David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘Do you think that’s what Peter and the American found?’

‘I don’t know. We may never know. But there is something else. A few days before we went into the camp, my SAS patrol ambushed a motorcycle courier. We’d been told to kill any we came across. At that stage in the war they might have carried personal orders from Hitler, the kind of thing that might have spurred wavering German soldiers to fight to the death. Stopping messages like that might have saved countless Allied lives, our own chaps. He rode right into a wire we’d strung across a junction. The man was still alive, but his motorcycle burst into flames that destroyed the dispatch box.’

‘Did he say anything?’ Rebecca said.

Hugh paused. ‘Perhaps I could have got something out of him. But we were behind enemy lines, and in a hurry. We didn’t take prisoners.’

Dillen leaned forward. ‘But you found something.’

‘I saw a charred fragment blow away from the flames. I picked it up, and there was writing still visible on it, a few inches square. It was part of Hitler’s so-called Nero Decree, the order telling his commanders to destroy the remaining infrastructure of the Reich. I’d been briefed on it at HQ, who had a complete copy, so I recognized it. Only this one was slightly different. At the top of the page was a stamped swastika, but not the usual Nazi one. This one was counterclockwise. Exactly the same as the one in the girl’s drawing, and the shape described by the man at Mycenae and Troy. Of course I knew nothing about the girl’s drawing then. But when I saw it and remembered the burned fragment, that swastika, it sent a chill down my spine. And I realized the link with Schliemann because of the words beneath it.’

‘Those were?’ Rebecca whispered.

‘Three words, visible above the standard text of the decree, part of the stamp with the reverse swastika, the counterclockwise one. I reported them, but never heard anything more. Some intelligence chaps came to talk to me about it, swore me to secrecy and that was it. The words appeared directly under the swastika. They were Das Agamemnon-Code.’

‘ The Agamemnon Code,’ Dillen whispered.

‘ Agamemnon. Why Agamemnon?’ Rebecca asked, incredulous.

Dillen turned to her. ‘The Nazis loved harking back to the imperial past, to those they regarded as Aryan precursors, great warrior leaders. Agamemnon was always high on the list. Discovering this object among Schliemann’s treasure, the Trojan swastika, somehow spirited away to Germany after Schliemann’s death, perhaps sent there by Sophia, would have been the greatest of all their plundered treasures. The symbolism, the association with what they may have regarded as Agamemnon’s triumphant destruction of Troy, the obliteration of an inferior Eastern race, all that would have fed their twisted imagination. So when it came to contemplating Armageddon, some fearful doomsday weapon, how better to encode it than to use the symbol of that reverse swastika, and name it after the king of kings himself?’

‘So that’s why you’re so fearful of that bunker in the forest,’ Rebecca said to Hugh. ‘You think there was some terrible weapon there?’

‘Not was,’ Hugh said quietly. ‘Not was, but is.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘After the war, the burnt forest, the site of the camp, the bunker, was bulldozed over and turned into a NATO airbase. The bunker will still be there, though. Even the RAF’s eight-thousand-pound bombs couldn’t destroy the U-boat pens, and bunkers were built of the same reinforced concrete. At least it might have sealed off what could still be inside. And I’m not just talking about stolen art. You know that now. As soon as I began to piece this all together in my head after the war ended, I had a terrible sense of foreboding about that place, about what was inside, the place where the girl had seen that reverse swastika. The horror of that forest isn’t just about what happened to the girl with the harp. Or what happened to Peter. It’s about what is still there, what could still be unleashed.’

Dillen took a deep breath. ‘It looks as if we’ve got our work cut out.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Hugh said.

Dillen paused and collected his thoughts. ‘We hope to God that nobody else has begun to piece together what we have been talking about this afternoon. We’re still only guessing, but there’s something terrible at the end of this road. Some Nazi weapon stored in that bunker. A weapon associated with this code, Das Agamemnon-Code. Something which, by all those chances of war, you and Peter may have been responsible for preventing fanatical Nazis from activating in the final days of the war. You, by finding that drawing. And by killing that motorcycle courier, perhaps. Peter, by going into the camp, into that forest. Perhaps he and the American died preventing someone from following Hitler’s final order. We can be sure that some in Allied intelligence knew what this was all about, and were afraid enough to obliterate all evidence, to let that bunker be buried under the bombed forest and then, after the war, for all time. There was something in there that not even they could trust themselves to reveal.’

‘So we carry on where Peter left off,’ Rebecca murmured.

‘We keep fighting the war,’ Dillen said. ‘Hugh?’

‘I’ve never stopped. That’s why I’ve kept this to myself for so very long.’

‘Our job is to obliterate any leads. To find any loose ends, and to cut them off. Just as Allied intelligence must have desperately been trying to do in 1945.’

‘We’ve already opened it up by going back to Troy,’ Rebecca said. ‘We’ve begun what we don’t want, which is to reawaken the search for Schliemann’s treasures in Europe.’

‘There’s no turning back now,’ Dillen said grimly. ‘It’s ironic. That’s exactly what I said to Jack last night on the battlements of Troy, looking at what we’d found that afternoon. He’d had a sense of foreboding, about Homer, about whether we wanted to uncover the dark side of the story of Troy. But then we were euphoric. No turning back, because we were on the cusp of the greatest revelations. Just like Schliemann that night at Troy in 1890.’

‘That art dealer,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘The guy in Amsterdam. The one I met. He’d be a good place to start. He seemed to know everything, had had his ear to the ground for decades. If anything’s shown up, anything to do with Schliemann’s treasure, he’ll know. He told me he had a whole cache of Nazi documents he’d collected, and he used those as a bargaining chip with Interpol. We want to comb through everything, everywhere, that might have that reverse swastika, that code on it, and delete it. If it’s ever shown up on the black market, he’d know about it.’

Dillen looked at his watch. ‘Jack and Costas are diving on the Bronze Age wreck right now. I’ll leave a message with Captain Macalister and Ben on Seaquest II. I remember you talking to your dad about those documents, Rebecca. After he’d gently told you never to do what you did again. I think they went to somebody high up in the Courtauld, Professor Hans Raitz, wasn’t it?’

Rebecca nodded, and curled her lip. ‘I met him, too. He took me out to lunch at the British Museum. I know he’s a big art historian, but I didn’t like him. I asked him whether he was Jewish, with that name, and he nearly spat at me. Then he apologized, said my generation were ignorant and it wasn’t our fault, and started touching me under the table. He said I was a good Aryan girl. Can you believe it? I suddenly had a phone call and had to leave. I never told Dad.’

‘Probably a good thing you didn’t,’ Dillen said. ‘And Raitz doesn’t make any secret of his family’s Nazi past. Trumpets it, says it’s driven his academic career, to see how architecture and art served fascism. But I wonder.’