David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

Mayne checked his watch. He looked around, scanning the trees, cocking his good left ear up, listening. He turned to Stein. ‘All right. So what exactly are we talking about?’

‘Tell me about 1918.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What happened.’

‘Well, the end of the Great War. The year I was born.’

‘And the year of the influenza epidemic.’

‘That too.’ Mayne paused. ‘That killed my mother, a few months after I was born.’ He stared at Stein, feeling an icy grip in his stomach. He stared again, then looked at the metal door. ‘ You’re not serious.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘They couldn’t have done that. It’d be suicidal.’

Stein spoke urgently, under his breath. ‘I’m deadly serious. The Nazis could contemplate anything. Spanish influenza was the worst epidemic in human history. Allied scientists have been desperate to understand it. Here’s why it’s so terrifying. Normally, most flu deaths are among people with weaker immune systems: the elderly, children, those already ill. In 1918 it was different. Most of the victims were healthy young adults. I’m old enough to remember it. The scientists have made a breakthrough, and it’s terrifying. It looks as if the virus caused the body’s immune system to auto-destruct. The stronger the immune system, the more deadly the result. At the time, so many young adults were being killed in the war that the epidemic just seemed like an extension of that. But the Spanish flu infected at least a third of the world’s population. It probably killed fifty million people. Fifty million. That’s more than five times the number killed in action in the Great War.’

Mayne swallowed hard. ‘And you think the Nazis have been experimenting with it?’

‘The alarm bell rang after we liberated Paris. By then, most of the French Jews had been deported to the camps, but there were still a few slave labourers left. One of them told US interrogators a bizarre story. In 1941, a small group of Jews had been detailed to join two SS doctors in a night visit to the Pere Lachaise cemetery, the largest in Paris. They dug up half a dozen graves. The doctors knew what they were looking for. The graves all contained people who had died in 1918. They were well-off people, all buried in lead-lined coffins.’

‘Meaning the possibility of intact bodies? Where the virus might still be found?’

Stein pursed his lips. ‘The coffins were dug up but left unopened and quickly trucked away. The Jewish labourers were shot over the open graves. One man escaped among the tombs. The entire Gestapo in Paris were detailed to hunt for him. He remained on the run. He’s in quarantine in an isolation facility in England now.’

Mayne was beginning to feel physically sick. ‘Do you think this place, where we are now, was where they brought the bodies?’

‘Something was going on here. Remember what I said. You don’t need much space. Cold storage for bodies, incubators, a basic microbiology lab. The kind of weapon we’re talking about is invisible to the human eye.’

‘And what Cameron told us. A place with a supply of healthy young people for experimentation.’

Stein stared at Mayne. ‘All I can tell you for certain is this. Hitler had it planned from before the war. Either a thousand-year Reich, or nothing. Here we are, probably days from the end of the Reich. If Nazi scientists did manage to isolate the Spanish flu virus, to nurture it – maybe, Lord help us, to mutate it to a more virulent form – then someone will have been detailed to use it. Someone who might be here now, waiting. You’ve seen how fanatical the SS can be. There would be no morality to hold them back. Only the order of their Fuhrer, and that would be absolute. I saw the flu epidemic of 1918 with my own eyes. Whole wards full of young people drowning in pneumonia, screaming as their immune systems ate into their brains. It seemed like a world gone mad. Even H.G. Wells couldn’t have thought it up. And now, in this war, in this place, at Belsen, at Auschwitz, we’ve seen what war can do. There are no boundaries. With a virus like Spanish influenza deliberately infecting the world, with all the cold efficiency of Nazi planning, there will be no miracle this time, no recovery from horror and death.’

Mayne shut his eyes for a moment. A world gone mad. He looked at Stein, started to speak, then stopped. He had had a terrible thought. The war in north-west Europe, the war since Normandy, had gone on far longer than anyone had thought it would. The Allies had mustered overwhelming forces. Yet there had been long periods of stalemate, of slow progress, of seeming vacillation as the armies lumbered forward. He could barely think it. Had it been deliberate? Had the generals been forced to stall by Allied intelligence, to allow intelligence agents to find this horror, this doomsday weapon, before the armies entered the homeland and Hitler issued the order? He stared at Stein. ‘You think the reverse swastika is the secret symbol?’

‘We think it’s an activation code. We captured a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer who was one of the few who knew of the plan, and he eventually talked. He only knew a little about it, but it was enough. We think the orders were sent out from the Fuhrerbunker at the British and American crossing of the Rhine, Operation Plunder, on the twenty-third of March. That was three weeks ago. There will probably be a redundancy, maybe two, three, four individuals converging on the place where the weapon is kept, if we’re right. Enough to ensure that one gets through.’

‘And then some kind of final code. A trigger.’

‘The word that Hitler is dead. Has committed suicide.’

‘What was the code called?’

‘The officer eventually told us. It was Das Agamemnon-Code.’

‘The Agamemnon Code,’ Mayne repeated. ‘My God. I knew it.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s that name. Agamemnon. I know where that symbol came from. It was a device, an ancient artefact. One of the most astonishing artefacts ever unearthed.’

Stein paused. ‘From Mycenae. We know. We don’t know the details of how it was discovered. That’s irrelevant to us. But the man we interrogated told us it was from Mycenae, and secretly stored for decades in Schliemann’s home town of Nuebukow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Ahnenerbe officers found it when they went there under the express orders of Heinrich Himmler to look for Schliemann’s treasures. They loved everything to do with Troy because of the swastika imagery. Himmler had done his research. He thought the golden swastika was the palladion, the lost symbol of Troy. It was made of gold and meteoritic material, from an ancient meteorite that fell on Troy far back in prehistory. They took it in secret triumph to the SS fantasy-castle at Wewelsburg, where it stayed reverently locked away. It was going to be the centrepiece of the Fuhrermuseum at Linz, another Nazi fantasy. Where it is now is anybody’s guess. But somewhere on the way it got hijacked as the symbol of the final apocalyptic decree. The Agamemnon Code.’

Mayne was silent for a moment. He spoke quietly. ‘Just one question. When was that Nazi interrogated? When did you know that the crossing of the Rhine would be the signal?’

‘Soon after the liberation of Paris. August 1944.’

‘ Christ. August 1944. So you’ve been searching for more than six months.’

‘As you have been. You didn’t know it, but you were too. You said it yourself in the jeep on the way in. Strategic intelligence. Look how many outfits there are operating ahead of our lines. Your unit, 30 AU. Mine, the MFAA. After Normandy, the whole of British Special Operations Executive redirected their efforts towards uncovering secrets. But hardly anyone knows the real reason. If all goes to plan, hardly anyone will ever know. It will go to their graves with them. With us. I happen to be one of those few. And I’m telling you because we’re so close to it here, closer than we’ve ever been. And the clock is ticking. Hitler can’t last much longer. What frightens me is that whoever it is might be frightened themselves into taking action now, in case they’re discovered. If I’m right about this place.’