James Twining - The Black Sun

‘Then come upstairs. Please.’ The rabbi pointed towards a narrow staircase in the far corner of the room. ‘I have something to show you.’

The staircase emerged into a vaulted room, the pale morning light filtering in from windows set high in the white walls. Here there were no graffiti, just a series of shattered wooden display cases and a tiled floor strewn with drawings and water-colours, some torn into pieces, others screwed up into loose balls, still more covered in dirty black bootprints.

‘This was a permanent exhibition of children’s drawings from Terezin, a transit camp not far from here. Whole families were held there before being shipped east,’ the rabbi explained in a half whisper. ‘You see, there is a certain awful innocence about war when seen through the eyes of a child.’

Tom shifted his weight on to his other foot but said nothing, knowing that anything he might mumble in response would be inadequate.

Rabbi Spiegel gave a sad smile. ‘Still, we will recover from this as we have recovered from much worse before. Come,’ he said, crossing to the far wall, ‘here’s what I wanted to show you.’

A gilt frame, perhaps two feet across and a foot wide, hung empty on the wall, only whitewashed stonework visible where the painting should have been. Tom edged towards it.

‘What was there?’

‘An oil painting of this synagogue completed in the early thirties.’

‘It’s been cut out,’ Tom said thoughtfully, running his finger along the rippled canvas edge where the painting had been sliced from the frame.

‘That’s why I asked you to come,’ the rabbi said excitedly. ‘They could have left it in its frame if all they wanted to do was damage or destroy it. Do you think maybe they took it with them?’

‘I doubt it,’ Tom said with a frown. ‘The people who did this don’t strike me as art lovers.’

‘Especially not a painting by this artist,’ the rabbi agreed grudgingly.

‘Why, who was it by?’

‘A Jewish artist. Not well known, but dear to us because he lived here in Prague – until the Nazis murdered him. He was called Karel Bellak.’

‘Bellak?’ Tom drilled him with a questioning look.

‘You’ve heard of him?’ the rabbi asked, clearly surprised.

‘I’ve heard the name,’ Tom said slowly. ‘I’m just not sure where. I’ll need to speak to my colleague back in London to be sure I’m thinking of the same person. Do you have a photo of the painting?’

‘Of course.’ Rabbi Spiegel produced a photograph from his pocket and handed it to Tom. ‘We made a few copies of this one a few years ago for the insurance company. They told us the painting wasn’t worth much, but to us it was priceless.’

‘May I?’ Tom asked.

‘Keep it. Please.’

Tom slipped the photograph into his overcoat.

‘From what I remember of Bellak…’ Tom began, pausing as two Czech policemen stepped into the room and peered around at the damage.

‘Go on.’

‘Is there anywhere a little more private we can go?’

‘Why?’

Tom tilted his head towards the policemen.

‘Oh.’ The rabbi sounded disappointed. ‘Very well. Come with me.’

He led Tom back down the stairs and across the main body of the synagogue to a thick wooden door that he unbolted. It gave on to a small open space, the oppressive cinder-grey walls of the surrounding apartment blocks looming down on all sides. A few trees reached into the small window of grey sky overhead, their leafless branches creaking in the wind and occasionally scraping their skeletal fingers against the stifling walls. Ahead of them, the ground undulated in a series of unexpected mounds and dips and was peppered with dark shapes.

‘What is this place?’ Tom asked in a whisper.

‘The old Jewish cemetery,’ the rabbi answered.

It suddenly dawned on Tom that the dark shapes in front of him were in fact gravestones, thousands of them in all shapes and sizes, some leaning against others for support, some lying prostrate as if they had been sprinkled like seeds from a great height. They were jammed so close to each other that the ground, muddy and wet where the morning’s frost had melted, was barely visible between them. Tom was certain that if he were to topple one, the rest would fall like a field of overgrown dominoes.

‘For hundreds of years this was the only place the city allowed us to bury our dead. So each time it filled up we had no choice but to put down a layer of earth and start again. Some say there are eleven levels in all.’

Tom knelt down at the stone nearest to him.

A swastika had been etched on to the stone’s peeling surface. He looked up at the rabbi, who gave a resigned shrug.

‘The war may have ended long ago, but for some of us the struggle continues,’ the rabbi said, shaking his head. ‘Now, Mr Kirk, tell me – what do you know about Karel Bellak?’

National Cryptologic Museum, Fort Meade, Maryland

3rd January – 2.26 a.m.

It was a little game he played; something to pass the time on his rounds. As he came upon each exhibit he would test himself against the display’s information cards to see how much he could remember. After twenty years he was pretty much word perfect.

First there was the Myer flag system, a line-of-sight communication tool devised in the Civil War by an army doctor who went on to form the Signal Corps. The glass cases held the original flags, battle-torn and stained with age.

Satisfied, he walked on, his rubber soles squeaking rhythmically on the floor like a metronome marking time, the polished toecaps of his boots glowing with a white sheen from the dimmed overhead lights.

Al Travis had been a guard at the National Cryptologic Museum since it had first opened. He liked it there. He’d finally found a place where he felt he was part of something special, something important. After all, technically he worked for the NSA, the agency responsible for protecting Uncle Sam’s information systems and breaking the bad guys’ codes. Hell, the NSA was right in the thick of things with this whole War on Terror.

He came upon the next exhibit – the Cipher Wheel. A series of rotating wooden discs, the wheel had been used by European governments for hundreds of years to encrypt sensitive communications. According to the card, it was designed to be used with French, the international language of diplomacy until the end of the First World War.

The Cipher Wheel’s cylindrical shape nestled snugly in its display case, the wood polished by generations of anxious fingers. He paused, looked at it, and checked with the information card that he was right in believing this to be the oldest such device in the world.

And then of course there was his favourite exhibit – the big one, as he liked to say – the Enigma machine. The museum had several versions on display in two large glass-fronted cases and Travis never failed to pause when he walked past, running his eyes appreciatively over them. He found it incredible that, in ‘breaking’ the code generated by this oversized typewriter, Polish and then British mathematicians had helped win the war for the Allies in Europe. But that’s what the card said, and who was he to argue?

A sudden noise made Travis stop. He checked over his shoulder and then peered into the semi-darkness ahead of him.

‘Anyone there?’ he called out, wondering if someone had come to relieve him early. As he paused, waiting for an answer, a steel wire shaped into a noose was lowered from above him until it was hovering just over his head, glinting in the lights like a silver halo. Then, just as Travis was about to move on again, it snapped past his face, the wire tightening around his neck and pulling him three feet off the ground.