Secrets of the Last Nazi Read online

‘Who was the person Stolz authorised you to give these papers to?’

  The lawyer paused before he answered, wondering again whether to hold back the secret. But he knew the same logic applied: tell now or be forced to tell later. He looked through his thick glasses at the American. He would at least gain pleasure from answering the foreigner correctly, without satisfying him at all. ‘The papers say “These are for a foreign man about to die, at the start of a trial by air, fire, earth and water”.’

  Glenn frowned. ‘And who’s that?’

  The lawyer shrugged, ‘I do not know,’ he said. Then his face contorted into an artificial smile, gloating openly. ‘Goodbye.’

  Twenty

  Berlin

  12.20 p.m. CET (11.20 a.m. GMT)

  * * *

  Driving back to Stolz’s old apartment in Am Krusenick Street, the team celebrated.

  Jean-François seemed happiest. ‘That lawyer – what a, a …’ he searched for the words in English, ‘… a stuff-ball!’

  Zenyalena and Heike-Ann laughed.

  It took them a quarter of an hour to reach Stolz’s flat. As the car pulled up in the drive, the four people inside climbed out casually. Zenyalena and Jean-François were still smiling as they approached the building. They had no thoughts about what might lie inside.

  Glenn unlocked the outer door, went through the lobby, then entered Stolz’s ground-floor apartment.

  A body lay on the floor. It was Myles, frozen in place.

  Glenn bent down to him, shaking Myles’ shoulders in panic. ‘Myles? Myles, you alive?’

  Myles didn’t move. The American shook him even harder. He searched Myles’ body for signs of life. Nothing.

  The others arrived. Jean-François called out, unsure how to react. ‘Myles?’

  Zenyalena looked around, alert to danger.

  Then, very slowly, muscles on Myles’ face began to twitch. He opened his eyes and tried to focus, and started spluttering on the floor, only half conscious.

  Glenn shouted at him. ‘Myles, what happened?’

  Myles was too dazed to reply. Glenn realised, and pulled him up into a sitting position.

  Myles finally started to remember where he was. He called out, gasping. ‘Air …’ He was desperate for breath.

  Heike-Ann pushed the door to the apartment wide open. A fresh breeze blew through the building – a through draft. A window was open somewhere in the apartment.

  Glenn enlisted Jean-François’ help, and together the two men hauled Myles outside. There, Glenn encouraged the Oxford lecturer to take some deep breaths.

  Myles gradually felt his head begin to clear. ‘… Has he gone?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Glenn.

  Myles didn’t know who, but he could still feel the boot marks on his neck.

  Then Myles remembered the gas. He remembered the lift motor running far longer than it should. He remembered the vent, and the filter. He remembered the sickness. Carbon monoxide sickness.

  The four others stood around him, all confused.

  ‘Are you OK, Myles?’ Heike-Ann sounded genuinely concerned.

  Slowly Myles began to explain. ‘I think they tried to gas me. Carbon monoxide poisoning - from the lift motor …’

  Zenyalena and Jean-François scoffed. Even Heike-Ann was sceptical. Only Glenn went back to inspect the lift machinery in the lobby.

  Heike-Ann checked Myles’ pulse. She took a small bottle of water from her bag and offered it to him.

  Myles brought the bottle to his lips, spilling some as he drank. ‘Thank you …’ Sitting outside the apartment while he recovered, Myles realised the people around him still didn’t understand what had happened to him. He tried to explain it all. ‘… Just after you left, someone turned on the motor to the lift in the building. But it didn’t just work the lift. It pumped carbon-monoxide gas into the apartment.’ He could tell they all seemed shocked.

  Zenyalena was still trying to grasp the order of events. ‘Is that why you opened the window? To clear the air in the apartment? Why didn’t you just open the door, or walk outside?’ There was a barb in the Russian woman’s voice. It was hostile questioning.

  Myles tried to be as honest as he could. ‘I didn’t open the window. It must have been opened by someone else.’

  ‘But why didn’t you just leave the building?’

  ‘I couldn’t – the poisoning stopped my muscles. And someone put a boot on my neck.’ Myles rubbed his collar as he spoke.

  Finally Jean-François gripped the seriousness of the danger. ‘You think you could have died?’

  Myles nodded.

  Jean-François put his hand on Myles’ shoulder. ‘Then, Mr Munro, we need to take you to a hospital.’

  ‘Thank you, but I’m alright.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Myles nodded again, not wanting to leave, and trying to work out who had almost killed him. ‘Which of you was the last to leave?’ he asked. ‘When you went to the lawyer, which of you was the last one to get into the car?’

  Jean-François, Zenyalena and Heike-Ann looked blankly at each other.

  Then an American voice spoke from behind. ‘Me. I was the last to leave,’ admitted Glenn. ‘And I’ve just checked out the pipework in the building: something’s been done to it …’

  Glenn led the whole team back to the entrance lobby. Myles walked with Heike-Ann’s arm supporting him, propping up both his ruptured knee and his recovering lungs.

  The American took them to the lift machinery, housed behind a wire-framed door. It was old technology – probably Communist-era, from before the Berlin Wall came down. Most of the metal had darkened from age and dirty grease. It all made the green plastic pipe, which bent round from the exhaust of the motor, instantly out of place.

  Glenn’s finger pointed to where the pipe led. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Someone recently attached the pipe, so it pumps the fumes straight into Stolz’s old apartment.’ He gripped the pipe hard and pulled at it. It came away in his hands.

  ‘Leave that,’ called Heike-Ann.

  Glenn obeyed, confused.

  ‘Fingerprints,’ explained Heike-Ann. ‘We must get this checked out.’

  Zenyalena frowned. ‘It’ll have Glenn’s fingerprints on it now … If it didn’t have them already …’

  Glenn’s face fumed with anger. The accusation was obvious. ‘If you’re saying I would do something like try to kill …’

  Myles tried to calm them both. ‘Nobody thinks Glenn tried to gas me. Zenyalena’s just trying to understand what happened.’

  ‘We need the police for that,’ volunteered Heike-Ann.

  Silence.

  Heike-Ann was surprised the team didn’t welcome her suggestion. She made her point again. ‘It was attempted murder, right? So we should contact the police.’

  Zenyalena spoke firmly. ‘We can contact the police. But their work must be limited to this incident. They are not to investigate Stolz. The attempted murder of Myles and the Stolz investigation are separate. OK?’

  Heike-Ann turned to the Englishman, asking her query in a very reasonable tone. ‘Myles – you want the police to investigate this, right?’

  Myles nodded. ‘Yes, they should. But they have to tell us everything they discover. Does German law allow for that?’

  Heike-Ann tipped her face to one side. ‘The police can tell us some things.’

  With Myles back on his feet, slowly he was able to lead the team back into the room. The others followed, all keen to know more about what had happened.

  Once they were all inside, Myles leaned on a crutch and pointed to a chair. ‘This is where I was sitting. I had the papers in my hand …’

  Heike-Ann, Glenn and Jean-François observed the scene from the doorway.

  Zenyalena picked up the file Myles had been reading. ‘What do you think of Stolz’s papers?’

  ‘Interesting. He liked dates.’ Myles put out his hand and the Russian returned the file to him. He started looking through it, trying to find the pa
pers he’d been reading before he was gassed. ‘There was one piece … Dates when the way the world traded across borders had changed …’ Myles kept trying to find it. ‘… The page was dated Juli 1940, which means July, right? It was written at the bottom of the page – although that date must have been added later …’

  Zenyalena’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Why must the “1940” date have been added later?’

  ‘Because it was so accurate. The paper described events since then,’ said Myles, still searching. ‘Things which couldn’t have been known back in 1940.’

  ‘Well, where is it?’

  No matter how hard Myles looked, he couldn’t find it. The page he had been reading was gone.

  Twenty-One

  Langley,

  Virginia, USA

  8.39 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (1.39 p.m. GMT)

  * * *

  Sally Wotton shook the rain from her hair and threw her broken umbrella in the bin. Damn thing …

  Trying not to spill her morning venti latte, she put her security pass between her teeth and took off her coat. Her arm caught in the sleeve. She fumbled, tried to yank it and coffee leapt out of the cardboard cup onto her black trousers. She was examining the stain when the door opened for her – from the inside.

  It was her boss. ‘Hello Sally – caught in the rain?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  The man only half-acknowledged her, then retreated inside.

  Sally cursed again. She tried to brush the stain clean, finished with her coat, and hung it up. Finally, she swiped in and walked into the secure area, looking up at the clock: nine minutes late.

  Walking through the open-plan office, she tried to ignore the other analysts – most, like her, had just got in. Their computers were still powering up. But she knew they’d arrived on time. The only person who had been late was her.

  She put down her latte, and pressed the ‘on’ button while she adjusted her chair.

  Sally typed in her username code, A439, and reminded herself of this week’s passwords, ready for the prompts she knew were coming. She typed the first sixteen-character code using just one hand:

  EB9A-W33H-JQ9H-JHHX

  Then the second code, typed with the other hand:

  RTKK-SBNN

  She pressed ‘enter’, and the machine seemed satisfied.

  She sipped her latte again, knowing she had several minutes before her computer would be fully ready to use. The delay was deliberate, like a time lock on a bank vault. It was an extra precaution to protect the information inside.

  She stretched the fabric on her trousers to check the coffee stain. So annoying … And the Central Intelligence Agency didn’t offer much in the way of laundry facilities. The stain would have to wait until lunchtime.

  She checked her watch, looking again at the other analysts – none of whom made eye contact. Eventually her gaze returned to her sterile desk.

  Slowly, her computer yawned to life. She watched the screen as the colours changed.

  Beep.

  A small box of text had appeared. Sally clicked on ‘Proceed’, then – at last – the morning’s summary came up.

  Special Sites Report (24 hours)

  She scrolled down through all the jihadist stuff. Al-Qaeda and ISIS belonged to other teams. Most of the time, like today, she ignored it.

  Far more interesting were the other sites. Usually oddballs, cranks and students experimenting with the internet. Some were computer hackers testing the security – trying to upload an untraceable website, filling it with terrorist stuff just to make sure Langley was watching. Almost always they were easy to trace – and the CIA did trace them. It was just that the agency couldn’t be bothered to react.

  Drug-traffickers, people-traffickers and the mafia who ran the ‘dark web’ weren’t for Sally either. Sally reported them, passing them on to whoever needed to know. But rarely did they impact directly on America’s strategic security interests.

  And she didn’t bother with electronic espionage, either. Everybody knew China was spying on America. Cyber systems from the rising superpower had penetrated US strategic infrastructure already. But China was what they called a ‘rational actor’. It was predictable, and measures to deal with it were already in place.

  She was looking for that very rare thing: a web-based threat to US interests which was credible, and which wasn’t linked to radical Islam or any nation state.

  Her eye stopped at an unusual-sounding site.

  File name: Mein Kampf Now

  Threat level: three

  Original IP location: unknown.

  She glowered at the screen, annoyed that a new site with a level-three security threat had come up as untraceable.

  She sipped her coffee again, and decided to look at the site itself.

  As she clicked her mouse, the screen filled with a photograph of Hitler saluting. She’d seen the picture before – it was a common library stock image of the dictator. Nothing new there. Probably just another sick Hitler fansite, posted by an American teenager spending too much time in their bedroom.

  She scrolled down to check the words. They were in English.

  In January and November 2024, I will destroy the traditions of trade so that America is forced to use technology to save its commerce with the world. World organisations will face a crisis.

  She raised her eyebrows - this was more interesting. She remembered all those accounts of 9/11: some said Al Qaeda had attacked New York’s World Trade Centre because they really believed all the world’s trade was coordinated from inside the building. Was this threat similar?

  And more unusually, it was so specific. It gave a date, several years off – why 2024? It was too far away to be threatening. When eventually the date had come and gone, the threat would seem redundant. Silly even. Unless, of course, it was accurate …

  She scrolled down the screen.

  … and in March 2043, I will undermine your technology and throw all your international trade into confusion. You may stop me in September 2043, but by January 2044 I will have succeeded. Your trade will have become like an ocean that is everywhere and nowhere.

  Sally sipped her latte once more. What sort of whack-job made threats – predictions, even – thirty years out?

  She shook her head, dismissing it all. Oh well, one for the tech boys …

  She pointed the mouse to an icon at the top. A drop-down list appeared:

  Ignore

  Add to Watchlist one (low priority)

  Add to Watchlist two (medium priority)

  Add to Watchlist three (high priority)

  Request further technical services (tracing)

  Sally drew the cursor down until the last option was highlighted. She clicked it, then watched as the grainy image vanished from her computer screen.

  Twenty-Two

  Schlosshotel Cecilienhof

  Potsdam, near Berlin

  6.15 p.m. CET (5.15 p.m. GMT)

  * * *

  Back at the hotel, Myles wondered how close to death he had been. Whoever had pumped carbon monoxide into the room had certainly meant harm. But had they tried to kill him and failed, or just tried to scare him – and succeeded?

  He picked up the phone and began to dial. After two rings, a familiar voice answered.

  ‘Helen Bridle speaking.’

  ‘It’s me,’ said Myles, noticing her voice picked up when she recognised him. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said. ‘How have you been?’

  ‘I’m still looking into Corporal Bradley - looks like he’s had quite an unusual life …’

  ‘How’s Berlin?’

  ‘Interesting, and the team I’m with is even more interesting,’ he said. Gradually

  Myles got round to telling her about the carbon monoxide attack. Helen’s voice became agitated and he tried to calm her down. ‘It’s alright, honey. Whoever it was: if they had wanted to kill me, they would have done it.’

  Helen wasn’t persuaded. ‘Or they’ll just try again. Wh
o do you think it was?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. Myles tried to recall the vague presence he felt in the room while he was losing consciousness. Even when they had placed a boot on his neck, they had stayed calm. Myles thought they might have been wearing a gas mask, although he hadn’t been able to see them properly. ‘They might have just wanted Stolz’s papers.’

  ‘Which means it wasn’t one of your team, right?’ Helen’s logic was sharp. Zenyalena, Jean-François, Heike-Ann and Glenn all had access to Stolz’s documents, so they didn’t need to steal them.

  ‘Yes, and they were with a lawyer at the time,’ he said.

  ‘So, they have an alibi,’ she added. ‘Someone else broke in to steal Stolz’s files, and they could do something similar again. Stay safe, you understand? Don’t risk your life for bits of paper. OK?’

  ‘Love you, Helen.’

  Myles replaced the receiver, and immediately regretted doing so. He missed her deeply, and wondered if he should take more of her advice.

  The team had arranged to meet back in their private meeting room of the Cecilienhof Hotel. Jean-François was reading a book about Nazis and their interest in the occult when Myles arrived, hobbling up the stairs to meet him, still hampered by his bad knee. As Myles laid his crutches by his seat, Jean-François jumped to his feet and offered to pour Myles a coffee. Myles accepted gratefully.

  Glenn arrived, looking more rested than before. He explained he had found a good running route around the lake. Heike-Ann arrived perfectly on time, followed only a minute later by Zenyalena, who was wearing a purple power-suit. Myles guessed her clothes were meant to be fashionable. They were certainly hard to ignore.

  Jean-François produced a folder and placed it on the table. Inside was a list of all the files they had from Stolz. As he spread the papers out, it became clear there were three lists. Jean-François had been working hard, typing up the lists in his hotel room. ‘This is what we have,’ he explained. ‘This first list sets out all the files from the official 1945 archive. The second is of the files we found in Stolz’s room, both in the care home and at his apartment. The third describes the papers given to us by Stolz’s lawyer.’ He paused. ‘We could divide the papers between us - but all of us would have to agree …’ The Frenchman lifted his palms. He wanted someone else in the team to make the next suggestion.