“Is that how Fan knew about the code word Ark?”
“Ian must have got that out of him in that last half hour, after the official stenographer had left. Having mentioned agents in South Africa, that was clearly what he was about to reveal to the chief interrogator when he became agitated.”
“Nothing more?”
“Not from Schnafel. But then I had a brainwave. I remembered hearing about someone who’d worked at Wewelsburg Castle, Himmler’s headquarters for the Ahnenerbe. Not one of the SS, but a civilian girl who’d been a typist. Almost all of what she typed up was deliberately destroyed by the SS as the Allies closed in on the castle, but she told what she remembered to the intelligence officer of the US unit that finally took Wewelsburg in April 1945. None of it was of tactical value, and most of it was accounts of Ahnenerbe expeditions that the interrogator found too far-fetched to believe, real Indiana Jones stuff. So the officer didn’t do a transcript of the interview and only made a brief report. It was one of my friends in the old West German intelligence service who came across it when she was remitted to archive the surviving Wewelsburg material on the Ahnenerbe, and I told her what I knew of Bermonsey’s interrogation of Schnafel.”
“You had friends in West German intelligence?” Jeremy said.
“I told you that my work didn’t end with Bletchley. It was another war, another veil of secrecy. It helped that I’d studied Russian at university alongside math.” Her monitor began flashing red and emitting a low alarm. “Oh blast,” she said irritably. “This thing’s telling me I need some meds. I do apologize.”
The nurse entered the room, walked over, checked Louise’s pulse and eyes, and hooked another tube into the IV on her wrist, taping it back up. Then she turned to Jack. “It’s time to go. She needs a rest.”
“Not likely,” Louise said. “I haven’t had this much fun since Bletchley. Anyway, I’m not she, I’m Louise.”
“Yes, Louise. My apologies. Five minutes then, no more.”
Jack nodded at the nurse, and she left. He leaned forward. “So where did you see that pictograph?”
“During her interrogation at Wewelsburg, the girl jotted down several images, and that symbol was one of them. She said that in late 1942, just after she arrived at Wewelsburg, she was assigned as typist to a Dr. Pieter Ritter, an archaeologist working for the Ahnenerbe. I looked him up. He seems to have been one of the more sane ones of the group, a genuine scholar, and also seems to have paid the price for it, probably for speaking out against some of the nonsense, as he disappeared in early 1944 and was never seen again. Anyway, all the US interrogator noted down was that Ritter had been in charge of a program called Ark, and that it concerned the Nazi hunt for the lost Ark of the Covenant.”
“Anything else?” Jack said.
“The girl was well educated, a student of history at Heidelberg University before the war, so what she remembered can be taken seriously. She told the interrogator that the Ark had been in Ethiopia. No great surprise there, as the present-day Ethiopians believe it is hidden away in a church at Axum, as doubtless you know. But she also said that it had been discovered in the mid-nineteenth century by King Theodore of Abyssinia, in a cave in his mountain fastness at Magdala. She said there were those among the British expedition against Theodore in 1868 who knew the whereabouts of the Ark and were intent on discovering it themselves. One of them was the journalist Henry Stanley.”
Jack stared at her. “But that expedition was to rescue British hostages.”
“All I know is what the American interrogator decided to write down, what he found plausible, before closing the file. The war was still on, and his job as his battalion’s intelligence officer was to collect any tactical information about German positions and movements ahead, not what he would understandably have viewed as fairy-tale Ahnenerbe nonsense.”
“So we don’t know whether they went there and hunted for it,” Costas said.
Jack took a deep breath. “What we have to go on is that plaque. The Ahnenerbe archaeologists scoured southern Africa for artifacts in the years before the war. Some South Africans of Boer origin were not exactly sympathetic to the British, and there were many poor local people who might have been persuaded to part with artifacts that no longer had cultural meaning for them. Let’s imagine that the plaque falls into the hands of the Ahnenerbe that way, perhaps aided by a thug like Schnafel. The war has started, and the problem is how to get it undetected back to Germany. The opportunity finally presents itself with the shipment of that gold consignment in 1943, and the plan to get it onto a U-boat. The Ahnenerbe archaeologists might have been able to make some headway with translating the Phoenician, and they may well have recognized the pictogram for what it was. Before that, aided by information we haven’t yet got, something perhaps from Stanley, they may have gone into Abyssinia while it was under the control of their Italian allies, and made it up to Magdala. What happened then is anyone’s guess.”
The nurse returned and stood with her arms resolutely folded. Jack gathered the photos and stood up, Costas and Jeremy doing the same. “Thank you so much, Louise. Whatever happens next, you’ve played a very big part in this story.”
“Game on?” she said, pointing at the books. “You see, I really have read them. How do my grandchildren put it? I can talk the talk.”
Jack smiled broadly. “You can talk the talk. And yes, game on.”
“Do you have to go yet? You haven’t even had any tea. Let me get you some.”
Jack saw the yearning in her face, the frustration. “We’ll keep you in the loop. I’ll email you with any updates.”
She reached down into the bag hanging on the side of her wheelchair and held up a phone. “Texting is better. You can send pictures, too. And video clips.”
“It’s a promise. And then we’ll come and see you again when it’s all over.”
“I so wish I were coming with you.”
Jack leaned down and kissed her on both cheeks, and she smiled up at him. “Now I like that.” Costas did the same, and then Jeremy. “My lucky day,” she said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve been kissed by as many men on one day since the war. That reminds me. There was a chap I used to meet behind the bombe hut—not my future husband, I fear. One day I wore lipstick and he forgot to clean it off. There was hell to pay from his commanding officer. Compromising hut security cavorting with a girl from another hut, or some such nonsense. Never did see him again, but there were plenty of others in the queue. Cheerio!”
Ten minutes later, Jack accelerated down the narrow paved lane that led from the house toward the main road, over cattle grids and through fields dotted with sheep and cows. “I’ve got my work cut out now,” he said. “Do you remember me discussing with Rebecca the 1868 Abyssinia material in the Howard archive? It contains a manuscript by a Captain Edward Wood, a fellow officer of my Royal Engineers ancestor, but there’s also some correspondence from Henry Stanley the explorer, among others. I glanced at it for the first time properly before we left Cornwall yesterday and it looks like fascinating stuff. I really want to get my teeth into it this evening and reconstruct the full story, to move from 1943 to 1868, to immerse myself in it. I’m quite excited by that, as I love those time shifts where there’s an unexpected thread running between them, but most importantly I think there’s a good chance of finding material in there that will help us make major headway with our quest.”