Synopsis and MPrologue

THE RAGNAROK DOSSIER

Synopsis

In 1940, a Nazi expedition to Greenland uncovers something
strange beneath an extinct volcano. Over sixty years later, a
young Jew is murdered by political extremists in Berlin,
setting in motion a chain of events which threatens to
culminate in Ragnarok – the Twilight of the Gods, and the end
of the world as we know it.

Does an Aryan super-race really sleep beneath an extinct
volcano in the desolate region known as Thule? There’s
certainly something there, something with far-reaching
implications for humanity, and over which people are quite
prepared to kill. Caroline Kent becomes drawn into the affair
while investigating her German grandfather’s war service, in
which there seem to be unexplained gaps. Once again she finds
herself enmeshed in a web of intrigue, in which there is more
than one spider. For by now others besides the Nazis have
rediscovered the secret of Thule; people who in their own way
are just as ruthless, and as deadly……

Part One: The Past
March 1940
It was either a paradise or a Hell, thought Dr Klaus
Wenzel; this bleak, barren expanse of white swept by
bitingly cold winds which could sometimes stifle the breath
in your mouth; depending on your point of view.
Personally he liked it, though he knew there were times
when it could be a killer. Of course he was well-insulated
in dufflecoat, pullover, wool vest, sealskin boots, mitts
and scarf, which undoubtedly helped.

He drew in a deep, sighing breath of that crisp air, which
stung the flesh of his face where it was exposed, but in a
manner not unpleasant. His gaze swept across the frozen
landscape to the rugged coastline with its fjords and
little inlets, and towering masses of ice which reminded
him of great cathedrals. “A floating crystal castle the
colour of a silver veil, yet hard as marble and the sea
around it as smooth as glass and as white as milk,” the
sixth-century Irish monk had described one of those
glaciers. Wenzel’s thoughts right now were much the same as
St Brendan’s when he first set eyes on this place. The air
was pure, like the snow on the ground; a purgatory, that’s
what it was. He thought of the Vikings who had settled here
to carve wood, spin, weave and dye, their simple, arduous
existence forging in them the qualities which he so much
admired. The hallmarks of a true Aryan.

They were about to rein in the dogs and take a brief rest
when Wenzel spotted what they had been looking for. “There
it is,” he shouted, pointing. The others glanced over to
the east and saw, just visible on the horizon, the three
masses of rock with the central one, the largest, soaring
high into the clear blue sky, its steep sides tapering
gradually to end in a blunt, flat top, resulting in an
overall shape not unlike a chimney stack. And indeed white
explorers referred to it as the Devil’s Chimney. It was
visible for miles around in what was otherwise a flat,
unbroken, featureless landscape.

The man sitting beside Wenzel on the sled glanced at his
rapt face, the eyes shining like the sun on the snow
surrounding them. He found himself smiling; there was
definitely something about his companion’s mood that
infected you. All the same, he couldn’t quite credit it.
What on earth did they think they were going to find here?
All this business of ancient runes and prehistoric
monuments, of Norse mythology and lost civilizations; it
might be alright for that crazy society Wenzel belonged to,
but not for him. Captain Albert Dachtler of the
Kriegsmarine, overall commander of the expedition, was a
practical man; if they wanted him to fight a war for them,
as might well be the case pretty soon if the current
conflict should suddenly escalate, that was fine. It was
his job. And indeed, one of the main reasons for the
expedition was to survey the area in order to establish if
a military base, preferably ice-free, could be built there.
It might prove of strategic importance if a U-boat war
broke out, allowing the Fatherland to command the northern
approaches to Britain and the Scandinavian countries. And
if America at some point should join the conflict, to have
a base in Greenland would enable an attack to be launched
against her, perhaps through Canada. The possibility of
such an attack might deter her from intervening. As for the
opinions of the Danes, who currently governed Greenland,
that simply did not matter. He suspected the war plans
included an occupation of Denmark, though if that were the
case no-one was choosing to share the knowledge with him.

As well as its military purpose the expedition had the
psychological value of demonstrating to others that the
glorious German Reich had conquered the North Pole. A
similar mission with a similar aim had been carried out to
Antarctica and proved successful.

The two Dornier seaplanes, Tristan and Isolde, had already
made over a hundred flights over the designated region,
covering some eight hundred thousand miles and taking more
than 11,000 photographs. They had been launched by steam
catapult from the deck of the expedition ship, the Prinz
Albrecht, anchored about ten miles down the coast from
where they were now. The Prinz Albrecht was a former
aircraft carrier which after the Great War had been
demilitarized and put to use on the transatlantic mail run
as part of the restrictions placed on Germany’s armed
forces by the hated Treaty of Versailles. After the Fuhrer
had put a stop to all that and begun an extensive programme
of rearmament, the Albrecht was not recommissioned, being
far too old for active service. She had been utilized as a
survey vessel instead.

Wenzel had been tempted to pepper the place with dropflags
bearing the swastika, claiming the territory for the
Reich as they’d done in Antarctica, but was persuaded that
this might be unwise. Antarctica belonged to nobody, so was
everyone’s for the taking, whereas Greenland was a Danish
possession and they could not just breeze in and act as if
they owned the place; not yet, anyway.

As it was they had so far failed to find any ice-free
areas, and there were unlikely to be any further north.
Wenzel and his team had carried out, without any result
whatsoever, a series of geological surveys; trying to
establish whether there was some kind of underground heat
source somewhere which might be tapped, although how it
could be harnessed to provide warmth and power for an
installation on the surface Dachtler couldn’t fathom. They
had visited the sites of the ancient Viking settlements,
drawn up plans of them, searched for and found a few
artifacts of interest. That was fine by Dachtler. He could
see nothing wrong with people taking an interest in how
their ancestors had lived; but as of yet they’d found
nothing of any practical value.

The expedition had already cost one million Reichsmarks,
not least in refitting the ship for its new role; and apart
from the various scraps of broken pottery they had
unearthed at the Viking sites it was turning out to be a
monumental waste of time. Wenzel and his friends from the
Department of History and Culture didn’t themselves seem
convinced it was worth the bother going by what he’d
overheard of their conversation around the Primus stove a
couple of nights ago.

“I still say it cannot be here,” insisted Dorfmann. He was
the one who was always complaining.

“But this is Thule,” Keller reminded him. “The
northernmost point. Not far off, anyhow.”

“It is not the Thule of the ancient legends,” Ludecke
said. “That is Iceland, it has to be.” The others sighed in
annoyance, dismayed that Dorfmann had found an ally.

“That does not matter,” smiled Wenzel happily. The place
had caught his imagination and he felt sure there must be
something here that would be of inestimable value to the
Fatherland.

“Iceland, that is where we should be,” persisted Ludecke.

“We’ve already sent expeditions to Iceland, plenty of
them. They found nothing.” They had had no luck anywhere
else either; Greenland was a last shot. It was like
searching for a missing key in the light purely because you
could see to do so, whereas in fact you had lost it in the
darkness. If even these clever people with their university
degrees, who must know what they were talking about –
although that was doubtful at times – weren’t sure of the
value of the mission, Dachtler didn’t see why he should be.
No, it was all a waste of time.

Except for what the shaman had told them the day before.

It was a contradiction which baffled Dachtler; Wenzel and
the other scientists seemed to regard the peoples of these
regions as inferior, like all non-Aryans, yet were
fascinated by them nonetheless. They studied their culture,
carried out measurements of their heads and the profiles
of their faces, while the Eskimos happily put up with it
all, and compared them to the supposedly superior Germans
with Kotze – judged the most Nordic of the group - acting
as the subject. They’d been instructed to do all this by
the Ahnenerbe; one of that nutcase Himmler’s daft ideas.
They had also tried to study the Eskimos’ folk legends, in
the hope among other things of being led to what Wenzel and
his fellow academics had really come here to find. Wherever
they stopped they made enquiries, seeking out someone with
status and learning who would be sure to have the answers
they sought, if anyone did. They met with no success until
they came to Qaanaaq.

When it was learned what they were about they were dragged
off to see the old woman. Something in the excited reaction
of the locals to their questions gave them hope. In any
case, this was almost the last outpost of – call it
civilization, although it was not of the same standard as
the glorious Aryan Reich, going by the standards of Hitler
and Himmler. If they didn’t strike lucky soon, they never
would.

So they had sat in the animal-skin tent, around a fire
made with whale oil, and listened to the shaman, with
Keller, the most knowledgeable about the local languages,
as interpreter. It was said there were not many shamans
left. All had now been baptized, the last just a few years
previously. A nominal, at least, adherence to Christianity
did not mean they had forgotten the old legends; all the
same this one, it was said, was the last of her line.

The woman was incredibly old, her skin seamed and wrinkled
like a walnut, and framed by hair as white as the snow
outside. But her eyes were bright and intense and
penetrating, gleaming with intelligence in the light from
the fire which cast strange wavering shadows across her
face.

Keller had questioned her about the legends of her people.
In her thick, guttural voice she told them about Nanuk the
polar bear, a spirit as well as a real flesh-and-blood
animal, about Sita, the life force which pervaded the
natural world and gave us our awareness of who we were, and
about the woman who lived at the bottom of the sea and
determined success or failure in hunting the creatures
there.

And then she lifted an arm and pointed away towards the
north. She spoke of a mountain not too far from here, that
had once spat fire. And she spoke of gods who lived beneath
the mountain, though they had not stirred from there to
walk among men for as long as anyone could remember. “When
they are angry the mountain roars. But the mountain has not
roared since before I came into the world….” And it
wouldn’t have surprised Dachtler if the shaman had been
over a hundred years old. “It is said the gods are
sleeping.”

The mountain was supposed to be haunted, though whether by
the spirits of the gods (could you have a ghost of a god?)
or by some other agency wasn’t clear. The legend seemed a
bit confused on this point.

But Wenzel leaned forward, his eyes as bright and keen as
hers. His Wagnerian imagination was working overtime; he
had to know more. He asked what the gods looked like. “Were
they like you?”

And the answer the old woman gave sent a powerful,
indescribable thrill racing through his bloodstream. She
shook her head emphatically. “No. Like you.”

“White? They were white?”

Again she nodded vigorously. “And tall, very tall. And
some of them were like...like him.” She shot out an arm
and pointed at Kotze: blond, blue-eyed,long-headed, the
epitome of everything the Fuhrer held dear. Wenzel jerked
backwards, sitting bolt upright as if an electric shock
had passed through his body. They heard him give a short,
involuntary gasp of amazement. Maybe it was the fire, but
his face seemed to glow like a prophet experiencing at
first hand some divine revelation.

Datchler frowned, shifting back a little. It couldn’t be
true, surely; it just couldn’t. Could it?

Wenzel muttered something the others didn’t catch. Then he
leaned forward again, his eyes fixed on the shaman’s. “And
this mountain; you say it is to the north of here? How
far?”

“A few hours’ ride, with dogs.”

“We just keep going north?” Dorfmann asked eagerly. His
manner was now entirely different, his scepticism
completely gone.

“Yes. You cannot mistake it. Its shape is very
distinctive.”

“Is there anything more you can tell us about the gods?”

“No. It was too long ago.”

Curtly he muttered his thanks to the woman, then rose to
his feet. “This is incredible! We must go to this place
first thing tomorrow morning.” And so they had, setting off
immediately it was light. By now they were experienced
enough in the ways of the Arctic, and particularly driving
a dogsled, to dispense with their Eskimo guide, which was
fortunate. They didn’t want things to get messy. What lay
within the mountain, if it was there at all, was to be seen
by them alone. Otherwise, they might have to…..

“Only this tribe of Eskimo seem to know about the gods,”
remarked Dorfmann as they went out to their sleds from the
hut the townspeople had set aside for their use. “It is as
if they were confined only to this one small part of
Greenland. The population could not have been very large.”

“Just a minute,” said Dachtler. “Are you saying they
really were gods, these…these beings? I have to say I’m a
little confused.”

“Not gods,” replied Wenzel. “Not gods but supermen.
Ubermensch.”

“I see,” Dachtler muttered. “And what military value are
they supposed to be, might I ask?”

“That is impossible to say at present. We just don’t know
what we’re going to find in there.”

“Do you think anyone has been here before us?”

“They may have done. But if they had found anything we
would have known about it.”

“Perhaps we’re lucky and the place simply hasn’t been
explored before.”

“What about the Eskimos?” asked Kotze.

“It seems they prefer to leave the place alone. I had the
impression they thought it was cursed in some way.”

Now they were almost up to the lower slopes of the
mountain. The ground here was flat, like everything else in
sight, save for a few rocks and boulders showing through
the light carpeting of snow. Above them loomed the towering
cone of black volcanic rock. There was a thin, ash-like
soil at its base. Oddly, it seemed to be entirely free of
snow itself, as if something, they’d no idea what, was
keeping the stuff at bay.

Dachtler suddenly reined in his sleigh and looked around
uneasily. The vast mass of rock was blotting out the sun,
casting a shadow over the party. They heard the soft, eerie
moaning of the wind blowing in and out of the crannies and
crevices within it.

“Are you alright, Kapitan?” asked Wenzel.

“Yes,” answered the Navy man, after a moment. “It’s
nothing.” Completely under the spell of the place, Wenzel
made no comment.

The others had also stopped, taking Dachtler’s doing so
for granted. They climbed down and gathered round Wenzel
and the captain. Wenzel placed his hand on a jutting
outcrop of rock, and looked up at the summit of the
mountain, although it wasn’t really that but rather a large
and unusually-shaped rock formation. It must be at least a
thousand feet high, and considerably greater than that in
extent. ”Now,” he began, “if there really is anyone living
inside it, the mountain obviously cannot be solid. And the
gods walked among men once, it is said, or no-one would
ever have known about them. So there must be some means of
getting in and out.”

They began to walk round the base of the mountain. The
massive folds of rock were riddled with numerous cracks and
crevices, some of which began at ground level or just
above; they varied in size, but a few were large enough to
admit the passage of a human body. One by one they explored
these openings, finding out how far in each went; Dachtler
without any obvious enthusiasm.

What is it? he wondered. I’m supposed to be a tough, nononsense
sailor but there’s something about this place
which….

Wenzel was examining the hollow between two projecting
spurs of rock for some means of entry when he heard a
hollow, muffled shout from close by. He stepped out into
the open and looked round. “Who’s that?” he called, his
voice echoing slightly.

Suddenly Kotze was there before him, seeming to emerge
straight out of the solid rock, like an apparition. “Dr
Wenzel, I think there is a kind of tunnel here.”

Wenzel’s heart leapt. He shouted out to the others. They
joined him at the mouth of the narrow passage, just wide
enough for two men to walk side-by side, which Wenzel had
found within a gnarled fold of rock that swept majestically
down from about halfway up the mountain.

“How far in does it go?” Keller asked.

“I’m not sure. At least twenty feet.”

“Fetch the torches,” Wenzel ordered. Dorfmann went and got
them.

Ordering him and Kotze to stay with the sleds, Wenzel led
the others into the tunnel, each man shining his torch
before him as darkness wrapped itself around the party.
It seemed to extend for rather more than twenty feet. “It
can’t go in all the way,” said Dachtler. “Surely.” His
voice echoed eerily back from the rock walls around them.
Wenzel hadn’t heard him. “An underground passage, that is
what we should be looking for.” Every so often they stopped
to shine their torches down at the floor.

“For one thing, we don’t want to fall into it,” said
Dachtler bluntly. “But why should there be an underground
passage?”

“It will lead to the centre of the Earth. If there were
human beings living here permanently, they would need to….”
Wenzel broke off with a short, sharp intake of breath. A
few yards ahead the tunnel broadened out considerably, so
that about half a dozen people could walk abreast. And at
that point there was a change in the texture of the
surrounding rock.

It was too smooth, too regular.

Realisation hit him, causing him to jerk to a sudden halt,
gazing around in speechless awe. The implication was
awesome, astonishing; a little frightening.

The tunnel was man-made. It had to be.

“Gott in Himmel,” he murmured softly. He heard a few of
the others utter similar expletives as the same thought
occurred to them.

“This was excavated,” he breathed. For a long moment they
stood there letting it sink in. Total silence enveloped
them, broken by what might have been the faint drip-drip of
water. Illuminated in the pool of light cast by a torch, a
man’s head was like a ghostly skull hovering in the
darkness.

Then suddenly Wenzel’s heart sank. There was a perfectly
ordinary explanation for it. Someone had got here before
them.

Still, having come this far they might as well press on.

Wait a moment. Why did the man-made section only start
here? If someone had wanted to widen the natural tunnel
through the rock, making it more easily passable, why
didn’t they begin at its actual entrance, saving themselves
a bit of bother? It didn’t make sense.

Unless someone had chosen to live here, and had merely
adapted the existing passageways through the rock rather
than make new ones.

He started forward again, his excitement rekindled. The
others, who’d guessed his train of thought, followed. The
tunnel led on and on, quite some time passing or so it
seemed. It must go in all the way, thought Wenzel. Or
almost. There had to be some kind of central chamber. It
couldn’t just be miles of smooth featureless rock, even if
the purpose of the corridor was to act as a conduit for
something rather than give access to a room or rooms.
What could that something be? He could think of all sorts
of possibilities. Once more his imagination was going
crazy.

They drew up sharply, feet scraping on the floor. In the
combined pools of light from their torches they saw before
them a vertical rock surface, completely blind; a wall
barring their path. Smooth like the sides of the corridor,
it gleamed in the torchlight.

Wenzel ran his hands over it but could find no opening, no
protrusion, no mechanism of any kind by which it might be
made to open out. In fact it seemed totally flush with the
sides and floor of the tunnel, an integral part with them
of the mountain. Nor was there any gap between it and the
ceiling.

Not a door, then. Just solid rock. You could make a rock
door open if there were some apparatus for doing it,
electrically- or diesel-driven; but he couldn’t see one.
But what was the purpose of this artificially-constructed
wall unless it did open? Another thing that didn’t make
sense. He ran his hands over it again, and over the side
walls, hoping to trigger a concealed mechanism but nothing
happened.

“We need equipment,” he snapped, spinning round to face
the others. “Explosives. We have to drill or blast our way
in.”

“We don’t have any of that stuff,” said Keller.

“Then we must send a message to Berlin for it.” Wenzel
glanced enquiringly at Captain Dachtler.

Dachtler nodded. “I’m happy to extend our stay in
Greenland for another few weeks, if Berlin are.” Actually
he wasn’t, despite what they’d just found, but he knew his
duty. “We’ll ask them for another batch of supplies.”

“Come, let’s go,” Wenzel said. They filed back down the
tunnel, to emerge with some relief into the open air and
feel the cool, fresh wind on their faces. Excitedly they
told Kotze and Dorfmann what they’d discovered.

“I’ll go and call Berlin,” said Keller, and went towards
the sleds, in one of which was the radio set.

“Then we must return to the ship,” Dachtler told them. “Or
go on to Siorapaluk. There’s no sense in hanging around
here until the equipment arrives.”

Wenzel nodded agreement. There might be something of
interest at Siorapaluk to keep them occupied for the time
being. It was still disappointing, though, not to be able
to go any further into the mountain. He sensed the others
shared his feelings.

“Herr Doktor Wenzel,” said Kotze. “Could there be another
way in, higher up?”

Wenzel thought. “I suppose there could be. But what would
be the sense in that? You’d have to climb up to get to it.
Much better to have all the entrances and exits at ground
level.”

“Yes, Herr Doktor, but you might need tunnels for
ventilation.”

In which case, they would probably not be blocked at any
point. Wenzel started with joy. ”Mein Gott, you are right,
Wilhelm. Excellent thinking! We must – “ He checked
himself. “We don’t have the right gear with us. Let’s leave
it for now.”

Kotze was scrutinizing the rocky slopes above them, eyes
narrowed against the thin but piercing sunlight. Suddenly
he grabbed Wenzel’s arm and pointed. “Up there – you see? I
think there is some kind of opening.” There did indeed seem
to be an indentation, squarish in shape, in the rock about
fifty feet above their heads. Only darkness could be seen
within. It looked just big enough to admit a man. Whether
or not it could have been made by one was difficult to tell
without closer inspection.

“Let me go up and check,” Kotze offered. The others looked
at each other doubtfully.

On a sudden impulse Kotze started to climb. He put his
foot on a spur of rock, roughly beneath where the opening
was, and levered himself up onto it. There were enough
little ledges and crevices for him to find hand- and
footholds, and with astonishing speed and agility for his
huge size he swarmed smoothly up the fairly steep surface
towards his goal.

“I think he’s done some climbing before,” said Ludecke.

They craned their necks to watch as he clambered higher and
higher, with almost effortless ease. They stepped back a
little as loose rocks dislodged by him rained down towards
them.

High above the opening, perhaps a couple of hundred feet
from the ground, was what Dachtler had thought at first to
be another projecting, solid outcrop of rock. He now saw it
was a huge boulder, resting on a spur which jutted out into
space like a pointing finger. He guessed it had fallen from
the higher slopes and come to rest lodged in its current
position, almost directly above where Kotze was now.
It must weigh several tons, Dachtler thought. That finger
of rock which had arrested its progress seemed very thin
and fragile by comparison. But it must have been there for
hundreds of years – thousands? – and not fallen yet, so why
should it do so now.

Dachtler was frowning. He should have told Kotze not to do
it, but it was too late now.

Wasn’t there a story about a hanging boulder somewhere,
precariously balanced just as this one was, which when it
fell would signal the end of the world?

Kotze’s head was just a foot or so below the opening. He
stretched his neck in order to see inside it. “Well, is it
man-made?” Wenzel shouted up to him.

Kotze shouted something back, but they couldn’t quite tell
what it was as the wind caught his words and snatched them
away. Then it dropped. “I can’t tell. This is as close as I
can get. No, I can’t be sure; but it looks too small to get
inside, anyway. I’m coming down.”

“Be careful,” Dachtler shouted. Coming down in these cases
was often more difficult than going up. Everyone’s eyes
were focused on Kotze anxiously.

Very slowly and carefully he began to descend, now using
handholds as footholds and vice versa. Once he nearly
slipped, his foot missing its hold and kicking vainly in
space for a moment before finding it again. They caught
their breaths.

Then they heard a grinding, crunching sound and looked up,
chilling with alarm. Concentrating on getting down to the
ground safely, Kotze was unaware of it.

The rock spur supporting the boulder was crumbling,
raining small stones and showers of black coal-like dust on
the watchers below. They saw the boulder give a lurch, then
dip as the spur broke away.

“Look out!” they shouted, and Kotze glanced up. He saw the
huge chunk of rock plummet down towards him, rapidly
filling his vision. He gasped in horror, aware that only a
sudden move to one side could save him and that if he got
it wrong it could be fatal. Desperately he glanced first
left, then right. Making his decision, he swung himself to
the left, out of the boulder’s path, fingers and toes
scrabbling for the holds he thought he had seen there.
His feet swung in empty air. What he had thought was a
ledge had been merely a shallow indentation in the rock,
offering no purchase. His weight dragged him down and his
fingers slipped from their crevice.

Kotze’s scream merged with the howl of the wind as he
plunged straight down, too fast for him to consolidate any
hold his scrabbling fingers might find. His feet hit the
rock face where it flared out towards the bottom and he was
flipped over backwards and to the right, his limbs flailing
wildly. Instinctively the others scrambled back. He landed
heavily at the base of the mountain, coming to rest with
his head and upper body directly beneath the falling
boulder. It was too late to drag him to safety. They turned
away, sickened. There was a soft crunching sound as the
boulder smashed down, shattering his skull and splintering
his ribcage like matchwood.

They forced themselves to look. From the amount of blood
staining the rocks, as much as anything else, they knew
Kotze was beyond help.

He had been young and keen. For the next couple of minutes
there was a stunned silence. Then Wenzel turned away
helplessly. “Poor fellow,” he muttered. “We shouldn’t have
let him go.”

They became aware that Keller had rejoined them and was
staring in horror at the mangled body, white-faced.
“There’s nothing we can do for him,” Wenzel told the
anthropologist.

They stood silently over the body, eyes closed, hands
clasped in front of them, until finally Wenzel turned to
Keller and asked in a subdued tone whether he had sent the
message.

Keller answered in a similarly flat, hollow voice. “Berlin
say we must return home immediately. It seems they can’t
say why without endangering the security of the Reich.
We’re to seal up the entrance to the tunnel, if possible,
and not tell anyone what we’ve found.”

They stared at him. “Kotze gave his life for the project,”
said Wenzel. “And we’re on the verge of a discovery that
will have..incalculable consequences. We can’t just abandon
everything.”

“The order came direct from Reichsfuhrer Himmler.” And
that, Wenzel knew, was the end of the matter. Hitler would
be sure to back Himmler up. He sighed long and hard, like
the wind whistling around the slopes of the mountain, and
gazed first up at the menacing outline of the Devil’s
Chimney, then down at Kotze’s body.

“Very well,” he said flatly, “if that’s what they want.
We’ll go home, and we’ll take poor Wilhelm with us.”

“It’s the best thing,” Dachtler agreed. ”Ehrich, we’ll
need some help to move this boulder, so go back to Qaanaaq
and tell them what’s happened. In the meantime we’ll wait
here.” Ludecke nodded and went over to where the sleds
stood waiting, the dogs beginning to bark impatiently.

“Wilhelm’s family will need to be informed,” Wenzel said,
stating the obvious because as with all such situations,
there wasn’t much else one could say.

Dachtler’s head sank until he was looking straight down.
“It was foolish of him,” he muttered to Wenzel, “but then I
should not have let him do it. It’s all my fault.” Why
hadn’t he done something? “Though as we saw, he was a good
climber. I thought….”

“Perhaps it’s just one of those things,” said Wenzel.
“Perhaps it was Fate.”

Datchler turned and stared away into the far distance,
pondering. “Yes,” he murmured. “Yes, perhaps it was.”


When the Prinz Albrecht returned to Kiel some weeks later
a telegram was waiting for Wenzel from the Armed Forces
High Command, summoning him to its headquarters in Berlin.
There he was greeted by an official from the War
Department, who after introducing himself as Hermann
Strasser showed him to a little room where they sat down to
talk.

“First of all let me say how sorry I am at the loss of
your colleague, Herr Doktor. And that your expedition was
interrupted. I know how disappointed you must be. Let me
assure you that the High Command fully support what you are
doing at Thule. The Fuhrer has been informed of what you
have found and is most intrigued.

“However, it would not be practical for you to return
there just now. Let me explain why.

“Yesterday morning our forces invaded and occupied
Denmark. We had of course been planning to do so for some
time, but the exact date of the invasion had to remain a
secret. It was always known that the resulting situation,
as far as Greenland was concerned, would for a time at
least be uncertain, and so we agreed with Reichsfuhrer
Himmler and the High Command to recall your expedition in
advance of the invasion. It had already set off when the
timetable for the operation was decided upon. To have
cancelled it without any explanation would have aroused
your suspicions, so we wished to leave you some time in
which to complete your survey.

“Our spies in the United States report that she is
planning to move into Greenland. Now we have control of
Denmark, they are worried we could establish a foothold
there which would render them vulnerable if they ever
decided to declare war on us, especially since they are
also concerned about Iceland. They intend to set up a
couple of military bases as well as refuelling depots and
weather stations.” Wenzel stiffened, giving him a worried
look. “In these circumstances it would obviously have been
dangerous for your team to have remained in Greenland. We
are not at present at war with America, but nor can we be
sure of her friendship in the long term.”

“All we needed were those explosives,” Wenzel said
bitterly. “Another few weeks, at the most, might have been
enough to prove my theories right.”

“We couldn’t have taken the risk. But did you manage to
seal the tunnel?”

“That was not possible. Had we done so somebody might well
have wondered why; it would only have attracted attention.”
He changed his tack. “Herr Strasser…if we were to find
something substantial at Thule, beyond what we have
already, might it not contribute significantly to the cause
of winning the war?” The propaganda value would be
enormous. Then again; he checked himself uncertainly. They
had no idea exactly what it was they had found at Thule,
not yet. Perhaps it was unwise to build this thing up into
something it might not be.

“I understand what you are saying,” Strasser replied. “But
at the present time the Fuhrer regards the winning of the
war in Europe as a priority. Besides which, as you say, we
do not want to attract attention to Thule. For you to
remain in Greenland and possibly be captured by the
Americans, with the likelihood of them finding out what you
have discovered, would be an unjustifiable risk. They would
surround the site and keep the knowledge of what is there
secret, to prevent us exploiting it for political or any
other purposes.”

“But if the Americans are in control of Greenland, we may
never be able to resume operations at Thule.” As long as
there existed something which nobody but Germany could be
allowed possession of, because no-one could be sure what
course relations with strategically important neutral
countries would take in the future, America was potentially
an enemy. And if she had to be fought, she would almost
certainly win. Wenzel couldn’t see how anyone but a fool
could expect to stand up to the military and industrial
might of the United States; even Hitler, daring as he had
shown himself to be, couldn’t be so stupid as to take the
risk involved. Surely.

But in the end, he knew Strasser was right. Or was he?

Just one more week, he thought with an inward sigh. That’s
all it would have taken.

“We will have to see how matters unfold,” the official
smiled. “Should there be a change in the current
relationship between this country and the United States,
the situation will I am sure be reviewed. In the meantime,
as I am sure you will appreciate, absolute secrecy must be
maintained.”

“You do not have to worry about that, Herr Strasser,”
Wenzel said stiffly. “I am a loyal servant of the Reich and
so are the others who took part in the expedition. We would
have known what to do. Now if you will excuse me?”
He rose and strode from the room, blank-faced.


Reich Chancellery, Berlin, 5th December 1943
The whole place was designed to intimidate, thought Wenzel
with irritation. The room where he’d been asked to wait
until the Fuhrer was ready to see him was of medium size
and unremarkable in décor and furnishings, seeming ordinary
and unthreatening, but only so that the shock when you
passed through the massive double doors at one side could
be that much greater. Beyond was a vast hall, decorated
with mosaics, with a short flight of steps in one wall that
led to a high-ceilinged, 480-foot long corridor which never
seemed to end. All throughout the journey to Hitler’s
office he felt small, lonely – despite the presence of the
uniformed aide who marched along smartly beside him – and
insignificant. He wondered if the sound of their feet
ringing out on the floor would drive him mad before they
eventually got there. The walk also tired him out; an
uncomfortable reminder, he thought, of how the war has aged
us all.

The room at the end of the corridor was far bigger than
any normal office. Its dominant feature was the enormous
marble-topped desk at which sat the small figure of the
Fuhrer, himself somehow seeming lost and lonely behind it.

“Mein Fuhrer, Dr Wenzel to see you.”

Hitler looked up from the pile of official documents on
which he was busy scribbling his signature. Rising from his
chair, he came out from behind the desk and halted just
before Wenzel, his hands clasped behind his back.

Wenzel had always found the man physically unimpressive
until you saw his face; until Hitler’s eyes met yours and
you felt the full impact of the massive personality within
that little frame. The scientist almost recoiled from their
piercing stare. But in them was something different from
what he had seen there on previous occasions, the last just
over a year ago, when they’d met. Wenzel was not its
target, not really; but now there was an anger, a dark
brooding hatred in them whose cause he thought he could
guess and which he knew would drive the Fuhrer to prosecute
with even greater savagery the extermination of those
innocents still trapped within the occupied territories who
he had marked down as non-Aryan and therefore undesirable.
Hitler gave a curt nod and looked at him in expectation.
Wenzel nodded back politely. “Mein Fuhrer.”

He cleared his throat. “You will remember, mein Fuhrer,
that my expedition to Thule four years ago found evidence
that the mountain was at one time inhabited?” Out of the
corner of his eye he noticed a file lying open on the desk,
which Hitler had evidently been perusing at some point.
Without answering Hitler started to pace about the room,
the slow heavy tread of his feet echoing hollowly in
Wenzel’s ears. Unsettled, Wenzel cursed the man inwardly
for making him feel so uncomfortable. He swallowed, then
rallied his wits and continued. “I suggest that it is time
we restarted the expeditions to Thule.”

Hitler went on pacing and Wenzel wondered what was going
on in that strange, impenetrable, labyrinthine mind. The
sound of those feet plodding up and down was particularly
annoying when he was trying to think, to choose his words
with care so he didn’t cause offence.

Only too aware why Hitler might be reluctant to sanction
the proposal, he sought to mollify his leader. “Of course
at this stage of the war....” He cut off abruptly as he
realised he might have made a mistake. He knew very well
what might happen if he dared to suggest things were going
badly. But he had committed himself now, couldn’t turn
back. “At this present stage of the war, I…I can understand
why other matters might seem more of a priority.”
Somehow he had to stress the renewed necessity of another
trip to Thule without suggesting that Hitler’s conduct of
affairs was deficient. It was the worst part of serving
leaders like this, your inability to speak the truth. And
the truth in this case was that Germany had probably lost
any chance of victory. The V-weapons were not yet ready.
The U-boat war in the Atlantic, success in which could
still have determined the outcome of the conflict, had
during the past year been more or less been won by the
Allies. The German presence had been ejected from North
Africa and the British and Americans were now moving their
way gradually up through Italy. The situation on the
Eastern Front was desperate. There were also rumours that
the Allies were preparing a full-scale invasion in the
West. The magnificent achievement of 1940-41 was starting
to crumble. The knowledge that Germany was staring in the
face a second shattering defeat; it must be tearing him
apart, surely. For them to lose not one but two World Wars,
after all the expense in material and financial terms and
in millions of heroic lives sacrificed….it seemed so cruel,
so unjust. But nonetheless the growing realization of what
awaited them was settling upon their minds like a great
black cloud.

Of course the V-weapons might still turn the tide. And
then there was Thule.

And yet to his frustration, Hitler was clearly not
impressed by his claims. Perhaps it was to be expected.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the Fuhrer considered the attempts
to prove the cultural virility of the German race by
discovering great cultural achievements of the past, the
evidence for which was doubtful, to be a foolish and
pointless distraction. It was a wonder he let Himmler get
away with so much. In Mein Kampf he had even written that
neo-Paganism was the work of dark forces seeking to divert
Germans from the all-important struggle against the Jew,
their common enemy. He had effectively forced Liebenfels
and the New Templars underground, forbidding them to
publish their writings. Nor was he alone among the Nazi
hierarchy in holding such opinions towards the movement. To
hard-headed politicians, for that was how his leaders liked
to see themselves, rockets and flying bombs represented a
more tangible and practical means of achieving victory.
Even Wenzel himself now wondered whether he had not been,
in truth, a crank; for all he knew, there was not the
slightest reason to think the gods still lived or had ever
existed in the first place. Or at least there hadn’t been
until he actually set foot inside the mountain and saw the
evidence. If evidence it was.

The Fuhrer continued to perambulate the room with his
hands behind him, the fingers knitted tightly together, and
his eyes staring intently ahead. His movements had brought
him close to Wenzel. Suddenly he stopped and swung round
sharply to face the scientist, again fixing him with that
hard penetrating stare. And so far, he hadn’t said a single
word.
God, those horrible eyes.

They were searching him, probing his features for some
sign of disloyalty. He had to struggle to hold the right
expression. If he averted his gaze or couldn’t keep a
straight face it would be seen as an insult.

He decided the only way to keep his cool was by going on
talking. His voice quavered from time to time as he fought
to stay calm. “If we have found what I think we have found,
it might have the effect of giving our soldiers new
courage.” Though how many of them really believed in the
ideology of Aryan racial supremacy, as opposed to wanting
victory simply for patriotic reasons, was a moot point.
“It is our only hope, Mein Fuhrer. We may not have a lot
to lose.” He had taken the plunge now. “But there is
everything to gain. If there’s anything at Thule which
could alter the course of the war in our favour, we should
take steps to secure it.”

Still that hostile, interrogative stare. The eyes seemed
to be - were - drilling deep into his very soul. He had
said about all there was to say now and could only stand
there looking sort of impassive, and hoping that even that
didn’t come over as rude.

Just when he thought he would crack, Hitler spoke. The
voice was exactly as you so often heard it on the radio.
Harsh, jarring, really quite unpleasant to listen to. He
wondered at times how the man had succeeded in gaining such
a mesmeric hold over an entire population; it must have
been by sheer force of character, rather than those cold
grating tones. “And may I ask,” the Fuhrer snapped, “how
you propose to enter Greenland without the Americans
noticing?”

“We have commissioned a feasibility study. It is possible,
as long as we can convince anyone who is suspicious that we
are Danes and not Germans. We will need some assistance
from the Kreigsmarine and Luftwaffe in getting there, and
perhaps afterwards, although they would only be called in
if absolutely necessary. As for equipment, we will need
only what an expedition to that part of the world normally
does. Apart from explosives and power drills; we must have
those.”

He fell silent. Hitler had lowered his eyes and was
thinking over what Wenzel had said, his brow still knitted
in a severe frown. The scientist waited, swallowing from
time to time, feeling his heart pound faster and faster
with the tension. Suddenly Hitler shouted “sehr gut!”, at
the same time giving a short, sharp jerk of the head and
turning away. Signifying the interview was over.

Wenzel’s eyes lit up and he almost fainted from the shock
of relief and excitement he felt. He bowed his head
reverently. “Danke, mein Fuhrer.”

He left, both glad to be out of Hitler’s presence and
delighted the meeting had turned out as he’d hoped. As long
as Hitler didn’t suddenly change his mind; the sooner they
found what they were looking for and put a seal on the
matter, the better.

The following morning, while busy in his office at the
Department, whose work was still considered important
despite the war situation, Wenzel received a telephone call
from Armed Forces High Command inviting him to a meeting at
its headquarters where the logistics of the expedition
would be further discussed. And two months later, on 1st
February 1944, a U-boat left Kiel on a special mission the
nature of which was known only to SS chief Himmler, a few
senior figures within the military and the Fuhrer himself.
On board were most of the people who had taken part in the
original Thule expedition plus a biologist, a chemist, a
couple of engineers, a cryptographer and a physicist.
Keller had been released for military service and was
currently fighting on the Eastern Front. Captain Dachtler
was lying somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic, the Uboat
he was commanding depth-charged and sunk by a British
warship.

In addition there were a number of men from the Reich
intelligence service, the Abwehr, who had been specially
picked for this mission for their Danish connections and in
particular the fact that they spoke with Danish rather than
German accents. It hadn’t been too difficult to find such
people for a good many Germans had Danish links and there
wasn’t much physical difference between Germans and Danes,
except to a trained eye. There was little doubt the men
would be able to pass themselves off as Danish
Greenlanders, although it was still better to avoid
contact with any Americans who happened to be about; it was
possible, Wenzel had been told, that Allied spymasters had
taught their agents to recognize any characteristics,
however hard to spot, in looks and speech which might give
them away. Should they come into contact with US forces the
Danish-Germans had to appear to be in charge of the whole
operation, whose purpose was to be presented as purely
archaeological, and Wenzel and Co to speak as little as
possible and generally keep out of the way. There would be
a problem if the Americans decided to check their story
with the Danish authorities in Greenland, but if it came to
the worst the expedition was equipped with guns and all its
members had been taught how to use them.

It was a gamble, this business. But Hitler had been
sufficiently desperate to take the risk. Let’s just hope it
pays off, Wenzel thought.

The U-boat surfaced off the Greenland coast at a point
sufficiently far from either of the towns of Qaanaaq and
Siorapaluk to be safe, and the team rowed to shore in three
rubber dinghies, one of which contained the explosives and
other equipment they would need for the operation. They
were met by Nazi sympathizers from among Greenland’s Danish
population, with dogsleds. No Eskimo guides were needed,
because the Danes knew the territory and how to survive
there just as well.

Wrapped up in their thick sealskin jackets, and hooded and
goggled against the cold and the wind, the group set off on
their journey to the point where, in a few hours’ time, a
captured American aircraft with a Luftwaffe crew would drop
the food supplies and other equipment the Germans needed,
to be loaded onto the sleds for transport to the site. The
rendezvous point was some distance from Thule, because one
of the American bases wasn’t too far from there; there were
rumours the Americans were planning to set up a base at
Thule itself, which meant they might already be surveying
the area. Better they didn’t see anything which would
attract their attention.

Once they reached their destination, the idea was to be in
and out of the place as quickly as possible. Hopefully with
something valuable to the Fatherland.


There were, in fact, quite a few of the small square
openings in the rock of the Devil’s Chimney, most of them
accessible from ground level; if only Kotze had not made
that impulsive decision to go climbing, Wenzel thought. In
any case they were far too narrow for a person to crawl
along.

His thoughts returned to the task in hand. They had rigged
up a string of lights, each connected by a single cable
running along the ceiling of the tunnel to a generator
which stood chugging away outside, a few yards from the
entrance. Now Lutzen, the Army engineer, was bringing the
tip of his drill to bear on a point on the smooth surface
of the “door” at the end of the tunnel. It too was powered
by a cable from the generator. Once a hole large enough had
been drilled several sticks of dynamite would be planted
within it, the fuses lit, and hopefully that would do the
job.

Standing watching, a few yards behind, were Wenzel
and Dr Ernst Grunewald, one of Wenzel’s colleagues at the
University. Grunewald was a large, pig-like man with a fat,
pink, fleshy face, currently hidden by the mask he along
with Lutzen and Wenzel was wearing as protection from
flying splinters of rock. Like the physicist and the
chemist, he’d been brought along because none of them had
any idea what they would find if they really did manage to
break through the door.

Lutzen switched on the drill and its high-pitched
screaming, muffled by the earphones the three of them had
donned, started up.

After a moment he switched it off, frowning. “What is the
matter?” demanded Grunewald.

Lutzen whipped off his earphones. “There’s no mark,” he
said crossly.

“You’ve only just started drilling,” Grunewald snapped.
“Should there be?”

“I should have felt it give almost straight away. But
there was resistance.” He stepped back a little. “Look, see
for yourself. This is no ordinary rock, it’s harder than
diamond.”

They squinted. In the yellow-white glow from the lights in
the ceiling they could see that the spot on the door where
the drill-bit had been was completely unmarked. There was
not the slightest indentation in the smooth unblemished
surface, and no chips on the floor.

“Incredible,” breathed Wenzel. He knew now the secret of
the mountain must be something fantastic, unparalleled. But
that was no damn use if they couldn’t get in.

“This thing should have cut through it like butter,”
Lutzen said.

“Try again,” ordered Grunewald. With a doubtful look
Lutzen restarted drilling, gritting his teeth and screwing
up his face in concentration. He pressed the point of the
drill home, and this time a few chippings flew out. The
drill lurched backwards like a recoiling gun, then
forwards. More chippings, minute and fine like grains of
sawdust, appeared on the floor.

The ghastly screeching of the drill as it struggled to
bore into the material was uncomfortable to listen to, even
through the earphones. Sweat was pouring down Lutzen’s
face, glistening under the ceiling lamps. His whole body
was juddering, quite as much as the drill. Unable to take
it any more he withdrew the bit and cut off the power. The
echo of its screaming died, and they all looked at the
door.

“Look!” cried Grunewald, pointing. This time there was
definitely a small neat, round hole in its centre.
Or was there?

He blinked, as if uncertain what his eyes had actually
seen. “There’s nothing,” he muttered.

“I swear it was there,” Lutzen gasped. “It…it’s closed
up.” It was as if the hole had disappeared in barely the
wink of an eye, almost as soon as it had been made.

“I don’t believe it,” he declared, clapping a hand to his
forehead. “Scheisse,” exclaimed Wenzel and Grunewald
jointly.

Lutzen inspected the point of the drill. It was worn
almost completely away. He said what was obvious to the
three of them. “We’ll never be able to penetrate it like
this. We’ll have to use the explosives.”

Dorfmann had come up behind them. “What do you make of
it?” Wenzel asked him.

Dorfmann shook his head slowly. “Right now I just don’t
know.” He started to collect up a few of the chippings.
“I’ll have to do an analysis of these.”

Meanwhile, Wenzel was wondering uneasily if the door was
resistant to explosives too. In any case he would rather
not have used them unless absolutely essential. If they
worked they’d bring down the roof of the tunnel and parts
of the walls, and they’d have to shift a lot of rock, in
danger from a further collapse while doing it, before they
could penetrate the heart of the mountain. An explosion
might also be noticed, and bring the Americans along to see
what was going on.

“Let’s get the dynamite,” he sighed. If it didn’t work
they might as well go straight home, though he had an idea
Grunewald would protest. He wanted to be away from here
before the Yanks came along and ruined everything.

They placed the sticks of dynamite, tied together in
bundles of six, at the base of the door, lit the fuses and
retired. Outside, at a safe distance from the mouth of the
tunnel, they waited. They heard the boom of the explosion
and saw the smoke pouring from the opening. Gradually it
dispersed in the clear cold air, the echoes from the blast
dying away too. As the smoke thinned and vanished they took
a few tentative steps into the tunnel, flashing their
torches. Almost immediately they saw the huge pile of
boulders blocking any further progress.

“Right, let’s get this cleared,” said Wenzel. “We’ll have
to shore up the roof in case any more of it comes down. And
we’ll need to install more lights.” The explosion had of
course brought them down, plunging everything once more
into darkness.

It was a long, arduous, back-straining task. They had to
break up all the larger rocks, that couldn’t be shifted by
hand, into smaller pieces like a prison chain gang. Several
hours passed before the job was done. The walls and roof of
the tunnel, they noted, seemed to be normal rock without
the strange properties of the “door”, and large chunks had
been gouged from them by the explosion. Arrangements of
wooden beams were erected to strengthen them as and when
the task of shifting the debris allowed.

As more and more of the rubble was removed, it became
apparent the door was completely undamaged. Or perhaps,
while they had been engaged in the lengthy job of clearing
away the mess, it had been quietly repairing itself.

Wenzel spread his arms. “That’s it. There’s nothing more
we can do. It’s finished.”

“Perhaps more dynamite would make a difference,” suggested
Grunewald. “Or we could try blasting away at the sides
until we find something.”

“We can’t be sure we would. We might eventually break
through into the central chamber but we’d use up all the
explosive, and I don’t think Berlin are going to risk
sending us any more equipment. The longer this goes on for
the more likely the Allies will notice something. And I
don’t fancy having to shift thousands more tons of rock,
not after having had to deal with that last lot. Look,
let’s just get out of here before the Americans find us.
For all we know someone may have heard the explosion, seem
the smoke, and is coming over to investigate. This time
we’ll seal the place before we go, so that nobody else can
get in and – “

He was cut off by a shout from Dorfmann. “Herr Doktor!”

They heard a cracking, grinding, crunching sound and
whirled round. Dorfmann and the others were staring at a
section of the side wall. It had already been badly
weakened by the first explosion, and was riddled with
cracks. Now several more had appeared: big ones, branching
off each other to form a triskelion. Dust trickled from
them. More and more became visible as they watched,
lengthening and deepening, joining up. They felt no fear,
because the timbers they’d put in would prevent total
collapse; only puzzlement, because it was only this one
part of the wall that seemed to be affected.

The rock started to bulge outwards, as if something on the
other side was trying to punch its way through.
“Was is…..”
“Gott in Himmel!”

A huge chunk suddenly crumbled away, leaving a gaping hole
about the size of a man. And through it, they saw
something which made them catch their breath. As soon as
Wenzel set eyes on it, he knew beyond a doubt that the
expedition had found what it was looking for.


A few hours later
They heard the rumble of the explosion as the remaining
sticks of dynamite went off, saw the smoke issuing from the
tunnel mouth. “Well, that’s it,” sighed Wenzel. Their work
here at Thule was done now, for the time being at any rate.
They had learned as much as they were likely to without
further assistance. And they probably wouldn’t get it, for
the Fatherland’s best brains were all being employed on
other tasks, in particular the development of the VWeapons.
All their combined scientific knowledge and ability had
been insufficient to tell them how everything worked.
Perhaps they just needed a little longer. Wenzel could put
the request to the Fuhrer but something told him it was not
going to be granted. They could channel all their efforts
into the research at Thule but if it failed to produce any
more results, if the gamble didn’t pay off, Germany would
have lost the chance to win the war by either conventional
or unconventional means. Basically, they had run out of
time.

The calls from Berlin had been getting more and more
desperate. The Wehrmacht was being pushed slowly but surely
out of Russia by the advancing Soviet forces and the
rumours of an Allied attack in the West continued to come,
although still no-one knew when or where it would be. Just
get back here as quickly as possible with what you have
found, they had said. Don’t delay. And always he had
replied, “Not yet. Just a few more days may be all we
need.” They’d been on the point of making it an order, he
was sure. It was what he’d have done.

They could have no idea how long it would it take to
finish the job; a lifetime maybe? He so much wanted to stay
but for various reasons that was impossible. All he could
do was take one last look back at the mountain, thinking of
Kotze’s death and hoping that now the sacrifice would not
have been in vain.

Would they ever be back, he wondered wistfully. Yes, he
vowed fiercely to himself, one day we will return. Whatever
happens.

He felt Grunewald’s hand on his arm, shaking it roughly.
“Come on, let’s go. The U-boat won’t wait forever.”

“I was just thinking,” Wenzel said. “When we get back, is
the Fuhrer going to believe what we tell him?”

“He’s going to have to,” Grunewald answered. “After all,
we have the evidence.” He started to make his way to where
the Danes, real and fake, were waiting for them by the
dogsleds; keeping a tight hold on the heavy metal case
clutched in his right hand.


Berlin, January 1945
It must have been like this for the British, thought
Wenzel with a grim feeling that Germany was only getting
what she deserved for having done it to them. The
terrifying, unearthly screeching as the bombs descended
through the night sky, growing louder and louder, seeming
so loud and so close that they must surely be going to land
here….the fear for loved ones elsewhere, not knowing if
they had made it to safety – supposing the “safety” would
do them any good – or would appear in the casualty lists
once enough of their bodies had been recovered to make
identification possible.

The mounting terror as each bomb seemed about to hit, the
sobbing relief when it didn’t…then, in another moment or
two, terror again…he wondered if his nerves could stand it.
Was the shelter strong enough to withstand the constant
pounding from thousands of tons of explosive?

A number of people had been working late at the University
when the eerie wail of the air raid sirens had sounded, and
they had all gone down to the shelter together. Keller was
somewhere among the huddled mass of bodies, Wenzel knew;
they had got separated at some point in the rush. They were
so tightly packed that it was difficult to identify any
individual person.

No-one spoke apart from the occasional muttered prayer,
even though it had been a while since the last bomb, which
sounded as if it had fallen well clear of the shelter. They
didn’t want to tempt Providence. They also knew the long
silences could be deceptive.

They lost themselves in their thoughts. Wenzel’s mind was
on Thule and the utter failure it had turned out to be. The
material they’d taken from the site had proved of no use
whatsoever. Given more time it might have been different;
but it was too late now to change the course of the war.
They had gambled and lost. The Department was itself a
thing of the past, its work put into abeyance as everything
was sacrificed either to the conventional war effort or the
basic needs of food, health, warmth and shelter. And those
commodities were themselves often in short supply.

What would happen after the war? Would the Allies come
looking for him? Would he be regarded as a war criminal for
what he had sought to do, or simply a crank? One thing was
certain, he saw no chance of rebuilding the Reich and
restarting the Thule project. After everything we’ve done,
they’ll never forgive us, he thought despairingly. It was
inconceivable they would allow Germany to regain its former
strength. In any case, at this rate there wouldn’t be an
awful lot of it left.

Someone had cracked under the strain and was shouting
hysterically.

The screeching started up again.

Again, you wondered whether the next few seconds were
going to be your last. You heard the children crying. You
tried to decided whether you should beg forgiveness for
your sins from a God you weren’t quite sure existed. You
just sat there and waited helplessly for what you hoped
would kill you instantly, if it was going to kill you at
all, and not leave you horribly scarred in mind and body.
And please God…please God, let the bomb not be an
incendiary………..

When it came the explosion was utterly terrifying in its
ferocity, as bad as the waiting had been. It left them
temporarily deafened. They recovered their senses and
realised they were still alive.

It must have hit the hospital next door.

Perhaps that was as close as the bombs were going to get.
Their survival was symbolic. They had been spared and would
now be all right. We deserve to be, Wenzel thought. We’ve
been through enough, why put us through any more of this
hell? We’re no less human beings than anyone else, whatever
our country has done.

Weren’t they? Was he a monster because he had believed that
Germans were...superior....

When the next bomb came they were barely aware of its
approach until the last, the stress they’d already
undergone having inured them to fear. The actual effects of
the impact, when it happened, might be another matter. But
it was possible for the end to be swift. For Klaus Wenzel
it seemed the shelter around them was there one minute and
gone the next. There was a brief, shattering shock which
numbed the senses, and then the chaos of rubble and dust
and body parts buried Wenzel, choking and crushing him. He
was aware that he couldn’t breathe; and then of only
blackness.


Hollenstadt Concentration Camp, East Prussia, April 1945
Sometimes, in his more reflective moments, Ernst Grunewald
found himself fancying that the eyes looked at him.

There were hundreds of them, of all different colours and
shades of colours, pinned to the wall of the laboratory
like butterflies. Eyes of soldiers killed in battle, eyes
of civilians who had died in tragic accidents; eyes of the
people who had been sent to the camp. Eyes of children,
eyes of adults. Eyes of men, eyes of women. Blue eyes,
brown eyes, green eyes, dark eyes; eyes of Aryans and eyes
of subhumans. Each one was marked with a number.

Eyes fascinated him. He had spent many hours during the
past year attempting to change their colour by swabbing
them with cotton wool impregnated with various substances.
As with any other experiment a certain thrill came from not
knowing what the result would be; it made up for the
discomfort caused by all the screaming.

His fascination with eyes had led him to take an interest
also in twins. He had noted that very few of them had the
condition known as heterochromia, in which one eye was a
different colour from the other. Maybe that was to be
expected. But it had occurred to him that if twins, the
people least likely to possess the characteristic, could do
so all the same, and you could find out why, it must be
possible to alter the colouring in just about anyone,
changing brown to blue…..He had spent a lot of time taking
twins apart to see how they functioned, hoping to devise a
means of persuading German mothers to produce greater
numbers of children with the characteristics he had
identified as typically Aryan. He had castrated them,
drained them of their bodily fluids, pumped them full of
various chemicals, immersed them in ice-cold water and
finally killed them with lethal injections before
dissecting them (sometimes he didn’t bother with the
injection).

As well as eyes Grunewald was also concerned with hair
colour, attempting to change it by the application of some
artifical substance or other. Unfortunately, he was unable
to trigger any change in the natural composition of the
hair; it was the dye itself which caused any alteration in
its appearance, and that wasn’t the same thing (also there
was that accursed screaming).

At most all the tests achieved was to inflict pain, injury
and frequently death upon the subject. Obviously this was
not the means by which the physical characteristics an
individual had might be determined; he needed to be looking
for something else, but at the moment had no idea what it
might be.

He had now abandoned this line of research. But the SS
leadership had more or less given him the freedom to do
what he liked while in the job, and so he busied himself
with whatever new idea seemed to appeal to him, regardless
of the eyes staring down from the wall. He amassed an
impressive collection of skeletons, many of Jews, dwarves,
and the mentally handicapped who he had placed, alive or
dead, in acid baths so that the flesh would dissolve and
render the bones more easily accessible. The wombs of women
prisoners were injected with cancer cells and later cut out
to observe the results. People were forced to have sex with
freaks. A naked man and woman, total strangers to one
another, were put together into a room where the
temperature had been lowered to just a few degrees above
zero, to see if they would attempt to warm themselves by
copulating. At one time Jews and anybody who was physically
or mentally defective were sterilized by means of surgery,
chemical castration or bombardment with X-rays.

At this present moment Grunewald was sitting at his desk,
recording the results of his latest experiment in a ledger.
On a shelf above him were stacked a collection of jars
containing the internal organs of some of the inmates whose
bodies he had dissected, preserved in alcohol.
Nearby his latest experiment lay strapped to a couch,
stark naked. It was the head and torso of a man, a prisoner
taken in Russia, from which the arms and legs had been
amputated, the stumps afterwards cleaned and cauterized. A
pair of woman’s breasts had been grafted onto the subject’s
chest. Nearby, an orderly was mopping up a pool of blood
and vomit from the floor with a sponge.

He heard jackbooted feet approach the door, and halt
smartly just outside it. The guard knocked several times, a
staccato rapping like the chatter of a machine gun. “Come
in!” Grunewald shouted.

The SS man entered, marching up to the desk. He treated
Grunewald to a brief, polite nod. “Herr Doktor, we have
received a message from the High Command in Berlin. Soviet
forces have been reported within ten miles of Hollenstadt.
We are to evacuate the camp immediately; everything is to
be destroyed.”

Grunewald received this news in silence. It was the most
sensible policy, he supposed. They’d known, of course, that
it was bound to happen before long. In fact he’d had his
escape route prepared some time ago. He would go along with
the soldiers to a small town on Germany’s southern border,
from where they would slip across into neutral Switzerland.
At the agreed rendezvous point the representative from the
Vatican would explain the plan in full, although Grunewald
guessed it involved a lengthy sea journey from an Italian
port to somewhere in South America.

But first, they had to get rid of as much evidence of
their activities here as possible. Grunewald gave a sharp
jerk of his head, and gestured towards the grotesque horror
on the couch. “Right. Get rid of that.”

The man’s eyes, blind from the chemicals with which
Grunewald had earlier tried to change the pigmentation of
the iris, merely stared glassily at the ceiling. The
sedative, administered after they’d finally got tired of
screaming, meant he could have little idea what was going
on anyway. You see, we are quite kind and considerate
really, Grunewald thought.

He turned away as the soldier stepped back and aimed his
Luger at the thing on the couch. The soldier fired once,
twice, into its body and it jerked convulsively, the straps
tautening. He unfastened them, scooped up the corpse and
flung it over his shoulder.

“Then I’ll need your help here,” Grunewald shouted after
him as he walked out with his burden. He and the orderly
were already snatching up as many of the smaller items as
they could, the surgical instruments, specimen jars and
bottles of dye and preservative, and stacking them in
wooden boxes.

A few minutes later, the flames of one of the camp ovens
roared with seeming relish and a puff of thick, evil-looking
black smoke swelled into being from the chimney
above.

Grunewald, the orderly Rottheimer and the SS man worked
fast to gather up all the equipment in the room and carry
it out to the yard, where they dumped it down in one huge
pile. Among it was some of the stuff they’d taken from
Thule; a pity, Grunewald thought, but since it had turned
out to be useless not much of one.

They had to make several journeys. All the time the three
of them were sweating with fear; “within ten miles” meant
the Russians could be as little as only two or three from
here, and they knew what was likely to happen if they were
captured.

They didn’t realise at first that everyone else had
already fled. Then the silence which had descended over the
camp suddenly registered with them. Grunewald paled,
swearing softly.

We’ll make that rendezvous point somehow, he told himself.
We’ve got to.

At this point the SS man took off as well, although they
weren’t aware he had gone until after they had returned to
the laboratory for the third time. Grunewald looked hard at
Rottheimer. “Will you stay?”

After a moment’s hesitation the orderly nodded. Without
replying Grunewald looked round the now almost bare room,
trying to decide if there was anything which could be
safely left behind. The bigger and heavier items, like the
couch and operating table, could be passed off as standard
medical equipment.

“What about this?” said Rottheimer, pointing to the metal
case sitting on the desk, which Grunewald had always kept
securely locked.

“That comes with us.” Grunewald removed his lab coat and
draped it over the back of a chair, then grasped the handle
of the case and made for the door. “Come on, let’s fetch
the petrol.”

While Grunewald waited for him outside, hoping he wouldn’t
take the chance to disappear after all and giving him no
more than five minutes in which to return, the orderly went
to get the petrol from the outhouse where it was stored and
also to find some matches. Grunewald was just about to
leave when he appeared. “I’m not sure it’s going to be
enough,” he said anxiously. Most of the remaining fuel was
in the tank of the lorry now making its way south as fast
as possible. The can Rottheimer carried was less than half
full.

“It’ll do,” Grunewald answered impatiently. It wasn’t as
if they needed to bother anyway, he thought gloomily. When
the Russians got here and found the surviving inmates it
would be all the proof anyone needed.

Rottheimer sprinkled the petrol over the pile of discarded
equipment. Then he struck a match, retreated a little and
tossed it onto the pile. They jumped back as it erupted
with terrifying ferocity, blazing like a furnace.

They guessed the Allies would be able to piece together
what had been going on here, sooner or later, from a
careful analysis of the charred debris. But the less they
knew the better.

The orderly was looking at Grunewald expectantly. But it
wasn’t time to go just yet. While waiting for Rottheimer
the scientist had been thinking carefully about what to do
with the case. His own capture was of minor concern beside
the danger to the Fatherland if it should fall into enemy
hands. “I need a spade,” he said.

Again, there was the fear Rottheimer would make a run for
it. Their eyes met. “I could get it if you like.”

Rottheimer shook his head. “I will.” He moved off, and
after a moment Grunewald decided to follow him; not that
there was any way of keeping him here against his wishes.
Grunewald supposed he could have got the spade himself,
although carrying both it and the case would slow him down.
In the end Rottheimer stayed loyal. He led Grunewald to
another outhouse where a number of spades stood leaning
against a wall; they’d been used, of course, to bury the
body whenever an inmate died from starvation, overwork or
in one of Grunewald’s experiments. Rottheimer selected one
and shouldered it, then the two of them fled through the
gates of the camp as fast as their burdens would allow.

“Where are we going?” Rottheimer gasped.

He’d guessed they were going to bury the case, presumably
in the little wood near the camp. Sure enough, when they
reached the point where the wood began Grunewald veered off
the road into the dense foliage, Rottheimer following. They
crashed through bushes and low-hanging branches until they
came to a small clearing where Grunewald signalled they
should stop.

Over to the west, through a gap in the trees, they
glimpsed a house and a cluster of farm buildings.

Selecting a tree at random, and using it as a marker,
Grunewald surveyed the ground around it. His gaze came to
rest on a patch of bare earth far enough from the tree for
the roots not to get in the way. He took the spade from
Rottheimer. “You can leave now if you like. I don’t need
you any more. You know where to go.”

Rottheimer nodded. “Yes, Herr Doktor.”

“If you speak to anyone about what you have seen, you and
your family will pay the consequences. Do you understand?”
Rottheimer stared for a moment, then nodded silently. He
resented the threat but didn’t feel disposed to argue with
it. And above all, he knew it was a very real one.

As he hurried away Grunewald began to dig. Fortunately the
earth was soft enough to yield easily beneath the blade of
the implement. When the hole was big enough, about three
feet deep, he placed the case inside it and filled it in
with the excavated soil. Then he heaped loose stones,
leaves and earth over the spot to hide the fact that it had
been disturbed. Finally he walked a few yards from the tree
before flinging the spade away; it fell out of sight into a
little hollow, partly hidden by scrub and bushes, which
he’d noticed earlier. From the path of sorts along which
they’d been running, nobody would see anything unless
they’d been looking in the first place.

The trouble, of course, was that he couldn’t be sure he’d
remember the exact location of the spot. Would it still be
discernible to someone seeking to retrieve the case
sometime in the future? He could leave some kind of marker
but it would be bound to arouse someone’s interest should
they set eyes on it.

He decided to worry about the problem later. Right now his
main concern was to avoid capture. That meant somehow
getting from here to the Swiss border. He had enough money
in his pocket for the train fare, but no idea whether in
the general state of chaos and disruption that prevailed
the public transport network was still functioning. Better
to try and steal a car or other vehicle, if he could.
Perhaps there was something at the farm….

He heard the crack of a rifle shot. It came from somewhere
ahead of him. Then the sound of running feet, crashing
through foliage. Through a break in the greenery, about a
hundred yards away, a group of figures came into view. It
looked like Rottheimer was among them.

Crack. He thought he saw Rottheimer twist and fall, his
body crumpling like a doll from which all the stuffing had
drained. So much the better, Grunewald thought. That’s one
less person who knows.

If they did catch up with him there was always the cyanide
capsule. If only he had the courage to use it.

He could hear more footsteps but they were not running
this time. They were the sounds of men moving slowly,
stealthily about the wood, looking for other men. And they
were coming from all around him. The Russians must have
split into several groups, the better to be sure of
covering every inch of the place.

His only chance was to find some hole and crawl into it,
burying himself among twigs and leaves so they wouldn’t see
him. Crouching down low, he padded softly from cover to
cover, hoping he could avoid being spotted before he left
the wood – because he couldn’t hide in there forever – for
open ground where he would be more dangerously exposed. If
they didn’t get a fix on him he might be alright.

Then he heard the sounds of movement change direction.
Some noise he’d made must have alerted the Russians and
they were all making more or less towards him. Closing the
net.

There looked to be a sort of dip in the ground just ahead.
But if, trying to hide there, he pulled the surrounding
vegetation over him he would make a noise which would
attract his pursuers. Sudden panic seized him and he broke
into a desperate run, forgetting all about stealth.
Brambles slashed at his face, drawing blood, and ripped
his clothing. But he hurtled straight on, stumbling blindly
through clinging foliage which seemed to be actively
seeking to arrest his flight, the twigs and branches like
clawlike hands holding him back.

He was brought to a staggering halt by the impact of the
bullet smashing into his shoulder, followed by a searing
pain which seemed to spread outwards through his body from
the point of entry. Instinctively he clapped a hand to the
wound, and sobbed in despair on feeling the warm wet
substance oozing copiously through his fingers. Rallying
himself, he started running again, his other arm swinging
uselessly by his side, slowed down by its dead weight and
the agonizing pain in his shoulder. He was quite
unconscious of another bullet whining through the air and
embedding itself in the bole of a tree to his right.
He had heard stories of how the Russians treated captured
Germans. And when they found out the kind of things that
had been done at the camp….oh God…..

The next shot hit him in the leg, and he knew he could run
no further. The leg folded beneath him and he went down on
one knee. He made one last feeble attempt to stand and
collapsed again, rolling over onto his side. This time he
lay still, gasping and moaning.

They hauled him roughly to his feet and bundled him off,
back to the camp. There he was taken to a field dressing
station the Russians had set up within the compound, where
the bullets were cut out of his shoulder and leg and his
wounds treated. The Soviet doctor moved about his task with
blank-faced, professional efficiency but offered no words
of sympathy or reassurance. They wanted him alive, because
they needed to find out what had been going on at the camp.
They wanted to know exactly who he was and what his
responsibilities had been. It was only for this reason that
they had not killed him. They would torture the information
out of him, if necessary. And once they had got what they
wanted, he didn’t give much for his chances of survival.
Once he was deemed to have suitably recovered, he was
marched off to what had previously been his own office and
thrust inside. At the desk sat a Russian colonel who put
down the pen with which he was writing out some official
despatch and glanced up at him with cold eyes. Two soldiers
positioned themselves against the wall behind Grunewald,
ready to thump him with their rifle butts should he prove
unco-operative. He was kept standing throughout the
interview, which began with a lengthy explanation, in
heavily accented but adequate German, of how he would die
should he not answer all questions thoroughly and
truthfully.

Grunewald told himself he might as well co-operate.
Everything was lost now, wasn’t it? There wasn’t a Third
Reich anymore whose secrets must be defended. Or there
wouldn’t be in a short time, by his reckoning.

And so he talked. He told them everything they wanted to
know. He didn’t tell them about Thule because they hadn’t
asked, being unaware of that business, and he could always
justify his silence on the matter, should the truth emerge,
by claiming they wouldn’t have believed him. The Russian
listened in silence, barely seeming to breathe all the time
they were in the room together. The only reason his cold
hard stare did not grow more intense as Grunewald’s story
unfolded was that his face had set in that expression long
before.

When he’d finished the colonel sat looking at him, tapping
the end of his pencil on the desktop and thinking. The look
on his face was one of contempt and loathing, but at the
same time thoughtful. He barked out an order and the
soldiers came forward, seizing Grunewald by the arms. They
dragged him from the office and down the corridor to the
cells. Unbolting and throwing open one of the heavy iron
doors, they shoved him inside then slammed and locked it.
He sat down on the bed in the tiny chamber which had
formerly been occupied by one of the hundreds of men and
women who had died here over the last three years; he’d
have plenty of time to reflect on the irony of it in the
days ahead.

He was to spend the next few weeks in this cramped little
cell, never allowed out for exercise and fed on stodgy food
and tepid water which every now and then they would shit
and piss in, collapsing with laughter at his expression
when he tasted it. They occasionally beat him, for no
particular reason except that he was German and at their
mercy, but they never spoke unless it was to issue orders
or, about a month after his capture, inform him with broad
toothy grins and gleaming eyes of the death of Hitler and
the final disintegration of the glorious thousand-year
Reich. Since total and crushing defeat was only what
Grunewald had come to expect, the taunting caused him no
distress. He sullenly accepted his fate, whatever it was to
be, with Teutonic impassivity.

And then one morning the door of the cell was unlocked and
the two soldiers appeared, ordering him to come with them.
He was led out to where a lorry stood in the yard, its
engine running, the rear doors open. They told him to get
in and of course he had no choice but to obey. The doors
were slammed shut and fastened. There were two more
soldiers in the back with him, sitting against the wall
with their rifles resting on their knees. By now the appeal
of being able to gloat had worn off and they simply eyed
him warily.

No-one bothered to tell him where they were going. Some
time later the lorry stopped at an airfield and he was put
onto a plane which immediately took off on a flight that
lasted about four hours. Disembarking in handcuffs, he saw
the grey concrete buildings of another small aerodrome with
beyond them a vista of drab, scrubby fields.

He was loaded onto another lorry which finally stopped
after a journey which took most of the rest of the day. He
stepped down from it to find himself in a cobbled square
surrounded by tall, grim buildings which might have been
deliberately designed to crush the soul, though no more
so than those of a concentration camp. From their style
it didn’t look like he was in Germany. It was in fact
Moscow, and within minutes he was in another
drab, dingy office being interviewed by a man in a civilian
suit who introduced himself as a member of the Soviet
Academy of Science; ever-watchful in the background was an
agent of the secret police. Basically, what he said was
this. Grunewald had skills in certain areas, skills which
the Soviet state might be able to use, and because of this
he was being allowed to live. He ought to be grateful,
considering what was happening to some of the Germans -
civilians included - who Stalin, attempting to establish
the fate of Hitler and his retinue, had had spirited off to
Russia for interrogation and eventual death in prison,
again simply because they were Germans. He would live and
work under carefully controlled conditions, with no
possibility of contact with the outside world. For his work
he would be paid a certain sum by the state. As part of the
package he was to undergo re-education to purge him of his
allegiance to Nazism and turn him into a loyal follower of
Karl Marx. Grunewald was to sit through each of the
sessions in solemn silence, pretending to absorb and accept
all the nonsense he was bombarded with without protest,
while inside remaining what he had always been – a
dedicated Nazi. It was a simple matter to put on a mask.
He’d learned that under Hitler, when he had found it quite
possible to be both a loving family man – he felt a pang of
sorrow at the realisation that he’d never see his wife and
children again – and a mass murderer.

Stalin was keen to learn how far Germany had progressed
with its chemical and biological weapons research. He
wanted to know how, if necessary, the technology might be
deployed against a Western city should war break out with
his former allies. Grunewald was moved to permanent
quarters at a scientific research centre in Siberia where
he worked on this and related projects for the next thirty
years. Throughout that time he was not allowed to receive
visitors. As far as the wider world was concerned he had
ceased to exist. He had committed suicide in order to
escape capture, crawling into some hole in the ground like
the miserable rat he was and then shooting himself or
taking poison. Or maybe he’d assumed some new identity in
Brazil or Paraguay, along with the Eichmanns and the
Mengeles. There was a third possibility, that which had
actually happened to him, but as long as the Cold War went
on it was impossible to investigate it properly.

Now that he had acquired a certain importance for the
Russians their behaviour towards him began to change.
Gradually they started to treat him with slightly less
brutality.

All the same those were terrible years, thanks to the
character of Josef Stalin. Years when one had to be
careful, to an almost impossible extent, not to give the
slightest sign of disapproval of the dictator’s policies.
You were forever on edge, under hideous stress, in case the
Georgian tyrant should suddenly decide you were plotting
against him and must be liquidated. The strain of
practising an unnatural self-control was almost unbearable.
The murder of millions of human beings in Hitler’s death
camps was obviously an incalculable tragedy, but this was a
living hell. Stalin’s paranoia - which gave some
indication, Grunewald thought, of what it might have been
like for those around him if Hitler had remained in power
into old age - extended to anyone he might have some
conceivable reason, however slight, to suspect of wishing
ill against himself or the Soviet state. Among those
considered fair game were anyone who had fought on the
German side during the war - who was German, in fact. It
seemed not unreasonable to suppose they might be secretly
working against him.

But Grunewald was saved from execution by Stalin’s death
in March 1953, and continued to work for the Soviet cause
until his retirement in 1979, when he was installed in an
apartment at a KGB base just outside Moscow. It was where
the Soviets kept spies and other citizens of enemy powers
who because of what they had discovered, intentionally or
otherwise, could not be returned to their home countries;
among the other inmates, with whom Grunewald was not
allowed to communicate, was a man called Korablov whom some
said was really the famous British diver and war hero
Commander “Buster” Crabb, missing after an ill-advised
attempt to photograph at close quarters a Soviet warship
moored in Portsmouth harbour with the Russian leaders
Khrushchev and Bulganin on board.

All the time Grunewald continued to keep secret from those
around him everything he and his team had discovered at
Thule. The discovery was to be for no-one’s benefit but
Germany’s. Although he had learned to like them after a
while, on the whole he would rather the old enemy, the
relatively less Aryan Russians, did not get to know about
it. And as far as he knew, neither they or anyone else did.
For a time he had worked with other captured German
scientists, forming a close-knit unofficial association
with them, but they had not been among those engaged on the
Thule project. There was no sure way of knowing, but as far
as he could tell the people still living who knew about
Thule, who had not been killed in the war or died of
natural causes or hung as war criminals, were keeping quiet
about it. Very sensible of them.

His own war records, which since the Russians did not seem
to be acquainted with them, apart from what they had been
able to deduce from evidence found at the camp, must have
been lost or destroyed in Allied bombing, had been doctored
to leave no trace of the Thule affair or the subsequent
research to which it had led.

Although he was by then an old man, from the mid-1980s a
whole new chapter in Grunewald’s life opened up. Glasnost,
as the sum total of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms was known,
acquired a momentum of its own and demolished what it was
intended to preserve by all too clearly exposing its
weaknesses. Suddenly and unexpectedly Communism crumbled in
Eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall fell, and Grunewald’s
beloved Germany was reunified. A year after that the Soviet
Union itself passed into history.

The implications were viewed with some trepidation by
Grunewald. What if, with the opening up of Russia,
questions began to be asked about the fate of war criminals
who could not be accounted for? He had no wish to end up
in the hands of the Jews.

For the moment, though, he remained where he was in his
comfortable KGB flat. The Russians showed no desire to let
him go and he didn’t want to anyway.

He did not in fact have anything to worry about, because
there was never any prospect of the Russians releasing him.
When the Soviet empire collapsed in 1991 what happened was
merely a change of regime; considerations of national pride
and prestige remained the same. Russia would not want the
world to know that she had employed an ex-Nazi and war
criminal on projects which, had they actually been put into
execution, would probably have attracted no less opprobrium
than the atrocities of Hitler.

Grunewald was handicapped because he really knew very
little about what was going on in the outside world; how
much it had changed in the last forty - nearly fifty -
years. He was allowed access to books but they were
heavily censored. But with Glasnost things had relaxed a
bit. And Ernst Grunewald saw how it could be done.
They weren’t bothering about him too much. He was just a
harmless, doddery old man, a relic from a bygone age. They
didn’t even mind him receiving books on the Third Reich, or
on modern-day Nazi organisations for that matter. He could
order copies of documents from libraries, not under his
real name of course.

He still wasn’t allowed access to the new mobile phones
which were just becoming available in Russia, though only
to the Party bigwigs, and it would probably take him ages
to work out how to use them anyway. But there was one thing
that worked in his favour and that was corruption.

The girl who had been assigned to attend to his daily
needs – which did not include sex, as it had with some of
her predecessors, because by now he was too old for that -
was young, ambitious, and still rather naïve though that
did not exclude her also possessing a certain calculating
intelligence. In addition security was becoming lax and
incompetent, like most things in Russia at that time. One
day when Sofia was in his room making his bed and generally
tidying up the place he beckoned her over to him and leaned
forward to whisper in her ear, grinning craftily.

“Listen, Sofia, I want you to do something for me. How
would you like to earn a lot of money? Enough to set
yourself up in a more comfortable apartment, with all the
Western goods you can afford?” They didn’t pay her very
well, he knew that.

He explained what he wanted her to do. “The letter must be
sent unopened or the deal is off. My friends will send you
the money. They’ll see you’re well rewarded for your
trouble.” He saw her eyes shine with a light as cold as the
smile that formed upon her elfin, doll-like, synthetically
pretty features.

His correspondence like the calls he made on his landline
was normally vetted, but it would be relatively easy for
Sofia to smuggle the letter out on her person. As soon as
she had gone he sat down and began to write it. It was
addressed to the secretary of a certain political
organisation based in Berlin.

“You will perhaps have heard of me; my name is Ernst
Ludwig Grunewald. During the Second World War I was in
charge of research into genetics and bacteriological and
chemical warfare at the Hollenstadt concentration camp.
“At the end of the war I was captured by the Russians and
forced to work for them on similar projects. I remain
their prisoner but have managed to smuggle this letter out.
Its content has vital implications for the future of the
German people, and indeed the entire Aryan race worldwide.
For their sakes, please therefore read the enclosed and
take the necessary action.”

Later Sofia returned and he handed the envelope to her
with an exhortation to be careful. Pocketing it, she
returned to her duties, moving about the flat with a
cheerless, mechanical kind of grace, and once finished left
without a word, closing the door behind her.

He collapsed back into his chair, eyes closed, breathing a
deep heartfelt sigh of relief.

Now Grunewald’s work was done. He couldn’t possibly
reward the girl for her trouble, but despite her resentment
she would keep quiet about the business because she faced
dismissal or worse if her employers got to know of it. And
he could always say that his “friends” had ignored the
message. Although they wouldn’t, he was sure. It was just a
pity that security was still tight enough to prevent its
receipt being acknowledged.
Not long afterwards Ernst Grunewald died peacefully at the
age of eighty-nine in his gilded prison, a reasonably fit
and healthy old man all of whose needs were provided for.
To the last he had avoided being brought to trial for his
crimes although he had not, by any standard, enjoyed full
liberty these last five decades. All in all the score was
even, he supposed. Meanwhile, the wheels he had set in
motion continued to revolve, gradually gathering speed,
propelling an unsuspecting world towards its destiny.
Towards Ragnarok.


“Come on, don’t let’s hang around,” scolded Elise Meinert.
Her husband, Karl, was still seated in the armchair in
their living room, in his slippers, doing the crossword. He
decided it could wait until later and levered himself
stiffly to his feet. “You are a bully, Elise, you know
that,” he complained. “You always were.”

“And you’re lazy. Come on, get your shoes on.” For them it
was a fairly typical conversation.

They were about to go into Hollenstadt for their
traditional Saturday morning excursion to the shops, plus
coffee and bread rolls at Horst’s café. It was one of the
simple pleasures which were all that remained once you were
too old to work or indeed engage in any strenuous physical
activity, and found the idea of long-distance travel
intimidating.

They had just taken their seats in the car when Elise
suddenly remembered she hadn’t locked up. She thrust her
shopping bag into her husband’s arms and fumbled in her
pocket for the key.

“Hah!” exclaimed Karl. “You try to push me into getting
everything ready, then you….” But there was a kind of
affection beneath his chiding, the sort which came from
over fifty years of marriage.

Elise locked the door and climbed into the now ancient VW
Beetle. Karl started the engine and they drove off along
the lonely road which wound through a range of wooded hills
towards Hollenstadt, travelling at a leisurely pace and
spending the time lost in reminiscences.

Neither of them regretted the course their lives had
taken, although in many ways things had been better before
reunification. They felt nostalgia for the order and
stability former East Germany had enjoyed under the
Communists. Like other “Ossies” Karl and Elise had found it
very hard to fit in at first; the two Germanies had grown
apart to some extent over forty-five years, and apart from
the bother of adjusting to a new currency, etc., they were
sometimes looked down on by westerners as thick-skulled,
unsophisticated rustics, narrow-minded and conservative in
their attitudes. Huh! The new Germany, dominated by the
prosperous west, that those people were so proud of wasn’t
what it was cracked up to be. Things weren’t done quite so
efficiently as in the old days; they regarded the
democratic system as corrupt and more a vehicle for the
egos of the various party leaders than for sound, or for
that matter representative, government. But they’d had
relatives in the West, and if a united Germany meant also
the unification of a fragmented family then it had to be
worth it. Now they could see their children, their
grandchildren, regularly and let their company relieve the
bleakness of one’s twilight years.

When they had grown too old to run the farm the property
had been split up and sold off. They kept the segment of it
which included the house, as well as rather unfortunately
bordering the camp. For a time they’d run the cottage as a
guesthouse, but although it was still known as Gasthof
Meinert it had never had many visitors and consequently
made little profit. The business had never been more than a
sideline, a way of providing a little extra financial
security for their old age. People didn’t like to linger
because of what lay just down the road.

That road turned back on itself, following the bend of a
river, until they could see the farm again, with to the
west the fifty acres of woodland between it and the former
concentration camp. Briefly the chimney of the crematorium
came into view then was swallowed up again by the trees,
looking like just another of them, which it always did
until you saw it from the right angle.

The camp. Elise remembered as a child seeing the place
being built, and wondering what it was for. They were
sometimes told it was a hospital, sometimes a prison, but
it didn’t take long to realise neither explanation
constituted the whole truth. She had shuddered at the look
of the place, the sinister black outline of the chimney
standing out starkly against the sky, and still did today.
She didn’t like to be near it and wished they’d pull it
down, but supposed they couldn’t. They had to remind
everyone of what had been done within those walls, in case
it all happened again.

Once she had been coming back from the village, where she
had gone to buy something for her mother – her father was
away fighting in Russia – along the lane which connected it
to the farm when a truck had gone past heading for the
camp. A section of the tarpaulin covering the metal
framework of the vehicle’s body was covered had come loose,
or been pulled away, and through the gap the face of a
little boy stared out, the wide frightened eyes gazing
fixedly at her in a silent appeal for help. She had been
unsettled and embarrassed by the incident and it still came
back to haunt her, even now.

She could not have done anything about it, of course, for
she was only a child. Her mother told her firmly not to
talk about it, for fear of the consequences. But if she had
been an adult then, what would she have done?

The fact was, it didn’t seem to her as if protesting would
have achieved any result other than her own probable
extinction. Maybe if you could be sure everyone else would
do it at the same time…but of course you couldn’t. And even
if they had been willing to, in the process of overthrowing
the ruthless dictatorship which ruled the country some of
them would probably have been killed, because soldiers would
panic and open fire indiscriminately on the crowd. And among
the dead might be oneself. Elise thought of herself as just a
simple farmer’s wife, but she was canny enough to understand
how the world, and dictatorships, worked. It was a simple
device, and very effective.

If people had known in the early days of the Third Reich
just what it would be responsible for later on, would they
have given it their support? That was an interesting
question. Perhaps not; but unfortunately, one could never
know for sure.

There was little point in dwelling on such matters, she
told herself. It was sixty years ago, in the first half of
what was now the last century – the last millennium – and
life had to go on.

What would happen to the land when they were gone? Sold
off, most probably. Their relatives, urban professionals
who enjoyed the city life and wouldn’t want to live way out
here in the sticks, had no interest in the property. Though
it would have been sad to leave it while they were still
alive, she didn’t care what ultimately became of it because
they would both have departed this world, joining all those
who had perished in the camp. German or Jewish, innocent or
guilty; whatever we are, whatever we have done or failed to
do and whether there is an excuse for it or not, we all end
up dead.

That was the thought which flashed briefly through her
mind as the massive 4 X 4 slammed side-on into their little
Beetle, sending it skidding off the road and into the wood
where it hit a tree with a force that smashed it like an
eggshell, killing her and Karl instantly and leaving the
ownership of Gasthof Meinert open to the highest bidder.


Wrapped up in a donkey jacket, Rolf Erdmann stood and
watched as caterpillar tracks and the massive tyres of
dumper trucks churned the ground into a morass of mud,
turning it into a First World War battlefield; a grey,
barren and featureless landscape from which the jaws of the
diggers were busy uprooting the few remaining trees, their
teeth biting deep into the ground beneath the roots and
then ripping them violently from it, to be tossed aside
like matchsticks. The peace and quiet of the little wood,
indeed the wood itself, was completely gone.

When the farm and the surrounding land had been put up for
sale on the tragic death of Karl and Elise Meinert,
Wachter’s consortium had faced little opposition in their
bid to buy the property. Not many saw any prospect of
developing it given that there was a concentration camp
next door. Certainly they wouldn’t want to live there.
Wachter’s actual stated plans for the site involved the
building of a research laboratory for the continuing
improvement of his company’s products; the work carried out
there would not of course involve experiments on human
subjects. All the same, the close proximity of the camp was
surely enough to make one uncomfortable. It was a crazy
plan, undoubtedly doomed to failure, and so people soon
dismissed the matter from their minds. When the project
appeared to have been abandoned – Wachter and his
colleagues having by then got what they wanted – it would
simply be assumed that the consortium had seen sense.
Idly Erdmann turned from watching the digging, and in the
near distance caught sight of the camp; a collection of
concrete blockhouses, brutally plain, from which jutted
skyward the black finger of the chimney. Yeah, well next
time we’re gonna finish the fucking job, he thought
savagely.

His thoughts returned to the letter Schwege had received
from Ernst Grunewald. None of them quite knew what to make
of it. It seemed to mention some kind of super-weapon which
a scientific expedition to Greenland, carried out under the
Third Reich, had discovered inside a mountain at a place
called Thule. That was the gist of it, anyway. What the
weapon was exactly Grunwald hadn’t quite made clear, though
he’d also mentioned evidence of an ancient, and
surprisingly advanced, civilization which he implied had
built the thing. At any rate it was meant to be something
that would benefit their cause enormously.

The deranged ramblings of an old man? Maybe. Or some sort
of ruse to expose them? It was a very clever one, if so.
The police didn’t have that much imagination. And they
wouldn’t try something which most people would probably be
highly sceptical about. So by his reckoning it had to be
true.

They knew Grunewald had existed, and been hunted for a
time as a “war criminal” by the Jews and their friends,
much of whose information on him had been obtained from a
dossier kept by the Simon Wiesenthal foundation. And that
he had worked as the camp’s doctor for the last year or so
of the war, after spending some time writing pamphlets on
genetics and the racial superiority of the Germanic
peoples. He also appeared to have been absent on
“research”, the nature of which was not disclosed, in the
early part of 1944.

The authorities probably dismissed all the stuff about
Thule as so nonsensical that anyone believing in it was at
worst a harmless nutter, not worth taking seriously despite
probably having extreme Nazi beliefs. After all, even
Hitler had been sceptical about it. Most of their movement
weren’t in the Society, as it happened, and tended to keep
themselves at a considerable distance from it. If this was
a ruse, it was therefore not being directed against the New
Vitality movement with the aim of discrediting it in the
eyes of the world.

The last tree was down now, and men in rubber gloves were
sifting through the mounds of earth piled up by the action
of the heavy machinery, or digging in the ground with
spades hoping that the blades of their implements would
encounter something else that was hard and metallic.

Suddenly he heard one of them cry out to him. “Herr
Erdmann! I think we may have found it!”

Erdmann spun round with a thrill of excitement. He saw
four of the men gathered round a mound of debris that one
of the excavators had earlier dumped down. A clod of earth
had fallen away to expose what looked like a hard impacted
chunk of soil, jutting out from the main mass, at which one
of the men was picking carefully. Something about its shape
– too solid, too regular – struck Erdmann at once.

He scrambled across to them, his heavy boots squelching in
the mud, and stood watching as a workman scraped away more
of the caked soil with his trowel, exposing a dark,
squarish object which gleamed dully in the sunlight. After
some struggling they managed to prise it free of the
surrounding earth and lay it on the ground.

It was a metal case, just as Grunewald had described,
light enough to have been carried in the hand; badly rusted
and still streaked with mud, but nonetheless intact. “Do
you think this is it?” a workman asked.

“It’s not likely there’s another lying around,” Erdmann
said. “All right, you and your mates can knock off work for
the day. I need to get this home so I can take a look at
it.”

That evening, back at his house in a comfortable suburb of
Munich, Erdmann placed the case, now cleaned of all
residual mud, on his desk and inserted a wrench between the
lock and the clasp, struggling fiercely for some minutes
against the rusted metal until he finally succeeded in
forcing it open. Fingers trembling with nervous
anticipation, he lifted the lid and looked down.

The case contained a bundle of papers on which extensive
notes had been typed out, the first sheet being headed “AN
ANALYSIS OF THE DISCOVERIES MADE AT THULE, FEBRUARY 1944”;
a small cardboard box; an old exercise book full of
handwritten notes and diagrams; a number of what looked
like specimen slides; and several test tubes full of
crystals of a grey-white substance.

He sat down and read through the notes, then opened the
box to be confronted with stacks of black-and-white
photographs, seemingly of good quality. He looked at each
one in turn, the feeling growing in him that this was
either a very clever, painstaking and elaborate hoax or the
most incredible archaeological find ever made. The sketches
and diagrams written in pencil within the exercise book,
filling most of its pages, produced the same reaction in
him.

As time wore on, he became more and more certain that it
was true. Why would anyone go to such lengths to perpetrate
a fraud like this? They would need an exceptionally vivid
imagination, plus a dedication that even the most
determined hoaxer couldn’t manage. The feeling was giddy,
intoxicating, unsettling. It was a hundred and one things.
Sometimes he was close to tears, sometimes it was so
overwhelming, frightening even that he had a sudden desire
to back out of all this.

But think of the opportunity he might be passing up. They
must have the courage to seize it and turn it into the
realization of everything they had ever dreamed of, their
apotheosis.

The test tubes and specimen slides didn’t mean much to
him. But they would to Wachter’s research chemists. It was
just a question of ensuring their silence until that
consideration didn’t matter any more. If they didn’t seem
likely to oblige an accident or two could always be
arranged.


Himself clad in the regulation white coat, Klaus Wachter
watched patiently as his chief scientist gently placed the
slide under the electron miscoscope and squinted through
its eyepiece, studying what he saw there with keen
concentration. With one hand he started to draw a complex
diagram on a notepad, attempting to reproduce what he was
seeing through the ‘scope. He seemed to find the task
difficult and gave up after a while, straightening up from
the machine to scratch his head in bafflement.

“So what is it?” Wachter asked, going over to look at the
drawing. He couldn’t make much sense of it.

“I – I’m not sure,” the scientist answered, his voice
hushed. “I…I think it’s…”

Impatiently, Wachter moved him aside and took a look
himself. He saw a structure of polygonal shapes, not unlike
the cells of a honeycomb, but with more than six sides and
each having a number of smaller, even more complicated
forms inside it. Asterisks; shapes like stars, or fishhooks,
or mathematical symbols; arrangements of horizontal
and vertical lines crossing over one another to form a
grid. The images they offered were bizarre and unfamiliar,
yet as if by way of compensation for this the number of
times each occurred was such as to form a symmetrical
pattern, a code perhaps. The whole construction was
fantastically complex yet somehow, in a way impossible to
describe, gave an impression of beautiful simplicity.
Wachter was more a businessman than a scientist. All the
same he knew what it, or bits of it, reminded him of.

“Those little shapes,” he murmured, fascinated.

“Yes,” said the scientist, “they’re the equivalent of the
structures within the cells of living matter. The asterisk
occurs more commonly than the others and I think it
represents some kind of nucleus. Only there are lots of
them in each cell, instead of only one.”

Wachter frowned. “I think it’s slightly bigger than the
rest.”

“It’s a control, to make sure the cells always develop in
the same way. Or for that matter in a different way, if
desired. A governing brain, relaying its instructions
through slave units which duplicate to some extent its own
functions.” The scientist took a deep breath. “Herr
Wachter, do you realise what this means?”

He saw that his boss’s eyes were shining and the grin on
his skull-like face inhumanly broad. “Yes,” the
industrialist whispered. “Yes, of course I do. You’re
saying the stuff is…” A sudden doubt struck him. “It is a
mineral, isn’t it?”

“Yes, a mineral. But the crystals were grown, and in a
similar way to living matter. It’s a mineral – but alive.”

For a while both men were silent, absorbing the
implications, from more than one point of view, of the
whole incredible discovery. “I, I always thought it was
possible,” the scientist said eventually. “A lot of people
did. But there was never any actual proof…where did you
come by the sample, may I ask? Who made it?”

Wachter smiled enigmatically. “That is my secret; a trade
secret. If people knew where to find the stuff, all our
rivals would be descending on the place and greedily
snatching it up so they could copy the process.”

The scientist was a little hurt. He was a good employee of
the company and he knew his job would be forfeit if he
disclosed details of the techniques it employed to another
concern. He was also puzzled, because Wachter had always
trusted him in the past. But then it was clear his employer
had some special reason for maintaining such tight secrecy.
Had he stolen the stuff from someone else?

“You think there is an application then?” he asked,
suppressing his misgivings.

“Undoubtedly. If minerals can be grown artificially in a
laboratory, in the same way that one breeds livestock or
cultivates bacteria, we won’t need to worry when the
natural supplies of them run out, when quarries are
exhausted. We need to run some further experiments. It
could be that from this sample alone we can grow whole
buildings, along with any number of different industrial
products. Then again, it’s possible the substance dies
after a while just as organic matter does, and can’t be
reanimated.”

Wachter seemed uncertain about something for a moment,
then came to a decision. “I think I’d better take charge of
the samples for the time being. And you must speak to noone,
no-one at all do you understand, about them. Is that
clear?”

The scientist was taken aback. “Y-yes, Herr Wachter,
but..surely the samples will be safest here? And don’t we
want to copy and develop the process as quickly as
possible? To get a patent?”

“It’s my decision,” Wachter snapped, taking the sample and
putting it with the others, which the scientist had placed
in a cellophane sleeve within a plastic box, along with the
test tubes. “I’m sorry if you don’t like it. Now remember
what I said about keeping this quiet, or you’ll need to
look for another job. Understand?”

“Yes of course, Herr Wachter,” the scientist said flatly.

“Good.” Wachter tucked the box under his arm and walked
off, leaving the man staring after him in total
bewilderment.

It probably wouldn’t be necessary to kill him, Wachter
decided. For something like this you needed proof, or you’d
be regarded with at best suspicion and at worst
incredulity. And as long as Wachter had the box, and the
other items from Thule, in his possession the scientist
wouldn’t have any. To break into his house and steal it
would be difficult, given that the building was surrounded
by high walls with CCTV cameras covering every square inch
of its surroundings, and bristled with all manner of stateof-
the-art burglar alarms and sensors, and that the grounds
were patrolled by tough ex-convicts with Dobermann and
Alsatian guard dogs; unless you had the kind of connections
which the scientist obviously didn’t.

Back in his office, Wachter dialled a number in South
America.

A phone rang on the desk in the combined study and living
room of a comfortably furnished farmhouse on the border of
Brazil and Paraguay, where a white-haired man in slacks and
a short-sleeved cotton shirt sat in a cane chair sipping at
his Tia Maria, his eyes fixed on the television screen
before him, which at the moment showed a clip from a blackand-
white film of Jews being herded into the convoy of
trucks which waited to take them to their final
destination, encouraged by the whips, fists or rifle butts
of the SS guards. Once a woman ran forward and threw a
bucket of something over one of them, to the applause of
the soldiers.

The man rose from the chair and strode to the phone on the coffee table in the corner. “Ja? Klaus, is that you?”

Wachter told him the results of the analysis. “I don’t
know what possible use it could be to us. But it means
there are other things there, things just as fantastic:
things we can use. There must be. We have to get back to
Thule right away.”

“I can leave you to see to it?”

“It shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Then I’ll say goodbye now, Klaus. But I’ll be speaking to
you again soon. We must lose no time over this.”
“Very good, Heinrich.”

The old man put the phone down and gazed out through the
glass sliding door which looked onto the patio at the
brightly-coloured birds flitting among the trees in the
garden. He crossed to his desk, on which lay an MP5 Heckler
& Koch sniper rifle, kept permanently loaded in case one
day the Jews should come for him. He opened a window,
leaned out through it with the gun in his hands, butt
cuddled against his shoulder, and trained it on one of the
birds, which had settled on a branch to preen itself. He
squinted through the weapon’s sights, moved it a fraction
to the left, and once the target was squarely within the
cross-hairs squeezed the trigger. He heard the crack as it
fired, felt the gun jerk in his grasp, and smiled as the
bird dropped from its perch without a sound.

He winced as a sudden twinge of pain shot through him.
Moving stiffly and with some discomfort he returned to the
desk, pulled out a drawer and took from it a plastic case
containing a hypodermic needle.

The serum took effect, the pain dulled and faded. He
settled down again to watch the film, glass in hand. It
showed dozens of naked men, women and children filing into
the gas chambers, their faces at best puzzled, slightly
apprehensive maybe, at worst downright scared. Then cut to
the bodies, which the camp guards were shovelling like shit
into a huge pile ready for burning.

He raised his Tia in salute to the architects of the Final
Solution. Here’s to the Fourth Reich, he thought with a
relish no less intense for being outwardly invisible to an
observer (he had never been a man to show much emotion,
which in his job had been a considerable asset). This time
may our achievement really last for a thousand years.

He thought of all Wachter had told him about Thule. Yes;
this time, as Rolf had said, they were going to finish the
job.




Part Two

The Present




















ONE
David Richards sat curled up in a ball against one wall of the little room where they had imprisoned him, his wrists tied to the pipe which ran along the base of it.

They had beaten him up badly. Fortunately he was young, able reasonably to withstand the vicious punches and kicks. He was bruised and aching all over but it didn’t feel like anything was actually broken. Not that it would do him the slightest good if he didn’t get out of this somehow, and soon.

Through the wall he could hear them talking in the next room, their voices muffled by several feet of brickwork; he wasn’t sure whether he could actually make out what they were saying or his fevered imagination was translating the babble into what he fearfully expected. “What shall we do with him?”
“Kill him, of course. He knows too much, doesn’t he? We can’t let him go, not now.”

“You’re right. We’ll have to get him out of here while it’s dark, though.” By then “he” might be a body, a dead body. “There’s a patch of waste ground down by the canal. Or we could just dump him in the water, that’d be better.”
“Yeah. It’s far enough away from here.”
“About ten o’clock, let’s say?”

“That’d be fine.” They didn’t care whether he could hear them or not, how he’d feel if he did. Their kind just didn’t bother about such things.

He was certain that the voices now died away; they had reached a conclusion of some sort. He couldn’t tell whether “ten o’clock”, if that was what they’d said, was the time he would die, the time they would dispose of the body, or both. Well, he wasn’t going to just sit here morbidly wondering which, if he could help it. But what the hell could he do?

Had it been like this for his relatives in Poland sixty or more years ago, when the family had been called Vishinsky and not Richards? Helpless prisoners in concentration camps, or hiding in cellars from the same kind of monster as the people who were holding him now, quivering at the thump of heavy jackboots on the floor above…The thought of them and of the courage many had shown, the determination not to give in to despair and let themselves be taken, now strengthened him.

He shouldn’t have to be in this situation. All this kind of thing should have ended with the war, forty years before he had been born. Why must his people continue to suffer? Why must any Jew, anywhere, have to live in fear of what the future might bring?

I needn’t have done this, he told himself. I could have left it to someone else. But I had to find out what they were up to. Perhaps I was foolish. He thought of his parents, and a pang of anguish stabbed through him like a knife in his guts. He’d let them down.
I have to get out of it for their sake.

He thought of them flanking him proudly at his Bar-Mitzvah, listening with rapt attention as he read with authority from the sacred texts, telling him afterwards how splendid he’d been.

He tried to think what it could have been that had betrayed him. Maybe at some point he had said the wrong thing, expressing undue admiration for a group or person they didn’t like, without realising it. Maybe he had gazed at the synagogue which stood at the end of the street with too much interest. Maybe he’d left something disturbed when prowling round the house looking for clues. Maybe to them he just sent out the wrong vibes. They had seemed to accept him at first, when he’d rung up and inquired about membership, pretending to be a British National Front activist; saying how much he liked their policies and yearned like them to roll back the tide of corruption, immorality and racial bastardization which was sweeping Europe. He looked reasonably Anglo-Saxon, despite his background, and spoke without the accent some British Jews had, so he didn’t think they’d have any cause to be suspicious.

In a bid to get inside their heads he’d spent hours laughing and drinking with them, everyone perfectly at ease, chatting at length whenever it was safe to do so about the group’s plans (his German was fluent, eliminating any communication problems). He’d spent a lot of time at Erdmann’s place, ended up staying the night on one or two occasions. And during that time he’d listened, picked up odd bits of chatter, stolen glances at things they’d left lying around when none of them were looking. Hovered at keyholes, planted one or two bugs. Until, for whatever reason, they had become suspicious of him. And pretended to go out, leaving him alone in the place or so he thought. Only a couple of them had in fact stayed behind, carefully concealed somewhere, to see what he’d do. The others at some point managed to sneak back in without him realising. He guessed that was what had happened, anyway.

He’d wandered around for a bit in search of more clues, and not found any because having begun to suspect him they were taking extra care. He decided it was time to call the Institute on his mobile, and started to tell them all he’d learned; then suddenly and frighteningly Erdmann had sprung into action, bursting in and rushing at him, grabbing the phone and hurling it into a corner where it broke, before seizing his shirt collar in both hands and shaking him violently. “All right you little bastard! Who are you and who are you working for? Fucking well answer or we’ll kick your fucking head in!”

“You Nazi swine!” David shouted, losing his nerve and finally giving himself away. He struggled to break free, but Erdmann shouted for help and the others ran in and overpowered him, wrestling him to the ground.

What he had found out before that happened was monstrous. Parts of it were also incredible. But they seemed perfectly serious about it, and David knew he’d stumbled on something big. He knew roughly what they were planning to do. And he’d often heard them mention someone called Heinrich who seemed to be the ultimate boss of their outfit. That might be a vital lead.

The point was to get out of here and tell someone. But that at the moment was more easily said than done.

The voices had started up again. “We must make sure there’s nothing left which could prove he was here.”
“Don’t worry, it’ll be done. We’ll torch the place if we have to.”
“With him in it?”
“Why not? Gets rid of all the evidence in one go. We’ll see.”

David had been working at his bonds, on and off, for some time now. Escapology was one of the first things he had been taught at the Institute: how to contract your wrist muscles when you were tied up, so they’d relax later on and you could slip out whenever you wanted. However, whether you could pull this off depended on how well they’d done it. These ropes had been tied with a savage tightness which caused them to bite deep into his flesh, leaving he was sure unsightly red weals on his wrists. He’d worry about the aesthetics of it later, once he managed to escape from here. If he did. It was taking time, that was the trouble; part of the problem was he had to be careful not to make too much noise. But gradually, one wrist was coming free. The raw, red flesh was sore and stinging where the skin had rubbed off, and he was sure he could feel a warm liquid running from it as he shifted about. That was good, he thought ruthlessly, because the blood would help it to slip out.

He didn’t suppose they’d look in from time to time to check on him. They weren’t the sort to be solicitous about the welfare of their enemies. To them he was just a sack of meat; soon to be dead meat. And a Jew, of course.

They wouldn’t expect him to have got free. And that gave him an advantage.

He wondered how much time had passed since he’d been caught. Because of the position he was in he wasn’t able to consult his watch. But a fair amount of light was still entering the room.

He almost cried out in triumph - not a sensible thing to do, of course – as the ropes finally slackened, hanging down limply. He shook them off, ripped the tape from his mouth and then undid the cords around his ankles.

A little stiffly, he stood up and took stock of his surroundings. He’d heard them lock the door as an added precaution on leaving the room, so there was no escape that way. They hadn’t bothered, though, about the little window high up in the wall opposite him, fastened by a hinged arm with notches in it that fitted over a little stub of metal on the window sill. He padded softly over to it, a step at a time, and reached up. Gently he lifted the arm off its catch and pushed on it. The window swung up and out to its full extent, and he peered through the opening. He could just see the top of a wooden fence, and beyond it the back of the row of houses that ran parallel to this one.

The window was designed more to let in a little light than as a means of access or exit. This was going to be awkward. If it proved too big to permit the passage of a human body, he’d have to try and run past them, relying on speed and willpower alone, assuming he could get the door open in the first place.
Thank God they were on the ground floor.

He rested both hands on the ledge, bent his knees, paused to gather his energies, and then finally jumped up. His knees scraped on the ledge, bruising them painfully, then almost slipped from it. He wriggled forward to give himself greater margin in which to manouevre.

Resting his hands on the ledge to steady himself, he listened nervously for any sound of voices or movement from next door. For the moment there was none.

He wriggled out head first through the narrow space, inch by inch, into the fresh air. His head and torso dipped as his centre of gravity moved beyond the window ledge and he began to slide forward. He twisted his body, bringing his hands up in an attempt to protect the back and crown of his head. The drop to the strip of concrete which ran round the little back garden was enough to hurt. He landed more or less on his side, with a jarring impact that left him briefly breathless and sent a stab of pain through his bones. He hit his head too, though fortunately it was only a glancing blow. As he lay there, winded and stunned, he thought he could hear the voices again, raised in alarm. He must have made some sound as he struggled through the little window and fell to the concrete, for they obviously knew he’d escaped.

Fear brought him back to full consciousness. He sprang to his feet and glanced round desperately.
He heard the rush of movement as they ran for the back door. In moments they’d be in the garden.
Over the fence. It was the quickest and also the only way out.

He stepped back a few paces, paused to brace himself and then sprinted forward, the burst of energy enabling him to convert his run into a jump of about a foot or so off the ground, with his arm thrust upwards. His fingers touched the top of the fence - just - and locked round it. He swung the other arm up and grabbed for a hold.

He pushed down with the palms of his hands and heaved, levering himself up. Scrambling over the top of the fence, he dropped straight down to land squarely on the soles of his feet, slightly shaken by the impact.

If they chose to follow him by the same route that he’d escaped, they’d catch him within seconds. Unless he moved very, very fast.

He took off like a rocket, along the stretch of muddy waste ground between the houses towards the main road. He was quite unaware of them clambering over the fence and hurtling after him screaming abuse at the top of their voices, only a few yards behind. He just didn’t have the time to think about things like that.
Once he reached the road, he would be safe. Presumably.

They had to stop him before he got there. They might well have blown things already, but if so it meant they had nothing to lose. Especially given what he knew.

If not the road, then the shopping district on the other side. They wouldn’t be able to do anything there, it’d be too public.
They were gaining on him fast.

If he paused at the road they might catch him. Or would they not go that far, afraid of drawing attention to what was happening? He couldn’t be sure, so he had to keep going, his one thought to reach the other side of the road.

He couldn’t stop to listen for oncoming traffic. So he ran across the road without thinking; he didn’t see or hear the car as it came hurtling round the corner and slammed into him, the impact punching him ten feet through the air. As its force dissipated he landed heavily on the tarmac surface, while the Opel screeched to a halt a few yards away with one of its front wheels on the pavement.

His pursuers saw him hit the ground, arms and legs splaying out in a manner they afterwards found amusing, and the driver of the car stop his vehicle and jump out in horror. As one they skidded to a halt, turned round and ran back towards the house, anxious to be away before anyone saw their faces. With any luck the Jew was dead; it was just a pity they couldn’t stop to make sure.

Meanwhile David Richards was lying very still in the middle of the road, while the driver of the Opel gabbled frantically into his mobile. Another car came along from the opposite direction, the man at the wheel seeing the body just in time to stop before he hit it. Several people who had been strolling along not far away and heard the general commotion came running up to see if there was anything they could do; one went and stood in the road to wave down oncoming traffic.

The pool of blood around the young man was gradually spreading. As the people crowded round him, moved by pity and horror, they saw him start to stir, eyelids flickering. His jaws began working, trying to form words.

A woman crouched down beside him. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly. “The police are on the way, and an ambulance. It’s all right.”

He seemed not to hear her, indeed to be only vaguely aware of her presence. His eyelids fluttered once more, then closed for the last time. With one final effort he managed to speak, though the words came out as a thick, guttural croak which was barely intelligible.

“Thule,” he gasped desperately, feeling the blackness closing in on his mind. “Thule......”

HEADQUARTERS OF INTERNATIONAL PETROLEUM LIMITED, HAMMERSMITH, LONDON
Returning to her office from her lunch break, Caroline Kent glanced at her diary and at the piles of paperwork spread out on the desk and took a long, hard, deep breath.

This was going to take ages. Unless she was lucky enough not to have any interruptions, she stood no chance of finishing it by the end of the working day, which for her usually meant between five and five-thirty. Like everyone else, she preferred five but realised it wasn’t always going to be possible. Normally she managed to meet that deadline by working at the brisk, efficient pace characteristic of her, which her colleagues – even the ones who didn’t like her - always admired, even envied (they often found themselves having to work late in consequence of not possessing her apparently limitless, almost superhuman reserves of energy). But even she couldn’t work miracles.

In fact, even without the interruptions midnight was a generous estimate. This stuff looked as if it would need lots of overtime, over a period of several days, to shift. When as the afternoon drew on she wanted more than anything else to be able to go home and relax in front of the telly with her cat, after a day which could be strenuous at the best of times. When there were also meetings with other senior executives, and a talk to give about her work to graduates (and prospective employees of the company) at Imperial College this coming Thursday.

She’d only just got back from a stint at the Rotterdam refinery, checking the anti-terrorist procedures there were adequate and listening to complaints from indignant local residents about foul smells and emissions of gas from the complex, unforeseen by-products of the processes going on there, which had apparently, caused the death of someone’s pet dog. The Dutch were a tolerant people but even they were starting to lose it these days. Protests had been mounted at the refinery gates and these were becoming more and more violent; it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt. The engineers and technicians at the refinery claimed they had things under control, and an expert had examined the body of the dead dog, deciding its demise could not have been due to the kind of gas given off as a side-effect of the refining process. But deaths of pets and unexplained illnesses among humans were continuing and being blamed on the company. Handicapped by not being herself a scientist, she didn’t know which side to take but promised that if a second opinion could prove the company was responsible she would institute a further review of practices at the plant as well as personally ensure that everyone affected was fully compensated. The local authority were informed that unless the problem were solved the refinery, an important source of wealth and employment for the region, would be closed down out of concern for the safety of its employees and the public. The bluff worked. A prominent councillor resigned his seat and a patch of waste ground near the refinery was cordoned off so that Health and Safety workers in protective clothing could go over it. Shortly afterwards the company of which the councillor was a director was prosecuted for illegally dumping toxic substances there. Caroline’s suspicions were confirmed.

Only a day before touching down in Holland she had been in Indonesia, attempting to calm angry tribesmen who claimed representatives of the company had been intimidating them into agreeing to the construction of a pipeline across their land. The meeting started to get out of hand and at one point she was seriously afraid the tribesmen were going to take her and the other company reps hostage, threatening to kill them if their grievances were not met. Something similar had happened to a group of Western tourists a few years before and the situation was only resolved after a bloody battle with government troops, which left several of the hostages and all but one of their captors dead. It wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted. In the end, she managed to convince them that the pipeline, construction of which was scheduled to begin in a year’s time, simply had to go ahead but could be rerouted, at IPL’s expense, so that they’d only have to give up a small part of their territory. The company was angry at her committing them to such a move but she knew there wasn’t any option if they were to remain on good terms with the locals. The tribespeople still weren’t very happy as it was.

Things seemed to have calmed down for the moment, but she knew less scrupulous employees of the company would try to hound the Indians into giving up the land so they could keep to the original scheme. The trouble was, unless she kept popping back there every few days to keep an eye on things, which was simply impossible, there was no sure way of prevening this. They’d be on their best behaviour all the time she was prowling around and then start wrecking the natives’ crops and burning their houses the moment she was gone.

And before that, she’d been freezing her tits off in Alaska where the company’s right to drill was being contested by a Greenpeace, who claimed the area was protected and IPL were in violation of a United Nations accord. A loophole in the legislation enabled them to go on working at the site until specifically told to stop, which no-one had any authority to do. Unfortunately the international authorities were for some reason dithering over the matter, and while they dithered protestors got hurt in clashes with security guards.

IPL America were quite happy to let her handle it on her own, her reputation as a fixer having spread far and wide with consequences she hadn’t banked on and wasn’t entirely sure she could deal with. She told the UN official deputed to liaise with her, and the spokesperson for the protestors, that she would respect any decision that drilling should be stopped but until some decision, whatever it might be, was made operations would continue; although she, along with local police, would look into any allegations of brutality she couldn’t guarantee there would not be any further unpleasant incidents. The protestors started to picket the UN instead, making a nuisance of themselves. The tactic worked, for she’d just received notification from the organization that an international court was being convened in a week’s time to finally establish the legality or otherwise of the company’s claim.

And I don’t care what they decide, she told herself, as long as it settles the matter once and for all.

While suffering, she was sure, from jetlag a weary Caroline now now had to complete reports on all three cases, the management being anxious to demonstrate to itself and its personnel that it had not been guilty of any malpractice; or, if it had, said wrongdoing had been suitably atoned for. The three reports had to be before her boss, Marcus Hennig, by the end of the week – it was now Wednesday – along with two others, on recruitment figures for the past year and a recent conference she had organized on Equality and Diversity in the Oil Industry. She knew if they weren’t, Hennig would not be a happy bunny.

She often wished she had not taken on both the job of INternational Operations Supervisor (2) and that of Head of Personnel and Public Relations. The problem was that as a troubleshooter you could be unemployed for long periods, should nothing particularly troublesome be going on anywhere in the world, so she had to have a regular job here at HQ as well. Caroline had been promoted to her current position when it fell suddenly vacant on the death of its then holder, and had since tried to get the two responsibilities, Personnel and PR, separated in order to make things easier for her. She’d like to get her hands on the idiot who decided it would be a bright idea to amalgamate them in the first place, and had once given voice to that sentiment in public only to discover that the “idiot” was in fact Hennig himself, resulting in some embarrassment when it was realised he’d heard what she’d said.

Unfortunately, her colleagues seemed to think it administratively more economical to have one person doing the same two jobs, and since she naturally did her best to make a success of them, generally achieving this aim, no-one saw any need for a change to the status quo. After initially, and rather foolishly she had to admit, thinking it would be cool to show she could juggle both tasks with effortless ease, Caroline had begun to have second thoughts but no-one seemed to respond to her frequent hints that she needed a break, and she now found herself well and truly trapped.

Again she contemplated the mass of paperwork: the reports to be read, the forms to be filled in, the letters to be signed. “Shit,” she said simply.

Ah well, she told herself, better get down to it, and maybe finish the job tonight if you’re lucky. She’d stay until eight, the latest at which Security were happy for people to be in the building, if it seemed likely to achieve that objective. She glanced at her watch; a quarter to three. Might just do it.

There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” she said, making an attempt to sound cheerful.
In came George Watson-Dove, head of Admin. She sighed inwardly.
“Good afternoon, George,” she smiled with exaggerated politeness. “What can I do for you?”

“Need a list of all the people who went to the last recruitment conference, and their expenses. Also a breakdown of the results from all the job interviews Human Resources have done in the last six months.” He called Personnel “Human Resources” because he knew it annoyed her. She had often expressed the view that since “Personnel” was neutral as far as race or gender was concerned there was nothing to be gained from the point of view of equality by altering the wording, especially when it meant expensively replacing all the company’s letterheads and a lot of its publicity material. So there had been no change, which set IPL apart from most other people nowadays. It was a little concession Hennig had granted her.
“Do you now,” she said dubiously. “When by?”

“By tomorrow morning, if that’s alright. Just leave it on my desk.” With a nod he made to leave.
“Er, just a minute,” she called out as he reached the door. He turned to face her, his eyebrows raised quizzically.
“George, I don’t really have the time to….” She gestured at the stacks of paper taking up most of the desk. “As you can see, I’m already a little pressed.”
“Well, it is pretty important,” he said reproachfully.

Her blue eyes narrowed, concentrating their gaze like a magnifying glass focusing the sun’s glare into a burning ray. Like others before him Watson-Dove quailed, then met the assault by simply turning away; the tactic was effective, and also an unspoken message to the other that the check had been mated. He appeared to be gazing casually out the window.

“I assure you I’m well aware of where my responsibilities lie,” she said coldly. “But I think you could handle this one yourself.” It was an area where the two departments overlapped, something Watson-Dove frequently took advantage of.

“Ah, well you see I’m a little pressed for time,” he grinned, trying to pretend this was light-hearted ribbing rather than spiteful sarcasm. “Several of my lot are off sick, and I’ve got to sort out one or two things with Marcus; could take a while.”

It occurred to her that she could check whether this was true, and she’d half a mind to, but the trouble was it would divert her from the all-important task of doing those reports. As Watson-Dove was well aware.

I don’t like doing overtime either, she muttered beneath her breath. But we all have to accept our share of the burden. Unless of course we’re George Watson-bloody-Dove.

She took a deep breath. “George, I really can’t accept – “
“Hang on, I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, and went out closing the door behind him.

Caroline knew very well he wouldn’t return unless it was to ask if she’d done what he wanted. In my own time, she thought fiercely, then realised with a sigh that that wasn’t good enough. The report did have to be done some time, for all she knew by the deadline Watson-Dove had specified, and if it wasn’t somebody would complain. Hennig would take the view that the importance of getting business done came before one’s personal sensibilities.
She could of course take it home with her. But after having worked till eight…….

She went into the outer office and told Sheila, her secretary, that she didn’t want any calls put through to her unless it was absolutely urgent. Unfortunately, she knew, there were striking variations in people’s definitions of what constituted “absolutely urgent”.

When Watson-Bastard wants that report he can jolly well come and get it, she told herself. In the meantime, let’s just see how it goes.

INCIDENT ROOM, HEADQUARTERS OF THE FEDERAL CRIMINAL POLICE (BUNDESKRIMINALAMT), BERLIN
“He died in the ambulance,” DS Astrid Lundt announced gravely. “The medics say he had several broken ribs and one of them was puncturing a lung. A lot of bleeding, both inside and outside.”

Inspector Hans Faltermeyer stroked his bottom lip with his forefinger, face grave. Finally he nodded. “Thanks, Astrid.”

Nodding back, Lundt took her seat at the table. She was blonde, getting on for six feet tall and big-boned, a rather intimidating apparition who seemed to have little difficulty in dealing with even the most hardened yobs, and thus an asset at a time when Germany was suffering like everyone else – though maybe not as severely as Britain, for example - from a certain increase in anti-social behaviour.

“So what do we know about the circumstances?” he asked the third and final member of his team, Sergeant Karl-Heinz Wegen.

“Very little, except that several witnesses say they saw a group of people running after him, but they don’t know who they could have been. They stopped, turned round and ran off when they saw him knocked down.”
“And no idea who the poor guy was?”
“None at all. There was no wallet or other ID on him. Perhaps the people he was running from took it.”

The phone rang and Lundt, who was nearest, picked it up. “Hello, Inspector Faltermeyer’s office.”
“This is obviously more than a simple road traffic accident,” said Faltermeyer to Wegen.
“Misadventure at best,” the sergeant agreed. Whether it might be something worse was what they had now to establish.
“The bunch who were chasing him didn’t stop to help when they saw what had happened,” Faltermeyer reminded him. “I think we might have to start asking what it might be at worst.”
Astrid Lundt was going “ah-hah”, nodding and scribbling down notes on a book of post-its.
“And he managed to say something before he died?” went on the Inspector.

“Yes,” said Wenge. “It sounded like “Thule”. Too-lay. What it means I’ve no idea.”
“I’ve a feeling I should know,” Faltermeyer said thoughtfully. He resumed stroking his lip, at the same time gazing intently out of the window.

Lundt put down the phone. “That was the hospital. They say there’s evidence someone had tied him up; marks on the wrists and ankles.”
All three looked at one another.

“That makes it manslaughter at least,” Lundt offered. Some silly game that had gone tragically wrong...perhaps.
“Right,” agreed Faltermeyer. “Now does the word “Thule” mean anything to anyone? Astrid?”
Lundt pursed her lips and thought. “No,” she said eventually.
“Sure?” he persisted. She hadn’t quite sounded it.
“It does sound vaguely familiar. I just can’t think where I’ve heard it before.”

The inspector looked at Wegen, who shrugged. He collected his thoughts. “Two things. Karl-Heinz: we need to know who the dead man was.” A statement would be broadcast on tonight’s news, including a description of the victim, together with an appeal for help, which hopefully would produce something. “You’ll be on the end of the hotline. I’ll handle the press if they start asking any questions.”

“I’ll get the notices sent out. What about the post-mortem?”
“I’ll see to that. Which mortuary is he at, Astrid, Bergenstrasse?” Lundt nodded.
“And we must find out who or what “Thule” is. Astrid, try the computer.”

The two of them left to carry out their respective tasks, leaving Faltermeyer alone in the room. Before ringing the mortuary, he stood for a moment looking out of the window again, overcome by a feeling he couldn’t quite put into words.
He wasn’t quite sure why. But somehow, he had a bad feeling about this case.


TWO
Caroline was just finishing typing out the last page of her report on the Rotterdam assignment when someone knocked on the door again. She shouted out for them to enter, hoping desperately they weren’t planning on staying long.

She had decided to get Watson-Dove’s business out of the way first, all the better to complete the other outstanding tasks before the evening was out. But to offset that she had staged a little rebellion and decided not to work late after all. Maybe it had been a mistake. She’d revised her plans and set herself a new deadline of Friday evening – tonight.

Her wish that she should receive no interruptions had unfortunately not been granted. From time to time people came along on important business which meant they couldn’t be turned away; needing her signature on a letter, her opinion on some crucial administrative matter, her approval for some statement being released to the press. With all that, and the meetings, which as always ended up taking much longer than anticipated, she had so far only managed to complete one of the five vital tasks. And one or two more things had come up to demand her attention, believe it or not. The deadline would have to be changed yet again. To add to her frustration she didn’t think she’d performed of her best at the talk yesterday; her mind had been too taken up with the problem of breaking the backlog, and she must have come over as edgy and unsure of herself, with annoyed her both in a personal way and because she felt she’d let down the company.

As for the meetings..well, yesterday morning’s hadn’t been too bad, but today’s was one she’d much rather forget. They had moaned at her because although she had yet to produce a final analysis of the current recruitment situation the figures seemed to be down on last year’s, despite her insisting there could be any number of reasons for that, including a sufficient number of individuals happening to have made one decision rather than another, and it wasn’t her department’s fault. “Yes, but we want them to join this company and not any other,” Hennig had reminded her, as if she had made no effort to explain the reasons why they hadn’t.

“Tell you what,” said one executive, “why don’t we just put Caroline on all the posters, preferably not wearing very much? That’ll solve the problem.”

Caroline looked at him dubiously. “Actually I’m not sure that doesn’t count as sexual harassment.”
“We could have her sitting on an oil drum – “

“John, please,” said Hennig, raising an admonitory finger, while clearly enjoying the look on Caroline’s face.
“Oh come on,” the executive smiled. “She loves it really.” The Head of Personnel made no comment.

It had been said that Caroline was the best recruiting agent for the company, that all they had to do was to milk her stunning blonde looks and fabulous figure for all it was worth, and that had proved nearer the truth than she cared to admit. After one particularly vigorous recruitment campaign, in which as Head of Personnel her face had featured prominently on much of the publicity, there had been a massive influx of job applicants, necessitating a crash programme of training sessions, until it was realised that all most of them wanted to do was to get into bed with her. The female ones as well, most probably; it wouldn’t have been surprising if she had had such an effect on otherwise heterosexual women.

At other times she might have been secretly pleased at the compliment to her looks, and contented herself with a quizzical raising of the eyebrows, laughing the remark off or pretending she didn’t know what the speaker was talking about. After all, she liked to think she could handle such things. As it was, she wasn’t in the mood.

Her visitor was Chris Barrett, her deputy at Personnel and occasional companion on her troubleshooting missions. “Just called to say goodbye,” he smiled. “I’m off now.”
She stared at him, completely bewildered. “Off? Off where?”

He stared back at her. “You know. To the Canaries. I told you ages ago. It should be in the Diary.”
“Oh,” she said, frowning. Briefly she put a hand to her head.
Chris took a step or two towards her. “Are you alright?” he asked, concerned.
“Just a little tired,” she confessed.

“Maybe you need a break too. You could always come with me – oh, I suppose it’s a bit late now.”
Caroline was staring into space, her mouth open, as if shocked by her forgetfulness. As indeed she was. The two of them had been colleagues for a long time and each usually knew what the other were doing. And it was her business to have known, if her departments were to be run properly.

“Do you want me to..“ He meant stay to help her, and would have done as well. He’d be a good husband, she thought. His invitation for her to join him on his holiday had been entirely Platonic in motive, but….

“No, it really doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. It would be unkind to expect him to forsake sunny Tenerife and Gran Canaria for gloomy autumn evenings working late in a London office block. “Honest.”
“But if things really are difficult – “

“Chris, shut up,” she snapped, worried she was going to change her mind. He looked a little miffed, then softened, not wishing there to be an edge to their parting. “Well, goodbye anyway,” he said. They pecked each other on the cheek. “Take care,” he smiled, and was gone.

The phone rang. “Natasha’s here with that brochure you were asking about,” Sheila said. “Are you free?”
“Uh-huh. Send her in.”

Natasha Wicksteed, a graphic designer by training, worked in Publicity and was responsible for producing a lot of the material by which the company advertised itself to the world. She was responsible also to Caroline, by virtue of the latter’s being Head of Personnel and also of Publicity’s work overlapping like a Venn diagram with that of PR. In appearance the two of them were exactly the opposite; Caroline was slim, blonde, fairly tall and with apparently flawless skin and Natasha short, dumpy, plump-faced, freckled, mousy-haired and with glasses. It was often unkindly suggested that this was why the two were so often at loggerheads with one another. That, in fact, had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Nor was there such antipathy between them as sometimes seemed the case.

Whatever else she might be Natasha, like many of the science-fiction fans to whose ranks she belonged, was highly intelligent. Unfortunately, she was also the sort of person to whom accidents seemed to happen. As a result, she tended to annoy Hennig and the other senior executives – not the sort of thing which helped your future career prospects. Fortunately Caroline had had the sense to see that with Natasha it was a case of organized chaos, not simply chaos; be patient with her, recognize and nurture her not inconsiderable talents, and she would be an asset. And rather than dislike her Caroline found it rather sweet that Natasha was constantly in a blue funk worrying that she, Caroline, was going to sack her, when in fact there was not the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort (whenever she tried to calm the girl’s fears, it had not the slightest effect).

One more than one occasion it had been Caroline who had defended her from dismissal, against the insistence of an influential exec who happened to have conceived a genuine and unwarranted dislike for her at a time when the company was being rather ruthless about “restructuring”. Those who thought of her as a heartless bitch concerned only with getting results would do well to remember that.

Far from the deadly enemies of in-house mythology, the two women often enjoyed a drink together and might with justification be regarded as friends. All the same, there were times when Natasha tried her superior’s patience.

She entered smiling nervously, coming to stand before Caroline’s desk rather like a junior schoolgirl summoned before the headmistress. She was clutching a glossy soft-backed brochure as if afraid the slightest relaxation of her grip would cause it to blow away. “I’ve, er, I’ve had the report on renewables back from the printers,” she announced.

“I assume you have, because you’ve got it right there in your hand,” Caroline said pleasantly. “All right, let’s have a butcher’s.”

“Th-the only thing is, I’m afraid there’s w-w-one or two things wrong with it,” Natasha informed her apologetically. “I’m sorry.”

Caroline frowned. “Not your fault, I trust,” she muttered, before realising it was the wrong thing to say. “Well let’s take a look anyway.”

Natasha had designed it competently, indeed imaginatively; the arrangement and juxtaposition of the different sections of the text was neat and economical, the overall effect upon the eye highly pleasing, and the graphics bold and colourful yet also thought-provoking, in line with Caroline’s belief that renewable energy, into which the company at her behest was trying to branch, should be taken seriously. There was, as Natasha had said, only one thing wrong with it.

As Caroline was scanning it something caught her eye and she frowned in distaste. She produced a thick black marker pen and ringed it. As she read on her frown grew deeper and the corrections more numerous. Finally she gave up in disgust and slapped the brochure down on her desk, looking up at Natasha in indignant amazement. “The spelling’s awful. What the hell are they playing at? You did check it before you sent it off?”
“Yes, yes, of course I did,” squeaked Natasha. “All they had to do was…well, print it.”

Caroline thought she saw what had happened. The printers were so amateurish that they genuinely believed the correct spellings of things to be wrong, and thought they were doing a good deed by changing them. It was the kind of bizarre phenomenon that sometimes resulted from poor standards of education and training.
“I’m sorry,” stammered Natasha. “I haven’t had time to look at it and you said you wanted it right away so – “

“Yes, yes, of course I did. I’m not getting at you.” She sighed in vexation. “They’ll just have to learn how to do it properly. Either that, or we’ll try someone else. Check the rest of it and then send it back to them. Now, what about that Equal Opportunities leaflet?” She glanced at her watch and sighed. “I’m told I’m supposed to return it to Hennig, having OK’d it, in about five minutes’ time.”
“I’m afraid I’ve only about half-finished it,” came the reply.

Caroline’s face froze. Not another bloody complication. Hennig would of course moan about it like he had all the others, and even though it would be a moan and nothing more it would add to the tension and the raised blood pressure.
“Why’s that?” she asked, hoping she didn’t sound too snappy.
“Yesterday I had to pick up my nephew from school because my sister couldn’t do it because….…and I was late coming in this morning, there was a traffic jam.…I’m really really sorry, honest. Then my rabbit wasn’t well and……”

Caroline closed her eyes tightly, sinking deeper and deeper into her chair. “Just get it done as soon as you can and bring it straight to me when you’ve finished.”
“All right,” said Natasha, making to leave. “I’m sorry.”
If she says that again I’ll……

Caroline was about to give her the report from Holland to put in the internal mail, as she would be going past it on her way to her office, but changed her mind. God, I don’t trust her do I. And that’s not good. It’s just that the slightest chance of anything else going wrong……

Natasha was scampering from the office like a frightened mouse. Such was her haste to be away she forgot to close the door properly.
“Natasha,” Caroline shouted after her.
“Sorry,” said Natasha, and slammed it shut, a little too forcefully.

Caroline winced. Getting to her feet, she gripped the edge of her desk with both hands, steadying herself, and for several minutes breathed deeply and slowly in and out. She fell back into the chair like a dead weight.
There was no doubt about it; she was starting to feel the pressure.


There were several people who could conceivably have been the man knocked down and killed by a car in the Hollendorf suburb of the city a couple of days before, but the most likely candidate was David Richards, a British student who had come to Germany on an exchange scheme. The authorities at the University of Berlin, where he had been studying, had reported that he hadn’t come back to his Hall of Residence for evening meal on Wednesday, nor was there any sign of him the following day. Not only that but the dead man’s description matched that of David. A member of staff was able to identify the body.

“Find out what you can about Richards’ background,” Inspector Faltermeyer ordered Karl-Heinz Wegen. “But first, Astrid, you were going to tell us about Thule.”

“Yes. It’s some sort of mythical land, somewhere up in the far North. In the past it’s been identified with Iceland, Norway, and the lost civilization of Atlantis. Apparently the Nazis believed that thousands of years ago it was the home of an Aryan super-race from whom all the other ancient civilizations, Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, got their culture and their technological achievements. There still is a Thule Society, an international organization with a website and headquarters in a dozen countries.”
“And are they Nazis?” Faltermeyer asked.

“Some of them have been involved with far-right political parties like New Vitality. It’s what you’d expect, maybe, given the society’s beliefs. But so far they’ve managed to keep their hands clean. No involvement in attacks on ethnic minorities, or anything like that, as far as we know.”
“They sound like just a bunch of cranks to me,” Wegen sniffed.
“If they’re involved in neo-Nazi politics, they’re dangerous cranks,” snapped Faltermeyer. “Ancient myths is one thing, killing people quite another.”
“So you think they might have been involved in the business?” Lundt asked.
“I don’t know what to think just yet. We haven’t got enough evidence.”
Wegen was frowning. “If Richards was English, he could have been saying “too late.” Zu spat.”
“It’s possible,” Faltermeyer agreed. Certainly he hadn’t thought of it until now. “He could have been. Too late for what, though?”
“Too late to give a last message to his loved ones,” Astrid suggested. “It’s the only thing I can think of. He might have been delirious from pain, of course.”
“Basically, we need answers. Astrid, was that all you could find about Thule on the Web?”
“No, there’s more. I’ve got the print-outs here.” She pushed them across the desk to him.

“I’ll look at those in a moment. Right now I want you and Karl-Heinz to concentrate on investigating David Richards. We need to know what possible motive someone could have for kidnapping him and holding him prisoner. We’ll be interviewing the family as soon as it’s been cleared with them.” The Richards’ had already been told the sad news through the British Embassy, and David’s parents and sister would be flying in from London the following morning to discuss arrangements for repatriation of his body and personal effects with British and German officials. “Astrid, liaise with the British. At the moment his people will be preoccupied with the funeral but as soon as they feel able to go through with it, we’ll need to speak to them. Karl-Heinz, see if you can get some more out of the University. I’ve a feeling there are depths to this case we aren’t fully aware of as yet.”

Outside, Lundt paused. “What do you think?” she asked Wegen.
“He seems to think it’s political. Me, I’m not so sure. But whatever the truth is, I’m certain there’s something funny about this case; the Chief certainly is. I think he’d be happier the more we learn about it, and the sooner.”

They went their separate ways, Astrid to contact the Foreign Office, and through them the British Embassy, Karl-Heinz to revisit the University in pursuit of further information on the murdered man, while Hans Faltermeyer sat himself down at the computer in the Incident Room and familiarized himself with the subject of Thule.

HEADQUARTERS OF THE SPECIAL AIR SERVICE, HEREFORD, ENGLAND
The man in the Major’s uniform sat waiting for them to call him, trying to decide if he did or didn’t have anything to worry about, and occasionally glancing from boredom as much as anything else at his watch or the remorselessly ticking clock on the wall opposite him. His mind made the usual comparison between the latter and a death knell and he wondered if it had been placed in that particular position as a form of psychological torture.

One of the clerical staff came by and flashed him a sympathetic smile, obviously guessing what he was there for. Major Mike Hartman smiled back.

Not knowing if you had anything to worry about was as bad as if you did have anything to worry about, he thought, because you might. It sort of made logical sense.

But was there really any cause to fret? In a few years’ time he’d be too old for this kind of work anyway.

He heard footsteps from down the corridor. They slowed down as they approached him and he looked up. Riordan, Moretti and Ferris were all standing there, anxious and subdued, wondering what they’d do if he did get kicked out of the Regiment. Their instinct would probably be to follow him wherever he was going, and he’d have to try and dissuade them. The Regiment needed men like these.
“Good luck, boss,” said Ferris.
“Yeah, good luck Sir,” chorused Moretti and Riordan.

The Major rose. “Thanks, boys. At least I’ve managed to keep you lot out of it.” That was the advantage – though there were also disadvantages – of being in an organization where you did things by simply obeying orders. It meant you could be excused blame if things went wrong. As long as you weren’t the one in charge.

The door was opened and a young staff officer appeared. “Major Hartman, the tribunal will see you now.”

Michael Hartman shook hands with his three friends and gave them a final rueful smile. “Well, here we go.” He disappeared inside the committee room where the meeting was being held, the door closing behind him. The three SAS men stood looking at it for a long time before turning away to go back to their duties.

Since it was very rarely used except for occasions like these, the room was almost bare apart from the usual notices about health and safety. At the side, grimly silent, the Commander-in-Chief of the Regiment, General Thomas Straker, sat with his arms folded. He was a trim, tough-looking man in his fifties with a grizzled moustache, a no-nonsense expression and the kind of hazel eyes that could be very penetrating. Behind the table sat three ex-SAS officers, the brigadier who would be chairing the enquiry and a pair of colonels, sitting on either side of him. The young staff officer, whose job it would be to take notes, had a table all to himself, with a pen and a notepad for him to scribble on in shorthand.

The brigadier looked up from his papers. “Please take a seat, Major Hartman.” Hartman planted himself on the single chair which had been placed in the middle of the room facing the table.

“Well, Major, you know why you’re here,” said the brigadier once the usual formalities had been concluded.
“Yes, Sir,” said the Major woodenly.

“You acquitted yourself very well in Pakistan. Even so, I’m sure you can appreciate that hijacking a nuclear submarine, that mutiny, if not piracy, is a very serious offence.” He paused for effect, replacing the biro he’d been playing with on the desk and leaning back in his chair. “Why, Major?”

“If I may say so, Sir, we did do the job. We prevented what might be prosaically described as a major nuclear disaster – and I’d say even that would be putting it mildly.”

“I know that, Major, I know that. You didn’t answer my question. We all know what this is really about. The “job” would have been done just as well if the Poseidon had remained under Captain Hillyard’s command. You’d no need to …”

Although he had no jurisdiction over how the tribunal conducted its business General Straker was allowed to chip in with pertinent comments from time to time. “We don’t know that. The way the Major stopped the Connecticut firing its missiles; it’s possible nobody else would have dared to do it.”

“I take your point, Sir. But it was still wrong for him to have commandeered the vessel the way he did. And in the first instance, his reasons had nothing to do with saving the world.” The brigadier sighed wearily, shoulders slumping in something like despair, then straightened up with an effort. “It’s that girl, isn’t it. It was all because of her. She’s a wrecker; if it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t be sitting here having to go through all this.”

“If it wasn’t for her, Sir, we might not be sitting, or doing anything, anywhere. We wouldn’t have had the faintest inkling what Marcotech were up to.”
“You were prepared to go on the run forever if necessary, weren’t you? Just to stop her from – “
“From being experimented upon without her consent. So that someone could do something that’d probably be just as unethical as what Marcotech were doing.”

“But that isn’t your decision to take, Major. If anything comes along which might be of use to the armed forces of this country, or any of our allies, in doing their job then it’s our responsibility to take the opportunity it presents. If you can’t obey orders you can’t be a soldier. I shouldn’t need to spell that out to an experienced officer like yourself.”

“Do you accept your actions were wrong, Major?” asked one of the colonels, speaking for the first time.
“Yes, Sir, I suppose they were,” said the Major contritely.
“But you’d do the same thing again, wouldn’t you?”

The Major’s expression alternated between the uncertain and the stonily impassive. The slightest suggestion of a smile flickered briefly on General Straker’s face.

“I don’t know what to do with you, Hartman,” sighed the brigadier. The Major’s lips twitched.
“And you can take that smug grin off your face.”
“Look at it this way, Sir,” said Hartman. “Who knows about it? It might be bad for discipline if they did, but my boys aren’t talking. I mean, we’ve all signed the OSA.”

“The public don’t have to know about it, Major Hartman. It’s still setting a dangerous example for others to follow. I think you can be sure your activities have already become enshrined in SAS legend. Although it’s safe to say there’ll never be that many officers like you in a million years.” He sounded almost admiring.

“Don’t we need people like me in the Regiment, Sir? We’re not quite like other units and never have been.”

“I know your gambles have usually paid off in the past. But this is different; this time you were clearly in breach of discipline. You were told that as soon as the Marcotech business was concluded, Caroline Kent was to be handed over to the Americans.”

“For them to do God knows what with her. Incidentally, I hope my lads aren’t going to be - ”
“We’ve been through that before, Major. As they were acting under your orders, we’ve taken the view they aren’t responsible for what happened. If someone barks an order at you you do it, you don’t question the ethics of it.”

“With respect, Sir, I’ve very rarely needed to “bark” an order at any of them. We’ve all been together long enough to understand each other perfectly.”

“Sure, Major?” grinned the second of the colonels. “I’m sure I’ve heard the sound of your voice from in town when you’ve been conducting an exercise here.”

“It isn’t true, Sir. Not the way you mean. With respect, to suggest it was would be demeaning both to myself and those under my command.”

“You’re protective of your men, aren’t you,” said the brigadier. “I like that.”
“And if I may say something else, Sir,” continued Hartman. “I thought that for us to be a party to something unethical would demean the whole of the British Armed Forces, in a way I’m much too patriotic to be happy about. It’s because I’m loyal to my country that I did what I did.”
“Your comments are noted, Major.”

It didn’t take them that long for them to conclude their business and dismiss him. After he’d gone, they sat looking at one another in silence.
“We’ve got to do something,” said the brigadier.

General Straker interjected again. “I take it you did read the Navy’s report on the incident?”
“Yes, General, of course we did,” the brigadier nodded. “They were a bit miffed at first, but when the full story emerged they seemed more amused than anything.” The one thing which had impressed those entrusted with the task of deciding the Major’s fate was the refusal of their brother service to press charges.

“And I have to admit,” Straker went on, “that insubordinate people are sometimes right. You have to allow them a bit of rope…”
The brigadier grinned. “So that they can hang themselves?”

“No,” Straker replied coldly. “That wasn’t what I meant at all.”
“The chap’s off his rocker,” complained the second colonel. “He’s mad. The girl too, from what I’ve heard. They’re made for each other.”

“He’s not mad, not in the way you’re suggesting. If he was he wouldn’t still be in the Regiment. He wouldn’t have been in it in the first place. I don’t know about the girl.”

“Understand the family spent some time in Zimbabwe,” said the first colonel. “They were there before independence, in fact, while it was still Rhodesia. Enough to make anyone go a bit crazy, in my opinion.” Apart from the effects of the burning African sun, there were those of living in a small, homogenous and in many ways embattled community, in a country controlled first by diehard racist reactionaries and then by an increasingly mad (and arguably even more reprehensible) Marxist dictator.

“You don’t understand the colonial mentality,” Straker snapped. “Come to think of it, nor do I. But lots of us in this profession have links with Rho…with Zimbabwe. And to stick it out there for any length of time takes guts. Those chaps have got something, even if I’m not entirely sure what it is.”

The colonel nodded respectfully. “I’m sorry if I seemed disrespectful, General. But we do have to make a decision and…well, the chap just worries me, that’s all. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

They continued to wrangle over the matter for some time; before finally reaching that time-honoured solution to a multitude of problems, the good old British compromise.


Thule, read Inspector Hans Faltermeyer, was the ancient Greek and Latin name for a land supposed by the people of those days to exist six days’ sail north of the British Isles, and to be the most northerly region of the world. It sounded like Iceland, and probably was, though there were other likely candidates such as Norway or the Shetland Islands. Some believed it was in a remote part of Asia but that somehow seemed wide of the mark. Thule was also the name of an Inuit culture in Greenland, though this seemed to have no connection with the mythical realm of the ancient chroniclers.

The word might mean simply the most distant unknown land, wherever it was. In a more general sense Thule, Ultima Thule, was a term sometimes used to describe the highest or furthest degree of something attainable; or alternatively the lowest point, the nadir.

In the late seventeenth century a Swedish writer named Olaus Rudbeck identified Thule as the fabled land of Atlantis, which was thought to have conquered North Africa and much of Europe some nine thousand years before. Rather than in the Atlantic Ocean, as received wisdom had it, he centred it in Sweden. Later the French astronomer and mystic Jean-Sylvain Bailly argued that the great powers of the ancient world had inherited all their knowledge and culture from a far superior civilization in the extreme north. Bailly believed that when the Earth was younger its interior heat was much greater, and claimed that this would have given the polar regions a more temperate climate than they currently enjoyed; one he thought much more conducible to the flourishing of the arts and sciences. The inhabitants of Thule were the Hyperboreans, who because they lived in northern Europe must have been tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed – typically Aryan, to use a term originally applied to what was thought to have been one of the aboriginal peoples of India and therefore now being misused, although perhaps not as much as objectors to it claimed since some inhabitants of the sub-continent still had fairish hair and skin and occasionally blue eyes.

In this way, the idea was helped to form in people’s minds that the Aryan – the Nordic, that is Germanic or Teutonic and Scandinavian - peoples represented the ultimate in both physical magnificence and cultural achievement, and were thus superior to other races. Here lay one of the roots of Nazi ideology. The tree was assisted in growing and in bearing fruit by nineteenth-century nationalism, as part of which races and nations rediscovered and sought to promote their own historic culture with increasing militancy. This tendency could sometimes extend to the praising of physical characteristics. The modern revival of Germanic paganism was a by-product of the German romantic movement and of German nationalism, following the creation of a united Germany in the nineteenth century. It tied in with a certain occult revival which came about as a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and was characterized by a belief in lost civilizations with semi-divine powers. It started off as harmless nonsense but in time acquired an unsavoury, potentially dangerous character. Perverting the ideas of the mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky, the writer Lanz von Liebenfels argued that humanity was descended from a series of Root Races that had degenerated over the millennia from beings who were morally and spiritually pure, almost to the extent of being gods, to crude and barbarous peoples of whom the Aryans were the least so. Apes, and all the non-Aryan races too (especially the Jews) were the result of sexual intercourse between the third Root Race, the Nordic peoples, and monsters. In Liebenfels’ view, a parody of the Biblical doctrine of the Fall from Grace, the Aryans had lapsed into bad habits after leaving the paradise of their northern homeland, to which he in his heart and soul longed to return in both a spiritual and a geographical sense. He called the lost continent where the “gods” had lived Arktogaa, from a Greek word meaning “northern Earth”.

Liebenfels saw human affairs in terms of an ongoing, perhaps eternal struggle between the blond races, who were creative and heroic, and the dark “beast-men” who sought to corrupt and retard human culture. This struggle could only be won through racial purity, the forced sterilisation or extermination of inferior races, and the destruction of democracy, socialism and feminism. He appeard to modify his theories somewhat in a book entitled “Theozoology or the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods”. In it he sought to convince his public that most of humanity was derived from a race of beast-men (Anthropozoa), fathered by Adam. There was however a higher humanoid race (the Theozoa), who despite their name were not quite gods but rather beings with advanced mental faculties such as telepathy, which functioned by the transmission of electrical signals between one brain and another. Over the millennia the god-men interbred with the Anthropozoa until they became debased and the organs which were the source of the telepathic power atrophied, becoming the pineal and pituitary glands of modern Man.

Believing that mediaeval values and virtues were superior to those of the modern world Liebenfels, in a corruption of the noble ideals of the Knights Templar, the monastic and military order which had fought in the Crusades, and the Teutonic Knights founded a secret society called the New Templars. The new organization would be at the forefront of the struggle for supremacy between the Aryan and all the other peoples for world domination. The two principal personalities behind the movement were Liebenfels and Guido von List, both of whom added an undeserved “von” to their names to stress supposed aristocratic descent.

List was one of the founders of the Volkische movement, characterized by love of unspoiled nature and a fascination with astrology and “earth energies”. He and his colleagues believed the greatness of the Germanic peoples lay in their idyllic, noble rural past which had now been soiled by the growth of urban capitalism with all its evils, presided over by Jewish entrepreneurs and money-lenders. List had been instrumental in establishing a secret Masonic society called the Germanenorden, which sought to promote its members in public life to counter the corrupting influence of the Jews and socialists. No-one not of “pure Aryan descent” was permitted to join it.

List was also heavily influenced by the legends of lost civilisations and sunken continents. In his The Legends of the Ario-Germans (1910) he identified the four elements into which ancient scientists divided the world – earth, air, fire and water – with the mythical Teutonic realms of Muspilheim, Asgard, Wannenheim and Midgard, which were inhabited respectively by fire-dragons, air-gods, water-giants and mankind. He claimed the prehistoric megaliths of Lower Austria were actually Atlantean artifacts.

In 1918 the Germanenorden changed its name to the Thule Society. As might be expected its members were appalled by Germany’s sudden collapse in the First World War, which they attributed to the spinelessness of Jew-infested liberal politicians, because Germany as the archetypal Aryan nation had to be strong, had to be dominant over all her enemies. One of its leading lights, Rudolph von Sebottendorff, wrote: “Yesterday we experienced the collapse of everything which was familiar, dear and valuable to us. In the place of our princes of Germanic blood rules our deadly enemy: Judah. What will come of this chaos we do not know yet. But we can guess. A time will come of struggle, the most bitter need, a time of danger.....I am determined to pledge the Thule Society to this struggle.” According to one account, it was the Thule Society out of which the Nazi movement was born. Shortly after its foundation it established a worker’s section, which later became the German Worker’s Party and then, in February 1920, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.

List, Liebenfels and von Sebottendorff all believed Thule to be the ancient homeland of the Aryan race. Von Sebottendorff, fascinated by the Eddas, the collections of Scandinavian myths compiled by the mediaeval writer Snorri Sturlusson, identified it with Iceland. So too did Alfred Rosenberg, one of the leading Nazi ideologues during the movement’s early years, who established an organization called the Nordic Society, with representatives from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland as well as Germany, whose aim was to defend the Aryan nations against the Soviet-Jewish threat. He called for expeditions to Iceland to make a proper study of its unspoilt, for the moment, culture and landscape before it too became ruined by the advance of modern technology and commercialism. Iceland had remained, until relatively late in the Middle Ages, the last place in Europe where a purely Germanic culture and language had survived untouched by the influence of Christianity or the classical civilizations.

Surprisingly perhaps, Hitler himself had little time for the Thulean mythology, which he regarded as utter nonsense, once actually in power. But his ally Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, was more sympathetic and in the 1930s organized several expeditions to Iceland and similar places under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe - the SS Association for Research and Teaching on Heredity. Among other things they carried out studies of Iceland’s caves and ancient monuments in an attempt to prove the existence of a prehistoric northern centre of culture (in itself a plausible enough hypothesis), based there.

All this was fascinating. But despite the Nazi connections which Astrid had obviously thought he needed to know about, Faltermeyer couldn’t see, at the moment anyway, what it might have to do with the kidnapping and possible murder of David Richards.
Wegen entered. “Anything?” Faltermeyer asked hopefully.
“Yes, It seems Mr Richards was Jewish.”

Faltermeyer stiffened, feeling alarm bells ring inside his head. Wegen noticed his reaction and nodded sombrely. If David Richards was Jewish, it had serious implications for the whole case. Firstly it suggested a possible motive for members of the Thule Society to kill him, given the history and character of the movement. Secondly, they would have to tread very carefully. If there was the slightest suggestion that the German authorities were failing to properly investigate the murder of a Jew by a far Right group, especially given certain events in their country’s past, there would be accusations of anti-Semitism. There would be political ramifications, and he himself might be settled on as a scapegoat and lose his job. The suggestion that Richards had lost his life as a consequence of some sort of kinky bondage game would have to be dropped, unless of course further evidence seemed to prove it. There were some people he could imagine causing offence there. We Germans are not very subtle on occasions, he thought ruefully.

Each of them knew that anti-Jewish feeling was on the rise in Germany, indeed throughout Europe in general, as a result of Israel’s activities in Lebanon and her treatment of the Palestinians.
Faltermeyer sighed long and hard. “We’ve got to find out who did this.”
“Yes. You still think he was saying “too late” when he died?”
“I suppose he could have meant it was too late to get him to hospital.”
“That implies he knew he was going to die. People generally don’t. That’s something only animals have. He wouldn’t have given in like that, and nor would you or I. And even if he was saying “too late,” it still doesn’t have any bearing on why he was killed.”
The corner of Faltermeyer’s mouth turned up slightly. “Do I take it you’re revising your original opinions about this case?”

“That it wasn’t political? What do you think? It’s all staring us in the face. It’s obvious he discovered something pretty nasty and they killed him to stop him telling anyone. He would have wanted to get the message to someone before he died.”
“Maybe he meant it was too late to do anything about the business. Whatever it was.”
“I certainly bloody well hope not,” the inspector muttered. He described to Wenge what Astrid had found out about Thule. As he went on his subordinate’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped lower and lower.
“Quite,” said Faltermeyer. “I’d say this was getting more and more alarming by the minute.”
“What was Richards doing here exactly?” he asked Karl-Heinz. “On an exchange, I think they said?”
“With a German student, also Jewish. It’s something the International Jewish Conference has set up with support from Israel, a scheme to promote links between Jews in different countries.

“A number of people at the University say that Richards had been acting very secretively over the last few days. It was like he was up to something he didn’t want people to know about. They say he was preoccupied, often anxious and irritable. They had the impression he’d got himself into something he wasn’t entirely happy about, but didn’t know how to get out of.”
“Or was being targeted by somebody? Harrassed?”

“There’s no evidence of that. In any case, if they didn’t like Jews I don’t see why they’d just murder one particular Jew.”
“Nor do I,” Faltermeyer agreed. “Unless, of course,” he added, “there was a very special reason for it.”


THREE

Major Hartman entered General Straker’s office, saluted, and took the chair Straker had pushed forward for him. His face was completely wooden and expressionless, but the General could feel his tension like a solid wall of electricity.
“All right, Major,” Straker said. “You’re off the hook. They’ve decided we should keep you on.”
“Obviously I’m very pleased about that, Sir.”

“So I can tell from the look on your face.” He jabbed a finger at the Major. “Don’t get too cocky. You’ve had a narrow escape. When you go against orders, it tends to work out. But they’re right, it’s bad for discipline. It’s bad because it could encourage someone who isn’t as good as you to do the same thing, and then it might not pay off. And since no-one would know if it was going to or not, we may as well give discipline the benefit of the doubt.”

“If it didn’t pay off, if they were the kind of officer who went against orders without knowing what they were doing, they wouldn’t be in the Regiment, Sir.”

Straker smiled. “No, Mike, they wouldn’t. Which is why I’m personally quite glad that you’ve been let off. But be careful. There are other people who wouldn’t take such a lenient view. Any more..…insubordination, whether or not combined with equally serious offences, and you’ll be out of the Army altogether. I’ll be issuing a formal warning in due course. Also, your secondment to the SBS has been terminated. It’s highly unlikely they’ll ever let you mess about with boats ever again.”

The Major’s face lengthened a little. He’d enjoyed his brief time in the SBS.
“I suppose that was inevitable,” he agreed.

“Yes, it was. I mean, you did ruin two perfectly good nuclear submarines. And Mike…if you should ever find yourself in another situation like that regarding Miss Kent…” The dark eyes bored into Hartman’s. “You understand? You can’t go on prioritizing her interests over those of the country, whatever the reason. Sometimes we just have to be harsh and put the common good before any one individual. Dismissed.”

They rose, exchanging salutes. “Er, one last thing, Sir,” Hartman said anxiously. “I don’t know if it’s in order for me to ask this but..did anything bad happen to Captain Hillyard?”

“Well there was an inquiry, of course. But I gather it looked at one stage like there was going to be a gunfight between your squad and the Navy boys. Hillyard was merely doing what he judged was necessary to avoid a very nasty situation.”
“I wouldn’t have gone so far as to let that happen.”

Again Straker smiled wryly. “Probably not. But the Lords of the Admiralty don’t know that. So Hillyard’s exonerated.”

Hartman went to the rest room where Moretti and Ferris were playing pool, and Riordan flicking through a copy of Loaded. “I’m in the clear,” he announced. “Sort of. But I’m afraid we’re finished with the boat boys, after what we did to the Poseidon.”
“So what happened?” asked Moretti.

The Major explained. They gave him three rousing cheers. “And are you going to…” began Riordan, once the echoes had died away. “I mean, if Caroline does get herself into trouble again….”

“It depends. If there really is anything to be gained by sacrificing her wellbeing, I might have to. If I think there isn’t….well, let’s just hope the situation doesn’t arise.” He grinned. “And as soon as we’re all free, go into town for a massive piss-up.”

CASTLE HENTZENDORF, PADERBORN, NORTH-RHINE WESTPHALIA, GERMANY
They were into Scene 2 of Das Rheingold. Wotan, the ruler of the gods, and his consort Fricka were asleep on top of a mountain, behind which the towers of a magnificent fortress, newly built, gleamed in the dawn sunlight. Waking, Wotan’s first sight was of the building and he started to sing a hymn of praise to it in his powerful, booming voice. Sourly, Fricka reminded him that her sister Freia, the goddess of love, was offered to the giants, builders of the structure, in payment for it. In turn Wotan reminded her that it was she, Fricka, who asked for the fortress. Fricka retorted that it was meant to be a gift to him, one intended to bind the two of them together more closely. Instead he had traded love and womanly virtue in return for power, of which he sees the fortress as a symbol.

Wotan pointed out that he once pledged his only remaining eye to court her – fortunately he was not called upon to pay up – and insisted he never had any intention of surrendering Freia. Then protect her now, Fricka replied.

A terrified Freia came on, followed by the giants Fasolt and Fafner. Angrily Wotan wondered what had detained Loge, the fire god, on whom he had been relying to extricate him from the contract. Fasolt demanded Freia for the work done but Wotan insisted he be allowed to find some other means of payment. Not only must Freia’s virtue be protected but if the gods were denied the apples she grew, eating which gave them eternal youth, they would wither into old age and die. Fasolt reminded Wotan that the runic markings on his spear represented the agreement they had made with him, legitimizing his seizure of Freia.

As the giants prepared to take Freia away her brothers Froh and Donner, the god of thunder, rushed in to protect her. Loge arrived at last, telling Wotan that he had been circling the world attempting to find out what men valued more than feminine beauty. No-one would forego it except one man, of the race of dwarves called Nibelungen, who stole the magic ring called the Rheingold after his sexual advances were rejected. Loge explained that the Rheingold granted its wearer absolute power and although Fricka, who wanted it as an ornament, objected he suggested that it be stolen from the Nibelungen and given to the giants as payment instead of Freia. The giants agreed to this plan, but said they would hold Freia hostage in the meantime. As they left, dragging Freia with them, a thick sulphurous smoke enveloped the gods who began to age and weaken.

Wachter turned off the TV and sat thinking in the huge baronial hall while he waited for the others to arrive. The myths had fascinated him for as long as he could remember, whether in their Scandinavian or Germanic – to draw a distinction between the two – form (which was the definite version was hard to decide). He remembered as a lonely child sent up to his room for misbehaviour finding solace in a book on those old legends and reading it for hours, forgetting his troubles, so enthralled that he didn’t want to come down.

Gerhardt, his Operations Manager, rang from the factory, interrupting these reminiscences. It had been discovered that the new production process they were going to bring in required fewer personnel to oversee it than they’d previously thought. It was only marginally more efficient than the alternative scheme they had turned down, which also had the benefit of allowing them to keep on people some of whom had been in the firm for years and served it loyally. Gerhardt wanted to know what he should do. Wachter didn’t need to spend an inordinate amount of time agonizing about it. “We want maximum efficiency, any company does. If we get into the habit of putting sentiment before that, we don’t know where it’ll stop. And Rencke and Vogel, if that’s who you’re talking about, are both too old. They wouldn’t get another job anyway.” In Wachter’s view that was an argument for dismissing the two men, not for keeping them on. They were out of it, no longer part of the overall, smoothly running scheme of things.

“Do they qualify for the pension scheme?” The arrangement was voluntary, and much appreciated by those who benefited from it even though they would be provided for perfectly adequately by the state. With it went membership of a kind of club, involving holidays and regular social events for all the retired personnel. Without such things, employees of long standing would feel they still belonged to the firm and would not have to undergo the pain otherwise caused by suddenly having to leave it, which it was said devastated some people for whom a comfortable old age was not the issue, whereas the need to know you were appreciated by the company to which you had given a lifetime’s service was.

Wachter thought. “Rencke, maybe. Vogel…no, I don’t think so. Remember that business when we had to get rid of Becker, the way he spoke to me?”

“It was a long time ago,” Gerhardt reminded him. And Wachter had not been Vogel’s superior then.

“That doesn’t matter. It proves he is insubordinate and we do not reward insubordination. Give him his notice of dismissal immediately, and then let’s just put the matter behind us.”
For a moment there was silence from the other end. “Well? Is there a problem?”
“Er, no, Herr Wachter. I will see that it’s done. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” Wachter cut him off.

To Wachter’s annoyance the phone rang again almost immediately. It was Gustav, his son, wanting a loan so he could afford to go on his trip round the world before starting at University. “No, I’m afraid it is out of the question,” Wachter snapped. And then of course Gustav started whining, wanting to know why it was out of the question. Wachter told him point blank that he didn’t want him bumming around the world, slumming it in youth hostels or second-rate hotels or even sleeping on beaches; that way of conducting oneself was degrading. And being impressionable, Gustav might come back with trendy addle-headed left-wing views from contact with non-Aryan cultures who had been “oppressed” by the superior races.

“Why can you not fund yourself?” Wachter demanded. “If you had not insisted on wasting the money I’ve already spent on you….” Gustav protested that he spent no more money than other people of his age, which was probably true. “What you are saying is that you have to be the same as those around you,” his father snorted. Frittering away your parents’ hard-won cash on booze and condoms and running up massive electricity bills through surfing the Internet. “That is pathetic, weak and stupid.” To Wachter conformity was only acceptable if it was to values of discipline, obedience and cleanliness.

“Well if you insist on going on this holiday of yours, you can pay for it by doing a bit of decent work,” he snapped and slammed the phone down.

He did briefly consider changing his mind. The thought of Gustav, big and strong and athletic, striding about the world, braving the harshness of some of the environments he would find himself in, the conqueror of all he found, would be an advertisement for the master race; if only the boy was a better specimen in other ways. Wachter doubted he really had the guts, or the brains to survive in dangerous and unfamiliar surroundings. His smashing up his father’s car, which he had borrowed for what it later became clear was nothing more than a joy-ride – he barely understood how to operate the vehicle despite taking lessons – had left Wachter senior with little faith in his abilities.

As for Vogel, he’d made his decision and it was too late to go back on it now.

But to return to the subject of his family, they were undoubtedly a pain; all of them. The younger boy, Helmut, didn’t quite agree with his politics although if he suspected what the Thule Society and New Vitality were actually doing he wasn’t telling anyone out of loyalty to his father. Gustav might have agreed with it, though he was just as likely to change his mind, but was in any case too much of an idiot, if a clever one, to be trusted with any important task for the party. And Lise, his wife, he now realised was a tiresome woman concerned only with social chit-chat and looking glamorous. He came here to get away from them all.

He liked to walk in the hills and wooded valleys among which the castle stood, feeling himself to be at one with nature and in communion with the gods. He could imagine the ancient rites being held there, secretly after the coming of Christianity, in sacred groves and hidden temples. The stirring Rhineland setting was one reason why the ruined castle had fired his imagination and his company had bought and restored it, as authentically as possible but incorporating all the comforts of the modern age where they did not adversely affect its character. Another who had been inspired by the old building and its environment, by the mist-shrouded Teutoburger Forest nearby, and by the other romantic old castles with which the region was dotted, was Heinrich Himmler who had taken it over as the headquarters for the Department for Pre- and Early History, a branch of the SS Race and Settlement Office. A major factor in its selection was that it was close to the stone monument known as the Exsternsteine, where the Teutonic hero Arminius was said to have battled the Romans. Its effective function under Himmler was as an indoctrination centre for SS officers, where they underwent pagan initiation rituals and learnt the mystic significance of the ancient runes.

Wachter had feared at one point that living in the castle once used by such a figure and for such a purpose was perhaps making things a bit obvious, but the pull of the place had been irresistible. Besides, people tended to dismiss New Vitality as just a small group of right-wing loonies and would continue to do so as long as they didn’t know too much.

After the war the castle had fallen into disrepair, and a great deal of renovation work had been required. Most of the rooms were entirely modern in their layout and fittings but the main hall had been restored to what Wachter, and Himmler before him, believed to have been its original state. Access to it was by a broad entrance hall with suits of armour in a row on each side, and the flags of the various SS regiments, and of ancient Germanic heroes, hanging from poles which jutted out from the upper walls to form effectively a covered walkway. In the hall itself a banner had been stretched across one wall with a motif of a serpent, thought of as evil in Judaeo-Christianity but regarded as sacred by the Aryans. It was based on the flag believed to have been carried by the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings.

Other flags and emblems, some duplicating those in the entrance hall and some different, also adorned the bare stone walls. Above the great fireplace hung the swastika, the crooked cross, also known as the hammer of Thor and symbolic of German manliness and Aryan supremacy. On one side it was flanked by the insignia of the Thule society, a circle of oak leaves surrounding a dagger superimposed on a swastika with curved arms. The head of the dagger was in the form of an eagle, coloured red to symbolize phoenix-like immolation by fire, after which Germany would be reborn to take her rightful place as the dominant nation of the world. On the other side was the Totenkopfring, the emblem of the SS, signifying membership of what had become a pagan cult as much as a military organization, with its death’s head, the ubiquitious swastika and a double S, the latter drawn in the fashion of the old runic alphabet of the pre-Christian Germans.

Also to be seen were the coats of arms of all who had served in the rank of SS Gruppenfuhrer; those to which their owners were not in fact entitled had been specially designed with great care and attention by “experts” from the Ahnenerbe. There were several paintings, most of them specially commissioned. The largest showed a mediaeval knight, fair and Nordic in appearance, slaying a monstrous two-headed dragon intended to represent the twin evils of Judaism and Communism. The knight’s hair was clear and shining like that of an angel, signifying cleanliness, goodness, moral purity. In another room was kept a different version of the same painting, in which the Teutonic hero was bare-chested and impressively muscled and in the background was chained up a well-endowed, naked blonde woman whom the knight by his action had presumably saved from being devoured by the dragon, or some other hideous fate. Wachter had intended to give the monster an actual Jewish head - the other, these days, would have been black or represented Islam - but he could not have borne having to look upon such a vision of appalling ugliness, even if portrayed in the throes of being destroyed.

Finally there were a number of triskelions and giant runic characters. The runes were believed to contain a magical power providing those who understood how to use them with a means of harnessing the fundamental, primitive, basic forces that powered the universe. By far the most powerful was the asterisk-like hagall rune, since within it could be found hidden all the others. The characters were meant to represent the different recurring stages in the ongoing history of the cosmos. The first stage, from unity to complexity, was symbolized by the swastika, by anticlockwise triskelions and inverted triangles; the second stage, from complexity back to unity, by a variety of clockwise symbols. In the view of one of the followers of Guido von List, the journalist Rudolf Gorsleben, every Aryan had hidden super powers, occult powers, which had become atrophied due partly to intermarriage with lesser races. If these powers could be fully tapped through the runic alphabet – devised it was believed by the chief Nordic god, Wotan - the Aryans would dominate the world. The runes could bestow upon one immortality, invincibility in battle, healing abilities, a superhuman degree of health and fitness and control of the elements. You could supposedly gain a slice of these powers through yogic exercises in which you adopted postures resembling the shapes of runic characters; Wachter had never found this worked for him, but of course he knew now that there might be other, more effective ways of harnessing the power.

In the centre of the hall stood the great oak dining table, modelled on the Round Table in the Arthurian legends which had always fascinated Himmler and around which he used to sit with his twelve senior Gruppenfuhrers, his Inner Circle. And beneath it, reached by concealed steps - three in all, symbolizing the three Reichs, the Holy Roman Empire (territorially based on Germany, though not a unitary German nation any more than it was holy, Roman or an Empire), the first German Empire created by Bismarck in 1871, and the Nazi state founded by Hitler - was a circular room with a shallow depression in the middle, like a kind of amphitheatre, where Wachter and his friends would carry on the strange rites performed here under Himmler. Among other things the coat of arms of dead members of the Thule Society or New Vitality, or deceased war veterans who had served in the SS, would here be ceremonially burned. There would also be attempts to communicate with the spirits of dead Teutonic heroes and influence the mind of a person in another room through concentration of willpower. And ceremonies where the names of the runes were called out and their shapes traced in the air as a way of invoking their power. It was claimed that on some occasions the rune shapes had formed themselves, magically appearing before the participants without any human agency being involved.

All the old pagan festivals were honoured, Easter being celebrated as Oster and Christmas as Yule. At the equinox and solstices they would gather on a hilltop and bury eight wine bottles laid out in the shape of a swastika. Also commemorated, though in pagan fashion, were Ascension Day and Good Friday; the former was sacred to Thor’s hammer, the latter to the heathen Saxons massacred by Charlemagne.

Each member of Himmler’s Inner Circle had had his own room at the castle, dedicated to an Aryan ancestor of his. Himmler’s own quarters were dedicated to Heinrich I, the Saxon king who had battled Hungarians and Slavs and of whom Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation, although he also claimed to have had conversations with Heinrich’s ghost at night.

Wachter certainly liked to think the spirits of Heinrich, and of other ancient Germanic worthies, walked the corridors of this place and looked down on him from their portraits on the wall. And sometimes on autumn and winter evenings, evenings like this one, when the wind blew along the draughty corridors of the old castle and howled around the eaves and windows, turrets and pinnacles, he would sit here by the warmth of the roaring log fire and remember the old stories and legends, imagining himself as an ancient Nordic chieftain sitting here in his stronghold, his fortress against the bleak and hostile world outside, ruled by fate; against the forces of nature, and against those evil powers that sought to destroy him.

The myths of northern Europe reflected both a love of storytelling for its own sake and a view of man and the universe as being caught in the grip of conflicting powers. Some of those powers were friendly, others savagely hostile. This attitude was rooted in an acute awareness, common to a largely agricultural society, of the rhythms of nature to which all people were subject: the alternation of day and night, light and darkness, cold and heat, summer and winter, life and death. By boldness and enterprise men might tame nature and master adversity to some extent, but human destiny was still shaped by powers greater than Man.

The Scandinavians in particular, in their harsh, cold and geographically isolated environment, felt little security. Life and happiness were menaced by forces beyond human understanding and control. Between life and death and light and darkness, there was but a fragile barrier. They deserved praise for having the wisdom to see that. A brutal environment had perhaps produced a brutal people but that was only to be expected. It was not true to regard them as simply a race of bloodthirsty brutes whose grim, sterile culture saw value only in killing. In 1911 G K Chesterton, who described the Norsemen as “great, beautiful half-witted men” had written:

Their souls were drifting as the sea
And all good towns and lands
They only saw with heavy eyes
And broke with heavy hands.

Their gods were sadder than the sea
Gods of a wandering will
Who cried for blood like beasts at night
Sadly, from hill to hill.

That was a load of rubbish, but typical of the anti-Aryan views espoused by some writers of the time in response to Teutonic nationalism. It was either Chesterton or his friend Hilaire Belloc, Wachter couldn’t remember which, who had sought in his writings to rubbish the idea of Germany and England getting together as the two great Teutonic nations, or that they had anything in common in that respect anyway. Thomas Carlyle had written of the Saxons as dull-witted, lumbering morons. And Nietzsche had attacked the “blond beasts of prey” who persecuted the Jews (odd behaviour for a man who supposedly inspired Hitler).

It was a pity that the influence of Greece, Rome and Jerusalem – of the classics and that effeminate Jew-inspired creed, Christianity - had destroyed the Germanic religion, Germanic culture which had extended at various times from the Black Sea across Central Europe and Scandinavia to Iceland and Greenland. It was only thanks to Snorri Sturluson that any trace of it had survived at all. In the Prose Edda Sturluson related all the known tales about the exploits of the Nordic gods in their struggle against their enemies, the race of giants, and the power of chaos; of the personal deities or guardian spirits loyalty to which could bring prosperity to oneself and one’s family, ensuring a bountiful harvest – so important in an agricultural society. (Since the gods had varying and sometimes overlapping functions, there was nothing inconsistent or heretical about worshipping more than one of them. On the contrary a man might need to maintain good relations with several gods and goddesses).

In the beginning there had been the Earth Mother, Frija (later Freya), after whom Friday was named, and the Sky Father, Tiwaz (Tyr in Scandinavia, Tiw in Anglo-Saxon England), who was called Ruler of All. Tuesday, to which he gave his name, was sacred to him and it was then that the various primitive German tribes met in a wood to sacrifice humans and animals to the god. Later Tiwaz was gradually displaced from his position in the pantheon by Wotan (Odin to the Vikings), itself a sign of the impermanence with which the early Teutons saw things. The Eddas described Wotan, whose name meant to rage, as the god of war, who would greet dead heroes on entering Valhalla, the afterlife over which he ruled. He was also the god of prophecy and magic, to whom many victims were sacrificed by being hung on trees. His sacred emblems were the spear, the eagle, the wolf and the raven. The fourth day of the week, Wednesday, was named after him.

Thursday was derived from the thunder god Thunor or Donar (the Viking Thor), who controlled the weather and who it was vital to appease if you wanted prosperity. The axe he carried, which later evolved into a hammer, was symbolic of the thunderbolts he sent from heaven when angry. He was also a god of fertility, though sharing this function with other deities from time to time. There was some evidence that worship of Thor had continued into modern times; early in the twentieth century a North German farmer was observed to place stone axes in his first seed-drill to ensure good crops.

The activities of the gods continued to inspire people into the modern age. They gained a new popularity thanks to the Germanic cultural revival of the nineteenth century, prominent among whose leading figures was Richard Wagner. Wagner based his great cycle of operas, The Ring, on Teutonic mythology, though oddly he took most of his material from a Scandinavian source, the Verse Edda (the poetic version of the myths), rather than a Germanic one, except for the last part of The Ring where the gods were destroyed (here the account of events, based on the Nibelungleid, a thirteenth century compilation based on much older material, seemed to differ).

The worldview of The Ring was that of a doom-laden universe moving inevitably towards a predestined chaos in which the gods themselves would perish. This meshed with the pagan beliefs of the Thule Society, which saw things as a perhaps eternal cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Man was a part of the cosmos and had to live by its laws, accepting the consequences of its impermanence and for comfort and protection drawing closer to his traditional culture.

Just as the world the gods inhabited was bleak and terrible, so in the nature of things would their end and that of the whole of creation be, reflecting the precarious balance of the cosmos and the impermanence of human achievement, which was constantly threatened by a harsh environment and by natural disasters such as floods, volcanoes and earthquakes. Where men were disloyal to themselves and their gods instead of imitating them in strength and valour chaos and disruption, such as there had been in the beginning, would result but even when they showed virtue and self-discipline, the best guarantors of survival in an uncertain world, they could not escape the endless round of Fate.

Wachter preferred the Scandinavian version, all in all. In this, the end of the world would be preceded by three winters of war, then three of terrible and unprecedented cold. A pair of monstrous wolves would devour the sun and moon, the stars would disappear and there would be violent earthquakes. The wolf Fenrir would break his chains and open his jaws to swallow up the world, and the Great Serpent spew poison over the sky and sea. At a blast on his horn from Heimdall, the watchman of Asgard, abode of the gods, Odin and his fellow deities would ride out to do battle with these and various other hideous creatures, as well as war among themselves. Thor would fight the Great Serpent, Frey the fire-giant Surt, Tyr the hell-hound Garm and Heimdall Loki (Loge), while the world-tree Yggdrasil trembled. While the other gods slaughtered one another Odin would be swallowed by Fenrir, Surt would hurl his fire over the world and the earth sink into the sea, dissolving in a maelstrom of fire and smoke. All would be as it was in the beginning, a void without form or substance.

But from this void, Ginnungagap, it would be born again, rich and prosperous and fertile and populated with a beautiful new race of humans.

Wachter wasn’t quite sure if things would actually turn out like that. He supposed so; after all, nothing was permanent. All through history civilisations had risen and fallen, and Aryan civilisation surely could not escape from that endless round of destruction and rebirth. Even Hitler’s Reich had been predicted to last a thousand years, not forever. And fate, or maybe the Fuhrer’s own foolishness, had ensured it survived for only twelve. Hitler had proved unequal to the Dark Forces against which he strove, and so deserved to fail and perish, dragging the German people down with him. If only he had not let the inferior Japanese with whom he had made an alliance ruin things, involving him in a needless and ultimately futile struggle with the United States. And yet Germany had been reborn, to become one of the most prosperous nations on Earth and later achieve political reunification. Now, maybe, she could contemplate her greatest ever triumph. Or at least Wachter and his friends could; for the moment, nobody else was allowed to know what they had in mind.

Against another wall stood a bookcase containing a collection of leather-bound volumes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first editions of works by List, Liebenfels and their like, with titles such as The Secret of the Runes, The Rites of the Ario-Germans and The Jewish Question by the sociologist Eugen Duhring, in which the author asserted his belief that the Germanic gods were still alive; plus writings on race and biology by Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Wagner’s son-in-law) and the Social Darwinists whose version of the theory of national selection justified the extermination or sterilization of so-called inferior races for the benefit of the superior, with whom they must not be allowed to breed.

The Jews, how I hate them, Wachter thought with a spasmodic clenching of his fist. The overidding impression they gave him was of darkness. Their hair, the clothes those Orthodox ones sometimes wore, their writing..all dark. Compared with his whole image, his whole concept, of something like Scandinavia, the white snow which covered everything there in winter, a sign he thought of purity, and the shining gold hair of its inhabitants, they seemed to him like something grotesque and alien. The two things contrasted hideously and offensively, entirely incompatible, when imagined together, one a dirty black stain on the other, a cloak of depressing blackness draped over it in a way that repelled the soul.

The style of their synagogues, their art and ornamentation, was alien to an exent that filled him with a visceral, shuddering revulsion. Then there were the high, gobbling voices, the thick lips and hooked noses, those nasty almost Oriental faces some of them seemed to have….he wondered how anyone could suffer such creatures to live. And they looked so unhealthily pale, were so effeminate in their manner; had to be effeminate because they venerated the female over the male principle, didn’t they? You were only considered a Jew if your mother, not your father, was Jewish; and Jewish women always henpecked their husbands, the children taking their side in any family dispute.

He resented the way they were lauded for their talents, their intelligence. Germany was told how much it benefited from the influence, before Hitler, of Jewish writers and philosophers and scientists. In this way her achievements were hijacked, misrepresented, projected as their achievements, the accomplishment of a people whose blood and ancestry meant they were not German, not Teutonic; it was both a pollution and a compromise of identity. And the more Jews had interbred with the rest of the population the more people would have felt they had grounds to do so.

Ironically, perhaps, he didn’t blame them for not having in the past been able to maintain themselves as a sovereign nation state, a sign in his view of lack of virility. It was because so many other powers had tried to oppress and destroy them. But because he sympathized with those powers’ wish to do so, it made no difference to his hatred.

Liberalism, feminism and plutocracy – all Jewish inventions, or at any rate built up by the Jews - destroyed the honourable virtues he believed to characterize traditional communal societies. He did, to his credit, occasionally reflect on the irony of this when one of the things he reviled Jews for was their association with communism.

But whatever happened, the Jews had to go. And along with them the blacks, the Arabs, the Turks and Iranians, all those other races who were becoming increasingly aggressive and assertive of their rights, and in the case of India and China increasingly powerful. They were a challenge, a threat, to Aryan identity on two fronts, at home and abroad. They had to be swept away to leave the Aryans sole masters of the world, of the future. And what better way to achieve that aim than through the embodiment of everything an Aryan hoped for and sought to emulate?

Because the more his colleagues learned about Thule the more he came to believe that it must all be true. The easier he found it to agree with List that great classical Christian writers such as Paracelsus and Boehme had been secret pagans, writing their books in a code which could only be understood by fellow members of the underground society to which they belonged, and that the Greek word “hieroglyph” was derived from the ancient Germanic “ir-og-liff”; that the swastika, originally a symbol in Sanskrit meaning good luck and used from prehistoric times in Asia and the Americas as well as Europe, was first found in the runic alphabet.

His thoughts turned to what they’d do once they’d actually achieved the power they had sought for so long. They had discussed it many times around this table. With any luck, what they did would be sufficiently devastating in its effects to leave them totally in control of the Northern Hemisphere at any rate, without creating a wasteland. In the aftermath they would take over and restore order. In the first instance, they would create a federation of right-wing totalitarian states to replace the corrupt and inefficient European Union, a monolithic – more or less - power bloc stretching from the US-Mexican border right round the world to Vladivostok. Then they would bring all white people of Aryan descent left outside it, in Australia, Africa, New Zealand or elsewhere home to the lands of their forefathers, or give them the power to resist the non-Aryans who surrounded them, threating a devastating retaliation if their interests were harmed in any way.

The rest of the world would have to deal with the new order of things whether it liked it or not. And sooner or later all those inferior races would be exterminated, by one means or another, so they could not be a threat to the survival of the new Reich. Before then all subhumans within Wachter’s empire would either have been killed or forcibly repatriated to their ancestral homelands (Wachter’s criteria for deciding if someone was “Aryan” was less exacting than Hitler’s had been, depending more on general physical appearance than detailed measurements of people’s facial bones, but no less uncompromising in the way it treated those who didn’t pass the test). Repatriation might be a better option if mass extermination made things too difficult with their friends in the south; but then again their friends in the south might not be in a position to do much about it.

He would recondition those concentration camps that had been kept as reminders of the Holocaust – Belsen, Auschwitz etc. – and re-employ them for their original purpose. How wonderful it would be to see those chimneys belching forth smoke again! And new camps would spring up too, to deal with the influx of blacks, Asians, Arabs etc who had flooded into Europe in recent decades seeking work or political asylum. He envisaged them as tall, austere, bleak, functional structures yet not without a certain beauty as things designed for a utilitarian purpose should be. The delight in undertaking a task with speed and technical efficiency, and the thought of cleansing for good the filth that now polluted the West combined in Muller’s mind to make the whole prospect exquisitely thrilling. He supposed Zyklon B could be used for the job, as in the war – it was still available, though only for eradicating animal pests - but if that didn’t prove possible for some reason there were, these days, any number of alternatives.

There would of course be a strict ban on immigration into the Reich, except by those judged to be sufficiently Aryan.

The Fourth Reich would have to be well-ordered, and thus viable. Here he was uncomfortably aware that the German state under Hitler had actually been in some ways very inefficient, and might have run into problems had it survived for a great deal longer. Divide and rule…it was sometimes a good policy, sometimes not.

Initially all industry and finance would be under the control of the government as it sought to restore order, but sooner or later private enterprise would return. Whether he wanted to privatize absolutely everything the way Margaret Thatcher and her successors in Britain, for example, had tried/were trying to do he wasn’t sure yet. What mattered most was that they produced efficient, loyal, hard-working citizens. In the long run they could use the developing sciences of genetic engineering and electronic surveillance to achieve that aim. Although even to him there was something false, something unappealing, about a total robot, a total clone. It was so manufactured you couldn’t really take a pride in it because it was not good from its own inalienable, fundamental, authentic, pre-existing nature, but only by virtue of what others had made it. Another bone of contention they would have to chew over at some point.

They would find no shortage of personnel to work for them as police or serve in the armed forces, once those who had shown dissident tendencies were eliminated. All the average citizen really cared about was having a roof over his head, a decent standard of living and freedom from escalating crime. They’d have no choice anyway, to be honest, but of course it would all be for the common good. And it wasn’t as if there weren’t many people in those professions who didn’t secretly sympathise with them.

Other than New Vitality all political parties would of course be banned, or their activities very closely monitored. Some difference of opinion as to how to do things was permissible, even necessary as a safety valve, as long as it didn’t go too far.

They had little need to worry about trade wars or price fluctuations on the international market threatening economic prosperity. The governments of the different countries making up the Reich would be so similar in outlook that they would inevitably gravitate towards each other, forming a single protectionist trading bloc. Political and economic union would follow from their natural inclinations and would not be something forced, artificial and resented. Nor was there any likelihood of foreign aggression; the crisis they would have to bring about to gain power in the first place would severely weaken the south, and besides the power from Thule, not to mention the nuclear and other WMD arsenals New Vitality would have inherited, could be used either to destroy it or make it think twice about trying anything. Israel – defined in any case as “southern” because it was beneath the line of demarcation Wachter had drawn – could be taken care of the same way if she decided on a pre-emptive strike.

At least they hoped it would turn out like that. They would gain a better idea how much was possible for them as research continued at Thule. Thule was the key to everything.


Martin Higson liked Germany. He liked to get stinkingly drunk at the Munich Beerfest, and an impressive collection of ashtrays from German hotels adorned his mantelpiece at home. He was over there as often as possible. Apart from anything else Germany was his spiritual homeland, and had been ever since he first developed an awareness of history and politics. He saw the Germans, as well as being good people to booze with, as brave and hard-working, the exact opposite to what the English had become. And he’d heard it said they were meant to be cleverer than their English cousins across the channel, these days. They certainly weren’t so fucking messed up, not feeling the need to complain so much when something went wrong instead of just getting on with whatever job needed to be done. Under the right leader they could achieve miracles; as, of course, they had.

Tiring of the paperback he’d bought from the airport bookshop, Higson put it aside and settled deep into his seat on flight 229 to Berlin with a wistful sigh, wondering how much better things might have been for him if he’d been born a German.

As it was he had come into the world in Upminster some thirty-five years before. His mother had been a nurse, his father a bus driver, working out of the local depot, and a union rep, until concern at the effect immigration from the Commonwealth was having on jobs had caused him to make certain controversial remarks at meetings of the local branch, and the union had kicked him out. The year after Martin was born the Higsons moved down the road to Romford. After primary school he went straight on to the local comprehensive, like most of the other kids in his street.

His interests were much like those of any normal boy from his kind of background, football figuring prominently among them. He was also fascinated by aircraft (as an extension of that, his imagination was captured by space travel and he had been quite heavily into sci-fi until he learned that the actor who played the lead role in his favourite TV series was a staunch socialist). He and his Dad had made model planes together, gone to air shows and to watch the big jets take off and land at Heathrow. Now his father was gone and a stable relationship from which might issue a son with whom he could keep the tradition going seemed as far away as ever.

But those days had left him with many happy memories. Memories of cosy little pubs where you could have beer and chips while watching the footie, a Union jack still hung over the bar, and on certain nights a good rousing sing-song was held round the piano while a china figure of John Bull looked on benignly. Watching the big match on a Saturday, West Ham v. Arsenal; fishing (illegally, which was the whole thrill of it) with his friends late at night by the little river which ran through the park; weekend outings to Brighton, with longer excursions to Blackpool or Torquay in the summer, for which the family had painstakingly saved up. There had been sad things too, of course; going to hospital to see his grandfather, dying of cancer, and finding him a pale gaunt skeleton of his former self, all sorts of tubes stuck into him to keep him alive; his aunt and uncle being killed in a car crash. It was all part of the unchanging rhythm of life and death.

Throughout it all Higson was growing up. And as he grew he realised the area where he lived was changing. Gradually, the world he knew with its comfortable feeling of a common identity was being eroded. The immigrants had started to flood in, taking jobs and changing the character of the place beyond recognition. As the black and Asian population, the latter taking over virtually all the newsagents and a lot of the other small businesses too, grew the indigenous whites started to move out. Instead of a warm, friendly little world where Higson knew he belonged, he now found himself in what he regarded as an alien colony. And because he was not a member of that alien culture, had never before known a situation where his ethnic group had not been in the majority, it was strange and unwelcome. He felt increasingly out of place and ostracized. They were very nice and polite, most of them, when you were in their shops but that wasn’t the point. It was hard, if not impossible, to adjust to and Higson didn’t see why he should have to do it when he hadn’t before.

The more their numbers increased, the more confident and assertive the Asians in particular became. The less they cared about what the white community thought of them. They did nothing to curb their bad habits, like their dangerous driving which could kill people. And Higson knew of an Asian party held in the local church hall after which the place had been left in a complete and utter mess, everyone shooting off home at the first opportunity so that church officials could be left to clear up the huge piles of rubbish. The more they became the majority the less they saw why they should change their behaviour to suit the whites, an increasingly small percentage of the local population. It didn’t help when a prominent Asian politician had admitted that he had intended a new housing estate recently built in the area to be from the start an Asian colony, and said he was disappointed when the Asians didn’t want to go there. Such talk sent a chill down Higson’s spine.

He was bewildered and unhappy, the more so because no-one seemed to care about what was happening. Either they couldn’t see what was happening under their noses or they simply chose to ignore it. As a result he had to suffer the inconvenience of having so much further to go to find a white pub.

It had been bad in the sixties and seventies, of course, although as a child he didn’t seem to have noticed or been bothered by it. Later his father told him how distressed and saddened at the whole business he had become, knowing what it signified and feeling utterly powerless to stop it.

And then one day, things had appeared to take a turn for the better. There seemed a ray of hope. Arthur Higson had come home, turned on the TV to watch the evening news, and seen a man with a moustache and a strange nasal accent stand up and talk about how the black man would end up having the whip hand over the white; how the annual inflow of thousands of immigrants was changing British society too much and would inevitably lead to violence. From then on a new spirit infused Higson Senior. He became bolder, more outspoken in his views, and didn’t really care when the union gave him the push because he sensed the tide was turning in his favour.

Then he received a second slap in the face when Powell, sacked from the Tory front bench for his temerity in saying what ordinary people were thinking, failed to compensate for this setback by organizing a party of his own and turning it into an effective political force. Angry and disillusioned, Arthur became violent and ill-tempered and on one occasion found himself in court for taking his frustration out on Martin’s mother, who eventually sued for divorce.

But there soon emerged a new focus for his hatred when the National Front was formed. Of course he immediately joined it, later transferring his allegiance to the BNP when it took over from the Front as the leading far right party in Britain. When old enough Martin joined too; it only seemed fitting. Both between and during elections to the council or to Westminster – in which Arthur stood every time, without success but always achieving a quite respectable tally of votes – he would accompany his father on trips in the Party’s “battle bus,” an ancient Bedford van, delivering leaflets, putting up posters and canvassing support among the ward’s white residents (naturally they didn’t bother asking the rest). He and a few others got into fights with black and Asian gangs who tried to break up their rallies; they didn’t always win but it was fun, especially when you did actually succeed in beating the crap out of the bastards.

In the 80s the family moved yet again, into a less racially mixed area. But then the niggers and the Pakis started to take over there too.

Martin Higson was by now on the brink of adulthood, and soon would have to start thinking about a job. At 16 he left school to join his father on the buses. That had probably been his first big mistake. He was clever enough to go to University, probably to study engineering, but wasn’t sure he was that bothered and by the time he’d made his mind up it was too late to apply. He could have tried again the following year but decided he’d missed his chance.

Then a remark he let slip out about a black colleague led to his dismissal from his job. His father resigned in solidarity with him, and never worked again, dying not long after from a heart attack. Higson got a job in a friend’s car repair business, but that didn’t last long once the friend found out about his membership of the BNP, of which he didn’t approve; apart from anything else he was worried about the effect on business if ethnic minority customers were alienated. There followed a couple of incidents which resulted in Higson acquiring a criminal record; they’d been mistakes, silly mistakes, but they left him a marked man. The publicity hadn’t helped his chances of re-establishing a foothold in the world of employment.

Even after he’d finally picked himself up by the scruff of his neck and embarked on an intensive jobsearch, the work was virtually impossible to come by. He felt excluded, disadvantaged; at best forgotten about, at worst derided. It didn’t help that the Paki woman down the Job Centre always treated him, he felt, with disdain. Most of the time, provided they were working in a primarily white environment or where the balance was about equal, they behaved with respect towards you. But a white person who was ill, or unemployed, and in their view lacked self-respect or any sense of responsibility, they felt they could shit on. That person’s own community had abandoned them, so why should they care? They didn’t have to respect a white who was vulnerable - and disowned, after all, by their own kind.

The opposite sex provided little consolation. Though gregarious enough, Higson was to prove unsuccessful at attracting a steady girlfriend; he was never quite sure why. They just didn’t seem to like him. So he was forced to seek comfort in the arms of prostitutes. These encounters were usually awkward and not entirely satisfactory; as well as very expensive, eating into his already limited budget and further lowering his standard of living. They were also, of course, degrading. But of necessity they continued to be his only source of sexual pleasure, if it could really be called pleasure; the only exception being a brief, fumbling, sordid, cheerless liaison with a stranger in the back bedroom of a friend’s house at a party, which only occurred because both of them had had too much to drink. Eventually he did manage to form one short-lived relationship which lasted about a year and whose failure left him depressed and lacking in confidence.

The one thing that gave him a purpose and an identity was the Party. They were good blokes who you could sit down and have a drink and a laugh with, because they thought as you did. A tribe united by a common allegiance to Queen and country, and to the white Aryan race worldwide. The only trouble was, they weren’t getting anywhere. He was constantly reassured that eventually things would swing their way, as the truth of Powell’s words back in ’68 became more and more apparent, but it seemed to be taking a very long time. He began to wonder if he should give it all up, let whatever would be be.
But then it had happened.


Waiting in the airport departure lounge for Erdmann to pick him up and take him to the castle, the man known as Heinrich felt a slight twinge of unease; but it soon passed.

Occasionally, when in public, he was struck by a sudden terrible fear that someone might recognize him. He would stop and look around, eyes darting guiltily from left to right, and people would ask him if there was anything wrong. By this he risked giving himself away. But his self-possession soon reasserted itself and he would smile and walk on, leaving them at worst staring after him in puzzlement. If anything he felt amused that they had no idea who he was, all the time that he was walking about quite freely and without, so far as anyone could discern, a care in the world.
In one way or another, he had always been doing that.

It was his great strength. The importance of his position within the apparatus of the Nazi state had been matched by his success at keeping out of the limelight. He’d been at the heart of it all, and yet the general public was unaware he had ever existed. And he’d kept those who might be interested guessing as to what had happened to him after the war. There were all sorts of often bizarre theories being aired on the Internet, which it amused him to read about (it had not taken him long to master the technology; adaptability was essential for someone in his situation). Some said he had joined the Soviet secret service; some that he had gone to work for one of Israel’s hostile Arab neighbours, most likely Syria; some that he was in South America, which happened to be the truth although they had no way of knowing that; some that he was dead. The CIA had a file on him, now declassified. Some of his supporters had built a fake tomb for him, bearing a false date of death, in the belief that it would throw the authorities off the scent. In fact, when the tomb was opened and found empty it suggested if anything that he was still alive, someone having connived to disguise the fact. But it didn’t matter that much as long as no-one knew for sure where he was. And they didn’t, despite an extensive search both in Paraguay and elsewhere, due to a combination of various factors; plastic surgery, the painstaking fabrication of a fake identity, withdrawal to a remote location, protection by the government (which had at one point been headed by a German immigrant, General Alfredo Stroessner) and by an extensive network of sympathizers drawn mainly from the country’s substantial German community and operating, where necessary, by threats and violence.

He did feel slightly more vulnerable whenever he left Paraguay, but soon got over it. After all there was very little chance of anyone realising who he was. His passport always got him through at both the point of departure and that of arrival; not that any custom officials would be looking out for him after so many years. They probably wouldn’t have expected him to be still alive.

It was probably the plastic surgery that was the crucial factor. He’d never liked it, because the sharp angular features it had left him with were so unlike his real ones; only of course the aesthetics of the matter weren’t important. But even in previous life his had been an ordinary, plain, undistinguished face, the face of an anonymous minor civil servant who you wouldn’t think twice about if you happened to pass him in the street. It was said that had been Himmler’s strength too, and Eichmann’s until the Israelis finally managed to track him down.

A Jew might recognize him, he supposed, though the risk still had to be taken. He wouldn’t put it past them.

Surgery apart, he supposed that if someone had done to him what had been done in the camps he’d remember their face regardless of how many years had passed in the meantime. That was hatred for you; and the Jews knew how to hate. He didn’t begrudge them that hate, all things considered. It just didn’t make any difference to what he had to do.


FOUR
What with one thing and another, Caroline still hadn’t broken the backlog of work that was continuing to accumulate on her desk. The report on renewable energy had come back from the printers suitably amended except for a couple of errors which they had forgotten to correct. A couple was too many for her so she sent it to another firm, hoping earnestly that they at least would get the ****ing thing right. She had half a mind not to pay the bill to the original printers but decided it would be simpler and less stressful, especially at the present time, not to make a fight of it, and sent a note to Finance authorizing the transaction.

Natasha reported that she had “almost finished” designing the draft Equal Opportunities leaflet. The Indonesian report was also out of the way. But that still left those on the Alaska assignment and the Diversity conference, plus the breakdown of UK recruitment figures. And the annual assessment for each employee at the London HQ had also come up.

She had finally decided to knuckle under and put in a few late nights. That was why she was still here in the building at about five minutes past eight, finishing the last sentence of the Alaska report. Earlier she had rung her friend and neighbour Jane, to whom she had entrusted her spare pair of house keys, asking if she could go in and feed the cat in case he grew hungry and unsettled by his mistress’ failure to appear at the appointed time.

Finally she sat back with a sigh of relief, resting for a moment before sending the command to the computer to print the document. When that task was done she put it through the laminator, then the binder, and the job was finished. She’d deliver it personally to Hennig’s office in the morning.

She shouldered her handbag and went from the room, her temper not much improved. What irritated and depressed her was the knowledge that after going home and having only three hours, at the most, to spend on leisure before going to bed she would have to be up first thing in the morning for another hard day’s work here. Good as her salary was compared to countless others’, she still wished sometimes that she was independently rich.

The click of her high-heeled shoes rang out sharply on the night-time corridors, the sound echoing through the otherwise deserted building. She took the lift to the ground floor. Anxious to be out of the place as quickly as possible, she strode across the foyer to the doors, managing a friendly smile at the security guard behind the reception desk as she passed him. He returned the compliment.

“Count yourself lucky,” he grinned in an attempt at consolation, having noted the look on her face and guessed what lay behind it. “I’ve got to be here till three!”

“Mmmmm,” she answered, not really consoled at all. She went on walking until, just before she got to the doors, she stopped suddenly and put a hand to her head, frowning.

The guard saw her pause, the muscles of her face twitching in what looked like a startled expression, and sat up sharply. “Are you all right, love?” he called out. “Miss Kent?”

“Er, yes,” she answered. “I’m fine, thankyou. Just…tired.” Composing herself, she pushed open the door and strode out into the night.

At her car, she paused again and rubbed her forehead, trying to decide if it really had been fatigue, or was a little bit more than that. Just for a second she had seemed to hear voices. Inside her head.


They were both tall, gold-haired, fine-boned; so alike, in fact, that they might have been brother and sister. They had successfully traced their Aryan ancestry as far back as 1750 (it didn’t matter what had happened before then since any undesirable genes would by now have been bred out), a necessary precondition of the marriage. The couple had walked beneath the array of flags and banners in the entrance hall, with at one point a pair of swords, held by Rolf Erdmann and Martin Higson, crossed high over their heads. The brief ceremony was conducted by Wachter in his capacity as high priest. The couple exchanged rings and received gifts of bread and salt from Wachter. “I now unite you as man and wife, to the glory of the Aryan race,” he intoned. “May you keep yourself pure in heart and in blood, and so uphold the noble ways of our ancestors.”

When their children were born, they would be taken to a clearing in a wooded part of the castle grounds where, on a stone altar, would be placed a bronze hammer and a bowl of water from a sacred spring believed to have magical properties. The mother would lay the child at the father’s feet, and the father then take it into his arms and sprinkle it with water from the bowl, saying “I recognise you as my own, take you into our kindred and give you a name. I sprinkle you with the pure water of the German spring. May all that is un-German be alien to you...”

Immediately after the wedding the bride and groom departed – the groom was not a member of the Ruling Executive, who at present were conducting the Society’s business on a “need-to-know” basis, and Wachter did not believe women competent to be involved in running its affairs anyway. Heinrich, Wachter and their colleagues took their seats at the table in the banqueting hall for the latest of their regular meetings to assess progress made towards achievement of their movement’s aims. They had used to meet at a hotel in Munich, but after the Thule Society had merged with New Vitality and become in effect a serious political movement aimed at establishing the Fourth Reich the venue was switched to Wachter’s castle for security reasons.

Present apart from Wachter, Heinrich, Erdmann and Higson were an American, a Russian, a South African, a Frenchman, an Austrian, several Dutchmen, a Belgian, a Dane, a Swede and a Norwegian. All were members of far right organizations, which might or might not be official political parties, in their home countries. Each possessed a secret military wing and some of its supporters, at any rate, belonged to the Thule Society.

The reports came in from the different branches. Generally, everything was going well. The stockpile of guns and other weaponry was growing. There was a lot you could obtain on the international black market in arms, such as mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, if you knew how to work it. In particular it was important not to let anyone know who you were really working for, just in case they had ideological objections to selling you the stuff. There was a lot of money laundering and a lot of phantom companies being set up as fronts.

Membership was on the increase, although they had reached a point where they had all the shock troops they needed for the initial series of uprisings. The rest could be relied on to go into action as soon as they realised what was happening and were told to take advantage of it (though they probably didn’t need to be). Any more might be a security risk, not because they weren’t sufficiently committed to the movement’s ideals but because the fewer members knew what was being planned the lesser the risk of something being blurted out and maybe overheard by the wrong people.

There were still several outstanding issues which needed to be resolved. For one thing, a number of people felt the criteria for deciding who was or was not a perfect Aryan were too loosely defined. “If we’re not careful,” warned the South African, “a lot of people will slip through that we don’t want.” The Austrian, the Belgian and the three Scandinavians nodded their agreement.

“I understand that,” said the American, Helldorf. “But there’s one thing that bothers me. You could get someone who looks a hundred per cent Aryan but isn’t, though only by a fraction. I’m frankly not happy about killing someone – a good-looking chick from Sven and Ulf’s part of the world, maybe - who doesn’t fit the bill just because their cheekbones are a millimetre too wide. Because of something you can’t see, unless you wanna get a ruler and take an exact measurement. Let’s face it, most of us are never gonna bother about a difference that small. It’d be a stupid waste.”

Wachter deliberated for a moment. “Well I suppose it’s down to whoever’s carrying out the examination in the first place. We can issue guidelines telling them they can allow a degree of leeway if they want. Any difference big enough to be a problem, they’re bound to spot.”

“What matters is that the subject’s ideologically sound,” Higson said. “They’ve got to agree with our aims, or at any rate be prepared to let us get on with it.”

“So is that how we should leave it?” Wachter asked the meeting. He glanced over at Heinrich, who sat at the head of the table in the place of honour once occupied by Himmler. The old man had been happy to let Wachter run things without any intervention by himself, while listening carefully to everything that was being said and well aware of the different factions within the party and their agendas.

Heinrich nodded. “It’s not how we used to do things,” he remarked, “but I suppose it makes sense.” After a moment a rumbling murmur of assent travelled round the table. Sensing the matter was resolved, Wachter moved on to the next item. “Now, the question of the leadership once we are in control.”

His eyes flickered briefly to the portrait of Hitler which he’d bought the year before from a shop that sold Nazi memorabilia.

“It’s either you or Heinrich,” said the Frenchman. “The pair of you have been involved the longest, and you have proved yourselves to be adept organizers. One or the other must be Fuhrer.”

Heinrich gave a little chuckle. “May I say I have no ambitions in that direction. In the past I have found it sufficient merely to play the part which fate has allotted me. And although I like to think I’ve lasted remarkably well, it’s still my opinion I’m too old for the job. So Klaus, I’m quite happy to let you do it. What matters is that this organization achieves the power it needs to fulfil its aims. That is all.”

“Then if you have no objection….” began Wachter. Fourteen heads bobbed up and down.

For a moment his skull-like face grinned broadly, the eyes gleaming in an almost feverish fashion. “Well, if that’s settled,” he concluded. He consulted the agenda on the table before him. “Ah, yes..it’s been suggested we ought to have a representative from the actual BNP on the Executive.”
“It would seem a good idea,” said the Dane.

“I’m not sure they’d want to sit at the same table as me,” Higson smiled. “Not now.”
“Of course,” he said with a shrug, ”if you want me to ugger off…”

Wachter smiled placatingly. “I don’t think there’s any need for that at this stage, Martin. Let me assure you we all appreciate the valuable service you have been to us. But is the time not now ripe for you to put out some feelers, re-establish some kind of contact with your former colleagues? If they are to be of any help when the time comes they must know what we are doing, and vice versa.”

“I take your point. But I’m not sure we can trust them not to cock it up somehow. What if they let it leak out that we’re planning something big?”

“Perhaps you could alert them just before it happens, so there is less time for something to go wrong?”

“They may think I’ve turned informer. After all it’s ages since any of them have seen me, they’ve no way of knowing what’s been happening meanwhile. I don’t think we should risk it. There’s no point: when the balloon goes up they’ll do their bit, believe me.” They agreed to leave it at that.

“While we’re at it, I think you could say they’re doing fairly well at the moment, if the local election results are anything to go by. That growth in support is worth any number of court cases or actual convictions, and the hassle they cause. Of course the pollies are trying to downplay all their gains but there’s no denying it’s slowly happening.”

Wachter nodded his approval. “That is good to hear. Now, I have kept the most important item until last, because I feel it is best dealt with once everything else is out of the way. The question of whether the authorities in any of our respective countries suspect anything.”

“There’s nothing,” said Helldorf. “Not at my end, anyway.” The others too shook their heads. “I know our LA branch got busted, but they don’t know about Thule. Of course we’re having to be very careful right now, so much has changed after 9/11. Any what they’d call an extremist organization…..they reckon the National Security Agency are tapping every phone in the country. But for the moment it looks like we’re all clean, as far as the Feds and the CIA are concerned. And we’ve no spies anywhere in the woodwork, that we’re aware of.”

“If there don’t appear to be any, then we may as well rest content,” Wachter told him. “There is no sense in worrying about a problem until we can be sure it exists.” He coughed. “There has, unfortunately, been one..incident about which you may well have heard by now.” Wachter was embarrassed that it should have taken place on the German branch’s patch.
“This Richards?” asked one of the Dutchmen.

Rolf Erdmann grunted. “I don’t think the police have enough evidence. We cleaned it all out, the stuff we used to tie him with, his wallet, the bugging device he was using. If they had the proof they would have arrested us by now, or at least brought us in for questioning.”

“All the same, it is very disturbing,” Heinrich said. “It suggests the Jews have reason to suspect us. They might anyway, of course. It concerns me that he was able to infiltrate your group in the first place, although it would seem we are already being as careful as possible over recruitment. Perhaps we were just unlucky.”

“I had thought of putting a ban on further recruitment for the time being,” said Wachter. “But such a measure might be seen as proof of our guilt.”

“We’ll have to be extra-careful from now on, whatever happens,” Higson muttered.
“Indeed. I would suggest we try to communicate by post where possible, not telephone or e-mail unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any contact with the Thule expedition. The old-fashioned way is often the best, because for one thing people will not be expecting you to use it. It’ll throw any investigator right off the scent.”
“They could intercept our letters,” pointed out the Swede.

“We will just have to try and find a way round that. We will also have to continue trying to avoid any more unfortunate incidents. It’s worth saying again; it is vital attention isn’t drawn to us before the plan is ready for implementation. So there must be no attacks on Turks or Jews or asylum seekers, not for the moment. Anyone who breaks that rule will be severely punished, especially if it turns out to have wrecked the plan.”

“If we don’t seem to be doing anything alarming that in itself will eventually make the authorities suspicious,” Martin Higson said. “The calm before the storm, know what I mean?”

“Or,” said the Norwegian, “the authorities may decide that since we do not at the moment appear to represent a threat to security, they should concentrate their resources on dealing with Islamic terrorism, which does. It could go either way.”
Higson guessed he was right.

“I’d still like some assurance that what’s at Thule is something we can use,” said Helldorf. “If it’s not then the whole damn thing’s blown, isn’t it?”

“We have to risk it,” Heinrich told him. “We may not get another chance. The way the world is going, it is sure to collapse in chaos anyway before long. But if we act now, if we are strong and decisive, we can influence the form the collapse and the subsequent rebirth will take. And establish something that has a chance of lasting maybe not forever, but for – for the next thousand years.”

“There is one more thing I would say,” he continued after a brief pause. “After it has achieved its purpose the machine must be destroyed. It is too dangerous for anyone to possess. Even us. Is that understood? Even us….”


The original plan had been for Astrid Lundt and Karl-Heinz Wegen to fly to London to interview the Richards family at their home in Twickenham. But they’d already had the funeral; Orthodox Jews believed that burial (it would be burial not cremation, which they saw as a blasphemous destruction of what God had created) of a body should take place as soon as possible after death, preferably within twenty-four hours. The only delay had been caused by the need for David’s mother and father, Jonathan and Muriel, to fly to Germany to identify the body, as well as recover from the initial shock and distress of the bereavement.

As it happened Muriel Richards had been intending to return to Germany as soon as the funeral had been held, to tie up a few loose ends; collect a few items of her son’s personal property, and say thankyou to the people who’d looked after him during his stay at the University. She also felt the need to see the place where David had died, to speak to a few of those who had had contact with him in the last week of his life, and to learn something of the progress of the police investigation into his death. Her husband would have accompanied her on the trip, but he hadn’t been very well these last few days.

Muriel was shown into Faltermeyer’s office, where the police chief introduced himself and Astrid Lundt. He had thought it best for a woman to be present at the interview in view of the need, for political reasons, to handle this sensitively. Lundt smiled reassuringly at the British woman as they took their seats, and Muriel smiled back weakly. She was a short, round-faced woman in her mid-forties, dark hair graying at the edges. Although obviously her manner was subdued, she somehow succeeded in giving an impression of considerable reserves of energy lying beneath that slight frame.

Both Germans spoke good English so there was no need for an interpreter. “First of all, Frau Richards, may I say how sorry I am at your loss,” Faltermeyer began. His manner was sincere enough, Muriel thought, and she nodded her thanks.

“Let me assure you we’re doing everything we can to find the people who killed David.” Unfortunately, they hadn’t had much luck so far. None of the eyewitnesses had been able to give descriptions of the men who had been seen chasing David, everything having happened so quickly, and neither the subsequent appeal for information or the house-to-house search of the immediate area had produced any result. It could just mean that the killers were covering their tracks well.

“And also,” Faltermeyer continued, “to find out why he was killed, which will to some extent amount to the same thing.”

“As with all police investigations, there are some things which may have to remain confidential for the moment,” Astrid said. At this, they thought they saw Muriel Richards frown briefly, her eyebrows lifting and then contracting as the eyes narrowed in what might have been suspicion.

Does she really trust Germans? Faltermeyer wondered. She knows all about what happened in the war; her elders would have made damn sure of that. And of course we’ve been foolish in the past, made silly mistakes, said things which have offended people.

“But that is only until the investigation is concluded,” Lundt went on. Either David Richards’ killers would be apprehended or they wouldn’t. If they were, neither Astrid nor her boss could see any reason why they should not be publicly tried and their identity thus revealed. The authorities would go out of their way to prove they were determined to take the threat of neo-Nazism seriously and that Germany was atoning for everything that had happened in the past. Unless of course members of the political establishment were themselves involved with the killers; that was always a possibility.

“You’ll keep us informed at every stage, won’t you?” Muriel asked.
“Of course,” said Astrid, she and Faltermeyer nodding in unison.

“So what can you tell me?” Muriel said. “It’s very important for us to know as much as possible.” She thought of her husband and the way he’d changed in just the past week or so to a haggard ghost she barely recognized as the man she’d married.

They told her all they’d been able to glean so far, about the men seen running after David, the failure as of yet to find any substantial clues, and about other things. “There were marks on David’s wrists and ankles suggesting he’d been tied up,” Faltermeyer said quietly. “I’m afraid David had also been beaten very badly. I, I’m sorry if this is distressing for you.”

They saw her wince, contemplating the floor for a moment or two. Astrid leaned over and placed a comforting hand on her arm.

Muriel took a deep breath to compose herself, and after a moment glanced up. The Germans’ faces were a study in solemnity, but she didn’t think it was entirely forced. Astrid asked her if she was willing to go on.

“Yes, of course,” she replied, a little impatiently. “It’s obvious they kept David prisoner for a while, then. Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?”

“I’m afraid that’s about all we know,” said Faltermeyer. “But we thought perhaps you might be able to help us in one or two respects.”
“Oh, yes?”

“Can you think of any reason why anyone might want to kill your son? Was there anybody who had a grudge against him, for one reason or another?”

“What, here?” Muriel frowned. ”David hardly knew anyone in Germany. Apart from the other people on his course, and they seemed to have liked him even though they hadn’t known him for very long.”
Astrid nodded. “That is what our own enquiries appear to confirm.”
“As for back home, well he always got on well with everyone. I don’t think he had an enemy in the world.”

Lundt went on, “We have spoken to some of David’s fellow students at the University who say he seemed preoccupied in the days leading up to his death. As if he was anxious about something but not prepared to confide in anyone about it.”

Muriel lowered her head again, sighing. ”As a matter of fact there’d been quite a few times recently when David was like that. We were a bit annoyed that he wouldn’t talk to us about it. He…he didn’t seem unhappy, though, not really. Not at that stage.”
“You’ve no idea what could have been on his mind?”

There was a pause in the proceedings while Muriel thought, but only a slight one. It obviously wasn’t the first time she had tried to fathom the business, without success. ”No I’m sorry, I can’t. I suppose a lot of young men are like that. There may have been nothing significant about it at all. If I can think of anything, of course I’ll let you know immediately.”

“That would be most helpful. Now if I could ask you, Frau Richards, why exactly did David come to Germany? I understand he was on an exchange visit.”
“Yes, that’s right. He was quite excited about it. I remember….” She swallowed several times, tears pricking at her eyes, and once again Astrid made to comfort her, but she smiled and shook her head to indicate she was coping. “It meant foreign travel, which he enjoyed, but he also wanted to understand how Jews in Germany today felt about the Holocaust and about anti-Semitism; in particular whether they felt themselves to be vulnerable at present. He also wanted to understand the reasons behind the atrocities, if there was anything in Germany’s past that made them…more likely to happen, I suppose.” She looked uncomfortable at this point, wishing not to offend them. “It fitted in with his own history course back home.”

“Did he belong to any……” Lundt hesitated very briefly. “Did he belong to any political organizations?”
“Not unless you count the Anglo-Israeli Friendship Society. I suppose some would say you could. After all, I admit it’s a political issue. May I ask why you need to know?”

Faltermeyer interjected. “Well, in case the motive for David’s murder was….political.” They’d known the issue would have to be raised at some point. He wondered if he needed to mention that David was known to have got into several vigorous arguments on the subject of the Palestinians and of Israel’s right to exist; probably not, since the discussions had not ended amicably enough.

“So you think there’s that kind of angle to the matter?” This was undoubtedly a challenge. There was a look in Muriel Richards’ eyes which told Astrid she wasn’t going to go away until the question was answered.

“These things cannot be ruled out,” Lundt said. “It is something we have to investigate.” She herself looked as if she was impatient with these platitudes. Muriel decided to come to her rescue. “You’ll probably have guessed by now that we are ourselves Jewish, Fraulein Lundt.” She’d been wondering for some time whether to mention it directly.

“As a matter of fact we had,” said Faltermeyer. “That is why we needed to know if there were political factors involved.” He couldn’t possibly mention the Thule Society until there was firm evidence to prove they were guilty. “I did not mention the…Jewish aspect specifically because without further evidence, it did not seem relevant. At present we cannot be certain this was a racial attack.” Which was perfectly true, depending on exactly what David Richards had been trying to say when he died.

“Perhaps,” Muriel agreed. “But the way things are these days, you can’t discount the possibility.”
“We don’t intend to discount the possibility, Frau Richards. We are ruling nothing out until we have all the facts at out disposal.”
“Well,” sighed Muriel, “just let me know when you’ve got it. If that’s all?”
“I think so,” said Faltermeyer, getting to his feet. “Once again, my condolences.” She nodded in acknowledgement; a little stiffly, but then she obviously had a great deal on her mind at the moment.

Did I do that right? Faltermeyer asked himself once she’d gone. It didn’t seem to him that Muriel Richards had any cause to complain; he noted however how reluctant he’d been to actually allude to the family’s being Jewish. They were getting far too sensitive about these things. And she’d gone away sensing, quite correctly, that they were keeping something back from her. Which wasn’t good.

The sooner they were in a position to be more frank with her, the better. Which meant finding out just what exactly the Thule Society were up to.


THULE
A hundred yards from the entrance to the tunnel into the mountain, from which all the rock and rubble had now been cleared away, the expedition had set up their base camp, consisting of six steel-framed cabins serving as living accommodation for its members plus storage for the smaller items of equipment. Each one contained separate living and sleeping quarters and a hygiene unit consisting of shower and chemical toilet. In the open space between the two rows of huts several Unimogs, one fitted with a snowplough, a Snocat and a couple of bulldozers stood around. Behind the camp was the airstrip built to receive the planes that had flown in the heavy equipment along with the prefabricated sections of the cabins, and every so often delivered food and any other supplies the expedition might need. Women were occasionally flown in too, although strictly speaking this was against the rules; all their needs had to be provided for.

It had taken time, but after several years’ planning they had returned to Thule. A subsidiary of Wachter’s company had acquired a lease on the site and within a few months, after some initial surveying, set up what purported to be a research station.

They now had what amounted to a permanent presence here of about a dozen people. It wasn’t always the same people, because life out here in this chilly wasteland could be bleak and monotonous despite all the creature comforts of modern society, and not everyone was able to stand it for long. The rota was changed every few weeks, apart from the personnel who because of their specialist knowledge needed to be here all the time. Their dedication to the cause would keep them going.

They had been allowed to carry on with their work unmolested; the occasional plane had flown over, but nobody was showing any close interest in their work, perhaps because they were so far from anywhere that mattered. They visited the town of Qaanaaq occasionally, but were careful to keep their distance from the American airbase at Thule, a sensible precaution to take anyway because the Yanks were so obsessively security-conscious.

From the mouth of the tunnel, which had been widened so that several could now walk abreast all the way along, stepped Professor Ludwig Wolfmann, formerly of the University of Bonn. Walking in a hurried, breathless fashion he made for the largest of the cabins, which served as a kind of community centre.

Before venturing out into the open he had donned parka and gloves against the biting cold, which grew more severe each day as the Arctic winter approached. He had not needed protective clothing within the complex itself – nor was there any need for central heating - for there was obviously a geothermal heat source, which a civilisation living inside a mountain would have needed, although as yet they had no idea how it was tapped.

They had expected all the major rooms to be underground, to be closer to the heat source, yet it seemed they weren’t. Perhaps there was a hot spring, or something like that, somewhere.

On the roof of the main cabin was mounted a cluster of aerials and several satellite dishes. Inside one found, apart from living and sleeping quarters for a couple of the party, a recreation room and a radio room where contact was maintained with the outside world. In the former a few of the heavies were sitting round a table, one reading a pornographic magazine, the rest playing a game of cards. There was a TV with a DVD player and a portable three-bar electric fire stood in the corner, for use should the power unit supplying lighting and heating to the camp, located in a hut of its own a few hundred yards from the main base, break down. Nodding briefly to the paramilitaries, Wolfmann entered the radio room where Mikhail Letsyn from Moscow, whose duty it was to man the place today, sat before a battery of CCTV screens. Letsyn had been a keen member of the main Russian nationalist Party, the Liberal Democrats, and a great admirer of its leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, until Zhirinovsky’s violent behaviour made him too many enemies and he became discredited. Letsyn – one of the Nordic-looking sort of Russian – had considered switching his support to Vladimir Putin when the latter came to prominence, for Putin represented the kind of no-nonsense authoritarianism he believed the country needed. But partly because Putin’s political background was Communist rather than nationalist, and partly because he, Letsyn, wanted something more openly in line with what he really believed, he and a few other nationalists decided instead to throw in their lot with the wider global neo-Nazi movement. They had thought of asking Zhirinovsky to join them, but dropped the idea because (a) the man was too much of a liability, and (b) although Letsyn wasn’t sure that he minded, it was possible Zhirinovsky might; for on one side of his family, Mad Vlad’s ancestry was Jewish.

“Hi,” said Letsyn. “How’s it going in there? Managed to crack the code yet?”
“I’m getting there,” Wolfmann said. “But it’s difficult. You can only learn a little bit at a time.” He nodded at the radio, in reality a form of satellite telephone. “We need to call Heinrich. Something’s come up.”
“What is it?” Letsyn asked eagerly. “Have you found something in there?”
Wolfmann looked the Russian straight in the eye. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I have. Something very important.”



FIVE
She kept herself so busy these days, working for the defence of her country, that she rarely had time to think about it. That was not her deliberate intent. What had happened had been so awful, so wrong and evil and without justification, that it was inconceivable either she or anyone else should forget the horror. Noa Golani was proud of the fact that her family were not émigrés from Europe, but unlike the thousands who had flocked to Israel after the war had always been there, rooted deep in the soil of the Promised Land. The land given to the Jews by God, as the Bible made abundantly clear, if you cared to reflect on that rather than rush to take the Palestinians’ side the way people were always doing. Not that Golani was particularly religious, but it still seemed to her a good argument for the existence of the state of Israel, by her interpretation of the Old Testament. The issue, however, was primarily about land as far as she was concerned. Land, and the freedom of a people to occupy it in peace, without fear of harrassment or actual harm.

Her own family had been farmers and shepherds here for thousands of years, since Biblical times. The pastoral surroundings in which they lived and toiled had in some ways changed little from those days.

From an early age she had worked on the farm gathering in the crops and tending the livestock, from time to time having to shift crates of produce and heavy machinery, and in the process she grew as big and as strong as many of the boys and men, often besting her brothers in fights or in feats of strength.

In those days she had played in the farmyard with the boys; and also with children from one of the Palestinian villages down the road. Yes; she would often play with the Palestinians in their dirt yards, among the piles of rubbish where the dogs scavenged, and join them on expeditions to raid orchards on neighbouring farms, scrumping olives and other fruit. A little girl called Hanan had been her constant companion on such adventures. They were the best of friends, seeing no difference between each other that mattered; to Noa Hanan was just another human being, and vice versa.

When you were a child, you didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

Then one day, while Noa aged thirteen had been working in the fields with her father, learning how to drive a tractor, the militants had come. Four men with cloths tied around their heads, wielding Kalashnikov rifles, had driven up to the lonely farmhouse in a pickup, jumped out and kicked in the door. They burst in and riddled the building and its occupants with bullets; killing her mother, her sister, her aunt who had come to visit, and two of her brothers.

The following day a shocked Hanan had come to see her, to say how sorry she was. Noa had stared at her blankly, as if in some kind of trance, then spat at her, full in the face. Before turning away and going back into the house, which she was not to leave for some weeks, she said one thing to her former friend.
“Your people did this.”

After that Hanan did not come to the house again. She knew there would be no point. Golani didn’t care; all she did care about was finding something to fill the aching void which had opened up within her, a desolate wilderness in which she could hear a voice crying. Crying out for revenge.


SIX
Caroline had considered working late every night until the logjam was broken, but now abandoned the idea, frightened by the odd sensation she had had on Tuesday night when leaving the office. Was the stress she was under affecting her brain?

It might be better to take a few days off. But she knew that the work wouldn’t get done in her absence, and when she got back it would have piled up even more making her task doubly difficult. She earnestly wished Chris hadn’t chosen this particular time to go on holiday, suddenly feeling a powerful urge for his presence.

At least Natasha had finished the draft Equal Opportunities leaflet, which Caroline had OK’d and passed to Hennig for his approval (though whether he looked at such things in detail was a matter of conjecture). But she still had three important tasks outstanding and past their deadlines, and the completion of all the others had failed to mollify Hennig.

“Oh by the way,” he said. “If you really want that renewables report to go before the next directors’ meeting, it’s got to be on my desk sometime within the next seven days.”

“There’s been a slight delay, I’m afraid,” she explained. “We had to send it to another printers’ because the first lot made a pig’s ear of it. As soon as it reaches me I’ll pass it on.”

He sat back and studied her thoughtfully. “I know I’ve asked you this before, but why are you so keen on this particular project, Caroline?”

“Don’t you ever feel uneasy,” she said, “that we’re working for a company that’s pumping God knows how many tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day, causing God knows how much pollution?”
“Why?” he asked. “Do you?”
Their eyes met.

“We ought to do something about it,” she said. “We think a fossil fuel economy’s the only way to guarantee a high standard of living like the one we’re enjoying right now. But the damage global warming’s eventually going to cause to the quality of our lives will offset any advantage we think oil and coal give us from that point of view.”

“I think you’re getting too worked up over it,” he said. “On top of all your other duties it’s a bit of a burden, surely.”

“Well no-one else was interested,” she pointed out resentfully. And so they’d ended up making it Caroline’s special responsibility, on her own suggestion. It was the one out of all responsibilities which she could jack in without anyone being particularly bothered and giving her grief. That was the one consolation; she didn’t have to care about the planet. She didn’t have to put any effort into making the Renewables Initiative a success, not for the sake of the human race or the millions of other species it shared the world with. She owed it to someone whose life had been so shattered by personal trauma that the green cause was the only thing left to them; but of course there was no point in exerting oneself unduly over things like that.

“It means you’re overworking yourself,” Hennig said. “I don’t want you conking out on me. That wouldn’t be much help to the company.”

No, because I’m everyone’s favourite repository for dumping work in, she thought bitterly.
“Come to think of it, you don’t look too good right now,” he said.
“Eh?” said Caroline, and winced.

The sensation was like a very sharp, stabbing migraine. Her head was swimming. For a terrifying moment, the view before her rippled and blurred, disappearing into a shimmering red haze. It was as if she couldn’t see, hear or even think in the normal fashion. There was just a babble of sounds, like a chorus of whispering voices all trying to speak at once. A jumble of diverse, unrelated sensations she couldn’t make sense of. It was like being trapped in a room where there was a multiplicity of doors and windows, all of which she could see at once, and no way for her brain to interpret the signals it received through them from the outside world. But somehow she had the odd impression she could hear the people talking in the office next door, even through solid brick.

Just as suddenly as it had started the attack passed, and her vision cleared. Caroline stared vacantly at Hennig, her shock such that she didn’t really see him. She felt cold sweat all over her body.

To Hennig her face had seemed to freeze for a few seconds, going totally blank as if her mind had been transported somewhere else, to a completely different plane of existence. Now she looked, he thought, seriously frightened.

Caroline became aware that he was speaking. “Are you alright?” To give him his due, he sounded genuinely concerned. “Caroline, for goodness’ sake what’s the matter?”

“I, I dunno,” she said stupidly, quite unable at the moment to make sense of her experience. “I just….I just…..”

“See what I mean? I’m telling you to go home.” He spoke bluntly, but kindly.
“But I’m OK now….”
“Caroline, go home,” Hennig snapped. “That’s an order. If you don’t I’ll suspend you, for your own good. I didn’t like what I just saw. Don’t come back until you’ve seen the doctor and found out what the problem is. Go home this minute; and I’d advise you to take the bus.”
“What about my work?” she protested.
“Don’t worry, I’ll see to that. Just go home.”

Seeing there was no point in further protest, she nodded and left with a brief muttered thanks, Hennig’s anxious gaze following her.

Caroline caught the bus home. And once there she collapsed into a chair to remain in it for a long time, staring at the wall and wondering fearfully what the hell was happening to her.

WALDERSEE OPERA HOUSE, BERLIN
It was a good production; the acting and special effects were both of a high standard, and oh that stirring music.

Brunnhilde had just come on, and was telling how Siegfried had sworn her an eternal oath of fidelity. She ordered logs to be gathered to make a funeral pyre for the hero, singing of her betrayal by he whom she had thought the noblest of men and how his death had atoned for his guilt. She took Siegfried’s ring, promising to return it to the Rhinemaidens who guarded it. She hurled a blazing torch onto the pyre, which immediately ignited, then mounted her horse and rode into the flames. The fire spread to the whole of Valhalla and everyone screamed and ran in terror. The Rhine burst its banks, flooding everything. The Rhinemaidens appeared in search of the ring and one of the gods leapt into the water in pursuit of it, intending to steal it, but the maidens went in after him and seized him, dragging him down to his death and holding up the ring in triumph. The flood waters receded and Valhalla caught fire again, the blaze illuminating it spectacularly as all those assembled there were consumed; Gotterdammerung, the long-predicted end of the gods, had come to pass. The curtain fell to the thunderous cheering and clapping of the audience.

He had turned his mobile phone off during the performance, not wishing to have his enjoyment disturbed. As soon as he turned it on again, outside in the foyer, it started ringing.

Wachter found a quiet corner of the place and answered it. “Klaus,” said Ludwig Wolfmann. “I know you said we shouldn’t phone, but something’s come up which we have to sort out. We need to find Engelmann.”


Muriel and Jonathan Richards sat together on the sofa, gazing without any particular interest at the old film on the TV. After a while Jonathan switched it off and just sat gazing into the blank screen, a single huge eye staring back at him impassively. He hadn’t bothered to ask her if she minded, as if he wasn’t even aware she was present.
“Shall I make you another cup of tea?” she asked. The last one still sat on the table beside him, barely touched.

He merely grunted vaguely, which she took as a yes. Taking the untouched cup with her she went into the kitchen. After she’d finished seeing to him, she steeled herself and trudged upstairs to David’s room – she’d always think of it as that – to continue sorting through all his possessions, including the things sent home from Germany by the university. It couldn’t be put off any longer.

She bent over the pile of stuff on the floor and set to work. It wasn’t long before the first tears began to prick at the corners of her eyes.

Photographs of David as a baby, on family holidays in Israel, at his bar-mitzvah; various framed awards won at school for hard work and good behaviour; a few battered old toys. The history of a life which had been suddenly and unjustly cut short. They had always known what they as Jews might potentially experience, though here in Britain they’d always considered themselves safe from it. Now the fact that it had actually happened to them made it personal, and unpleasantly so.

She thought back to the funeral, which had been held at the local Jewish cemetery. It was a simple affair, because Jews believed that rich and poor should be treated alike. Death can happen to anyone. The body had been washed and wrapped in a plain linen shroud with the prayer shawl around its neck, and then placed in a plain wooden coffin over which the mourners had said the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Afterwards the family had returned home for the period of formal mourning known as Shiva (seven), which lasted the whole of the following week. During that time they stayed at home, as was the custom, friends and members of the synagogue visiting them three times each day to offer prayers and comfort.

They had two other children, which of course took the pain away to some extent. But to lose someone you had nurtured from birth, on whose education and welfare you had lavished such loving care and attention…she knelt weeping over the heap of bric-a-brac until her husband heard it, picked himself up shakily from his armchair and climbed the stairs to her. They hugged each other for a long time, neither speaking.

He was out of it now. Because he could see she needed him, just as much as he knew he needed her.

Finally he smiled weakly, saying he’d better let her get on with it, and went back downstairs. He knew that the whole heart-breaking business might set him off again.

Muriel got on with it, sorting out what they were going to keep, putting all that could be thrown away in a separate pile. While she did it she imagined David safely in the afterlife, looking down at them and laughing his head off at all the fuss they were making. It was the only way to cope.

Finding herself contemplating an old shoe box full of Corgi toys, she sorted the less damaged from the rest and laid them out neatly in a row. They could always be given away, to a charity shop or a collector. The rest would be dumped, having long ago served their purpose of helping give David a happy and content childhood. She turned her attention to the next item: a metal case, dented and rusted, in which her son used to keep miscellaneous personal possessions. She’d found it tucked away right at the back of the wardrobe, buried under a pile of old clothes. It could be padlocked and had been, suggesting to her, now that she thought about it, that there was something inside David hadn’t wanted people to see.

Again she recalled how preoccupied, how secretive, he’d been at times in the weeks before his departure for Germany, while the arrangements for the visit were being finalized. The people at the university hadn’t mentioned it but the German police had, clearly feeling the matter to be important.

Dirty books or girlie magazines? She could cope with that; it wasn’t that much of a sin, not for a red-blooded, perfectly normal young man of twenty-one. And she doubted it was the reason for his strange behaviour. You might be embarrassed if your parents found out you were hoarding such things, even in adulthood, but she didn’t think you’d lose much sleep over it, not altogether. The days when young people ever thought like that about such matters were long gone.

It might be something it would be preferable for her not to know, but she couldn’t think what. David couldn’t be a serial killer or a child abuser, she was sure of that.
What she did want to know, though, was why he was dead.

Perhaps now that he was gone they should respect his wishes, but…..

There should be a key for the padlock somewhere. Glancing round the room, she saw what might be it lying on David’s desk. She tried it and with a click the lid of the case jerked, loosened. Lifting it, she gazed down at the contents.

Just a few scraps of notepaper: but why had he kept them locked away like this?

On one was scribbled “Abi Feinstein c/o Embassy” and a London telephone number. The name suggested the embassy in question was the Israeli. It wasn’t surprising if David had been in contact with its staff, since he was known to be an enthusiastic supporter of the country and had often taken his holidays there as an adult. He had probably been intending to arrange some such outing, or wanted to participate in some cultural event the embassy was staging.

But if that was the case, why hadn’t he mentioned it to them? He mentioned most things to them. Most things. Something big had been bothering him in the last few weeks of his life, without doubt, and they didn’t know what it was.

It couldn’t be anything to do with the German exchange because that had been organized by the IJC, though she knew the Israelis had an input. And why had the notes been kept apart from his other possessions?

On another flimsy were written the dates, times and venues of various meetings, usually with this “Abi” person somewhere in London. The other names were Jewish or might have been. Were they Israelis too?
A third sheet contained a series of notes:

New Vitality
Main branch in Berlin, others in Munich, Hamburg and Bonn. Membership fairly mixed, though quite a few unemployed and low-grade workers. Funded mainly from personal wealth of leader. Manifesto calls for repatriation of asylum seekers and Turkish immigrants and end to “culture of apology” for Nazi war crimes. One or two Holocaust deniers among Ruling Executive. Links in past with French National Front, South African racists, Austrian Freedom Party and Flemish Nationalist Union.
Key names:
Wachter (leader). Big league industrialist, runs one of country’s leading computer firms. Not seen much. Lives mainly in old castle in Rhineland.
Schwege (Secretary).
Lucke (Treasurer).
Erdmann. Runs party’s youth wing, been in trouble with police in past for beating up political opponents, but clean of late. Was student at the University in Berlin, where blackballed for his views. Recently active in trying to recruit members for party among student population, despite being banned from campus. Still people there, fellow NDP members, who can be counted friends of his. Get to know them?

Muriel read through the notes again and again, turning what she was seeing over in her mind. It all added up to something highly disturbing. Something she would have preferred to have been told about.


Again the leading members of the Thule Society were sitting round the table in Wachter’s banqueting hall, having been summoned back from their homes in England, France, Holland, Belgium, Paraguay or wherever almost as soon as they had touched down there.

Heinrich felt it was best if he chaired the proceedings. He explained what had been discovered by the team working at Thule. “You will all know about Engelmann from your study of the Grunewald dossier. We had supposed he was of no further importance to us. This latest discovery at Thule, however, affects the situation quite considerably.”

Wachter nodded. “We don’t want the Power to be in the possession of anyone who might not share our aims. That could be utterly disastrous.”

“So - we must find out what happened to Engelmann, if he survived the war. We can start at the Bundesarchiv.”
“I’ll get Ulrich to do it,” Wachter said.

Heinrich’s gaze swept over each of them, travelling round the room in a wide arc. “I needn’t emphasise how important this is. If anyone knows or finds out anything they are to inform Klaus immediately.”

Rolf Erdmann took the opportunity to ask what was the general situation at Thule.
Wachter told him. “We still don’t know enough about how the stuff works, and what we do know we’re piecing together gradually through trial and error. It might help if we could get through those sealed doors, but I’m not optimistic about our chances there.”
“Haven’t they tried explosives?” asked Ulf.

“One of them, you wouldn’t want to go in there anyway. The other, it’d probably be a waste of time. The hole would simply seal up again, too fast for us to get through it. Tests on some of the surrouNding rock confirm that. We’re clearly not meant to get either of those doors open, you see.

“But that is not our most pressing worry right now. If we can’t find Engelmann, matters may slip out of our control.”

“If the theory is correct, if someone had used the Power, then there would be..incidents,” said Sven. “We have heard of none.”
“Perhaps there have been. Things which were badly observed and wrongly interpreted.”

“But if they were not wrongly interpreted? If someone were to realise what they meant? The authorities have ways of covering such things up. Which means perhaps we will never find Engelmann.”
“Only if they know,” Higson reminded him.

“What would be the implications,” asked the Russian, “if they had found out about the Power and studied it to learn how it worked?”

“It is difficult to say. But let’s not lose heart unnecessarily. I suggest we apply the principle of William of Occam’s razor; we do not know the authorities have found out about the Power, so let us be optimistic they haven’t.”
“But we must find Engelmann,” he added. “Before somebody else does. We must find Engelmann.”
“Or his descendants,” Heinrich said.


FIRST SECRETARY’S OFFICE, ISRAELI EMBASSY, PALACE GREEN, KENSINGTON, LONDON
Muriel had managed to secure the interview by saying it was a matter affecting Israel’s national security and that she needed to speak to someone urgently, in confidence. That, she knew, would produce the desired result and save having to badger them.

“Now, Mrs Richards, what can I do for you?” began Shimon Ezra charmingly.
“It’s about my son, David Richards. The young man who was murdered in Germany, you may have heard about it.”

He nodded sympathetically. “Yes; a dreadful business. However I’m not at all sure how we can help you. He was a British citizen, I take it?”
“Yes, he was.” She looked him squarely in the eye. “But he was working for you, wasn’t he?”
The First Secretary looked puzzled. “What do you mean, Mrs Richards?”
“I don’t mean for the Embassy. I mean he was working for your security services. Spying for them.”
“You have evidence?” he asked politely.

“Something I found in his belongings when I was going through them.” She pushed the two pieces of paper, both photocopies, across the table towards him and he put on his glasses and peered at it closely.
It was perhaps foolish of David to have kept it, she reflected. But then he probably hadn’t expected himself to die. The young generally didn’t.
“I was sure it was Nazis. What I didn’t know was why they’d killed him. But now I think I do. You got him to infiltrate them, didn’t you? And something went wrong.”

Ezra looked up. “Mrs Richards, I really don’t understand this.” It was hard to tell if his bewilderment was genuine. “I can assure you it’s not our policy to recruit nationals of foreign countries for our intelligence services.”
“The evidence is right there before me. I checked the number and found it was for this office.”

“Yes, that’s our number alright. But perhaps it was for some other reason that he had it. I admit the evidence of these notes your son wrote down supports the theory he was spying on this organization, but I don’t see that there’s necessarily any connection with this embassy.”

“I rang the extension and asked for a Mr Abi Feinstein. Apparently he doesn’t exist. Not officially, anyway. I think you’re lying to me, Mr Ezra.”

He stared at her, then gave an astonished laugh. “I assure you I’m not, Mrs Richards.”
“I still want to know why. You’ll appreciate that it means a lot to us.”
Almost a whole minute went by before he replied to this. “That cannot be revealed, I’m afraid. It would compromise our national security.”
In other words, her surmise was correct.

“Did you tell the German police what you were doing?” she asked.
“We weren’t doing anything, Mrs Richards. The Germans won’t be able to tell you any more than we can, which quite frankly is nothing at all. I appreciate that you need to understand why your son came to die, but - ”
“So there was something going on? Otherwise you wouldn’t want it kept quiet, would you?”
“Mrs Richards, I’ve already told you. We don’t recruit nationals of foreign countries.”

“But you just implied there was a threat to your national security. I’m just…..putting two and two together. I hardly think it likely David would have been working against you.”
Ezra smiled. “I don’t mind having to say it again; I appreciate your concern to see justice done for your son. However, there’s really nothing to add to what I’ve just said. It’s only fair to tell you you’d be wasting your time by taking this matter any further.”
Falling silent, he began to fiddle with his biro.

Muriel regarded him through hollow eyes. “I see,” she muttered, and rose slowly from her chair.
“I’ll see you out,” he offered cordially, rising too.

“Don’t bother, I think I remember the way. Thankyou for seeing me.” She left the room, and the building, without a word. Her mind remained a blank haze until she got home, when she could think more clearly and calmly about what she’d been told. And what to do about it.


STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE, MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA
Strictly speaking, thought Dr Frank Haydon, I shouldn’t be here. The tests were supposed to take place in a controlled environment, which meant the constant presence of a supervisor looking over one’s shoulder was discouraged. It might prove a distraction and lead to mistakes, answers which were wrong or only correct because of sheer fluke. But they needed to observe the behaviour of the subjects while the experiment was in progress, know whether the exercise of the powers caused them any stress. A hidden camera would have made no difference because the subjects probably guessed there’d be one anyway, and so it would affect their performance every bit as much as his actual physical presence. He might as well take the risk.

All the same he had entered the room softly, and then stood looking at them from a position right at the back, making sure none of them could see him. Of course, if they really had the powers they were supposed to possess they might know he was there anyhow. They showed no sign of it, though. Maybe that was because their minds were too taken up with the task they’d been set. This thing didn’t make you omniscient, no matter how well it worked. Trouble was, you’d no idea most of the time when it was working.

Each person had been given a different puzzle to solve, though Haydon supposed it wasn’t really a puzzle since there weren’t any clues. You just had to describe the colour and other features of the object or objects within the sealed box before you – those who did cheat by trying to open the box when they thought no-one was looking were immediately kicked off the programme – say which of a number of envelopes, also sealed, contained letters with secret writing, or look at a photograph of some faraway foreign location and see if you could sense details which were too small to be detected by the eyes alone, with or without glasses.

They were of all ethnic groups; all social classes, occupations. There was a glamorous blonde, a plump motherly-looking housewife in her fifties, an intelligent-looking black youth with massive thick-framed spectacles, a tough-looking construction worker, a girl in a studded leather jacket with a ring through her nose, several smartly-dressed business types, a smattering of Hispanics and Asiatics. The only restrictions were on account of age. No-one over sixty had been selected to take part in the tests because after then, to be brutally frank, your mental powers were no longer quite functioning at maximum efficiency.

It wasn’t his presence that was bothering them, Haydon sensed. It was the test itself. They seemed irritable, uneasy, impatient. All except the black kid, Gary, who was ploughing through it with the calm, relaxed, yet at the same time alert expression of one who is enjoying what he is doing. But although Gary was always convinced he’d got it right that didn’t necessarily mean he had. He was often cut up to be told he was wrong and there had been some friction between the two of them over interpretation of the results.

Beside Gary sat Sam, an older Caucasian with greying hair and a benign, owl-like face. Sam’s brow was deeply corrugated, the muscles of his face drawn tight, in an expression of almost painful concentration. No, it was painful. Haydon felt a sudden pang of remorse and shifted from one foot to the other uncomfortably.

It was the fifth test they’d done that day. He wondered if the failure so far to produce concrete results was only making him more determined to pull this thing off, explaining why he was increasing the pressure. That could be dangerous and he’d better ease off.

Sam drew himself up with a deep breath. He looked round, caught Haydon’s eye and pulled off his glasses.
“Dr Haydon,” he said plaintively, “you’re working me too hard. I just can’t do this any more.”
Fatigue was another thing that could lead to mistakes. “All right, folks, that’s it for today,” he called out. “OK, Sam.”

Gary looked disappointed, even resentful, that his fun had been interrupted but the rest threw themselves back in their chairs with heartfelt sighs of relief. As they began to relax, and the initial euphoria at the cessation of tension passed, their true feelings about the test became apparent. Some were just glad it was all over, others annoyed despite the stress that they hadn’t managed to crack it, which had been found to be a fairly common reaction. The blonde’s face was difficult to read but Haydon didn’t think she was entirely happy.

If it doesn’t come easy to them, he thought, if they have to strain themselves so much to get results that we know aren’t always accurate, then this’ll never work. We need something more but what the hell is it?

He noticed one woman was in tears, and being hugged by another with whom she’d formed a close friendship during the course of the sessions, as wasn’t uncommon. Haydon approached them cautiously, aware that men weren’t really welcome when one woman was comforting another. “Are you alright, Dolores?”
Her friend replied for her, rather curtly. “Yeah, she’s OK.”

They all filed out, making for the room specially set aside for them to relax in after a session. Haydon collected up the completed answer sheets and took them back to his office, where he sat down to mark them.

The same mixture of right and wrong answers, proving nothing. There was quite a high proportion, approaching fifty per cent, of correct ones but still not enough to demonstrate that it couldn’t be coincidence.

I suppose the only thing for me to do, he guessed, is keep going until someone in higher authority tells me to stop. He was certain that somehow, somewhere in among all this, he would find what he had been looking for if he only kept on persevering.

With encouragement from the CIA and FBI, who had a close interest in any tangible result it might produce, the programme had been going on, though not quite continuously, since the early 1970s. Admittedly it had its origin partly in the interest in such matters then current among the general public. But it was intended to have a serious military application; the other main reason for Stanford’s research into psychic phenomena was Cold War paranoia. Apart from anything else it stemmed from the fear that the Soviets might be doing the same thing, and perhaps making greater progress. The enemy now, of course, was a decentralized religious terrorist organization, or loose association of such organizations; a tendency rather than a state. But it was no less important that America be protected from it, and a secret agent with paranormal powers would be very useful in her defence.

The scientists working on the project included physicists interested in things like fundamental electrodynamics, electrical engineering, quantum vacuum states, gravitation, cosmology and high power microelectronics. They sought to establish a connection between the physical world, the world of matter and energy and their interactions, and the more mysterious and intangible realm of the mind. They were principally interested in “remote viewing”, the supposed ability of a person to detect the existence of an object in a particular place regardless of how far away it was, or whether it was enclosed in a building or other container. Individuals with such gifts could be successfully used to locate hostages or secret installations, perhaps from thouands of miles away.

Operation Stargate, as it was called, continued for over twenty years. During that time thousands of people were recruited from all walks of life (though the majority were university students), placed in darkened rooms and asked to describe clearly the objects they saw there. Fifty per cent of the time their observations, according to one of the project’s directors, were accurate. Particularly good results were achieved in the late 70s and early 80s with a group called “The Naturals”. One of them, a retired army intelligence officer called Joe McMoneagle, claimed that in 1984 he received a Legion of Merit award for “providing information on more than 150 targets that had previously been unavailable from other sources.” In the early 70s McMoneagle had a Near Death Experience which seemed to have given him telepathic abilities, that he could turn on and off at will. He believed the ability to remote view was dependent on the individual; it was a talent you were either born with or weren’t. On one occasion the Naturals described in detail a secret Soviet missile base which no spy plane or satellite had seen, although conventional means were later used to substantiate what the remote viewers claimed they saw.

Research into the paranormal was also being carried out at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, Texas, and among students at Penn State University. At the latter, participation in the tests was not always voluntary, or so it was claimed. The subjects were drugged and then subjected to various forms of stimuli to see if mental activity during sleep could be increased. They also alleged that hidden cameras were placed in their dormitories to keep them under surveillance. To avoid criminal liability on the part of the federal government dirty tricks were played on them, including the altering of academic records and unauthorized withdrawals from their bank accounts, designed to send them into overdraft and so make them look financially irresponsible, discrediting them in the eyes of the law and public. Having been somehow got at their lecturers refused to testify in their favour, pretending not to know them. The University refused to comment on the allegations when questioned by journalists, while not actually denying them.

In early 1972 a scientist at Stanford with an interest in quantum biology, which was the scientific study of biological processes in terms of quantum mechanics, published a paper arguing that physical theory as we knew it was inadequate to describe the function of living organisms. It was read with interest by another scientist, Cleve Backster, who had been studying the electrical signals that appeared to be given off by plants. During a visit by him to Backster’s laboratory the paper was seen by Ingo Swann, who had earlier participated in some apparently successful experiments in psychokinesis – causing movement in physical objects, or influencing their behaviour, through the power of the mind – at the laboratory of Professor Gertrude Schmeidler at the City College in New York. Swann wrote to the Stanford scientist suggesting that a study of the paranormal might be a useful line of enquiry for someone in his field. Swann was invited to visit SRI where he appeared to disturb the operation of a magnetometer which was surrounded by several layers of heavy shielding designed to keep out any signals which might have interfered with it (it was to be noted in later experiments with promising individuals that the apparent psychic ability was not itself affected by electromagnetism and the like). He then went on to describe its interior workings accurately even though details of them had never been published. In further tests Swann described objects hidden from view in boxes with varying degrees of accuracy. Encouraged, Stanford embarked on what it called a Biofield Measurements Program, costing $49,909.

Operation Stargate meanwhile continued, under strict conditions designed to prevent any external factor influencing the subject’s behaviour and giving a false result. An increasing number of individuals turned out to have remarkable remote viewing abilities, often to their own surprise. One of them, it was alleged, even managed to find a ring around the planet Jupiter before the Pioneer 10 probe did. Sometimes it was necessary to give the subjects the approximate geographical location (i.e. latitude and longitude) for a site; but once they did, they gave an astonishingly accurate account of its layout, both inside and outside.

During the Carter administration an American plane went down in Zaire and after an intensive search by spy satellites failed to locate the wreckage the then head of the CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner, turned to a woman reputed to have psychic powers who was able to give the geographical co-ordinates of the crash site. The satellite cameras were turned on that point and sure enough, the plane was found. Later, between 1986 and 1995, the Department of Defense ran a paranormal psychology programme which received more than two hundred requests from military organizations for it to help them obtain information they had been unable to acquire from more conventional sources.

Following the closure of Stargate in 1994 a review of the results from the experiments at Stanford and elsewhere was carried out by two academics, Jessica Utts from the Division of Statistics at the University of California and Ray Hyman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon. Utts concluded that the existence of extra-sensory perception had been proved but Hyman disagreed, insisting that the reports from some of the experiments “have become accessible for public scrutiny too recently for adequate evaluation…moreover, their findings have yet to be independently replicated.” He still felt more evidence was needed. Overall, the assessment concluded that despite some striking results there was insufficient proof for consistent and accurate use of paranormal powers in any individual, as opposed to coincidence. Sometimes a subject could tell what sat within the locked, lead-lined box that had been placed in front of them, sometimes they couldn’t. In a lot of cases the authorities had known the information themselves and merely failed to communicate it to the subjects; there was no absolute proof that the latter had not actually happened despite the safeguards in force.

Maybe the politicians were scared of something they didn’t understand and wouldn’t be able to control if they let it out of the bottle. Maybe there just wasn’t enough money. Maybe the programme had acquired a bit of a cranky image, and was too much influenced by the New Age movement with its noted fascination for the paranormal; Joe McMoneagle was on record as saying “the project deteriorated as the military began letting any old kook into Stargate.” Maybe they really couldn’t be sure of eliminating extraneous material which either prevented the psychic ability from working or made it appear more powerful than it was; some researchers had commented that they had picked up “a lot of noise along with the background material”, and it was true that the power had not worked, or worked poorly, in certain conditions, like underwater where the dense liquid seemed to muffle it. The director of Stargate strongly disagreed with the report’s findings and the project’s subsequent cancellation. But for whatever reason, the various experiments to determine the existence of paranormal faculties in human beings ceased, and the whole idea was relegated to the back of the official mind.

At least for a time. What with the threat from Islamic extremism, in some ways more dangerous and destructive than anything the US had faced before, it had been decided to resurrect the program. Although the main interest still lay in remote viewing, efforts were also being made to explore the possibility of teleportation through psychic energy. Though its claims were dismissed by most mainsteam scientists the Air Force had commissioned a 7.5 million dollar study which concluded that the phenomenon was quite real and could be controlled.

Haydon was aware that a few years back, just after the invasion of Afghanistan, the British Ministry of Defence had spent £18,000 recruiting psychics for use in tests similar to those carried out at Stanford, the aim being to try and find Osama bin Laden plus any dirty bombs or other WMDs al-Qaeda might have hidden somewhere. The experiments were deemed to have proved inconclusive and the project abandoned.
Maybe America would have better luck.


The room was spacious, one wall covered by bookshelves filled with an impressive collection of volumes, some of them hundreds of years old, on Jewish law and history.

Muriel Richards waited patiently while the Rabbi continued to stare down at the desktop, his chin resting on the knuckles of one hand. It was clear he felt the matter required some thought.

Muriel had had much to think about after the doors of the Israeli Embassy closed behind her. She was aware she needed to tread carefully. Aware she needed advice. And she had decided to seek it from her rabbi, Dr Abraham Kohler. Kohler, a member of the Board of Deputies for British Jews, was a prominent figure in Britain’s Jewish community, and not without links to Israel.

He finally straightened up from his mediations. “All right. So that’s what this man told you - that they wouldn’t recruit foreign nationals but he couldn’t discuss the matter any further because it was against their national security?”
“That’s right. It seemed like a contradiction somehow.”

The Rabbi’s lips pursed grimly. “That’s untrue, for a start. They’ve always depended on a network of supporters, mainly from the Jewish community, in other countries. The likelihood is that David was a sayanim, a volunteer agent recruited by one of the local Mossad field officers. There are thousands of them around the world. He’d have been told not to tell you about it, on the basis that the fewer the people who knew the better.” It was almost inevitable, when you thought about it. David Richards was a passionate Zionist; on his first visit to Israel he had been captivated by its people, its culture, the beauty of its natural environment, and generally impressed by all it had achieved. And given enthusiasm, youth, naivety perhaps….

“When I wouldn’t give in he more or less admitted there were...political aspects involved. I mean, if he wasn’t working for them why would there be anything to damage their national security? That’s what I told him.” She paused breathlessly. Recovering her wind, she looked him squarely in the eye. “Do you think it’s right, what they’re doing?”

The Rabbi appeared uncertain. ”If it’s the best way for them to operate, then maybe. A case could be made for it, let’s say. And it was David’s choice. He was doing what he wanted to. As for the secrecy, it’s something all agents of intelligence services have to respect; even, sometimes, to the extent of keeping things from their own families. It doesn’t just apply to Israel.”

He bit his lip. “I’m sorry to say this, Muriel, but quite frankly I don’t think you’ve much of a case.”

“I want to know,” she said firmly. “I want to know how exactly he came to die. I don’t like the veil that’s been drawn over the whole business.”
“I suppose a secret service would be bound to do things - ”

“Secretly? Well yes, of course. But they didn’t even tell the German police.”
“How can you be sure of that?”

“Because I’ve just been on the phone to them. I could tell from their reaction it’d come as a genuine surprise. I know when someone’s being honest with me and when they aren’t.”

“They must have told someone in the Bundeskriminalamt.” Kohler didn’t sound one hundred per cent sure of that. In fact, it wouldn’t have been the first time Mossad had conducted operations on the territory of a friendly country without informing its government. In 1982 Margaret Thatcher had had to expel staff at the London embassy because they had failed to share information about suspected Arab terrorists living in Britain, whose activities might have been dangerous to the British public. The reason given for the expulsion was that the personnel concerned had been guilty of “activities incompatible with diplomatic status”. And the recruitment of a British citizen wouldn’t go down well with certain elements in the UK establishment where there was considerable disapproval of the conduct of the state of Israel.

“There might not have been any reason for the police to know,” he told her.
“I want to know,” she repeated.

His benign bearded features broke into a smile. ”Am I right in thinking that it’s because you’re not too fond of the Israelis? I mean, generally.” When discussing the subject with fellow members of her synagogue, Muriel Richards had often been critical of the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli state. She felt it was responsible for much of the anti-Semitism that was spreading around the world today. They might, perhaps, be said to be indirectly responsible for her son’s death, and not just because they had employed him on a dangerous mission without the knowledge of his family or his government.

“I think the way they carry on is unacceptable,” she said. “And I’m determined to do something about it. Do I have your support?”
“Well, if there is anything I can do..“

Muriel knew Kohler would make representations on her behalf. But he wouldn’t go as far as she believed was necessary should the Israelis prove obdurate.

“I’m just...unsure where to go from here,” she said. “I mean, maybe he’s right, it would create too much of an embarrassment if everyone knew the truth. But I want to know, and so does Jonathan. So do all of us.

“The Israelis think it’d be safer if a lid was kept on the business. The thing is, do I just leave it at that? Say they were right and forget everything?”

”Well, no doubt Mossad will continue their investigations. And perhaps they’ll get lucky. When the time is right they’ll probably release details of what they’ve found to the Germans, who’ll have to act or they’ll look as if they don’t care. Then maybe David’s part in the matter will be revealed. Your son will be a hero.”

“And what if Mossad don’t get lucky? What if these Nazis just go underground? David will have died in vain and we’ll never know what really happened.”

She threw herself back, breathing out heavily, and sat for a moment attempting to translate what she was feeling into words. “I just feel like David was duped into something he shouldn’t have been, and I’m expected to approve of it.”
“Your son was an intelligent young man. He must have known exactly what he was doing.”
“We should have been told.”

“It was a good cause. These people, these Nazis must have been up to something pretty bad if Mossad were investigating them. And the more there was at stake the greater the need for secrecy.”

“Why did they pick David to do it? He was just too young. Clever, yes, but you can be intelligent and…..and foolish at the same time. Perhaps that’s why something went wrong and David got killed. He made some silly mistake and – “ She was near to tears again.
“Are you alright?” the Rabbi asked softly.

“Yes, I’m alright. But I think Mossad have slipped up in a big way. Why didn’t they tell the Germans? Why did they have to try and do it all by themselves? Why did they use an inexperienced young student instead of working with the German authorities and making a proper job of it?”

“I don’t think they trust the Germans. They seem to prefer doing their own thing – in all sorts of matters, not just this one. Perhaps it is because of anti-Semitism, I don’t know. But I agree, it’s better on the whole to work with the security forces of other countries. It causes too much distrust if you insist on being a loose cannon.”

“Something needs to be done about it when they do,” Muriel snorted. She lapsed into silence.

Again the Rabbi studied her thoughtfully. Muriel Richards was a very determined lady. There wasn’t much point in trying to dissuade her from whatever she was contemplating. And that she was contemplating something he could tell by the look in her eyes.

There was only one thing he could do. “Be careful,” he warned her. “Whatever you do, be very careful.”


The room was divided into three aisles, meeting at a stone altar on which a pile of wood had been placed. Behind it was a second, smaller altar on which sat a copy of the Prose Edda, a replica of Thor/Thunor’s hammer and a gold ring, believed to be sacred, on which oaths were to be sworn. The sweet smell of incense filled the air.

All of them wore white robes with horned helmets on their heads. Wachter, the Master, held a ceremonial lance intended to represent the spear of Wotan, while Higson and Erdmann, his assistants, both carried swords. Higson didn’t look entirely at ease; he had to admit, this was when it all got a bit daft. But as with the gangs he had been in as a boy to be fully a member of the Society, and thus trusted by the others, meant having to do as they did.

While other Thuleans, including Schwege the Secretary and Lucke the Treasurer, sang the Pilgrim’s Song from Wagner’s Tannhauser Helldorf and the Belgian entered leading forward the candidate for initiation, robed and blindfolded. It was Marenkov, the Russian.

The song came to an end and everyone made the sign of the swastika. Lucke lit the heap of wood on the altar with flint and steel, and the dancing flames along with those of the candelabras hanging from the ceiling cast their flickering glow over the rapt faces of the worshippers. A sermon was preached on a text taken from the Edda. Then solemnly Wachter explained the aims and beliefs of the Society, informing the novice that they were distinguished from inferior races by their Ario-Germanic concept of the world and life. Marenkov swore a solemn oath that he was of pure Aryan blood, would keep his line so by marriage only with other Aryans, and would bring up his children to do the same.

Wachter seized the spear in both hands and held it up before him. Higson and Erdmann crossed their swords upon it. Finally to the accompaniment of music from Lohengrin the Russian was asked a series of questions to determine his loyalty to the Society’s aims, all of which he responded to in a satisfactory manner.

Afterwards they divested themselves of their robes and repaired to the banqueting hall, Schwege and Lucke included. Wachter lit the fire and took his seat with the others. “What have you found?” he asked Schwege.

“According to the Bundesarchiv Engelmann was captured with his regiment in France in September 1944. He was shipped to England as a POW and decided to remain there after the war, as all his family had been killed in an Allied bombing raid on Cologne, and in any case he’d fallen out of favour with them long before. Some sort of scandal involving a girl Engelmann had got pregnant.”
Wachter interjected. “You say “long before...””

“It was when he was on leave from the Army, in the summer of 1938. Two years before the first Thule expedition. And the child was aborted. It can have no bearing on our current plans.”
Wachter sat back.

“So Engelmann seems to have felt he had nothing to return to,” Schwege finished.
“And then?”
“Then the official record ceases.”

Silence fell around the table as they reached this impasse. Wachter broke it. “I think our next move should be to contact former Army colleagues of Engelmann’s. There should be a few still alive.”

“We’re assuming he kept in touch with them,” Marenkov said. “You say he felt there was nothing left for him in Germany.”

“It was his family he had fallen out with. He might still have had friends. In the army....let’s say the bonds forged by war are too strong to break easily.”

“Let’s try the British authorities first,” Rolf Erdmann said. “There must be some record of him there.”

“We can entrust that to you, Martin,” Wachter said, turning to Higson. “Fine,” nodded the Englishman.
“Are we sure there’s no doubt about it?” the Belgian asked.

“None whatsoever, Wolfmann says. Of course we’re still learning from what’s at Thule but I think we can be pretty certain.”

“So is there no record of Engelmann after he returned to active service?” Lucke asked Schwege.

“We only know, from the official histories of the war, that his regiment was transferred to France after the D-Day landings. Since the experiment appeared to have failed, he was no longer of any interest to the Reich. Besides, our only concern at that time was the war, so nobody bothered to keep track of him.

“He was unmarried at the time of the experiment and, as far as we know, for the remainder of his war service. Not that anyone had much time in which to get married at that stage of the war. There remains the possibility of illegitimate children, of course, but such children might not be easy to trace.”

Wachter meditated silently for a moment, then briskly drew himself up. “Well, gentlemen. Let’s assume that he survived the war, got married, and had at least one legitimate child. If that lead proves fruitless we can consider the illegitimacy angle.”

“If there were children, we must find them before their powers become a danger to the plan,” he went on anxiously. “If things got out of hand…”

“If anyone had the powers and were able actually to use them, I still think we would know about it,” Lucke said. “Everyone would know.”

Helldorf shook his head. “Not necessarily. They might have been locked up somewhere to prevent them doing any damage.”
“Could you keep such a person locked up?” Erdmann asked.

“I don’t know. We don’t know the full extent of the powers or how it might be possible to control them.”

“The means to control them does not exist, beyond what there may be at Thule,” said Wachter. “And that is another reason why no-one must find out what we are doing there. No-one.”


Once again Muriel Richards was seated before Shimon Ezra in his office at the Israeli embassy.

“I had to find out from you and not the Germans,” she complained. “And if I found out at all, it was purely by chance.”
Ezra shifted awkwardly.

“The only reason you’re not telling us the truth is because you don’t want the world to know you were doing it on your own, without any contact with the Germans. And I don’t think that’s right. It makes me even more angry that David had to be mixed up in all this. Besides, if you worked with them on it you might get better results.” She didn’t believe all Germans were bad and shouldn’t be trusted. Until some Hitler came along and set them off most people probably didn’t care whether you were a Jew or not.

“I want you to tell them everything you know. And unless I hear from them that you have, I’ll make sure everyone’s acquainted with what’s been going on, whatever the consequences. I’m not going to let go of this.”
“Your son would not have approved of that,” Ezra said.

“Don’t try and use emotional blackmail against me when your own behaviour has been reprehensible. I think you took advantage of David because he was young and naive.”

“Your son died in a good cause. Something he believed in.” Ezra seemed to marshal his thoughts. Finally he said, “How much of a Jew do you consider yourself to be, Mrs Richards?”

“I think that’s an impertinent question. However, I’ll answer it if you like. How much of a Jew am I? Enough of one to know the difference between right and wrong.

“Jews and Israel aren’t the same thing, you know. I’m a Jew and proud of it but I’m also British.

“What are you going to do to stop me talking? Kill me? That wouldn’t look good, would it? Israel killing other Jews to stop them from washing her dirty linen in public.”
“If this were to leak out....” he protested.

“I’ll make sure it does, one way or the other. Goodbye.” And Muriel Richards left him to his thoughts.

It occurred to her that she had been a little naïve. There was no way for her to be sure that Mossad would keep any promise to work in conjunction with the Bundeskriminalamt. The Germans themselves might not want to cause too much of a fuss over the business. What mattered was that she’d shaken them up a bit.

A little later, Ezra picked up the phone and dialled an extension, the one listed in David Richards’ notebook, which Muriel Richards had tried only to be told by the telephonist that it didn’t exist. “Abi? It’s Shimon. Listen, I think we have a problem. I’m afraid we’re going to have to tell Head Office what we’ve been up to.” Abi Feinstein was the senior Mossad officer in charge of recruiting and running new agents, with special responsibility for the sayanim.

”I already have,” Feinstein sighed. “The Germans have been on to us about it already. You can expect a bollocking very shortly. I’ve already had mine.”

“Well you can tell them we’ve now got Richards’ mother threatening to cause trouble, on top of everything else. I guess we’ll just have to let them sort it out and be careful not to do anything like this ever again.”

“Or not to get caught. Yeah, OK. Thanks for letting me know, anyway.” Feinstein cut him off. Almost immediately the phone rang again and Ezra picked it up, swallowing. He had a nasty suspicion who this might be, the ambassador or someone important in Jerusalem, and and what they were going to say to him.

Feinstein was evidently considered important enough to be allowed to keep his job, though only just. Ezra wasn’t so lucky.


There were two possible lines of enquiry for someone seeking to trace Reynart Engelmann. They could find out what camp he had been in and try and get in touch with its commander, if still alive, or former camp guards. Or they could do a name search on “Engelmann” and take it from there. For the moment, Higson decided to try the latter approach.

The Data Protection Act would restrict the amount of information available on any one private individual to another. Engelmann was not, of course, a very common name in England. Or for that matter Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. In fact Higson could only find two Engelmanns from his study of the telephone directories in his local library, the electoral rolls, or any other source of information which you could either consult legitimately or hack into using your computer. Neither of them fitted the bill. Though both were of German extraction, one was a recent immigrant living in Britain for business reasons and the other a Jewish lecturer at Keele University. They weren’t the right age to be the man himself, nor did they have any family or other connection with Higson’s quarry.

Engelmann if he was still alive would be well into his nineties. Higson wondered if someone could still use the power at that age, or survive the strain of it breaking out. He doubted it somehow.

As regards finding the man they were left with two possibilities. Either Engelmann had died without issue, thus solving the problem, or he had changed his name. It had not been uncommon for immigrants to Britain to do that before political correctness started to dictate that people should not be ashamed of having foreign origins. For example the late controversial businessman Tiny Rowland, whose father had hailed from the same part of the world as Engelmann but whose mother was half-English, allowing him entry to the UK, had come into the world as Roland Fuhrhop.

The name change would have occurred between 1945 and 1947, Higson reckoned. The time German POWs were being repatriated to Germany, and would be considering their options; whether to stay behind or return to the land of their birth. If the former, the name change might be part of their domesticisation, a desire to put as much difference as possible between themselves and their past.

Between 1939 and 1952, because of National Registration and the need to issue identity cards and ration books, all changes of name by British or foreign nationals had to be recorded by means of a declaration, and until 1945 were published in the London Gazette. Unfortunately the declarations had been destroyed when National Registration was abolished. However someone carrying out a search for a change of name by deed poll could search the indexes in the Gazette, copies of which were held by the National Archives or indeed any main reference library in London, to find details of the enrolment even if they only had the person’s original name.

It wasn’t that long before Higson got lucky. Reynart Albert Engelmann, born Koblenz, Germany, on 24th November 1908 but now a naturalized British citizen. And with the name change no longer Reynart Engelmann, but Richard Kent.


EIGHT
MOSSAD HQ, KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV
“We do appear to have got ourselves into rather a mess,” observed Stefan Wolniak. Wolniak was the Institute’s Head of European Operations.

“You’re telling me,” sniffed Uri Masur, the ex-soldier who was currently overall director of the organization. “If Feinstein slips up like that again, he’ll find himself demoted to a fucking filing clerk. We can’t afford too many mistakes like that.”

“Yes,” Wolniak sighed. “To have used someone like Richards, not without at least telling me first..he was young, enthusiastic, dedicated, but he didn’t damn well think about what he was doing. For one thing he shouldn’t have kept records of it at home for his mother to find.” That went against the basic rules of any self-respecting intelligence agency, let alone Mossad.

“What about the surveillance equipment and all that? You’re sure you got all of it back?”

“There wasn’t much of it. He took it all to Germany with him and I guess the Nazis have some of it now – although it’s still not clear what actually happened after we last made contact with him. The rest we managed to sneak out of his college room safely.”

“That’s something, at least.” And the Germans had been appeased by the sacking of those staff at the Berlin embassy who had been privy to the scheme. “Our problem now is to do something about the mother. I get the impression it won’t be easy to persuade her to shut up. And we obviously can’t kill her.” They would of course do their best to cover it up, but all the same it’d look extremely bad if by some bad chance the world learned that officials of Mossad had authorized the murder of a fellow Jew because she was threatening to expose activities carried out in a way many people, including some in Israel, would have considered unethical. And Masur, Wolniak and their kind never liked to take life, not unless it was the only way out. They prided themselves on being above that sort of thing.

When needing to think about something carefully Uri Masur liked to stand at the window of his office looking out over the panoramic view it gave of the city. He did so now.

“I’ll speak to the Foreign Ministry and see if I can get an official letter of apology sent,” he said. “We’ll promise not to do it again and also let her know – if it’s politically feasible and doesn’t compromise the investigation – when there are any further developments in the case. We’ll also try and prevail upon Mrs Richards not to tell the British authorities. Jerusalem will want the damage from this to be limited as much as possible.”
“What if she’s told her government already?”
“I get the impression she wanted to let the threat of it hang over our heads.”

“If the Germans tell her we’ve set the record straight with them, that should keep her happy for the moment,” Wolniak said. “She’s still angry that a British citizen was recruited by a foreign intelligence service without London’s consent. But I think she’s sensible enough to see the need for a prudent compromise.”
“So she won’t show our letter to anyone?”

“It’s there for her to use if she ever feels she has to. We’ll just have to make sure she doesn’t.
“Yes, I think we’ll have to leave most of the work to the Germans. But we definitely need to know everything that’s going on in the case. These Nazis definitely seem to be up to something, or they probably wouldn’t have killed Richards. Some good’s come out of what Feinstein did, anyway. That’s why I let him keep his job. Of course there had to be some…casualties.”

“Why didn’t he at least recruit a German Jew for the operation?” said Wolniak, still angry at Feinstein’s indiscretion.

Masur grinned. “You think a German one would have done it more efficiently?”
“I think it would have made more sense.”

“I’m not so sure. In view of everything, in my opinion it’s better to keep the Jewish community in Germany out of it. It would only increase the hostility of the German far right towards them.”
“I wonder why he did it at all?”

“He claims he was just being over-zealous. But at a guess, the reasons go a little deeper.”

Most of the remaining Nazi war criminals being too old to stand trial, Mossad activity in the world at large was mainly concerned not with avenging the sins of the past but rather those things which presented a current threat to the interests of the state of Israel. The more powerful and influential right-wing, anti-Semitic groups became in Europe the more likely it was she would be endangered, and have to withdraw into herself for her own protection when like everyone else in the modern world she needed the economic, political and military support of the wider global community if she was to prosper. “It worried him, as it does me. He may also have been thinking about what happened to his family during the war.”
“I did hint,” Masur went on, “that it had never been our policy to let our feelings get the better of us.”


Andrei Maskov downed the last of his wine and leaned back to gaze benignly round the hotel’s spacious dining room, replete. Now all he needed was a couple of hours’ relaxation in front of the TV in his comfortably appointed suite followed by a good night’s sleep. Then in the morning he would meet the Iranian, hand over the nuclear triggers locked safely away inside his briefcase and conclude the deal before heading back home to Moscow.

He had got in to dinner late, having been tied up on the phone speaking to his contact and also sorting out the affairs of the Montreal branch – a convenient excuse for his being here in Canada. A few other smart-suited businessmen, plus a couple of tourists, were still sipping at their cocktails and making small talk, but otherwise the refectory was almost empty.

His eyes wandered idly over the remaining clientele, to come to rest on an attractive young brunette sitting alone at one of the tables gazing casually ahead of her. She was close enough for Maskov to see that her features were smooth and regular, the skin gleaming like porcelain in the lighting, along with the reddish highlights in the long chestnut hair which fell to just below her shoulders.

Sitting up straight with her arms folded on the table before her, she looked relaxed but attentive, as if waiting for someone; a friend maybe. At what seemed carefully judged intervals she let her eyes stray around the room in a manner almost casual but not quite.

Was it possible she was….he’d heard stories about some hotels.

He could be mistaken, but there was no harm in trying. Think what he might be missing out on if he didn’t.

He saw that her skirt was split almost to the waist and she had crossed one knee over the other, exposing a length of shapely thigh. She caught his eye, smiled, and although he was a perfect stranger lifted her hand and waved to him in a friendly fashion.

Maskov felt his heartbeat quicken and his penis stir as the blood rushed to his loins at express-train speed. Yes!

A little nervously, he got up and crossed her table, taking the seat opposite her. “Hi,” he grinned.

“Hi,” she replied, eyes lighting up with interest. “What are you in Montreal for?”
“Oh, business. You?”

“The same.” Which was undoubtedly true. “I’m Luisa, by the way.” She held out her hand for him to shake. “I’m Andrei,” he said, taking it.

She asked where he came from, if he visited this hotel often, if he was married, all that sort of thing. They chatted for a couple of minutes before she smiled again and said, as if she’d only just thought of it, “would you like to come for a drink somewhere? The bar’s just closing but – “
“How about my room?” he suggested.
“OK. Two hundred dollars for an hour, three hundred for the whole night. Alright?”

“Fine.” He stood up, pushing back the chair, and followed her out into the lobby. They chatted while they were in the lift, Maskov a little nervously, the girl with a complete lack of self-consciousness which showed she was a thorough professional at her job.

She led him to the room and once they were both inside closed the door quietly. “Now if I could take some money off you?”

He unzipped his wallet and handed over the bunch of notes. She counted them off, gave a brief nod of satisfaction and stowed them away in her handbag.

She turned back to him. Once again that charming smile. “If you’d like to take your clothes off?”
Maskov didn’t waste any time over it.

“Now if you could lie on your back on the bed.” Maskov stretched out and watched her as she stripped, revealing a trim figure and well-rounded breasts and buttocks. In a moment he was going to be running his hands over that, squeezing and kneading the firm, taut young flesh. He’d hit pay dirt alright. “I’ll just put a condom on you, if I may,” he heard her say. She pulled open a drawer and fumbled about inside for a moment. Then she turned towards him, her expression seeming to change slightly. And he saw that the object in her hand was not a condom. She shot him twice through the heart with the silenced pistol and his body jerked reflexively, the head thumping back against the pillow. Then Maskov’s eyes glazed over and his face set in the expression of surprise.

Dressing, the girl went over to Maskov’s briefcase and with the equipment she had been issued with before setting out on her mission picked the lock. She opened the case, found what she was looking for and tucked them away in her handbag.

She would wait a few minutes before leaving. In the meantime she made a quick call on her mobile phone. “It’s done.”

“Good,” said Noa Golani, in her own hotel room a couple of streets away. “See you at the airport, first thing tomorrow.”

Golani called Tel Aviv to report that Andrei Maskov would be doing business with the enemies of their country no longer.

“Well done,” said the section head for North America. “See you all back home, then. By the way, Noa, European Section have a job for you. It’s a pretty big one, but they seem to think you’re their best chance of pulling it off. It was the boss man himself who requested you.”

Golani felt herself swell with pride. She would be taking on this assignment on the personal recommendation of Uri Masur. Now she was certain, if she hadn’t been before, that she’d been fully accepted by the higher echelons of Mossad. The past was no longer a weight dragging her down.

“It sounds interesting,” she replied. “I guess I’ll hear all about it when we get back.”

In bed later on it seemed appropriate to reflect on her career so far. Almost from the moment of the atrocity at the farm, she had known what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to join the army and defend her country from the people sought to destroy it and had killed her family in friends in pursuit of that goal. Initially the choice was made for her, because of Israel’s system of conscription. But she knew that when her three-year period of service came to an end, she would be asking to be allowed to stay on as a permanent member of the armed forces.

The request was granted. Unlike many of the other conscripts she had shown no fear when under attack, and was quite prepared to directly imperil her own life when necessary, while never taking unnecessary risks. On the one occasion where there had been no option but to run into a house occupied by Hamas militants and open fire she had stood and blazed away at the enemy, quite fearless and barely seeming to notice when a bullet grazed her shoulder. And she clearly enjoyed the military life, the orderliness and discipline that went with it, sometimes too the sense of comradeship although it was noted she didn’t mix with her fellow soldiers much more than was unavoidable.

And she would savour the thrill of a successful strike against the Palestinian strongholds from which rocket attacks were launched on Jewish settlements. The missions in which she took part were mainly short-haul ones like those, because as a woman she couldn’t march for long distances, disqualifying her from serving with some units. On the one occasion when she’d had to march, she and two male colleagues having been separated from the rest of their squad when it was decimated by an RPG attack and their transport destroyed, her companions were astounded by the distance she covered before finally collapsing from exhaustion. Perhaps the frightening look of sheer determination on her face gave some clue as to how she did it.

She continued to be held in high regard by her superiors, until one or two things happened which caused them some concern. She was felt to have used excessive force in clearing a group of sleeping foreign backpackers, one of whom was obviously ill, off the beach at Eilat while conducting a security operation against Palestinian guerillas who were planning a seaborne assault. Then she had to be disciplined for beating up two British woman tourists who’d strayed more or less accidentally into a prohibited area.

Golani was demoted and confined to barracks for a short period, then after a decent interval reinstated in her former rank and returned to service. It hadn’t been that much of a hassle. The truth was that the Israeli Armed Forces needed people like her, and in the long run they were to be tolerated if they got results within the context of their job. Golani knew that if she kept her temper in check from now on, she’d probably be alright. The business with the British tourists, which fortunately had occurred at an early stage in her career, would be forgotten. To be a permanent soldier she would have to show restraint, if she wanted to carry on doing what she liked most. That, she decided, was no problem; if you wanted to defeat your country’s enemies you had to be smart, and of her commitment to doing the defeating there could be no question.

Not long after her reinstatement she single-handedly captured a Palestinian sniper who had been threatening the patrol of which she was a member. Later as he was being led away the man had spat in her face and hurled at her just about every insult imagineable. He rounded off his tirade of abuse by informing her that (a) she was a whore and (b) she had not been conceived in the missionary position. “Your family, I’ve heard they will only fuck like dogs,” he sneered.

Her unit had held its breath. But all through the barrage of invective Golani had simply stared at the man without emotion, her dark eyes barely blinking, until his anger had exhausted itself and he fell silent. And each of the soldiers around her had felt an indescribable chill penetrate deep into their very soul.

So tightly controlled were her emotions that she felt no remorse at the loss of lives when a unit under her command, or anyone else’s for that matter, flattened a village which terrorists were thought to be using as a base of operations. Similarly it was her heartfelt conviction that those Western peace activists who insisted on getting caught in the crossfire, ending up shot and killed or, in one case, crushed under a bulldozer while trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes, had only got what they deserved. Her new restraint made no difference to her inner feelings. Her superiors knew what it was that motivated her, or guessed, but because the anger was controlled it was acceptable. And she got results.

She had risen within a relatively short time from private to sergeant to lieutenant to captain, and finally from captain to major. They still didn’t seem to trust her with any rank higher than the latter, and after a while she had felt the need for a change of scenery. She didn’t mind which branch of the Army she served in as long as she was protecting Israel against her enemies, and there were many ways one could do that. So she applied to join the Special Forces. Her initial choice of unit had been Sayeret Duvdevan; they were the counter-terrorists, who carried out raids into the occupied territories to kill or kidnap Palestinians suspected of terrorism. But they had a reputation for being trigger-happy, one she preferred to ditch, and for committing acts of excessive violence which left them suffering psychological problems. Her eventual decision to go for hostage rescue instead was probably a wise one. She led a variety of missions, some of them on foreign territory, at great personal risk but always with a high success rate.

Although intelligence-gathering prior to a mission was usually the work of spies rather than soldiers, in the planning of those missions Golani demonstrated an observant, coldly logical mind and a sharp instinct for danger which could detect suspicious behaviour and alert her to the fact that a house was being used by terrorists. It was therefore suggested she be seconded to Military Intelligence, a proposal to which she agreed. The job involved a lot of plainclothes work and proved to be her passport to Mossad, enabling her to bridge the gap between the worlds of soldiering and spying. She had become interested in the intelligence services because she wanted to develop that more analytical, assimilatory side of her personality. In the future, as she grew too old, relatively speaking for active combat, that was where her skills would lie. In the meantime she was still young, physically fit, exceptionally strong for a woman, and just as capable of performing well on active service as when she’d first joined up.

By now the earlier incidents were indeed forgotten, or no longer mattered quite so much. Any lingering doubts on the part of her superiors were offset by their conviction that to deny her country the benefit of her talents would be the greater loss. All in all.


“Do you really think it was wise to bring in Golani?” said Stefan Wolniak. He looked hard at Masur. “We don’t want another Feinstein. Someone who takes the wrong kind of risk to get results.”

“You know the story, I see,” Masur smiled. “Well, she’s been on her best behaviour these last few years. And we need to show that we trust her, by giving her something big to do, or it’s my reckoning she will kick over the traces out of sheer resentment.” It was part of Wolniak’s philosophy that you should take good care of your agents. “Anyway, for the moment she’s only going to sit in on the case, make a few pertinent comments now and again. I don’t think there’s any cause for worry.

“And don’t you see, it’s because she hates that she won’t make any mistakes. Give me credit for having seen that. If you don’t appreciate the sense in it, then you don’t understand the woman.”

“I trust your judgement,” Wolniak said. “All the same, there’s something about her that….”

Impatiently Masur waved this aside. “I’ve heard people say that a thousand times. Look, I know what I’m doing. We had a psychological assessment made and it confirmed that the best thing to do was keep her on. Her country is everything to her and if she’s denied the chance to serve it then she will go crazy. I don’t want to have to deal with a rogue agent as well as all the other things we’ve got on our plate. She’s the sort of person you want on the inside pissing out, not the other way round.

“If these Nazis are planning something you can bet she’ll find out what it is, and deal with it. You know, Stefan, maybe I need my head examined but somehow I almost feel sorry for them.”


Caroline seemed to have been sleeping lightly of late. She dreamed often, and the dreams were very vivid, so much so that when she woke up she wasn’t sure for a time whether they really had been dreams, or actually happened.

That morning she went to see the doctor for a low-down on the results from the blood and other tests he’d done. “I can’t find anything wrong with you,” he said. “Physically, anyway. The cause must be psychological. You said you’d been under a bit of stress recently….”

She explained again about her job and the bad effect it was having on her at the moment. He nodded understandingly.
“Describe the feeling to me again,” he said.

Again she struggled to find the words. “Like a rushing noise in my head. And a burning sensation there. I feel sort of hot and prickly....that’s about it.”

“You’re a bit too young for the menopause,” he said thought-fully. “But it can happen earlier. And yet there ought to be some indication of it in the hormone levels.”

He had studied her medical history in some detail. “As far as I can see, you’re a perfectly normal healthy young woman. No hereditary diseases, no illnesss or injuries in childhood which could have a lasting effect. All I can assume is that it’s mental in nature and the stress is triggering it off. I can give you some tablets to take, and sign you off sick for a few days if you’d prefer.”

“I think I’ll just take the tablets,” she said. Taking time off would only postpone the problem because in her absence the work would simply pile up all the more. It wasn’t worth the additional bother she’d sooner or later be caused, especially if there was any chance the tablets would do the job. She could of course have delegated some, at least, of her tasks to others but everyone seemed to be too busy and there was no way of telling, in the cases where doubt existed, if the excuse was sincere or not.

So she went back to IPL that afternoon, by bus. And, as she had expected, found a huge pile of stuff waiting for her on her desk, in addition to that which had already been outstanding. God, she groaned inwardly, were they under some impression she was an octopus?

She supposed the simplest thing to do was just to grit her teeth and get on with it. Taking out her bottle of tranquiliser tablets and swallowing a couple, she sat down and started work on the Diversity report. She had almost finished it, but as was often the way with lengthy and laborious tasks it still seemed to be taking forever. And every time the phone rang it meant another bloody interruption she couldn’t afford.
The phone rang.
“What is it, Sheila?” she answered with forced politeness.

Sheila hesitated before informing Caroline that Mr Watson-Dove wanted to see her. “What is it now?” she sighed.
“He didn’t say.”
“Can you ask him?”

A few moments later Sheila came back. “Something about a…personal log?”
“What?” Caroline frowned. “Oh, he doesn’t mean that silly thing he….well, let’s have a word with him and then I guess we’ll find out.”
“Right, boss.”

Caroline swept the tablets off the desktop into a drawer. If Watson-Dove saw them, he’d only be able to give a bit of credence to the rumours he liked to spread that she was neurotic and unstable. He might ease off if she knew she was ill, but the gossip….

Talking of the tablets, they didn’t seem to be doing her a lot of good, she reflected with irritation. Perhaps it was just a question of giving them time to work.

Watson-Dove knocked and was admitted. “Yes, George, what can I do for you this time?” she said in a voice of exaggerated cheerfulness.

“I couldn’t have your personal log for the last few weeks, could I?” he said politely.
“George, would you care to remind me please,” she simpered, “what a personal log actually is?”
“Well, a….a personal log.” He looked both puzzled and annoyed that she didn’t know.

“Of what? You don’t mean that little scheme you were so keen on back in February?” At that time Watson-Dove, with the mentality of someone who was both ex-Army and ex-civil service, had proposed a system whereby every employee, from the Administrative Assistants who tended to be no more than glorified tea girls or boys right up to the MD (though she suspected that in practice the latter was exempt from it), kept detailed notes of everything they’d done each day and how long it had taken, and entered it into a log to be submitted to the heads of the Admin and Finance Departments. The aim was to decide whether each person was using their time profitably from the viewpoint of both organizational efficiency and financial cost-effectiveness. Caroline had thought it a stupid idea, because nobody unless they were a robot could bring themselves to bother with such a tedious and time-consuming task, and so had everybody else. Everyone except the other managers. She had argued against it at an inter-departmental meeting but been outvoted. In line with her predictions, the scheme died a natural death as everyone, including some of the people who’d enthusiastically supported it in the first place, lost the energy to fill in the forms and there was an unspoken collective agreement to abandon it. That wasn’t good enough for Watson-Dove, though. He’d evidently decided that since there had been no overt official decision to drop it it was therefore still in force.

“George, we’re talking about months ago,” Caroline protested. “Ages. No-one gives a damn about it now.” And why had he decided to undertake personally to see that hers was completed and returned? Obnoxious git. He could easily have sent one of his staff over to ask for it.

“I don’t think that’s a very responsible attitude to take,” he said in a low voice.

Yes Sir, Mr Watson-Dove Sir. “I’m far too busy with a lot of stuff which I have to regard as considerably more important. I’m sorry. Maybe some other time.”

“May I remind you that it was a decision reached by the Board of Management and implemented according to – “

“And now completely forgotten about by everyone except you. You’re wasting your time. If you don’t mind – “

“I do need it right away. The information has to be collated and analysed by the next Board meeting.” He actually held out his hand for it.

She could feel his dislike and contempt for her like a great black cloud descending on her mind. “I haven’t done it,” she told him. “As you should have gathered from everything I’ve just said.”
His eyes widened. “You haven’t done it?”
“No. Now please – “

“If I may say so, as a senior executive you’re not setting the right example. I’m going to have to report this conversation to the MD. Can I ask you to make sure you and your staff complete the forms and send them to me by – “

Slamming down her pen, Caroline sprang to her feet, face twisted with rage. “You’re just wasting my time and getting on my bloody nerves. If you haven’t got anything useful to say to me then you can damn well get out!”

Watson-Dove, used to ordering soldiers about with professional machismo in a loud bellowing voice, quailed. If there was such a thing as a cold fire then this was a blazing furnace of it. He managed to pull himself together and said, “There’s no need to take that tone of voice.”

“I said get out!” Caroline screamed, trembling uncontrollably. He stared at her for a moment, then hurried from the room. She glared savagely after him, and the image of the door was still burning itself onto her retina some time after it had closed behind him.

As she finally turned her gaze from it, something caught her eye. She stared at her handbag where it rested on the edge of the desk, wondering why it was several feet from where she knew she’d left it when she came in.


The date of the name change was 15th December 1945. The entry gave Engelmann’s - Kent’s - address as 15 Belle Vue Terrace, Tunbridge Wells. Whether he was still living there...well, it was possible but doubtful after five decades. But if he had been there for some considerable time, and left a forwarding address when he moved, maybe it was worth visiting the place.

On the whole Higson didn’t think so. For all he knew 15 Belle Vue Terrace might no longer exist. As a last resort, perhaps.

But somehow he had to find out whether Engelmann – Kent – was still alive and if he had married (though whether he had or not didn’t necessarily have a bearing on whether he he’d left any descendants; it was just a bit more likely). Birth, marriage and death certificates were kept at the Family Records Centre, Islington, where they could be consulted free of charge. It wasn’t very far from where he lived in his rented flat, so he caught the bus over there and introduced himself to the staff at reception, explaining that he was doing a bit of family history research.

Looking first under the old name, in case any marriage had taken place before it was changed, and then when that produced no joy the new one, he consulted the index to find that Richard Kent, aged 38, labourer, had married Mary Ann Elizabeth Hollis, 27, nurse, on 12th March 1947 at the Registry Office in Tunbridge Wells. Also that Richard Kent had died of a heart attack on 8th June 1986 at his home in Leatherhead, Surrey.

Next Higson had to search through all the birth certificates between those two dates. When he had finished he had a list of several hundred people whose surnames were Kent and whose father was called Richard (the ones whose mother was Mary and still of childbearing age he ringed as being the most likely candidates, but it was possible Kent had been divorced or widowed and later remarried). Richard was a very common Christian name, and Kent a fairly common surname. He needed to boil things down a bit.

It occurred to him that they could start killing all the people called Kent, but once the first few had died the rest would be given police protection, so if they didn’t get the right one earlier on it might not do them any good, unless they had the Terminator on their side and even he would find it a messy and time-consuming business. Besides, to kill them might also be to slay the goose that would lay the golden egg.

Where to go from here presented something of a problem. The Data Protection Act would make it difficult for the Society to find the information it required. They had enough knowledge and expertise between them to hack into a few computers but that wouldn’t necessarily tell them anything. At most they would be left with a list of people with the surname Kent, who might conceivably be the children or grandchildren of Reynart Engelmann. And since a man could father offspring until around the age of 70, or even after, it would be quite a long list. There would be various data on them, such as their age and marital status and occupation, but it wouldn’t necessarily tell Higson what he wanted to know.

Google, or any other of the Internet search engines, might supply more information. There were a few terminals at the Centre, one of which he was able to book; it was the better way to access the network if you wanted to cut down on your phone bill.

He clicked on “Internet Explorer”, then “Google”, and keyed in the word “Engelmann”. This produced no result of any benefit to him so he tried “Kent” instead. It turned out there were thousands of UK sites to work through. Patiently, he began scrolling down the list, pressing “Next” every time he came to the bottom of the screen. Most of the sites were to do with the county of Kent: publicity for the county council and other local authorities.

By closing time he hadn’t had any luck, so he visited his local library the next day and took up the search again. Halfway through the session he found something a bit more relevant. “International Petroleum PLC Annual Report. Caroline Kent, Director of Personnel and Public Relations, says IPL is meeting all its targets for recruitment....”

He clicked on the link, and after about a minute the first page of the weighty document came up on the screen. He kept clicking on the “down” arrow, scanning the text before him for any mention of the name. Eventually a photograph of Caroline Kent appeared. As with all Internet photos the quality wasn’t wonderful, but it was good enough for him to see that she was of the Aryan type, with a fine bone structure, golden hair and very blue eyes. And she looked about the right age to be a grandchild of Reynart Engelmann. None of those things, however, proved she had any connection with him.

She could be contacted at the company, whose address was given on the website under one of the hyperlinks. But was there any point, if it was the wrong person? An enormous waste of time if so.

Unless you wanted to ask her for a date, he mused. There was no doubt about it, she wasn’t a bad looker.

Regarding the camp Engelmann had been at, a member of the organisation had managed to get hold of a book written by a German historian on the experiences of POWs in England, including those who had decided to “stay on”, which included an interview with Engelmann. From this they learned the name of the camp and its location.

He’d keep trawling the net for info on people with the surname. In the meantime, perhaps an advert in the papers? Yes, that might be the way. He sat down to write it.


It was some time now since Caroline had first suspected its presence within her, but until now it had only made itself manifest when exceptional circumstances happened to trigger it off. Images from past incidents, past exploits, flashed back into her mind: a fierce battle for her life with a being who knew how to use the power better than she did, but could only do so through a device which fortune had placed in Caroline’s possession, thus evening the odds….standing on a bleak Cornish clifftop, calling on the help of another force from realms beyond this one, concentrating savagely, laying herself open to its psychic influence so that she could open a channel to it, summon it to her aid……

The whale…..one of the most intelligent of animals, seeming almost human at times. You could talk to it, after a fashion. Hello, who are you? I’m Caroline and I want to get out of here. Let me come with you…that’s right….I like you, you’re my friend. I like you too. Animals understood the power better than a human, because their minds functioned on an instinctual, if more complex than humans often realised, level and their brains, not being occupied with exercising the faculty of reason, had more time to devote to using it. They sensed, not thoughts because they didn’t think as such, not in the way humans did, but emotions…..

This time it was stress that had started it off. That made sense, didn’t it? Stress unlocked things that usually lay trapped beneath the surface, perhaps struggling to break out but never quite succeeding. Under it – or the mental disruption it could cause, the madness sometimes - people were sometimes capable of extraordinary feats of strength. And weren’t ghosts, poltergeists, and other paranormal phenomena often reported in houses where there was someone in their early teens, going through the trauma that accompanied puberty?

The only thing was, she had been under pressure before and it hadn’t happened. This was surely something new, something different. Oughtn’t she to tell someone? But if she did they’d lock her up, wouldn’t they? And yet if it happened again, there was no telling what the consequences might be.

Eventually she came to some sort of decision. If the stress was the trigger, then if she managed to keep calm despite it she might be alright. Once the stress was gone then it would go away too.

And if she couldn’t cope with her many burdens, she knew her colleagues, or some of them anyway, would start spreading malicious comments. Comments that might reach the ears of top management, meaning people even higher than Hennig. She wasn’t having that.

And so for the umpteenth time Caroline took a deep breath, forced herself to put her worries behind her, and bent her head once more to her work.


Seated at the table in the room set aside at Bundeskriminalamt HQ for important top-level meetings were Astrid Lundt, Hans Faltermeyer, Karl-Heinz Wegen, Stefan Wolniak and Noa Golani.

Faltermeyer - heading the German side of the operation as the officer under whom the investigation had first begun - studied the two Israelis with interest. Wolniak was short, stockily built, greying; Golani slightly larger and taller than the average for a woman, seeming somehow or other to dwarf her superior and indeed dominate the entire room, even when not speaking. Her dark hair was drawn back into a severe ponytail, with a cluster of thick ringlets at the sides. Faltermeyer found her vaguely attractive, in a coarse kind of way. Her lips were tightly set in a fashion indicating strict self-control. In contrast with the impassive, slab-like face the eyes were in constant movement, flickering from side to side as they tried to size up the others in the room. He sensed he might find some clue there to the rigid restraint she otherwise practiced, but searched for it in vain. If only they’d stop moving.

It was Wolniak who was speaking at the moment, addressing himself to the three Germans. “Again let me say how sorry I am this should have happened without your being notified,” he said. “Those responsible have been disciplined. From now on our people would be happy to leave matters entirely in your hands, although we would like to be informed as soon as there are any significant developments. You will understand of course why we take an interest in such matters.”

Noa Golani continued to stare ahead with a face as cold and hard as stone.
“Of course,” smiled Faltermeyer.

“I need hardly state that we would have informed you anyway once we felt we had enough evidence to justify your making arrests.” Now it was the Germans’ turn to look impassive.

It would have been moral blackmail, Faltermeyer was thinking. While on our territory they act as if they’re a law unto themselves, and then they expect us to step in right at the end to add the finishing touches, for their convenience. But we have to let them do it because of what happened in the war. They get away with fucking murder.

“Perhaps it would help,” he said, “if we could begin with your setting out why you first became interested in the Thule Society, and what exactly you have found out about them?”

“Certainly. We had become concerned by the growth of right-wing, neo-Nazi sentiment in Europe – I am sure you will agree, Herr Faltermeyer, it is a problem – and naturally wished to know what the extremists were doing. While I and most of my colleagues concentrated on problems such as al-Qaeda, the matter was entrusted to one of my subordinates who I am afraid proved a little over-zealous. However David Richards might have seemed, in some ways at least, an ideal choice. He was interested in, and knowledgeable about, modern European history and very much concerned for the wellbeing of Israel and of the Jewish people. And so when approached he readily agreed to help infiltrate Nazi organizations in Germany and find out what their long-term plans were. He wanted to find out, for academic and more important reasons, how a Nazi’s mind worked, how influential these groups were and whether they were doing anything we ought to be worried about.

“He chose the New Vitality party, and through them also became involved with the Thule Society. They seemed a bunch of cranks with bizarre ideas about race, religion, science and politics. The kind of people even Hitler, it seems, did not take seriously. And yet in the last few years its membership has increased significantly and it has also become affiliated to New Vitality – who are the most important of the far right parties in Germany at present. A lot of its members are also members of the NVP including its leader, Klaus Wachter.” The Germans were nodding, telling him that their own investigations had confirmed his findings.

“Richards had managed to work his way into the confidence of Rolf Erdmann, New Vitality’s Youth Organiser, and his friends, pretending to be of like mind to themselves. There was a lot he wasn’t able to find out; he sensed information was being divulged strictly on a “need to know” basis, and there seem to be a lot of different Nazi cells, here and in other countries, which are to a great extent compartmentalized so that each knows very little of what any of the others are doing – a sensible precaution. But that we are talking about a wider international movement, which probably includes French, British, Russian, Dutch, Belgian, Scandinavian, South African and American Nazis, was suggested by various chance remarks, various little incidents, that Richards saw or heard made while he was with them. He just had the vague, but nonetheless definite, impression of one. As for anything more substantial…well, the word Thule came up a few times, and there was a lot of talk about someone called “Heinrich” who seemed to be the one ultimately in charge of everything. We’ve no idea who he might be at present. From time to time they talked about “the excavation” and said it was proceeding well, but we’ve no idea what’s being excavated or where. I expect we would have learned more if Richards had been alive to tell it.

Astrid Lundt spoke. “There would have to be some contact, from time to time, between the different cells for the organization to function, especially if it was planning something on a worldwide scale.”
“What evidence do you actually have against them, at present?” Noa Golani asked Faltermeyer.

“Nothing that would justify arresting anyone, I’m afraid.” Golani’s face showed a faint but unmistakeable disdain. It was clear she thought they could and should be doing more. “Other than that Erdmann’s house is not far from where the accident happened. The group often meets there. We’ve questioned them and searched the premises inch by inch. But there’s nothing to connect them with David Richards’ death, not that would stand up in court. They did point out that in these times of increased anti-Semitism, which problem is of course nothing to do with them, it could have been some other right-wing group that did it.”
“Some other far right group, but racist which of course they are not,” Wolniak remarked acidly.
“All the same, they could be telling the truth.”

Wolniak had to admit this was so. “Another damn silly mistake,” he growled. “Richards should have told his controller where he was going that day.”

“Surely his use of the word “Thule” would settle the matter in the eyes of a judge?” Golani said. If so, there would be no need to bring up the findings of intelligence agencies in court, which would present certain complicated problems.

“If that’s what he was actually saying.” Does a part of me still want to believe it wasn’t? Faltermeyer thought.
“Have you put anyone under surveillance?”

“As of yet, no. I didn’t think there was enough proof to justify it. But you think these people have something big in mind, and they’re going to do it pretty soon – maybe within the next few weeks or months?”

“There seemed to be some uncertainty whether they could pull it off. But that was the impression Richards got, yes. They were pretty confident something could be made to happen before very long.”

“Then in that case I think a surveillance operation would be in order. On both Thule and the NVP.”

Wenge said that both organizations had branches in major cities, the Thule Society only in Munich, the NVP also in Berlin, Bonn, Hamburg, Dresden, Koln and Stuttgart. It might also be an idea to monitor Wachter’s Rhineland castle but unfortunately it was very difficult to actually get near the place. “Like any rich businessman, or because he’s got something to hide, Wachter is very security-conscious. The place is surrounded by high fences and CCTV cameras, patrolled by security guards with dogs, and bristling with alarm systems. He’s also pretty knowledgeable about how you can hack into a computer or listen in on a phone conversation and how to guard against that kind of thing.”

“Could you not infiltrate the group yourselves?” Golani suggested.
“Doubt if it would work,” answered Faltermeyer. “After the Richards affair, they may be wary about taking on new members. That and the compartmentalization might mean our plant wouldn’t learn anything much. I suggest we concentrate on the surveillance for now. As time goes by, the evidence should start to accumulate. Don’t worry, Fraulein Golani; sooner or later, we’ll have found something interesting to tell the judge.”


Caroline thought she had succeeded in solving the problem by going off sick (which in a way she was; Hennig had seen the effects of it and would not ask questions) and taking her work home with her, leaving the phone off the hook while she attended to it so she could be free from any distractions. Unfortunately, from time to time there were things for which she needed to call the office or make an actual visit there. This made it difficult to keep up the pretence of illness. The frequent journeys to and from the office were a time-consuming business since she was relying on public transport. And, deciding that she wasn’t really sick, or that even though she was had signified she was still part of the loop, they kept ringing her and then complaining that they couldn’t get a reply.

So the backlog was still not broken, and she knew people were getting restless. The next few days would be crucial and that fact made her even more tense and anxious and irritable. There was always the fear some additional complication would appear out of the blue and disrupt her schedule for clearing it.

To endure the stress and control her anger and irritation had taken a Herculean effort. It left her resentful that she couldn’t, at any time between approximately nine and five, relax and so be better equipped for what she had to put up with the rest of the day. Someone or something seemed to feel it was out of order that she should be given the slightest break.

It was now getting on for teatime and she hoped, she hoped, that nobody else would try to get in touch with her today. She was starting to sound bolshy and hostile on the phone and someone was bound to complain before very long.

She was sitting in the living room doing nothing in particular, a half-drunk cup of tea on the coffee table nearby, Jack her cat perched comfortably beside her on the arm of the sofa with his legs tucked beneath him. She reached out and tickled the animal gently behind one of his ears, his contented purring rising a notch or two in response.

Jack was a handsome tabby the vet had thought was about five years old. He wasn’t very big, and inclined to be timid, even nervous, by nature though happy enough as long as he was safe within the boundaries of a house and garden where he had enough space to play in to his heart’s content, when he wanted to, and plenty of warm comfortable places to sleep, and an owner who cared for him and tended to all his needs. It was a strange business, how she had come by him. He had popped in through the back door one evening, looking around with nervous curiosity. He was in perfect condition as far as she could see, and obviously belonged to someone because there was a collar around his neck with his name on it, along with a little bell. She gave him something to eat, presuming he would go away after a while. But he seemed to decide that he liked the place and wouldn’t mind staying. When he was still there the following morning she realised, with a certain sadness, that she should place adverts in all the local newsagents and in each of the local papers to say he’d been found and could someone come to collect him. They didn’t, and after a month or so Caroline realised that Jack was hers. Her heart leaped with delight, in spite of inward groaning at the responsibility of buying cat food and all the other things. After a while the fear that someone might suddenly turn up to claim him faded, and he became fully part of the furniture. He certainly liked to sit on it, and occasionally on her newspaper while she was trying to read it but of course if you really valued the company of cats, or people for that matter, you had to put up with all their faults and try to see the good things in them instead of complaining.

She never found out the reason for his sudden appearance, although she had the impression he was fleeing from some frightening experience which of course he couldn’t talk about, not in any language she could understand. A real mystery. But certainly he had no cause to complain about his current situation. He returned affection with affection, and was a cherished companion at times of trouble. She liked to relax with him on her lap of an evening, thinking that however much of a chore it might be to ensure he was properly fed and groomed you never had half the trouble from animals you did from people. You got a lot more respect, anyway. Jack was only occasionally naughty, and that because something or other had unsettled him, and she didn’t begrudge him the likelihood that if he found himself somehow uprooted and placed in a new environment with a new owner he would probably adapt to it quite easily, forgetting her altogether after a while. He couldn’t help being a cat. And although she liked to think she might be mistaken in her estimation of his loyalty, she couldn’t blame him for simply trying to survive. That was one thing she liked about cats, their adaptability. Their independence. Each knew what suited it best, as a cat or as an individual, and was determined to have it. In that respect they were a bit like her.

Jack’s fault was that he wasn’t particularly playful or adventurous. That didn’t especially bother her, she was just glad to have someone who didn’t complain too much. And without a husband or a boyfriend at the moment, she needed his companionship.

Only right now it wasn’t doing her any good. She couldn’t stop thinking about the..problem and how it affected her, on top of everything else.

She knew there were people at work who didn’t like her. Sometimes when going about on her business at the office she could sense their thoughts. When they were angry with her she had a sudden sense of being surrounded by an attacking army, the very air turning into a forest of cold steel knives stabbing at her.

She didn’t ask for this. The powers had proved useful at times and she knew she ought to be grateful, but right now she didn’t feel like it. They were also scary. They put on her a terrible responsibility which weighed heavily on her mind like a millstone, dragging her down into a deep, dark sea of depression.

What if she couldn’t control them? There would be danger either to herself or others. She wanted just to be normal. Why had Fate singled her out, picked on her to be troubled by this particular demon, just at the very time when she didn’t need any more hassle?

Jack sensed the uprising anger in his mistress and glanced up, eyeing her a little uneasily.

The anger broke surface, suddenly and violently. “It’s all so wrong!” she shouted, jumping to her feet.

The cup of tea shot off the table and flew through the air on a roughly horizontal path. Before the psychokinetic energy could expend itself the wall stopped it and it shattered into several pieces.

With a startled meow Jack sprang up, took off across the room and darted under the bookcase, crouching down as low as he could and shrinking back in terror.

Caroline stood staring at the fragments of the cup, confronted by the indisputable proof. She breathed out slowly, eyes closed.

Well, there’s no doubt about it now, she told herself. It’s there. Now somehow I’m going to have to deal with it.

She looked round for Jack, couldn’t find him, then saw the light glinting on the two wide eyes looking out from the shadows under the bookcase. “Jack?” she called. “Jack, it’s alright honey. Jack?”

She took a few tentative steps towards him, trying not to alarm him by any sudden movements, but he only shrunk back a little further, unsettled by the power because it had manifested itself in violence. Because she had been the origin of the incident he had identified her as a threat.

Caroline felt herself grow cold with horror, upset at any thought that he might regard her as an object of fear. She hesitated, then moved a little closer. To her distress he hissed at her.

She knelt down, peering underneath the case at him. “Jack? “Jacky? It’s alright, Mummy didn’t mean to hurt you. Come on.”

Jack stayed firmly where he was. “Jack, it’s all right, sweetheart. Mummy’s sorry she startled you. Come on, don’t be frightened.”

She caught a flicker of movement and the frightened eyes looked out at her warily. Then they drew back out of sight.

Suddenly she knew what she should do. Shuffling forward on her knees, she lay down on her front until she was on a level with him, taking the risk that he might decide to lash out and scratch her. Her eyes met the cat’s and she gazed into them intently, concentrating on her love for the animal, thinking benign and comforting thoughts.

“Mummy didn’t mean to frighten you,” she whispered soothingly. “Come on out. There’s nothing to be scared of. Mummy loves you. Alright?”

Jack seemed to twitch, his head jerking upwards in an alert fashion. The expression on his face was most like surprise. He stared back at her in fascination, his fear evaporating for the moment. He wasn’t quite sure what was going on but didn’t seem to find it entirely disagreeable.

“Mummy was just a bit upset because the nasty people at work have been giving her a hard time,” she explained. “She didn’t mean to take it out on you. You’re my friend, aren’t you Jacky? I wouldn’t hurt you, not ever. You understand, don’t you? Of course you do.”

Unafraid, perhaps a little curious, Jack crept out from his hiding place, his feet padding softly on the carpet. He went up to her, sat back on his hind legs and looked up expectantly.

Gently she picked him up, settled him in her arms and carried him over to the sofa. She sat down, resting him on her lap, and let herself relax. Purring now, he turned to face her and began to push his paws up and down on her stomach. She smiled with pleasure, rubbing him behind the ears and on the side of his head.
There are some good things about this, she reflected.


Together, Angachuk and his brother Kunnunguaq loaded the kayaks onto the sled and fastened them down. Then Angachuk went round the back of the house where the dogs were chained up and released them. Enticing them with scraps of whale meat and fish, he persuaded them to accompany him to the sled. They came barking and howling impatiently, not having eaten for some days. It was felt that if the dogs were too well fed they would become lazy and not work hard.

Once they had finished greedily wolfing down their food he chained them to the sled in a fan formation. Then he and Kunnunguaq climbed onto the drivers’ seat. Both men wore sealskin trousers, sealskin anoraks with ruffs of fox fur around the hood and wrists, and sealskin mittens rather than synthetic materials which they disliked; for this was Qaanaaq.

From the door Kunnunguaq’s housekeeper and “companion”, Pawluk, a sturdy young woman with hair tied back in the traditional topknot favoured by female Inuit, waved them goodbye. She preferred to accompany Kunnunguaq on his hunting expeditions but in addition to staying at home and looking after the children and old people she had been forced to take a job to pay the bills, a not uncommon situation faced by Greenlanders these days. In any case it was not unusual for Inuit men to have a different “companion” for when they were out on the ice – an age-old custom which Pawluk accepted with equanimity. Though Kunnunguaq had none at the moment, it was likely one would come along before too long.

They waved back and then Angachuk tugged on the reins. “Puquok, puquok,” he cried. “A ta ta ta ta ta.”

The sled began to move, the runners of smooth polished whalebone sliding easily over the flat snow-covered ground, and they were off on another day’s hunting. It was always, to some extent, a hit-and-miss affair, this way of making a living; but it had served the Inuit well enough in the past and Angachuk for one had no wish to abandon it.

Traditionally, Greenland’s was a balanced economy which made best use of the resources of both land and sea – caribou (though mainly in the south-west around Kangerlussuaq), and fish and sea mammals - storing them against the winter when they would be needed most. Families lived a nomadic existence, moving every two or three months to follow the game. In the summer those in the north would travel south to Savissik to hunt walrus and in the winter there would be a mass emigration to the far west where it was better for finding whales. The distances covered in these seasonal migrations, or in trading expeditions between settlements, could be vast. Angachuk’s grandfather told of journeys to Qaanaaq from Illorsuit, many miles to the south, and back which took four months, from February to May. The hunters often spoke of how unsettled they became by the flatness of the land the further north they ventured, especially around the ancient site of Thule where there were no mountains at all, apart from that Devil’s Chimney place. It spooked them. You felt there was something wrong with the land there, the way it was so flat and bleak and desolate. It scared Angachuk too, to be honest. The place did remind him a bit of the surface of the Moon, or the wasteland after a nuclear holocaust.

He understood the white people were doing something at Thule; they’d built a base there with a runway where planes touched down every few days. And it was said they’d actually opened up the mountain and were doing things inside it. He’d no idea what it was about, nor did he care; it was their business. Though they’d have to be crazy to do it, in his estimation. In the past explorers had avoided the place, or not stayed long there, because of the way it screwed up the mind, giving you this sense of black foreboding. What kind of person would actually want to live in it?

They passed a cluster of wooden huts on the outskirts of the town, the home of one of their distant relatives. In the old days, Angachuk reflected, people had lived in houses of stone or earth over a framework of wood or whalebone, lit by lamps of whale oil. They were communal, a dozen or so nuclear families with their own reserved space and oil lamp living in each. Kin were recognized on both paternal and maternal sides of the family to the degree of second cousin. Generally everyone helped each other out as much as possible, although there was a basic line of demarcation between the sexes where vital tasks were concerned; the men went out to hunt while women stayed at home to do the cooking, mend clothing and look after the children (though it depended to some extent on where you were exactly; here in Qaanaaq the women had often hunted with the men and indeed they still did).

But for the past hundred years or so, the old way of life had been gradually changing. The advent of more efficient methods of hunting, using guns and motor boats, meant the prey was dying out, or going north to those realms where still no man could live in order to escape the predators. You had to travel much further away to find your food these days. And the decline in traditional hunting had an effect on everything else.

Angachuk hunted because for him it was the only way to survive; the only way he knew. Those damn Greenpeace activists didn’t realise that killing whales and seals was essential for the livelihood of the community – the very livelihood Western do-gooders claimed they sought to protect – and it had had a bad effect on the economy here when they got the selling of sealskins in Europe and America banned.

He wondered if it would ever be possible to make the polar regions habitable in the same way the developed world was, so they could be colonized by millions of people living a settled existence off the products of farms and heavy industry. He hoped not. Apart from anything else, it would mean changing the climate to such an extent that it’d cause far more damage than global warming already had.

Some places resisted the onward march of change better than others. Up here around Qaanaaq people had been late in catching up with the modern world, compared to the more progressive – if you saw it in terms of “progress” – south of the island. It was only in the last twenty years that electricity had been installed, and mobile phones and fax machines still weren’t very common. Everyone now used computers and the internet, except for some of the older inhabitants, and a few important places had satellite TV for when an emergency arose and it was necessary to contact the wider world for assistance. But many still hunted for their living, often doing so in dogsleds or in kayaks made by the village kayak maker (albeit with wood imported from Denmark). The outer covering of each kayak was made from sealskin and fastened over the wooden skeleton with string made from narwhal ligaments. The oars were wood too, also the harpoons, formerly of bone, still used to spear seals, walruses or narwhals. Snowmobiles and motor boats were an option, but restrictions on their use meant you didn’t see them very often, unlike in say Canada where they were regarded as an essential accessory. Generally Thule, as the overall region which included Qaanaaq was known, was a strange mixture of the old and the new, combining the best of both. The outboard motors for the skiffs used in hunting were made from reindeer antlers, and when plastic dogsled runners cracked sealskin might be used to patch them. On the whole Angachuk was happy with the compromise that had been achieved, though he knew not everyone shared his views; the old folks still regretted the disappearance of the stone and peat houses, now replaced by clapboard houses made from the ubiquitous Danish wood, in which they had been born and brought up. But that was understandable.

Thule had remained so traditional in its outlook because here there’d been less Danish colonisation. Elsewhere, the missionaries had from the early eighteenth century onwards destroyed much of the Inuit’s historic culture in their well-meaning attempts to Christianise it. Because it was thought to encourage sexual immorality and incest extended families were prevented from living together in the same house and this had destroyed the whole communal basis of Inuit society, on which successful hunting – involving co-operation – depended. Some of the damage was repaired later on as the Danes embraced socialism, which brought out the underlying preference that still persisted for a communal lifestyle. Thule, less affected by colonialism, benefited in particular from this tendency. But throughout Greenland today, although one’s house remained one’s own, the land was held in common and there were no boundary fences and no disputes over ownership, unlike in the West.

Whatever troubles they might have to face in a changing world Greenlanders had one thing to be grateful for, at least. Thank God the Americans hadn’t settled here. If they had, the Inuit might have disappeared or been carted off to the States as slaves. But they hadn’t, and so it had not been like the Native Americans in the USA or the indigenous peoples of Central and South America. There were nice Americans, of course; Angachuk had met some of them. But thank God the Americans had never settled here.

As it was the inhospitable, to a white person, nature of the environment had discouraged full-scale colonisation and the basic fabric of Inuit society was kept intact, here at any rate. Family groups remained important and were merely made more complex and interlinked by the infidelity that often went on. The elderly were always taken care of, children fleeing broken homes where there was violence taken in without complaint, and offenders, even murderers, dealt with by communal sanctions and ostracism rather than prison. Instead of being punished for misbehaviour children were allowed to learn from the consequences of their mistakes. They each inherited the name and the “name soul” of an ancestor, to whom smacking them therefore showed disrespect. This also accorded wonderfully with the liberal Danish view that smacking was wrong and a form of child abuse.

The Inuit had an over-arching sense of the oneness of everything. Along with respect for the wider family unit went an appreciation for nature and of how far humans depended on it for their continued existence. It provided the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the materials they used for lighting and heating. You paid it back for that by not damaging it, which meant killing no more animals than was necessary for survival. For apart from anything else the land could take revenge by killing you. As always, despite the modern world, the ice was a harsh place where a stupid person could die, which was why the people needed to all pull together in order to master their environment. Because like all things – natural features, animals, people, inanimate objects - it had a spirit, and that spirit could sometimes get angry. During the dark winter months when it was impossible to hunt stories were still told, if by electric light rather than a fire made with whale oil, of how the spirits had created the world, of people who could turn into animals, and of great feats by which men and women had won their favour.

Because the spirits needed to be appeased if hunting was to be good and the people prosperous. Formerly there had been a complex set of taboos and rituals designed to ensure that the souls of the animals killed were shown proper respect, which meant the carcasses must be being quickly skinned, the flesh eaten and all non-edible parts put to some other use rather than wasted. This was especially important because the dead beast had to be treated with proper ceremony if it was to be reincarnated as a new animal of the same species and the never-ending cycle of birth, death and rebirth continue. Breaking the rules could result in death, famine or other misfortune for the transgressor. There had been shamans who made “soul flights” under the ice and put themselves into trances during which they journeyed to the spirit world, where they interceded with the beings who inhabited it to ensure success in hunting and release a person from the curse they were under as a result of some offence. Alternatively the shamans could invoke malevolent spirits to punish troublemakers within the community; this they did by making carvings of either real animals, bears or birds or seals, or hideous imaginary creatures - whatever the nature of the spirit was thought to be – as a focus for their powers.

They could also cure the perlonereq - the madness which, particular during the long winter months, could come upon even those who’d lived on the ice all their lives as the all-enveloping darkness of the Arctic night fell over everything. The psyche was a delicate thing, a treacherous terrain which they knew how to navigate. They perfected this and all their other skills through finding a solitary place where they would meditate for hours, recognizing that only in solitude, away from the distraction of other people, could true wisdom be attained.

Angachuk still knew someone who had been a shaman’s apprentice, although she was very old and sadly had forgotten all the dances and songs she had learned. Apart from that; well, no-one knew for sure but it was rumoured there were people who could put in a good word with the spirits to ensure a good catch. Could twenty thousand years of it have disappeared in less than a hundred? Who were you trying to kid.

Like their not too distant relatives, the “Indians” of the North American prairies, traditional Inuit believed in a happy hunting ground where successful hunters went after death, and where caribou grazed in vast herds. Hunters who were lazy and therefore unsuccessful went to a land called Nuqumiut where they could never catch anything and simply sat around miserably, eternally hungry.

Yes; so far, Thule had preserved the old ways. But Angachuk knew things were very different in the south, and he feared that sooner or later the cancer would spread to here. During the 1950s, in another well-intentioned but misguided social experiment, the populations of the smaller villages were shipped off to the new towns which had arisen with the booming fishing industry. Those who had previously been subsistence hunters, but now hunted mainly to supplement their income, felt rootless and turned to drink to cure their resulting depression, which only made it worse. Nor did it improve matters when boom turned to bust, first in the fishing and then in the burgeoning oil industry. The consequence was more alcoholism; especially dangerous was the local home-brewed beer, known as imiaq, which was both of poor quality and also often toxic, having been brewed in old oil drums – and a host of other social problems such as domestic violence, rowdiness, drug and solvent abuse and rape. The Inuit tolerance of infidelity now became socially harmful, leading to a rise in teenage pregnancies and STDs and the breakdown of many relationships. Suicide rates were high. The alcoholism was particularly common on long winter nights when there was nothing much to do, in settlements which were still relatively remote but had lost the traditional culture which formerly prevented people from falling into bad habits. It fuelled the domestic violence, which in turn resulted in binge drinking as people tried to forget their troubles by drowning them in beer, completing a vicious circle. Along with Western processed foods – bringers of obesity and heart disease - it caused health problems to which the Inuit had a low immunity, partly due to their genetic make-up and partly because they simply weren’t accustomed to the Western lifestyle. The effects were even more distressing when children took to the bottle or absorbed the alcohol from their mother when in the womb.

Instead of knowing how to navigate a snowdrift as their forefathers had done, people would get drunk and fall asleep in it, losing their limbs from frostbite. Or career about madly in their snowmobiles until they crashed and killed themselves or others. Children would stay out on the streets all night because they were afraid of being beaten by their parents, or simply out of the latter’s neglect of them. It made Angachuk’s soul weep just to think of it. The more the economic development of Greenland followed the West’s, the more it suffered from the latter’s problems, its physical and psychological illnesses.

Where diet was concerned, the problem was partly pollution of the environment. It was thought poisonous chemicals were accumulating in the Arctic food chain, and the northern peoples were being advised to limit their intake of the more healthy traditional foods. Pollution was an issue in more general ways. In many areas the oil and mineral extraction industries, neither of which did a lot of good for the environment, were now the main sources of wealth. Oil and gas exploitation, ozone depletion, climate change and general industrialization were destroying the natural ecosystem and the human cultures which depended on them.

New towns and roads threatened wildlife migration routes, commercial fishing threatened to exhaust remaining stocks of seafood as it was doing elsewhere. And as the ice melted with the heat, traditional seal hunting grounds would gradually cease to be accessible, even in the far north. The bears were feeling it too; nowadays you often saw them marooned on drifting chunks of ice which were carrying them inexorably out to sea, looking bewildered and sad at what had happened so that Angachuk almost felt sorry for them. It was comical, he supposed, but not funny for the bears themselves or the people who hunted them for their skins or meat.

Then of course there was the weather. It was stormier now and broke up the ice so that it was difficult to use kayaks alone when hunting. There were lots of things wrong with the weather. Angachuk had the feeling that it was getting old; like the planet.

Everyone seemed powerless to stop it all. The most they could do was try to persuade the young people to live by the old ways, teaching them hunting as soon as they were old enough. Whether they absorbed what they were taught was up to them. But he himself, like all his family, had been taught from an early age how to shoot, prepare skins, flense a seal, and drive dogs.

He preferred the young not to go to universities in Denmark or the States, in case they acquired Western ideas that would be dangerous if applied to the Inuit. In fact he didn’t have a lot to worry about because most of them soon got homesick and returned to Greenland without graduating. It had been so with him, he’d gone to an American college for a couple of years and not liked it.

His thoughts turned to the day which lay ahead and what the hunting would be like. They were on the way to Inglefield Fjord, a vast inland lake fed by a channel linking it to the sea, where narwhal, seals and whales could be found in abundance. They were making good time, although no doubt they’d get there even quicker in a snowmobile. Again he thought about getting one and dismissed the notion with a shudder not caused by the cold. They were dangerous and not too good for the environment either, the way they churned up the snow and frightened away the wildlife.

During all the time he had been thinking they had neared the American airbase, just visible on the horizon some ten miles away to their right. The military association between the US and Denmark had begun during the Second World War when airbases were established at Sondre Stromfjord and Naarssarsuaq as defence against possible German attacks, by air or sea, on America. Then in a covert agreement between the two countries during the Cold War a new air force base was built on the historic site of Thule, on Inuit hunting grounds, to protect the “free world” against its new enemy, Russia.

He didn’t like the place, or its reputation; a cousin of his been arrested just for going a bit too close to it while hunting. You could easily find yourself locked up while an extensive check of your credentials was carried out, simply because you had stood and looked at the base, out of curiosity, for just a moment too long. Generally he avoided the installation as much as he could.

The construction of the base, which had begun in 1953, still caused resentment. A whole Inuit settlement, the original Qaanaaq, had been uprooted to make way for it. The houses of turf were demolished and the population housed temporarily in thin canvas tents which were quite insufficient to keep out the cold, some of the old people dying, until a new town of wooden huts, where they were not happy, could be built for them. Many never wholly recovered from the trauma inflicted on a whole community by this uprooting. In fact the old Qaanaaq was not quite gone, but it was a ghost town, just a few buildings remaining which were used occasionally by hunters passing through.

Angachuk forgot about the base and concentrated on being happy, on the exhilaration as they felt the passage of the cool wind displaced by the sled cutting through it, and took in the vast, beautiful emptiness of the icefield all around them. Out here in this wilderness you could remember who you were.

The sky was so clear and blue, like the eyes of some qannuaalit women, and the sun so bright that you sometimes felt you were already in some celestial paradise; for Heaven must surely be not unlike this. The sled travelled so smoothly over the snow that it seemed you were flying. Flying to Heaven.

They needed no maps to get to Inglefield; the Inuit had done without maps for twenty thousand years. All they need do was look for the pointers that nature had provided, like a flock of seagulls flying over, which meant there must be open water somewhere near.

In ten minutes they had sighted the Fjord, lying before them glimmering in the sunshine; part sheet of ice, part sparkling blue water. It was so vast and extended for so long that although the place was popular with both foreign and native hunters, no-one else was visible for as far as the eye could see. They would have this lonely spot all to themselves.

Angachuk reined in the dogs at the lake’s edge and they unloaded the kayaks, easing them slowly into the water and then climbing in. Each had an opening in its upper surface in which one man could sit and a cluster of harpoons was held in place beside him by a pair of pitons. They paddled slowly out, the oars making hardly any sound as they rose and fell with perfect, almost practised symmetry.

Five minutes into the hunt Kunnunguaq saw a dark shape break the surface, just a few yards away. He laid down his oars, selected a harpoon and threw it. It lodged quivering in the seal’s head and the water around the prey began to fill with blood.

They killed five seals in all before it began to get dark and it was time to return home. With ropes tied to the harpoons which had killed them they dragged the dead animals up onto the little beach, cut them up there and then with their knives and bagged up the bloody chunks of raw meat in polystyrene sheeting, their only concession to modernity.
“Could have been better,” grunted Kunnunguaq as they started on the third seal.
“It’ll make us all a good supper tonight,” Angachuk replied. “That’s what counts.”

He felt his brother stiffen slightly and glanced in the direction Kunnunguaq had been looking. Another dogsled was coming towards them over the ice, seeming to be making straight for them. They broke off what they were doing and waited for it to reach them. It could be these people needed help, in which case it was their duty to give it.

The driver reined in his dogs and the sled glided to a halt. He and the two men who had been sitting flanking him now dismounted and began walking towards the two Inuit, smiling in a friendly fashion. They wore parkas rather than sealskin; so probably not locals, then. Their features were Caucasian. Danes?

The trio halted. “Good afternoon!” said the one who had been the driver. He spoke Danish but his accent was different from a Dane’s; German, Angachuk reckoned. “We’re from International Geographic, doing a feature on what life is like here, and we’d like to take a photograph of you both if that’s alright.”

Angachuk nodded. If that was what they wanted to do he could see nothing wrong with it. He glanced at Kunnunguaq, who indicated his assent.

“Thankyou,” said the driver politely. One of the men produced a camera. “One of your sled first, with the seals?” he said. His accent was different from the first man’s, thick and guttural and probably East European in origin, Angachuk decided. Russian?

Again Angachuk bobbed his head in assent. The man aimed the camera at the sled, took a couple of pictures. “Now the two of you together,” beamed the Russian. They moved to stand close to one another and the Russian positioned himself in front of them, raising the camera.

Their attention focused on him, they didn’t register the other two each step to one side, out of their line of vision.

He raised the camera to his eye and they heard the click as he pressed the shutter button. “Now one more…that’s it, that’s beautiful.” He lowered the camera.

Angachuk was about to move away when he felt the hood of his jacket pulled back and something cold and metallic pressed to the side of his neck. It pricked him sharply and he gave a short gasp of pain before the tranquiliser took effect and he knew no more.

Kunnunguaq too felt a cold sensation as something made of metal was pressed against his skull. But this object was not a hypodermic needle, and the blackness which descended upon his mind was the blackness of death. For the experiment they were about to perform, Wachter’s men only needed one subject.

They weighted Kunnunguaq’s body and heaved it over the edge of the ice into the water, where it sank straight to the bottom. They did the same with the corpses of the dogs, once they’d shot them with their silenced handguns, and the sled, and the seals, and the two kayaks with the oars and harpoons still strapped in place. The knives and any other remaining equipment were replaced in the bags in which they had been carried by their owners and dumped along with the other stuff. Preferably no trace should remain of what had been done here; there were still the tracks made by the sleds but these would probably be obliterated by the wind and snow within a short time. Angachuk and Kunnunguaq’s failure to return from their hunting expedition would be noticed sooner or later, but as far as the explanation for it was concerned it would simply be assumed that the ice had claimed two more victims. One of them, or both, had made some foolish mistake and nature had not been forgiving.

The Russian and the Frenchman laid Angachuk’s unconscious body on their own sled and strapped it in place, covering it with canvas which they then fastened down securely. They and the German climbed onto the vehicle and set off back to Thule, their mission accomplished.


ELEVEN
Finchley, North London
It had reminded Stephen of his own bar-mitzvah, eight years ago now. Having attained his thirteenth birthday Joshua, wearing his own prayer shawl for the first time, had been called to the reading desk in the synagogue to recite the blessing on the Torah before his family and friends. To learn the Hebrew had taken a lot of practice, despite which the boy was still clearly nervous, just as Stephen had been. But he got through it alright. Their father and the rabbi both said their piece, thanking God for His grace in permitting Joshua to grow to healthy maturity. Congratulating the boy, Dr Jezelvitch gave a brief talk in which he informed Joshua that he would now be counted as an adult in everything involving his religion, and explained the new status, and responsibilities, this entailed, which included counting towards the quorate needed before a service or important administrative meeting could go ahead. Joshua looked rather chuffed at it all.

After the service a celebration meal was held. There were further speeches and Joshua was presented with books on prayer and on the history of the faith, intended to help him fully understand what it meant to be a Jew. Finally everyone had gone back to the house for a buffet supper.

Surrounded by all the chatter and bustle of a Jewish get-together in full swing, Stephen moved among the guests, asking each if they would like something more to eat or drink, a responsibility which fell upon him as the eldest. Most people either already had something or were so busy laughing and joking with one another that he suspected his inquiries were proving more of an intrusion than anything else, and soon more or less gave up.

He continued to wander around a little aimlessly until he caught sight of his Aunt Simone talking to her friend Greta, and went over to her. “All right, Aunt?” he asked.

Interrupted, she glanced up sharply, saw who it was and broke into a warm smile, eyes shining with pleasure. “Stephen, my boy! How are you?”
“Fine thanks,” he grinned.

Forgetting Greta for the moment, she shifted to create a little more space on the sofa. “Come and sit down, and tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself. Still at College?”

Stephen suppressed a smile. They’d surely have told her if he was due to leave it. Simone had reached the age where one started to become a little forgetful.
“Yes, aunt, this is my final year,” he said. “But the exams will be in May and June.”

Simone frowned, screwing up her face in concentration, and shook her head peevishly. “Oh, of course….my poor addled brain.” She was subdued for a moment, contemplating what was happening to her, then gave a shrug of resignation. “So, how are your studies going?”

“Fine, aunt. Trouble is, I haven’t decided what to do for my thesis yet. And it needs to be ready by January.”
“It has to be something to do with what you’re studying, doesn’t it?”
“That’s right.”

“And that’s history, isn’t it? Same as that poor young man who got killed the other day. If you’re thinking of going to Germany on a student exchange, be careful.”
“The full title of the course is “Modern European History and the Holocaust”,” Stephen said helpfully.
“I knew it was something like that. It’s right that people should know about such things.” Greta nodded in polite agreement.

“Well, you could always write about what happened to me,” Simone suggested.
“But people have already done that. It’s been on the TV and in the papers, on the Net, everywhere. I found a website on it the other day.” And he’d heard the story straight from her own mouth, many times since he was a small child. Sometimes she’d broken down and cried and he’d been embarrassed, not understanding.

“But they still haven’t found the man who did it,” she said. “The man who gave the order.” Her chin sank onto her chest, her eyes staring down at the floor but not really seeing it, gazing instead back sixty years into the a now increasingly distant past. “Terrible business,” she whispered, because there never had been much else to say about such things, anything that words could remotely express. “Terrible business….terrible…” Her voice tailed away, and Stephen held her hand while she regained her composure, wiping the moisture from her eyes.

Greta clearly thought she ought to say something. “What happened?” she asked awkwardly.

For a moment the old lady was silent. Then, swallowing, she began to speak, perhaps moved to do so by the contrast between the scene of life and laughter around her and the horror she was now fearfully recalling. A horror of a kind which might one day visit itself upon the people merrily chatting and joking in this room; people who could never take for granted the security and comfort, the happiness, which they currently enjoyed, whatever they might think. No-one had ever thought Hitler and the Shoah possible but it had happened. She supposed even Greta, who was not Jewish, couldn’t be entirely safe from it. She was an….Anglo-Saxon, a WASP, but there were people who hated WASPs because of all the racism, the imperialism there’d been in the past and if they ever came over here, to conquer and enslave as Hitler had most of Europe…was that possible? Anyhow……

“After the north fell in June 1940,” she began, “we moved down south to the part of the country under the control of Vichy. We thought we’d be safe there, though we still took care to keep out of sight. Then in 1942 the Germans tightened their control over the south and things became very hard. God knows how we managed to survive for so long, when all the others had been deported to the camps. The resistance helped; they managed to set up a network, moving us around the country one at a time, in disguise - at least the ones who looked Jewish were. They should have got us out of France long before, then we’d have been alright. But apparently someone had said that getting out the British airmen who’d crashed or baled out and been trapped was the priority. After the war people blamed Churchill and the British government for what happened. I don’t know if that was fair. As a matter of fact, there was a plan to smuggle us all out, across the Channel in a fishing boat; that’s why we were in the north, in Macy. But it was abandoned just before D-Day; they probably thought that with D-Day we’d be alright. Everything got swallowed up in the preparations for that, and so we were still there when the Allies invaded. Funny, in a way…

“One man, an important local official with connections to the Resistance, managed to hide us in the cellar of his house for a whole year. There were about twenty or thirty of us. Then during the invasion the house was shelled and flattened by tanks and the people there were killed. We were alright in the cellar, but we knew we couldn’t stay there because there was no-one to look after us and keep bringing food. We managed to shift the rubble which was blocking the hatch into the cellar and one of us took the risk and went exploring. We could hear the guns going off and the sound of explosions, and guessed there must be a pretty fierce battle going on. The shells were going off all around us….we had to find somewere to hide and we chose the church. The priest, a good Christian man, realised who we were but didn’t mind. Unfortunately it was a fairly modern church and it didn’t have a crypt. Anyway we stayed inside, frightened out of our wits but daring to hope the battle was going in our favour…the children crying…” She was near to tears herself. Stephen reached for her hand and clasped it tightly. “Aunt, you don’t have to….”

But she was too far gone now. “We were afraid the church would be hit. The sound of the shells was terrifying, deafening…then it stopped. We almost cheered. When it hadn’t started up again five minutes later we thought the battle was over. Maybe the British or the Americans…but then the door into the church was thrown open and a German officer came in, followed by some of his men. The Germans must have beaten back the Allies from the town for the time being. You can imagine how we felt.

“The children started crying again. I held on to Pierre and Francoise – the cousins who you never knew, Stephen – as tightly as I could, while Paul seemed to be making up his mind whether to challenge the officer. I shook my head at him and he saw it out of the corner of his eye. Thankfully he gave up the idea, because he realised it might only get us into more trouble.

“None of us dared to say anything….in fact we could barely breathe. The officer stood there looking at us…then he turned and walked out, the soldiers following. Someone sneaked a look out of the window and saw the tanks parked in the square where the church stood.

“He was an ordinary army officer, not SS, so we thought we’d be alright. All the same none of us wanted to move or speak for some minutes after he’d gone.

“No sooner had we started to talk than the shelling began, this time even more fiercely. One young boy became excited and started shouting, “The British and the Americans are coming! They’re going to rescue us, you’ll see!”

“We were all spread flat on the floor, the priest and his family included. But the boy…I suppose it was a kind of madness, brought on by having to spend so long in hiding, often underground in dark places where there wasn’t much room and…well, you can imagine what it must have been like. Anyway he couldn’t resist going to the window and looking out. And he saw something which caused him to collapse in a kind of fit, screaming hysterically.

“Then the first shell hit the church. We all screamed, not just the children, when part of the roof fell in. Several people were hit by the falling rubble and didn’t get up again. And then…and then….”

She was trembling. Greta put a hand on her arm in an effort at consolation. Stephen studied her in some embarrassment. Several times he had seen her looking out of place but trying not to let her feelings show. He knew that sometimes Gentiles could feel excluded at a Jewish party, not really one of the family; and now she had to listen to this. It wasn’t, perhaps, entirely fair.

Simone was making a great effort to keep calm, so she could tell her story coherently. Maybe she particularly felt Greta ought to hear it. “It was like…all Hell breaking loose, that’s the only way I can describe it. All Hell…in what was supposed to be a church, a religious place, a place of sanctuary. They pounded the building into rubble. They used shells….incendiary shrapnel as well. Or just drove over the rubble and crushed it to dust. People everywhere, men women and children, screaming and crying and sobbing, running around trying to find a way out, only the fallen rubble was blocking the exits. We were all just stumbling about, in first one direction then another, completely blind, trying to keep hold of our loved ones and failing. It was like a sea of bodies, a sea of rubble, drowning me and crushing me and suffocating me…I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, and I knew I wasn’t going to get out alive. And the noise…deafening, tearing our heads apart…..Yes, I know there can be no such thing as Hell for me when I die, because I have already been there. Mon dieu…..”

She took a long, deep breath. “Something struck me a blow on the head and I suppose I must have blacked out. When I woke up, I can’t say how long afterwards, I found I was trapped in a sort of little cave, formed by three big pieces of rubble. I couldn’t move my leg at first but eventually I managed to get it free.

“It was a miracle I had survived. But of the rest, all but three did not. Pierre and Francoise, your Great-Uncle Paul, my father and mother, my friends were all killed. All killed….

“I still couldn’t get out but I didn’t dare shout for help in case the Germans heard me. I don’t feel that way now, I suppose, but at that moment I didn’t trust any German, whoever they were. They could all go to where I had just been, as far as I was concerned. Then I heard shouting, the sound of boots tramping all over the place, and felt the rubble around me shift a little. Hands took me and lifted me out, into the daylight. They were American hands.

“I saw one or two German tanks standing around, burning. A body was leaning half out of the top of one and it was all black and smoking; I felt no emotion, no pity. Otherwise, there wasn’t a German in sight.

“And I saw….heads, arms, legs….or just the, the torsoes, with everything else gone…lying about. Some of them crushed flat into the ground, with the imprint of the tank tracks on them. It looked like something unreal, the sort of thing you see in a cartoon, only there the people get up again afterwards and of course these didn’t. I didn’t think that could actually happen to a human body.”

Greta looked about to throw up. “I’m sorry, my dear, for putting you through all this,” Simone said honestly.
“It’s OK,” Greta answered, although her voice had been constricted to a strangled whisper.
“If you’d like me to stop….”
Greta ignored her. “So what, what happened then?”

“Well, I was safe. The Americans were very kind, very friendly, and horrified by what had happened. They took me to a field hospital and cleaned me up, treated me for shock and put my leg in a cast until the broken bones had healed. But it was several weeks before I could bring myself to talk about what had happened. And when they said Paul and the children were dead I went back into a sort of coma again and said nothing until……well, again I had lost my sense of time. I couldn’t tell you when I first regained the ability to speak.

“I and the other survivors were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp where we were housed in a special section, away from all the German prisoners. When I was well enough, I was interviewed by someone from an organization that dealt with refugees, displaced persons. I told him I didn’t want to go back to France after what had happened but would rather join my relatives in England.

“After the war I got together with the other survivors and we tried to find out what had happened, who exactly had been responsible for the…the atrocity. A Panzer Regiment, obviously, but which one? There were several around at the time, so I understand. We knew the names of their commanders, but the trouble was none of those who had survived had actually seen the face of the officer who had come into the church, and who must have ordered the attack. It was bad chance, really. One had been standing behind someone else. Another, who was little more than a child at the time, was so shocked that he blocked the whole incident from his mind and could remember nothing of it. Me…well, for one reason or another I can’t recall his face. When they showed me photographs of the different commanders I honestly couldn’t say which was the one. As for the other soldiers, everyone had been looking at the officer and not his men so their faces didn’t register.”
“But the matter was investigated?” Greta asked.

“By a War Crimes tribunal, yes. We’ve tried to get the case reopened several times since, but there hasn’t been much interest. It’s because what happened in the camps seems much worse. But this was no less deliberate.”
“So they definitely meant to kill you all?”

Simone nodded slowly, looking her straight in the eye. “No doubt about it. During the investigation a man watching from one of the houses close by told the tribunal that he had seen the tanks turn their guns to point at the church. We knew then what the boy had seen and what had turned him mad with fear. He knew we were going to be…..

“I don’t see why they would have needed to destroy the church. A military expert confirmed it. Unless it was just because we were Jews, it didn’t make any sense. We thought our lives had been spared, but…to have lasted so long, until D-Day, and then….”

Stephen saw that Greta’s face had tightened in what was unmistakeably anger. She didn’t speak, but perhaps she didn’t need to. Her expression and the glint that had appeared in her eyes said it all. There was no longer any embarrassment or discomfort in her manner.

“For the first few years I wasn’t thinking of revenge. My main concern was survival. How to cope with the trauma I’d suffered, the way my life had been destroyed. Some people didn’t.

“My wonderful husband and my two beautiful children were dead. And I knew I could never replace them, because I could never love another man like I had Michel. To go through all the business of marrying and having more kids, just as a way of spiting Hitler, was quite impossible. So now there’s just me. I’m here now because if I had given in and taken my own life it would have been to hand victory to those bastards. I like to think I made something out of what remained to me.”

Stephen felt a lump in his throat. “You’ve got us. We’re your family, aunt…”

Taking a close interest in her wider kin had been a way of coping with it. But sometimes, he thought, she must look at couples with children and be reminded, with a feeling like a stab to the heart, of what she had lost.

“Yes, and you’re a good boy, Stephen,” she said, patting him on the arm. “You’ve always been very kind to me; everyone has. I couldn’t wish for anything better. But sometimes, I can’t help thinking…

“You might think it would matter less to me as I get older…as time moves on. Well for a while I suppose that was true. But now….I don’t know why but suddenly it seems important to me again.”

She looked up at her great-nephew. “Oh, Stephen……Stephen my child, do you think you could do something for me?”

She seemed to have forgotten Greta was there, in this moment of family intimacy. But Greta didn’t look as if she minded.
“What’s that, aunt?” Stephen asked.

“Find out who killed my husband and children. Who took away my life. For my sake and for the sake of all Jewish people. The world must never forget. You are young, you have the time and the energy; it’s with your kind that our future lies. I want him found and punished, if it’s not too late. I don’t really care about his men, I’m old and I haven’t got the time or the strength any more to argue about whether they were just obeying orders. Just find that man and see that justice is done. If we can only show that sixty years make no difference…but if all you can do is put a name to him, then that would make me feel much better.”

She squeezed his hand. “Will you promise me you’ll do that, Stephen? Will you?”

He felt overwhelmed with emotion at the responsibility she had chosen to entrust to him. It was a moment before he could reply, during which she repeated her question again. There was only one answer he could give to it.


The original inhabitants of the mountain had not, it seemed, required all of it and so the expedition had been able to cut or blast away enough of the rock to make rooms to serve as toilets or storage space. The further one ventured into the complex, however, the harder it was to penetrate it, because it regrew almost immediately an explosion disintegrated or a drill made a hole in it. That was why they’d decided to leave the rooms they couldn’t get into alone for the moment, not wanting to risk the whole place caving in on top of them.

They had also installed halogen lighting where it was needed. Most of the time it wasn’t, because the veins and clusters of crystal found there gave off a phosphorescent glow that proved adequate to see by. (Where the walls were overlaid with stone they formed a criss-cross pattern in it, like mortar lines).

They had enlarged the ventilation shafts already present, mainly for ease of access when maintenance was required since the shafts were otherwise quite sufficient for their purpose, allowing fresh Arctic air to circulate within the mountain.

The room in which Otto Kiessling stood was vast, even bigger than the entrance hall, and fashioned out of the bare rock of the mountain yet lit by the same phosphorescent radiance as elsewhere. Everything was a silver-white colour, perhaps because of the light from the crystals which seemed to be brighter here; needed to be as this had been a place where people worked. All around him were control consoles and huge masses of machinery which gave off a low, almost inaudible hum like the gentle purring of a kitten. Near to the wall the expedition had set up two or three workbenches with laboratory equipment spread out over them.

The dominant feature of the room was a huge machine twenty or thirty feet across. It was enclosed within four walls of a material like stone but incredibly light, so that one side could be lowered on some kind of hinge, permitting direct access to the equipment when required. Within them at the heart of the apparatus was an intricate structure of metal or crystalline filaments, like a very complex cobweb.
At its centre was a space large enough to contain a human body.

Poised rather menacingly above it, two on either side, were four jointed rods which arched back and up then finally downwards, like snakes in the act of striking at their prey. Between them an inspection gantry, reached at either end by a flight of metal steps from floor level, ran across the top of the machine, passing directly above the cluster of filaments at its core.

Projecting from one end of the machine was a stone slab which could retract and extend in and out of it, performing the function of a conveyor belt, the mechanism like all the other technology of this place being operated using either electricity or some process very similar to it. And branching off from it at right angles were several control consoles, each of which appeared to be integral parts of it. There were two seats by one of them, and an apparatus that looked like a pair of headsets.

As Kiessling stood waiting by the machine he heard footsteps approach from the corridor and looked up to see his colleague, Ludwig Wolfmann, come towards him. “They’re here,” Wolfmann said.

“Good. Everything seems to be working alright, so we can begin.”

The paramilitaries came in, two of them carrying the Inuit stretched out between them. Kiessling signalled to them to place him on the conveyor belt. Clamps snapped into position around his wrists and ankles, holding him there.

“Do you suppose it makes any difference if the subject is alive or dead?” asked Wolfmann suddenly.

“I don’t know. So we don’t want to take the chance. We need him alive.” Kiessling moved to what they had identified as the main control console for the machine, located a few yards away from it near the wall, and placed his hand on a raised crystalline surface which served as a button, switching it on. The conveyor belt started to disappear into the machine.

They heard the Inuit stir and mutter. “He’s coming round,” said one of the paras.
Kiessling shook his head dismissively. “No matter.”

They saw Angachuk’s eyes open, widening in first astonishment and then fear as he looked round at his strange surroundings, his head twisting from side to side. Was this some abode of the gods? He saw the men watching him, and began to cry out in Danish and Greenlandic, struggling against the clamps holding him down. “What do you think you’re doing? What is this?”

They said nothing, their faces as cold and impassive as the rock out of which the chamber was hewn. Something about that total lack of expression chilled him unspeakably.

As the belt carried him along, into the machine, his terror mounted. Ignoring him, Kiessling touched another control. And it was then that Angachuk screamed.


TWELVE
Caroline Kent yawned and stretched luxuriously, feeling the stress leave her with a delicious, almost orgasmic she thought wickedly, tingling sensation. The Annual Assessment was now finished. That meant there were no more tasks which had to be completed by an imminent deadline. Through perseverance, self-discipline, patience, involving the sacrifice of one or two relaxing evenings by the TV with Jack, she had finally managed to break the backlog. She only just managed to restrain herself from flinging the document clean across the room in her euphoria.

There had been no more of those frightening attacks. Obviously she had managed to get the power under control, and therefore saw no need to contact the authorities. And since there should be no more stress, she hadn’t any reason to suppose the problem would return.

Feeling better than she had for many days, she went into the outer office to ask Sheila if she would like to join her for a meal after work, followed by a visit to a club, with maybe a few other colleagues invited too. She was in the mood for a celebration. It occurred to her, come to think of it, that she didn’t spend enough time socializing with fellow employees in the evenings or at lunchbreak; which wasn’t good if you wanted to maintain your power base at work. Well, tonight would be a new start. Because from now on, the road ahead looked much clearer and the sky above it bright and sunny, regardless of the autumn gloom now gathering outside as October wore on.

Sheila said “yes”, and that she would try to get a group together from both the departments, putting out a few tentative feelers during lunch. Failing that it would just be the two of them, woman to woman, discussing each other’s ongoing problems and offering mutual support. That would be good enough for her. It was a pity, though, that Chris couldn’t be there. They could, she supposed, have waited until he returned from holiday in a couple of days’ time. But she owed it to herself; a fun, relaxing, uninhibited night out, in the company of friends, with any residual worries that remained behind banished firmly to the back of her mind.

Caroline caught sight of Natasha in the corner chatting to one of the AAs – probably about Doctor Who or something like that, she thought affectionately. The girl caught her eye and termin-ated the conversation with a brief apology, suspecting she had roused Caroline’s ire by discussing non-work-related matters in her office. She made to leave but Caroline stopped her, making sure to sound friendly. “Oh, Natasha?”

Natasha looked politely expectant. Caroline gestured to the girl to go out with her into the corridor.
“Thanks for all your hard work over those leaflets,” she smiled. “It’s much appreciated.”
Natasha broke into a broad grin, pleased to feel that she’d done something right. “Oh, th-that’s all right,” she gasped.

“A few of us are having a get-together at Monty’s just round the corner, about seven. You don’t have to come but you’d be most welcome. Bring a friend if you like…” She realised she was implying Natasha didn’t have any friends at IPL, and looked uncomfortable. Fortunately, the girl didn’t pick up on it. “Alright,” she said. “I’ll have to see what I’ve got on tonight first, though. But that’s very kind of you.”

“See you there then, maybe,” Caroline said, and went back into the office, feeling herself surrounded by a warm glow of goodwill and wellbeing.


After the party Stephen Aron had thought very carefully about how he was going to go about his one-man investigation into Macy.
He’d never done anything quite like this before.

He was very much aware that Aunt Simone was eighty-six and not necessarily going to be around for much longer. She’d been quite ill a few months back, emphasizing the need for haste. But he would have to devote a lot of time to his thesis as well, with the risk of having to perform a difficult balancing act.
Why not combine the two projects?

As a subject for a thesis it did make sense; how to view the atrocity in the context of the Second World War and of anti-Semitism generally. What was it that had led to the massacre, and public and official attitudes towards it subsequently. He could entitle it “Macy: The Forgotten Holocaust,” or something like that. It would be a good complement to what he was already studying. He’d have to have a word with his tutor, of course. Would Dr McKeith consider it too specialized? Perhaps he’d let him do it anyway out of fear of causing offence if he didn’t, and if so should Stephen take advantage of that? How would he know that was the reason, anyway? He decided that if McKeith thought he shouldn’t then it was for McKeith to say so, and if he didn’t that was his own fault. If he did Stephen would accept his decision.

Whatever happened, he would make some effort to get the investigation reopened. If it produced no result then he’d make enquiries of his own. Any results he obtained would provide material for the thesis as much as anything else.

He wondered why exactly he was so keen to do it. Just for Simone’s sake, or for other reasons too? He remembered what she had said to him at the party, that it was with people like him that the future lay.

Stephen Aron liked being Jewish. He liked the strong family ties, the fact that Jews knew how to get together and have a good rousing song and dance, a good nosh, the way others had forgotten how to. The sense of solidarity and a common identity which thousands of years of persecution had only served to make seem all the more important.

He knew what being Jewish meant; but he wasn’t only thinking about the good side of it.

He had been told, of course, about the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the Romans, the Tsars and the Nazis, from an early age. But to his young mind it had all seemed like ancient history, sometimes literally. Then one day it had become suddenly and unpleasantly real, if in a way less serious than other things which had happened over the past few thousand years, when a rather silly argument with a schoolfriend turned nasty and he found himself subjected to uncomplimentary remarks about Jewish people; their appearance, their solidarity with one another, their supposed meanness.

Seriously upset, he had gone home and told his parents. Taking him aside, they had told him gently that now he knew what they had been trying to explain to him all these years, but also that it was something they simply had to bear with, and if they did so with patience and dignity it would prove their superiority over those who hated them. His mother had also assured him that no Nazis were going to attack him in this country.

And indeed, he hadn’t since then experienced any trouble personally, apart from one affair at boarding school when he had punched a boy who called him a “dirty Jew”. A fair-minded headmaster had cautioned him not to try to resolve such disagreements by fisticuffs in future - he didn’t really have much choice but to do so, for the sake of discipline - while reserving the worst punishment for Stephen’s tormentor. But such incidents served to remind him of the hatred and prejudice that lurked under the surface.

He was unsettled by it at times, and also angry. The Jews hadn’t gone around making life difficult for other people. Most of the time, they’d kept themselves to themselves. And when he considered their contribution to the cultures and economies of the countries where they had settled, which had been entirely beneficial, the bigotry filled him with a seething rage. It was merely resentment at how clever and successful the Jews were, and he suspected it stemmed from a sense of inadequacy at one’s own efforts. The Jews had often been more literate, more educated, maybe more intelligent (although that was a controversial, complex and sensitive subject) than the people around them, who should put their own houses in order before trying to knock them purely out of spiteful jealousy.

Nonetheless, he was aware there was a wider human race of which the Jews were but one part, and he felt it was better to be involved with it than not since apartness only bred more suspicion and hostility. While identifying with fellow Jews in Israel and admiring their achievements he didn’t condone the way they treated the Palestinians and hoped like most decent sensible and decent people for a two-state solution to the region’s problems. He knew that although many Gentiles had stood aside while millions were herded into the gas chambers there had also been those who had risked, and sometimes lost, their lives trying to prevent that happening.

But as for why he was taking up the subject of Macy in such a big way; all he knew was that it was for Simone’s sake as much as any other reason. He wanted to set her heart at rest so she could die reasonably happy. And if he couldn’t do that, he’d go on searching in her memory.

He started with some research on the Net, and also read up extensively. The one thing which became abundantly clear before he’d got very far was that there had been no strategic advantage to be gained by flattening the church. It wasn’t on the Allies’ main line of advance, nor was there any evidence of enemy troops within the building. The whole thing was a needless act of malice. Just because they were losing the war…..

Well, by now he had established exactly what had happened and who the principal suspects were. Finding out just who was the guilty party - when everyone else had failed to do so, and after sixty years – was another matter. One thing he needed if he was to succeed was publicity. The more people were aware of the matter in the first place, the more likely someone’s memory would be jogged. Perhaps a line or two to the TV companies was in order.


Every so often, Rolf Erdmann went down to the cellar of his house to lovingly run his eyes over the collection of rifles, sub-machine guns, grenades, mortars, RPGs, and explosives, with a certain frustration at not yet being able to use them. It was enough, literally, for a small army. Because that was what they were, the Aryan Army.

The weapons had been moved in gradually over a period of weeks, one at a time. That way it was less likely anyone would realise. The Jew Richards had probably known it was there, although there hadn’t been so much of it then, but fortunately they’d taken care of him before he could tell anyone.

The stuff was here because they would need to hit the major cities first, hit them hard and fast, if they were to take maximum advantage of the chaos and confusion caused when the Power was first used. But there was more of it stacked in various farmhouses on land owned by the company, including Gasthof Meinert near the concentration camp, and other remote rural locations ready for the follow-up. He knew that similar measures had been, or were being, put in hand by the cells in Paris, Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, London, and the various branches in America. When the time came each would occupy government offices, military bases and TV and radio stations in the cities, declare themselves in charge and then start gradually clearing up the mess and restoring order, gaining support from the public in the process. Many of the police and armed forces would probably join them – for God’s sake, a lot of their members were soldiers, or had been. He could certainly see it happening in Britain where racism, if you called it that, still existed in those professions despite having been driven underground by the march of political correctness. That was what Higson had told him, anyway. Generally police officers disliked the way PC had made their jobs more difficult. They lived in constant fear of being accused of some form of bigotry, and had to spend too much of their time on tedious form-filling so they could give an account of themselves for every single tiny thing that had happened to them each day, an account which would be subjected to minute scrutiny, in case they’d done something racist. It detracted from the business of effective policing and was putting people off joining the profession, which made the task of fighting crime that much more difficult.

The Army itself was suffering. The young recruits were pampered too much nowadays, Higson said. They had duvets on their beds, not blankets. It didn’t equip them for the business of real fighting and the officers knew that, only they had to bow down to PC and user-friendliness like everyone else. Mismanagement and poor planning by the politicians had left British forces handicapped in trying to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, hampered by ineffective equipment and by the sheer scale of the problem facing them. And when those sailors captured by Iran were allowed to turn the whole affair into a media circus by selling their stories to the press it had made a mockery of the entire armed forces. Who altogether were confused, demoralised and unhappy.
They wanted an end to it all.
And when everyone rises in our support, he thought, the baptism of fire will purge us of the filth that walks our streets, and the swastika will flutter in the chill north wind.

He brought himself back down to earth for the moment. Without the Power, of course, the uprising didn’t stand the remotest chance of success. The armies and police forces of the different countries would soon crush them, even if casualties were sustained in the process. There would still be some point in it because they’d cause fear and alarm throughout the world, by making clear the forces that lay beneath the surface and were prepared to resort to direct action to get their way. But to offset that their leading members, himself included, would probably be arrested, their network smashed and their hardware confiscated.

One thing was certain, they’d have to use it sometime or it’d all be a pointless waste. And the longer the equipment sat here in its various hiding places, the greater the more likely it’d be found.

Yes, it all depended on this miraculous Power that Heinrich and Wachter claimed existed under a mountain in Greenland. It was clear they still didn’t have a clue how exactly it was going to be used to benefit the organization. In Erdmann’s view Heinrich, despite his legendary coolness and the remarkable state of preservation he was in, was nonetheless an old man in a hurry. He hadn’t thought it all out properly.

It was the big question; if it turned out in the short run that they couldn’t depend on it, and might have to wait years, maybe decades, before they could did they go ahead with the coup regardless of the consequences? Probably the national cells would grow impatient and each make their own decision. That could be disastrous if not enough of them acted to maximize the overall effect of the uprising.

You’d better have got this right, Heinrich, Erdmann muttered to himself beneath his breath. I’ve a feeling it’s going to be all or nothing. The thousand-year Reich or Gotterdammerung.
Ragnarok.

He knew what the trigger would be; fortunately, it was something David Richards hadn’t quite managed to find out before he died.

He went upstairs to the kitchen, where he made himself a cup of coffee and over it sat thinking and occasionally doodling on the notepad beside him, drawing a series of square objects and one big round one with a number of chimney-like structures in the background.
Drawing a nuclear power station.


The resolution of the problem that had been dominating her thoughts so entirely left Caroline’s mind a pleasantly blank slate, until other considerations, which had been suppressed while she worried about the backlog and the attacks, suddenly rushed back into her consciousness. She was sitting at home one evening after work thinking about what she ultimately wanted to do with her life. At some point she was sure to get bored with her current job within the company and want to move on. Vertically, she hoped, rather than horizontally. Ideally she wanted to be in Hennig’s shoes; but would she really be able to stand the extra pressure, the extra responsibility, given that her current job could be strenuous enough? She would of course eventually get to the stage where it wouldn’t matter what she did as long as she attended the occasional board meeting, but that kind of cop-out wasn’t for her.

Best to just take things as they came. The future often turned out to be something totally unexpected, anyway.

She decided to turn on the TV and catch the rest of the news, wondering with a morbid idleness what kind of horrors were going on in the world today.

The presenter was just finishing describing the latest terrorist atrocity in Baghdad, judging from the graphics of soldiers and burning cars on the screen beside her. Cut to her colleague. “A London student is calling for the investigation into the murder of Jewish refugees at Macy-sur-Auvergne in France during the Second World War to be reopened. The incident took place shortly after D-Day…” A black-and-white film of German and Allied tanks opening fire on one another, and buildings collapsing in heaps of rubble. ”German forces were fighting a fierce rearguard action in the streets of the small market town in Normandy, against the advance of British and American forces, when according to an eyewitness account a Panzer regiment suddenly turned their guns on a church where the refugees were hiding. Only three people survived the massacre that followed, in which the priest and his family were also killed.

“Earlier, a German officer had entered the church with some of his men, but taken no action against the fugitives. Although it’s been suggested the Germans thought there might be Allied soldiers hidden in the church, ready to fire or throw grenades at the tanks, interviews with surviving British and American officers involved in the battle for Macy suggest this is unlikely.” Talking head of military historian giving his opinion.

“What is certain,” the presenter went on, “is that one of the Panzer groups known to be involved in the battle knew there were refugees in the building. Now Stephen Aron, the great-nephew of a survivor of the massacre, is hoping someone will come forward with new information. Cassie McMillan reports.”

Cut to an intelligent-looking young man who couldn’t be much more than eighteen if he was that; he was sitting at a desk poring over an assortment of papers, the idea being that he should look keen and studious. “It all grew out of a thesis for a University course. For Stephen, however, the matter is more than just academic.”

“This has been investigated before, hasn’t it?” McMillan’s voice, off-screen, asked Stephen Aron who was now in close-up. “There wasn’t enough evidence for a prosecution.”

“Yes, but it’s possible someone who didn’t hear or see the original appeals for information may come forward,” said the young man.

Back to the voice-over, while Stephen was shown discussing something, probably nothing to do with the atrocity, with other members of his synagogue. “It may be the last chance to bring the men responsible for the crime to justice. They’d now be very old, in their eighties or nineties. Some would say the whole thing happened so long ago there’s little point. But Stephen’s Great-Aunt Simone, now 86, disagrees. And Stephen is determined to campaign for justice on her behalf.”

“I think there’s still anti-Semitism around, and that means we can’t forget it,” Stephen said.

There was a brief interview with Simone during which she explained why she felt the matter was still important. Then back to Stephen. “So what do you say to those who think this is simply stirring up things which are much better forgotten?”

“I’d ask them how they’d feel if it was their family who’d been murdered,” he replied simply.

“So Stephen continues to look for clues to the identity of the officer who ordered the attack which killed Simone’s husband and two children.” Another black-and-white, this time a still photo of a man in Second World War German Army uniform, flashed up onto the screen. “One possibility is this man… ”

Caroline’s grip on her cup of tea went limp. It tilted and some of the contents splashed onto the carpet. She was barely aware they had done so.

“Oh God, no,” she whispered. “Oh no. Please. Not again. Please…..”

She had felt uneasy the moment World War Two atrocities had been mentioned, and as soon as it was clear the item was about Macy her stomach churned. Now her fears were confirmed and she felt as if the bottom had dropped right out of her world. The face staring out at her from the TV was the face of her grandfather, Reynart Engelmann.


THIRTEEN
“He’s known to have commanded the 27th Panzer Division, which was in the area at the time. However when interviewed after the war he denied any involvement in the killings. So do the two surviving German tank commanders who took part in the fighting around Macy.” Photographs were shown of the commanders as they would have looked in 1944. By now, Caroline guessed, they must be very old.

“Although the situation at the time was very confused, of the three tank divisions in the area Engelmann’s is thought to have been the closest. However when American forces captured the town and rescued the survivors of the massacre, the wrecked tanks found at the scene were from another regiment. But information from eyewitnesses and from captured German records makes it clear the 27th Panzers were in a position to carry out the atrocity.”

“We’d like to eliminate him from our enquiries,” said Stephen Aron. “The closer we can get to the truth the better.”

“Engelmann, who emigrated to Britain after the war, is now dead,” Cassie McMillan informed her public. Evidently no-one had made any effort to find out if Engelmann had any surviving family in Britain, so they could be contacted in advance of the item going out in deference to their feelings. “But that doesn’t mean this particular line of enquiry is now closed.

“Stephen is off to France shortly to make enquiries there. Whether, after so many years, his search is likely to prove successful is anyone’s guess; that hasn’t dampened his determination to find out once and for all, sixty years on, who was responsible for one of the forgotten tragedies of the Second World War.”

Back to the studio. “That’s all for tonight,” smiled the newsreader. “Join us again tomorrow at six, goodnight.”

Caroline closed her eyes and for a minute or so breathed deeply in and out. Then she reached for the phone.

It was her father who answered. “Oh, hi, love.” He sounded pretty grim.
“Dad, have you seen the news?” It sounded as if he had.
“Yes,” he sighed.

“What are we going to do? They’re going to rake it up all over again. I thought they’d forgotten….I thought they’d given up….”
“Nobody found anything last time.”
“That doesn’t mean they might not now.”

“I don’t see there’s very much we can do. I’ve said it before, I doubt very much if it was our Grandad. I just don’t think he was the type, whatever his faults. But if this kid wants to go around digging up the past like that I’m afraid we can’t stop him.”

Caroline knew he was right. Again her heart sank like a lead weight.

“Look, love, don’t worry about it. We’ll just have to ride the storm. Face it together. We could even offer to help him.”

Caroline didn’t fancy the idea of aiding in the unmasking of her own grandfather as a war criminal. Would Stephen Aron accept their assistance anyway?

“We’ll get together and have a talk about it; the whole family. In the meantime, try not to think about it. You’ve usually got enough on your plate with that job of yours. Anyway, I can’t see how it would reflect on us if he did do it.”

“But it does,” she replied. “It shouldn’t, but it does.”

“We’ll sort it all out,” he promised. The conversation moved on to the usual niceties. But Caroline wasn’t in the mood for them.

Afterwards she curled up on the sofa, hugging herself protectively, and tried to think the problem over. If Engelmann had done what he was supposed to have done, didn’t he deserve to be exposed, dead or alive? Perhaps the truth should come out.

To be honest, it wasn’t the first time it had happened, though nothing had come of the incident. They’d kept quiet, trusting to the people who knew of their connection with Engelmann not to gossip.

This time, she had an idea things might be different. Over time, the probability was that new evidence would become available. Because it often did, if you only kept on looking for it.

It wasn’t possible, surely. Reynart Engelmann had been a loving man, totally dedicated to his family, kind to animals and children. But then so had Dr Goebbels.

Eventually she uncurled herself and did what the English always do in times of stress; made herself a cup of tea and sat down in front of the TV again, letting the warm liquid gradually soothe her ruffled nerves.

She picked up the newspaper and flicked casually through it, tossing it aside after a few pages. The item at the bottom of the second page of the advertisements section, inviting any surviving British descendants of Oberst Reynart Engelmann, former soldier in the 2nd Regiment of the 27th Panzer Division, and known to have settled in the United Kingdom after the war, or anyone who had worked in any capacity at the Boarstall Hill prisoner-of-war camp near Dover, to ring a certain Munich telephone number remained unnoticed.

*

It was a shame, really, that gatherings like this didn’t happen very often, and that when they did happen it tended to be for the wrong reasons.

The entire extended Kent family were grouped round the table in the dining room of Edward and Margaret’s house on the outskirts of Dorking. Actually they weren’t quite a complete set; Caroline’s two cousins on her father’s side were absent, evidently feeling the business was nothing to do with them and they could easily brush off any hassle that did ensue. Lucky you, she thought.

Opposite Caroline and her parents sat Edward’s two sisters, Marlene and Sophie, with their husbands. Both women were more or less grey now, but here and there a few hints of the original gold showed through. Sophie was the spitting image of her mother, Reynart’s wife, the Red Cross worker who had fallen in love with him and nursed him back to health, one might say to life, after the shocking news of his family’s death in an Allied bombing raid, to afterward marry him and help found a new dynasty in a new land. Marlene, like Edward, had the face of the man whose photograph sat on the sideboard. All three of Reynart Engelmann’s children had aged in much the same way. They made a rather striking group, anno domini having on the whole been kind to them; adding if anything a touch of distinction to their appearance.

The introductory small talk had exhausted itself, and they now sat staring at one another vacantly, unsure where to begin.

As always it was Caroline who took the lead. “Well,” she sighed, “what are we going to do, then?”

“Let’s face it, if he did do what he’s supposed to have done, it wasn’t right. They’ve every right to know. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Caroline knew what Marlene said was true. Not that it made her feel any better.

“I still can’t believe he’d do a thing like that,” said Sophie. She looked hard at her sister. “Can you?” Evidently she felt Marlene ought to be displaying more in the way of family loyalty. Marlene sighed. “Let’s face it, there are things we don’t know about our nearest and dearest which would knock us silly if we did. I’m afraid we can’t rule anything out.”

“Yes, I’m sure. But I don’t think he was a secret child molester or anything like that, somehow.” Sophie’s tone was acid.

“Nor do I darling, nor do I. But a war criminal…I don’t know…”
“But he never talked about it. He never said anything.”
“He wouldn’t do, would he?” Marlene snapped. “Would you?”
“I don’t like what you’re implying.”

Caroline decided it was time to interrupt what looked like developing into quite a promising family quarrel. “Just a sec, you two,” she said authoritatively, then changed the tone of her voice. “So Marlene, you think…you think there might actually be some truth in these allegations?”

“Remember that’s our father you’re talking about,” Edward said darkly. And Marlene’s husband Ron stiffened, sensing the atmosphere of hostility towards his wife and feeling the need to defend her. Marlene swallowed. “We…we have to face it. It’s happened before. People have lived lies…kept their past from their families. Let’s face it, how much did we ever really know about him?”

Up until then the non-Kents by birth had preferred to keep out of it. But now Sophie’s husband, Caroline’s Uncle Derek, spoke up, possibly emboldened by the effects of drink. “That he was a loving father and grandfather and a thoroughly decent bloke. That’d be good enough for me.”

“Aren’t you just trying to appease those people who are determined to have their pound of flesh over things like this?” Edward said to Marlene.

Caroline raised a hand in an appeal for calm. “Look, folks. If we’re going to face this together, decide what we’re going to do about it, we need to be united. Not fall out with each other like this. It’s going to be damaging enough even if the allegations aren’t true, supposing nobody ever manages to prove it one way or the other. Which is one possible outcome.”

“You’re daughter’s talking sense again, Edward,” Derek said. “Like she always does. Let’s just try and cool it a bit, shall we?”

“We ought to make some sort of statement,” said Margaret Kent, Caroline’s mother, making a contribution for the first time.

“That’d just be drawing attention to ourselves,” said Derek. Ron, a man of few words, nodded in a slow ponderous fashion.

“I can’t see why it matters so much to this kid, anyway,” grunted Edward. “Everyone connected with the business, on the German side, is either dead or very old. No point in punishing them.”

“They think there’s every point in it,” said Sophie. “Vindictive lot at times, they are.”
“Who are?” asked Caroline.
“The Jews.”

Caroline looked at her sharply. Sophie caught her niece’s gaze and qualified the statement. “I suppose when you consider what they’ve been through; perhaps not vindictive, but...vengeful. Some of them, anyway. They don’t forget a favour but they don’t forget a wrong either. And they never get off the scent where these things are concerned.”
Caroline relaxed, acknowledging there was a certain amount of truth in what Sophie said.

“It matters to them,” said Derek, “because it still happens.” Synagogues still got bombed or torched, cemeteries desecrated, people murdered. Anti-Semitism was still a problem, and in fact in recent months there had been a disturbing new spate of attacks, though so far nobody had been killed, in Europe anyway, with the possible exception of David Richards in Germany. People didn’t like the influence they thought the Jewish community had, the insistence of many Jews that the Holocaust was a worse thing than the countless other examples of murder and cruelty that disfigured human history. And then of course there was the behaviour of a certain small Middle Eastern country.

“But he’s dead, for Christ’s sake,” Edward grumbled. “You can’t try a dead man. What’s the point in stirring things up now? Don’t they have any feeling for us?” Something had happened to put him in a bad mood, which wasn’t unusual, and he was in a less conciliatory frame of mind than the night before. “It’s like that business with Princess what’s-her-name.” He had in mind the storm which broke when the father of the German-born Princess Michael of Kent was revealed by a witch-hunting researcher to have served in the SS, something which until then had been kept strictly quiet. The effect on the Princess herself had not been pleasant and many people thought the matter ought to have been left to rest.

“I think they just want to know the truth,” said Caroline. “People often feel better that way, when something nasty’s happened in their lives and it has a lasting effect. We have to see it from their point of view.

“It’s also possible that they don’t know we exist. They may have heard of me because of my…..exploits.” The ones she could tell people about, anyway. “But they won’t necessarily connect me, or any of us for that matter, with Grandad. Especially if, as Derek says, we don’t attract attention to ourselves.”

They still seemed to be going round in circles. “Let’s look at what we know. Someone says he actually went into the church and saw what was going on there, not long before it was flattened.” It was why Marlene had concluded Reynart was guilty. “Afterwards, things were a bit confused. No-one can be sure it was the same unit.”
“So it’s not conclusive,” Ron said.
“And that’s the trouble,” Caroline mused.

“It may not have been your grandfather,” Ron continued, finding a voice for once. “There could have been someone else involved, someone who’s still alive somewhere. To be fair to the lad, I think they ought to be allowed to find out the truth. I mean, we can’t stop him, can we?”
“Precisely,” Caroline muttered.
And, of course, she knew she probably wouldn’t be quite so objective if it was her family who had been slaughtered.

Sophie brightened a little. “Couldn’t we persuade them to keep Father out of it....if, yes, there was someone else involved, besides himself and we found out who it was...if they could be satisfied with that...”

“I don’t think that’d work,” Caroline warned. “If anything they’d probably take offence. And it wouldn’t be seen as ethical.” Because it wasn’t. “Besides I think we’re grasping at straws there. We’ve no reason to suppose there was anyone else. Apart from the people who were simply obeying orders, of course.”

They weren’t any nearer reaching a decision. The smoke from Marlene’s cigarette curled ceilingwards in a seemingly endless spiral; the big antique clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the minutes without remorse.

Edward spoke with a sudden snort of impatience. “I say we just do nothing. No-one would connect us to him, anyway, like you said Caroline.”

“Some people know,” Sophie objected. “And there’s such a thing as gossip. It’d get around.”
They fell silent again.

“I want to know,” said Caroline suddenly. “I want to know if he was a war criminal or not.”

“You mean look into it yourself? You’ll only be drawing attention to the connection that way,” Edward said. “Which is just what you said we shouldn’t – “

“I want to know,” she repeated stubbornly. Family pride was at stake.
“You could be doing more harm than good, sweetheart.”

“That depends on what she finds,” Derek pointed out. “He may have been perfectly innocent. And she doesn’t have to let anyone know she’s doing it at all.”

“I won’t,” Caroline said. “Until – “ She stopped herself. If the evidence proved her grandfather’s guilt, would she really be prepared to reveal it to the public? “Well I’m going to do it, anyway. We’ll see what I can find and take it from there.”

Marlene lent her support. “I don’t want our past to be shrouded in lies, in mystery. We’ve got to know what happened, for the sake of our own piece of mind.”

After a moment Edward nodded in agreement. “It’s better than standing back and let this Aron bloke do it for us. Of course he may find nothing at all - as might we - but we can’t bank on that.”

Caroline sat sunk in morbid reflection. The fact that there’d been a name change meant nothing. It was still her family. She knew very little about her German forebears, but certainly didn’t like to think they’d been racists and murderers. She didn’t see why you should be embarrassed by your ancestors. You couldn’t be, because you needed a past, a pedigree; it was vital for your sense of identity. But if they were Nazi butchers……
It must be embarrassing, and that seemed a massive understatement, for the children and grandchildren of the Nazi leaders. Some of them had changed their names; how far it had gone towards making them feel better she didn’t know. It could easily be established, as it had been by those carrying out the most recent of the previous investigations, that Reynart Engelmann had later became Richard Kent. That wouldn’t mean people could necessarily connect them, out of all the people in the country with their surname, with the events at Macy. But unless they went to elaborate lengths to conceal their past, or lied which seemed distasteful, people would sooner or later find out. To her mind it was sure to be extremely distressing, whatever happened.

Well, she wasn’t going to sit around and wait to be distressed. She would have to take a hand. If there were things to be discovered which might upset her she’d much rather do it herself than wait until someone else did. As for employing a paid researcher or a private detective she didn’t want to do that in case they mucked it up.

Edward raised his voice. “So are we all agreed then? We’re going to leave it all to Caroline.”

The group around the table nodded. “Good on you, lass,” said Ron. “Go for it. I hope you get there before he does.”

Determinedly she stood up. “The best thing is if I start right away.”
“Can you get the time off?” Edward asked.

“They owe me it, after all the hard work I’ve put in over the last few weeks.”
“Where are you going to start?”

She realised she had no idea. “I’m not sure, really. Germany, maybe….France sometime….” She paused and looked round at them all. “One thing. Whatever happens, we can’t let ourselves be blamed for something that happened over sixty years ago. Something we wouldn’t have remotely considered doing. If anyone asks us about it we’ve got to have the courage of our convictions and say it shouldn’t be allowed to reflect on us in any way. We’re sorry about the massacre, of course. But we have to get on with our lives the same as anyone else.”
And that, she hoped, would be sufficient.

*

It occurred to Caroline that her investigations were just as pointless as Stephen Aron’s, when all things were considered. She had managed to get hold of a report of the previous investigation into Macy. It had been fairly thorough and she didn’t see herself dredging up anything that no-one else hadn’t already. But just in case…..

The London Holocaust Bureau, located in Godman Street near St Paul’s Cathedral, served both as a source of information on that dark chapter in Mankind’s history and as the headquarters for the Nazi-hunting organization set up by its founder, Auschwitz survivor Shmuel Tenenbaum. Most of its work was educational these days, the surviving unpunished Nazi war criminals now being very few in number. But in its time it had been responsible for bringing a good many of Hitler’s butchers to justice, and by so doing making sure the world did not forget.

Shmuel Tenenbaum himself happened to be in that day, as Caroline had hoped. The two of them had first met when she had called on him asking for advice on how to go about finding the terrorists who had murdered her brother, and had devised an elaborate system of safeguards to make sure they were never brought to justice. He’d been happy to give it, even though it had not really been part of his brief, and it had paid off. They had kept in touch ever since. The two were good friends even though they disagreed, sometimes vehemently – the old man still had plenty of fire left in him – over many issues; whether Israel was not as bad as the Nazis at times in her behaviour, the morality of the kidnapping of Eichmann in violation of international law, and the relativity of the Holocaust when compared with other atrocities. The disagreements were always amicable.

The Secretary met her and showed her upstairs to Tenenbaum’s office. The old Jew rose slowly from his chair to greet his visitor, breaking into a broad delighted grin. She suspected that having lost so many of his family to the Nazis, he compensated by regarding her as a sort of daughter.

He was now over ninety, but had aged grandly. There were lines and wrinkles of course, but the flesh had not begun to sag and the eyes were still clear and bright, for the most part perceiving the world without the aid of glasses. Sparse white hair fringed a massive dome of a skull whose skin was smooth and brown and gleaming. Above his moustache thrust a hooked nose which seemed typically Semitic, although she knew it was really no more common among Jews than, say, blond hair among English people. We don’t, she supposed, tend to find such a feature attractive; but it in no way marred Tenenbaum’s appearance. If you saw him coming towards you in the street, and you didn’t know him, something about him would impress you, grabbing your attention and holding it. You would see more than just a frail little old man. He was that, of course. There was a justification for the Bureau’s continued existence but not a lot he himself could do now, at his age. But all the same, every day he came into work here, stiffly mounted the stairs to the office and sat down at his desk to read and answer correspondence, type out a few letters, and go through the copies kept there of all the files to see if there were any outstanding matters, perhaps forgotten about over time, where his intervention might produce results.

The two embraced one another affectionately, Caroline planting a kiss on his ninety-three year old cheek. “My dear, it’s so nice to see you again,” he beamed. “Do sit down.”

A helper fetched tea for them while they took their seats, Caroline gazing briefly round the little room which for sixty years had been, in many ways, the centre of the entire operation being conducted from here. It was simply furnished, without undue ornamenation. One wall was taken up by a bookcase of polished mahogany, its shelves filled with works on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in general. The sounds of cars and buses drifted up to them from the busy, bustling London street. The office was dusty, but it was not the dust of neglect but rather that of age; the dust of old crimes.

She’d had no need to tell them the purpose of her visit, because she knew she was welcome to turn up any time she liked, but Tenenbaum had obviously guessed it anyway. “I’m afraid Stephen Aron has already been here,” he chuckled.
“I expect he has,” she muttered.
“It would be his logical first port of call.”
“May I ask what you told him?”

“I told him to be careful. That he must never accuse without proof. That has always been my watchword, all through the years I’ve been running this. And he must do his best to be calm and reasonable about the whole business.” A look of foreboding crossed the old man’s face for a moment. “I’ll be honest with you, some of these young Jews nowadays….”

“You told him to leave the family alone, didn’t you? Not to come to us with any questions. You’ll appreciate this is causing us enough grief as it is.”

“Huh!” exclaimed Tenenbaum, eyeing her reprovingly. “What do you take me for? That was another of my watchwords. Our quarrel was with the war criminals themselves, not with those who happened to be their families. It’s not my business purely to be vindictive.” He shrugged. “Of course, they might shelter their relatives from justice, but I suppose….”

“Your father is your father whatever he’s done,” Caroline observed. “Maybe it’s natural.”

“Of course. It just doesn’t get in the way of my doing my job. Although if my father were a mass-murdering Nazi I should be pretty ashamed of him, to say the least.”
Caroline winced.

“I’m sorry,” said Tenenbaum, reaching out to pat her on the hand.
“It’s alright,” she whispered.
“And you still don’t want my people to look into it for you?”

He knew, had known long before, just who she was, of her grandparent’s possible involvement in Macy. But she had sensed she could confide in him, knowing his reputation for honour and also compassion. She’d already established that Tenenbaum’s organization had nothing on the matter themselves, having been more concerned at the time with hunting down those responsible for atrocities that had to be considered more serious, on terms of scale anyway. Perhaps some additional material had come along in the meantime.

“No, thankyou,” she said. “This is something I have to do myself.”

“Then I don’t understand why you have come to me for help on this matter. Or is this just a social call? You’d be welcome, of course…..”
“I just want to know if you’ll back me up if it does turn out that he was…”

“But of course!” He shrugged, spreading his arms expansively. “We established that long ago.”
“If you did find out he did it, you’d have to make it known though, wouldn’t you?”

“We understand each other well enough for you to know that I would. After all, that was my brief. It was what I set out to do all those years ago….” For a few moments he was silent, lost in sad memories, his eyes going to the framed black-and-white photograph on the desk.

Something in his manner suggested he wasn’t quite so sure as he seemed. You’re wondering, aren’t you, Caroline thought, whether there’s still any point in prosecuting doddery old men who’ll soon be senile, most of their lives already past; men the sight of whom, as they’re led off to trial, may even excite pity, at worst ridicule, and make us look stupid….…or worse.

Tenenbaum snapped out of his reflections and back into the present. “So I don’t think there’d be anything to gain from the point of view of your own peace of mind. Always depending on the results of any investigation, of course.”
She felt the need to clarify her thoughts. “I’m just a bit....I don’t know, this time it feels…as if I’ve got to stand up and play a part in things, or I’m going to find myself in trouble.”

“I’m sure nothing that has happened reflects on you,” he said consolingly.
She wasn’t quite listening. “They could at least have considered the possibility he might have relatives here who’d be upset by it all being brought up again.”
“Ah, but what if they had contacted you? Would you not have felt offended? Being asked to help investigate your own relative...I gather someone did, once.”
“Yes, they did,” Caroline said. “I wasn’t very old at the time. But my parents remember it quite clearly.”

“Once again I must apologise for that. It was foolish of them, and done without my approval. It was fortunate your father took it so well.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Caroline said. “They weren’t really part of your set-up, were they?”
“No, they were a collection of amateurs who had decided to set up their own Nazi-hunting organization, without first taking advice from anyone else. Normally people tend to come to me for guidance on these things.”

“They certainly should,” she said. She allowed herself a slight smile. His seminal importance, not undeserved, in the Nazi-hunting cause mattered to him and making reference to it was a good way to win him over.
“I could arrange a meeting with the family, if you like,” he said kindly. “Would that help?”
“No, it’s alright.” Caroline felt she’d done enough soul-searching on the subject and that a meeting with Stephen Aron’s family wouldn’t help. The angst she was experiencing over the matter was becoming tiresome.

“My impression of Stephen Aron was that he was basically a good lad. Perhaps a little…impetuous. I’m sure he doesn’t harbour any ill will towards you or your family. And he does have a point; people may be able to forgive but they should not forget.

“I suppose we should really be grateful. There have been others who were much more….” Vindictive was the word Sophie had used, Caroline remembered. “They are crazed by vengeance. But I expect even they realise there is little point in visiting it upon the dead.”

“They wouldn’t go for me, would they?” Caroline asked uneasily, suddenly worried. She’d read a novel once where…..”I mean, an eye for an eye and all that.”

She thought Tenenbaum looked uncertain for a moment. “To have the satisfaction of seeing Engelmann’s line wiped out too, even though he could not know it? Well, in the early days it’s true I had to restrain some of my associates from taking…extreme measures. The effect it can have on a person, to have gone through an experience like the Shoah....but to my knowledge such incidents have never actually occurred in real life.” Would he admit it if they had, Caroline found herself wondering, given the damage there might be to his cause. “And after so many years…no, I think I can probably set your mind to rest on that count.”
They decided to dismiss the matter.

“Aside from all that, how are you, liebchen?” Tenenbaum smiled.
“Oh, OK. And you?”

“I’m having a little trouble with my back, and if I’m reading something for a long time I may need the glasses…it’s to be expected of course, considering.”

“And how is your w….oh, I’m sorry.” She had forgotten that Tenenbaum’s wife had died not so long ago, never quite having recovered from the treatment she had received at the camp all those years ago.

He just smiled, but Caroline knew he was more affected by the death of someone he had lived with and loved for nearly seventy years than he was willing to let on.

“Anyway, I’d like to see what you have on the case. I guess all there is to know about it would be here, if anywhere. I know most of it already but a recap wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“Certainly,” said Tenenbaum, and rose creakily to his feet. “There’s not much. But what we do have is at your disposal.” She started to follow him out. At the door he paused and turned to her. “You realise, if you are investigating the matter yourself it may only create suspicion, because you would stand to gain by a favourable result?”
“I have to do something,” she said. “I’m not just going to sit back and watch while my family’s reputation is torn apart.”

He moved on, and they went downstairs to the Reading Room where Tenenbaum asked the woman behind the desk for the file. It was available on computer – a row of them stood on a table - but although he knew how to use one she guessed the old man still thought in terms of manual filing systems. The helper nodded, went to a filing cabinet and pulled out one of the drawers. She sorted through the contents, found what she was looking for and offered it to them. Caroline smiled her thanks, took the folder and sat down at one of the tables.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Tenenbaum said, and left. She watched him shuffle out with a look of concern. There had been an unmistakeable deterioration since she had last set eyes on him. He wasn’t as spry in his movements as he had been then. At least his mind remained as sharp as ever. But then he’d had a very important job to do these past sixty years, and that had helped.

CENTRAL AMERICA
It was dank, dark and damp inside the temple, though refreshingly cool after the oppressive humidity of the rain forest. Rivulets of water glistened in the light of the torches as they trickled down the walls. With unnerving suddenness a bat – they supposed it must have been a bat – flew at them from out of the darkness, its sleep disturbed. They jumped back in alarm and it fluttered away down the corridor.

“In here, Senor,” said the boy, pausing at the opening in the left-hand wall. He went inside, and Heinrich, Wachter and the rest of the party followed him.

He halted, and shone his torch on the wall in front of them, running the circle of lig