"But he doesn't have it," Tom observed. "If he did, he wouldn't have left Weissman's arm and the other Bellak painting for me to find. It's lost in some private collection somewhere and he's trying to use us to connect the dots."
"What did you say?" Dominique's eyes narrowed, her forehead creasing into a quizzical frown.
"I said, why else would he have left Weissman's arm and—"
"No. About the dots?"
"What dots?"
"Connecting the dots. Isn't that what you said?"
"What the hell are you talking about, Dom?" Archie said impatiently.
She didn't answer. Instead, clicking her tongue with frustration, she hurried through to the far room and unpinned the railway map from the wall. The others followed, swapping confused glances.
"Here, lay it out on the floor," she said, handing it down to Tom. "I wondered what those holes were for," she continued, shaking her head ruefully.
"What holes?" asked Archie.
"The holes in the painting." She snapped her fingers impatiently, indicating that Archie should hand her the rolled Bel-lak painting that lay on the desk. "They'd been made too carefully to be accidental." She unscrolled the canvas and laid it flat on the map, aligning the bottom left corner with the L shape that had revealed itself under the black light. "Give me a pencil." Dhutta pulled one from the neat row of pens he kept clipped in his shirt pocket and handed it to her.
Gripping the pencil tightly, she pushed its end into the first hole and swiveled it around so as to mark the surface of the map underneath. She then did the same in each of the nine other holes until, satisfied that she had covered them all, she peeled the map away and let it spring shut, revealing the pencil marks she had just made.
Archie whistled slowly.
"They show the same route we revealed before," Dhutta exclaimed.
"It's like you said" — Dominique was beaming proudly — "connect the dots."
Tom stared silently at the map, hardly believing what he was seeing. Dhutta was right, the pencil marks had fallen precisely on the towns revealed by the black light earlier and confirmed by Lasche as the route of the Gold Train.
All the dots apart from one. A small village in northern Germany whose name he had to squint to read because the pencil mark had gone right through it. Above it was a small symbol which the key told him denoted a castle.
Wewelsburg Castle.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
So you lost him?" Even the several thousand miles between them could not hide the disappointment in Carter's voice.
"Yes, sir." Bailey winced, picturing Carter's face. "And he doesn't show up on any of the systems."
"I'm sorry, Chris." Cody sighed, leaning in toward the speakerphone. "I put my best guys on this. I guess we didn't figure he'd read us so fast."
"I know you did what you could," Carter reassured him. "And I really appreciate all your help on this. All of it."
"I guess at least next time you'll know what he's capable of," Cody added. "I'd suggest taking him down as soon as you see him."
"If there is a next time," Carter said with a hollow laugh, his voice booming around the room. "He was our one and only lead."
"Not quite," said Bailey thoughtfully. "We've still got Lasche to follow up on. And there's the guy we saw with Blondi as well. He did show up on the system."
"It's about time we caught a break," Carter said with relief.
"It turns out he's got form. Some sort of high-end art thief. His name is Tom Kirk, also known as Felix."
"A thief!" Carter exclaimed. "That makes sense. He must be in on this whole thing too."
"Except that it turns out he cooperated with one of our agents on a case last year and got his slate wiped clean by way of a thank you. Now the general view is that he's gone straight."
"Which agent?"
"Jennifer Browne. You know her?"
"Name rings a bell," Carter said slowly. "She was mixed up in some shooting a couple of years back. I'll check into it."
"Meanwhile, we could get his name and description out to all airports, railway stations and border police," Bailey suggested. "That way, if he tries to leave the country, we'll know about it. With luck, his friend Blondi may not be far behind."
"Make it happen," Carter agreed. "And next time, let's make sure we bring at least one of them in."
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
It was clear from their journey up the hill that Wewelsburg Castle occupied a commanding position over the neighboring countryside.
More surprising, perhaps, was its design. Wewelsburg was the only triangular castle in Europe, with one large round tower in the north corner and two smaller ones south of it, each linked by heavily fortified walls. But then, as Dominique had told them during the seven-hour drive from Zurich, so far as she had been able to establish from the research she had been able to do whenever her laptop was able to get a good phone signal, its design was just one of the ways the castle broke with convention.
In 1934, a hundred-year lease had been taken out on the castle and its grounds. The signatory? A certain Heinrich Himmler. His plan, which was rapidly put into effect, was to establish the castle not just as an Aryan research and learning center but as the spiritual home of the SS, a place as sacred to the Aryan race as Marienburg had been to the medieval Teutonic Knights.
To that end, each room commemorated a legendary Nordic hero or a pivotal moment in Aryan history. One room had even been set aside to house the Holy Grail, on the assumption that Himmler's men would eventually succeed in their quest to find it.
Himmler's own quarters had been dedicated to King Heinrich I, founder of the first German Reich. Apparently not only had Himmler believed himself to be the earthly reincarnation of Heinrich's spirit, he had also believed he would be endowed with supernatural powers once he was able to locate the legendary island of Thule — a supposedly lost civilization that he spent vast sums trying to locate — and make contact with the "Ancients."
To Tom, it all sounded horribly familiar, echoing Lasche's account of the hate-filled ideology with which Himmler had shaped and inspired the SS to new heights of inhumanity. But there was an even darker edge to the story. A concentration camp, brutal even by Nazi standards, had been established close by in order to provide slave labor for the alterations needed to bring the castle in line with Himmler's aspirations. And even though the castle was never fully operational, or indeed finished, it was rumored that pagan, even satanic rituals had been conducted within its dark walls.
As if to emphasize Tom's thoughts, the castle chose that moment to loom out from behind the skeletal vault of interlocking branches that had previously masked it, its mul-lioned windows glinting like animals' eyes in the yellow sweep of their headlights before slinking back into the cold embrace of the surrounding forest.
A small church stood silhouetted against the night sky as they rounded the final corner, its steeple casting a long shadow on the ground. Tom killed the lights and put the car into neutral, and they silently coasted the final hundred yards in the moonlight, a fox slinking lazily back into the undergrowth as they approached. Archie broke the silence as the car came to rest in front of what Dominique identified as the old SS guardhouse, now a museum.
"Well, we're definitely in the right place," he said. Tom nodded. The castle was unquestionably the one in the photo of the Bellak painting recovered from Weissman's secret room and the stained-glass window commissioned by Lammers.