The Doomsday Testament

LX

Lotte Muller parked outside the police offices and Jamie retrieved what looked like the decaying carcass of a long-dead animal from the boot of the BMW. ‘I think you should hold on to this,’ he suggested.

‘This is a police station, Mr Saintclair, not a recycling depot.’ Her long nose wrinkled with distaste at the scent of decay, ‘Although I believe whatever it is may already be beyond recycling.’

Jamie grinned. ‘I hope not. Because I think it could be a very valuable Oriental rug. The man who hung a Raphael on his wall wouldn’t have any old carpet on the floor. At least have an expert look at it.’

Reluctantly, the police chief stretched out her hands for the mouldering heap of cloth. But Jamie was already on his way into the police office. ‘No need for both of us to get our hands dirty.’

Lotte Muller followed him inside while Sarah stayed by the car. ‘Put it there.’ She pointed to a corner, close to a rubbish bin, which is where she would have preferred him to deposit it.

He dropped the carpet where he was told, raising a cloud of dust.

‘I have a favour to beg.’

She stared at him, her patience beginning to wear thin. ‘The Herren is through there on the left.’

‘Not that kind of favour.’

They drove south until they picked up the autobahn close to Nordhausen and Jamie turned east, following the signs for Halle and Leipzig. The atmosphere in the car was like a physical barrier between them. He deliberately kept his eyes on the road, but he could feel her anger building as if it was the heat from an open fire. It couldn’t go on. There were things that had to be said and there might not be another chance to say them. He pulled off the motorway at the next turn-off and drew in to a car park overlooking a series of man-made lakes. He got out of the car and waited until she followed. They stared out over the nearest lake, avoiding each other’s eyes. When Sarah eventually spoke her words were an explosive mix of pain and suppressed fury. ‘What the fuck is going on, Jamie? When are you going to tell me what the hell you found in that bunker?’

‘I’m not certain yet.’

‘Then where the fuck are we going?’

‘South.’

‘I have eyes. I can see that.’

‘I need you to trust me.’

‘You what?’

‘I need you to trust me… and I need to know exactly what’s going on.’

She turned to stare at him and now the anger had been replaced by something else, but he couldn’t read what it was. ‘Who do you think you are, Jamie Saintclair? Haven’t I trusted you every day since we goddam met? I thought we were partners? I thought we were more than partners.’

‘We are.’

‘Partners don’t hide things from each other. People who love each other don’t hide things from each other.’

There it was. The first time either had dared to mention love, even though its presence had grown so powerful it had sometimes threatened to suffocate them. It took all his resolve not to surrender. ‘No, they don’t, Sarah, and that’s why I need you to tell me the truth. The time for games is past. If I’m going to save our lives I have to know everything.’ He knew he’d won when the first tear rolled down the velvet of her cheek.

When she spoke it was as if each word was being torn from her. ‘First I was to follow you. Then they wanted me to get close to you. When you fell under that train I thought it was over before it had begun, but it gave me my chance.’

‘Who is they?’

She hesitated, reluctant to take the next irrevocable step. ‘Israeli intelligence. My controller. I don’t know how, but they somehow learned about the Sun Stone and the link to Walter Brohm. My family is Jewish and I spent a year in Tel Aviv doing my Masters degree. They were on the lookout for people with backgrounds like mine. That’s where I was recruited.’

He’d known, or at least he’d suspected. All those handy little criminal skills. The way she handled a gun so expertly. He remembered the meeting in the Kensington pub. Simon’s ever so cooperative friend. ‘Is David your controller?’

She sniffed. ‘That’s one of the names he uses.’

‘So it was all just part of the job, getting close to me and the rest of it? You played me for a sucker and I fell for those big brown eyes of yours. Dumb old Jamie Saintclair rolled over to have his tummy tickled whenever Sarah Grant smiled. Jesus, you must have had some laughs.’

‘No.’ She shook head so hard he felt her tears on his face. ‘Not the rest of it. That was my choice. You have to believe me, Jamie. What happened between us mattered. Don’t taint it by thinking it had anything to do with them. I tried to stop this. I tried to get you to turn back, but you were too damn stubborn.’ He wanted to reach out to her, but it wasn’t yet time.

‘And then?’

‘We had a team close by all the time. They were to provide protection and as soon as we’d located the Sun Stone I was to call them in.’

His laugh was short and sour. ‘Protection? Your Mossad geniuses didn’t make much of a job of it. Where the hell were they while we were dodging bullets in the Harz?’

‘My phone, I was supposed to contact them…’ She swallowed and took a deep breath. ‘So now you know… everything.’

The unspoken question hung between them. He answered it by taking her in his arms and kissing her eyes, tasting the tart salt of her tears.

‘Listen,’ he said gently, ‘there are a lot of things we need to talk about, but this isn’t the time. I should kick your spying backside out here and now, but I won’t because I’ve fallen a little bit in love with whoever the real Sarah Grant is.’

‘We could still turn back, walk away from all this. I’ll tell them I won’t work for them any more and we can fly back to London and see if we can make it as two ordinary people.’

‘No. We’ve come too far now. We owe it to Matthew and Tenzin and Simon and Magda, all the people who have died, to see it through.’ He looked out over the rippling waters of the lake. ‘Can I assume David, or whatever he’s calling himself today, is nearby?’

She nodded. ‘There’s a satellite tracking device in my new phone.’

‘Good. When we get closer to where we’re going, we’ll let him know exactly where to find us.’

She held back as he got into the car. ‘So you still won’t tell me what you found back there?’

‘Trust me.’

Two miles behind them the driver and passenger in the grey Mercedes listened to the final exchange.

‘Lovers’ tiff?’

‘I’ll give you odds of three to one he tells her in the next hour.’

‘And then?’

The other man said nothing. They both knew the answer.

After another thirty minutes the driver studied the locator device on the screen in front of him. ‘Looks like they’re pulling in for fuel. Not a bad idea. I could do with a piss.’

The passenger frowned. He didn’t like it, but they didn’t have much choice, he didn’t want to get in front of his quarry. ‘We’ll stop there too, but we’ll stay in the car until they move again. Then you can have your piss.’

They passed Leipzig and began to see the first signs for Prague. ‘What will you do if you find it?’ Sarah’s voice was devoid of emotion, as if the question had drawn all the strength from her.

Jamie shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I thought we could destroy it, but the closer we get the less likely that seems. Maybe hire a boat somewhere and drop it into the ocean. Chuck it into a volcano.’

‘Christ, Jamie, you’re not in Lord of the fucking Rings,’ she said. ‘This is real life. This is dangerous. Please, for my sake, turn back now.’

He didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to see the tears. Instead, he glanced out of the window to check if the helicopter that had been flying parallel with the road for the last ten miles was still with them. The next sign said eight kilometres to Dresden.

‘I told you. It’s too late.’

After five minutes he turned on to a slip road towards the city. Sarah stared at him and he nodded.

‘Walter Brohm hid the Sun Stone in the safest place in Germany, which also happened to be the place where he was born. When he closed down the bunker early in nineteen forty-five, Dresden was the only major city in Nazi Germany that had never been properly bombed by the Allies. They called it Florence on the Elbe. It was a centre of huge cultural significance with some of the most beautiful architecture in Europe, a place of grand palaces and theatres, opera houses and museums. More importantly, there was no heavy industry, no tank production lines or ball bearing factories. And it wasn’t on any of the Wehrmacht’s main supply routes. The kind of stuff that attracts target allocation officers. Dresden was a military backwater.’

She looked out over the city unfolding below them. ‘Where, Jamie? Where did he hide it?’

‘I found the last Black Sun on the floor of Brohm’s office in the bunker. No one had noticed it in all the madness surrounding the Raphael. The road and river network matches what I know about the city. But even if I hadn’t known how to decode the Black Sun, the inscription beneath it would have told me. Die kreuzung wo die frau betet.’

She looked puzzled. ‘The intersection where the women worship?’

‘The crossroads where the women pray. When I found out Walter Brohm was born in Dresden, I did a little reading on the city. Remember the journal entry where Brohm was talking about the centre of the earth? The one I missed that pointed us towards Wewelsburg? In the next line, my grandfather said that everyone has a different centre of the earth and Brohm’s would always be his mother’s spiritual home. That was Dresden, but not just Dresden. The most famous building in the city isn’t a palace or a museum. It’s a church. The Frauenkirche. The church at the crossroads where his father was pastor and his mother would have worshipped. He knew every stone and every potential hiding place. It must have seemed perfect. Walter Brohm hid the Sun Stone and all his research papers in the crypt of the Frauenkirche.’

Sarah leaned forward against the dashboard and put her head in her hands.

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

The driver of the Mercedes turned to his partner. ‘Did you get that?’

‘I got it. Paydirt.’

‘You know what to do. I’ll call the old man.’

The passenger didn’t hesitate. Twenty years in special forces and a month that had seemed like a lifetime in a dusty shithole called Fallujah had long since eroded his belief in the sanctity of human life. He reached for the mobile phone on the dashboard, chose speed dial and pressed one. His face wore a look of intense concentration as he listened to the phone dialling up the number.

The bomb was a simple enough device, smaller and less crude than the one he’d set in the Menshikov Palace, but more than big enough to do the job. He’d copied the signature — the specific design features used by a known bomb maker — from a bomb discovered during a raid on an al-Qaida safe house in Hamburg three years earlier. A kilogram of shaped C-4 high-energy explosive detonated by a mobile phone that was one of a batch of Nokia 2300s bought by the now-deceased terrorist in 2004. Normally, he prided himself on being capable of manufacturing a bomb precise enough to take out an individual target within the car. But using the Hamburg bomber’s signature also meant using his methods. A kilogram of HE would tear the car apart and destroy everything within about a thirty-metre radius. As a professional, the overkill offended him, but he also recognized the need for certainty.

Several factors dictated how the next millisecond would affect the occupants of the target car. The shaped charge and the quality of build of the engine bay combined to direct 80 per cent of the explosive force towards the passenger compartment. They started dying when they were hit by a blast wave which expanded within the enclosed space at a speed of 9,000 feet per second, causing a catastrophic pressure change that ruptured lungs, ear drums and bowels and resulted in what trauma experts call ‘full body disruption’ — multiple amputations. The nervous system is not built to withstand the kind of stress created by proximity to such an event and immediately shuts down. This was fortunate for the victims who by now had been enveloped by the 3,00 °C flash which instantly followed the initial wave and inflicted first-degree burns over any exposed flesh, burned away hair and clothing and caused further internal damage as the super-heated air was drawn into already damaged lungs. In the third wave of the explosion, precisely one third of a millisecond after detonation, the combined materials which had divided the occupants from the engine compartment, now consisting of chemical dust from various vapourized plastics, white-hot molten metal and many thousands of shards of jagged steel shrapnel, caused devastating penetrative injuries from abdomen to skull. By this point the two victims were already clinically dead, their brain function fading and the memory of the previous half a millisecond merely a single white flash. In a quirk of physics which the bomb maker could hardly have calculated, the combined forces of the blast catapulted what remained of the car’s driver through the gaping hole where the roof had been, at the same time as the fireball from the exploding petrol tank. The body of the passenger — or at least the charred trunk from the knees upwards — remained in its seat to be consumed by the flames as the mangled wreckage of the German automobile spun to a stop next to the centre barrier of the autobahn. The resulting investigation and the clean-up operation would close the highway for the next twenty-four hours.

‘What was that?’ Sarah reacted to the muffled ‘crump’ of the explosion and looked round in time to see an expanding fireball a few miles back on the autobahn. ‘Must have been some kind of crash. Looks like a bad one, maybe a petrol tanker or something.’

Jamie considered stopping, then shook his head. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it.’

She sank back in her seat with her chin on her chest. ‘No, there isn’t.’ They would never know that David had spent most of the previous night debating with his superiors whether tampering with the bomb Mossad’s tame mechanic had found would compromise the operation. Or that he had eventually lost the argument and in the end had ordered the switch at the final fuel stop on his own authority.

Jamie drove into the city centre and turned off just before the broad ribbon of the River Elbe on to a road that led them past railway tracks and run-down factories. Halfway along it he stopped. For a few moments there was silence as they stared ahead at the broken skyline of Dresden’s Old Town.

‘I made a mistake. I should have trusted you.’

‘Damn right you should.’

‘If this doesn’t work out will you forgive me?’

She turned quickly and kissed him on his lips and in the soft glow of the setting sun he realized she had never looked more beautiful. ‘There’s nothing to forgive.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure. Let’s get this thing done.’

He nodded.

‘Let’s.’

He put the car in gear and they drove on. To find Walter Brohm’s Sun Stone and the discovery that would change the world.