The Mask of Troy

14

D illen pushed open the door into Hugh’s flat and pocketed his phone. He had caught Jack on Seaquest II just before diving, uncertain about the state of the Aquapods. The schedule off Tenedos had been delayed a few hours to allow a Turkish navy minesweeper with an underwater demolition team to remove the mine from the shipwreck. Mustafa, the IMU Turkish liaison, had also arrived, and there had been delicate negotiations with the Turkish commander to convince him that it was feasible to float and tow off the mine, rather than detonate it where it was. The commander had refused to have his divers in the water while the mine was being shifted, and Jack had completely understood. He had taken the man into the lecture room and shown him a picture of Monticelli’s Shield of Achilles. That had done the trick, in combination with Costas taking the navy team on a tour of Seaquest II ’s equipment to show them the other available options. Eventually two Turkish divers had gone down to attach lifting bags to the mine, but the actual job of raising it was being done using IMU’s remote-operated vehicle.

It had been going on at that very moment, while they were on the phone; Jack was on Seaquest II ’s foredeck describing it to Dillen. The minesweeper had blast protection so had remained on site, but Seaquest II had stood off two miles to the south of Tenedos on Captain Macalister’s insistence. Meanwhile there was an issue with the electronics on one of the Aquapods. Dillen could sense the tension in Jack’s voice. He was glad he was not there. The good news was that Hiebermeyer had made some kind of breakthrough in the underground passageway at Troy. Jack was going to fill Dillen in at the end of the day, when Dillen would also be able to run through anything new that Hugh might have told them. Dillen had held off mentioning the mysterious swastika until Hugh had explained the connection with Mycenae. And by then Jack and Costas should have completed their dive. If the equipment glitch was sorted out, this could be another day of huge excitement.

Dillen stood for a moment, trying to think ahead. His mind was in a turmoil. He did not know what the next few days might hold for him. Much would rest on what Hugh told them now. He would return here as planned after taking Rebecca to London, to spend time with Hugh on the translation, but only to get it started and to map a course of action. The pressure was already on at Troy to get results, with the deadline of the military exercise looming, and now he felt another line of investigation was going to cascade before them and require his involvement, with Jack and the rest of the team fully committed in the field. And they needed to keep ahead of the game before word leaked out that they were on any kind of new trail, not at Troy this time but in the shadowy underworld of present-day Europe.

He closed the door behind him, and sat down. Hugh handed him another steaming mug. ‘Call get through?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Good show. Are they diving?’

Dillen looked at his watch. ‘Scheduled for fourteen thirty local time. They’re planning to use the one-man submersibles, the Aquapods.’

‘Blast it all. If only I were younger. Jack got me into a drysuit and tank in the IMU pool a few years ago, and it was wonderful. At least he keeps me up to date, with that gizmo.’ He pointed at the computer half submerged under the stacks of papers on his table. ‘Real-time video. Not for this project, though, it seems.’

‘Media blackout,’ Rebecca said. ‘Too many bad guys watching. But I’m sure Dad will link you up as soon as it’s safe.’

‘Do you want to have a proper rest before talking more?’ Dillen asked.

‘Good Lord, no. Let’s carry on.’

‘To Mycenae, then.’

Hugh leaned forward. ‘All right. The summer of 1938. One of the foremen on the excavation had actually known Schliemann. Had actually known him. The foreman was frail and crippled, too arthritic to dig any more, a kind of camp elder. But as a boy, he’d been the one who first showed Schliemann the mound at Hissarlik when Schliemann went there in 1868. It was astonishing to hear his account. It wasn’t Schliemann who discovered Troy. It wasn’t even Frank Calvert, the British consul who led him to the site. The local people had always known about it. A clan in the village of Hissarlik claimed they were descended from Hector, the Trojan prince. Schliemann knew the power of local legend, and of course he believed that real history lay behind myth. And he knew the power of dreams in childhood. That had been where his own quest had begun, as a little boy in a town in Germany, dreaming of Troy. So when he went to Hissarlik, the first thing he did was to go to the children. He offered them riches beyond their imagination, to open up the world to them as the world had once been opened up to him. And the boy who became the crippled old man had taken the bait.’

‘And afterwards he followed Schliemann to Mycenae?’ Rebecca asked.

Hugh nodded. ‘The boy’s father was a Greek sailor his mother had met in nearby Canakkale, and the boy could pass himself off as a Greek or a Turk. Schliemann was as good as his word and took the boy on as a kind of protege, teaching him to read, teaching him English and German, showing him the tricks that had led Schliemann himself to wealth and fame. But the boy was unambitious and content to remain by Schliemann’s side. After the great man’s death, he never rose above excavation foreman, working for the German and British archaeologists who followed in Schliemann’s wake. But what he did tell us was fascinating. He knew perfectly well that Schliemann and Sophia had dug secretly at Troy. And he told us the Ottoman authorities knew too.’

‘So the Ottomans turned a blind eye?’ Dillen said.

‘It was more than that. At Hissarlik, the local Ottoman vizier threatened to expose the boy’s Greek paternity if he didn’t inform on Schliemann. That was why the man opened up to us, all those years later, when he knew he was close to death. All his life he’d felt as if he’d betrayed Schliemann’s trust, and he wanted to ease his burden and tell those he felt might forgive him. But Schliemann like many showmen was too absorbed in his own self-image to realize that others were playing him as well. He was a huge international celebrity, a powerful tool for regimes aspiring to improve their status in the world. The Ottoman court in Constantinople was a decaying beast by the 1870s, but was still a byword for intrigue. It suited the Ottomans to know that Schliemann had dug secretly at Troy and found treasure he had spirited away. One day they might use that knowledge as leverage to make him play their game, to enlist him to help blow their trumpet abroad. The Ottomans were well aware of their bad reputation. Schliemann’s friend Prime Minister Gladstone of Britain was particularly antagonistic towards them. Schliemann unwittingly became a pawn in the world of international power politics. The Greeks allowed him to dig at Mycenae so they could keep up with the Turks, to allow Greece to lay claim to her own share of the Trojan War myth and the Schliemann celebrity juggernaut. Everyone knew that. But that was only what the world was allowed to see. Behind the scenes, the Greeks were playing the same game as the Turks.’

‘You mean Schliemann dug secretly at Mycenae too?’ Rebecca said.

Hugh leaned towards them, his voice low. ‘One night in 1876, just before the excavation closed for the season, Schliemann and Sophia got the Greek inspector of antiquities – the ephor – blind drunk, and secretly made their way up to the citadel. Or so they thought. The ephor wasn’t really drunk. And the boy, by then a teenager and spying for the Greeks as well, was sent to follow them. He said Schliemann was always visible at night at Mycenae because he loved to stand like Agamemnon at the highest point of the ruins, staring out towards the sea. The boy watched Schliemann and Sophia descend with their tools into the royal shaft grave, the place where a few days later the world would watch as Schliemann raised the golden mask of Agamemnon.’

‘The boy saw that?’ Rebecca whispered.

Hugh nodded. ‘Then, almost fifteen years later, he watched Schliemann and Sophia do the same at Troy, secretly digging again, night after night. Schliemann should have known he would be watched. Maybe he did. Maybe that was part of his game. Once, when the boy was small and watched the great trench being dug through Troy, Schliemann joked that he was not the descendant of Hector but of Homer himself, always watching, perched above like an ancient bard, playing his toy pipes. The Greeks at Mycenae said that about Schliemann, too. The ephor told the boy that Schliemann was a poet, and Sophia was his muse. He said the Greeks had a soft spot for foreign poets coming to their shores, like Byron. He said that was really why they tolerated Schliemann. Do you remember, James, when you were a small boy and I first told you the stories of Homer, I said that we were poets too, and that one day you would sit on the walls of Troy and see the ghosts of heroes, and hear the bellow of Agamemnon?’

Dillen stared at Hugh. ‘I do remember. You should have seen me at Troy, yesterday. But tell us what the boy saw.’

‘This is where it really gets extraordinary. At Mycenae that night, he watched Schliemann and Sophia emerge from the shaft grave and then disappear down the hillside. When he thought they’d gone, he crept down to have a look himself. He saw the Mask of Agamemnon freshly revealed, and he lifted it. Imagine it. A small boy alone, seeing that. Just then he heard low voices above, and he quickly replaced the mask and hid himself in the back of the shaft, inside another grave. Schliemann and Sophia came back down the ladder carrying a bundle. There was much digging and exertion, and half an hour later they left, this time for good. The boy waited a long time, then came out and looked again. The earth had been tamped down as if it had never been disturbed, and even had water poured on it to look as if it had been rained on. He dug down where he’d seen the mask, and uncovered it again, and that was when he saw what he hadn’t seen before, a human skeleton underneath. He hadn’t seen it because it hadn’t been there before. He realized what Schliemann and Sophia had brought with them, in the bundle. They’d brought a skeleton and buried it under the mask.’

‘Ah,’ Dillen murmured. ‘That explains it. The mysterious deformed skeleton. It’s in Schliemann’s book.’

‘It was apparently in very poor condition,’ Hugh said. ‘But the boy recognized the misshapen skull. It was from a Bronze Age cemetery the team had been excavating outside the city walls just below the Lion Gate, and then abandoned once Schliemann realized they were just humble graves, not royal tombs.’

‘Why on earth would they do that?’ Rebecca said. ‘Put a skeleton into Agamemnon’s grave?’

Hugh held up his hand. ‘Before that. To Troy, fourteen years later. Night after night the man watched Schliemann and Sophia disappear off into the ancient citadel mound to dig alone, just as they had done in 1873 when they uncovered Priam’s treasure beside the great trench. Only this time the dig was much more secretive, in a part of the citadel to the west that remains unexcavated today. The last time he saw them digging was the evening after the end of the second Troy Congress, held at the site in March 1890. Schliemann had sat down with the boy, the man, for a few minutes before the congress, and seemed to want to confide in him. He said he’d known all along that Priam’s treasure dated a thousand years before Homeric Troy, but only at this congress would he finally acknowledge it.’

‘Which he did,’ Dillen murmured. ‘It’s on record.’

Hugh nodded. ‘But it wasn’t an act of humility. Not Schliemann. No, he told the man that he’d misdated the treasure deliberately, to make it seem as if the greatest treasure of Homeric Troy had been found. He had wanted to deflect attention from the real revelation he and Sophia believed they had begun to unearth in 1873. Only now, in 1890, had Schliemann reached the point in his discoveries at Mycenae and around the ancient world when the time was right to return to Troy, to finish the excavation, to make that revelation. The man knew it must have something to do with the secret digging. That very night, Sophia laid a trail of little candles from the site entrance to the tunnel in the western perimeter. It was typical Schliemann, very theatrical. And the man soon realized why. All of the delegates to the conference had gone, but three new men arrived. They were clearly important men, travelling incognito. The man never saw the faces of two of them, and afterwards they left before he could get close enough to see. He was too far away to hear their conversation. But the third man he recognized.’

‘Who was it?’ Dillen asked.

‘Schliemann frequently returned to America to manage his business empire, and on one occasion he took the boy with him. They’d gone to Washington and stayed with one of Schliemann’s benefactors from his early days as an entrepreneur at the time of the California gold rush. They’d maintained a close but secret friendship ever since. The man’s name was George Frisbie Hoar.’

‘ George Hoar,’ Dillen exclaimed, thinking hard. ‘Good God. Yes, that makes sense. Hoar was a prominent antiquarian, a patron of the Smithsonian Institution and the Peabody Museum at Harvard. But he was more than that. Far more. He was one of the most prominent American politicians of the second half of the nineteenth century. That’s why Schliemann would have courted him. Hoar’s was a voice of moderation and humanity, famously warning against American imperialism and foreign wars. By 1890 he’d been a senator for years, one of the most respected in the House. If you were going to choose the most important American politician of the time, you might have put Hoar above any incumbent president.’

Hugh reached back and picked up a heavy hardbound volume from his desk, handing it to Rebecca. It had lavish embossing on the cover, a golden bull’s head, the horns curving upwards. ‘That’s Schliemann’s account of his excavations at Mycenae, where he describes the Mask of Agamemnon,’ he said. ‘I had that actual volume with me on the dig in 1938, and I’ve been reading it again for the first time in years. I remember your dad poring over it when he first came to visit me. His eyes just lit up when he saw the account of the mask. Now, take a look at the inside cover.’

Rebecca carefully opened the book. Dillen leaned over, and saw a pasted coat of arms with the word HOAR in Gothic script beneath. ‘It’s a complete coincidence, pretty amazing, but these things happen,’ Hugh said. ‘I bought this book on a visit to New York City the year before Peter and I were in Greece, in 1937. Some of the contents of Hoar’s library were for sale and I was expanding my archaeology collection. I’d inherited some money and spent it on books.’

‘That’s it!’ Rebecca exclaimed excitedly.

‘What?’ Dillen said.

‘That coat of arms! The double-headed griffin! You remember the golden ring, the one Hiebermeyer found yesterday in the excavation? Dad said he’d seen the emblem somewhere before, but couldn’t remember. This was where!’

‘Good God,’ Dillen murmured. ‘I do believe you’re right.’ He stared at the arms, then turned to Hugh. ‘Yesterday afternoon, Maurice was digging in a tunnel under Troy and found a Victorian signet ring, with exactly that motif on it. We assumed it was somehow lost by one of Schliemann’s well-to-do guests.’

‘And now we know who it was,’ Rebecca exclaimed.

‘A tunnel, you say,’ Hugh murmured, staring hard at Dillen. ‘ A tunnel. I’ve kept up with the excavations of the last few years. You mean the watercourse tunnel they found on the south-west part of the site, leading to the spring?’

Dillen shook his head. ‘Something I was going to tell you, and it may as well be now. It’s extraordinary. In the last few days Maurice has found a passage under the Homeric citadel, a deep trench with inward-sloping sides in the same masonry as the city walls, clearly late Bronze Age. That watercourse may perhaps lead to it, to whatever lies at the end. We don’t know. Maurice hasn’t got there yet. What we do suspect is that it was some kind of monumental entranceway, not to the citadel but to something underneath. The walls were lined with stone stelae, some with inscriptions. Maurice thinks he’s even seen hieroglyphics. And there’s a colossal sculpted head of a king, like a gate guardian. Rebecca and Jeremy found it.’

Hugh continued staring hard at him, then reached over to his desk and took a scuffed old sketchpad from the pile. He held it closed for a moment, deep in thought, then opened it and leafed through to a double-page pencil drawing in pastel colours. He carefully turned the open book around, and handed it to Dillen. ‘You mean like this?’

Dillen took it, and gasped. The sketch showed an entranceway as he had just described, but with two gate guardians, one on either side. ‘That’s incredible. Where on earth is this?’

‘The old man described it to us, when we spoke to him at Mycenae in 1938. This is what he saw that night under Troy.’

‘Good God. This is it. This is what Maurice has found.’ Dillen looked across. ‘You’ve kept this a closely guarded secret.’

Hugh paused. ‘It’s been hard for me to look at that again. It’s been locked away, since the war. That’s Peter’s drawing. Based on the old man’s description. Peter was quite a good watercolourist. He was always trying to frame what he saw. He told me once when we met up before Cassino that he did that after battle, to try to take one step back from what he was really seeing, from the carnage and the horror. ’

‘It looks so much like the entranceway to a tomb,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘Like the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae.’

‘That’s exactly what the old man said,’ Hugh replied enthusiastically. ‘We were there, at Mycenae, and he showed us. And he was convinced that it’s what Schliemann thought, too. That somewhere at the end of the passageway was a tomb, a treasury, right under the palace of Troy. But this passageway, as much as you see in this drawing, was as far as Schliemann and Sophia got.’

‘What happened?’ Rebecca asked. ‘Why didn’t they finish excavating it?’

‘That night in 1890, it was as if Schliemann had invited the three guests to view a work in progress, but at a time when he knew there’d be a great revelation. Perhaps he was prepping them, stoking their enthusiasm, for another visit several months, maybe a year ahead, when all would be revealed. But later that summer Schliemann drove himself to a physical breakdown.’

Dillen nodded. ‘It’s all there, in his papers. Gladstone was concerned about his health, writing to him about it. And there’s one letter Schliemann himself wrote that summer to another of his friends, Prince Otto von Bismarck of Germany. It sticks in my mind. He said, “My workers and I are utterly exhausted. I shall be forced to suspend operations on 1 August. But if heaven grants me life I intend to resume work with all the energy at my disposal on 1 March 1891.” ’

‘But that wasn’t to be,’ Rebecca murmured.

Dillen shook his head. ‘The ear infection that had plagued him for months became acute, and deafened him. It was pretty ghastly. He sought treatment around Europe, but he died in Athens in December.’

‘So what happened to the excavation?’ Rebecca asked.

Hugh leaned forward again. ‘According to the old man, Sophia backfilled what they’d discovered, the stelae with the inscriptions, those two statues, all by herself. Then she had the man and his brother come in and bury the trench, turfing it over so that pretty soon it looked as if it hadn’t been disturbed.’

‘So Maurice was right to be suspicious,’ Dillen murmured. ‘He thought he was digging through stratigraphy that didn’t look entirely plausible, as if it had been deliberately backfilled.’

‘But why?’ Rebecca demanded. ‘Why bury it if the moment of revelation was so close?’

‘Sophia and Schliemann were truly in love, and were a team,’ Hugh replied thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps with Heinrich gone, she simply couldn’t bear to carry on. But I think there was more to it than that. They were always conspiratorial, digging secretly, spiriting treasures away. Peter and I wondered whether Sophia could have been carrying out Schliemann’s last wishes in the event of his sudden death. Perhaps she was to backfill the trench, and look to the future when some distant archaeologist might take up the baton. Someone of similar stature, someone with the personality and drive to make his discoveries come alive, to sell them to the world in the same way he had. If so, I can’t help thinking he was right. Troy without Schliemann is inconceivable. Another archaeologist might have dug the mound with greater precision, published a more sober monograph, but the site at Hissarlik would never have caught the popular imagination in the way it did.’

Dillen nodded. ‘His papers show that Schliemann was always afraid of his mortality, afraid that his death might extinguish his myth. Maybe he gained solace from thinking that what had already been revealed might inspire another with the same spark, the same imagination, to take up where he had left off. Schliemann was always leaving little clues. The decoration of his house in Athens, the swastikas.’

‘Swastikas?’ Rebecca said.

‘Not a Nazi invention,’ Dillen said. ‘It’s found in prehistory from India through Asia, including Troy. It’s actually quite common. The Nazis associated it with their supposed Aryan precursors and hijacked it.’

‘That’s why the swastika on the drawing might not be all that it seems,’ Hugh said.

Rebecca peered again. ‘Because it’s counterclockwise?’

‘Not the usual Nazi swastika, which goes clockwise,’ Dillen murmured.

‘Those ancient swastikas, the decoration at Troy?’ Rebecca asked. ‘Which way do they go?’

‘Counterclockwise too. Not always, but most commonly.’

‘So how on earth does the girl with the harp come to draw a Trojan swastika?’ Rebecca demanded.

Dillen tapped his fingers on his mug, staring at the Mycenae book still resting on Rebecca’s lap. ‘That final night at Troy, with those three guests,’ he murmured. ‘What on earth was Schliemann playing at? Hoar was a pretty important figure. Who were those other two? This was about more than just treasure. Schliemann was an ideas man. He wanted to fire up people’s imagination. He wanted people to do more than just gape in wonder.’

‘I still don’t understand how the swastika’s a clue,’ Rebecca said. ‘A clue to what?’

‘And you haven’t told us what the boy saw in the grave at Mycenae, before Schliemann and Sophia put in the skeleton,’ Dillen said.

‘He saw the golden mask, where they’d left it, but underneath, when he lifted it, he did not gaze on the face of Agamemnon. Instead, there was a void in the clay. A shape, where something had been. He could see fresh marks around the sides, where it had been prised out. He remembered Schliemann had brought a bag with him, a satchel. An object that had been concealed there three thousand years before, and was to disappear again that night until the Second World War, when it was seen by a Jewish girl in the midst of the worst horror imaginable.’

Rebecca gasped. ‘The shape. You mean a swastika.’

Hugh nodded. ‘A Trojan swastika. With the arms going counterclockwise. Just as the girl with the harp drew it.’

Dillen could barely believe what he was saying. ‘So Agamemnon himself could have buried it.’

Rebecca stared at the picture. ‘Why? Why in a grave? In his own grave?’

Hugh looked at her. ‘Where better for a king to conceal something he may never have wanted found? What better way to stamp your authority over it, to lay claim to it, than to bury it in your own grave under your own mask?’

‘What did it mean?’ Rebecca said. ‘Why did he have it? How? What did the swastika symbolize?’

Hugh looked at them intently. ‘The final ingredient of the story. What the old man said he saw that final night at Troy after Schliemann and the three men had left.’

‘ He saw more,’ Dillen whispered. ‘Go on, Hugh.’

‘He’d been spying on them from the rampart above. After they’d gone, he slid down into the unexcavated end of the trench, where the sloping walls disappeared into the soil, converging towards some spot under the citadel. There was a tunnel inside, just wide enough for him to crawl along. It was pitch black, so he took a candle. At the furthest point, a crack in the fallen masonry ahead allowed him to glimpse what lay at the end. He saw what Schliemann must have seen. He realized why Schliemann had summoned Hoar and the others to come to Troy that night. He knew why Schliemann had been supremely confident that a great revelation was to hand.’

‘What was it?’ Rebecca whispered.

‘He saw bronze, the face of a great bronze door. In the centre was a saucer-sized roundel. And within that was a shape.’

Rebecca stared at him. ‘ A swastika.’

‘A Trojan swastika,’ Dillen exclaimed.

Hugh nodded. ‘It was impressed, exactly the same shape and size as the void under Agamemnon’s mask.’

‘Good God,’ Dillen exclaimed. ‘Of course. In a door. It’s blindingly obvious. That’s what Schliemann knew. The swastika wasn’t just a symbol of Troy. It was a key.’

‘No wonder Schliemann wanted it kept secret,’ Rebecca said. ‘The key to a secret chamber under Troy. How many treasure-hunters would die for that.’

‘And it’s the key to something else,’ Hugh said quietly, sitting up, glancing back at the photo on the mantelpiece. ‘Something awful, something I wish I could deny, like a bad dream. It’s to do with the girl with the harp, and that drawing she made in 1945. I think she may have seen the Trojan swastika in a bunker in the forest. When she was taken there and raped. One of the SS men who tried to surrender to us was raving about something in the forest, kept jabbing his finger, saying there were hidden treasures, underground. He was trying to bargain for his life. We didn’t believe him. We thought the camp was for forest labourers and then was used as an overflow camp for Belsen. We knew there were other SS who had escaped into the forest, so we thought it was just a way of leading us into an ambush. That’s what may have happened to Peter. But now I think that the guard might have been telling us the truth.’

‘Do you think that’s what Peter and the American found?’

‘I don’t know. We may never know. But there is something else. A few days before we went into the camp, my SAS patrol ambushed a motorcycle courier. We’d been told to kill any we came across. At that stage in the war they might have carried personal orders from Hitler, the kind of thing that might have spurred wavering German soldiers to fight to the death. Stopping messages like that might have saved countless Allied lives, our own chaps. He rode right into a wire we’d strung across a junction. The man was still alive, but his motorcycle burst into flames that destroyed the dispatch box.’

‘Did he say anything?’ Rebecca said.

Hugh paused. ‘Perhaps I could have got something out of him. But we were behind enemy lines, and in a hurry. We didn’t take prisoners.’

Dillen leaned forward. ‘But you found something.’

‘I saw a charred fragment blow away from the flames. I picked it up, and there was writing still visible on it, a few inches square. It was part of Hitler’s so-called Nero Decree, the order telling his commanders to destroy the remaining infrastructure of the Reich. I’d been briefed on it at HQ, who had a complete copy, so I recognized it. Only this one was slightly different. At the top of the page was a stamped swastika, but not the usual Nazi one. This one was counterclockwise. Exactly the same as the one in the girl’s drawing, and the shape described by the man at Mycenae and Troy. Of course I knew nothing about the girl’s drawing then. But when I saw it and remembered the burned fragment, that swastika, it sent a chill down my spine. And I realized the link with Schliemann because of the words beneath it.’

‘Those were?’ Rebecca whispered.

‘Three words, visible above the standard text of the decree, part of the stamp with the reverse swastika, the counterclockwise one. I reported them, but never heard anything more. Some intelligence chaps came to talk to me about it, swore me to secrecy and that was it. The words appeared directly under the swastika. They were Das Agamemnon-Code.’

‘ The Agamemnon Code,’ Dillen whispered.

‘ Agamemnon. Why Agamemnon?’ Rebecca asked, incredulous.

Dillen turned to her. ‘The Nazis loved harking back to the imperial past, to those they regarded as Aryan precursors, great warrior leaders. Agamemnon was always high on the list. Discovering this object among Schliemann’s treasure, the Trojan swastika, somehow spirited away to Germany after Schliemann’s death, perhaps sent there by Sophia, would have been the greatest of all their plundered treasures. The symbolism, the association with what they may have regarded as Agamemnon’s triumphant destruction of Troy, the obliteration of an inferior Eastern race, all that would have fed their twisted imagination. So when it came to contemplating Armageddon, some fearful doomsday weapon, how better to encode it than to use the symbol of that reverse swastika, and name it after the king of kings himself?’

‘So that’s why you’re so fearful of that bunker in the forest,’ Rebecca said to Hugh. ‘You think there was some terrible weapon there?’

‘Not was,’ Hugh said quietly. ‘Not was, but is.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘After the war, the burnt forest, the site of the camp, the bunker, was bulldozed over and turned into a NATO airbase. The bunker will still be there, though. Even the RAF’s eight-thousand-pound bombs couldn’t destroy the U-boat pens, and bunkers were built of the same reinforced concrete. At least it might have sealed off what could still be inside. And I’m not just talking about stolen art. You know that now. As soon as I began to piece this all together in my head after the war ended, I had a terrible sense of foreboding about that place, about what was inside, the place where the girl had seen that reverse swastika. The horror of that forest isn’t just about what happened to the girl with the harp. Or what happened to Peter. It’s about what is still there, what could still be unleashed.’

Dillen took a deep breath. ‘It looks as if we’ve got our work cut out.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Hugh said.

Dillen paused and collected his thoughts. ‘We hope to God that nobody else has begun to piece together what we have been talking about this afternoon. We’re still only guessing, but there’s something terrible at the end of this road. Some Nazi weapon stored in that bunker. A weapon associated with this code, Das Agamemnon-Code. Something which, by all those chances of war, you and Peter may have been responsible for preventing fanatical Nazis from activating in the final days of the war. You, by finding that drawing. And by killing that motorcycle courier, perhaps. Peter, by going into the camp, into that forest. Perhaps he and the American died preventing someone from following Hitler’s final order. We can be sure that some in Allied intelligence knew what this was all about, and were afraid enough to obliterate all evidence, to let that bunker be buried under the bombed forest and then, after the war, for all time. There was something in there that not even they could trust themselves to reveal.’

‘So we carry on where Peter left off,’ Rebecca murmured.

‘We keep fighting the war,’ Dillen said. ‘Hugh?’

‘I’ve never stopped. That’s why I’ve kept this to myself for so very long.’

‘Our job is to obliterate any leads. To find any loose ends, and to cut them off. Just as Allied intelligence must have desperately been trying to do in 1945.’

‘We’ve already opened it up by going back to Troy,’ Rebecca said. ‘We’ve begun what we don’t want, which is to reawaken the search for Schliemann’s treasures in Europe.’

‘There’s no turning back now,’ Dillen said grimly. ‘It’s ironic. That’s exactly what I said to Jack last night on the battlements of Troy, looking at what we’d found that afternoon. He’d had a sense of foreboding, about Homer, about whether we wanted to uncover the dark side of the story of Troy. But then we were euphoric. No turning back, because we were on the cusp of the greatest revelations. Just like Schliemann that night at Troy in 1890.’

‘That art dealer,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘The guy in Amsterdam. The one I met. He’d be a good place to start. He seemed to know everything, had had his ear to the ground for decades. If anything’s shown up, anything to do with Schliemann’s treasure, he’ll know. He told me he had a whole cache of Nazi documents he’d collected, and he used those as a bargaining chip with Interpol. We want to comb through everything, everywhere, that might have that reverse swastika, that code on it, and delete it. If it’s ever shown up on the black market, he’d know about it.’

Dillen looked at his watch. ‘Jack and Costas are diving on the Bronze Age wreck right now. I’ll leave a message with Captain Macalister and Ben on Seaquest II. I remember you talking to your dad about those documents, Rebecca. After he’d gently told you never to do what you did again. I think they went to somebody high up in the Courtauld, Professor Hans Raitz, wasn’t it?’

Rebecca nodded, and curled her lip. ‘I met him, too. He took me out to lunch at the British Museum. I know he’s a big art historian, but I didn’t like him. I asked him whether he was Jewish, with that name, and he nearly spat at me. Then he apologized, said my generation were ignorant and it wasn’t our fault, and started touching me under the table. He said I was a good Aryan girl. Can you believe it? I suddenly had a phone call and had to leave. I never told Dad.’

‘Probably a good thing you didn’t,’ Dillen said. ‘And Raitz doesn’t make any secret of his family’s Nazi past. Trumpets it, says it’s driven his academic career, to see how architecture and art served fascism. But I wonder.’

‘As you say,’ Hugh said. ‘The war still goes on. The enemy is still out there.’

‘This dealer,’ Dillen said. ‘Where is he?’

‘He lives incognito in London,’ Rebecca said. ‘But I know where.’

‘Right.’ Dillen looked at her. ‘But we aren’t going there without IMU security this time.’

‘Okay,’ Rebecca said quietly. ‘This does frighten me.’ She got up and walked over to the table, looking again at the drawing of the two people holding hands, the little girl between them and the swastika above. She brought the back of one hand to her mouth, and Dillen could see she was swallowing hard. Hugh saw too, and put his hand on her arm. ‘I’ve always wanted to find her again, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘To find out what happened to her.’

‘The girl with the harp,’ Rebecca whispered, sniffing and wiping her eyes. ‘I wish I could hear her play.’

‘It was her,’ he said, his voice faltering, reaching for Rebecca’s hand. ‘Not really Peter, or me, but her. If she hadn’t made that drawing, perhaps some awful horror would have been unleashed.’ He withdrew his hand, and got up, lurching slightly, steadying himself. Dillen looked at him with concern. Hugh suddenly looked terribly tired, and for the first time Dillen saw him as an old man. Perhaps they should not have put him through the inquisition like this. But Hugh had wanted it. Hugh looked at his watch, and cleared his throat. ‘Thirteen hundred hours, on the dot. If you go right now, you might just make the fifteen twenty to Paddington. Otherwise you wait another forty-three minutes.’

Dillen gave him a tired smile. ‘Ever the old soldier, Hugh.’

‘And the old schoolmaster. When I retired, I swore I’d never be enslaved to the clock again. But at my age, you also realize that time is of the essence. When you’ve still got work to do.’

Rebecca turned, and hugged him. ‘You loved Peter, didn’t you?’

Hugh stood stiffly for a second, then relaxed and put his arms round her. ‘I’m still there, you know. Sometimes it’s as if the war is like the moment before death, a moment one is forever living. And it’s the old cliche. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. Peter’s forever young. I apologize for being so emotional earlier. Shameful, really. I’m tougher than that, you know. It’s just that recently, in the past few years, there have been a few moments. The armour’s coming off. Old age, I suppose. I do wonder what Peter would have thought of me now. He the eternal youth, me the shuffling old man.’

‘You might have to be tough again, Hugh,’ Dillen said. ‘We’re all being drawn back to that place. Maybe to confront the gates of hell once more.’

Hugh let go of Rebecca, then held out his hands, palms upward. ‘Sometimes, when it’s cold and I close my hands, I feel the crackle of frozen blood on my palm. I felt that once in the Ardennes. Other men’s blood, not mine. When it’s warm, I smell it. The blood of the men I’ve killed. You don’t need to worry about me when I stand there, in front of those gates. I’ve been there for years.’

Dillen got up. Rebecca put on her fleece, and slung her pack over her shoulder. Dillen zipped up his Gore-Tex jacket and picked up his laptop bag. Hugh went over to the door. ‘You’ll get a taxi to Temple Meads station?’

‘We’ll walk.’ Dillen slung his bag on his shoulder. ‘I was telling Rebecca on the way up about my time here as a schoolboy. I haven’t seen the place for years. And we might just have time to pop into the Llandowger Trow for a quick drink before catching the train. I want Rebecca to see where Robert Louis Stevenson set the opening scene of Treasure Island. The docks are still a place where you can step into the past. And I’m sure a few Howards have set off on high-seas adventures from there before now.’

Hugh put his hand on Dillen’s shoulder. ‘It’s been good to see you here again, James. Always good. Let’s hope that what we’ve been talking about is all ancient history. A closed book, for you two, if not for me.’ He turned to Rebecca, and put his other hand on her shoulder. ‘And you, Rebecca Howard, daughter of my friends Jack and Elizabeth. I was very fond of your mother too, you know. She came here with Jack once, sat just where you did. Seeing you, it was as if I were seeing her again. She’ll be with you for ever, you know. It’s not just your dad who will look after you. My home is your home. Any time.’

Rebecca’s eyes welled up, and she embraced him again. ‘I’ll come back. You can count on it. For the hot chocolate.’

Hugh stepped over and opened the door for them, then paused. ‘When I was a schoolboy, a famous general named Sir Ian Hamilton came to unveil our war memorial. He’d been commander during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. He’d known the terrible beauty of war, its seduction, from soldiering in the heyday of the British Empire. When heroes still seemed possible, when wars were not yet world wars. He was steeped in the classics, in Homer, and when he sat in his ship off Gallipoli, he wrote of his troops in Homeric terms, as if when they went over the top into a storm of lead they were men of Mycenae before the walls of Troy. History has reviled him for it, but he was only using the words he knew, the metaphors, the similes drummed into him as a boy studying Homer. And maybe, sitting there with Gallipoli and Troy in his sights, he saw the truth. More than three hundred old boys from my school died in that war. Hamilton stood before us and told us they had hoped to kill war. I’ll always remember that. They had hoped to kill war. That’s what we were doing too, you know, Peter and I and all the countless others. But since then, I’ve come to realize a truth, perhaps the truth that Hamilton saw. The flames of war were ignited in Troy three thousand years before, not in burning ships and pyres of dead heroes, but in the flaming citadel, in women and children lit like torches. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. We can never kill war. All we can do is contain it, know it’s there but keep the horror boxed away, like that bunker in the forest, like the monster within us that is so easily unleashed, the monster I feel inside me every time I open and close my hands. And fighting that war is no longer a job just for soldiers. It’s for all of us.’

‘Roger that,’ Rebecca murmured.

Hugh grinned, and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Now where have I heard that before? You are a chip off the old block. And now enough of this. It’s time for you to go. And time for me to get cracking with that translation.’ He looked at Dillen, a twinkle in his eye. ‘Onwards and upwards, James.’

Dillen looked at him. What would the future now hold, for Hugh, for Rebecca, for all of them? He put his hand on Hugh’s shoulder, feeling the sinewy toughness, but the frailty too. It was their old parting expression. He could not imagine coming here and not hearing it. He smiled broadly. ‘Onwards and upwards, Hugh.’