David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘Just outside Diyarbakir, isn’t it?’ Costas said.

Jack nodded. ‘In the desert on the way to the Armenian border. Just about the worst place in the world. A sweathole in summer, freezing in winter. Maximum-security military prison. Murderers, psychopaths, homosexual rapists, that kind of thing. No human rights there, because the inmates barely count as human. You go in there, you don’t come out. Throw away the key. Simple as that.’

‘We can do a deal,’ Raitz said hoarsely, craning his head up, his eyes desperate. ‘I’ve got original documents, maps. Treasure maps.’

‘Das Agamemnon-Code?’ Jack said.

‘I know nothing about that.’

Costas waved his pistol. ‘We may as well kill him, Jack. This is getting us nowhere. Rebecca, block your ears.’

‘No!’ Raitz begged. ‘Please. I’ll tell you. In a safe in my house. Under the floorboards in the cellar. At the bottom of the stairs.’

Jack kept aiming. ‘Only the one document?’

‘Only one with those words. But there are more. Many more. Photos. Maps to bunkers. A treasure trove. Just don’t hand me over to the Turks. Please God. I can give you the key to untold riches. All the lost treasures of the Nazis.’

‘You mean in the other safe in the study? Or the one behind the bookcase in your office in the Courtauld? Our security guys are pretty adept lock-breakers, wouldn’t you say, Costas? Both safes empty now, I’m afraid.’

‘ Sheisse,’ Raitz muttered, staring at the ground. ‘Sheisse.’ He looked up at Jack again, suddenly defiant, tapping his head. ‘In here. Much more in here. I’ll do a deal with the Turks. Just like Schliemann did.’

‘Schliemann didn’t mess around with the Turks. They were the ones who were using him. Anyway, they won’t believe you, without documentation. And they won’t listen to you where you’re going. Just another insane Westerner babbling away in solitary confinement in a hellhole Eastern prison.’

‘For the rest of his life,’ Costas said.

‘Not a very long life, I would imagine, especially if they ever let him out of solitary and the other prisoners get their hands on him.’

‘What can I do?’ Raitz sobbed.

Jack put the Webley in his fleece pocket, took out a small notebook and pencil, walked over and knelt in front of Raitz. ‘Here’s the deal. You’ll do time, but I can keep you out of that place. I can even put in a word for repatriation to a British prison. And you know how lenient judges are in Britain. You’re still a young man. You could remake your career. Even argue that you were forced to do this against your will. A British court would probably believe you. You have lots of influential friends, former students and colleagues, politicians.’ Jack pushed the notebook towards him. ‘All you have to do is write down one name. The name of the person who’s been controlling you.’

‘He’ll find me and kill me. Whatever it is he wants in that bunker is too precious to him. He’s got more of these thugs. Russians, mostly, but they call themselves Totenkopfe. Ironic, isn’t it? I’m the one with the Nazi background, not…’

‘Not who?’ Jack demanded.

‘He’ll kill me. They’ll hunt me down.’

‘I don’t think that should be a concern where you’re going.’

Raitz was still for a moment, then put his hand on the notebook. He let it rest there, then picked up the pencil and scrawled a name. Jack quickly took the pad, stared at it, thought hard for a moment, then pocketed it. ‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘Why? You wanted your absurd Fuhrermuseum. What on earth did a man like that want?’

‘Gold,’ Raitz said. ‘Gold, and works of art. Everyone knows he has Marseille gangsters in his background. The press love it. He’s used it to his advantage. A charming Algerian intellectual, with a bit of rogue in his genes. The truth is, that wasn’t just in the past. He’s secretly in charge of the family crime syndicate. No longer just small-time gangsters. One of the biggest in Europe. Worth hundreds, hundreds of millions.’

‘So he was interested in all your leads? All the material on hidden art you’d collected?’

Raitz shook his head. ‘No. Only the Agamemnon Code. Only that one bunker in the forest.’

‘He was playing you,’ Costas said.

‘You’ve been a fool,’ Jack said to Raitz angrily. ‘A bloody fool, duped into going along with someone who had no interest in your cause, let alone antiquities or art.’

‘You’re wrong. He said-’

‘I don’t care what he said. You’re a naive academic, Raitz. You’ve forgotten what real people are like.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look around you,’ Jack said. ‘All this bronze, all this raw material for weapons, enough to equip all the armies of the ancient Aegean world: the Mycenaeans, the Trojans, every one of them. Yet all of it redundant. It’s because a new metal had been forged, iron. And then think of today. People are always on the search for the new weapon. Or the weapon that may already have been devised and then been hidden away. Think of the underworld since the fall of the Soviet Union. First they were on the hunt for nuclear weapons, components for dirty bombs. Then, with the revelation of what the Russians had taken from Nazi Germany, the lost treasure of Priam, and all the revived interest over the past few years in hidden Nazi art, their ears pricked up. They’d forgotten about the Nazis, about what might still be hidden. About the dreadful weapons that probably still lie in those bunkers today.’

‘I know nothing of weapons,’ Raitz mumbled. ‘This is nothing to do with me.’

Jack picked up the empty black box and tapped it. ‘In 1945, a Luftwaffe officer took the Trojan palladion from the salt mine in Poland to the bunker near Belsen you know about. He was a fanatic. He was one of those who had been activated, to be there, poised ready to fulfil Hitler’s final decree. Not the Nero Decree, the destruction of the Reich. No. The Agamemnon Code. Armageddon. There were others activated, too. We believe at least one of them was there, in the forest, waiting, because of what happened. The officer took the palladion into the bunker, but a few days later, while he was waiting for the final order, he was shot by British soldiers. Then the SS guards at the nearby camp took a girl into the bunker and raped her. She saw the palladion. It was her drawing of it that gave us the clue. We knew it was there all along, not in the salt mine. We knew that two officers, one British and one American, were told about it, and went to investigate. Nobody knows what happened to them. But it is possible that the other fanatic was there, waiting for the final activation signal from Berlin, and they died together in a fight. Whatever was in there that was so lethal is still there today.’

‘But the palladion was the key to opening a storeroom of art,’ Raitz said weakly.

Jack waved his hand dismissively. ‘Is that the story Saumerre sold you? Why have a special key for that, some sacred symbol? No. It was the key to something completely different, much more sinister. I believe the palladion may have been partly meteoritic, according to an ancient Trojan myth about its origins. The reverse swastika itself is hardly a unique key, but there could have been a unique magnetic signature that made it the only way of opening the door.’

‘The door to what?’ Raitz said.

‘We can only guess. The worst the Nazis could come up with. Not nuclear, which they were never close to achieving. Perhaps not chemical, which might be difficult to propagate widely without aircraft or missiles. That leaves biological. And that’s the worst. Typhus. Plague. Look what happened to the world with the flu epidemic in 1918. That would have been fresh in the minds of the Nazi scientists. They might even have had access to diseased bodies. They certainly had access to plenty of live humans for experimentation, in that camp. They could have reawakened the Spanish influenza virus, and even mutated it. If that’s still in the bunker, if it was released, it could kill hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions. It could wipe out civilization as we know it. Is that part of your Nazi dream?’