The Doomsday Testament

XXX

Starting early next morning, they retraced their route fifty miles due north to Kassel, a sprawling district capital on the Fulda River that owed its startling modernity to the fact that it had been wiped off the map by Allied bombers in 1943. When they arrived in the city centre, the shops were just opening and the streets lay empty apart from a few early-bird office workers and the street cleaners without whom no German dawn is complete. Sarah bought a few basics to replace the clothes and toiletries they’d been forced to leave behind in Paderborn, while Jamie watched her from a distance until he was satisfied she wasn’t being followed. Still, he had an uneasy feeling. Someone like Frederick would undoubtedly have contacts in the Bundespolizei. Their little hired Toyota was as anonymous as any car on the road, but it could only be a matter of time before someone noticed it. Sarah had suggested abandoning the Japanese compact in Fulda, and he’d considered it. But the car would have had to be replaced by something else and if the opposition were looking for it, they’d also be checking the hire firms. On balance, it was better to stay below the radar for as long as they could.

From Kassel the road took them on a long sweeping curve through Gottingen and Gleboldehausen, until about another hour into the journey they could see the Harz Mountains on the horizon.

‘They look kinda pretty,’ Sarah said, when they were about twenty miles from their destination, the spa town of Braunlage. Jamie saw she was right, from a distance and in the golden light of the afternoon sun, the mountains appeared benign and unthreatening, their sharp edges dulled by the spruce, oak and beech that cloaked their flanks. But by now he knew differently.

‘If you imagine a sliding scale of mountain ranges and the Himalayas is ten, then the Harz is probably less than one. The Brocken is the highest peak, but it’s only eleven hundred metres, and the land mass is about equivalent to England’s Lake District. But what these hills lack in scale, they more than make up for in atmosphere. Goethe didn’t set Faust here by accident. This is a land of forest and bog, witches and devils, mist and mystery; a place where anything can happen. Heinrich Heine described the mountains as “so Germanically stoical, so understanding, so tolerant”, but it’s doubtful whether the concentration camp prisoners who were held there until nineteen forty-five or the East Germans who were shot attempting to cross the Iron Curtain death zone that cut through those hills would have agreed.’

‘My, we are poetic today.’ She said it with a smile. ‘Any particular reason for that?’

He grinned at her. Last night, they had proved to their mutual satisfaction that the previous afternoon had been no fluke. He looked back with a mixture of weary delight and awed wonder at what they had created. A coupling of the soul as well as the body, a ferocious contest of will as they attempted to outdo each other in imagination and intensity… He forced himself to concentrate on the road.

‘All I was saying was that they may look pretty, but they are actually pretty bloody dangerous. The terrain is what you might call fractured. Craggy gorges and deep, steep-sided lakes. The place is honey-combed with caves and pits. It’s also probably the wettest place in Germany.’

‘You make it sound so welcoming.’

He didn’t reply. After the encounter with Frederick and his fascist friends in Wewelsburg the best he could hope for was no welcome at all. They covered the last twenty miles on winding, narrow roads through a tree-blanketed wilderness. If Walter Brohm had wanted to hide something, then this was the perfect place. Jamie had chosen Braunlage because it was the closest town to the mountain, but he had no idea what would greet them there.

‘It looks like an Alpine ski resort, only without the Alps. I kinda like it. Reminds me of Colorado in the summer.’ Sarah studied her surroundings as they entered the town, a sprawling community that flowed like a red-roofed glacier down the valley. It had a manufactured tourist prettiness that Jamie guessed would be more inviting in the winter. The websites said it was predominantly a ski resort, but also a popular summer destination for hikers.

He spotted a shop where they could purchase walking gear. An ominous mass of dark cloud piling up on the eastern horizon meant two good quality anoraks and decent hiking boots were going to be essential. They’d also be able to buy a large-scale map of the area that he’d compare with the silk drawing. Still, he had a feeling tomorrow was going to be a long, tough day. The only consolation was that he couldn’t spend it in better company.

They booked into a gabled hotel on the main square and kitted themselves out from the outdoors shop at an eye-watering price which reminded Jamie just how badly the pound was doing against the euro. Europe, and Germany in particular, seemed to have weathered the banking crisis much better than Britain. The thought prompted an image of his dwindling bank balance and he reminded himself to check for progress in the sale of his grandfather’s house. Braunlage seemed benign and unthreatening and it would be easy to forget Frederick and his sinister friends had ever existed. But as he sat at a restaurant overlooking the artificial lake in the town centre, Jamie’s eyes never stopped searching for potential threats among the multi-coloured weatherproof jackets.

It wasn’t easy. A tall man on the far side of the square seemed to be staring at them until his face lit up and he walked forward to meet a woman with two young children. Did the danger come from the four hikers who walked with the straight backs and measured stride of the military? Or was it more likely to be from the couple at the next table who seemed to take a little too much interest in what Sarah was ordering? Eventually, he forced himself to relax and concentrated on his food.

When they’d finished their meal they spread the walking map out on the table. Jamie pointed to the approximate centre. ‘Here’s the Brocken. Remind me what the journal said.’

‘Where Goethe met his demon, avoid the witches’ trail, below the water you will find it, but you must look beyond the veil.’ As Sarah recited Walter Brohm’s riddle her finger traced a red line that meandered horizontally across the map with the Brocken at its centre. ‘I thought finding the Witches’ Trail would be the most difficult part, but it’s the biggest thing on this map. A whole network of hiking trails through the Harz. Look, there must be sixty miles of it. That’s a lot of ground to cover. Too much.’

‘Maybe we don’t have to cover it. Excuse me.’ He called to a passing waiter, a young man in a white shirt and dark trousers. ‘We were thinking of doing some walking around the Brocken. If we wanted to bypass the Witches’ Trail what would be the best route to take?’

‘That would depend on how far you wanted to go and what you wanted to see, sir.’

Jamie was stumped for an answer, but Sarah cut in. ‘Somewhere scenic with lots of water. A lake or a river.’

The young man laughed. ‘Then that is simple. Here.’ He put his finger on the map at a point west of the mountain and conveniently just north of the town. A thin ribbon of bright blue amongst the green and the grey of the mountains. ‘It’s a popular walk for people who want to branch off the main trail and take in Braunlage. The Oderteich and the Oder gorge. Lake and river.’

Sarah turned to Jamie with a wry grin. ‘Did you pack your swimsuit?’

When they returned to the hotel more than one pair of eyes watched them cross the square.

At ten the next morning they were gazing across the glittering expanse of the Oderteich lake. The guidebook said the dam where they stood had been built three hundred years earlier to create a reservoir for the area’s mining industry. Now it powered a hydro-eletric scheme. The reservoir was close to one mile long and perhaps two hundred paces wide. For once, it was Jamie who chewed his lip. Sarah leaned against the wall, dejection written plain on her face.

‘OK, I’ll rephrase my question of yesterday. Did you pack your diving gear? Because it looks like you’re going to need it. We always knew this was a potential wild-goose chase, but at least there was a chance we’d find something. Now,’ she waved a despairing hand at the acres of grey water surrounded by pine trees, ‘now this. If they’ve sunk the painting in here we haven’t got a hope in hell of finding it. Not without a boat and a diving team.’

But Jamie only continued to gaze out across the rippling surface. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said distractedly.

‘You don’t think we should give up?’

‘No, I don’t think I’ll need my diving suit. Not even my swimming trunks.’

‘But you read Brohm’s words: Below the water you will find it. Well, there’s your water and if you want to find the Goddam thing you’ll have to find it yourself.’ She turned away and would have walked back towards the car, but Jamie put his hand gently on her arm.

‘You’re forgetting who we’re dealing with here. With Walter Brohm nothing is ever quite what it seems. This is a riddle within a riddle. No one in their right minds would hide a painting worth millions of pounds underwater. Gold, yes. Jewels, yes. But not something delicate, like an Old Master.

‘So we have to start with the premise that it’s not there, and ask ourselves what Walter actually was telling us. Think. He’s a scientist, a man very precise with his words. He would say Below the surface or Under the water, maybe even Below the water line, but never Below the water.’ He led her by the arm across to the opposite side of the road, where the Oder gorge cut through the trees as if it had been hacked out by a giant with a knife. ‘Unless he meant below the dam.’

‘Down there?’

‘Down there.’

‘What are we looking for?’

It was a question Jamie had been asking himself as he studied the map and tried to make it work with the shape formed by the four legs of the Black Sun symbol on the silk. They were sitting in the hired Toyota in a walkers’ car park, three miles downstream of the Oderteich, and it was only now that they’d begun to realize the true scale of the task facing them. He had never expected it to be easy, but, on paper, it had looked relatively straightforward, if strenuous and time-consuming. Find a track that would take them in to the general area pinpointed by the maps and then cover the ground until they discovered… what?

‘I don’t know. A sign, another symbol, a message painted on a rock. I don’t think we’re going to find the Raphael nailed to a tree. Walter Brohm says: ‘you must look beyond the veil’, which I suppose means whatever we’re looking for isn’t what it seems. But the diary says it exists and the map says it’s around here somewhere.’

‘That’s helpful,’ she said in a voice that reminded him of nails dragged across a school blackboard.

Somewhere. That was the problem. The forest around them would have been all but impenetrable except for the woodsmen’s tracks and walking trails carved into it. Low cloud the colour and consistency of guncotton added to the gloom, providing a thick mantle that brushed the treetops and wept a steady drizzle of misty rain that made it difficult to see more than fifty paces. Not that the visibility mattered. Even on a good day the view would have consisted of mile upon mile of grey-green spruce and the odd patch of bare granite. Somewhere behind them in the fog he could feel the great stubborn mass of the Brocken looming like a fox waiting to pounce. It wasn’t a nice feeling.

‘Well, whatever it is, we aren’t going to find it in here,’ Sarah said decisively. She zipped her black and green Gore-tex jacket to the neck and dragged the hood over her red-streaked hair. He followed suit and they got out of the car into the rain. The rucksacks were stowed in the boot and they checked the contents before setting out. They decided to start their search in the centre of the gorge, on the grounds that whoever had hidden the painting would have done so at one of the less accessible spots. ‘You’re sure you’ve got the compass? I have the feeling that once we get into this shit we’re going to need it.’

He showed her the perspex-encased dial and a pack of sandwiches wrapped in plastic. ‘We’ve enough food so we won’t starve to death until next Tuesday.’ He wiped the rain from his face. ‘I don’t think we’ll have to worry about dying of thirst.’

‘You don’t say.’

Their route took them along a forest track that led in the direction of the river. Five minutes after they set out, a white minibus drove into the car park and eight men in wet-weather gear jumped from the rear led by a man almost as broad as he was tall. Ensuring the minibus screened him from the road, Gustav took a Heckler and Koch MP5 machine pistol from the floor of the bus, rotated the selector lever to ‘safe’ and pulled the cocking handle back to empty the chamber. Guns were the tools of his trade, but he thought the compact, matt-black Heckler had a rare dangerous beauty. This model, the SD1, had been developed for use by border guards during the Cold War and was fitted with a suppressor. It weighed less than three kilos and was small enough to be easily concealed. The stubby silencer added three inches to the length of the gun, but was remarkably effective, as he’d found when he’d topped four ragheads in a row outside Fayzabad. Stupid bastards stood around like dummies while he took them out one at a time. Frederick wouldn’t have been happy to see so much firepower, but Frederick wasn’t here. Gustav didn’t intend to take any chances with Saintclair and the girl. The purple bruise over his left eye was a throbbing mass of pain. These people were owed. He slung the weapon around his neck by its leather strap and zipped his jacket over it. The others were armed with pistols, the Sig Sauer 266, standard German police weapon. Gustav ordered them to gather round as he spread a large-scale map of the Braunlage area on a nearby picnic table. He didn’t like the look of this fucking jungle, but Frederick had sounded uncharacteristically alarmed when he heard the Englishman had visited the Oderteich and insisted they hit them at the first opportunity.

‘All right, you know my feelings about this.’ He ran his finger over the line of the Oder gorge. ‘It’s a shithole in there, but we have our orders. Ideally we take them before they descend into the gorge, but if that’s not possible we split into two teams as discussed. Like a game shoot; beaters to the north with Jurgen, the gun line to the south under Werner. I will direct from above using the tactical radio and flush them out if necessary. Ideally we want them alive, but the important thing is to recover what they have with them. Anybody fucks up and they’ll have me to deal with. Are we clear?’

‘What if they start shooting? They killed Arnim and shot Hans.’ It was Jurgen, the Hamburg bully boy who liked to think he was tough, but one of these days would find out different.

‘It won’t happen,’ Gustav said dismissively. ‘They’re amateurs. Arnim was a fluke.’

‘But if it does?’

Gustav thought about that. It was true that he owed them for Arnim and when it came right down to it, Frederick said the priority was to recover the journal.

‘If they fire on you, kill them. But I want that book.’