The Doomsday Testament

XXXIX

The pony-tailed man stared from the enormous picture window of his suite in the corporation’s Manhattan headquarters and considered his next move. Normally he barely noticed the dramatic New York skyline, but today it inspired and moved him. The fact that he was the head of the Vril Society did not make him any less of an American. This country had lost its way, thanks to failed politicians who did not understand the new reality. In the decades since the Second World War, the United States had sought to extend its global influence by military and economic means, but in almost every instance it had failed. Korea had been the last just war, and the West had been fought to a stalemate, ground down by the sheer mass of its enemies. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were largely pointless conflicts, as he saw it, with little profit to be had either politically or diplomatically. The 9/11 attacks had shown how a great power could be rendered militarily impotent. In the wake of the Twin Towers, America had lashed out like a chained bear at her tormentors; the bear had the power to crush its attackers, but the chains of misguided liberalism denied her the chance to use that power to its full extent.

And now the world was moving towards a new phase, but they were still too blind to see it. Energy was the key. It had been the key since the first turn of a turbine during the Industrial Revolution way back in the eighteenth century. The Russians knew that, and Europe would soon be on its knees begging for a whiff of the natural gas reserves the Kremlin controlled. But the Russians would only hold the cards in the short term. He had a far broader vision. A true world leader who combined the best of German and American blood would create peace and prosperity. No government on earth would be able to ignore him when he could send them back to the Dark Ages with the flick of a switch.

But he couldn’t delude himself. He didn’t just need the Sun Stone to make his vision a reality. He needed it to survive. His analysts predicted that the global banking crisis was much worse than anyone, even the banks themselves, realized. The group of companies he had formed was hopelessly exposed. If one of them went under the effect would be like the bottom brick being removed from a wooden tower. The entire entity would collapse, bringing all the other nearby towers down with it. The result would be catastrophic.

Frederick said his men would soon have Saintclair and the girl, and with them the journal. But Frederick could not be allowed to lay his hands on the Sun Stone. Frederick was a very dangerous man: the true soul of the Vril, even if he did not yet know it. A fanatic who would take the stone and use it in some pointless mumbo-jumbo ritual at Wewelsburg.

The true power of the Sun Stone lay in its capacity to change the future, not alter the past.

In time, Frederick would have to be taken care of, but Frederick was not the only obstacle in his path. Somewhere out there other forces were at work. Sinister unseen forces who exhibited the same ruthlessness he was capable of himself. The Chinese certainly, though how much they knew of the Sun Stone’s true power he wasn’t sure. And who had killed their two agents? It was even possible some shadowy organization within his own government had become involved. If that were the case he might be forced to reconsider his long-term strategy. He had always intended to make a gift to his country of the military by-products generated by Brohm’s breakthrough. Now he could be forced to play that particular card a little earlier than he’d intended. Soldiers were such simple souls, give them a sniff of a new wonder weapon that would make a bigger bang than anything yet created and they would sit up and beg. But for the moment all that was of secondary importance.

He turned back to the desk, where the grinning silver skull from the casket returned his stare. Secret papers of any kind are a currency, even if they deal with events long past. Surprisingly often they produce the small seedlings from which large profits grow. One of the businesses that formed his many-tentacled corporation was that of producing newspapers. True, as an industry it was in danger of being steamrollered by the emerging technologies and was not the high-profit vehicle it had once been. Still, he enjoyed the prestige that ownership brought with it and the leverage his reporters gave him over small-minded individuals in government and the professions. From the start he had been amused by how artfully dishonest journalism could be; utterly unscrupulous, like espionage, but more cynical and with a little less pointless sacrifice. Through his publications he had created a network of informants among low-paid government archivists across Europe and the United States, retained to cherry-pick their files for papers that might be of interest. These men and women believed they were working for his newspapers and were grateful to accept a relative pittance for the fruits of their researches. Certain categories of papers, including those of curiosity value or which provided the possibility of exploitation, automatically made their way to his desk.

The documents from the records clerk in Cologne were only forwarded to him because of his well-known interest in technology, but he could still remember the dry feeling in his throat as he had read them for the first time. They dated from 1943 and included requisition orders for certain materials, tools and equipment that seemed to point to only one thing — and a name.

That was when he had launched the resources of the Vril Society on this hunt to discover Walter Brohm’s whereabouts and the location of his research materials. The first hint of progress had come with an investigation into Brohm’s background and the revelation that he had been a member of the 1937 Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet. Most of the official papers had been destroyed, but enough evidence remained to reconstruct the route of the expedition and satellite images of the Changthang crater confirmed enough of what the Brohm papers hinted at to set his heart racing. It had taken six years to track down the casket and another three before he had the confidence to give the Menshikov operation the green light. In the meantime, his Vril contacts in the State department and the Bundestag were making efforts to discover Walter Brohm’s fate. The German authorities had traced a Red Cross document confirming Brohm’s incarceration in a prisoner-of-war camp near Leipzig, where he had been placed in protective custody. His rank was given as private and, even more curiously, the paper had later been stamped ‘Unconfirmed’. There was no further evidence of Brohm’s existence in the camp system. Much later, the State department official found Brohm’s name in a list of potential prisoners who might be suitable for what would become Operation Paperclip, a secret OSS programme to recruit Nazi scientists and exfiltrate them to work for the American government. The next big breakthrough had come when some nuisance of a computer hacker had leaked dozens of archived Pentagon files on the internet, including a document marked ‘Highly Restricted’ which named Jedburgh teams Dietrich and Edgar. The military record showed that Team Edgar had been wiped out in an ambush in the Bavarian Alps on 8 May 1945, the day the war ended. On further investigation, it was found that two survivors from Team Dietrich, Captain Matthew Sinclair and Lieutenant Stanislaus Kozlowski, had been subsequently awarded the Military Cross for their actions on that date. Walter Brohm had never been heard of again.

The pony-tailed man’s investigators confirmed that Matthew Sinclair had left the Army and been ordained into the Anglican Church. Between 1949 and 1963 he had carried out missionary work in the African Congo, until, in an altercation that had made the front page of many newspapers, he had physically assaulted the mercenary commander of Katanga province, Colonel Michael Hoare, and been sentenced to death. When he returned to Britain all trace of him was lost.

Stanislaus Kozlowski, the only other member of Team Dietrich, had been traced to a home for the elderly in Rugby, Warwickshire. At first, he had been reluctant to talk about his military service, but eventually he was surprisingly forthcoming about his wartime experiences. Kozlowski’s insistence on telling his story to a wider audience had required his removal, but it was from transcripts of the Kozlowski interview that he had learned of the fate of Jedburgh teams Dietrich and Edgar. And of the journal that Team Dietrich’s commander had kept so assiduously in the final weeks of the war.

From that moment on, he had devoted every resource at his disposal to the discovery of Matthew Sinclair and his surviving relatives. How ridiculous that after all this time and effort and investment it came down to one man.

He picked up the telephone on his desk. ‘Get me Sumner.’