‘Those were?’ Rebecca whispered.
‘Three words, visible above the standard text of the decree, part of the stamp with the reverse swastika, the counterclockwise one. I reported them, but never heard anything more. Some intelligence chaps came to talk to me about it, swore me to secrecy and that was it. The words appeared directly under the swastika. They were Das Agamemnon-Code.’
‘The Agamemnon Code,’ Dillen whispered.
‘Agamemnon. Why Agamemnon?’ Rebecca asked, incredulous.
Dillen turned to her. ‘The Nazis loved harking back to the imperial past, to those they regarded as Aryan precursors, great warrior leaders. Agamemnon was always high on the list. Discovering this object among Schliemann’s treasure, the Trojan swastika, somehow spirited away to Germany after Schliemann’s death, perhaps sent there by Sophia, would have been the greatest of all their plundered treasures. The symbolism, the association with what they may have regarded as Agamemnon’s triumphant destruction of Troy, the obliteration of an inferior Eastern race, all that would have fed their twisted imagination. So when it came to contemplating Armageddon, some fearful doomsday weapon, how better to encode it than to use the symbol of that reverse swastika, and name it after the king of kings himself ?’
‘So that’s why you’re so fearful of that bunker in the forest,’ Rebecca said to Hugh. ‘You think there was some terrible weapon there?’
‘Not was,’ Hugh said quietly. ‘Not was, but is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘After the war, the burnt forest, the site of the camp, the bunker, was bulldozed over and turned into a NATO airbase. The bunker will still be there, though. Even the RAF’s eight-thousand-pound bombs couldn’t destroy the U-boat pens, and bunkers were built of the same reinforced concrete. At least it might have sealed off what could still be inside. And I’m not just talking about stolen art. You know that now. As soon as I began to piece this all together in my head after the war ended, I had a terrible sense of foreboding about that place, about what was inside, the place where the girl had seen that reverse swastika. The horror of that forest isn’t just about what happened to the girl with the harp. Or what happened to Peter. It’s about what is still there, what could still be unleashed.’
Dillen took a deep breath. ‘It looks as if we’ve got our work cut out.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Hugh said.
Dillen paused and collected his thoughts. ‘We hope to God that nobody else has begun to piece together what we have been talking about this afternoon. We’re still only guessing, but there’s something terrible at the end of this road. Some Nazi weapon stored in that bunker. A weapon associated with this code, Das Agamemnon-Code. Something which, by all those chances of war, you and Peter may have been responsible for preventing fanatical Nazis from activating in the final days of the war. You, by finding that drawing. And by killing that motorcycle courier, perhaps. Peter, by going into the camp, into that forest. Perhaps he and the American died preventing someone from following Hitler’s final order. We can be sure that some in Allied intelligence knew what this was all about, and were afraid enough to obliterate all evidence, to let that bunker be buried under the bombed forest and then, after the war, for all time. There was something in there that not even they could trust themselves to reveal.’
‘So we carry on where Peter left off,’ Rebecca murmured.
‘We keep fighting the war,’ Dillen said. ‘Hugh?’
‘I’ve never stopped. That’s why I’ve kept this to myself for so very long.’
‘Our job is to obliterate any leads. To find any loose ends, and to cut them off. Just as Allied intelligence must have desperately been trying to do in 1945.’
‘We’ve already opened it up by going back to Troy,’ Rebecca said. ‘We’ve begun what we don’t want, which is to reawaken the search for Schliemann’s treasures in Europe.’
‘There’s no turning back now,’ Dillen said grimly. ‘It’s ironic. That’s exactly what I said to Jack last night on the battlements of Troy, looking at what we’d found that afternoon. He’d had a sense of foreboding, about Homer, about whether we wanted to uncover the dark side of the story of Troy. But then we were euphoric. No turning back, because we were on the cusp of the greatest revelations. Just like Schliemann that night at Troy in 1890.’
‘That art dealer,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘The guy in Amsterdam. The one I met. He’d be a good place to start. He seemed to know everything, had had his ear to the ground for decades. If anything’s shown up, anything to do with Schliemann’s treasure, he’ll know. He told me he had a whole cache of Nazi documents he’d collected, and he used those as a bargaining chip with Interpol. We want to comb through everything, everywhere, that might have that reverse swastika, that code on it, and delete it. If it’s ever shown up on the black market, he’d know about it.’
Dillen looked at his watch. ‘Jack and Costas are diving on the Bronze Age wreck right now. I’ll leave a message with Captain Macalister and Ben on Seaquest II. I remember you talking to your dad about those documents, Rebecca. After he’d gently told you never to do what you did again. I think they went to somebody high up in the Courtauld, Professor Hans Raitz, wasn’t it?’
Rebecca nodded, and curled her lip. ‘I met him, too. He took me out to lunch at the British Museum. I know he’s a big art historian, but I didn’t like him. I asked him whether he was Jewish, with that name, and he nearly spat at me. Then he apologized, said my generation were ignorant and it wasn’t our fault, and started touching me under the table. He said I was a good Aryan girl. Can you believe it? I suddenly had a phone call and had to leave. I never told Dad.’
‘Probably a good thing you didn’t,’ Dillen said. ‘And Raitz doesn’t make any secret of his family’s Nazi past. Trumpets it, says it’s driven his academic career, to see how architecture and art served fascism. But I wonder.’
‘As you say,’ Hugh said. ‘The war still goes on. The enemy is still out there.’
‘This dealer,’ Dillen said. ‘Where is he?’
‘He lives incognito in London,’ Rebecca said. ‘But I know where.’
‘Right.’ Dillen looked at her. ‘But we aren’t going there without IMU security this time.’
‘Okay,’ Rebecca said quietly. ‘This does frighten me.’ She got up and walked over to the table, looking again at the drawing of the two people holding hands, the little girl between them and the swastika above. She brought the back of one hand to her mouth, and Dillen could see she was swallowing hard. Hugh saw too, and put his hand on her arm. ‘I’ve always wanted to find her again, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘To find out what happened to her.’
‘The girl with the harp,’ Rebecca whispered, sniffing and wiping her eyes. ‘I wish I could hear her play.’
‘It was her,’ he said, his voice faltering, reaching for Rebecca’s hand. ‘Not really Peter, or me, but her. If she hadn’t made that drawing, perhaps some awful horror would have been unleashed.’ He withdrew his hand, and got up, lurching slightly, steadying himself. Dillen looked at him with concern. Hugh suddenly looked terribly tired, and for the first time Dillen saw him as an old man. Perhaps they should not have put him through the inquisition like this. But Hugh had wanted it. Hugh looked at his watch, and cleared his throat. ‘Thirteen hundred hours, on the dot. If you go right now, you might just make the fifteen twenty to Paddington. Otherwise you wait another forty-three minutes.’
Dillen gave him a tired smile. ‘Ever the old soldier, Hugh.’
‘And the old schoolmaster. When I retired, I swore I’d never be enslaved to the clock again. But at my age, you also realize that time is of the essence. When you’ve still got work to do.’
Rebecca turned, and hugged him. ‘You loved Peter, didn’t you?’
Hugh stood stiffly for a second, then relaxed and put his arms round her. ‘I’m still there, you know. Sometimes it’s as if the war is like the moment before death, a moment one is forever living. And it’s t
he old cliché. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. Peter’s forever young. I apologize for being so emotional earlier. Shameful, really. I’m tougher than that, you know. It’s just that recently, in the past few years, there have been a few moments. The armour’s coming off. Old age, I suppose. I do wonder what Peter would have thought of me now. He the eternal youth, me the shuffling old man.’
‘You might have to be tough again, Hugh,’ Dillen said. ‘We’re all being drawn back to that place. Maybe to confront the gates of hell once more.’
Hugh let go of Rebecca, then held out his hands, palms upward. ‘Sometimes, when it’s cold and I close my hands, I feel the crackle of frozen blood on my palm. I felt that once in the Ardennes. Other men’s blood, not mine. When it’s warm, I smell it. The blood of the men I’ve killed. You don’t need to worry about me when I stand there, in front of those gates. I’ve been there for years.’
Dillen got up. Rebecca put on her fleece, and slung her pack over her shoulder. Dillen zipped up his Gore-Tex jacket and picked up his laptop bag. Hugh went over to the door. ‘You’ll get a taxi to Temple Meads station?’
‘We’ll walk.’ Dillen slung his bag on his shoulder. ‘I was telling Rebecca on the way up about my time here as a schoolboy. I haven’t seen the place for years. And we might just have time to pop into the Llandowger Trow for a quick drink before catching the train. I want Rebecca to see where Robert Louis Stevenson set the opening scene of Treasure Island. The docks are still a place where you can step into the past. And I’m sure a few Howards have set off on high-seas adventures from there before now.’
Hugh put his hand on Dillen’s shoulder. ‘It’s been good to see you here again, James. Always good. Let’s hope that what we’ve been talking about is all ancient history. A closed book, for you two, if not for me.’ He turned to Rebecca, and put his other hand on her shoulder. ‘And you, Rebecca Howard, daughter of my friends Jack and Elizabeth. I was very fond of your mother too, you know. She came here with Jack once, sat just where you did. Seeing you, it was as if I were seeing her again. She’ll be with you for ever, you know. It’s not just your dad who will look after you. My home is your home. Any time.’
Rebecca’s eyes welled up, and she embraced him again. ‘I’ll come back. You can count on it. For the hot chocolate.’
Hugh stepped over and opened the door for them, then paused. ‘When I was a schoolboy, a famous general named Sir Ian Hamilton came to unveil our war memorial. He’d been commander during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. He’d known the terrible beauty of war, its seduction, from soldiering in the heyday of the British Empire. When heroes still seemed possible, when wars were not yet world wars. He was steeped in the classics, in Homer, and when he sat in his ship off Gallipoli, he wrote of his troops in Homeric terms, as if when they went over the top into a storm of lead they were men of Mycenae before the walls of Troy. History has reviled him for it, but he was only using the words he knew, the metaphors, the similes drummed into him as a boy studying Homer. And maybe, sitting there with Gallipoli and Troy in his sights, he saw the truth. More than three hundred old boys from my school died in that war. Hamilton stood before us and told us they had hoped to kill war. I’ll always remember that. They had hoped to kill war. That’s what we were doing too, you know, Peter and I and all the countless others. But since then, I’ve come to realize a truth, perhaps the truth that Hamilton saw. The flames of war were ignited in Troy three thousand years before, not in burning ships and pyres of dead heroes, but in the flaming citadel, in women and children lit like torches. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. We can never kill war. All we can do is contain it, know it’s there but keep the horror boxed away, like that bunker in the forest, like the monster within us that is so easily unleashed, the monster I feel inside me every time I open and close my hands. And fighting that war is no longer a job just for soldiers. It’s for all of us.’
‘Roger that,’ Rebecca murmured.
Hugh grinned, and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Now where have I heard that before? You are a chip off the old block. And now enough of this. It’s time for you to go. And time for me to get cracking with that translation.’ He looked at Dillen, a twinkle in his eye. ‘Onwards and upwards, James.’
Dillen looked at him. What would the future now hold, for Hugh, for Rebecca, for all of them? He put his hand on Hugh’s shoulder, feeling the sinewy toughness, but the frailty too. It was their old parting expression. He could not imagine coming here and not hearing it. He smiled broadly. ‘Onwards and upwards, Hugh.’
15
London, England
The man stood in the corner of the room, fidgeting with his fingers, watching the scene unfolding in front of him. Another man, heavy-set and middle-aged, was sitting on a wooden chair in the centre of the room, sweating profusely, his a few strands of the centre of the room, sweating profusely, his few strands of hair plastered to his forehead. He was wearing faded army surplus trousers and an artist’s smock, smeared with coloured chalk. His legs were strapped to the chair legs and his chest and upper arms to the chair back, leaving his forearms hanging loose. A piece of duct tape had been slapped over his mouth, and his eyes were darting about, terrified, imploring, at the man in the corner and the other man standing in front of the chair, then out of the window, over the river Thames towards the Houses of Parliament and the grey sky.
The man in front of the chair, expensively dressed in a dark coat, stroked his neatly trimmed beard and looked pensively at the bound man, then clicked his fingers at the two other men standing in the room, against the wall behind the chair. One of them came forward, an ugly, heavy-jowled man of Slavic appearance, the sleeves of his leather jacket rolled up to reveal a smudged tattoo with the word Spetsnaz above his left wrist. He stood behind the chair, reached down and lifted the man’s right forearm, bending the hand back and holding it there. The man struggled, bouncing the chair legs on the floor, and then went wide-eyed and breathed hard through his nose as the thug put pressure on. The man in front nodded, and in one movement the thug pressed his hands together like a vice, snapping the man’s fingers. The man made a terrible noise and slumped forward, sobbing, jerking the chair again, mucus dripping from his nose.
The man in the corner shut his eyes, feeling faint. It was not supposed to be like this. He opened them again, and saw the man in front of the chair gesturing for him. He walked over and spoke urgently. ‘Saumerre. We need to talk.’
‘Not now, Raitz.’
He could smell the sweat, the stench of fear. Saumerre looked thoughtfully at the man in the chair, and then clicked his fingers at the thug again, gesturing at the man’s mouth. The thug reached over and ripped the tape from the man’s face. The man gasped, breathing loud and fast, wheezing and groaning, then looked up, sniffing away the mucus that was dripping off his face, trying to rub it on his shoulders. His cheeks were streaked with sweat. ‘What do you want with me?’ he said hoarsely, his accent slightly European. ‘Who are you? Why did you do this?’ He lifted his left forearm, looking at it, the fingers hideously splayed, hanging like the hand of a rag doll. ‘I’m an artist. An artist. What have you done to me? My God.’
‘It will be right hand next,’ the thug growled, his English heavily accented. Saumerre signalled him, and the thug stepped back against the wall between the other two, men evidently from the same mould. Saumerre sank down on one knee in front of the chair. ‘You are Marcus Brandeis, yes? Jewish, I think. Yes, I think you are Jewish, Sephardic with that name, in Amsterdam. My ancestors were in Spain too, you know, Moors, of course, but we have something of a common heritage, you and I. We have common interests.’ He shook his head, as if sadly. ‘If only you would share yours with me.’
‘Share what?’ the man in the chair sobbed. ‘You haven’t asked me anything yet. What do you want?’
Saumerre suddenly changed his manner and stood up abruptly, stared at him icily. ‘Don’t play the fool with me, Brandeis. You’ve been expecting this for months.
You’ve been a marked man since you turned police informant. London was hardly a good place to hide, was it? A pavement artist on the South Bank. Hiding in the crowd. It must be demeaning. You must miss the big time.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I’m just an artist. A street artist. That’s how I make my living. I draw people. Tourists.’
Saumerre took an iPhone out of his pocket and flipped it open, reading from it. ‘Marcus Brandeis, formerly of Brandeis Gallery, Prinzegracht 3, Amsterdam.’ He snapped shut the phone. ‘Until recently regarded as Europe’s premier broker for black-market antiquities. Special interest in art and antiquities stolen by the Nazis. Not, I might add, in returning art to its rightful owners, even fellow Jews. But a particular interest in finding art still hidden away, then selling it to the underworld. Art used to lubricate deals, drugs, arms, you name it. The Russian Mafia. Big names, your clients.’ Saumerre tapped the phone. ‘A very exclusive list. Names like the one who lent us those two gentlemen standing behind you. Names who like to see deals finished. Names who like to remain anonymous. Names who no longer appreciate your services, my friend.’
The man slumped, then gave a shuddering sigh. He looked up, deathly pale, his face wet but his eyes now defiant. ‘Which one is it?’ he said quietly. ‘Ivankov? Labazanov? Which one do you work for? Just tell me. I can give you what you want. Anything. We can still do business. I know far more than I’ve told the police. I know where Nazi art is still buried. In bunkers, in mines. Fantastic treasures. We can find it together.’
‘Now we are getting somewhere,’ Saumerre said.
Brandeis peered at him, narrowing his eyes. ‘I know that face. Politician, diplomat. French, I think? Algerian? Who are you?’
‘It is of no consequence to you.’ Saumerre gestured at the man standing beside him. ‘But you know Professor Raitz?’
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