The Isis Covenant

VIII

‘I think I’ve got something for you.’

‘Sorry, can you repeat that. This line’s not too good. Who am I speaking with?’

‘It’s Jamie Saintclair. From London. We talked about Geistjaeger 88.’ He hoped the line was bad enough to hide his disappointment that Danny Fisher hadn’t remembered him. But Detective Fisher had just finished a fourteen-hour shift that involved a long day scrambling through Brooklyn’s biggest garbage facility in the hunt for missing body parts and her numbed mind needed a few moments to recognize the Englishman with the sexy accent.

‘Oh. Hi there.’

‘I think I’ve got something for you,’ he said again.

‘Go.’

It took a second before he worked out that ‘go’ meant speak. ‘Geistjaeger 88 was set up in nineteen forty-two as a rival to Herman Goring’s art-looting organization, but it had a slightly more specialized remit.’

‘Uhuh?’

‘Its task was to hunt down works of art and historical artefacts linked to the occult. Himmler believed that if he could harness the power of the past, the Third Reich would be able to build super-weapons that would allow Hitler to bring the world to its knees. We’re talking death rays and flying saucers here.’ He explained the former Bavarian chicken farmer’s obsession with the origins of the Aryan race, which had spurred him to send expeditions to Tibet and Siberia in the search for the underground cities of the Vril, a mythical people said to have been the inhabitants of sunken Atlantis. ‘Among other things, he believed that the Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced the side of Christ as he hung on the cross, had magical powers that would help the Nazis achieve world domination. Berndt Hartmann was one of the men whose job it was to track it down. Hartmann didn’t fit your normal image of an SS man. Most of them were just as you see them in all the pictures: tall, blond and very Germanic, in a square-jawed, bullet-headed kind of way. At the start of the war they had to have flawless criminal records and you could be chucked out for having a single missing tooth. According to the sketchy description Ritter gave his interrogators, Hartmann was short, skinny and he’d just been released from jail in Hamburg after doing time for bank robbery. Ritter was a clever chap. When he was appointed to command G 88 he very quickly worked out that the job required a team with a special combination of talents. One of those talents was an ability to open a locked safe without blowing up or burning what was inside. That’s where Hartmann came in. Ritter took a liking to him and he became Geistjaeger 88’s safecracker and unofficial mascot. They would have trawled Europe looking for anything of religious or ritual significance. They’d target museums, private art collections, churches for the bones of the saints, splinters of the true cross; that kind of thing. One of Himmler’s top men, a fellow called Walter Schellenberg, wrote after the war that he spent months touring churches in Italy looking for the last known copy of the Roman historian Tacitus’s work Germania, because it was thought to hold the earliest clues to the origin of the German peoples. There’s a theory that Schellenberg actually found the sword of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, but if he did it disappeared with thousands of other treasures at the end of the war. That sword is said to have been involved in magic rituals. Himmler loved that type of thing. The occult was his passion.’

‘I thought slaughtering Jews was his passion?’

‘Actually, he was quite a reluctant killer, physically that is, but that’s not the point. Geistjaeger 88 operated in southern Russia, Romania, Hungary and France, but in the great battles that followed D-Day they were forced to retreat back to Germany with everyone else. I’ve found a specific reference to them in May nineteen forty-five as part of a hotchpotch of SS units defending the Reichschancellery.’

‘How does that help us?’

‘Their commander, Standartenführer Bodo Ritter, survived the war. He seems to have got out before they were trapped. Most of the rest were killed, but two of them just disappeared.’

‘Let me guess. Hartmann?’

‘Berndt Hartmann and Max Dornberger.’

There was a pause as she considered the names.

‘What do we know about Dornberger?’

‘Next to nothing, except that he was the unit’s political officer, which probably makes him a rabid Nazi.’

Danny tested the new information for possibilities for a few moments before discarding it. Something else occurred to her. ‘Hey, I almost forgot. I have a picture I’d like you to take a look at. I’ll e-mail you right this second.’

He heard the click as she sent the message and they waited for it to drop into Jamie’s inbox.

‘So what does an NYPD detective do when she’s not catching killers?’ he said to fill the silence.

‘Are you flirting with me, Mr Saintclair?’

He laughed. ‘If I am, you should call me Jamie.’

‘She sleeps, Mr Saintclair. She works, she eats and she sleeps. Not quite as glamorous as being an art dealer.’

He was about to disabuse her of the preposterous notion that his life was in the least glamorous when the computer gave a distinct ‘beep’ as the e-mail arrived. It contained an attachment and he double clicked to download it.

‘Just bear with me a second.’

‘Sure, take all the time you want.’

The image that appeared on the screen was of a stylized single eye, topped by a curving brow, and it looked oddly familiar, except for one thing.

‘At first glance, I’d say it looks Egyptian.’

‘That’s what our experts over this side of the pond reckoned. Trouble is we can’t find anything that links the dead family, or any of their potential killers, to Egypt. The question I have to ask you is: do you know anything that might tie it to this Nazi ghosthunter outfit or Heinrich Himmler and his obsession with the occult?’

‘Good question.’

‘And the answer is?’

‘I have no idea.’

He could feel her disappointment at the other end of the line.

‘Maybe it would help if I knew where you found the symbol?’

‘It was on one of the victims.’

‘When you say on, what specifically do you mean?’

‘Specifically?’ She hesitated, unsure just how much information to reveal. ‘Well, Mr Saintclair, it was carved into her forehead with the point of a hunting knife. Now what do you think of that?’