The Mask of Troy

by David Gibbins

  ‘Now. Again,’ Raitz said, bringing his face close to Jack. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Why do you want it, Raitz? Your own private collection?’

  ‘For the Führermuseum,’ Raitz said quietly.

  Jack pretended to stifle a laugh. ‘The Trojan swastika? The palladion? What does that have to do with the very dead little Austrian?’

  ‘It is the key to the greatest hidden art treasures in the world. I will find them, and they will be the centrepiece of my museum, to perpetuate the memory and vision of the Führer for all time.’

  ‘And your colleague? The one I spoke to on the phone?’

  Raitz looked nonplussed for a moment. ‘Of course. He has his own interests. Family interests. Gold, antiquities, not art.’

  ‘You and I need to talk about that.’

  Raitz snapped his fingers again, and the man in the shadows beside Rebecca grabbed her arm and shoved the pistol closer. Raitz took out his own pistol from his overcoat pocket, a small Walther that he fumbled with and cocked. ‘Now. You tell me or Rebecca dies.’

  ‘You’re getting better at this, Raitz.’ Jack gestured back to the entrance. ‘You didn’t think I was going to come in here with it, did you? I needed to see that Rebecca was here. I’ve hidden it outside. I’ll go and get it. It’s in the black box, as we discovered it in the mine.’

  Raitz snapped again. The man behind Jack grabbed him by the neck and pulled him roughly back. ‘Get it,’ Raitz said.

  ‘By myself. This man stays in here.’

  Raitz gestured impatiently. The man let go of Jack, and then moved around in front of him. He was another Russian, like the ones in the mine, a thug. Rebecca had said there were two. The second one was holding the pistol to her head. Jack had seen no others. He turned back towards the entrance, making a show of staggering, still being in pain. He reached the edge of the rubble and pulled out the black box, and then turned and went back, holding it in front of him, displaying the Nazi swastika emblem. As he walked slowly toward the centre of the chamber, he saw out of the corner of his eye something in the dark entrance to the right. It was Costas. Jack looked hard at Rebecca, who stared at him, then he nodded his head, almost imperceptibly. She lowered herself to the ground until she was squatting on her haunches, hands pressed against her ears, head bent over and eyes closed, and began sobbing, loudly. Raitz stepped back towards her, waving his pistol. ‘Shut up, Rebecca.’ She kept sobbing and wailing. ‘Shut up!’ he yelled.

  At that moment Jack saw Costas’ Beretta aimed out over the stack of ingots towards the man beside Rebecca. He would have a perfect head shot, with no risk of hitting her as long as she remained crouched, hidden from Costas’ viewpoint. They just needed to divert the man’s attention, to get him to take his aim away from Rebecca, even momentarily. Suddenly Costas bellowed, ‘Hey! Where’s Chechnya!’ The two men and Raitz spun round, and the man beside Rebecca instinctively raised his pistol, aiming it into the darkness. There was a deafening crack from Costas’ Beretta and the man’s head disintegrated, leaving his body slumping over the ingots, his pistol falling from his hand. In the same instant Jack slammed backwards, sending the man behind him reeling. He fell forward, kicked open the box and took out the Webley, rolling over and aiming at the Russian’s chest, low and right as Ben had said. He pulled the trigger and the revolver kicked up, the massive report echoing through the chamber. The man remained upright, staring, a dark patch spreading over the front of his shirt, the hole where the bullet had gone through his sternum clearly visible. Jack saw that he had a Spetznaz tattoo on his wrist. The man suddenly dropped like a stone, leaving a spatter of blood all over the stack of ingots behind him. Jack turned, and saw Raitz staring like a scared rabbit, the Walther dangling from his hand. In one lightning movement Rebecca kicked upwards, catching Raitz full in the crotch. He howled in pain, doubled over and dropped the Walther, which Rebecca snatched up and trained on him. Costas was already there, aiming the Beretta at Raitz’s head. He rolled on the ground, groaning, and then slowly raised himself. Rebecca had come round beside Jack, who took the Walther and lowered the smoking Webley. He hugged her briefly, then pointed her to the entrance Costas had come in through, away from any further bullets. As she went towards it, Raitz raised himself up on his knees. ‘Don’t shoot. Please. Please.’

  ‘Nobody aims a gun at my daughter,’ Jack said coldly.

  ‘I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I never would have harmed her.’

  ‘Well then, I think we might have to let him live, Costas.’

  ‘Right-oh.’ Costas kept the Beretta trained.

  ‘Let me see,’ Jack said. ‘Attempted murder, extortion, kidnapping. On Turkish territory. That means a Turkish prison.’

  ‘No,’ Raitz whispered. ‘Not that. I’d rather die.’

  Costas levelled the Beretta at his eyes, holding it with two hands and sighting it. ‘You’d rather die? Really? Have you got the guts to die?’

  ‘No, please.’ Raitz fell forward on his knees, sobbing. ‘Don’t shoot.’

  Jack held the Webley ready. ‘Better still. We’re in a military zone. That means you come under the jurisdiction of the Turkish military. At least it’ll save you the public humiliation of a trial by jury. You’ll get a tribunal of Turkish officers. They’re good men. I know plenty of them personally. But I don’t need to call in any favours. They’ll see that justice is done.’

  ‘Just outside Diyarbakir, isn’t it?’ Costas said.

  Jack nodded. ‘In the desert on the way to the Armenian border. Just about the worst place in the world. A sweathole in summer, freezing in winter. Maximum-security military prison. Murderers, psychopaths, homosexual rapists, that kind of thing. No human rights there, because the inmates barely count as human. You go in there, you don’t come out. Throw away the key. Simple as that.’

  ‘We can do a deal,’ Raitz said hoarsely, craning his head up, his eyes desperate. ‘I’ve got original documents, maps. Treasure maps.’

  ‘Das Agamemnon-Code?’ Jack said.

  ‘I know nothing about that.’

  Costas waved his pistol. ‘We may as well kill him, Jack. This is getting us nowhere. Rebecca, block your ears.’

  ‘No!’ Raitz begged. ‘Please. I’ll tell you. In a safe in my house. Under the floorboards in the cellar. At the bottom of the stairs.’

  Jack kept aiming. ‘Only the one document?’

  ‘Only one with those words. But there are more. Many more. Photos. Maps to bunkers. A treasure trove. Just don’t hand me over to the Turks. Please God. I can give you the key to untold riches. All the lost treasures of the Nazis.’

  ‘You mean in the other safe in the study? Or the one behind the bookcase in your office in the Courtauld? Our security guys are pretty adept lock-breakers, wouldn’t you say, Costas? Both safes empty now, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Sheisse,’ Raitz muttered, staring at the ground. ‘Sheisse.’ He looked up at Jack again, suddenly defiant, tapping his head. ‘In here. Much more in here. I’ll do a deal with the Turks. Just like Schliemann did.’

  ‘Schliemann didn’t mess around with the Turks. They were the ones who were using him. Anyway, they won’t believe you, without documentation. And they won’t listen to you where you’re going. Just another insane Westerner babbling away in solitary confinement in a hellhole Eastern prison.’

  ‘For the rest of his life,’ Costas said.

  ‘Not a very long life, I would imagine, especially if they ever let him out of solitary and the other prisoners get their hands on him.’

  ‘What can I do?’ Raitz sobbed.

  Jack put the Webley in his fleece pocket, took out a small notebook and pencil, walked over and knelt in front of Raitz. ‘Here’s the deal. You’ll do time, but I can keep you out of that place. I can even put in a word for repatriation to a British prison. And you know how lenient judges are in Britain. You’re still a young man. You could remake your career. Even argue that you were forced to do this against your will. A British court wo
uld probably believe you. You have lots of influential friends, former students and colleagues, politicians.’ Jack pushed the notebook towards him. ‘All you have to do is write down one name. The name of the person who’s been controlling you.’

  ‘He’ll find me and kill me. Whatever it is he wants in that bunker is too precious to him. He’s got more of these thugs. Russians, mostly, but they call themselves Totenköpfe. Ironic, isn’t it? I’m the one with the Nazi background, not . . .’

  ‘Not who?’ Jack demanded.

  ‘He’ll kill me. They’ll hunt me down.’

  ‘I don’t think that should be a concern where you’re going.’

  Raitz was still for a moment, then put his hand on the notebook. He let it rest there, then picked up the pencil and scrawled a name. Jack quickly took the pad, stared at it, thought hard for a moment, then pocketed it. ‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘Why? You wanted your absurd Führermuseum. What on earth did a man like that want?’

  ‘Gold,’ Raitz said. ‘Gold, and works of art. Everyone knows he has Marseille gangsters in his background. The press love it. He’s used it to his advantage. A charming Algerian intellectual, with a bit of rogue in his genes. The truth is, that wasn’t just in the past. He’s secretly in charge of the family crime syndicate. No longer just small-time gangsters. One of the biggest in Europe. Worth hundreds, hundreds of millions.’

  ‘So he was interested in all your leads? All the material on hidden art you’d collected?’

  Raitz shook his head. ‘No. Only the Agamemnon Code. Only that one bunker in the forest.’

  ‘He was playing you,’ Costas said.

  ‘You’ve been a fool,’ Jack said to Raitz angrily. ‘A bloody fool, duped into going along with someone who had no interest in your cause, let alone antiquities or art.’

  ‘You’re wrong. He said—’

  ‘I don’t care what he said. You’re a naïve academic, Raitz. You’ve forgotten what real people are like.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look around you,’ Jack said. ‘All this bronze, all this raw material for weapons, enough to equip all the armies of the ancient Aegean world: the Mycenaeans, the Trojans, every one of them. Yet all of it redundant. It’s because a new metal had been forged, iron. And then think of today. People are always on the search for the new weapon. Or the weapon that may already have been devised and then been hidden away. Think of the underworld since the fall of the Soviet Union. First they were on the hunt for nuclear weapons, components for dirty bombs. Then, with the revelation of what the Russians had taken from Nazi Germany, the lost treasure of Priam, and all the revived interest over the past few years in hidden Nazi art, their ears pricked up. They’d forgotten about the Nazis, about what might still be hidden. About the dreadful weapons that probably still lie in those bunkers today.’

  ‘I know nothing of weapons,’ Raitz mumbled. ‘This is nothing to do with me.’

  Jack picked up the empty black box and tapped it. ‘In 1945, a Luftwaffe officer took the Trojan palladion from the salt mine in Poland to the bunker near Belsen you know about. He was a fanatic. He was one of those who had been activated, to be there, poised ready to fulfil Hitler’s final decree. Not the Nero Decree, the destruction of the Reich. No. The Agamemnon Code. Armageddon. There were others activated, too. We believe at least one of them was there, in the forest, waiting, because of what happened. The officer took the palladion into the bunker, but a few days later, while he was waiting for the final order, he was shot by British soldiers. Then the SS guards at the nearby camp took a girl into the bunker and raped her. She saw the palladion. It was her drawing of it that gave us the clue. We knew it was there all along, not in the salt mine. We knew that two officers, one British and one American, were told about it, and went to investigate. Nobody knows what happened to them. But it is possible that the other fanatic was there, waiting for the final activation signal from Berlin, and they died together in a fight. Whatever was in there that was so lethal is still there today.’

  ‘But the palladion was the key to opening a storeroom of art,’ Raitz said weakly.

  Jack waved his hand dismissively. ‘Is that the story Saumerre sold you? Why have a special key for that, some sacred symbol? No. It was the key to something completely different, much more sinister. I believe the palladion may have been partly meteoritic, according to an ancient Trojan myth about its origins. The reverse swastika itself is hardly a unique key, but there could have been a unique magnetic signature that made it the only way of opening the door.’

  ‘The door to what?’ Raitz said.

  ‘We can only guess. The worst the Nazis could come up with. Not nuclear, which they were never close to achieving. Perhaps not chemical, which might be difficult to propagate widely without aircraft or missiles. That leaves biological. And that’s the worst. Typhus. Plague. Look what happened to the world with the flu epidemic in 1918. That would have been fresh in the minds of the Nazi scientists. They might even have had access to diseased bodies. They certainly had access to plenty of live humans for experimentation, in that camp. They could have reawakened the Spanish influenza virus, and even mutated it. If that’s still in the bunker, if it was released, it could kill hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions. It could wipe out civilization as we know it. Is that part of your Nazi dream?’

  ‘My God,’ Raitz said. ‘My God. What have I done?’

  ‘What you can do,’ Jack said, kneeling down in front of him, ‘is help us. We need to know whether Saumerre was operating solely for his own business interests. Such a weapon could be worth millions. Billions. We need to know whether he is interested as a middleman, or whether there was any other motivation. Did he say anything, did you hear anything? If I believe you, that’s another mark in your favour with the courts.’

  Raitz looked pale, and put his hand to his forehead. His voice was shaky. ‘I can’t think of anything. Anything at all. We only ever spoke about it in the British Museum where we first met, where he passed me the code document, and then in that ghastly flat in London where they murdered the Dutchman. It was only ever family interest with him. The family business. Marseille mafia. It was just money.’

  Costas nodded at him, still keeping the Beretta trained. ‘Just out of curiosity. What’s Saumerre’s religion?’

  ‘Saumerre? Muslim, of course. His grandfather was from Algeria. So what? There are millions of Muslims in Algeria, in France. And look at him. He’s hardly a terrorist.’

  ‘Who is?’ Costas murmured.

  ‘He did say something. When we parted at that flat.’ Raitz stared at Jack, clearly thinking hard, then sank down and put his head in his hands. ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. Why didn’t I see?’

  Jack reached over and lifted his head up. ‘What?’

  ‘I said I was doing this for the Führer. For the cause. For a museum, God help me. He said something in Arabic, about Allah, but then seemed apologetic, as if he’d let something slip. I thought it was odd, as he’d been so adamant about this being all to do with gold and antiquities and money. But I thought he was just repeating a familiar phrase. I remember it. It was Jazaka Allahu Khairan. May Allah reward us with good. A perfectly normal expression for a Muslim. He even said so, when he explained it. But maybe . . . my God. My God.’

  Jack leaned over and took Raitz’s chin in his hands. ‘Listen to me, and listen well. If you breathe a word of this to anyone, anywhere, my people will know. You’ll be getting that one-way ticket to Diyarbakir. Play your cards right, and I’ll see what I can do for you.’

  Jack nodded at Costas, who took the iPhone from his belt and pressed it. Seconds later Ben appeared at the entrance to the chamber flanked by two IMU security men with handguns drawn, and then a team of black-clad Turkish navy commandos with MP-5 sub-machine guns, who quickly filed into the chamber, training their weapons on Raitz and the two bodies, and then kicking the bodies. Jack recognized the officer in charge, did a thumbs-up at him and pointed to Raitz. The officer gest
ured, and two of his men dragged Raitz to his feet, handcuffed him behind his back, and then pushed him through the entrance and out of sight down the tunnel. They could hear the clatter of a helicopter somewhere close by. Rebecca had come running from her hiding place, and Jack took her in his arms and held her tight.

  ‘I hope I never see him again,’ Rebecca murmured.

  ‘Are you all right? Did they touch you? Thank God you’re here.’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘Don’t worry, Dad. I’m fine. What about you?’

  One of the security team, a woman, passed them each a small water bottle, and they uncapped and drained them together, then clicked the bottles together. Jack smiled at her. ‘I’m fine. A little tired.’ He gestured at Ben and the security team. ‘Bet they’re itching to hear your story.’

  Costas came up to them, and eyed Rebecca shrewdly. ‘Nice kick. Ouch.’

  ‘Ben taught me that.’

  Jack nodded at Ben, who had joined them. ‘Yeah, he’s pretty good like that.’

  Ben nodded, and looked intently at him. ‘Got a result?’

  Jack handed him the notebook. ‘Got a result.’

  ‘I’m on to it.’ Ben tapped his BlackBerry, Googling the name. ‘Saumerre. Keynote speaker at a European Union cultural affairs conference in Brussels today.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Should be on the podium in roughly forty-five minutes.’

  ‘Okay. He’s going to be on tenterhooks waiting for a result from here. I imagine Raitz would have been planning to call him about now. Get Raitz’s cell phone and try the contact numbers. I want to be on the phone with Saumerre before he makes that speech.’