The Doomsday Testament

LXI

Dresden’s Old Town was a curious mix of the old the new and the unlikely. Sprawling Renaissance palaces and layer-cake opera houses evoked the glory days of Saxon culture while rubbing shoulders with the thronging modern shopping malls, hotels and cinema complexes that are the ever-present advertisements for consumer capitalism in any twenty-first-century city worth the name. Yet the building that caught Jamie’s eye, as he drove through the centre hunting down a place to park, was an enormous Stalinist sports hall covered with multi-coloured mosaics of Dresden’s Soviet-era heroes; a reminder that this city had spent forty-five years in the very heart of Communist East Germany. All around them on the banks of the River Elbe, giant cranes dwarfed the buildings they helped construct and the constant machine-gun rattle of jackhammers shattered the early-evening silence. Despite all the building work, Jamie noted an unlikely number of empty, weed-infested sites and the kind of structural ruins that would have looked more at home in the forum in Rome. If Sarah noticed, she didn’t comment. In fact, since they’d entered the city proper she hadn’t said a word.

They reached the Altmarkt, the Old Market, which, in true Dresden style, seemed to be surrounded mainly by modern buildings. On the far side of the street Jamie spotted the sign for an underground car park. He pulled in at the roadside outside a shop that sold fine china. For a moment he felt like an Olympic ski jumper waiting at the top of the slope and when he laid a hand on Sarah’s shoulder he could feel the tension in her body. ‘I’ll drop you here, so you can make your call to your boss. Just be natural and tell him exactly what I told you. I shouldn’t be more than five minutes.’ She turned and gave him a long, searching look. He wondered what she was seeing. He hoped it wasn’t the truth. A moment of decision and, finally, the hazel eyes softened. She leaned across and brushed her lips against his.

‘I’ll be right here, waiting.’

The first floor of the car park was full, so he took the narrow, curving ramp down to the lower level. Here, the cars were all parked in the spaces closest to the lifts and he drove to a vacant spot at the far end of the low-roofed cavern. As he sat in the car with the engine running he felt the weight of everything he’d set in motion threatening to crush him into his seat. What gave him the right to gamble with other people’s lives? What if it all went wrong? Then his mind filled with old Matthew’s face and he heard Tenzin’s words and he realized he’d never had any other choice. The next thirty minutes were mapped out before him like the acts of a play. All he needed was the courage to play his part. He opened the car door just as the squeal of synthetic rubber on dust-coated concrete announced a second vehicle entering the building. The car park smelled of motor oil and petrol fumes, but it wasn’t the smell that made Jamie’s stomach lurch. As he walked towards the lift he was conscious of another presence keeping pace with him on the upper floor, which was just visible through a narrow gap close to the ceiling. He stopped for a second. From above, three soft footfalls and then silence. The lift was ten paces away and he felt the panic rising inside him as he made for the metal doors. What now? Breathe and think. There’s no rush. Think! With fumbling fingers he attacked the knots of his shoes and removed them, then, standing in his socks, he pressed the ‘up’ button. An arrow showed that the car was ascending from the floor below. He sent up a silent prayer that it would be occupied by someone who’d just parked their car. A family, including a couple of schoolchildren who’d giggle at the idiot in his socks holding his shoes in his hand. The ‘ting’ as the lift arrived startled him even though he’d been expecting it. The doors parted and he felt a physical pain as he stared into the empty compartment. He hesitated. Was he being paranoid? Sarah would be waiting. It didn’t matter. A little paranoia was good for the blood pressure. He stepped inside and pressed the button for street level, immediately leaving the lift and jogging silently towards the far end where a ramp led up towards the exit. He hit the slope at a run, and when he reached the top he could see the barriers and ticket machines. The upper floor was empty and away to his right the lift doors were just closing. A draught of fresh air made him smile at his own foolishness.

He was still smiling when the arm locked around his neck like a steel clamp.

Shock and fear slowed his reactions, but he knew the first few seconds of a situation like this were crucial. He managed to stab his elbow into the ribs of the man behind him with enough force to make him grunt and his right leg twisted round the other’s in an attempt to unbalance him. At the same time, he reached both hands over his left shoulder to get a grip of his unseen opponent’s collar and threw his weight forward, bending his left knee and trying for a hip throw that would use the attacker’s bulk against him. He might as well have tried to shift a block of concrete. In desperation he smashed his head backward, anything to loosen the grip that was choking him, but he only managed a glancing blow that made the other man laugh. His stockinged heels scraped on the concrete as he was dragged helplessly towards a darkened alcove off the main car park.

‘Twice you have missed our appointment. There will not be a third time.’

The voice sounded familiar, but before he could place it Jamie’s legs were kicked from under him and massive hands slammed him to the ground so the back of his skull bounced off the floor. While his head still spun, some kind of filthy rag was stuffed into his mouth. He was positioned head first towards the garage with his feet into the alcove. An enormous weight settled on his chest, pinning his arms at his side and he found himself looking up into a grinning face that was too small for the head it inhabited. He searched for a name and his heart stopped as he found it. Gustav.

‘I took this from a Taliban who was trying to cut my balls off outside Farkar, up in Kunduz,’ the squat German said conversationally, producing a long curved knife from inside his zipped jacket. ‘Guess who still has their balls?’

He brought the knife down close to Jamie’s face, so he could see every shade of blue on the shimmering blade, and drew the razor edge across the Englishman’s cheek. Very slowly. First the left side, then the right; the blade rasping effortlessly through two days of stubble.

‘You didn’t have time to shave? No need now, eh? Frederick, he thinks you’re planning to auction the Sun Stone, but that will not happen, OK?’ He slapped Jamie’s cheek for emphasis. Now the wicked twinkle of the knife point hovered directly over Jamie’s right eyeball. ‘It won’t happen because you are going to tell Gustav exactly where it is or you end up like your friend. The stone belongs to us, the keepers of the truth; the successors of the ancients. Only we have the knowledge to use it for the purpose it was intended.’ The words came out stilted and mechanical, as if they’d been learned by constant repetition in a school room. Jamie shook his head to try to dislodge the gag, but the German interpreted the movement as rebellion or defiance. ‘No? That’s good, because now we’re going to have some fun, you and me.’ Gustav studied him impassively, like a butcher contemplating a cut of meat. ‘The eyes, the ears or the nose? Not the tongue. You will need the tongue later.’ His free hand reached down to caress the side of Jamie’s head. ‘The ears then.’

Desperately, Jamie used all his strength in an attempt to shift the German.

‘Shhh,’ Gustav said gently. ‘The more you struggle, the worse it is for you.’

Rough fingers closed on the lobe of Jamie’s right ear and pulled it taut. He tried to scream behind the gag that filled his mouth, but he knew no one would ever hear him. He thought he was losing his mind when a red spot appeared like a cancerous mole beside Gustav’s left lip. The spot wavered and Jamie’s eyes followed it. The German must have read something in his captive’s face, because he hesitated before making the cut. Another bright spot appeared over his left breast, and a third almost exactly in the centre of his forehead. Gustav frowned and his eye drifted down to the spot on his chest. It took him a split second to recognize it for what it was.

‘No!’

The knife rose high before the blade descended in a deadly two-handed arc towards Jamie’s exposed throat. Three sharp cracks split the silence.

Sarah saw Jamie emerge from the car park lift and went to meet him. The Englishman’s face was pale, almost grey, and at first he seemed to look right through her. When she took his arm, he blinked and forced a smile.

‘Hey, you’re shaking,’ she said.

‘I had a bit of a run-in with the car park attendant. I’ll be fine in a minute.’

They walked in the general direction of the river. It was busy now, the offices and banks were emptying and the streets filled with shoppers. At the intersection of two streets they found a tourist sign that pointed them towards the Frauenkirche and, when they crossed, there it was, on the far side of a small park in the centre of the square.

Sarah gave an involuntary gasp when she saw the soaring, octagonal confection in honeyed stone that dominated everything around it, the enormous dome topped by a twenty-foot bell tower. As they walked across the square, Jamie hesitated, torn between what he knew was right and what he knew was best. He could turn away now and they could get on with their lives as if this had never happened. But could they? Frederick and his thugs would never stop looking for them as long as he thought they would lead him to the Sun Stone. Every time they opened the door it could be to some human meat grinder like Gustav. No. It had to be this way. In any case, there were things he had to know and things Sarah had to understand.

She felt his steps falter and thought he was delaying to get a better view of the church. ‘I wonder what your grandfather would have thought of it?’

Jamie squeezed her hand, the last doubt gone, and led her into the hallowed silence of the interior, where the gilt Baroque ceiling soared above just as it had done three hundred years earlier, supported by lavishly painted marble columns and layers of galleries, the windows allowing in an almost ethereal light that made the whole church glow. In the cupola of the dome, they could see the faces staring out from the glass front of the ramp that led in a long spiral up to the viewing platform. Several dozen tourists wandered the aisles taking in the wonder around them. Sarah followed him to a place in the front pew in front of the astonishing golden masterpiece of the High Altar and waited as he bowed his head as if in prayer.

They’d been sitting for a few minutes when they were joined by a pony-tailed man in a denim jacket who looked as if he’d just escaped from a 1970s pop group. Gradually, recognition dawned. Howard Vanderbilt never voluntarily appeared on TV business shows, but despite his best efforts a few images of him survived. The pictures they used were either photos from a time when the ponytail had actually been in fashion or blurred shots of a distant figure on the hundred-million-dollar yacht that transported him around the Bahamas every summer. Jamie tried to tell himself he’d been expecting this, but it was still a shock to be sitting within feet of one of the richest men in the world — especially when that man was holding a gleaming 9 mm pistol that appeared to be aimed in the direction of his heart.

‘Mr Saintclair, I’m glad to meet you at last.’

‘I wish I could say the same, sir.’

The fact that Howard Vanderbilt was carrying a gun told Jamie everything he needed about the billionaire industrialist’s state of mind. Just like Walter Brohm, Vanderbilt had been driven beyond logic and reason by the Sun Stone. Why else would a man who could buy and sell whole countries be running around with a pistol when he had half a dozen perfectly good executioners sitting within fifteen feet? Their relative positions meant they were forced to talk across Sarah, who seemed not to have noticed the pistol and was showing similar signs to a volcano about to erupt. Her hands clutched at the shoulder bag in her lap and Jamie hoped she would keep them there.

A commotion at the back of the church signalled a new influx of visitors and Jamie turned his head to see a dark-suited figure he recognized as Frederick push his way past Vanderbilt’s bodyguards. Four shaven-headed minders in leather jackets and jeans accompanied him, sweeping the interior of the Frauenkirche with their eyes and evidently not liking what they saw. They’d still be trying to figure out Gustav’s mysterious disappearance and it would make them jumpy, but Jamie hoped not too jumpy. He was reassured when a word from Frederick brought them to heel. He noted a flaring of the nostrils when the previously impassive German recognized the man sitting beside him. Interesting, but they’d have to wait to see how interesting.

The German took his seat in the second pew, off to Jamie’s right but within touching distance of Howard Vanderbilt’s left shoulder. An aide approached the tycoon and he visibly stiffened when he heard whatever information he’d been given. Vanderbilt snatched a glance towards the man seated behind him and Frederick’s pale eyes hardened, confirming the surveillance information Mr Lim had provided in exchange for the location of the Sun Stone. Of course, the trade had been a little one-sided and Mr Lim hadn’t expected to be part of a delegation, but Jamie hoped he was a man who appreciated irony.

For a few seconds the two sets of bodyguards jockeyed for position in the open spaces around the pews as if they were part of a carefully choreographed ballet. Vanderbilt frowned, his patience evidently wearing thin. ‘As you can see, Frederick, I have this situation under control,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Your presence is not required. We can talk about this later, but for now I think you and your friends should leave.’ The only answer was a short laugh and at some unseen signal one of Vanderbilt’s bodyguards moved to Frederick’s right where he could cover the German’s gun hand.

Howard Vanderbilt sighed and when he spoke, Jamie detected a lack of certainty in his voice. The weariness of a man who had run out of time, or ideas, or both. Obviously this wasn’t going according to the industrialist’s plan.

‘You have caused me some trouble, Mr Saintclair. I have spent a great deal of time and money seeking out what has brought us to this place. It ends here. Am I clear on that?’

‘Very clear, Mr Vanderbilt.’ He thought he heard the word ‘chicken’ but Sarah might only have been sighing. ‘But I would have thought that in your world everything was a matter of negotiation?’

Vanderbilt leaned closer to Sarah. ‘I can buy it, or I can take it, son, it’s up to you. Name your price. We’re finished playing games.’

Jamie shook his head and looked around. ‘Do you think you and your stormtroopers are the only people who’ve been following me? Bugging my phone? There’s probably an NSA satellite up there right at this moment, listening to every word we say. The cheerful Oriental gentleman at the back with his two friends is to my certain knowledge a representative of the Chinese government. Everybody wants the Sun Stone, Howard, and frankly you’re the last person I’d give it up to. All you want to do is exploit it, whatever the cost. Just like Brohm.’

Vanderbilt’s face hardened. ‘Have it your own way, son.’ He moved the barrel of the pistol from Jamie to Sarah. ‘Tell me where the stone and Brohm’s documents are or I’ll kill the girl.’

Jamie stared at him. Not even Howard Vanderbilt could get away with murder in a church full of witnesses, but suddenly the church wasn’t so full. Young men in dark suits began ushering the tourists out. Most went, but Jamie could hear Mr Lim politely refusing the offer of assistance to leave, and the distinct sound of a pistol being cocked seemed to indicate that the pro-Frederick members of the Vril Society were prepared to stand their ground. Jamie hoped that he hadn’t misread the cast who’d assembled here, the last thing they needed was a shooting war in the Frauenkirche.

Vanderbilt took a big breath. ‘I…’

It wasn’t often a man like Howard Vanderbilt could be rendered speechless, but the muzzle of the little pistol Sarah Grant was screwing into the flesh beneath his right ear achieved what presidents and prime ministers had routinely failed to do.

‘The Sun Stone belongs to the State of Israel,’ she said loudly enough for everyone in the church to hear.

‘Perhaps I should have mentioned that, Howard,’ Jamie said patiently. ‘Miss Grant and the handsome gentleman who has the drop on us from the walkway up there are here to represent the people who were sacrificed to help Walter Brohm unlock the potential of the Sun Stone.’

It was time. He got to his feet and addressed everyone in the church. ‘Gentlemen.’ He raised his voice and it rang around the enormous space that had been designed precisely for that purpose. He allowed himself a smile at Sarah. ‘And lady. This is a place of worship, let us not turn it into a war zone. As you can see, we have a number of competing interests for the legacy of the late Brigadeführer Walter Brohm. Mr Vanderbilt here believes he has a divine right to exploit it and the gun in his hand suggests he is probably prepared to go further than any of you to get it. The shadowy gentleman behind him, representing the paramilitary wing of the Vril Society, may have a legal point were he to suggest that what Walter Brohm called the Sun Stone was in the gift of the then Tibetan government and that the investment which brought the major breakthrough in exploiting it was made by his countrymen. I suppose the German government could make a similar claim, though I doubt that they would want to press it. Mr Lim,’ the Chinaman bowed his head, ‘of the Chinese People’s Republic, would argue that his country has a more legitimate claim to it than any of you, because the Sun Stone was first discovered in the soil his people lay claim to, although I know the supporters of a Free Tibet would dispute that claim. And finally, Miss Sarah Grant, representative of the State of Israel, who can give evidence, which I’d be happy to support, of the human sacrifice her people were forced to make by Walter Brohm in the pursuit of his obsession.

‘But,’ he continued, ‘as I said, this is a place of worship. It is not a law court. You are all here because you want to know the story of the Sun Stone, particularly how it is going to end. My grandfather, like Walter Brohm’s father, was a churchman, so please indulge me if I preach you a short sermon about greed.

‘When Walter Brohm returned to Germany and opened the casket he found in Tibet, he suspected he had in his hands something enormously significant: a substance hitherto unknown to man. As a scientist it was his duty to discover the properties of that material and, at a time of great upheaval for his country, their significance and potential value. Yet the very upheaval which spurred him proved to be his greatest obstacle, because with war on the horizon no one was interested in possibilities — a dream that promised some distant panacea — only in certainties.

‘But Walter Brohm, for all his faults, was a man with several admirable qualities, not the least of which were persistence and self-belief. Somehow, he found the time and the resources to carry out his experiments. We don’t know the mechanics of it, but it appears that some time before early nineteen forty-one he came to the conclusion that the Sun Stone consisted of what we now call Dark Matter. That led in turn to the possibility, even the probability, of creating controlled nuclear fusion.’

A stir ran through the men in the church at the mention of the goal which had brought each of them here.

‘Now, he was able to turn directly to Hitler for support, but his beloved Führer failed him. Why? Because Hitler feared the power the Sun Stone was capable of unleashing. But one man had no such reservations. Walter Brohm sold his soul to the devil and the devil’s name was Heinrich Himmler.’

He waited for some reaction to his words, but none came.

‘Brohm needed to operate in total secrecy. That meant the labour to build the bunker in the Harz Mountains had to be expendable. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Russian prisoners, Polish slave workers and, of course, Jews were rushed off to the gas chambers the moment the bunker was complete. But the killing didn’t stop there. Scientists and technicians. Even the SS guards. When the time came to close the bunker down… when he was on the very brink of another breakthrough… Walter Brohm sacrificed them all to save himself and his precious secret.

‘And, just as Brohm never questioned the ethics or the danger or the morality of what he was doing, he knew his value to the last dollar. Germany could burn, her soldiers could be slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands, German boys could throw themselves at tanks, but Walter Brohm and his work must survive. As the war ended, he dangled the Sun Stone under the noses of people with even fewer morals than himself, and they took it: hook, line and sinker.

‘Within a month, he would have been welcomed to America and given more resources than he could ever have dreamed of to complete his project. But for one man.

‘One man recognized the true danger of the Sun Stone and Walter Brohm. That man was my grandfather. He shot Brohm through the head and hoped that when he died, the Sun Stone would die with him. But, of course, it didn’t, which is why we are here.’

‘Enough of the history lesson, Saintclair. We came for the stone. Where is it?’

Jamie shook his head. ‘You had my grandfather killed, Mr Vanderbilt, and a Polish war hero called Stanislaus Kozlowski who was his friend. Who knows how many more have been sacrificed on the altar of your greed? You were even prepared to betray your own kind.’ Vanderbilt flinched as if someone had slapped his face. ‘Oh, yes, Mr Vanderbilt. You’re not the only one who can bug a telephone. I suspect you and your friend Frederick will have lots to talk about when this is over. But the more I discovered about Matthew Sinclair, the more certain I was that he would have died to keep the Sun Stone away from men like you.’

‘The old man was an accident and the Pole was in the way.’ Vanderbilt’s voice was almost a plea. ‘Don’t you understand that this is more important than life or death? The Sun Stone can assure the future of the planet and the survival of our civilization.’

Jamie ignored him and looked around the cathedral, meeting the eyes of Mr Lim and Frederick in turn, before focusing his attention on Sarah Grant. ‘I came to the Frauenkirche prepared to sacrifice everything to make sure Walter Brohm’s legacy remained unfulfilled. To do so I would have blown up this place and everyone in it.’ They looked at the building around them, wondering if they’d been lured into a trap, all except Sarah who had forgotten Howard Vanderbilt and whose eyes never left Jamie. ‘But fortunately, I don’t have to do that.’

‘What do you mean?’

Jamie stared at the industrialist, wondering what was going through his head. ‘When he left the bunker in February nineteen forty-five Walter Brohm believed he had chosen the safest place in Germany to hide the Sun Stone. Little old Dresden, famous for nothing more than its crockery and its culture. Untouched by six years of war and likely to stay that way. He knew every stone of this great church, because his father had been pastor here. In particular, he knew the stone vaults below it as no one else did. Where better to keep the Sun Stone and his research papers until they were needed? Brohm probably calculated it would be lunacy to waste resources on bombing Dresden at that late stage of the war.’ The church had gone very still. He could probably have whispered and they would still have heard him. ‘But Brohm forgot that lunacy and war go hand in hand. There’s some suggestion the decision was taken because the Wehrmacht was likely to retreat this way from Czechoslovakia, as it was then. The more likely reason is that somebody at Bomber Command was looking for another box to tick on his long list of targets.’

He heard a grunt of bitter laughter. It wasn’t surprising that Frederick had worked out what was coming. Frederick was German, and Germans knew all about the history of Dresden.

‘Walter Brohm believed Dresden was the ideal place to keep the Sun Stone safe. He was right… up to a point. That point came on the night of February the thirteenth nineteen forty-five, probably about a week after the stone was brought here, when a formation of 723 Lancaster bombers proved him wrong. The bull’s-eye for the raid was to be a sports stadium about three hundred metres from here in the Aldstadt, but the Pathfinder mosquitoes dropped their target markers over the cigarette factory about a mile to the east. If every plane had dropped its bombs on target, everything would have been fine, but there was a phenomenon during the war called bomb creep, where every subsequent crew tended to drop its bombs a little further back than those that had gone before. Bomb creep resulted in an arrowhead pattern one and a quarter miles long and one and three-quarter miles broad at its widest point. In the next twenty-four hours that arrowhead would become the most dangerous place on earth. The first RAF attack would be followed by a second, a few hours later, and a daylight raid by B17 bombers of the USAAF. Twenty-seven hundred tonnes of high explosive and incendiaries rained down from planes flying at eight thousand feet and the flames of Dresden could be seen by air crew from as far as five hundred miles away. In the middle of the arrowhead was the Old Town; in the middle of the Old Town was the Frauenkirche. At least twenty-five thousand people were killed, crushed beneath falling buildings or incinerated in the firestorms that followed.’ He paused. ‘Nothing was left but rubble.’

Mr Lim appeared to be praying. Frederick’s vengeful eyes never left the back of Vanderbilt’s head. Sarah and the industrialist stared at the church around them.

‘Oh, yes, this too,’ Jamie assured them. ‘The Frauenkirche may look like an eighteenth-century Renaissance masterpiece, but it was built — or rebuilt — as an exact replica of the original only after the Communists were kicked out and it was finally completed in two thousand and five. All that’s left of the old Frauenkirche are those little black stones you see decorating the exterior. The church that was here in nineteen forty-five was blown to bits by at least one four-thousand-pound blockbuster bomb. The RAF in their schoolboy fashion called them Cookies and they were designed to bury themselves deep in the earth before exploding. They were among the most destructive weapons of that uniquely destructive war. The bomb reduced everything, including the vaults of the Frauenkirche, to dust and bricks. Whatever was down there ended up with the millions of tonnes of rubble from the rest of Dresden.’

Vanderbilt’s face had turned ash grey. ‘What happened to it?’ he whispered. ‘What happened to the Sun Stone?’

Jamie took Sarah Grant’s hand and she didn’t resist as he walked her steadily towards the doorway. No one tried to stop them. Through the door he could see the flashing lights of half a dozen parked police cars. He didn’t envy Lotte Muller the job of cleaning up the diplomatic mess, but the pictures and phone transcripts from Mr Lim should help.

‘It’s out there, Howard,’ he continued. ‘The rubble from the old city was used to build the foundations for the new Dresden, and to pave the roads for a couple of hundred miles around. About half a million people are living on top of the Sun Stone.’

They emerged into the early evening sunshine.

‘It’s all yours.’