The Doomsday Testament

by James Douglas

  She nodded. ‘And a lot of other things. When we’ve eaten and you’ve freshened up, maybe we could talk about it?’

  An hour later they were sitting on opposite sides of the bed with the two rucksacks between them. Sarah pulled out her laptop and linked to the hotel’s wi-fi connection.

  ‘I did a little research on this Vril thing our friend Frederick mentioned. It’s another of Himmler’s pet cults and all tied up with his obsession with the creation of the Aryan race. The cult was founded by a bunch of guys who’d read a nineteenth-century book called The Coming Race by some crazy English baron called Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It was a work of fiction that speculated on a long lost master race emerging to rule the world. You can see where we’re going here, huh? The Vril Society ticked all the boxes for Himmler, but the important thing for us is that the energy that gave the Vril their mythical powers was said to be from the Black Sun and the aim of the Vril Society was to find the key to that power.’

  Jamie felt the room go cold. ‘So what exactly was the Black Sun? Obviously it wasn’t just a symbol.’

  ‘Nobody knows, but it sure spawned a lot of conspiracy theories. Look.’ She brought up another internet page. ‘Remember Magda talked about Wewelsburg being a landing site for UFOs? Crazy, huh? Well, here’s a story that claims the Nazis actually made contact with the Vril and they cooperated to build a fleet of flying saucers at a secret base in the Antarctic. It sounds nuts, but the United States government were convinced enough in nineteen forty-seven to put together Operation Highjump under a respected admiral and former polar explorer called Richard E. Byrd. Admiral Byrd commanded a task force that included an aircraft carrier and four thousand men. They combed the ice shelf from one side to the other and it’s claimed that Byrd actually found the base. After he returned to the States he was hospitalized and when he died in nineteen fifty-seven there’s speculation that he was murdered.

  ‘What I need to know is where we go from here.’ She spoke slowly, choosing her words with care. They were at a crossroads, she was saying, and not just in their quest. Jamie held her gaze as she studied him. ‘My take is that this has got way out of our control. What happened back there has taken it beyond a fun jaunt looking for a painting that may not exist and with a little sexual tension thrown in to make it spicy.’ She saw his look. ‘Come on, Jamie, don’t tell me you didn’t feel it too. Anyway, people have died and we’re on some Nazi’s hit list and on the run. This isn’t a game, it’s the real thing. These people are cold-blooded killers. The sensible option would be for both of us to get the hell out of here, find a way back to London and disappear for a while.’

  Jamie nodded, acknowledging she was correct in every particular.

  ‘You’re right. You should go. There’s bound to be a train from Fulda to the north coast. You can jump on a ferry and be home by Friday. But I have to stay here. I have my own reasons for keeping going.’

  ‘And those reasons are?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Magda for one. I’m to blame for what happened to her, no one else. She was a nice kid, trying to make a better world. She didn’t deserve to die, but she was as good as dead the minute we walked into that museum. It’s not about anything as melodramatic as revenge, though I’d surely like to see Frederick behind bars, or better still, in a coffin, but at the very least I need to know why she died. And that’s the second reason. I can’t let Frederick get away with whatever he’s doing. Not now.’

  She nodded. ‘I kinda guessed that would be the argument, and it answers one of the questions I was asking myself: what makes it worth going on? You’re right, Magda does. We can argue about who’s to blame when this is all over, but she sure as hell deserves some answers. My second question is, if this is out of control, how do we get back in control?’ She allowed the question to hang in the air and develop an energy of its own. He sensed that the answers she sought went far beyond the meaning of the words she’d used. He had a decision to make.

  He reached for the rucksack.

  ‘Maybe the answer to that is in the journal.’

  XXVIII

  SHE CLOSED THE book and laid it back on the bedcover.

  ‘So this isn’t about the Raphael at all?’

  ‘Not just about the Raphael, no,’ he admitted. ‘I suppose it’s always been about my grandfather.’

  ‘But Frederick and his Nazis aren’t interested in the painting or your grandfather. They’re interested in this other thing that Walter Brohm discovered.’ She seemed very calm, which struck him as unlikely and possibly ominous. He picked up the journal and flicked through the pages to avoid meeting her eyes.

  ‘We don’t know that for certain. All Frederick did was confirm he knew about the journal.’

  ‘I thought this was supposed to be a team effort, but you’ve been holding out on me.’

  ‘I . . .’

  Her face was turning pink below the light tan. ‘All this time we’ve been working together and you’ve got this cute little guidebook while dumb old Sarah has been groping around in the dark. Christ, I’ve only got your word for it that there is a painting. This could just be some kind of elaborate dodge to get me into the sack. But then it couldn’t be, could it? Because you haven’t been trying very hard. How many times does a girl have to wave a Goddam flag before a stiff-necked Englishman finally notices?’

  ‘But you didn’t—’

  ‘Shut up.’ She was crying now and the tears turned her mascara into dark blobs around her eyes. ‘Where I come from a girl likes to be asked. But you didn’t have the balls. Just stood there like some Goddam ruptured goldfish with your mouth opening and closing. Well, you’ve had your chance, Mr Saintclair. Sarah Grant isn’t going to play second fiddle to no colouring book.’

  He stared at her, not sure how to react. In another time and another place those words would have torn him apart, but the way she said them, a certain inflection buried deep in the rage, made them more consoling than angry. She was letting him know he had let her down, but she wasn’t going to walk away from this. Not yet.

  ‘I needed to be certain. The same way I needed to be certain about the book. I didn’t know you. I didn’t know where this was going to end up. Let’s face it, I’m not some kind of super-sleuth. I’ve been completely useless; a danger to you and everybody else we’ve come into contact with. And I’m not sure where to go next. The book is all we have now, but without getting a closer look at the Black Sun maybe it’s not enough.’

  She sniffed and shook her head. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, buddy. You’re not the only one who can pull a rabbit out of a hat.’ There was a rustle as she retrieved something from the rucksack. ‘I made a mistake. Two sheets instead of one. If I leaned heavily enough we should be able to retrace the lines . . .’

  Between one breath and the next she was straight back to business. They laid the tracing paper flat on the wooden floor, pushing the chest of drawers aside to make room. Sarah’s pencil had left a barely visible impression when she’d drawn on the top sheet Frederick had confiscated. She began highlighting the faint lines. It wasn’t easy, sometimes a mark that looked significant was only a crease where she had folded the sheet into her rucksack. It took twenty minutes before they had a semblance of the original.

  ‘It’s a pity the paper wasn’t big enough to cover it all.’ She brushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘But I think I got the centre pretty much mapped, apart from the section that’s missing.’

  As they worked over the paper, they moved closer together until their heads touched above the centre of the drawing.

  She pulled back, smiling nervously. ‘I think that’s us about done.’

  Reluctantly, Jamie drew away. They studied the diagram she had created, and he felt the excitement growing in him like a bottle of champagne about to pop.

  ‘You said mapped. Can you see it?’ It hadn’t been visible on the marble of the castle floor, but the tracing had brought out faint lines on the symbol’s twelve spokes, spaced by unidentifiable
blobs. ‘The guide said the castle was to be the centre of the world. Well, this is a map of the SS world. Twelve spokes of the Black Sun. Twelve Obergruppenführers to do Himmler’s dirty work. Twelve departments. I bet if you had enough information you could identify each one and its headquarters.’

  ‘That means . . .’

  ‘If the Wewelsburg Sun is a map, so is ours.’

  Sarah frowned and bent low over the paper.

  ‘I think . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look closer. Those blobs are symbols of some sort.’

  He got down beside her. His hip nudged hers, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘You’re right. These are runes, like the SS lightning flashes, but much more complex. See, there’s a kind of upturned Z in a square, and a pair of what look like arrowheads in a circle. There could be twenty different variations here and we’re only looking at one small part of the Black Sun.’

  ‘And they seem to be linked by the lines.’

  ‘Maybe, it’s difficult to tell. But if they are . . .’

  ‘And this is a map . . .’

  ‘The placing of each rune would correspond to a location and the rune itself would tell whoever knew the code what is being stored or kept there. This was the place of secrets. No one but the twelve SS generals were meant to see this, and only they knew the meaning.’

  ‘And now Frederick must know. He said they were the inheritors.’

  Jamie shook his head. ‘Not necessarily.’

  Her eyes lit up. ‘Because something’s missing.’

  ‘The golden disc at the centre. What if the disc was the key? It disappeared at the end of the war, but did the SS take it when they abandoned Wewelsburg? Or did the Americans loot it with everything else?’

  ‘It could have been melted down, or it could still be out there somewhere.’

  Jamie studied the detail of the Black Sun again. It was like a star map and if it continued over the entire marble circle it was huge and incredibly complex. Looked at in different ways it could have many different meanings.

  ‘This is why Frederick couldn’t allow us to have the tracing. He couldn’t afford to let us go with the Black Sun’s secret. And what if there was more? What if the gold disc wasn’t fixed, but rotated? It’s possible that the orientation of the disc opened up another set of secrets to those who could read the runes. Perhaps the Black Sun isn’t a single map, but layers of maps.’

  He sat back and found he was breathing hard. ‘This could unlock the whole underworld of the SS. Who knows what mysteries are hidden there? If we could track down the gold centrepiece . . .’

  ‘If we could decipher the runes,’ Sarah agreed. ‘But we can’t. And this is just a part. We would need it all.’

  ‘You’re right. We don’t have the time to do this. It will have to wait. We already have enough mysteries to solve, but maybe, some day?’

  ‘Some day.’

  The excitement was still on them as Jamie fetched the silk map with the original Black Sun and spread it beside the tracing. Compared with the drama of the last few minutes, the drab, poorly drawn image seemed to smother their enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ Sarah said. ‘This is just a drawing. Perhaps if we could find the original?’

  ‘Well, we don’t have it. There has to be another way.’ He struggled with the possibilities for a few moments. ‘Can you get the road map we brought, please?’

  They studied the two suns and the map, seeking out any similarities.

  ‘Hey! You’re a genius, Saintclair.’ Sarah broke the silence. ‘Pick a town. Any old town. See the way the roads radiate from the centre the way rays shine from the sun.’

  ‘So we’re looking for a town with nine roads?’

  She looked at the silk Sun again. 1357. 1357?

  Jamie watched her elation grow as the permutations went through her mind. ‘Not necessarily. Remember we’re dealing with the same people who drew that map on the Wewelsburg sun. Nothing is what it seems.’

  She pointed at the spokes on the drawing. ‘One. Three. Five. Seven. Not nine roads, four, and in this very distinctive configuration.’

  He saw it, but he was still sceptical. ‘So we study every city, town and village in Germany, until we find the right one?’

  Sarah’s eyes met his, and he recognized the challenge there. ‘I did my bit. Your turn now. Let me see that book again.’

  ‘OK.’ But after half an hour of staring his vision began to blur.

  ‘Your granddaddy had quite a war.’

  He nodded. ‘I grew up without a father, so it came as a shock to find that the only father figure in my life wasn’t the man I thought he was. I need to know, but I’m still not certain exactly what it is I need to know, even now. Until I read about Walter Brohm’s great discovery I’d only been kidding myself I was trying to find the Raphael. If that sounds like I was leading you on, well, as I said, I’m sorry.’

  She leaned forward and he thought she was going to kiss him. Instead she stared into his eyes as if she was looking for something there. Eventually, she must have found it. ‘At least now we know why someone would go to the trouble of pushing you under a train. The big question is do we believe it?’

  ‘That Brohm discovered something during the war that has stayed hidden for sixty years? On the face of it, that seems unlikely,’ he admitted. ‘From what’s recorded in Matthew’s diary, we know Walter Brohm was an egotistical dissembler who exaggerated his capabilities, sucked up to his superiors and would have shopped his own granny.’

  ‘Shopped?’

  ‘Betrayed. But stranger things have happened. If Brohm did make it to the States it’s possible he passed on his formula, but that the Yanks – sorry, Americans – for their own reasons either suppressed it or discovered that it didn’t work in the first place.’

  ‘Why would they suppress it?’

  ‘For any number of motives, most of them economic. They’d spent hundreds of millions developing nuclear technology and along comes this new wonder-power that makes it redundant about sixty years before they’ve recouped their investment. Maybe it’s sitting in a wooden crate in some big warehouse, like in that Indiana Jones film.’

  ‘This isn’t Indiana Jones, Jamie, this is real life, but I take your point. What do you think it is?’

  And there it was. The sixty-four million dollar question. The problem being that he didn’t have an answer. Not yet. ‘I don’t know and I don’t think we can even make an educated guess. If you believe Brohm, it was a one-off discovery that paved the way for a great scientific breakthrough; something of enormous power that even Hitler feared. Since Hitler was willing to do anything to win the war, we can assume that whatever it was it must have had a fearsome potential to make him walk away. Greater even than the nuclear capability he’d just given up on.

  ‘That’s why it’s so important to find out where this map takes us and what happened at the end of my grandfather’s journal. If Brohm didn’t reach America, then the great secret is still hidden in Germany.’

  The question was where.

  Sarah read the diary with a frightening intensity, as if she was trying to force the answer from its pages with the power of her mind. ‘Was this why we came to Wewelsburg?’ She pointed to a paragraph and he looked over her shoulder.

  ‘No, it was a wild shot. I looked up Himmler and the occult on the computer, I found the photograph with the Black Sun and it seemed the most likely place to start. Why?’

  ‘Because Walter Brohm pointed you towards it. And I think he gave you the first clue to the Raphael.’

  ‘Where?’ He made a grab for the book.

  She drew it away from his hands. ‘You had your turn, Saintclair. What is Wewelsburg?’

  ‘The centre of the SS world?’

  ‘Exactly.’ She read from the page. ‘My journey begins at Heinrich’s centre of the earth.’

  ‘Christ, how could I miss that?’

  ‘There’s more: You must l
ook upon the faded map for the sign of the Ox.’

  Simultaneously, they looked towards the tracing paper still lying in the middle of the floor. Jamie reached it first and Sarah quickly knelt beside him.

  ‘The faded map is the Black Sun.’

  ‘Yup, has to be.’ She nibbled the inside of her lip. ‘But what is the sign of the Ox?’

  ‘Get your laptop.’

  She stared at the screen. ‘The runes on the Black Sun all seem to be from some kind of runic alphabet called the Elder Futhark. There are other Futharks, but this one is what’s called proto-Germanic. The Elder Futhark has twenty-four runes broken up into three groups of eight.’ She looked up at him, her brow creased in concentration. ‘Jeez, this is complicated. Each rune has dozens of entirely different meanings, depending on how it’s used. It would take years to decipher the stuff on the Black Sun even if you knew what you were looking for.’

  ‘But we’re not interested in the Black Sun, are we?’ he pointed out. ‘We’re only interested in one symbol. Which one is the Ox?’

  She shot him a poisonous look and bent over the screen again. It took only moments before she cried out triumphantly. ‘Here! It’s kinda like an n or a sort of inverted U. Uruz, sign of the aurochs, which this says is a kind of giant cow or oxen.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  She showed him the screen and they both turned to the traced drawing.

  ‘You’ve done it.’ Jamie hugged her to him and the feel of her body sidetracked him for a second. ‘There it is.’ The Ox rune lay a short way from the centre of the drawing on one of the legs of the sun symbol. ‘Now all we have to do is translate it to the silk map.’

  ‘How do we do that?’ She frowned.

  ‘Magda said the spear of destiny was aligned north to south. That means the point of the castle is north.’ Suddenly he saw what she meant. ‘The spear must align with one of the legs of the wheel, but which one?’

  ‘There’s no way to tell.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a circle. It doesn’t have a top or a bottom, a left or a right. If we could find one point of reference . . .’