The Mask of Troy Page 18

  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 détente 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 Père 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 Führer, 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 Führerbunker 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 Führermuseum 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 Lagerfüherin. 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 liber
ation 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.’