‘And Roland wasn’t like that?’
‘He was, but not so much.’ Another blushing smile. ‘He was more interested in me. They would both sneak out of the Enklave, and I would spend time with Roland while Volker used the Internet.’
‘What was he reading about?’
‘Everything. In many languages, too — he was very smart. So is Roland, actually. He told me they are all taught English and Spanish as well as German. But Volker read a lot about history.’
‘What, like archaeology?’
‘Sometimes. But most of it was recent history. The Second World War.’ She shook her head. ‘There were always rumours about the people in the Enklave, that they were Nazis, but my father told me not to think about them. He tried not to think too much about the Enklave himself — like it was a secret he wished was not there. He wanted me to stay away from them when they came into town, but… I did that anyway.’
‘Why?’
‘They were not nice people. They always seemed very angry, looking at us like we had done something wrong — even though it was our town! But Roland and Volker were not like that. They were not supposed to go outside the Enklave, but they did — well, it was Volker’s idea, but Roland went with him — because they wanted to see if what they had been told about the rest of the world was true.’
Eddie smiled faintly. ‘If Roland’d never seen a girl before, I’m guessing they were pretty surprised about everything else they found.’
‘Volker was — and he was angry, too, at first. Like he didn’t want to believe it. But he kept coming back to find out more, and… and he was still angry, but now at the people in the Enklave for lying to him.’
‘What did they lie about?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask, because I did not think I wanted to know. But when he left, he said he was going to stop the lies. Roland did not want him to go, but he said he had to. That… that was the last time I saw him.’ Her voice caught.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eddie.
‘Thank you. I do not know how I am going to tell Roland, though.’ She wiped an eye, then changed direction, heading away from the lake bed. ‘Up here.’
They climbed a rumpled slope dotted with scruffy vegetation. A tall barbed-wire fence stretched into the distance, enclosing a huge tract of land. ‘How far’s the hole?’ asked Eddie.
‘Not far, inside some bushes. They check the fence for gaps, but this is hard to see from inside the Enklave. It is big enough to crawl through. Don’t touch the fence, though,’ Julieta added in sudden warning.
‘Is it electrified?’
‘No, but there is an alarm. I do not know how it works, but men come down in a Jeep if it is touched.’ She led him up the hillside to a stand of shrubs that was bisected by the fence, and pulled back a bush to reveal a small depression beneath the lowest barbed strand. Eddie bent for a closer look. It would be a tight squeeze, but he would fit through.
He surveyed the grounds within the fence. No sign of life, or any indication that they were being observed. Some laborious mental arithmetic during the walk — if Nina had been with him, she could have done it in moments — had told him that the Enklave’s perimeter was over thirty miles long; a lot of ground for a hundred or so people to monitor, especially with so many blind spots caused by the rippled terrain.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll go first, then you follow. If you’re absolutely sure about coming.’
‘I am,’ said Julieta firmly. ‘I have to know that Roland is okay. There is a way up where we will not be seen — Roland took me once because I wanted to see where he lived.’
‘How long will it take to get there?’
‘About two hours.’
Eddie checked his watch. By the time they reached the top, they would be heading into darkness, but that could be to his advantage. ‘All right then. Let’s go.’
He dropped on to his back and wriggled under the barrier. There was a tense moment when the wire almost brushed his stomach, but he sucked it in and passed through without incident. On the other side, he rose to his feet and checked his surroundings.
The landscape looked little different from that outside, but it felt as if a switch had been flipped, putting him on high alert. He was about to head into the Nazi stronghold — into darkness in more ways than one. ‘Where Llamas Dare,’ he muttered, before turning as Julieta emerged. ‘You okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Which way?’
‘There.’ She pointed along a crease in the hillside. ‘It goes to the railroad bridge.’
‘Okay.’ He drew the gun he had taken from Vargas and pulled back the slide to chamber the first round from its reloaded magazine. ‘Let’s get started.’
24
Nina looked up from the bronze fish at a quiet ‘Psst’ from Macy. The young woman gave the bored guard a sidelong glance to make sure he was not paying close attention, then whispered: ‘I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. I’ve worked out the same set of map coordinates six times already; they’ll figure out that we’re screwing them around sooner or later.’
‘Hopefully later,’ Nina replied. The archaeologists had covertly used the position of Alexander’s original tomb in Memphis as a new baseline to calculate the latitude of the Spring of Immortality, and the text upon the relic describing the king’s journey to narrow down its probable location to a mountainous region of northern Iran. However, the maps on the wall were of too large a scale to pinpoint it exactly. ‘We’ve got to stretch this out for as long as we can.’
‘But when they realise that we have kept the spring from them, then what?’ said Banna. The Egyptian was tired, despair clear in his voice. ‘If we give them what they want, they might let us go…’
‘They won’t,’ the redhead told him firmly. ‘The moment we’re no longer useful to them, they’ll kill us. If we give them the spring’s real location, they’ll have everything they need to kick-start their goddamn New Reich.’
‘Then — then we give them the wrong location!’ He waved a hand at the maps. ‘We name a place, tell them it is there—’
‘You think they won’t check it first?’ Macy cut in. ‘We can’t just pick some random spot and hope they’ll believe us.’
‘She’s right,’ said Nina. ‘Kroll’s computer gives them access to satellite photos, terrain maps. The text on the fish describes the area around the spring — which means that if we choose a location, it has to match that description. But we don’t have satellite maps, so if we make some place up, we won’t know if it fits—’
The guard belatedly registered the muttered discussion. ‘Hey! What are you talking about? Have you found what we are looking for?’
‘No, we haven’t,’ said Nina. ‘We were just translating this Greek text.’
The guard’s permanent scowl made it hard to tell if he believed her or not. ‘Work faster,’ he finally said. ‘And if you talk, talk loud so I can hear you.’
‘Jawohl,’ she replied, loudly and sarcastically. ‘Okay, so maybe we need to go through the whole translation again. Start from the beginning. It’ll take time, but we want to be sure we’re right. Don’t we?’
Banna nodded reluctantly. ‘We will do it your way. But if they lose their patience, then what—’
He broke off as the door opened. Rasche entered, his piercing stare locking on to Nina. ‘Come with me,’ he snapped. ‘All of you.’
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
A chilly smile. ‘Herr Kroll wishes you to meet an unexpected guest.’ He drew his sidearm and gestured for the prisoners to go ahead of him.
The trio were marched through the compound to a windowless concrete bunker. Nina spent the journey in a state of growing apprehension. Who was the ‘guest’? Rasche’s sadistic amusement suggested that it was somebody she knew… which meant another friend had been captured by the Nazis.