The Doomsday Testament (37 page)

‘My grandfather instructed the solicitor to only pass it on after he was dead.’ Jamie’s voice came out cracked, as if all the moisture had been sucked from his throat by the dry, aged object in front of him.

‘What is it?’

The green eyes filled with a combustible mixture of grief and pain, anger and loss that almost made her turn away. ‘The final pages of his diary.’

Her fingers made an involuntary lunge for the envelope, but he put his hand, palm down on top of it. He saw that he’d hurt her feelings, but the hand didn’t move.

‘I need to think about this, Sarah. I’ve read the first few pages, but I couldn’t . . . I want to see it through his eyes as it happened. We need to go back to Germany.’

She reached out and placed her hand over his. The
flesh
was cold. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ she reassured him. ‘Just tell me where you want to go and I’ll book the flights. Do you want to hear about Paperclip?’

He shook his head. ‘Paperclip can wait. First you have to know what I know.’ He reached into the envelope and counted out four lined sheets of paper, identical to those from the blue journal.

He began speaking in a flat monotone and the first thing she noted was that Matthew Sinclair was no longer in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, but was recording his memories of the period four years earlier, in the summer of 1941. It began as a love story.

‘We met in that old church hall by the cathedral, the one that smelled of stale sweat, flat beer and Capstan Full Strength. It was a time of hate, but you drove it away with your laughter. My soul was blackened and rotten, but you healed it with your goodness. My heart had turned to ice, but you melted it with the warmth of your love. When I picture
y
our eyes they are the shifting colours of a tropical sea on a sunlit summer’s day; sometimes blue, sometimes green, their surface sparkles but in their depths lies the smoke and the fire that makes you you
.

‘Your mother disapproved of me and the army disapproved of you, but you were clever enough to defeat them both. I can never smell the musty earthiness of old straw or feel the kiss of the sun on my bare flesh without thinking of you. You came
to
me bathed in the scent of elderflower and new-mown grass, your skin soft as velvet and hot as naked flame, and together we found a new place, far from war, far from pain, and far from fear
.

‘I had forgotten how to live. You gave me life
.

‘
When the war found us again, your courage humbled me. Who would have believed we would ever become a target in our harmless old town? But then Hitler is a serial devourer of all that is good, with his Junkers and Heinkels, his incendiary bombs and his aerial torpedoes
.

‘
On the best day of my life, but one, you made me prouder than any man, standing tall before the priest even as the ground shook beneath our feet in the big shelter under the railway station. Remember how we laughed when he said, “Do you Margaret . . .” because you will never be anything but Peggy to me? When we emerged into that living hell, shattered buildings were our guard of honour and our confetti the falling ash. You smiled through your tears and spent our wedding night mending torn bodies and splinting broken bones, while I dug the living and the dead from the rubble that had been their homes. Coventry, 14 November 1941. And still we were happy. Because the seed had already been sown
.

‘
They appeared, like snowdrops at the end of March, earlier than expected but never more welcome. Elizabeth and Anne. Anne and Elizabeth. I held them in my arms and felt the life I had created
squirm
and bubble within them. I looked into their eyes and saw your eyes. Perfect. Have two new human beings ever been more perfect? How many hours did I have with them, and with you? I count them every day, but somehow I can never reach a proper tally. Did I ever see them smile? I dream that I did, but I do not truly know
.

‘
I try not to remember that day, Peggy, but the devil perches on my shoulder and whispers the details in my ear. I know I was at the camp when I heard the sirens. I ran, God knows how I ran, until the breath was like a knife in my throat and my legs collapsed under me. What is there in bricks and mortar to make them burn so? Flames, leaping from the roof like a giant funeral pyre. Flames, spewing from every window so it was as if I peered into the very mouth of hell. Flames all around. A sea of flames. No, an ocean of flames. I knew you would have been taken to the shelter, so why did I run to the hospital? But Elizabeth was sick, and Elizabeth couldn’t go to the shelter. So you stayed. You all stayed. I wept for you as I watched the hospital burn, all the time praying that you had escaped. All the time knowing – knowing – you had not. Then you were there. In the doorway. A shimmer in the heat. A smudge of darkness against the gold and the red. Of course, you would get them out, brave Peggy. You would smell the smoke and carry them through the wards and down the burning stairs and into the burning hall and out
into
the burning world. I called out your name, but the fire devoured it. Just as it devoured you. And Anne. And Elizabeth. You were on fire as you walked towards me, a pillar of flame with a halo of gold around your pretty head. Was it your feet that melted first? Or was it the tarmac? Did you hold them out to me as I ran into that wall of burning air? Did you cry my name as they held me back from you? I can’t remember, Peggy. All I remember is lying on the hot ground with my hair on fire and watching you melt, sinking slowly down until you and my babies became one with the burning earth
.

‘
And then I went mad
.’

Jamie’s emotionless voice faded and the only sound in the room was Sarah’s sobbing.

‘You realize what this means?’ he said harshly. ‘My grandfather had another wife. Another family. If the Germans hadn’t killed that woman and her children Jamie Saintclair wouldn’t have existed. They died, so that I could live. How do you think that makes me feel?’

Her reaction astonished him. She lifted her head and her eyes flashed. ‘They had names,’ she snapped. ‘Peggy and Elizabeth and Anne. Don’t try to kid yourself that if you don’t give them names they don’t exist as real people, the way the Germans do by not mentioning the Jews. Spare me your fucking self-pity, Jamie. Matthew left you those pages so that you would understand. Don’t tarnish his memory and theirs by using it as an
excuse
to feel sorry for yourself. If you want to sit here and mope, that’s fine by me, but I’m going to pack.’

He let her get to the door.

‘We fly in to Munich, but we do this my way.’

She turned and gave him her hard stare.

‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘We’ll do it your way. But just remember, Jamie Saintclair, that I like you how you are now. The guy who was prepared to take on the Chinese army and the Indian air force just for little ol’ Sarah Grant. Not the way you were before somebody threw you under that train. Don’t go all boring on me.’

He nodded and when he lifted his head the old Jamie was back. ‘At least we know what we’re fighting for. Maybe you should tell me what you found out about Operation Paperclip?’

She shook her head. ‘I need to book our flights for tomorrow and I suspect it will mean an early start. I’ll explain on the plane.’ They headed for the stairs and she glanced back at the table. ‘You forgot your other envelope. What is it anyway?’

He picked up the letter and put it in his inside pocket.

‘Just a detail my mother left me to sort out.’

‘WE LOST HIM.’

Bob Sumner couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘What do you mean you lost him?’

‘You told us to keep him on a light rein, so that’s what we did. His secretary said he was due back in the office this morning, but he called her last night and said she should take a couple of weeks off once she’d cleared his diary.’

‘The girl?’

‘We think she’s with him.’

Sumner allowed himself a few moments of menacing silence, while the other man fidgeted at the end of the phone.

‘Get everybody on it. Two weeks means they’re going travelling. That means airports. I want to know where they’re going, what their seat numbers are and what they’ve taken along to read. Everything. You have until noon.’ He didn’t say
or else
, he didn’t have to. He put
down
the phone and immediately picked it up again for the call he wasn’t going to enjoy making.

‘Operation Paperclip.’ Sarah read from her notes and wriggled herself into a comfortable position in the cramped economy-class seat of the Gatwick–Munich flight. ‘As the war was ending the good old US of A belatedly realized that with the Red Army overrunning most of Germany they also had their hands on most of the Nazis’ military secrets, including their nuclear programme. This was about the time when what became the Cold War looked like it might be pretty hot, so it was suddenly very important to get any scientists and technicians in Allied hands back to America where they could be squeezed of what they knew. President Roosevelt had specifically ruled out offering these guys any guarantees, but Harry Truman overturned that decision – on condition they weren’t involved in war crimes.’

‘Truman was one of your more naive presidents?’

‘Yes, he was, or maybe he knew that the people he was letting loose on Operation Paperclip didn’t have the time or the morals to make such fine distinctions. In the end, the OSS smuggled out more than seven hundred scientists and their families. According to their documents they were whiter than white, but now we know better. Werner von Braun was the best known. He had designed the V2 rocket and went on to play a key role in the NASA space programme, but he was originally tagged a security risk to the United States.
He
was an angel compared to some of the others. Kurt Blome infected hundreds of concentration camp prisoners with plague vaccines. He got a job with the US Army Chemical Corps. Arthur Rudolph ran the Mittelwerk factory at Dora-Nordhausen in the Harz, where they made V2s and twenty thousand prisoners died from hanging, beating and starvation. He became a US citizen and designed the Saturn 5 rocket for the moon landings. A couple of guys called Hermann Becker-Reysing and Siegfried Ruff carried out medical experiments on inmates at Dachau, including placing them in an altitude chamber and decreasing the pressure until they died. They were paid to write their findings by the USAAF. And so it goes on. Klaus Barbie, for Christ’s sake. You’d think being labelled the Butcher of Lyon might have given them a clue?’

‘So Walter Brohm was part of Paperclip?’

Sara shook her head. ‘Not officially. Paperclip was spawned by a couple of earlier freelance operations involving the Special Operations Executive. It looks as if Brohm and the others were part of that experiment. What bothers me is that they just vanish from the record. Sure, a lot of these guys disappeared to Argentina and Brazil after they arrived in the States, but we know that they reached there. Maybe Brohm handed over his big secret and they gave him a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires, but if he did, what happened then?’

She turned, expecting an answer, or, if not an answer, at least a theory, but Jamie had his head back with his eyes closed and was snoring gently.

‘Bastard,’ she mouthed, and turned to stare at the clouds, failing to notice the Chinese man in the business suit who had been studying them from the aisle seat three rows behind.

Munich’s Franz Josef airport is a vast modernistic barn of a place fifteen miles north of the Bavarian capital. Only the language rapped out by the hard-faced security men differentiated it from a hundred other charmless landing places in a hundred other cities. When they’d cleared passport control, Jamie hired a Volkswagen at the airport’s Europcar desk. Before they set off they decided to have a coffee and a pastry at one of the cloned chain restaurants clustered in the glass-roofed shopping centre that connected the two main terminals.

Sarah finished her drink quickly. ‘I gotta go powder my nose and make a phone call.’

He smiled. ‘I won’t go anywhere without you.’

‘Just see what happens if you do.’

Jamie was sipping his coffee when the Oriental who had been on the plane sat down uninvited at the table. He rose to his feet, but a second man put a hand on his shoulder, and he felt a third, running professional hands under his arms and over his chest, before he was pushed back into his seat. He looked around, but no one appeared to have noticed what was happening.

‘Please excuse my companions, Mr Saintclair.’ The man spoke precise language school English and his tone oozed reason, but Jamie allowed himself to ease into what Matthew described as combat mode. Instinct told
him
that this striped bespoke suit represented a greater danger than any gun. ‘I see your Himalayan adventures have not put you off foreign travel? But, please, that is in the past. My name is Lim, and I am a rather lowly representative of the People’s Republic of China.’ Mr Lim had dark, soulful eyes and a cheerful smile that might have been painted on his broad face. Without moving his lips he passed a message to one of the two men accompanying him, and the bodyguard went off in the direction Sarah had disappeared. He continued: ‘I would have prevented it if I was able. There has been far too much miscommunication. Would it surprise you if I said that two of my colleagues exceeded their authority in London, leading to your unfortunate . . . accident? No? Of course, it does not make us friends, but perhaps the fact that I am prepared to give you this information will help us trust each other.’

‘After my experiences in Tibet, I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw your minders, Mr Lim. Perhaps you could get to the point, if there is one.’

Mr Lim’s smile grew appreciably wider. ‘Certainly. You have proven yourself very resourceful and very persistent. My superiors felt that you were an obstacle to us, but I have persuaded them otherwise. I believe you will find what you are looking for. This object rightly belongs to my government.’