The Templar Prophecy (10 page)

Effi closed her eyes. ‘Because it is chemical, Udo. It needs to be made up before it can be promulgated. And when the Führer received the formula he was surrounded on every side by enemies of the Reich. Just as we are, Udo. Just as we are. But there is one difference between then and now. We have time. And the Führer didn't. We have time to choose our targets. There will be no more Breiviks for us. No more lone wolves. Winston Churchill said only one true thing in his entire life – that “the fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists”. Anders Behring Breivik quoted exactly this in his manifesto. He is now in jail. We will not
make the same mistake he did. Where he killed seventy-seven, we will kill millions.'

‘Here? In mainland Europe?'

‘No, Udo. Not in Europe. This time we shall take the war to the enemy.'

EIGHTEEN

Rancho La Virgencita, Antigua, Guatemala

23 JULY 2012

This was the bit Udo liked the best. He laid the SS uniform tenderly across the bonnet of his car. It had been his grandfather's, but his mother had let it out for him some years before and now it fitted him like a glove. Udo ran his fingers lovingly over the thick black material. Then he leant forward and buried his face inside the fabric, snorting in its odour like a truffle pig.

His father's father, Hanke, had been an
oberscharführer
– equivalent to a Wehrmacht sergeant major – in the Julius Schreck Regiment of the General SS. He had fought with distinction throughout the entirety of the war, and had blown his brains out the day General Jodl and Grand Admiral Dönitz signed the German Instrument of Surrender on 7 May 1945 in Reims. On his body had been a handwritten note quoting from Heinrich Himmler's speech to the SS Generals at Poznan on 4 October 1943:

A war has to be won spiritually. By willpower and via the spirit. He wins the battle who goes on fighting for even one hour after the armistice has been declared. I consider it crucial for the life of our people to teach our grandsons to enter into this same life and to understand the difficulties of their ancestors. There can be no doubt that it will be our Order, the racial élite of the German people, which will have the greatest number of progeny. Woe to us if the Germanic people cannot win this battle! It will be the end of beauty, of culture, and of creative thought on this earth.

Mouthing Himmler's call to arms to himself – the call to which both his grandfather and father had dedicated their lives – Udo stripped naked and began the ritual. First he poured water from a bottle of Salvavidas onto a flannel and scrubbed his face, neck and armpits. Then he dried himself on a clean napkin he had brought especially for the purpose and put on the black silk boxer shorts and vest he so enjoyed wearing next to his skin. Next he slipped on his grandfather's khaki shirt and black SS issue tie, the winged breeches and the black patent leather riding boots. After that came the tricot jacket, the belt and shoulder strap, the accompanying SS dagger, and the non-commissioned officer's crusher cap. Last of all came the red swastika armband.

When he was ready, Udo leant inside the car and adjusted his hat in the rearview mirror. He viewed the result with
profound satisfaction. His jaw was clean and his nose was straight. He no longer carried an ounce of excess flesh on his body. He was a true Aryan. One day he would have sons and, like his grandfather, he would teach them the ways of the world – tell them exactly what they needed to do to protect the natural order from outsiders. Meanwhile he would serve the Brotherhood with a true and honest heart. Perhaps it would be Effi who would bear his children one day? Now there was a thought. That would be the correct way of things. The peasant Zirkelers and the blue-blooded Raches combined into one. She would not be able to fend him off forever. What else was a woman for but to breed with?

Udo slid the machete he had bought at a hardware shop in Antigua out of its leather scabbard. They were sold blunt, so he had honed it to within an inch of its life with a diamond chip sharpener he had brought expressly with him from Germany. He eased the car door lightly shut behind him so that he would not warn the enemy of his arrival, straightened his tie, and marched towards the ranch house. Night was falling and the lights had been switched on inside the house, with the occasional silhouettes of a man and a woman smudging across them. Udo tried the back door. It was unlocked.

He smiled and inclined his head, as if he were performing in front of an audience. For in Udo's mind there was always an audience present on these occasions. It was a large audience made up of his ancestors, both known and unknown, certain Norse Gods, and a dozen or so carefully chosen figures from German history. This audience watched every move Udo
made. Approvingly. Paternalistically. Encouragingly. They were the chorus to his hero. The witnesses to what Udo understood to be Nietzsche's ‘tragic joy even in destruction'. They were Udo's secret sharers.

He pushed open the door. A man in a white Guayabera shirt and a pair of dark trousers was straightening a painting on the far wall. The man left off what he was doing and started up the corridor towards Udo, a quizzical frown on his face. He came to an abrupt stop when he caught sight of what Udo was wearing.

‘Salgase, Señora. Afuera. Rapido!'

The man ran straight towards Udo, his face livid with fear.

Udo smiled. He knew just what the man was about to do. He had encountered such situations before. He termed them ‘the instincts of sacrifice'.

Colel Cimi's chauffeur, Santiago, pulled down the bookcase that almost blocked the narrow hall corridor, causing the books to tumble out in an untidy pile between himself and Udo. By doing this it was clear that he intended to hamper Udo's progress towards the main part of the house, allowing his mistress the chance to escape.

Udo backed out of the door. The man could wait. It was the woman he wanted.

‘No!' shouted Santiago. He fought his way across the obstacle he had just created and ran after Udo.

Udo stepped back inside the house. He brought the machete down in a full sweep from left to right, allowing the weight of the blade to carry the power of the blow, just as he had learnt
from the numerous books on samurai swordsmanship he had studied as an adolescent. He was back out of the door even before Santiago's body hit the ground.

In the distance he could see Colel Cimi's pale face and forearms flashing in the moonlight. He gave chase. Speed was of the essence on such occasions. Speed scared people. Speed and certainty of action. Certainty of will.

Colel Cimi looked behind her and saw the black-clad figure briefly silhouetted against the luminous white of the ranch-house walls. She recognized the SS uniform. Saw the glint of the machete. Knew what was about to happen to her. There would be questions. Force. Pain. Disfigurement.

Colel Cimi had spent the greater part of her life keeping herself beautiful for the man who loved her. Now, in this penultimate moment of her existence, she understood that she, too, had loved him. She looked up as she ran, half expecting to see her lover and their daughter beckoning to her from beyond the stars. Calling her back to them.

She launched herself off the edge of the barranca and into thin air. There was no forethought. No remorse. It was something she knew she must do.

She fell fifty feet, her arms and legs spiralling, before she hit the ground. She rolled for a few paces and then tumbled off the lip of the waterfall that overlooked the valley. She was dead before she struck the water.

Udo stood at the edge of the barranca and watched Colel Cimi's body resurface. She looked like a rag doll some child had cast away – a loose-limbed piece of jetsam drifting on the
swell. He watched her for some time with active interest, as one would watch the carcase of some unknown species of fish roiling in the surf.

He turned round and headed back towards the ranch house. Things weren't usually this easy, he told himself. Fate and his audience must be smiling on him for a change. Looking with approval on his destiny. Humouring him.

NINETEEN

Hart finished packing for the airport. He checked his watch. His taxi was due in twenty minutes. He still had time.

He left his bag with the hotel clerk and hurried the two hundred metres to La Casa Del Jade. Once there he picked up the black jadeite necklace he had ordered for Colel Cimi as a thank-you present for seeing him through his attack of malaria. The necklace was made to his own design, and he was thrilled with it. Colel Cimi was not a woman who showed emotion easily, but Hart could imagine her delight when she opened the package – a particular look she would get on her face when she was taken with something you had said or done. The prospect pleased him enormously. He had become very fond of her during his days under her and Santiago's care.

He had fleetingly toyed with the idea of having a second piece designed for Amira as a peace offering, but he was no masochist. Amira was still so angry with him for attempting to save her life that she would probably throw it in his face. And
then throttle him with his camera straps for good measure. No. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

Hart sat back in the taxi and mulled over everything that Colel Cimi had told him. The process made him feel oddly content. As though she had unwittingly supplied the key to something that had hitherto been missing from his consciousness. A crucial part of an impossible to unravel thousand-piece jigsaw.

That his father suffered from bipolar disorder – which Hart understood to be the same as manic depression – had come as a profound shock to him. But it answered many questions. The baffling ‘Roger Pope' alter ego that his father used only in the house in Antigua when he was in the throes of mania, for instance. Or the crazy plan his father had come up with to contact the descendants of the man to whom his parents had been entrusted to deliver Hitler's suitcase. Colel Cimi had confirmed that rationally, when he was taking his medication, such an idea would never have occurred to the James Hart she knew. But to Hart's alter ego? When he was in a manic state? Roger Pope was capable of any idiocy.

Colel Cimi had gone on to describe how his father had once sold a twenty-five thousand dollar SUV for one hundred dollars cash to a passing stranger. Later, he had given away most of his clothes and cut up his credit cards and passport because he had felt threatened by perceived enemies – enemies who existed nowhere but in his imagination. He had been located by Santiago, a week later, living rough near San Andres, on the shores of Lake Peten Itza, being fed and
clothed by some American tourists who had taken pity on a fellow countryman so down on his luck that they had felt constrained to contact the US Embassy about him as a matter of urgency.

Such psychotic episodes usually lasted for between two to six weeks, she told him, depending on the strength of his mania. During these periods Pope felt that he was in direct communication with God and took to acting like a man possessed. Colel Cimi had long ago realized that only medication and Santiago's watchfulness could control him during such episodes, but there were times when Pope had managed to elude both the medication and his minder and go AWOL.

There were times, too, when Colel Cimi temporarily gave up on her lover and returned to her village to renew herself. It was during one of these periods that Pope had made the disastrous mistake of contacting someone – Colel Cimi did not know who – concerning the Holy Lance and the other material in the suitcase.

When Hart had pressed her as to what additional material she might be referring to, Colel Cimi had explained that she had no idea, as it had remained under Adolf Hitler's unbroken personal seal. When Hart questioned this, Colel Cimi explained that it had become an article of faith with Pope not to fracture the seal under any circumstances, for he was convinced that to do so would be to negate his parents' blood sacrifice – a sacrifice that Pope felt his parents had made in order to protect him.

‘It was a superstitious delusion, you mean?' said Hart.

‘You might call it that. Your father would have called it something else. A moral imperative, perhaps.'

‘I see.'

‘Yes. I believe you do. Your father was a good man, John. It was his illness that made him seem foolish.'

Colel Cimi had only learnt about the Holy Lance and the seemingly unbroken von Hartelius family connection to it because Hart – in full Roger Pope mode – had begun obsessively reading up on his ancestry and, being something of a Luddite, had been forced to ask for her help in obtaining books via the internet. Ancient books on the Knights Templar, on Frederick Barbarossa, on the Grail Legend, and on the Third Eye. Books on Second World War female test pilots and on the Battle for Berlin. Biographies of Adolf Hitler and of Dietrich Eckart, the occultist to whom Hitler had dedicated the second volume of
Mein Kampf
. Books on secret groups like the Vril or Luminous Lodge, and on the Thule Society, which had welcomed the young Adolf Hitler as a member and had helped form his public persona via séances related to the Secret Doctrine. It was through the Thule Society – at least according to Roger Pope's version of events – that Hitler had been inculcated into the irrelevance of personal morality and the strategically inverted importance of the Manichean Struggle between Light and Darkness. Later she had caught the fatally obsessed Pope reading August Kubizek's
Young Hitler: The Story of Our Friendship
, in which Kubizek described the Luciferically possessed Hitler's first viewing of the Holy Lance.

‘So my father was a closet Nazi? Is that what you are telling me?'

‘No. No.' Colel Cimi had laughed. ‘Nothing like that. But when he was in a manic state he didn't know who or what he was. He would enter into what he described as a condition of Karmic Transformation. A communion of spirit with the past. What he called being bathed in astral light. When he was in his “normal” state, he was, if anything, of an advanced liberal persuasion. What in the United States one might call a democrat. That is certainly how he voted.'

‘My father voted democrat?' The thought struck Hart as a little surreal. He was grateful, though, for small mercies. The prospect of both his father and his grandfather being fascists was too dreadful to contemplate. He could imagine the terminally socialist Amira's withering contempt. She would probably never talk to him again.

Hart's train of thought was broken by the taxi driver slapping lightly at his steering wheel and making a cutting gesture with the edge of his hand. ‘These people you are visiting must be very rich, Señor. Very rich indeed. They leave their lights burning even in the daytime.'

Hart glanced towards the ranch house. The man was right. It was broad daylight but the lights were still on and the back door open.

‘They've been holding an all-night party perhaps? I'm sorry, Señor, but you have missed all the fun. There is only the cleaning up to do now. The drink is drunk and the girls are gone.' The taxi driver slapped the steering wheel again, this
time with a downward flicking motion, as if he was shaking excess water off his fingertips. He grinned, showing three widely separated teeth. ‘
Asi es la vida
, eh? Such is life.'

Hart felt the first faint stirrings of unease. ‘Stay here, please. I'll be back in twenty minutes. My plane leaves in two hours. We shall have to hurry if my visit takes any longer.'

‘No problema
,' said the taxi driver. ‘I have my newspaper. I have the capacity to sleep. And I sleep like a baby whenever the meter is running, that I promise you. Tick, tick, tick, tick.'

Hart started towards the house, leaving the man cackling at his own joke. It was an odd thing about the lights, though. The day was sunny – not overcast at all. Maybe the electrician was testing the circuits? Or maybe there had been a power cut and the juice had just been switched back on again?

Hart stepped into the hall. He half opened his mouth to call out but he got no further. Santiago was sprawled lengthways across a pile of books. He had been slashed across the face and down one side of the chest with a sharp weapon. Hart could see the white of exposed bone through the gristle. The blow must have nicked Santiago's intestines because the stench was overwhelming. Hart steadied himself against the wall and began to dry retch.

This couldn't be happening. Not twice. Not twice in one week. Hart drew a hand down his face. It came away covered in cold sweat.

He stepped over Santiago's body and hurried down the hall. He searched anxiously through the familiar bedrooms but
they were all empty. Pillaged, but empty. The French windows leading to the garden were wide open.

Hart ran towards the barranca. Had Colel Cimi managed to escape? Was she hiding in the grounds? Should he call out to her? Or was Santiago's murderer still on the premises?

Some instinct drew Hart to the lip of the gully leading down to the falls. Colel Cimi had shown him the place the afternoon before. It had been her special spot. The place she went to when she was upset or worried. The place she called ‘the gateway to my soul'.

He stood at the edge of the barranca and looked down. A body floated face downwards in the pool below the falls. Long black hair spread out in a starburst all around it.

Hart plunged down the scree slope, arms akimbo, not caring when he lost both of his shoes in his flailing downhill progress. When he reached the pool he plunged in. It took him ten strokes to reach the body.

The instant he took hold of Colel Cimi's head, he knew that she was dead. Her neck was loose and her eyes were closed. Her mouth was pursed as if in prayer.

Hart pressed her body to his chest and kicked backwards towards the shore. Colel Cimi seemed as light as air in his hands.

He carried her up the path towards the house, hardly noticing that his bare feet were being laced to shreds on the volcanic stones. Once inside, he carried her to her bedroom and laid her on the bed. He stood over her, gasping and choking, his face contorted with grief.

Slowly, tentatively, Hart began to return to a state of rational consciousness. First he remembered the taxi and its driver waiting for him outside. Then he recalled the original purpose of his journey, which was to get him to the airport in time for his plane back to London. He realized that if the taxi driver decided to venture into the house for some reason – to use the lavatory, say, or to check how much longer he was going to be – he could not fail to spot Santiago's body. Then Hart would be forced to remake the acquaintance of the chief of police. And this time he would not get off so lightly.

An
Inglés
accused of murder in Guatemala? The chief would clean him out. Together with any friends and family who were foolish enough to cough up even the smallest portion of the
mordida
bribe that would be the only way to secure his acquittal. That was the way things worked in countries like Guatemala. Hart knew how it went down. He'd witnessed it for himself just a few days before in Syria – and many times further down the line.

He looked down at the bed. Colel Cimi was dead. Santiago too. Nothing could change that. Nothing could bring them back. But at least he now understood why they had been killed. One look around Colel Cimi's bedroom answered that question for him. The place was a wreck. Every drawer and cupboard had been torn open. Each pillow slit. Even the mattress had been eviscerated, as if whoever had done it enjoyed the mayhem and the effect it would leave behind. But why had they waited so long after his father's murder? Why
hadn't the murderer come whilst he was still there and added him to the bag? Hart shook his head in despair.

The reason for all three deaths must lie in the suitcase his grandfather and grandmother had spirited out of Berlin in April 1945, just hours before the victorious Russian Army had begun violating the city in revenge for the Siege of Stalingrad. The person or persons responsible for their deaths must be linked to the descendants of the man to whom the suitcase had originally been consigned. These were the people his father had contacted in his manic state. These were the people responsible.

But that was as far as his logic managed to carry him. Hart had neither a name nor an address for the perpetrators. And any clues left behind in his father's or in Colel Cimi's house were long gone. Where should he start looking? What should he do? How should he respond?

Hart hobbled into the drawing room. He searched through the detritus littering the floor until he found the photograph of his sister that Colel Cimi had shown him. The frame was broken and the glass was cracked, but Carmen's photograph was blessedly intact. Hart took it out of its frame and flattened it carefully between the pages of a discarded magazine. He slipped the magazine inside his shirt, making sure that the photograph was snug against his belly and in no danger of being creased.

He picked his way down the corridor and into Santiago's bedroom. He scrabbled around in the mess left by the murderer until he found a matching pair of open-backed mules and
some socks. He put them on over his bloodstained feet. Then he swept an eiderdown off the floor and shook it clear of dust. He covered Santiago's body with it. He returned down the corridor and did the same for Colel Cimi. Then he stepped into the sunlit yard.

The taxi driver was sleeping. He was using his newspaper as a sunscreen.

Hart eased himself into the back of the cab. He propped the door open with his foot whilst he swept the damp hair back from his forehead. Then he allowed the door to fall shut.

The driver straightened up, his newspaper disintegrating into leaves around him.

‘I am ready, Señor,' said Hart. He passed a fifty dollar bill across the seatback. ‘My plane leaves in less than an hour. And it is a matter of the greatest possible urgency that I get on it.'