The Black Sun (24 page)

“I hope for your sake you haven’t,” Tom said coldly. “I can think of several people who would be very interested in your current whereabouts. If you’ve breathed so much as a word about us to anyone . . .”

“We have made a deal,” Dhutta pleaded, furiously rolling something invisible between his right thumb and forefinger. “I would never betray that trust. It’s all people like us have left.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence until the shrill sound of the bell broke the spell.

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“Maybe that’s him,” Dominique said with a hopeful smile. Dhutta slipped gratefully out of the room, then reappeared moments later with Archie only a few steps behind him.

“Sorry I’m late.” Archie sat down heavily on one of the sofas. “Spot of bother. I’m sure Tom filled you in.”

Dhutta made straight for his medicine shelf, ran his fingers along the line of brown bottles, selected one, opened it, took a swig, and replaced it. Whatever it was, it seemed to calm his nerves.

“Any idea who it was?” Dominique asked.

“I didn’t exactly hang around to find out.”

“What the hell did he want with us?” Tom asked.

“They, you mean,” Archie observed drily. “I counted at least three. And in case you hadn’t noticed, it was me they were after, not you.”

“You been up to anything I should know about?” Tom eyed Archie suspiciously.

“You’ve never had heat like that before.”

“ ’Course not.” Archie sounded almost offended.

“Your recent American trip, for example. You never did say what that was about.”

“Oh, come on,” Archie protested. “I’m out of play, and you know it.”

“What were you doing there, then?”

“Nothing that’s got anything to do with this. That should be enough for you.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” Tom conceded. “Guess I’m a bit jumpy. Anyway, I’d say it’s about time we moved on. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to hang around to find out who they were and what they wanted. Besides, we got what we came here for.”

“Did we?” said Archie. “Fine, so we found out that Weiss-man and Lammers were both members of some secret order of SS knights. We know that they spent a small fortune protecting a map that concealed the final journey of a train loaded with stolen Jewish treasure—”

“Lasche told you that?” Dominique asked excitedly.

Tom

quickly

recounted

the

story

of

the

Hungarian

Gold

the black sun 205

Train. Dhutta’s eyes widened with each new revelation, the feverish twirling of a pen through his fingers increasing, until it was a blur of black plastic.

“The point is, two carriages were taken from that train and we haven’t got a bloody clue what was on them or where they are,” Archie said resignedly. “So I’m not sure we did get what we came for.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Dominique said, a smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

Tom looked around, recognizing the tone in her voice. “You’ve found something, haven’t you?”

“The map wasn’t the only thing they were protecting in that safety-deposit box,” she said.

“Wasn’t it?” Archie frowned.

“This was kept in there too.” She picked up the frayed leather satchel that the map had been kept in.

“It’s just a regular satchel,” said Tom. “German made, late forties. Probably one of millions.”

“Come on, Dom,” Archie said impatiently. “What are you getting at?”

“Well, after an hour of turning it up and down and shaking it, nothing. But then I noticed this.” She pointed at the front flap.

“The stitching?” Archie eyed it carefully, then looked up with interest. “It’s a different color.”

“It’s newer than the rest. So I unpicked it. And I found something inside.”

“Another map?” Dhutta suggested eagerly, moving in for a closer view.

“No. Not even close.” She slipped her hand between the two pieces of leather that made up the satchel’s front flap and withdrew a small flat shard of what initially looked to be orange-brown plastic. She handed it to Tom, who examined it, then passed it silently to Archie.

“It’s lined with gold leaf,” Dominique said.

“No.” Archie shook his head, turning the shard over in his hands. “It isn’t. It can’t be.”

“Why

not?”

Tom

said

quietly.

“It

makes

sense.

It

makes

206 james twining

perfect sense. Why else would the Order have been involved with that train? That must have been what was on those missing carriages.”

“Christ!” Archie looked up, his voice caught somewhere between fear and reverence.

“You realize what this means?”

“No, Mr. Archie, I’m afraid I don’t,” said a confused-looking Dhutta. “What is this, please?”

“It’s amber,” Dominique said slowly. “Jewelry-grade amber.”

Tom

nodded.

“Renwick

is

after

the

Amber

Room.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

5:26 p.m.

The room was quiet, the only sound the muted commentary from an unseen cricket match being screened on one of the plasmas in the other room. All eyes were on the small shard of amber that lay cradled on Archie’s rough palm. It was Dhutta who broke the silence first.

“Please forgive my ignorance, but what is this Amber Room?”

Tom paused. How to describe the indescribable? How to frame in base words the jeweled essence of an object of such ethereal beauty that it seemed to have been created by sheer force of imagination rather than by human hands?

“Imagine a room so beautiful that it was called the eighth wonder of the world. A room commissioned by Frederick the Great of Prussia, gifted to Peter the Great of Russia, and completed by Catherine the Great. A room created from tons of Baltic amber resin, which at the time was twelve times more valuable than gold, infused with honey, linseed, and cognac, and then molded into a hundred thousand panels backed with gold and silver—

nine hundred and twenty-six square feet of it, accented with diamonds, emeralds, jade, onyx,

and

rubies.

Then

imagine

that

it

disappeared.”

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“Disappeared?” Dhutta asked, his eyebrows raised quizzically.

“When they were laying siege to St. Petersburg in 1941, the Nazis removed the room from the Catherine Palace and reinstalled it at Königsberg Castle before dismantling it again in 1945 because they feared a British bombing raid.”

“Then it vanished,” Archie continued. “Not a whisper. Until now, maybe.”

“You really think that’s what was on the train?” Dominique said excitedly. “The actual Amber Room?”

“Why not?” said Tom. “It was one of the greatest works of art ever made. It must be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What else would have warranted Himmler assigning his most elite troops to guard duty? What else would they have gone to such lengths to conceal?”

“Remember how fascinated your father was with the story of the Amber Room,”

Dominique reminded Tom.

“He’d been looking for it for as long as I can remember.” Tom nodded. “Hoping to pick up some whisper of its fate, however tenuous. Dreaming of bringing it back from the dead.”

“That’s what this is all about,” said Dominique. “The Bellak portrait must contain some clue to where the Amber Room is hidden.”

“But what would Renwick—or Kristall Blade, for that matter—do with the Amber Room? It’s not as if they can sell it,” Archie pointed out.

“Not whole, no. But they could break it up. Sell it piece-meal—a panel here, a panel there. Maybe even enough to line a small room. There’s no shortage of people who’d pay hundreds of thousands for a fragment of the Amber Room and not ask too many questions about where it came from. They could clear fifty, maybe even sixty million easy.”

“Enough for Renwick to get back on his feet and for Kristall Blade to fight their war,”

said Archie.

“Which is why we’ve got to stop them.” Tom’s eyes blazed with determination. “Now more than ever. This isn’t just about Renwick anymore. This is about protecting one of the

the black sun 209

world’s greatest treasures from being broken up and lost for ever.”

“If Renwick’s got the portrait, we’ll never catch up with him now,” Archie said ruefully.

“But he doesn’t have it,” Tom observed. “If he did, he wouldn’t have left Weissman’s arm and the other Bellak painting for me to find. It’s lost in some private collection somewhere and he’s trying to use us to connect the dots.”

“What did you say?” Dominique’s eyes narrowed, her forehead creasing into a quizzical frown.

“I said, why else would he have left Weissman’s arm and—”

“No. About the dots?”

“What dots?”

“Connecting the dots. Isn’t that what you said?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Dom?” Archie said impatiently. She didn’t answer. Instead, clicking her tongue with frustration, she hurried through to the far room and unpinned the railway map from the wall. The others followed, swapping confused glances.

“Here, lay it out on the floor,” she said, handing it down to Tom. “I wondered what those holes were for,” she continued, shaking her head ruefully.

“What holes?” asked Archie.

“The holes in the painting.” She snapped her fingers impatiently, indicating that Archie should hand her the rolled Bellak painting that lay on the desk. “They’d been made too carefully to be accidental.” She unscrolled the canvas and laid it flat on the map, aligning the bottom left corner with the L shape that had revealed itself under the black light.

“Give me a pencil.” Dhutta pulled one from the neat row of pens he kept clipped in his shirt pocket and handed it to her.

Gripping the pencil tightly, she pushed its end into the first hole and swiveled it around so as to mark the surface of the map underneath. She then did the same in each of the nine other holes until, satisfied that she had covered them all, she peeled the map away and let it spring shut, revealing the pencil marks she had just made. 210 james twining

Archie whistled slowly.

“They show the same route we revealed before,” Dhutta exclaimed.

“It’s like you said”—Dominique was beaming proudly— “connect the dots.”

Tom stared silently at the map, hardly believing what he was seeing. Dhutta was right, the pencil marks had fallen precisely on the towns revealed by the black light earlier and confirmed by Lasche as the route of the Gold Train.

All the dots apart from one. A small village in northern Germany whose name he had to squint to read because the pencil mark had gone right through it. Above it was a small symbol which the key told him denoted a castle.

Wewelsburg

Castle.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CIA SUBSTATION, ZURICH

January 8—6:01 p.m.

So you lost him?” Even the several thousand miles between them could not hide the disappointment in Carter’s voice. “Yes, sir.” Bailey winced, picturing Carter’s face. “And he doesn’t show up on any of the systems.” “I’m sorry, Chris.” Cody sighed, leaning in toward the speakerphone. “I put my best guys on this. I guess we didn’t figure he’d read us so fast.”

“I know you did what you could,” Carter reassured him. “And I really appreciate all your help on this. All of it.”

“I guess at least next time you’ll know what he’s capable of,” Cody added. “I’d suggest taking him down as soon as you see him.”

“If there is a next time,” Carter said with a hollow laugh, his voice booming around the room. “He was our one and only lead.”

“Not quite,” said Bailey thoughtfully. “We’ve still got Lasche to follow up on. And there’s the guy we saw with Blondi as well. He did show up on the system.”

“It’s

about

time

we

caught

a

break,”

Carter

said

with

relief.

212 james twining

“It turns out he’s got form. Some sort of high-end art thief. His name is Tom Kirk, also known as Felix.”

“A thief!” Carter exclaimed. “That makes sense. He must be in on this whole thing too.”

“Except that it turns out he cooperated with one of our agents on a case last year and got his slate wiped clean by way of a thank you. Now the general view is that he’s gone straight.”

“Which agent?”

“Jennifer Browne. You know her?”

“Name rings a bell,” Carter said slowly. “She was mixed up in some shooting a couple of years back. I’ll check into it.”

“Meanwhile, we could get his name and description out to all airports, railway stations and border police,” Bailey suggested. “That way, if he tries to leave the country, we’ll know about it. With luck, his friend Blondi may not be far behind.”

“Make it happen,” Carter agreed. “And next time, let’s make sure we bring at least one of

them

in.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

WEWELSBURG, WESTPHALIA, GERMANY

January 9—2:23 a.m.

It was clear from their journey up the hill that Wewelsburg Castle occupied a commanding position over the neighboring countryside. More surprising, perhaps, was its design. Wewelsburg was the only triangular castle in Europe, with one large round tower in the north corner and two smaller ones south of it, each linked by heavily fortified walls. But then, as Dominique had told them during the seven-hour drive from Zurich, so far as she had been able to establish from the research she had been able to do whenever her laptop was able to get a good phone signal, its design was just one of the ways the castle broke with convention.