Chapter 33
While Sam took pictures of the ghastly scene, Nina’s curiosity was piqued by another door, a common wooden variety with a window laid in on the upper part that was now too filthy to see through. Under the door she saw a streak of light from the same series of lights that lit the room they were in.
“Don’t even think of going in there,” Joost’s sudden words behind her shook her to a near heart attack. With her hand on her chest in shock, Nina gave Joost Bloem a look he often got from women — exasperation and repudiation. “Not without me as your bodyguard, that is,” he smiled. Nina could see that the Dutch council member knew he was attractive, all the more reason to reject his mild advances.
“I’m quite capable, thank you, meester,” she teased abruptly, and tried the handle of the door. It needed some encouragement, but it opened without too much effort, even with the rust and disuse.
This room looked completely different from the other, though. It was a bit more inviting than a medical death chamber, but still it retained that Nazi air of foreboding.
Well-stocked with antique books on all subjects ranging from archeology to the occult, from postmortem textbooks to Marxism and mythology, the chamber resembled an old library or office, given the large desk and high-back chair in the corner convergence of two bookshelves. The books and folders, even the papers lying about the place, were all of the same color thanks to the heavy dust deposits.
“Sam!” she called. “Sam! You have to get shots of this!”
“And what, pray tell, are you going to do with these photographs, Mr. Cleave?” Joost Bloem asked Sam when he snapped one from the door.
“Do what journalists do,” Sam said nonchalantly, “sell them to the highest bidder.”
Bloem uttered a disturbing laugh that denoted his disagreement with Sam clearly. He slapped his hand down on Sam’s shoulder, “And who said you’ll be getting out of here scot-free, lad?”
“Well, I live for the moment, Mr. Bloem, and I try not to let power-hungry pricks like you write my fate for me,” Sam smirked smugly. “I might even make a buck off a picture of your corpse.”
Without warning Bloem delivered a hefty jab to Sam’s face, throwing him backward and off his feet. As Sam fell against a steel cabinet his camera crashed to the floor, breaking into smithereens on impact.
“You are speaking to someone powerful and dangerous who happens to have those Scottish gnads in a firm grip, laddie. Don’t you fucking forget that!” Joost thundered, as Nina ran to Sam’s aid.
“I don’t even know why I am helping you,” she said in a low tone as she wiped his bloody nose. “You got us into this shit, because you didn’t trust me. You would have trusted Trish, but I am not Trish, am I?”
Nina’s words caught Sam off guard. “Wait, what? It was your boyfriend I didn’t trust, Nina. After everything he dragged us through you still believe what he tells you, but I don’t. And what is this about Trish all of a sudden?”
“I found the memoirs, Sam,” Nina told him close to his ear as she pushed his head back to stop the bleeding. “I know I will never be her, but you have to let go.”
Sam’s jaw literally dropped. So that is what she meant back at the house! To let go of Trish, not her!
Purdue came in with Wesley’s gun perpetually at his back and the moment evaporated just like that.
“Nina, what do you know about this office? Is this in the records?” Purdue asked.
“Purdue, nobody even knows of this place. How would it be in any record?” she snapped.
Joost scrambled through some papers on the desk. “There are some apocryphal writings here!” he announced, looking fascinated. “Actual, ancient scriptures!”
Nina jumped up and joined him.
“You know, the basement of the west tower of Wewelsburg held a personal safe that Himmler had mounted there. Only he and the castle commander knew about it, but after the war its contents was removed and never found,” Nina lectured as she looked through the arcane documents only heard of in legend and ancient historical codices. “I bet you it was moved here. I would even go so far as to say…” she turned in all directions to scrutinize the age of the literature, “that this could very well have also been a vault. I mean, you saw the door we came through.”
As she dropped her eyes to the open drawer she found a handful of scrolls of immense age. Nina saw that Joost was not paying attention and on closer inspection realized it was of the same papyrus the journal was written on. Prying the end away with her dainty fingers, she rolled it open slightly and read in Latin, something that punched the air from her lungs — Alexandrina Bybliothece — Scripta ex Atlantis
Could it be? She checked that no-one saw her slip the scrolls into her satchel as gently as possible.
“Mr. Bloem,” she said after she had secured the scrolls, “would you mind telling me what else was written in the journal about this place?” She kept her tone conversational, but she meant to keep him occupied and establish a more cordial thread between them to not alert him to her intentions.
“To tell you the truth, I did not have much interest in the codex, Dr. Gould. My only concern was using Agatha Purdue to find that man,” he replied, nodding in Purdue’s direction as the other men discussed the age of the hidden records room and its contents. “However, what was interesting was what he had written somewhere after the poem that led you here before we had to go through the trouble of un-riddling it.”
“What did he say?” she asked in mock interest. But what he relayed to Nina inadvertently did interest her purely in a historical capacity.
“Klaus Werner was the city planner for Cologne, did you know?” he asked. Nina nodded. He continued, “In the journal he writes that he went back to where he was stationed in Africa and returned to the Egyptian family that owned the land where he claimed to see this magnificent treasure of the world, eh?”
“Aye,” she responded, casting a glance at Sam, nursing his bruises.
“He meant to keep it for himself, like you,” Joost taunted maliciously. “But he needed help from a colleague, an archeologist who worked here at Wewelsburg, a man by the name of Wilhelm Jordan. He accompanied Werner as historian to retrieve the treasure from the Egyptian’s smallholding in Algeria, just like you,” he repeated his insult cheerily. “But when they got back to Germany his friend, who was overseeing excavations around Wewelsburg for Himmler and the SS High Commission at the time, got him drunk and shot him, making away with the aforementioned loot that Werner still did not directly refer to in his writings. I guess we’ll never know what they were.”
“Pity,” Nina feigned sympathy while her heart slammed inside her chest.
She hoped that they could somehow rid themselves of these less-than-cordial gentlemen sooner than later. In the past few years Nina was proud to have evolved from a feisty, although pacifist, academic to the capable ass-kicker she had been molded into by the people she had encountered. Where she once would have considered her goose cooked in a situation such as this, she now thought of ways to escape capture as if it was a matter of course — and it was. In the life she lived nowadays, the threat of death was constantly on her and her colleagues and she had become an unwilling participant in the madness of maniacal power plays and its unsavory characters.
From the passage way the turbine’s humming stopped — a sudden, deafening silence replaced only by a soft howling whistle of wind that haunted the complex tunnels. Everyone noticed this time, looking at one another with perplexity.