"Which means that the rotor settings might be on here too," Tom added. "It would make sense for them to keep everything all in one place."
They analyzed the photos again, looking for further discrepancies that might provide some sort of clue. But, disappointingly after their breakthrough, there were none. In every other detail the painting had been faithfully reproduced, even down to Bellak's signature and the date, just about visible in the bottom left corner.
"I just don't get it." Tom shook his head in frustration. "They must have left some way of breaking the code, otherwise why bother going to all this trouble to hide it?"
"Maybe one of the other stolen Bellak paintings had the last piece of the code?" Dominique suggested.
"Maybe," said Tom. "Hang on, what's that?" He pointed at a small section of wall below the stained-glass window that Archie had caught on the edge of one photo. "Can you enlarge it?"
She clicked a few buttons and zoomed in on the area Tom was pointing at.
"It's the dedication plaque. 'In loving memory of Eva Maria Lammers,' ' ' she translated. " 'Taken from us on 13 November 1926.' "
"Nineteen twenty-six?" Tom frowned. "That can't be right. I'm sure Archie told me she'd died in the nineteen fifties."
"What if it's a deliberate mistake?"
"How would that work?"
"Well, the date could be the ring settings — thirteen, eleven, twenty-six," said Dominique, trying not to allow herself to get too carried away.
She selected rotors three, five, and two from the tin and then set the first one to thirteen, the second to eleven, and the third to twenty-six. Then she lifted the machine's lid, inserted them, and closed it again so that only the top part of the rotors poked through the narrow slit. At that moment Archie and Viktor walked in carrying food and drinks.
"Any progress?" asked Archie in a mournful tone.
"Maybe," said Dominique.
"We're just about to try something," Tom explained. "Dom noticed that there were differences between the painting and the window that might suggest the rotor selection."
"And the date on the dedication plaque underneath doesn't tally with when you said Lammers's wife died." She pointed at the magnified image of the plaque that was still on the screen. "So we used the dates to set the ring positions."
"Well done," Viktor said, squeezing Dominique's shoulder. "So now all we need is the starting position of the rotors."
"What?" Dominique asked in dismay. "I thought we had everything we needed."
"You see those little windows on the top of the machine?" Viktor indicated three small holes next to the rotors. "The rotors have to be moved until you can see the relevant starting letter through the window."
"How about EML?" Tom suggested.
"EML? Why those?" Archie asked with a frown.
"They were her initials." Tom pointed at the plaque that was still on screen. "Eva Marie Lammers. Or at least, that's the name he put on there. He could have made it up to suit the code."
"Worth a go," Dominique agreed, moving the rotors so that the letters could be seen through the openings. "So is that it?" asked Archie.
"I guess there's only one way to find out," said Viktor, with a nod at Dominique to continue.
She pressed the first letter — A. Z flashed up on the light board. Then L. W appeared. Then X: O was illuminated.
"ZWOLF." Archie's voice cracked with disappointment once they had deciphered the whole word. "That's not a word. That's not even the beginning of a word. We must have got it wrong."
"It's not a word in English," Tom reminded him. "But this message would have been encoded in German, remember? Zwolf is German for twelve."
Soon a second word emerged: funf — five. Then sieben — seven.
"Twelve, five, seven," Archie murmured, as if saying them again would help reveal the hidden meaning.
Dominique continued, Tom translating each number as it emerged, although with no punctuation it was sometimes difficult to make out where one number ended and the next began. It ended, however, with two familiar words. Archie read Tom's scribbled translation back out loud.
"Twelve, five, seven, three, six, nine… Heil Hitler…" He paused. "What do you think it means?"
"Aren't map references given with six numbers?" Dominique asked no one in particular.
"It would certainly be the logical way to pinpoint a specific location," Tom agreed.
"And we already have a map," Archie reminded them, pulling the railway map out of the leather pouch and unfolding it on the floor.
Tom followed the grid reference with his finger, first locating the correct horizontal position, then the vertical one. His finger came to rest at a point on the outskirts of a small Austrian village. A village whose name they all recognized as being the final place the Gold Train had passed through before having to turn back.
A village called Brixlegg.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
Tom knew this part of Austria well, although the snow and ice that blanketed the pastures and weighed down tree branches like a heavy blossom made it almost unrecognizable. His previous visits to the Tyrol had been in the spring, climbing holidays with friends, or more often on his own, when bright green mountains had plunged dizzily from snow-capped peaks to the frenzied tumult of rivers half drunk on meltwater.
Brixlegg itself was a fairly ordinary little town just off the A12 motorway that Tom had not been to before. Huddled in the shadow of muscular tree-lined mountains on the banks of the river Inn, it was a hodgepodge of traditional Tyrolean buildings and more modern concrete construction, built to accommodate the ever-growing demand for living space. There was a church, of course, its steeple clawing above the surrounding rooftops like a hand reaching desperately for the sky.
The spot indicated by the coded grid reference on the painting lay a short distance off a distinctive kink in the railway line that snaked along the valley floor, roughly following the path of the river. It was reached by turning into a narrow road before the village itself, and then following it up a shallow incline, past several chalets that appeared to be on the cusp of being swallowed up by the encroaching forest.
The track ended in a gate, the steadily falling snow having already hidden its top edge under what looked like a thick layer of cream. Tom stopped the car and killed the engine. In the rearview mirror he saw Viktor do the same behind him and turn off her headlights.
For a few seconds they sat there in muffled silence, the car suddenly deathly still.
"Are you worried about her?" Dominique asked.
"Should I be?" said Tom.
"I told you what I saw the other night. She was giving instructions to those three men. It looked like they were planning something. Maybe it was a mistake bringing her along."
"It's not like we had much choice, is it?" Archie reminded them. "How else were we going to get out here without being seen?"
Tom nodded. Archie was right. Viktor's offer to smuggle them on her private jet to Salzburg and to provide two cars at the other end had been their only option. The price had been bringing her and her three men with them to, as she put it, protect her investment. And even though they'd flown out on the first takeoff slot Viktor's bribes could secure, they'd still had to delay their departure until that morning.
"I think I trust her," said Tom. "But we should keep our eyes open. Maybe try and split them up."
"Well, we're going to struggle to find anything under that lot anyway." Archie nodded disdainfully at the snow-covered mountains that towered above them. He lit a cigarette and cracked the window open an inch to blow the smoke out.