The Shadow Project

Chapter Fifty-Five

When the three ambulances shrieked out of the Steiner residence gates, Ben was riding with his sister, and he clutched her hand in his all the way to Bern. She drifted in and out of consciousness as the sedatives the paramedics had pumped into her took effect. Not long before they reached the hospital, her eyes fluttered open and she looked drowsily up at him from the stretcher.

‘This was all my fault,’ she murmured. ‘It was me who told him about it. None of these things would have happened if—’

‘Don’t talk,’ Ben said.

The ambulances screeched into the emergency room bays. Paramedics threw open the doors and Ruth was rushed out and wheeled hurriedly down white-lit corridors towards the operating theatre with her drip bag swaying on its stand. Ben walked with the gurney as far as the hospital staff would let him. Steiner was up ahead, the blood soaking fast through the sheets that covered his body, tubes in his mouth and nose. Two doctors burst out of a double doorway at the end of the corridor, one male, one female, already prepped for theatre.

‘We’ll take it from here,’ the female doctor said, raising a hand to halt him. Ben stood back and watched as Steiner and Ruth were wheeled through the doors and out of sight.

Then all he could do was pace anxiously up and down in the waiting room as people came and went around him. Every second of waiting seemed like a week. After forty minutes, Silvia Steiner arrived. Her eyes were puffy and red as she joined Ben in the waiting area and perched herself on the edge of one of the chairs.

‘Heinrich and I have just finished talking to the police,’ she said. Her voice was husky from crying and weak with emotion, but as she went on there was a note of fierceness that Ben hadn’t heard before. ‘I told them that our nephew was insane with jealousy because he thought he was being denied his proper inheritance. He took a gun and tried to kill his cousin, and he would have killed us all if Max hadn’t acted to defend us. Then there was a terrible accident and Otto fell off the balcony.’ She reached for a handkerchief, dabbed her eyes and composed herself. ‘That’s what I told them. And I made sure that Heinrich said the same. That will be our story. The whole story,’ she added.

Ben looked at her and admired her strength. Not just hers. ‘Your husband’s a hero,’ he said. It sounded strange to hear the words coming from his own mouth. He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

‘Your name has been left out of it,’ she told him. ‘This is a family matter. Although I suppose you are family now, in a way.’

He thanked her. Just at that moment, the female doctor who’d talked to Ben earlier came striding up the corridor. The first piece of news was good. Ruth was fine. There had been no complications, no major damage. Her arm would be in a sling for a few weeks but would heal perfectly.

‘My husband?’

‘I’m sorry to say that Herr Steiner suffered a minor stroke on the operating table,’ the doctor replied gravely. ‘We’re doing everything we can. He’s in intensive care right now.’

‘When can I see him?’

‘Not yet. But soon. Please try not to worry.’ The doctor smiled and tried to look reassuring, then turned and hurried away.

Silvia Steiner fell back into her chair. Ben crouched beside her. ‘He’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘Pray for him.’

‘I will. And you look after yourself, Silvia.’ She looked at him tearfully. ‘You’re going?’ He nodded.

She gripped his arm. ‘You go. Finish this.’

‘I need to get into Maximilian’s safe. Do you have the combination?’

She shook her head. ‘But Heinrich does. You tell him that I said to provide you with anything you need. Anything. He won’t give you any trouble.’

Before she’d even finished saying it, Ben was heading for the exit.

‘You take care,’ she called after him, but he wasn’t listening.

The Steiner residence was a hive of police and forensic teams. The media were already at the gates, and pretty soon they’d be swarming all over Heinrich Dorenkamp for a statement about the tragedy that had seen Otto Steiner, heir to one of Europe’s biggest fortunes, fall to a horrible death. The newspapers and TV would be full of it that night and probably for the next week, until a fresh disaster came along to turn everyone’s heads the other way.

Silvia had been right. Dorenkamp didn’t even try to resist Ben’s request to see inside the safe. Five minutes after walking into the foyer, Ben was sitting alone at the billionaire’s Louis XIV desk, reading a sixty-page bound sheaf of waxy, yellowed papers that few eyes had seen since 1945. Each faded page was headed with a Nazi imperial eagle perched on a wreathed swastika, and the official seal of the SS.

Ruth wouldn’t have been disappointed. The documents had it all. Detailed diagrams and cutaway drawings of the mysterious Bell, showing all its bizarre internal workings. Column after column of technical data whose meaning Ben couldn’t even begin to decipher. Grainy photographs of what looked like some kind of enormous underground factory, a maze of tunnels and galleries, shafts and chambers, together with comprehensive plans of its layout. Everything he could have asked for was right here.

As well as some things that he didn’t need to know, but found himself reading with a chill in his spine. Buried near the back, yellowed and faded with age, was a written military order dated 1944, and Ben’s German was good enough to work out what it was. It was an order sanctioning the building of the secret facility under the supervision of the Kammlerstab, the general’s own personal staff. This hadn’t just been some disused munitions factory that Kammler had commandeered for his own use. The whole mammoth construction development had been undertaken for the single purpose of housing his special weapons project and keeping it a deadly secret from the outside world.

Two names were signed at the foot of the page. The upper scrawl belonged to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Head of the SS.

Underneath it was an ugly, spiky flourish of a signature. The ultimate sanction. The mark of Adolf Hitler himself.

The next few pages were a detailed report on the construction of the secret facility, showing plans of the temporary railway that had carried trainload after trainload of forced labourers from the concentration camps to work on the project. Among the figures in the right margin were statistics of the number who had died, from exhaustion or disease, or from electrocution or drowning or tunnel cave-in, during the build. Tens of thousands of them, their unspeakable suffering reduced to an anonymous typed entry in a report, and all just so that Hans Kammler could keep his machine hidden from Allied Intelligence. The place had been a death camp in its own right.

Ben had read enough. He put the papers down on the desk. Reached for Steiner’s phone and called Jeff at Le Val.

‘What’s happening?’ Jeff asked.

‘Plenty. I’ll explain when I see you. Is Brooke still there?’

‘She’s back in London,’ Jeff said. ‘Left this morning.’

‘Is she OK?’

‘She’s worried about you. Listen, someone called Sabrina phoned, asking about Adam and Rory.’

‘That’s what I’m phoning you for, Jeff. I need your help.’

‘Thought you’d never ask,’ Jeff said.

‘I’m asking. Get over to the airport PDQ. I’m sending a private jet to collect you. You can’t miss it. It’s got the name Steiner written on the side in great big letters. I’ll be waiting for you in Bern, and I’ll brief you in the air.’

If Jeff was surprised, he didn’t react. Or maybe nothing Ben did surprised him any more. ‘Do I need to bring anything?’

‘Just yourself,’ Ben said. ‘And as much tactical raid gear from the armoury room as you can stuff into two big holdalls.’

‘Sounds like fun. Where are we going?’

Ben picked up the sheaf of documents, flipped a couple of pages and looked again at the faded map that had been drawn by SS General Hans Kammler sixty-five years earlier.

‘We’re going to Hungary,’ he said. ‘To a hidden Nazi base inside a mountain.’