The Isis Covenant (25 page)

As they ran, he kept darting glances over his shoulder. It seemed unlikely anyone would be able to follow them in this warren, but he was out of his depth and he knew it. Even Danny Fisher had more idea what they were doing than he did. Somehow, the Sisterhood had found a way to follow them, ready to give what help they could in the search for the Crown. But even they had no answer to the sinister force that had stalked them in their turn, a force so ruthless it had cut down their representative without a second thought and with a savagery that was clearly intended to send a message. The girl had said ‘They’ were following, and he had automatically assumed it must be Frederick and the Vril. But how had Frederick found them? It could just as easily have been whoever had hunted down and butchered the men who had been sent from America to kill him. The ruthlessness was all too evident, but there was a pattern to his killings that just didn’t fit here. And there was a third possibility: what if the Sisters of Isis had enemies of their own? A secret society would always inspire fear of the secrets they kept, and a society that had survived for two thousand years would have no shortage of secrets. He had so many questions and no answers and he had a feeling things weren’t going to improve any time soon.

It seemed the alleys could get no narrower when Teddy turned into a gap between two buildings that
would
only allow them through in single file. At the rear of the larger of the buildings, a metal stair climbed to an anonymous doorway on the first floor.

Their guide’s eyes shone in the darkness.

‘We are here.’

XXVII

BENEATH THE FIRST
light of the sickle moon
.

Paul Dornberger frowned and checked his calculations, though he knew the answer well enough. The old man’s time was running out.

He tried to remember the first occasion his father had mentioned the children, but his mind was blank. Had it been in the cellar? He could never truly know that, because the visions of what had happened there were never complete. They arrived like star-shells over a battlefield; a burst of light, a moment of stark illumination, a fleeting shadow, then back into the darkness. But they always left that lingering doubt. Had he truly seen what he thought he had seen? Done what he feared he had done? It struck him that there was some memory that even a mind saturated with so much blood had to repress for fear of the consequences it would bring. He felt a surge of an unfamiliar emotion that brought with it a shudder. The realization came as a shock. It was
there
, somewhere inside this kaleidoscope that was his head, but Paul Dornberger didn’t dare to access it. Beyond a hidden door in his tortured mind was the secret that made him who he was. But he was too
frightened
to look for it.

Oleg Samsonov appeared in the doorway.

‘Are you all right, Paul?’

Dornberger forced a smile. ‘Of course, sir. By the way, I have these papers for you to sign.’

‘Fine, but come upstairs.’ Samsonov gave an embarrassed grin. ‘I’ve left my reading glasses in the big lounge.’ Dornberger smiled back. His employer was notoriously shy of admitting any deficiency. It was a measure of his growing trust that he revealed even this minor physical fault. Paul followed the other man up the spiral staircase to a room that took up two-thirds of the second floor of the building. Above this were the family bedrooms and dressing rooms and the state-of-the-art gym, and above that a helicopter pad hidden behind blast-proof walls. The space, it was more than a room, was enormous, a vast floor of the finest Finnish ash hardwood, scattered with oriental carpets from Isfahan and Tabriz, each of which would have paid Paul Dornberger’s annual salary twice over. In one corner hung the largest and most expensive flat-screen television that money could buy. In another, a Swedish sound system that had cost as much as one of Oleg’s Ferraris. The space had been designed somehow to produce separate acoustic zones, so that Oleg could be
listening
to music at the same time as Dmitri watched cartoons and his film-star wife Irina was entertaining her friends by the enormous picture window that looked over the park. Marble busts from Rome and Greece jostled with modern sculptures on strategically placed pedestals. And in the centre, its exterior hung with fine art worth millions, the panic room.

‘You’re putting in a lot of extra hours lately on these merger deals.’

‘Maybe you should give him some time off?’ Irina Samsonov kissed Paul on both cheeks, while Dmitri pawed at his hand with a shy smile. Oleg picked up his son and hugged him.

‘I don’t think Paul has any of those treats he doesn’t believe I know about. Maybe later, Dimi. Ah,’ he sighed, ‘here they are. If there is one thing I detest it is getting older, but even money cannot buy you youth.’

Irina kissed her husband on the lips in a show of genuine affection. There was nothing artificial about Oleg Samsonov’s wife, neither the love she showed her family nor the beauty that seemed to light up any room she entered. ‘No, but it could buy you laser surgery, if you weren’t so frightened.’

Oleg shook his head ruefully. ‘No man, certainly no Russian, goes into hospital unless he needs to.’

He signed the documents, reading each one with care before putting his pen to it.

‘You should let Paul see your new acquisition,’ Irina suggested. ‘After all, he’s almost one of the family. He
bought
it while you were in New York. How did that go, Paul?’

Dornberger smiled. He had a momentary vision of terrified faces and the particular salt-sweet scent of burning flesh. ‘I think we’ll see the fruits of it before too long.’

Oleg glanced at the panic-room door and frowned. ‘No, we have things to talk about. Perhaps another time.’ Paul nodded and bit back his disappointment. If Irina was excited about whatever was in the panic room, it must be something special.

They walked back downstairs and Oleg went to his office, leaving Paul to deal with the papers. Dornberger’s mind drifted back to his earlier inner conflict. The Crown and the knife. The ever-presents in his life. It was still difficult to believe that what he had learned in the past few months was true. Yet how else could his father be explained? How else could he be explained. His father’s creation. Always the outsider. Never loved. Never treated as a child should be. His life had revolved around the Crown and the knife and Hartmann. A small bleep from his computer alerted him to a message in his super-encrypted e-mail basket. He opened it and read. It was a complex message with a number of attached documents and it took time before he understood its true meaning. The contents took his breath away. One step. Just one more step and he had him.

XXVIII

A SHAVEN-HEADED TEENAGER
dressed in a dark bomber jacket and black jeans met them at the top of the stairs.

‘Friends,’ Teddy assured him.

‘Sure,’ the boy grunted. ‘But friends still gotta be given the once-over. Orders.’

Teddy shrugged and ushered Jamie forward. The hands that ran over his body were surprisingly gentle, but thorough – whoever taught the boy knew what they were doing.

‘Tell him if he tries that with me I’ll tear his freekin’ head off.’ Danny stood with her arms folded.

Jamie translated. The boy shrugged and produced his best high-school English.

‘You don’t get searched, you don’t come in. Suit yourself.’

‘You can wait outside,’ Jamie suggested.

‘Sure, when hell freezes over. You put one hand in the wrong place, mister, and your girlfriend will be the one
who’s
crying.’ She submitted to the search with a glare that would have lowered the temperature considerably in Satan’s realm, and they were ushered through the metal-studded wooden door.

Inside, a short bar dominated one corner; worn leather benches lined the walls, providing seating for a few scattered tables, at one of which three old men in shirtsleeves sat playing cards and muttering while a fourth watched. The cards were slapped down in quick succession followed by a triumphant cackle from the victor as he picked up the winning hand.

Teddy nodded to a door at the rear of the club. Jamie and Danny exchanged glances. They’d already decided that Jamie would do the talking and that they had no option but to trust their hosts. Jamie followed Teddy while Danny went to sit in the corner near the card players.

Behind the door, an office. Bare, nicotine-stained walls with flaking paint, three olive-green filing cabinets, a large ornate safe that might have been looted from a Hungarian bank, and a wide desk with a scarred red-leather top and a desk lamp that gave the room its only illumination. In an ashtray beside the lamp a cigar smouldered, the smoke spiralling in uninhibited tendrils through the rays of the lightbulb. At the desk, a silver-haired patrician – in another setting, Jamie thought, he would have been a count or a prince – sat mountainous and solid, despite his obvious great age. Even now it was possible to see the ghost of the laughing eyes and
matinee-idol
looks that must have had the girls chasing after him in the grey uniform with the silver lightning flashes on the collar. The man looked up and sent a message with his eyes. Teddy turned to go.

‘Wait,’ Jamie said. ‘A girl was killed on the way here. She was stabbed. He had a knife.’

Again the slightest flicker and Teddy was at the old man’s side, whispering into his ear, then sliding past Jamie to stand behind him. Not a threat, exactly, but …

‘He says he knows nothing about the girl. You were being followed. Two men. Maybe they were there to protect you – from us?’

Jamie shook his head. ‘No. You said to come alone. We came alone.’ At the same time an image of David’s face appeared. Who knew how the Israelis worked? It was possible, but if it had been Mossad, Jamie doubted even streetwise Teddy would have spotted them.

‘You lost them when you came through the bar, but he went back to check. Found only one. That’s when he came to you. The first time he saw the girl she was already dead. Then he brought you here. Does that satisfy you?’

It didn’t seem to matter whether it did or not. He knew it was all he was going to get. He nodded and there was a slight click as Teddy closed the door behind him. Once they were alone, the other man allowed the silence to lengthen and Jamie felt the ice-blue eyes searching his soul.

‘Where do you think you are?’ It seemed an unlikely question, but appeared to demand an answer.

‘I’m in a gentlemen’s drinking club in Hamburg.’

The leonine head shook slowly.

‘No, you misunderstand your situation.’ He picked up the cigar and pointed it at the door. ‘You and your lady friend are one step from the tomb. You think you can just walk into our world and walk out again? That’s not how it works. If I believe what you say, maybe you do. I don’t believe what you say: two bodies are floating in the docks. A blow to Hamburg’s tourist trade, but what the hell, there are plenty more tourists.’ He smiled at his joke, but it was an undertaker’s smile. ‘Who killed Micky Janelis?’

The room seemed to grow twenty degrees colder and Jamie was surprised he was able to keep his voice steady. ‘Micky killed himself.’

‘And how would you know that?’

‘Because I was there when he did it.’

The head came up. ‘Why would Micky do a thing like that? Micky was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Everybody liked Micky.’

Jamie hesitated. With some people you could get away with a lie or a diversion, but not with this man. ‘Maybe he thought someone was going to tell the world the truth about his past.’

‘You?’

He nodded.

‘You’d have done that to Micky?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Micky was my friend.’

‘Maybe Micky should have chosen his friends more carefully?’

‘Maybe.’ It took all Jamie’s nerve to hold the blue eyes. ‘But sometimes there comes a point when you even have to sacrifice your friends. I thought a man who’s done what you’ve done would understand that?’

For the first time he noticed there was a clock somewhere in the room. He could hear a laboured ticking somewhere in the background. Eventually, the other man reached below the desk and opened a drawer. Jamie held his breath for what came next. And what came next was a bottle filled with a clear liquid and two glasses which he filled to the rim. He pushed one towards Jamie and raised the other in salute.

‘To Micky.’

‘To Micky,’ Jamie poured the rough liquor down his throat, blinking as it exploded in his stomach and set his body on fire.

From somewhere a picture magically appeared on the desk as the glasses were refilled. ‘Me and Micky, Kharhov, ’forty-three, when his
kompany
was seconded from the Leningrad front. I was eighteen when that was taken, and with the
Leibstandarte
.’ He grinned. ‘Hitler’s bodyguard. The best. Let me tell you about Micky. Micky hated the Reds more than any man on this earth. Sure, we sometimes killed prisoners. They sometimes killed prisoners. So what? It was war. They’ll tell you that the Eastern Front was a nightmare. Hell on earth.
No
. The Eastern Front was a soldier’s paradise. Every man knew that if he was captured, he was dead. So you fought until your last bullet; and when that was gone, you fought with your entrenching tool, then your knife and finally with your teeth and your bare hands.’ He lifted his hands so Jamie could see them. Strong workman’s hands that looked as if they should still bear the bloodstains of half a century earlier. ‘We were the walking dead, and that made us the gods of the battlefield. Micky wasn’t real SS, not Waffen SS anyway, but I liked Micky. Problem was, he
enjoyed
killing prisoners. One day after we recaptured Kharkov I saw him pop twenty in a row and he never stopped smiling. Maybe they were commissars, maybe they weren’t. Twenty men and women kneeling in front of him. Pop. Pop. Pop.’ He pointed a finger and pulled the imaginary trigger in imitation of a hand gun. Jamie tried to square the image of Micky’s perpetual grin with the penitent Micky had claimed to be, praying for the souls of his victims, and failed. ‘I heard the Latvian Legion was wiped out in Courland, so I never expected to see Micky again. Then one day in the fifties he turns up in Hamburg. I’d got lucky; shrapnel in the leg fighting with the Hitler Jugend at Caen. Fortunately, the Canucks didn’t shoot the wounded, although they shot just about everybody else. By the time Micky knocks on my door, I’m in business for myself and working with HIAG helping out the old
kameraden
who weren’t so lucky. He needs help, he says, he’s back fighting the Reds, but this time with the
CIA
. I laughed, because the CIA was a big joke back then, but he was serious. They wanted to run agents into Latvia from Hamburg; Micky had convinced them he could put together the organization to make it happen. We have the people, we have the expertise – everybody in Hamburg knows someone who has a boat. So for about three years the SS is working with the Americans against the Soviets, and getting well paid for it. In maybe ’fifty-four, Micky’s star is fading and the Yanks work out that everybody they’re sending into Latvia is being snapped up soon as their feet hit the beach. The work dries up, but Micky is still smiling. He’s always been interested in art, he says one night when we’re having a drink at the Ferry House to wind up the operation. “I’m going to start an art gallery; would you know anyone who has any art to sell?” Now, Micky, he knows what happened in the war, in France and Italy and the Netherlands, when everybody was putting away their nest egg for the future. You were a trooper, you stuck a gold candlestick down your boot. You were a general, you filled a convoy of trucks with everything you could lay your hands on: paintings, sculptures, gold and silver bullion. Some of it was destroyed, some recovered by the Allies, but a lot of it was still around in attics and bank vaults and nobody had any idea what to do with it. “Give me a little at a time,” Micky says, “just the small stuff, no Old Masters, I’ll sell it for you at best price and take a commission.” So that’s how Micky started in business,
and
we’ve been in business ever since. I miss Micky.’