‘That makes a change from last time.’
‘There’s more at stake here.’
‘These characters security-check you?’
‘They strip-searched me. Had all my tools out. Ham-fisted bunch of bastards. They wouldn’t let me have my diving knife. But I got away with a few metres of detonator cord.’
‘They didn’t recognize it?’
‘It’s hanging from the front of my e-suit, masquerading as a lanyard with hose clips to stop my gear dragging on the cave floor. It’s what you always say. People hide things in the most obvious places.’
‘That was a risk.’
‘What were they going to do if they found it? They need me too. They know we’re a team. And det cord’s not usually an offensive weapon.’
‘Your man, Wladislaw, knows nothing of this?’
Costas shook his head. ‘But how long we’re able to keep it up, I don’t know. I don’t exactly see eye to eye with the Chechnya guy. It’ll become pretty obvious to Wladislaw when we kit up. You make your own judgement about Wladislaw. Maybe there’ll be a chance for a swift word before we dive. He could be our contact with IMU. But if our stooges think he knows what’s going on, Wlady’s dead meat. They’re relying on his ignorance of all this to keep the mine closed off. They’d think he’d contact the police.’
‘He’s probably a marked man anyway. There’s only one reason these guys are here: they’ve been sent to kill us once we’ve got what their paymaster wants.’ Jack paused. ‘What about our own gear?’
‘Still bagged and locked up. I’ll know if it’s been tampered with. I doubt it will be, though. They want us to do the dive and get a result. They’ve been given strict instructions. Payout for them is when they show up with what we’ve found. And there are easier ways than fiddling with our equipment to make sure we don’t come back up. Cruder ways. Come on.’
Jack followed Costas towards the door. He stopped for a moment before going in. Costas had mentioned Auschwitz, how close it was. Jack looked again at the leaden sky. So close you could almost sense it, in the air. It was strange. James had mentioned Auschwitz on the phone the day before, the story of Hugh and the girl who had done the drawing, the girl with the harp. The image of that girl had stayed with Jack, had been with him over the last twelve hours, like a piece of music that would not go out of his head. He knew it was to do with Rebecca, as if that image of the other girl, a girl he had never even seen, was giving him something to hold on to. Something enduring, eternal, from a time of shock and horror, something like an old master painting, like one of those works of art the Nazis so coveted. He looked around. Everything here, the buildings, the ground, was pastel-coloured, washed out, and it was about as landlocked a place as you could find. It seemed inconceivable to be going underwater, let alone doing one of the most dangerous dives they had ever attempted. He took a final deep breath outside and stepped through the door.
Jack followed Costas into an office. A small, balding man was sitting behind the desk, writing. He looked up, smiled broadly and immediately bounded over to Jack. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and had an open, intelligent face, suffused with excitement. Jack felt a jolt of discomfort as he saw him. Someone else he was going to let down. Someone else he had put in terrible danger . He dismissed the thought. Wladislaw offered his hand, and looked up penetratingly. ‘Dr Howard. A pleasure to meet you. A real pleasure.’ He pumped his hand. ‘Everything is as you wished it. Dr Kazantzakis has seen to that. Anything else I can do, let me know. I’ll accompany you down to the pool. But before we go, this.’ He picked up a piece of paper and handed it to Jack with a flourish. ‘Came through yesterday. The uranium-thorium results. They date the halite recrystallization to the early Neolithic. To exactly the time of the Neolithic exodus.’ He slapped his hands together theatrically. ‘ To exactly the time of Atlantis.’
Jack looked at the sheet. It was true. It was fantastic. He looked at Wladislaw, forcing himself to smile broadly, and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Brilliant. Brilliant. Now we know we’re on the right track, let’s get down there.’
‘Of course.’ Wladislaw put the sheet back on the table, picked up a ring of keys and led them out of his door. He pressed an alarm box on the wall beside his office and they heard the door lock behind them. ‘That locks up the entire place, the main gates, everything. Exactly as you wished.’
Jack coughed. ‘Very good.’
Wladislaw looked at Costas. ‘Your three colleagues? They are ready?’
‘Familiarizing themselves with some new gear, and kitting up.’
‘New gear?’ Wladislaw said with interest. They reached the sliding metal door of the lift shaft and he opened it up, then pressed a button on the side.
‘State-of-the-art,’ Costas replied. ‘At IMU, the technology’s always one step ahead of the diver. That’s my department.’
‘You’re using trimix? Rebreathers? It’s going to be too deep for compressed air, yes?’
‘Rebreathers for Jack and me, to give us the safest option for very deep water, if we have to go below a hundred metres. The other three are going to be using nitrox from one tank, and then trimix from the other. They’ll be fine to eighty, ninety metres. It’s state-of-the-art too, but it’s easily used by anyone who has used scuba. The rebreathers are a different matter. Only Jack and I are certified for them.’
‘Got you. So the other three guys are back-up. Logistical support.’
‘You got it,’ Costas said.
Wladislaw nodded sagely. ‘I suppose that’s the reality. In Dr Howard’s books, it always seems to be you two alone.’
‘It usually is.’ Costas looked beyond Wladislaw at Jack. ‘Health and safety, you know. Our board of directors have clamped down on us.’
‘I know the problem. Running a tourist mine? Oh yes.’ The lift light flashed green, and Wladislaw slid open the inner door, motioning them inside. ‘Here in Poland, though, we still take risks.’ He grinned, pulled the door shut behind them and pressed the down button, then pressed another button for level 2A. The floor jerked, and Jack could hear the machinery above straining and whirring as the cable paid out. Lifts were not his favourite places. Flooded mines were not his favourite places. It was something else he needed to forget. The near-death experience years ago in a flooded mine shaft, when Costas had saved his life. He needed to stay focused. The lift creaked to a halt, and Wladislaw opened the mesh door. ‘We’re just below the second level, a hundred and twenty metres deep. This route is normally sealed off. We’ll walk through a series of chambers to the pool. It’s faster this way, and there’s a chamber I want you to see.’
Costas turned to Jack. ‘I went with our friends to the base of the shaft, at a hundred and thirty-five metres. That’s the deepest level of these workings. We carried the diving equipment along a shaft about two hundred metres to our entry point.’
Jack stepped out of the lift, followed by the other two. They were in a small cavern about the size of a car garage. Ahead of them a rusting railway track led to a tunnel, lit by a connected string of light bulbs that extended down the tunnel out of sight. Jack took a few steps inside the chamber and put his hands on the wall, feeling the damp. He could see pick and wedge marks, evidently old workings, though the floor and the walls at the lift entrance had clearly been shaped more recently. He looked around. It was the colour that was most unexpected, a dark grey, like wet concrete, with off-white streaks inside the gouge marks. It was almost sepulchral. He turned to Wladislaw. ‘Presumably the man-made tunnels follow the seams?’
Wladislaw nodded. ‘The grey colour is rock salt darkened by surface oxidation. You also get bronze-coloured salt, with iron, and green-coloured, with copper. And there are some crystal-clear patches, where the rock salt’s been dissolved and reconstituted without mineral inclusions.’
‘Those little stalactites,’ Jack said, pointing up at the ceiling.
‘That’s secondary crystallization, from salt leaching out and then
solidifying, in the years since this chamber was dug.’
‘We’re well above the water table here?’
Wladislaw nodded. ‘That begins at the pool.’
Costas leaned against a rock pillar in the centre of the chamber, as if testing it, and then pushed hard against a timber support inletted into the salt. He looked sceptically down the tunnel. ‘What’s the structural stability of this place?’
‘Sound enough, where the salt hasn’t been completely dug out. Generally the miners didn’t do that in case it created chambers that were wider than they were high. They always seemed to be mindful of safety. Must have been some terrible accidents early on. You can see there’s been lots of shoring up with timber too. This particular tunnel follows the line of a natural fissure, which is another reason I wanted to bring you this way. It’s the most likely route that Neolithic miners would have taken to get deep underground, and we know it extends off below the main workings beyond that pool. In the early Neolithic, the water level may have been considerably lower, and the deeper fissures and passageways more accessible.’
Jack breathed in deeply. The air had a distinctive heady smell that seemed to sharpen his senses, to revitalize him. He and Costas followed Wladislaw down the tunnel. They stopped at the entrance to another chamber, much larger. Jack took another deep breath, and Wladislaw watched him approvingly. ‘Sodium, calcium, magnesium chloride. The air’s full of it. Enjoy it while you can.’
‘What do you mean, while you can?’ Costas asked.
Wladislaw pointed up. ‘Look at the roof of the cavern.’
Costas craned his neck. ‘Either those are shadows, or it’s scorched.’
‘Before the development of a ventilation system, methane released from the rock would collect in pockets against the ceiling. The miners went round with torches on long poles and burned it off. We’re all right in the main workings, but where you’re going is a different story. You might encounter what look like pockets of air. Except they’re not.’
Jack glanced at Costas, then turned to Wladislaw. ‘Do the others know about this? Our colleagues?’
‘I’ll warn them when we get there.’
Jack shook his head. ‘Thanks, but let Costas do it. That’s what he’s here for. Part of the safety briefing.’
Wladislaw nodded. ‘Of course. You’re the experts.’ He led them into the next cavern, a space that rose above them like the interior of a cathedral, thirty metres or more in height. ‘This will interest you.’ He grinned. ‘One for Jack Howard. The clue to a treasure.’
‘Tell us as we walk,’ Jack said, glancing at his watch. He had little interest in stories now. He could only focus on Rebecca. On what they had come here to do.
‘Okay.’ Wladislaw clattered down the metal stairs, producing an odd dull echo in the chamber. He gesticulated as he spoke. ‘In 1944, the Nazis established an assembly plant for aircraft parts in this chamber. They used Polish Jews as slave labour. When the Soviets came close, the Nazis dismantled the plant and the Jews were sent to the death camps. But one of the Jews who survived came back here recently, and told me a story. He said they all knew the deeper chambers were used by the Nazis to hide treasures. They all assumed it was gold, stolen from the Jews of Poland. There was always a guard post at the entrance to the deep passageway to prevent anyone entering. Then, the night before the evacuation, several of the fitter prisoners were ordered to go down there, with picks and hammers, evidently to do some kind of manual work. They were accompanied by a couple of the Hungarian SS guards and a Luftwaffe officer, the boss of the factory. Only the officer came back out. He was carrying something in a bag. The survivor saw the officer again, because he accompanied the death march from Auschwitz of the Jewish survivors being sent to work on bomb damage in German cities. The officer remained with them until they entered the concentration camp where the survivor was soon afterwards liberated by the British, somewhere near Belsen.’
Jack suddenly stopped. He had only been half listening. ‘Where did you say?’
‘A camp, near Belsen. In Upper Saxony, Germany. One of many satellite camps, probably.’
Jack turned to Costas, who had also stopped and was staring at him. They both looked at Wladislaw. Jack felt a chill of certainty. It all made sense. An object secreted away here, in a place apparently impregnable from discovery, secure for ever in the heart of the thousand-year Reich. But then the unthinkable happened. The war was being lost. An ultimatum was activated. The object was removed, taken west. It was to be the signal for the worst horrors to be unleashed. Jack remembered the story Dillen had told him from Hugh. The document Hugh had found on the motorcycle courier, with the counterclockwise swastika. The Agamemnon Code. Jack thought hard, staring at the ground, his heart pounding. The people who had kidnapped Rebecca must not hear this story. They must not know that the object might no longer be here. The three men who would be diving with them. At all costs they must not know. He looked at Wladislaw. ‘Did the survivor tell you anything else?’
‘He saw the Luftwaffe officer when they entered the camp near Belsen, and said that he still had the bag with him. He never saw him again after that. He thought the bag must contain some great treasure stolen from a museum in Poland, hidden to begin with in this mine. They all thought that was what the Nazis stored down here. By telling me the story, he thought he was doing a service to Poland. There might be a chance of recovering the treasure, somewhere, somehow, and bringing it back home. ’
Jack tensed up. ‘Does anyone else know this? Anyone? ’
‘The man told me he’d never told anyone else. He spoke to me in my office, where you met me. He insisted on locking the door. He told me he was old and dying. He’d come back to this place for the first time since 1945, had seen that we had a memorial to the Jewish prisoners. He’d asked to see me. I was very busy that day, but I remembered the story a few days later and phoned the place that looked after him. They said he’d died the day after coming here. Just slipped away.’
‘Who else have you told? Your friends? Your family?’
Wladislaw shook his head. ‘Nobody. It was the day we took that phone call from you, from IMU headquarters. When you said you wanted to come here to search for the Neolithic remains. I thought I’d save this story until you came. Icing on the cake for you.’
Jack looked intently at Costas, then at Wladislaw. ‘A pact, just the three of us, right? We tell nobody about this. Not until we can take it further. Nobody. Not even our three friends waiting below.’
‘Done,’ Costas said. Wladislaw stared at Jack. ‘Of course. You have my word.’
Jack slapped his back. ‘Good man. Now let’s move.’
‘We should get you over to the IMU campus in Cornwall, Wlady,’ Costas said as they clattered down. ‘I invited you when we met at that conference, remember? I didn’t know there was an archaeologist in you then. We need an IMU representative in Poland. What do you think, Jack?’
‘Excellent idea,’ Jack said.
‘You really think so?’ Wladislaw said. ‘You would not be disappointed in me, I assure you.’
‘Take it as a done deal,’ Jack said. ‘But for now, news blackout.’
‘Total secrecy,’ Wladislaw agreed.
Jack glanced at Costas as they followed Wladislaw off the metal walkway and on to a platform of wooden duckboards. They had reached the end of the complex that was open to the public, barred off with a mesh barrier but with a little door that Wladislaw swung open. It was cooler now, and damper. They crouched through and carried on. The way ahead was a narrowing void, the timber vaulting fitted into the wall becoming sporadic and then finishing altogether. The duckboards ended, and Jack could see where the boards had lain over a narrow-gauge railway line that carried on ahead down the tunnel. The ceiling was just high enough for the tunnel to have been used for pushing carts up from the deepest mine workings. After a few more metres the passage widened into a chamber the size of a small room, also lit by a single bulb. On the sides Jack c
ould just make out shadowy forms, half-finished sculptures in salt that seemed to leer out of the walls, inchoate. It was a macabre place, like a catacomb. Wladislaw pointed his torch at one of the figures. ‘St Clement, patron saint of miners,’ he said, his voice sounding strangely dull again, without any echo. ‘This is not like the sculptures you see on the tourist route. These ones are the real deal. They were done long ago, hundreds of years ago, by the miners, not for visitors but for themselves. They show what the miners really felt, the terrible fear, the pact with God they made to come down here, the bargain they made to survive.’
Jack stared at the sculpted face in the torchlight. It looked like Munch’s The Scream. Secondary recrystallization had clouded the features, obscuring the sculpted lines, as if the salt in the walls were reclaiming the figure, absorbing it back into a world of stone where humans were never meant to pass. Wladislaw went forward and they carried on. The passageway was now only just tall enough for Jack. It dropped at a steeper angle, dipping to follow the salt seam, the walls shadowy and deathly grey. He felt a tiny lurch, a tightness of the breath, then steeled himself. If you feel fear, it is fear that you will let Rebecca down. It is not fear of this place. He saw light ahead, another chamber. The light reflected off a pool of water, green and iridescent, as if it were full of algae. ‘The colour’s from copper,’ Wladislaw said. ‘The water might be like that ahead. Nobody’s explored it for years, since it flooded.’
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