Lammas Night (10 page)

“There's a bit of variety, sir. I think you'll want oversize prints of everything before we head back.”

“I think you're probably right.” He let the film roll back on itself and tucked it into the envelope again as he glanced at William with a pleased expression. “He did a good job.”

“So I gathered,” William said. “What happens now?”

“Back to work, for me and Denny,” Graham replied, returning the envelope to Denton. “Once we've run the prints, I can do a preliminary workup on the way back to London. Then it's probably an all-nighter.”

William smiled ruefully. “Would you believe me if I told you I even miss the all-nighters?” he said, extending his hand in reluctant farewell. “We do have some unfinished business the next time we see one another, however. I shan't keep you now, but once this immediate crisis is over, why don't you pop up to Windsor for a day or two, at least for an afternoon? We'll ride if it's fine.”

Bowing over their joined hands in a slightly more formal gesture, Graham allowed himself a final smile. He had no doubt that the invitation bordered on a royal command, but he was used to that after his years of friendship with the prince. He would have plenty of time to think about his earlier impulse to confide in William and to plan any necessary strategy.

The prince was far from his thoughts half an hour later, however, as he and Denton pulled the first oversized prints out of their bath. The Dieter film was first. As Graham clipped the first print up to dry, eerie in the red light of the darkroom, he had an odd prickle of
déjà vu
.

He hardly looked at the dark, banner-hung room in the background of the first photograph, though that was unsettling enough. Instead, he found himself bending apprehensively over the developing bath where the next print was beginning to appear—almost being drawn into the image as Denton swished the paper back and forth in the solution.

He had seen the face before—on the Second Road. Its memory sent chills of dread along his spine, and the terror he had felt before returned in full force.

C
HAPTER
5

The scar, the glittering eyes—the face Graham had glimpsed on the Second Road. That alone was enough to convince him that these particular photographs should never fall under official scrutiny. He was also willing to bet it was the face of Michael's nightmare.

Grimly, he inspected the remainder of the prints as they came out of the final bath, each one more horrifying than the last. The final shot on the roll was a single page of close-typed text with Dieter's code name at the bottom. As soon as it was dry enough to handle, he left Denton to finish printing and took all the Dieter material into an adjoining office. He leafed through the prints again, feeling a little sick to his stomach as he noticed additional details, then stuffed all but the final page into a manila envelope and sat back to read Dieter's report.

Graham had never really cared for Dieter, though he had worked with the man from time to time because Selwyn asked him to. Dieter was a brilliant occult scholar and ceremonial magician—more than a match for either Selwyn or Graham—but he was also quite amoral. Despite the coolly dispassionate reassurances of the accompanying report, the content of the photographs left some doubt that Dieter's defection was wholly feigned. That he was German also made him suspect in Graham's eyes.

Dieter's connection with the Jordan family had come through a brief marriage to one of Selwyn's older sisters, who had died tragically in the birth of a stillborn child. It was after her death, early in the twenties, that Dieter made his decision to infiltrate and sabotage high-level Nazi occult operations. In the decade that followed, he broke publicly and apparently bitterly with his dead wife's British relations in order to increase his credibility, adopting an increasingly fanatical pro-Nazi stance.

More recently, Dieter had become an instructor at Vogelsang, one of the three great
Ordensburgen
, or castles, of the orders of Naziism, where SS officers and other future leaders of the Third Reich were indoctrinated into the mystical aspects of racist doctrine. The Oakwood group had had little inkling of his occult progress up until now.

But the photographs made it all too clear just how well Dieter's extracurricular affiliations had succeeded—though Graham would have preferred less disturbing confirmation. The banner-hung ritual chamber of Graham's vision existed exactly as he had seen it: a focus of dark, unspeakable power secreted in one of Vogelsang's subterranean vaults. More chilling was the face of the group's leader—always masked across the eyes, but quite definitely the presence Graham had sensed on the Second Road. Dieter identified the man only as Sturm.

Even Dieter knew little about Sturm other than his name and his alignment. He came and went mysteriously, obviously holding a high rank in one or several black-magical traditions. He was not formally associated with Vogelsang, even though he had hand-picked the members of the lodge Dieter had penetrated from among its faculty and used its physical facilities. His patron was believed to be Himmler, the SS Reichsführer, but it was also whispered that Sturm was in the confidence of the Führer himself.

The implications were staggering, but Graham realized that for the present they must take second place to more official concerns. Dieter's material would have to go to the Oakwood group; Michael's was fodder for MI.6. As Denton emerged from the darkroom with the rest of the finished prints, Graham tucked Dieter's report in with its photos and tried to put it out of his mind as well.

Graham skimmed the rest of Michael's material on the way back to London, bouncing observations and speculations off Denton. By the time they reached the office, he had roughed out a preliminary evaluation that created several days' round-the-clock activity on the part of his staff. They finished at about the same time that Dynamo was coming to a close. Some of the information had been available in skeletal form before, but much of it was new and startling. Even without the Dieter complication, a disturbing picture emerged.

At least the Nostradamus material could be largely discounted so far as Graham was concerned. Ernst Krafft's attempt at reinterpretation was more laughable than alarming to anyone who knew Nostradamus well at all, though it still must be refuted, since some people might otherwise believe it. Ashcroft, Graham's Nostradamus expert, agreed. Drafting a memo to that effect, Graham sent the entire Nostradamus package on to MI.6 liaison. Captain de Wohl, who was writing the British counterleaflet, should get a chuckle out of it when he integrated the new information into what he was doing.

But the rest of Michael's material was no laughing matter. Several months before, the agent who gave Michael the second roll of film had penetrated Himmler's Section VII, which was a rough counterpart to Graham's. His first few reports had outlined the expected array of occult and psychic phenomena being investigated by the Third Reich for possible wartime application: the astrological warfare connected with the Nostradamus operation, mental telepathy to influence the enemy, pendulum dowsing over maps to locate enemy shipping. The new material treated even more serious matters.

Himmler's agents had begun a crackdown on occult practitioners who did not put their talents at the disposal of the Third Reich. Any group with a potentially mystical or esoteric orientation was suspect. Former Freemasons, odd religious sects, astrologers not sanctioned by the Nazi party, occult lodges and study groups, gypsies—all fell under the scrutiny of Himmler's black brotherhood. Some of those who agreed to turn their talents to the support of the fatherland were courted and brought into the Nazi fold; but those who would not or who belonged to groups singled out for elimination were ruthlessly rounded up and never seen again. Graham recognized the names of several once-powerful occultists on the list of the missing that Michael's contact provided. It was grim confirmation that the Third Reich took the entire matter of the occult very seriously.

Most disturbing of all were the copies of astrological charts and interpretations that Michael himself had managed to secure. Many of the highest echelons of the Nazi high command were represented, including the Führer himself, and even a few Allied personalities such as Churchill and the King. These charts showed subtle differences from a similar set smuggled out six months before—an entirely new hand now involved in the interpretations, far more competent and frighteningly more subtle than previously. Two of Graham's analysts independently concurred: if Himmler or even one of the other lesser lights of the Nazi court had engaged an astrologer of this caliber to advise the Führer, it could make a great deal of difference. The man went by the professional name of
der Rote Adler
—the Red Eagle.

“He's good—too
bloody
good, if you ask me,” Grumbaugh confided in the privacy of Graham's office, pushing his glasses on top of his balding head as he spread an array of texts before his boss. “What especially worries me is that I'm not certain he's
only
an astrologer.”

“Oh?”

Grumbaugh shook his head, scowling. “Something in the back of my mind connects him with those satanist lodges we've been hearing about. If he's that good an astrologer, what if he's also a first-rate black magician? This is just sheerest speculation on my part, but suppose he turned out to be the same masked chap who's been showing up at secret meetings of the Vril and the
Thule Gesellschaft
, fanning up support? Several items in the Section VII material suggest such a connection. Take a look at these passages I've marked.”

While Grumbaugh perched on the corner of the desk and paged through the references, pointing out specific items, Graham skimmed them with growing suspicion. The Vril Society and the
Thule Gesellschaft
—German occult orders spawned at the time, of the Great War from roots of the old
Germanenorden
—were violently racist and anti-Semitic. The Thule Group had provided all forty of the original members of the New German Workers' Party, which eventually brought Hitler to power, and had been financed in turn by the high command. Hitler was believed to be an initiate of the Thule Group's inner core, whose orientation was markedly satanic. No one knew how far the Thulist web extended.

But as Grumbaugh guided Graham through the evidence, the overwhelming image that kept coming to Graham's mind was the mysterious Sturm. When they had finished, Graham tilted back in his chair thoughtfully.

He had come to trust Grumbaugh's intuitions. The English-born Jew was his most brilliant analyst: a resourceful if little-known Cambridge scholar who spoke half a dozen European languages fluently as well as reading a handful of dead tongues. He was also one of the most brilliant Qabalists Graham had ever met. If Sam Grumbaugh thought that
Rote Adler
might be tied in with a German satanic lodge, then the possibility certainly should be explored further. He wondered whether he should show Grumbaugh at least a few of the Dieter photographs to get his reaction.

“This
Rote Adler
—you think he's Hitler's pet Thulist, then?” Graham asked. “The one who's working a black lodge on his behalf?”

“The name would fit,” Grumbaugh replied. He twitched his eyebrows in a characteristic expression that was pure Grumbaugh, letting his glasses slip back into place as he pulled another page out of his stack.

“Listen to this passage. It occurs in one of last month's intercepts and also in the new material:
Our God is the father of battle and his rune is that of the eagle
. That's a Thulist slogan, pure and simple. In the old German solar mythology, the eagle is the symbol of the Aryan race. The Thulists use it as a secondary insignia, along with the swastika traversed by the two lances. It all fits, Gray. I think he's Hitler's black adept.”

Graham opened his desk drawer and pulled out just a few of the Dieter photographs, which he tossed on the desk in front of Grumbaugh.

“I wonder if this might be the same man,” he said quietly, watching Grumbaugh's expression shift from surprise through shock to grim endurance as he shuffled through the photos. “He goes by the name of Sturm. He operates out of Vogelsang and draws most of the members of his group from its faculty. The photos come from a private source,” he added as Grumbaugh glanced up and started to make bitter comment.

Silenced, Grumbaugh leafed through the photographs a second time very slowly, then dropped the stack on Graham's desk and wiped his palms against his thighs in distaste.

“I don't suppose those could have been staged for our benefit?” he asked quietly.

Graham shook his head, remembering his own vision on the Second Road. “I have no reason to doubt their authenticity. The purpose of the photographs apparently was to incriminate the other participants so that there could be no backing out later on. I'd appreciate it if you'd keep the knowledge of these to yourself.”

With a shudder, Grumbaugh looked away. “The Thulists' famous ‘astrological' magic,” he whispered harshly, “which is neither astrological nor magical in any decent sense but an excuse for depraved tortures and murder. And I'd be willing to bet a month's pay that the victims in those pictures were Jews.”

“Some were.” Briskly, Graham gathered up the photographs and returned them to his desk drawer. “I think we should put out some feelers on this Sturm. Have Basilby get on it right away. In the meantime, I want you to correlate anything that fits linking Sturm,
Rote Adler
, Vogelsang, the Thulists, the Vril—any black-magical connections whatever that may tell us more about this chap. How soon do you think you can have it on my desk?”

Grumbaugh had it for him the next morning before the rest of the team had even finished their tea. His conclusions sent Graham straight to Dover with a copy for the recuperating Michael, though not before he rang Alix to request a meeting at Oakwood the following evening. Michael was devastated.