The Isis Covenant (12 page)

‘So what do you think?’

‘You’re the detective.’ He shrugged. ‘But for me it begins to make more sense. The Eye of Isis may or may not exist, but if certain people believed they could lay their hands on a billion dollars’ worth of diamond that would give them more than enough motive to torture and kill. It provides a reason for the deaths of the Hartmanns and the Hartmans, even if it takes us no closer to finding out who did it.’

She nodded slowly. ‘I’ll go along with that. We have the symbol carved into the woman’s skull, which links us to the Eye of Isis, and that gives us our motive: greed. But where do Masterton and his theory fit in?’

‘Maybe, it
was
a coincidence?’

‘I refer you to my earlier answer, counsellor.’

‘It sounds like something out of a Dracula movie. Historical artefact keeps turning up through the ages and suddenly the local population starts being thinned out.’

‘She said kids, remember. And kids have died.’

‘True. But from what you’ve told me, the Hartmann children died for a reason, albeit a shitty, monstrous reason. They weren’t sacrificed, not in a sense that I’d understand it, because there was no evidence of ritual.’

She went silent and he could see her running the alternative scenarios through her mind. He waited until she was satisfied. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It’s progress, of a sort. Now tell me about your day.’

‘Firstly,’ he took a sip of water, ‘I think your initial instinct about Hartmann was correct. We have two sets of victims with a link to a man last seen in Berlin in nineteen forty-five. The Crown of Isis is exactly the kind of artefact that
Geistjaeger 88
was set up to find. If it was hidden somewhere in Europe the most likely time for it to surface was in the chaos of war.’

‘Plunder, like the Koh-i-noor.’

‘That’s right. Plunder. Secondly, Hartmann was a thief. Let’s just say, for instance, Ritter, and Dornberger and Hartmann smash down the door to some mansion or chateau. Chances are they are there for a reason. A tip-off, or information collected from someone in a concentration camp by means we don’t want to think about? They search the place for whatever it is that they’ve been told they’ll find there. Probably take it apart. But Hartmann, the thief, stumbles on the Crown of Isis, with its whacking great diamond. Does he hand it over? Not on your life. This is his chance to make sure that, whoever wins, he has a very comfortable start to the post-war era.’

‘The Crown of Isis is a sizable object, remember.’ Danny giggled and it was odd to hear a little girl’s laugh from a full-grown woman. ‘He could hardly just put it down his pants.’

‘Don’t underestimate Hartmann. I have this mental picture of someone young, resourceful and cocky; a kind of Nazi Artful Dodger. He would have found a way. Maybe he broke it up. Anyway, the point is that whoever killed those people in Brooklyn and out in Docklands believed Hartmann had found the Crown of Isis. The question is, did he find it during the war, or after it?’

‘During, I think we’re agreed on that.’

‘Then Berlin is the key. And Berlin is where I’ve spent my day.’

The waiter approached their table, but Danny waved him away. ‘You said that Hartmann and this guy Dornberger took part in the defence of Berlin. I got the impression that maybe you knew more than you were telling me. Now how could that be?’

‘You didn’t pick up on the reference to the Reichschancellery, then?’

‘I thought it was some kinda Nazi telephone exchange.’

He smiled at that. Danny Fisher liked to play the wide-eyed Yank innocent on her first venture beyond Hoboken, but the reality was that she had a brain as sharp as a switchblade. He suspected she knew as much about the Reichschancellery as he did, but she wanted him to spell it out.

‘The Reichschancellery in Berlin was the official residence of Germany’s head of state. When the Russians closed in on the city in the spring of nineteen forty-five, the chancellery and the Reichstag, the parliament building that was nearby, were their primary targets.’

‘All right.’ She nodded. ‘I get that.’

‘The people who defended the Reichschancellery were billeted in a bunker nearby.’

‘So?’

‘Hitler’s bunker.’

‘Holy shit!’

‘Precisely.’

‘So Hartmann was there at the end?’

‘He was certainly there until the last week in April. Quite a few German units, particularly SS units, actually fought their way into Berlin as the Third Reich was collapsing around them and everybody else was trying to get out. Either they still had faith that Hitler would save Germany or they were prepared to defend him to the end, even if it meant their own deaths.’

‘The real fanatics, huh?’

Jamie shrugged. ‘Fanatics, but brave men. The SS knew exactly what their fate would be if they were captured by the Russians. If they surrendered to the Americans they might be roughed up a little and there was a chance they’d be shot, but the best they could hope for from the Red Army was a bullet in the back of the head.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, this doesn’t sound like our guys. Hartmann and Dornberger were Himmler’s licensed plunderers, not real soldiers. And from what you tell me about Ritter, he may have killed thousands of innocent people, but he was a bureaucrat at heart, a pen-pusher.’

‘You’re right,’ he admitted. ‘But in those final days of the war, the Nazis needed every able-bodied man they could lay their hands on. There’s a photograph of Hitler during the defence of Berlin, handing out the Iron Cross to soldiers who single-handedly destroyed Russian tanks. In the picture he’s patting the cheek of a boy who can’t be more than fourteen years old. The German equivalent of Dad’s Army.’ He saw her puzzled frown and smiled. ‘A sort of home defence force – it was called the
Volkssturm
and consisted of men between the ages of sixteen and sixty. By nineteen forty-five sailors and Luftwaffe ground crew were fighting as infantry. The chances are that the men of
Geistjaeger 88
were reluctantly swept up into some SS battle group. The soldiers they ended up fighting beside in Berlin were a unit of French SS volunteers under the command of
Brigadeführer
Gustav Krukenberg. A month earlier, the Charlemagne Division had marched out of a station in Poland straight into the German defence line on the Eastern Front with more than seven thousand men, by the time they were forced back to Berlin there were fewer than a hundred of them.’

Danny Fisher held up her hand. ‘Hang on just a
minute
. I don’t know much about World War Two, but I do know that the French were on our side.’

‘Well, yes and no.’ Jamie smiled. ‘The Free French under General de Gaulle fought on the allied side, and so did the Resistance, though not as many of them as they’d like you to think. But until August nineteen forty-four, France was divided into the Occupied north and Vichy in the south, which was run as a German client state and actively collaborated in Nazi policies like rounding up the Jews. Marshall Petain, the Vichy leader, was a First World War hero and rabid anti-communist. He encouraged his young men and members of the
milice
, a kind of local militia, to fight for the Germans in Russia. For an organization that began life as the epitome of the Aryan ideal, the SS turned into a surprisingly cosmopolitan institution. It already had the Wiking Division, which was composed of Norwegians, Danes, Dutchmen and Belgians, Balts and even a few Britons. They would have welcomed the French with open arms, especially after they’d seen how they could fight. It seems that Ritter had already slipped away, probably on some concocted mission for Himmler, who was by now playing both ends against the middle and negotiating with the Allies, but Hartmann and Dornberger were trapped in some of the hardest, dirtiest and most dangerous battles of the war. They would have been battered by artillery, fighting day and night from burning ruins and cellars to counter Soviet probes, hungry, scared and entirely without
hope
. The men of the Charlemagne Division, or what little remained of it, made their name as tank killers. They’d stalk the Russian T-34s through the streets with magnetic mines and
panzerfaust
rocket launchers, kill the accompanying infantry and blow up the tanks. The Red Army lost at least a hundred tanks in the battle for central Berlin and those few Frenchmen are credited with destroying at least fifty. But gradually the noose tightened and the last remnants of the French SS and the men who fought with them withdrew to make a final stand at Hitler’s bunker in the garden behind the Reichschancellery.’

Danny chewed her lip as something occurred to her. ‘If Hartmann and Dornberger were caught up in that kind of horrendous battle, why are we so certain that they survived?’

‘Because we know exactly where they were on the morning of the twenty-ninth of April nineteen forty-five – the day before Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide and three days before the final surrender.’ She took a deep breath and he realized he was stretching her patience. ‘The reason we know they were there is because our two heroes carved themselves their own little place in history. According to at least one source, Max Dornberger and Berndt Hartmann were the SS men who executed Hitler’s brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein.’

XVI

MAX DORNBERGER FELT
his blood rise as the images flashed through his mind like a home-movie reel. The cave and the Crown and hot blood on his hands. Tearing down the walls of some nameless eastern city where the sand now gathered in the skulls and sang through the exposed ribcages of the slaughtered population. Riding into Rome at Alaric’s side with the women screaming and men choking on their own balls. Charging knee to knee with Murat at Marengo and Borodino. As so often, he found himself questioning his own certainty. How could it be real?

But the Crown was real. The Eye was real.

And that meant Hartmann was real. Berlin was real.

Dust and death. Living – no, it could not be called living, let us instead say existing – in cramped cellars where the air was so foul that you chewed on other men’s shit and drank their sweat, while you waited for the katyusha mortar strike that would bury you alive.
Red
, swollen eyes staring blindly from below steel helmets and Hitler Jugend caps in the flash of an exploding artillery round. Rats’ eyes, only they weren’t rats, they were the worn-out husks of human beings. Men and boys who hadn’t slept for a week clinging by a thread to what remained of their sanity. A shout. ‘Ivan kommt!’ Jackbooted feet charging for the doorway. Hanging back as long as you could as Hauptsturmführer Fenet led those crazy Frenchmen past with their ’fausts and their magnetic anti-tank mines, but not for too long because, SS or not, the kettenhunde military police liked nothing better than to string up a shirker from the nearest lamp post. The breathless, heart-pounding dash through streets choked with the remains of bomb-shattered buildings and piles of rubble that stank of festering corpses. Halt. Disperse for ambush. Crouching behind a burned-out Mercedes staff car, ears straining for the telltale tortured shriek of tank tracks on concrete. Hands shaking as they clutch the warm steel of the new banana-magazined Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifle that marks you as SS as clearly as the lightning-flash runes on your collar or the blood group tattoo on your arm. There it was! A nerve-fragmenting clatter of diesel engine. Savage shouts in the demonic language of the barbarian. Wait. Wait. Be invisible. Let them pass. They are careless. As exhausted as you are. They think they are already the victors, their minds on the fat fräuleins and the unlimited vodka and schnapps that will be their reward for all the years of struggle and
sacrifice
. Vermin. The first sight of a creeping figure in a soot-stained brown uniform, then the gun barrel that heralds the silhouette of the tank. A T-34, thank Christ, and not the Stalin with its thicker armour. Wait. Don’t let them see you. This is not your time. This is not the way it should be. A flash, instantly followed by the distinctive thump of a panzerfaust and the takatakatak rattle of fully automatic fire. Nerveless fingers find the composure to throw a stick grenade. A scream you realize is from your own throat mingling with the shrieks of the wounded and the dying; the big rifle bucking in your hands as you seek targets by sense among the shadows in the thick smoke from the burning tank. Enemy or friend, in the madness of battle it is impossible to tell. All that matters is it’s not you. Two figures rolling on the ground in a welter of grey and brown. Bright blood spurts in short jets from a punctured throat, like a scarlet rose flowering in a monochrome landscape. A child’s face is frozen for ever in a final moment of terror. The Ivan rises snarling from his victim to be dispatched by a short burst from the MG-44. In the odd oasis of calm that follows, Vaulot, the tank killer, sprints past with a funnel-shaped H3 magnetic mine in his hands, hunting a second T-34 that no one else has noticed. Another explosion. More firing. More screams. A whistle: the signal to withdraw. Back to the cellar, only there is a lot more space now. Berlin, April 1945. And always at your heels, like a faithful hunting dog: Hartmann
.

Hartmann with his rat’s face and his rat’s cunning. Slim and agile and quick as a circus acrobat. The hands, too delicate for a soldier, with long fingers made for playing the piano. Hartmann the thief. Once a thief, always a thief. I should have remembered that
.

Hartmann came to the unit in late ’43, with the smell of the jail still on him. Nineteen, but looking years younger, he’d been in an SS uniform for less than a month and at first he was in awe of the veterans around him. But he was good, and being good made him popular. When he crouched before a safe, he found an inner stillness that was almost beyond human. When his fingers worked the dials he was like a great conductor directing an orchestra
.

But Hartmann would always be an outsider. The veterans of Geistjaeger 88 had served in the east. We had seen things that had changed us. The unit was always under pressure from Himmler to deliver and often that meant taking extreme actions to extract information. Sometimes, I suspected Hartmann was too squeamish for the job, but, as we lost more men to the Ostfront, he became part of the G88 inner circle
.