The Sacred Scroll (36 page)

The waiter came over.

‘What’ll it be?’ he asked.

Leon looked at her questioningly.

She hesitated. ‘A Schweppes?’

‘And another coffee. Latte this time,’ said Lopez. ‘Decaf.’

‘Coming up.’ The waiter left them.

They didn’t speak until he’d returned with the drinks and parked them.

‘Got your message,’ said Lopez.

‘Thanks.’ Her eyes were wary.

‘Took one hell of a risk.’

‘I know.’

He was trying to place her. How old was she? Maybe twenty-five. So she’d been in his class five, six years ago. Then it came to him. Surname at least. Lundquist. ‘I remember you,’ he said. She’d been one of his better students, maybe the best of her year. He’d taken her under his wing, taught her how to make a computer do everything but sing and dance, thought about recruiting her for INTERSEC, but she’d caught the hint and wasn’t interested. Wanted to go on, do a doctorate, go home to Sweden, teach.

Annika, that was it. Annika Lundquist. But here she still was, and she looked very far from prosperous.

‘You wanted to see me,’ he said guardedly.

‘Yes.’ The tension, which had ebbed while he’d been talking, returned to her face. She looked around.

‘You’d better tell me, and fast. Do you realize what a security risk you’ve become? Do you know what happens to people who’ve done what you’ve done?’

‘Wait. It’s important. I think. You always said, “Come to me if ever you need anything.”’

He was silent. It was true. He’d learned since never to make such promises. But it was too late for this one. Besides, Lopez was intrigued. It was the first time in a while that he’d come face to face with the cutting edge.

‘You said you were in need.’

‘I am not doing so good. I need money.’

He sighed. Was that why she was still here, not back in Sweden, why she looked as if she’d been sleeping rough?

Drugs? Not like her, but who could tell?

‘I want to go home.’ She drew herself up a little proudly. ‘I qualified. You can call me Dr Lundquist. But I had problems with a man. Not so good. And lost my job. Have to work in a cash and carry. To pay for little Mia.’

He wanted to ask questions, but something in her eyes told him not to. He inferred that Mia was her kid. Interesting, her giving the baby the same name as his wife. He felt his heart soften a little. And he was intrigued.

‘Remind me, where do you come from – in Sweden?’

‘Ystad.’

Down in the south. In Scania. Town on the coast, hemmed in by flat countryside. Like Manhattan once was. By the look of things, she’d be better off there than here.

‘You want money to get back there?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Start over.’

‘Nice coincidence, your having something you want to sell me.’ He saw her recoil at his tone.

‘I was going to get in touch with you anyway. Then I saw a little of what you were looking for. That was the coincidence. But it doesn’t matter. What I have may be of no consequence at all.’

‘What is it?’

‘My father’s family is very old. He was so proud of it, as a little girl I would get embarrassed for him, talking to his friends too much, after too much beer, about his great-grandfather the engineer
this
and his great-great-great grandfather the general
that
. But it wasn’t just boasting. There was a chest, full of papers. Some of them very old, should have been in a proper archive. But he took good care of them. When he was killed, my mother gave me some of them. I think she intended I should sell them if I ever got short of cash. We may be an old family, but we are not rich, and I am the only child.’ She looked wistful. ‘My father would have liked a son, but all he got was me. Not that there was a name to preserve any longer. His own father was the grandson of a daughter of the old family. There was little left to inherit, when his turn came, but the old papers and letters.’

The door of the coffeehouse opened and she looked round, alert. It struck Lopez that he might not be the only one she was wary of. But it was only a couple that entered, a plump woman with long dark hair, eccentrically dressed, accompanied by a business-type, a gaunt man with wet lips and pale eyes. Annika turned back to Lopez.

‘I learned enough from you to work on very old documents. There is one in the collection written by hand on good vellum, in Latin, dictated to a scribe in Sweden in about 1210; the grammar and spelling are perfect but the tone is of a man speaking rather than writing. The narrative wanders a little.’

Lopez leaned forward. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a letter, but it’s also a memoir and a kind of last will and testament. But there’s a whole passage that I cannot fathom. It seems to be written in code, or in another language altogether, strange to me.’

‘Do you know who wrote it?’

She frowned. ‘I told you, a scribe, near where Malmö is now, but there’s no way of telling, the city wasn’t founded then.’

‘I mean, who dictated it?’

‘It’s signed – or at least there’s a mark, and then the name written in, added by the scribe.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s the name of our oldest ancestor. That’s what my father used to tell me. I doubt if anyone except perhaps an aristocrat can trace their family back so far, but I don’t see how the document can have made it into that trunk of my father’s otherwise.’

‘And what is the name?’

‘Frid Eyolfsson. He was a man close to Enrico Dandolo.’ Annika watched his face. ‘I’d been reading about the Dandolo Project in the professional journals. Then there was that news of the deaths of those archaeologists. I knew Dr Adkins briefly, I was at Yale as a junior lecturer for a semester.’ She smiled, half-mockingly, half-ruefully.
‘He tried to seduce me. But he was always doing things like that. I don’t think he meant any harm by it. He didn’t ever take other people’s feelings seriously.’ She hesitated. ‘Then I lost my job, and things got just too bad for me to handle, so I thought I’d try to contact you. But I couldn’t reach you – even through Columbia. There were clues though – and so I set off in pursuit of you.’ She looked at him. ‘I was desperate. I just wanted help. To get away. But I’d already connected the Dandolo Project to something … something secret … you seemed to be involved with. And I remembered this document. I couldn’t help it. My father used to hold it up often enough. “A piece of Swedish history,” he’d say. “It ought to be in the
Riksarkivet
.’’’ She slumped back, exhausted by her speech, which had spilled out fast, words tripping each other up, like a confession.

Lopez noticed she’d eaten all the nibbles. The waiter was on the other side of the room, serving the couple who’d come in earlier. Lopez waved him over, and ordered a plate of mixed sandwiches and a tall cappuccino.

‘Can you show me this document?’

‘Yes. But I don’t have it with me.’

Lopez paused, uncertain. ‘You’re
sure
it exists?’

‘I’m in need, not mad. You can come with me now.’

‘No.’ Lopez looked at his watch. ‘I have to get back. Can I call you?’

She produced a biro, wrote a number and an address on a cardboard coaster, and slid it over to him.

‘Thanks. Later today?’

‘I’ll be in all evening.’

‘We’ll arrange something, then.’ He hesitated, reached
over, patted her hand. ‘It’ll be all right, Annika. You’ll see. We’ll sort this out for you.’

She smiled back wanly. He could see she didn’t believe him, much as she wanted to.

The waiter reappeared with a tray. He placed the sandwiches, beautifully garnished, with the coffee, in front of Annika. ‘Nothing for you?’ he asked Lopez.

‘Just the bill.’

He paid it when it came, but still sat for a minute. She was eating as if she hadn’t eaten all day. He reached for his wallet again, withdrew $50, and placed the notes by her. She looked at the money, at him, mouth full, and smiled her gratitude.

‘I’ll call you in an hour. That good?’

She nodded.

‘Until later, then.’

He stood, smiled at her, and left.

Outside, dusk was gathering.

When he got back to INTERSEC, he called off the lockdown. Security reported no queries in his absence. He was in the clear.

He was also alone with Annika’s information. He considered his position.

But when, an hour later, he rang the number she’d given him, there was no answer.

Berlin,
AD
1945

Late April, but it was as if spring had been strangled at birth. The city was a mound of debris, a grey pile between whose smashed buildings tattered figures flitted. Most trees dead and the Tiergarten a wreck.

Far underground, breathing pumped air, sallow from too many days of artificial light, the last representatives of the Thousand-Year Reich lived on. Uniforms were spotless, and routine maintained its brisk order. The Führer hardly slept, spent days and nights in the map-room poring over charts of the Middle East in the company of exhausted generals.

‘Gentlemen, we need to secure the Persian oil. That is imperative for the counter-attack.’

They nodded their assent, knowing that the end wasn’t more than two weeks away. The Russians were at the gates of the shattered city and, from the west, the Americans and the British were trundling east over Greater Germany. Those who could get out, had. Only fanatics were left – and those who had no other choice.

Adolf Hitler knew the truth: they had
betrayed
him. The very people he had sought to turn into a Master Race. At fifty-six, he knew his work was over. He had done what he could.

But one question tortured him. How had he exhausted the power that had been given him?

And now the tablet had disappeared.

His first thought was that it had been stolen. The box, too, which all the ingenuity of Nazi science had been unable to open. But how could that be? He had spoken of the secret to no one, not even Eva, soon to be his wife.

His thoughts wandered. He would take her to Valhalla with him. She was willing, and Blondi too, most faithful of his servants, the German shepherd Bormann had given him five years earlier. Blondi had had puppies recently, and he had named one of them Wolf, his favourite name. Didn’t his own name, Adolf, mean ‘Noble Wolf’?

It was only to Blondi that he had ever whispered his secret. Perhaps the gods had taken it back. It had served its purpose.

He knew he had never mastered the deepest secrets of the tablet. But surely the power of his own will had been enough, the tablet’s power a mere ancillary. It had gone now – and he had no further need of it! Soon, he would be united with the warrior-gods of Valhalla. Soon, he and Eva and Blondi would be enthroned in the place which was theirs by right, and to which Destiny had led them.

And the world would never forget him – he would be immortal.

Unter den Linden, Wilhelmstraße and Friedrichstraße were rubble-fields, a few broken towers sticking up like the fingers of a dead man; but, as if by a miracle, the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum had escaped with little damage.

A miracle, too, for me, thought Generalleutnant Hans von Reinhardt.

Reinhardt looked back with pleasure on his life. The scion of a modest aristocratic family from Pomerania, he’d used his title and contacts wisely, getting posted to the General Staff of the Regular Army early in his professional career. No front line for him, though there were times, he knew, when he fantasized about leading a platoon of desperate men into the thick of the gunfire.

In reality, he’d sat at an oak desk, held a pen instead of a Luger P 08; but he’d moved swiftly through the ranks to become one of the youngest generals on the staff. This was facilitated by a flair for administration, which led in turn to his secondment to Adolf Eichmann’s sector of the RSHA.

After the big attempt on Hitler’s life in July the year before, orchestrated by fellow officers of the General Staff, he’d played an executive role in Operation Thunderstorm. That purge had seen promotion for him, and privileges. But he knew that they had come too late to do him any good in the crumbling Third Reich. And the real downside was that he’d been pretty much forced, as a
career move, to join the SS. But he would shed the unwelcome additional rank of Gruppenführer as soon as the war was over, and then – he would disappear.

Reinhardt had already laid plans. He’d heard good things about Argentina, but Neuquén in Patagonia looked right for him. Timber or cattle-farming. His family had been involved in such activities for generations, they were in his blood. He was already dreaming of his ranch. And of greater things than that. Perhaps even of a New Reich, a phoenix reborn. He’d always felt that his talent had never had a real chance to spread its wings.

The best thing to have come out of all this was that his slavish attention to detail in the great round-up and execution of suspects that was Operation Thunderstorm, had catapulted him into the Führer’s inner circle. And now he found himself in this warren beneath Berlin, the
Führerbunker
, safe, but, at the same time, trapped.

Still, he’d been in worse traps than this and got free, and he’d laid plans. There was a flat in Potsdam, where civilian clothes and a forged Swiss passport awaited him. The passport was a work of art, done years ago by a master craftsman, Ernst Thalheimer, before they took him to Auschwitz. It was valid until June, 1950.

There too, was the box. He’d get money for that in the USA, his first port of call when he escaped. The box represented for Reinhardt a valuable antique which could be turned into cash for his onward journey and the purchase of land.

As for power, he was certain that all the power he would ever need lay in the tablet.

He’d stolen the box and the tablet from the desk in the
Chancellery the day before the move to the Bunker. Just in time, as it turned out. Had to steal the key to the drawer, get a copy made, replace the original, nothing missed; Blondi, the only other occupant of the office when he’d done the deed had barked a little, uncertainly, but he knew Blondi well, had made friends with her, and she liked him, trusted him.