The Black Sun (41 page)

She pointed at the photo of the window on the screen as he sprang to her side, then passed the photo of the painting into his eager hands.

“Let me see.” Tom held the photo up to the screen. “Christ, you’re right!” He breathed excitedly. “The window’s different. He must have changed it.”

“It’s quite subtle. Here the castle has two turrets, but in the window it has three. Here there are seven trees in the foreground, in the window five.”

“And look, four birds in the painting, two in the window. That means we’ve got two sets of three numbers.”

“But which ones should we use?”

“The ones in the window,” Tom said confidently. “Don’t forget, Bellak didn’t know anything about the Order or their plans; he finished that painting years before the Gold Train set out on its journey. But the window was produced after the war and could easily have been designed to include the Enigma settings. The painting is only useful insofar as the discrepancies with the window tell people where to look for the numbers. Reading left to right there are three turrets, five trees, and two birds in the window. That’s three, five, two.”

“It could be the rotors!” Dominique exclaimed, her earlier frustration evaporating in the excitement of the moment. “There are only five of those. This could be telling us which rotors to use.”

“Which means that the rotor settings might be on here too,” Tom added. “It would make sense for them to keep everything all in one place.”

They analyzed the photos again, looking for further discrepancies that might provide some sort of clue. But, disappointingly after their breakthrough, there were none. In 358 james twining

every other detail the painting had been faithfully reproduced, even down to Bellak’s signature and the date, just about visible in the bottom left corner.

“I just don’t get it.” Tom shook his head in frustration. “They must have left some way of breaking the code, otherwise why bother going to all this trouble to hide it?”

“Maybe one of the other stolen Bellak paintings had the last piece of the code?”

Dominique suggested.

“Maybe,” said Tom. “Hang on, what’s that?” He pointed at a small section of wall below the stained-glass window that Archie had caught on the edge of one photo. “Can you enlarge it?”

She clicked a few buttons and zoomed in on the area Tom was pointing at.

“It’s the dedication plaque. ‘In loving memory of Eva Maria Lammers,’ ” she translated. “ ‘Taken from us on 13 November 1926.’ ”

“Nineteen twenty-six?” Tom frowned. “That can’t be right. I’m sure Archie told me she’d died in the nineteen fifties.”

“What if it’s a deliberate mistake?”

“How would that work?”

“Well, the date could be the ring settings—thirteen, eleven, twenty-six,” said Dominique, trying not to allow herself to get too carried away.

She selected rotors three, five, and two from the tin and then set the first one to thirteen, the second to eleven, and the third to twenty-six. Then she lifted the machine’s lid, inserted them, and closed it again so that only the top part of the rotors poked through the narrow slit. At that moment Archie and Viktor walked in carrying food and drinks.

“Any progress?” asked Archie in a mournful tone.

“Maybe,” said Dominique.

“We’re just about to try something,” Tom explained. “Dom noticed that there were differences between the painting and the window that might suggest the rotor selection.”

“And the date on the dedication plaque underneath doesn’t tally with when you said Lammers’s

wife

died.”

She

pointed

the black sun 359

at the magnified image of the plaque that was still on the screen. “So we used the dates to set the ring positions.”

“Well done,” Viktor said, squeezing Dominique’s shoulder. “So now all we need is the starting position of the rotors.”

“What?” Dominique asked in dismay. “I thought we had everything we needed.”

“You see those little windows on the top of the machine?” Viktor indicated three small holes next to the rotors. “The rotors have to be moved until you can see the relevant starting letter through the window.”

“How about EML?” Tom suggested.

“EML? Why those?” Archie asked with a frown.

“They were her initials.” Tom pointed at the plaque that was still on screen. “Eva Marie Lammers. Or at least, that’s the name he put on there. He could have made it up to suit the code.”

“Worth a go,” Dominique agreed, moving the rotors so that the letters could be seen through the openings.

“So is that it?” asked Archie.

“I guess there’s only one way to find out,” said Viktor, with a nod at Dominique to continue.

She pressed the first letter—
A
.
Z
flashed up on the light board. Then
L
.
W
appeared. Then
X: O
was illuminated.

“ZWOLF.” Archie’s voice cracked with disappointment once they had deciphered the whole word. “That’s not a word. That’s not even the beginning of a word. We must have got it wrong.”

“It’s not a word in English,” Tom reminded him. “But this message would have been encoded in German, remember?
Zwolf
is German for twelve.”

Soon a second word emerged:
funf
—five. Then
sieben
— seven.

“Twelve, five, seven,” Archie murmured, as if saying them again would help reveal the hidden meaning.

Dominique continued, Tom translating each number as it emerged, although with no punctuation it was sometimes difficult to make out where one number ended and the next began. It ended, however, with two familiar words. Archie read Tom’s scribbled translation

back

out

loud.

360 james twining

“Twelve, five, seven, three, six, nine . . . Heil Hitler . . .” He paused. “What do you think it means?”

“Aren’t map references given with six numbers?” Dominique asked no one in particular.

“It would certainly be the logical way to pinpoint a specific location,” Tom agreed.

“And we already have a map,” Archie reminded them, pulling the railway map out of the leather pouch and unfolding it on the floor.

Tom followed the grid reference with his finger, first locating the correct horizontal position, then the vertical one. His finger came to rest at a point on the outskirts of a small Austrian village. A village whose name they all recognized as being the final place the Gold Train had passed through before having to turn back.

A

village

called

Brixlegg.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

NEAR BRIXLEGG, AUSTRIA

January 12—3:32 p.m.

Tom knew this part of Austria well, although the snow and ice that blanketed the pastures and weighed down tree branches like a heavy blossom made it almost unrecognizable. His previous visits to the Tyrol had been in the spring, climbing holidays with friends, or more often on his own, when bright green mountains had plunged dizzily from snowcapped peaks to the frenzied tumult of rivers half drunk on meltwater. Brixlegg itself was a fairly ordinary little town just off the A12 motorway that Tom had not been to before. Huddled in the shadow of muscular tree-lined mountains on the banks of the river Inn, it was a hodgepodge of traditional Tyrolean buildings and more modern concrete construction, built to accommodate the ever-growing demand for living space. There was a church, of course, its steeple clawing above the surrounding rooftops like a hand reaching desperately for the sky.

The spot indicated by the coded grid reference on the painting lay a short distance off a distinctive kink in the railway line that snaked along the valley floor, roughly following the

path

of

the

river.

It

was

reached

by

turning

into

a

362 james twining

narrow road before the village itself, and then following it up a shallow incline, past several chalets that appeared to be on the cusp of being swallowed up by the encroaching forest.

The track ended in a gate, the steadily falling snow having already hidden its top edge under what looked like a thick layer of cream. Tom stopped the car and killed the engine. In the rearview mirror he saw Viktor do the same behind him and turn off her headlights. For a few seconds they sat there in muffled silence, the car suddenly deathly still.

“Are you worried about her?” Dominique asked.

“Should I be?” said Tom.

“I told you what I saw the other night. She was giving instructions to those three men. It looked like they were planning something. Maybe it was a mistake bringing her along.”

“It’s not like we had much choice, is it?” Archie reminded them. “How else were we going to get out here without being seen?”

Tom nodded. Archie was right. Viktor’s offer to smuggle them on her private jet to Salzburg and to provide two cars at the other end had been their only option. The price had been bringing her and her three men with them to, as she put it, protect her investment. And even though they’d flown out on the first takeoff slot Viktor’s bribes could secure, they’d still had to delay their departure until that morning.

“I think I trust her,” said Tom. “But we should keep our eyes open. Maybe try and split them up.”

“Well, we’re going to struggle to find anything under that lot anyway.” Archie nodded disdainfully at the snow-cov-ered mountains that towered above them. He lit a cigarette and cracked the window open an inch to blow the smoke out.

“That’s if Renwick hasn’t already beaten us to it,” said Tom. “He’s had almost two days’ head start, minus however long it took him to decode the painting.”

“Well, we’re here now,” Dominique chimed, ever enthusiastic. “I say we go and take a look, at least.”

Tom zipped his coat up and opened the door, the snow billowing in through the crack like

a

fine

spray.

The

air

was

the black sun 363

crisp and cold, especially compared to the soporific blast of the car’s heating. He stepped out of the car and walked toward Viktor, who was at the back of her car, leaning over the open trunk with her three men—Grigory, Piotr, and Yuri—clustered around her.

“Viktor?” Tom called.

She turned, a snub-nosed Beretta pointing straight at him. Tom froze.

“Here—” She threw it toward him. Tom snatched it out of the air. “You might need that,” she explained.

“I don’t like guns. Never have.”

“I don’t like them either,” she said. “But I’d prefer to have one and not need to use it, than not have one and need it.”

As if to emphasize her point, she reached into the trunk again and took out an AK–47

rifle, its polished wooden stock and under-barrel grip dark and shiny. She held it with an immediate familiarity that suggested a long and intimate relationship, the feel of it seeming to ease the tension in her shoulders.

Tom knew she was right. From what Turnbull had told him about Kristall Blade, he knew that Hecht and his men, assuming they were still with Renwick, would be armed and would have no qualms about opening fire on whoever got in their way.

“Argento!” An unfamiliar voice echoed through the air. Viktor dropped the rifle back into the trunk and slammed it shut. Tom stuffed the Beretta into his pocket before turning to see who was there.

An old man, a dog leash looped in one hand like a lasso, had appeared at the doorway of one of the chalets and was calling to a large German shepherd who was studiously ignoring him, alternating instead between chasing his tail and trying to bite the snowflakes as they drifted past his nose, both activities accompanied by a series of excited barks and yelps.

“Argento!” the man called again, before shutting the door behind him and trying to grab the dog’s collar as it pranced around his feet. The dog, however, caught sight of Tom and the others and broke free, sprinting out onto the track. Tom 364 james twining

knelt, grasped the dog’s thick leather collar as it came toward him, and held on as the dog licked his face furiously.

“
Danke
,” the old man said gratefully as he walked up to Tom and clipped the leash to the collar. “Argento always gets very excited when we go for a walk.”

“You’re welcome,” replied Tom in German. “He seems quite a handful.”

“Oh, he is. Keeps me young.” The man looked down and patted the dog’s head lovingly as it lunged at the snow, then peered at Tom quizzically, his eyes almost lost under the brim of his hat. “Are you with the others?”

“The others?” Tom frowned.

“The men who came a couple of days ago. They said some others might come, so I assumed . . .”

“Oh right, yes.” Tom nodded. “We’re with them. I wonder, can you show us where they’ve gone? My phone doesn’t seem to work out here and I can’t get in touch.”

He unfolded the map from his pocket and opened it for the man. After a few seconds of trying to find their current location with his gloved index finger, the old man pointed to a spot on the map.

“That’s it.”

Tom frowned. It wasn’t the spot indicated by the coordinates decoded from the painting. “What’s there?”

“The old copper mine, of course. I told your colleague that he was wasting his time, but he had the right paperwork so I had to let him through.”

“Paperwork?”

“To open the mine up. Diggers too. Big yellow things. He’s been at it nonstop. In this weather—can you believe it? But he’s wasting his time. There’s nothing there.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I used to play in it,” the man said simply. “Of course that was a long time ago now, before the war, but it had long since dried up, even then. We used to play hide and seek. I remember my mother was always terrified it would collapse and kill us all.” He gave a wistful smile.