accustomed to working in the field. But not laboratory scientists. They come later.’
‘Scientists?’
Stein stared at him. ‘The war may nearly be over. This war. But this may only be the beginning. We know the Nazis were developing super-bombs, using nuclear fission. We’re pretty confident that most of the research was still on the drawing board, and the Allied bombing campaign has wiped out most of that. But there’s another threat, even more terrifying. Have you ever wondered why Hitler never used chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield? It wasn’t for any ethical reason. Look at what we’ve just seen, the camp. There were no ethics.’ Stein shook his head. ‘It’s because the Nazi research efforts were not going towards tactical weapons, but towards strategic ones. Not battlefield weapons, but weapons of mass destruction. Towards something even worse than that. Towards a doomsday weapon.’
‘ A doomsday weapon? What the hell do you mean?’
‘With the end so near, there might be a final fanatical edict. Remember what Hitler said at the Nuremberg rally in 1938? He said that either there would be a thousand-year Reich, or there would be no Germany. No Germany means no world. Hitler made a suicide pact with his own people. And if the time came, if his armies were truly close to annihilation, there had to be a way of unleashing Armageddon. We know from our interrogated Nazi official that the signal was the Allied crossing of the Rhine. That was when Hitler knew he could never win on the battlefield. A small number of men were activated to be ready to unleash hell, to wait for the time of Hitler’s choosing. We fear that time is nearly upon us.’
Mayne tapped the steel door. ‘And you think this is it?’
‘We believe that stolen art caches, maybe in bunkers like this one, might have been a cover for research facilities. They would have been the most top-secret facilities of all, concealed with all the ingenuity the Nazis could muster, even from their own people. Nuclear weapons research needs a lot of space. For biological research, the kind of thing I’m talking about, you only need a small room and a school chemistry set.’
Mayne suddenly had a cold feeling in his gut. ‘Good God. And a supply of human test subjects. Those people the Frenchman told Cameron about, trucked in here by the Nazis.’
‘That’s why the camp was also a plausible cover. Nobody was going to bat an eyelid if they saw truckloads of people go into camps like this but never come out again.’
‘So what do we do?’ Mayne murmured. ‘Get the RAF raid cancelled? Corps HQ could get a reserve brigade up to this forest by nightfall. Mop up any SS still out here.’
Stein shook his head. ‘This has to stay top secret. It’s not only Nazi fanatics we’re worried about. There are others, too.’
Mayne paused. ‘The Soviets?’
‘Allied intelligence is riddled with spies, Communist sympathizers from before the war. A lot of them came out of Oxford and Cambridge. I took a chance with you. For all I know, you might be one of them.’
Mayne snorted. ‘I was an idealist, but my fantasy world was three thousand years old, the world of Homer. You’re right, though. There were plenty of Communists among my school and university friends. And while we’re pointing fingers, several art historians I knew, even at the Courtauld.’
‘That’s what I mean. I could reel off some big names from the art world, really big names, now working in intelligence. Keeping these people in place, using them, has been part of the complex planning for the world after the war. Some of our discoveries of Nazi research have deliberately been leaked. And that’s where the background of the MFAA comes into play. We’re scholars, not generals or politicians. We want to do all we can to end this war, but our aim is not to find weapons that can be used against the Nazis. Our aim is preventing such weapons from ever being used. Here’s the take. Either everyone has them, or nobody does. If both sides in the new world have horror weapons, then nobody will use them, right? That’s the gamble. Our intelligence planners call it mutually assured destruction. If everything works according to plan, that’ll become the catchphrase of the new war ahead of us, a war of standoff. It’ll be the nearest we can get to recreating the detente in Europe during the decades after the defeat of Napoleon, before the Franco-Prussian War tipped the balance and set all this in train.’
‘So both the Allies and the Soviets will have nuclear technology,’ Mayne murmured, keeping his eyes on the woods.
Stein nodded, waving his pistol. ‘But a biological weapon is another matter. All you need is a test tube. There may be many bit-players who could become terrifyingly dangerous in a fragmented world: resurgent fascist groups, or religious extremists like the Wahabists of the Middle East. A flashpoint may be a new Jewish homeland in Palestine. Our arrival may have saved those people in the camp today, but the fate of their children is what I’m talking about. The fate of all children.’
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
