The Doomsday Testament (41 page)

‘Yet it was only when Walter Brohm told me about his bomb “greater than any bomb ever invented” that I finally came to my decision
.

‘He sits directly opposite me, beneath a tree on the bank of the stream, watching me write, smiling that knowing smile of his, well fed and satisfied, certain of his own greatness, his genius merely dormant and soon to flower again beneath the benevolent rays of a Californian sun. I know of no crime Walter Brohm has committed, apart from the crime of complacency. He is a garrulous, almost likeable man, who, but for a tendency towards arrogance, would make a perfectly acceptable dinner companion. In a world full of enemies, Brohm wishes to be everyone’s friend
.

‘Why is Walter Brohm more dangerous than a hundred Klosses? Because his curiosity knows no boundaries. Because no price is too high if it proves him right. Because no risk is too great if it enhances his genius
.

‘I carefully placed the journal in my pack and roused them from their rest. Klosse and the Ox
were
reluctant to move, but I explained that our contact was waiting for us across the border less than an hour away
.

‘Klosse laughed. “Gut,” he said to me. “At least the Amis will treat us with the respect we are due. I intend to report you for your treatment of your prisoners. You will be reprimanded.”

‘Strasser eventually pushed himself to his feet, grumbling quietly and scratching his fat backside
.

‘Walter grinned at me. “You will visit me in America, Leutnant Matt? They say we will have fine houses and big cars. Perhaps even a swimming pool. Who would believe such a thing? That is how precious my work is to them.” He took my hand and shook it. “I thank you for bringing us here. Do not mind Klosse. His opinion counts for nothing against Walter Brohm.”

‘I detached myself and told them we wouldn’t be stopping again. If they wanted to take a pee now was the time to do it
.

‘They stayed together, as men do in such circumstances, and lined up along the ravine as I had predicted they would
.

‘I had the Browning ready, with the safety catch off and I walked quickly up behind them. I shot the Ox first, in the back of the skull, and his body was thrown forward on to the rocks below. Klosse turned, prepared to attack me, but a man with his penis in his hand is peculiarly vulnerable and I had time to aim the gun directly at his heart. He
died
cursing me, as I suppose was his due. Walter Brohm calmly finished what he was doing and turned to face me . . .’

JAMIE’S VOICE FADED
. He had read the final paragraph automatically, not taking in the meaning of the words and the shocking reality dawned on him only slowly. This was a confession of cold-blooded murder. The scene replayed itself in his mind, but his brain wouldn’t connect the man who pulled the trigger with the picture he had of the real Matthew, a smile on the kindly face and eyes that glittered with gentle humour.

‘
READ THE REST
, Jamie. Matthew wanted you to see this. You won’t understand why unless you stay with him to the end.’

‘I . . .’

‘Read it. What happened to Walter Brohm? What happened to the Sun Stone?’

‘At first Brohm didn’t believe he was to die with the others. He was Walter Brohm. He was guilty only of genius. Klosse and Strasser were war criminals. He was a scientist. It was only when I kept the muzzle of the .45 pointed at his chest and he saw the implacable resolve on my face that the smile faded. He began to plead for his life
.

‘He offered me the contents of his briefcase, which, he said, were worth a king’s ransom. When I kicked it aside he reached for the top pocket of his tunic. I almost shot him then, and he knew it, because his hand began to shake. He took out a
silk
escape map with some sort of Nazi symbol on the reverse. This, he said, would lead me to the Raphael and everything else. He explained how to decipher it, but I wanted nothing from Walter Brohm. I knew that whatever he offered would be poisoned by contact with him. I despised him. He thought he was better than the two men I had just killed, but he was the worst of them. In his arrogance and his conceit he was prepared to unleash Armageddon upon this world in the name of science. A thousand Coventrys in a single explosion of white light. How many Peggys and Elizabeths and Annes must die to prove Walter Brohm right? Worse, he was prepared to risk the End of Days, and for what?

‘He attempted to justify his work. It was the wonder of the world and only he, Walter Brohm, had the skills and the genius to make it happen. Unlimited energy, Leutnant Matt, think about it. Heating for every house. Power for industry. And that was only the start. Ordinary people would ride in cars and automobiles and trains designed to use his technology. Air travel would be so affordable and swift any man could go anywhere in the world, yes, and take his family too
.

‘He tried to tell me about the Sun Stone, but I wouldn’t listen. I almost spat in his face. “What about the bomb, the bomb with all the power of the sun?” I demanded. “What about Peggy and Elizabeth and Anne” He looked bewildered, he
knew
nothing of any Peggy or Elizabeth, I was trying to trick him. By now he was weeping and I almost wavered, but I knew I had to harden my heart for the sake of the world
.

‘He went down on his knees and asked me to hear his confession, as if that single gesture would gain him absolution for all the sins he forced me to listen to. The deaths of Tibetan monks and Russian slave labourers. Jews shot down for having clumsy fingers or slaughtered for having the temerity to know too much. Yet his greatest sin of all he would not confess. The sin of certainty
.

‘When he was finished I shot him through the head and carried his body to the ravine and threw it over. Then I climbed down and did what I could to cover them in a decent fashion.’

In a daze, Jamie walked across to the edge of the gully and looked down. After sixty years there was nothing to see except a jumble of moss-covered rocks twenty feet below and a thin stream barely worth the name running amongst them. ‘He killed them all. They were unarmed. He executed them. It was murder, Sarah, cold-blooded murder. They would have hanged him if they’d found out.’

‘But they didn’t,’ she said firmly. ‘And I’m not sure they would have . . . hanged your grandfather, I mean. The three men he killed were monsters. Each one of them was responsible for hundreds of deaths. Even thousands. You heard what Matthew said about Walter Brohm’s
confession?
Jews slaughtered for having the temerity to know too much
. Well, we found the evidence of that massacre, didn’t we? That alone would have been enough to have Walter Brohm hanged at Nuremberg. And Klosse, with his vile medical experiments on children. Strasser, the executioner. Do you know how many Jews were killed at Kiev in September nineteen forty-one? Thirty-three thousand innocent men, women and children. Come on, Jamie, these people were scum. If anyone deserved killing, they did. Matthew Sinclair did the world a favour when he fired those three bullets and you know it.’

‘Who they were doesn’t change the fact that my grandfather murdered three men in cold blood. He brought them here, he let them eat a last meal and he killed them. He and my mother brought me up to believe in justice, Sarah, but my grandfather set himself up as judge, jury and executioner.’

She gave a long drawn out sigh. ‘Christ, Jamie, you’re doing it again. This isn’t about Jamie Saintclair. It’s about Matthew and the war and the Sun Stone. You read what the journal said about his family. He watched his wife and children being burned alive by German incendiary bombs. That’s enough to drive any man crazy. Yet he fought back. He endured the rest of the war and took part in some of the toughest battles of them all. He was tired and he was sick and what happened in Coventry had overwhelmed his mind. When he met a man who promised to build a bomb that would create a thousand Coventrys in a single
night
what the hell was he going to do? What the hell would you have done? Don’t tell me you would have watched Walter Brohm and Klosse and Strasser walk away into the sunset en route to their cosy retirement in the States and then waited for the news that America had dropped the world’s most powerful bomb on Moscow, because I won’t believe you. In the same circumstances both of us would have done exactly the same thing, and you know what? We would have been right. Maybe it wasn’t legal, but any way you look at it, it was justice. Remember the bunker? You seem to have forgotten what you promised, but that doesn’t matter any more because Matthew Sinclair, your grandfather, did the job for you. It’s simpler this way.’

Jamie turned away from the ravine. He remembered the hatred he had felt for Walter Brohm in the depths of the bunker, and the silent vow he had made to the girl with the pianist’s fingers. Sarah was right. Justice was done. It was over. ‘What about the Sun Stone?’

He saw the moment of indecision before her eyes hardened. ‘Forget about the Sun Stone. Burn the diary. If we can’t find the Sun Stone with the information we have, what chance is there of anyone else finding it without the book. Give me it. Right now.’ She unhitched her rucksack from her back and opened one of the zipped compartments to pull out a box of matches. ‘Give me it.’

He looked at her outstretched hand, the palm raised, and it reminded him of the hand in the bunker. He was tempted. Sorely tempted. It would be so easy to give it to her and watch the flames eating it, then go home and
forget
everything. No one else would ever know about the Sun Stone. No one would ever know about Matthew Sinclair and the murder of three Nazis he’d been ordered to protect. ‘It’s not that simple.’

She shook her head and now her eyes were filled with a mixture of anger and pity. ‘You’re wrong, Jamie, it is that simple. Give me the book.’

‘We owe it to Tenzin not to give up. Have you forgotten that he sacrificed himself to save us? Just because it happened six thousand miles away doesn’t make it any less real.’

‘Tenzin was a dead man walking and you know it. He’s not here now, but maybe if he was he’d be giving you the same advice. Let’s walk away from this now, Jamie. For us. Let’s go back to London and get on with our life and forget we ever heard of the Sun Stone.’

He noticed the way she said life singular, not lives, and a little bolt of hope shot through his heart. She was saying she would be his and that made it all the more sensible to hand over the journal. There was only one problem.

‘If I give up now, I wouldn’t be the man you met at the Tube station, or the man who was going to fight a helicopter gunship for you. I’d just be the same old loser I was before I found you. Matthew would have wanted us to see this through.’

He walked back to the gully edge and studied the long drop. ‘I need to go down there.’

She came to his side. ‘Are you crazy? You’ll break your neck.’

He laughed. ‘You’re talking to someone who’s climbed the Himalayas. This is a piece of cake.’

She shook her head. ‘All you’ll find down there are a few mouldy old bones picked bare by rats.’

He ignored her and dropped to his belly, slithering backwards until the bottom half of his body was over the edge and his feet scrambled for a toehold. Before he started climbing down, he looked up at her. ‘What if Walter Brohm didn’t have one map, but two? What if he waved the Harz map at my grandfather as a decoy while the map that points the way to the final location of the Sun Stone was hidden somewhere else? It could be down there, still in his pocket. I can’t take the chance.’

With a rush of falling soil he was gone, half sliding, half scrambling down the sheer dirt face. He grabbed a tree root to slow his progress, but it only unbalanced him and he ended up rolling the last few feet and landing in an undignified dusty heap among the rocks beside the trickling water of the stream.

‘I’ll give you a two for style, but you get top marks for comic interpretation.’ Sarah’s voice came to him from above. ‘What can you see?’

He looked around. Matthew said he had covered the bodies in a decent fashion. That meant there should be some kind of cairn.

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s nothing down here. No burial. Nothing that would mark a grave. The rocks are scattered about. Wait.’ Something a little further downstream caught his
eye
and he worked his way towards it. He picked up a fallen branch and dug at a ragged piece of material sticking out of a patch of sand between two large boulders.

‘What is it?’

His heart quickened and he excavated deeper. Cloth? No, something more substantial than cloth. Leather.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jamie!’

‘I think I may have found Walter Brohm’s briefcase.’

Getting back up took longer than coming down, but eventually he made it caked in dirt, sweat running down his face and some shapeless, weather-stained remains under his left arm. Sarah accepted it with distaste, brushing off sand and wriggling aquatic insects.

‘You sure this is Walter Brohm’s case? It looks like crap to me.’

‘You’d look like crap if you’d been buried in mud for sixty years. If you look closely you can see the SS insignia stamped in the leather. I’m surprised it’s survived at all. It must have been made for Brohm from some kind of specially reinforced hide, crocodile or buffalo, maybe. Look, the brass catches are still intact.’

He took the case from her and studied the furred green locks.

‘Let me,’ she demanded. ‘What makes you think there’ll be anything in there? Surely Matthew would have searched it before he threw it away.’ She rummaged in her rucksack, came up with a substantial Swiss army knife and opened the largest blade.

‘I’m not so sure. You heard what he said about Brohm.
He
wanted nothing to do with his research or the Sun Stone.’

Sarah worked at the brass with the knife point. ‘He took the map of the Black Sun,’ she pointed out.