow Heike-Ann to continue.
The German policewoman duly carried on, pointing her finger beneath the words as she read them. ‘The Christian Church tried to co-opt this growing body of belief – the three wise men who followed a star were accepted into the Gospels, and festivals like Christmas and Easter were set according to the calendars of the sun and moon. By medieval times, this “science” …’ she paused, as if the word science was inappropriate, ‘… was becoming more accurate and so was outlawed, in 1542, to remove its threat. The ban forced the knowledge underground for more than three centuries. However, the legislation became difficult to enforce when, in 1903 and again in 1914, two different courts in New York State accepted predictions based on the planets were both scientific and very accurate …’
Glenn looked at Myles, who didn’t know what to make of it all.
Heike-Ann carried on, absorbed by what she was reading. ‘… In 1936, a US court decided to allow newspapers to make predictions as long as they divided people into just twelve groups. That is how the USA and other western countries came to adopt the least accurate form of astrology and scientific astrology was lost.’
Zenyalena interrupted. ‘So an American court allowed horoscopes just because they couldn’t be true, while accurate predictions stayed illegal?’
Heike-Ann nodded, continuing with the translation. ‘This gives the Third Reich a golden chance to perfect the ancient science, unrivalled by the West.’ She turned the page. ‘We collected details about the planets and information about human affairs, then looked for a link. One of the first patterns we found concerned Pluto: whenever Pluto progressed into a new sign of the zodiac, it brought a new system for administering sovereign states and their money. Each new system was linked to the symbolism of the zodiac sign it entered. By knowing what had happened for the times Pluto changed zodiac sign up until 1939, we have predicted what will happen in the future:’
She took a table from the file, probably typed during the war. The team stared at it. Myles recognised it from somewhere: he’d seen this before … It listed the dates when borders were set throughout Africa, when the US Federal Reserve was established, and for the 1939 Pact of Steel. Then it predicted the start of the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and the Credit Crunch, all with the exact month, perfectly precise.
Then he remembered – this was the page he’d been reading in Stolz’s flat before being knocked out by the carbon monoxide.
Heike-Ann could see the team were silenced by her information. She carried on reading from Stolz. ‘We then looked for patterns between the planets. The orbits of Saturn and Neptune mean they align every thirty-six years. These times coincide with subversive revolutionary activity: the Boston Tea Party in 1773; South American revolutions in 1809; European Communist Committees set up in 1846; Marxist political parties in 1882; and the communist revolution in Russia in 1917. They will come together again in 1953 when we expect major “rebalancing” in the Soviet world, and three times in 1989 (March, June and November) – the last of these dates, in the second week of November 1989, coincides with other planetary events, making it particularly notable.’
Myles remembered Helen reading these dates on the museum’s stolen papers. And he could see Heike-Ann knew all about the Berlin Wall. After the first hammer cracks on the evening of 9th November, the wall was taken apart with vigour on the 10th, 11th and 12th, and by the middle of that month it was history: destroyed in the second week of November 1989, just as Stolz predicted. The collapse of the Berlin Wall was probably the most important political event in her life, and in the life of most Europeans alive. And yet it had been foreseen with such accuracy, all those years ago by Stolz.
Heike-Ann looked sullen. ‘I studied science at university. This should not be possible.’
‘Too damn right,’ scoffed Glenn. ‘“Hogwash” is the word you’re looking for.’
But Zenyalena encouraged their translator to keep working. ‘Well, I studied literature. Old classics – Shakespeare, Chaucer – they’re full of this stuff.’
Heike-Ann raised her eyebrows – Zenyalena seemed to be an expert in a bizarre field. The translator’s eyes turned back down to the page and she continued to read out loud.
‘“We soon found other planetary cycles were linked to different human affairs. The forty-two-year cycle between Uranus and Saturn correlated with scientific discoveries and inventions. The much longer cycle between Uranus and Neptune was linked to mass communication – and we expect humans to exchange information differently after these two planets come together in the early 1990s.”’
Zenyalena interrupted. ‘The internet?’
‘That’s just a coincidence,’ scoffed Glenn.
Heike-Ann ignored them both and carried on with the text. ‘‘‘We found that since all the cycles between the planets seemed to affect people, when they were added together, it gave us a measure for stability in human affairs. Instability led to war and death. We checked three centuries of warfare, and found there were sixty-one times more war deaths when the planets, Jupiter-to-Pluto, were closing in than when they were separating. This correlation was so unlikely to have occurred by pure chance – about one in a million-trillion – that even sceptics accepted we had found the link. By charting the planets, we could forecast how many people would die in future conflicts.”’
Myles remembered Stolz’s graph with the two lines. So that’s how he did it: the angle between each pair of planets, all added together, allowed him to predict the number of war deaths. And all with astonishing accuracy.
Heike-Ann lifted the police reports on Hitler out of the boxfile and put them to one side. Somehow the official documents proving the dictator was a draft dodger had become unimportant. The pages from Stolz which predicted the future so accurately were what mattered now.
‘Come on, Heike-Ann,’ said Pascal, trying to steady her. ‘We don’t know how much to believe it, not yet. There must be more.’
Heike-Ann looked in the file. There were just two pages left, paper-clipped together. She lifted them out. ‘There’s this,’ she said. ‘It’s called “Nuclear”.’
Pascal urged her to read it.
Heike-Ann took a deep breath, then began translating again. ‘“We learned the date of the first nuclear reaction in December 1942, and saw the date was marked by planets opposing each other in the sky on an axis of nine degrees Gemini to ten degrees Sagittarius. We found this position in the sky was linked to nuclear events in the past, such as the discovery of uranium in 1789, of radioactivity in 1896, and the cluster of advances made in 1932, including the discovery of the neutron. Then we calculated when planets would strike this axis again, adding the traditional meaning of each planet to make our predictions.”’
Heike-Ann had reached the second page, which was a table. It contained a list of twelve dates, the earliest being 1945 and the last 2052.
Myles found himself recognising the dates; even though he couldn’t read the German, he knew what had happened on each occasion which had already occurred. ‘That’s how he did it,’ he said Myles. ‘The dates all match up.’
Zenyalena was nodding. ‘Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukishima – even the Cuban missile crisis,’ she added. ‘It all ties in.’
Pascal checked the box for any secret compartments. There were none. ‘So there are no more papers? That’s all?’
Heike-Ann looked again, confirming Pascal was right.
Zenyalena seemed to concentrate, then kicked her head back, staring at Heike-Ann. ‘Location Two. What was the clue, again?’
Heike-Ann was still too stunned to speak. Myles answered for her. ‘‘‘Location Two: Where it was written, and he grew fat, minus thirty-two metres”.’
No one seemed to have an answer. Myles tried to solve it for them. ‘‘‘It” – if we can work out what “it” is, we’ll get the answer.’
Glenn flicked through the rest of the papers again – the police reports on Hitler, the page from Mein Kampf, and Stolz’s history of the science of prediction. ‘Could it be something here?’ he wondered. ‘Where ‘“it” was written – could Stolz mean where he wrote this stuff?’
Then Myles got it. He smiled, scratching his head to wonder why he hadn’t got it sooner. He took the papers from Glenn, then spread them out in front of them. ‘This is the order we found the papers in the boxfile, yes?’
The others agreed. Then Myles began pointing to the documents in turn:
Police reports on Hitler
The page from Mein Kampf
The clue about Location Two
Stolz’s history of the science of prediction
‘So the page immediately before this paper about “Location Two” was the one torn from Mein Kampf. Right?’
Glenn started to show he understood. ‘So the clue, “Where it was written” means where Mein Kampf was written? So, Myles, where did Hitler write Mein Kampf?’
