better of him, then spoke too much. He was last seen being led away screaming to Goebbels’ chamber of horrors in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Word was he was fingered by a former student of his who coveted his senior position in the Ahnenerbe hierarchy and miraculously moved into that office the next day.’
‘Who do you mean? How do you know this?’
‘Because before coming here we had a very interesting visit to Wewelsburg Castle with an expert guide. Frau Heidi Hoffman, to be precise.’
Schoenberg swallowed hard, reached for his stick to get up and then sank back again into his chair. ‘Frau Hoffman. Yes. She has talked to you about the Ahnenerbe?’
‘She has told us a great deal.’
Schoenberg rose again slightly on his stick, and for a moment his face was contorted in contempt. ‘You should be very careful what you believe. This woman is not to be trusted. Did you know she worked for the Lebensborn? She even volunteered herself to be impregnated by SS men. The Lebensborn programme was designed to create a new generation of the master race. Peasants fornicating with peasants. Do you know they even went to Poland to snatch children just because they were blond and blue-eyed? Being blond and blue-eyed is not enough to make you Aryan. They were Poles, for God’s sake. And that woman is a whore.’
Jack nodded at Costas, then got up and followed him to the door. He stopped and looked back. ‘When you scoured the ancient texts, when the Ahnenerbe went to the glaciers, to the icecaps, you weren’t just looking for Atlantis, were you? There was something else. Something Reichsfuhrer Himmler wanted. Something terrifying, from the distant past. Something that could be made into a wonder-weapon.’
Schoenberg stared at him, then narrowed his eyes. ‘I am a scholar, Jack. You know that. The Reichsfuhrer may have had other dreams, but they were not mine. These wild theories died on the funeral pyre of the Reich in 1945.’
‘Thank you for telling us what you know. We’ll be in touch.’
Jack led Costas through the door and closed it. They crossed the veranda and clattered down the wooden steps to the beach, then began to walk towards the jetty and the inflatable boat. The tide was coming in, pushing foaming sheets of water almost to their feet, backed by rolling Pacific breakers that made a muffled roar. It was time to get back to the aircraft before the wind and the water rose any more. Costas hurried up alongside Jack. ‘That was pushing it. Asking about Frau Hoffman and Himmler.’
‘I wanted him to be on edge. I want him to know that we know.’
‘It was revealing that he called Himmler Reichsfuhrer, a little respectfully I thought, after you did.’
‘That was intentional on my part.’
‘He was there in Iceland.’
Jack nodded. ‘He was there, though I’m not convinced he knew the real purpose. Anyone Himmler let in on his scheme was probably doomed to be liquidated. I don’t believe Saumerre will have told him the truth either. My guess is that Schoenberg doesn’t know a lot more than he’s told us. He evidently was not one of the Ahnenerbe men who discovered the ancient site in the Caribbean, though he must have known it was an area where they’d been searching for Atlantis. Once Himmler had decided to use the site for his own purpose, those men were probably all removed from the equation early on. If Schoenberg knew the location, we wouldn’t be here now, and the world would be a much more dangerous place.’
‘There’s a lot of contradiction in Schoenberg,’ Costas said, jerking his head back towards the house. ‘A scholar who tears a page out of an ancient manuscript to prevent it being destroyed by the Nazis. A senior Ahnenerbe man who was under the spell of Himmler, yet was perfectly aware that most of the stuff was nonsense and that many of his fellow Ahnenerbe men were beneath contempt. A Prussian aristocrat who is scornful of Nazi thugs, and of peasants. A family man fearful of his children finding out out about his past. A racist who despises Poles and Chinese. And if we’re to believe Frau Hoffman, a man capable of shopping his old professor to the Gestapo.’
‘I believe Frau Hoffman.’ Jack clicked on his phone, put it to his ear and made a call. He hung back for a few moments behind Costas, and then caught up. ‘I was speaking to Ben. Frau Hoffman needs beefed-up protection. The first thing Schoenberg is going to do is call Saumerre and tell us we’ve been talking to her. We need her alive to be able to work on that antidote to the bacterium, and I’m sure Major Penn and his men will be more than happy to have some of our IMU security team along as well.’
‘You buy Schoenberg’s story about the manuscript, what we’ve just seen?’
Jack nodded. ‘I’ve spent enough time with Maria and Jeremy looking at old vellum to know the real thing when I see it, and the imprint of the text was authentic. It’s not that I’m worried about. Schoenberg was playing us. He wants us to take this to its conclusion, to use all our skills to find whatever lies at the end of this trail.’
‘That word, Jack. The word we’ve just seen in the ancient text.’
Jack took a deep breath and stopped walking, putting his hands on his hips and staring out to sea. He turned to Costas. ‘ Atlantis.’
Costas slapped him on the back. ‘Pretty amazing. I thought that word was history for us, but here it is shining again like a big red neon light.’
‘It’s explosive,’ Jack said, his voice tight with emotion. ‘Absolutely explosive. If we can prove they went west, find where they went, then it looks as if we might be on the way to bending history again, as big a bend as you can imagine.’
‘Noah and Alkaios, Uta-napishtim and Gilgamesh? You think these are the same two men?’
‘I’m convinced of it. We already know from Katya’s interpretation of those symbols on the cave wall at Atlantis that Noah was Uta-napishtim, and Enlil was Gilgamesh: the shorter names were like nicknames, the longer ones more formal shaman names. But Alkaios makes complete sense to me as another name for Enlil-Gilgamesh. Alkaios was the hero of the West, the early version of Heracles. If Enlil-Gilgamesh returned from his huge ocean voyage, leaving Noah-Uta-napishtim in his new Atlantis, he may have acquired mythical stature among those people of the north African coast – the “Ladies of the West” as Pliny calls them, maybe at Lixus itself – who may have equated him with their ancient god Alkaios. Over time he became Heracles, and it would have been natural for Pliny to use this familiar name for a god-hero already associated with the gateway to the Western Ocean, the Pillars of Hercules.’
They reached the boat, and Costas untied the stern line and jumped in. Jack gestured at his phone again and climbed the rocky spur to get better reception. A few minutes later he pocketed the phone, and bunched his fist. ‘Yes.’ He clambered back down, untied the painter and hopped in beside Costas, resuming his position in the stern beside the engine. ‘Two very quick phone calls clinched it.’
‘Spill it.’
‘The first one to Maria, who’s in Naples. She saw that marginal note in Claudius’ manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History yesterday morning, but assumed it was probably a reference to the Atlantis story in Plato. She was looking at the infrared spectrographic images of the first part of Book 5 as I called her, and she was able to read out the note. It was exactly the same as on Schoenberg’s sheet. Exactly the same. That confirms it. It wasn’t made up by a medieval monk. It was copied from Pliny.’
‘And?’
Jack grinned. ‘The second call was to Dillen. He was back in his office in Cambridge, having closed the excavation at Troy yesterday. It was something that’s been niggling me ever since we saw those Stone Age symbols at Atlantis. I knew I’d seen something like them before, and I don’t mean the symbols on Palaeolithic cave paintings, but somewhere unexpected, the reason why it didn’t click for me straight away. You remember I said that when I was a student I did a study tour of Phoenician sites in west Africa? When Schoenberg mentioned Lixus, I suddenly remembered. At the top of the acropolis I found a large hole, probably where masonry had been dug out centuries ago from the Roman site for reuse. At the bottom was a much older stone, worn, apparently toppled sideways, with barely discernible symbols on it that I assumed were early Phoenician. I asked Dillen to dig out my study tour report from his shelves and take a look at my photograph. He said there were only three very worn symbols visible, but that they looked like a crescent, a V and three slashes. Those were the first three symbols from the Atlantis cave that Katya interpreted as the name Gilgamesh.’
Costas looked incredulous. ‘The pillar mentioned by Pliny? You mean you found it more than twenty-five years ago?’
Jack grinned again. ‘Sometimes things stare you in the face for a long time. You just have to know what you’re looking at.’
