The other message was blank, but it had a link embedded in it. Jaeger clicked through and it took him to Dropbox, an on-line data storage system.
The Dropbox file contained one image – a JPEG file.
Jaeger clicked on it.
The internet connection was slow, and as the image downloaded it hit him like a series of savage punches to the guts. It showed the figure of Leticia Santos – kneeling naked and with her hands and feet tied, her eyes staring wide into the camera and red with terror.
Behind her was what looked like a torn and bloodstained bed sheet, on which were scrawled the now familiar words:
Return to us what is ours.
Wir sind die Zukunft.
They were crudely written in what appeared to be human blood.
Jaeger didn’t bother to log off. He sprinted from the café, leaving his coffee untouched.
Somehow, even their draft email communications system had been penetrated. That being the case, who knew how quickly a drone unleashing a Hellfire might arrive overhead? Jaeger doubted the enemy had the wherewithal to deploy one over east London, but presumption was the mother of all screw-ups.
Instinctively he knew what the enemy was about here.
They were deliberately taunting him. It was a tried and tested means of waging battle, one that the Nazis had named Nervenkrieg – mind warfare. They were torturing him by careful design, in the hope that they could provoke him into remaining at a traceable location for long enough for them to find and kill him.
Or failing that, in the hope that he might be provoked into going hunting, solo.
And in truth, the Nervenkrieg was working.
Having watched that sickening image download, it was all Jaeger could do to resist the temptation to go seeking out Leticia Santos’s tormentors right here and now. And alone.
There were any number of leads he could follow. The C-130 pilot, for a start. Carson would have his details on file, and that would be enough for Jaeger to start tracking him down. Plus Colonel Evandro had promised a whole caseload of new leads from his own investigations.
But Jaeger needed to hold off.
He needed to regroup his forces, learn from whatever it was they had discovered, study the ground, the enemy and the threat, and strategise and act accordingly. Somehow he had to reclaim the initiative – to make proactive decisions, not reactive heat-of-the-moment ones.
It was the old adage again: fail to plan, plan to fail.
90
First to arrive for that evening’s meeting was the archivist, Simon Jenkinson.
Jaeger had spent most of the day on his Triumph Explorer, paying a furtive visit to his Wardour Castle apartment. There, he’d retrieved his edition of the Voynich manuscript – the one that Grandfather Ted had bequeathed to him.
He’d laid the thick tome on his desk in the barge with some degree of reverence, awaiting Simon Jenkinson’s entry.
The archivist was a good half an hour early, and he looked only marginally less like a hibernating honey bear than when Jaeger had last seen him. At Jaeger’s request, he’d managed to track down a copy of the Voynich manuscript translation. He’d brought it with him, tucked firmly under his arm.
Jaeger was barely able to offer him a cup of tea before Jenkinson sat himself down with the Voynich manuscript and the Bioko file, placing the translation beside them. And that was it: thick glasses perched on the end of his nose, Jenkinson got to work on the Duchessa’s list of apparently random numbers – code-breaking, or so Jaeger presumed.
An hour later, the archivist raised his head from his task, his eyes burning with excitement.
‘Gotcha!’ he exclaimed. ‘At last! I’ve done two, just to make sure the first wasn’t a fluke. So… number one: Adolf Eichmann.’
‘I know the name,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘But remind me of the details.’
Jenkinson already had his head bent over the books and papers once more. ‘Eichmann – truly a nasty piece of work. One of the chief architects of the Holocaust. He escaped Nazi Germany at war’s end, only to be tracked down to Argentina in the 1960s.
‘Next one: Ludolf von Alvensleben,’ Jenkinson declared.
Jaeger shook his head: the name wasn’t familiar at all.
‘SS Gruppenführer and mass murderer par excellence. Ran the Valley of Death in northern Poland, which became a grave for thousands.’ Jenkinson flashed Jaeger a look. ‘Also disappeared to Argentina, where he lived to a ripe old age.
Jenkinson bent over his books again, flipping back and forth through the pages, until the third was decoded.
‘Aribert Heim,’ the archivist announced. ‘Him you must have heard of. He’s been at the centre of one of the longest manhunts of all time. His nickname during the war was Dr Death. He earned it in the concentration camps, by experimenting on inmates.’ Jenkinson shuddered. ‘Also thought to be hiding out in Argentina, though rumour has it he may have died of old age.’
‘There seems to be a theme developing,’ Jaeger remarked. ‘A Latin American theme.’
Jenkinson smiled. ‘Indeed.’
Before he could reveal any more of the names, the rest of the party arrived. Raff led Irina Narov and Mike Dale into the barge, the latter two looking tired from their travels but also remarkably recovered, and noticeably better fed than when Jaeger had last seen them.
He greeted each in turn, and did the necessary introductions with Jenkinson. Raff, Narov and Dale had flown into London direct from Rio, with a connecting flight from Cachimbo prior to that. They’d been on the go for approaching eighteen hours, and it promised to be a long night.
Jaeger brewed some strong coffee, then gave them the good news: the book code seemed to be working – at least for the Bioko documents.
Five figures gathered around the Voynich manuscript and its translation, as Narov produced the satchel of papers retrieved from the Ju 390’s cockpit. The atmosphere aboard the barge was electric with anticipation. Would seventy years of a dark and secret history finally be brought to life?
Narov took out the first set of papers.
Dale produced his camera. He waved it at Jaeger. ‘You good with this? In here?’
‘What’s got into you?’ Jaeger needled him. ‘It’s film first, ask later, isn’t it?’
Dale shrugged. ‘This is your home. Makes it a bit different from filming out in the wilds.’
Jaeger sensed a change in the man – an air of maturity and genuine concern, as though the trials and tribulations of the last few weeks had somehow been the making of him.
‘Go ahead,’ he told him. ‘Let’s get it documented – all of it.’
Under Jenkinson’s initial tutelage, Narov set about the Aktion Feuerland document, while Dale framed up his shots, and Raff and Jaeger stood an informal guard. The archivist seemed remarkably talented at multi-tasking: it wasn’t long before he was able to thrust a list under Jaeger’s nose – the seventh page of the Duchessa’s manifest, fully decoded. He proceeded to point out some of the most notorious individuals.
‘Gustav Wagner, better known as “the Beast”. Wagner founded the T4 programme – to kill off the disabled – then went on to run one of the foremost extermination camps. Escaped to South America, where he lived to a grand old age.’
His finger stabbed at another name on the list. ‘Klaus Barbie – “the Butcher of Lyons”. A mass murderer who tortured and killed his way across France. At the end of the war—’
Jenkinson broke off as Jaeger’s boatie neighbour, Annie, ducked through the barge’s entranceway. Jaeger did the introductions.