Testament

12

The man ducked against the downdraft of the rotor as he made his way from the helipad to the main deck of the ship, clutching his briefcase against his chest and holding his glasses on with his other hand. A crewman who had been waiting guided him past the ROV derrick and salvage machinery on the aft deck, steering him clear of the port railing where spray from the bow wave lashed the deck as the ship plowed through increasingly heavy seas. They clattered up the metal stairs and along the gangway toward the bridge, where the crewman opened the door and waved him inside. He dropped his suitcase, took off his glasses, and wiped them on his shirt, almost losing his balance as the ship pitched forward and another huge wave broke over the bow. A man wearing a baseball cap with the company logo and the four gold bands of a captain on his shoulder boards came over from the binnacle to greet him. “Dr. Collingwood. Welcome to Deep Explorer. Mr. Landor is waiting for you in the chart room. This way, please.”

Collingwood picked up his briefcase and followed him toward the door at the back of the bridge, staggering as the ship lurched forward again. The captain opened the door and ushered him inside, closing it behind them. The noise of the spray against the bridge windscreen was blocked off, but they could feel the ship shuddering and groaning beneath their feet as it powered forward. Collingwood steadied himself and looked around.

As well as the captain, there were two other men present: Landor, whom he knew from their meetings in London before the Clan Macpherson project, and another he did not recognize, a wiry younger man chewing gum who looked Somali, dressed in a tracksuit and cradling an assault rifle. Collingwood stared at the gun, discomfited, and then back at Landor, who got up from his chair and limped over to shake hands. “Dr. Collingwood. The captain you already know, and this is the boss. He’s our contact in northern Somalia, where he runs a fishing trawler. Don’t worry about the Kalashnikov. It’s the tool of the trade in these parts, wouldn’t you say, Boss?”

The Boss spat his gum into a bin, then took out a handful of green leaves from his pocket and stuffed them into one cheek. “Whatever you say, man.”

Landor turned back to Collingwood. “Drink?”

Collingwood lurched sideways again. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Straight to business, then. As soon as you called us three days ago with the heads-up on the U-boat, I took a gamble and set us on this course. You’d better be right.”

Collingwood sat down heavily on a chair beside the chart table in the center of the room, bringing his briefcase up and opening it. “I’ve never had a lead as exciting as this one in all my years researching.”

Landor sat down again opposite him and leaned forward, eyeing him intently. “I need everything you’ve got, and I mean everything. We’re only forty-eight hours from Somali territorial waters and we need to be ready to strike fast and get out of there as soon as we can. This time we’re not waiting for some joke UN inspection like we did with Clan Macpherson.”

“Is that where your friend comes in?” Collingwood gestured at the Somali. “Keeping away unwanted attention?”

“You call him the Boss.”

“That’s right.” The man spat a jet of green juice into the bin. “You call me the Boss, I call you English. The only names we need.”

Collingwood looked at him uncertainly, and back at Landor. “Right. The Boss. I’ve got it.” He clutched his briefcase to stop it sliding down the table, and then delved inside it, passing over a sheaf of papers and a file. “That contains copies of all the original source material I unearthed from the Deutsches U-Boot archive, and my summary and assessment. There’s nothing more.”

Landor arranged the material into a neat pile in front of him, and then put his hands on it. “Okay. I want a quick briefing. First, the U-boat.”

The ship lurched again, and Collingwood swallowed hard, gripping the table. “U-409. She was a top-secret Type XB cargo boat designed to be used in the trade in raw materials and gold between the Nazis and Imperial Japan, laid down in November 1942 and first deployed four months later. She carried out two successful runs right under the noses of the British and Americans, despite the fact that at least one operative at the German B-Dienst intelligence facility believed that the Allies had broken Enigma and were on to the secret trade. Luckily the operative wasn’t believed, otherwise the Battle of the Atlantic might have gone catastrophically wrong for the Allies in the middle of 1943. Not only that, but with Enigma being shut down, some of the secret U-boats that were intercepted and destroyed by the Allies on the basis of Ultra intelligence might have got through with cargos that could have changed the course of the war.”

“You mean the cargos you told me about on the phone. You’re certain of that?”

“We already knew that the U-boats on this mission were used to transport uranium ore to Japan. None of it, thankfully, was ever put to any use, other than one consignment captured by the Americans that probably went to the Manhattan Project, the A-bomb program. But the risk was always there, the terrifying possibility of the Germans or the Japanese developing a nuclear weapon. And the risk with material that remains unrecovered is still there today, only the enemy is different and the value much higher, now that we know how uranium can be used to make dirty bombs as well. A consignment of uranium worth two tons of gold back then would be worth ten times that now, and a number of potential customers have those kind of resources.”

“That’s my business, not yours,” Landor said testily. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, about to risk my ship in a potential war zone. Just tell me about this U-boat.”

“According to my informant, the last time anyone heard of U-409, right at the end of the war, she was heading toward the Horn of Africa off Somalia with as much gold as she could carry, as well as a secret cargo, very possibly uranium ore. Judging by the consignment captured by the Americans, it would have been unrefined, and sealed inside lead cubes to minimize radiation. There was no record of her sinking. She vanished without trace.”

“And you’re certain about the secret U-boat pen on the island?”

“It was built just before the war under instructions from the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s so-called Department of Cultural Heritage. That in itself was odd. I can only assume that the Ahnenerbe were intending to store artifacts in it from their crazed expeditions around the world to find lost treasures, a kind of halfway house before working out a way to get them to Germany. Perhaps the captain of U-409 had been involved in transport for the Ahnenerbe at some earlier point in the war and knew its location, and then remembered it as an ideal place to stash his loot — better than surrendering to the Allies or carrying on to Japan, with the Nazi war over. I feel certain that’s where he went.”

“Your source?”

“As I told you on the phone. A verbal testimony from a former SS Ahnenerbe man who gave himself up after the war and spilled the beans to an American interrogator, in return for an assurance that he would not be executed for other crimes. Unfortunately for him, the assurance he was given could only be empty, as he had gone on to work for the SS Einsatzgruppen liquidating Jews in Ukraine; but fortunately for us, his death meant that the story stopped there until I uncovered it. Any account mentioning the uranium transport was considered so secret that no written record was ever made of it. I know about it only from speaking to a former US naval intelligence interrogator who died a decade ago. I kept the story to myself, and was only able to link it to U-409 after my visit to the Deutsches U-Boot archive last week.”

Landor held up the file. “Once again, you can assure me that nobody else knows about this?”

The ship lurched, and Collingwood gripped the table again, looking pale. He shook his head. “Listen, I’m not doing too well here. Maybe I will have that drink. Water.”

Landor opened a drawer behind him, put the file inside and locked it, then turned back to Collingwood, relaxing in his chair and smiling pleasantly. “Water won’t help. What you need is to get off this ship.”

“Jack Howard sends his greetings, by the way. Said you were old friends.”

Landor’s demeanor suddenly changed. “Jack Howard? How? You’ve been talking to him?”

“I met him at the National Archives yesterday.”

Landor glared at him. “What do you mean, you met him?”

“Quite by chance. I’m always meeting people there. He and I had ordered the same box of convoy files to look at, and had to work out between us who was going to see them first. He was looking at a file on Clan Macpherson.”

“What the hell for?” Landor exclaimed. “Clan Macpherson is a done deal. He and his sidekick Kazantzakis saw to that by doing whatever it was they did to sabotage the wreck during their dive. I never bought the story they spun about unstable munition cooking off. It’s too much of a coincidence that the wreck should blow up and slide into the abyss just after they happen to be there. I should never have agreed to that inspection. Howard has let me down once too often, and now he owes me big time.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Collingwood said. “But remember, Jack’s an archaeologist and historian, not a treasure hunter. If he was trying to get to the bottom of something in the archives, it’s not because he’s after gold.”

“I know full well what Howard is. He’s someone who has cost me far too much. Not recovering any gold from Clan Macpherson has put the whole Deep Explorer operation in jeopardy. We’re out here now on a wing and a prayer because of him.”

“All he was doing was tying up loose ends. He’s going to have to make a report to the British government and the new UN committee regarding the identification of the wreck as a war grave. That’s what he and Kazantzakis were out there with you to ascertain, and he’ll finish the job properly. In fact, he asked me to come on board, to contribute anything I’d found on the convoy attack to help flesh out the report. We were graduate students together at Cambridge, and he knows the quality of my work. I agreed to go down to the IMU campus to collaborate with one of their researchers.”

“You agreed what?”

Collingwood looked nonplussed. “I thought it would look good. To have my name on the report would make it look as if we’d had a productive collaboration, as if Deep Explorer had done everything it could to facilitate IMU. It would give you a clean bill of health and make it less likely that you’d be interfered with next time.”

“I don’t need a clean bill of health. Not at the risk of Howard having insider knowledge of where I might be going next. I know exactly what he’s doing. He’s playing you.” Landor slammed one hand on the table, staring angrily at the chart, and then got up and limped over to Collingwood, glaring at him. “Did you tell him anything about our new operation? That you were coming out to visit us?”

Collingwood looked uncertain, and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so. What does that mean?”

“He didn’t ask.”

“He wouldn’t, would he? Did you tell him you’d just been to the U-boat archive?”

Collingwood brightened. “That’s when he asked me to contribute to the report. We were both lamenting the fact that the National Archives contain little on the U-boats, and he asked me whether I’d been to the Deutsches archive. I told him I was there several months ago to research U-515 and the West Africa convoy, in the lead-up to Deep Explorer finding Clan Macpherson.”

“And did you also tell him that you were there again a few days ago, after he and Kazantzakis had done their dive?”

Collingwood looked nonplussed again. “Why not? I’d just flown in from Dusseldorf that morning, gone straight from Heathrow to Kew. Jack saw my Deutsches Archiv pass and said he was wondering whether to visit himself. I gave him the contact details of the guy there who looked after me. They’re incredibly helpful, and I knew they’d be flattered to hear from Jack Howard.”

Landor raised his arms in the air in vexation, and then let them fall. “So. Jack now knows that I sent you to the U-boat archive after we knew that Clan Macpherson was a write-off. That’d be just enough for him to wonder where we were going next, to keep an eye on us via Landsat. He has an American who does that for him, the geek with long hair who looks such an idiot in those IMU films. So by now Jack will know we’ve come up this coast, and he’ll be putting two and two together. He’ll have guessed that you found something new as a result of your visit to the U-boat archive that has led us here.”

The captain turned to him. “We’ve probably got nothing to worry about. We’re in international waters, and there’s nothing he can do to us with the resources he has to hand. The nearest IMU vessel, Seaquest, is at least four days away in the Palk Strait off Sri Lanka. And even if Howard has friends in Somalia, I don’t think that should concern us. The few patrol boats that comprise the Somali navy hardly ever leave port and they don’t seem to have the guts to confront anyone. And with things heating up with Iran, the anti-piracy Combined Task Force 150 is going to be looking elsewhere. We should have a free hand.”

Collingwood looked at Landor. “All I’ve done is what you wanted. I’ve found you a prize far more valuable than Clan Macpherson. You’ll be able to recoup your losses easily and sail out of here rich men.”

Landor stared at him coldly. “You’re right. You’ve told me everything I need to know.” He turned to the captain. “Dr. Collingwood has a flight to catch. Can you slow the ship for a helo launch?”

The captain nodded and went through to the bridge. Landor looked at the Boss, jerking his head toward the door, and the two men followed the captain, shutting the door behind them. After a few moments, Landor opened the door again and gestured for Collingwood to follow. “All right. The helo’s revved up, ready to fly you off. Our pirate friend is going with you because he needs to get back to his village and get ready for the next phase of our operation.”

“He’s a pirate. You didn’t tell me that.”

“The Kalashnikov is as good as a skull and crossbones. But we’re paying him more than he’d ever get from kidnapping and ransoming any of us. Just don’t provoke him.”

Collingwood shut his briefcase, then hesitated. “About my payment. Fifty percent on contract, fifty on coming up with the goods. That was our agreement. I think this counts as the goods.”

Landor paused for a moment, and then took Collingwood by the shoulder, steering him out onto the bridge. “I’m going to do one better than that. I’m going to cut you in on a percentage of the gold, ten percent, the same proportion as the captain and the operations director, Macinnes. Does that seem fair? It’ll make you a millionaire. Our banker will be in touch once you’re back in England. Have a good flight.”

Twenty minutes later, Collingwood sat beside the Boss in the rear passenger seat of the Lynx as it clattered away at low level from Deep Explorer, the downdraft from the rotor kicking up spray from the sea. The helicopter gained altitude, tilted forward and roared off, soon leaving the ship far behind. There had not been enough intercom helmets, so the two passengers were just wearing ear defenders. As Collingwood looked out, clutching his briefcase, he saw that they were still heading east, into the Indian Ocean. He turned to the Boss, tapping on his ear defender. The Boss raised it, and Collingwood shouted into his ear, “We’re going in the wrong direction. The African coast is west, and we’re going east.”

The Boss, who had been listening to music, rocking with the beat, took out his earbud headphones. “Eh?” he said. “No, this is the right direction.” He pointed down to the waves. “Very dangerous, English. Very dangerous.”

Collingwood lifted his defenders, struggling to hear against the roar of the rotor. “What do you mean?”

“Very dangerous, lots of sharks. No fishermen come out here, no navy, no Americans, no Obama, no English, no nobody.”

“I get it,” Collingwood shouted. “A very dangerous place. So a good time for the pilot to turn around.”

“Hey, English.” The Boss prodded him with the muzzle of his Kalashnikov. “You know how to swim?”

“Not very well, actually. Time I learned.”

“Yes, English, you learn. You learn now.” The Boss reached over, unclipped Collingwood’s harness and prodded him hard. “Now get up.”

Collingwood looked at him in alarm. “What do you mean? What are you doing?”

The Boss curled his finger round the trigger and aimed at Collingwood’s chest. “I mean, get up.”

Collingwood did as he was told, dropping his briefcase and grasping for handholds as he swayed in the confined space. His briefcase slid toward the door and he lunged for it, nearly following it out. He turned back to the Boss, enraged. “What did you do that for? That had everything in it, all of my notes, now lost in the sea.”

“Yes, the sea,” the Boss said, spitting a jet of green at him and wagging a finger. “Very dangerous. Too many sharks.”

Collingwood banged hard on the glass partition between the passenger compartment and the cockpit, but the pilot remained unperturbed, staring forward. He turned back to the Boss, holding on to the rail above the door, the downdraft ruffling his clothes. “Okay, let’s end this game. We’ve come far enough.”

“Yes, English. Far enough.” The pirate raised the rifle and fired a single round into Collingwood’s chest, the blood spraying out behind and whipping away in the wind. Collingwood seemed frozen in shock, unable to breathe, and then his legs collapsed and he fell away, tumbling round and round into darkness.

13

Jack followed Costas and Jeremy toward the main entrance of the nursing home, a red-brick Georgian mansion set in beautiful grounds in the rolling Herefordshire countryside, the Malvern Hills visible on the skyline to the east. It had taken them a full two hours to drive here from the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford, but it had been a chance to go over the Periplus of Hanno again and to scrutinize Jeremy’s translation of the golden plaque from the wreck. Jack’s excitement had been mounting during the drive, knowing that they were now on the trail of a story more remarkable than he could ever have imagined when he and Costas had glimpsed those symbols underwater less than a week before. The new evidence they had discovered for the voyages of Hanno and Himilco would rewrite the history of early exploration, and he could hardly hope for more. And yet they now knew from the pictogram and the two words beneath it that an even more extraordinary story lay behind those voyages, one that opened up the possibility of discovering what had really happened to one of the greatest lost treasures of antiquity.

For Jack, the biggest mystery now lay not in the ancient past, but in the darkest days of the Second World War. He had crossed his fingers as they had turned into the lane, hoping against hope that what they heard here today would provide the key to unlocking that mystery, an explanation for what he and Costas had found on the wreck of the Clan Macpherson and its link with the voyage of a Phoenician mariner and his astonishing cargo more than two and a half thousand years ago. He took a deep breath, remembering his phone conversation with the woman they were about to meet, and stepped through the entrance.

The receptionist took their names and pointed up the grand staircase to the first landing. “She’s expecting you. She’s been looking you up on the internet. You should expect a grilling from her. Jenny will take you up.”

They followed the nurse up the stairs and along the first-floor corridor, past doors on either side surrounded by food trolleys and medical gurneys. “Lunchtime,” the girl explained. “Louise has already had hers. She’s quite excited by this. Her family come over a lot, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but when you get to her age, there aren’t many old friends left.”

“How is she?” Jack asked. “I mean, her health?”

“Up and down. She’s in her wheelchair today, with an IV. It’s important not to tire her. But her mind’s sharp as a tack. And you should be prepared,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “She really likes men.”

She led them through the open door of what had once been a grand bedroom, its wide windows looking out toward the Malverns. On one side was a bed, on the other a desk with a computer; the space in between was crammed with bookcases covered with artifacts and framed photographs. An old woman sat in a wheelchair looking out of the window, wearing a gaily colored skirt and a Norwegian sweater, an IV drip extending into her left wrist. The nurse stood aside and gestured toward the three men. “Louise, your guests are here. I’ll pop back in five minutes to see that everything’s all right.”

She left, and Louise turned. She had silver hair done in a 1940s fashion, and was still a beauty. She pressed a button on her armrest and the wheelchair advanced to the low coffee table in the center of the room. “You know, I’m nearly a hundred,” she said, flashing a smile. “All my old friends from boarding school have gone, and there can’t be that many left from my time at Cambridge either. There are still a few of us from the war, of course, old crocks like me by now. And yet sometimes,” she said, eyeing the three men, “I don’t feel a day over twenty-three.”

She spoke with the crisp accent of her era and background. Jack smiled, holding out his hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you. I’m Jack Howard, and this is Dr. Costas Kazantzakis and Dr. Jeremy Haverstock, both Americans. They’re colleagues of mine.”

“Ah, Americans,” she said, shaking their hands in turn. “We had Americans at Bletchley, you know. They were so much more civilized than our chaps, at least to begin with, less desperate to get under our skirts. Not that I minded that, but so many of our chaps had been in the war before being assigned to Bletchley and were haunted by it, still expecting to be knocked off any minute. Those first Americans had a bit more time for romance. Are any of you gentlemen married?”

She looked inquiringly at Costas, who coughed. “Um, not yet, ma’am.”

“I’m Louise, not ma’am. And why not? You’d be a good catch for the right sort. I’ve looked you all up on the IMU website, you know. Some girl out there’s bound to go for that Hawaiian look. It happened for the German chap, despite his shorts, with his delightful Egyptian wife, and even for the one who looks as if he’s out of Star Trek… what’s his name?”

“That would be Lanowski, Dr. Jacob Lanowski,” Costas said.

“I think he’s lovely. Well?”

Costas looked rueful. “Never seems to last beyond the beach. Where I have my holidays, that is. Romance and the engineering lab don’t mix too well, I find. Too much grease and oil.”

“Never stopped me at Bletchley. I was covered in it from operating the wretched bombe. You should try harder.”

Costas coughed again, glancing at Jack. “Yes, ma’am. I mean Louise.”

“And you, young man?” She turned to Jeremy.

“Not yet either,” he said. “Well, I’ve got a girlfriend. Actually, it’s Jack’s daughter Rebecca. We might be engaged.”

“Engaged,” Jack exclaimed. “First I’ve heard of it.”

Costas turned to him. “Might be engaged?”

Jeremy pushed up his glasses, looking uncomfortable. “Well, it’s a little tricky. It’s kind of hard pinning her down.”

“That’s because nobody pins my daughter down,” Jack said. “She’s a Howard.”

“Nobody pins you down either, it seems,” said Louise, looking at Jack. “I’ve read two of your books on your underwater adventures. They’re over there, on the table. Costas is in them a lot, and so is Jeremy, and Maurice and Aysha and that lovely Star Trek man. But in one book there are quite a few pictures with one woman, and in the other book another woman. One looks central Asian, the other Spanish. Katya and Maria.”

Jack scratched his chin. “That’s a bit tricky to explain, too.”

“No, it’s not. You’re dithering. You need to make your mind up. A girl likes to be chosen.”

Jack nodded. “Yes, she does. Damn right.”

“Okay.” Her eyes twinkled with amusement, and she gestured at the three chairs that had been placed on the other side of the table. “Now that we’ve got that sorted out, let’s get down to business. How can I help you?”

Twenty minutes later, Jack sat back, having told Louise about their dive off Sierra Leone. On the coffee table were two large photographs of the wreck, one showing the ship’s name painted below the bow, the other the gaping hole caused by the torpedo explosion. He had not yet shown her the intact British torpedo that had been resting inside the hull, or the gold. He was still feeling for what she might know, and did not want to press her too far.

She had been mesmerized by the images. “Fascinating. You know, I’m glad my friend Fan won’t be seeing these. She felt personally responsible for the men lost in that convoy.”

Jack looked up from the pictures. This was what he had wanted to hear. “Was she also at Bletchley?”

“We called it the special operations hut. Commander Ian Bermonsey.”

“You worked together?” Jack said cautiously.

Louise shook her head. “Not exactly. We were in digs together, though. Fan always thought I did something frightfully mysterious, but really all I did was what I told her, supervising the Wrens operating one of the bombes. It was stinking, dirty, noisy work. Computers then were not like they are now. Not the obvious thing for a cosseted girl like me, but we all got on with what we were told to do. There was a war on.”

“So Fan was more the mathematician of the two of you?”

“Not at all. We both had first-class degrees. To some extent it was luck of the draw where they put you in Bletchley. They wanted clever people everywhere, even oiling the bombe. But Fan was exceptional, a really clever statistician. And she’d had an actual job before the war, teaching math at a school. I’d gone back into London society after Cambridge and was in danger of becoming a flibbertigibbet. Really, Bletchley was the best thing that could have happened to me. You could say I drew the short straw getting the bombe, but mucking in with the Wrens was probably just what I needed.”

“Do you remember the thirtieth of April 1943, when Clan Macpherson went down?”

“I remember it well. It was cold, unseasonably so. Summer wasn’t yet in sight. Fan came back to our digs that evening terribly upset about something, but of course she couldn’t talk about it. I knew that her hut was where the decrypts were put into action, as it were, sent down the line to the Admiralty. Maybe they’d tried but failed to reroute a convoy. There were two battles that night, I remember, one in the mid-Atlantic and one off West Africa. Later I saw on her bedside table that she’d copied down the names of the ships lost in that West African convoy, and had underlined Clan Macpherson. I’d never seen Fan cry before. It was odd. She was usually so tough. I suppose we all have a breaking point. It never happened again.”

Jeremy opened the tablet computer he had brought in with him. “Have you got wireless in this place?”

“Wouldn’t have allowed them to move me here if they hadn’t.”

“Okay. I’ve got the stats here for the two convoys that night. ONS-5, the mid-Atlantic one, Liverpool to Halifax, forty-two ships and sixteen escorts, with a total of forty-three U-boats in two patrol lines arraigned against them. The ensuing week-long battle saw thirteen merchant ships sunk against seven U-boats destroyed and six damaged. The African convoy was TS-37, Takoradi to Sierra Leone, a fairly short hop on the West African route from Cape Town to the UK. Seven merchant ships sunk by U-515, one of the biggest tallies of the war for a solo U-boat attack. No U-boat losses.”

Jack thought for a moment. “The evening of the thirtieth of April, when Fan came back distressed, was before these losses had actually been incurred. Maybe she was upset because she knew a decision had been made not to act on the Ultra decrypts that day. I can see why that decision might have been made for ONS-5. The S designation means that it was a slow convoy, and altering course would have been a long-winded business. Even if Bletchley did have decrypts showing the position of U-boats, with over forty boats out there they might have been redirecting the convoy straight into another line of U-boats.”

“Think about the overall context, too,” Jeremy said. “The escort corvettes by that point had become very proficient at killing U-boats. Dönitz’s fleet was already losing more boats than could be replaced. As the Bletchley intelligence people might have anticipated, the ONS-5 battle was hard-fought, with bad losses, but turned out to be one of the decisive battles of the war.”

“You’re saying they wanted that battle to happen,” Costas interjected. “That the merchant ship losses in ONS-5 were a price worth paying to bring the navy and the U-boats together. If she knew about that, no wonder the girl was upset.”

“It’s harder to explain a decision not to save the other convoy, the one with Clan Macpherson, TS-37,” Jack said. “A single U-boat, a distant route off the main battle area that had rarely been hit. Given that, you might have thought it was safe enough for a decrypt to be acted upon without exciting German suspicion.”

“Maybe they didn’t have an Ultra signal showing the position of U-515 clearly enough,” Jeremy said. “Maybe her captain was on silent patrol, lurking. Sometimes U-boat captains did that when they didn’t want to be reined in by Dönitz. I’ve been reading a lot about it over the past few days.”

Jack pursed his lips. “I’d agree with you, except that the girl appears to have been specifically upset about that West African convoy and Clan Macpherson, suggesting that they could have rerouted that convoy too.”

While they were talking, Louise had been struggling to reach a framed group photo on her windowsill. Jeremy quickly got up to help her, placing it on the table so they could all see. “There,” she said. “That’s the only picture I’ve got from Bletchley. Actually, it’s not at Bletchley, as hardly any photos were taken there, but it shows a group of Bletchley cryptographers just after the war back at Cambridge, members of a chess club. Those were some of our chaps.”

“Seems a fairly unlikely-looking bunch for a girl like you,” Jeremy said, pushing up his glasses and sweeping back his hair. “I mean, romantically speaking.”

Costas peered at the picture and then inspected him. “You should talk. The only thing missing is a bow tie. Otherwise you’d fit in perfectly.”

“You’d be surprised,” Louise said, pointing at the photo. “That one there could really do the business, once you showed him the ropes. He became my husband.”

“Ah,” Jeremy said.

“You never took his name?” Jack asked.

“Too independent for that. Also, my postwar job. You couldn’t show you were married for risk of being compromised. I can’t really talk about it.”

“Understood. We don’t want you to say more than you’re comfortable with.”

“Jeremy’s right, though,” she went on. “Before the Americans arrived, it was a question of going with what you’d got. The cryptographers could be pretty awkward, but then the alternative was those poor men in uniform who’d been wounded or traumatized, burned-out submariners, that kind of thing. Bermonsey had been one of those.”

“Did you know him personally?” Jack asked.

“I invited him for a drink in the pub near our billets soon after he arrived, in early autumn of ’42, I think. I’d known his sister before the war in London, and she asked me to look out for him. He was very nervy, wouldn’t talk much. By that stage we’d been at war for three years, and there were a lot of men like that. It sounds harsh, but that’s why the arrival of the Americans was such a breath of fresh air for us girls.”

“Did Fan ever talk about him?”

“He had the hots for her, you know. Never did anything about it at Bletchley, far too professional, but I could tell. Of course, they got married after the war.”

“Ah,” Jack said. “Did you keep up contact?”

“I was a witness at their wedding,” she replied. “It was at Southampton registry office the day before they were due to sail, in late 1947. He’d resigned from the navy and they were going to start a new life in Canada. Happened quite a lot with people from Bletchley. Not the marriage, I mean, but getting away. We were all supposed to walk off that last day when Bletchley shut down, to go back to our civilian lives and never talk about it. Oddly, it wasn’t such a problem for the cryptographers like my own future husband, as to them Bletchley was like a kind of special extended research fellowship, and afterward they returned to their universities and carried on doing much the same kind of thing. For the rest of us it was different. It would have been nice for me to tell my children growing up that I’d done something for the war effort.”

“They must know by now,” Costas said.

She nodded. “I told them when the whole Alan Turing story became public. But other than the fact that I worked on the bombe, I haven’t revealed any details. We were sworn to secrecy.”

“Where did Fan and Bermonsey go?” Jack asked.

“To British Columbia. I went to visit her there about twenty years ago, after Ian had died. They’d both been schoolteachers. We had a lovely week together, went whale-watching. I hadn’t realized then that she’d been ill, too. She died soon after I returned.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Costas said.

Jack leaned forward. “Did she ever talk to you about the work that she and Ian did at Bletchley? It might help with the Clan Macpherson mystery.”

She gave him a sudden steely look. “As I said, we were sworn to secrecy.”

“Of course.”

She paused, staring at the photos on the table for a moment, her hands shaking slightly. “But the answer is yes. I didn’t tell you about it when we spoke on the phone, as I wanted to size you up in person. But this is the reason why I wanted you to come here.” She looked at Costas. “There’s a little key in a matchbox in the top drawer of that desk beside you. Find it and use it to open the lower drawer.”

Costas did as he was told, taking the key and pulling the drawer open, revealing a few neatly stacked notebooks and a small pile of envelopes.

“I don’t keep many papers, as you can see,” Louise said. “A legacy from Bletchley days. But there’s a brown envelope with my name and address and a Canadian stamp on it. Fan sent it to me just after I returned from my visit to her.”

“Got it,” Costas said. “Do you want me to open it?”

“Pass it over to me, please.”

She took the envelope and pulled out a three-page typescript letter. She paused, and eyed Jack. “What do you know about the Ahnenerbe?”

“Himmler’s Department of Cultural Heritage, based at Wewelsburg Castle in Bavaria. We’ve bumped into them a few times — their legacy, I mean. They were on the hunt for a couple of artifacts that interested us.”

“The menorah,” Costas said.

“Sacred golden candelabra of the Jews,” Jeremy added, looking at Louise. “Stolen by the Romans when they looted the Temple in Jerusalem, and then vanished.”

“I know what the menorah is,” she said. “Anyway, everyone knows it was stolen from its secret hiding place in Constantinople by Harald Hardrada of Norway. He had it with him when he failed to conquer England in 1066, then took it across the Atlantic to the Viking colonies of Vinland and down to the Yucatán in Mexico, where he had a showdown with the Maya. What happened to it then is anyone’s guess. Probably melted down by the Maya and became part of the gold stolen by the Spanish five hundred years later, then lost in one of those shipwrecks off the Spanish Main.” She gave Jack a mischievous look. “Am I right, Dr. Howard?”

Jack pointed at one of his books on the table. “I’ll even sign it for you if you like.”

Costas smiled. “It’s a great story. One of my favorites. And I can vouch for it, as I was there, trapped inside an iceberg looking for a Viking longship.”

“I’ll have your signature too, then.”

Jack smiled, and then looked serious again. “Why do you mention the Ahnenerbe?”

Louise coughed, suddenly looking frail, and reached back toward the table behind her. Jack saw the small water bottle and got up to pass it to her, unscrewing the top first. She took a sip and then put it in the cup-holder on the arm of her wheelchair, her hand shaking badly. “You know,” she said, “we’ll never have the full story of what really went on at Bletchley. As more of us go, the secrets will die with us. But when Fan wrote that letter, she had decided to tell me everything she knew about that particular operation. She’s left the trail open for someone to follow. Perhaps for you to follow.”

“Will you read it to us?”

“One of you read it. My eyesight’s not so good any more. Fan always typed her letters, so it’s clear enough.” She handed the letter to Costas, who was nearest to her, and turned back to Jack, her eyes suddenly gleaming. “You asked about the Ahnenerbe. Prepare to be amazed.”

14

15

Louise took the letter back from Costas, and then showed them a handwritten note from the same envelope. “Fan included this as well. It’s personal. It’s where she tells me she only has a short time to live.” She tucked the note and the letter back inside the envelope, and then turned to Jack, eyeing him keenly. “Well? Was she right? Is there a trail to follow?”

Jack leaned forward on his elbows, his mind racing. “It’s an incredible story. What I can do now is show you three more photos from the wreck of Clan Macpherson. I was holding back on these until we knew where we were going with this.” He picked up the folder from the table, took out another A4-sized print and handed it to her. It showed a mass of twisted metal covered with rusticules and marine accretion, and in the center a long cylindrical object nestled in the wreckage. It was the extraordinary view that had confronted Jack when he had followed Costas into the sunken hull off Sierra Leone a week earlier.

“It’s a torpedo,” Louise said, her hand shaking slightly. “I can see the propeller.”

“Unexploded, inside the hull,” Jack said. “Now take a look at the markings.”

“I can see numbers and words, in English. It’s a British torpedo.”

“A Mark VIIIC, to be precise,” Costas said. “A submarine rather than an aerial torpedo, much bigger. We’d already concluded that the sub that fired this must have launched a pair of torpedoes almost simultaneously, and that this one entered the breach in the hold created by the explosion of the first. We were baffled at how a U-boat could have got hold of British torpedoes. Fan’s letter solves that mystery for us.”

“And the second photo?”

Jack pulled it out, and paused. “The next two are a bit blurred. By the time I got to this part of the wreck we had only minutes left in the hull. We had something of a close shave.”

She gestured at his books on the table. “So what’s new?”

“All I needed to do was to unscrew the torpedo fuse,” Costas said. “Then everything would have been fine.”

“No it would not,” Jack said firmly. “Rebecca would not have had a father. Your beach friends would have missed their volleyball partner.” He turned to Louise. “The warhead had nearly come off the torpedo when it drove into the hull, which is how you can see those markings on the base. In the process of fiddling with the fuse, my dive buddy here caused the torpedo to dislodge, fall through the wreckage and come to rest with the warhead facing downward, held in place by a few tendrils of rust. One accidental brush, one waft with a fin, and boom.”

“I thought you two always worked as a team?” she said, her eyes glinting with amusement.

Costas nodded enthusiastically. “I go ahead where there are explosives to defuse, and Jack goes ahead where there’s archaeology to be found. That’s teamwork for you.”

Jack gave him a wry look. “In this case, teamwork got us out just in time and behind a ridge of rock before the torpedo broke free and detonated, causing the entire wreck to slip down the drop-off into the abyss.”

She pointed at the first picture. “So this is all gone?”

“Well, it’s still there, in a manner of speaking,” Costas replied. “Only it’s more than a mile deep, strewn down the slope of the massive canyon that lay next to the wreck.”

Jack passed her the second photo. “And that includes what you can see here.”

She stared at the image from Jack’s helmet camera, her hands shaking. “Crikey,” she said quietly. “So they really were on board. Gold bars.”

“That’s the reason we were diving on the wreck in the first place, as I explained to you on the phone. A researcher for the salvage company we were monitoring had got hold of a bill of lading, evidently made by an over-scrupulous clerk in Durban, who must have filed it away before the security people supervising the lading could see and destroy it. It showed that Clan Macpherson was in Durban to pick up a consignment of South African gold.”

“There are a lot of bars there.”

“About five hundred million pounds in today’s money.”

“Crikey. The salvage company can’t have been too pleased about your little escapade, then.”

“Not too pleased, though we told them nothing about seeing the gold. Apart from a select few at IMU and those of us here in this room now, nobody else has seen that photo or knows what we found. As far as the salvage company is concerned, we drew a blank and the explosion was just an unhappy accident with unstable Second World War ordnance. Being a treasure salvor is generally like that, one disappointment after another.”

Louise’s eyes glinted. “You can rely on me. I’m a Bletchley girl. I’m pretty good at keeping secrets.”

Jack looked at her intently. “I’m thinking of those Nazi agents in Durban that Fan mentioned. In a major port like Durban, their day-to-day work would presumably have been spying on ships’ movements and cargo lading. The arrival of such a large consignment of gold from the mines would have been difficult for the authorities to conceal.”

“What are you suggesting?” Jeremy said.

“I’m suggesting that there might be more to this than meets the eye. More than Fan was able to tell in her letter. Bletchley was all about folds of secrecy, right? Every time something is revealed about the workings of that place, it seems to point to another operation. Open the wrapping and you reveal another layer.”

Costas eyed him. “You mean the story of Clan Macpherson is not just about the Ahnenerbe and ancient antiquities. Ask me, and we’re talking about a heist. A Nazi gold heist.”

“A heist, yes, but one that fits into the wider picture, the operation that Fan and Bermonsey had sworn never to reveal. An operation that would have been a far greater concern to Churchill than lost Jewish antiquities. The reason why I think there was a British submarine on station off Sierra Leone in the first place.”

“Go on,” Costas said.

“You mean the Yanagi program,” Louise said quietly.

Jack turned to her. “You know about it?”

“I was the one who spotted the decrypt,” she said.

“I’m astonished. I shouldn’t be, of course, knowing what went on at Bletchley. But you were adamant that you’d only worked on the bombe.”

“In the bombe hut. Once the thing was up and running, clanging and belching away, there could be hours when there was very little to do, and eventually someone in Hut 8 decided that the more mathematical of us in the bombe rooms should be put to use cribbing, trying to find patterns in the code that might fit with words we knew should be there. I spotted the Japanese word yanagi on one of the decrypts, and passed it on. My father was a British trade attaché in Japan while I was growing up, so I know some Japanese. I knew this was the word for willow, though I had no idea until after the war that Yanagi was the code name for the Japanese exchange program with Nazi Germany.”

“Did Fan know about your role in this?”

“I never told her. I was sworn to absolute secrecy. There was a fear that the Soviets had got hold of Japanese encryption machines in Manchuria, and after the war, anything to do with Japanese code breaking was a closed shop. I was still in the game then, you know.”

“I didn’t know. I thought it ended with Bletchley.”

“For Fan, yes. For me, not quite.”

“The Yanagi program,” Costas said. “What kind of stuff was exchanged?”

Jeremy tapped on his computer and scanned the page. “From Germany, mainly technology: weapons and blueprints, optical glass, radar equipment, jet engines and so on. An exchange of scientists and engineers. Oh, and some Indian nationalist leader, traveling from Berlin to Tokyo. From the Japanese, mainly raw materials: rubber, tungsten, tin, zinc, quinine, opium, coffee. Oh, and here we go. Transferred from a Japanese submarine to a U-boat on the twenty-sixth of April 1943. That’s only four days before Clan Macpherson was sunk. Two tons of gold.”

“Holy cow,” Costas said. “Where?”

“Off Mozambique. Transferred from Japanese I-29 to German U-180, and destined for the U-boat base at Lorient on the western French coast and then Germany.”

Jack sat forward, speaking slowly. “Two tons of gold. And we believe there were also two tons of gold on Clan Macpherson. Look at the dates. U-180 would have passed the Cape of Good Hope and been up the west coast of Africa exactly in time to rendezvous with U-515 after she’d hit the convoy.”

“What are you suggesting?” Costas said.

“Got it,” Jeremy interjected, staring at the screen. “U-180 was a Type 9D1 transport U-boat. That means she was a cargo carrier. U-515 may have been the boat tasked to take the gold off Clan Macpherson, but she was an attack sub, not a cargo carrier, and it would have made sense for her to transfer the gold as soon as possible to a specialized U-boat in the vicinity designed to take that kind of load.”

Jack nodded. “And at that point, all going well, U-180 parts company with U-515 and makes her way undetected to Lorient, with a whopping four tons of gold on board. Two tons come from Japan, and the other two tons could be considered Japanese booty, the heist having been carried out on Clan Macpherson by Japanese-trained agents.”

“Hold it there,” Jeremy said, swiping the mousepad and staring intently at the screen. “I think I might just have seen the bigger picture. The one that Fan couldn’t reveal to us.”

“Go on,” Jack said.

Jeremy cleared his throat. “I mentioned that most of the German export seemed to be manufactured products, high technology. Well, it wasn’t always that way round. When the long-range cargo submarine U-234 put out for Japan in December 1944, she was indeed carrying examples of the latest military technology, including a crated Me 262 jet fighter. But she was also carrying twelve hundred pounds of uranium oxide.”

“Good God,” Jack said, sitting back. Of course. “That explains all the secrecy at Bletchley. That’s what the gold was for.”

“Uranium for what purpose?” Jeremy said.

Jack pursed his lips. “In April 1943, the Manhattan Project was still a good way from coming to fruition, and there would have been a lot of concern about the possibility of similar research being carried out by physicists in Germany and Japan. By then Germany was beginning to receive the full brunt of the RAF and USAAF bomber offensive. The Americans in the Pacific had not yet taken islands close enough to put Japan within easy range of the US bombers then available. Japan would have been a safer bet for research and development, and the Germans may even have entered into some kind of scientific collaboration. They may never have been close to developing a fusion bomb, but uranium oxide could have been used to make a radiological weapon, a dirty bomb. If a few of those had been shipped back to Europe and put on top of V-2 rockets, Hitler could have devastated the population of London. That terrible possibility would really have stoked the fire under Churchill.”

“And it explains why a line of Allied submarines were lying in wait off the coast of West Africa,” Costas said. “They were hoping to catch those Japanese and German cargo subs.”

Jack turned to Louise. “Some of those American officers you had your eye on at Bletchley might actually have been there to keep close to the action on this too. Roosevelt would have been as horrified by the possibility as Churchill.”

“Fascinating,” she murmured. “We didn’t even know about the Manhattan Project, of course, though I do remember overhearing some of our Cambridge chaps in the pub talking about physicist friends who had disappeared off to America. It was only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we realized the reason.”

Jeremy turned to Jack. “Back to Clan Macpherson. So what we’re talking about here is a really audacious heist. The Nazis loved Hollywood gangster movies, didn’t they? A high-seas robbery worthy of Al Capone. Japanese-trained agents take over the ship, transfer the gold to the U-boat, and ship it to Germany in payment for vital raw materials, maybe for a consignment of uranium.”

Jack nodded. “And meanwhile British submarines, alerted to Yanagi by encoded Enigma decrypts, were strung out along the coast of Africa waiting to pounce on long-distance U-boats heading to or from Japan.”

“So the sub that hit Clan Macpherson was diverted from that task, but actually by sinking the gold it was all part of the same game.”

“The diversion ostensibly being because of the Ahnenerbe treasure on the ship, but actually to sink the gold as well,” Jack said. “Quite astonishing. If we’re right about this, then Fan really was only pulling away one veil on a much bigger story.”

Louise picked up the third photo from the wreck of Clan Macpherson that Jack had taken out to show her. “Goodness me. Is that it? Nestled in among the gold bars?”

She placed the photo on the table, and Jack leaned forward. “It’s an incredible find. Jeremy is certain that the lettering is Phoenician, and relates to the voyage of the Carthaginian explorer Hanno around Africa in the early sixth century BC. We think the Phoenicians set up markers to record their voyages at various waypoints, just as the Portuguese did two millennia later. It’s not exactly a planting of the flag, but it shows those who might follow, colonists or traders, that they were on the right track. A big excitement from Jeremy’s reading of the text is that it shows Hanno about to head north again, suggesting that this was set up at the Cape of Good Hope. The surviving medieval rendition of Hanno’s Periplus stops somewhere on the west coast not far south of Senegal, and this is the first evidence that he went further and probably circumnavigated Africa, as many like me have suspected.”

“Assuming that the plaque is authentic,” Louise said.

Jeremy turned the laptop around and showed her his rendition of what could be seen of the text. “We went through that yesterday. I’m certain that these letters could not have been forged or duplicated. They’re identical in style to letters we’ve been finding on amphoras from a Phoenician wreck off Cornwall. I did a reverse analysis, taking letters from the wreck inscriptions and re-creating the text on the plaque. It’s virtually identical.”

She clapped her hands. “So you used the Cornwall text as a crib. Just as we used to do at Bletchley.”

“My doctoral supervisor, Jack’s friend Dr. Maria de Montijo, made me learn all of the Bletchley code-breaking material when I arrived in Oxford to study ancient paleography. She said it would train my mind and would be bound to come in useful one day.”

“So how does this relate to the Ark of the Covenant?”

Jeremy increased the magnification and pointed. “Take a look at that symbol at the end. It’s not Phoenician but a hieroglyph, and indeed is probably Egyptian in derivation. To be more exact, it’s a pictogram.”

She stared at the little image of the two men carrying the box, and then sat up, smiling broadly. “Well, that really is satisfying. Everything does interconnect.”

“Say again?” Jeremy said.

“Well, I’ve seen that image before.”

Jack stared at her. “You’ve seen that pictogram before?”

“Not the original myself, but someone else’s drawing of it.”

“Go on.”

The nurse came in, and checked Louise’s IV. “Ten minutes, no more,” she said. “Your physio is coming at two.”

Louise waved her arm irritably. “No time for that. What’s the point, at my age? It’s keeping my mind active that matters, and I haven’t had this much mental exercise in ages.”

“We’re almost done,” Jack said. “It’s been a marvelous visit.”

“Well, I’m not done,” Louise said. “Fan had her say in her letter, and now it’s my turn.”

The nurse turned to Jack, mouthing the words to him. He nodded, and she left. He turned back to Louise. “Do go on.”

“When I dug up Fan’s letter after you called, I thought about what she said at the end. About following the trail. I can’t exactly go traipsing about like Indiana Jones, but I can do a bit of research of my own.” She pointed to the desktop computer on the other side of the room. “You see, I’ve upgraded since the bombe. My grandchildren asked me how on earth we managed without the internet. Well, at Bletchley we wouldn’t have trusted it an inch. It’s a seedbed of misinformation and disinformation. The stuff we fed the Germans and the way we did it makes today’s hackers look like amateurs. But mum’s the word about that.”

They watched as she wheeled herself to the keyboard and began typing. A few seconds later, a scanned document appeared on the screen. “Fortunately, what I wanted was available as an original document online. This is part of the Nuremberg Trials records. I wanted to check out Fan’s story, to see if I could take it further.”

“You didn’t trust Fan’s account?” Jeremy said.

“I trust her implicitly. But what anyone says is only as good as their sources. You’re a paleographer, aren’t you? Well, you deal with it too, all those scribal errors, deliberate changes and additions that are then copied down the line and become received wisdom, just as you get everywhere on the internet. Always go back to the original sources. Always verify, always double-check. The cardinal rules of intelligence gathering.”

“Indeed,” Jeremy said.

“This is the final part of the interrogation report of May 17 1947 on one Ernst Schnafel, a former Obersturmbannführer in the SS. That’s not the army SS — the Waffen-SS — but the ones who ran the concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen murder squads on the Eastern Front. A nasty piece of goods from a nasty bunch. Before that he had worked for the Ahnenerbe as a kind of bully boy who accompanied the archaeologists on their expeditions and roughed up any natives who stood in their way. I know about this because Ian Bermonsey had been at Nuremberg as part of the naval interrogation team shortly before he resigned and went to Canada with Fan. He spoke about it when we met up in Southampton for their marriage, and mentioned this unsavory character and his Ahnenerbe connection. Ian was something of an amateur archaeologist, having read classics at university before joining the navy in the early thirties.

“The transcript shows that Schnafel did indeed briefly mention his time in the Ahnenerbe, specifically an expedition involving agents in South Africa. At that point he became agitated because the chief interrogator showed no signs of accepting this information as a bargaining chip, and he clammed up. Apparently he’d already been interrogated by an American officer at the time of his capture in 1945, but I couldn’t find a record of that anywhere. After the end of the interrogation at Nuremberg he was left with Bermonsey for half an hour to clarify some details about Kriegsmarine movements at the end of the war in the Baltic, where he had been captured. That night Schnafel found a way of killing himself in his cell. A pity, really. I mean a pity that he cheated the hangman, but also that he didn’t say more.”

“Is that how Fan knew about the code word Ark?”

“Ian must have got that out of him in that last half hour, after the official stenographer had left. Having mentioned agents in South Africa, that was clearly what he was about to reveal to the chief interrogator when he became agitated.”

“Nothing more?”

“Not from Schnafel. But then I had a brainwave. I remembered hearing about someone who’d worked at Wewelsburg Castle, Himmler’s headquarters for the Ahnenerbe. Not one of the SS, but a civilian girl who’d been a typist. Almost all of what she typed up was deliberately destroyed by the SS as the Allies closed in on the castle, but she told what she remembered to the intelligence officer of the US unit that finally took Wewelsburg in April 1945. None of it was of tactical value, and most of it was accounts of Ahnenerbe expeditions that the interrogator found too far-fetched to believe, real Indiana Jones stuff. So the officer didn’t do a transcript of the interview and only made a brief report. It was one of my friends in the old West German intelligence service who came across it when she was remitted to archive the surviving Wewelsburg material on the Ahnenerbe, and I told her what I knew of Bermonsey’s interrogation of Schnafel.”

“You had friends in West German intelligence?” Jeremy said.

“I told you that my work didn’t end with Bletchley. It was another war, another veil of secrecy. It helped that I’d studied Russian at university alongside math.” Her monitor began flashing red and emitting a low alarm. “Oh blast,” she said irritably. “This thing’s telling me I need some meds. I do apologize.”

The nurse entered the room, walked over, checked Louise’s pulse and eyes, and hooked another tube into the IV on her wrist, taping it back up. Then she turned to Jack. “It’s time to go. She needs a rest.”

“Not likely,” Louise said. “I haven’t had this much fun since Bletchley. Anyway, I’m not she, I’m Louise.”

“Yes, Louise. My apologies. Five minutes then, no more.”

Jack nodded at the nurse, and she left. He leaned forward. “So where did you see that pictograph?”

“During her interrogation at Wewelsburg, the girl jotted down several images, and that symbol was one of them. She said that in late 1942, just after she arrived at Wewelsburg, she was assigned as typist to a Dr. Pieter Ritter, an archaeologist working for the Ahnenerbe. I looked him up. He seems to have been one of the more sane ones of the group, a genuine scholar, and also seems to have paid the price for it, probably for speaking out against some of the nonsense, as he disappeared in early 1944 and was never seen again. Anyway, all the US interrogator noted down was that Ritter had been in charge of a program called Ark, and that it concerned the Nazi hunt for the lost Ark of the Covenant.”

“Anything else?” Jack said.

“The girl was well educated, a student of history at Heidelberg University before the war, so what she remembered can be taken seriously. She told the interrogator that the Ark had been in Ethiopia. No great surprise there, as the present-day Ethiopians believe it is hidden away in a church at Axum, as doubtless you know. But she also said that it had been discovered in the mid-nineteenth century by King Theodore of Abyssinia, in a cave in his mountain fastness at Magdala. She said there were those among the British expedition against Theodore in 1868 who knew the whereabouts of the Ark and were intent on discovering it themselves. One of them was the journalist Henry Stanley.”

Jack stared at her. “But that expedition was to rescue British hostages.”

“All I know is what the American interrogator decided to write down, what he found plausible, before closing the file. The war was still on, and his job as his battalion’s intelligence officer was to collect any tactical information about German positions and movements ahead, not what he would understandably have viewed as fairy-tale Ahnenerbe nonsense.”

“So we don’t know whether they went there and hunted for it,” Costas said.

Jack took a deep breath. “What we have to go on is that plaque. The Ahnenerbe archaeologists scoured southern Africa for artifacts in the years before the war. Some South Africans of Boer origin were not exactly sympathetic to the British, and there were many poor local people who might have been persuaded to part with artifacts that no longer had cultural meaning for them. Let’s imagine that the plaque falls into the hands of the Ahnenerbe that way, perhaps aided by a thug like Schnafel. The war has started, and the problem is how to get it undetected back to Germany. The opportunity finally presents itself with the shipment of that gold consignment in 1943, and the plan to get it onto a U-boat. The Ahnenerbe archaeologists might have been able to make some headway with translating the Phoenician, and they may well have recognized the pictogram for what it was. Before that, aided by information we haven’t yet got, something perhaps from Stanley, they may have gone into Abyssinia while it was under the control of their Italian allies, and made it up to Magdala. What happened then is anyone’s guess.”

The nurse returned and stood with her arms resolutely folded. Jack gathered the photos and stood up, Costas and Jeremy doing the same. “Thank you so much, Louise. Whatever happens next, you’ve played a very big part in this story.”

“Game on?” she said, pointing at the books. “You see, I really have read them. How do my grandchildren put it? I can talk the talk.”

Jack smiled broadly. “You can talk the talk. And yes, game on.”

“Do you have to go yet? You haven’t even had any tea. Let me get you some.”

Jack saw the yearning in her face, the frustration. “We’ll keep you in the loop. I’ll email you with any updates.”

She reached down into the bag hanging on the side of her wheelchair and held up a phone. “Texting is better. You can send pictures, too. And video clips.”

“It’s a promise. And then we’ll come and see you again when it’s all over.”

“I so wish I were coming with you.”

Jack leaned down and kissed her on both cheeks, and she smiled up at him. “Now I like that.” Costas did the same, and then Jeremy. “My lucky day,” she said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve been kissed by as many men on one day since the war. That reminds me. There was a chap I used to meet behind the bombe hut—not my future husband, I fear. One day I wore lipstick and he forgot to clean it off. There was hell to pay from his commanding officer. Compromising hut security cavorting with a girl from another hut, or some such nonsense. Never did see him again, but there were plenty of others in the queue. Cheerio!”

Ten minutes later, Jack accelerated down the narrow paved lane that led from the house toward the main road, over cattle grids and through fields dotted with sheep and cows. “I’ve got my work cut out now,” he said. “Do you remember me discussing with Rebecca the 1868 Abyssinia material in the Howard archive? It contains a manuscript by a Captain Edward Wood, a fellow officer of my Royal Engineers ancestor, but there’s also some correspondence from Henry Stanley the explorer, among others. I glanced at it for the first time properly before we left Cornwall yesterday and it looks like fascinating stuff. I really want to get my teeth into it this evening and reconstruct the full story, to move from 1943 to 1868, to immerse myself in it. I’m quite excited by that, as I love those time shifts where there’s an unexpected thread running between them, but most importantly I think there’s a good chance of finding material in there that will help us make major headway with our quest.”

“What you’re saying is you’ve got that feeling,” Costas said.

“I’ve got that feeling.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

“You’ll be busy too,” Jack said.

“Not much call for submersibles engineers up in the mountains of Ethiopia, if that’s where you’re thinking of going.”

“I meant while I’m in the library, you’re going to be in charge of the Phoenician wreck,” Jack said.

“What do you mean, in charge?”

“I mean in charge. Archaeologist.”

“You must be joking. I can barely spell the word.”

“Maybe, but after all these years you can talk the talk, just as Louise said. Anyway, Jeremy will help.”

“Me?” Jeremy said, looking up from his tablet. “Bit nippy in the sea off England, I find. If you want any help in the Indian Ocean, though, I might be persuaded.”

“I need you on site in case any more inscriptions come up. And in case Costas needs help spelling that word.”

Jeremy’s phone vibrated. “Will Rebecca be there? Anyway, I thought she was taking over the site.”

“You should know. It seems you’re engaged. Anyway, I’m going to need Rebecca’s help with the Abyssinia material. Maybe that’s her calling you now.”

“Nope. Text from Maurice,” Jeremy said, munching an apple and trying to read the screen as the vehicle bounced over a cattle grid. “Seems a bit miffed that you’re not answering your phone. That’s all.”

Jack glanced at his phone. There were no new texts or phone messages, just missed calls. His pulse quickened. That meant Maurice would only speak to him personally, and that usually meant something big. He remembered Rebecca saying that he was saving up something he had found at Carthage. He pulled the vehicle up on the grass verge before reaching the main road and quickly returned the call. A familiar voice answered, cursed in German as the phone seemed to go flying and then issued instructions loudly in French, the sound of a muezzin’s call to prayer competing with the roar of machinery in the background. Jack clicked on the speaker phone. “Maurice, is that you? Costas and Jeremy are here too. Tell us what you’ve got.”