The Isis Covenant (5 page)

‘Ever heard of a guy called Berndt Hartmann? No? Then how about some loony-tunes Nazi outfit:
Geistjaeger 88
?’

VI

DREAM OR MEMORY?
Max Dornberger was barely lucid enough to be aware of the question’s significance. All he knew was that, whichever was the answer, the images his delirious mind conjured up were of startling clarity and intensity. It begins with a crisis. An Empire in peril. Funds must be found even from the most unlikely sources.

‘I task you with the recovery of Queen Dido’s treasure.’ The voice had been shrill, more boy than man, but no sane man would mock its owner, for that owner was the Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Germanicus and he had power of life and death over forty million people. ‘You will bring it to me and I will reward you with wealth unimaginable and an honoured place at my side. Here is my seal, my pledge and your orders, which give Marcus Domitius, faithful centurion of the First Cohort of Praetorians, leave to demand what aid he will from any man under the Empire’s
dominion
. Succeed and you will have your Emperor’s everlasting gratitude. Fail, and you need not return.’

The sound of his father’s faint voice woke Paul Dornberger and he stirred in the cramped chair where he’d been dozing beside the old man. It was the old-fashioned Latin again, but this time he sensed something different. It was as if there was someone else in the room with them. Quickly, he fumbled for the recorder and set it down in front of his father’s cracked lips.

Caecilius Bassus was my guide, and no man ever had a worse. An African mystic of low morals and fewer principles, he dazzled my master with his fugues and his conjuring tricks and the single gold ingot that was the centre-piece of his tale. All men knew of Queen Dido, once ruler of despised Carthage, for her story and her end had been recited by most noble Publius Vergilius Maro in his great history of Aeneas. It is a tale of greed and avarice and murder, as, I suppose, is this
.

The secret men have pondered for centuries is that of the great treasure, stolen from her brother, the tyrant Pygmalion, and hidden away so that no man’s eyes should ever again be inflamed by its glitter. Yet Bassus, that unlikely hero, claimed to have been led to the treasure in a dream, and did he not have the ingot to prove it? He told of piles of gold taller than a man and wider than a four-wheel cart; coins and bullion and priceless gem stones. But there was more. Precious objects wonderfully wrought and steeped in mystery
and
magic; the treasure of ages. Bassus claimed to be able to smell gold, and when we had docked in Carthage and requisitioned an escort of legionaries from the Second Cohort of the Third Legion Augusta, he led us south. South and west, to the foothills of the Atlas, where we marched and camped and dug, marched and camped and dug, for the nose of Bassus smelled gold in every gully and on every slope, in every cavern and every runnel. If Caecilius Bassus could truly smell gold, then the Atlas are made of it. Yet gold, we found none. From the mountains to the desert. From heat and jagged stone to heat and stifling dust. March and dig. March and dig. Little water and short rations. On the fifty-seventh day, the baggage slaves mutinied for the first time. My legionaries would have slaughtered them to the last man, for no free man will readily bear a slave’s insult. I showed them mercy by burying alive only one in ten and making the rest work in chains, where they died slowly, but productively. Bassus, I would gladly have killed a hundred times, but without Bassus and the Emperor’s gold I could never return to Rome. So we marched. And we dug. As the African summer became the African winter, he led us on a fool’s errand back to the mountains. To the high peaks where it is so cold that men’s fingers and toes turned black and fell off and we huddled together like beasts for warmth around the fires. Snow lay deep in the gullies and the ground was frozen solid, but Bassus had the scent of gold thick in his nostrils now, so we climbed
ever
deeper into the mountains. Where, to the amazement of all, he found it
.

The final words were followed by what seemed an endless pause and for a moment Paul Dornberger wondered if his father was dead. He found that he had barely taken a breath since the old man had started speaking. Now he waited in an agony of confusion for the bony chest to rise again. It seemed an age before the instinct for survival triumphed and Max produced a long groaning sigh and resumed his testament in a desperate voice that quickened with every new revelation.

We had moved enough earth to fill a dozen arenas. Now, in a narrow canyon in the highest pass Caecilius Bassus pointed to the mouth of a cave. No legionary likes the dark, least of all a fearsome shadow that might be the entrance to the underworld of the dead. But it must be done. I chose one hundred of the bravest and placed Bassus at the front, where I could reach him with the point of my sword. To create a lifeline to the true world, we tied together every piece of rope and harness and carried every torch and flint, leaving those left behind to survive the cold as best they could. I gave one end of the rope to Cato, the cohort’s senior decurion and a man I could trust. He secured it to a scrubby bush and with the ragged end in my hand I led them into the bowels of the earth. The caves seemed to go on for ever and our lives were defined by the reach of the flickering torches and the treacherous, slippery rock beneath our
feet
. Above, the cold was a piercing, jagged-edged trial, in the caves it ate you from the inside, leaching into your bones and numbing your brain. The men of the Second Cohort had borne every privation with the good humour and comradeship that is the mark of a legionary, but in the cold and the dark their morale crumbled like a mud dam in a winter spate. I reached the end of my tether sometime around nightfall in the world above, the frayed tip of the taut rope that was our only link to the world of men a testament to my failure. But Bassus was a man possessed. He would go on, even if he must go alone. It was around the next corner, or the next, but it was here. We rested, if you could call it rest, for two hours. Five men refused to continue, but I did not chastise them. Instead, I ordered them to stay by the rope until their rations ran out or we returned
.

The caves twisted and turned, rose and fell, and were riddled with inscrutable side passages. Even if we reached our goal, without the security of the rope it would take just one wrong turn to condemn us to wander for ever in the darkness. In place of the rope, I devised a chain of men. Each was positioned within shouting distance of the next and able to maintain contact lest they go mad from loneliness in this hellish place. In this fashion we travelled another mile in the time it would have normally taken a healthy man to march ten. We walked with the dead for two days in the darkness of the Otherworld before we reached Queen
Dido’s
treasury. At times, I feared we would be lost in the caves for ever
.

Paul waited for the next chapter in his father’s story, but to his fury there was no more, and the old man lay, silent and exhausted, on the bed. With every sentence, Paul had become more convinced that he was witnessing some kind of genuine link between past and present. He didn’t understand how, but that was of little consequence. His was a mind trained to ignore distraction and diversion and focus only on the target ahead. He was like a hunting dog, its every sense attuned to the trail. It wasn’t just the story, told in such intimate detail, but the living flesh before him that provided the evidence. To his certain knowledge, Max Dornberger had been born on a farm outside Linz, Austria, in December of the year 1910. Yet the man on the bed, even despite his illness, did not look a day over sixty. And he had looked that way for as long as Paul could remember. What other explanation could there be, but the obsession that had ruled his life – and shaped his son’s?

Paul’s memories were of an unusual childhood, though that didn’t mean he looked back on it with any kind of regret. He had been educated by personal tutors and had no contact with other children. The extracurricular lessons with his father had been designed to exploit and enhance certain talents and tendencies that the old man believed were in his breeding. And if those talents and tendencies did not exist, they had been beaten into him by constant repetition.

He couldn’t remember when he had realized his father was evil. Only that by then it didn’t matter. A ten-year-old boy isolated in a rambling, ramshackle house in the country; there had never been any escape from what he was to become. Before he could be allowed to inflict pain, he must understand pain. To understand it, he must suffer it. Strapped to the chair. Whipping. Burning. Electricity. So many levels of pain. So many consequences. He had come – at a certain level – to relish the pain, even to be as one with it. And, after he understood the pain, they began to be brought to him. First the animals, so he should know the feeling of the knife in flesh. The exact position of the vital organs and the most efficient way they could be reached. How the cringing muscles trapped the blade like a clamp if it was pushed too far. The scrape on bone if the point missed that vital gap between the ribs. How you could feel the beat of the heart through the knife until the very last spasm of the dying organ. The way a living, breathing entity kicked and bucked when it realized you were trying to kill it, even though its brain didn’t understand what was happening. All repeated over and over in that cold, dark cellar until he was drenched in blood.

‘No! Use your wrist to twist the knife, so the blade itself breaks the suction. Again. Again.’

And after the animals, the people.

Where did he get them?

Little Pauli never knew, but his older self could guess. The lost and the lonely picked up from bars, or
anywhere
a sedative could be administered unseen; those were the days before all-seeing CCTV surveillance. An offer of a lift home for a staggering drunk; a cup of coffee handed to a homeless vagrant. Nobodies.

It was the eyes he remembered. The eyes had a vocabulary all of their own. Fear, pleading, hopelessness, defiance, hatred. Agony, suffering, fading. Dying.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to kill them. First there must be the mock interrogation. The gift of hope. That was when he discovered a new truth: that a man able to withstand enormous amounts of pain could be broken by terror. Rip out a man’s right eye and he would do anything or say anything to save his left. Cut off one hand and the thought of living without the other would drive the subject to the brink of madness. Take away a finger and let him know his manhood will be next and he will tell you anything you want to know.

They all talked in the end.

He learned how to carry a man to within a heartbeat of death and keep him there. How to gauge the effectiveness of the pain he was inflicting to minimize the time it took to break his subject. He became adept. And if he ever betrayed that he was enjoying what he was doing, little Pauli would be placed back in the chair, and the learning would begin again.

Eventually would come the moment when the broken, soiled creature in the chair must be dispatched. At first, he had not been strong enough to kill with his
hands
, although he had been taught the mechanics of it. Sometimes it would be with a knife. Sometimes with a pistol. Poison, administered in various ways. Even once with gas, though this was never repeated because of the time it took to clear the room. But his father’s favoured method was the wire. He remembered the quiet, almost seductive voice in his ear as he took hold of the wooden toggles with the link of steel piano wire between them.

‘
Wenn Sie die Schleife platzieren, müssen Sie die Hände kreuzen, rechts über links. Sehen Sie, wie es Ihnen die beste Position ermglicht, um den größten Druck ausüben? Nun, ganz langsam, in die entgegengesetzten Richtungen ziehen
.’ When you place the loop, you must cross the hands, right over left. See how it gives you the best position to apply the greatest pressure? Now, slowly, pull in opposite directions. Let him know he is dying.

It was only after he mastered the wire that his father had proudly shown him the pictures of the men in grey with the lightning-flash runes on their collars and the people in the striped uniforms with the hopeless dead eyes. And when he had given him the belt buckle with the eagle and made him recite the oath.

He felt a twinge of guilt at the thought of the oath. He knew he had taken pleasure in mutilating the woman in New York and inflicting the kind of pain on the children he had suffered as a boy. It was not part of his mission to take pleasure from it. It meant he would
have
to cleanse himself later at the special establishment he was a member of.

Still, the deaths had served their purpose. One more avenue to the man he sought closed off to the opposition.

And the computer he had removed from the apartment of the English Hartmans had provided him with a new trail to follow.

VII

GEISTJAEGER 88?
JAMIE
studied the sparse file on the computer in his Kensington High Street flat. According to Detective Danny Fisher, the two murdered families had one thing in common, apart from the similarity of their names. If you went back a couple of generations their genes converged with those of a Hamburg resident named Berndt Hartmann, and this Hartmann’s name had been linked to
Geistjaeger 88
. Most people thought Herman Göring was the Second World War’s greatest art thief, but he’d had a few rivals. Hans Frank for one, the
gauleiter
who had ruled over what had been called the General Government – the Nazis’ Polish slave state – and had pinched Raphael’s
Portrait of a Young Man
from under Göring’s nose. Frank, however, was just a bit player. Göring was a man who didn’t know the meaning of the word enough. When he stole, he stole on an industrial scale. In 1939 he had created an organization specifically to create the greatest art collection the
world
had ever seen. The man appointed to run it was an Austrian art historian called Kajetan Mülhmann, an SS officer and the Nazi Special Delegate for the Securing of Art in the Occupied Territories. Mülhmann and his staff travelled the length and breadth of the ever-expanding Third Reich plundering artworks belonging to Jews, ‘enemies of the state’ and the Roman Catholic Church, prudently siphoning off the occasional piece to go to Adolf Hitler’s planned
Führermuseum
in Linz. But what Göring and Hitler had, Heinrich Himmler must have too. Himmler loathed ‘
der dicke
’, as he called Göring. He also had his own, rather more specialized, reasons for hunting down artefacts and artworks. In 1942, he ordered the creation of a special SS unit specifically for that purpose. It had started off with a grandiose name to match the grandiose aspirations of its founder, but the men who served in it called themselves Ghosthunters and their unit became Ghosthunter 88; eight being the number that corresponded with the letter H in the alphabet, and not, as some historians had surmised, after the celebrated anti-aircraft, turned anti-tank gun of that calibre.