The Doomsday Testament (23 page)

I looked round, and found three pairs of eyes staring. Klosse was calculating the chances of jumping me and taking my M1 carbine. Strasser’s were wide with pure terror, but I knew that if Klosse moved the SD man would follow him. Walter Brohm was wearing a little half smile that asked me what I was going to do next
.

‘Stan!’ I kept my voice low and the Pole looked back from where he had been covering the road. He nodded as I signalled him to move into the forest and towards our ambushers’ flank. He shot a last look at the three prisoners, grinned at me and was gone into the undergrowth
.

‘Here.’ I tossed my pistol to Brohm. ‘If they move kill them.’ Then I followed Stan into the wood
.

Why did I put my trust in Brohm, who was undoubtedly the least trustworthy of all? Because the one thing I could trust was his instinct for self-preservation. Walter Brohm had a destiny. He was not going to join some ragged band of fanatics whose fate was, at best, to end up in a prison camp,
or
more probably be hunted down and killed by the Allies. Walter Brohm had placed his faith in America. Now I was placing my faith, and my life, in the hands of Walter Brohm. Stan and I had operated as a team on and off for a year and now we moved sweetly and silently through the trees, taking it in turns to cover each other. We froze as a last burst from the machine gun brought the firing to a halt. I was gambling that the firepower I heard was evidence of their strength. The MG-42 required a crew of two, one to fire and one to load, three more for the small arms and the faust, add two just in case. Say seven. We began moving again and I motioned Stan right, towards the trees edging the road. I heard voices, at first quiet, then high-pitched shouting as they celebrated their victory. In my mind I could see what was happening and what was about to happen and I picked up the pace, taking the chance of being heard and arming a grenade as I moved forward at the crouch. Stan kept pace with me. Thirty yards ahead I could make out movement through the trees and I prayed they were concentrating on their front and not their flank. They would be relaxed now, in that state of post-combat euphoria when a man is at his most vulnerable. They would be hungry and focused on whatever treasures the jeep held. I slowed and dropped to a crawl among the leaf mulch and the dead branches and I sensed Stan mirroring my movements to the right. Then I felt him tense,
stop
, half-sensed, half-saw the hand signal. Three, no, four, moving into the road to investigate the jeep. Wait. He nodded, his eyes intense, but not frightened. Stan had been fighting Germans since 1939 when the world had been looking the other way as they raped his country. He was better than I was. Wait. Wait. I imagined one of the men at the burning jeep looking at the mangled bodies, kicking them, just to make sure, turning, seeing the second jeep by the ditch a hundred yards away. A shout. Fire! Stan’s controlled bursts raked the road at the same instant I threw my first grenade. The second was in the air as the first exploded and I heard screams as lumps of razor-edged shrapnel scorched the air between the trees, tearing flesh and smashing bone. I ignored the men in the road. They were Stan’s. I ran forward, screaming, though I wasn’t aware of it, and firing short bursts at the two soldiers by the machine gun and the two who had simply been waiting to share the spoils of the attack. Three of them were down, caught in the grenade blasts, but the fourth blazed away and I felt the hot breath of a passing bullet on my cheek and heard the unmistakable shoop . . . shoop . . . shoop of rounds passing over my head. Inexperienced. Firing too high. I took my time, aimed and he was punched back with two bullets in his chest and another in his throat. A second grey-clad figure struggled to his feet at the edge of my vision and I fired as I turned towards him,
the
burst folding him in half like a puppet with its strings cut. It was finished, but I was still flying, my mind ranging over the scene around me and the carbine kicking as I automatically fired into the prone figures lying by the wrecked machine gun. I’d learned the lesson the hard way a long time ago. A wounded man can kill you, a dead man can’t. As I stood in the disbelieving void of the aftermath, I registered single shots coming from the trees by the road and I willed my protesting body across the pine needles to take up a position a few yards from the Pole
.

‘How many?’

‘Just the one, hiding behind the jeep.’

I replaced the half-empty clip in the carbine with a full one and he did the same. No point in prolonging this. It had to be done
.

‘Three-second burst then we rush him. I’ll take right. You take left.’ On such arbitrary decisions your life hangs. Stan just nodded
.

‘Go!’

I fired towards my side of the overturned jeep, leaping forward as the last bullet left the barrel. When I was halfway across the road I saw a muzzle flash a heartbeat before someone kicked me in the right shoulder and I went down hard on the gravel. I heard Stan continue firing and a high-pitched voice call out ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’, which is what Gerry says when he wants to give up. But Stan hadn’t heard from his family since the
Warsaw
Uprising in 1944 and he knew what that meant. A single shot was followed by a sharp cry, then there was silence
.

I didn’t feel any pain yet, only a numbness in my right side, but I knew the pain would come. I lifted my head to see Stan’s grinning face looking down at me. He was holding my carbine. The German’s bullet had smashed the wooden stock and the impact had knocked me off my feet, but otherwise I was unharmed. He held out a hand to help me up and we walked slowly back up the road . . . where Walter Brohm waited
.

THE SOFT HISS
of the rain filtering through the trees was the only sound apart from the scuff of boots on gravel as Jamie and Sarah made their way along the unpaved loggers’ road. Jamie quickly discovered that walking with the hood of his jacket raised reduced his peripheral vision to zero and his auditory perception by about 75 per cent. Any follower could have been wearing steel-shod boots and whistling the
Dam Busters
theme tune and he still wouldn’t have known until it was too late. He lowered the hood. Now the misty rain worked its way inside his shirt collar and trickled down his back where it turned the waistband of his boxer shorts into a chilly, sodden trial. Sarah followed his example and the rain quickly plastered her hair tight to her head and face, making her look like an extra from a low-budget zombie movie.

She caught his glance. ‘Don’t say a single word.’

Spruce trees grew tight to the flanks of the path, but their ordered ranks and the lack of thick undergrowth
gave
Jamie increasing hope that conditions might not be too difficult once they were forced to leave the road. They’d been walking for twenty minutes when the track took a sharp turn to the south.

He stopped. ‘We need to be further west.’ He pointed away from the road, into the trees.

‘Let me see the map again,’ Sarah said. He handed it over and she studied it, grimacing. She sniffed. ‘You’re right, but it’s going to be a lot harder going.’

He shrugged. ‘We don’t have any choice. We’ll stick to the track for another hundred metres; with luck there’ll be a spur that goes in the right direction. If not, we take to the trees. It might not be as bad as you think.’

It was much worse. They discovered that the cultivated, evenly spaced plantations by the trackside quickly gave way to wild woodland where fallen branches and rotting vegetation created natural traps designed to break a leg or turn an ankle. Worse, these were covered by a mass of bracken and nettles, and vicious waist-high brambles created impenetrable nests of coiled, inch-thick tentacles that might as well have been made of razor wire. Every step became a lottery, each wrong move a five-minute delay while the hooked thorns were disengaged from clothing and flesh and a new route was found. Within minutes of leaving the path Jamie had forgotten about the rain because he was sweating so much he might have been sitting in a bath.

With each hundred yards they covered his respect for Sarah Grant increased. She accepted every setback without complaint, her eyes narrowed and her face a
mask
of determination. A bramble had cut across her forehead and a thin line of blood tinted the rain running down her nose pink, but, if she noticed, she ignored it. Eventually, they stopped for a breather and she pushed a damp strand of hair from her eyes.

‘Boy, you sure know how to show a girl a good time, Saintclair.’

He laughed and offered her a bottle of water. ‘Some champagne, madam? You’ll find that life’s always an adventure when you’re with me.’ She accepted it, took a deep drink and handed it back.

‘What now?’

He picked up his rucksack. ‘More of the same.’

She nodded. ‘One thing has been bothering me since I’ve read the journal—’

His head came up sharply. ‘Did you hear something?’

She listened for a few seconds. ‘No. What do you think it was?’

He stared the way they’d come. ‘I don’t know. Just a noise. Back towards the road.’

They waited a few moments. Nothing. As they moved off Sarah continued her thesis. ‘From what I’ve read so far, Walter Brohm only makes vague hints that he has the Raphael, yet you seem pretty certain he did possess it. Certain enough, anyway, for us to be here. But even your grandfather thought Brohm could be making it all up.’

Jamie considered the question as he unhooked himself from another patch of brambles.

‘True, but he had his own reasons for thinking that.
Brohm
was trying to tempt him, bribe him even, but I like to think that Matthew Sinclair decided – at least then – that he wasn’t going to be bought. Matthew knew his art. He’d worked out that the painting was by the contemporary Leonardo feared most. Well, that was Raphael. Two popes, Julius and Leo, were among Raphael’s patrons. Leonardo was thirty years older and his powers were waning, Raphael’s were at their peak. He feared the younger man was about to eclipse his genius and, if he had lived, who knows he might have done just that.’

‘He died young?’

Jamie gave a sheepish smile. ‘He was thirty-seven. One theory is that, the er, cause was overdoing it in the bedroom with a lady friend.’

‘He died of an overdose of sex!’

‘It’s possible.’

Her laughter rang through the trees.

‘OK,’ she returned to her subject, as the ground began to fall away beneath their feet. ‘So let’s accept that you’re right and Brohm was referring to the Raphael? Who’s to say he didn’t just see it hanging on a wall somewhere. You have an unproven link between Hans Frank and Reinhard Heydrich, but as far as I can see, none at all between Heydrich and Brohm.’

‘That’s true, but I would refer you to the circumstantial evidence, m’lud.’

‘Carry on,’ Sarah said graciously.

‘We know Hans Frank had the painting, that’s a given?’ She nodded and he continued. ‘In nineteen thirty-nine
Frank
became governor of that part of Poland which wasn’t incorporated into Germany or Russia. It gave him power of life and death over millions of people, and he wasn’t afraid to use that power. In one single
Aktion
, he had thirty thousand Polish intellectuals arrested. Seven thousand were shot.’

‘A bastard, then.’

‘A bastard, but it seems not a big enough bastard. Some people, most of them in the SS, thought he was being too soft on the Poles. Within months of his appointment they were undermining his authority and challenging every decision he made. By December ’forty-one he was on the brink of being sacked. To survive, he needed an ally, a powerful one.’

‘Heydrich?’

‘It’s possible. At the time Heydrich was chief of the RSHA, the Reich Main Security office, and was probably the most feared man in Germany after Hitler and Himmler. Let’s say, for instance, Frank wanted to send Heydrich a sweetener. Well, you don’t just wrap a million quid’s worth of masterpiece in brown paper and stick it in the post. Ideally, he would have handed it over himself, but Heydrich was busy in early nineteen forty-two and so was Frank. The next best thing would be to send it by a trusted messenger.’

‘So?’

‘On the twentieth of January nineteen forty-two Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Buhler, Frank’s deputy, were in the same building in Berlin, in fact, in the same room.’

He saw he had her. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because the twentieth of January nineteen forty-two was the day fifteen men, including Heydrich, Buhler, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, gathered in a Berlin suburb for the Wannsee Conference to resolve the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. The meeting that decided the fate of six million people.’

Sarah choked. ‘I’m beginning to think this painting is cursed.’

‘You don’t have to touch it. I’ll take care of that.’

‘So Heydrich has the painting. Now tell me how it gets to Brohm.’

‘Ah well, this is where the evidence gets even more circumstantial, that is to say . . . flimsy.’

‘Convince me.’

Jamie forced a path through a thick clump of bushes that barred their way. ‘OK. Everything I’ve read about Heydrich makes me certain he would have been amused that Frank believed he could be bought with some daub, even if it was a Raphael. As soon as he saw it he would have wanted to find a way of rubbing Frank’s nose in it. He would also have wondered if the gift was part of some kind of plot against him. So he’d get rid of it as quickly as he could. But to who? Hitler and Goering would be the obvious candidates – they both wanted the painting when it was originally looted. To give it to Hitler would be to acknowledge its worth, so that was out. Heydrich despised Goering almost as much as he despised his boss Himmler. So why not give it to an old friend?’

‘What makes you think Heydrich and Brohm were friends?’

‘This is the flimsy part. They were contemporaries in the Nazi party, which was a relatively small organization when they joined in nineteen thirty-one. Heydrich was in the SS from the start, but Brohm wasn’t far behind him. Brohm must have needed funding and support for his research in the early days, who better to call on than Heydrich?’