The Doomsday Testament

XXXII

The soft hiss of the rain filtering through the trees was the only sound apart from the scuff of boots on gravel as Jamie and Sarah made their way along the unpaved loggers’ road. Jamie quickly discovered that walking with the hood of his jacket raised reduced his peripheral vision to zero and his auditory perception by about 75 per cent. Any follower could have been wearing steel-shod boots and whistling the Dam Busters theme tune and he still wouldn’t have known until it was too late. He lowered the hood. Now the misty rain worked its way inside his shirt collar and trickled down his back where it turned the waistband of his boxer shorts into a chilly, sodden trial. Sarah followed his example and the rain quickly plastered her hair tight to her head and face, making her look like an extra from a low-budget zombie movie.

She caught his glance. ‘Don’t say a single word.’

Spruce trees grew tight to the flanks of the path, but their ordered ranks and the lack of thick undergrowth gave Jamie increasing hope that conditions might not be too difficult once they were forced to leave the road. They’d been walking for twenty minutes when the track took a sharp turn to the south.

He stopped. ‘We need to be further west.’ He pointed away from the road, into the trees.

‘Let me see the map again,’ Sarah said. He handed it over and she studied it, grimacing. She sniffed. ‘You’re right, but it’s going to be a lot harder going.’

He shrugged. ‘We don’t have any choice. We’ll stick to the track for another hundred metres; with luck there’ll be a spur that goes in the right direction. If not, we take to the trees. It might not be as bad as you think.’

It was much worse. They discovered that the cultivated, evenly spaced plantations by the trackside quickly gave way to wild woodland where fallen branches and rotting vegetation created natural traps designed to break a leg or turn an ankle. Worse, these were covered by a mass of bracken and nettles, and vicious waist-high brambles created impenetrable nests of coiled, inch-thick tentacles that might as well have been made of razor wire. Every step became a lottery, each wrong move a five-minute delay while the hooked thorns were disengaged from clothing and flesh and a new route was found. Within minutes of leaving the path Jamie had forgotten about the rain because he was sweating so much he might have been sitting in a bath.

With each hundred yards they covered his respect for Sarah Grant increased. She accepted every setback without complaint, her eyes narrowed and her face a mask of determination. A bramble had cut across her forehead and a thin line of blood tinted the rain running down her nose pink, but, if she noticed, she ignored it. Eventually, they stopped for a breather and she pushed a damp strand of hair from her eyes.

‘Boy, you sure know how to show a girl a good time, Saintclair.’

He laughed and offered her a bottle of water. ‘Some champagne, madam? You’ll find that life’s always an adventure when you’re with me.’ She accepted it, took a deep drink and handed it back.

‘What now?’

He picked up his rucksack. ‘More of the same.’

She nodded. ‘One thing has been bothering me since I’ve read the journal—’

His head came up sharply. ‘Did you hear something?’

She listened for a few seconds. ‘No. What do you think it was?’

He stared the way they’d come. ‘I don’t know. Just a noise. Back towards the road.’

They waited a few moments. Nothing. As they moved off Sarah continued her thesis. ‘From what I’ve read so far, Walter Brohm only makes vague hints that he has the Raphael, yet you seem pretty certain he did possess it. Certain enough, anyway, for us to be here. But even your grandfather thought Brohm could be making it all up.’

Jamie considered the question as he unhooked himself from another patch of brambles.

‘True, but he had his own reasons for thinking that. Brohm was trying to tempt him, bribe him even, but I like to think that Matthew Sinclair decided — at least then — that he wasn’t going to be bought. Matthew knew his art. He’d worked out that the painting was by the contemporary Leonardo feared most. Well, that was Raphael. Two popes, Julius and Leo, were among Raphael’s patrons. Leonardo was thirty years older and his powers were waning, Raphael’s were at their peak. He feared the younger man was about to eclipse his genius and, if he had lived, who knows he might have done just that.’

‘He died young?’

Jamie gave a sheepish smile. ‘He was thirty-seven. One theory is that, the er, cause was overdoing it in the bedroom with a lady friend.’

‘He died of an overdose of sex!’

‘It’s possible.’

Her laughter rang through the trees.

‘OK,’ she returned to her subject, as the ground began to fall away beneath their feet. ‘So let’s accept that you’re right and Brohm was referring to the Raphael? Who’s to say he didn’t just see it hanging on a wall somewhere. You have an unproven link between Hans Frank and Reinhard Heydrich, but as far as I can see, none at all between Heydrich and Brohm.’

‘That’s true, but I would refer you to the circumstantial evidence, m’lud.’

‘Carry on,’ Sarah said graciously.

‘We know Hans Frank had the painting, that’s a given?’ She nodded and he continued. ‘In nineteen thirty-nine Frank became governor of that part of Poland which wasn’t incorporated into Germany or Russia. It gave him power of life and death over millions of people, and he wasn’t afraid to use that power. In one single Aktion, he had thirty thousand Polish intellectuals arrested. Seven thousand were shot.’

‘A bastard, then.’

‘A bastard, but it seems not a big enough bastard. Some people, most of them in the SS, thought he was being too soft on the Poles. Within months of his appointment they were undermining his authority and challenging every decision he made. By December ’forty-one he was on the brink of being sacked. To survive, he needed an ally, a powerful one.’

‘Heydrich?’

‘It’s possible. At the time Heydrich was chief of the RSHA, the Reich Main Security office, and was probably the most feared man in Germany after Hitler and Himmler. Let’s say, for instance, Frank wanted to send Heydrich a sweetener. Well, you don’t just wrap a million quid’s worth of masterpiece in brown paper and stick it in the post. Ideally, he would have handed it over himself, but Heydrich was busy in early nineteen forty-two and so was Frank. The next best thing would be to send it by a trusted messenger.’

‘So?’

‘On the twentieth of January nineteen forty-two Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Buhler, Frank’s deputy, were in the same building in Berlin, in fact, in the same room.’

He saw he had her. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because the twentieth of January nineteen forty-two was the day fifteen men, including Heydrich, Buhler, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, gathered in a Berlin suburb for the Wannsee Conference to resolve the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. The meeting that decided the fate of six million people.’

Sarah choked. ‘I’m beginning to think this painting is cursed.’

‘You don’t have to touch it. I’ll take care of that.’

‘So Heydrich has the painting. Now tell me how it gets to Brohm.’

‘Ah well, this is where the evidence gets even more circumstantial, that is to say… flimsy.’

‘Convince me.’

Jamie forced a path through a thick clump of bushes that barred their way. ‘OK. Everything I’ve read about Heydrich makes me certain he would have been amused that Frank believed he could be bought with some daub, even if it was a Raphael. As soon as he saw it he would have wanted to find a way of rubbing Frank’s nose in it. He would also have wondered if the gift was part of some kind of plot against him. So he’d get rid of it as quickly as he could. But to who? Hitler and Goering would be the obvious candidates — they both wanted the painting when it was originally looted. To give it to Hitler would be to acknowledge its worth, so that was out. Heydrich despised Goering almost as much as he despised his boss Himmler. So why not give it to an old friend?’

‘What makes you think Heydrich and Brohm were friends?’

‘This is the flimsy part. They were contemporaries in the Nazi party, which was a relatively small organization when they joined in nineteen thirty-one. Heydrich was in the SS from the start, but Brohm wasn’t far behind him. Brohm must have needed funding and support for his research in the early days, who better to call on than Heydrich?’

‘You’re right. Wafer thin.’

‘That’s what I thought until I remembered that on January the twenty-fifth, five days after Heydrich would have received the Raphael, Walter Brohm celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday and—’

This time they both heard the snap of a branch. For a moment they stared at each other, an identical question in each of their eyes. Run or hide? But the noise had been very close, somewhere in the bushes they’d just come through. Hide. Jamie dropped to the ground and waved Sarah silently back to a clump of fern where the knee-high green fronds formed a sanctuary big enough for one person. While she wriggled away, he crawled through the undergrowth into the closest patch of brambles, ignoring the thorns that twisted around his legs as if they had a life of their own. He almost panicked when something caught his rucksack, but in the same instant the ominous rustle of bushes a few feet away made him freeze. One man? It seemed unlikely. He strained his ears and heard more stealthy movement behind him. More than one, then. But only one to worry about, for now. Footsteps in the undergrowth, slow and deliberate, each footfall measured and testing the grass beneath his boots so as not to repeat the mistake that had given away his position. Jamie heard the instructor’s voice from the escape and evasion course in his head and he willed himself to be part of the landscape; a stone, a tree, a bush. He kept his eyes down, relying on his ears, so that whoever was hunting them wouldn’t be alerted by a flash of pale skin among the foliage. He picked up the soft whistle of controlled breathing. A whisper of cloth on cloth. That close. A walking boot appeared in the grass and nettles in front of his eyes and he had to suppress the urge to cry out. Every fibre of his being screamed at him to flee. Ever so gently, the boot lifted and was gone. He waited, measuring the seconds, before risking a glance with a single eye that rewarded him with the sight of a retreating back in a green anorak, mousy hair cut short and a single earphone that he doubted was connected to an iPod. Something else, too, that chilled his blood. A red flower among the bracken where no red flower should be. Not a flower, then. Red hair. Sarah’s hair.

‘Come out where I can see you.’ A harsh voice that enjoyed giving orders. North German, from the back streets or the docks. ‘I said get out here, or I’ll fucking shoot.’

Sarah pulled herself from the bracken. She was partly concealed by the man between them, but Jamie could see that though her eyes were wary, she wasn’t frightened.

‘Put your hands on your head and take two steps forward. Good. Now kneel. I like it when the girls kneel in front of me.’ There was a pause while Sarah obeyed. ‘Good. Now, where’s your boyfriend?’ Jamie untangled himself from the thorns, wincing at each slight ‘tick’ as the hooked barbs came free, and rose silently to his feet. He heard the sharp slap of flesh meeting flesh. ‘I said where’s your fucking boyfriend. Open your mouth.’

‘Please don’t hurt me.’ Sarah’s plea was just loud enough to mask the sound of Jamie’s three strides through the soft grass.

The reaction to her words was as natural as breathing. No calculation was required. Just a realization that it had to be quick and there must be no sound. His left hand came round to clamp over the man’s mouth and nostrils, his right took the back of the head, and the two twisted in opposite directions in an unconscious imitation of Stan’s demonstration at the hospital. It took more force than he would have expected, but adrenalin added to his strength and he felt the moment the German’s neck snapped. The body jerked and twitched in his hands and there was the sound of tearing cartilage you get when you tear the leg off a Christmas turkey. He held the head until the twitching stopped before he allowed the German to drop. As he stood over the dead man all the strength drained from him. He stretched out a hand to help Sarah to her feet, but she seemed to be part of a mirage because he wasn’t able to find her.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jamie, let’s go,’ she hissed. She was beside him, tugging at his arm. ‘If you want to send him flowers do it later. We need to get out of here. Now.’ She picked up the German’s pistol from where it had fallen and handed it to him.

‘Sorry, it’s…’ His brain seemed to reassemble one small piece at a time. ‘Where?’

There was a soft crackle from beside the body, where the earpiece had dropped. Sarah darted a glance to the right, but he shook his head. ‘Not there.’

No time for argument. They dashed through the undergrowth knowing the only way to escape now was to outpace their hunters. Jamie could still feel the dead weight of the man he had killed; the warm head resting between his hands as the torso convulsed. The morality of what he’d done could be debated later, for the moment his mind barely acknowledged his surroundings. Sarah dropped back a little, her eyes scanning for danger. A shout from behind announced that someone had found the body and it was echoed from left and right. But not in front.

‘Christ.’

If her reactions hadn’t been lightning fast he would certainly have fallen. As it was he found himself teetering on the brink of a two-hundred-foot near-vertical drop to the river with Sarah hanging on to one arm and digging her heels into the turf. For a split second he thought his weight was going to carry them both over, but with a grunt of effort she hauled him away from the edge.

‘Bloody hell.’ He peered over the edge.

‘Stop!’ A faint rattle accompanied the shout, like a woodpecker at work somewhere in the faraway woods, and the tree above them began to disintegrate, chunks of white bark dropping down like snowflakes amid a curtain of pine needles. It seemed odd that there was so little sound to accompany the violence. Jamie’s mind made an unconscious calculation. Machine pistol, silenced, only accurate at short range, but now we’re really fucked.

‘Stop,’ the cry was repeated. They looked at each other.

‘Bugger that.’ Jamie made the decision for them both. He took her hand and they launched themselves over the edge.