had had a terrible thought. The war in north-west Europe, the war since Normandy, had gone on far longer than anyone had thought it would. The Allies had mustered overwhelming forces. Yet there had been long periods of stalemate, of slow progress, of seeming vacillation as the armies lumbered forward. He could barely think it. Had it been deliberate? Had the generals been forced to stall by Allied intelligence, to allow intelligence agents to find this horror, this doomsday weapon, before the armies entered the homeland and Hitler issued the order? He stared at Stein. ‘You think the reverse swastika is the secret symbol?’
‘We think it’s an activation code. We captured a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer who was one of the few who knew of the plan, and he eventually talked. He only knew a little about it, but it was enough. We think the orders were sent out from the Fuhrerbunker at the British and American crossing of the Rhine, Operation Plunder, on the twenty-third of March. That was three weeks ago. There will probably be a redundancy, maybe two, three, four individuals converging on the place where the weapon is kept, if we’re right. Enough to ensure that one gets through.’
‘And then some kind of final code. A trigger.’
‘The word that Hitler is dead. Has committed suicide.’
‘What was the code called?’
‘The officer eventually told us. It was Das Agamemnon-Code.’
‘The Agamemnon Code,’ Mayne repeated. ‘My God. I knew it.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s that name. Agamemnon. I know where that symbol came from. It was a device, an ancient artefact. One of the most astonishing artefacts ever unearthed.’
Stein paused. ‘From Mycenae. We know. We don’t know the details of how it was discovered. That’s irrelevant to us. But the man we interrogated told us it was from Mycenae, and secretly stored for decades in Schliemann’s home town of Nuebukow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Ahnenerbe officers found it when they went there under the express orders of Heinrich Himmler to look for Schliemann’s treasures. They loved everything to do with Troy because of the swastika imagery. Himmler had done his research. He thought the golden swastika was the palladion, the lost symbol of Troy. It was made of gold and meteoritic material, from an ancient meteorite that fell on Troy far back in prehistory. They took it in secret triumph to the SS fantasy-castle at Wewelsburg, where it stayed reverently locked away. It was going to be the centrepiece of the Fuhrermuseum at Linz, another Nazi fantasy. Where it is now is anybody’s guess. But somewhere on the way it got hijacked as the symbol of the final apocalyptic decree. The Agamemnon Code.’
Mayne was silent for a moment. He spoke quietly. ‘Just one question. When was that Nazi interrogated? When did you know that the crossing of the Rhine would be the signal?’
‘Soon after the liberation of Paris. August 1944.’
‘ Christ. August 1944. So you’ve been searching for more than six months.’
‘As you have been. You didn’t know it, but you were too. You said it yourself in the jeep on the way in. Strategic intelligence. Look how many outfits there are operating ahead of our lines. Your unit, 30 AU. Mine, the MFAA. After Normandy, the whole of British Special Operations Executive redirected their efforts towards uncovering secrets. But hardly anyone knows the real reason. If all goes to plan, hardly anyone will ever know. It will go to their graves with them. With us. I happen to be one of those few. And I’m telling you because we’re so close to it here, closer than we’ve ever been. And the clock is ticking. Hitler can’t last much longer. What frightens me is that whoever it is might be frightened themselves into taking action now, in case they’re discovered. If I’m right about this place.’
‘Still a big if.’ Mayne leaned back. He had meant to ask, but could not. It would do no good to know. It was almost beyond contemplation. He thought of the terrible grind of the war since Normandy, all the friends he had lost, the killing he himself had done, then the dreadful camp, all of those deaths, the girl with the harp, what had happened to her in this forest. Was all of that a price that had been paid to get them, the two of them, by chance, to where they were now, this day? He shut the thought from his mind. He took a deep breath and knelt up, checking his watch. ‘Right. I think I need a breather from this place. From everything you’ve just been saying. Let’s get back. Lewes should be setting out from Corps HQ by now. Knowing him, he’ll be early. Doesn’t like to leave me alone. We can meet him at the camp gate.’
There was a rustle in the foliage behind them. Mayne spun round, revolver at the ready. A man lurched out, dressed in the tattered blue-striped uniform of a camp inmate. His arms were up, hands open towards them. His head was roughly shaven and he was gaunt-faced, his eyes sunken. ‘ Juden. Juden,’ he said in a cracked voice, pointing at himself with one hand, gesturing desperately with the other at Mayne’s revolver. He pulled back his left sleeve and revealed a tattoo like the one the nurse had shown them on the child from Auschwitz, but raw, inflamed. Stein put his hand on Mayne’s arm and he slowly lowered the pistol. Stein waved at the man to calm down. ‘ Shalom aleichem,’ he said.
‘ Aleichem shalom,’ the man replied, looking pathetically grateful. Stein spoke urgently with him in Yiddish, asking short questions and the man answering rapidly, several times pointing to the structure behind them and then down the side of the building, where all Mayne could see was the buried concrete wall. Stein put his hand up to silence the man and turned to Mayne. ‘I think he’s genuine. He says he’s Hungarian Jewish.’
‘There were Hungarian fascists among the Waffen SS we captured at Cassino,’ Mayne murmured, his finger still on the trigger. ‘Not Jews, of course, but some of them knew Yiddish and could pass muster.’
‘He speaks the Hungarian dialect of Yiddish flawlessly. I know it, because my mother’s family were originally from the German borderland near Hungary.’
Mayne pursed his lips. ‘So what’s his story?’
‘He says he was one of the final batch who were deported by the Nazis from Budapest to Auschwitz, late last year. He was selected for something called the Zondercommando, Jewish assistants who cleared the bodies from the gas chambers and then burned them.’
‘He told you that?’
‘That’s what I mean. Why tell something like that if you’re spinning a tale?’
‘Because it makes the story more convincing. Go on.’
Stein saw Mayne’s concern, and paused. ‘He said he was singled out with several others and brought here about three months ago. He said the Nazis were always bringing small batches of healthy young men to the camp. That’s exactly what Cameron told us. They were kept separate from the others, well fed, then brought into this building. None of them came out alive. The bodies were never sent to the camp crematorium but were buried in a deep lime-filled pit on the edge of the forest, by men in protective overalls and gas masks.’
‘He must have overheard us talking about the virus. That sounds like confirmation of experimentation on humans. Exactly what we might want to hear.’
Stein looked uncertain. ‘He says he doesn’t speak English. Look at him. He doesn’t understand a word we’re saying. He says he and several others escaped into the forest five days ago. They’ve been hunting down and killing any of the former SS guards they’ve found hiding out here. That’s also what we heard was going on.’
‘Strange they didn’t get that woman, the Lagerfuherin. Her disguise wasn’t going to fool anyone.’
‘I mentioned that to him. Apparently she only fled into the forest yesterday, when the troops arrived. But this man and his comrades didn’t want to put themselves at any more risk. Once the camp was liberated, they just wanted to survive. They knew she’d be caught eventually, precisely because she made so little effort to disguise herself. He said that he and the others just wanted to wait for Allied soldiers like us to arrive so they could show the world this place. I told him the forest was due to be bombed, that it was time to leave. He got agitated. You saw that. Went very pale. He said we had to see what was inside the bunker then, immediately. They’ve got the keys. They took them off a dead SS man. He knows another way in.’
‘You mean where he was gesturing?’
‘Around the corner. Behind those fallen logs. Apparently, it’s where they used to take the bodies out.’
Mayne took a deep breath. He felt a sudden jolt of pain in the old wound in his shoulder, cutting into him like a knife, but he kept steady and gestured with his revolver. ‘All right. We haven’t got time for more of this. We need to get back to Lewes. Tell him to show us the way. Quickly.’
Stein spoke in Yiddish to the man, who put his hands down, nodded enthusiastically and scurried towards the corner of the concrete wall about five metres beyond the barred door. Mayne and Stein followed him around the corner, ducking beneath a jumble of logs and cut boughs that partly concealed a ramp leading down at a low angle along the side of the building, ending about three metres below the level of the surrounding forest. It was a loading
