The Doomsday Testament

XXVIII

She closed the book and laid it back on the bedcover.

‘So this isn’t about the Raphael at all?’

‘Not just about the Raphael, no,’ he admitted. ‘I suppose it’s always been about my grandfather.’

‘But Frederick and his Nazis aren’t interested in the painting or your grandfather. They’re interested in this other thing that Walter Brohm discovered.’ She seemed very calm, which struck him as unlikely and possibly ominous. He picked up the journal and flicked through the pages to avoid meeting her eyes.

‘We don’t know that for certain. All Frederick did was confirm he knew about the journal.’

‘I thought this was supposed to be a team effort, but you’ve been holding out on me.’

‘I…’

Her face was turning pink below the light tan. ‘All this time we’ve been working together and you’ve got this cute little guidebook while dumb old Sarah has been groping around in the dark. Christ, I’ve only got your word for it that there is a painting. This could just be some kind of elaborate dodge to get me into the sack. But then it couldn’t be, could it? Because you haven’t been trying very hard. How many times does a girl have to wave a Goddam flag before a stiff-necked Englishman finally notices?’

‘But you didn’t—’

‘Shut up.’ She was crying now and the tears turned her mascara into dark blobs around her eyes. ‘Where I come from a girl likes to be asked. But you didn’t have the balls. Just stood there like some Goddam ruptured goldfish with your mouth opening and closing. Well, you’ve had your chance, Mr Saintclair. Sarah Grant isn’t going to play second fiddle to no colouring book.’

He stared at her, not sure how to react. In another time and another place those words would have torn him apart, but the way she said them, a certain inflection buried deep in the rage, made them more consoling than angry. She was letting him know he had let her down, but she wasn’t going to walk away from this. Not yet.

‘I needed to be certain. The same way I needed to be certain about the book. I didn’t know you. I didn’t know where this was going to end up. Let’s face it, I’m not some kind of super-sleuth. I’ve been completely useless; a danger to you and everybody else we’ve come into contact with. And I’m not sure where to go next. The book is all we have now, but without getting a closer look at the Black Sun maybe it’s not enough.’

She sniffed and shook her head. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, buddy. You’re not the only one who can pull a rabbit out of a hat.’ There was a rustle as she retrieved something from the rucksack. ‘I made a mistake. Two sheets instead of one. If I leaned heavily enough we should be able to retrace the lines…’

Between one breath and the next she was straight back to business. They laid the tracing paper flat on the wooden floor, pushing the chest of drawers aside to make room. Sarah’s pencil had left a barely visible impression when she’d drawn on the top sheet Frederick had confiscated. She began highlighting the faint lines. It wasn’t easy, sometimes a mark that looked significant was only a crease where she had folded the sheet into her rucksack. It took twenty minutes before they had a semblance of the original.

‘It’s a pity the paper wasn’t big enough to cover it all.’ She brushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘But I think I got the centre pretty much mapped, apart from the section that’s missing.’

As they worked over the paper, they moved closer together until their heads touched above the centre of the drawing.

She pulled back, smiling nervously. ‘I think that’s us about done.’

Reluctantly, Jamie drew away. They studied the diagram she had created, and he felt the excitement growing in him like a bottle of champagne about to pop.

‘You said mapped. Can you see it?’ It hadn’t been visible on the marble of the castle floor, but the tracing had brought out faint lines on the symbol’s twelve spokes, spaced by unidentifiable blobs. ‘The guide said the castle was to be the centre of the world. Well, this is a map of the SS world. Twelve spokes of the Black Sun. Twelve Obergruppenführers to do Himmler’s dirty work. Twelve departments. I bet if you had enough information you could identify each one and its headquarters.’

‘That means…’

‘If the Wewelsburg Sun is a map, so is ours.’

Sarah frowned and bent low over the paper.

‘I think…’

‘What?’

‘Look closer. Those blobs are symbols of some sort.’

He got down beside her. His hip nudged hers, but she didn’t seem to notice.

‘You’re right. These are runes, like the SS lightning flashes, but much more complex. See, there’s a kind of upturned Z in a square, and a pair of what look like arrowheads in a circle. There could be twenty different variations here and we’re only looking at one small part of the Black Sun.’

‘And they seem to be linked by the lines.’

‘Maybe, it’s difficult to tell. But if they are…’

‘And this is a map…’

‘The placing of each rune would correspond to a location and the rune itself would tell whoever knew the code what is being stored or kept there. This was the place of secrets. No one but the twelve SS generals were meant to see this, and only they knew the meaning.’

‘And now Frederick must know. He said they were the inheritors.’

Jamie shook his head. ‘Not necessarily.’

Her eyes lit up. ‘Because something’s missing.’

‘The golden disc at the centre. What if the disc was the key? It disappeared at the end of the war, but did the SS take it when they abandoned Wewelsburg? Or did the Americans loot it with everything else?’

‘It could have been melted down, or it could still be out there somewhere.’

Jamie studied the detail of the Black Sun again. It was like a star map and if it continued over the entire marble circle it was huge and incredibly complex. Looked at in different ways it could have many different meanings.

‘This is why Frederick couldn’t allow us to have the tracing. He couldn’t afford to let us go with the Black Sun’s secret. And what if there was more? What if the gold disc wasn’t fixed, but rotated? It’s possible that the orientation of the disc opened up another set of secrets to those who could read the runes. Perhaps the Black Sun isn’t a single map, but layers of maps.’

He sat back and found he was breathing hard. ‘This could unlock the whole underworld of the SS. Who knows what mysteries are hidden there? If we could track down the gold centrepiece…’

‘If we could decipher the runes,’ Sarah agreed. ‘But we can’t. And this is just a part. We would need it all.’

‘You’re right. We don’t have the time to do this. It will have to wait. We already have enough mysteries to solve, but maybe, some day?’

‘Some day.’

The excitement was still on them as Jamie fetched the silk map with the original Black Sun and spread it beside the tracing. Compared with the drama of the last few minutes, the drab, poorly drawn image seemed to smother their enthusiasm.

‘It’s impossible,’ Sarah said. ‘This is just a drawing. Perhaps if we could find the original?’

‘Well, we don’t have it. There has to be another way.’ He struggled with the possibilities for a few moments. ‘Can you get the road map we brought, please?’

They studied the two suns and the map, seeking out any similarities.

‘Hey! You’re a genius, Saintclair.’ Sarah broke the silence. ‘Pick a town. Any old town. See the way the roads radiate from the centre the way rays shine from the sun.’

‘So we’re looking for a town with nine roads?’

She looked at the silk Sun again. 1357. 1357?

Jamie watched her elation grow as the permutations went through her mind. ‘Not necessarily. Remember we’re dealing with the same people who drew that map on the Wewelsburg sun. Nothing is what it seems.’

She pointed at the spokes on the drawing. ‘One. Three. Five. Seven. Not nine roads, four, and in this very distinctive configuration.’

He saw it, but he was still sceptical. ‘So we study every city, town and village in Germany, until we find the right one?’

Sarah’s eyes met his, and he recognized the challenge there. ‘I did my bit. Your turn now. Let me see that book again.’

‘OK.’ But after half an hour of staring his vision began to blur.

‘Your granddaddy had quite a war.’

He nodded. ‘I grew up without a father, so it came as a shock to find that the only father figure in my life wasn’t the man I thought he was. I need to know, but I’m still not certain exactly what it is I need to know, even now. Until I read about Walter Brohm’s great discovery I’d only been kidding myself I was trying to find the Raphael. If that sounds like I was leading you on, well, as I said, I’m sorry.’

She leaned forward and he thought she was going to kiss him. Instead she stared into his eyes as if she was looking for something there. Eventually, she must have found it. ‘At least now we know why someone would go to the trouble of pushing you under a train. The big question is do we believe it?’

‘That Brohm discovered something during the war that has stayed hidden for sixty years? On the face of it, that seems unlikely,’ he admitted. ‘From what’s recorded in Matthew’s diary, we know Walter Brohm was an egotistical dissembler who exaggerated his capabilities, sucked up to his superiors and would have shopped his own granny.’

‘Shopped?’

‘Betrayed. But stranger things have happened. If Brohm did make it to the States it’s possible he passed on his formula, but that the Yanks — sorry, Americans — for their own reasons either suppressed it or discovered that it didn’t work in the first place.’

‘Why would they suppress it?’

‘For any number of motives, most of them economic. They’d spent hundreds of millions developing nuclear technology and along comes this new wonder-power that makes it redundant about sixty years before they’ve recouped their investment. Maybe it’s sitting in a wooden crate in some big warehouse, like in that Indiana Jones film.’

‘This isn’t Indiana Jones, Jamie, this is real life, but I take your point. What do you think it is?’

And there it was. The sixty-four million dollar question. The problem being that he didn’t have an answer. Not yet. ‘I don’t know and I don’t think we can even make an educated guess. If you believe Brohm, it was a one-off discovery that paved the way for a great scientific breakthrough; something of enormous power that even Hitler feared. Since Hitler was willing to do anything to win the war, we can assume that whatever it was it must have had a fearsome potential to make him walk away. Greater even than the nuclear capability he’d just given up on.

‘That’s why it’s so important to find out where this map takes us and what happened at the end of my grandfather’s journal. If Brohm didn’t reach America, then the great secret is still hidden in Germany.’

The question was where.

Sarah read the diary with a frightening intensity, as if she was trying to force the answer from its pages with the power of her mind. ‘Was this why we came to Wewelsburg?’ She pointed to a paragraph and he looked over her shoulder.

‘No, it was a wild shot. I looked up Himmler and the occult on the computer, I found the photograph with the Black Sun and it seemed the most likely place to start. Why?’

‘Because Walter Brohm pointed you towards it. And I think he gave you the first clue to the Raphael.’

‘Where?’ He made a grab for the book.

She drew it away from his hands. ‘You had your turn, Saintclair. What is Wewelsburg?’

‘The centre of the SS world?’

‘Exactly.’ She read from the page. ‘My journey begins at Heinrich’s centre of the earth.’

‘Christ, how could I miss that?’

‘There’s more: You must look upon the faded map for the sign of the Ox.’

Simultaneously, they looked towards the tracing paper still lying in the middle of the floor. Jamie reached it first and Sarah quickly knelt beside him.

‘The faded map is the Black Sun.’

‘Yup, has to be.’ She nibbled the inside of her lip. ‘But what is the sign of the Ox?’

‘Get your laptop.’

She stared at the screen. ‘The runes on the Black Sun all seem to be from some kind of runic alphabet called the Elder Futhark. There are other Futharks, but this one is what’s called proto-Germanic. The Elder Futhark has twenty-four runes broken up into three groups of eight.’ She looked up at him, her brow creased in concentration. ‘Jeez, this is complicated. Each rune has dozens of entirely different meanings, depending on how it’s used. It would take years to decipher the stuff on the Black Sun even if you knew what you were looking for.’

‘But we’re not interested in the Black Sun, are we?’ he pointed out. ‘We’re only interested in one symbol. Which one is the Ox?’

She shot him a poisonous look and bent over the screen again. It took only moments before she cried out triumphantly. ‘Here! It’s kinda like an n or a sort of inverted U. Uruz, sign of the aurochs, which this says is a kind of giant cow or oxen.’

‘Let me see.’

She showed him the screen and they both turned to the traced drawing.

‘You’ve done it.’ Jamie hugged her to him and the feel of her body sidetracked him for a second. ‘There it is.’ The Ox rune lay a short way from the centre of the drawing on one of the legs of the sun symbol. ‘Now all we have to do is translate it to the silk map.’

‘How do we do that?’ She frowned.

‘Magda said the spear of destiny was aligned north to south. That means the point of the castle is north.’ Suddenly he saw what she meant. ‘The spear must align with one of the legs of the wheel, but which one?’

‘There’s no way to tell.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a circle. It doesn’t have a top or a bottom, a left or a right. If we could find one point of reference…’

‘Bugger,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re so bloody close, I can touch it.’

Sarah shrugged. ‘Nobody said this was going to be easy.’ With a last glance at the tracing she returned to the journal. She’d been reading for fifteen minutes while Jamie continued to stare in frustration at the drawing when she suddenly stiffened.

‘Idiot.’

Jamie turned to her. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not your fault.’

‘I mean you. Why didn’t you show me this damned book earlier? Walter Brohm may have been a great scientist, but he was a lousy poet. Listen to this: Where Goethe met his demon, avoid the witches’ trail. Below the water you will find it, but you must look beyond the veil.’

‘You’re right,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s rotten.’

‘You are an idiot. Where Goethe met his demon. Don’t you know who Goethe is?’

‘Some kind of German writer, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, he was.’ Her voice was dangerously patient as she handed him the journal. ‘He also wrote a version of the Faust legend. Remember Faust? In Faust’s footsteps?’

Jamie winced. ‘You’re right, I’m an idiot. But what does the rest of it mean? Witches and water and beyond a veil. It’s just gibberish.’

‘One step at a time, lover boy. First we need to find where Goethe met his demon.’ She began a search on the laptop, while Jamie retrieved the Tragicall History from his rucksack.

‘According to Marlowe, Faustus met the devil’s representative in a place called Wittenberg, which…’ he exchanged the book for the road atlas they’d used to cross-check the escape map ‘… is here, about a hundred miles to the north-west. We could be there in about three hours.’

‘Uhuh, but we’d probably be going in the wrong direction. Remember, this isn’t about Faustus, it’s about Goethe. Goethe based his Faust on Marlowe’s play. His demon is the same Mephistopholes who visited Faustus in the original and gave him twenty-four years of access to absolute power in exchange for his soul. But if I remember rightly the two stories are very different. Marlowe’s Faustus began by wanting to do good, but Mephistopholes ensured he wasted his opportunity. Goethe’s is a much deeper and more complex tale. They only have one thing in common. Nothing good can come of doing deals with the devil.’

‘I’ll remember that. OK, it’s interesting, but where does it take us?’

‘Precisely nowhere,’ she admitted. ‘I can’t find anything about Goethe meeting up with Mephistopholes. What we need is a really good biography. I doubt if the hotel will have one.’

‘No, but there’ll be a library in town… I think one of us should stay here and keep checking online, while the other finds the book.’

‘I’m the one who graduated summa cum laude. I’ll take the library,’ she said grandly. ‘You can stay here with the laptop, but no peeping at my Facebook page.’

He opened his mouth to say something, but she put a finger to his lips. ‘I know. I’ll take care.’

It was three hours before she reappeared. ‘Remind me never, ever to volunteer again. When I got there, this greasy librarian looked down his nose at a pesky foreigner speaking lousy German, but after I asked him for books about Goethe he couldn’t get enough of me. I’d get started on one, then he’d come along with another. Have you seen the size of German biographies? I could have built a cabin. He started talking and boy that guy could talk. Goethe and politics, Goethe and philosophy, Goethe and religion. When he got to Goethe and sex, I was outa there.’

Jamie waited patiently, familiar enough with her now to know she was toying with him. ‘But?’

She grinned. ‘But I got it. Walter Brohm was a little cavalier with the facts. Goethe never actually met Mephistopholes, but he decided to write Faust after a scary encounter in the mist on a big ol’ hill somewhere in the Harz Mountains.’

‘The Brocken?’

‘Now how did you know that?’

‘Because I found a version of the Faust play on the internet. The Harz Mountains were where Mephistopholes took Faust to see the devil. Listen to this: The witches hie to the Brocken top, yellow the stubble and green the crop.’

‘Avoid the witches’ trail, huh.’

‘I think we should pack.’

She looked at him a certain way and he felt something melt inside.

‘I have another idea.’