a helicopter somewhere close by. Rebecca had come running from her hiding place, and Jack took her in his arms and held her tight.
‘I hope I never see him again,’ Rebecca murmured.
‘Are you all right? Did they touch you? Thank God you’re here.’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘Don’t worry, Dad. I’m fine. What about you?’
One of the security team, a woman, passed them each a small water bottle, and they uncapped and drained them together, then clicked the bottles together. Jack smiled at her. ‘I’m fine. A little tired.’ He gestured at Ben and the security team. ‘Bet they’re itching to hear your story.’
Costas came up to them, and eyed Rebecca shrewdly. ‘Nice kick. Ouch.’
‘Ben taught me that.’
Jack nodded at Ben, who had joined them. ‘Yeah, he’s pretty good like that.’
Ben nodded, and looked intently at him. ‘Got a result?’
Jack handed him the notebook. ‘Got a result.’
‘I’m on to it.’ Ben tapped his BlackBerry, Googling the name. ‘Saumerre. Keynote speaker at a European Union cultural affairs conference in Brussels today.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Should be on the podium in roughly forty-five minutes.’
‘Okay. He’s going to be on tenterhooks waiting for a result from here. I imagine Raitz would have been planning to call him about now. Get Raitz’s cell phone and try the contact numbers. I want to be on the phone with Saumerre before he makes that speech.’
‘What are you going to say to him?’
‘I’m going to tell him that I know everything about his criminal activities. Enough to destroy his political career. That career is undoubtedly crucial to his, shall we say, business interests, as well as to the bigger picture that may lie behind all this. He won’t want to jeopardize his status and influence, as that’s worth a huge amount to him, to the organization he may represent.’
‘Fill me in.’
‘We need to check any affiliation he might have with extremist Islamist terrorism.’
Ben peered at him. ‘Okay. Got you.’
‘What’s the latest on the bunker?’
‘We’ve been overtime on that one. My people have scoured everything they can get their hands on that’s not under the Official Secrets Act, and called in a few favours to see some things we shouldn’t have. We knew the site of the camp was under a NATO airbase built fairly soon after the war. The construction workers came across a pit full of hundreds of skeletons, all shot. We now think we can pin the likely location of that sector of forest with the bunker to an area well within the military compound, actually beneath the runway tarmac. That’s good news as far as we’re concerned, Jack. Nobody’s going to go burrowing around there and it’s about as secure a site as you could get. It’s still an active base, two Luftwaffe squadrons flying Tornados. The question is, how long will that last, with the Cold War standoff finished and so many bases being mothballed?’
‘Have you told anyone in the military about the bunker yet?’
‘You said to hang fire, and I’ve done that. It’s your call. When they built the base, there was no ground- penetrating radar, but any survey today in advance of new building work might reveal it. The runways get resurfaced routinely but are pretty old underneath, and at some point they’ll redo them if the base is kept running. There’s probably no structural issue with the bunker under the runway, as it’ll be buried very deep, but if you’re right, we may need to think about whether our NATO pilots should be taxiing and landing with JDAMs and who knows what other munitions with something just beneath their runway that may contain a deadly biological weapon.’
‘Okay. Good work. I’ll give you my decision when we’re out of here. Meanwhile, let’s catch Saumerre on the phone.’
‘I’m on to it.’
Rebecca waved at the other security people she knew, then detached herself from Jack and went down the passageway. Jack watched her stop and stare at the rubble wall, and then turn back to him. ‘Dad. I forgot to say. That ring Maurice found here, the signet ring? It was George Hoar. A famous American senator who knew Schliemann.’
Jack knew he had seen it before. ‘Of course. Hugh has Hoar’s copy of Schliemann’s Mycenae. The bookplate with the coat of arms in the front.’
Rebecca waved, then turned and spoke intently to the others, gesturing. Jack remembered Dillen’s account from Hugh of Schliemann’s foreman, and the men he had seen here that night in 1890. What was George Hoar doing here? Had Schliemann invited him to see this wonder he had begun to uncover? Jack remembered reading Hoar’s speeches to the US Senate against imperialism. Had Schliemann wanted to tell others what he thought had happened here, others who might find hope in this chamber for avoiding war in the future?
He looked at Rebecca again, and then at Ben, who gestured back, smiling and pointing at Rebecca and doing a thumbs-up. Jack returned the gesture. She was in the best possible hands. He and Costas were now the only ones left in the chamber, discounting the two bodies. Jack took out the Webley, clicked it open, ejected the cartridges into his hand and dumped them in his fleece pocket. Then he closed the Webley and held it tight. It was over. He could let go. He walked towards the ancient bronze door, and suddenly began to shake uncontrollably. He squatted down, then stood up, leaning against the door, the Webley still in his hand, bowing his head, trying to control it. Costas put a hand on his shoulder. Jack nodded at him, then stood upright, taking several deep breaths, and tried to relax. He swallowed hard. ‘Two days can seem like a very long time.’
‘We did it,’ Costas said. ‘You did what you said you’d do. You got Rebecca back.’
Jack high-fived Costas with one hand. ‘Right on,’ he said, wiping his eyes. Right on. He looked at the door he was holding, and then moved round to glance at the extraordinary symbol, the keyhole, visible from both sides.
‘I was thinking about the swastika, the meaning, the associations,’ Costas said. ‘On one side, the clockwise swastika, you’ve got war, horror, the Nazis. On the other side, peace, the balance of power, if you’re right about this place.’
Jack stared at it. ‘The ancient Hittites had a saying. “I give you a tablet of peace; I give you a tablet of war.” It’s the same thing, offering the same tablet, different sides. We make the choice. One side, war. The other side, peace.’
‘Unless you’re up against Agamemnon with ten thousand arrows of iron, or Hitler and the Nazis.’
‘Or a bunch of Russian thugs.’
‘No choice there.’
‘None at all.’
A team of Turkish naval ratings in overalls appeared with body bags and went past them into the chamber, quickly bagging the two bodies and carrying them out. Jack looked back at the extraordinary place Hiebermeyer had found, that Schliemann had found, thinking of the days ahead when this discovery would be splashed across world headlines. Hiebermeyer would take the cake, but Jack would be there alongside him once the shipwreck excavation was finished and he could reveal the splendours of the Shield of Achilles and the other discoveries. He looked around again. Had Schliemann truly dug this far, and seen this? Jack fervently hoped so, hoped that in the days before his death Schliemann had been vindicated, had found what he needed to prove he had been right. This place now would be put before the world as Jack imagined Schliemann would have planned, not simply as an astonishing discovery but also for its place in history, to show a time when men might have found a way to curb war. He looked around one final time, and sniffed. He could smell the blood in the chamber. He thought of it for a moment, of all that this meant. The smell of blood. The smell of iron. He shook his head. He looked at his fingernails, and realized that they still had the dark residue of blood in them from the Russian he had killed in the mine. At Troy, killing was never far away.
‘I think…’ he said to Costas, rubbing his stubble. ‘I think I might take a trip to Paris. Look at some art, you know. It’s been a while.’
‘While you’ve got a Trojan War shipwreck to excavate? No way. You mean you plan never to let Rebecca out of your sight again, ever.’
‘You can come too.’
‘Me? The Louvre? Dad and Uncle Costas? Accidentally in Paris, just when Rebecca happens to be on a school trip there? No way Rebecca will allow that. Let Ben deal with security. Anyway…’
