His father had made it clear that he didn’t believe a bit of it. As far as he was concerned, the separate bedrooms act was just that – an act. It was all for show. And with Jaeger’s wife and child absent pushing four years now, his father had made it clear that he and his mother believed it was time.
Time for Jaeger to move on.
Jaeger loved his parents to death. His father in particular had bequeathed to him his joy of all things wild – the sea, mountains, forests. Jaeger hadn’t quite managed to tell him that he’d never felt more convinced that Ruth and Luke were alive. Most probably he’d held off doing so to save his parents any more uncertainty and anguish.
He didn’t really know how to explain his new-found conviction. How could he tell his father that a psychotropic cocktail administered by an Amazon Indian – a brother warrior – had given him back his memories, and with them, his hope?
93
Surfing done for the morning, he and Narov wandered back towards the house. His parents were out, and Narov went to take a shower, to wash the salt off her skin and hair. Jaeger headed for his bedroom and grabbed his iPad. He needed to check for news of the rest of his team.
Until they were all safely out of the Amazon, he felt uneasy planning the next steps. Of course, simply uncovering the master plan for the return of the Reich – a global Nazi power-grab – didn’t necessarily mean that plan was actually being put into action. But the evidence was all too compelling, and Jaeger feared the worst.
First Andy Smith had been killed, and then Jaeger and his team had been hunted across the Amazon. The Dark Force had done its damnedest to finish them and bury for ever the secrets of the Ju 390 ghost flight. They clearly had a global reach, and some serious technological and military prowess at their disposal. Plus, an official British government file had been snuffed out of existence, disappearing from the archives.
Any which way Jaeger looked at it, the sons of the Reich did indeed appear to be rising. And no one seemed to be aware of it or doing anything much to stop it – apart from him and his small, war-weary team.
When Jenkinson had cracked the Operation Werewolf papers, Jaeger had been tempted to reveal the presence in his grandfather’s war chest of a document with the same title. But something instinctive had held him back. That was a card he’d keep close to his chest until the time was right to play it.
With Colonel Evandro’s help, he had managed to set up a system of secure encrypted email, so that all the surviving team members could communicate in some degree of safety. Or rather, all bar Leticia Santos. Colonel Evandro had his best men, supported by his kidnap, ransom and extortion specialists, out scouring the country, searching for her whereabouts, but so far all leads had come to naught.
Jaeger fired up the iPad and logged on to ProtonMail – the end-to-end email encryption system they were now using. He had one message waiting, from Raff, with good news. In the last twenty-four hours, Lewis Alonzo, Hiro Kamishi and Joe James had surfaced. They had made it out of the Serra de los Dios under the guidance of Puruwehua and some of the neighbouring tribe, the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau.
All three were as well as could be expected, and Raff was now working with Colonel Evandro to ensure they were brought home as quickly and safely as possible. Jaeger emailed him back, asking for an update on the search for Leticia Santos.
While he knew there was little he could do to help, a part of him wanted to return to Brazil forthwith to support Colonel Evandro in the hunt. Once he was done in Bermuda, that was what he intended to do, as long as Santos hadn’t been rescued in the interim. He’d vowed to himself that she would be found and brought home safely.
There was a second message waiting in his inbox, this one from Pieter Boerke. He was about to click on it when there was a knock at his door.
It was Narov. ‘I am going out for a run.’
‘Okay,’ Jaeger replied, keeping his eyes on the screen. ‘And when you’re back, maybe we can have that long-overdue chat about how you knew my grandfather. And why you resent me so much.’
Narov paused. ‘Resent you? Maybe not so much now. But yes, in this place, maybe we can talk.’
The door closed and Jaeger opened the message.
First off, download the attached photograph. It’s one I missed in the vaults. Once you’ve got it, dial me on my Skype link. It’ll go through to my cell phone even if I’m out on the move, so you’ll always get me. Do it immediately. Don’t speak to anyone else.
Jaeger did as instructed. The photo was a grainy black-and-white image taken with a long lens. Once again, it was clearly of the Duchessa, and it showed a group of senior Nazi commanders clustered along the ship’s rail. Nothing leaped out at him, so with the image on screen, he pulled up his Skype link and dialled Boerke.
The South African answered, his voice thick with tension. ‘Look at the guy fourth from the left, in the very centre of the photo. You got him? That guy. That scowl; the appalling hairstyle; the frown marks. Remind you of anyone? Now imagine that face with a small and very bloody stupid-looking Charlie Chaplin moustache…’
Suddenly it was as if Jaeger couldn’t breathe. ‘No way,’ he gasped. ‘Can’t be. We cracked the code, and he wasn’t on the list. The top Nazis were, but not him.’
‘Well double-check,’ Boerke countered. ‘’Cause if that’s not Adolf bloody Hitler, then I’m a bloody Chinaman! One more thing. The photo’s date-stamped on the reverse. The date: the seventh of May 1945. And I guess I don’t need to point out the significance of that.’
Once Boerke had signed off the call, Jaeger double-clicked his cursor, zooming closer on the image. He stared at the figure’s features, hardly daring to believe the evidence before his eyes. No doubt about it: the face was the spitting image of the Führer’s – suggesting that he had been standing on a ship’s deck in Santa Isabel harbour fully a week after he had supposedly shot himself in his Berlin bunker.
It was a good while before Jaeger felt able to return to the task in hand. Boerke’s revelation – presumably the last of the Duchessa’s dark secrets – had totally numbed him. It was one thing to discover that many of the Führer’s deputies – the chief architects of the evil – had survived the war’s end.
It was quite another to discover evidence that the Führer himself might have done so.
Using the ProtonMail search engine, Jaeger logged into their draft email account – the one that had been compromised. He couldn’t resist the urge to take a look, and he knew that via ProtonMail his location should be pretty much untraceable. ProtonMail boasted that even the US National Security Agency – the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance outfit – couldn’t crack traffic going via their servers, which were based in Switzerland.
There was one new message sitting in the draft folder.
It had been there for several days.
Jaeger’s unease deepened.
As before, it was blank, providing only a link to a Dropbox folder. Jaeger didn’t figure it would be from any of his team. With a growing sense of dread, he opened Dropbox and clicked on the first JPEG file, fully expecting it to be another horrific photo of Leticia Santos – part of the enemy’s ongoing Nervenkrieg.
He told himself that he had to look, for in one of those sickening images the enemy might inadvertently have left a clue as to their whereabouts – a lead from which Jaeger and the others could start to hunt them down.
The first image appeared: six lines of lettering only.
Holidaying in Paradise…
While your loved ones burn.
Question: how do we know so much?