Ghost Flight

90

First to arrive for that evening’s meeting was the archivist, Simon Jenkinson.

Jaeger had spent most of the day on his Triumph Explorer, paying a furtive visit to his Wardour Castle apartment. There, he’d retrieved his edition of the Voynich manuscript – the one that Grandfather Ted had bequeathed to him.

He’d laid the thick tome on his desk in the barge with some degree of reverence, awaiting Simon Jenkinson’s entry.

The archivist was a good half an hour early, and he looked only marginally less like a hibernating honey bear than when Jaeger had last seen him. At Jaeger’s request, he’d managed to track down a copy of the Voynich manuscript translation. He’d brought it with him, tucked firmly under his arm.

Jaeger was barely able to offer him a cup of tea before Jenkinson sat himself down with the Voynich manuscript and the Bioko file, placing the translation beside them. And that was it: thick glasses perched on the end of his nose, Jenkinson got to work on the Duchessa’s list of apparently random numbers – code-breaking, or so Jaeger presumed.

An hour later, the archivist raised his head from his task, his eyes burning with excitement.

‘Gotcha!’ he exclaimed. ‘At last! I’ve done two, just to make sure the first wasn’t a fluke. So… number one: Adolf Eichmann.’

‘I know the name,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘But remind me of the details.’

Jenkinson already had his head bent over the books and papers once more. ‘Eichmann – truly a nasty piece of work. One of the chief architects of the Holocaust. He escaped Nazi Germany at war’s end, only to be tracked down to Argentina in the 1960s.

‘Next one: Ludolf von Alvensleben,’ Jenkinson declared.

Jaeger shook his head: the name wasn’t familiar at all.

‘SS Gruppenführer and mass murderer par excellence. Ran the Valley of Death in northern Poland, which became a grave for thousands.’ Jenkinson flashed Jaeger a look. ‘Also disappeared to Argentina, where he lived to a ripe old age.

Jenkinson bent over his books again, flipping back and forth through the pages, until the third was decoded.

‘Aribert Heim,’ the archivist announced. ‘Him you must have heard of. He’s been at the centre of one of the longest manhunts of all time. His nickname during the war was Dr Death. He earned it in the concentration camps, by experimenting on inmates.’ Jenkinson shuddered. ‘Also thought to be hiding out in Argentina, though rumour has it he may have died of old age.’

‘There seems to be a theme developing,’ Jaeger remarked. ‘A Latin American theme.’

Jenkinson smiled. ‘Indeed.’

Before he could reveal any more of the names, the rest of the party arrived. Raff led Irina Narov and Mike Dale into the barge, the latter two looking tired from their travels but also remarkably recovered, and noticeably better fed than when Jaeger had last seen them.

He greeted each in turn, and did the necessary introductions with Jenkinson. Raff, Narov and Dale had flown into London direct from Rio, with a connecting flight from Cachimbo prior to that. They’d been on the go for approaching eighteen hours, and it promised to be a long night.

Jaeger brewed some strong coffee, then gave them the good news: the book code seemed to be working – at least for the Bioko documents.

Five figures gathered around the Voynich manuscript and its translation, as Narov produced the satchel of papers retrieved from the Ju 390’s cockpit. The atmosphere aboard the barge was electric with anticipation. Would seventy years of a dark and secret history finally be brought to life?

Narov took out the first set of papers.

Dale produced his camera. He waved it at Jaeger. ‘You good with this? In here?’

‘What’s got into you?’ Jaeger needled him. ‘It’s film first, ask later, isn’t it?’

Dale shrugged. ‘This is your home. Makes it a bit different from filming out in the wilds.’

Jaeger sensed a change in the man – an air of maturity and genuine concern, as though the trials and tribulations of the last few weeks had somehow been the making of him.

‘Go ahead,’ he told him. ‘Let’s get it documented – all of it.’

Under Jenkinson’s initial tutelage, Narov set about the Aktion Feuerland document, while Dale framed up his shots, and Raff and Jaeger stood an informal guard. The archivist seemed remarkably talented at multi-tasking: it wasn’t long before he was able to thrust a list under Jaeger’s nose – the seventh page of the Duchessa’s manifest, fully decoded. He proceeded to point out some of the most notorious individuals.

‘Gustav Wagner, better known as “the Beast”. Wagner founded the T4 programme – to kill off the disabled – then went on to run one of the foremost extermination camps. Escaped to South America, where he lived to a grand old age.’

His finger stabbed at another name on the list. ‘Klaus Barbie – “the Butcher of Lyons”. A mass murderer who tortured and killed his way across France. At the end of the war—’

Jenkinson broke off as Jaeger’s boatie neighbour, Annie, ducked through the barge’s entranceway. Jaeger did the introductions.

‘Annie’s from the nextdoor barge. She’s a . . . good friend.’

Narov spoke from where she was bent over her documents. ‘Aren’t they all? Women and Will Jaeger – they seem drawn like the moth to the candle flame. Isn’t that how you say it in English?’

‘Anyone who can make carrot cake like Annie – they’ll win my heart, for sure,’ Jaeger answered, doing his best to rescue an awkward situation.

Realising that he and his friends were busy, and sensing the tension in the air, Annie handed Jaeger the cake she’d brought and backed out quickly. ‘Don’t work too hard, fellas,’ she called with a wave.

Narov hunched closer over her documents. Jaeger eyed her, irritated by what she’d just done. What right did she have to be rude to his friends?

‘Thanks for helping the neighbourly relations,’ he remarked, sarcastically.

Narov didn’t even raise her head from her task. ‘It is simple. No one outside of these four walls should be trusted with what these documents will reveal – that’s if we can crack them. No one, no matter how good a friend.’

‘So, Klaus Barbie,’ Jenkinson volunteered.

‘Yeah, tell me about the Butcher of Lyons.’

‘At war’s end Klaus Barbie was protected by British and American intelligence. He was posted to Argentina as a CIA agent, code-named Adler.’

Jaeger raised one eyebrow. ‘Adler: eagle?’

‘Eagle,’ Jenkinson confirmed. ‘Believe it or not, the Butcher of Lyon became a life-long CIA agent code-named The Eagle.’ He moved his finger down the list. ‘And this one. Heinrich Müller, former head of the Gestapo – the most senior Nazi whose fate remains an utter mystery. Believed by most to have fled to… well, you guessed it: Argentina.

‘Below him, Walter Rauff, a top SS commander. The inventor of the mobile vehicles in which the Nazis gassed people. Fled to South America. Lived to a grand old age, and his funeral was reportedly a major celebration of all things Nazi.

‘And finally,’ Jenkinson announced, ‘the Angel of Death himself, Joseph Mengele. Carried out unspeakable experiments on thousands in Auschwitz. At war’s end he fled to – need I say it? – Argentina, where he is reported to have continued his experiments. A true monster of a human – that’s if you can even call him human.

‘Oh, and lest we forget, Bormann’s also on the list. Martin Bormann – Hitler’s right-hand man—’

‘Hitler’s banker,’ Jaeger interjected.

‘Indeed.’ Jenkinson eyed him. ‘In short, it’s a Nazi rogues’ gallery if ever there was one. Though the foremost rogue of all is missing: Uncle Adolf. They say he died in his Berlin bunker. I’ve never really believed it myself.’

Jenkinson shrugged. ‘I’ve spent most of my adult life in the archives researching the Second World War. You’d be amazed what an industry has grown up around it. But I’ve never come across anything that even remotely rivals all this.’ He waved a hand at the pile of documents on the table. ‘And I must say, I’m rather enjoying myself. Mind if I have a crack at another?’

‘Go right ahead,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘There’s too much for Ms Narov to deal with in the one night. But I’m curious, what happened to that Hans Kammler file that you found in the National Archives? The one you emailed me a couple of pages from?’

Jenkinson seemed to jump slightly, a hint of worry creeping into his eyes. ‘Gone. Vanished. Kaput. Even when I checked the online cloud storage systems – not a page remains anywhere. It’s the file that never was.’

‘Someone went to great lengths to make it disappear,’ Jaeger probed.

‘They did,’ Jenkinson confirmed uneasily.

‘One more thing,’ Jaeger added. ‘Why use something so basic as a book code? I mean, the Nazis had their state-of-the-art Enigma cipher machines, didn’t they?’

Jenkinson nodded. ‘They did. But thanks to Bletchley Park, we broke Enigma, and by the end of the war, the Nazi leadership knew that.’ He smiled. ‘A book code may be simple, but it’s also utterly unbreakable, unless you have the exact same book – or, in this case, books plural – that the code is based upon.’

With that he joined Narov, turning his fine mind to cracking another of the documents.