The Doomsday Testament

by James Douglas

  ‘What now?’

  He picked up his rucksack. ‘More of the same.’

  She nodded. ‘One thing has been bothering me since I’ve read the journal—’

  His head came up sharply. ‘Did you hear something?’

  She listened for a few seconds. ‘No. What do you think it was?’

  He stared the way they’d come. ‘I don’t know. Just a noise. Back towards the road.’

  They waited a few moments. Nothing. As they moved off Sarah continued her thesis. ‘From what I’ve read so far, Walter Brohm only makes vague hints that he has the Raphael, yet you seem pretty certain he did possess it. Certain enough, anyway, for us to be here. But even your grandfather thought Brohm could be making it all up.’

  Jamie considered the question as he unhooked himself from another patch of brambles.

  ‘True, but he had his own reasons for thinking that. Brohm was trying to tempt him, bribe him even, but I like to think that Matthew Sinclair decided – at least then – that he wasn’t going to be bought. Matthew knew his art. He’d worked out that the painting was by the contemporary Leonardo feared most. Well, that was Raphael. Two popes, Julius and Leo, were among Raphael’s patrons. Leonardo was thirty years older and his powers were waning, Raphael’s were at their peak. He feared the younger man was about to eclipse his genius and, if he had lived, who knows he might have done just that.’

  ‘He died young?’

  Jamie gave a sheepish smile. ‘He was thirty-seven. One theory is that, the er, cause was overdoing it in the bedroom with a lady friend.’

  ‘He died of an overdose of sex!’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  Her laughter rang through the trees.

  ‘OK,’ she returned to her subject, as the ground began to fall away beneath their feet. ‘So let’s accept that you’re right and Brohm was referring to the Raphael? Who’s to say he didn’t just see it hanging on a wall somewhere. You have an unproven link between Hans Frank and Reinhard Heydrich, but as far as I can see, none at all between Heydrich and Brohm.’

  ‘That’s true, but I would refer you to the circumstantial evidence, m’lud.’

  ‘Carry on,’ Sarah said graciously.

  ‘We know Hans Frank had the painting, that’s a given?’ She nodded and he continued. ‘In nineteen thirty-nine Frank became governor of that part of Poland which wasn’t incorporated into Germany or Russia. It gave him power of life and death over millions of people, and he wasn’t afraid to use that power. In one single Aktion, he had thirty thousand Polish intellectuals arrested. Seven thousand were shot.’

  ‘A bastard, then.’

  ‘A bastard, but it seems not a big enough bastard. Some people, most of them in the SS, thought he was being too soft on the Poles. Within months of his appointment they were undermining his authority and challenging every decision he made. By December ’forty-one he was on the brink of being sacked. To survive, he needed an ally, a powerful one.’

  ‘Heydrich?’

  ‘It’s possible. At the time Heydrich was chief of the RSHA, the Reich Main Security office, and was probably the most feared man in Germany after Hitler and Himmler. Let’s say, for instance, Frank wanted to send Heydrich a sweetener. Well, you don’t just wrap a million quid’s worth of masterpiece in brown paper and stick it in the post. Ideally, he would have handed it over himself, but Heydrich was busy in early nineteen forty-two and so was Frank. The next best thing would be to send it by a trusted messenger.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘On the twentieth of January nineteen forty-two Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Buhler, Frank’s deputy, were in the same building in Berlin, in fact, in the same room.’

  He saw he had her. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because the twentieth of January nineteen forty-two was the day fifteen men, including Heydrich, Buhler, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, gathered in a Berlin suburb for the Wannsee Conference to resolve the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. The meeting that decided the fate of six million people.’

  Sarah choked. ‘I’m beginning to think this painting is cursed.’

  ‘You don’t have to touch it. I’ll take care of that.’

  ‘So Heydrich has the painting. Now tell me how it gets to Brohm.’

  ‘Ah well, this is where the evidence gets even more circumstantial, that is to say . . . flimsy.’

  ‘Convince me.’

  Jamie forced a path through a thick clump of bushes that barred their way. ‘OK. Everything I’ve read about Heydrich makes me certain he would have been amused that Frank believed he could be bought with some daub, even if it was a Raphael. As soon as he saw it he would have wanted to find a way of rubbing Frank’s nose in it. He would also have wondered if the gift was part of some kind of plot against him. So he’d get rid of it as quickly as he could. But to who? Hitler and Goering would be the obvious candidates – they both wanted the painting when it was originally looted. To give it to Hitler would be to acknowledge its worth, so that was out. Heydrich despised Goering almost as much as he despised his boss Himmler. So why not give it to an old friend?’

  ‘What makes you think Heydrich and Brohm were friends?’

  ‘This is the flimsy part. They were contemporaries in the Nazi party, which was a relatively small organization when they joined in nineteen thirty-one. Heydrich was in the SS from the start, but Brohm wasn’t far behind him. Brohm must have needed funding and support for his research in the early days, who better to call on than Heydrich?’

  ‘You’re right. Wafer thin.’

  ‘That’s what I thought until I remembered that on January the twenty-fifth, five days after Heydrich would have received the Raphael, Walter Brohm celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday and—’

  This time they both heard the snap of a branch. For a moment they stared at each other, an identical question in each of their eyes. Run or hide? But the noise had been very close, somewhere in the bushes they’d just come through. Hide. Jamie dropped to the ground and waved Sarah silently back to a clump of fern where the knee-high green fronds formed a sanctuary big enough for one person. While she wriggled away, he crawled through the undergrowth into the closest patch of brambles, ignoring the thorns that twisted around his legs as if they had a life of their own. He almost panicked when something caught his rucksack, but in the same instant the ominous rustle of bushes a few feet away made him freeze. One man? It seemed unlikely. He strained his ears and heard more stealthy movement behind him. More than one, then. But only one to worry about, for now. Footsteps in the undergrowth, slow and deliberate, each footfall measured and testing the grass beneath his boots so as not to repeat the mistake that had given away his position. Jamie heard the instructor’s voice from the escape and evasion course in his head and he willed himself to be part of the landscape; a stone, a tree, a bush. He kept his eyes down, relying on his ears, so that whoever was hunting them wouldn’t be alerted by a flash of pale skin among the foliage. He picked up the soft whistle of controlled breathing. A whisper of cloth on cloth. That close. A walking boot appeared in the grass and nettles in front of his eyes and he had to suppress the urge to cry out. Every fibre of his being screamed at him to flee. Ever so gently, the boot lifted and was gone. He waited, measuring the seconds, before risking a glance with a single eye that rewarded him with the sight of a retreating back in a green anorak, mousy hair cut short and a single earphone that he doubted was connected to an iPod. Something else, too, that chilled his blood. A red flower among the bracken where no red flower should be. Not a flower, then. Red hair. Sarah’s hair.

  ‘Come out where I can see you.’ A harsh voice that enjoyed giving orders. North German, from the back streets or the docks. ‘I said get out here, or I’ll fucking shoot.’

  Sarah pulled herself from the bracken. She was partly concealed by the man between them, but Jamie could see that though her eyes were wary, she wasn’t frightened.

  ‘Put your hands on your head and take two steps forwar
d. Good. Now kneel. I like it when the girls kneel in front of me.’ There was a pause while Sarah obeyed. ‘Good. Now, where’s your boyfriend?’ Jamie untangled himself from the thorns, wincing at each slight ‘tick’ as the hooked barbs came free, and rose silently to his feet. He heard the sharp slap of flesh meeting flesh. ‘I said where’s your fucking boyfriend. Open your mouth.’

  ‘Please don’t hurt me.’ Sarah’s plea was just loud enough to mask the sound of Jamie’s three strides through the soft grass.

  The reaction to her words was as natural as breathing. No calculation was required. Just a realization that it had to be quick and there must be no sound. His left hand came round to clamp over the man’s mouth and nostrils, his right took the back of the head, and the two twisted in opposite directions in an unconscious imitation of Stan’s demonstration at the hospital. It took more force than he would have expected, but adrenalin added to his strength and he felt the moment the German’s neck snapped. The body jerked and twitched in his hands and there was the sound of tearing cartilage you get when you tear the leg off a Christmas turkey. He held the head until the twitching stopped before he allowed the German to drop. As he stood over the dead man all the strength drained from him. He stretched out a hand to help Sarah to her feet, but she seemed to be part of a mirage because he wasn’t able to find her.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Jamie, let’s go,’ she hissed. She was beside him, tugging at his arm. ‘If you want to send him flowers do it later. We need to get out of here. Now.’ She picked up the German’s pistol from where it had fallen and handed it to him.

  ‘Sorry, it’s . . .’ His brain seemed to reassemble one small piece at a time. ‘Where?’

  There was a soft crackle from beside the body, where the earpiece had dropped. Sarah darted a glance to the right, but he shook his head. ‘Not there.’

  No time for argument. They dashed through the undergrowth knowing the only way to escape now was to outpace their hunters. Jamie could still feel the dead weight of the man he had killed; the warm head resting between his hands as the torso convulsed. The morality of what he’d done could be debated later, for the moment his mind barely acknowledged his surroundings. Sarah dropped back a little, her eyes scanning for danger. A shout from behind announced that someone had found the body and it was echoed from left and right. But not in front.

  ‘Christ.’

  If her reactions hadn’t been lightning fast he would certainly have fallen. As it was he found himself teetering on the brink of a two-hundred-foot near-vertical drop to the river with Sarah hanging on to one arm and digging her heels into the turf. For a split second he thought his weight was going to carry them both over, but with a grunt of effort she hauled him away from the edge.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ He peered over the edge.

  ‘Stop!’ A faint rattle accompanied the shout, like a woodpecker at work somewhere in the faraway woods, and the tree above them began to disintegrate, chunks of white bark dropping down like snowflakes amid a curtain of pine needles. It seemed odd that there was so little sound to accompany the violence. Jamie’s mind made an unconscious calculation. Machine pistol, silenced, only accurate at short range, but now we’re really fucked.

  ‘Stop,’ the cry was repeated. They looked at each other.

  ‘Bugger that.’ Jamie made the decision for them both. He took her hand and they launched themselves over the edge.

  XXXIII

  WHILE I HAD been fighting my war, Walter Brohm had been fighting his. The contest could only have one winner. Klosse’s face was pink with rage and he wore a new bruise on his right cheek. Brohm’s eyes shone with the eerie light of victory and he twirled my pistol on his finger as if he was Tom Mix. I retrieved it before he shot himself. ‘We make a good team, you and I, Leutnant Matt. Perhaps you should come with us to America?’ Somehow I restrained myself from wiping the smile from his face with the Browning. I signalled him to get to his feet and told him we had a job to do first. Strange how you can share your food and your blanket with a man, but still never really know him. Ted Jack, my wireless operator, had nursed me through two bouts of chronic dysentery, but because I was an officer I’d never called him anything but Sarn’t. Ted was one of those stolid, competent, uncomplaining types who are the backbone of the British Army. He had a wife and two children under five. Now I cradled his head in my hands, wondering at the weight of it, as the others watched me with the kind of look you reserve for a man standing outside a lunatic asylum who suddenly announces that he’s Napoleon. Sarn’t Jack’s eyes were half closed, the way most dead people’s are, but at least he still had eyes. Al Stewart didn’t even have a head. We hadn’t been able to find it. Klosse muttered something about being a gentleman and threw his entrenching tool down. Stan didn’t appreciate that and kicked him in beside the tattered, blackened remains of what was left of our four friends. The German looked at me for support. For answer I tossed Sarn’t Jack’s head at his feet and he got the message and continued digging. Even Walter Brohm didn’t complain. We put the bodies of our ambushers into the ditch. I didn’t want them sharing a grave with the men they’d killed. Apart from an older SS veteran who had operated the machine gun, they were probably aged between twelve and fifteen and their bled-out, marble-grey faces and surprised eyes made them look younger still. Just children. But they were Hitler’s children, indoctrinated since the day they started school to worship the Führer and programmed to give their lives for the Fatherland. Well, they’d got their wish. I looked down at them, the flies already feasting on the drying blood that stained their faces. One particular fly made its way slowly from one side of a staring opaque eyeball to another and I was surprised the dead boy didn’t blink. If you asked me then how I felt about killing children I would have told you that they weren’t children, they were the enemy, and the moment they had lifted their weapons and fired upon my friends they had forfeited their lives. But I knew that someday these dead boys would come and visit me in the night, the way all the men I’d killed do, and maybe then my answers would be different. At one point my hands started shaking and I kept them busy by replacing the magazine in the carbine I’d recovered from the wreckage of the first jeep. It made a sharp click when I pushed it home. The three men filling in the grave froze and their faces went almost as pale as the corpses in the ditch. Stan laughed.

  We marked the grave with a makeshift cross and I scrawled the names of the dead on a page from the journal and placed it under a rock. When we were done, we drove on in silence until we were south of the town of Blumberg about four miles from the Swiss border. Stan parked the jeep along a forest track outside a small hamlet. I told him to make camp there and wait for me. At first I thought he was going to argue, but the discipline of his long service prevailed. Once he was organized I shook hands with him and got back into the jeep with the three Nazis. I’d spent two months before the war walking in this countryside to the west of Lake Constance, what the Germans call the Bodensee, so I knew the area well. We were on the northern edge of the Hoher Randen, the hill country that straddles the border between Germany and Switzerland, and beyond it, on the far side of Schaffhausen, lay the upper reaches of the Rhine. I drove two miles further up the track before I stopped again. ‘We walk from here,’ I told them. ‘When we reach the border we will be met by a representative from the US State Department who will arrange your onward journey from Switzerland.’ The Germans laughed, even Klosse, and talked about what they’d do when they reached America, what they’d buy and what they’d eat. They made me sick. ‘You are to say nothing to anyone, not even your guide about who and what you are,’ I told them. ‘Nothing.’ I stared at Brohm. ‘Nothing, Walter. You talk too much.’ He just grinned at me and clutched his briefcase tighter to his chest.

  XXXIV

  WHAT STARTED AS a slide quickly turned into a roll and eventually a flailing tumble. Somewhere on the way down Jamie lost Sarah’s hand. His world gyrated through impossible angles and planes. Rocks that would have bashed
his brains out missed his head by fractions so fine he felt them touch his hair. He knew it couldn’t last so he closed his eyes to make them go away and prayed that Sarah was as fortunate during the helter-skelter plunge down the steep hillside. A final lurch and a mouthful of dirt announced an unlikely and relatively safe landing and he was just opening his eyes when something landed on top of him and drove all the breath from his body.

  For a few ominous seconds Sarah lay unmoving, a dead weight across his ribs, but the rhythm of her breathing told him she hadn’t suffered any serious injuries. ‘You feel like you’re still in one piece?’

  ‘Give me five minutes and I’ll let you know,’ she groaned. ‘Also, remind me never to go out on a date with you again.’

  He dragged her into the shadow of the cliff where they would be out of the line of fire of the shooter with the machine pistol. They’d landed a few feet from the river in a pile of dust and pebbles that had fallen from the cliff above. From here, the Oder looked much deeper and wider than it had from above. Rain-dampened dust caked them from head to foot and Sarah’s hair looked as if it had been styled by a 1970s punk. Jamie could see her mentally checking for any damage. She patted herself down and his heart sank when he saw a moment of panic cross her face. She reached into her jacket.

  ‘My mobile.’ She withdrew the phone from her inside pocket. It took only one look to know it was smashed beyond repair. A little cry of anguish escaped her lips.

  ‘Better the phone than you,’ he pointed out.

  ‘You don’t . . . OK,’ she said resignedly. ‘Let’s get to it.’

  Jamie studied the dark swirls of the swift-flowing river. ‘If we try to cross, we’ll only make ourselves targets, and I don’t much fancy our chances of getting to the other side in any case. So upstream or down?’