The Doomsday Testament (12 page)

Jamie held the door for him. ‘There was one point. Do you know anything about the relationship between Heydrich and a man called Hans Frank? Frank was an SS bigwig who ruled over most of Poland for four years of the war. He was hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg.’

Simon frowned. ‘No. But David would. You should stay in touch with him. He’s a handy man to know. Look after yourself, laddie.’

When
he was gone, Jamie sat down at the computer and stared at the man on the screen. The words beneath the picture confirmed most of Simon’s chilling biography. Heydrich’s subordinates went in terror of him and had nicknamed him The Hangman. How he came by it was never properly explained, but Jamie could hazard a guess. Heydrich had been cleverer than Himmler, Goering and Goebbels combined, more cunning than Bormann and saner than Hitler, if your definition of sanity encompassed an anti-Semitic mass murderer with ice-water in his veins. If he hadn’t been killed he would undoubtedly have become one of the visionaries of the Nazi regime, taking his place among the coterie of thugs and bullies who clung to Hitler like lice, even a possible successor to the Führer himself. Where Hitler saw the destruction of the Jews as a means to an end, Heydrich had been taught to hate them from the cradle and approached their extermination like a Holy War. Kicked out of the German navy in 1931, for seduction of all things, he’d thrown in his lot with the Nazis, making himself indispensable to Himmler while the future Reichsführer-SS was still a Bavarian chicken farmer. Heydrich had created a political power base in the
Sicherheitsdienst
, Himmler’s feared security service, used the Night of the Long Knives and the corpse of Hitler’s former ally Ernst Rohm as stepping stones to help him up another few rungs of the ladder, before, with the Führer’s blessing, making it his business to rid the world of the Jewish race. When he had been rewarded with the Protectorship of Bohemia-Moravia, it must
have
seemed just another step in the right direction. But two British-trained Czech agents brought his career to an abrupt close with a couple of hand grenades on a warm spring morning in Prague. The date was 27 May 1942. No wonder Hans Frank’s interrogators hadn’t believed him. If he’d made a present of the Raphael to Heydrich early in 1942, surely it must have been in his possession when he died?

It was all very interesting, but it wasn’t getting him any closer to the painting or his grandfather’s mission. He retrieved the journal and the silk map from the drawer and placed them side by side on the desk in front of him. When he looked at it now he wondered why he hadn’t seen the similarity between the design of the wheel and the SS lightning-flash runes immediately. Runes? The word stirred something in his memory, something he’d read about Heinrich Himmler.

He brought up Google on the computer and typed in the words
Schutzstaffel
and
symbolism
.

There were thousands of hits, but a name and a place drew his attention as if they’d been written in lights. He clicked on the link and there it was: a large room with a marble floor surrounded by pillars. In the centre of the floor was a circular symbol identical to the one on the reverse of Matthew Sinclair’s silk map. The place was Wewelsburg Castle, the very heart of Himmler’s SS empire. The symbol was known as the Black Sun.

A few miles away the search results were replicated on another computer screen.

‘
WE HAVE WHAT
we need. The package is no longer required.’ The disembodied voice crackled in their earphones.

‘About time.’ The younger of the two Chinese men parked in a blue Ford across the street from Jamie’s flat reached below his seat and fitted a silencer to the pistol hidden there. The driver put a hand on his arm.

‘Wait.’ He punched a number into the hands-free phone on the dashboard in front of him. ‘Please confirm.’

‘Are you questioning my order?’

The driver, Li Yuan, who used the work name Charles Lee, was a senior operative of the Second Bureau of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. He bit back the comment that threatened to get him into further trouble. Who was this pup they’d parachuted in from Beijing to treat him like one of the waiters in the upmarket Cantonese restaurant he ran? Lee had been trained in assassination and covert operations, but his
primary
function was intelligence gathering, and ten years of work was in danger of being compromised by this cowboy from the Fourth Bureau. It was a measure of the importance of this mission that they were even prepared to consider what they were about to do, but if he was going to terminate this Saintclair he wanted to be certain.

‘Seeking clarification. If the subject is making progress, perhaps—’

‘Perhaps he will help others make progress?’ The voice had grown sharper. ‘He is attracting too much attention. We have a location and we have far greater resources to find what we seek than a second-rate salesman of paintings of dubious provenance. There are other lines of inquiry with which you need not concern yourself. We no longer need Saintclair. Confirm, please.’

The driver shrugged. Idiot. ‘Confirmed.’

His passenger grinned and clicked off the safety catch on the silenced automatic.

The older man shook his head. ‘No, not that way. Better if it’s an accident.’

Jamie didn’t notice the blue Ford with the tinted window as he left the building to go to his office later that afternoon. Neither did he notice the young Chinese in the leather jacket who dogged his footsteps on the way to the Tube.

At this time of the day more people were coming out of Kensington High Street station than going in and Jamie quickly made his way through the ticket barrier
and
down to the platform. As he stood among the crowd on the platform edge, his mind was on the breakthrough he had made and what his next step should be. He now knew where the original of the symbol was located, but what should he do about it? Yes, it was a potential link to the Raphael, but how much time could he afford following a trail that was sixty years old and likely to lead nowhere? He had his grandfather’s story. Maybe he should just be happy with that? But then there was the not knowing. Not knowing whether Matthew Sinclair had been a war hero or some callous gun for hire. The latter didn’t seem possible, but the moment he’d opened the journal Jamie had entered a world where the certainties of the past no longer existed.
Anything
was possible. And what if the Raphael was just beyond his fingertips? In his mid-teens Jamie had become obsessed with discovering the identity of his father and he felt the same compulsion now. He needed time to think. He needed to take a good look at what resources he had. Did he have enough money to give a month of his life to this mad quest? He did if the house sold, but the market was dead and didn’t look as if it was going to get any livelier for a while.

‘Sorry.’ Someone nudged him in the back, but he couldn’t identify who because he was surrounded by commuters. He looked to his left, where the train would be arriving and six feet along the platform his eyes caught those of a slim young woman – a girl? – with distinctive red streaks in her dark, shoulder-length hair. She returned his gaze and he could have sworn he saw a
twinkle
of amusement, even recognition. He smiled and turned away. It was strange how you grew accustomed to the suffocating proximity of other people. Up there, in the natural light, you fought for your personal space. Down here, in the dusty, ill-lit depths, breathing in lungfuls of chewy, overused air, you spent an hour with some big Romanian housewife camped in one pocket and an African busker in the other and were happy to pay for the privilege. The big digital counter at the far end said the next Circle Line train was due in forty seconds. He moved nearer the edge of the platform.

Nobody talked, but it was always noisy; the echoing halls of one of Tolkien’s cavernous subterranean cities. A muted dragon’s roar and the familiar change of pressure told him the train was approaching. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. The movement at his back increased as people nudged forward in anticipation and he soaked it up, his toes inching a little closer to the edge. Something, he wasn’t quite sure what, made him smile. The lunatic optimism of a man standing in a grubby London Tube station who thought he was about to discover one of the world’s great missing masterpieces? The feeling that old Matthew was up there somewhere daring him to follow the trail he had left? Maybe this was all a delayed reaction to his death. A sort of pre-mid-life crisis. The roar changed to a demonic, rhythmic clattering of steel on steel as the train approached along the tunnel.

He never felt the push. One moment he was on the platform, the next he was in the air, falling and twisting,
his
eyes wide open and the postered walls spinning. A freeze-frame moment when a female face gaped at him from the opposite side of the track, the mouth torn by a silent scream. At her side a dapper man in a dark suit and a red tie wore an annoyed frown, as if a demented circus performer had leapt out from nowhere to spoil his lunch break. Jamie knew he should move his arms to cushion his fall; do
something
. But they might have belonged to someone else. His shoulder struck first with a sickening crunch that sent a fireball of pain through his left side, but at least it absorbed most of the impact. When his cheek bounced off concrete with a rattle that loosened his teeth, he knew it could have been worse. A steel rail shone two inches from his eyes. Only now did it register where he was and what was about to happen. His feet. His legs. Where were they? Terror engulfed him like quicksand, forcing its way into his eyes and his mouth and his ears. He lost any sense of self, any control of body. He didn’t hug the concrete, it absorbed him. After a millisecond the lights went out with an explosive whoosh of whirling air that threatened to pick him up, buffeted him as if he was head down in a wind tunnel, tugging at his clothes and tearing at the bond that held him to the oily concrete. He screamed, louder than he’d ever screamed before, fighting with the sound of a million nails being scraped across a million blackboards, magnified a million times. Then it stopped. Dead.

WAS HE DEAD?
The question took time to answer. There was a long, breathless pause; an in-between time where he wasn’t quite sure. No, because he could feel his heart beating like a roadman’s jackhammer, his shoulder hurt like hell and a metallic taste told him his mouth was bleeding. For some reason it seemed important that he hadn’t lost any teeth and he ran his tongue over them, checking the molars one by one.

Someone was screaming quite close by and he could hear a voice shouting for help. He moved his arms and legs. Surprisingly, they were all present and correct. The inky blackness seemed terribly extreme until he realized his eyes were screwed tight shut. Very carefully, he opened them and a low, gloomy tunnel appeared ahead of him split by three rails that ran parallel with his face. He lifted his head an inch to get a better view and clattered his skull against something unyielding and metallic. So that’s what the underside of a Tube train looked like? It came to him in a rush. In that second he
realized
how close he had come and he had a vision of an alternative end that featured ragged lumps of flesh, splinters of bone and a single eyeball discovered some way down the track.

That was when the shaking started.

‘So you didn’t jump?’

Jamie looked up at the florid features of the British Transport Police sergeant and answered the question for the fourth time. ‘No.’

‘And you don’t think you were pushed?’

‘I don’t know. One minute I was standing on the platform, the next minute I was doing a double somersault with back flip in front of forty tons of Tube train.’

‘Only the CCTV is pretty poor quality. In the frames that matter there are maybe eight people in close contact with you, but most of the faces are indistinct. It doesn’t show anything except you taking a flyer and none of the passengers we’ve been able to interview noticed anything helpful. Most of them cleared off when they found out you were still alive and kicking. That’s Londoners for you. Always got something better to do.’

They’d reversed the train from above the spot where he lay and three Tube workers had helped him up from the pit below the track and carefully past the electrified centre rail. After he’d been checked over by a paramedic they’d brought him to the station supervisor’s office that served as the BTP team’s temporary interview room. The walls had recently been painted a dazzling daffodil
yellow
and the over-heated atmosphere combined with the paint fumes made him feel sick.

The sergeant studied the report in front of him and shook his head. ‘What I’m saying, Mr . . . Saintclair,’ he pronounced the name with a tight smile that said he didn’t quite believe what he was reading, ‘is that unless you can give us a little more detail, or a reason to think otherwise, at the moment we’re looking at an unfortunate accident that will look bad on our statistics, but won’t require any further investigation. Are you with me?’

Jamie nodded, not trusting himself to speak. The sergeant was staring at his black eye. Should he have mentioned the attack in his grandfather’s house? If the men who’d beaten him up had wanted to kill him they would have done it there and then, not waited until they had a hundred potential witnesses. Maybe it
had
been an accident. Even as the thought formed he knew it wasn’t true. There’d been too many accidents lately. The bottom line was that if he told them about the attack he’d have to tell them about Matthew’s journal and the Raphael. For reasons of his own, he didn’t want to do that.

He declined the offer of a cup of tea and the chance to have a friend collect him. At the sergeant’s request, he signed a health and safety form confirming he was fit and well enough to be released under his own steam. The policeman ushered him to the door. ‘I’d say you used up a couple of your nine lives there, Mr Saintclair,’ he said cheerfully. ‘If you’d landed on the rails instead of
in
the suicide pit, you’d probably have been electrocuted and you’d certainly have been killed by the train. If you hadn’t stayed still like you did it would have had your head off. Have a good day, sir.’