The Doomsday Testament - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора James Douglas (XXII) #22

XXII

5 May 1945 We camped for the night on the outskirts of Ingolstadt. We were in the middle of the American sector now, but we kept our distance from any other units we met on the way. While we ate, the two other Nazis sat apart like ghosts at the feast. They despised Brohm and didn’t care that he knew it. The tall thin one is Gunther Klosse, some kind of medical genius. Klosse has the gloomy demeanour of an undertaker and is filled to bursting with suppressed fury. Strasser, the third of my precious charges, seldom speaks, even to Klosse, but cries out in his sleep in a language, Stan, our Polish paratrooper, says is Russian. Brohm pulled a bottle of brandy from somewhere — he is that kind of man, always finding a way to provide life’s little comforts — and insisted I share it. He teased me about the painting. ‘Perhaps, when it’s over, I will take you to see it, Leutnant Matt.’ ‘See what?’ I asked. ‘My masterpiece,’ he says. ‘It is beautiful, but to reach it you will face the traditional fearsome challenges. Where Goethe met his demon, avoid the witches’ trail. Below the water you will find it, but you must look beyond the veil.’

He grinned, a drunken Germanic bard, pleased with his atrocious poetry. I said I didn’t understand, but he only smiled and shook his head. I was a clever man; perhaps I would solve the riddle in time. It was not like any of the painter’s earlier works, but had the beautiful simplicity that characterized his best portraits. He tried to persuade me to guess the artist. I wouldn’t play his games, but by now I was close to knowing. Not Leonardo, but one of his contemporaries, the one he feared. It made me smile to think that he believed he could tempt me with his non-existent masterpiece. Art had once been my passion, but I had watched whole galleries burn and not felt a scratch on the flint surface of what was now my soul. When a man has seen people burn, what are a few scraps of oily canvas?

Later, Brohm got very drunk, perhaps we both did, but what he revealed that night was a stronger brew than the brandy, and I’d never felt more sober in my life. He began to speak about his work, about a force so powerful that even Hitler feared it, a force that could change the world or destroy it.

* * *

Back in his hotel room, hunched over the journal, Jamie frowned as he contemplated the two puzzles the short passage had spawned. Phrase by phrase, his unconscious mind worked its way through the words until it felt as if the blood was fizzing inside his head.

Where Goethe met his demon, avoid the witches’ trail. Below the water you will find it, but you must look beyond the veil.

Could this be it? The first real clue to to the Raphael’s location, rather than just its continued existence? But what kind of clue was it? What did it mean? Unless he could decipher it, he was no closer to the painting than he had been before he turned the first page of Matthew Sinclair’s journal. From across six decades it was as if he could hear Walter Brohm taunting him.

Reluctantly, he turned to the second mystery. A force so powerful that even Hitler feared it? This was something new. Or was it? David had said Walter Brohm had been involved in the Uranverein, the Uranium Club, and the project’s goal had been to create a force capable of changing the world or destroying it. But surely Hitler had been aware of the bomb’s potential? He had embraced it, not feared it, at least until it had become clear it wouldn’t win the war for him and he’d diverted the resources to other, more readily available, wunderwaffen. Perhaps Brohm had been closer to Hitler than anyone knew and had recognized something no one else had seen. After all, what was it Robert Oppenheimer had said about the Manhattan Project? Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. In 1945, nobody, certainly in Germany, was aware of the bomb’s true power. Hitler would have been well within his rights to fear it.

He was about to put the book away, but the next passage caught his eye because the tone was so different from those he had read so far.

6 May 1945 I dreamed of Peggy last night. She had the most beautiful hair, soft and flaxen, and the colour of spun gold. It was silhouetted against the sun, so that it made her appear like some haloed Madonna. I went to take her in my arms, but it was as if I had run into some sort of invisible barrier. I called out her name and she smiled at me.

He read the words twice, flicking back to Matthew’s doomed love affair and confirming that the description of Peggy matched the unnamed lover of the earlier pages. This was wrong. Peggy had been his grandfather’s pet name for Jamie’s mother, but… He shook his head in frustration. He didn’t have time for another mystery. He already had too many things to think about.

He dug out the paperback copy of Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus he’d bought in the hope that it would help him decipher the meaning behind ‘In Faust’s footsteps’. So far it was hard going and he’d discovered nothing that seemed to be relevant. Faustus had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for increased power and knowledge. Walter Brohm had sold his soul to the twin devils of Nazism and science. Was that the message? And if it was, where did it take them? Or could it be some sort of mea culpa from beyond the grave by Matthew Sinclair for his part in Operation Equity? Somewhere in these pages were the clues that might lead him to the Raphael and bring him closer to Walter Brohm’s great secret. The problem was that there were too many of them. Brohm had created a blizzard of riddles to camouflage the truth, whatever the truth was. Jamie desperately needed time to sit down and unpick them. He picked up the diary again and turned the page.

We are south of Augsburg now, heading west, and our little unit is increasingly nervous. For months this area has been cast as the great stage for a suicidal last stand by Nazi fanatics still loyal to Hitler’s shade, who operate under the codename Werewolf. The Final Redoubt. By now we knew the Redoubt was probably just wishful thinking, but the mountain roads are just a little too narrow and the twisting valleys too ambush-friendly for us to relax. Nobody wants to die now, when it is clear the war has only a few days at most to run. The tension affects us all and the division between Brohm and the two other Nazis grows ever deeper. He sought me out last night and nodded towards fat little Strasser. ‘To look at him,’ he says, ‘you would not believe that he holds a world record; like Jesse Owens, but a little different, eh?’ He saw that he had aroused my curiosity. ‘It’s true, Leutnant Matt. In September nineteen forty-one, just outside Kiev, our friend Strasser personally shot eleven hundred and sixty-five individuals in a single day. Extraordinary, no? But I have seen the papers. They gave him a medal, I think. And more extraordinary still that he is now accompanying a man like me to a new life thanks to our American friends. Why? you ask. I will tell you, Leutnant Matt, because you and I should have no secrets. Our Strasser discovered that killing made him nervous, so they transferred him to the Ausland-SD, where he became most adept in counter-intelligence against the Soviet Union. My good friend Strasser, the Ox, knows more about the NKVD than any other man alive, so he will not hang, as he deserves, but will sunbathe overlooking Long Island Sound as he sips his whisky sour. And Klosse? Look at him,’ he spat, ‘a monster who carried out experiments in the camps, even on children. The very sight of him makes me ashamed of the uniform I once wore. And why does he deserve your charity, Leutnant Matt? Because he knows things that would make your flesh creep. What civilized person would make war with germs that are capable of wiping out entire nations? Bubonic plague, anthrax and awful things that don’t even yet have names. Gases that strip a man’s flesh from his bones in seconds. You have read Frankenstein, of course, Leutnant Matt. Compared to Gunther Klosse, Dr Frankenstein is a kindergarten teacher.’ What bothered Brohm most, was that, as he saw it, Klosse’s work had no benefit for mankind, whereas Brohm’s, of course, did. I asked him how he knew these things. He shook his head regretfully, all part of the performance: ‘Once I was an important man, Leutnant Matt, and I made it my business to know things.’ What he was telling me was almost certainly the truth, but the reason he was telling me was to set him apart from these other men. The guilty. If Walter Brohm was guilty of anything it could only be of genius, which he then went on to reinforce. When I think of all we have suffered and all the men who have died, I can’t get Brohm’s words out of my head. He talked of things I didn’t fully understand; a ‘Nuclear Age’ that was over before it had begun, superseded by this thing he was on the very brink of creating. Something that was beyond the comprehension of most ordinary men — though not Walter Brohm. He painted an image of himself as a great Germanic hero. Another Humboldt. Before the war, he had walked in a land of giants, seeking the heart of Aryan purity and there, in the most unlikely place on earth, he had found it. His only regret was that he did not dare stay longer, because he was certain there was more to find. When the Americans gave him the resources he would replicate its qualities. It would be the wonder of the age…

More clues and more riddles. And a tantalizing possibility. He read the last paragraph again. Another Humboldt? The only Humboldt he could think of was the German voyager and naturalist. So Brohm had been an explorer. And from there, the rest was simple. Jamie’s researches had uncovered the pre-war SS expeditions sent to seek out the origins of Aryan civilization. Those expeditions had travelled to Finland, the Middle East and Siberia. But to only one land of giants.

He reached into his wallet and pulled out a card, then dialled the number into his mobile phone. It was late, but he had a feeling the man he was calling wouldn’t mind.