Even before the invasion of Poland, Hitler had decreed that the great artworks of Europe should be confiscated to hang in a grandiose Führermuseum at Linz, his birthplace in Austria. Teams of collectors followed the Wehrmacht’s armoured spearhead like hunting dogs, sniffing out paint and marble. One of them, Kajetan Mülhmann, an SS officer and the Nazi Special Delegate for the Securing of Art in the Occupied Territories, had tracked the three paintings to their hiding place on the Czartoryski estate. Later, they had become the subject of a three-way tug-of-war between Hans Posse, Hitler’s art curator, Hermann Goering, who naturally wanted them for himself, and Hans Frank, the governor of Poland. Perhaps surprisingly, Frank won the contest and had hung the paintings in the Wawel Castle where he could enjoy them as he organized the massacre of the Polish intelligentsia and the enforced segregation of the millions of Jews under his control.
When Hans Frank left Poland in 1945, a few steps ahead of the avenging Red Army, his paintings went with him. But after his capture by the Americans in Bavaria only the Leonardo and the Rembrandt were among his hoard of looted treasures. Frank claimed he had given the Raphael to Reinhard Heydrich early in 1942, but despite confessing to war crimes and converting to Catholicism before he was hanged in 1946, his interrogators refused to believe him. There was no record of Heydrich ever possessing the picture.
Portrait of a Young Man was the most important masterpiece still missing from the Second World War. According to the article it had a potential value of one hundred million dollars but that had been three years ago. Jamie reckoned that, given the way people were now pulling their money out of plummeting shares and investing in art, it was certain to be a great deal more.
Somewhere in Matthew Sinclair’s journal were the only known clues to its whereabouts. It was all there. A portrait by one of the big three, the one Leonardo feared. Oil on wood. One of his later works.
Jamie felt as if his heart might burst; an almost sexual feeling of anticipation. With shaking hands he picked up the book and flicked through the remaining pages . . . only to find what he least expected.
Twenty leaves at the end of the journal had been carefully removed.
XII
HIS HEAD FELT as if it was about to explode. For a few frustrating moments he had been within inches of one of the world’s greatest missing artworks and a coup that could have made him a fortune and restored his battered reputation. Just as quickly, it had been stolen from him.
After the shock, came the questions, so many of them; like an avalanche. Who had – so carefully, with scalpel or razor blade – removed the key pages? Not Matthew, who had somehow safeguarded the journal through six years of war and kept it secret all this time. His mother? Had she found it and read it; discovered some awful family secret? If she had wanted to hide something why not destroy the whole book? And if it had been someone else, why leave the journal behind with all its tantalizing clues? The more he considered it, the greater became his certainty that those final pages contained some momentous revelation.
In an explosion of sublime clarity he felt the old man’s presence beside him and he understood. The journal had always been meant for him.
Now he found himself able to look at the blue leather volume in a different way. If Matthew had always wanted him to have it, did he not also want him to have the treasure at its very heart: the Raphael? Perhaps there were other clues he’d missed. He would read it again with fresh perspective, go through it line by line. Matthew Sinclair’s life had been changed irrevocably by his meeting with Walter Brohm and that was where the key to the mystery lay. Poor Stanislaus Kozlowski could have given him the answers he needed. Now there was only one road to follow. To understand Matthew, he must understand Walter Brohm.
Almost reverentially, he picked up the journal and opened it where the pages had been so clinically removed. He’d been so infuriated by the discovery that he hadn’t inspected the damage as closely as he might. Now that he did, he was struck by something curious. It was as if his subconscious was sending him a message in an indecipherable code. He’d had a similar sensation when looking at paintings that were later revealed as fakes; he just hadn’t had the wit or the insight to comprehend them. This was subtly different. An alarm bell was ringing . . .
He reached for the magnifying glass on the desk and focused it on the roots of the missing pages. It confirmed his original suspicion that the removal had been carried out with great care and in a way that did minimal damage to the journal. The responsible party had valued what he was removing and what he was removing it from. That realization brought him back to Matthew. But why? If he had wanted Jamie to have the book why not give it to him in its entirety?
As he weighed the open journal in his hands he felt a prickle of anticipation as he realized something that had originally eluded him. The book balanced almost perfectly between his palms, but it shouldn’t. The missing pages should make it slightly lighter at the back than the front: only a little, but enough to be noticeable. Now he closed it and looked at it side-on. The missing pages weren’t the only difference between the front and the back, the endpiece was imperceptibly thicker than the frontispiece. Was that usual in a book? He couldn’t be sure. He chose a title at random from the shelf nearest to him, wondering at the coincidence that placed a leather-bound copy of Pope-Hennessy’s Raphael in his hand. He studied it from the same angle he’d looked at the journal. No, the front and back covers were identical in thickness. He stood up and walked to the window. This was when he needed to be at his calmest, but the adrenalin rushing through him made the whole room spin. He took a deep breath and returned to the journal. He prodded the blue leather of the back cover. Almost undetectable, but it was definitely more cushioned than the front. But when he looked at the interior board under the magnifying glass he could see no evidence that it had been tampered with.
He took the book back through to the front room with its packed bookshelves and little-known, haphazardly hung works of art, placed it on the coffee table beside the window and poured the large glass of Macallan he’d promised himself earlier. Sitting back, he studied the journal from a distance for a long time, sipping the mellow malt whisky and feeling the burn rise to wrap itself around his heart. When he made his decision it was surprisingly easy. He hunted through the nearby drawer for the scalpel he knew was there somewhere, and worked the blade carefully around the half inch of stretched leather that overlapped the heavy card on the inside of the back cover. He found himself sweating. One part of him worried he was committing sacrilege, but another insisted he had his grandfather’s permission, his encouragement even. When he’d peeled back the torn leather, he very gently worked the point of the knife beneath the card so he could prise it clear.
Jamie hardly dared breathe as he levered back the covering. His first reaction was disappointment. Not the missing pages. Of course, they would never have fitted into the space he had uncovered. Then came dry-mouthed anticipation. Whatever this was, it was important to Matthew Sinclair. It was a neatly folded piece of what appeared to be fine cloth. Carefully, he drew it clear and unfolded it on the coffee table.
A perfect square of silk tinted in dull shades of green and brown. At first it meant nothing. A cheap scarf or a watchmaker’s cloth? After a moment of careful concentration he found himself staring at a faded map of Germany’s land mass. Bending low he searched it for any markings or symbols. It couldn’t be that simple – X only marked the spot in pirate fiction – and it wasn’t. Apart from a few tiny broken stitches the silk was unblemished. So what was its purpose? Very slowly suspicion became certainty. It was an escape map. He’d seen enough war films to know that every airman who risked being shot down over Occupied Europe had been issued with one like this, along with a compass and enough local currency to give him a chance of reaching the nearest safe haven. It was only natural that the Jedburgh teams, parachuted into the very heart of enemy territory, should be similarly equipped. He ran his hand over the silk. This had been Matthe
w’s. He might even have worn it around his neck. It made him feel closer to his grandfather than ever. But why, when it apparently contained no information, had it been hidden inside the book cover? He had his answer when he turned it over.
On the reverse was a crudely sketched symbol of a type he’d never seen before.
XIII
Central Germany, 7 February 1945
IT WAS OVER. SS Brigadeführer Walter Brohm couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when intuition had become truth, but he knew the war was lost. He could taste defeat in the air he breathed and smell it on the people who surrounded him. As a physicist he understood the concept of critical mass better than most. He wondered why he hadn’t recognized earlier the moment it had all turned to dust. Perhaps he could blame the fact that he had been trapped in this enormous concrete prison for most of the past two years, but he knew that wasn’t true. The evidence had been there for all to see despite the Führer’s grandiose promises. Goebbels could trumpet Wehrmacht success as loud as he liked, but anyone who could read a map knew that each ‘victory’ brought the enemy ever closer to the heart of the Reich. Brohm had watched the Ami bombers making their stately, invulnerable way across sacred Germany’s skies like shoals of tiny silver fish through a pale blue sea. Only a few weeks earlier he had seen the results as he flew into Berlin across whole districts reduced to barren fields of crater and rubble. Everyone knew a family who had lost a loved one at the front. The truth was, like everyone else in Hitler’s Germany, he had deluded himself that it could never happen. The promised wunderwaffen existed; the unstoppable rockets and jets that could fly faster than any Allied plane, the pulse cannon and the new tanks and improved U-boats. But there had never been enough and now there never would be. The Reich’s industrial base had already been crippled beyond repair. Not even Speer could make artillery shells with dead engineers in a factory that was just a pile of bricks.
He looked around the office that had been his home for the last twelve months. Wood-panelled walls, works of art and Persian carpets couldn’t disguise the chill reality of a subterranean existence and the all-pervading damp earth scent of quick-drying cement. He lit one of his little black cigarettes to mask the smell, the smoke swirling through the glare of artificial light to be consumed by the extractor fan in the ceiling. Beyond the internal window SS troopers from the security battalion hurried back and forth helping his research staff carry boxes of files and records to be burned in the furnaces two floors below. The occasional metallic crash told him that the work of dismantling or destroying the plant and removing the experimental machinery was being carried out as he had ordered.
Such a waste, after all the years of struggle and effort.
This bunker’s existence was known only to the highest ranking members of the SS hierarchy and had been built to last for a thousand years, but he had never truly believed the Reich would survive that long, and had never much cared. What mattered was his work.
At first, no one would even consider his theory about the material in the casket from Tibet. It was beyond the intellectual capacity of even the finest minds. Schumann and von Braun had looked at him as if he were mad. In the two years leading up to 1939, the theoretical and the experimental were only of interest if they applied to technology that would help Germany win the war everyone knew was coming. Even in 1940 the High Command had issued an edict banning research and development that would not produce military results in four months.
Chastened by the professional setback, Brohm had been recruited to work with Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann and Lise Meitner on a project that involved bombarding uranium with neutrons, continuing the work begun by the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford who had split the first atom. Meitner, a chain-smoking dynamo of a woman, was undoubtedly the brightest of the team and the acknowledged leader, but as an Austrian Jew her genius could not offset the massive disadvantage of her tainted blood. In 1938 she had fled Germany for Sweden. A year later Brohm had watched as Hahn discovered barium in a uranium sample. They had achieved what would become known as nuclear fission.
But that had not been enough for Walter Brohm. During the years with Hahn and Meitner, he had continued with his own experiments to discover the exact nature of what he had found in the casket. He worked at night, pushing himself to the point of exhaustion and mental breakdown, driven by the absolute conviction that this substance had been placed on earth for him and him only. He understood that his quest went beyond obsession, that it took him to the very brink of madness, but he revelled in the pain and disappointment as he rode ever closer to his goal on a tidal surge of anticipation. Eventually, he had come close enough to be sure of what he had. Now it was a matter of examination, analysis and theory as he tried to understand where the material took its place in the periodic table of earthly elements, if it had a place there at all. Row upon row of calculations on a blackboard concluded, studied, then dismissed. At first it had been as if he was wandering through a jagged, fissured landscape in a dense fog, each step uncertain and fearful, but gradually his mind had cleared. Eventually, he realized that he’d wasted hundreds of hours trying to peer forward into the unknown when he should have been looking back at the celestial origins of what the casket contained.
A timid knock at the door interrupted his thoughts and he looked up as a lovely dark-haired girl of about nineteen carried a tray into the office.
‘Your coffee, Herr Direktor.’
‘Thank you, Hannah, that is kind of you.’ He smiled. She truly was beautiful. Even wearing the dowdy, striped grey shift, Hannah Schulmann radiated a kind of inner tranquillity that always made him feel at ease with himself. And she was as talented as she was pretty; he had never heard the piano played more movingly than when her supple fingers moved over the keys. Her presence in his bed had made the last few months almost bearable.
The girl flinched as a guard dropped a box of files and he stood up and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t be frightened, my dear. You must go and join the others now.’
He watched her leave and experienced a painful twinge of what, in another man, might have been conscience.
It had been the late summer of 1941 before he had felt confident enough to approach Himmler with his findings. He found it difficult to think of Heini as the bogey man who had terrorized Europe. The intense, myopic stare and the unnatural stillness could be unnerving at first, but the Heinrich Himmler he had come to know was an affable dinner companion who called him by the familiar du and had always shown a genuine interest in his work. Himmler, who delighted in anything mysterious or enigmatic, had been fascinated by the Changthang casket, and when Brohm presented the paper outlining his discovery’s possible potential the owl’s face shone with excitement. As the panzers probed the suburbs of Leningrad, threatened Moscow and completed the encirclement of Kiev, Brohm received a call telling him to report to Templehof aiport. Two hours later he was on a Junkers 252 transport to Rastenburg for a personal interview with Adolf Hitler at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters. It was the only time he had met the Führer and he had emerged both hugely impressed and hugely disappointed. With the war all but won, Hitler had been at his most affable. In person, he had none of the enormous presence he projected at the great rallies Brohm had attended, but the scientist found himself mesmerized by the aura of power surrounding the man. To meet him was to truly believe. Hitler had clearly been well briefed on the subject and had immediately grasped its potential, but, just when Brohm believed he had received agreement to proceed, the Führer had called a third man into the room. The moment he recognized the visitor, Brohm realized he had been outmanoeuvred. Six years earlier Werner Heisenberg had been involved in a scientific scandal that had brought him into conflict with Himmler. Brohm had supported his chief and Heisenberg had been fortunate to survive. Now he was back in favour and Brohm knew he was in trouble.
Heisenberg went over the arguments for and against Brohm’s project and then pointed out the potentially catastrophic consequences
of an error. Brohm had been forced to acknowledge the hazards and argued that no scientific experiment was without risk, but he knew he had already lost the battle. The Führer had brusquely shaken his head, too timid to truly appreciate the capabilities of what Brohm was offering. He left the meeting in a rage. Hitler had cost him his place in history.
But he had underestimated Heinrich Himmler.
When he met Himmler two weeks later, the Reichsführer-SS had been at his most charming. Since the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the Führer had a great deal to occupy his mind and could not be expected to oversee every tiny detail of national policy. Brohm’s project would go ahead, but under the auspices of the SS-WVHA, the economic and main administration office of Himmler’s vast organization. It was only now that Brohm was given an insight into just how vast. The SS had developed from Hitler’s bodyguard into a state within a state and with the financial power to match. After years of fighting for funding and laboratory time, Brohm now had everything he wanted, and more. More staff and more funding meant he could make greater progress, which in turn increased the project’s importance. When the bombs began to fall on Berlin the scientists and engineers had been evacuated to the bunker, the most advanced research facility in the world, and Brohm had been able to experiment on a scale that would previously have been unimaginable. And with each experiment he moved a step closer. Closer to harnessing the power of the stars.
And just as he had it within his grasp, it was over.
The Doomsday Testament Page 8