The Black Sun

by James Twining

  perfect sense. Why else would the Order have been involved with that train? That must have been what was on those missing carriages.”

  “Christ!” Archie looked up, his voice caught somewhere between fear and reverence.

  “You realize what this means?”

  “No, Mr. Archie, I’m afraid I don’t,” said a confused-looking Dhutta. “What is this, please?”

  “It’s amber,” Dominique said slowly. “Jewelry-grade amber.”

  Tom

  nodded.

  “Renwick

  is

  after

  the

  Amber

  Room.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  5:26 p.m.

  The room was quiet, the only sound the muted commentary from an unseen cricket match being screened on one of the plasmas in the other room. All eyes were on the small shard of amber that lay cradled on Archie’s rough palm. It was Dhutta who broke the silence first.

  “Please forgive my ignorance, but what is this Amber Room?”

  Tom paused. How to describe the indescribable? How to frame in base words the jeweled essence of an object of such ethereal beauty that it seemed to have been created by sheer force of imagination rather than by human hands?

  “Imagine a room so beautiful that it was called the eighth wonder of the world. A room commissioned by Frederick the Great of Prussia, gifted to Peter the Great of Russia, and completed by Catherine the Great. A room created from tons of Baltic amber resin, which at the time was twelve times more valuable than gold, infused with honey, linseed, and cognac, and then molded into a hundred thousand panels backed with gold and silver—

  nine hundred and twenty-six square feet of it, accented with diamonds, emeralds, jade, onyx,

  and

  rubies.

  Then

  imagine

  that

  it

  disappeared.”

  208 james twining

  “Disappeared?” Dhutta asked, his eyebrows raised quizzically.

  “When they were laying siege to St. Petersburg in 1941, the Nazis removed the room from the Catherine Palace and reinstalled it at Königsberg Castle before dismantling it again in 1945 because they feared a British bombing raid.”

  “Then it vanished,” Archie continued. “Not a whisper. Until now, maybe.”

  “You really think that’s what was on the train?” Dominique said excitedly. “The actual Amber Room?”

  “Why not?” said Tom. “It was one of the greatest works of art ever made. It must be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What else would have warranted Himmler assigning his most elite troops to guard duty? What else would they have gone to such lengths to conceal?”

  “Remember how fascinated your father was with the story of the Amber Room,”

  Dominique reminded Tom.

  “He’d been looking for it for as long as I can remember.” Tom nodded. “Hoping to pick up some whisper of its fate, however tenuous. Dreaming of bringing it back from the dead.”

  “That’s what this is all about,” said Dominique. “The Bellak portrait must contain some clue to where the Amber Room is hidden.”

  “But what would Renwick—or Kristall Blade, for that matter—do with the Amber Room? It’s not as if they can sell it,” Archie pointed out.

  “Not whole, no. But they could break it up. Sell it piece-meal—a panel here, a panel there. Maybe even enough to line a small room. There’s no shortage of people who’d pay hundreds of thousands for a fragment of the Amber Room and not ask too many questions about where it came from. They could clear fifty, maybe even sixty million easy.”

  “Enough for Renwick to get back on his feet and for Kristall Blade to fight their war,”

  said Archie.

  “Which is why we’ve got to stop them.” Tom’s eyes blazed with determination. “Now more than ever. This isn’t just about Renwick anymore. This is about protecting one of the

  the black sun 209

  world’s greatest treasures from being broken up and lost for ever.”

  “If Renwick’s got the portrait, we’ll never catch up with him now,” Archie said ruefully.

  “But he doesn’t have it,” Tom observed. “If he did, he wouldn’t have left Weissman’s arm and the other Bellak painting for me to find. It’s lost in some private collection somewhere and he’s trying to use us to connect the dots.”

  “What did you say?” Dominique’s eyes narrowed, her forehead creasing into a quizzical frown.

  “I said, why else would he have left Weissman’s arm and—”

  “No. About the dots?”

  “What dots?”

  “Connecting the dots. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Dom?” Archie said impatiently. She didn’t answer. Instead, clicking her tongue with frustration, she hurried through to the far room and unpinned the railway map from the wall. The others followed, swapping confused glances.

  “Here, lay it out on the floor,” she said, handing it down to Tom. “I wondered what those holes were for,” she continued, shaking her head ruefully.

  “What holes?” asked Archie.

  “The holes in the painting.” She snapped her fingers impatiently, indicating that Archie should hand her the rolled Bellak painting that lay on the desk. “They’d been made too carefully to be accidental.” She unscrolled the canvas and laid it flat on the map, aligning the bottom left corner with the L shape that had revealed itself under the black light.

  “Give me a pencil.” Dhutta pulled one from the neat row of pens he kept clipped in his shirt pocket and handed it to her.

  Gripping the pencil tightly, she pushed its end into the first hole and swiveled it around so as to mark the surface of the map underneath. She then did the same in each of the nine other holes until, satisfied that she had covered them all, she peeled the map away and let it spring shut, revealing the pencil marks she had just made. 210 james twining

  Archie whistled slowly.

  “They show the same route we revealed before,” Dhutta exclaimed.

  “It’s like you said”—Dominique was beaming proudly— “connect the dots.”

  Tom stared silently at the map, hardly believing what he was seeing. Dhutta was right, the pencil marks had fallen precisely on the towns revealed by the black light earlier and confirmed by Lasche as the route of the Gold Train.

  All the dots apart from one. A small village in northern Germany whose name he had to squint to read because the pencil mark had gone right through it. Above it was a small symbol which the key told him denoted a castle.

  Wewelsburg

  Castle.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CIA SUBSTATION, ZURICH

  January 8—6:01 p.m.

  So you lost him?” Even the several thousand miles between them could not hide the disappointment in Carter’s voice. “Yes, sir.” Bailey winced, picturing Carter’s face. “And he doesn’t show up on any of the systems.” “I’m sorry, Chris.” Cody sighed, leaning in toward the speakerphone. “I put my best guys on this. I guess we didn’t figure he’d read us so fast.”

  “I know you did what you could,” Carter reassured him. “And I really appreciate all your help on this. All of it.”

  “I guess at least next time you’ll know what he’s capable of,” Cody added. “I’d suggest taking him down as soon as you see him.”

  “If there is a next time,” Carter said with a hollow laugh, his voice booming around the room. “He was our one and only lead.”

  “Not quite,” said Bailey thoughtfully. “We’ve still got Lasche to follow up on. And there’s the guy we saw with Blondi as well. He did show up on the system.”

  “It’s

  about

  time

  we

  caught

  a

  break,”

  Carter

  said

  with

  relief.

&nbs
p; 212 james twining

  “It turns out he’s got form. Some sort of high-end art thief. His name is Tom Kirk, also known as Felix.”

  “A thief!” Carter exclaimed. “That makes sense. He must be in on this whole thing too.”

  “Except that it turns out he cooperated with one of our agents on a case last year and got his slate wiped clean by way of a thank you. Now the general view is that he’s gone straight.”

  “Which agent?”

  “Jennifer Browne. You know her?”

  “Name rings a bell,” Carter said slowly. “She was mixed up in some shooting a couple of years back. I’ll check into it.”

  “Meanwhile, we could get his name and description out to all airports, railway stations and border police,” Bailey suggested. “That way, if he tries to leave the country, we’ll know about it. With luck, his friend Blondi may not be far behind.”

  “Make it happen,” Carter agreed. “And next time, let’s make sure we bring at least one of

  them

  in.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  WEWELSBURG, WESTPHALIA, GERMANY

  January 9—2:23 a.m.

  It was clear from their journey up the hill that Wewelsburg Castle occupied a commanding position over the neighboring countryside. More surprising, perhaps, was its design. Wewelsburg was the only triangular castle in Europe, with one large round tower in the north corner and two smaller ones south of it, each linked by heavily fortified walls. But then, as Dominique had told them during the seven-hour drive from Zurich, so far as she had been able to establish from the research she had been able to do whenever her laptop was able to get a good phone signal, its design was just one of the ways the castle broke with convention.

  In 1934, a hundred-year lease had been taken out on the castle and its grounds. The signatory? A certain Heinrich Himmler. His plan, which was rapidly put into effect, was to establish the castle not just as an Aryan research and learning center but as the spiritual home of the SS, a place as sacred to the Aryan race as Marienburg had been to the medieval Teutonic Knights.

  To

  that

  end,

  each

  room

  commemorated

  a

  legendary

  Nordic

  214 james twining

  hero or a pivotal moment in Aryan history. One room had even been set aside to house the Holy Grail, on the assumption that Himmler’s men would eventually succeed in their quest to find it.

  Himmler’s own quarters had been dedicated to King Heinrich I, founder of the first German Reich. Apparently not only had Himmler believed himself to be the earthly reincarnation of Heinrich’s spirit, he had also believed he would be endowed with supernatural powers once he was able to locate the legendary island of Thule—a supposedly lost civilization that he spent vast sums trying to locate— and make contact with the “Ancients.”

  To Tom, it all sounded horribly familiar, echoing Lasche’s account of the hate-filled ideology with which Himmler had shaped and inspired the SS to new heights of inhumanity. But there was an even darker edge to the story. A concentration camp, brutal even by Nazi standards, had been established close by in order to provide slave labor for the alterations needed to bring the castle in line with Himmler’s aspirations. And even though the castle was never fully operational, or indeed finished, it was rumored that pagan, even satanic rituals had been conducted within its dark walls. As if to emphasize Tom’s thoughts, the castle chose that moment to loom out from behind the skeletal vault of interlocking branches that had previously masked it, its mullioned windows glinting like animals’ eyes in the yellow sweep of their headlights before slinking back into the cold embrace of the surrounding forest.

  A small church stood silhouetted against the night sky as they rounded the final corner, its steeple casting a long shadow on the ground. Tom killed the lights and put the car into neutral, and they silently coasted the final hundred yards in the moonlight, a fox slinking lazily back into the undergrowth as they approached. Archie broke the silence as the car came to rest in front of what Dominique identified as the old SS guardhouse, now a museum.

  “Well, we’re definitely in the right place,” he said. Tom nodded. The castle was unquestionably

  the

  one

  in

  the

  photo

  the black sun 215

  of the Bellak painting recovered from Weissman’s secret room and the stained-glass window commissioned by Lammers.

  “I thought you said Himmler had had it destroyed?” Tom asked.

  “He did,” Dominique replied. “Or at least, he tried to. Following his orders, it was blown up in March 1945, but the ceremonial hall and the crypt in the north tower survived pretty much intact. The rest of the castle was rebuilt after the war.”

  Tom turned to face Archie and Dom’s expectant faces. “You’re sure it’s empty?”

  “It’s a youth hostel and a museum these days, but it’s pretty quiet this time of year. There won’t be anyone around until morning.”

  They got out of the car. It was drizzling, a thick, icy rain. Tom opened the trunk and took out two large packs; he handed one to Archie and strapped the other to his back. Then he turned to survey the castle walls.

  The wide moat, no doubt once a formidable obstacle, had long since been drained, its formerly treacherous banks now sheltering a manicured garden. A narrow stone bridge supported by two arches led across the void to the castle’s main entrance, an arched doorway surmounted by an ornately carved bay window. This was presumably a later addition, given its frivolous variance from the building’s stern aspect. They crossed the bridge to the imposing main gate, a solid wall of oak inset with six large roundels. Unsurprisingly, it was bolted shut, so Tom set to work on the narrow door set into it. Within a few seconds the rudimentary lock sprang open. They stepped into a short vaulted passageway that in turn gave onto the castle’s triangular courtyard, the yellow glow from a few lanterns vanishing into the shadows. Apart from the muted drumming of the rain, it was eerily quiet and still, the wind seemingly

  unable

  or

  unwilling

  to

  penetrate

  this

  cobbled

  sanctuary.

  216 james twining

  Dominique gestured toward a doorway in the base of the North Tower, a wide, squat circle of stone that loomed portentously above them, blocking out the night sky. By comparison, the two other, more delicate, towers that they could just about make out above the roof’s steep slope seemed as if they might flex in a strong wind. They approached the door, the walls closing in on them as the sides of the triangle met, an ancient inscription indicating that this had once been the entrance to a chapel. The door was unlocked and they stepped inside, only to find an iron grille blocking their way. Tom reached for his flashlight and pointed it through the bars, revealing a large chamber. Twelve stone pillars encircled the room and supported a succession of low arches that gracefully framed the slender windows set into the tower walls. But his eyes settled almost immediately on the floor. At the center of the floor, black marble had been laid in the now familiar shape of a disc surrounded by two further circles, with twelve runic lightning bolts radiating from its center. The Black Sun.

  “This was the Hall of the Supreme Leaders,” Dominique whispered. “A place where the SS staged ritual ceremonies.”

  “You make them sound almost religious,” observed Archie.

  “In many ways, they were,” Dominique agreed. “Him-mler’s doctrine of unquestioning obedience was inspired by the Jesuits. The SS was more like a fanatical religious sect than a military organization, with Himmler as Pope and Hitler as God.”

  “Is all this original?” Tom asked, surprised at the room’s condition.

  “It’s been restored.”

  “Well, in that case, whatever we’re looking for won’t be here, or they’d have fo
und it,”

  Tom said. “Where’s the crypt you mentioned?”

  “As far as I recall, directly underneath us. But we need to go back outside to get to it.”

  She

  led

  them

  back

  through

  the

  main

  gate,

  which

  they

  shut

  the black sun 217

  behind them, and across the bridge, the wind whistling through the two arches below. To their left, a flight of steps led down to the floor of the moat, where two doors had been set into the base of the east wall.

  “That one,” she whispered, pointing at the right-hand door.

  It was locked, although again it was only a matter of seconds before Tom had it creaking open. They stepped into a vaulted passage, and Dominique indicated with a wave of her flashlight the narrow staircase that led off to their right. The staircase ended at another iron grille, which Tom had to pick open. Dominique located the light switch on the wall outside before following Tom and Archie inside.

  The circular crypt was about twenty or thirty feet across and looked to be of solid construction, the walls built from carved stone blocks, the floor of polished limestone. A vaulted ceiling climbed perhaps fifteen feet above their heads. In the middle of the room was a round stone pit with two steps leading down to a shallow depression at its center. It was to this smaller circle that Tom went, stopping in the middle, directly beneath the apex of the ceiling.

  “Look.” Archie pointed his flashlight up above Tom’s head. The outline of a swastika, made from a different-col-ored stone, was clearly visible above.

  “What was this place?” Tom asked.

  “A sort of SS burial ground, apparently,” said Dominique. “Presumably a final resting place at the center of the universe for the spirits of the Order when they passed away.”

  Her voice had a strange deadened timbre, no echoes despite the confined space, as if every sound was being absorbed into the walls.

  Tom looked curiously around him. Four light wells were set high into the thick walls, narrow shafts that angled steeply toward the night.

  “According to Himmler, the center of the world lay not in Jerusalem or Rome or Mecca but here, in the hills of Westphalia,” she explained. “He planned to build a massive SS