The Sacred Scroll

by Anton Gill

  Of course there were still snags. People who resisted him. But they would be broken. What had he said to Otto Strasser, when Strasser had had the temerity to ask him what the policy of the Nazi Party was? He smiled in pride at the memory of his reply: ‘The policy is not the question. The only question is power.’ Strasser had argued back, saying: ‘Power is only the means of accomplishing policy.’ ‘No,’ he had retorted. ‘That is the opinion of the intellectuals. We need power. That is all.’

  And now he had it. Soon, when the programme was in train, he would deal with Strasser, and his brother, and all the other left-wing, Jew-loving breed.

  Ludendorff could have had no idea of the importance of what he had handed over. If he had, he would never have let the tablet go.

  The man felt for it in his pocket, clutched it. This little piece of baked earth. It had taken him much study, much discreet consultation, but he had mastered it, as he would master everything else. Nothing stood in his way now. If there were a means of using it to control his enemies – the weak British, the pusillanimous French and the distant, aloof Americans – as well as it had enabled him to control his fellow countrymen, he would find it. Their turn would come.

  For the moment, it would be the turn of Germany, the turn of Austria, the turn of Poland and, above all, the turn of the Jews.

  Their power would be broken for ever; their fraud uncovered in the shining light of the New Dawn.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Herein!’ barked the man.

  An excited young adjutant entered. ‘First edition,’ he said, ‘Chancellor!’

  Controlling his excitement, accepting his Destiny, the man took the proffered copy of the Völkischer Beobachter, the People’s Daily, his newspaper; looked at the front page. Big picture of him, smaller ones of Frick and Göring, now ministers in the new administration.

  He read the headline: Ein Historischer Tag – Erste Maßnahmen der Reichsregierung … ‘A Historic Day – First Measures of the National Government led by …’ and then his name. His leadership! His country. Above all others!

  It was past midnight. January 31 now. The first day.

  The First Day of the Third Reich.

  77

  New York, the Present

  Leon Lopez became aware of the problem on an otherwise unremarkable late Wednesday afternoon.

  He’d been looking away from his screen to rest his eyes, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his tie. It was going to be his son Alvar’s fourteenth birthday the following week, and he intended to buy him the latest Ubisoft game, top of Alvar’s wish-list.

  He thought about Alvar, and Lucia, now rising eleven, how time flew, and of his wife, Mia. He allowed himself a contented smile.

  Then he saw the icon flash on his screen, clicked, went to the inbox, saw the mail.

  Perhaps it was Mia’s Swedish connection that alerted him. There was something about the message that had come through, though how the hacker had managed to get as far as he or she had in order to place it was nothing short of miraculous.

  The message itself made Lopez freeze.

  He picked up the internal phone, and spoke briefly. The sector’s systems were instantly locked down, and Monitoring went on full vigilance status.

  Over the next hour there was nothing more. No demand for money, no attempt to access any kind of information. Lopez studied the message.

  I have something you may need. I know this because you taught me history of science and other skills. I am in need so I turn to you. The other skills you taught me let me see your recent exchange about the scroll with colleagues in Paris. I am sorry. Accident. I just want to be in touch with you. You were like a father. I always follow you. Maybe we meet.

  Christ, thought Lopez. How can I explain this to Jack?

  He decided to block the thing himself, nip it in the bud before anyone else in the sector knew. This job was well-paid and a welcome addition to his university salary. He wasn’t the only academic to moonlight like this. He had colleagues, economists, who were in the pocket of big business. One made a fortune producing analyses in the financial press which were favourable to his client’s projected investment ventures. That paid for the house in Malibu.

  Lopez didn’t want to lose this sinecure. But, now, he was vulnerable. He knew that if he hadn’t isolated and neutralized this incursion by day’s end he would have to come clean. If he didn’t, and they found out, he’d be out of more than a job.

  As he’d expected, there was no source for the mail. But the message contained clues. One was obvious, not even a clue, a statement. Whoever it was was a former student of his. The other was less apparent but clear to him because of the way Mia still spoke English sometimes, especially when she was agitated or needed to express a difficult concept. Whoever had written this was not a native English speaker, that was clear. The nuances suggested, equally clearly, that the person was Scandinavian, and probably female.

  Maybe we meet. Fine, but how, when there was no way he could make contact to arrange it? The time before Marlow would start asking questions about the lockdown was limited. Luckily, Marlow was otherwise engaged somewhere and Graves was working from home on material she’d told him needed further processing before she passed it on to him for analysis.

  He had, maybe, two hours.

  Something told him that whoever it was wouldn’t be long in getting in touch again.

  He considered the position. It’d taken courage to make this first step in the first place, and now the person – she – would be careful, would make sure she wasn’t led into any kind of trap. If he was being watched, he had to give some kind of assurance that he was alone. If he was putting his neck on the block, if he was laying himself open to some psycho, so be it. But he didn’t think so and, anyway, he hadn’t a choice.

  One thing was certain – he had to get out of the office. The very walls oppressed him. He passed the work he was engaged on to his assistant, told her he’d be back in an hour, and made his way down through the hotel and out of the building. He walked a block, avoiding his usual coffeehouse, and made his way to another, on East 75th near the Whitney. It was dark, fake-Edwardian, a pastiche English gentlemen’s club, all but deserted at this hour.

  He chose a table in a corner, and a chair which faced the door. He ordered an espresso and a bottle of Gize. They came accompanied by a porcelain dish of mixed nuts and fruits. He drank the coffee quickly then sipped the water, while his brain refused to come up with a plan and floundered constantly back to the hope that something would happen to take any decision away from him. Absently, he nibbled the fruit-and-nut mixture, unable to taste it.

  He’d been there fifteen minutes and was beginning to fidget, hating to sit still, a world away from his normal, ordered existence. Then she entered. He knew she was the one from the moment he saw her.

  She must have been hanging around near the office – she knew where it was, my God, she knew where it was – then followed him, waited some more, either uncertain or to make sure he was really without company. But then she’d taken the plunge. She was short, stockily built, had close-cropped brown hair, a tanned, big-boned face. She wore khaki chinos, black trainers and a parka that was too big for her. A leather shoulder-bag swung from one shoulder. She looked about as much at home here as a penguin in a desert. She’d seen him, of course, but she didn’t approach, looking about uncertainly instead. A waiter was making his way towards her. The handful of other customers, all middle-aged businesspeople, paid little attention, though one or two of the women looked in her direction curiously.

  Before the waiter could reach her, Lopez stood up, heart in mouth. ‘Over here,’ he called.

  She nodded, sidestepped the waiter and came over to him. She still looked unsure of herself, but she also looked relieved. The last step had been taken.

  78

  The waiter came over.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ he asked.

  Leon looked at her questioningly.


  She hesitated. ‘A Schweppes?’

  ‘And another coffee. Latte this time,’ said Lopez. ‘Decaf.’

  ‘Coming up.’ The waiter left them.

  They didn’t speak until he’d returned with the drinks and parked them.

  ‘Got your message,’ said Lopez.

  ‘Thanks.’ Her eyes were wary.

  ‘Took one hell of a risk.’

  ‘I know.’

  He was trying to place her. How old was she? Maybe twenty-five. So she’d been in his class five, six years ago. Then it came to him. Surname at least. Lundquist. ‘I remember you,’ he said. She’d been one of his better students, maybe the best of her year. He’d taken her under his wing, taught her how to make a computer do everything but sing and dance, thought about recruiting her for INTERSEC, but she’d caught the hint and wasn’t interested. Wanted to go on, do a doctorate, go home to Sweden, teach.

  Annika, that was it. Annika Lundquist. But here she still was, and she looked very far from prosperous.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ he said guardedly.

  ‘Yes.’ The tension, which had ebbed while he’d been talking, returned to her face. She looked around.

  ‘You’d better tell me, and fast. Do you realize what a security risk you’ve become? Do you know what happens to people who’ve done what you’ve done?’

  ‘Wait. It’s important. I think. You always said, “Come to me if ever you need anything.”’

  He was silent. It was true. He’d learned since never to make such promises. But it was too late for this one. Besides, Lopez was intrigued. It was the first time in a while that he’d come face to face with the cutting edge.

  ‘You said you were in need.’

  ‘I am not doing so good. I need money.’

  He sighed. Was that why she was still here, not back in Sweden, why she looked as if she’d been sleeping rough?

  Drugs? Not like her, but who could tell?

  ‘I want to go home.’ She drew herself up a little proudly. ‘I qualified. You can call me Dr Lundquist. But I had problems with a man. Not so good. And lost my job. Have to work in a cash and carry. To pay for little Mia.’

  He wanted to ask questions, but something in her eyes told him not to. He inferred that Mia was her kid. Interesting, her giving the baby the same name as his wife. He felt his heart soften a little. And he was intrigued.

  ‘Remind me, where do you come from – in Sweden?’

  ‘Ystad.’

  Down in the south. In Scania. Town on the coast, hemmed in by flat countryside. Like Manhattan once was. By the look of things, she’d be better off there than here.

  ‘You want money to get back there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Start over.’

  ‘Nice coincidence, your having something you want to sell me.’ He saw her recoil at his tone.

  ‘I was going to get in touch with you anyway. Then I saw a little of what you were looking for. That was the coincidence. But it doesn’t matter. What I have may be of no consequence at all.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘My father’s family is very old. He was so proud of it, as a little girl I would get embarrassed for him, talking to his friends too much, after too much beer, about his great-grandfather the engineer this and his great-great-great grandfather the general that. But it wasn’t just boasting. There was a chest, full of papers. Some of them very old, should have been in a proper archive. But he took good care of them. When he was killed, my mother gave me some of them. I think she intended I should sell them if I ever got short of cash. We may be an old family, but we are not rich, and I am the only child.’ She looked wistful. ‘My father would have liked a son, but all he got was me. Not that there was a name to preserve any longer. His own father was the grandson of a daughter of the old family. There was little left to inherit, when his turn came, but the old papers and letters.’

  The door of the coffeehouse opened and she looked round, alert. It struck Lopez that he might not be the only one she was wary of. But it was only a couple that entered, a plump woman with long dark hair, eccentrically dressed, accompanied by a business-type, a gaunt man with wet lips and pale eyes. Annika turned back to Lopez.

  ‘I learned enough from you to work on very old documents. There is one in the collection written by hand on good vellum, in Latin, dictated to a scribe in Sweden in about 1210; the grammar and spelling are perfect but the tone is of a man speaking rather than writing. The narrative wanders a little.’

  Lopez leaned forward. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a letter, but it’s also a memoir and a kind of last will and testament. But there’s a whole passage that I cannot fathom. It seems to be written in code, or in another language altogether, strange to me.’

  ‘Do you know who wrote it?’

  She frowned. ‘I told you, a scribe, near where Malmö is now, but there’s no way of telling, the city wasn’t founded then.’

  ‘I mean, who dictated it?’

  ‘It’s signed – or at least there’s a mark, and then the name written in, added by the scribe.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s the name of our oldest ancestor. That’s what my father used to tell me. I doubt if anyone except perhaps an aristocrat can trace their family back so far, but I don’t see how the document can have made it into that trunk of my father’s otherwise.’

  ‘And what is the name?’

  ‘Frid Eyolfsson. He was a man close to Enrico Dandolo.’ Annika watched his face. ‘I’d been reading about the Dandolo Project in the professional journals. Then there was that news of the deaths of those archaeologists. I knew Dr Adkins briefly, I was at Yale as a junior lecturer for a semester.’ She smiled, half-mockingly, half-ruefully. ‘He tried to seduce me. But he was always doing things like that. I don’t think he meant any harm by it. He didn’t ever take other people’s feelings seriously.’ She hesitated. ‘Then I lost my job, and things got just too bad for me to handle, so I thought I’d try to contact you. But I couldn’t reach you – even through Columbia. There were clues though – and so I set off in pursuit of you.’ She looked at him. ‘I was desperate. I just wanted help. To get away. But I’d already connected the Dandolo Project to something … something secret … you seemed to be involved with. And I remembered this document. I couldn’t help it. My father used to hold it up often enough. “A piece of Swedish history,” he’d say. “It ought to be in the Riksarkivet.’’’ She slumped back, exhausted by her speech, which had spilled out fast, words tripping each other up, like a confession.

  Lopez noticed she’d eaten all the nibbles. The waiter was on the other side of the room, serving the couple who’d come in earlier. Lopez waved him over, and ordered a plate of mixed sandwiches and a tall cappuccino.

  ‘Can you show me this document?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t have it with me.’

  Lopez paused, uncertain. ‘You’re sure it exists?’

  ‘I’m in need, not mad. You can come with me now.’

  ‘No.’ Lopez looked at his watch. ‘I have to get back. Can I call you?’

  She produced a biro, wrote a number and an address on a cardboard coaster, and slid it over to him.

  ‘Thanks. Later today?’

  ‘I’ll be in all evening.’

  ‘We’ll arrange something, then.’ He hesitated, reached over, patted her hand. ‘It’ll be all right, Annika. You’ll see. We’ll sort this out for you.’

  She smiled back wanly. He could see she didn’t believe him, much as she wanted to.

  The waiter reappeared with a tray. He placed the sandwiches, beautifully garnished, with the coffee, in front of Annika. ‘Nothing for you?’ he asked Lopez.

  ‘Just the bill.’

  He paid it when it came, but still sat for a minute. She was eating as if she hadn’t eaten all day. He reached for his wallet again, withdrew $50, and placed the notes by her. She looked at the money, at him, mouth full, and smiled her gratitude.

&nbs
p; ‘I’ll call you in an hour. That good?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Until later, then.’

  He stood, smiled at her, and left.

  Outside, dusk was gathering.

  When he got back to INTERSEC, he called off the lockdown. Security reported no queries in his absence. He was in the clear.

  He was also alone with Annika’s information. He considered his position.

  But when, an hour later, he rang the number she’d given him, there was no answer.

  79

  Berlin, AD 1945

  Late April, but it was as if spring had been strangled at birth. The city was a mound of debris, a grey pile between whose smashed buildings tattered figures flitted. Most trees dead and the Tiergarten a wreck.

  Far underground, breathing pumped air, sallow from too many days of artificial light, the last representatives of the Thousand-Year Reich lived on. Uniforms were spotless, and routine maintained its brisk order. The Führer hardly slept, spent days and nights in the map-room poring over charts of the Middle East in the company of exhausted generals.

  ‘Gentlemen, we need to secure the Persian oil. That is imperative for the counter-attack.’

  They nodded their assent, knowing that the end wasn’t more than two weeks away. The Russians were at the gates of the shattered city and, from the west, the Americans and the British were trundling east over Greater Germany. Those who could get out, had. Only fanatics were left – and those who had no other choice.

  Adolf Hitler knew the truth: they had betrayed him. The very people he had sought to turn into a Master Race. At fifty-six, he knew his work was over. He had done what he could.

  But one question tortured him. How had he exhausted the power that had been given him?

  And now the tablet had disappeared.

  His first thought was that it had been stolen. The box, too, which all the ingenuity of Nazi science had been unable to open. But how could that be? He had spoken of the secret to no one, not even Eva, soon to be his wife.