Heidi looked at him. ‘You’re right. I myself knew the scholar who had been to the Lascaux cave, a secretive Ahnenerbe expedition that took place after the occupation of France in 1940. He penetrated further into the caves than anyone has done since, and found many paintings with animal art and these symbols. Back at Wewelsburg, the SS ideologues assembled the symbols as evidence not just of Aryan ancestors, but of Atlantis. Their theory was that the survivors of Atlantis huddled in the caves, where they sought refuge after the flood. That day here with Ernst we attended an indoctrination lecture on Atlantis, given by an acquaintance of Ernst’s from university days who insisted that he come along. It was a clever lecture, not occult nonsense, and I remembered enough from my schooling in the classics to know that the lecturer was talking sensibly about Plato. But it was there that I first saw the symbols, the same ones I was to see that afternoon down here with Himmler.
The lecturer showed us some slides taken by the primitive underwater cameras of the time revealing symbols incised on what seemed to be a cavern wal .
He said it was the most astonishing discovery ever made by the Ahnenerbe, in conditions of great danger to the divers.’
‘Divers,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Where was it?’
‘The location was not revealed. He showed a picture of an underwater habitat that had been secretly developed in the U-boat base at Lorient, an early version of the ones Captain Cousteau and his divers used in the 1960s and 1970s. It was very rudimentary by comparison, like two bathyspheres joined together. He said the divers used it as a base for their explorations, but I doubted it. I thought the habitat was too smal for that, and afterwards wondered if it had been some kind of storage facility. I remember seeing fish, tropical fish. I took up scuba-diving myself in the 1950s, and often went to the Caribbean and the Red Sea. It could have been one of those places, or somewhere else in the tropics.
Remember,
the
Ahnenerbe
got
everywhere,
especial y in the late 1930s, leading up to the war.’
Jack squatted down, and peered at Heidi. ‘When you were down here with Himmler, did you actual y see the pal adion?’
‘Only briefly. He treated it like the Holy Grail.
Another man came down to lift it from that hol ow and show it to us, an unpleasant Nazi named Dr Unverzagt, who was its custodian. I saw it for long enough to notice that it had symbols around the edge.
There was no doubt in my mind that they were genuine, as old as the time when the gold was melded to the meteorite and the metal was forged into the swastika shape, far back in prehistory. The symbols on the pal adion were exactly the same as the symbols that Himmler had carved into the marble in front of you.’
‘Including that early Atlantis symbol?’ Hiebermeyer asked.
‘I remember it vividly on the edge of the pal adion.
There was no other symbol quite like it.’
Jack looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘We’ve got some brainstorming to do.’
‘You start.’
‘The pal adion, the most sacred symbol of ancient Troy, was taken by Agamemnon to Mycenae, where it was buried in the Royal Grave Circle and then discovered by Heinrich Schliemann. He hid it away under his house in Athens, where it was discovered by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe men and brought here.’
‘Right,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘The pal adion was meteoritic in origin, exactly in accordance with the ancient Trojan legend that it had been the gift of the sky god. Meteorites are most easily found on ice, suggesting that the original artefact was in the hands of the ancestors of the Trojans long before the time of the recorded citadel, perhaps as far back as the end of the Ice Age, when the glaciers were close to northern Greece and the Black Sea. Some time between then and Bronze Age Troy, the meteorite was fashioned into the swastika shape and melded with gold, when it had those symbols added.’
‘Symbols of the Ice Age.’
‘Symbols exactly identical to those found at Atlantis, the first great civilization after the Ice Age, whose inhabitants fled with their belongings after the glacial meltwaters final y flooded the Black Sea basin in the sixth mil ennium BC.’
‘And their first landfal to the west would have been the Dardanel es, and the site of Troy.’
Hiebermeyer slapped his thigh. ‘Troy was founded by the Atlanteans.’
‘The pal adion came from Atlantis.’
‘Bingo,’ Hiebermeyer said triumphantly.
‘The only question is, how could Himmler’s people possibly have associated it with Atlantis?’ Jack murmured.
‘I think it goes back to what I was tel ing you before we met up with Heidi. The Ahnenerbe col ected a lot of real-life artefacts, some of them extraordinary treasures like the pal adion, but then assembled them into a story according to their own mythology. Yet by accident, or sometimes by design – because there were occasional genuine scholars involved – some of that held a shadow of the truth. Behind the Aryan obsession lay a reality that we ourselves are uncovering, the spread of early Neolithic culture in prehistory, the advance of agriculture and Indo-European language, something we now know goes back to the diaspora of Atlanteans from the Black Sea. And behind the Nazi idea of a worldwide precursor civilization lies the truth of a people we know did profoundly influence the rise of civilization elsewhere. I’m certain that Himmler could have had no evidence that the pal adion came from Atlantis or the meaning of that pectiform symbol, but sealing this sacred artefact in a hole surrounded by the word Atlantis in fake Nazi runes is exactly what we should expect.’
‘And in their search for Atlantis, the Ahnenerbe chanced on a place where someone who could only have come from Atlantis inscribed those symbols into a cavern wal , underwater and somewhere in the tropics,’ Jack murmured. ‘With the symbols being identical to those inscribed on the pal adion, it must have convinced them that the place those divers had found held huge significance. And they may have been right.’
He turned to Heidi. ‘Is there anything more you can tel us about the pal adion? Anything you remember from when you saw it?’
She looked pensive, and then clasped her stick. ‘It had peculiar magnetic properties. The meteoritic iron was strangely affected by changes in the earth’s magnetic field, becoming dramatical y heavier at certain places. For Himmler, this seemed to add to the mystique. The marble hol ow in the floor has a magnet embedded in it, and when it was activated, only the pal adion could unlock it. Himmler enjoyed the fact that the pal adion was stuck there like Excalibur embedded in the rock, another Arthurian fantasy. It apparently had a unique magnetic signature.’
Jack stared at Hiebermeyer. He remembered the shape in the bunker door. The palladion was a key.
He looked back at Heidi. ‘Anything else?’
She paused, and then looked Jack ful in the face.
Her eyes were moist again, and she suddenly seemed very old. ‘I need to get out of here now. I need to leave this grim place, and feel the sun on my face.’
‘Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, concern in his voice. ‘Let’s get you back to your wheelchair immediately, and we’l go out into the courtyard.’
She rose unsteadily, then put a hand on Hiebermeyer’s, staying him. She looked at Jack again. ‘There is something else,’ she whispered.
‘Something I’ve never told anyone, not even my son. I know where you’ve seen the shape of that reverse swastika before.’
‘Tante Heidi?’ Hiebermeyer said.
‘You’ve seen it in the bunker in the forest.’
Jack stared at her. ‘How do you know about that?’
‘In the door of that horrible death chamber. I was there too, in the autumn of 1944. You know that I was a toxicologist. I was one of the scientists who worked there. That’s my terrible secret. When you cal ed and told me about the discovery of a lost art cache in a bunker beneath the NATO base, Maurice, I knew what was also there and that you would find it. That’s real y why I cal ed you here now
. I had to tel you what I knew, a truth I had hoped would remain buried in that bunker and die with me. I wil tel you everything now. But first I need the sunlight.’
16
Jack leaned back in his chair below the castle wal , reeling at what he had just heard. Over the past twenty minutes, Frau Hoffman had told them everything she knew about Himmler’s secret project to develop a deadly biological weapon. They had learned how two victims of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic had been exhumed from Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and secretly transported to the bunker in the forest, where Heidi herself had been part of the team who dissected the bodies and isolated the virus. They had learned how another lethal microbe had been sought, a waterborne bacterium hinted at in the ancient sources that Himmler’s scholars thought had been the cause of Alexander the Great’s death in the third c e ntur y BC. From the late 1930s, Ahnenerbe expeditions had scoured the world looking for it, eventual y finding a place where the conditions were right for its growth and returning to the laboratory with a sample. The two weapons had been kept apart, the virus and the bacterium, ready to be used as a threat against the world in a scheme by Himmler that far exceeded in horror any secret wonder-weapon the Nazis were previously known to have contemplated.
Jack in turn had told Heidi everything they knew about Saumerre and his scheme: about how Saumerre’s
grandfather
had
been
in
the
concentration camp next to the bunker and had come to know of the secret research being carried out there; and how he and his son and grandson had pursued the truth of it as they built up their criminal empire, the prospect of a secret Nazi weapon being the greatest prize they could offer to the terrorist clients whose cause Saumerre himself supported.
Jack had begun to understand more clearly the link with Atlantis, how the search for a lost Aryan civilization had been used by the Ahnenerbe to shroud the truth of what they were real y after; and how an underwater archaeological discovery somewhere in the tropics had provided the perfect place for a hideaway that al owed Himmler to continue the ruse, a place that Jack felt certain was the landfal for the western exodus from Atlantis that he had hoped to find. It was now vital that they discovered every clue they could to its whereabouts, with each moment that passed risking Saumerre losing his patience and deciding to sel to the highest bidder the phial Auxel e had stolen for him from the bunker.
Hiebermeyer walked across the terrace with a glass of water for Heidi, who sipped it grateful y. He turned to Jack and spoke quietly to him. ‘I’ve just had a cal from Major Penn. He was keen to help, so this morning he went ahead and contacted my friend in the Berlin underground group and asked him for the measurements of the impressed reverse swastika symbol in that corridor under the Zoo flak tower.
Apparently it’s exactly like the one we saw in the bunker, but whatever’s beyond it in the corridor is flooded and crushed beneath tons of rubble. And there’s been another development. Auxel e’s been found murdered in an abandoned warehouse in Berlin.’
‘The phial?’
‘Penn was contacted before the scene had been tampered with. Auxel e had been stripped naked and garrotted. There was no phial.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. He’d served his purpose for Saumerre. From now on, your aunt has a ful -time escort until this is over.’
‘You think Saumerre knows about her?’
‘He and his family have been on this trail for years.
We have to assume they know about everyone stil alive with any possible connection to Himmler’s schemes.’
Hiebermeyer pursed his lips, then resumed his seat on the other side of Heidi. Jack leaned towards her.
‘A crucial question,’ he asked. ‘Which phial was it that Auxel e took from the bunker?’
‘The bacterium. The Alexander bacterium.’
‘So that’s what Saumerre has now,’ Jack murmured. ‘And the virus was stored in the chamber under the flak tower. That’s the missing ingredient, what Saumerre assumes must have gone to Himmler’s secret lair.’
Hiebermeyer looked down, trying to say something.
Jack had seen how distraught he had been after Heidi revealed that she had been in the bunker. He seemed to marshal his strength, and looked up again.
‘Tante Heidi,’ he said quietly. ‘Yesterday, inside that bunker, I saw something terrible, too awful for words. I saw the remains of the corpses on the gurneys that you must have worked on. But there were other bodies, young people, that looked as if they’d been dissected alive. They’d been left there to die in agony.
I have to know . . .’
‘ Nein, nein, nein,’ she said, raising her arms as if to cover her face, then closing her eyes tight for a moment and shaking her head vehemently. ‘I had nothing to do with that. Nothing. But I knew it was going to happen. I knew that once the scientists had isolated the virus, they would want to experiment with it, to mutate it and try ever more potent forms. I knew they had wanted to use healthy young adults born after the 1918 epidemic, people whose bodies had not built up the resistance of those who’d lived through the outbreak. And the Alexander bacterium was a completely unknown quantity: it needed to be tested.
As soon as they started to expand the concentration camp next door, original y a camp for Russian prisoners, I knew what it was for and that I had to get out. They thought I could become like the SS female auxiliaries who ran the camp. I was desperate. My salvation came in the cal for women to join the Lebensborn.’
‘You were part of that? The Nazi eugenics programme?’ Hiebermeyer exclaimed, aghast.
‘It was a year before I met Ernst. None of us were forced into it, but some of us, like me, were there as an escape from worse situations. And I was the ideal physical specimen: blonde, blue-eyed, healthy, the perfect mother-to-be. We cal ed the place the cattle farm. Truckloads of SS men would be driven up to visit us, every day. It was supposed to be a baby factory, but to them and to us it was a whorehouse.’
‘ Mein Gott,’ Hiebermeyer whispered. ‘I never knew anything about this.’
‘How did you find out about Himmler’s plan?’ Jack said. ‘I know you saw what was going on in the laboratory, but you’ve told us more than Himmler’s men would surely have revealed to a junior technician.’
‘Being a junior technician, a woman, and then volunteering for the Lebensborn programme probably saved my life,’ she replied. ‘The scientists seemed to disappear at regular intervals and be replaced. I think people were liquidated as soon as they’d done their task, and the turnover ensured that only a few knew the ful picture. But remember my new job in the cattle farm. We mainly served the SS, whose ranks would have provided Himmler with the fanatical fol owers he could trust. In the bedroom, men wil talk.’
‘Who was he?’
Heidi gripped her stick. ‘After four months, I had failed to get pregnant. That was the usual time limit, and I was terrified of being sent back to the laboratory. But there was one escape route. The brighter girls like me who failed to conceive could become part of the Lebensborn group used to repatriate children of Germanic background from eastern Europe, to make them into good little Nazis.
For repatriate, read kidnap. I worked in the temporary hostels in Poland and was never present at the snatchings, but involvement in that awful episode was my crime against humanity. It was why, for as long as I was physical y able after the war, I spent half the year working in a children’s hospice in Poland near the Auschwitz camp. It made me feel worse about what I had done, not better, but at least I was helping children and not causing them dreadful unhappiness any more.’ She seemed to slump forward, and Hiebermeyer handed her the glass of water again.
‘Tante Heidi, this is too much. You must rest.’
She waved him away, and straightened up. ‘Let me get it over with. In answer to Jack’s question, his name doesn’t matter. He was Hungarian, a volunteer for the Waffen-SS who had risen through the ranks to become
an officer, a hardened veteran of fighting the Canadians in Italy and then the Russians. He was one of the core of real soldiers that formed Himmler’s innermost circle. When I was sent back to the cattle farm in Germany after working in Poland, I was given a new lease of life there as a medical assistant because of my background. But even those of us who weren’t being used to make babies were stil expected to perform. The best arrangement was to find a man who would frighten others away, and stick with him. My Hungarian visited me for five months, until Himmler spotted me on one of his many visits and thought I would be a suitable partner for Ernst.
One night when we heard the terror bombers overhead on yet another attack on Berlin, my Hungarian said it didn’t matter if we lost the war because Himmler had a secret weapon that would see the world cower in front of him. Before the war he’d even been with the Ahnenerbe on expeditions as a student, and later helped to acquire samples of one of the deadly components of the weapon. He told me that now he had the most important job: to go to the bunker in the forest – the same one where I had worked – when Himmler gave the signal and retrieve the weapon, then take it to Berlin. He told me about the Agamemnon Code, the secret signal that would be passed among the chosen few when the time was right. He told me how the pal adion had a special purpose as a key to unlock the chambers with the phials. He told me everything I’ve told you.’
Jack remembered the image Hiebermeyer had described of the body of the SS man entangled with Major Mayne in the entrance to the bunker laboratory.
If that was Heidi’s Hungarian, if Mayne had died preventing him from getting inside the laboratory and retrieving the phial, then he truly had prevented the terrible catastrophe that would have ensued had the biological weapon somehow been deployed. Jack remembered Hugh Frazer, Mayne’s friend who just recently passed away, and it sent a judder of emotion through him. He wished he’d been able to tel Hugh that Mayne had not died a meaningless death. He took a deep breath, and turned to Heidi. ‘So then you met Ernst. And you must have quickly become pregnant.’
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