The Mask of Troy

12

M ayne and Stein walked forward in an uneasy silence, one on either side of the bridleway, occasionally raising their arms high to avoid patches of stinging nettles. Mayne kept his revolver cocked and at the ready. Suddenly there was a commotion and a woman lurched out of the undergrowth in front of them. He aimed his revolver and kept it trained on her. She staggered about, and then stood a few yards away from them, swaying. Her hair had been tied back in a bun, but was dishevelled, and her face was scratched and bruised. She wore an overcoat, muddied but decent, and she was stout, well-fed. She was clearly not one of the inmates.

She lurched closer, staring around as if she were being hunted, then peered hard at Mayne, looking at the unit flashes on his battledress, at the crown of his rank on his shoulder lapels. She had little piggy eyes. She smiled to herself, muttering feverishly. ‘You are Englisher, ja?’ She spoke with a heavy accent. Mayne nodded, keeping the pistol trained on her. She clapped her hands, her face beaming, and came closer, grabbing his arm. Her breath smelled like food, like meat, a foul smell in this place, obscene. He shook her off and pushed her roughly back. She came at him again. ‘English officer? Thank Gott you have come. You will rescue me from this filth, these Juden. I know what you English really think. You don’t believe me? Look. I am not one of them.’ She peered furtively around and then shrugged off the overcoat. Underneath she was wearing the tunic of the SS-Totenkopfverbande. She had been a camp guard. Mayne suddenly remembered. The Lagerfuhrerin, the hated camp leader. The one who had escaped into the forest. The one who had taken the girl. She thrust her lapels towards him, showing the death’s-head insignia, then stood back and held her hands out, as if to rest her case. She grinned insanely, gesturing at Stein as well. ‘ Ja? Ja? ’

Mayne raised the Webley, aimed at her stomach and fired. She lurched backwards and then fell forward on her knees, a look of shock on her face. A gob of blood spurted out of her mouth and she made a terrible gurgling sound. He raised the revolver again and shot her in the head. She snapped back, her knees contorted. The bullet had blown the top of her head off, and fragments of bone and brain spattered the ground. Blood pumped out of the wound in a gush, and then stopped. She lay still, with one eye open and the other half shut. The sound of the shots had been a dull thud, not a crack, as if the trees and the weight of this place had dampened the report. Mayne broke open the revolver, extracted the two spent cartridges and replaced them with new ones he took from his webbing pouch. He snapped the revolver shut, then glanced at the body. ‘Funny. That’s the first blood I’ve seen in this place.’

Stein stared hard at the corpse, then looked at Mayne. ‘I’m Jewish, you know.’

‘I guessed it. Your name.’

They continued walking up the track. The trees were now bigger and the canopy denser, obscuring the sunlight. The thick scrub on either side of the track near the forest entrance gave way to large trees, their lower branches dead and leafless, allowing them to see into the gloom on either side. Regular rows of pines from an old plantation were bisected by the path. As they passed each row it was as if they were parting veil after veil, compressing the view ahead, making them look sideways down the tunnels between the trees where the perspective seemed clearer. It was a curious trick of the mind, disconcerting. There was no sign of any more people, but Mayne knew there were others out there. He wished he could hear better, wished his body was less damaged. In past wars he would have been dead by now, a warrior who had done his deeds on the battlefield and could die with honour. He felt as if he were on borrowed time, and those words, glory, honour, had a hollow ring to them, only meaningful in brief snatches of daydream when he remembered an innocent version of himself before the war, before he knew what Homer had really meant, what heroes really did.

The image of the woman he had just shot flashed before him, grotesque, gushing blood. It meant nothing to him. He wondered whether like Homer he would be able to turn away from the fall of Troy, leave unsaid what no poet could describe. Perhaps this place, this horror, was beyond description, and would be blotted out in a paralysis of imagination that would follow this war, a war whose end seemed to recede the closer he thought he had got to it.

‘This must be it.’ Stein paused as the track came out on another roadway, with tyre tread marks clearly visible in the dried-up mud on either side. He took a compass out of his pocket and held it level. ‘This runs east-west, exactly where I thought a road might run into the forest from the far side.’ He pocketed the compass, and looked up at the trees. ‘Completely invisible from the air.’

They turned right and followed the track as it curved round and headed west again. After about a hundred metres it began to drop in a slight gradient, cutting down into the forest floor. They carried on down until they came to an overhang created by giant tree trunks that had been deliberately laid across the track like roof beams, with enough space beneath them for a large lorry to back down. Mayne scanned the gloom ahead. ‘This must lead to an underground bunker, cleverly concealed. They had to remove some big trees to dig it out, but then they covered it again by transplanting trees over an area about two hundred yards square, beyond those beams. That’s what must have kept those Soviet prisoners busy. They’ve even cabled together the tops of some of the big trees surrounding the clearing to bend them inwards, to make it look like continuous forest from the air.’

He held his revolver at the ready and they advanced cautiously under the beams. About ten metres ahead he could see the dull grey of a concrete wall, just as he had guessed. In the middle of the wall was the black face of a metal door, with two massive metal latches padlocked over it. Mayne reached the door and tried the padlocks, to no avail. He stood back, took a deep breath, then squatted down. ‘We can’t do anything here by ourselves. We need to wait for my sappers to come and blow these latches off.’

Stein tried the locks. ‘What time is Lewes due back?’

Mayne checked his watch. ‘Seventeen thirty hours in the camp. That’s almost three hours from now. We can either go back to the camp now, or leave going back for an hour so we don’t have to spend any more time than we need to in that place.’ He looked at Stein, and they both slumped back wordlessly against the metal door. Mayne took out his cigarettes, but then thought better of it. He craved the nicotine, but the smell was too close to the smell of burning in the camp. He wondered if he’d ever smoke again. He shoved the pack back into his battledress tunic, cracked open his revolver to check the chambers again, then stared at Stein. ‘This monuments and fine arts stuff. It’s really a front, isn’t it? You’ve pretty well implied as much. I never bought the idea that art was such a priority. I was there when we bombed the monastery at Cassino, remember? And look what we did to Dresden. This is total war. And anyway, I saw the way you handled that pistol. You’re not just an honorary soldier.’

Stein was silent for a moment, then spoke quietly. ‘The MFAA is genuine. And we’re all experts, passionate about art. But you’re right. I did the full Special Operations Executive training course. We’re the kind of people they wanted. Academics, art historians, archaeologists, people with a keen eye, able to spot details, to find clues, accustomed to working in the field. But not laboratory scientists. They come later.’

‘Scientists?’

Stein stared at him. ‘The war may nearly be over. This war. But this may only be the beginning. We know the Nazis were developing super-bombs, using nuclear fission. We’re pretty confident that most of the research was still on the drawing board, and the Allied bombing campaign has wiped out most of that. But there’s another threat, even more terrifying. Have you ever wondered why Hitler never used chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield? It wasn’t for any ethical reason. Look at what we’ve just seen, the camp. There were no ethics.’ Stein shook his head. ‘It’s because the Nazi research efforts were not going towards tactical weapons, but towards strategic ones. Not battlefield weapons, but weapons of mass destruction. Towards something even worse than that. Towards a doomsday weapon.’

‘ A doomsday weapon? What the hell do you mean?’

‘With the end so near, there might be a final fanatical edict. Remember what Hitler said at the Nuremberg rally in 1938? He said that either there would be a thousand-year Reich, or there would be no Germany. No Germany means no world. Hitler made a suicide pact with his own people. And if the time came, if his armies were truly close to annihilation, there had to be a way of unleashing Armageddon. We know from our interrogated Nazi official that the signal was the Allied crossing of the Rhine. That was when Hitler knew he could never win on the battlefield. A small number of men were activated to be ready to unleash hell, to wait for the time of Hitler’s choosing. We fear that time is nearly upon us.’

Mayne tapped the steel door. ‘And you think this is it?’

‘We believe that stolen art caches, maybe in bunkers like this one, might have been a cover for research facilities. They would have been the most top-secret facilities of all, concealed with all the ingenuity the Nazis could muster, even from their own people. Nuclear weapons research needs a lot of space. For biological research, the kind of thing I’m talking about, you only need a small room and a school chemistry set.’

Mayne suddenly had a cold feeling in his gut. ‘Good God. And a supply of human test subjects. Those people the Frenchman told Cameron about, trucked in here by the Nazis.’

‘That’s why the camp was also a plausible cover. Nobody was going to bat an eyelid if they saw truckloads of people go into camps like this but never come out again.’

‘So what do we do?’ Mayne murmured. ‘Get the RAF raid cancelled? Corps HQ could get a reserve brigade up to this forest by nightfall. Mop up any SS still out here.’

Stein shook his head. ‘This has to stay top secret. It’s not only Nazi fanatics we’re worried about. There are others, too.’

Mayne paused. ‘The Soviets?’

‘Allied intelligence is riddled with spies, Communist sympathizers from before the war. A lot of them came out of Oxford and Cambridge. I took a chance with you. For all I know, you might be one of them.’

Mayne snorted. ‘I was an idealist, but my fantasy world was three thousand years old, the world of Homer. You’re right, though. There were plenty of Communists among my school and university friends. And while we’re pointing fingers, several art historians I knew, even at the Courtauld.’

‘That’s what I mean. I could reel off some big names from the art world, really big names, now working in intelligence. Keeping these people in place, using them, has been part of the complex planning for the world after the war. Some of our discoveries of Nazi research have deliberately been leaked. And that’s where the background of the MFAA comes into play. We’re scholars, not generals or politicians. We want to do all we can to end this war, but our aim is not to find weapons that can be used against the Nazis. Our aim is preventing such weapons from ever being used. Here’s the take. Either everyone has them, or nobody does. If both sides in the new world have horror weapons, then nobody will use them, right? That’s the gamble. Our intelligence planners call it mutually assured destruction. If everything works according to plan, that’ll become the catchphrase of the new war ahead of us, a war of standoff. It’ll be the nearest we can get to recreating the detente in Europe during the decades after the defeat of Napoleon, before the Franco-Prussian War tipped the balance and set all this in train.’

‘So both the Allies and the Soviets will have nuclear technology,’ Mayne murmured, keeping his eyes on the woods.

Stein nodded, waving his pistol. ‘But a biological weapon is another matter. All you need is a test tube. There may be many bit-players who could become terrifyingly dangerous in a fragmented world: resurgent fascist groups, or religious extremists like the Wahabists of the Middle East. A flashpoint may be a new Jewish homeland in Palestine. Our arrival may have saved those people in the camp today, but the fate of their children is what I’m talking about. The fate of all children.’

Mayne checked his watch. He looked around, scanning the trees, cocking his good left ear up, listening. He turned to Stein. ‘All right. So what exactly are we talking about?’

‘Tell me about 1918.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What happened.’

‘Well, the end of the Great War. The year I was born.’

‘And the year of the influenza epidemic.’

‘That too.’ Mayne paused. ‘That killed my mother, a few months after I was born.’ He stared at Stein, feeling an icy grip in his stomach. He stared again, then looked at the metal door. ‘ You’re not serious.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘They couldn’t have done that. It’d be suicidal.’

Stein spoke urgently, under his breath. ‘I’m deadly serious. The Nazis could contemplate anything. Spanish influenza was the worst epidemic in human history. Allied scientists have been desperate to understand it. Here’s why it’s so terrifying. Normally, most flu deaths are among people with weaker immune systems: the elderly, children, those already ill. In 1918 it was different. Most of the victims were healthy young adults. I’m old enough to remember it. The scientists have made a breakthrough, and it’s terrifying. It looks as if the virus caused the body’s immune system to auto-destruct. The stronger the immune system, the more deadly the result. At the time, so many young adults were being killed in the war that the epidemic just seemed like an extension of that. But the Spanish flu infected at least a third of the world’s population. It probably killed fifty million people. Fifty million. That’s more than five times the number killed in action in the Great War.’

Mayne swallowed hard. ‘And you think the Nazis have been experimenting with it?’

‘The alarm bell rang after we liberated Paris. By then, most of the French Jews had been deported to the camps, but there were still a few slave labourers left. One of them told US interrogators a bizarre story. In 1941, a small group of Jews had been detailed to join two SS doctors in a night visit to the Pere Lachaise cemetery, the largest in Paris. They dug up half a dozen graves. The doctors knew what they were looking for. The graves all contained people who had died in 1918. They were well-off people, all buried in lead-lined coffins.’

‘Meaning the possibility of intact bodies? Where the virus might still be found?’

Stein pursed his lips. ‘The coffins were dug up but left unopened and quickly trucked away. The Jewish labourers were shot over the open graves. One man escaped among the tombs. The entire Gestapo in Paris were detailed to hunt for him. He remained on the run. He’s in quarantine in an isolation facility in England now.’

Mayne was beginning to feel physically sick. ‘Do you think this place, where we are now, was where they brought the bodies?’

‘Something was going on here. Remember what I said. You don’t need much space. Cold storage for bodies, incubators, a basic microbiology lab. The kind of weapon we’re talking about is invisible to the human eye.’

‘And what Cameron told us. A place with a supply of healthy young people for experimentation.’

Stein stared at Mayne. ‘All I can tell you for certain is this. Hitler had it planned from before the war. Either a thousand-year Reich, or nothing. Here we are, probably days from the end of the Reich. If Nazi scientists did manage to isolate the Spanish flu virus, to nurture it – maybe, Lord help us, to mutate it to a more virulent form – then someone will have been detailed to use it. Someone who might be here now, waiting. You’ve seen how fanatical the SS can be. There would be no morality to hold them back. Only the order of their Fuhrer, and that would be absolute. I saw the flu epidemic of 1918 with my own eyes. Whole wards full of young people drowning in pneumonia, screaming as their immune systems ate into their brains. It seemed like a world gone mad. Even H.G. Wells couldn’t have thought it up. And now, in this war, in this place, at Belsen, at Auschwitz, we’ve seen what war can do. There are no boundaries. With a virus like Spanish influenza deliberately infecting the world, with all the cold efficiency of Nazi planning, there will be no miracle this time, no recovery from horror and death.’

Mayne shut his eyes for a moment. A world gone mad. He looked at Stein, started to speak, then stopped. He had had a terrible thought. The war in north-west Europe, the war since Normandy, had gone on far longer than anyone had thought it would. The Allies had mustered overwhelming forces. Yet there had been long periods of stalemate, of slow progress, of seeming vacillation as the armies lumbered forward. He could barely think it. Had it been deliberate? Had the generals been forced to stall by Allied intelligence, to allow intelligence agents to find this horror, this doomsday weapon, before the armies entered the homeland and Hitler issued the order? He stared at Stein. ‘You think the reverse swastika is the secret symbol?’

‘We think it’s an activation code. We captured a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer who was one of the few who knew of the plan, and he eventually talked. He only knew a little about it, but it was enough. We think the orders were sent out from the Fuhrerbunker at the British and American crossing of the Rhine, Operation Plunder, on the twenty-third of March. That was three weeks ago. There will probably be a redundancy, maybe two, three, four individuals converging on the place where the weapon is kept, if we’re right. Enough to ensure that one gets through.’

‘And then some kind of final code. A trigger.’

‘The word that Hitler is dead. Has committed suicide.’

‘What was the code called?’

‘The officer eventually told us. It was Das Agamemnon-Code.’

‘The Agamemnon Code,’ Mayne repeated. ‘My God. I knew it.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s that name. Agamemnon. I know where that symbol came from. It was a device, an ancient artefact. One of the most astonishing artefacts ever unearthed.’

Stein paused. ‘From Mycenae. We know. We don’t know the details of how it was discovered. That’s irrelevant to us. But the man we interrogated told us it was from Mycenae, and secretly stored for decades in Schliemann’s home town of Nuebukow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Ahnenerbe officers found it when they went there under the express orders of Heinrich Himmler to look for Schliemann’s treasures. They loved everything to do with Troy because of the swastika imagery. Himmler had done his research. He thought the golden swastika was the palladion, the lost symbol of Troy. It was made of gold and meteoritic material, from an ancient meteorite that fell on Troy far back in prehistory. They took it in secret triumph to the SS fantasy-castle at Wewelsburg, where it stayed reverently locked away. It was going to be the centrepiece of the Fuhrermuseum at Linz, another Nazi fantasy. Where it is now is anybody’s guess. But somewhere on the way it got hijacked as the symbol of the final apocalyptic decree. The Agamemnon Code.’

Mayne was silent for a moment. He spoke quietly. ‘Just one question. When was that Nazi interrogated? When did you know that the crossing of the Rhine would be the signal?’

‘Soon after the liberation of Paris. August 1944.’

‘ Christ. August 1944. So you’ve been searching for more than six months.’

‘As you have been. You didn’t know it, but you were too. You said it yourself in the jeep on the way in. Strategic intelligence. Look how many outfits there are operating ahead of our lines. Your unit, 30 AU. Mine, the MFAA. After Normandy, the whole of British Special Operations Executive redirected their efforts towards uncovering secrets. But hardly anyone knows the real reason. If all goes to plan, hardly anyone will ever know. It will go to their graves with them. With us. I happen to be one of those few. And I’m telling you because we’re so close to it here, closer than we’ve ever been. And the clock is ticking. Hitler can’t last much longer. What frightens me is that whoever it is might be frightened themselves into taking action now, in case they’re discovered. If I’m right about this place.’

‘Still a big if.’ Mayne leaned back. He had meant to ask, but could not. It would do no good to know. It was almost beyond contemplation. He thought of the terrible grind of the war since Normandy, all the friends he had lost, the killing he himself had done, then the dreadful camp, all of those deaths, the girl with the harp, what had happened to her in this forest. Was all of that a price that had been paid to get them, the two of them, by chance, to where they were now, this day? He shut the thought from his mind. He took a deep breath and knelt up, checking his watch. ‘Right. I think I need a breather from this place. From everything you’ve just been saying. Let’s get back. Lewes should be setting out from Corps HQ by now. Knowing him, he’ll be early. Doesn’t like to leave me alone. We can meet him at the camp gate.’

There was a rustle in the foliage behind them. Mayne spun round, revolver at the ready. A man lurched out, dressed in the tattered blue-striped uniform of a camp inmate. His arms were up, hands open towards them. His head was roughly shaven and he was gaunt-faced, his eyes sunken. ‘ Juden. Juden,’ he said in a cracked voice, pointing at himself with one hand, gesturing desperately with the other at Mayne’s revolver. He pulled back his left sleeve and revealed a tattoo like the one the nurse had shown them on the child from Auschwitz, but raw, inflamed. Stein put his hand on Mayne’s arm and he slowly lowered the pistol. Stein waved at the man to calm down. ‘ Shalom aleichem,’ he said.

‘ Aleichem shalom,’ the man replied, looking pathetically grateful. Stein spoke urgently with him in Yiddish, asking short questions and the man answering rapidly, several times pointing to the structure behind them and then down the side of the building, where all Mayne could see was the buried concrete wall. Stein put his hand up to silence the man and turned to Mayne. ‘I think he’s genuine. He says he’s Hungarian Jewish.’

‘There were Hungarian fascists among the Waffen SS we captured at Cassino,’ Mayne murmured, his finger still on the trigger. ‘Not Jews, of course, but some of them knew Yiddish and could pass muster.’

‘He speaks the Hungarian dialect of Yiddish flawlessly. I know it, because my mother’s family were originally from the German borderland near Hungary.’

Mayne pursed his lips. ‘So what’s his story?’

‘He says he was one of the final batch who were deported by the Nazis from Budapest to Auschwitz, late last year. He was selected for something called the Zondercommando, Jewish assistants who cleared the bodies from the gas chambers and then burned them.’

‘He told you that?’

‘That’s what I mean. Why tell something like that if you’re spinning a tale?’

‘Because it makes the story more convincing. Go on.’

Stein saw Mayne’s concern, and paused. ‘He said he was singled out with several others and brought here about three months ago. He said the Nazis were always bringing small batches of healthy young men to the camp. That’s exactly what Cameron told us. They were kept separate from the others, well fed, then brought into this building. None of them came out alive. The bodies were never sent to the camp crematorium but were buried in a deep lime-filled pit on the edge of the forest, by men in protective overalls and gas masks.’

‘He must have overheard us talking about the virus. That sounds like confirmation of experimentation on humans. Exactly what we might want to hear.’

Stein looked uncertain. ‘He says he doesn’t speak English. Look at him. He doesn’t understand a word we’re saying. He says he and several others escaped into the forest five days ago. They’ve been hunting down and killing any of the former SS guards they’ve found hiding out here. That’s also what we heard was going on.’

‘Strange they didn’t get that woman, the Lagerfuherin. Her disguise wasn’t going to fool anyone.’

‘I mentioned that to him. Apparently she only fled into the forest yesterday, when the troops arrived. But this man and his comrades didn’t want to put themselves at any more risk. Once the camp was liberated, they just wanted to survive. They knew she’d be caught eventually, precisely because she made so little effort to disguise herself. He said that he and the others just wanted to wait for Allied soldiers like us to arrive so they could show the world this place. I told him the forest was due to be bombed, that it was time to leave. He got agitated. You saw that. Went very pale. He said we had to see what was inside the bunker then, immediately. They’ve got the keys. They took them off a dead SS man. He knows another way in.’

‘You mean where he was gesturing?’

‘Around the corner. Behind those fallen logs. Apparently, it’s where they used to take the bodies out.’

Mayne took a deep breath. He felt a sudden jolt of pain in the old wound in his shoulder, cutting into him like a knife, but he kept steady and gestured with his revolver. ‘All right. We haven’t got time for more of this. We need to get back to Lewes. Tell him to show us the way. Quickly.’

Stein spoke in Yiddish to the man, who put his hands down, nodded enthusiastically and scurried towards the corner of the concrete wall about five metres beyond the barred door. Mayne and Stein followed him around the corner, ducking beneath a jumble of logs and cut boughs that partly concealed a ramp leading down at a low angle along the side of the building, ending about three metres below the level of the surrounding forest. It was a loading bay, wide enough for a small lorry to back down. On the side of the building was a jumble of cut logs that Mayne guessed had been dropped there within the past few weeks to hide the entrance.

The man began to shift the logs aside, working with ease. Mayne remembered his story. His strength seemed plausible. In the death camps, only the most proficient workers would have been kept alive, and this man’s job at Auschwitz had been to haul and stack bodies. Even so, his wiry frame concealed remarkable strength for one who had eaten little for weeks. Perhaps the adrenalin of the moment was what kept him going, if liberation was what he and his comrades had been waiting for. Mayne kept his revolver unholstered, but lowered it. The man pushed aside the final log to reveal a metal door, smaller than the other entrance. He straightened up, wiping his brow, then produced a key from the chain around his neck and inserted it in the padlock that hung from a massive metal latch across the door. The lock sprang open and he removed it, dropping it to the ground. He swung open the latch, pushing the door inwards, then reached inside and switched on a light, before turning and speaking quickly to Stein in Yiddish. Stein followed and gestured back to Mayne. ‘He says the place has its own generator, but after the Allied bombing of the hydroelectric power stations last year, they installed a couple of charged-up U-boat batteries for back-up. There’s enough electricity to keep the basic amenities going for years, decades. They needed it for dehumidifiers, apparently, and other equipment.’

Mayne peered in. ‘I wonder what that equipment might have been,’ he murmured. ‘Dehumidifiers I can understand, though. It must get damp down here. A problem for storage.’ He followed Stein into a dimly lit corridor about ten metres long. At either end were glass-fronted booths, evidently security posts. He peered into the booth at the entrance. Everything still seemed in place, as if it had been hastily abandoned, the phone still on its receiver, and stationery and other paraphernalia neatly arranged. The man spoke in Yiddish again, and Stein looked back at Mayne. ‘Apparently it was only abandoned by the SS a few days ago, when they knew the camp was about to be surrendered. Our man says he and his comrades were waiting in the woods and ambushed the guards. This place was stocked up for a siege, and this is where he and his friend have been getting their food.’

They reached the far end of the corridor. The booth contained an MG-42 machine gun on a tripod, its receiver still glistening with oil and a bullet belt slinking down to a cartridge box on the floor, like a coiled serpent. There was a clang and Mayne turned back in alarm, his revolver raised. The metal door had swung shut. The man spoke quickly to Stein, who put a hand on Mayne’s arm. ‘Don’t worry. He says the door’s on an angled pivot, and closed itself. The Nazis didn’t want anyone stumbling in here.’

Mayne felt uneasy, confined. It was as if they had entered the underworld, and passed beyond a portal where return might be impossible. ‘All right. Let’s get this over and done with.’

A locked door barred their way. The man produced another key and opened the padlock, and the door swung open. The interior was already lit, with bare bulbs hanging from wires strung high above. It was a cavernous chamber, with curved walls like a Nissen hut. The lattice of steel reinforcement rods in the concrete was clearly visible, evidently designed to withstand bomb blast. The shape reminded Mayne of the London underground station where he had sheltered during a German bombing raid early in the war. He looked around. It was packed with wooden shipping crates, pushed together like old coffins in a crypt, leaving a narrow passage ahead to another door at the far end. The man was already halfway down the passage, gesturing for them to follow. Mayne and Stein stood transfixed, staring at the crates.

‘Is this what I think it is?’ Mayne murmured.

‘Only one way to find out.’

Mayne holstered his revolver and unsheathed the commando knife he kept at the back of his webbing belt. He approached the nearest crate, then quickly prised up the lid and toppled it off. He sheathed the knife, and they both peered in at a mass of crumpled paper and straw packing material. He reached in and pulled out handfuls of the material, and they both gasped. ‘These are canvases, old paintings,’ he exclaimed.

‘ I knew it. Let me have a look at one,’ Stein said, reaching in and pulling out more of the packing material. ‘I just need to identify one painting. Just one old master. Then we can keep going.’

Mayne carefully pulled out a framed painting, propped it on the crate and ripped open the protective paper that had been wrapped crudely around it, revealing the canvas beneath. Stein caught his breath again. ‘This is wonderful.’ He whipped on a pair of spectacles and took out a torch, shining it at the painting, the deep colours and imagery of the canvas reflected at them. ‘ Portrait of a Young Man, by Raphael,’ he murmured. ‘Stolen in 1941 from the Czawarky Museum in Krakow, Poland, on the personal orders of Goring.’ He took off his glasses and looked around. ‘That makes this place very important indeed. It could be an absolute treasure trove.’

Mayne looked at the canvas, and shook his head in disbelief. He knew this painting well. He had given a print of it to Hugh before the war, had hung it over the fireplace of his college sitting room in Oxford. They had shared a bottle of wine in front of it, then gone for a walk along the river Isis. It had been one of those perfect days. He looked down for a moment. He wondered how Hugh was now. He hadn’t looked at all well. He hoped he wasn’t with his SAS unit somewhere on the edge of this forest, looking for the Germans, waiting. He hoped they had taken him out of the line. The end of the war was so close now. Hugh must survive. Mayne found himself suddenly crying, weeping, here of all places, in this awful bunker. He wiped his eyes, and shuddered. Please God, let Hugh survive.

The man shouted to them in Yiddish, his voice harsher now, agitated. Stein listened, then turned to Mayne. ‘He says this is only the beginning. He says there’s more, much more. He says we need to follow him to the end, to the door at the other side.’

Stein stared hard for a moment into the eyes of the young man in the painting, shook his head, smiled broadly and then turned away. Mayne pulled the protective paper back over the painting, then followed him. A few steps on he saw another open crate, close to the wall. He squeezed quickly between the boxes to have a look. This crate had also been packed with straw. It was lit by a bare light bulb directly overhead. He leaned awkwardly over and put his fingers on the edge of the crate, pulling himself forward by the strength of his arms, careful not to twist his bad shoulder. He peered inside.

He had found it.

It was there, nestled in straw at the bottom of the crate, partially wrapped in a piece of old burlap, as if it had been brought here recently and hastily unpackaged, not part of the carefully packed collection around him. It was resting the way the old foreman of Schliemann’s had described it, in reverse. A swastika, symbol of unimaginable horror, but somehow different, speaking of a different world, one Mayne had stepped out of six long years ago. He heard the ringing again in his ears, but this time it was like a distant clash of arms, like the mighty contest that had once transported him to the age of heroes. For a moment he was back on the hillside overlooking Mycenae, wondering what had driven the king of kings to set it all in motion, to lead his army to Troy. Now he saw what Schliemann had seen. The most fantastic treasure ever found. And he remembered what the girl had drawn, the girl with the harp, sitting out there in that wasteland. So this was what she had seen too. They must have taken it out, paraded it around when they brought her here.

‘Mayne.’ Stein’s voice broke in, a dull, resounding echo. ‘He’s going to open the door for us.’

Mayne pushed back from the crate, twisted round and searched for the voice. His mind was in a tumult. He saw Stein and the man standing by the door at the far end of the room. He felt the dread lurch in the pit of his stomach again. Another door, another room. Something else had been going on here. Perhaps the art, the treasure, had all been a front. Perhaps Stein had been right.

He made his way through the crates quickly and reached Stein. ‘You’ve got your Raphael. Now listen to what I’ve found.’

Stein jerked his head to the door. ‘It can wait. This is more important.’

The door was metal. Halfway down was a swastika, saucer-sized, impressed into the metal within a roundel. It was tilted sideways in an X shape. Mayne realized that it was some kind of keyhole, and had been opened. It was magnetic, pulling his wrist with his watch towards it. It was exactly the same shape and size as the swastika he had just seen in the crate. Mayne looked higher. There was a small clouded window, like a porthole. It was dark inside, but he could see green growth around the inside edges of the window, like algae. Maybe the dehumidifiers in this room had failed. Stein stood to his right, the man to his left. The man raised his right arm to pull out the upper latch of the door. As he did so, the sleeve of his tunic fell back, revealing the raw red tattoo on his wrist and then another tattoo, an older one, further up under his bicep. Mayne stared. He remembered the soldiers they had captured in Italy, with their blood group tattooed in that way.

He froze. Only the SS did that.

In that split second the man realized what Mayne had seen. He pulled Mayne’s right arm back and twisted it up, shoving him violently against the door, pressing his cheek hard against the window. Mayne heard a click under his right ear and felt cold steel against the nape of his neck. He cursed himself for letting his guard down. The man had come at him on his right side, where he was deaf. He should never have holstered his pistol. It was what he always told his soldiers. It only takes one mistake. The cold steel was removed and there was a deafening crack. He felt a warm wetness splatter the side of his head, and Stein’s body slumped to the floor. The man let go of his arm, and Mayne’s hand dropped, instinctively searching for the hilt of the knife in his belt. Then the barrel was pressed into his neck again, burning hot now. ‘Your Juden friend is dead,’ the man hissed, close to his ear, speaking in English, barely audible through the ringing in Mayne’s ears. ‘You see? They will never escape us. And now I will unleash hell. This war has only just begun. Heil Hitler.’ Mayne felt the muzzle thrust into his neck, and saw the man’s other hand push up the second latch on the door. He unsheathed the knife, then flipped it so the blade faced upwards, holding it flat against his back. The man kicked the door and Mayne could feel it give, edging inwards. ‘ Raus ,’ the man snarled, pushing his body hard against Mayne. ‘ Schnell. You wanted to find out what was going on in here. Now you will have your wish.’

A light flashed on inside the room. Mayne looked through the window.

He saw something too horrible for words.

The door swung open, and he lurched forward, bringing the knife up, deep into the heart of his assailant. The pistol cracked. They fell together.

Then blackness.