The Gods of Atlantis

11

Lower Saxony, Germany

F ive minutes after leaving the runway, Jack hopped out of the jeep at the site of the Nazi bunker. In front of him was the large Portakabin with barred windows, and behind it the polyester bubble covered with camouflage netting that rose over an area the size of a tennis court. He could see where the edges of the bubble had been sealed to the roof of the Portakabin and anchored into a freshly dug perimeter ditch filled with concrete around the site, isolating the bunker from the atmosphere outside; beyond the Portakabin was a parked flat-bed truck containing an air compressor to keep the bubble pressurized, large carbon-dioxide scrubbers and pumps to clean the air and a filtration system to extract anything toxic from the outflow. The door to the Portakabin was guarded by two Bundeswehr military policemen carrying Hechler amp; Koch G-36 assault rifles. Jack’s driver spoke in German into his phone, and then turned to him. ‘Dr Hiebermeyer has finished the decontamination process and will be with you in a moment. You are to wait here.’

Jack nodded in acknowledgement as the jeep drove off, and then turned back to the entrance just as the door opened and Hiebermeyer came out. He was wearing a spotless white shirt and pressed trousers, the first time Jack could remember since their schooldays not seeing him in dusty khaki excavation gear. His right wrist was bandaged and hanging in a sling. With his other arm he swept back his remaining strands of hair, still glistening from the shower, and pushed his little round glasses up his nose. Jack watched him close his eyes and breathe deeply a few times. His glasses had steamed up on leaving the Portakabin, and he took them off and cleaned them on his sleeve, then peered around and spotted Jack. His shoulders slumped with relief and he walked over, putting his hand on Jack’s arm. ‘I heard the jet take off. It’s really good to see you. I read your email update on the dive on my phone in the decontamination room. It’s like a sauna in there.’ He wiped his face with his hand. ‘Diving to Atlantis again. Pretty amazing stuff. Human sacrifice, you think?’

Jack pointed at the sling. ‘Your wrist?’

‘Just a sprain. It was slippery in there. Everything’s covered in a sticky decomposition product, kind of yellow-green.’ He rubbed his forehead with his sleeve, then pushed his glasses up again. Jack looked with concern at his pale face and red-rimmed eyes. ‘Are you okay, Maurice? You look whacked.’

Hiebermeyer exhaled slowly, looked down at the ground for a moment and then nodded. ‘ Ja,’ he said. ‘ Mein Gott.’ He looked at Jack again, his eyes lacking their usual exuberance, and then angled his head upwards and took a deep breath through his nose. ‘I can still smell it, Jack. That decomposition product. We were encased in CBRN suits inside the bunker, but as soon as I took mine off in the scrubbing room, the stench was overpowering. I’d already thrown up inside my suit in the bunker, and I’m afraid I did it again. Not impressive for the hardened Egyptologist used to rotting mummies, but Major Penn says it happens even to the toughest of his team.’

Jack pulled out a small bottle of water from his khaki trouser pocket. ‘Have something to drink.’

Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘Not yet. I couldn’t stomach it. Not until we get away from this place.’

‘It was that bad?’

‘I’ve been down some pretty unpleasant holes in my life, but nothing like that. Count yourself lucky you’re not going in there.’

‘What do you mean?’ Jack said abruptly. ‘I thought that was why I was here.’

‘Come with me. Let’s sit down.’ Hiebermeyer steered Jack past the guards to a seating area beneath some bushes about fifty metres away, a place set up for the excavation team to relax. They were alone and out of earshot of the guards. Hiebermeyer sat down heavily on a bench and put his head in his hands, then took a deep breath and pressed his hands together, staring back pensively at the bunker site. Jack sat down beside him, and Hiebermeyer turned to him. ‘I have to tell you about what we found in there. And about what we didn’t find.’

Jack suddenly felt a yawning sense of apprehension. What wasn’t there. This was what had kept him up at night over the past months. ‘Go on.’

‘First, the good news. The bunker’s full of antiquities and works of art. There was one open crate filled with paintings. Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, for a start. It’s incredible, though the Raphael had been left exposed and is probably beyond recovery. And there are crates of archaeological treasures. It looks as if most of them are from Himmler’s collection at Wewelsburg Castle, the objects looted by the Ahnenerbe from around the world in the 1930s that I’d always dreamed of finding. The only crate we looked inside was already open, its lid prised off some time in those final days in 1945. Inside were carefully packaged boxes, all labelled. One of them had prehistoric symbols on it that I recognized from cave art, the kind of thing the Nazis would have interpreted as precursor Aryan runes. But many of them had been packaged more than fifty years before the war, evidently left unopened for some future occasion. I recognized Heinrich Schliemann’s handwriting, Jack. Schliemann’s. They must be the lost treasures from Troy that he hid away, possibly rediscovered by the Nazis somewhere in Germany or when they conquered Greece in 1941. I’d always wondered what lay beneath Schliemann’s house in Athens.’

Jack’s heart was pounding. ‘The palladion?’

Hiebermeyer pursed his lips. ‘It had been there, Jack. We found the impression of a swastika in the packing straw in one corner of that crate, a heavy object about two hand’s breadths across. But someone had taken it. There’s no sign of it elsewhere in the bunker. We already knew the palladion had been in that salt mine in Poland, right? Some time in the final months of the war it was brought here, and some time in the final hours before the forest was bombed it was taken away again.’

Jack closed his eyes, trying to contain his disappointment. The palladion, the most sacred object of the Trojans. He remembered his dive with Costas six months before in the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow, and their desperate fight with three of Saumerre’s men at the place where the palladion had been hidden. What did the Nazis want with it? Who had given the order to move it here, to this bunker? Six months ago they had worked out that the reverse swastika of the palladion had been the symbol of the Agamemnon Code, a secret Nazi code activated near the end of the war that was somehow connected with the purpose of the bunker. He turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘You’re sure it wasn’t taken recently?’

‘Not a chance. The bunker was sealed in by tons of fallen trees and soil after the Allied bombing raid in April 1945. Nobody’s been in there since.’

‘So that’s the bad news?’

‘Not all of it, Jack.’

‘I didn’t think so.’

Hiebermeyer put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. ‘I’m glad Hugh Frazer isn’t with us any more. He’d lived his life since the war wondering what had gone on here, what had happened to his friend Major Mayne. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to break it to him. It was a terrible sight, Jack. It’ll stay with me always.’

‘You found him?’

‘And the American colonel, Stein. They’d both been shot at close range by a 9mm Walther P38. We know that because the pistol and the shell casings are still there. The pistol belonged to another body, with an SS tattoo on his arm. It looks as if he and Mayne were caught in a death embrace, with Mayne’s knife in his ribcage.’

Jack swallowed hard. ‘Where were the bodies?’

Hiebermeyer lowered his arm from Jack’s shoulder, stared at the ground and spoke quietly. ‘At the far end of the chamber with the crates was a sealed room, a laboratory. The American was found outside the doorway, Mayne and the SS man just inside. The door had swung to on its hinges afterwards, nearly but not quite shutting. What I saw inside, beyond those bodies, was a scene of even greater horror.’ He put his hand to his forehead, and paused. ‘There were badly adiposed bodies, Jack, naked and strapped into gurneys. They were partly preserved in their own body liquor. That’s where the awful yellow-green slime came from. Thank Christ the Egyptians mummified their bodies.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘The forensic anthropologist with the army team reckons they were being used as guinea pigs, as live victims for research. She thinks they were being dissected alive, to ensure that the Nazi scientists could extract living viruses and bacteria from their organs. Two of them looked as if they’d been abandoned halfway through. They’d died horribly, in agony. And they weren’t the only ones. You remember you authorized an IMU geophysics team to come over here last month and survey the site of the concentration camp? They thought there was nothing remarkable in the results, but then the forensics guy saw something unusual that has just been confirmed.’

Hiebermeyer took a crumpled sheet out of his pocket, his hand shaking slightly, and passed it to Jack. It was the printout of an archaeological resistivity survey. Jack smoothed it out and put it on his knees. He could identify buried foundations, visible in the contrast of black-and-white features that showed where walls had been. It looked like the survey of a Roman fort, with long barrack buildings and an organized layout of smaller huts. Hiebermeyer pointed to several hazy areas that obscured parts of the buildings. ‘That’s new-growth forest, trees that grew on the bombed-out site. But look here, at the top right-hand corner.’ He pointed to a long, rectilinear feature at least ten by thirty metres in area, like a wide section of boundary ditch. Jack looked up from the sheet to the bunker, traversing his eyes along the forest boundary beyond and trying to visualize the place before the airfield was constructed. Hiebermeyer pointed to a low line of bush to the north-west. ‘The team crawled around in the undergrowth and found a track about a kilometre long between the bunker and that ditch, with impressed tyre marks from large vehicles. Yesterday the forensics lady had a hunch about the ditch. She put a borehole down, and came up with lime, lots of it. They pulled back immediately and sealed off the site behind a guarded perimeter. She said she knew instantly what she was looking at. She’d worked on mass-burial sites from the Balkans wars of the 1990s and was sure the lime had been used to slake corpses, put down here in such quantities because the bodies were contaminated. We think the people on the gurneys inside the bunker were only the last batch of victims, the ones left to die an awful death when the Nazi scientists abandoned this place as the Allied front line came closer in 1945. I can only imagine that Mayne and the American saw those bodies, probably the last thing they ever saw after they’d made their way into this place. But the normal procedure had clearly been to take the corpses from the bunker to the ditch. The forensics lady reckons it could hold five thousand bodies, stacked ten deep.’

‘ Christ.’ Jack looked away. He had expected that they might find evidence of Mayne and Stein, the two Allied officers who had entered the camp soon after its liberation and then disappeared into the forest. From talking to Hugh Frazer, he knew that they were both part of the forward reconnaissance teams searching for Nazi secrets, ostensibly looking for hidden caches of art but really seeking any form of secret weapons research: anything the Nazis might use to devastating effect in their final defence of the Reich. Now he knew that what those two officers had seen would have been their ultimate nightmare, the worst-case scenario they would have been briefed that they might find. It was human experimentation, a terrible disease being perfected. Jack felt a cold shiver down his spine. A disease that may have been spirited out of the past, a past not ancient but within living memory, then refined for use once again, a disease that could take more lives than all those snuffed out in concentration camps like this one, more than were killed in the entire Nazi rampage of murder.

Hiebermeyer continued talking. ‘That chamber was like a sort of ghastly inner sanctum. A huge U-boat battery had been installed outside to provide electricity, and it was still working after all these years. Whoever constructed that place was taking no chances and had planned for this laboratory to survive the fall of the Third Reich. And I haven’t told you the full horror of the bodies on the gurneys. Two of them were different, old cadavers that had been disinterred from somewhere else, both of them partly dissected. The heads had been removed and were sitting there upright, embedded in body liquor and looking like those ancient plastered skulls of the Neolithic, only with stainless-steel forceps clamped to them like the ones the Ahnenerbe used to carry out craniological measurements when they went on their expeditions in search of Atlantis. One of them had a hole in it where the forensics lady thinks they extracted rotting brain tissue looking for something. Putting my hand in what came out of the bodies was what really did it for me, and that’s when I threw up.’

‘So these were different from the other corpses?’ Jack persisted.

Hiebermeyer nodded, and swallowed hard. ‘Different vintage. The forensics lady thinks they must have come originally from sealed lead coffins. She could even work out the year of death, because she returned to the chamber after we’d left to take a sample and analyse it using her portable lab within the bunker. She found enough to pin down what she’d already suspected was the cause of death, and everything fell into place. She was convinced that those two bodies were there because of what they contained. Still living within them when they’d been disinterred had been one of the deadliest viruses known to man, a virus everyone in the 1940s thought had been extinguished a generation before.’

Jack froze. The nightmare had become real. ‘You mean the Spanish influenza virus from the 1918 outbreak.’

Hiebermeyer gave Jack a grim look. ‘We can only speculate on what was going on here, but the forensics lady and her team are convinced. They think it was refinement, a process of trial and error, mutating and selecting the virus according to its effect on the victims, finding the most lethal form. The other corpses on the gurneys were young men born since 1918 who would not have had the immunity of survivors of the 1918 outbreak. Whoever was doing this was planning something even worse than the Holocaust, Jack: mass murder on a global scale, totally indiscriminate.’

‘Or planning to threaten the world with it,’ Jack murmured.

‘This was a true doomsday weapon,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘A weapon of the apocalypse. The ultimate creation of Hitler’s madness.’

‘If it truly was Hitler who ordered it,’ Jack said, pursing his lips. ‘There were other architects of evil floating around him, others with egos that might have pushed them to create an insurance policy of their own if the whole Nazi scheme went belly-up.’

Hiebermeyer paused. ‘And now for the really bad news.’

‘It gets worse?’

‘There’s no evidence yet that the virus survives anywhere in the bunker. As you can see, every precaution is being taken. But there’s a downside to that. A horrible downside.’

Jack felt a lurch in his stomach. ‘You mean we actually wanted to find the virus. The refined virus. The weapon.’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘There was a refrigerator safe in the laboratory, about the size of a microwave oven. The forensics team are certain that’s where the result of all this horror was stored. The safe was open, Jack. There was a stand for some sort of small container like a test tube inside, and it was gone.’

‘ Jesus.’

‘Someone must have taken it back in 1945. The SS man tangled up with Mayne was dressed in camp inmate clothing, as if he were in disguise, like the SS who tried to flee from Belsen and other camps that way. He may have been lurking near the bunker to keep prying eyes out, waiting for instructions. There may have been another with him, someone who got into that refrigerator and removed it.’

‘If they were planning to take it anywhere more secure in those final weeks of the war, it would have to be towards the shrinking Nazi perimeter around Berlin.’

Hiebermeyer peered at him. ‘That’s the real reason I wanted you in Germany.’

Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘Berlin?’

‘I have an old friend who spends his free time with the Berlin Second World War archaeology group, exploring underground bunkers and tunnels of the Second World War in Berlin. When I knew I was coming to Germany, I called him on the off-chance. He told me about something they’d found just south of the Tiergarten at the site of one of the biggest bunkers of them all, the Zoo flak tower. I said I’d try to get there after this. And now because of something else we found in the bunker this morning, it’s become imperative.’

‘Go on.’

‘My friend in Berlin discovered a buried corridor that had once been under the tower. He found a door with a symbol deeply impressed in it, a reverse swastika within a roundel. And there’s something about the bunker I haven’t told you yet. Major Penn’s men also found a reverse swastika impressed within a roundel, concealed under a sliding panel on the door into the laboratory. Penn measured the impression of the swastika in the straw in the crate full of Schliemann’s treasures. It was the same dimensions and shape as the swastika in the door. And there’s more. The lock was embedded with a strong magnetic device, producing a very unusual signature. We think the palladion was magnetic; the ancient Trojan story that it had fallen from heaven, a meteorite? Whoever opened up that chamber of horrors used the sacred symbol of ancient Troy as a magnetic key.’

‘Good God,’ Jack whispered. ‘And you think it’s the same at the Berlin site?’

‘I phoned my friend in Berlin while you were on the way here. He said he hadn’t thought to mention it before, but the magnetic pull around the swastika symbol on the door in the tunnel was enough to lock his torch against the metal.’

Jack’s mind raced. ‘If that’s the only lead we’ve got to go on, we need to jump on it. Remember there are still eyes watching this place. If Saumerre knew about this bunker, then he might know about Berlin too. Do we need an IMU excavation team? I can have people in Berlin by tomorrow morning.’

Hiebermeyer peered at him. ‘It turns out that beneath the Zoo tower there was a huge reservoir, designed to keep the tower self-sufficient. That’s why you need to be with me, Jack, you and Costas and your diving gear. The tunnel leads underwater.’

Jack held his breath, and then exhaled hard. He looked at the forest edge, squinting against the sun that was breaking through the mist. He knew that his only course of action now was to deploy all of his energy and resources to see this through. Somewhere out there was a weapon of unimaginable horror, and they might have the only clues to discovering it. He gave Hiebermeyer a steely look. ‘You should get back to Aysha. I can take over from now on.’

Hiebermeyer put a hand on his shoulder again. ‘I promised Costas I’d stay with you, and I’ll do so until he arrives. The buddy system, he calls it.’

Jack hesitated for a moment, then relented. ‘I guess we’ll make a diver of you yet.’

‘After that place?’ Hiebermeyer looked towards the bunker. ‘Not a chance. That’s the last time I put on any kind of suit.’ He took his hand down. ‘Seriously, Jack. Costas told me everything that happened in the salt mine in Poland last year, when you were searching for the palladion. About your killing spree. We just want to make sure you’re in control.’

‘Those were Saumerre’s thugs, and they’d kidnapped my daughter. I’d do it again without a moment’s hesitation. Saumerre’s still out there, and it’s unfinished business. I want to bring him down.’

‘We need to tread carefully. We need to maintain the balancing act you set up with Saumerre six months ago after your showdown with his men at Troy. He knows that his position in the European Union bureaucracy in Brussels depends on you keeping quiet about his underworld background. One word from you and he’d lose everything that allows him to operate freely across Europe. He wants whatever was inside that bunker, what’s gone missing. Remember our briefing by the security people after you’d got your MI6 contact on the case? They think he’s dangled the possibility of a Nazi wonder-weapon in front of his terrorist customers. Imagine it: the biggest underworld deal of all time, far bigger than the old Soviet fissile materials that MI6 suspects he’s been feeding them for dirty bombs. It’s been quiet recently on the international terrorist front. The big boys are biding their time, because they’re expecting a delivery. But Saumerre knows that if we rumble him and he loses his credibility, he becomes a liability to them. If that happens, you may not even need to take him down. But we have to keep playing the game of bluff and counter-bluff as long as possible, to let him think we’ve found what he wanted in the bunker.’

‘If we had found it, the game would be over for him. He’d know he could never get his hands on it. And that’s when he’d become a liability for us. He’d assume we’d be about to blow his cover, and he’d have nothing to lose. He’d do everything he could to take us down with him.’

‘Or he could play a game of bluff with us.’

‘You mean take a risk that we were bluffing about having the weapon, and try to convince us that in fact he had somehow got hold of it? He could threaten to use it himself, but the bluff would last only as long as it took for his terrorist customers to realize he was stringing them along as well.’

Hiebermeyer took a deep breath. ‘There is something else. Jack. Just a slight concern I’ve had, and it’s been growing as I’ve been sitting out here thinking about the last few hours. Being in that bunker was a nightmare, and I’m only getting my thoughts straight now. It was a niggle, but now it’s become a worry. If Saumerre did claim he had the weapon, there’s just a chance he might not be bluffing.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

Hiebermeyer paused. ‘Major Penn’s operation is impressively tight, but there was one chink in the armour. They work in two-person teams. This morning things went slightly awry because one of Penn’s men, a Sergeant Jones, collapsed in that inner chamber and we had to take him out. It’s a big concern, because he’s still not regained consciousness, but the doctor is with him now inside the bunker. Apart from me, the only one inside that chamber this morning who wasn’t one of Penn’s team was the man paired with Sergeant Jones – a European Union Health and Safety inspector named Auxelle. He’d foisted himself on Penn yesterday, arriving at the perimeter roadblock in an EU limousine with a police motorcycle escort. By all accounts he was arrogant and pompous, but Penn had him checked out by MI6 before letting him in and there seemed to be no question over his credibility. He came with the highest EU authority.’

Jack turned to Hiebermeyer in alarm. ‘The highest authority in Brussels? Who was his line manager?’

‘That’s what I’ve just been wondering. I have a horrible feeling that one of Saumerre’s departments might be Health and Safety.’

‘ Shit,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘But there’s no chance of this man having removed anything from the bunker?’

‘Everyone is body-searched before leaving the double-lock chamber at the entrance, to make sure that they haven’t inadvertently got material on them from inside that might be contaminated. Each one of a pair is responsible for checking the other. But Sergeant Jones was down, and he was Dr Auxelle’s partner. In the concern to get Jones out of the laboratory chamber and attended to by the medic, there might have been a slip-up. What worries me is that we’re probably only talking about a test tube or a phial, very easily concealed in one of those suits. And Major Penn was completely preoccupied with Jones. They’ve worked together in a lot of bad places.’

Jack looked at Hiebermeyer intently. ‘Do you remember anything else about that laboratory? Anything odd?’

Hiebermeyer looked down and then nodded, putting his hand up to his forehead. ‘Something was lurking in the back of my mind, and I’ve just realized what it was. You remember I said the safe was open? All I could think about at the time – all I could think about until just now – was that whatever had been inside was gone. But there was something else. It should have rung a huge alarm bell at the time, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d just been stumbling over dead bodies. I should have held the reins tighter. Poor show, as your dad would have said.’

‘I’d probably have been worse,’ Jack said. ‘I’m not used to being in tombs full of corpses, like you.’

‘It was the interior of that refrigerator safe, visible because the door was open. Everything else in the bunker was covered in that yellow-green layer, the decomposition product. But the interior of the safe was gleaming. Gleaming. I should have realized that meant it had only just been opened.’

‘Were Jones and Auxelle in there by themselves?’

‘For a few minutes before Jones collapsed and Auxelle called us in to help.’

‘Okay. We need to have Auxelle detained. We need to get our contact in MI6 on to it and have him interrogated. And I don’t care how high-up he is in Brussels. We need to take him down now.’

‘Brussels won’t be happy with that. A secretive NATO team, mainly British, arresting a top EU inspector? And there’s another problem. The story would be impossible to contain, and it would blow this place wide open to police and journalists, exactly what Major Penn and his team are under the strictest instructions to avoid. Everything about this bunker needs to be kept top secret.’

‘Then I’ll find Auxelle and do it myself.’

Hiebermeyer eyed Jack shrewdly. ‘I think we should bring Major Penn in and tell him everything we know, the stuff MI6 may have kept from him about Saumerre and the whole backstory. I mean everything. He has a full special-forces security team surrounding this place, and exerts more authority than his rank suggests. Top secret operations like this to find and contain Nazi scientific sites have been going on since the end of the Second World War and are given all necessary resources by the former Allies, one area where the EU does not hold sway. It’s why MI6 are overseeing the operation. Just a hint of bacteriological contamination and Penn can lock down a site for miles around. He’s a pretty useful man for us to have on board.’

Jack stood up and paced across the grass, took a few deep breaths and looked around. Maurice was right. He needed to keep his cool, not to let his blood rise, to play the game carefully. He turned back. ‘One question’s nagging me. If Auxelle did take what was in that refrigerator, then what happened to the palladion? You said the door to the laboratory was already ajar when Penn’s men arrived there, and that the impression of the palladion in the straw in that crate was covered with the decomposition layer. Everything points to it being removed from the bunker in 1945. It must have been used to open the laboratory door some time before Mayne and Stein arrived, maybe somehow during the fight with the SS man. If it was the SS man who opened the door, then the palladion should have been found near his body. Yet there was nothing. Everything points to an accomplice, one who survived, though that still doesn’t explain why the accomplice would have left without removing the contents of the refrigerator.’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Penn has a theory about that. We had two hours together in the decontamination room and mulled it over. He’d been headhunted by MI6 at university and had actually done several courses at GCHQ Cheltenham before opting out and joining the army instead. One of the courses was on “need to know”, how to keep a network going while minimizing the number of people who are in on the whole picture. Like you he thought we might be looking at two operatives, but he took it further. Let’s imagine that one of them knew about the palladion and was also tasked to retrieve the phial in the refrigerator, the most secret and important part of the whole conspiracy. The person entrusted with that task, to take the deadly weapon to its next destination, had to be a particularly fanatical follower of the conspiracy originator, perhaps unique. If he was somehow unable to perform the task, then the fallback might be for the originator himself to try to retrieve it. But for that to happen, the originator had to have the palladion to open the chamber door. So the second man in the bunker knew nothing of the refrigerator but had been tasked to retrieve the palladion if something happened to the first man before he was able to get inside.’

‘So the first man is about to perform his task as Mayne and Stein arrive,’ Jack said slowly. ‘He dies in the ensuing struggle, killing Mayne and Stein in the process. But perhaps just as he is about to kill Mayne, pressing him against that door, he uses the palladion to open it, intending to leave Mayne and Stein’s bodies inside and lock the door behind him, concealing what had happened and keeping any other Allied troops who might enter the bunker away from the truth of that inner chamber for as long as possible. But Mayne kills the SS man with his knife as he himself is shot, and they both fall into the room together. The accomplice comes upon the scene and his only thought is his own specific task, to retrieve the palladion and take it to his master.’

‘And my friend’s discovery under the site of the flak tower in Berlin suggests that the palladion may have had more uses than opening this one door,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘The forensics lady was in the decontamination room with us after she’d returned from sampling those corpses. She suggested that you could combine the flu virus with a bacteriological agent to make it particularly deadly, adding something that would weaken the immune system to ensure that the virus was always fatal. Maybe this bunker wasn’t the only laboratory. Maybe there was another one, perhaps in Berlin.’

Jack pursed his lips. As he turned, he saw an army officer in a camouflage smock and beret approaching them rapidly from the Portakabin, followed close behind by a soldier. The officer wore a sidearm, and the soldier was carrying a rifle and swivelling round every few steps to survey their surroundings, talking into a headset. The soldier stood off to one side while the officer came up to them, his face grim. ‘Major David Penn, Royal Engineers. You’re Jack Howard. I recognize you from TV.’ He shook hands quickly and turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘I have some very bad news.’

Hiebermeyer stood up. ‘Yes?’

‘Sergeant Jones died ten minutes ago. He never regained consciousness.’

Hiebermeyer looked stunned. ‘ Mein Gott,’ he whispered. ‘Dead? How?’

Penn gazed down for a moment, then looked up and cleared his throat. ‘The team medics inspected his suit and his body. They found a tiny puncture in the upper right arm of his suit and a matching puncture in his skin. The puncture was from a syringe. Sergeant Jones didn’t die of natural causes. He was murdered.’

Hiebermeyer lurched backwards and sat down heavily. Jack had a sudden cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. Where was Auxelle? The soldier with the rifle walked quickly over and whispered into Penn’s ear, and after a few questions Penn turned back to them, undoing the flap of his holster and looking around. ‘I know what you’re going to ask. Auxelle left as soon as we exited the bunker. Urgent EU business back in Brussels. As soon as we spotted the puncture marks on Jones’ arm, I sent a Humvee from our outer roadblock racing after him. My soldier has just given me an update. They found the EU limousine by the side of the road five kilometres away, about the spot where my soldiers at the checkpoint had heard the sound of a helicopter landing and taking off. Auxelle was nowhere to be seen, but the driver of the limousine was still there. He’d been shot at close range in the back of the neck.’

Jack shut his eyes for a moment. So it begins. ‘In that laboratory in the bunker,’ he said. ‘You’re sure that refrigerator safe was open when you first saw it after going in to help Jones?’

‘Wide open and empty,’ Penn replied grimly. ‘I assumed that whatever had been inside was removed in those final days in 1945. But now I think those two Allied officers, Mayne and the American, actually stopped that happening. For more than seventy years, their actions prevented the world from being exposed to a weapon too awful to contemplate. But it looks as if I failed them today.’

‘Nobody has failed them,’ Jack said. ‘There’s an evil mastermind behind this. We had a run-in with him last year, and his existence has been plaguing me for six months. You could never have predicted what has happened.’

‘We’re finished here now,’ Penn said, putting a hand on his holster and pursing his lips. ‘From the forensic data on those exhumed bodies, we know there was a lethal biological agent contained in that laboratory, and that the corpses we saw on those gurneys had been the victims of experimentation. That means the agent might be present elsewhere in the bunker. Just before Jones died, I activated Protocol 15, which means that this place up to the perimeter of the airfield is out of bounds permanently. An SAS team and a full squadron of German military police are on the way to bolster perimeter security. The machinery we used to excavate the bunker will return this evening and begin widening the trench around the walls so it can be filled with thousands of tons of concrete, and after that’s been built up, there will be at least eight metres’ depth of concrete poured on the roof. This place will be buried like the Chernobyl reactor. I’m afraid that means those works of art and antiquities will never see the light of day after all. They probably wouldn’t have escaped the taint of this place anyway. And we’re going to have to leave Sergeant Jones’ body in there. That pinprick through his suit meant that his body was exposed to the atmosphere inside, and we can’t risk it.’

‘He had three small children,’ Hiebermeyer murmured, shaking his head. ‘He was only telling me about them a couple of hours ago.’

‘I’m their godfather. I’m going to have to break this to them.’ Penn bunched his fists, his voice tight with emotion. ‘I’d do anything to get my hands on Auxelle.’

Jack clicked open his phone. ‘We have a dedicated MI6 contact. It’s the same as the one overseeing you.’

‘Done,’ Penn said. ‘I made the call the instant we worked out what had happened to Jones. I used our secure line, and gave a full situation report.’

‘Good,’ Jack said, clicking shut his phone. ‘I’ll use the same secure line before we leave, if you don’t mind. Doubtless Saumerre will have disappeared from Brussels by now too. We have to let MI6 find him and Auxelle. They still won’t want to put out a warrant for them, but if anyone’s going to catch up with them, they will. We have to bide our time but stay on maximum alert. Meanwhile Maurice and I have an invitation to Berlin to visit a bunker site that may have a connection with this place and what was stored inside. We’d benefit from your expertise.’

‘Maurice told me about it. I have to go to Wales to visit Jones’ wife and children. But I don’t want to let go of this. I’ll call you.’ Penn turned and began to walk back to the Portakabin, followed by the soldier. Jack thought for a moment, and then ran after him, catching up with him just before the entrance. ‘David,’ he exclaimed.

Penn stopped and turned around. ‘What is it?’

Jack unzipped the pocket of his khaki trousers, carefully pulled out a presentation case and opened it. Inside was a Military Cross, the silver of the cross tarnished and the mauve and white ribbon faded, but pinned carefully into the case. ‘I told you on the phone last week about Hugh Frazer, the army officer who’d been in the camp and was a friend of Major Mayne’s. Before Hugh died, I promised him that if we found Mayne’s body, I’d leave this with him. Mayne won it in North Africa when the two of them were together in the same unit, and Hugh kept hold of it when he dealt with Mayne’s effects after he’d gone missing. He said Mayne was a bloody good soldier, the best. I was wondering whether you could leave this with Sergeant Jones. Hugh would have liked to know that a fellow soldier like you was putting this where it belonged.’

He handed the medal to Penn, who stared at it for a moment and then gently closed the case. Jack could see that his face was taut with emotion. Penn nodded, and then clicked his heels. ‘I’ll see to it.’ He turned and walked up the steps and through the Portakabin door. Jack walked back quickly to Hiebermeyer, who was leaning forward on the bench with his head in his hands. Jack sat down beside him, put a hand on his shoulder and then stared forward himself, looking pensively at the bleak wasteland surrounding the runway. His dive to Atlantis seemed light years away, yet he remembered the extraordinary, harrowing image on the ROV monitor of that chamber in the volcano, and then Lanowski’s remarkable ideas about the Atlantis papyrus, something he would show Maurice when they had got away from this place. He peered with concern at his friend. He would also tell him about the exciting discovery of the Egyptian statue at Troy, but not now; that could be kept in reserve. He knew they had to do everything to keep from being overwhelmed by a sense of foreboding, a worst-case scenario with Saumerre and the Nazi weapon that could be playing out at this very moment. They needed to keep lifelines to the archaeological prizes beyond the darkness Jack knew lay ahead. He opened his phone, and looked in his inbox. Still no word from Katya about the ancient symbols.

Hiebermeyer straightened up, took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt, then looked at Jack. ‘I’ve had an invitation from my Tante Heidi to visit her. She wants us to go to Wewelsburg Castle.’

‘Himmler’s SS headquarters?’

‘I don’t know why. But it was after I told her I was coming to the bunker. She insisted that she had something to tell me, and I called her from the decontamination room and told her you’d come along too. Okay?’

Jack gave him a tired smile. ‘I need to make that phone call to our MI6 contact in London, and then there’s a jeep waiting to take us off the airfield to a rental car I’d already got arranged in Bremen. We can drive from there to Wewelsburg. Are you all right?’

‘I’m supposed to be the one watching out for you, not the other way around.’

‘Now you see why I didn’t want you to come here.’

They both stood up. Hiebermeyer winced as he tried to flex his injured wrist, and then relaxed his arm in the sling. The jeep that had brought Jack from the Tornado was waiting again outside the Portakabin, and they walked towards it. Jack looked at the bubble over the bunker, trying to imagine what lay inside. Hiebermeyer stopped and stared at it. ‘This place,’ he jerked his head, ‘this is what most people imagine the worst of war is all about. This is war spread beyond the battlefield to its worst excess, to genocide. But the place we’re going to now, to the heart of Nazi Germany, we have a word in German for what went on there. We call it Gesamtkrieg.’

Jack nodded. He knew what that meant.

Total war.